(1) MILLION WORDS (IN) MARCH. Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors, curated by SL Huang and Kurt Hunt, is available as a free download at Bad Menagerie until March 31.
This anthology includes 120 authors—who contributed 230 works totaling approximately 1.1 MILLION words of fiction. These pieces all originally appeared in 2014, 2015, or 2016 from writers who are new professionals to the science fiction and fantasy field, and they represent a breathtaking range of work from the next generation of speculative storytelling.
All of these authors are eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2016. We hope you’ll use this anthology as a guide in nominating for that award as well as a way of exploring many vibrant new voices in the genre.
(2) MANLY SF. And then, if you run out of things to read, the North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation has announced the preliminary eligibility list of 116 titles for the 2016 Manly Wade Wellman Award for North Carolina Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Or you could just look at all the pretty cover art in the “2016 Manly Wade Wellman Award cover gallery” at Bull Spec.
(3) ALPINE PARABLES. An overview of “The Swiss Science Fiction” at Europa SF.
„Swiss science fiction? Never heard of it !
Yet for a long time, the Swiss SF has engaged in speculative fiction game.”
(4) TOO SOON TO REGENERATE? Radio Times has the scoop — “Peter Capaldi: ‘I’ve been asked to stay on in Doctor Who after Steven Moffat leaves’”.
Now, RadioTimes.com can reveal that the BBC has asked Capaldi to stay on as the Doctor after Moffat’s departure — but the actor himself isn’t sure whether he’ll take up their offer.
“I’ve been asked to stay on,” Capaldi told RadioTimes.com, “but it’s such a long time before I have to make that decision.
“Steven’s been absolutely wonderful, so I love working with him. Chris is fantastic, and I think he’s a hugely talented guy.
“I don’t know where the show’s gonna go then. I don’t know. I have to make up my mind, and I haven’t yet.”
(5) ASTRONAUT SHRINKS. Scott Kelly had reportedly grown taller while at the International Space Station, but he’s back to normal now.
US astronaut Scott Kelly said Friday he is battling fatigue and super-sensitive skin, but is back to his normal height after nearly a year in space.
Kelly’s 340-day mission — spent testing the effects of long-term spaceflight ahead of a future mission to Mars, along with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko — wrapped up early Wednesday when they landed in frigid Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz spacecraft.
One of the effects of spending such a long time in the absence of gravity was that Kelly’s spine expanded temporarily, making him grow 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters), only to shrink as he returned to Earth.
His twin brother, Mark Kelly, said they were the same height again by the time they hugged in Houston early Thursday.
According to John Charles, human research program associate manager for international science at NASA, any height gain “probably went away very quickly because it is a function of fluid accumulation in the discs between the bones in the spinal column.”
(6) AUTHOR’S PERSPECTIVE. Rose Lemberg provides “Notes on trans themes in ‘Cloth…’”
“Grandmother-na-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds” is a Nebula nominee. As such, it is getting a lot of attention.
I usually let my stories stand on their own. When this story came out, I had written brief story notes focusing on Kimi’s autism in the context of the Khana culture. Even that felt too much for me. I want readers to get what they need from my work, without my external authorial influence.
But as this story is getting more attention, I’d like to write some notes about the trans aspects of this story…..
Many of us are pressured by families. Especially trans people. Especially trans people (and queer people) who are from non-white and/or non-Anglo-Western cultural backgrounds, and/or who are immigrants. Many trans people I know have strained relationships with their families, and many had to cut ties with their families or were disowned.
This story came from that place, a place of deep hurt in me, and in many of my trans friends. It came from a place of wanting to imagine healing.
It also came from a place of wanting to center a trans character who comes out later in life. For many trans and queer people, coming out later in life is very fraught. Coming out is always fraught. Coming out later in life, when one’s identity is supposed to be firmly established, is terrifyingly difficult. This is my perspective. I am in my late thirties. There’s not enough trans representation in SFF; there’s never enough representation of queer and trans elders specifically. I write queer and trans elders and older people a lot.
(7) DEVIL IN THE DETAILS. The historianship of Camestros Felapton is on display in “Unpicking a Pupspiracy: Part 1”.
I’m currently near to finishing an update to the Puppy Kerfuffle timeline. The update includes Sp4 stuff as well as some extra bits around the 2013 SFWA controversies.
One issue I thought I hadn’t looked at what was a key piece of Puppy mythology: basically that their enemies are being tipped off by Hugo administrators to enable shenanigans of a vague and never entirely explained nature. A key proponent of this Pupspiracy theory is Mad Genius Dave Freer. In particular this piece from mid April 2015 http://madgeniusclub.com/2015/04/13/nostradumbass-and-madame-bugblatterfatski/
Freer’s piece has two pupspiracies in it; one from Sad Puppies 2 and one from Sad Puppies 3. I’m going to look at the first here and the second in Part 2. However, both use a particular odd kind of fallacious reasoning that we’ve seen Dave use before. It is a sort of a fallacy of significance testing mixed with a false dichotomy and not understanding how probability works.
(8) CLASS IN SESSION. “’You can teach craft but you can’t teach talent.’ The most useless creative writing cliché?” asks Juliet McKenna.
So let’s not get snobbish about the value of craft. Without a good carpenter’s skills, you’d be using splintery planks to board up that hole in your house instead of coming and going through a well-made and secure front door. Let’s definitely not accept any implication that writing craft is merely a toolkit of basic skills which a writer only needs to get to grips with once. I learn new twists and subtleties about different aspects of writing with every piece I write and frequently from what I read. Every writer I know says the same.
Now, about this notion that you cannot teach hopeful writers to have ideas, to have an imagination. The thing is, I’ve never, ever met an aspiring author who didn’t have an imagination. Surely that’s a prerequisite for being a keen reader, never mind for taking up a pen or keyboard to create original fiction? Would-be writers are never short on inspiration.
(9) DONE TWEETING. Joe Vasicek comes to bury, not praise, a social media platform in “#RIPTwitter”.
All of this probably sounds like a tempest in a teapot if you aren’t on Twitter. And yeah, it kind of is. In the last two weeks, I’ve learned that life is generally better without Twitter than it is with it. No more getting sucked into vapid tit-for-tat arguments in 140-character chunks. No more passive-aggressive blocking by people who are allergic to rational, intelligent debate. No more having to worry about being an obvious target for perpetually-offended SJW types who, in their constant efforts to outdo each other with their SJW virtue signaling, can spark an internet lynch mob faster than a California wildfire.
The one big thing that I miss about Twitter is the rapid way that news disseminates through the network. I can’t tell you how many major news stories I heard about through Twitter first—often while they were still unfolding. But if the #RIPTwitter controversy demonstrates anything, it’s that Twitter now has both the means and the motive to suppress major news stories that contradict the established political narrative. That puts them somewhere around Pravda as a current events platform.
Am I going to delete my account the same way that I deleted my Facebook account? Probably not. I deleted my Facebook account because of privacy concerns and Facebook’s data mining. With Twitter, it’s more of an issue with the platform itself. I don’t need to delete my account to sign off and stop using it.
(10) OR YOU CAN ENGAGE. When Steven A. Saus’ call for submissions to an anthology was criticized, here’s how he responded — “Just Wait Until Twitter Comes For You: Addressing and Fixing Unintended Privilege and Bigotry”
TL;DR: When a social justice criticism was brought to us, we acknowledged the mistake, engaged with those criticizing, and fixed the problem instead of doubling down or protesting that wasn’t what we meant. It worked to resolve the problem and helped us clarify the message we meant to send….
So why have I written a thousand words or so about it?
Partially to acknowledge the mistake honestly, and to note how it was fixed.
Partially to demonstrate that there are people in publishing that will listen to your concerns, and that voicing them honestly may effect real change.
Mostly it’s for those people who warned me about Twitter coming for me. It’s for those people who get angry or scared because they’re afraid they’ll use the “wrong” term. It’s for those people who think the right thing to do is to double-down about what they intended and just saw things get worse.
Because they told me that listening to and engaging others would not be useful.
And they were wrong. You can act like a bigot and never mean to. Privelege can be invisible to you – but still lead you to cause real, unintended harm.
I’m here to tell you that if you’re willing to really listen, if you’re willing to put your ego to the side, to forget what you meant and focus on what was heard, if you’re willing to acknowledge the damage you did and willing to try to fix it…
…then you only have to fear making yourself a better person.
(11) ADVANCE NARRATIVE. io9’s Katherine Trendacosta gets a head start on disliking the next Potterverse offering in “JK Rowling Tackles the Magical History of America in New Harry Potter Stories”.
The idea that Salem cast a long shadow over American wizarding history is one that drives me crazy, by the way. First of all, there was a whole thing in the third Harry Potter book about witch burning being pointless because of the Flame-Freezing Charm. But thanks for showing people screaming in fire in the video anyway! Second of all, not to get all “America, fuck yeah!” on people, but please let’s not have the a whole story about the amazing British man saving America from its provincial extremists. Third of all, skin-walkers are a Native American myth, so let’s hope the white British lady approaches that with some delicacy.
(12) WORKING FOR A LIVING. Mindy Klasky adds to the alphabet for writers in “J is for Job” at Book View Café.
Other aspects of “job culture” bleed over into the life of a successful writer.
For example, writers maintain professional courtesy for other writers. They don’t savage other writers without good reason. (And even then, they make their attacks in the open, instead of lurking “backstage” in corners of the Internet where their victims can’t follow.) This doesn’t mean, of course, that all writers always must agree with all other writers at all times. Rather, disagreements should be handled with respect and professionalism.
Even more importantly, writers maintain professional courtesy for readers, especially reviewers. It’s impossible to publish a book and get 100% positive reviews. Some reviewers—brace yourself; this is shocking—get things wrong. They might not understand the fine points of the book an author wrote. They might mistake facts. They might have completely, 100% unreasonable opinions.
But the professional writer never engages reviewers. That interaction is never going to work in the author’s favor. The author might be considered a prima donna. He might attract much more negative attention than he ever would have received solely from the negative review. Even if the reviewer is completely absurd, engaging solely in ad hominem attacks, the writer is better off letting the absurdity speak for itself. The cost of interaction (especially including the time to engage) are just too high.
(13) RECURSIVE FILES. Camestros Felapton knows the thing fans are most interested in is…themselves.
I predict his graph of File 770 comment topics, “Trolling With Pie Charts”, will get about a zillion hits.
(14) THEY STUCK AROUND. The Washington Post’s “Speaking of Science” feature reports “Lizards trapped in amber for 100 million years may be some of the oldest of their kind”.
Tree resin can be bad news for a tiny animal: The sticky tree sap can stop small creatures in their tracks, freezing them forever in time. But that’s good news for scientists. If you’ve ever seen “Jurassic Park,” you have some idea of how great tree resin is at preserving finicky soft tissues. The hardened amber can keep specimens remarkably intact for millions of years.
Now, scientists have examined a flight of lizards locked away in the stuff about 100 million years ago. Among the specimens is a tiny young lizard that could be the oldest chameleon ever found — a staggering 78 million years older than the previous record breaker. One of the geckos may be the most complete fossil of its kind and age. These and 10 other fossilized lizards are described in a paper published Friday in Science Advances.
(15) THE TATTOOINE BRASS. The Throne Room march from the original Star Wars movie as performed by a mariachi band!
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Andrew Porter, and Will R. for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]
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@Peace: Indeed, when did the Puritan colony in Massachusetts become the definitive early Americans? Thanksgiving becomes a US thing in and after the Civil War? Until then would there have been more of a sense of Roanoke and Williamsburg and Cape Cod all forming their own Americas?
(9) DONE TWEETING
blah blah blah SJW blah blah SJW blah
Drink!
Anonymous verbal abuse has always been part of the internet.
No it hasn’t.
And even if it has, should we just sit back and accept it?
Eff that.
Mr Vasicek conveniently forgets that as a white male he is usually not the target of the slime that attacks women and minorities on Twitter and the Interwebs. I’m sure Anita Sarkeesian has a hair trigger about blocking because she’s been subjected to so much abuse. It is her, and anyone’s right, to block whoever they want to block, and for whatever reason. This is the same old complaint–haters want to spew their speech without consequences, and they can’t stand it when new laws (for harassment) and protocols (for blocking) stop them from doing so.
@Peace–
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born Nathaniel Hathorne. He added the “w” to hide his descent from John Hathorne, the only one of the Salem Witch Trial judges who never repented. Of course, he was a Massachusetts man, and born in Salem, but still, early 19th century, it was well known enough to matter to him.
Mr Vasicek conveniently forgets that as a white male he is usually not the target of the slime that attacks women and minorities on Twitter and the Interwebs.
Looking through his twitter timeline last night, I didn’t see Vasicek getting targeted at all. Maybe I missed an instance in which some “perpetually-offended SJW type” targeted him, but if it did happen, it seems to have been completely unnoticeable. On the other hand, he seemed to jump into ongoing conversations on a fairly regular basis in order to express his outrage over someone saying something he didn’t like about the Sad Puppies, or GamerGate, or a couple other topics.
My impression (non-USAn, but did do graduate studies in English in the US) is that the dominant literary figures in the US were New Englanders up until the middle of the 19th Century (Edwards, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Dickinson, Emerson, Thoreau, Adams, James, not to mention the Alcotts (Bronson and Louisa)) and that the narratives defining Americanness reflect this fact. This gets heavily disrupted when Twain elbows his way into literary prominence.
11) Based on her response on Twitter, I imagine Debbie Reese (of American Indians In Children’s Literature) will be commenting in length about this soon.
NickPheas: But then, the puritans were not the only people to have end-of-year thanksgiving feasts. I believe it can be demonstrated that such feasts had taken place in Virginia before the Massachusetts colony was founded. So the question may be when people started to think that the story of the Pilgrims was the story of Thanksgiving.
I’m surprised and intrigued to find it being a thing so early: I would have pegged the “Salem=Vast Historical Injustice” thing either to the whinier and more historically-deluded elements among my fellow pagans or to Arthur Miller realizing it made a great parallel to McCarthyism. But Gardener didn’t hit the scene until the thirties, and Miller until the fifties, so if Salem comes up much in the 19th century, it must be something else.
Also what James says. Although I don’t recall any but maybe Hawthorne actually addressing the trials or Puritanism as a topic, albeit I was hung over for most of college and might have missed something. 🙂
On reviews: Agreed. Plus, the completely unreasonable ones can be downright hilarious: I got one which basically seemed to accuse me of writing the Necronomicon, or at least the King in Yellow. (“It dabbles where it shouldn’t, and with no regard for consciousness or truth.” I…kind of want that on a t-shirt.) Given the book the person in question was discussing, that was recursively awesome in its way.
Maybe he gets blocked a lot. That’s basically censorship.
From Vasicek’s twitter bio:
Not advise the average puppy has ever lived by.
@Isabel Cooper
*cough*The Scarlet Letter*cough*
ETA: oops misread your comment. Never mind…. (Ugh need coffee)
Bonnie McDaniel said:
I do recall him claiming that the list of finalists must have been distributed early on the SMOFs mailing list, which I can assure you is not the case, although that’s the sort of thing the sort of person who subscribes to the SMOFs list would say, isn’t it?
At least a couple of people announced their own nominations early, and at least one of them was on the slate, so that was a big clue that the slate voting might have been wildly successful.
It occurred to me sometime later that there was a potential source of some of the suggestive Internet gossip that no conspiracy theories examined: If an author gets their nomination notifcation, understands that it’s embargoed until the official announcement, but absolutely has to share the secret with someone, the likely people are (1) their significant other and (2) their editor. And editors have their own backchannels.
Maybe he gets blocked a lot. That’s basically censorship.
Oh, he does. Then he whines about it. Or claims it as a badge of honor. Or both. He seems to have noticed that he is on some blocklists last autumn as well.
One has to wonder how “perpetually-offended SJW types” gather up to target him when so very many of them seem to have made their desire never to interact with him quite clear by blocking him en masse.
lurkertype said:
I’m with you on that one. In fact, ever since the announcement about other magical schools around the world, I’ve been contemplating the possibility that I’ve outgrown the worldview of the Potterverse somewhere along the way. I mean, seriously, one school for the whole continent of Africa? And I’ve absorbed enough Japanese fiction at this point that the description of the Japanese school feels just as weird and awkward and wrong as the worst of the times when anime tries to depict institutions in Western settings.
Re: Salem
One, Hawthorne wrote a great deal of fiction set in and amongst Puritan times, and merely being white/Western is no bar to an oral tradition – witch tales and ghost stories and Salem seem to have had a long history in the region before Hawthorne wrote and introduced them to a wider audience. Also, enough notable people were unrepentant for long enough about their roles in the executions to make it a sensitive subject for much of the 18th.
Two, a charm against fire wouldn’t do you much. These are good Calvinists who’ve left behind papist fripperies like burning at the stake in favor of a good solid hanging, or pressing to death in the case of one person who refused to plead.
Three, if we’re getting into the whys and wherefores, this is a period of political chaos. James II has just upset all of the usual political arrangements of the colony, Dutch William is just putting things back together again, and what’s more, the residents of Salem Village and Salem Town hate each other. This is combustable situation, amongst a group of people primed to see the devil everywhere, with an older generation who’d been involved by the bloodiest war per capita that English speaking North America has ever faced.
If it seems weird that land disputes could turn into a blood bath, well, look at the history of New England – or indeed, anywhere. (One thing though – it probably wasn’t ergot poisoning. Too few people got it, the symptoms are all wrong, and only a few people in a given household started claiming hallucinations.)
But to return to JK, well, I expect her to have as nuanced and detailed a few of American history as many Americans do of other places history.
Wow, they’re basically targeting him for blocking which is the same as abuse because they can’t hear him tell them how awful they are.
Meanwhile, on a happier note, here’s something on my Hugo radar for next year, now that we know it’s finally going to be released this year: No Man’s Sky. I know that some people have called for nominating video games in Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, but since this one is 100% non-linear exploration, I’m thinking of it as a Related Work.
Lovecraft trots out lines about having an ancestor burned at Salem occasionally, so it was in the early horror gestalt, anyway.
(I actually have an ancestor who was apparently Not Burned as a witch. The story goes that she was tried and convicted, (and that bit’s well-recorded) but everybody apparently felt really weird about it, witch burnings being SO last century, so the judge said “Right, show up tomorrow to be burned! And now we’re all going to look over in this other direction away from the main road out of town…” She walked off, was joined by her husband in another town, and they were buried next to each other at a ripe old age.)
Wow, they’re basically targeting him for blocking which is the same as abuse because they can’t hear him tell them how awful they are.
It must be truly terrible for Vasicek that so many people who he needs to set straight about (for example) how they are the real racists for caring about racism don’t want to listen to him.
this seems appropriate
Now he’s leaving twitter so they won’t be able to block him any more. See how they like THAT.
The Hugo admins can’t embargo authors from telling their friends and editors that they did NOT get a nomination.
If every single author of a Hugo-worthy piece told their friends and editors that they did NOT get a nomination, people could guess that the slate swept that category.
This does not require SMOFs to know the nominees early, just to know lots of authors of Hugo-worthy works.
And if RedWombat’s ancestress isn’t an example of a mass compulsion spell, being used to escape a legal punishment I don’t know what is.
Surely the real point is that flame retardent magic isn’t any use when the witch finders have the wrong people, which they generally will have. And the second real point, is judge the book(s) when you can read them, not on a set of ‘this must be ill researched nonsense’ assumptions.
Now he’s leaving twitter so they won’t be able to block him any more. See how they like THAT.
I can hear all of the teeny-tiny violins playing mournfully as thousands of people who didn’t want to interact with Vasicek will be deprived of his presence on twitter.
If I recall correctly Lovecraft got his Salem data from Cottom Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americania , which wasn’t written as fiction. A quick check on google books (my copy while on my kindle is in the cloud) has a lot on witch craft in Salem Village from page 472 onwards.
If Rowling is setting anything near coastal Massachusette, the Native American nation is the Wampanoag, who have, so far as I know, entirely their own culture and traditions *completely* *different* from the skinwalker stories of the Navajo, who live two thousand miles west.
Thanks to the folks who pointed out about Nathaniel Hawthorne being the one who popularized the mythology of Salem witch trials as a Thing. I forgot about him the way one forgets about one’s crazy old embarrassing uncle. There are folks in my family who have never forgiven him for writing that glamorous fraudulent biography of Franklin Pierce, possibly the Worst POTUS Ever.
As atonement for misreading earlier 🙂 an earlier example than Hawthorne (assuming Franklin actually wrote it):
http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-01-02-0056
@NickPheas
Actually, I think they live this every day. 🙂
I am a little fuzzy on the details, but I was reared in the area and naturally we got fistfuls of history lessons at every turn.
So far as I can recall, not a one person was actually *burnt* at Salem (inland Salem Village, really, not the port town the tourists always go to, which has its own very rich and interesting mercantile history).
Hanged, yes, pressed, yes.
But not a single burning that I recall.
The Massachusetts Bay colony was English, and under English laws and legal traditions. The English didn’t burn witches; they hanged them.
So those convicted of witchcraft in Salem were hanged. Just like they would have been in England.
One man, who refused to enter a plea either way, was pressed to death, also English law and practice.
So if Rowling is talking about witches being burned in an English colony, that’s pretty profound ignorance of even English history.
@ Brian Z
The people actually administering the Sasquan Hugos (i.e. Ruth Sachter and myself) were told that there was no way to adequately protect the anonymity of the voters and still release the data for analysis. (We had no access to the raw data and could only use the tools given to us by the system administrators to count the votes.)
Accordingly, we were surprised to hear that the data had indeed been released for analysis by the system administrators without us being informed. We were even more surprised to hear this first from the people performing the analysis, rather than the system administrators who released the data to them.
On the other hand, I don’t give a good goddamn about your fake outrage over the matter. You’ve proved all last year to have a total lack of sincerity, and I don’t see that will ever change.
As for (7) and the ramblings of Dave Freer–that’s why I have vowed to never, ever handle to Hugos ever again. (For those of you who don’t know, Sasquan was the fourth time that I’ve been a Hugo administrator. Three of those times were a lot of fun.)
Even if you exclude all the great Virginian political writers as literary figures, there’s still Poe (Virginia/Maryland), Brockden Brown (Pennsylvania), Irving, Melville and Fenimore Cooper (New Yorkers all). Not to mention that James and Adams (I presume you mean Henry) are late 19th Century figures (so late in fact that some of their most famous works were published in the 20th Century), and Dickinson, though she wrote earlier, wasn’t published until the 1890s.
RedWombat says:
I actually have an ancestor who was apparently Not Burned as a witch. The story goes that she was tried and convicted, (and that bit’s well-recorded) but everybody apparently felt really weird about it, witch burnings being SO last century, so the judge said “Right, show up tomorrow to be burned! And now we’re all going to look over in this other direction away from the main road out of town…” She walked off, was joined by her husband in another town, and they were buried next to each other at a ripe old age.
It’s a fairly common thing to have a family with roots in Salem claim they had an ancestor tried as a witch in Salem as its was a story in my family that we also had one male ancestor who was tried, convicted and actually hanged while his wife and children fled to safety. No way ‘tall to verify if happened.
Misleading title on that ebook article; the body of the article itself appends “…with DRM”, which is the correct statement.
As always much love to authors who sell DRM-free ebooks, even if there exist sketchy methods of breaking DRM.
Thank you Young Pretender for trying to bring some actual history WRT Salem. No witches were burned. All were hung but the one who refused to plead as he stated. In addition to the European politics that YP mentions, there was also a lot of conflict with some of the native Americans in the area, with smaller outposts and farmsteads being burnt out. The atmosphere in Salem was one of paranoia.
Also important to understand is people truly believed that witches were real and had true power. Also, according to one book I read, there were actual procedures to follow when investigating, such as interviewing witnesses separately, none of which they followed and which generated a lot of criticism from leaders of surrounding communities when the news got out. It was widely believed among their contemporaries that they may have executed innocent people due to the botched and rushed investigation. They couldn’t know for sure because witches are real, etc.
Tl;dr No witches were burned in what later became the US.
@WW
Peace and Lis Carey also touched on the fact that these were hangings, and also some of the background; Isabel Cooper also touched on how some of the popular legends of Salem in fandom are a bit wrong.
@Peace
Yes, if theres actual research, there’s a lot to be said of the utter and complete differences of the Navajo and the Algonquin speakers of the Northeast. Also, about the cultural interchanges between the natives and the English. Long story short, there is a reason that when the colonists started talking about their “rights as Englishmen” in the 1770s, the English wondered what they were talking about: by the average colonists view of their “rights” had been influenced enough by the natives that it had diverged.
Aaron sez:
I mentioned my Asshole ex yesterday, and he did this a lot. “I’m not arguing, I’m debating!” Except it’s the most hostile debate anyone’s ever seen. He would leap into random Twitter conversations and TweetBomb! them, often in a snide tone with all caps, and then get huffy or sad when called a troll and blocked.
I think what Vasicek fails to understand is that nobody is obligated to take part in a “rational debate” with everyone on the internet who wants to engage them. Certainly Anita Sarkeesian got no time for that shit. (Was it her who posted one week of her Twitter abuse? That was viscerally upsetting.)
Has “virtue-signalling” become the new trendy sneer among the Puppies, or among the other anti-SJW warfighters of the 101st Keyboard Brigade? Are they looking for new epithets because they’ve worn out the P and C keys on their laptops?
Missed the edit window to say Ninja’ed by many.
My roommate and I buy all the books we truly love in hard copy so we can keep them forever. I haven’t trusted electronic media since we were forced to switch from VHS to DVD. Record to CD to streaming. Unless all this paper spontaneously combusts, my books will always be mine.
There was a strong secular movement in late 19th Century America, and witch trials were exactly the sort of thing they liked to point to as evidence of how borked religion is. Just a quick search of Ingersoll’s lectures turns up several references to Salem.
anonymous internet comments: back in the day, there were very few sites that even offered the opportunity to anonymize your identity – and even when you could use a “handle”, it was pretty darned easy to link it up with someone’s real identity.
So I’ve heard. It sounds absolutely dreadful.
Double-edged sword, etc.
@Seth Gordan
Yes and no. It’s a perfectly acceptable and accurate term for a host of behaviors. Generally, I’d heard it more in discussion of and among the left, discussing the differences between people who are actually politically active and those who make the consumer culture choices associated with the left (organic food, hybrids, yoga) but are not politically active. Or in other contexts, the importance of showing up and being visible in a church or club, regardless of actually activities.
I think it’s being used but the 101st Keyboard ISIS Hunter Brigade as a sort of soooper genius co-option of academic terms.
Hanged, not burned. Blargh, brain fuzz.
I’d have to dig up my mom’s notes on it. She goes off on these genealogy kicks occasionally, but she learned long ago that I really only care if somebody’s done something interestingly nefarious. So she calls me up with the axe murderers and the generals who get slaughtered through poor tactical decisions and whatnot. People who live lives of relative virtue make good friends, but poor ancestors.
@World Weary: It was widely believed among their contemporaries that they may have executed innocent people due to the botched and rushed investigation. Indeed. In fact, the Salem trials died out largely because even those who prosecuted them came to have grave doubts about what they had done – John Hathorn and Cotton Mather (who wrote an entire book defending the trials) being notable exceptions.
(11) It’s been a long time since I read the book in question, but did the burning witches essay specifically mention Salem? My (very foggy) memory is that it was more about British witch burning, not American. But I could be completely wrong about that, it’s been at least ten years since I last read PoA…
Anyway, I do still think it’s implausible that many actual American witches and wizards were killed in the trials, but I do think it’s plausible that it’s still a dark time in American wizarding history, because a lot of innocent Muggles would have been killed in their places, maybe even because of the self-defensive measures actual magical folk took cast suspicion on them. Also Squibs with strange items in their homes, magical children with Muggle parents casting accidental magic that implicated them or their families or their friends, etc. etc. There are plenty of directions the “Salem was a dark time for American wizards and witches” could go and still work.
As for the skin-walker thing, that’s not necessarily going to be set in New England – it’s going to be in one of the four Pottermore stories about the wizarding history of the whole United States, so it’s entirely possible that it will be well-researched and accurate. I’m not saying I have complete faith in her to do it right sight-unseen, but I’m not going to assume she’s going to do it wrong until I’ve seen it, either. I think JK Rowling’s shown a lot of progress in learning how to be inclusive since she wrote the original 7 books. 🙂
I did say dominant, not only. If I were to try to make this a more structured argument rather than an impression — and I have seen the argument made by people who were specialists in the period, but being inexpert I can’t do more than pass it on — it would be that there was a definite New England literary “establishment” which was perceived to be (and very much perceived itself to be) at the core of American letters (much as I could make an argument for a Toronto-Montreal Canadian literary establishment in the middle of the 20th Century which does not exclude the existence of some important authors from the Maritimes and the West). This had to do not only with the provenance of the authors but the prominence of publishing companies such as Ticknor and Fields and Little, Brown and Co. (New York was, nevertheless also, obviously, a centre for publishing as a commercial centre.)
Allow me to buck the trend.
I have ancestors in Salem, real Salem the port, not Danvers, that which was once called Salem Village where all the nonsense happened.
My ancestors were merchants and sea captains who sailed tens of thousands of miles to bring back china plates and tea and fabrics.
My ancestors may have been called impious (a number of them were Quakers, thrown out of Britain for refusing to swear oaths to the king), but they and their sensible neighbors would have laughed at the very idea of witches.
Peace is My a Middle Name:
Believing in witches and witchcraft did not preclude my ancestors for being good Christains. In fact my Scotch (as my grandmother called herself) and Welsh ancestor owned pews in the local coastal New England towns they lived in. And witchcraft accusations were often just a cover for hatred of other practices as you can see in Joan Huff and Marian Yeates’ The Cooper’s Wife is Missing which we reviewed here.