Pixel Scroll 4/6/2016 I Saw A Scroll Drinking A Pina Colada At Trader Vic’s, His Pixel Was Perfect

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(1) APPRECIATION. At Fantasy Café, Stephanie Burgis thanks the women who blazed the trail into the fantasy genre.

I wanted to write a very important thank you note to the women who first showed me the way into this field…

I imagine the extra emotional hurdles I would have had to jump, if those women hadn’t taken the risk before me of letting the world know their gender when they published their books.

So: thank you, Robin McKinley, Patricia McKillip, Emma Bull, and Judith Tarr. I loved your books then, I love them now, and I’m so grateful that you took that risk for me and every other fantasy-loving girl reader/writer out there.

Thank you.

(2) FEMINIST COMICS. Corrina Lawson at B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog recommends “9 Feminist Comics Everyone Should Read”. Apparently this doesn’t literally mean feminist, but anyway —

It’s a good time to be a reader interested in feminist comics. When I say “feminist,” I don’t necessarily mean “a book in which a women fights the patriarchy.” I don’t even require the story to be written by a woman.

What I mean by “feminist comics” is that they offer stories that include three-dimensional female characters. That’s it. I know, it seems like a low bar, but it’s surprising how often it isn’t done. And yes, many of them that do it are written by women—but not all.

In compiling a list of feminist comics I think everyone should read, I looked beyond Marvel and DC Comics, because I wanted to spotlight work being done outside of the “Big Two,”  though I do love and applaud the work being done on Ms. Marvel, Captain Marvel, A-Force, Black Canary, Batwoman, and Gotham Academy. It is not meant to be an exhaustive list; rather, it’s a glimpse at a handful of the many comics out there with fascinating female characters. Please feel free to add your own recommendations in the comments. (And to those wondering why Lumberjanes isn’t on this list, well, I sang the praises of that book in a previous article.)

First on the list is Monstress, story by Marjorie Liu, art/cover by Sana Takeda (for young adult readers)

(3) MORE CIVIL WARRIORS. SciFiNow breathlessly reveals “Captain America: Civil War adds two interesting last minute cast members”.

The first is the marvellous Jim Rash, best known to many as Dean Pelton from Community. The second is Alfre Woodard, who is particularly interesting seeing as she’s also set to appear in Netflix’s Luke Cage as Mariah Dillard. Does that mean Captain America: Civil War will become the first MCU film to cross over with Netflix’s series of Marvel shows?

Both Woodard and Rash’s involvement in Civil War seem to have been revealed by accident when both their names were included on a Disney list of cast members who will be attending the film’s upcoming premiere. Since the list was issued, sources have claimed that Woodard will play a small but pivotal part in Civil War as the mother of an American citizen who was killed during the Battle of Sokovia in Avengers: Age Of Ultron.

(4) BRADBURY IN MUTTS. James H. Burns says, “One of my favrorite things in the world for many years now has been Patrick McDonnell’s comic strip, Mutts. McDonnell is simply one of the best, of our generation, and really, all time. You should like this installment!”

mutts, bee

 

(5) KINDLE SCOUT. Joan Marie Verba explains “How Kindle Scout Works” at the SFWA Blog.

Kindle Scout is a publishing option sponsored by Amazon.com. Writers can submit an unpublished manuscript of 50,000 words or more in the science fiction, fantasy, mystery, or romance genres. Kindle Scout then will put up a web page with the cover, summary, sample chapter, and author information. Potential readers then review the information, and if they have an Amazon.com account, they can nominate the work. At the end of 30 days, the Kindle Scout team reviews the statistics and the work. If they accept the work for publication, the author gets an advance against royalties and the work is published on Kindle Press….

One site I would highly recommend reading before, and especially during, one’s campaign is kboards—in particular, the “Kindle Scout Experiences, Anyone?” board. This board has authors who are in the midst of a Kindle Scout campaign as well as authors who have completed one (successfully or unsuccessfully). Some on that board assert that there are factors in addition to the number of nominations that Kindle Scout considers in order to make a selection, such as the author’s sales history and number of titles previously published.

(6) MOVIE SPACESHIPS. ScreenRant lists the “14 Most Iconic Ships To Ever Appear In Science Fiction Movies”. It’s true, I made noises while reading this article.

If you’re reading this list, chances are at some point in your life you’ve held a toy spaceship in your hands and steered it gracefully through the air, banking left and right, while making engine noises (“Kschchchch,” “Wrrrrrrreeeeeeeaaaar!”) and laser noises (“Pfew, pfew,” “Tschew!”). That’s because ships in sci-fi movies can be so crazy cool. That’s part of the fun of watching them: seeing which new designs special effects teams have come up with, or what old favorites have been updated.

Most of these ships are spacecraft, but sci-fi ships can also go underwater or even inside the human body. There are malicious, invading alien crafts and benevolent alien ships; massive vessels that hold thousands of people, and little one-seaters. But they’re all awesome in their own way.

Okay trufen – before you peek, guess whether #1 on the list is from Star Wars or Star Trek!

(7) BAEN NEWS. Baen Books will now offer MVMedia ebooks on the Baen Ebooks website. MVMedia is an Atlanta-based publisher known for a wide range of science fiction and fantasy, notably for its Sword and Soul genre anthologies. Sword and Soul is epic fantasy adventure set in a mythological Africa featuring a sword-wielding black hero.

MVMedia at Baen Ebooks launches with The Dark Universe Anthology edited by Milton J. Davis and Gene Peterson, and From Here to Timbuktu, written by Milton J. Davis.

The Dark Universe anthology is a multi-author space opera in the high sense. It portrays the origin story of the Cassad Empire, from its ambitious beginning as a refuge and new home for a persecuted people to its evolution to the first great human Galactic Empire. Authors include Milton Davis, Gene Peterson, Balogun Ojetade, Penelope Flynn, Ronald Jones, Malon Edwards, K. Ceres Wright and DaVaun Sanders….

(8) GUSTAFSSON OBIT. Ahrvid Engholm pays tribute to the late Lars Gufstafsson (1936-2016) at Europa SF.

Lars Gustafsson was just awarded the International Zbigniew Herbert Prize in Poland, and was supposed to collect it May 17th in Warsaw, his 80th birthday.

But death intervened.

Lars Gustafsson, author, poet, philosopher, etc, passed away April 3rd. He was 79.

Lars Gustafsson was a heavyweight in Swedish literature and culture. The biggest swedish morning paper, Dagens Nyheter, had seven (!) pages about Gustafsson’s death.

And he was a big fan of science fiction and fantastic literature! It began when he as a young boy steadily read the then sf pulp magazine Jules Verne Magasinet (1940-47). He even visited our local SF conventions occasionally.

(9) DRAGON AWARDS REACTIONS. Here are samples from the range of reactions to Dragon Con’s new SF awards.

https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/717764337377484800

https://twitter.com/JasonKing1979/status/717799573649907712

(10) THE WINNER HAS YET TO ENTER THE RING. Lela E. Buis awards a technical knockout to the Dragon Awards simply for being announced, in “Upheaval in the awards system”.

Contrast this attendance figure with WorldCon that gives out the Hugo Awards. Wikipedia lists 4,644 attendees and 10,350 who bought memberships to vote the 2015 Hugo Awards, which was a record for numbers. With DragonCon moving into the awards game, I’m thinking the Hugo’s are officially undermined. The Puppy scandal has not only disrupted the voting system, but it seems to have led to an inspection of the Hugo process where works are winnowed through a narrow review and recommendation system and onto the ballot.

(11) DUKING IT OUT ABOUT PC. Matthew M. Foster and L. Jagi Lamplighter overflowed Facebook with their recent discussion of Political Correctness, each writing a supplemental blog post.

Foster’s post is, “They Took My Job!”

Political Correctness threatens people’s jobs.

OK. How? The example from that other thread is that researchers who disagree with climate change are afraid to speak up due to fear of losing their job. Unfortunately, this isn’t a good example for it brings up an obvious alternative—that is that researches who do not do a good job fear losing their job. Which they should. If 99 researchers do an experiment and get X, and 1 guy does it and gets Y, then the most likely reason is because 1 guy did it poorly. And that’s what we have in climate change research. But lets get past that and make this more general, to take out the notion that the employee is bad at his job while keeping in mind the nearly meaningless nature of the term “PC.”

So, how can someone lose their job due to political correctness?

  1. He could say something that is offensive to other employees or the boss thus damaging productivity.
  2. He could say things that are offensive to the general public
  3. He could say something that indicates his disagreement with the boss.

….Or they can just say whatever they want, and accept the consequences. Because that’s not political correctness. That’s life. I believe the phrase is, freedom isn’t free. Yelling “political correctness” doesn’t get you out of life. It doesn’t excuse you from consequences, and if you think it does, you are an idiot whose views of society would create the totalitarian state you claim to abhor—if you were consistent anyway.

Which all comes down to, no one is losing their job due to political correctness nor should they fear doing so. They are losing their jobs because they are rude and insulting, or because they are inconsiderate by disrupting the company, or because they are causing the company to lose sales, or because they are personally upsetting their boss, or because they won’t follow their boss’s lead, or because they are bad at their jobs. That’s how jobs work. Don’t want to lose your job? Don’t do those things. Political correctness has nothing to do with it.

L. Jagi Lamplighter wrote, “Political Correctness vs. The Search for Happiness”.

I am a strong supporter of the great dialogue that is civilization. Were it up to me, nothing would ever interfere with it.

Political correctness quenches this conversation. Here are some of the reasons I say that:

* It replaces discussion and debate with Puritan-style disapproval.

You don’t explain to someone why you disagree with them. You speak so as to shut them down as quickly as possible.

* It keeps people from sharing politically correct views in a way that might convince.

Because of this, if the person who favors the politically correct position has a good reason for their opinions, the other person will not know, because debate has been silenced.

*It keeps people from sharing any other view.

If the person who does not favor the politically correct position has a good reasons for supporting their position—the person favoring the politically correct reason will never hear it, because he shut down the debate before he had a chance to hear the reasons…..

(12) CARD HOLDS THUMBS DOWN. “Will this election doom America? ‘Ender’s Game’ author holds dim view in light of current politics” reports the Ripon Commonwealth Press.

America has no hope.

That could be the summation of an hour-long talk science fiction writer Orson Scott Card offered last week Wednesday at Ripon College.

Couching his comments in the concept that a good science-fiction writer must understand history, Card explained that history now suggests the United States is not at a crossroads, but already too far down the wrong path to seek a solution.

“There is no winning hand in this election. There is no vote you can now cast that will save us from potential disaster, and that’s never really been true in American history before. Sometimes we’ve elected the worst guy, nevertheless the worst guy was never as bad as the choices we have now,” said Card, who wrote the popular book “Ender’s Game,” and which he turned into a screenplay for a Hollywood movie. “So we can look at empires, we can look at them as I do as a science fiction writer, and try to find how they rise and fall, what rules apply …

“The problem is, we’re all making this situation up together, and we’re all stuck with whatever answers we come up with. And if history’s taught us one thing, it’s all empires fall, and they all fall at inconvenient times.”

(13) POTTER EVENT RESCHEDULED FOR GEEZERS. The City of Perth Library postponed its Harry Potter event, aimed at teens aged 12-18 and their parents, to accommodate adults who complained they felt left out.

Library staff attempted to explain that the event was curated by its Youth Services faculty and the events were specifically targeted at teens….

Despite this explanation, many fans lamented over the idea that they would miss out on their chance to learn about owls or take a “potions class” from local experts so the library decided to postpone the event indefinitely.

“We want to be able to provide a magical experience for all Library patrons,” they wrote on Facebook. “As such the Harry Potter event has been postponed and we are looking at how we can accommodate many more witches, wizards, muggles and their families.”

(14) RIDLEY RAPS. “Daisy Ridley Rapping Is the Greatest ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Bonus Feature Yet!” at YouTube.

(15) WHAT A WRITER NEEDS TO KNOW. Soon Lee’s instant classic started life as a humble comment before being enshrined in the canon of English literature a few minutes later.

The Writer

On a cool Autumn’s eve
At a Worldcon bound for nowhere
I met up with the writer
We were both too tired to sleep

So we took turns a-starin’
Out the window at the darkness
The boredom overtook us,
And she began to speak

She said, “Child, I’ve made a life
Out of writin’ people’s stories
Knowin’ what the plots were
By the way they held their tropes

So if you don’t mind me sayin’
I can see you’re out of ideas
For a taste of your Oolong
I’ll give you some advice”

So I handed her my China
And she drank down my last swallow
Then she bummed a cigarette
And asked me for a light

And the night got deathly quiet
And her face lost all expression
She said, “If you’re gonna play the game, child
You gotta learn to write it right

You’ve got to know when to show ’em
Know when to tell ’em
Know when to passive voice
And to gerund

You never check your wordcount
When you’re typin’ at the keyboard
There’ll be time enough for counting
When the writin’s done

Every writer knows
That the secret to good writin’
Is knowin’ what to throw away
And knowin’ what to keep

‘Cause every book’s a winner
And every book’s a loser
And the best that you can hope for is to Fail
Better next

And when she finished speakin’
She turned back toward the window
Crushed out her cigarette
And faded off to sleep

And somewhere in the darkness
The writer she dreamt stories
But in her final words
I found advice that I could keep

You’ve got to know when to show ’em
Know when to tell ’em
Know when to passive voice
And to gerund

You never check your wordcount
When you’re typin’ at the keyboard
There’ll be time enough for counting
When the writin’s done

Repeat to fade

(Starring Badass Raadchai Ann Leckie as the writer. With apologies to Kenny Rogers)

[Thanks to Will R., JJ, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]

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303 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 4/6/2016 I Saw A Scroll Drinking A Pina Colada At Trader Vic’s, His Pixel Was Perfect”

  1. Hey, where’d the Phantom go? He’s in my email, but I’m not seeing him here.

    One wonders if he reconsidered the courage of his convictions during the edit window…

  2. A Phantom appearance of the Phantom?
    Is he emulating Patrick McGoohan?
    (obscure reference is obscure)

  3. RedWombat — For reference, the All-Papa sketches can be found on the twitter of Matt Smith (not the actor). I’ve found about five so far, as well as a bunch of other lovely Star Wars character sketches and whatnot.

  4. No, guys, the Phantom is right. I’m a competent white male, and I’m gainfully employed and have been for decades–

    Wait. Did I say “right”? Sorry, I meant that other thing. The opposite of right. “Wrong”, that was it! He’s completely wrong. Sorry for the confusion there.

  8. @Aaron

    True. Well, I’ll hang on to the email just in case he pops up and tries to wiggle out of what he said.

  9. Bonnie McDaniel on April 7, 2016 at 9:02 am said: This is utter bullocks. While you’re searching for the nonexistent links regarding Cat Valente, why don’t you search for the nonexistent links regarding this assertion. At least it’ll keep you busy and out of our hair.

    As I said previously, posting links here is f-ing pointless. But since you’ve got your knickers in such a twist Bonnie, I’ll do the ten second search for you.

    http://www.catherynnemvalente.com/holding-the-hugos-and-the-english-language-hostage-for-fun-and-profit/

    There you go. Happy? Of course not, and that’s why I didn’t bother before. Truth is wasted on some people.

    Moving on…

    PC job loss victim: Brendan Eich.

    Or this absolute gem here, http://dailycaller.com/2016/04/04/navy-bureaucracy-has-no-idea-how-to-make-job-title-yeoman-gender-neutral/

    I would not say no to 1% of the money they are spending to find a gender-neutral term for Yeoman. Probably would amount to a healthy seven figures. That’s your tax dollars, m’dear.

    Or, here’s a dog-not-barking clue for you: Have you noticed any awesome new breakthroughs coming out of Hewlett Packard lately? I bet they’ve got a very robust PC policing department, probably a great place to work if you’re easily triggered by deep voices saying “good morning”.

    So no, it’s not utter bollocks. It’s a very profound problem, one that affects a lot of people. Matthew M. Foster is a buffoon at best, if he really believes what he wrote there.

  10. I think the phantom was in moderation, but had come out, but inserted in before the page break.
    Best left there imho. Some things aren’t worth searching for.

  11. Darren Garrison
    That floating cloud city (and the graphite) look pretty cool. I bought a pen in China that is suspended like that, resting on its tip. The spaceship is a little different in that it floats between two magnets, and the background piece keeps it from slipping away backwards. Its full neatness isn’t readily apparent to the eye, but handling it for a moment makes it kick in.

  12. John Seavey on April 7, 2016 at 9:23 am said: “Wrong”, that was it! He’s completely wrong. Sorry for the confusion there.

    So John, Bonnie thinks you should post some links to prove your argument.

    Oh wait, that wasn’t an argument. Never mind then. As you were.

  13. Yeah, Phantom’s comment’s there, but not worth reading. It’s not even coherent thought, just a collection of right-wing talking points bolted together with no thought as to a logical structure. Trigger warnings bad, straight white men the only real oppressed minority. It could have been put together by Markov-chaining bits of Wisdom From My Internets.

  14. @Stevewright (and others who think I was a bit reactionary yesterday)

    A. I probably was too…intense…in my response
    B. I certainly may have concerns or sensitivities not shared by most
    C. I also have a personal track record, going back decades, of very successfully being able to say “I told you so”. (And an accompanying track record of being consistently 5-10 years ahead of things)
    Which really means nothing except that I’ve often been able to suss out where things are going sometime down the road and have almost always failed to get others to take effective action (if/when/where needed). I don’t like saying “I told you so”, nor being the boy who cried wolf when the wolf really shows up, but have gotten used to it.
    D. My problem with the Dragon awards is not that they’ll make the Hugos go away – so far as fans are concerned. They won’t and they can’t.
    My issue is the recognition of how things play these days. SF/Fandom has been a marginalized niche market for decades. It is being pulled out of that now by media & etc. (and that’s not necessarily a good thing either); it hasn’t attracted big marketing dollars because it has been perceived as a niche. However, here’s the scenario: an award used for marketing that is participated in by maybe 12,000, versus one that reaches 80-120,000. At an event that is focused (same locale year after year); an event that regularly attracts mainstream media attention.
    Those looking for something to market behind will hardly have any decisions to make as to which one to pump their dollars and attentions into. The first publisher that sticks “Dragon Award Winner” or whatever on a book cover and sees an increase in sales, will use that tool more and more.

    The above will not make fandom go away, nor diminish its influence – on fans. And that fact may be enough for most fans to simply be able to ignore fandom-lite.

    But what happens when the publishers start listening to the marketers (ummm, they already do), who say things like “this story will not sell to the dragon con crowd”? Or the editor says to the author “you need to dumb this down even more to appeal to our audience?”

    Money follows money. Fandom does not have money. Dragoncon does. Fandom does not market well (not an accusation). Dragoncon does.

    My concern is not “the end of fandom as we know it”; it will continue. But what was once the “mainstream” of that niche market, the people who knew people, cared, influenced, etc, will no longer be the mainstream of that (growing) niche market and the landscape will change irrevocably in favor of things that we do not necessarily think are important; “sold the most copies” will supplant “was the best” – insofar as those controlling the dollars and the marketing are concerned (not that it hasn’t been heading in that direction). The ability of fandom to maintain a place at the table in the face of people and things that can throw dollars and sales at the table will steadily diminish.

    And probably most important of all is, if anyone wants to delay (not prevent) that from happening, things need to be addressed from a marketing and dollars perspective – something that I think fandom is ill-equipped to do and generally uninterested in doing.

    So – no camps for Trufans, but I do think we are watching the beginning of the end of anything recognizably fandom – at least for the next generation.

    Sorry for so much negativity, but I felt the need to explain my position.

  15. @The Phantom: Could you offer some proof of where a straight, competent, white male has been fired for being one of the following: 1) straight, 2) competent, 3) white, 4) male.

    Until then, kindly shut the fuck up.

    (Speaking as a straight white male who is currently crushing it and is yet to lose a client because of one of those factors)

  16. @steve davidson: But the Dragon*Con crowd are primarily in media fandom, as is my understanding. Media fans don’t buy a great number of books compared to Worldcon-type fandom.
    Some publishers will, yes, go after the small slice of a comparatively big pie — but many publishers are already doing that, selling media tie-in novels and so on. That’s always been a big market anyway.
    But other publishers will continue to realise that having a midlist is a good thing, and that building careers rather than focusing on a single big hit right out of the gate is worthwhile.
    There’s not been a single SF audience for decades, and the companies publishing fandom-friendly SF aren’t going to suddenly veer away into publishing Star Wars-lite — and if they do, someone else will relatively quickly come along to replace them, because even a relatively small audience is worth catering to if, like many of us do, that small audience is buying a hundred or so books a year rather than one or two.

  17. Andrew Hickey on April 7, 2016 at 9:50 am said:
    Yeah, Phantom’s comment’s there, but not worth reading. It’s not even coherent thought, just a collection of right-wing talking points bolted together with no thought as to a logical structure. Trigger warnings bad, straight white men the only real oppressed minority. It could have been put together by Markov-chaining bits of Wisdom From My Internets.

    Yeah, personally, I look for a better quality of trolling.
    Pathetic.

  18. But what happens when the publishers start listening to the marketers (ummm, they already do), who say things like “this story will not sell to the dragon con crowd”? Or the editor says to the author “you need to dumb this down even more to appeal to our audience?”

    We live in this world already. Do you think publishers have not seen the sales figures for people like Laurel Hamilton and Charlaine Harris? If a publisher wanted to reach as big a market as they possibly could, they’d publish nothing but romance novels and celebrity tell-all books. But they don’t. They want to sell to other markets. This has always been the case, and the existence of the probably-soon-to-be-renamed Dragon Awards doesn’t change things one way or the other.

  19. Dragon Awards just seem like a smaller version of the Goodreads Choice Awards or the Legend award. Not sure how that will supplant the Hugos.

  21. Oneiros on April 7, 2016 at 10:02 am said: @The Phantom: Could you offer some proof of where a straight, competent, white male has been fired for being one of the following: 1) straight, 2) competent, 3) white, 4) male.

    Brendan Eich. But I repeat myself.

    While we’re on the subject, what about the Odds? What about the guys who don’t do “social” well enough to know they should shut the hell up about what the Parson said at church on Sunday morning that they found so uplifting and beautiful? I do not go to church myself, but I’ve seen plenty of examples where if fellow employees even knew a person went on Sundays, the knives would be out. Or synagogue for that matter, being Jewish is still a career threatening condition in some places. Divest Israel, you know.

    PC creates an environment where you have to carefully watch what you say. The very basis of PC is that some ideas are so harmful you just can’t be allowed to say them. Over time that gets to be pretty much all ideas.

    Such an environment is abusive, toxic, and most of all, unproductive. Please see Hewlett Packard, again, for elucidation. Not because they are the worst possible example, but because they’re about average for corporate America these days.

    Nice language by the way. You talk like that at work? Probably not, right? Might trigger somebody.

  22. Cat Eldridge on April 7, 2016 at 7:00 am said:
    Greg says This certainly won’t help with the Puppies’ original goal, though, which was simply “get Larry a Hugo.”

    I’d suggest that there’s only two work by him that are Hugo worthy, the first being Ringworld and the second being The Mote in God’s Eye which was written with Pournelle. Pretty every work after those two has more than a dollop of right wing politics in it.

    I thought it was Larry Correia, not Niven. Maybe both?

  23. Phantom —

    Or, he/she could be something that is considered offensive. Like male. Or white. Or pretty. Or tall. Or worst of all, -competent-. Everybody hates competence.

    That’s why we have laws that say you can’t fire someone for their race or their gender or their sexual orientation (or height or weight or whatever random thing). As far as I know there’s no law that says you can’t fire someone for being a person of colour but it’s okay if they’re white. None. At. All.

    What we do have is laws that allow corporations to put contradictory or impossible clauses in their employment contracts so that they’ll always have a reason to fire anyone they don’t like. And since most corporations are run by straight white men, I can guess which way their biases lie.

    So, pretty much the opposite of what you say we have. If anything needs to be improved, it’s not the “PC” employment laws, it’s the laws that allow managers to make life for all workers hell, and let them act arbitrarily in service of their own petty biases and prejudices.

  25. Agreeing with Andrew Hickey.
    There’s already things like Goodreads and rankings at Amazon for them that want just bulk ratings.
    Another free-for-all popularity contest won’t change anything.
    (Though maybe that is maligning Goodreads, I guess, since they did root out their recent puppy incursion.)

    Still, the new award won’t really tell anyone anything they didn’t already know: popular book or movie is popular.
    There will be a bit of a wrestle between the impact of sheer sales figures and the power of organized fan factions, but it’s pretty much going to be a bring the popcorn kind of thing.
    And that is fine.
    If they were smart, they’d organize some programming around their finalists, and make the contest an integral part of the event.
    Dunno if they’ve got their timeline set up to make that possible, though, again, a lot of that might happen in any case, since, to repeat, popular work is popular.

  26. @The Phantom

    It’s been an on again off again topic at the Harvard Business Review whether a toxic superstar is worth keeping. The consensus (of execs and managers actually in the business world not just professors), and associated studies, suggest toxic team members, even superstars, generally do more damage to a team’s productivity than any value they add. I’ll leave the reading up to you but there it is.

  27. I’m talking an expanse view of the DragonCon awards for a number of reasons. One, this could be an email account harvesting scheme with minimal effort behind it.

    Two is something lurkertype mentioned on the other friend. Oh, you’re going to organize a band of alt-right MRAs? I’ll see you a horde of anime geeks, and raise you some PNR fans. Your throwing a band of Gamergaters into the mix? I’ll see you about a bajillion women who shoe up to Dragon-con, and which ever category Sherlock is eligible for will have won in any year we have a series that involves Cumberbatch and Freeman intensely whispering at each other from a distance of inches once the bishonen fans get introduced to the mix.

    I think the Puppies have woken a dragon here, because let’s face it: they’re insular within fandom, and their going to find out just how big a tent fandom has become.

  28. David Shallcross on April 6, 2016 at 9:29 pm said:
    I saw nothing in the Dragon Award web pages suggesting that you couldn’t vote the same novel for multiple categories.

    No, you do have to decide which category your favorite (grabbing a few categories at random) alt-history, apocalyptic, YA horror novel best fits in.

    From the “important notes” at the top of the nominations page:

    Do not nominate a book for more than one category. If the same book is added more than once, your nominations will be null.

    (@NelC Oops!)

  29. I think the Puppies have woken a dragon here, because let’s face it: they’re insular within fandom, and their going to find out just how big a tent fandom has become.

    Remember how upset Torgersen was that a book of essays about Doctor Who beat out a book of inside baseball about publishing written by Resnick and Malzberg?

  30. There are oodles of awards already; anyone looking at File770 beyond the pixel scrolls will see Mike faithfully recording them. Why on earth should the existence of yet another award be a cause for concern?

    And please don’t try the ‘all the publishers will publish is Charlaine Harris’ route; publishers have kept publishing all sorts of things not by Charlaine Harris, and will undoubtedly continue to do so. Charlaine Harris herself was a mid list author for decades before the Southern Vampire series took off, and yet her publishers kept on publishing her.

    So, more awards, more parties, more celebrations of things which people love; it sounds good to me, even if I don’t love the things in question. As Sir Terry Pratchett pointed out This is not a dress-rehearsal; it’s worth bearing that in mind before embarking on the never-ending what if? which simply wastes time and energy…

  31. NelC on April 7, 2016 at 10:28 am said: Phantom —What we do have is laws that allow corporations to put contradictory or impossible clauses in their employment contracts so that they’ll always have a reason to fire anyone they don’t like. And since most corporations are run by straight white men, I can guess which way their biases lie.

    It’s been my experience that large corporations only hire a certain type of person. They like the ones who look sharp, don’t have any opinions on anything, and follow nose to tail no matter what. They do not hire for ability or competence, those things are not considered important.

    See the Target Canada fiasco or elucidation. Shell after shell of yes-men and PC dictated yes-women, yes-POCs and yes-others, collectively failing to have a single clue among the lot of them. Because upper management ruthlessly crushed anybody who wasn’t a yes-creature. A single competent human who stood up at the begining and told the CEO he was out of his fricking mind would have saved hundreds of millions. Nobody did. Because SHUT UP!!! is a way of life.

    Let there be a hint of race/gender/orientation involved, and the shut-uppery becomes even more fabulous. How much money do -you- think the US Navy is spending on gender neutral job descriptions? Not the jobs themselves, mind you. The descriptions and the paperwork. You could probably build, fit-out and crew a destroyer, would be my unsupported wild guess.

    Why are they doing it? PC. It’s the only reason. They even say it’s the only reason.

    This makes dealing with large corporations/government a special kind of hell. I avoid them where possible.

  32. Dear Puppies: Yes, indeed, with the introduction of the Dragon Awards, the Hugos are defeated, doomed, bereft of even the last sliver of prestige that an ignorant public was foolish enough to grant them. The chief recreational activity at MidAmericaCon is going to involve SJWs gathering at the hotel bar, weeping into our kale smoothies, drying our tears on our organic hemp sleeves, and perhaps repairing to our rooms for bouts of joyless non-procreational sex.

    After such a thorough victory, for you to even mention the Hugos again, let alone vote for them, would give them far, far more attention then they deserve. Let these ashes stand unperturbed as a monument and a warning.

    The Hugos are the past. The Dragon Awards are the future. Will you dare to seize the future?

  33. “It’s been my experience that large corporations only hire a certain type of person.”

    Mine too. Like when I worked at IBM, in an office that at its peak had about eighty people working there, two of whom were women (and one of those two was the receptionist).
    And when my manager there had a rant in a team meeting about being sent on a diversity training course, saying he didn’t need it because “Look at us! We’re a diverse group!” — everyone in the room was a cis man between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five, with no visible disabilities, and if any were gay or bi they weren’t out at work.

    Yep, I really hate that whole only-hiring-the-same-type-of-person thing — although it does mean that I managed to get a job as a software engineer on a high salary despite having no relevant qualifications or experience whatsoever, simply by knowing the right people and looking the part.

    (It happened I *was* genuinely very good at my job, but that’s just coincidence).

    I agree. Big corporations should stop employing the same kinds of people.

  34. @steve davidson: I’m inclined to take a less pessimistic view, myself. There have always been commercial pressures exerted on authors, pretty much for as long as there have been authors who’ve needed to eat… and yet literature as a whole continues to be an extremely diverse field, and there is no sign yet of the celebrity memoirs and romances crowding everything else out.

    From a purely commercial point of view, the question is whether a Dragon win will translate into anything noticeable in the way of sales… which we don’t know as yet, and probably won’t for some time. It seems unlikely, though, to me, that this one award will have such an impact that it’ll distort the market as a whole. (I’d submit that, for purely commercial reasons, your best bet is to write something that might get to be a set text in school, and forget about any awards.)

    Besides which, we don’t know what sorts of books are likely to win these awards in any case. There’s no particular reason to think they’ll be bad books; maybe they won’t be the same sort of books that won fan awards back in the old days, but, well, that always happens, doesn’t it? I’ll bet Homer had to put up with people at the back of the audience grousing about how he wasn’t a patch on the Epic of Gilgamesh. Personally – and, as I said, I’m speaking entirely selfishly – I don’t mind if the Dragon winners lack some elusive and numinous quality of fannishness, so long as they’re good books. If they’re not good books, well, I’ll know better than to pay any attention to those particular awards. There will still be other stuff out there – possibly in some profusion, given the proliferation of small presses and self-publishers. I see no reason for doom and gloom over this one, sorry!

  35. Stoic Cynic on April 7, 2016 at 10:33 am said: @The Phantom It’s been an on again off again topic at the Harvard Business Review whether a toxic superstar is worth keeping.

    Your argument revolves around the meaning of “toxic”. One hugely competent guy who’s a total dick might be more trouble than he’s worth. (Although, there is Steve Jobs to consider.)

    What was Brendan Eich’s toxicity though? He was an average Silicon Valley CEO until he privately backed something politically incorrect. He gave his own money to the “wrong thing”.

    If that guy can lose his job to PC bullsh1t, I can certainly lose mine.

    That’s why I say it is a waste of time posting links to stuff here. Everybody here knows Eich lost his CEO job because he didn’t privately follow the accepted politically correct path. He didn’t say the wrong thing, he -is- the wrong thing.

  36. @Steve Davidson
    Have you seen publishers rushing to put “Goodreads winner” on books and change publishing decisions based on them?

    I think Dragon*con winners are going to be books which are already on multiple bestseller lists and/or won other awards in which case your scenario is already happening as authors are asked to write books like that one.

    I’m not as worried as you because I’m seeing more and more authors going hybrid and expect to see more infrastructure to help them do it right and get into bookstores. Going from hybrid to full-time self-publishing is going to happen more as authors continue to get fed up with bad contracts, being told to write like someone else instead of themselves, and they have a fan base.

    @Seth Gordon
    Well said! LOL

  37. Money follows money. Fandom does not have money. Dragoncon does. Fandom does not market well (not an accusation). Dragoncon does.

    Dragon*Con. Is. Fandom.

    Every single person who attends Dragon*Con is a Fan. With a capital F, even.

  38. All good comments and mine are most certainly affected by current life happenings which are of a very negative nature, so I’m going to do what I ought to have done yesterday and shut up until I can regain some perspective on things.

  40. (6) I thought I smelled a trick question and guessed before clicking through that #1 would be the TARDIS. Oh well.

  41. Shell after shell of yes-men and PC dictated yes-women, yes-POCs and yes-others, collectively failing to have a single clue among the lot of them. Because upper management ruthlessly crushed anybody who wasn’t a yes-creature.

    So, upper management only hires yes-people. Exactly who is being fired because they are white, male or straight again?

    How much money do -you- think the US Navy is spending on gender neutral job descriptions? Not the jobs themselves, mind you. The descriptions and the paperwork. You could probably build, fit-out and crew a destroyer, would be my unsupported wild guess.

    So you don’t actually know and are talking out of your ass. Again.

  42. … who the hell is going to Dragoncon that’s not a fan? Is it the kids putting tens of hours into making their costumes? Is it the people that are waiting on their computers for the tickets to drop to snap them up? Is it the people willing to trudge around the city of Atlanta though throngs of people to see their favorite actors/authors/youtube personalities?

    Fans don’t have money? I wonder who is buying all those Funko Pop figurines.

  43. Money follows money. Fandom does not have money. Dragoncon does. Fandom does not market well (not an accusation). Dragoncon does.

    As customers, for the book market, traditional Worldcon-based Fandom has plenty of money. They tend to be older than the average Dragon*Con attendee. They tend to be more avid readers than the average Dragon*Con attendee. These factors mean that the average Worldcon-type fan has more money to spend on books, and is more inclined to spend a higher proportion of their entertainment money on books than a typical Dragon*Con attendee.

    Just a case in point: A quick count shows that I bought at least forty-five new genre fiction and genre-fiction related books in 2015 alone. I’m not particularly atypical on this front among the circle of people that I know who attend Worldcon and other similar fan-oriented conventions. How many new books a year does the typical Dragon*Con attendee buy? I suspect it is a considerably smaller figure.

    Dragon*Con fans are fans, but they are not all book reading fans, and of those who are, they are probably more casual about it. That’s a fine way to be a fan: If your fandom involves movies, or television, or cosplay, or anything else, that’s great. But we are talking about books here, and the things book publishers do to sell books. Marketing to book buyers is probably where the money is in that equation.

  44. Andrew Hickey on April 7, 2016 at 11:12 am said: Mine too. Like when I worked at IBM, in an office that at its peak had about eighty people working there, two of whom were women (and one of those two was the receptionist).

    I did business with IBM, briefly. Once. It was a torture of a thousand cuts. Because of things like this:

    1) What’s the point of sending an office full of software engineers to Sensitivity Training? Is it going to make them better programmers? Is it going to boost the bottom line with increased productivity? Is it going to get the project out faster?

    2) How many top-drawer female software engineers do you know? I’m not talking about women who got hired to work at your company that call you up for help. I’m talking about people you would call up in a panic for help if something wasn’t working and you couldn’t figure it out. I’m talking Wizard level programmers. Uberfems, code monsters with lipstick. How many?

    Dozens? Ten? Five? Any?

    Based on your answer, tell me again how smart it was for IBM to be spending money on Sensitivity Training, instead of trying to keep me, the customer, taken care of. Oh, and what awesome thing has IBM done lately? They’re even more f-ed than HP from what I can gather. They’re basically Geek Squad these days.

  45. Let me tell you how much money is spent changing job titles to gender neutral.

    Are you ready?

    The CNO says “From now on it’s corpspeople, and not corpsmen.” And then anything printed from that day forward has the new name.

    Done. What money is spent?

  46. I just finished reading All The Birds In The Sky by Charlie Jane Anders and it made me cry at work.

    No idea if that will be considered a good or bad thing, but it hit all the right notes for me in mixing Magic! and Science! and relationships and complexities of being human. Really, really loved it, and it is on my desert island list.

  47. alexvdl on April 7, 2016 at 11:54 am said: Let me tell you how much money is spent changing job titles to gender neutral.

    Please, go ahead.

    Are you ready?

    Ready ready!

    The CNO says “From now on it’s corpspeople, and not corpsmen.” And then anything printed from that day forward has the new name. Done. What money is spent?

    Well, it would be nice if that were true, but it isn’t. True, that is.

    Behold, The Link! [trumpet fanfare] http://dailycaller.com/2016/04/04/navy-bureaucracy-has-no-idea-how-to-make-job-title-yeoman-gender-neutral/

    They have a whole fucking department dedicated to this crap. Is a department worth as much as a destroyer? I think it might be, once you drill down into the book keeping.

    But I repeat myself. Again. Because it’s pointless posting links on File770.

    That was my last one. No more linkage for you, grasshoppers. From here on, you do your own google. Y’hear that, Bonnie? Google your own, ducky. I got spaceships to build.

  48. Aaron on April 7, 2016 at 11:40 am said: So, upper management only hires yes-people. Exactly who is being fired because they are white, male or straight again?

    I’ll say it for the third time for you really slowly, ok Aaron?

    Brendan

    Eich

    Was that slow enough for you? I hope so, typing careful like that is painful.

    You are like the fricking poster boy of pointless malarkey on here, aren’t you? It’s hilarious watching you rage on that there’s “NO PC IN THE WORKPLACE DAMNIT!!!” and then you can’t even follow the links. It’s almost like you’re frothing at the mouth. Do you even read what I post, or do you just cut and paste shit randomly?

    Of course there’s PC in the workplace, and of course people get fired over it. All the frigging time. It’s like gravity these days, pervasive and inescapable.

  49. We really need to look for a better source for trolls. Acme just hasn’t been providing good, quality trolls for quite a while now.

  50. job titles in the Navy …

    Bosuns Mate … hmm already gender neutral
    Machinists Mate … ditto
    Electricians Mate … ditto
    Operations Specialist … ditto

    etc ..

    in fact the only rate that I can think of was the one mentioned above Corpsmen which as was demonstrated is easily changed by a single 1-second correction.

    you can of course go check for yourself

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Navy_ratings

    as you will see most the whatever-men rates have been merged into larger gender neutral rates i.e. Radarman –> Operations Specialist

    Doesn’t appear as if the guy knows much about the Navy …

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