(1) BLAME THOSE GUYS SOUTH OF CANADA. T. R. Napper’s “Americans Destroy Science Fiction” was passed along by JJ with the observation, “I find this piece ridiculously clueless about the history of Worldcon and the Hugo Awards, and about the actual reasons for the kerpupple and the American domination of the Awards. However, it certainly contains a different point of view, with some very valid points.”
…But let’s rewind a little. When I first started writing a few years back I heard there was this controversy in the genre. That diversity was being blocked, or rolled back, by a conservative praetorian guard of writers. My first thought was to man the barricades: to fight with those fighting for this thing they said was diversity, a concept I’ve always correlated with equity.
I worked in international aid for fifteen years. In that time, friends and colleagues of mine have been shot at, beaten, kidnapped, murdered, blown up, car-jacked, abused, and imprisoned. These horrific things were done to them because they tried to build a school for girls, or they ran a women’s empowerment program, or simply because they had the temerity to stand with the poor against a corrupt and violent social order.
So, you see, social justice, equity, are things I have a passing concern with.
The problem, I soon discovered, is that this debate is not about equity, and sure as hell isn’t about diversity. Rather, it is an inside-the-bubble conversation between two groups of American writers, each attempting to claim victim status. Worse, the boundaries of the discussion almost completely exclude non-Americans, and even within the US context there was little mention of disability, and none of class.
This particular tributary of the American culture wars is little more than tiny elite – the middle and upper-middle class of the most powerful country in the world – debating and defining diversity in the genre as a whole. It boils down to insiders arguing how to make awards more representative of 45% of the population (the middle and upper class) in a country accounting for 4% of the global population (the US).
(2) GAMING ADDICTION. On Real Life Magazine, Tony Tulahwitte, in an article called “Clash Rules Everything Around Me” talks about his love of Clash of Clans and tries to make the case for the positive things about spending all that time gaming.
Clan Prestige kicked me out immediately; Clan Friendship kicked me out for donating weak troops; Clan Love communicated mostly in Arabic. So I stayed awhile in the dead-silent Clan Maturity, left a week later for Clan Corgi Butts, and ended up where I always suspected I belonged: in the Trash Clan.
(3) KEEPS ON GOING. A total of nine NASA missions received extensions this week, including the two in the headline: “New Horizons Receives Mission Extension to Kuiper Belt, Dawn to Remain at Ceres”.
Following its historic first-ever flyby of Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons mission has received the green light to fly onward to an object deeper in the Kuiper Belt, known as 2014 MU69. The spacecraft’s planned rendezvous with the ancient object – considered one of the early building blocks of the solar system — is Jan. 1, 2019.
“The New Horizons mission to Pluto exceeded our expectations and even today the data from the spacecraft continue to surprise,” said NASA’s Director of Planetary Science Jim Green. “We’re excited to continue onward into the dark depths of the outer solar system to a science target that wasn’t even discovered when the spacecraft launched.”
Based upon the 2016 Planetary Mission Senior Review Panel report, NASA this week directed nine extended missions to plan for continued operations through fiscal years 2017 and 2018. Final decisions on mission extensions are contingent on the outcome of the annual budget process.
In addition to the extension of the New Horizons mission, NASA determined that the Dawn spacecraft should remain at the dwarf planet Ceres, rather than changing course to the main belt asteroid Adeona.
Green noted that NASA relies on the scientific assessment by the Senior Review Panel in making its decision on which extended mission option to approve. “The long-term monitoring of Ceres, particularly as it gets closer to perihelion – the part of its orbit with the shortest distance to the sun — has the potential to provide more significant science discoveries than a flyby of Adeona,” he said….
(4) EASTERCON 2012 CHOW. Lawrence Schoen posted “Eating Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky” on Monday —
And there, in that weird moment of existential, Star Trek-related crisis, I was found by a band of SF academics from Oxford who I very tentatively knew, mostly through a common acquaintance with Paul Cornell (who is the Kevin Bacon of the UK SF scene). And like some kind of choir of angels they took me from the windowless confines of the convention hotel, first into the Outside, which I had almost forgotten existed, and then off to a Chinese restaurant with a bunch of other fans.
(5) SMOOTH SEGUE. Here’s where I drop in the Rob James Morgan tweet in response to Delilah S. Dawson’s fears about something literally eating authors.
the last one concerns everyone; worldcon bear attacks are forecast to be up 200% in 2016*
*not an actual statistic
— Rob M. (@RobJamesMorgan) July 6, 2016
(6 FEELS GUIDE TO FANAC. Suvudu’s Matt Staggs recommends a book and podcast discussion: “Therapist Kathleen Smith Talks About ‘The Fangirl Life’ on ‘Beaks & Geeks’”.
In her book The Fangirl Life: A Guide to Feeling All the Feels and Learning How to Deal, Kathleen Smith, a licensed therapist, introduces readers to her own brand of fan-friendly self-help: a unique niche in therapeutic thought where Doctor Who is more important than Doctor Freud, and the feels is very real. This is her first book aimed at fangirls, but Smith has been offering sage advice to female fandom for handling anxiety, relationship troubles, and more for a long time at her site www.fangirltherapy.com.
If you enjoy flailing over badass fictional ladies or speculating endlessly over plot points, but would like to carve more space for the narrative of your own life, this is the book for you. Written by a proud fangirl who is also a licensed therapist, The Fangirl Life is a witty guide to putting your passions to use in your offline life, whether it’s learning how writing fan fiction can be a launching point for greater career endeavors, or how to avoid the myths that fictional romance perpetuates.
(7) T5S. Aaron Pound reviewed Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin for Dreaming of Other Worlds. (Haiku warning!)
Full review: There is a vague and indistinct region in between the genres of fantasy and science fiction. While some books rest comfortably on one side of this division or the other, others are happy to rest in that ambiguous zone between them, maybe from some angles a work of fantasy, and from others a work of science fiction. The Fifth Season is one of those books, with elements that make one think that the story is a pure fantasy, and others that are squarely within the realm of science fiction. Against this backdrop, Jemisin weaves a brutal story of enslavement, oppression, and anger that is at once intensely personal and breathtaking in its scope.
(8) QUOTE OF THE DAY:
Kyra: I consider SFWA to be a one-syllable word, pronounced as spelled.
(9) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman joined Gene O’Neill for lunch in Las Vegas on Episode 12 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.
For the fifth and final episode of Eating the Fantastic recorded in Las Vegas during StokerCon, I headed out to Hash House A Go Go, one of my favorite restaurants—at least in its San Diego incarnation. My breakfast there is always one of my favorite Comic-Con meals. But alas, there turned out to be more than a 90-minute wait that Sunday morning in Vegas, so I moved on to Yard House at the recommendation of my guest, Gene O’Neill, who’d eaten there earlier that weekend.
Gene, with whom I attended the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, has been nominated 11 times for the Bram Stoker Award, and has won twice, in the categories of Long Fiction and Fiction Collection.
(10) INDIANAPOLIS FANDOM. Tony Schaab wrote a report on InConJunction for ScienceFiction.com.
Dubbed “The Crossroads of the Multiverse,” the small but mighty InConJunction celebrated it’s amazing 36th show this year on July 1-3, 2016, at the Marriott East in Indianapolis, IN. A fan-run convention since the beginning some 30-plus years ago, the show is organized by The Circle of Janus Science Fiction & Fantasy Club. With a heavy focus on sci-fi and fantasy, the show boasts several unique and entertaining aspects, including a fully-functional Bridge Simulator, an expansive Live Auction, a cosplay Masquerade, and specific rooms dedicated to ‘Doctor Who,’ anime, and more.
(11) SEVENTH HELL OF WHO. Not everyone thinks it was bad, however, “’Doctor Who’ Showrunner Steven Moffat Admits Series Seven Was ‘Miserable’”, at ScienceFiction.com.
If you don’t recall, Season Seven of NuWho involved a “monster movie of the week” feel with a series of standalone episodes that built up to the departure of Amy and Rory in the midseason episode ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’, the Doctor’s first adventures with Clara Oswald, and the introduction of John Hurt as the War Doctor. But with important moments like these, how could the season have been so generally bad? Well, it sounds like the pressure of Matt Smith leaving the show and the 50th anniversary got to Moffat a little bit:
“Matt [Smith], who was a friend and ally, was leaving – I couldn’t get him to stay. It felt like everything was blowing up around me. I was staggering into the 50th, with no Doctors contracted to appear in it, battered with endless hate mail about how I hadn’t got William Hartnell back and ‘Sherlock’ series three at the same time. I was pretty miserable by the end of it, and I couldn’t bear to let that be the end.”
(12) THE LOST WORLD. “See Gigantic Prehistoric Monsters Battle Modern Lovers” when the Alex Film Society screens The Lost World (1925) on Sunday, July 10 at 2:00 p.m.
“Imagine a Lost World—millions of years old—and now found by a daring exploring party. Imagine this world still existing as in the beginning of time—with gigantic antediluvian monsters roaming it—ape men—prehistoric men living on it—fighting at every turn for existence—fighting the monsters who would devour them. And it all happens in this tremendous love and adventure drama—and people from your own world were brave enough to encounter hardships and dangers to bring back this story to you. Without doubt the biggest motion picture achievement.”
Featuring some of the biggest stars of the silent era, including Wallace Beery, Bessie Love and Lewis Stone, as well as no less than a dozen different species of dinosaur, our print of The Lost World is a fully restored version from the George Eastman House collection. Famed composer and pianist Alexander Rannie will accompany the film with the musical score that was written for the original release.
(13) CHANGING ICON. In The Hollywood Reporter, Graeme McMillan has the story: “Tony Stark Replaced by Black Woman as Marvel’s Comic Book Iron Man”. The theory is that a brilliant MIT student who built her version of Iron Man armor will replace Tony Stark from Invincible Iron Man #7 onwards.
Williams debuted in Invincible Iron Man No. 7 in March of this year, and will headline a relaunched version of the title later this year as part of the Marvel NOW! relaunch. Created by series writer Brian Michael Bendis — who also co-created Miles Morales, the half-black, half-Latino Spider-Man who debuted in 2011 — and artist Mike Deodato, Riri has been shown to be even more resourceful than Stark himself, and just as stubborn.
Williams’ ascension as Iron Man (The title of the series will remain the same, according to Marvel) continues a trend for replacing, or at least adding to, the traditional white male heroes with a more diverse cast over the last few years; in addition to the Miles Morales Spider-Man, Sam Wilson became Marvel’s second black Captain America in 2014, the same year that Jane Foster took over as Thor.
(14) WILL THERE BE A MELTDOWN? Breitbart.com is canvassing the internet hoping to find negative reactions to the Iron Man story. This is a tweet they included in their news item.
https://twitter.com/ira/status/750690368413249536
(15) CAP CLAIMED BY BATTLING BOROUGHS. BBC reports a Marvel will place a statue of Captain America in a Brooklyn park. Naturally, this is causing controversy. For a change, it has nothing to do with Hydra.
The company has commissioned a 13-ft (3.96m) bronze statue which will be housed in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
It will be unveiled at the San Diego Comic Con later this month before being placed in the park from 10 August.
A sketch of the statue released by Marvel shows the character holding his signature shield in the air…..
The figure will also bear the superhero’s quote “I’m just a kid from Brooklyn” – said in the 2011 film Captain America: The First Avenger.
However, some fans have pointed out the original comic book character was actually from Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
In the comics, the superhero was the son of Irish immigrants – a similar background to that of co-creator Jack Kirby, who was the son of Austrian-Jewish immigrants living in the same area.
(16) COMIC STRIP. The eponymous character of The Wizard of Id is attending Wizardcon this week. Today he has a tough decision to make.
(17) NEXT ROGUE ONE TRAILER COMING. UPI says the second Rogue One trailer will premiere in the US on ABC.
According to fansite Making Star Wars, television listings for ABC reveal that they plan on airing a new Star Wars special on July 15 that will also include a new three minute trailer for Rogue One.
The title of the special, Secrets of The Force Awakens, shares the same name as a making of documentary that was included in the blu-ray release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
(18) JUNO. NASA posted images received from Juno as a time-lapse video of moons orbiting Jupiter.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured a unique time-lapse movie of the Galilean satellites in motion about Jupiter. The movie begins on June 12th with Juno 10 million miles from Jupiter, and ends on June 29th, 3 million miles distant. The innermost moon is volcanic Io; next in line is the ice-crusted ocean world Europa, followed by massive Ganymede, and finally, heavily cratered Callisto. Galileo observed these moons to change position with respect to Jupiter over the course of a few nights. From this observation he realized that the moons were orbiting mighty Jupiter, a truth that forever changed humanity’s understanding of our place in the cosmos. Earth was not the center of the Universe. For the first time in history, we look upon these moons as they orbit Jupiter and share in Galileo’s revelation. This is the motion of nature’s harmony.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day mc simon milligan.]
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@Jack Lint Also, the “Listen” button on that page validates Kyra’s tweet above – it’s all one easy-to-pronounce syllable!
@Petrea: according to https://file770.com/?p=21699, Olde Heuvelt was also not on the original list; https://file770.com/?p=21886 tells us this was because “Yes, Virginia[…]” was booted for prior publication.
The media react to the new Iron Man:
NPR (with pun in cheek): http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2016/07/06/484945363/a-starkly-different-iron-man-black-female-and-15-years-old
BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36731596
NPR also tells of the town that spoiled a seismic demonstration: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/06/485021384/california-town-fixes-crooked-curb-breaks-geologists-hearts.
@arkansawyer: something’s wrong with the embedded link. In clear, http://www.popsci.com/planets-and-prejudice works.
(1) BLAME THOSE GUYS SOUTH OF CANADA – I skimmed the article eager for news of perfidious Patagonia and all to nought! I feel I’ve been misled. 😛
@John A Arkansawyer
Broken link (It tagged File770 as a prefix):
http://www.popsci.com/planets-and-prejudice#page-3
I’m wondering if Nasa’s employment lawyers are reading a Bachelor’s as an FLSA exemption requirement (Fair Labor Standards Act – The US federal basis for minimum wage and overtime). I can’t imagine they’d slight her that way otherwise.
ETA: Ninja’d!
Re: Tingle
He has a new one: Slammed By The Substantial Amount Of Press Generated By My Book “Pounded By The Pound: Turned Gay By The Socioeconomic Implications Of Britain Leaving The European Union”.
It gets even better when you realize that the reason for some of the inception-y bits is that it previewed at a CONvergence panel in a public reading; a fact mentioned in the text itself.
Jack Lint on July 7, 2016 at 8:09 am said:
If you go over to Google’s translation page and set the controls for the heart of the sun…er, to detect language, it is pretty sure that sfwa is Haitian-Creole..
That seems appropriate somehow: I own a how-to-learn-Haitian-Creole book that includes useful phrases like “He’ll die for sure this time” and “They beat the man so hard he soiled himself” and which illustrates the simple past tense with the sentence “He looks at the man’s head. He pulls out his machete; he strikes; he cuts it off”.
(This is an actual book: https://www.amazon.com/Lets-Learn-Creole-Edner-Jeanty/dp/B0000EE9L3?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0)
(1):
The baseball World Series started in 1903 (and had precursors in the 1800s with similar names), so I question whether misleading American-centric uses of ‘World’ are truly a symptom of the era of American global cultural hegemony. I choose to see it as more aspirational than ethnocentric.
It seems like another case of someone acting betrayed by what they assumed the Hugos were rather than what they actually are, then asking for reality to be changed to fit their assumptions.
I was wondering why his blog post would use a pie chart of Hugo novel winners by country that was out of date enough to omit the recent exception to his point, so I reversed image searched it. I found that he recycled half the blog post from another one a few months ago, which is no big deal but it does show he had time to do more research. But more significantly, the chart is out of date because he ‘borrowed’ the image from a blog post from Ian Sales from February 2014. How hard is it to make your own pie chart of four data points in Excel?
(also, Ctrl-F “english” yields zero mentions in the post, so yeah)
@TYP. That is very very meta. The Convergence people are going to love it (they were delighted to be tweeted at by Tingle during the convention…)
@Paul: The reading is on YouTube and was linked to here a couple of days ago. They did seem to be enjoying it.
Speaking of non-US works, the anime world has commenced its quarterly demonstration of Sturgeon’s Law. First batch of premiere reviews here. (TL;DR: Believe the hype about Orange.)
@Nick
Yeah, I was at a room party at the time and missed it “live” but we were talking about it at the same time…
@Paul
Oh, I’m quite sure they did love it.
@Howloon,
To be fair, it’s only the Adult World series that’s America centric.
The Little League Baseball World Series is pretty panglobal.
In the UK at least the game closest to ‘baseball’ is very much a children’s game called rounders. No-one would think of playing it professionally.
(1): Yes, the article has many faults. Yes, thinking the Hugos as an award is a pipe dream. This is a shame, really, because the central idea (or what I think of it) is a good point:
The whole Puppie-controversy is very, very American-centric.
I always wondered where I, as a European, was suppose to be? The controversy spins at least partly around _American_ politics and the fault lines are American. The definitions of “liberal” or “conservatve” is American.
I also know a lot of German SF fans – real fans – who dont had a clue about this whole puppy thing. I only was aware of it, because I read american websites.
I think it doesnt hurt, to be remined of this from time to time. 🙂
Puppies next year, might drown.
Hmm, Uz-voo-ah or maybe Us-voo-ah depending on which end of the principality you hail from….
To be fair, it’s a lot easier to pronounce, backwards.
So I read Ninefox Gambit in a rush at a science fiction convention we have here in Minnesota. This is well worth the read, and I hope to see it knocked off the Hugo Ballot next year only because that means that the remaining five months of this year will be utterly amazing.
First, this is a novel that in terms of just dumping you straight into the setting with no hand holding is somewhere between Fifth Season and Quantum Thief. Which means it has that similar effect in that you have a mystery to solve as the shape of the world unwinds. This is a steep gradient, and it provides a whole of surprises as the writing unfolds.
Second, its a creatively batshit world. This is both good space opera, and highly innovative, and has a thing or two, if your are smart and not seeking a comfort zone, of how societies can work. It’s more Scalzi than Leckie when it comes those observations as they tend to be buried down. It also grants the horror of unrolling what a truly creepy dystopia this is.
Third, it’s military science fiction where you don’t have to feel like it’s just pulp or fluff. This isn’t just the bright uniforms and Gallantry, muddy uniforms and Serious Messages About Manliness, and a triumph after suitably Scary Others have been killed. I know that the last sentence is far from all milscifi, but it’s enough. The realization of the hierarchy they are all in is new and well done, and the description of it… will be powerful.
So has this come up yet?
http://www.tor.com/2016/07/07/star-trek-beyond-sulu-lgbt/
The headline: Star Trek Beyond to Feature Sulu’s Husband and Daughter
I’m still skeptical about the movie as a whole, but this does make me happy.
This story brought Three Body Problem to mind:
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/astronomers-spy-giant-planet-three-stars-in-odd-celestial-ballet/
Re (9): The puppies would agree that SFWA is a one-syllable word. but would likely differ on pronunciation. They think that, at least for the current membership, the S is silent.
Re the new Iron Man: Writer Michael Bendis is half of an inter-faith, inter-racial marriage and has multiple children, which (unlike a few other folks I could name) he uses to write about the same with great insight and effectiveness. He’s also one of the best writers in comics when it comes to characterization. His “Jessica Jones” sequence (Alias, The Pulse) is a high point in comics. I look forward hugely to his new Iron Man.
1) The whole Puppies war is, and always has been, an American culture war. The rest of us are peering in through the smoked glass and seeing Americans bicker amoungst themselves about who’s the victim, while trying to achieve more diversity *amoungst themselves*, while still insisting that we use American terminology and conform to the rhetoric. The irony would be hilarious if it wasn’t so perverted. You cannot possibly expect me to believe that the Hugos represent international fandom. The Three Body Problem is a fantastic start, but it’s got an incredibly long way to go.
Also, the term “People of colour” (someday I might actually be able to type that without air quotes) is in itself an example of how the rest of us non-Americans have been shuttered out of the conversation. If you used it here in Australia, or anywhere else outside of the US, you’d either get stares or laughed out of the pub. I’m not trying to be cruel about it – it’s just the truth. It’s not just the argot, it’s the insistence that we conform to the Americana way of thinking and align our identity politics. The wealthy white woman Tim speaks about chased after me and demanded that (and others) shift our viewports and conceive our identities and ideals and choice of literature in a way that she felt they ought to be. You know, the American way. And became offended and indignant when I did not. That’s an insipid bullying tactic if there ever was one – and it almost made me want to leave fandom entirely if I was going to get that revolting treatment.
If you’re looking for a way to alienate and isolate us non-Americans from the Hugos and WorldCon, that’s a sure fire way to do it. We deserve to be part of fandom, just as everyone else does. Include us the conversation. But the more I see of this Puppy nonsense, the less appealing that becomes.
@howloon:
Pie chart?! Is there no end to this guy’s iniquities?
@Peer Sylvester:
Mike dealt with this pretty early in the comment thread. Basically, no. And the convergence of the European Right – establishment getting more neoliberal in its econ – and the American Right – ultras getting more “blood and soil” in its nativism is pretty far along at this point. That’s before you even start to talk about the considerable human cross-pollination among anti-Muslim activists on the low road and one-percenter-stroking policy wonks on the high road. About the only issue that uniquely animates the US right vs. the British and European Right any more is firearms. Our guys can’t get enough of them. Your guys still don’t seem to that into it.
I worry about European and British progressives who still talk like Your Father’s Christian Democrats stalked the land and not UKIP/Front-National and Americanized Killer Austerians. I admire the hell out of the European welfare-state model, and British and Continental progressives who imagine it is not under determined if occasionally subtle assault risk losing it.
I pronounce it “Siff-wuh”
Also, Pokemon Go just came out, so I love you all and I’ll see you again when I’ve caught them all.
Juno delights me. Of course I’m easy to delight with great engineering in the pursuit of great science.
I’ve also recently discovered the livestreams from Okeanos Explorer; as I type this, my iPad’s showing me the view from an uncrewed submersible at 5800 or so meters below sea level, making its way up the eastern wall of the Mariana Trench right above the hadean/abyssal transition zone.
Which is to say: it turns out that Okeanos Explorer is a research ship, equipped with a pair of uncrewed submersibles, and set up to broadcast data as it gets gathered, and operating with procedures that get geological and biological specimens out to the scientific community at large in 2-3 months rather than the usual 2-3 years. It’s also got mission leads who speak well and are fun to listen to.
This has been a great way to spend down time the last few days, and a project I’m intensely in favor of for public science.
1) The guy has a point, though it is buried beneath a whole lot of nonsense about banning Americans from Hugo voting.
I completely agree with Peer – the whole Puppy controversy and many diversity debates in general are very American-centric to a degree that many Americans aren’t aware of. The definitions of conservative and liberal are American. Liberal isn’t a synonym for left in Europe and the idea of John Scalzi as a leftist is ridiculous from a European POV. The focus on race above all else is also a very American thing – in Europe ethnicity is usually more important and a lot of resentments run along ethnic lines. Or take that post from a few days back where someone wanted more religious diversity in fiction, while defining it completely in American terms.
Another example: Some time ago one of those diversity pie charts classified Wolfgang Jeschke as a white man – which he absolutely was. But as a writer from a non-Anglophone country, he still faced a lot higher hurdles to getting published in the US than a white American man. However the pie chart had no category for that.
Now in recent years we’ve seen a lot of positive steps at the Hugos and Nebulas towards more diversity also on the international level with nominations and wins for Liu Cixin, Hao Yinfang, Aliette de Bodard, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, etc… But that doesn’t mean that a lot of genre debates aren’t still very American centric.
@Jim I’m well aware of the current political problems on my continent, thank you very much. So is Peer, I’m sure. After all we have to live here.
Referring to John Scalzi as a leftist is fairly ridiculous in the context of the United States, as well. We are talking about a man who has referred to himself as a moderate liberal and even as an old style liberal republican (I believe) at different points when describing his political perspective. He’s been deliberately mislabeled by some ridiculous people because he’s been fairly diligent in criticizing sexism and racism, but his politics aren’t terribly radical within our political terrain.
@robert wood: The fact that Scalzi is referred to as a liberal says more about the extreme nature of the political positions taken by those doing the labeling than it does about Scalzi. As far as I can tell, Scalzi’s politics are reasonably moderate, maybe a tinge to the left insofar as he regards women and people of color as actual humans whose concerns should be taken into account. He is pretty much in the mainstream of American politics. To those on the extreme right (which describes a large number of Puppy and Puppy-adjacent individuals) that makes him a radical hippie anarchist.
@Jeremy Szal:
Surely in Australia of all places you’ve noticed that national variations of a mother tongue feature local idioms. But perhaps you are overstating for effect: Search results for “‘people of colour’ -color australia” verbatim.
Re #1
The thing about the assholes’ attack on the Hugo Award is that it’s not symmetric. It’s simply NOT just two sides contending about differing definitions.
On the one hand, SF fandom is looking for ‘good’ SF (however defined) – and on the other side, the various flavors of self-labeled “Puppies” are assholes who gamed the system with the specific, explicitly described intent of limiting the diversity of the Hugos. They are explicitly against “diversity”.
And the fact that the Hugo Awards remain a mostly American institution is contingent on its history; if Napper doesn’t like it, they’re free to look for the time stream where the SF genre developed somewhere else on the planet, and organize a fandom and an associated award over THERE.
@P J Evans
The AAAS has posted a very cool video of the stars and planet.
This is absolutely worth watching, but it does show that this system is far more stable than the one described in “The Three Body Problem.”
@Jim Henley
Are you seriously trying to tell teach me the day-to-day jargon about my own country? Really? As if I wouldn’t know and I need an American to tell me?
And your anecdotal results proof nothing – half of it is Americans talking about Australia, or language used by the rarest of academics. It’s not the everyday language that 99% of the population uses. And even if it were, it would just be further proof of American hegemony compartmentalizing our language on their terms.
@Jeremy Szal:
No, and smuggling “day to day jargon” into your response is palming a card, but you seem to be so sunk in resentment that further discussion with you would be a waste of time. I hope you will have the best life you can possibly have despite Americans talking about American things and building proud traditions like the Hugo Awards without asking you how to do it first.
@Bruce Baugh
Thank you for the Okeanos Explorer link! Stepson and I just watched the tail end (diagnostic end?) of today’s dive. He’s a very airplane enthusiastic kid and is also extremely excited that tomorrow they’re diving a B-29 wreck. He’s been diligently figuring out the time zone difference to make sure we can tune in and see it. Very cool stuff. Wish I had known about it earlier!
I have posted a non-Hugo related review for Elements of Mind by Walter H. Hunt. It is a decent secret history set in the Victorian era with a little bit of magic thrown in.
Let’s be clear about a couple of things:
1) It is much, much more important that the Hugo Awards do right by American people of color than by white Europeans. Deal.
2) Here is a complete list of everyone White Australia, as a whole, is qualified to condemn regarding racial discourse and race relations: No. Fucking. Body.
@TYP: Who was reading Tingle during a panel at CONvergence? Son name of Jon? Best Buckaroo Zoe? Or just a panelist with much humor and a high tolerance for typos?
Re: getting natural hair into the helmet. 1. It’s a comic book 2. Iron Riri can probably invent some miraculous new hairstyling compound that will free black women everywhere from the horrors of hat hair and make her rich. She’ll be the next Iron Man AND the next Madame CJ Walker.
@Stoic Cynic: You’re very welcome! I’m looking forward to whatever they’re up to next, and I see they have quite the backlog.
No, I think he is trying to repudiate your earlier point “Also, the term “People of colour” (someday I might actually be able to type that without air quotes) is in itself an example of how the rest of us non-Americans have been shuttered out of the conversation. If you used it here in Australia, or anywhere else outside of the US, you’d either get stares or laughed out of the pub. I’m not trying to be cruel about it – it’s just the truth. It’s not just the argot, it’s the insistence that we conform to the Americana way of thinking and align our identity politics.”
That Australia does not have the same extensive vocabulary that the US has on issues of race and ethnic diversity is not an example of non-Americans being shut out. It is an example of how the depth and sophistication of the debate in the US is and how Australia is *NOT* anything like as sophisticated in terms of its vocabulary on these issues. And yes, that is a criticism of Australia and yes I live there and yes, I am an Australian citizen.
Not at all. The list of people we are qualified to condemn includes:
Pauline Hanson
Cory Bernardi
Peter Dutton
John Howard
Tony Abbott
Eddie McGuire
Any one of the various arse holes who booed Adam Goodes
@Camestros Felapton:
I bow to your superior Australiana. Also, your blog entry on the recent election there was both entertaining and informative.
Everyone, you should read Camestros’s blog!
::Everyone here points out they already do, as evidenced by the names in the comment section.::
Okay, that’s cool.
Jim, apologies if I’m misunderstanding your point re: White Australia, but Jeremy Szal isn’t white.
@Dawn Incognito: Thanks. I was trying to give non-white Australia a break since it has enough to deal with already. But point taken.
@Camestros Felapton
So “people of colour”, one of the most hegemonic, non-nuanced, ham-fisted and imperialistic phrases ever conned in identity discourse, is sophisticated? A phrases that combines 70% of the world in one dumpster for the sake of convenience, is sophisticated, and we’re running behind when we don’t use it? Even when said “people of colour” tell you that they don’t like it? Go and read the rest of this thread if you don’t believe me.
Here’s the thing: Americans don’t get to tell non-white, non-Americans what they’re going to be called. America doesn’t set the standard for international rhetoric – that’s for damn sure. No country does.
@Jim Henley
Yeah, asking that the other 96% of the world’s population be included in the awards is far too much to ask. You talk about diversity, but even the mention of including the rest of the world seems to offend you. That’s *exactly* what Tim says in his essay – either we do it The American Way or not at all.
Got to it before I did.
This is asinine. The term “people of color” was originated by people of color. They certainly did not come up with it to “consign themselves to a dumpster for the sake of convenience.” Shock: activists coined a useful term that did not achieve instant global adoption. Oh noes!
Jim Henley
Indeedz, and I always believed that the expression ‘people of color’ was coined precisely to take the place of some of the expressions which the ruling group is pleased to make up for its own delight.
Eeeeep. Mines everywhere. I don’t particularly feel qualified to speak on this subject because I’m so white I’m nearly translucent, so I’m going to quote from that Vajra Chandrasekara piece I linked early in the thread:
I appreciate reading these perspectives from, um, non-white non-Americans as to their thoughts on the term “people of colo(u)r”. It is certainly not my place to insist they accept or agree with the terminology because it originated with other people who are also not white.
@Kip W:
I have to back off of this thread because it is the wrong fucking night, but yes: activists coined the term to connect the various cultural groups impacted by white supremacy and white privilege and to situate those American communities in the global context. Its precursors include the “Negritude” movement that began in the 30s, anti-colonialism, the developing concept of the black diaspora, the increase in solidarity among civil-rights activists in the black, Latinx, Muslim and, increasingly, Asian communities.