We now return you to those thrilling days of yesterscroll.
(1) Some anniversaries.
| August 29, 1997 Cyberdyne’s “Skynet“ intelligence system becomes self-aware. | September 1, 1922 Yvonne De Carlo (Lily Munster) is born in Canada. | September 3, 1969 The Valley of Gwangi opens in New York City. |
(2) The “17 places you won’t see on the official UCLA campus tour” include —
#1
On the second floor of Boelter Hall, home of the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, there’s a seemingly random arrangement of dark and light gray floor tiles outside room 2714. The tiles actually spell out “Lo and behold” in binary code. The hidden message was secretly added to a renovation project in 2011 as a clever (and subtle) way to honor Internet pioneer and professor Leonard Kleinrock.
#4
Clayburn La Force, who received his master’s and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA, was the Anderson dean who spearheaded the construction of the school’s contemporary building complex. To honor him, one of the exterior red brick pillars in the Anderson courtyard carries the inscription, “May La Force Be With You.”
#5
Among the campus’ little-known treasures is the largest collection of meteorites in California (and fifth-largest in the nation.) Assembled for years by cosmochemist John Wasson, researcher Alan Rubin and their colleagues, more than 1,500 space rocks rest in the UCLA Geology Building. About 100 of them are on display at the UCLA Meteorite Gallery,
#7
If you can find room 60 in the section of the basement of Powell Library Building housing the Office of Instructional Development, you’ll see a sign that commemorates the room where “Fahrenheit 451” took shape. In 1950 and 1953, author Ray Bradbury came supplied with a bag of dimes for the rental typewriters. He clacked out “The Fireman” in nine days (total cost $9.80) and returned to rework his story into “Fahrenheit 451.” You can still find a copy of his original work in UCLA Library Special Collections, which houses a rich treasure trove of Bradburyana.
(3) Eric Flint – “The Divergence Between Popularity and Awards in Fantasy and Science Fiction”
[Another epic.]
Here’s the truth. Of the twenty-two authors today whom the mass audience regularly encounters whenever they walk into a bookstore looking for fantasy and science fiction, because they are the ones whose sales enable them to maintain at least a full shelf of book space, only one of them—Neil Gaiman—also has an active reputation with the (very small) groups of people who vote for major awards.
And they are very small groups. Not more than a few hundred people in the case of the Hugos and Nebulas, and a small panel of judges in the case of the WFC.
With them, Neil Gaiman’s popularity hasn’t—yet, at least—eroded his welcome. He’s gotten five nominations and two wins for the Hugo; three nominations and two wins for the Nebula; eight nominations and one win for the WFC—and almost all of them came in this century.
But he’s the only one, out of twenty-two. In percentage terms, 4.5% of the total. (Or 4.8%, if we subtract Tolkien.)
There’s no way now to reconstruct exactly what the situation was forty years ago. But I know perfectly well—so does anyone my age (I’m sixty-one) with any familiarity with our genre—that if you’d checked bookstores in the 1960s and 1970s to see how shelf space correlated with awards, you’d have come up with radically different results. Instead of an overlap of less than five percent, you’d have found an overlap of at least sixty or seventy percent….
And that was the Original Sin, as it were, of the Sad Puppies. (The Rabid Puppies are a different phenomenon altogether.) As it happens, I agree with the sense the Sad Puppies have that the Hugo and other F&SF awards are skewed against purely story-telling skills.
They are. I’m sorry if some people don’t like to hear that, but there’s no other way you can explain the fact that—as of 2007; I’ll deal with today’s reality in a moment—only one (Neil Gaiman) of the thirty authors who dominated the shelf space in bookstores all over North America regularly got nominated for awards since the turn of the century. The problem came with what the Sad Puppies did next. First, they insisted that Someone Must Be To Blame—when the phenomenon mostly involves objective factors. Secondly, being themselves mostly right wing in their political views, they jumped to the conclusion—based on the flimsiest evidence; mostly that some people had been nasty to Larry Correia on some panels at the Reno Worldcon—that the bias against their fiction in the awards was due to political persecution. Neither proposition can stand up to scrutiny, as I have now demonstrated repeatedly in the course of these essays….
One more thing needs to be said. The biggest problem in all of this is that way, way too many people—authors and awards-bestowers alike—have a view of this issue which… ah…
I’m trying to figure out a polite way of saying they have their heads up their asses…
Okay, I’ll say it this way. The problem is that way too many people approach this issue subjectively and emotionally rather than using their brains. With some authors, regardless of what they say in public, there’s a nasty little imp somewhere deep in the inner recesses of their scribbler’s soul that chitters at them that if they’re not winning awards there’s either something wrong with them or they’re being robbed by miscreants. Or, if they don’t sell particularly well but do get recognition when it comes to awards, there’s a peevish little gremlin whining that they’re not selling well either because somebody—publisher, agent, editor, whoever except it’s not them—is not doing their job or it’s because the reading public are a pack of morons.
Everybody needs to take a deep breath and relax. There are many factors that affect any author’s career and shape how well they sell and how often they get nominated for awards. Some of these factors are under an author’s control, but a lot of them aren’t. And, finally, there’s an inescapable element of chance involved in all of this.
The only intelligent thing for an author to do is, first, not take anything that happens (for good or ill) personally; secondly, try to build your career based on your strengths rather than fretting over your weaknesses.
(4) Craig Engler – “Dear Sad Puppies, I’d like to share some thoughts with you (Part 1)”
However, it’s possible to overdo it. The FAQ on the Hugo Awards site even has something to say about self promotional efforts: “Be careful. Excessively campaigning for a Hugo Award can be frowned upon by regular Hugo voters and has been known to backfire.” The words are italicized for emphasis not by me but by the person who wrote the FAQ. Note that the FAQ is addressed to the entire world, not to a specific group within fandom. In other words, anyone anywhere who excessively campaigns may face a backlash. It’s actually happened before….
That stance against campaigning has nothing to do with the personal beliefs or the politics of the campaigner, but rather their actions, i.e. campaigning to an excessive extent. And yes there was a lot more going on with Sad Puppies besides just campaigning, but even if that’s all that had ever happened, it was extremely doubtful voters would have responded favorably to Larry [Correia]’s campaign to get himself a Hugo….
I’ve been a Hugo voter off and on since 1988 when I attended my first Worldcon, and it’s always been widely known that voters react badly to campaigning. So had anyone done what Larry (and later on other Sad Puppies did), voters would have responded the same way. In fact, Larry isn’t even the first to try campaigning and have it not work. (Thus the reason it’s in a FAQ to begin with.)
So my thought to you is, while there was more going on around the vote than just Larry’s excessive campaigning (again, I’ll talk about that stuff in Part 2), we really never had to get past the campaigning issue to know that Larry’s tactics were simply not going to work. Not because of his politics, not because of his story telling ability, but because of his actions.
(5) What do we call this — a matho?
https://twitter.com/HermesMenusco/status/638418745145298945
(6) The Carl Brandon Society has issued a “Non-profit Status Update”.
Due to a misunderstanding between board members in the wake of a personnel transition, we did not ensure that our tax returns were filed properly for 2012 – 2014. (It is worth noting that tax returns for organizations as small as the Carl Brandon Society are done via a form called the e-postcard, which requires only basic information, and does not require any degree of complex accounting).
We discovered the oversight when the IRS administratively revoked our non-profit status and provided instructions to us on how to be reinstated. We have spent the time since then working toward reinstatement and taking steps to assure that this does not happen again. These steps include, but are not limited to: (1) doing a complete examination of our fiscal practices and financial controls, (2) getting a new treasurer with significant non-profit experience, as well as a legal background and experience tracking and analyzing financial records, and (3) doing a complete review of our bookkeeping and financial records for all the affected years. We are about to file detailed tax returns for the years in question along with an application for reinstatement as a non profit charitable organization. We expect to be reinstated without difficulty as soon as our paperwork is reviewed by the IRS. Charitable donations made during this time will be covered by that application.
The Carl Brandon Society Steering Committee apologizes to everyone concerned for not resolving this issue in a more timely manner. Though the revocation happened in 2013, it was retroactive to the date covered by the missed filing. The reinstatement, likewise, will be retroactive to the same date.
The public became aware that the Society had lost its 501(c)(3) status after donations were solicited in connection with John Scalzi’s offer to voice an audiobook — “Charity Drive for Con or Bust: An Audio Version of ‘John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular’ Read by Me”
(7) Aristotle!
https://twitter.com/MegDaLibrarian/status/638401877433040897
(8) Those E.T. the Extra Terrestrial Atari cartridges dug up in Alamogordo netted over $108,000 in an auction last year, Rolling Stone recalls:
Nearly 900 copies of the infamously terrible video game were sold on eBay after an April 2014 excavation in Alamogordo, New Mexico confirmed the urban legend that thousands of the cartridges were buried following the game’s critical and commercial failure…. The most an E.T. cartridge sold for at auction was $1,535.
“There’s 297 we’re still holding in an archive that we’ll sell at a later date when we decide what to do with them,” Lewandowski said. “I might sell those if a second movie comes out but for now we’re just holding them. The film company got 100 games, 23 went to museums and we had 881 that we actually sold.”
The city of Alamogordo will receive $65,000 from the sale, while the Tularosa Basin Historical Society gets over $16,000. The remainder of the money went towards shipping fees as buyers in 45 states and 14 countries scooped up copies of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial.
(9) Coincidentally, the E.T. movie will be back in theaters for one day this October.
In conjunction with the Blu-ray release on October 9th and the film’s 30th anniversary, Fathom Events has announced that E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial will return to the big screen for one night only on October 3 at 7:00 p.m. local time with special matinee screenings in select theaters at 2:00 p.m. local time.
(10) Eric R. Sterner in “The Martian Message” says he thinks movies do nothing to encourage space exploration.
Surely, several interests want to capitalize on the melding of film and speculative reality. Damon recently visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he talked about his role, and NASA’s website proudly uses the opportunity to explain the real NASA-developed technologies portrayed in the movie. It can only do a space advocate’s heart good when Hollywood seems to discover the same sense of excitement in space that we see and experience every day.
Sadly, if the space community seeks to turn The Martian into a commercial for sending people to Mars, we will fail miserably. The 2000 movie Castaway was nominated for multiple awards, including an Academy Award for Tom Hanks. It did not increase public support for sending people to deserted islands. Neither will The Martian bring them closer to Mars.
(11) Nerd Approved shows how you can get Serenity on your GPS.
You are seeing the Serenity instead of a car on this Garmin GPS image tweeted by Nathan Fillion. The picture was sent to him by Browncoat Greg H. and you can have it, too. All you need to do is download the image and then add it to your Garmin’s vehicles folder and you’ll be driving through the ‘verse. As far as finding a way to avoid the Reavers and outsmart the Alliance, you’re on your own.
(12) NPR interviewed Ursula K. Le Guin who has a new book coming out — Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story.
Interview Highlights
On the importance of “crowding” and “leaping”
Crowding is what Keats said when he said, “Load every rift with ore.” In other words, pack in all the richness you can. All great books are incredibly rich; each sentence can sort of be unpacked. But then also in telling a story, you’ve got to leap, you’ve got to leave out so much. And you’ve got to know which crag to leap to.
(12) Marc Scott Zicree posted a Special Space Command Update on his birthday, which included showing the birthday present he was given by John King Tarpinian (at :27).
(13) George R.R. Martin on Not A Blog — “Next Year’s Hugos”
Let’s make it about the work. Let’s argue about the BOOKS. And yes, of course, it will be an argument. I may not like the stories you like. You may not like the stories I like. We can all live with that, I think. I survived the Old Wave/ New Wave debate. Hell, I enjoyed parts of it… because it was about literature, about prose style, characterization, storytelling. Some of the stuff that Jo Walton explores in her Alfie-winning Best Related Work, WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK SO GREAT? That’s the sort of debate we should be having.
The elimination of slates will be a huge step toward the end of hostilities.
But there’s a second step that’s also necessary. One I have touched on many times before. We have to put an end to the name-calling. To the stupid epithets.
I have seen some hopeful signs on that front in some of the Hugo round-ups I’ve read. Puppies and Puppy sympathizers using terms like Fan (with a capital), or trufan, or anti-Puppy, all of which I am fine with. I am not fine with CHORF, ASP, Puppy-kicker, Morlock, SJW, Social Justice Bully, and some of the other stupid, offensive labels that some Pups (please note, I said SOME) have repeatedly used for describe their opponents since this whole thing began. I am REALLY not fine with the loonies on the Puppy side who find even those insults too mild, and prefer to call us Marxists, Maoists, feminazis, Nazis, Christ-hating Sodomites, and the like. There have been some truly insane analogies coming from the kennels too — comparisons to World War II, to the Nazi death camps, to ethnic cleansing. Guy, come on, cool down. WE ARE ARGUING ABOUT A LITERARY AWARD THAT BEGAN AS AN OLDSMOBILE HOOD ORNAMENT. Even getting voted below No Award is NOT the same as being put on a train to Auschwitz, and when you type shit like that, well…
The Pups have often complained that they don’t get no respect… which has never actually been true, as the pre-Puppy awards nominations of Correia and Torgersen have proved… but never mind, the point here is that to get respect, you need to give respect.
[Thanks to Craig Engler, Martin Morse Wooster, and John King Tarpinian for some of these links. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cubist.]
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Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little on September 1, 2015 at 10:20 am said: Nevertheless, even if I considered it genuinely the best novel published in 2015, if I knew for sure that Pratchett had expressed a wish to decline all present and future nominations for the award, I’d feel compelled by my conscience to rank it below No Award, out of respect for his wishes.
Would the reason he declined make a difference? As I recall, it was at least partly because he couldn’t stand the stress and tension of being nominated and then waiting for the votes to be counted to see if he’d won. He said something, I think, about wanted to “enjoy the party” of Worldcon and fandom without the nerves.
Er–ETA, I haven’t read Shepherd’s Crown yet either, but I love the Tiffany Aching books and if this one is genuinely worth nominating I’m going to have a hard time leaving it off my list . . .
“A little bit have departed”? Oof.
Flint: Not more than a few hundred people in the case of the Hugos and Nebulas
Has he even checked the numbers of voters in the last, oh, thirty or so years?
Why did I read that JCW entry? That’s 24 seconds of my life I can never get back…
Anybody got a subscription to this blog: http://www.tracinskiletter.com/2015/08/no-award-culture/ ? It’s about the Hugos but subscriber-only.
Based on the public post I was linked to and where I was linked from ( http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2015/08/atlas-shrugged-the-problem-of-original-property/ – think Slacktivist only for Atlas Shrugged), I doubt it’s going to be along the lines of “nobody voted you an award because your stories suck”
Have y’all seen the Shannara trailer?
I have. It’s…very white. So very very white. Fortunately, it’s set around Seattle, where as we know, there are no people of color.
Am woefully behind on reading comments, but I need to retract my statement from a few posts ago about eReaderIQ helping to save money. I have had it for less than a week and have already bought 5 ebooks:
The Martian, which wasn’t even near my TBR pile; Station Eleven, which was on my To Consider pile, my typical reading being rollicking fantasy adventure in taverns with snow falling on them from nowhere and not this literary stuff which I hear can make you look at the world differently; A Game of Thrones, which I already had in hardback; Feed, which I even had checked out from the library at the time; and last night Deathless.
In other news, I finally got around to watching the Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell miniseries, which I thought was excellent, although we did have to dig out the book at one point because I wanted to reread the prophecy wording. Now I need a spin-off series of the magical Venetian adventures of Lady Pole, Arabella, and Flora.
Another webcomic for consideration: Prince of Sartar, by Jeff Richard and Kalin Kadiev. This is set in the epic fantasy world of Glorantha, developed by Greg Stafford ever since the ’60s. It’s been the subject of a couple wargames, several roleplaying game lines, and a great computer game, King of Dragon Pass (now out for iOS, Android, Windows, and OSX).
Roughly speaking, Glorantha is for anthropology and myth studies what Middle Earth is for linguistics. 🙂 It’s a bronze-age world, though the “bronze” is actually the bones of gods who died before time was made. True dragons’ sleeping forms are part of mountain ranges, and the last time one woke up its stirring depopulated the center of a continent. And like that. The webcomic is about the conflict that’s apparently going to end an age of the world and drastically reshape it. It’s gorgeous and as weird as it should be.
Aaron:
Gabriel:
Beyond that, remember that his criteria for the ballot seems to have been to nominate his friends and people he wants to suck up to. Now he’s embarrassed them all. So it has to be Someone Else’s Fault.
The fact that If It’s In The Rules It’s Fair was his mantra at the nomination stage and now he’s switched to It May Be In The Rules But It’s Not Fair will not register with him as a contradiction. He wanted to flatter people and now they’re unhappy. Someone must pay!
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
The Sculptor was brilliant. I read that, and said “Now that’s what I call a graphic novel.”
I don’t know if this has been mentioned yet, but according to a recent blog post, Lou Antonelli had only 6 people attend his reading at Sasquan and only 3 attend his kaffeklutch/coffee clique/whatever the hell it is. No matter how deep he dug his own grave that he has to lie in, I kinda feel pity for the guy over that.
Most readings by non-famous people at Worldcon have fewer than a dozen attendees. At any given moment, the readings are the least interesting thing going on at Worldcon.
Well, except for the kaffeeklatsches.
Antonelli::
Oh dear. Did David Gerrold do something horrible to Mr. Antonelli? That must have been awful for him.
rcade:
Sad Puppies 4 should wait until Rabid Puppies releases a slate before it publishes a slate/recommendation list/whatever.
I don’t think they can, unless they publish their list too late to be useful. Because the Rapids are fewer and more cohesive than the Sads, Vox can afford to wait until just before the nominations close to publish his list. The Sad list needs to have at least a week of lead time to get to everyone and let them make decisions.
Otherwise they’ll continue to be his monkey.
Achievement unlocked.
The new JCW post just makes me want to re-read Pournelle and Niven’s INFERNO
As grim as these dreary puppy wars are, I can always find strength at JCW’s blog. The Christian virtues of humility, forgiveness, and charity shine forth from every post, and from every comment that follows. I always walk away refreshed and rejuvenated and optimistic, ready to face the rest of my day with renewed spirit.
I don’t see those numbers as something worthy of pity. He’d likely have drawn a crowd of the same size if he had no association with the Puppies at all.
Sometimes my best experiences with pros at cons were when I was in a small crowd. One time I walked into a Dallas Fantasy Fair panel and the only people there were panelists Scott McCloud, Jim Woodring, Archie Goodwin and two crowd members (including myself). We had a long conversation that included McCloud explaining the hilarious cartoonists’ card game Five-Card Nancy and then moved the proceedings outside to lean on the walls of the Renaissance Hotel, which is shaped like a speed stick and curves outwards at the bottom.
Woodring had us all lie down on that curve and look upwards while we continued to discuss comics and his love of surrealism.
Surely, they’ll want to release their reading list as early as possible to guarantee they have plenty of time to read the suggested works that they may have missed…
Now, that was a read.
August 29 is also the deadline for USOS SEAVIEW to fire the atomic missile that will extinguish the burning Van Allen radiation belts and rescue humanity from a planetary convection oven.
And it’s my birthday. So, a date linked to at least -3- science fictional disasters. 🙂
“He’d likely have drawn a crowd of the same size if he had no association with the Puppies at all.”
I was basing that on a (months) earlier mention here that he had a reading with over 20 attendees at a different con that led him to believe that the strong majority of fans had a pro-puppy stance–so that would mean a 3/4 drop-offf.
io9 has a new article up:
The Final Lessons From This Year’s Hugo Awards Clusterfrak
August 29, 2015 was when the Seaview fired that missile?
Well, I hope it worked. It’s far too hot here …
Busiek him say:
And I see that many others have made the same point already, and better. That’ll teach me to sleep.
On the Pratchett front, I think his wishes should be respected. He turned down a Hugo nomination in part because he didn’t need it, so let it go to someone who’d get a boost from it.
He still doesn’t need it. There are other ways to honor him than giving him an award he already chose not to compete for.
Shouldn’t JCW at some point decide we’re going to get our just desserts in the afterlife and leave us the hell alone?
Pretty sure that’s what Jesus would have done.
I went to a kaffeeklatsch (though they misspelled it) at which there were only 3-4 attendees. We had a fine time. They don’t have to be full.
There’s a lot more competition for fan attention at a Worldcon.
Of course it doesn’t.
My word is Schaden*s*freu*n*de – the *n* is the decisive difference.
Schaden-s-freund-e
damage-GAP-friend-PL
The *s* as a ‘gap element’ sounds better than none to my ear, but not necessary.
I remember attending a kaffeeklatsch at TorCon3 at which there were six attendees.
Unfortunately, none of those six was the actual guest (Mark Shainblum, creator of Northguard and Angloman).
I think I still have a photograph somewhere of the six of us holding up the ‘Mark Shainblum’ sign in front of the empty space between us.
Fair enough, but at Worldcon there’s a lot more stuff competing for a SF/F fan’s seat butt. Including really long business meetings in which people order each other to point, members rise and they all form something called a serpentine. How can a working class hero like Antonelli (Columbia University, ’81) compete with that unspeakable debauchery?
Sad Puppies 4 should wait until Rabid Puppies releases a slate before it publishes a slate/recommendation list/whatever. Otherwise they’ll continue to be his monkey.
Would that necessarily save them? I wouldn’t put it past VD to publish a decoy slate, wait for SP4 to publish their whatever they call it, then publish his real slate borrowing from SP4, chortling over his cleverness the while. It’s not as though he believes in playing fair.
>Now I need a spin-off series of the magical Venetian adventures of Lady Pole, Arabella, and Flora.
MOST EMPHATICALLY. The immensity of my craving cannot be overstated. I must have it. It must be made existent.
Laertes wrote
Allow me to compliment you on your delicate touch with fantasy. That was truly a pleasure to read.
Sometimes not many people at an event works out well. Way back when, just when I was getting into a certain subset of electronic music, Apple held an event in London to launch their second generation iMacs, and they brought in a DJ to play…
…a gentleman who later went on to great fame, but with only 15 or so of us at the event, it meant I was the only one who knew who Sasha was (having just listened to his first mix CD). And so I ended up having a nice chat with him as he packed up, about a record label we both liked, and what was coming from them…
So a few people at a Kaffee Klatsch? That’ll be a treat for them…
.
Nah. I have never (to my knowledge) dug my own grave, and I’ve published a lot more in sf/f than Mr. Antonelli (my 11th fantasy novel was released in November and my 68th sf/f short story was released a few days ago)… and I can’t even count how many times I’ve done a reading or panel or kaffesklatsch where no one showed up, or 1-2 people showed up, or I only had a good crowd because (as they made a point of telling me) the hallways were too crowded for them to leave before I started reading.
I’ve done a kaffeklatsch that no one attended, as well as one that was attended by two friendly writers (and no one else) who came because they6 saw my sign-up sheet was empty and felt bad for me. On another occasion, of the 3 people who showed up at my kaffeeklatsch, 1 had signed up because he thought I was someone else (and he was openly disappointed with me), and the other 2 had signed up after discerning that my table was next to Lois McMaster Bujold’s. They had wanted to sign up for her klatsch, but the sign-up sheet was full, and they were hoping that their strategic position at my table would make it possible for them to subtly infiltrate her table (which they did after about 10 minutes). I did another kaffeeklatsch where the only 2 attendees showed up because they had a message for me from a mutual friend. Then they left.
I’ve done any number of readings where 0-2 people showed up.
I once texted Jim Hines (yes, THAT Jim Hines) from a publisher dinner to say the meal was running long and I wasn’t going to be at our panel. Already 10 minutes into it, he texted me back that this was okay, because if I had shown up, we would outnumber the audience.
You THINK of public appearances as the sort of thing that GRRM, Gaiman, and Scalzi do, with an enthusiastic audience of standing-room-only crowds. But much of the time, they’re depressing and humiliating. For most of us, not just Lou Antonelli.
I’m torn between the ideas of honouring Sir Terry with a 100′ statue of him in his big hat swinging his sword, or making him part of the GCSE syllabus so that a generation of kids will grow to hate him. Maybe we can do both?
Oh, look, Sir Terry. Can anything beat being made a knight of the realm for honour? Who needs a tin rocket when you’ve been tapped on the shoulder by Queenie?
Laura Resnick — But you bottle it up and only reveal the heartache when you’ve had too much gin, like a civilised person, whereas Lou Antonelli turns it into a whole supervillain origin story.
Perhaps he lacketh gin?
Ouch. But I’m a computer book author with 30 books to my name, so I see your tale of having two people at your public appearance as aspirational. Man, wouldn’t THAT be something!
When I get a compliment from a reader, it’s almost always paired with a request to help them debug their printer.
Definitely. That was a very odd book for me: both the primary and secondary characters got the 8 Deadly Words from me (I like them much better in the miniseries) but I really cared about what happened to the tertiary characters.
See now, I felt that the miniseries was trying too hard to make Norrell likeable especially, which rather discombobulated me. He isn’t *meant* to be liked! Let me grudgingly pity him in peace!
Laura Resnick, I feel for you. When I was fan GoH at a tiny local convention they put me on two panels. I did exhaustive research on the topics, and came in with references and talking points and book recommendations…
Nobody at all came to either one of them. <wry>
@Nicole J LeBoeuf-Little
You say yourself: We know Pratchett turned down a Hugo nomination. My impression is (correct me if I’m wrong), that he intended to decline any Hugo nomination ever. We know this. Taking advantage of the fact that it’ll be hard for him to decline a Hugo now that he’s dead seems incredibly disrespectful.
And then there’s the other problem with your suggestion: the Hugo Award for Best Novel isn’t for “reconciliation” any more than it’s for cronyism, total book sales, promoting a political movement, spitting in the face of a political movement, or for giving Popular Author X their turn.
(And then there’s the other other problem: For heaven’s sake, why is anyone obliged to do anything to “reconcile” with the Puppies?)
It seems premature to suggest it for an award without having read it yet, and terribly contrary to the spirit of the Hugos (indeed, almost Sad Puppy-like) to nominate it for reasons that have nothing to do with its own excellence.
As another commentator pointed out, he declined, stating as the reason that he didn’t need the tension and aggravation.
And it isn’t that I plan to vote for it unread, that I feel the need to kowtow to the Pups, or anything other than I am rather tired, as many other people are, of the sniping, and was hoping that there could be at least one Hugo about which there would be genuine good feeling, on all sides. That book, if indeed it is worthy, seems the best chance for that. Wishful thinking, nothing more.
Sadly, I don’t think the Puppies were really arguing that Pratchett should be honored with Hugos. I think their logic was more like:
1. You guys didn’t give awards to Terry Pratchett!
2. Therefore we are right that you’re a dumb and tiny far-reaching and all-controlling conspiracy!
3. Give Hugos to us!
@ Cassy B – There’s a very nice romance writer name Shelly Thacker who I vowed to kill one day. (Nothing personal.) Years ago, when I was a romance writer, I drove 90 minutes through bad weather to do a book signing. No one showed up the entire 2 hours I was there. AND there entire 2 hours I was there, the bookseller told me (at length, in excruciating detail, reptitiously) how lots and lots and LOTS of people had come there the week before for Shelly Thacker’s book signing, and how popular and charming she was, and how much people loved her books, and how many people wanted a chance to meet her, etc., etc.
Shelly Thacker, you are a dead woman! DEAD!
(Standard Puppy Paranoia disclaimer: The above was humorous hyperbole and not an actual death threat.)
@Laura: (comment at Eric Flint’s blog)
I have it on very good authority that, in all modesty, your cat is in the top 99.9% of all cats lying about today.
@Nick Mamatas
Most readings by non-famous people at Worldcon have fewer than a dozen attendees.
Even some other conventions. I went to one in New Orleans where Pat Cadigan had a reading scheduled and only Howard Waldrop showed up. So we went out for lunch instead!
@Jon
I wouldn’t put it past VD to publish a decoy slate, wait for SP4 to publish their whatever they call it, then publish his real slate borrowing from SP4, chortling over his cleverness the while. It’s not as though he believes in playing fair.
After all, this year VD followed up his own slate by publishing his own supposed actual Hugo ballot, so he could snub Kary English and take credit for 3BP and the like. So it’s certainly in the realm of possibility.
(I do that Puppy disclaimer because I once made a throw-away joke about alpha males on Whatever, after which a certain racist homophobic misogynist repeatedly claimed I had threatened him with violence. I had never even heard of this person at the time and did not know of his existence until months later… And it was a lesson to me in how self-absorbed, excruciatingly literal, dimwitted, and paranoid certain persons can be.)
Laura Resnick- you seem like a fascinating and interesting person to talk to. I’m surprised you don’t get more attendance. The people signing up for your event so they could crash Bujold’s though… Ouch. Really rude.
I’ve ended up in some really interesting panels and readings because I randomly wandered in somewhere between events I was planning on, or because traffic in the halls was terrible. Hell at Dragoncon I discovered board gaming basically because the gaming hotel was the only one not completely packed with people on a Saturday afternoon…spent almost the whole day over there!
And yet not nearly as rude as all of my former literary agents and a number of my editors have been to me.
Heigh-ho, the glamorous life!