Pixel Scroll 8/11 Award not for whom the puppies troll

These are the times that try men’s Scrolls.

(1) Dilbert is still not at work on his sci-fi novel.

(2) Blogger and Big Bang Theory actress Mayim Bialik is opening a new venue for her writing:

I am founding this space for all of us: It’s called GrokNation.

Do you know what it means to grok something? Grok is an old-school sci-fi term from the 1961 book “Stranger in a Strange Land.” It means to fully grasp something in the deepest way possible.

I want to be able to reach all kinds of people with my thinking and writing, and while I will still continue to write for Kveller about Jewish parenting, GrokNation will be the place where I share my thoughts about being an actress on “The Big Bang Theory,” being a scientist and a vegan mom, being an unusual woman because I am an actress and a scientist and a vegan mom, and everything in between. Eventually, I want GrokNation to become a place for voices other than mine, but we are just starting out so it may take some time!

(3) Rachel Bloom, known to fans for her Hugo-nominated music video “F*** Me, Ray Bradbury”, has been busy charming TV critics in advance of the October 12 premiere of her sitcom Crazy Ex Girlfriend.

When it organically was revealed that literally every single present “Crazy Ex” actor can professionally tap dance, Bloom’s co-star and four-time tap champ Donna Lynne Champlin challenged the journalists in attendance to ask all the other casts we come across this tour that same question, and see if any other show comes close….

Showrunner Aline Brosh McKenna and Bloom also masterfully handled — or at least deflected — sincere topics, such as the use of the potentially pejorative “Crazy” in the title, which could have been bait for a less comfortable group.

(4) In World War II, dozens of radio operators in Scituate, Rhode Island dialed into enemy conversations worldwide:

The Chopmist Hill listening post soon became the largest and most successful of a nationwide network of 13 similar installations. Its ability to eavesdrop on German radio transmissions in North Africa, for instance, was so precise that technicians could actually listen in on tank-to-tank communications within Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s infamous Afrika Korps.

The Germans’ battlefield strategy was then relayed to the British, who under Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery eventually defeated Rommel at El Alamein.

(5) With the Worldcon coming to town next week, the Spokane Spokesman-Review brings locals up to speed about the Sad Puppies:

It also arrives amid controversy.

Fans at Worldcon vote for the winners of the annual Hugo Awards. Regarded as some of the most prestigious honors in sci-fi and fantasy writing, the Hugos have been bestowed upon such names as Kurt Vonnegut and Portland novelist Ursula K. Le Guin. The Hugos have been awarded every year since 1955.

This year’s Hugos are mired in a present-day argument instead of a futuristic struggle.

A group of authors who call themselves the “Sad Puppies” is accused of strong-arming Hugo organizers to insert three authors on the shortlist of nominees. The group’s leaders contend the Hugos are too often awarded to what they call the “literati elite” and predisposed to affirmative action rather than less pretentious and more deserving writing.

Critics call the “Sad Puppies” a right-wing group supportive of the writings of white men and averse to the growing diversity of the genre. Martin has chimed in with a long series of blog posts, saying the controversy has “broken” the awards and “plunged all fandom into war.”

The controversy “has resulted in more people interested in Worldcon than would have been interested before,” said Tom Whitmore, a Seattle massage therapist and Worldcon volunteer who’s helping promote and organize the not-for-profit event. “We’ve followed our own rules, and we’re going ahead with our own rules, and that’s that.”

(6) Even those who have been following the Puppies from day one need a map. Aaron Pound, who Lou Antonelli tried to get fired from his job as a government attorney, summarizes all the Antonelli news from then til yesterday on Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Despite my tweeting on my personal twitter account, Antonelli took it upon himself to track down my work e-mail and phone number, first e-mailing a poorly thought out threat to come down to my workplace and do something or other, and then telephoning my office to confirm I was employed there.

(7) Natalie Luhrs’ chronicle of Antonelli’s offenses, “Pattern Matching: Lou Antonelli and the Sad Puppies”, characterizes them as she feels they deserve.

I think it bears emphasizing that by making a false report to police about David Gerrold, Lou Antonelli placed every single attending member of Worldcon in danger. This is reprehensible. The fact that David Gerrold forgave Antonelli for this is between the two of them; Gerrold does not get to accept Antonelli’s apology on behalf of the rest of the convention membership and to its staff and volunteers….

His modus operandi seems to be to incite an incident or seek one out, become abusive in some manner, and then only apologize if the target is high profile enough or if enough high profile people notice that he’s being abusive. His apology will contain a lot of language that deflects responsibility for his actions off him and onto other people or communities. Lather, rinse, repeat.  If he goes after you and you don’t make noise about it or if someone doesn’t make noise on your behalf, or if you’re not particularly high profile, you’re not going to get even an attempt at an apology….

(8) In a separate post, “Some Members are More Equal than Others”, Luhrs makes her case against Sasquan’s decision not to ban Antonelli from attending.

One of Gerrold’s quoted reasons is that Antonelli “deserves” to be able to attend the Hugo Awards because he’s a nominee.

The message I’m getting from Sasquan is that if you apologize enough, if you can convince the person you’ve harassed into accepting your apology, and if you’ve been nominated for an award, Codes of Conduct don’t apply to you. Especially if you’ve promised to be on your very best behavior and not do it again.

(9) But Antonelli has not been left to face the music completely alone. Amanda S. Green on According To Hoyt argues the way he’s being treated is out of proportion, and compares his critics to the storybook folk who claimed “The sky is falling!”

At least that is the way it might seem if you were paying much attention to those very vocal few who have made it their life’s mission to denigrate anyone who might even remotely be associated with Sad Puppies 3. Oh how they have rallied these last few days to not only vilify Lou Antonelli but, even in the face of the one man who could reasonably be seen as having an issue with him accepting his apology, they continue to attack and demonize him. This has resulted in at least one contract being cancelled for Mr. Antonelli and even that is not enough to satisfy those who have taken to social media to attack him.

And, like with so much of what the Anti-Puppy crowd has done these last few months, they have taken Antonelli’s actions and blown them out of proportion. Specifically, Antonelli sent a letter to the Spokane Police Department expressing concerns not so much about what David Gerrold might personally do but what some of those who follow him on social media might do. Was it a wise move on Antonelli’s part? No. But, to be honest, with some of the vitriol I have seen from both sides of the fence the last few months, I can understand why he might have felt concerned.

(10) There will be no comic relief at the end today! Because Stephen King knows how to take a horror and make it verse.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Nigel.]


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287 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/11 Award not for whom the puppies troll

  1. Forget “remote psychoanalysis”: Aaron’s they’re-only-in-it-for-the-money notion is a falsifiable hypothesis, which can be applied to the Pups’ observed & documented actions. Use said hypothesis to formulate predictions about how Pups will behave in various situations, and if/when any of those situations come up, compare those predictions to the Pups’ actual behavior. If they’re-only-in-it-for-the-money is not an accurate guide to Puppy actions, that should become clear.

  2. Aaron on August 13, 2015 at 6:39 am said:


    Peter J on August 13, 2015 at 6:17 am said:
    The really depressing thing is not that the Puppies don’t care about getting the science right, but that Analog, of all magazines, is prepared to publish the resultant dross.

    This would have never happened under Schmidt’s watch. I have been very unimpressed with Quachri’s work as editor of the magazine

    ——————-

    Ah, so that’s why the Puppies didn’t nominate Quachri for Best Editor – Short Form … quality of editing.

  3. Rev. Bob:

    Speaking of asterisks, since I just used one as a wildcard: I’m on the no-asterisk side of the trans/trans* debate. … Morris, I’m curious to know more about the other side of that debate. Do you have a good link handy?

    No, this was just mentioned in in-person conversation, not online. She said something like, “You wouldn’t believe the amount of argument about whether there should be an asterisk in ‘trans*'”. But it seems to me that all parties agree that the asterisk, if there, is silent when the word is pronounced. I don’t read enough of the trans* blogosphere to have seen any of this. I just follow a couple of friends’ low-activity blogs and occasional links from them.

  4. rcade on August 13, 2015 at 5:43 am said:

    The error in that logic is that toy sections possess no inherent gender, thus they must be given one to possess it.

    Just for fun and not to suggest in any way the further use of the -ed word, how is a zygote not a toy aisle? Chromosomes in the sperm cell and ovum give the zygote a gender. A Target Team Leader gives the aisle a gender. Neither one has an inherent gender. Both can be changed.

    Chromosomes do not give the zygote a gender. They are—and they produce—markers which are used by humans to assign the zygote or the baby a sex and a gender. The assigned-at-birth sex and gender of a person does not always correspond to their gender identity. Using “assigned” rather than “gendered” or “sexed” highlights the fact that this is an active cultural process rather than something that just happens “naturally”.

    A lot of trans* folk object to the idea that they have changed their gender, asserting that it was always consistent but had been mislabeled. Others reject the idea of a gender binary. There are numerous other theories. One result of all this is that transgender and transgendered don’t really fit a lot of people’s self-conceptions. Transsexual is also out. So trans* comes to be a kind of compromise neologism for the whole spectrum.

  5. That aside, generally, Torgersen taking a craft approach to one story is poor grounds for extrapolating to his general approach to his work, much less the puppies who are not Torgersen.

    I only used it as an example. The Pups as a whole are obsessed with how much money is being made, usually expressed in sales figures. One only has to look at how Correia and Torgersen push the narrative that the books they have promoted for Hugos are really good – Anderson has 25 million books in print! Butcher sells a lot! When they talk about how they represent the real fans, it always comes down to “we sold a lot of books!” The various self-published authors who have aligned with the Pups criticize Scalzi (and his $3.4 million contract with Tor) on the grounds that they think Scalzi could have made a lot more money by self-publishing. Lamplighter wrote a long post talking about how bad the Oscars are because they don’t honor the movies with the highest box office numbers. And so on.

    With the Pups, it almost always seems to come back to money. It isn’t just Torgersen and this one story. It is an established pattern among the Pups to say that the work isn’t important, only how commercially successful the work is.

  6. Paul Weimer (@princejvstin) on August 13, 2015 at 4:41 am said:

    RE: The Query letter.

    Yeah, I looked hard for evidence of Leckie’s evil plans involving pronouns and other anti-Puppy stuff, to no avail in the letter. Maybe it was in code?

    Actually you joke but the “Cherryh-flavored space opera” bit might count – I remember finding the use of the gender neutral “Sera” address in her books standing out to me when I first got into Cherryh (and it’s not like the Chanur saga didn’t delve into what the puppies would find to be “SJW” stuff).

  7. @Michael Eochaidh on August 13, 2015 at 7:06 am said

    @mk41: Remember that Brad has been unwilling or unable to provide concrete details on how the Sad Puppy slate was selected and that Brad has been unwilling or unable to defend the literary merits of the Sad Puppy nominees. The Analog incident seems to be part of a pattern.

    I think BT has explained the details of his process pretty throughly. There were calls for suggestions some open to his open posting, some off channel I am sure, and then a private discussion took place that resulted in the short list length recommendation list; other times referred to as a slate.

    It can’t truly be described as ‘open and democratic’ as BT would like to claim but that was the process used per BT.

    tl;dr BT picked what he wanted to.

  8. I have been very unimpressed with Quachri’s work as editor of the magazine.

    Oh, good, I’m not the only one.
    I find his selections to be boring. Some of the stories in the October issue might be mild horror, but they don’t register as SF in my mind, if they register at all.

  9. Regarding puppies (and their beta readers/editors) not caring about getting science right, I was particularly unimpressed by the following from Lou Antonelli’s nominated story:

    Ymilas’ sun had contracted in the distant past, and the planet’s orbit has adjusted as a result. It was that gravitational disturbance that had shifted its core into such an active state.

    On the face of it, it sounds as though Antonelli thinks a planet’s sun contracting, presumably without any change in the location of its center of mass, would make some difference in its gravitational influence sufficient to make a not very tectonically active planet become very tectonically active. I’m a mere engineer but colour me skeptical that this is remotely plausible.

  10. I remember finding the use of the gender neutral “Sera” address in her books standing out to me

    It isn’t gender-neutral: she’s consistent in using masculine ser, feminine sera, plural seri.

  11. On the face of it, it sounds as though Antonelli thinks a planet’s sun contracting, presumably without any change in the location of its center of mass, would make some difference in its gravitational influence sufficient to make a not very tectonically active planet become very tectonically active.

    I think some of the Pups just don’t understand how gravity works. In The Dark Between the Stars we are told that the Earth’s moon was blown up at some point prior to the time the book is set (presumably during one of the seven previous books in the series). This, we are told, meant that the Earth no longer had tides. But all of the chunks of the Moon are still out there (in fact, there is an ongoing project talked about in the book to collect the debris). That stuff has mass, even if it isn’t all in one piece. Wouldn’t that still cause tides?

    (Also, some of the tidal action on Earth is caused by the Sun, which still exists).

  12. I always found the “Money!” issue a weird once since other than Correia none of the major Pups are actually making money. Brad has one book that isn’t performing well, Freer has been demoted to sharecropping in other Baen author settings, Hoyt’s career isn’t on the radar anymore, Wright’s books don’t sell and he remains with Tor as an act of noblesse oblige on Hartwell’s part, etc.

    And even Correia could make a fuck of a lot more money if he wrote mainstream right-wing thrillers and didn’t throw Dungeons & Dragons shit into them.

  13. @snowcrash
    I think his criteria was he thought the author* was deserving by sales or identity or association but it was not a wide ranging search it seems with many good candidates not considered or forgotten.

    *and yes I don’t think the work mattered so much as if the author was eligible.

  14. Aaron on August 13, 2015 at 7:52 am said:

    I think some of the Pups just don’t understand how gravity works. In The Dark Between the Stars we are told that the Earth’s moon was blown up at some point prior to the time the book is set (presumably during one of the seven previous books in the series). This, we are told, meant that the Earth no longer had tides. But all of the chunks of the Moon are still out there (in fact, there is an ongoing project talked about in the book to collect the debris). That stuff has mass, even if it isn’t all in one piece. Wouldn’t that still cause tides?

    I have not had the (perhaps dubious) pleasure of reading The Dark Between the Stars, but the answer is, it depends on the post-BOOM fate of the ex-Moon’s fragments.

    If the ex-Moon’s fragments were scattered to the far corners of the Universe, there would be no more Lunar contribution to Earth’s tides.

    If the ex-Moon’s fragments formed a ring system around the Earth, those fragments’ contribution to Earth’s tides would be greatly lessened, possibly to the point of being eliminated. The question here is, how evenly is the ex-Moon’s mass distributed throughout this ring system? If there’s no “lumps” in the ring system, there’s not going to be any Lunar contribution; otherwise, well, make up whatever mass-distribution you like for the ring system, and we can talk about how that version of a ring would affect Earth’s tides.

    As you noted, the Sun’s effect on Earth’s tides would still be there. The Sun’s contribution is about 46% of the Moon’s, so even in the case where the Moon is effectively erased in its entirety, there would still be non-trivial tides on Earth.

  15. I think his criteria was he thought the author* was deserving by sales or identity or association but it was not a wide ranging search it seems with many good candidates not considered or forgotten.

    I think he criteria was “author who is a friend or business associate of mine”.

  16. If the ex-Moon’s fragments formed a ring system around the Earth, those fragments’ contribution to Earth’s tides would be greatly lessened, possibly to the point of being eliminated.

    Wouldn’t that create a more or less permanent tidal effect on the plane of the ring? And if the ring wasn’t perfectly stable with respect to the Earth, wouldn’t that create tides as well?

    Anderson wasn’t entirely clear, so which scenario exists is not readily apparent, but it is clear that the Moon’s fragments are still in Earth orbit. It also seems like they are not evenly distributed, but that is more of an inference than something made clear by the text. One persistently annoying thing about Anderson’s book is that he is so very vague on things that should be concrete.

  17. @Mike Glyer

    Mark: It just feels like it fell on me from nowhere!

    I’m ashamed by how long it took me to twig to that reference.

  18. If I may be forgiven for hauling out my PhD in linguistics to play the subject-matter expert for a moment…

    rcade on August 12, 2015 at 5:42 pm said:

    In the phrase “a public figure is transgendered,” the word “transgendered” is an adjective.

    In this phrase, “transgendered” is a verbal past participle functioning as an adjective. The key element here is whether a word functioning as an adjective describes a state or the end result of a process. In the phrase “burnt toast” the word “burnt” is functioning as an adjective but (as a past participle) is indicating a state that is the end result of a process: at some point the toast had not yet become burnt.

    The objection to using the past participle “transgendered” adverbially to describe a state is that it implies that the state is the result of a process, i.e., that one becomes “transgendered” by crossing (trans) from one gender to another. Using the non-verb-derived form “transgender” avoids this grammatical state-changing implication and allows (although it doesn’t necessarily require) the interpretation that it describes the state of being across (trans) from the gender that society expects one to be. (Hence the corresponding term cisgender, where “cis” indicates “on the same side”. I suspect the only other place most people are likely to see trans/cis as contrasting prefixes in for trans-alpine and cis-alpine Gaul. The relevant regions are “trans” or “cis” in comparison to Rome, but these are static descriptions. Trans-alpine Gaul did not become so by crossing the Alps like Hannibal.)

    So, in short, the relevant grammatical contrast is state versus result.

    I’ve seen people make the exact opposite recommendation and say that saying “she is transgender” is wrong. I try to use the proper terms when talking about the subject, but I’m not seeing a grammatical reason why “she is transgendered” is wrong when the adjective “gendered” is correct in a sentence like “Target toy aisles are inappropriately gendered.”

    With regard to the toy aisles, the verb “to gender” is indicating the transitive action of imposing gender characteristics on an object (the toy aisle) that does not have any objective inherent gender identity. So, again, the grammatical distinction is in a change of state, and in particular one expressed via a transitive verb where the object to which gender is attributed is the object of the verb (i.e., is acted on in some fashion by an external agent).

    So, yes, some of this is a subjective matter of associations for particular vocabulary items, but in this case there actually is an underlying grammatical reason for the preference. (Complicating the issue, in many people’s spoken dialect the past participle “-ed” can be pronounced very weakly or even be absent. In that case, some hearing the phrase “transgender person” may hyper-correct to “transgendered person” believing that the speaker had an ed-less dialect.)

  19. I think BT has explained the details of his process pretty throughly. There were calls for suggestions some open to his open posting, some off channel I am sure, and then a private discussion took place that resulted in the short list length recommendation list; other times referred to as a slate.

    As Snowcrash said, Torgersen has never explained his process. I’ve seen him avoid the question at least 20 times so far when the issue is pressed in his comments and other places he shows up. Your explanation is simply a guess.

    He won’t even say which people decided the slate with him. Based on people calling themselves the Evil League of Evil and saying that group chose the slate, it would be Torgersen, Larry Correia, Sarah Hoyt, John C. Wright and Theodore Beale.

    I think Torgersen avoids the question because he knows the truth would reveal that Sad Puppies is as much a product of nepotism as Rabid Puppies. So he keeps proclaiming it was “open” and “democratic” in the hope that a lie repeated often enough will become the truth.

  20. Aaron on August 13, 2015 at 8:17 am said:

    If the ex-Moon’s fragments formed a ring system around the Earth, those fragments’ contribution to Earth’s tides would be greatly lessened, possibly to the point of being eliminated.

    Wouldn’t that create a more or less permanent tidal effect on the plane of the ring?

    Not really. Tidal forces exist because the strength of gravitational pull varies with distance, which means (among other things) that if you measure the strength of the Moon’s attraction to the bit of Earth that’s closest to the Moon, you’ll get a different, higher, figure than if you measure the strength of the Moon’s attraction to the bit of the Earth that’s farthest from the Moon. So, with the ex-Moon’s fragments evenly distributed in a ring system, the gravitational pull from an ex-Moon fragment at position [X degrees] in the ring system, will be largely canceled out by the gravitational pull from an ex-Moon fragment at position [(360 – X) degrees] in the ring system. It’s more-or-less the same deal as how there’s no net gravitational pull inside a hollow spherical shell of uniform thickness & density.

    And… having written all that… it occurs to me that even with an evenly-distributed ring, the ring will still exert a net attractive force towards the ring-plane. And since the ring system is probably going to ‘flow’ along an elliptical orbit, not a perfectly circular orbit, there’s likewise going to be a net attractive force towards whichever bit of the ring-orbit is closest to the Earth. So okay, any ring system made of ex-Moon fragments is going to have some effect on Earth’s tides, just a whole lot less than when all those fragments were conveniently gathered up in one big body. Alas, I do not have the math to offer up anything within arm’s reach of a decent estimate of the physical effects.

    And if the ring wasn’t perfectly stable with respect to the Earth, wouldn’t that create tides as well?

    Yes, if the mass distribution within the ring changes, the ring’s effect on Earth’s tides would necessarily also change.

  21. @Cubist: I think the takeaway here is that destroying the Moon will not result in a situation in which there are no more tides on Earth, and it is even implausible that the Moon’s effect will be eliminated under most scenarios other than “the Moon is destroyed and its fragments are carried away to distant parts of the galaxy”.

  22. Those of you talking about the moon exploding would probably love the technodumps in Seveneves – frankly I thought the “moon exploded and what earth does about it” to be the most interesting part of the book.

    Re: Otherland vs Snowcrash, I honestly find Tad’s writing style much more engaging. I love the details, I love the worldbuilding, and I love the way his characters move through them. He’s like a more character-oriented Tolkien, and that’s my jam. YMMV, and I expect it does.

  23. Those of you talking about the moon exploding would probably love the technodumps in Seveneves – frankly I thought the “moon exploded and what earth does about it” to be the most interesting part of the book.

    Rot-13 just in case someone would regard this as spoilerish

    I did love it but I’ll note that V nggraqrq n ernqvat naq D&N qhevat gur Frirarirf obbx gbhe naq Fgrcurafba znqr vg pyrne gung ur unqa’g chg nal fcrpvny rssbeg vagb znxvat fher gur fpranevb va juvpu gur zbba pbagvahrq gb qvfvagrtengr naq obzoneqrq gur rnegu jvgu obyvqrf va gur cebprff bs tenqhnyyl gheavat vagb n evat flfgrz nsgre gur vavgvny rirag gung oebxr vg vagb frira ynetr cvrprf jnf fpvragvsvpnyyl ernyvfgvp (nf bccbfrq gb zreryl fbhaqvat cynhfvoyr). Sebz gur fbhaq bs vg, vg’f dhvgr cbffvoyr gung gur vavgvny nffhzcgvba va gur obbx gung gur zbba jbhyq ersbez jvgu yvggyr pbafrdhrapr sbe hf urer ba Rnegu vf gehr be ng yrnfg pybfre gb gehr guna gur fpranevb gur obbx ynlf bhg.

    Gurer jnf ng yrnfg bar bgure ovg bs culfvpny fpvrapr va gur obbx V unir frevbhf erfreingvbaf nobhg – jurgure zbfg bs gur jngre va gur Rnegu’f bprnaf jbhyq ernyyl rfpncr vagb fcnpr bire gur pbhefr bs bayl n srj gubhfnaq lrnef whfg orpnhfr vg tbg pbairegrq gb jngre incbhe (jul jbhyq gur jngre rfpncr ohg abg gur erfg bs gur ngzbfcurer?).

  24. @Jim Henley

    Hey guise! Guise! Ann Leckie has published her query letter for Ancillary Justice! It explains how the book is a device to make everyone an androgynous lesbian through beating the reader over the head with the message, “YOU SHOULD BECOME AN ANDROGYNOUS LESBIAN AND SO SHOULD EVERYONE ELSE.” And it’s signed “SJ Dubs 5.271.009.”

    At least, that’s how it all read after I pasted the text into hoyt13.com

    Shouldn’t that be AN ANDROGYNOUS MARXIST LESBIAN?

  25. @Gabriel

    Those of you talking about the moon exploding would probably love the technodumps in Seveneves – frankly I thought the “moon exploded and what earth does about it” to be the most interesting part of the book.

    I’m actually enjoying the 5000 years later quite a bit. There are a LOT of interesting ideas in there.

  26. @rcade
    BT has described the steps as such so I don’t know how that makes it a guess on my part.

    The part that you are sticking on I believe is how that process could be ‘open’, or ‘democratic’ ? Short answer it’s not and BT has not been able to explain how it might be those things and that question he has run away from.

    But he has described what he did, it just did not meet his lofty claims of democracity, transparency, or quality.

  27. “On the face of it, it sounds as though Antonelli thinks a planet’s sun contracting, presumably without any change in the location of its center of mass, would make some difference in its gravitational influence sufficient to make a not very tectonically active planet become very tectonically active. I’m a mere engineer but colour me skeptical that this is remotely plausible.”

    It’s been a long time, but I seem to remember being in Physics 201 and calculating orbits while considering the central object to be a point mass. It is of course an approximation, but when you are talking about effects large enough to change a planet’s orbit or how it’s core is affected… You can afford to round to a few decimal places.

    So yes, Antonelli’s understanding of physics is imperfect.

  28. Heather Rose Jones at 9:27:

    I suspect the only other place most people are likely to see trans/cis as contrasting prefixes in for trans-alpine and cis-alpine Gaul.

    I think many people are also likely to have had cause to notice cis and trans fats.

  29. The Sun’s contribution is about 46% of the Moon’s, so even in the case where the Moon is effectively erased in its entirety, there would still be non-trivial tides on Earth.

    A lot of SF authors don’t know about solar tides. Or stellar tides on their exoplanets; I’ve read something recently set on a moonless, tideless planet of a K-type star. And the planet wasn’t tide-locked to the star, so that’s not why the oceans had no tides [1].

    1: Although… even with tidelocking, wouldn’t there be libration?

  30. @rcade: “Just for fun and not to suggest in any way the further use of the -ed word, how is a zygote not a toy aisle? Chromosomes in the sperm cell and ovum give the zygote a gender.”

    No. Chromosomes contribute to sex, not gender. To take a recent example, I understand that Caitlin Jenner has not had any SRS procedures, and thus could be described as having the male sex despite her female gender identity. This discrepancy is why she is described as a transgender woman. By contrast, Halle Berry (to pick a name out of a hat) is a cisgender woman; her sex aligns with her gender. That’s a blunt description, and some may protest my usage as transphobic, but that is far from my intent.

    Toy aisles, unless we’re talking about those in adult toy stores, have no innate sex and no capacity for gender. They’re inanimate objects which are deemed from outside to be suited for the use of one gender or another. Living beings in the animal kingdom are fundamentally different in that respect, to the degree that they cannot reasonably be lumped together with cars and dresses.

  31. I an going to join Gabriel in lauding Tad Williams. Yeah, his books are always longer than he first plans, but none of it feels like padding to me.

    I think Otherness is probably his best work to date and I think cutting a character here,or a VR world there, for lengths sake would diminish the series richness.

  32. @ Rochrist re Seveneves:

    V whfg jvfurq gurl’q npghnyyl cnaarq bhg. V fnvq va n cerivbhf guernq gung vg naablrq zr gb ab raq gung gur obbx srryf yvxr 4 obbxf va n frevrf, ohg jr bayl trg gur svefg naq unys bs gur ynfg obbx.

    Vg jnf n irel ratntvat, ohg sbe zr ragveryl sehfgengvat obbx.

  33. Pingback: Amazing Stories | AMAZING NEWS FROM FANDO: 8-16-15 - Amazing Stories

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