Where there’s smoke there’s… Well, exactly what there is is a subject of debate in today’s Scroll.
(1) Do not miss – “Dilbert Writes A Sci-Fi Novel”.
(2) Oh brave New World! Scientists claim to have pinned down one of Shakespeare’s previously unsuspected literary influences —
South African researchers announced they found cannabis residue on pipe fragments found in William Shakespeare‘s garden.
Francis Thackeray, an anthropologist at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand and the lead author of the study published in the South African Journal of Science, said he and his team used gas chromatography mass spectrometry to analyze residue found on 24 pipe fragments from the bard’s hometown of Stratford-Upon-Avon, England, and cannabis residue was discovered on four fragments taken from Shakespeare’s garden.
(3) When Arthur C. Clarke introduced interviewer Jeremy Bernstein to Stanley Kubrick, he accidentally launched their 25-game chess duel.
I told Clarke that nothing would please me more. Much to my amazement, the next day Clarke called to say that I was expected that afternoon at Kubrick’s apartment on Central Park West. I had never met a movie mogul and had no idea what to expect. But as soon as Kubrick opened the door I felt an immediate kindred spirit. He looked and acted like every obsessive theoretical physicist I have ever known. His obsession at that moment was whether or not anything could go faster than the speed of light. I explained to him that according to the theory of relativity no information bearing signal could go faster. We conversed like that for about an hour when I looked at my watch and realized I had to go. “Why?” he asked, seeing no reason why a conversation that he was finding interesting should stop.
I told him I had a date with a chess hustler in Washington Square Park to play for money. Kubrick wanted the name. “Fred Duval” I said. Duval was a Haitian who claimed to be related to Francois Duvalier. I was absolutely positive that the name would mean nothing to Kubrick. His next remark nearly floored me. “Duval is a patzer,” is what he said. Unless you have been around chess players you cannot imagine what an insult this is. Moreover, Duval and I were playing just about even. What did that make me?
Kubrick explained that early in his career he too played chess for money in the park and that Duval was so weak that it was hardly worth playing him. I said that we should play some time and then left the apartment. I was quite sure that we would never play. I was wrong.
(4) The new Fantastic Four reboot is getting the kind of reaction that explains why the phrase “stinks on ice” was invented.
Not only were reviews scathing — resulting in a 9 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes — audiences on Friday night gave the $120 milliion Fox tentpole a C- CinemaScore, the worst grade that anyone can remember for a marquee superhero title made by a major Hollywood studio. (CinemaScore, based in Las Vegas, was founded in 1979.)
…For the weekend, Fantastic Four, starring Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara and Jamie Bell, topped out at a dismal $26.2 million from 3,995 theaters in North America, one of the lowest openings of all time for a Marvel Comics film adaptation
(5) Carrie Cuinn explained why Lakeside Circus killed plans to publish a Lou Antonelli story, what Antonelli did next, and the verbal attacks she received as a result.
I couldn’t stand by and do nothing after Mr. Antonelli publicly admitted to essentially SWATing someone in our community, especially given the numerous deaths by police and in police custody that have recently made the news. As I said in my letter, it’s a matter of SAFETY. Antonelli took away Gerrold’s safety when he filed that false police report, and I won’t support that by giving him my money or promoting his work.
I was content to do what I felt necessary privately, between Mr. Antonelli and myself, but he dragged me up in front of his fans and made a target of me. He knew people were defensive and angry on his behalf, and he gave them me as a target. Doing that, he took away my safety, too.
(6) Lou Antonelli says what happened wasn’t his intent, and apologized again.
I want to make it clear than when I posted about Carrie Cuinn and Lakeside Circus’ decision taking back their decision to publish a story of mine, I meant it as a cautionary tale – don’t be a jackass like I was, because there are repercussions. Experience is a hard teacher. I don’t begrudge the decision at all. I apologized to David Gerrold because I realized I did something stupid and I made a mistake. But I didn’t think I made a mistake in revealing Cuinn’s decision. Fact was. I thought people would commend her for it, and I thought there would be some people who would like to give her credit for it.
Now she says she’s gotten threats over the revelation. That’s not why I posted it! So I’m sorry again, in this case, because it never occurred to me her action would be seen negatively.
(7) K. Tempest Bradford has a take on the Antonelli/Gerrold story.
You hear all this, and your response is UGH, how terrible! That crosses a line! Antonelli should explain himself and apologize!
Oh? Really? A guy contacts a police department in a serious effort to have said police pay extra special attention to a convention attendee in an atmosphere where there’s already plenty to worry about with police overreacting and you want him to apologize?
Sure, Gerrold isn’t a young black man, so he’s already much safer around police than a lot of folks. But Antonelli’s intent was bring police into a situation for the purpose of causing alarm and harm to Gerrold for no other reason than that he can’t handle Gerrold having an opinion and a platform….
There are real ramifications here, real consequences. There may be a good chance nothing bad will happen. That doesn’t mean it’s okay. That doesn’t mean an apology is enough….
The difference between how we treat people from marginalized identities who do things harmful to our community and how we treat white men who harm our community is so stark, so blatant, that I feel like I’m living in a Onion article right now.
This is how you fail, white people of SFF. This right here….
(8) Some commenters are extrapolating Bradford’s post to mean that Benjanun Sriduangkaew, the subject of a report by Hugo nominee Laura Mixon, ought to be treated with comparable leniency.
Jason Sanford, for one, has written a post “On the double standard of genre apologies”.
Here’s a simple test. Can you figure out why the following situations are different?
- Lou Antonelli apologized. The genre is beginning to accept his apology, with many people wanting to act as if nothing happened.
- Harlan Ellison apologized. The genre accepted his apology and most people now act as if nothing happened.
- Benjanun Sriduangkaew apologized. Most people in the genre refuse to accept her apology.
(9) Ann Somerville sharply disagreed that these cases are comparable.
The crucial differences are – and Tempest fucking knows these:
- Antonelli does not carry out secret campaigns of abuse. He does everything, for good or ill, under his own name (which is now mud).
- He hasn’t been carrying out harassment of people, white/POC, male and female, straight and gay, cis and trans for over ten years
- he apologised for what he actually did, in full – unlike Miss Hate who sort of vaguely alluded to bad behaviour, without acknowledging the full scope of what she did or directly apologising to her actual victims
- his victims don’t include people of colour, but include one of Hate’s much loathed white women (that should make him a hero, according to Bradford and Hate)
- People don’t feel constrained from criticising Antonelli on account of his oh so persecuted race and sexuality – which is still the case with Hate (despite the fact she is massively class privileged and not racially disprivileged in her own country.)
(10) In an earlier post, Jason Sanford made an appeal for peace in the genre.
But this incident has also brought into focus how much bad blood there is in the science fiction and fantasy genre. The letter Lou wrote wasn’t merely an attack on David — it was an attack on Worldcon and the entire genre.
Which I’m certain isn’t what Lou intended. I have no doubt he loves the genre. I’m certain he wants the genre to thrive and grow.
We have reached the point in the SF/F genre where people must decide what they want. Because there are now two simple choices: To destroy the genre or reach for peace.
Reaching for peace doesn’t mean silencing your views or beliefs. Our genre has long been a big tent where all viewpoints and people can co-exist. Yes, the genre has often not lived up to this ideal. And that doesn’t mean there won’t be disagreements and arguments and people who hate each other.
But at the end of the day a shared love of science fiction and fantasy joins us together. We must never forget this.
(11) Though prompted by her experience at the BEA, not by this latest kerfuffle, Kameron Hurley’s article for Locus “Your Author Meltdown Will Be Live-Tweeted” seems prescient.
The more people respect what you have to say, the more folks will come out of the woodwork trying to tear you down. Having been one of the people flinging arrows at authors myself (and let’s be real, I still do), I get it, and I accept it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to navigate when you’re sitting in a restaurant and wondering if your dinner conversation will end up in an Instagram video.
In the ten years I’ve been writing online, I’ve mostly been hated as some kind of women’s lib boogeyman, and that’s just funny more than anything. It’s a lot easier for me to dismiss haters when they’re sending me death threats for believing women are people. It’s harder to dismiss people who want me dead because they despise me in general. In the same breath they’ll say I should be garroted to keep me from speaking and Starbucks should stop serving Pumpkin Spice Lattes because, gosh, those lattes are gross.
More and more, ‘‘being a writer’’ isn’t about writing at all. It’s about the writer as celebrity. The writer as brand. The writer as commodity. And more and more, I see authors themselves reviewed as if they’re businesses on Yelp.
(12) Is it possible that the extended edition of The Battle of the Five Armies could be even more violent than the version shown in theaters? TheOneRing.net theorizes that will be so —
According to a bulletin published today by the Motion Picture Association of America Classification and Rating Administration, the extended edition of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies will carry an “R” rating for “some violence.” Of course, it’s no news flash that the movie contains violence. The theatrical version’s PG-13 rating came with an advisory for “extended sequences of intense fantasy action violence, and frightening images.” So, it’s intriguing to imagine what, exactly, in the EE bridged that gap, especially with only “some violence” to go by. Possible EE spoilers ahead!
(13) The late Terrence Evans (1934-2015) is remembered at StarTrek.com:
Evans ventured to the Star Trek universe to play Baltrim, the mute Bajoran farmer, in the DS9 episode “Progress,” and Proka Migdal, the Bajoran who adopted a Cardassian war orphan, in “Cardassians.” He also appeared as the Kradin ambassador, Treen, in the Voyager hour “Nemesis.”
(14) Voice of Trillian in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Susan Sheridan, has passed away. SF Site News has more at the link.
(15) I believe Matt!
For the record: None of my decision to break my five-year con-free streak by attending Worldcon has anything to do with the Hugo Awards.
— Matt Wallace is Updates Only (@MattFnWallace) August 10, 2015
[Thanks to Gregory Benford, JJ, Andrew Porter and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
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David Brin’s response to Jo Walton is interesting too.
Looking back, Walton should have been far more embarrassed and offered an apology for her behavior instead of claiming “he deserved it.” You don’t publicly humiliate someone like that over the minor offense she describes — being patronizing and putting an arm around her shoulder — by physically assaulting them with a drink.
If the situation were reversed and he poured a coke on her, I suspect the reaction would’ve been far less kind to the pourer.
I don’t want to see Antonelli harrassed or arrested or fired from his job (at least, not on account of anything I know about him), and I wouldn’t boycott any person or company just because they choose to associate with him.
But I, personally, would not want to get into any kind of business or fannish relationship with him. This would be true even if he did a 180° turn in his politics and became Barack Obama’s biggest fan.
It’s better to apologize for the shit you’ve done than to do shit without apologizing, but it’s better still to stop doing shit that needs apologizing for. Somebody let me know when he’s demonstrated that he’s reached that stage.
Patrick May,
The reduction of impact you found for 1984 was reduced for 2013. But even in 1984, if 20 percent of the nominators had organized a bloc vote, they’d have occupied a big chunk of the ballot in short fiction and fan categories.
What we’ve got to work from at the moment is that analysis of 2014 patterns from Kempner. Creating 2014 dummy ballots based on his analysis, and assuming some moderate (and debatable) amount of convergence in nominations for the “had buzz on tor.com” works like I described above might be the best that can be done for now.
I don’t think it accomplishes its goal if the short fiction, fan categories, etc. would still be largely dominated by such an organized hack, as felice pointed out. I think it sends the message (and says explicitly in the FAQ) that groups who campaign for bloc voting should be able to get something (between one and four items, depending) on the ballot in every category. That is not discouraging slate campaigning – it is a recipe for competing slate campaigns.
The situation today is not ideal, but at least under today’s rules, if you really did want to fill the entire ballot with your picks, year after year (which no one does), you’d have to get dozens of authors willing to participate in your annual “screw you” to the readers and the industry, which wouldn’t work, you know, forever.
yeah, because it’s not like we’re dealing with someone who runs his own toy publishing house
And now it doesn’t. So it seems like he is cleaning up his blog from previous temper outbreaks.
He may have scrubbed his own blog, but the internet never forgets.
Also, I’ve written up a lengthy post about Antonelli’s recent misconduct.
Brian Z.,
Unfortunately, that’s not remotely close to a quantifiable distribution. Kempner’s work, while interesting, doesn’t provide enough information to determine the distribution and clustering of works across ballots, either.
As I and others have pointed out, by running the EPH rules on the 1984 data with slates added, EPH is far more resilient to slates than are the current rules. You are focusing on Felice’s theoretical comments and ignoring the actual calculations. Here’s what really happens with a slate in the Short Story category:
That’s far better than the current rules.
So, accepting ad arguendo that these results are accurate, would you agree that EPH is superior to the current rules?
The fannish community has taken a strong anti-slate stance. It seems unlikely that any well-meaning efforts to counter-slate would survive for long. The only slates to really watch out for are the maliciously stupid (sads) and the stupidly malicious (rabids.) But hey, like you say, they can’t keep it up forever!
Not a big believer in the excluded middle, are we? You’d only have to do it one year at a time. And the authors would not all have to be willing.
Ray: the publishing house isn’t even necessary for most of the categories. Under Hugo rules, a story doesn’t need to be sold through any kind of established venue. Someone can dump text into a blog and it qualifies.
So if Vox wanted, he could get a random text generator to produce a 40,000 word document, prepend it with a sentence like, “One time on a spaceship I saw a book with these words in it,” throw it onto a blog post, and voila, it’s eligible for a Best Novel Hugo. It’s science fiction (spaceship!), it’s fiction (Vox wasn’t really on a spaceship!), and it meets the length requirement. That’s all it takes.
Of course, even the Rabid-est of Puppies might balk at voting for such a novel (or, better yet, 5 such novels with different randomized text, and then produced documents with fewer randomized words as short stories, novelettes, related work, etc.), but if the whole purpose is to burn the Hugos down, he can try to get enough people to vote for ‘the Total Nonsense’ slate to crowd out the rest of the ballot. And if they’re all him, then he doesn’t need to worry about the authors retracting their stories.
That’s one reason I think EPH is important. Right now, a firebrand could get together a couple hundred people and stand a strong chance of flooding the ballot with total gibberish, provided they have no shame. EPH makes that much harder because you need to have a much larger percentage of the electorate to effect a sweep.
I haven’t commented before on the whole Antonelli thing, but even when I saw the apology (the first one), it bothered me in some subliminal way. After I re-read this post on Making Light (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/015968.html), as well as Natalie Luhrs’ post (linked here: http://www.pretty-terrible.com/2015/08/10/pattern-matching-lou-antonelli-and-the-sad-puppies/), it’s become clear to me that my discomfort was with Antonelli’s repeated “mistakes”. As Ms. Luhrs says, he has a pattern of this behavior, and it’s not a good thing.
In contrast to RH, who I bounced off of on LJ, there was a stronger, more malignant presence online. She actively cultivated and attacked; Antonelli seems to think he can avoid opprobrium by hiding behind his avuncular persona and displacing while disclaiming intent. Ultimately, both will end up in the same place.
Harlan, though, to me, falls into the CWAA category. The intent there is primarily for himself, not against all others. The result is, he’s kind and generous to some, and an a$$hole to others. In his case, YMMV quite widely. In RH or Antonelli’s cases, the circle closes in too rapidly for many people and YMMV turns into “Avoid at all Costs” (AAAC?).
In bird-watching news, I forgot to mention that the flicker was intensely watched by a bold chickadee (what else are they but bold) and a bright yellow Goldfinch, in full breeding season splendor. On my way in the door last night, I startled the rabbit (each yard in the neighborhood has at least one rabbit), but s/he zoomed off into the brush before I could see much else besides the cottontail. (Years ago, while we were sitting on the couch, we could see the two adult rabbits “playing” in the yard.)
For the record, I feel that there’s an entirely morally consistent stance to take on Antonelli and RH both–you can accept their apologies while noting that the apology is merely the beginning of any true act of contrition, and that they will have to act to repair the damage they’ve done to the community they injured with deeds instead of words and prove the sincerity of their apology and that you accept their apology contingent on that.
Based on subsequent events, I’ve retracted my acceptance in both cases. Not that I think either one of them care about my opinion of them. 🙂
Whether or not Antonelli is simply unaware of the danger of his actions, malicious or just a whiny man-child who thinks that there must be a movement against him, specifically him, when he does not instantly get everything he wants, I think one thing is certain. To interact with him is harmful. Antonelli considered harmful, so to speak. If you interact with him online, he may try to get you fired. If you criticize him, he may try to send cops after you. If you decide to abide by a contract and cancel publishing his story and sending a kill fee, he will sick the hounds of puppydom on you to dox and harass you. He will later apologize after the issue. What this means to mean, is that if I ever encounter him in real life, I will do my best to pretend he is not there. He is irrational and impulsive, controlled by instantaneous emotions and I do not know what he will do if he is disappointed. Honestly, the man scares me. I do not work for a publisher, but if I did, I would worry for the safety and sanity of any of editors who worked with him.
I read Mixon’s piece on RH, but honestly, I have forgotten most of it. I know that she cultivated followers and sicked them on people, as many other semi-sentient fecal containers (like TB) have in the past and will in the future. I cannot remember if she actually tried to get police or employers involved during her harassment campaigns. Rather than re-read Mixon’s piece (which was good, but rather long), can anyone let me know if she did?
Antonelli did not SWAT David Gerrold, but I put that down to a lack of technical know-how, rather than any nobler intention. Maybe I am overreacting, but like I said, the man scares me. I know TB wishes we would think that about him, but he is predictable, boring, pathetic.
Regarding KTB’s complaint, it’s far from clear that Antonelli’s gotten an Out of Jail card from all fandom, but only that Gerrold’s acceptance of his apology has put one particular matter to rest.
Still no luck in tracking down whether Elizabethans called it anything other than hemp, but I’m finding some fascinating stuff. Bhang seems to first appear as a word in Europe in Portugal in the 1560’s. Marijuana for drug use was certainly being called “bang” (bhang) by 1690 in England, when it shows up in “The Treasury of Drugs Unlock’d”. (“An herb … of an infatuating quality and pernicious use.”)
Was the term used in England in Elizabethan times? Possible. In 1596, a Dutchman named Jan Huyghen van Linschoten described the use of bangue, hashish, boza, bernavi, and bursj. An English language version appeared in 1598 (“Iohn Huighen van Linschoten his Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies”). It appears to have been considered a significant and well-known work. Sample:
“Bangue is likewise much used in Turkie and Egypt, and is made in three sorts, having also three names. The first by the Egyptians is called Assis (Hashish (Arab.)), which is the poulder of Hemp, or of Hemp leaves, which is water made in paste or dough, they would eat five peeces, (each) as big as a Chestnut (or larger); This is used by the common people, because it is of a small price, and it is no wonder, that such vertue proceedeth from the Hempe, for that according to Galens opinion, Hempe excessively filleth the head.”
I might actually take from that, though, that hemp may have been the most commonly used name at the time, since hemp is being used to explain what all of this means.
Also of possible note is the 1620 poem “The Praise of Hemp-seed” by John Taylor, which includes:
“Apothecaries were not worth a pin,
If Hempseed did not bring their commings in;
Oyles, Unguents, Sirrops, Minerals, and Baulmes,
(All nature’s treasures, and th’Almighties almes),
Emplasters, Simples, Compounds, sundry drugs
With Necromanticke names like fearful Bugs,
Fumes, Vomits, purges, that both cures, and kils,
Extractions, conserves, preserves, potions, pils,
Elixirs, simples, compounds, distillations,
Gums in abundance, brought from foreign nations.”
@rcade:
You’re leaving out several rather important details, some of which you may not be aware of.
He’d been condescending and dismissive all weekend. The arm around the shoulder was not the provocation; it was just the last straw.
Jo wasn’t the only person who was fed up with him that weekend. They were surrounded by tired people many of whom were also very irritated with him, and were amused and delighted to see someone else give such visible expression to that frustration. That’s not something for any of us to be proud of, nor were we even at the time, but it’s what we were really feeling.
She was really embarrassed and ashamed of behaving that way. She went to great lengths to discourage the very real tendency of some of the witnesses to celebrate or crow about it, and emphasized to everyone that she was embarrassed and ashamed at having behaved that way.
And it was the cause of a significant hiatus in Jo attending American cons, and a longer hiatus in her attending Boskone, the scene of her unfortunate behavior.
Let me be clear about this: She was embarrassed by her own behavior, and then she was also embarrassed by the tendency of some to treat it as funny rather than embarrassing.
Yeah, because a tall, reasonably fit man emptying a can of Diet Coke onto the head of a much smaller, mobility-impaired woman, who is also far less prominent in the field than he is (Brin was GoH that weekend), would not have been “embarrassing but kind of funny, to people too tired to be exercising good judgment.” It would have been embarrassing and a bit scary.
Really, this whole situation has lead me to add Ann Somerville to the list of people whose comments I roll my eyes at.
Scalzi seems to be doing okay for himself.
How long before VD posts about how these numbers are actually tremendously disappointing and only prove how unsuccessful Scalzi is?
Also puts the Tor boycott in perspective. Even if the boycotters all habitually bought Scalzi in hardback (when clearly very few of them actually purchase Tor books) they would now be reducing his sales by less than 1%.
@Aaron @Ginger
I am stunned Lou never apologized directly. Thanks for the links and the writers who took the time to sum that up.
It’s a pattern of behavior that seems ingrained.
@Patrick May
Thanks for the additional details on the results using 1984 data and injected slates.
I wish BrianZ would simply say he thinks rule changes are unneeded and in his view inflammatory and leave it at that.
As a noob, do I want to know why one would roll one’s eyes at Ann Somerville’s comments? I assume it’s because of what she said about Antonelli and RH. But a few of her previous posts show how RH is still engaging in harmful behavior and doesn’t understand what she did wrong. That may be where Antonelli ends up, but he’s not there yet (though Natalie Luhrs’ post strongly suggests that’s what will happen).
I don’t know much about any of the people involved and could easily be mistaken, but if Bradford is defending RH (as seems likely), it seems much better to ignore her than Somerville.
Patrick May,
Agreed. I said it is the best we’ve got. Perhaps one could create two sets of dummy ballots using Kempner as a starting point. One set could assume nominators converged on “Tor-buzzed” works more or less in the way I described above. For comparison, in the other set the 100 people who chose, say, Lady Astronaut were not much more likely to choose Ancillary Justice, Selkie, Ink Readers, Dinosaur, Water, etc., than people who chose puppy-friendly works/authors were. Subject both data sets to scenarios like band of lockstep voters co-opt “Sad Puppies buzz,” rival band responds by coopting “Tor.com buzz”, obscure slate comes out of nowhere, or what have you.
I appreciate your offer to pull something together and if you do I’m glad to do try to lend a hand this month (I wouldn’t have as much time after that).
No. I follow you. In your calculations, an outside group of a size equivalent to 20% of the 1984 Hugo nominators (a bit over 200) would have got either two or three stories on the ballot. For 2013, felice’s calculation was that 200 nominators would get four places in short story.
Look: even this year, when the slate sweeps were practically accidental and many of the people involved were completely well-meaning and didn’t think of it as a hack, a lot of the authors withdrew from consideration, and still more promised not to participate again. If slating is the kiss of death, isn’t that what you want? Right now, you can still claim that moral high ground. (Barely, given the vitriol on all sides.)
The current system allows for the defeat of bloc voted items through no award, and also allows for social sanctions to discourage bloc voting. Both of these would be weakened by EPH, since slate campaigns could try to claim the high ground, pointing even to the EPH FAQ which says in so many words that they SHOULD get something on the ballot. So how would you discourage competing slates from claiming the same justification and crowding other things out of short fiction and fan categories? That sounds like a terrible outcome.
Rob_matic said:
Don’t be silly. He’ll first claim that Scalzi made up those numbers in order to make it seem like he’s more successful than he really is, and cite Bookscan as a counter-example.
Look: even this year, when the slate sweeps were practically accidental and many of the people involved were completely well-meaning
Another day of Brian Z lying his ass off. Business as usual.
since slate campaigns could try to claim the high ground, pointing even to the EPH FAQ which says in so many words that they SHOULD get something on the ballot.
No, it doesn’t. This has been pointed out to you many times before, and yet you continue to dishonestly make this claim. The EPH FAQ says that voters should have their votes count, even if they are participating in a slate. They just shouldn’t have their votes count disproportionately.
@rcade Re: Weapons of Mass Carbination
It looks like there was an apology offered and accepted, just not publicized. From the comment section after Jerry Pournelle commented …
ETA: also in full in a later posting
http://papersky.livejournal.com/50358.html
Does it sound like a more terrible or less terrible outcome than what we’ve seen this year?
Why and how should we identify and remove slate votes? That’s what you seem to be advocating that a technical solution should do.
And I fail to see how EPH doesn’t discourage slates? Yes, it allows people to vote as they choose, but as an individual voter what is the benefit of voting a slate under EPH? You follow someone else’s directions and get one or two works onto the shortlist, which are probably not your favourites. Great, that’s really motivating.
Well meaning slate voters and all that vitriol and hate equally shared on both sides, talk about high quality Speculative Fiction.
Speaking of double standards in apology acceptances, I’m surprised Irene Gallo hasn’t come up at all. Though I guess the Puppy argument is that she hasn’t really apologized?
And on books: the latest Robin Hobb just downloaded onto my Kindle and I have NO TIME TO READ!!!
Passing the EPH proposal at Sasquan makes sense to me, given that after Sasquan we’ll have this year’s Hugo voting data to evaluate as well. In the meantime, we’ll also get to see what SP/RP slates are proposed in the coming year. For all I know, we’ll all be singin’ Kumbayah in Kansas City by MidAmericon II, but in any event I’d like to have the option of EPH on the table there, given the facts about slates dominating the Hugo nominations this year.
Even if the Puppies disavowed slates in perpetuity and stuck to that forever, I’d still like to see EPH pass because inevitably someone else will try it, sooner or later.
Shao Ping
I tend to avoid Ann’s comments because she has a habit of writing angry.
On a vaguely Puppyish note, here’s an amusing bunch of comments on hard right pearl-clutching site Free Republic under the discussion thread for “Warning to parents: pro-gay cartoons are on the rise”: http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3322946/posts
Apparently, says “FateAmenabletoChange”:
So far no one has said “Actually, about Eric Flint…” or even “Let’s boycott Tor-published commies like John C. Wright” but it’s only a matter of time.
@Eve
Oh they did. Dr Mauser dragged it into every comment for awhile, it’s in earlier threads
I don’t. I may not always agree but I don’t dismiss her comments
Dismissing anyone’s opinions because they’re angry is short-sighted. And while I’m not suggesting it’s happening here, there’s a hint of the ‘oh, she’s a hysterical woman’ thing about some of the posts in response to Ann, which is highly problematic even if it’s unintentional.
If there was a proposal on the table to identify slate ballots and remove them from the count, Brian would be outraged at the idea and spread FUD about accidental slates and purity tests for voters.
But there isn’t, so he complains that counting all votes equally is a tacit endorsement of slates.
Any change to the status quo is the wrong change for Brian
I agree with Bruce Baugh.
Now that Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen and Theodore Beale have shown it can be done, even in the unlikely event that they can be persuaded to stop, someone else down the line is sure to take it up again. Whether their politics move them, or whether it’s a desire to do right by a beloved author or whether it’s simple greed, sooner or later it will happen.
So I hope the Sasquan Business Meeting will pass EPH. In the best case scenario–absence of slates–the effect will be as if they hadn’t passed it. And when slates come back again, there is still a little room left on the ballot for the collected wisdom of people like me, reading what appeals to us and picking our honest favorites without recourse to marching orders dictated from On High.
@ Ed
The Puppies are plainly playing in a massive long-running primary world LARP, in which they pretend that the dreaded SJWs control publishing and the government and you can tell how tight that control is because only Puppies are willing to mention it. Under the circumstances, more speculative fiction in the form of well-meaning slate voters and both sides equally wrong is only to be expected.
I wonder how many of them know about the Aaron event and his clueless claim here that his reaction was totally justified, because for me, this *is* the “again”.
I’m torn. I’m curious about the puzzle at the heart of the story, but not so much in the story itself. So I’m eager to hear what other people think of it before diving in again.
… Wow. That’s some pretty impressive obliviousness there.
@Kate H.
Tor also publishes Weber’s Safehold series.
@ RAH: “Me, I would have sued for a broken contract.”
Really?
The market that withdrew its offer for Antonelli’s short story pays $0.02 for short fiction. Antonelli’s story was approximately 2050 words.
So he would have been paid approximately $41 for the story.
Litigation attorneys rarely charge less than $300/hour and usually much more, and they require retainers up front. (The litigator I would hire if I wanted to sue a publisher, a lawyer who has won a number of cases for writers against publishers and agents, charges $450/hour.) And litigation takes a long time and is very, very expensive. IIRC, when Ellora’s Cave decided to sue DearAuthor.com blogger Jane Litte, Litte’s initial expenses, just to go through the initial filings of what is widely seen as an extremely weak case against her, were in excess of $25,000.
Moreover, canceling a publishing contract is so common (I’ve had a number of books contracts canceled on me, as well as various short fiction contracts, during the 27 years of my full-time self-supporting writing career) that the right to cancel is usually specificied in publishing contracts—as it certainly seems to have been in this one, since Cuinn asked where to send the kill fee (which Antonelli declined). So what would be your strategy for proceeding in a lawsuit wherein the publisher acted within contractual rights and according to the contractual procedure?
Additionally, precisely because canceling contracts, or deals falling through, isn’t uncommon, who do you imagine would want to work with a writer who SUES over that? (Yes, Stephen King, Laurell Hamilton, or John Scalzi would get work again if they sued a publisher; but an unknown writer who files a nuisance lawsuit? No. He’d be a pariah.)
But you? You would spend enormous time and money on career-destroying litigation in a case where the contract you signed ensured you were very, very unlikely to win, because a $41 deal was canceled?
O…kay. It’s your money to burn and your writing career to trash, if that’s your decision.
@ Gene Lim: “Laura Resnick absolutely rocks. ”
(blush)
I also cook and garden. And I nap.
Indeed, though I do say so myself, I nap at a world class level.
@Patrick May, a typo above: a bloc equivalent to 20 percent of the total 1984 nominators would be about 100. Which would get two or three short stories – it isn’t clear from your description.
Brian Z.,
Just so I understand where you’re coming from, do you agree that the ability for a minority of voters to collude to take over all nomination slots is a flaw in the current system?
I see nothing in the FAQ that says that. Could you provide a direct quote and link?
EPH works to increase enfranchisement by making it more likely that more voters will see one or more of the works they voted for make it onto the final ballot.
Again, to understand where you’re coming from, do you agree that is a desirable goal?
My position is that EPH would address the issue of crowding other works out of categories far better than the current rules do. Do you agree or disagree with that assessment?
One final question: Accepting, ad arguendo, that in the presence of slates EPH does enfranchise more voters than the current rules, would you agree that it is a better mechanism than what exists now?
Brian, I don’t give a damn how you feel about EPH. Your constant blithering here has only convinced me that it is the best solution we have on hand at this time. I urge all those who can attend the Business Meeting to vote for it.
And I’m wondering who’s the sock-puppet — you or “felice,” whose name does not signal happiness to me.
To Liz Carey and Shambles: Thanks for the additional information on the Walton/Brin altercation. I only was judging it by Walton’s blog post and Brin’s comments posted in response. Her subsequent apology linked here is the kind of response I think was warranted, given the circumstances. So I’m glad to see it.
Lori Coulson, over on Making Light, felice explicitly said that although she didn’t think EPH was a perfect solution, she thought it was a huge improvement on the current system and would support it. LINK
I don’t believe that she’s either a troll or a sock puppet.
Cassy B., thanks for the clarification. So it seems felice’s concerns are just another stick Brian Z is trying to beat us with…he’s become the boy who cried “Wolf.”
I’m surprised there are any people here left with the patience to engage Brian Z’s bad-faith contributions to the EPH discussion. He’s just sealioning. There’s no honest intent there.
@ Aaron–good summary of the Antonelli/Puppy mess on your blog.
Like you (I gather), I don’t see the difference between the Sad and the Rabid Puppies that they apparently want me to see. I have been criticized a number of times by (apparently) Sad Puppy supporters when using the word “Puppies” rather than specifying one faction or the other. But since they have similar names, logos so similar that I didn’t realize for weeks they were not the exact same logo, very similar slates, identical rhetoric, propound nearly identical sociopolitical rationales for Puppying, numerous followers who appear to support both “factions,” defend and promote each other’s antics across “factional” lines, engage in joint efforts (particularly in the Tor mess), and appear to have all the exact same oft-cited obsessions, targets, and “enemies”… They strike me as far, far more similar (indeed, identical) than as different, distinct, or distinguishable.
I also have the impression that VD has taken the driver’s seat of the whole movement. And since he and SP4 ringleader Kate Paulk appear to enjoy mutual amity and admiration, I don’t anticipate seeing the much-proclaimed “difference” between SP4 and RP2 in 2016, either.
Patrick:
It is that same feature of the existing rules that has always given Hugo voters the ability to come together, to converge on and jointly recognize true excellence in the field, and that feature has helped produce consistently good results most of the time in the past. Rather than a “flaw”, you should say it is a method of voting that has proven its advantages, and also carries the risk that was demonstrated this year, and we can choose to address that risk in various ways.
11. How does this system eliminate slate or bloc voting?
It doesn’t, exactly, nor should a nominee be automatically eliminated just because it appears on a slate. On the other hand, any slate which nominates a full set of five nominees will find that each of its nominations only count 1/5 as much. With “non-slate” nominating, some of your nominees will be slowly eliminated, so your remaining nominees get more and more of your support. Since slate nominees tend to live or die together, they tend to eliminate each other until, in general, only one slate nominee remains. With a large enough support behind the slate (five times as much), the slate may still sweep a category; however, if that many voters support the slate, they arguably deserve to win, and no fair and unbiased system of nomination will prevent that. The answer in that case is, simply, to increase the general pool of voters. Regardless, with E Pluribus Hugo, slates will never receive a disproportionate share of the final ballot, as occurred in the 2015 Hugos.
Note “until, in general, only one slate nominee remains.” In general? For novels, maybe. But novelettes?
You found a slate of obscure works voted by 20% of the nominators would take either two or three short stories in 1984, and felice found it would take four in short story and three or four in a large number of other categories in 2013, even without taking into account the likelihood that there is additional non-bloc-voting support for some of the slated items, or some clustering of the non-slated items.
And what would happen with two such groups?
I’ve answered that above. I’ve explained my view on the advantages of the current system over EPH. I understand that what you are trying to do with EPH has a laudable aspect, but I have a different assessment of the potential outcomes.
In my opinion, it is better to ask for a task force to look at this again after the report on the 2015 voting is available – and try to make sure the task force includes respected people from many different parts of fandom.
@Laura: Thank you. Your opinion matters more to me than you probably know.
The more I have looked into the whole Sad/Rabid Puppy issue, the more it has become clear that they are not really two movements, but rather one movement with two faces. Brad and Larry’s angry denial that the two are the same ring hollow in the face of Castalia House’s presence all over the Sad Puppy slate (yes, the Sad Puppy slate). The fact that they didn’t specifically add Beale to their slate doesn’t make him uninvolved when they saw fit to nominate multiple works and individuals who are part of his personal publishing house.
@Brian Z.
I thought a little more about your question of what to test with your EPH implementation.
I thought there must be some reason you were too busy to notice that felice in fact didn’t do analysis on any data set at all, which is surely the only reason you’re ignoring that unpleasant fact to generate further distractions.
What if among the 368 voting for Ancillary Justice (possibly the 160 for Wheel of Time) there was a group of readers who were disproportionately likely to nominate works or authors that got buzz on Tor.com?
Well, I have two responses:
(1) What if there wasn’t?
(3) What is “disproportionately likely” to do with a batch of stories that got 100 votes from one set of voters and 40 from the same set? If the set of voters was “the set of all Hugo nominators,” would that question be any more or less meaningful?
(2) Who (besides you) gives a shit?
Since the existence of such a pattern is disputed, maybe there should be two data sets, one with more convergence and one with less, to see what the different effects might be.
What pattern?
Hurry up with those data sets, now.
The situation today is not ideal, but at least under today’s rules, if you really did want to fill the entire ballot with your picks, year after year (which no one does)
Brian Z, amateur mind-reader.
Look: even this year, when the slate sweeps were practically accidental and many of the people involved were completely well-meaning and didn’t think of it as a hack, a lot of the authors withdrew from consideration, and still more promised not to participate again. If slating is the kiss of death, isn’t that what you want?
All you have to do is put a couple of ringers on your similar-but-not-identical slate, as TB did, so when one of his short story nominees withdrew, one of the Sad Puppy picks he’d replaced on his own slate stepped in to fill the gap. If it didn’t take so many more votes to game the Novel category, this might have worked there as well.
The current system allows for the defeat of bloc voted items through no award, and also allows for social sanctions to discourage bloc voting. Both of these would be weakened by EPH, since slate campaigns could try to claim the high ground, pointing even to the EPH FAQ which says in so many words that they SHOULD get something on the ballot.
Cite, please. “In so many words,” if you would be so kind.
(Hint: No. No, you can’t.)
Note “until, in general, only one slate nominee remains.”
That’s not what you claimed before. You claimed that EPH FAQ says that EPH somehow approves of slate voting. Specifically, you said:
slate campaigns could try to claim the high ground, pointing even to the EPH FAQ which says in so many words that they SHOULD get something on the ballot.
This is why you are regarded as nothing but a liar.