Pixel Scroll 3/7/16 Burning Down the Scroll

(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”.

F2_large

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.]

242 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 3/7/16 Burning Down the Scroll

  1. Causality Broken

    Excuse me for changing the subject, but I just wanted to point out that we have an historic opportunity tomorrow/today to observe a total breakdown of causality, as a solar eclipse will begin on Wednesday, but end on the prior Tuesday.

    Here in 8032, we now realize that this isn’t at all unusual, as predicted by Clarke in Childhood’s End.

  2. 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?

    I’ve long since come to the conclusion that if you tap on Rowling’s worldbuilding outside of Hogwarts itself (and even then…), it falls apart quickly. Like a mainstay of the Ministry of Magic for muggle relations (Mr. Weasley) having no clue at all about the most basic aspects of non-magic culture and objects, and that apparently being common among mages. Which conveniently ignores that an 11 year old muggleborn Hermione knew more than they did, and muggleborn mages were not uncommon. The class sizes in Hogwarts were at most 100 or so. If Hogwarts is the only school in Britain, that’d mean around 6000 adult mages in Britain tops. Which is way too small a number to support a professional Quidditch League and *both* the significant number of folk only in the mage society (Hogwarts and Diagon Alley businesses) and the number apparently in the world at large.

    And just what can you do with a Hogwarts degree? It’d appear your career choices are work for the Ministry, work at Hogwarts, or play Quidditch (if inventive, do a startup practical jokes shop….for a potential customer base of 6000 at most…OK, I’m not angel funding that). Etc.

  3. Standback on March 8, 2016 at 11:03 am said:

    OK, this is kind of cool: a “Women of Star Trek” series of postage stamps, in Tuvalu. Now I wanna live on a cool island like that!

    Only if it stays cool (in the literal sense). Tuvalu appears poised to be the first major victim of climate change, due to its lack of mountains, or even notable hills. The average height of the islands is currently about 2m above sea level. It may well become the first significant source of eco-refugees. Fortunately (for the people, if not the place), it’s surprisingly well-off for a country of its size, because the country domain it was assigned was .tv, which it happily exploited.

    (And now, of course, they’re making additional money off of Star Trek fans with those cool stamps, which is just fine with me!) 😉

  4. Shambles: Some e-book deals on US amazon store

    The Guy Gavriel Kay book, Sailing to Sarantium, was nominated for the WFA, the Mythopoeic, and the Prix Aurora.

  5. While trying to gather info on the artist Lauren K. Cannon (pro or fan? I really don’t know), I found her covers to the re-issue of The Zombie Bible by Stant Litore. Have any of you read them? They sound kind of interesting, but I don’t really care for horror (it’s too horrible!), so I want someone else to tell me about them.

  6. Cultures all over the world have magical traditions of their own. You create a magic system that needs a focus item like a wand? Look at the existing culture’s concepts of magic focus items – they exist!

    But I gave up on JKR’s worldbuilding (and arithmetic skills – sheesh!) long before the end of the series.

  7. Tom Galloway said:

    The class sizes in Hogwarts were at most 100 or so. If Hogwarts is the only school in Britain, that’d mean around 6000 adult mages in Britain tops.

    Assuming they all go to wizarding school, which, as we’ve seen, they haven’t (e.g. the conductor on the Knight Bus). Also, magical folk have significantly longer lifespans that nonmagical ones.

    Even so, I still haven’t been able to get the right kind of population numbers, so the point stands. And it’s something that’s always bugged me a little, but I’m fairly inured to fantasy authors who can’t do math at this point.

    Treating the entirety of Africa like one civilizational unit is a whole other category of error.

    And just what can you do with a Hogwarts degree? It’d appear your career choices are work for the Ministry, work at Hogwarts, or play Quidditch

    Yeah, it’s kind of a magical Eton– geared mostly toward manufacturing civil servants.

  8. Taking over the world and saving the world aren’t career choices? How disillusioning!

  9. John Lorentz –
    I cannot properly express my admiration for professionalism the Sasquan Hugo administrators displayed under massively trying circumstances. My hat is off to y’all.

  10. I’d like to echo others in this thread by expressing my appreciation for the efforts of the Sasquan Hugo administration team:

    John Lorentz
    Ruth Sachter
    Linda Deneroff
    Ron Oakes
    Dave McCarty
    Glenn Glazer

    You all put up with a great deal of public (and I have no doubt, private) abuse from certain quarters — on top of fulfilling a job that is tough and demanding even in the best of circumstances (never mind the highly-fraught situation last year).

    People are always quick to complain if they don’t like how things go, but remember much less often to express appreciation and congratulations for a job well done. I hope we’ve been able to remedy that at least a little today.

    John, I’m sorry that this past year has put you off serving in that capacity ever again. But your contributions up to this point were huge, and I am deeply thankful that you made the extensive time and effort to give them (and indeed, are still doing so, every time you choose to respond to people on this blog).

  11. On Hugo-related matters, I have reviewed Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear. It was good, but I don’t know if it is good enough to merit a nomination. Your mileage may vary.

  12. One of the things that always sort of amused me about Hogwarts is that no one seems to be teaching basic math, or composition, or anything not magic-related, really. (Unless it’s all in Muggle Studies, which it doesn’t seem to be.) I suppose the muggle-born might get that from their schooling before they come to Hogwarts, but what about the wizard-born? No wonder the wizarding world is in such a mess–no one can balance a checkbook or fill out a job application!

  13. @John Lorentz

    Thank you for doing the work under truly unenviable circumstances. And it’s not even that you were being criticized by people who knew what you were doing – it was entirely clueless man children, conspiracy theorists, and false-faced trolls.

    You fought the good fight. You ran the race. You kept the faith.

    @Mary Francis

    I think I remember a lengthy and obscene Cracked rant on how Hogwarts taught massive, fabric of the universe altering powers – and none of the civics or art of general ed courses that make a well rounded person. So you’d have someone with a kindergarteners knowledge of the world, universe altering powers, and an 18 year olds emotional maturity at the end of it.

  14. JJ on March 8, 2016 at 6:36 pm said:
    I’d like to echo others in this thread by expressing my appreciation for the efforts of the Sasquan Hugo administration team:

    John Lorentz
    Ruth Sachter
    Linda Deneroff
    Ron Oakes
    Dave McCarty
    Glenn Glazer

    I’d like to add my echo to the above. Thank you all.

  15. I will add my voice to the chorus of people who are appreciative of the excellent work that the Sasquan Hugo Administrative team did under what must have been extraordinarily trying circumstances.

  16. Aaron: I have reviewed Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear. It was good, but I don’t know if it is good enough to merit a nomination. Your mileage may vary.

    My mileage is the same as yours. It’s a really enjoyable book, it just didn’t quite hit my “OMG Hugo!” button.

  17. JJ on March 8, 2016 at 6:36 pm said:
    I’d like to echo others in this thread by expressing my appreciation for the efforts of the Sasquan Hugo administration team:

    John Lorentz
    Ruth Sachter
    Linda Deneroff
    Ron Oakes
    Dave McCarty
    Glenn Glazer

    Agreed. Another echo here…

  18. Petréa Mitchell on March 8, 2016 at 2:45 pm said:
    (11) Regarding skin-walkers, the first prominent reaction from a Native American perspective is… nope.

    For those who didn’t click through to the full io9 post, BTW, a skin-walker is in the teaser trailer for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

    Oh, gross. How disappointing. What a wasted opportunity.

    @Tom Galloway:

    You are not the only one. A friend of mine calls it cardboard worldbuilding, unable to tolerate the slightest poke.

  19. Also much gratitude to the Sasquan Hugo Administrators, who did a magnificent job under trying circumstances. Thank you.

  20. I don’t know how much actual worldbuilding Rowling did, as opposed to just kind of making things up as she went along, especially in the early volumes. If she had to do it over again, I wonder if she’d excise some of the more whimsical elements she introduced in book 1 — things that she threw in because they sounded neat (moving stairways; secret-door password-protected paintings) but that then had to be kept in mind when the series took a much more serious turn.

    (Which isn’t to say that I wasn’t a huge fan of the books, several of which I bought at midnight, and one of which (Deathly Hallows) I brought home and read until the dawn.)

  21. John Lorentz,

    Thank you for demonstrating your commitment to the traditions of Worldcon fandom, and for the informative reply to my comment.

    How ironic that one of the fans engaged in analyzing the ballot data is a world famous expert in data security.

    Earlier, I suggested a constitutional amendment requiring that the ballots must be destroyed once there is no possibility of changing the winners.

    Since the current constitution leaves a lot of scope for future Worldcons to do things differently, perhaps another way to talk about what went wrong and how to fix it is through the site selection mechanism.

  22. Brian Z: What is your proposed standard for “destroying the ballots” in this era when 99%+ of the votes are cast electronically?

    (In case you have trouble thinking of a sufficiently extreme example, I remember Ye Olden Days when a Computer Audit Specialist summonsed the physical hard drive a company used for accounting, not wanting to trust the printouts.)

  23. @ Mike Glyer

    There’s a whole industry devoted to that kind of question, so if future Worldcons continue to be blessed with record membership numbers, perhaps someone could be contracted to answer it.

    Or maybe the standard should be “tell everyone to empty the Recycle Bin,” since “this is a fan-run literary award, not the UN Security Council.”

    Even short of a formal rule change, Worldcon bids simply discussing during site selection what steps they will take to handle data security seems like a move in the right direction.

  24. @Mike Glyer
    The mind boggles as one contemplates all the problems:

    1. Fully wipe clean/reformat properly all the computers/servers involved in the Hugo nominating and voting

    2. Fully wipe clean/reformat all the backup drives/flash drives/cloud computing servers/etc.

    3. Lose all other programs and data on those machines drives in doing steps #1 & #2

    I don’t see this passing a business meeting if thought through.

  25. (3) I’m embarrassed to say that, despite being Swiss, I’ve read none of the authors mentioned. On the other hand, the page forgets to mention that Dürrenmatt, in addition to being a literary giant in general, also published one bona fide Science Fiction story: “The Winter War in Tibet”. An english translation seems to be available here: http://tinyurl.com/zgf2jjk

  26. @Paul Weimer: “Here in 3766, of course, we’re arguing over the latest adaptation of Lord of the Rings as a low-gravity opera recorded on the Moon.”

    Hey, I’d watch that; how do I get back to 3766??? (I’m stuck in 7552, which is just a bit over twice 3766, oddly.) Aaaaand @Nigel and @James Moar just take things further, LOL. 🙂

    @Zil: Also much love to publishers who sell DRM-free ebooks!

    @Standback: Cool stamps! Thanks for linking to it.

    @Salem Experts: Keep in mind, in an alternate universe, history may be (should be!) a bit different; perhaps that includes Salem witch burnings. I can’t hand-wave away anything else but that one tiny bit, however.

    @Petréa Mitchell: “No Man’s Sky”? Uh-oh, the horrible truth:

  27. “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?”

    I think a bit different. Hogwarts is a typical brittish invention where parents send away their loved childs during the time they typically should want to spend as much time as possible with them. Good for books, but seems horrible in reality.

    I would hope most of the wizards of the world are not taught magic under such circumstances. I don’t know what the alternatives would be. Smaller schools with less specialized teachers? Apprenticeships?

  28. Hoo-boy, that magical North America thing is as terrible as feared. Combination of Noble Savage (“they’re so good with herbs!”) and Ignorant Savage (“they can’t do PROPER magic because they don’t use wands!”), conflation of all NA groups into one big mass of undifferentiated “Indian culture” (hint: if you can see different cultures in countries you can drive/sail back and forth between in one day, how’s about noticing how big the US is?), and saying “the Indians TOTES knew the Europeans were coming, except they somehow missed the germs, firearms, and genocide”. And apparently an ignorance of these large landmasses we call Canada and Mexico.

    It’s one big mush of cultural appropriation, unexamined casual racism, lack of research, and not even bothering to answer questions on Twitter.

    Well, don’t worry, Native Americans, I’m sure she’ll get around to having simplified caricatures of white US citizens tomorrow, so you won’t be alone for long! I look forward to “All Americans love guns and eat too much” followed by “Everyone with a Southern accent is a moron.”

  29. Hampus Eckerman: I think a bit different. Hogwarts is a typical brittish invention where parents send away their loved childs during the time they typically should want to spend as much time as possible with them. Good for books, but seems horrible in reality.

    Maybe I don’t have the right to comment on others’ culture. But I’ve always thought the “Boarding School” custom was indicative of a whole lot of people who shouldn’t be having children having them anyway because something something heirs something something carry on the family name — and a whole lot more people falling in line and doing it too, because it was the “done” thing.

    I’ve always wondered how many of these parents regretted not getting to be part of their childrens’ childhoods. I’ve always wondered how many children were permanently psychologically damaged by that lack of familial interaction. I’ve always wondered if there were studies which showed how many kids came out of the experience better for it, and how many never got over the parental distancing and the school bullying. 😐

    I would be interested to hear the thoughts and feelings of Filers who did the Boarding School thing.

  30. One of the things that always sort of amused me about Hogwarts is that no one seems to be teaching basic math, or composition, or anything not magic-related, really.

    There’s a bit in Diana Wynne Jones’ Charmed Life where one of the magic-users is Not Pleased to discover that she’ll have to spend a lot of time on studying ordinary subjects as well as magic. It almost plays like a parody of Harry Potter, despite being from a couple decades earlier.

    Witch Week in the same series also feels like a Potter parody, taking place in a boarding school that’s run-down and repressive even before you get to the fact that they burn witches rather than teaching them.

  31. I would be interested to hear the thoughts and feelings of Filers who did the Boarding School thing.

    *Raises hand*.

    My parents taught at a succession of them; I went to another one across the country (my choice). I thought it was great.

    First of all, it was more academically challenging than my local public school, which also meant I was surrounded by people who thought that “smart” was a good thing. That helped considerably with making friends. (There was actually much *less* bullying than there might have been at a public school, because most people had better things to do with themselves.)

    Second, I learned more independence. You do your homework yourself or fail, to wake up when the alarm goes off or not get breakfast/miss class and get penalized, determine how sick you are and walk to the infirmary, ask for the help you need yourself, buy supplies when you’re out, and so forth. I was also flying across the country and back by myself six times a year, usually *not* on direct flights. It’s good preparation for, you know, life.

    Third, it actually made my relationship with my parents better. I went to school at fourteen, the time when many kids are in their boundary-testing phase, and when I in particular was a complete asshat. I found pretty quickly that rebellion and tantrums *would not work*–not that they’d worked super well on my parents, who are reasonably tough cookies, but that people who care about you but also know you’re one of a thousand and will leave in four years are even less vulnerable. I learned to work either within the system or around it, and while my folks and I certainly had our fights on vacations, there were much fewer, and I think boarding school spared us the really bitter arguments I’ve heard of other teenagers and parents having.

    I was fortunate in that I didn’t need it, but a lot of people also benefited by being far away from more toxic family situations, whether that was learning that gay people are people despite fundamentalist parents, being away from a messy divorce, or just getting free of unreasonable expectations re: dress and behavior.

    Fourth, you get diversity of perspective. I was in a dorm with girls from all over the country and even a few foreign students, and encountered many more backgrounds and ways of viewing the world than I would have done by staying home.

    It’s not for everyone, for sure. (And I didn’t go until fourteen–the vast majority of US boarding schools, at least, are high schools rather than the middle-and-high combo that you get in the UK, or in UK-based fiction.) But I know it was good for me and my sister, and I think it’s good for a lot of other kids and families as well.

    For what it’s worth, my parents definitely didn’t have kids out of obligation–they’ve each got four siblings who were being fruitful and multiplying long before we came along–and we both could have gone to public school if we’d wanted. (My sister did, for a year.)

  32. We have boarding schools for highschool and up also. Usually, they are specialized like for sports or something else. Or are in rural areas. Only heard good about those.

    We also have boarding schools made after british model for younger students. Out of four in total, one was closed because of abuse and another one closed and then opened again after abuse. Not a good record. :/

  33. I’ve tended to assume that the British boarding schools of fiction are about as accurate as any fictional representation of a real-world institution. That is: I assume that those elements that make for interesting plots are emphasized, and those that aren’t, are minimized.

  34. @Hampus: I feel like it does get a lot harder to do well when the kids are younger, though I’m sure there are exceptions (I might have been okay with it myself, as I started the independence/differentiation/don’t-want-my-folks-around thing pretty early). Neither a parent nor a child development expert, but I’d guess that you’re going to get a lot more fourteen-year-olds than eleven-year-olds who are ready for that kind of independence.

    There are US boarding schools that do start that young or younger, but it’s pretty rare (one of the ones Dad taught at was 6-12th grades, but students couldn’t start boarding until 8th grade–13 or so), like less than fifty in the US. (Including a number of military academies and religious schools, which wigs *me* out some.) At a guess, I’d say that many of those serve kids who, for one reason or another, are doing really badly in their home environment, or whose parents have to travel frequently or live in places where they don’t want to take children, but I couldn’t speak with any authority there.

  35. For some reason, military schools used to advertise in the back of National Geographic. At least, that’s where I seem to recall having seen them, and they were as ubiquitous and dependable as the fullpage ads for Victor B. Mason in the latter pages of Popular Science used to be.

  36. I would be interested to hear the thoughts and feelings of Filers who did the Boarding School thing.

    I went to a boarding school for my final three years of high school. There isn’t any kind of tradition in my family of sending kids to boarding school: My parents were living in west Africa during that time, and there just weren’t any suitable educational options locally so I returned to the U.S. and attended a boarding school to finish high school.

    Despite living on a different continent from the rest of my immediate family, I didn’t feel deprived. The school was a pretty high quality academic institution primarily aimed at getting its attendees into college. I have always appreciated the excellent education I received there. I made some good friends at school and that helped with the problem of homesickness.

    One interesting side benefit of a boarding school was that I had more time to do things. I had a pretty tight schedule, and most of my activities were required, but I was able to carry a full academic load, participate in varsity sports, help with the school literary magazine, participate in the model U.N., take part in several drama productions, and so on. Because everything was basically right outside of my dorm room door, I didn’t spend time driving to and from school and activities, and so I was able to actually do a lot of things that might have been foreclosed otherwise.

    On a side note, a fictionalized version of my high school appeared in the book Passion Play, written by one of my high school English teachers. Aside from the murders, the book is fairly accurate.

  37. I didn’t attend boarding school but my parents seriously considered sending me to one at the end of middle school. because I was under-performing at my public school (based on test results). I don’t think it would have helped, though. They thought I needed discipline and structure. What I really needed was treatment for ADHD and dyscalculia, neither of which were diagnosed at the time. This was back when girls were just considered flighty or daydreamers. It would have only been about an hour and a half away from home, though, so I could have gone home on weekends. They did have cute uniforms. I wouldn’t have minded that part.

  38. I attended a boarding school for high school, but I wasn’t one of the boarding students because I lived in town.

    @Aaron:

    On a side note, a fictionalized version of my high school appeared in the book Passion Play, written by one of my high school English teachers.

    A fictionalized version of my high school appeared in the little-known movie Ups and Downs, with one of my English teachers playing a starring role. (Colin Skinner was more a stage actor than a movie actor in general, so most of his credits aren’t actually on IMDB.) When I started attending the year after the movie was filmed, a number of the students who had been there the year before still had the movie’s modified version of the school crest on their blazers.

    Well, I guess you write what you know…

  39. Kendall said:

    @Petréa Mitchell: “No Man’s Sky”? Uh-oh, the horrible truth:

    They’ve anticipated that– they’re going to have some sort of filters (both human and computerized, it sounds like) on the submitted names.

  40. @Isabel: “There are US boarding schools that do start that young or younger, but it’s pretty rare (one of the ones Dad taught at was 6-12th grades, but students couldn’t start boarding until 8th grade–13 or so), like less than fifty in the US. (Including a number of military academies and religious schools, which wigs *me* out some.) At a guess, I’d say that many of those serve kids who, for one reason or another, are doing really badly in their home environment, or whose parents have to travel frequently or live in places where they don’t want to take children, but I couldn’t speak with any authority there.”

    I can speak with some; I was a day (opposite of boarding) student at a private 7-12 school that had boarding for 9-12. It’s a single-sex religious school that used to be a military one and still shows some signs of that heritage. Anyway, my mother and I acted as… I don’t remember the exact term the school used for it, but we were kind of a “local family” for one boarder whose brand of awkwardness meshed fairly well with mine. Basically, although he had frequent contact with his own family, we were locals that he could associate with outside of school – have a home-cooked meal, go to the bookstore, hang out on weekends, that sort of thing. His folks returned the favor a few times, bringing me out to stay with them for a week or two.

    His family was (probably still is) quite religious and went to church every Sunday, but they were more “quietly conservative” than “fire-and-brimstone” – by which I mainly intend to indicate a degree of… not “prudishness,” but something close, to the degree that he’d routinely skip over any “kissing scenes” (to swipe from TPB) in books and dogear those pages so he could skip them more easily on a reread. (He may have been asexual at the time, but he’s married now.) They certainly weren’t GOP “family values” types; I still get pro-Democrat emails from the father, and his politics are close enough to mine that any differences are insignificant.

    At any rate, they’re good people, not at all the distant sort, and I always knew them to be a very close-knit family. I know they’ve moved twice – from Kentucky to New Orleans to Alabama – but they weren’t exactly jet-setters who were never home. They just wanted their son to have a better education than he could get locally.

    ETA, @K8: (uniforms)

    Ugh, the local all-girl school had tragic uniforms. One type of dress, merely in different colors, and instantly recognizable as The GPS Dress. At least my school was basic shirt-and-tie – boring, but flexible.

  41. @Rev. Bob: Makes sense. There’s also a lot of that, especially with the state of public education what it is; while we need to solve it for everyone in the long term, I can’t fault any parent for looking for personal ways out in the here and now. I can also see kids genuinely wanting to go–either because they don’t fit in at home or because they’re the type who find the whole experience a cool adventure, like summer camp. (I, at fourteen, wanted to go to New England and see the seasons. I, at fourteen, was dumb. The fact that I’m thirty-three and still live here says something too.)

    None of the places where I was either a student or a faculty brat actually had uniforms. The dress code ranged from anything-but-jeans-and-t-shirts through “neat, clean, in good repair, and semiformal for two dinners a week” through, at the school where I went, “anything as long as it’s legal.” There was one girl my tenth-grade year who wore a bustier and fishnets to first period. It was more effort than I ever wanted to put in at 8 AM, but hey.

    I fictionalized a bunch of my schools in a Hickey of the Beast, a novel I wrote under my actual name a while back, and this thread has reminded me to contact my current publisher about maybe picking up the rights to that.

  42. @Cat
    Much thanks to you and Ruth Sachter for all the work you have done to make the Hugos happen! I certainly understand why you don’t want to go through a case of Puppies again.

    One thing I am angriest at the Pups about (and there is a lot to choose from) is the way they have sapped the interest and good will of the people who put in all the hard work of organizing the WorldCon and the Hugos. Whatever they may have intended (and I have some unflattering ideas about what that was) what they achieved was vandalism of an all-too-rare volunteer spirit that none of them possess themselves.

    If I could add a comment here, we should all remember that volunteers are free to quit any time and be on guard that our demands and criticisms don’t slide over into bullying.

  43. @ Lela,

    You are wise to caution that all of us should take care given the rhetorical tone of this conversation.

    We had learned previously that “Sasquan” passed its data to MAC II, which provided it to someone who published an analysis of the numerical strength and voting patterns of political groupings within the membership in order to influence the upcoming vote. That we were told individual voters might even be personally identifiable from that data was icing on that cake.

    The justification was that every Worldcon has the right to do anything it wants with the ballot data, “period.”

    In that context, John Lorentz’s clarification that the Hugo Administrators in fact knew nothing about that is really terrific news. The Hugo Administrators performed their jobs well, and the system worked.

    And it looks like there was no malice here – just, as you noted, busy volunteers performing a thankless task.

    But cutting corners without thinking it through.

    To pick an example out of a hat, would we want a volunteer helping with database administration for some upcoming Worldcon passing ballots to persons associated with a boycott of a publisher?

    Even if no harm was intended, this is a terrible precedent.

    The most positive step is for the Worldcons present and future to acknowledge that data security and the final disposition of our ballots has not been adequately addressed, and start to think of some practical solutions.

  44. Brian Z: We had learned previously that “Sasquan” passed its data to MAC II, which provided it to someone who published an analysis of the numerical strength and voting patterns of political groupings within the membership in order to influence the upcoming vote.

    Brian, there is no “we” in that sentence. The “we” in that sentence is YOU.

    You do not speak for me. You do not speak for anyone else here. I thought that this was a lesson you learned almost a year ago. Apparently you have a learning disability, because it looks as though that lesson didn’t actually sink in.

    Nothing has been revealed which would “influence the upcoming vote” in any way. This is just more of your lies. And I’m tired of you repeatedly spouting your lies here.

  45. @Lele E. Buis: Your comment baffles me, given @Cat wasn’t demanding, criticizing, or bullying WorldCon and Hugo volunteers. She was criticizing people who did – at least, that’s how I read it. Did you mean to quote someone else?!

  46. I think it’s meant as an addendum to Cat’s post, not an argument against it.

Comments are closed.