(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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9) “Does anyone else think it’s a bad idea for the field to continue its fascination with cultural critique…”
IMHO, it wouldn’t be so bad if SJW authors were actually critiquing the culture. You know, talking about actual problems that most people face, extrapolating trends, stuff they used to do in the ’40s and ’50s. This leads to stories like “Deadline”, published in Astounding in 1944, which got Campbell a visit from the Feds. Or Harrison’s “Make Room, Make Room”, which I hated, but it still gets called a “classic”. Or Dominic Flandry stories for that matter.
What we’re actually getting is Alex MacFarlane and “Post-Binary Gender in SF”, flavor-of-the-week agit-prop from the usual suspects using tropes as old as Jules Verne and HG Wells.
It’s boring. It isn’t selling. Publishers continue on regardless. Probably a self correcting problem, but one that I’d sooner not have to live through.
There is a tradition of associating the Hugos with Victor Hugo, which I believe goes back to the 2005 Hugo ceremony, initially introduced as the ‘Prix Victor Hugo’; this was nominated for BDP short form in the following year. Ken Scholes and Jay Lake repeated the joke in 2011, beginning the ceremony with references to a number of Hugos, including both Weaving and Victor, until a voice from heaven said ‘actually it was Hugo Gernsback’. So I’m fairly sure all these references were deliberate.
What we’re actually getting is Alex MacFarlane and “Post-Binary Gender in SF”
So your big complaint is the existence of a free column on a website. And you wonder why no one takes your whining seriously.
But isn’t that what Fury Road did? Extrapolate from our current habits of environmental and sexual exploitation and take it to the extreme?
@Phantom Or Dominic Flandry stories for that matter.
I’ve never been particularly convinced by the “cultural critique” in those. Not least because the timeline of Roman history they track so closely gives the “dying” empire a good three centuries of peace and prosperity.
I’ve added a comment now. Although I don’t see anything NSFW on that page (am I wrong?), I had forgotten Tan writes erotica which may be referenced on her site.
guys it doesn’t matter …. Fury Road is SJW liberal femi-nazi crap and The Martian is rugged manly competence porn. Case closed. Brad said so.
One DOES wonder, however, how The Martian (both book and movie) might have gone had it been Commander Lewis accidentally left behind instead of Mark Watney. And one wonders if the story had more or less came out the same, if Brad et.al. would have loved it as much.
@Doctor Science
I also read Linesman a few weeks back and thought along very similar lines. There were definitely some issues, as you mentioned, but I’ll probably pick up the second book after I get through all my Hugo and Retro Hugo reading (as well as Too Like the Lightning which I’ve been looking forward to). I thought the main character was a bit overpowered, and OMG enough with the heart attacks, but I liked the technology and the lines.
The 2005 Award speech by Kim Newman and Paul McAuley celebrating Victor Hugo – author of The Jet-Pack of Notre Dame and editor of “Histoires Étonnaments”:
https://johnnyalucard.com/fiction/online-fiction/2005-hugo-award-ceremony-script/
It’s boring.
To you, maybe. To others, maybe not. One mark of adulthood is realizing others enjoy things you do not.
It isn’t selling.
Do you have sales figures to back this up? Or is this just more of the “facts” that you know but have no basis in reality to support?
Publishers continue on regardless.
This would seem to be an indication that such stories are, in fact, selling.
WTF is Alex MacFarlane and what does he or she have to do with the price of fish?
WTF is Alex MacFarlane and what does he or she have to do with the price of fish?
She is a British science fiction and fantasy writer who wrote a column for Tor.com about non-binary gender in science fiction. The fact that someone exists who talks about challenging binary assumptions concerning gender with respect to genre fiction seems to drive Pups batty.
Phantom said “What we’re actually getting is…”
No, it’s the same. What’s changed is you. It’s not that “SJW” authors aren’t actually critiquing the culture, they are, but you are part of what is being critiqued now, so you don’t like it.
Every time I read a comment by you, I imagine it starting and ending with “Kids these days, I tell you what… mumble mumble”.
Yeah, man, SJWs like Martin and Scalzi are TOTALLY not selling books. Even Teddy admitted that Kameron Hurley sells a decent amount of books. Naomi Novik is a NYT bestseller. Chuck Wendig, noted SJW and Puppy hater, hit list with his Star Wars novel thatw as “infested with gays”.
SJWs totally aren’t buying. You got it summed up.
Nerdlaquer has added LeGuin, Leckie, and Jemisin shades. I really love LeGuin …
Clif:
What he actually said was that he liked both movies a lot.
Hampus:
yes I know … but what the puppy minions heard was “Fury Road” bad … “The Martian” good. Many (most?) pups don’t really read all that well or to the end.
honestly if he liked both movies a lot … why the need to write anything about which movie won? Unless he’s simply out of other ideas and things to get worked up about.
Torgerson’s comments are borderline hilarious, aren’t they? I love that the whether or not one film is better than the other never even plays in to it; all that matters is the worldview behind it. And, seriously…”so-called writers”? Are we still in elementary school?
@ snowcrash: FWIW, I read your snark as “mutter mutter all these damned honky names sound alike,” and it made me giggle.
@ JJ: See also “Second place = first loser”. These people have seriously bought into the lie that winning is the only thing that matters.
Also, there’s a rather cute short story somewhere (I think it’s in one of Resnick’s alternate-people anthologies) in which Hugo Gernsback sells his magazine to Charles Ponzi and goes on to become the namesake of the “Gernsback scheme” while Ponzi makes science fiction a respectable branch of literature.
I have to think the comment “it’s boring and it isn’t selling” while mentioning MAE ROOM! MAKE ROOM!, WHICH is kind of funny, since the book was turned into a movie and is a bit of folklore via meme from its punch line which you can recognize from the title SOYLENT GREEN.
And I think SJW know best. For them, books are about people.
“Does anyone else think it’s a bad idea for the field to continue its fascination with cultural critique…”
Says the guy criticizing the culture of the genre . . .
Writing has always been about the reflections of inner and outer world of man. It can’t be anything else.
A story without content cannot be written. Even if you were to bound 200 blank pages up, someone could find it a commentary on human society.
@ Aaron: Enh, this is just more of the “creating our own reality” bullshit that the pups have borrowed from their political inspirations. Phantom thinks that repeating those mantras over and over again will magically make them so, despite the fact that reality says something entirely different.
steve davidson:
Putting a wall around SF negates the very thing you are trying to define.
He will build that wall! And he will make the SJWs pay for it!
I think I was doing the Hugo = Victor Hugo until I was in my early 30s. Maybe even later. Sometimes you just get an idea into your head and have no reason to test it.
Hugo Gernsback doesn’t come up much even when the awards are mentioned. (I think he might be most famous with the tumblr crowd for his Isolator.) In retrospect, there isn’t much to support the Victor Hugo idea, but people have done strange things in the past.
Hugo Gernsback did have a statue based on the death mask of Nikola Tesla and was way ahead of his time on VR TV glasses so that’s something…
Arifel on May 16, 2016 at 12:13 am said:
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, at Making Light:
There is also an unabridged audiobook available from Audible. What’s not available are e-books or audiobooks for readers outside North America, because Tor doesn’t have those rights and no UK/Commonwealth publisher has yet picked up the book. It is, however, perfectly legal for people outside North America to, for instance, buy a printed copy from Amazon.com.
There are walls around SF. Along with a lot of doors and windows and quite a few bridges (some which lead no where). SF is a ghetto genre. It can mix well with others, and it depends on the writer and their readers.
Hugo Gernsbeck was the one who started the Science Fiction ghetto
I’ve read his fiction–still not very good, even after it has aged one hundred years.
Tesla was writing an autobiography for Gernsbeck, but stopped after 112 pages. Wonder if he wasn’t getting paid, too.
John Scalzi’s Nebula photos are now up at https://www.flickr.com/photos/scalzi/sets/72157668377237626/
And now I’m promoted where to look, I see that it’s a column not published since 2014. Ripping the industry apart.
@Phantom – you should really stop re-reading that one series of columns that upset you a couple years back. More stuff has been written since then, much of which is neither by Alex MacFarlane nor about gender at all, let alone about non-binary gender. I am also not particularly interested in the subject, and through carefully not looking at the words, managed to only read a couple of the articles in that series. I can see why you’re so upset, though, if that’s all you’ve had for reading material since 2014.
It’s confusing for people who live inn the past to confront the future. That’s the major problem with the Puppies, isn’t it?
BGHilton on May 16, 2016 at 12:46 am said:
@ JJ- It could have been worse. Up to about an hour ago, you could have been thinking that the Hugo Awards were named after Victor Hugo. ?
Ah yes, the famous Hugonaut leader.
Just catching up on my scrolls here, but surely that should be Hugo-Naught?
— though I hadn’t heard of Victor Hugo’s association with that small cult of disaffected authors.
New Rule: Anyone who wants to say something “doesn’t sell” has to:
1. define their terms
2. show their work.
The management is grateful for your immediate, complete compliance.
Separately: Tesla is fakey.
@Lydy Nickerson: The worldbuilding in Fury Road makes zero sense. In that way, it does connect to a sub-tradition of New Wave SF, where tropes are deployed for their symbolic and psychological value rather than as outputs and indicators of a model world. Call it “fantasy” or “speculative fiction” as you like.
@L:
Cool. Thanks much.
@steve davidson: ~70% of your definition is arguable. Points 2, 3, 4, and some of 1 were innovations of the early 1950’s (see Galaxy and F&SF) rather than the New Wave — although I’m sure there’s some 1960’s manifesto claiming them. But you’ve left out arguably the most important part: the New Wave was heavily into experiments in style for their own sake, not just better writing or even “literary elements”. I don’t \think/ anybody got something Joycean published (but I can’t swear to this — I never read New Worlds per se, only the bits that got into the Merrill anthologies et al), but at the time I read quite a few pieces in which the taking of attitudes and/or the deliberate stretching of language were more important than the story.
For anyone preferring The Martian to Fury Road because reality: did you know that windstorms on Mars aren’t anywhere near that strong? Take that away and what’s left is something leaning toward competence porn; it’s massively better (e.g., more plausible, less deliberately sexist & racist, …) than Frankowski, but it’s still a hole in claims that the story is real. wrt gasoline being available in MadMaxWorld, how much is used and how much is now stored in Australia? (I’m reminded of yesterday’s BBC story about the network of underground gasoline pipes built so southeastern WWII airfields could be supplied from harbors elsewhere; I doubt Oz has anything like it, but guessing how long an infrastructure would support \some/ activities after a collapse is non-trivial.)
I don’t \think/ anybody got something Joycean published
Delany’s Dhalgren comes to mind, although that was published after the New Wave had pretty much become a non-issue.
I see that it’s a column not published since 2014. Ripping the industry apart.
Many of the Puppy complaints are centered on the 2013-2014 period. 2014 is the year The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere, If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love, and Ancillary Justice were nominated for Hugos. Redshirts won a Hugo in 2013. The Pups, as a group, seem almost frozen in that era for their grievances.
James Moar : “I liked the fact that there were actors I’ve seen doing Shakespeare on stage, but dressed in bondage gear in a postapocalyptic realm.”
Though watch enough Shakespeare interpretations, and you’ll probably see that anyway.
Well, that pretty much described a production of Macbeth put on a few years back by the local university company.
I don’t \think/ anybody got something Joycean published
Aldiss’ “Barefoot in the Head” uses a dense punning style that owes something to Finnigans Wake. Plus it has concrete poetry.
People forget how experimental some of the New Worlds stuff really was. And even in the States, James Sallis and David R Bunch were pushing the envelope. (Although Delany was a better writer than either, obviously.)
There actually is a Prix Victor Hugo, given by a regional literary association, “[qui] récompense un ouvrage (contes, nouvelles, roman, histoire, etc.) autoédité ou publié par une petite maison d’édition dans les 18 mois précédant la remise du prix, écrit par un auteur lorrain résidant en Lorraine.” [Which rewards a work (stories, novel, history, etc.) self-published or published by a small press in the 18 months preceding the awarding of the prize, written by a Lorraine author living in Lorraine.]
I want to thank most commenters. Reading this thread has me laughing so hard tears stream down my face.
@Camestros Felapton
I’ve been enjoying Timothy’s anthology There Will Be Walrus: First Volume V. I miss a usable table of contents but it has all the things promised and then some.
(1) TWO FIVES WORTH OF WISDOM.
Nobody’s mentioned it yet, but this comes across as suggesting the Hugo awards were a monoculture and therefore susceptible to Rabid Puppy griefers. To me that’s plain wrong.
The Hugos have always been about ” the writing, the quality, the ideas, and the love” and have in recent years been “biodiverse”. None of that was sufficient to protect against “invasive, opportunistic vermin”. It’s not because the Hugos are a monoculture, it’s because the Hugos are run under a different ruleset, one which has a weakness that “invasive, opportunistic vermin” have exploited.
Joyce was a fairly large influence on Robert Anton Wilson (Illuminatus!), as was Burroughs (Wm., not E.R.), who was a big influence on a lot of New Wave writers.
I don’t know if Wilson really counts as New Wave, since he was sort of outside of the mainstream of SF, but I suspect that Illuminatus! would never have been published if it weren’t for the influence of the New Wave.
SF has the Pre-Joycean Fellowship whose members may* include Steven Brust, Emma Bull, and Neil Gaiman.
* “may” because I don’t think I’ve seen any of them refer to it for ages. The joke may have run its course.
Get going. I’d read that.
There is always Phillip Jose Farmer’s Riders of the Purple Wage from Dangerous Visions. James Blish famously said it won a Hugo for “daring innovations taken lock, stock and barrel out of the “Cave of Winds” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses.”
::New Wave ticky::
Re (9): Torgersen seems to impute some kind of Manichaean view to the awards process: if it didn’t win (even if it was nominated), the electorate hated it. Both The Martian and Fury Road were well-loved by the electorate, more so than 99% of the other eligible items this year. No matter which one won, they were both well-loved by the nominators and by the electorate. If the motivations of the nominators and voters was as Torgersen describes, The Martian would not have even made the ballot.
So that said: the evidence he cites does not support his conclusion. If anything, it refutes his conclusion.
I don’t know about the Nux thing… Maybe you could run a movie that way, sidelining the handsome male lead so that the redeemed soldier of the evil empire was carrying more of the plot. Then the hypercompetent female lead could make some big sacrifice….
But no. Sorry, Brad, but I don’t expect we’ll ever see an SFF movie like that any time soon.
Amina:
Yeah, but environmental exploitation is barely a science because we don’t want it to be true and sexual exploitation isn’t a thingy thing thing AT ALL because women should just SHUT UP about it or we’ll threaten to kill and rape them until they PIPE DOWN.
So it’s just SJW fantasy, unless Nux is the lead. Science is science, not women! Global warming hah.
clif:
But Commander Lewis would have to use botany to survive (from crew botanist Watney’s great notebooks, surely) and fixing the habitat and all and that would be all touchy-feely nurturing growing things and nesting. Who wants to see that kind of SJW crap unless it’s a man doing it, because then it’s farming and building!
But at least there’d be a scene in the end where she tells Watney that she’d have died if not for his helpfully-indexed notebooks, so she sleeps with him.