(1) TWO FIVES WORTH OF WISDOM. Cecilia Tan shares “Ten Things I Learned at SFWA Nebulas Weekend”. Here’s the outline, click through for details:
- We Clean Up Pretty Good
- Kickstarters Should Be Pretty
- At Patreon a Little Means a Lot
- Dictate for Artistry
- The Myth of Self-Publishing
- White Knights and Online Harassment
- Think Globally
- You Can’t Be in Two Places at Once
- John Hodgman is Really Funny
- Not the Hugos or the Worldcon
[Warning: One Filer says this was flagged on her system as NSFW. I don’t see anything problematic on that page. However, Tan does write some NSFW things which may be elsewhere on her site.]
(2) NEBULA WINNERS PHOTO.
(3) NEBULA LOSERS CELEBRATION. Meanwhile, an informal survey showed only 50% of SFWAns know how to make an “L” sign on their foreheads.
Proud #Nebula Losers! I love my ridiculous writer family #NebulaAwards @sfwa https://t.co/visxr34pmt pic.twitter.com/QCT4XBa7QL
— Sam J. Miller³ (@sentencebender) May 15, 2016
(4) GRANDMASTER CHERRYH. Black Gate’s John O’Neill has posted a video of C.J. Cherryh’s SFWA Grandmaster panel.
This weekend I attended the 2016 Nebula Conference here in Chicago, where CJ Cherryh received the SFWA Damon Knight Grand Master Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Part of the Friday afternoon programming included “An Hour With CJ Cherryh, SF’s Newest Grandmaster.” I sat in the front row, with Nebula nominees Ann Leckie and Lawrence M. Schoen, and captured the first part of the speech, in which Cherryh entertained the audience with recollections of her childhood ambition to be a writer, discovering science fiction, her early career, selling her first novel to Donald Wollheim at DAW Books, and her recent marriage to fellow novelist Jane Fancher.
(5) SAME NIGHT, AT THE BRAM STOKER AWARDS. Ace Antonio Hall knew from the look of Scott Edelman’s piñata-colored jacket there was still some candy left….
(6) WISE INVESTMENTS FOR YOUR PLAY MONEY. From Die Welt, “Game of Thrones: Real estate and Prices in Westeros”.
The dungeons and castles located on the continent of Westeros have kept the families known from the tv-show “Game of Thrones” safe and sound for centuries. What if several properties from the show were suddenly listed for sale? Christoph Freiherr Schenck zu Schweinsberg, leading expert on castles for the real estate agency Engel & Völkers, checked out some of the unreal estate objects….
Andrew Porter is skeptical about these exorbitant valuations:
I don’t believe any of the properties have indoor plumbing, and the thought of being shot with a crossbow while sitting on the throne (no, not the Iron Throne!) may give you second thoughts about buying any of these…
(7) TOLKIEN’S FRIEND. Tolkien scholar John Garth contributed to “Robert Quilter Gilson, TCBS – a documentary”.
When Tolkien writes in the Foreword to The Lord of the Rings that ‘by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead’, he is referring to his friends in a clique formed at school but later bonded by the First World War – the TCBS. Of these, Robert Quilter Gilson was the first to be killed, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 100 years ago this July. Tolkien’s shock and grief infuses one of the first items in The Letters of JRR Tolkien: ‘His greatness is … a personal matter with us – of a kind to make us keep July 1st as a special day for all the years God may grant to any of us…’
Geoffrey Bache Smith never returned from the Somme either; only Tolkien and Christopher Luke Wiseman, a naval officer, survived the war. The letters written by Tolkien, Gilson, Wiseman and Smith form the heartbeat of my book Tolkien and the Great War. For Gilson, thanks to the wonderful generosity of his relatives, I was also able to draw a little from the many letters he wrote home from the training camps and trenches to his family and to the woman he loved.
Now, with my help, Gilson’s letters have been used as the basis for a 40-minute documentary by the school, King Edward’s in Birmingham.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born May 15, 1856 – L. Frank Baum. John King Tarpinian has a Baum story —
A number of years back I went to an author event for a friend. She raises Cairn Terriers aka Toto Dogs. The author, a grand nephew of Baum was using a rubber stamp made from an imprint of Toto’s paw to sign the books.
Baum’s house was in Hollywood, just behind Musso & Frank Grill. It is now a mid-60s apartment building. In those days just about every house had an incinerator for burning trash, my parent’s home had one that also worked as a BBQ & wood burning oven.
Shortly after his death a niece came over to the house to visit her aunt to see how she was doing. Baum’s wife was in the back yard burning his papers. She figured since all of his books were on the shelves there was no need for the old papers. The niece explained to her why that was not a good idea to continue. You could feel the people in the event audience shudder at the thought.
(9) CHOOSING HELL. Brad R. Torgersen takes SFWA’s choice of Max Max: Fury Road for its dramatic award as the text for his message, in “The Martian and Mad Max”.
…Of course, The Martian was every inch a Campbellian movie, while Fury Road was almost entirely New Wave.
Guess which aesthetic dominates and excites the imaginations of SF/F’s cognoscenti?
I know, I know, I am a broken record about this stuff. But it never ceases to amaze me (in an unhappy way) how the so-called writers of Science Fiction, seem to be in such a huge hurry to run away from the roots of the field. I’ve read and listened to all the many arguments — pro and con, from both sides — about how Campbell rescued the field from the Pulp era, but then New Wave in turn rescued the field from the Campbell era. So it might be true that we’re finally witnessing the full maturation of SF/F as a distinct arena of “serious” literature, but aren’t we taking things too far? Does anyone else think it’s a bad idea for the field to continue its fascination with cultural critique — the number of actual nutty-bolty science types, in SFWA, is dwindling, while the population of “grievance degree” lit and humanities types, in SFWA, is exploding — while the broader audience consistently demonstrates a preference for SF/F that might be termed “old fashioned” by the modern sensibilities of the mandarins of the field?
Now, I think there is a very strong argument to be made, for the fact that Campbellian vs. New Wave is merely the manifestation of a deeper problem — a field which no longer has a true center. The two “sides” in the discussion have been taking shots at each other since long before I was born. The enmity may be so ingrained — in the internal conversation of SF/F — that nothing can reverse it. Save, perhaps, the total explosion of the field proper….
(10) BAD DAY IN SANTA FE. Bleeding Cool posted screencaps of a con committee’s rude Facebook comments in “Santa Fe Comic Con Makes Social Media Faux Pas”.
Instead of faux pas, how about we just say you shouldn’t call anyone a boob model?
(11) TIME TRAVEL ON FALL TV SCHEDULE. NBC’s new drama Timeless, starring Abigail Spencer, Matt Lanter and Malcolm Barrett, follows a team chasing a criminal intent on destroying America through time.
(12) AND THIS. NBC’s new comedy The Good Place follows Eleanor Shellstrop and her mentor as she tries to become a better person in the afterlife.. Stars starring Kristen Bell and Ted Danson.
(13) TIME OUT. Trouble, as one of last year’s Best Graphic Story Hugo nominees goes on hiatus. Mad Art Lab reads the Twitter tea leaves in “Tess Fowler Pushed Out of Rat Queens?”
Comic book fans were deeply saddened by the recent news that Rat Queens, the Eisner Award-nominated comic book series, was going on hiatus. As fans likely know, Rat Queens has had a tough run since the series launched in 2013. In 2014, artist/co-creator Roc Upchurch was removed from the series after being arrested on charges of domestic violence. His departure made room for Tess Fowler, who was a natural fit artistically – but also seemed to some a symbolic choice, given her history of speaking up for women in comics. Unfortunately, it seems that is at an end. Fowler announced she would be leaving the series a few weeks ago, with creator Kurtis Wiebe making the news of a hiatus official…
(14) MEMOIR COMPETES AT SF BOOK FEST. Congratulations to Francis Hamit – A Perfect Spy received recognition at the San Francisco Book Festival.
A Perfect Spy, Francis Hamit’s memoir from fifty years ago of his adventures as an undercover police operative fighting the drug trade while a student at the University of Iowa has been awarded runner up (or second place) in the Biography/Autobiography category by the 2016 San Francisco Book Festival. It is an excerpt from a larger forthcoming work entitled OUT OF STEP: A Soldier’s memoir of the Vietnam War Years.
The book also includes Hamit’s encounters with notable figures such as novelist Nelson Algren, filmmaker Nicholas Meyer and the poet Donald Justice, and his enthusiastic participation in the Sexual Revolution even as he resisted the onslaught of the drug culture. It was a transformative time for him that led to his abandonment of a theatrical career for one as a writer and his enlistment in the U.S. Army Security Agency at the height of the Vietnam War when most of his contemporaries were trying to evade military service.
(15) NEW BFG TRAILER. Disney’s The BFG comes to theaters July 1, 2016.
(16) STUDY TIME. Paul Fraser at SF Magazines reviews the stories in the June 1940 issue of Astounding, including Retro Hugo nominee “The Roads Must Roll” by Robert Heinlein.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Hampus Eckerman, Andrew Porter, Cora Buhlert, Mark-kitteh, and Will R. for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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@snowcrash: Don’t feel too bad, I still occasionally confuse Joseph and John W. despite knowing who’s who. Of course, hearing Star Wars described as Campbellian really did confuse me…
Brad’s issue seems to be that “Hard Science Rescue” lost to “Women Win the Day”. Once I realized that, the rest of his rant made sense.
Yep, I’m utterly bemused to the point of commenting here for the first time by the suggestion that “Fury Road”, a crowd-pleasing, totally linear action-adventure story with a “good triumphs over evil” ending, qualifies as “New Wave”.
Though watch enough Shakespeare interpretations, and you’ll probably see that anyway.
@GSLamb
Hard to argue with that now I’ve had a look at the whole piece. I find it hilarious that Brad thinks Fury Road should have been Nux’s story. Although I think he’s more interested in Campbell’s triumphalism than what hard science made it through his obsession with psychic powers.
As a kind of aside, now I’m thinking about Campbell I’m reminded that his own best stories (“Who Goes There?” and “Twilight”) were mood pieces, and not particularly triumphalist either.
Wait, remind me, which one did Andy Warhol paint?
The Tenth Doctor audio dramas released today!
I just finished the first one and it’s such a pleasure to hear David Tennant and Catherine Tate again. Their chemistry is as good as ever.
The phrase “elitist literary snob” sort of conjures up a vision (to me, at least) of someone in a beret and a purple velvet smoking jacket, sipping absinthe and bemoaning the ugliness of the quotidian world.
Of course, you don’t actually need any of those props. All you need is a literary theory, and a loudly expressed conviction that anyone who goes around liking things they like, instead of what your theory says they ought to like, is wrong, and possibly very stupid or very dishonest, too, but in any case wrong.
By this measure, Brad Torgersen is an elitist literary snob.
5) I would very much wear that jacket. Amazing
9) The Martian, while entertaining, doesn’t have a fire guitar guy so….
I mean, I guess I applaud him not writing a think piece on how it’s bad that only women won? But to try and state that The Martian should have won because it made more money at the box office… Come on.
(6) WISE INVESTMENTS FOR YOUR PLAY MONEY.
I’m dubious about those numbers – he’s suggesting central London prices for what is essentially a beachfront property in Dorne, and his likely yield for The Inn at the Crossroads is highly optimistic given that Winter Is Coming. 😉
Darn it, Bartimaeus, I hold you personally responsible for crashing the Big Finish site.
That someone should conflate Victor Hugo and Hugo Gernsback is amazing, but I wouldn’t let it make me miserable.
(6) WISE INVESTMENTS FOR YOUR PLAY MONEY. I want Stevie to weigh in on this issue.
(9) CHOOSING HELL. I had THOUGHTS, but I think the Brad’s Taste piñata is well out of candy at this point.
Of all the things wrong in Torgersen’s article my favorite is the assertion that SF writers/readers fall into two categories.
Well that and asking for adventures that inspire the imagination instead of literary scifi while complaining about a movie which was almost entirely awesome spectacle and action.
Not enough nuggets in it.
Thank you for the reminder! I’ve been looking forward to these for ages. Donna Noble is still one of my (two) favourite companions. I like to pretend that last couple of minutes of Journey’s End never happened.
While I enjoyed the experience of watching The Martian more, Fury Road was the one that stayed with me and made me think about it long after, which has always seemed like the better qualification for a writing award. If that makes any sense.
That someone should conflate Victor Hugo and Hugo Gernsback is amazing, but I wouldn’t let it make me miserable.
Probably schadenfreude, but that actually made me less miserable.
Speaking to the choir: New Wave was about, in my estimation, three/four/five things:
1. breaking some of the bonds of acceptability (omg, people in the future have sex and their relationships often influence their thinking!)
2. better writing (or, to be more generous, introducing some literary elements to the established style)
3. moving characterization to the front of the story
4. widening the scope of accepted sciences and technologies (the science could be based on psychiatry rather than chemistry, or sociology rather than physics)
5. moving the center of innovation in SF from the US to the UK (with the notable exception of Ellison’s Dangerous Visions project(s)).
Cambellian SF’s primary contribution (again, in my estimation) was the introduction of the concept of using an SF story as a “thought experiment”; conduct the world building in a manner consistent with that used by scientific inquiry; follow it through to its natural conclusions.
Most Campbellian SF was tech heavy and characterization light, or, rather, used the available space to focus on the BDO/scientific problem while relying on stereotype to flesh out the characters.
SF Before that was a hodgepodge of things that could at least marginally fit within Gernsback’s three precepts: “…a charming romance(1) intermingled with scientific fact(2) and prophetic vision(3).”
The New Wave was largely dismissed by the field at the time (vociferously in some cases) for a couple of reasons: insufficient markets in the US engaged with it deeply enough to make it a “paying” market; too many leading lights of the industry were invested in producing a certain kind of SF (and probably could not stretch their art, at least at the time) and it was seen as a watering down of a central pillar of the field – reliance on strong scientific principals, knowledge and speculation.
Not hard and fast of course; a “science of history” was a major theme for a while among Campbellian authors, as was engagement with ESP (though if you trace them both back, they have their roots in “real” scientific inquiry).
Once New Worlds magazine folded (the primary flag carrier for the New Wave), New Wave as a thing largely went away.
However, it is clear from the works published these days that the field has largely adopted many of its concerns. Take The Martian as an exemplar:
John W. Campbell himself wrote a novella titled The Moon Is Hell. In it, a small team of scientifically knowledgeable explorers establishes a moon base, encounters disaster and must rely on their knowledge to survive an impossible amount of time before they can be rescued.
The focus of the story is not on the thoughts and interplay of the characters, but on their scientific achievements; turning clothing into a food source; baking gypsum to produce oxygen, etc.
They experience cascading disasters and manage to overcome every single one of them.
The Martian is the exact same story, with one major change; the focus is on Whatney and his internal dialogue, while he is doing sciencey stuff.
The Martian IS Campbellian SF, as seen through a New Wave filter.
Likewise, MadMax: Fury Road, is A Boy and His Dog, (itself a pastiche of Cambellian and New Wave), filtered through the post New Wave amalgam.
Literature (including SF) does not stand still. A complicated dance of market forces, the body of existing work, the author’s creativity, the audience, current events, scientific advance, personal experience go into the stew of a new story.
To point at any single work in the field and say “this is SF”, implying that everything else is not, is begging to be contradicted with solid evidence.
Putting a wall around SF negates the very thing you are trying to define.
@JJ, Mark
That’s because the one time he was involved, they weren’t.
It shouldn’t surprise me that he thought Fury Road should have been Nux’s story. Because of course he did; Nux is a man. The woman character who is also an amputee should have sacrificed *herself*–she could have been his mentor but he could have rapidly become better than her at what she was best at, yeah, that’s the ticket!–and then when he thinks he still needs her but has actually outgrown her, she could stay behind so they can escape and be killed by the enemy! (Would it be too much if he found her body in the fridge? Does this future have fridges?) Then the audience could sympathize with–him! While he mourns her ! This forces him to stand on his own two feet and stop being dependent on a woman, while giving him the motivation to face the villain in manly battle! Yeah!
Boy the director really missed an opportunity there. [/sarcasm]
That said, I enjoyed the Martian a lot too. It was a very different movie but both were good. I loved the character’s sense of humor in the book–which I thought didn’t quite translate to the movie, but the charm of the actor involved made up for it, to my mind.
I’ve got a hunch you’re making some kind of puns here.
Well the time he earned one, it was. But he didn’t notice that at the time, and he’s ago deep in that hole now that digging appears to be his only option.
@Darren: Yes, and it’s delightful enough that I wouldn’t call for a pun tax.
I also want to toss out that Victor Hugo is not a completely unreasonable assumption for someone who has never heard of Hugo Gernsback and has had nothing to prompt him to check his assumption. Especially if said assumption were formed pre-intertubes.
@nickpheas: I think you’re confusing Brad and Larry.
And speaking of (Victor (Hugo) Gernsback)…
https://johnnyalucard.com/fiction/online-fiction/2005-hugo-award-ceremony-script/
Arifel: I have a suggestion for your problem which I am rot13ing for reasons of Googleproofing.
Na bayvar obbxfgber pnyyrq BzavYvg znl yrg lbh chg va n HF nqqerff naq fryy lbh gur robbx qrfcvgr n aba-HF perqvg pneq. V’ir frra vg jbex va gur cnfg.
Rail: I also want to toss out that Victor Hugo is not a completely unreasonable assumption for someone who has never heard of Hugo Gernsback and has had nothing to prompt him to check his assumption. Especially if said assumption were formed pre-intertubes.
I don’t remember when I first found out the awards were named for Gernsback, or who/what I thought they were named for before that, but I honestly don’t ridicule anyone for not knowing. It’s not as if Gernsback was a good author himself (never mind well-known as an author), and he was was a crook and a bit of a whackjob, to boot. So he’s really not what I would call a “usual suspect” for having a highly-prestigious award named after him.
He’s like the whacko, somewhat criminal great-grandfather from whom the highly-esteemed and successful family business derived its name, and most of the time the family members don’t feel inclined to talk too much about him and would prefer to discuss more positive and interesting things.
@ NickPheas
Oh, right–my bad. Good catch.
@Rail
No, I don’t think he is. Torgersen got a pre-Puppies Hugo Nomination *and* Campbell nomination. Correia got a pre-Puppies Cambell nomination (in a different year, I think.)
the assertion that SF writers/readers fall into two categories.
E. g., (1) those who think SF writers/readers fall into two categories, and (2) those who do not.
(sometimes the old jokes are the best).
JJ: For a more nuanced explication of Hugo Gernsback, check out Silberman’s NeuroTribes.
Like many from his era, Hugo had his faults and his merits.
@Cat: Pfeh. You’d think I’d have learned by now to never rely on my memory.
Mea culpa.
James Moar
I keep wishing I had a platform to push my ideas. I had a hot one about mounting a production of Julius Caesar, and having it set in ancient Rome, near the end of the Republic.
no, No, NO! You can’t merely decide, on personal taste, you prefer chocolate or vanilla (or such fluffery abstentianism as: both! FOR SHAME…). Any coherent theory of frozen dessert criticism requires you examine the philosophical underpinnings of the confection and judge it on its ethos not it’s transitory merits of pleasing flavor (and especially it demands you reject the platonic horror that is frozen yogurt. Also it demands you bring me a Hugo, a large coffee, and a chocolate muffin… but I digress).
Ayn Rand told us so. Q… E… D, mother-lovers! QED.
Also, strawberry.
::sorry, but i had to tick the checkbox off::
Torgersen wrote:
“But it never ceases to amaze me (in an unhappy way) how the so-called writers of Science Fiction, seem to be in such a huge hurry to run away from the roots of the field.”
It never ceases to amaze me (in an unhappy way) how the so-called writers of Science Fiction, seem to be in such a huge hurry to run away from any sort of innovation in the field and want to cling fervently to looking backwards without espousing any sort of change.
Now I’m all set to start my new gothicpunk epic, The Gernsback of Notre Dame.
Hugo Gernsbeck had his faults and not too many merits. Getting him to pay the writers whose stories he published was one thing…
People still arguing about the New Wave? How positively antique.
@Robert Whitaker,
Antique Wave doesn’t really have the same ring
@alexvdl
Antiquepunk, on the other hand…
Ahhh, Punque. With curlycue serifs and extraneous terminal Es.
So I unwisely clicked on the Cecelia Tan link at work. When I next turned to that tab, it said Access Denied, as it often does – it’s social media, it’s this, it’s that, it’s a risk, you can ask for this site to be unblocked…
…I did not expect to find the page denied on the grounds that it had been classified as “pornography”. Oooops.
Thankfully these are my last days in this job, but maybe append a NSFW label?
I suspect for me I found out about the Hugos and who they were named for from this venerable tome.
Here, have an File770 Award with Crossed Fire Guitars and Gold Brow Cloths.
Just finished “Central Station” and will be chewing on it for a long time. For those who read the previous stories, worth noting that they are said to be “substantively different,” and though I didn’t read those, I can say this feels very much like a novel, albeit somewhat nomadic in its viewpoints (though nowhere near David Mitchell levels).
Many comparisons could be drawn, but Neuromancer is the one that kept coming to mind, mostly for the feeling of of-the-moment plausibility. Touching, beautiful, strange, terrifying, deeply compassionate…hard to fault much of anything in this one. On now to read his previous stuff.
I don’t know that amused is the word I would reach for, but racism always has a place at the SFnal table, whether it’s Seveneves “
or 2312’s
@James Nicholl
Wow. It’s been obvious Stephenson has bad politics since at least Cryptonomicon(*), but I’d have expected better of KSR.
(*) Or earlier. As with Gene Wolf, my growing understanding Stevenson’s views retroactively diminished his older work for me.
I finished “Linesman” by S.K. Dunstall, who are a pair of Australian sisters. It’s such a relief to be back in SPAAACE for my SFF! Verdict: pretty good, though there’s a lot of stuff you have to just roll with, hoping to pick up later. It’s one of those “we have cool interstellar travel using lost-alien-civilization tech we don’t understand, what could go wrong?” stories, which I always love. *Lots* of semi-comprehensible politics. First of a trilogy, of course.
I don’t think it’s quite “Hugo-Worthy”, because too much of the world-building doesn’t feel like it hangs together. How can a space-faring civilization hang together jura gurer’f bayl bar uvtu-yriry zrpunavp sbe fvk zbaguf? for instance. Also, heart attacks don’t work like that. But I’ll be picking up the second volume.
Though that will be after “Too Like the Lightning”, which is being delivered today.
You know, it actually pains me to agree with BT.
I liked “The Martian” better than “Fury Road.” I mean, I really liked “Fury Road,” and I was utterly delighted with the fully realized characters. There’s a lot of subtlety. In the end, though, I can’t quite get past the world building. I can’t make sense of a post-apocalyptic world where Furioso’s prosthetic exists. I can’t imagine a gasoline-based culture when the basic wheels of civilizaiton have ground to a halt. Production, distribution, refineries, the huge infrastructure which maintains our gas-guzzling technology swept away, but the gas-guzzling remains? Yeah, but no. Can’t do it. And so although I really loved “Fury Road” that remained a burr under my saddle.
The things “The Martian” got wrong mostly I didn’t know enough about to notice. And my experience of watching “The Martian” was that, at its core, it was about the emotional life of many of my friends and loved ones. Not the tightly held bounds of sex partners and blood relationships, but the more loose bonds of co-workers, those of similar intellectual interests, geeks together. And that spoke to me, profoundly, because rarely have I seen that set of relationships portrayed so accurately. The message from the Martinez to Watney, with the slam about botany not being a real science, was utterly perfect.
I probably don’t agree with BT, since the thing that I loved about “The Martian” wasn’t Science Triumphant. It was the beauty of the relationships. And that was also the thing that I adored about “Fury Road.” I just found it harder to suspend my disbelief when it came to “Fury Road.”
You know, it actually pains me to agree with BT.
Do you think science fiction is doomed because Fury Road won? If not, you don’t agree with BT. No one is faulting BT for liking The Martian more than Fury Road, I suspect you’ll find a lot of people here who would agree with him on that score. What BT is being criticized for is the position he’s taken that suggests that Fury Road winning is a harbinger of doom for the genre.
The idea of the story as thought experiment was around well before Campbell. Look at Maurice Renard’s essays on the merveilleux scientifique, for example (1909). Or contemporary critical discussions of Wells and Rosny.
I haven’t gotten around to seeing Fury Road yet but thought The Martian (film) was really, really boring. Guy has problem, guy solves problem, lather, rinse, repeat.
@Aaron: in the strictest sense of the word, I’m not sure that “Fury Road” is science fiction. But then, that’s true of almost every “sci fi” movie ever made, so I don’t let that stop me, or even slow me down. I love “Star Wars,” though I’d be hard-pressed to call it science fiction. But I don’t particularly think that “science fiction” is some pure form that must be protected and is to be exalted about all, either. (I confess that the end of “The Matrix” ruined it for me. I ended up yelling “Entropy, dammit!” at my television. So I’m weird about world-building. Will grant that going in.)
I confess I haven’t actually read BT’s screed (he give me hives), so I am relieved to discover that I do not, in fact, agree with him.
Oh, he has lots of form in this matter, going back at least as far as Red Mars and its obligately stabby Muslims, mystical Japanese and (iirc) that one black stowaway. It’s just a liberal sort of paternalistic, exoticizing racism so he generally gets a pass on stuff like
JJ: Go read it again. He thought he was cracking a joke about the Victor Hugo Awards not really having been named after Hugo Weaving. Then he found out that they weren’t the Victor Hugo Awards.
I don’t think so, JJ. I suspect you missed a layer of deadpan there. There’s a very common joke structure wending around places like Tumblr that consists of correcting someone with an intentionally incorrect explanation. (These can go 20-30 replies deep, and turn into works of art along the way.) Part of the joke is making fun of the “well, actually” guys on the internet.