(1) I encountered this oasis while researching today’s scroll — Nelson Lowhim’s clever story “Sasquan, worldcon and the science fiction convention”
…Leaning back and inhaling the sterile convention center smell, I realized that I’d sat on a book. I pulled it out from under me and examined the cover: on it a gallant woman rode a chariot being pulled by naked men. They were headed to a shining light at the end of the road.
It was thin, the book, and so I read through it, the writing clean enough for me not to stop and the premise interesting enough for me to flip the pages. When I was finished, unsure with the ending, I threw the book on the table where it collided with the sculpture.
It was then that I noticed a shift in the atmosphere and the smell of something like rotting feet. Out from the shadows in a corner stepped a large man. I froze. For not only was he large, not only did he wield a large sword, but he moved with the kind of nimbleness that signifies a specifically potent violence.
“Treat the book with a little more respect, small man.”…
(2) Marko Kloos – “My Sasquan Weekend”
So we were at the Hugo Losers party, mingling with old and new friends and generally having a good time, when GRRM had a special surprise for us. He brought out a table full of trophies made from 1950s hood ornaments which he called the Alfies, after Alfred Bester, the winner of the inaugural best Novel Hugo in 1953. George started giving them out to various people who would have been on the ballot without the slates, especially in those categories where the nominees all came from the slates.
And then he awarded one to Annie Bellet, who withdrew her short story from the ballot the same day I withdrew my novel…and I thought to myself, “Self, he may call you up there too.” The room was packed with people, many of them authors and editors of works you’ve probably read, and I basically had two or three minutes to think up something to say that wouldn’t make me look like a giant jackass.
(3) Angela Blackwell on Bull Spec – “The Exploding Spaceship Visits Sasquan – Worldcon 2015”
Panel organizers appeared to try to bring diverse authors onto panels but like many conventions could really have used some oversight from a diversity coordinator. Many “diverse” authors were on panels with topics which had nothing to do with the type of writing they do. It looked as if someone said, “Oh, we need diversity on this panel so let’s randomly pick a diverse author we used somewhere else instead of broadening our panelist pool and finding a diverse author who fits the topic”. Also “diverse” authors need to be put on panels about the subgenres they write about not just on generic panels….
Next year’s Worldcon will be in Kansas City. We hope their panel organizers learn from the many comments on Twitter and Facebook as well as at the convention about how different authors were placed on panels and what panel topics were chosen. All the members of the community need to feel welcome and none should be stuck in a “diversity” box, or a “minority political opinion” box.
(4) Ellen Datlow has over a hundred photos from Sasquan, many from GRRM’s Hugo Losers Party, posted here.
(5) Lou Antonelli on Facebook
Thought for the Day: In light of the way he depicts social occasions in his fantasy writing, I was rather surprised anyone would accept an invitation to a private event from George R.R. Martin. (wink)
(6) Campbell nominee Rolf Nelson – “Sasquan post, obligatory”
I wasn’t sure what to expect. I certainly didn’t expect being totally ignored, but that’s largely what happened. No offers of being on panels. No interviews. Nobody to introduce me. No packet available that was supposed to be ready for me. No open attacks on me. No large shows of support for the puppies. (Some background on the puppies here: http://sfauthor.net/burning-down-the-house/ ; I was a “rabid puppy” nominee. Five second recap: the insiders worked the nominations and voting in back rooms and parties for years, and didn’t like it when an outsider did the same thing, out in the open, and better, shutting them out of a lock on the awards). Normally new writers are loaded up with panels and shown around and introduced to folks. For me and most of the non-TOR-books nominees? Nothing. So I wandered around, watched, listened, talked to a lot of “average SF con attendees.” They were mostly nice, and most knew little or nothing about the whole puppies thing. Most who knew something had a warped left-wing version of events in their heads. I managed to line up 3 interviews of my own by walking down to the press room and asking “want to interview a rabid puppy?” including one with Amy Wallace of Wired (http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/ ) who talked to me for 20 or 25 minutes, but didn’t use any of it (flatly contradicted what I said, in fact, perhaps because I was recording the interview, too, so she could not out-of-context sound-bite me).
(7) Melinda Snodgrass – “There Is and Was No Conspiracy”
So now I have to address the boatload of idiotic conspiracy theories that have sprung up from the fervid brains of the Puppies both Sad and Rabid.
No, George did not know in advance who had won and who had lost. He had to wait for the pink sheet that detailed the Hugo nominations before he could figure out who was going to receive an Alfie. I know because I had to check in with him when thing were running late for presenting the awards, and he told me in harried tones that he had had to wait for the breakdown to come out and everything was running late.
No, George did not buy 3000 memberships and tell them how to vote. Has anyone looked at fandom? Herding cats wold be easier. And seriously — George is the guy who loves this award. He would never, ever game his beloved Hugos.
No, the Puppy votes were not “discounted”. It’s the Australian ballot. It’s confusing. Here’s a link where Ranked Voting is explained. Try to understand. So you don’t get your money back.
No, you can’t sue. You have to show harm before you can get into court, and you have to have standing to bring a lawsuit. If someone calls you a banana that might hurt you deeply, but the court will not provide a remedy for your pain. You voted/you lost. If your argument had merit I’d be suing over the 2000 election. Let it be noted that I didn’t.
(8) Jim Hensley on Unqualified Offerings – “Social Engineer-ing”
Ken Burnside writes the best “pro-Puppy” retrospective on the Hugo Awards that I’ve seen. It’s frank about the pain he felt from the way some people treated him during the controversy but impressively free of bitterness. The piece is long, but what interests me most is something he doesn’t quite say, and possibly doesn’t quite realize. Here’s what he does say, about what he identifies as the “Heroic Engineer” genre, also known as competence porn:
Heroic Engineer Stories drive a lot of sales. Nearly every SF author I know who doesn’t need a day job writes an action-adventure series, where the Heroic Engineer/Officer/Competent Protagonist Solves The Problem. They sell, and they sell to a male demographic, often current or recently retired military, and that demographic skews conservative.
Let’s zero in on the last sentence. It states that SF competence porn sells to people who see themselves in the protagonist. They are pleased to read stories in which they recognize people like them.
Which is exactly what gets called affirmative-action “box checking” when the protagonist is female, non-white, queer or some combination of those. Often, particularly when Puppy advocates are writing, when readers derive pleasure from seeing themselves in those protagonists, they are accused of favoring representation over quality, even though representation can be a marker of quality.
I remember when I first saw Apollo 13 in the theater, my overwhelming, thrilled reaction was: “My people!” Those very clever, very white nerdboys in Mission Control, trying to save the lives of the astronauts via kitbashing and pedantry reminded me of myself and my friends in a way hardly any screen protagonists had heretofore. And you know, there’s nothing wrong with that. And there’s nothing wrong with an ex-service-member deriving pleasure from stories about guys kinda like him saving the world with shop tools and shaped charges.
But there’s also nothing wrong with a black woman deriving pleasure from stories about black women on Mars, or gay men enjoying stories about gay men dealing with unexplained phenomena. This even goes beyond the issue of representation-as-quality – that stories with people of color, LGBT folks and women of agency better reflect the world as we know it and our plausible futures. While the old stereotype of science-fiction and fantasy as nothing but wish-fulfillment stories was unjust, wish-fulfillment remains an element of much fiction, and most adventure fiction. There’s simply no case that non-white, non-straight, non-male readers’ enjoyment in seeing themselves reflected in fiction is somehow less legitimate than the pleasure that “a male demographic, often current or recently retired military” takes in the same phenomenon.
(9) After Chris Meadows meets Michael Z. Williamson at the gun show, he reviews and approves Kate Paulk’s plans for SP4 – “Whether Sad Puppy or opposed, fans are people, too” .
That’s a much better way to approach the matter than coming up with a slate with just a small number of candidates, the way Brad Torgersen did last year. As Paulk points out later in the livestream, Torgersen didn’t fill every category on the Sad Puppy slate with five candidates, but its having fewer than five left room for the Rabids to come in and piggyback on them by putting five on theirs. It also resulted in some candidates that Puppies might have nominated, such as the Heinlein biography, getting left out because Torgersen didn’t know about them to put them on the slate. Listing all suggested nominees will make a lot more sense.
More importantly, it’s also the way that a lot of other places make Hugo recommendations. That’s how John Scalzi’s “Fans Award Recommendation Threads” work, for example—people plug stories they personally think are worthy and recommend that others read them. And people have historically been fine with that kind of thing. There’s no attempt there to make a specific list of just a few works in each category. There are also people out there attempting to list and discuss every possible eligible work for 2016, so people will know what’s available.
Torgersen might have meant the 2015 slate as a list of recommendations for things people should read and then nominate if they liked them (though he wasn’t really very clear about that in the original announcement), but the problem with a list that has just a few candidates on it is that a lot of people will choose to nominate it as-is without actually bothering to read the works on it. They might not feel like they have the kind of time it would take to read everything, but that list is right there and it’s easy to copy and paste. Hopefully more people will be moved to nominate stuff they actually read this year.
(10) Elton Gahr on Life, the Universe, and Sci-Fi – “My Controversial Opinion on the Hugo Awards”
I know I’m a bit late commenting on the Hugo awards, but the recent Hugo awards controversy annoyed me enough I wanted to comment with my own super controversial opinion on the Hugo awards. I apologize before I tell you because I know that it’s going to surprise and possibly upset some people, but the award for the best science fiction story, novel, etc should go to the, wait for it… Best story.
Basically what I’m saying is that most of the people involved in the argument are wrong regardless of which side you’re on (though I’ll admit if it makes you feel better that some are more wrong than others). If you’re voting for people instead of the work of fiction they wrote you’re wrong. I can understand not voting for someone if you really dislike them simply because you don’t want to support them. But voting for someone because they are a white male, a black Hispanic woman or an aboriginal Australian when you don’t believe their story is the best is just wrong and it doesn’t really matter why you’re doing it. Ignore the author and vote for the story you like the best. That’s what the award is for….
I have no problem with people putting together a list of stories that they think are the best though it seems clear that isn’t going to be a good idea. I’m also very pleased that more minorities and women are writing science fiction. Part of the reason I read science fiction is to see the world from the point of view of people who see it different from me. And if they write the best science fiction story in their respective categories they deserve to win, but honestly anyone who votes for them because they are a minority or a woman when they don’t believe it’s the best story is voting wrong.
So that’s basically it. My controversial opinion about the Hugo Awards is that the rabid people on both sides of this are idiots. If I heard someone saying that women or minorities shouldn’t be involved in science fiction I’d have a hard time not punching them in the face. It’s 2015 and we are supposed to be past that type of thing. But I really don’t feel much better about the people on the opposite extreme. If you won’t vote for someone just because they are a white male then there is no difference at all. If you assume someone is racist because they disagree about what the best story then you need to consider that they might just like something different than you and that’s O.K. and if you vote for someone who didn’t write the best story to make a political point you’re helping to prove the people on the other side right.
(11) Jonathan Jones in the Guardian – “Get real. Terry Pratchett is not a literary genius”
It does not matter to me if Terry Pratchett’s final novel is a worthy epitaph or not, or if he wanted it to be pulped by a steamroller. I have never read a single one of his books and I never plan to. Life’s too short.
No offence, but Pratchett is so low on my list of books to read before I die that I would have to live a million years before getting round to him. I did flick through a book by him in a shop, to see what the fuss is about, but the prose seemed very ordinary.
I don’t mean to pick on this particular author, except that the huge fuss attending and following his death this year is part of a very disturbing cultural phenomenon. In the age of social media and ebooks, our concept of literary greatness is being blurred beyond recognition. A middlebrow cult of the popular is holding literature to ransom. Thus, if you judge by the emotional outpourings over their deaths, the greatest writers of recent times were Pratchett and Ray Bradbury. There was far less of an internet splurge when Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014 and Günter Grass this spring. Yet they were true titans of the novel. Their books, like all great books, can change your life, your beliefs, your perceptions. Everyone reads trash sometimes, but why are we now pretending, as a culture, that it is the same thing as literature? The two are utterly different.
(12) Damien G. Walter – “Sorry Jonesy, but I can write for the Guardian and love Terry Pratchett”
I never had the good fortune to meet Terry Pratchett, but I’ve been reading his books since I was eleven. My favourite Discworld tomes – Mort, Small Gods and Going Postal – have been read a half dozen times each at least. I also hold a Masters degree, have been a senior university lecturer, and am a columnist for The Guardian, the very same bastion of middlebrow values that Jonathan Jones penned his opportunistic attack on Terry Pratchett. Unlike Jones however, I see no conflict in being both an intelligent educated human being and loving the fuck out of Terry Pratchett’s discworld books.
(13) Christopher Priest – “You Don’t Know What It Is, Do You, Mister Jones?”
Finally, the works of Sir Terry Pratchett. I have been provoked to write this essay today by an article in the Guardian’s blog, by the newspaper’s arts correspondent Jonathan Jones. As a display of closed-minded prejudice, and an astonishing willingness to brag about it, there have been thankfully few precedents. Here is how Jones starts:
It does not matter to me if Terry Pratchett’s final novel is a worthy epitaph or not, or if he wanted it to be pulped by a steamroller. I have never read a single one of his books and I never plan to. Life’s too short. No offence, but Pratchett is so low on my list of books to read before I die that I would have to live a million years before getting round to him. I did flick through a book by him in a shop, to see what the fuss is about, but the prose seemed very ordinary.
Unsurprisingly, the online comments on this pathetic piece of ignorant journalism have swarmed in (at the time of writing, just under one thousand), and for once almost all of them agree with each other. I will be surprised and disappointed if Mr Jones retains his job with the Guardian, at least in the capacity of an arts correspondent. I have rarely seen a letter of resignation so overtly and shamelessly revealing as this. I was forcibly reminded of a letter my old friend John Middleton Murry wrote to the Observer many years ago on another, not dissimilar, matter: ‘I note your organ does not have a reporter in Antarctica, and suggest that this would be a suitable posting for Mr Martin Amis.’
I should add that Terry Pratchett and I were respectful colleagues rather than personal friends. We knew each other better in the days when we were teenage hopefuls, trying to get our first stories sold. The years went by, we found our publishers and we went our separate ways. I doubt if Terry ever read my books – I read only a few of his. Terry does not need me to defend him – Jones’s article is contemptible.
But I would say that of all the writers I have ever known, or the books I have ever read, Terry Pratchett’s seem to be a dead cert for long-term classic status.
(14) Scott Lynch on Storify – “That awful, awful SJW message fiction”
(2) It's wall to wall female characters mixed in with male characters. Even in the military. Even the INFANTRY. This is treated as normal!
— Scott Lynch (@scottlynch78) August 31, 2015
(15) OK. Now it’s been said.
We got a great Best Novel in #hugoawards from the ISS but disappointed nobody said "No Award them from orbit, it's the only way to be sure!"
— Robot Archie???????????????????? (@RobotArchie) September 1, 2015
Bingo?
(16) Angelique Trouvere has a request:
Some merriment, circa mid-1970s, at a New York STAR TREK convention… That’s also Elyse Pines (Rosenstein) second from left in front, Joan Winston on Jeff Maynard’s lap (sadly, both Joan and Jeff are also gone), “Patia Von Sternberg,” redheaded, fourth from left in the back, and a very popular helmsman, under the beanie….
I’ve attached the photo you included [in Toni Lay’s obituary] of the group shot from the early Trekcon with George Takei and I had a question that I hope you may be able to help me with:
There is a woman sitting next to Elyse on the far left–she’s wearing a red jacket and a white top with dots – she’s an old friend from the cons who moved to L.A shortly after that pic was taken. I visited her there but lost contact with her. It’s been so long that I can’t be sure if her first name is Barbara or Sharon. This photo was also published in Joan’s book, “The Making of the Star Trek Conventions” but it’s a grainy b/w. Would you know her or know someone who might?
If you have the answer e-mail me at mikeglyer (at) cs (dot) com and I will pass it on to Ms. Trouvere.
(16) The one true reason why people are writers:
https://twitter.com/KameronHurley/status/638782719435120640
(17) Just what do the Orks want anyway? Multiplexer gives this neglected sociological question extended thought at Critical Hits.
Coda
Generic evil for the sake of being evil is boring. The most banal and dull of demi-humans benefit from a bit of motivation, incentives, history and background. Why are the Orks in the dungeon? What do they get out of being in the dungeon? Did they come from a village? How is that village? Can the PCs learn anything about this culture while killing things and looting their stuff? Maybe they have something and the local magistrates want it more?
No one is what they seem and everything has little pull-able threads that unravel into a tapestry of background, story, and tale.
Or maybe the Murder Hobos only want to roll bad guys and take their stuff.
(18) We end today with this highly scientific excerpt from io9 – “Archeologists Tracked Lewis and Clark by Following Their Trail of Laxatives”
Eventually, researchers came across some information that helped clarify things… and that information came from their latrines. Lewis and Clark were fairly well-equipped and well-trained, even if only by the standards of the day. Given what those standards were, it’s surprising that they only lost one person during their trek. According to their own records, they bled people who were feverish, they gave purgatives to people who felt weak, and they administered potassium nitrate (a preservative substitute for salt) to people suffering from heat stroke and dehydration. They also brought along the wonder drug of the day, mercury chloride (otherwise known as calomel), as a pill, a tincture, and an ointment.
Calomel was often used to treat those with syphilis (mercury does work against the bacterium that causes syphilis, but it takes out the host as well, so don’t try it at home) along with nearly everything else, including constipation. And an expedition that ate mainly the game they could catch along the way would have suffered from constipation regularly. In their journals, Lewis and Clark regularly make note of someone having to take one of Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills (because constipation was thought to be caused by an excess of bile) and spending the day purging.
If you know that you and your men are going to spend a day expelling everything they’ve eaten for a week, you make sure to dig a latrine. Most of the mercury that the men ingested went out of the system again, which means that over a century later, historians and archaeologists were able to pin down where Lewis and Clark had stayed by testing old latrine contents for mercury.
[Thanks to Paul Weimer, Martin Morse Wooster, and John King Tarpinian for some of these links. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kurt Busiek, with a signal boost by Shambles .]
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@Ann Somerville: “Holy crap, Uncle Timmy is an arsehole.”
I would disagree. Sometimes he behaves like one, but generally he’s a decent guy. You may see that as a fine distinction; I see it as an important one. All of us act like assholes on occasion. I know the man, and I’ve seen his kind and generous side… but I’ve also seen him be a jerk. It is important to recognize that both sides exist and are true reflections. Humans are complicated.
@NickPheas and MaxL:
The article at that link does an okay job of summing up the “Archon uninvited Uncle Timmy” flap from a sympathetic point of view, but it glosses over the actual complaint that led to that action. Here’s my understanding of it.
Before I get started: I know Timmy. I am friendly with Timmy. I’ve played Spades with him and occasionally won. I’ve been to LibertyCon both as an average fan and as staff. I subscribed to the Revenge for years. When I speak on those subjects, I am not passing along what someone has told me about them; I speak from firsthand knowledge. On the other hand, I was not part of the Archon side of things, and so my statements on that aspect are less solid. There, I’m speaking from my memory of public sources. So, that said…
For years, Timmy has published a weekly newsletter called “The Revenge of Hump Day,” aka “the Revenge.” He distributes it by emailing big PDFs (a few dozen pages) which consist of fandom news/gossip, letters, science articles, political commentary, and jokes. If you got this year’s Hugo packet, the Puppies made sure you got a taste of it. It generally amounts to people sending Timmy links and him cobbling them together into a PDF.
So it came to pass that Archon invited him to be their FGOH a couple of years ago. Someone then showed them some things that had appeared in the Revenge’s “jokes” section, and Archon subsequently rescinded their invitation. Those are the bare facts.
See, the problem was that some of the gags Timmy’s included over the years have been, well, gag-worthy and offensive. The example that always comes to my mind is an Ebonics-laden anecdote about three black women on a plane discussing how they’d applied strategic thinking to the color of their underwear, to increase their chances of survival in case the plane went down. The punch line is that the third woman didn’t wear any panties “’cause dey always look for de black box.” (That’s a close paraphrase; I do not claim that it is an exact quote. It does at least retain the flavor of the piece.) That’s some pretty racist crap, and my opinion is that the choice to publish it reflects poorly on the person making that choice.
Whether Timmy himself is or is not a racist is beside the point, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on that. What I cannot deny is that first, he has published racist crap in his newsletter, and second, that when the Archon complaint brought it to light, his defense was a muddled mess of “I publish what I’m sent,” “free speech,” “I crack on everybody,” and “I’m a good guy” – none of which actually addresses the complaint that he’s published some racist crap.
At no point do I recall him ever taking an ounce of responsibility for his role in curating and publishing the content, and I lost a good deal of respect for him due to that omission. In short, he took the classic “freedom of speech means I should face no consequences” position.
Nobody ever said Timmy couldn’t publish whatever he wanted to publish. All Archon did was decline to extend FGOH honors to someone who’d published such things. I can’t argue with that decision; dissatisfaction with his editorial choices was the main reason I stopped my subscription. Archon has exactly the same right to choose their guests as Timmy does to choose what he’ll publish. That’s how freedom of speech (well, freedom of the press) and freedom of association work.
@JJ: “I have no doubt that Bolgeo has contributed to fandom, and conventions, and has some loyal friends, and has done nice things for people. But really, is this the sort of person they want to hold up as a positive example?”
My sentiments exactly.
Je suis fatigué de les chiots.
So I’m going to wait until the outcome of Kate Paulk’s SP4 & Theodore Beale’s RP2 because nothing I’ve seen since the Hugos has caused me to review my position. And in the interim, I’m going to try to read as widely as possible with the aim of nominating some good stuff for next year’s Hugos.
In other news…
Bought!
Regarding “Uncle Timmy”: There’s a very apposite xkcd strip. And in addition to the strip itself, so is the alt-text:
I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t stay away. Hoyt interview, part 2:
http://accordingtohoyt.com/2015/09/02/interview-with-cathy-young-part-2/
“I didn’t even view it as a politically correct thing, though let’s not forget the nineties was the time when a lot of the stores changed the History section to “Herstory.” “
There’s a great Parks & Rec moment in season 4, ep 3 where a character named Joan Callamezzo makes a ridiculous claim and Ben Wyatt just says: “That… never happened.” IT IS NOT ON YOUTUBE. So just imagine I put that link there.
I worked in a bookstore in 1998 and 1999, and, in fact, a bookstore at one of those elite, little Ivy colleges. At no point did we re-label the history section. I worked at a Barnes & Noble 2002-05. If the history section had been renamed, we would’ve heard about. I would be willing to bet my entire savings account that Ms. Hoyt cannot name three stores where this actually took place.
All right, it’s bed time.
“My English is not perfect but I have to tell you that your beer is like swill to us. Do I have that right? I am saying only a swine would drink this beer.”
As many others have pointed out the US beer market has changed substantially since that Simpsons quote first appeared in the early to mid-90s. I’ve been spoiled since I’ve lived in college towns or big cities since I’ve reached drinking age, but there is a lot of good US craft beer out there.
So I’m late to this party but apparently Amazon took down the “failure mode of satire is asshole” listing. Anyone care to fill me in on what that was?
Somebody put up a counter-parody book of ‘John Scalzi is not a popular writer and I myself am quite popular’, the start of the title being ‘John Scalzi is a rapist’. Beale claims it wasn’t him.
More anti-Scalzi/Erin parodies are appearing, though. Fairly indistinguishable from Beale’s original. This is starting to look less and less like a well-thought-out publishing strategy.
@Greg
Holy gods, I think my eyes rolled so hard they’re permanently dislocated. I don’t even know where to start with that, beyond that clearly Hoyt does not get the concept of simile / metaphor. And free speech. And backing up her claims.
Bring on SP4. It promises to be remarkable.
@Greg and Snowcrash
So much of what Hoyt says is *cite needed*
E.g. there is (or was a few years ago) a group of writers known as “the young communists club” (all about ten years younger than I, but never mind.)…It appalled me more that this affiliation was lauded on various reviews.
This club have done sterling work in hiding themselves form Google under that name despite “various reviews” then.
Half of our slate was female. No, not even by the vaguest use of “half”
Part of their post-mortem has been to say that they did a bad job reaching the media. Well, here’s why – this reporter has gone away thinking “young communists? Juicy quote there” then done some basic fact checking and realised her interviewee was totally unreliable.
If Hoyt puts herself up to a media outlet as a voice of SP4 and gets a demonstrably false quote published, the retraction-storm will be much worse than the EW article.
If Rolf wants that kind of treatment, he should probably try the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest. I understand they treat the writers quite well. Just don’t sign anything.
Re Rolf Nelson’s objection to bestiality stories: Probably the most well-known/notorious SF story featuring bestiality is “”The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured his Larinks, a Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk“, appearing in the August 1990 ASIMOV’S and written by… wait for it… Dafydd ab Hugh. (Who held the title of “SF’s most annoying extreme-right idealogue” in the pre-Vox days.)
(“Coon” was actually a pretty good story. It got into several Best SF collections for that year, and was nominated for a Hugo and Nebula. Very much an outlier for ab Hugh’s work, though. I’ve read some of ab Hugh’s other fiction, which, ahh, wasn’t “pretty good”; I found it ranged from undistinguished to bloody awful. HEROING is a book I hold up as the textbook example of how not to write a woman-warrior character; glue a penis onto the protagonist, and she’s indistinguishable from a male character. A stereotypical male character.)
@Jason
do you have an opinion on
http://madgeniusclub.com/2015/08/27/yet-another-post-hugo-post/
Late in thanking whomever upthread posted the link for the Annie Bellet trilogy. Bought. I’m a women who has been playing RPGs for over 35 years (no, that’s not hyperbole; I still have my Basic D&D little brown books), so this sounds like it’ll be entirely my cup of tea.
Ah Wraith, I remember that that was… different. I played a one-shot around when it came out (so, twenty years ago I suppose) and still have vivid, and slightly unnerving, memories of that session.
@Jason
But… That’s not what she said. Someone even quoted the exact language above. It wasn’t nearly as flippant as you are claiming and was a perfectly good apology.
“Sometimes he behaves like one, but generally he’s a decent guy. You may see that as a fine distinction; I see it as an important one.”
Rev Bob, I respect you and your opinion. However, someone who gleefully posts racist jokes is indistinguishable from a ‘real’ racist, and someone who behaves like a dick is, in his effect on people, indistinguishable from a ‘real’ dick.
Your friend obviously has some good qualities, but I wouldn’t want to spend any time in his company, because of the qualities which are repellent to me.
I’ve read the nominated works and I’ll stand by my assessment. If you don’t like it, tough. Write better.
You know what is a “dick move”? Gaming the nominating process to push worthwhile candidates off and get third- and fourth-rate nominees onto the Hugo ballot.
You know what is a “dick move”? Pretending that your movement is about “the best books regardless of who wrote them” when you’ve nominated Wisdom from My Internet, The Revenge of Hump Day, Zombie Nation, and a collection of nigh-unreadable crap by John C. Wright.
You know what is a “dick move”? Justifying gaming the nominations process by inventing a secret cabal that doesn’t actually exist that you claim to be crusading against, and then repeating that claim over and over again when it has been shown to be completely false.
You know what is a “dick move”? Lying and claiming that someone called for false one-star reviews when they manifestly did not.
You know what is a “dick move”? Claiming an apology is a “non-apology” when the text showing that it is an actual apology has already been shown for everyone to see.
You know what is a “dick move”? Claiming that the Hugo winners for the past couple of years only won because of secret affirmative action and not the quality of their work.
You know what is a “dick move”? To be honest, it is difficult to think of anything done by anyone associated with the Puppy group that hasn’t been a dick move.
I’ll just quote some Heinlein:
“You! I’ve just awarded you the prize for the hundred-meter dash. Does it make you happy? No dodging, please. You have the prize — here, I’ll write it out: ‘Grand prize for the championship, one hundred-meter sprint.’ ” He had actually come back to my seat and pinned it on my chest. “There! Are you happy? You value it — or don’t you?” Mr. Dubois had looked surprised. “It doesn’t make you happy?”
“You know darn well I placed fourth!”
“Exactly! The prize for first place is worthless to you . . . because you haven’t earned it. But you enjoy a modest satisfaction in placing fourth; you earned it.”
Enjoy the first place ribbon Mr. Dubois, er, Mr. Torgersen pinned on you. Just don’t expect anyone else to take it seriously.
@RedWombat on September 2, 2015 at 7:58 pm
Thank you.
One of the biggest planks in puppy eyes seems to be a constant demand for empathy from others without willingness to give any in return.
@Jason Cordova
I see variations on this talking point come up a lot among people who seem to be, at least peripherally, “dread minions” or whatever it is he calls them. (I don’t know if you consider yourself such.) What are you trying to tell us, exactly? We already know VD doesn’t care. His public persona (the character Vox Day) is that of a malicious sociopath who spends all day cackling to himself with amusement about his own evil. He’s like Freddy Kreuger without the finger knives and the ability to kill people in their dreams. So why associate yourself with a guy like that?
Further, what exactly do you mean by “burn this whole thing to the ground”? That’s seems to be a disgruntled puppy catch phrase, in that VD and his followers have been threatening to do it all along if they don’t get their way, and after the Hugo results were made public, regular fans were frequently accused in various ways of having “burned down” the Hugos. And I don’t actually know what they’re talking about. The only thing that burned down at Worldcon was a substantial portion of Washington forest, and I’m pretty sure VD had nothing to do with that.
Cathy Young and the Sad Puppies…oy, what an awful combination. My response to the entire interview is the same as Mark’s:
http://www.acc.umu.se/~ericj/junk/citation_needed.png
And the Annie Bellet trilogy is 99p in the UK as well!
So often I see a today-is-a-good-day-to-buy tip and follow it to find it’s still full price in pounds. Well coordinated book sellers.
Ray,
I’m tempted to lob out the tired “well they said it first” defense but quite frankly, I’ll own that comment. It’s why I typically don’t post anything online when I’m ticked off. Horrible choice of words on my part.
Everyone else (too many comments),
Believe it or not, I had no plans to engage over here. My intention (I’ll say again) was to try to address the overly-broad paintbrush being used to paint either side. Of course I’m guilty of it as well.
I’m really trying to understand a lot of this. I’m late to the fandom party (my first con was in 2004) and I was never a huge fan of some of the “elders” of SF like Bradbury and Heinlein. I have a few of their books in my library, but for the most part (to me) they’re hit and miss.
In that same vein, though, I don’t understand, for example, why people were celebrating in 2014 when only women won… the Hugos? Or was it the Nebulas? I just remember reading somewhere that everyone was celebrating the fact that nothing but women won. I was confused by this. If gender shouldn’t be a big deal, then why the celebration of the gender and not the works themselves? You can argue that it was a celebration of their work, but whenever people commented, it seemed to be more about what gender they were.
I don’t care about politics or gender when it comes to enjoying books. I’ll pick up an N. K. Jemisin book just as fast as a Larry Correia one. Paulk? Scalzi? I read them all. You get my money if I enjoy your books. You can call it a simple-minded approach. I’m perfectly okay with that. Books have been (and always will be) an escape from dreary, day-to-day life for me. When you grow up in group homes and that’s the only way you can get away from everything, you take it.
As for past posts on my blog, I still feel the same way about defending Uncle Timmy. That personal attack on him was unjust, and getting him dis-invited ranked (in my opinion) up there with the entire Elizabeth Moon/WisCon thingy. Read what I wrote about him. Read all of it. Tim is crass, but he’s an extremely nice guy who tries to help anyone and everyone who needs it. I doubt I’d be this far along as an author if it hadn’t been for him inviting me to the convention. He helped get my foot in the door with other publishers by simply inviting me to attend as a pro.
I’ll reiterate: I’m not going to go to everyone’s website and demand that they apologize. I view File 770 as sort of a cross between the the cantina at Mos Eisley and the UN, a place where people from varying sides can meet and try to work things out. As I said before, I wasn’t going to
It’s amazing how your views on things change when you get older. Opinions change. They’re supposed to. While people are digging through my old posts (I think they go back 7 years or so, I don’t know) looking for things I said that you can use in an argument (wordpress tracks that stuff for me), remember that everyone’s views can change. I mean, isn’t the idea of a discussion/argument to try to get someone to see your side of it and not to scream blindly into the face of another?
“Opinions change. They’re supposed to”
Your post on uncle tim is from last year, not seven years ago. And you just said your opinion hasn’t changed. So what is your damn point?
I don’t understand, for example, why people were celebrating in 2014 when only women won… the Hugos? Or was it the Nebulas? I just remember reading somewhere that everyone was celebrating the fact that nothing but women won. I was confused by this. If gender shouldn’t be a big deal, then why the celebration of the gender and not the works themselves?
Awards have been biased against women for decades. This is not a point that can be really questioned. It has been documented time and again. The celebration was that when given a fair shake fiction by women won. Gender is a “big deal” because of the history of how gender is treated, and how gender is treated now (why don’t you try submitting your fiction to publishers under a female name to see how much bias there still is against female authors). It was a recognition that where there was once extreme bias, there was hope that perhaps in the near future that bias could be put in the rear view mirror.
So what is your damn point?
That he’s willing to stand by and defend a man with a documented history of publishing racist things, but you shouldn’t criticize him for that because of reasons.
Charles Stross, John Chu, Aidan Moher. Definitely only women that year.
Charles Stross, John Chu, Aidan Moher. Definitely only women that year.
Women swept the Nebulas in 2014.
@Jason, I think you’re referring to the 2014 Nebula’s, and if you can’t tell why people would note that a historically under-represented group (within the genre awards) making such an achievement would be news….well, I don’t think you ever will.
Er, right. Way to go, Jason, forgetting to finish an entire paragraph. Moron.
(continued)
I wasn’t going to come here and pick a fight. I still am not here to pick a fight. Mike’s been a rather kind host and I appreciate it, and it would be extremely rude to piss all over his welcome. We obviously have differing opinions of the matter at hand, but I’m hear to also try and listen to your grievances as well as share a few of my own. It’s the only way to reconcile all of this.
Snowcrash
I think you missed what I said about being “new to fandom”. Until 2006 I’d never even heard of the Hugo awards. I look at authors I like to read, and most of them are women. So no, I never saw any sort of underrepresentation in the genre, because it seemed that female authors were the ones getting most of my money.
Well, good luck to you all. I need to go finish a book before my publisher murders me.
So no, I never saw any sort of underrepresentation in the genre, because it seemed that female authors were the ones getting most of my money.
They may have been getting your money, But they were underrepresented in the Hugos.
@Jason – And how would you feel if someone began repeating, as an article of faith, that you didn’t actually like any of those books you read by women, you were just lying about it to get political brownie points? And built a whole platform on the back of that?
Good luck with the book, anyway.
lurkertype on September 2, 2015 at 11:33 pm said:
I did that once. It was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever tasted (and I’ve eaten natto. more than once). I was at a Mexican restaurant/bar having lunch with some colleagues, ordered a beer that I’d never had before (an African beer, if I remember correctly), tasted it, and said,
“Bleah! This beer tastes like it has no hops in it!“I then looked at the ingredients list on the label, and discovered that I was right. I don’t care for heavily-hopped beers, which is why I generally avoid IPAs, but the total lack of hops made this one incredibly unbalanced and flat-tasting.I don’t want to dogpile…
The sad puppies complaint last year was that an unrepresentative minority were controlling the awards, voting for stuff they didn’t even like because it had the right political message. And what was the response? They encouraged people – explicitly for the Rabids, implicitly for the Sads – to vote for a set of works that had the right political message. And by doing so, an unrepresentative minority controlled the nomination phase of the awards.
Of course, since they were a minority, they couldn’t control the second phase of the awards, and people reacted against what happened in the nomination phase by voting for No Award a lot.
The thing is, that is – or can be – in the past. New Worldcon next year, new nominations, new finalists. Nobody has to be defined by who they voted for in 2015, or whether they were put on a slate. The question is, in 2016, are people going to do the same thing again? Are we going to have a political campaign for awards, with a minority of voters trying to game the system? If we do, other people will react to them in 2016 as they did in 2015. Or are we going to have people talking about their favourite books (films, related works…) and voting for their favourites. If we do, it doesn’t matter if those favourite books are by Scalzi or Moon or Correia or Leckie.
I was wondering if the recent Puppy-leaning visitors might like to opine on what they think worthy for the retro-Hugos next year. From what Jason Cordova says, though, it may not really be his cup of tea.
Perhaps L. Jagi Lamplighter might have some thoughts?
Regarding the art awards: I believe that in fact ‘non-professional’ was added to the clause after Monroe’s nomination, so at the time it was not strictly ruled out by the constitution. One might reasonably think that, when two awards are offered, one pro and one fan, ‘fan’ should be taken to imply ‘non-professional’; but it was not said in so many words.
There is a general puzzle about just what ‘fan’ means in the WSFS constitution, which affects Fan Writer as well. If you just look at the definition, it lets in all sorts of people who are presumably not what those who drew up the rule had in mind; anyone whose work appears in semiprozines (e.g. John Clute, or Ursula K. LeGuin); anyone whose work appears in publicly accessible electronic media (e.g everyone at Tor.com). I haven’t been able to find a copy of the WSFS constitution early enough to confirm this, but I suspect that in origin both clauses simply said ‘appears in fanzines’; this was then expanded to cover other modes of publication, but you can’t really distinguish fan from professional work by mode of publication any more .
Hypnotosov: Wraith can be like that. We’re taking advantage of the passage of time to clear up a lot of ambiguities and provide a much stronger clear-cut foundation – this is what a wraith’s first few days/weeks/months in the Underworld is like. I get to write up the capital city of Stygia as a default setting, and wow, like everything is going in here, or at least is inspiring: Poul Anderson’s and L. Sprague de Camp’s recreations of past civilizations, the venerable future of Gene Wolfe and the decadent ones of Jack Vance, and on and on. 🙂
One can’t distinguish fanwork from prowork by who did them, either. Pros have won fan awards in the past, and justifiably so. There isn’t a switch that gets thrown when someone makes their first (or fiftieth) professional sale that says “this person is no longer a fan, and can no longer produce fan writing or art”. Fred Pohl, for instance, was a professional writer and editor, and also a fanwriter right up until he died.
The fan categories have fuzzy edges, and people have to make up their own minds about where the borders are.
Well that was another short visit by a puppy who didn’t seem interested in doing much other than restating puppy talking points. The talking points don’t get any more convincing. Maybe it’s my week female mind which can’t follow their superior logic…
@Jason good luck with your book. I know deadlines can be hard to meet. Especially when your upset about other things.
I popped into extended fandom (regional not Worldcon) for a couple years 1998-2001 (?) and came back in 2011 or 2012 (regional mostly). Sometime in 2012 or 2013 I started supporting memberships for Worldcon as a friend was involved in site selection and I was reading Scalzi regularly by then. I think that makes me newer than @Jason.
I’m not sure what “new to fandom” means. I had no problem learning about how things work simply by reading a number of authors and the progress reports members get each year as well as Worldcon.org and Kevin Standlee.
Although I can’t say I’ve ever understood IRV/how votes are counted. My husband and I disagree on the best way to deal with books/people we don’t want to win. I leave them off the ballot. He may or may not still be ranking them under No Award. We’ve both read the same material on how to vote & come to completely different conclusions. He’s good at math while I’m easily intimidated (yeah I know such a stereotypical cliche couple). Please don’t try to help me.
I don’t understand EPH either but from from what I glean I’m for. Again I’ve read all the various stuff on it. My eyes glaze over on stuff like this. I’m still not sure how I passed my statistics class in college. Open book tests and good software had a lot to do with it.
@Jason Cordova:
I’d have more sympathy for this if it didn’t look like Beale was involved in SP3 from early on and if he hadn’t been added to SP2 to piss people off.
Beale’s true nature has been obvious for years.
Some of the work in Julie Dillard’s Kickstarter 2 book has been used by Crossed Genres and Lightspeed I believe. Unfortunately she doesn’t mention in the book which pieces were used by whom. Thanks for the reminder to drool over the book again.
Did a comment of mine really get posted twice? If so the other one’s uneditable.
@Jason Cordova
Keep in mind that when referring to the quality of the “nominees,” in many of the categories we are addressing the work directly, not the author.
Merely deciding your vote based on the quality (or lack thereof) of the nominated works would have been easy enough, even if so many of the creators hadn’t made their qualities as human beings so publicly visible through their online personas.
Why do you expect Irene Gallo’s apology to be any better-written than her over-hasty summation of the Puppies? Be that as it may, it wasn’t a “non-apology” that said “sorry if anyone was offended.” She acknowledged that she hurt people, and apologized to the people she hurt. “Hurt,” not “said things people chose to be offended by.” If you choose to believe her apology was insincere, fine, just STOP MISCHARACTERIZING IT.
Have you posted a comment on Mad Genius Club responding to Kate Paulk characterizing everyone who disagrees with her as equivalent to Nazis?
(Yeah, I don’t know if you’ll be back to read this, and I’m mostly just repeating points others have already brought up, but the whole “recasting-the-apology” bit always ticks me off. Even if lying isn’t proof someone is acting in bad faith, it’s still lying.)
RedWombat said:
Oh dear, I hope not – my glitches are my own, and I don’t expect anyone but my nearest and dearest to adapt to them, and not always even then. Although, if you must, a better argument for the same poking would be “your listeners would love to understand what you’re saying!”
And then that arc came to fruition and all us readers cried too. *hugs*
Thank you so much for saying this. And for being willing to say it again, and again, and again.
(I am also indebted to the commenter who pointed out that all this talk of affirmative-action ticky-boxes seems to have an underlying assumption that the pleasure of seeing yourself reflected in fiction is one that only “default” human beings have the right to expect.)
brightglance on September 3, 2015 at 8:25 am said:
My guess is that on their ballots for Best Related Work, Operation Weserübung und Operation Seelöwe will be duking it out with Fall Gelb.
Tasha Turner on September 3, 2015 at 9:34 am said:
I think it’s less difficult than most people think; it’s just that most people have been conditioned to think of elections as if they were horse races, or they only think about elections with two candidates or a yes/no decision.
Consider a single election, with six candidates. When you look at your ballot, pick the candidate that you want to win, and put a 1 by it. Now look at the ballot and say, “If the only possible candidates were the five that I haven’t yet marked, which one would I want to win?” then put a 2 by it. Repeat this until one of these two things happens:
1. You run out of choices
2. You don’t care anymore; that is, you look at who is left and say, “I don’t care which one of these wins.”
Now you cast your ballot. We take all the ballots, ignore the ones left completely blank (that happens; it’s an abstention), and make stacks based on choice #1. We now have six stacks of ballots, and one of two things happens.
1. Someone has a majority of all the votes that are in one of the stacks, they win. (A majority is any number that is more than half. It’s not 51% or 50%+1; I can explain why seprately.)
2. Nobody has a majority yet.
If #1, you’re finished, and the tallest stack is the winner.
If #2, we’re not finished yet. We look at the stacks, and say, “which one is smallest?” That candidate is now eliminated. We pick up that stack, and start redistributing the ballots among the remaining stacks based on the next-highest choice. If any ballot has no more choices, it’s out of the race and is an abstention — it no longer even counts as a ballot cast for the purpose of determining a majority.
After redistributing the votes, run the test above again. If someone has a majority (not just a bigger stack than anyone else, but a majority, they win. Otherwise, repeat the process of eliminating the smallest stack and redistributing votes until someone wins.
-=-=-=-
If this is too confusing, pretend that you’re in a club meeting trying to elect a new President. There are six candidates. You take a vote by show of hands, and nobody won because nobody got a majority. The least-popular candidate drops out, leaving five candidates, and you take another vote. You keep doing this until eventually someone gets a majority. IRV just automates the process of having to vote over and over again.
I’d say that I’ll say it until I get an answer, but honestly, I’ll feel like I’m whining way before then, and probably give up. I gave up trying to climb glass mountains long, long ago. But glad it’s appreciated!
Jason:
The thing is, you seemed to want to address it by complaining about non-Puppies doing it, ignoring when Puppies do it, pretending there was no connection between the two and refusing flat-out to say the same kind of thing to your Puppy associates that you’re willing to say to non-Puppies.
And you were surprised when that created engagement because you thought people would just take your one-sided “both ‘sides’ do X so one side should stop and the actual aggressors, well, it would be insulting to tell them what I’m telling you” argument as received truth?
@Jason Cordova:
If you want to understand the anti-Puppy backlash on a really basic level, I have a simple experiment for you. Take this statement you made about this blog:
…and make one slight change:
Because that’s what the Puppies did. They walked into a big gala, insulted the host, and pissed all over the carpet while shit-talking the other people who were there for the party.
Imagine a group of people showing up at LibertyCon next year wearing “BAEN SUCKS” shirts – how welcome do you think they’d be? How about if they went around telling everyone they could find that none of the guests deserved to be there, because obviously a Seekrit Baenling Cabal had selected them to fit a far-right agenda, and nobody really likes their work? Do you think these people would have a good time at the convention, or would they feel more like rejected pariahs? (Bonus question: How long would it take you to say “BUT ERIC FLINT!” to “disprove” the far-right allegation?)
Do I need to tell you which substitutions to make in that paragraph, or can you figure them out on your own?
Cally: Oh yes, certainly you can’t distinguish fan and pro work by who writes it. What, six of the last eight winners have been pros? And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if next year’s winner was as well.
I probably wasn’t clear enough about what LeGuin and Clute were doing in my example. LeGuin writes fiction in semiprozines; Clute is a professional critic whose professional criticism is published in a semiprozine. (With the change in the rules for Semiprozine, a lot of them are now mainly fiction magazines, so lots of fiction writers would qualify under the rule, strictly construed.) I don’t think these are the kinds of case to which the rule is meant to apply (and I don’t think anyone actually reads it that way).
So: at one time fan writing could be defined simply by milieu, but now it can’t; so how should it be defined? Presumably ‘fan’ implies ‘not professional’ (as regards the writing, not the writer), but what does that mean? The rules for art say that professional work is that which appears in a professional publication – and that isn’t just one where money changes hands, but one which provides more than a quarter of someone’s income. Should that be the rule for writing as well?
But ‘fan’ also implies that it should have something to do with SFF. In the olden days, its being in a fanzine would establish that, no matter what the writing was about; but now that test won’t work. I have seen people raising questions about whether some nominees were sufficiently concerned with SFF to count as fan writers.
I’d be happy to go with ‘voters decide’ – voters get to decide whether something is SF, and whether a work is related, so why not whether something is fannish? But people do keep raising questions about whether things are fannish or not, and the lack of any clear definition in the rules means it’s hard to answer.