Pixel Scroll 9/2 Split-Level Headcheese

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(1) Pat Cadigan is still making cancer her bitch.

I didn’t plan to travel as much as I did this year, it just happened that way. And I’m not done yet. I have at least one trip, possibly two left before I put the suitcase away till next year.

It’s been very good for me, physically as well as mentally. In May, I visited Copenhagen for the first time. In June, I took a road-trip from Virginia to a college reunion in Massachusetts. In July, I spent most of a week at a festival in Spain. And in mid-August, I went to Spokane, WA for Sasquan, the world sf convention. The difference in my physical condition now compared to the same time last year is virtually miraculous. I could walk reasonable distances without collapsing. On Saturday night, I went to the Hugo Losers Party––the one given by original co-founder George RR Martin––and didn’t go to bed till four a.m. Then I was up at 9-ish to meet a friend for breakfast.

Last year at this time, I was pretty feeble. This year, I’m hopping around like an ingenue. I appear to be well, so much so that you’d never guess I had terminal cancer. A lot of people didn’t know––they thought I was in remission. It was no fun to correct them. I hated making them feel bad. Seriously; I remember what it was like to be in their shoes. I have a lot more experience being them than being terminal.

I’ve been saying that more often in the last few weeks: terminal cancer; I’m terminal; treatment is palliative. There’s about a year and four months left of my oncologist’s original two-year estimate. Where did the time go?

(2) Little White Lies – “Video Artifacts No. 4 – Andrew Ainsworth”

You may not know the name, but Andrew Ainsworth is the creator of one of the most iconic images of the 20th century – the original Star Wars Stormtrooper helmet. Working out of his shop situated on the quaint, leafy Twickenham Green, Ainsworth began his career in the ’70s as a prop maker for films and has since become one of the leading exponents of products made via plastic moulding techniques.

 

(3) Here’s a headline I missed: James Potter — Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley’s son — started Hogwarts on September 1.

(4) Tremendous examples of trompe l’oeil posted by George R.R. Martin – all the work of John Pugh, “master of the art style called ‘narrative illusionism.’”

(5) Summer’s almost over, which means it’s time for Doctor Who fans to start counting down until “The Doctor and River Song Reunite For A Spectacular Christmas”…

Alex Kingston returns to Cardiff to reclaim her role as Professor River Song for the highly anticipated 2015 Doctor Who Christmas special, part of BBC One’s essential seasonal viewing.

It’s Christmas Day in the future and the TARDIS is parked on a snowy village street, covered in icicles, awaiting its next adventure. Time traveller River Song meets her husband’s new incarnation, in the form of Peter Capaldi, for the first time this Christmas.

Day one of filming the eleventh Doctor Who Christmas special starts this week and is written by Lead Writer and Executive Producer, Steven Moffat, produced by Nikki Wilson and directed by Douglas Mackinnon (Doctor Who, Sherlock).

River Song made her first Doctor Who appearance in 2008 in ‘Silence in the Library’ and ‘Forest of the Dead’ and has appeared in 15 episodes to date.

Award winning Alex Kingston comments on her reappearance, “To be honest, I did not know whether River would ever return to the show, but here she is, back with the Doctor for the Christmas special. Steven Moffat is on glittering form, giving us an episode filled with humour and surprise guest castings. I met Peter for the first time at Monday’s read through, we had a laugh, and I am now excited and ready to start filming with him and the Doctor Who team. Christmas in September? Why not!”

Steven Moffat, Lead Writer and Executive Producer, adds, “Another Christmas, another special for Doctor Who – and what could be more special than the return of Alex Kingston as Professor River Song? The last time the Doctor saw her she was a ghost. The first time he met her, she died. So how can he be seeing her again? As ever, with the most complicated relationship in the universe, it’s a matter of time…”

(6) Ken Marable drops his name in the hat as another fan who would like to host the go-to Hugo recommendation site. Details are at 2016 Hugo Recommendation Season.

I am trying to encourage the community to take part in a “Hugo Recommendation Season” from November to February. Basically to both create as much conversation as possible about the works themselves, and to give each category its fair spotlight, I’m hoping to have a Focus Week on each category. During each week, fans would post their recommendations (on their blogs, Facebook, whatever) saying what works they love, and most importantly, why. (There are a lot of recommendation *lists*, I want more – I want to know *why* it is recommended.)

….I am hoping to get as many fans as possible to participate including Sad Puppies, non-Puppies, new members, and long-time fans like you. In fact, my ideal would be to have some of the old guard introduce each category, possibly explaining why it came into existence, things to consider, etc. (e.g. suggestions on how fans can look for a Best Editor; just what is and why do we have a semiprozine; venerable past winners; surprising past winners, etc.). Sure it’s all a Google search away, but it would be nice to have a single, short reference to accompany the recommendations. However, I would be pleased if fans just participated in each Focus Week and talked about works and people they think are award worthy in each category.

(7) David Gerrold has something going too – see Facebook

Here’s a secret cabal for the rest of us. THE SECRET CABAL OF FANNISH FANS [SCOFF]. Anyone can join. Anyone can recommend. There are no slates, just people sharing the books they enjoyed.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/407010419502085/

(8) Edouard Briere Allard has posted “A Critical Review of Laura J. Mixon’s Essay”, which is as voluminous and heavily annotated as the work it attacks:

This is only my interpretation, but Mixon appears saddened that BS was not kicked out of SFF and that BS has instead decided to become a better person and keep writing in SFF (although to be clear, BS had already made that decision in 2013, possibly even some time in 2012). Mixon later tells us: “trust can’t precede the cessation of abuse. Forgiveness can’t come at the expense of basic fairness. Reconciliation can’t precede regret.” This idea that the WoC in front of her might not be guilty of all the crimes she is accused of is impossible for Mixon to believe; just as impossible as believing that she, herself, might be guilty of comparable crimes. This, I think, explains her desire to pursue the matter until she gets her way. It’s a very American way of seeing things.

In the same follow-up post, Mixon says:

Dividing people into camps, branding those who disagree with us (or whose religious beliefs (or lack thereof), skin color, gender, sexual orientation, etc. offend us in some way, for that matter) as The Enemy—as irredeemably evil—and appointing ourselves and our friends as the sole arbiters of Truth, is a destructive practice. No matter who does it. That was why I wrote my report.

Here, if nowhere else, this single paragraph illustrates perfectly why I loathed Mixon’s essay, and her apparent inability to empathise with others and to evaluate her own actions. Mixon, in an essay that begins with decrying the difficulty of getting rid of the “evil” that is BS, says: “branding those who disagree with us […] as The Enemy—as irredeemably evil—and appointing ourselves and our friends as the sole arbiters of Truth, is a destructive practice”. This branding, you’ll recall, the only branding RH as ever done that could conceivably fit into what Mixon is saying here, is calling things or people misogynist, racist, homophobic or colonialist. While there is always ample room to discuss strategy and tactics in the fight against misogyny, racism, homophobia or colonialism, I disagree with Mixon’s sweeping condemnation, and I find her framing deeply hypocritical.

(9) Brandon Kempner on Chaos Horizon – “2015 Hugo Analysis: Category Participation”

[Post includes an assortment of graphs covering several years of history in every category.]

Now 2015: that line is totally inconsistent with the previous 4 years. Previously ignored categories like Editor grabbed an increase of 30 points—there’s your visual representation of how the Puppy kerfuffle drove votes. Thousands of voters voted in categories they would have previously ignored. I imagine this increase is due to both sides of the controversy, as various voters are tying to make their point. Still, 80% participation in a category like Editor, Short or Long Form is highly unusual for the Hugos. Even the Best Novel had a staggering 95% participation rate, up from a prior 4 year average of 87.4%.

 

(10) Harry Connolly, taking off from a recent Eric Flint post, speculates that Hugo voters and readers have these differences — in “oh god am i really going to write about the hugos again”

But here’s my suggestion, tentatively offered: what if the Hugo voters/nominators aren’t the one’s who’ve changed these last few decades? I mean, sure, some folks age out, new folks come in, so they aren’t the same individuals. But what if they’re the same sort of novelty-seeking reader, preferring clever, flattering books to pretty much everything else?

Because that would mean that the bulk of the readership now are the sorts of readers who don’t care about fandom or voting for Awards. Who have maybe sampled a few award-winners and found them not to their taste. They’re the people who came into the genre through Sword of Shannara, because it was the first fantasy to hit the NYTimes list, through STAR WARS and dozens of other action/adventure-with-ray-guns movies that sold millions of tickets, through D&D novels like Dragonlance, or through shoot-em-up video games.

Maybe the award hasn’t changed very much, but the readership now suddenly includes huge masses of people who are looking for Hollywood-style entertainment, with exaggerated movie characterization and a huge third act full of Big Confrontation.

(11) Robert B. Marks in Escapist Magazine – “The Night Science Fiction’s Biggest Awards Burned”

When you take a step back, it’s easy to see the Sad Puppies as the only sympathetic clique of the lot. They bought their memberships and voted for the stories they thought were worthy of recognition, as was their right as members – they’re also the only group who didn’t advocate a response of “if we can’t have it, nobody can!” Of everybody involved in the voting, the Sad Puppies did nothing wrong. In fact, they may be the only clique in this mess who actually honoured the fan-driven spirit of the Hugo Awards. It speaks volumes that when George R.R. Martin asked if he could nominate authors for consideration in next year’s Sad Puppies effort, the answer came back as an unconditional “yes.”

(12) Charles E. Gannon on Whatever in a comment on “Wrapping Up 2015: A Hugo Awards Open Thread”

This is a proven recipe for quickening passionate partisans into aggressive zealots. When advocates forsake their initial behavioral limits, they have started down a path in which their ends have begun to justify means they would not have countenanced earlier. And so they are on their way to becoming radicalized extremists.

We are familiar enough with the early warning signs of this dynamic at work, and which, cast in the taxonomies of our genre, equate to:

increasing numbers of SF & F readers becoming infected with the same virus of polarization now endemic in so many other parts of our culturescape;

name-calling, mockery, and personal invective that becomes so ubiquitous that it no longer stands out as arresting or unusual;

increasingly strident and absolutist rhetoric, often accompanied by a reflex to screen for “correct think vs. wrong think” semantics.

I don’t propose to have any sweeping answer for how to reverse this trend. (That would make me yet another strident advocate, wouldn’t it?). Rather, I perceive the answer to be ultimately personal: a conscience-informed attempt to balance what one intended to convey with how it was received. In short, to temper oneself without muzzling oneself.

My own answer is to keep talking amiably with people from all over the spectrum, regardless of however different (or not) our opinions may be. Consequently, lots of the folks I’ve spoken with over the last six months will not find the content of this post surprising and have expressed sympathy for larger or smaller parts of it. The list includes people such as Larry Correia, David Gerrold, Brad Torgerson, John Scalzi, Rachel Swirsky, and Eric Flint, just to name a few. And if anything strikes me as even more prevalent than the differences of opinion and perception among the dozens of people with whom I’ve chatted, it is the degree to which the “sides” do not understand each other. Which, given America’s contemporary culturescape, is not really surprising.

https://twitter.com/IanRobinson/status/639165546043469824

(14) Solarbird on crime and the foreces of evil – ”on the business meeting, part 2: e pluribus hugo”

E Pluribus Hugo doesn’t know about intentional slates. It doesn’t need to be told, “this is a slate.” Nobody has to make that call, because it doesn’t matter. It’s kind of like a normalisation function applied to nominations. There are no arguments over whether a pattern or voting is intentional or a plot or intent or political – a lot of identical ballots will be normalised to a first-order approximation of their actual popular support, regardless.

That’s why it’s so elegant, and that’s why it’s so genius. It doesn’t lock anybody out; it just stops campaigns from locking everyone else out, dramatically reducing their value vs. their labour and monetary cost, and eliminating the incentive for opposition parties.

For me, that is fair. For me, that is enough.

I hope that, for the honest flank of the Sad Puppies, it will also be enough. One self-identified Sad came up and voiced active support for E Pluribus Hugo during the business meeting. Those who actually believe in the mythical SJW VOTER CABAL – which was emphatically demonstrated not to exist by the events of this year, but stick with me – will know that E Pluribus Hugo would normalise this supposed SJW CABAL slate just as effectively.

Is it sad that we’ve reached a point where this sort of engineering is necessary? Eh, maybe. Probably, even. But it has driven fandom to create what even some opponents at the business meeting called a more perfect nominating system.

Yes, it’s tedious as all hell to do by hand, but it can be done. Yes, it’s more complicated – but not much. It’s only a little different than what we do for final voting and for site selection already.

(15) Allum Bokhari on Breitbart – “The online culture wars have moved out of comments sections and into Amazon’s Kindle Store”.

Online progressives were not so supportive. Alexandra Erin, a sci-fi writer who described Day’s book as “rehashing old slights”, wrote a short parody of the book for Kindle. Entitled “John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular: How SJWs Always Lie About Our Comparative Popularity Levels,” the book makes fun of Day’s alleged fixation with the progressive sci-fi author John Scalzi.

Scalzi himself appeared to be delighted with the parody,  saying he “loved it already.” He used the book in a fundraising drive for a charity promoting diversity at sci-fi conventions, promising to release an audio recording of him reading the book if $2,500 was raised within three days. The target was successfully met, and Scalzi subsequently uploaded an audio recording.

Supporters of Vox Day responded by releasing their own parody book, entitled “John Scalzi Is A Rapist: Why SJWs Always Lie In Bed Waiting For His Gentle Touch; A Pretty, Pretty Girl Dreams of Her Beloved One While Pondering Gender Identity, Social Justice, and Body Dysmorphia.”

The counter-parody was removed by Amazon today following complaints from Scalzi. Prior to its removal, it was the top seller in the “parodies” section of the Kindle store, two places ahead of Erin’s book. Kindle top 100 rankings are calculated on an hourly basis, and surges in popularity for titles usually reflect a short, rapid increase in the number of purchases….

Both parody authors saw genuine returns for their products. The parody books were both under 30 pages long, and are unlikely to have taken much time to write. The fact that they became part of a buying war by two factions in the culture wars shows how animosity can be harnessed for profit.

(16) John Scalzi weighed in throughout the day.

(17) Ken White on Popehat – “Satire vs. Potentially Defamatory Factual Statements: An Illustration”

So. If someone wrote an article saying “Ken White’s legal analysis should be disregarded because dresses up in a rubber suit on the weekend and hunts ponies with a handmade crossbow,” and says it on their trash-talking blog, to an audience that knows them and knows about my blogging here, it’s almost certainly parody, because the relevant audiences would be familiar with our in-joke about responding to spam emails with rants about ponies and would therefore not take it seriously.

The Facts Here

Here the factors point very strongly to the book being treated as parody, and protected by the First Amendment, rather than as a defamatory statement of fact. With all respect to Scalzi, his question is wrong: you can’t analyze the book title in isolation. You have to look at it in the context of the whole. In that context, the intended audience (both fans of Beale and fans of Scalzi) would recognize it as a reference to Beale’s tiresome meme. Plus, the Amazon description explicitly labels it as “a blazingly inventive parody,” and the descriptive text is mostly nonsensical and evocative of ridicule of “SJW” concerns, and references some of the topics that anger Beale’s coterie in connection with Scalzi like the Hugo Awards.

I think this one is protected parody, and I don’t think it’s a very close call.

(18) Vox Day on Vox Popoli – “Why Johnny can’t sue”

I suppose that leaves lobbying Amazon to ban books that make fun of John Scalzi, which I tend to doubt will be a successful strategy. UPDATE: Amazon just pulled down John Scalzi Is A Rapist: Why SJWs Always Lie In Bed Waiting For His Gentle Touch; A Pretty, Pretty Girl Dreams of Her Beloved One While Pondering Gender Identity, Social Justice, and Body Dysmorphia  …

Fascinating, in light of how Is George Bush a War Criminal and Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Paula Deen is a Big Fat Idiot are still available for sale there. I wonder who will be the next target of these dread parodists?

(19) Brad R. Torgersen – “Tyranny of the Safe”

We must not allow ourselves to become a Tyranny of the Safe. You can have intellectual latitude, or you can have intellectual comfort. But you cannot have both. Larry Niven was 110% correct: there are minds which think as well as yours, just differently. Silence the other minds, and you will ultimately find you have silenced yourself. Because any rules you install today, are guaranteed to be abused by your opponents tomorrow. The mob you join in — to metaphorically encircle and burn the homes of the “wrong” people — will encircle and burn your home eventually. Commanded reverence — for an institution, an idea, or a demographic — begets simmering contempt. And the harder you push and punish, the more you use threats and pressure, the more obvious it is that your concepts cannot endure objective criticism.

(20) John C. Wright – “Dantooine is Too Remote”

Look — I hate to get emotional. It is bad for my Vulcan digestion. But the Hugos used to mean something, and now they don’t. A little bit of light and glory have departed the world.

Those who snuffed that light, hating a brightness they could not ignite themselves, must pay.

(21) David Wintheiser on Contrarian Bias – “My Only Hugo Disappointment”

But the big problem with [Guardians of the Galaxy]as Hugo-winner came when I discovered what movie got left off the Hugo nominations list because of the three films from the Puppy slate that got on it: Big Hero 6.

The entire plot of Big Hero 6 revolves around the question of who decides how to make the best use of technology, and for what ends. The ‘superpowers’ exhibited in the film all make use of science presented in the film, and while not all the science is strictly ‘real-world’, it still follows the rules set up in the film itself — for example, the limitations of Hiro Hamada’s big invention become a significant plot point in the defeat of the true ‘villain’ of the piece. And, of course, it was a really good story, well-told. Had Big Hero 6 been in the nominations list, I’d have voted for it myself, and felt it was the most deserving potential winner, but because a bunch of butt-hurt white dudes felt like flooding the Hugo nominations market with their own wishlist, the movie I thought would have been the most deserving 2015 Hugo winner didn’t even get nominated.

That, to me, was the biggest and really only disappointment I had from taking part in the 2015 Hugo Award voting. It may well be something I decide to do more regularly in the future, if only to continue to represent a ‘new mainstream’ in SF where diversity in stories and subjects is celebrated, not lamented.

(22) A Stitch in Time – “The World is not Black and White: Hugo-related ramblings”

So. Knowing what I knew about the author’s campaign against the Hugo, and the Puppies slate, and the things said against him, or implied against him, or actually, mostly, the things he wrote that everyone from the Other Side (TM) thinks about him though they’re not actually true… I was really pleasantly surprised. (Now that I’m writing this, I think that I read most of the accusations allegedly done against Correia in his own writing, where he stated them and then vehemently said that he, of course, was none of that. In a way and tone that very much made me think that there was probably a bit of truth to them.)

I did enjoy the books, but knowing about all the personal and sorta-political background story, it felt a little weird to do so, as the Puppy Thing really irked me. I cannot completely part the writing from the author. That may be a good thing for a person: I’ve supported artists because I like the person for their personal qualities or their way of seeing and approaching life, though do not much care for their actual art, for example. But of course it can also mean that I won’t support someone because of their political or general stance on things, and, more importantly, because of the actions they take in this field.

Without the Hugo Kerfuffle, I would choose the Grimnoir books as an Xmas or birthday present for some friends of mine who I’m sure would enjoy them. But… the world is not black and white, and I will not buy these books on their own, because of the Hugo Kerfuffle and the actions the author has taken.

(23) L. E. Modesitt, Jr. – “The Hugos, or ‘You Just Don’t Understand’”

We have two groups with very different perspectives on what constitutes excellence. Each believes the other is wrong, misguided, or the like. Those on each side can argue quite logically their viewpoint. The problem is that, all too often, people with fixed mindsets believe absolutely and firmly that their understanding of a situation is the only way it can be accurately perceived. It has nothing to do with whether one is liberal or conservative, or any other social outlook. It has to do with a certain firmness of thought, described as “principled” by each of themselves, while describing their opponents as misguided or unprincipled.

In the case of the Hugos, as I see it, and I’ve certainly been criticized for the way I see it, there is some truth in both the cases of the “sad puppies” and the “new traditionalists.” [I have to say that I don’t see much truth or objectivity in the points of the “rabid puppies,” but perhaps my mindset just doesn’t accept what seems to be hateful provocation or use of hate to self-publicize.] And, as I’ve said before, not only do I think the field is big enough for both viewpoints, but the sales of a range of authors prove that rather demonstrably.

Yet each side is contending that the other did something hateful and discriminatory, largely because one side refused to abide by unspoken rules that they believed minimized their concerns. In the end, the other aspect of groups that this conflict illustrates, again, is why unspoken rules tend to be superseded by written procedures in larger groups.

[Thanks to Will R., Vox Day, 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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385 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/2 Split-Level Headcheese”

  1. Most of the comments so far are the usual stuff, but some are pretty far out…

    Interesting. I suppose one should point out that refusing the right to go armed is a violation of 18USC 241, as well as the Second Amendment, so there goes two provisions of the Code almost before it’s fairly published.

    Wait what? And does this also apply to WorldCons held in Europe?

  3. @Jon F. Zeigler: I wonder if the point is to include authors who are not directly linked to the puppies on the slate; so that if people try to do straight-up No Awarding based on the slates (as it appears a number of people did this year), then that may even knock off authors who had nothing to do with the Puppies, and the Puppies can then do even more crowing about the “political cabal” that keeps trying to keep them down.

    At this point, I know that VD is straight up trying to burn down the awards, and I think that even a lot of Sad Puppies are more in this to feed their own victim complex than because they actually think that there is any value in winning (or having their favorite works win) a Hugo Award.

  4. On John C Wright and “Architect of Aeons”
    I have mentioned this before as I was taking an aeon to finish it.
    I’m finally done with it.
    This is not a review so much as a passing impression.
    It is a very mixed piece, as is the whole “Trillion” series.
    Like a lot of Wrights things it has a trillion ideas pushing in and fighting for space, which makes it very disjointed, and this series has the worst faults one will find in Wright. Wright really, truly, badly needs an editor to help with his structure, pacing and continuity. He also has some character and dialogue problems, insisting on a folksy-eccentric tone that smells like the worse parts of Heinlein.

    On the other hand, there is the scope, the invention, the detail, and on occasion the images he comes up with that make the slog worthwhile – at the risk of major spoilers –

    “War?” Montrose remembered wondering why so many of the galaxies
    looked torn and scarred. He felt the fool for not realizing that they were. He imagined a precocious mite living in a cathedral that was being bombed. The whole life of the mite was part of a single second, and to him the picture was frozen. The shattered glass in the window as it fell would be a natural phenomenon, the shrapnel holes in the pews, and the flames burning the roof. He would have no other cathedrals to compare it to, and would simply keep changing his theories until they fit what he saw. When he concluded all roofs naturally burst into flame after a certain point in their roofly evolution, perhaps he would climb the steeple and look outside, and see the other buildings in the neighborhood, see their roofs all blazing. The precocious mite would congratulate himself on his theory, and sit in awe, staring at the natural wonders of the universe, just as Montrose had stared at the exploding stars and smoldering nebulae and colliding galaxies. “

  5. I’ve posted this before, but if the RP are intent on nominating things such as tie-ins, random postings from Dead Elk, sketches by VD and a Farsi dictionary, then their slate is going to be different from the SP’s lists. It also means that the likely SP nominees become more important should RP nominees decline nominations or are ruled ineligible/moved to another category.

    And who knows if things fall apart before the nominating deadline. Maybe the gators will become obsessed with taking down Jimmy Kimmel and spend all their time on that. The horse may yet speak.

  6. Kevin, that’s an easy one.

    If you run the phrase “enough Hugo voters” through the standard Puppy translation device, it comes as: “our slate wins.”

  8. It occurs to me that describing the predominance of No Award as “burning down the Hugos” is rather like blaming the ruination of the party on those who refuse to drink the beturdled punch, when it makes much more sense to blame those who put the turd in the punch bowl in the first place.

    And describing the non/anti-puppies as a “clique” because they all agree that beturdled punch is non-potable… well, if that’s a clique, it’s a big damn clique, so big I’ll never in my life be able to meet every member. Which is sort of contrary to the definition of “clique,” isn’t it?

    —

    While we’re asking people not to emulate SP4’s use of the b—- slur, could we also refrain from using the phrase “make X your b—-“? That particular phrase is the intersection of a lot of awful things (misogyny, toxic masculinity, m/m rape as acceptable dominance maneuver esp. in prison communities) and it always hurts to see it used approvingly.

  9. Wait what?

    Non-laywers are remarkably bad at understanding the law. Gun nut non-lawyers seem to be especially bad at understanding the law. The Second Amendment prevents the passage of a law to infringe upon one’s right to keep and bear arms. There is no right to take weapons to a private event or onto private property. Event organizers and property owners can (and frequently do) exclude weapons from their premises and there is no legal reason they cannot do this.

    In short, that commenter is ignorant and talking out of their ass. Then again, they are a Puppy, so that is to be expected.

  11. Ah — light dawns. Did I get kicked to moderation earlier because I mentioned the woman who is almost but not quite a Cardassian?

  12. A list of ten works per category, ordered by popularity, with explicit encouragement to vote for “the most popular,” is a slate with barely a fig leaf of deniability.

    As well as a handy hint to Vox Day about how to use the Sad slate for his own purposes.

  13. Jon F. Zeigler said:

    “What’s starting to get me regarding the stated approach for Sad Puppies 4 is: why are they bothering?”

    This is what I don’t get either. At this point, it is clear that they do not have and will never get the numbers to get awards to their chosen candidates. Increasing the number of Hugo voters resulted in a resounding defeat for their slate, and there’s no reason to believe that there is ever a set of conditions that will result in their favorites winning…short, obviously, of them finding some favorites that are genuinely good and popular, but if they did that then there wouldn’t be a need for their movement. 🙂

    So at this point, all they’ve got left is spite. Literally, the only reason now to participate in any Puppy effort is the sense of schadenfreude you might feel in knowing that if your favorite author isn’t getting an award, then nobody else’s favorite author is either. It isn’t even a movement based on “hate”, it’s a movement based on small-minded pettiness. Whatever it was in the past, the people participating have to know that this is what it is now.

    Why on earth would you let spite and small-minded pettiness rule you to that degree? I do not get it.

  14. @cmm: “They have a shiny new logo with a 4th puppy, whose name is Robert (joining puppies Isaac, Frank, and Ray).”

    I wish to go on the record as being completely unassociated with and opposed to SP4, RP2, and any other Puppy-related movement…

  16. Afterthought: Has someone Storified the Ryan North In A Hole saga? Because I need that in my life.

    It needs a movie at the very least.

  17. A chancer once there was condemned to die,
    Who told the King, that reprieved for a year,
    He’d teach his horse to talk.
    When asked just why,
    He’d picked a pupil difficult to steer,
    Even with spurs, at adverbs like to baulk?
    He shrugged and said, “Why in a year what may?
    I may die anyway, the King, a lance
    Might perforate in war, the horse on hay,
    Might choke, who can be sure to live another day?,
    And in a year the horse may talk perchance.”
    A year gone by he at the scaffold stood,
    The stallion silent underneath his King,
    The rope stretched taut, sent shivers through the wood,
    The horse remarked, “Why there’s a funny thing.”

  19. Oh come on — we KNOW what the latest iteration of Puppy is:

    SP4 — The Dog in the Manger Campaign

  20. Thanks, Nicole. That is much more direct and likely to reach its intended audience.

    –master of hedges, waffles, and quasi-idiolectal flailings of dubious communicative value

  23. @Brian C

    I wonder if the point is to include authors who are not directly linked to the puppies on the slate…

    Well, that does fit with the stated intention to not ask authors for permission to be included, and to not remove works whose authors object.

    Of course, that would fit most recommendation lists – I don’t plan to ask permission, although I suppose if an author does object to being included on the list I end up with, I will remove them.

    It’s also possible that we’re over-analyzing all of this.

  25. @Kevin Standlee:

    tl;dr: 11,000 nominators is enough as of this year.

    (Do I really believe the calculation that follows? No, it’s crap. I’ve made so many assumptions and taken so many flat-out wrong shortcuts that every line below could be easily demolished. I’d guess it’s not out by more than a factor of 10, however).

    Assumptions:

    1) All nominators know enough about 30 works (in my head: have read 30 novels, as I’m concentrating on that category).
    2) There are 3,000 new works per year (the link gives 4.5k new SFF novels; I’ve cut it down to make the calculation easier).
    3) Two separate nominators need to have knowledge of the same 3 works in order to compare their tastes.

    So, given 100 “perfectly distributed” nominators, they’d have complete knowledge of the field. Given 110 “perfectly distributed” nominators, they’d have complete knowledge, and they’d be able to compare 3 works with their “neighbour”. They’d then be able to say if their tastes matched so they could trust their judgement (or not, so they’d reverse their judgement). I take this to mean that 110 nominators could be treated as 1 “nominator hive” that knew its opinions of the whole field.

    Then, to extrapolate across the population, I’m assuming it would go like an opinion poll: 100 people with knowledge give error bars of the order of 5%, if they’re appropriately random. In this case, “people” matches to “nominator hive”, containing 110 nominators. Hence: 11,000 nominators.

  27. Thanks guys ! The wired article is fine. Im going to post and then log off so as not to get sucked into aany malestrom. Luckily, i have comlicated stats work to do, so i should be able to escape the OCD page refresh tic i can sometimes fall into…. 😉

    And yeah, lets lose bitch. Things like that are pretty hard tho. For instance, I I have a spec needs kid and still keep having to work on the r word being banished from my comments.
    I have to admit, it would be much easier to just use her as a shield. But I do wonder if shes be okay with me referring to her that way ? “Hey T***, time for story time”? Hmmm.

    Maybe thats a good reason not to play the ” I’m not an xxxist, look at my spousekidfriends “; if you wont say it to their face, Just maybe possibly it isnt ok.

  28. Speaking of reviews of Hugo-eligible works, I reviewed Sam Maggs’ “The Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy” at my blog:

    http://fraggmented.blogspot.com/2015/09/review-fangirls-guide-to-galaxy.html

    I believe it would be eligible for Best Related Work.

    Dunno that I’d necessarily put it on my Hugo ballot–it’s fun and informative and has good things to say, but it might not be one of the top five things released this year. But that’s the whole point–I’m not going to make that determination for anyone else. All I can say is that I read it, I liked it, and I think other people should read it too.

  29. So, SP4 is all about MOAR! More voters. More votes. More people…..

    Anyone can post any number of recommendations (obviously not for the same work – one recommendation per person per work), and there is NO political test. The only criteria is that you’ve read it/watched it/seen it and you think it’s one of the best in its Hugo class published in 2015.

    Fortunately we have a few months to think over how to react to SP4 but the temptation, regardless of other considerations, is strong to do exactly what Kate Paulk asks, encourage others to do that same, and perhaps teach her to be careful what she wishes for. Conceivably, once she and her friends have tried to tally a few hundred thousand recommendations, they’ll develop more appreciation for the volunteer effort that has gone into the Hugos over the years.

    Later – most likely somewhere around February or early March, I’ll be posting The List to multiple locations.

    Correct me if I’m wrong but while we don’t yet know when the deadline for 2016 Hugo nominations will be, isn’t it likely to be somewhere around early March again? Doesn’t seem like much time for people to evaluate the 10 things that bubble to the top in each category, unless they happen to have read or otherwise consumed most of them before the list is revealed.

    ETA: which would tend to feed reasonable suspicions that the list is intended primarily as a guide to effective tactical voting rather than as a recommended reading list.

  31. Let me state now, for the record, that I am not the namesake for the new SP.

    The dog is much better looking than I am, for one thing.

  32. @NelC. Thank you for the information. So likely not them (Asymbina) – still, it’s a pretty extreme, believe me and not your lying eyes, so I wonder at it’s provenance. Winterfox’s respectable defenders at least admit that they did something wrong; this kind of anti-Mixon report doesn’t even nod that way.

    @Hypnotosov. They’re almost certainly wrong. Second Amendment enthusiasts and Tea Partyers fancy themselves Constitutional lawyers; the last five years have practically made it a brightline legal rule that the second someone says, loudly, “Well, I just follow the Constitution” you may safely assume they do not know what is in the Constitution, have no knowledge of the relevant jurisprudence. Second Amendment jurisprudence has gotten a little harsh since 2009, but we’re not quite at “the Second Amendment means I can carry the biggest gun I want, where ever I want, and no-one cans say nothing.”

  33. I’m probably in the minority (again), but I find uncommented recommended-anything lists less useful than reviews and discussions–with the obvious exception of bare recommendations offered by very trusted sources. And in those cases, trust arises from the longitudinal experience of matching tastes and/or respect for the observations/reviews of the lister. And as much as I might enjoy the general conversation here or at Making Light, I would not automatically pick up a book mentioned even by by a respected community member without something more than a thumbs-up or star rating. I like reviews. (And not just because I write reviews.) I like conversations. (And a slate is a thumbs-up list compiled by an interest group, and thus doubly ignorable.)

  34. Mike

    As ever, as we sail to Troy, I rely upon you to tell me what’s going on in th rest of the world. Also, I’m really grateful that you do the sorting out, leaving me to worry about Troy 1-9, because Troy 1-9 is quite complicated and Pergamon + Ephesus were not exactly straightforward either; thank you.

  35. @Mark Dennehy: “while a thousand pairs of eyes reading and recommending means I get a good recommended reading list, two thousand gives me a better quality reading list. Three thousand and its better still, and while it’s not a linear thing, more is always better.”

    Thank you for helping me crystallize my objection to the “MOAR PEEPULS” argument. Something about it hasn’t been sitting well with me for a while now, and now I know why.

    It’s the “give the awards to the bestsellers” argument in drag.

    Seriously, what is the New York Times (or any other) bestseller list but a popularity-ranked list of works voted on by the people who care enough about voting to plunk down money? The more people participate, the “truer” that list is.

    I guess SP4 can pack up and go home now. No need to ask people to send them recommendations – just compile the bestseller lists for a few months and post the result. Whatever hits the top is the most popular, so it must be the best, right? Let’s see how that works for movies; I’ve got a 2014 list right here. I’ll have to filter for SFF content, so…

    The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1
    Guardians of the Galaxy
    Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    The LEGO Movie
    The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    Transformers: Age of Extinction
    Maleficent
    X-Men: Days of Future Past
    Big Hero 6
    Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

    Show of hands – who thinks that Transformers movie was better than both Big Hero 6 and Days of Future Past? It sold more tickets, so it must be true, right? Is Suzanne Collins really better than Tolkien? Interstellar and Edge of Tomorrow didn’t even make the cut…

    I don’t care what Joe Average likes. Lots of people “like” stuff for loads of reasons. Hell, how much bigger is the romance market than SFF? Should we all bow to the Wisdom from our Marketplace and abandon our ray guns and rocket ships for the more popular Regencies? The people have spoken!

    No. Tell me what people like me love, and why. That’s what I want from a recommended-reading list. Give me two passionate critics over two thousand average readers every day of the week.

  37. @Russell Letson

    I don’t think you’re in the minority at all, but I’m also not sure that’s really how a comment-free recommendation list works. Such a list is a starting point for seeking out reviews & comments; it’s a convenient starting point from which to perform (possibly brutal) triage.

  38. Stevie: Enjoy your pilgrimage to the literary wellspring of Western Civilization.

    I have stood on what’s left of the topless towers of Ilium myself. Which is actually only the bottom. And if I try and finish that thought I’m only going to get into more trouble.

  39. Jim Henley on September 3, 2015 at 5:17 am said:

    @Robert D. Marks: I’m not 100% behind your police work there. Among other things, to believe VD “won,” I have to believe that he’d have been sad if, say, John C. Wright won two Hugos, Rolf Nelson won the Campbell and he himself won best editor short form. I don’t believe that. Do you believe that? Would VD have been less happy if Castalia House people had walked off with awards?

    VD claims he wanted No Award to win but that he wanted the non-Puppies to make that happen. There are only two bits of evidence I’ve come across that suggest that as well as Public Rabids (people who voted because of what they read on VD’s site) there might be private Rabids who voted along lines consistent with an agenda VD might have but not according to his published preferences.
    1. In the Best Editor Long Form VD had published preference that put Toni W 1st. However 166 people put VD 1st.
    2. In Best Fan Writer in the head-to-head round of No Award versus Mixon, No Award gained 116 preferences from Puppy votes. Some indication of that in Best Novelette as well but a harder category to track.

    So arguably there could be 100ish rabid people who either voted according to super-secret orders or 100ish rabid people who aren’t very good at following a list of preferences or just a 100 Hugo voters who like doing crazy stuff (if so good on ’em)

  40. Rev Bob:

    I’d certainly put the movie made from Collins’ work ahead of Jackson’s final Hobbit flick; The Five Armies had terrible pacing and made several poor choices in its adaptation, while Mockingjay was solidly paced, didn’t overreach itself, and featured a powerfully nuanced (for a blockbuster) performance from Lawrence.

    Mike:

    Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, and burn’t the topless towers of Illium?
    hey, remember when the towers first went topless?

  41. Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little on September 3, 2015 at 10:08 am said:
    Afterthought: Has someone Storified the Ryan North In A Hole saga? Because I need that in my life.

    Oh yes, yes indeed

  42. @Rev.Bob:

    Small problem with your logic though. I said “a thousand pairs of eyes reading and recommending”. The reading comes first. With bestsellers, the reading cannot come first because you must buy the book before reading it (I’m ignoring our widespread book crime problem for now – those masked bandits who keep stealing books and either returning them or returning their RRP in black envelopes are a matter for the police, not fans).

  43. Well, I’m on tenterhooks waiting for Zen Cho’s new Regency fantasy to arrive in the mail, JS&MN is still one of my favorite SFF novels ever, and I’ve never cared about the presence or absence of specific genre “props”… so yeah, no objections from this quarter.

    –Jo/e Average

  44. buwaya

    Reading the excerpt from the Wright piece reminded me of the writer’s adage to “Kill your darlings” — that is, you may be in love with a particular word, turn of phrase, image, metaphor whatever — but if it doesn’t add to the story in any significant way, if it muddles things or throws off the pacing, it needs to go.

    Stephen King definitely emphasizes this rule in his book On Writing (and considering some of the bloat that has made it through his editing and revision process, he must have many, many dead darlings on the floor of his writing room).

    John C. Wright badly needs to learn to kill his darlings. His self-description as a literary writer (one of the finest working today) placed side-by-side with his actual work suggests that he has never even heard this adage, let alone tried hard to apply it. He adores all his darlings and expects us all to do the same.

    That is one big reason why his writing doesn’t work for me at all.

  46. This is what I don’t get either. At this point, it is clear that they do not have and will never get the numbers to get awards to their chosen candidates.

    From my vantage point, what seems to me to be going on is:

    They want to slate the Hugos. They don’t see anything wrong with it — in fact, they think (or claim to think) that others are doing it already, all evidence to the contrary. So when Hugo voters rise up and No Award the crap out of their choices, their reaction is to think, “Okay, you don’t like ‘slates.’ How do we do what we want without calling it a slate?”

    And so they come up with a “non-slate” that nonetheless gives their followers more influence than ordinary voters.

    The thing they’re missing is that Hugo voters don’t like that. It’s not a matter of finding a way to game the rules, it’s not a matter of whether it’s called a slate or not. It’s a matter of whether they’re doing things in a way that gives them an advantage over ordinary Hugo nominators and voters. If they do that, they’ll get slapped down, because that’s what Hugo voters en masse don’t want to see happening.

    The trouble is, that’s exactly what they want to do. So they’re trying to thread their way through technicalities and labels and all that, but at core the point is still to have an outsized advantage. And if it smells like gaming the system, Hugo voters don’t care what it’s called. They’re going to know that’s what’s going on, and they’re going to No Award the results. Maybe not all of them, but enough of them.

    What the Sads want is antithetical to the spirit of the Hugo Awards, and they’re trying to make it palatable by repainting it. But if it’s still antithetical to the spirit of the awards, it’ll get rejected.

    And if it isn’t antithetical to the spirit of the awards, it won’t be what they want to do.

    Viciously insulting the people they’re hoping to win over with the new coat of paint isn’t going to help. Beale and the Rabids aren’t going to help. But the real problem for the Sads is conceptual. They want — somehow, some way — to game the system in the face of voters who don’t want the system gamed.

    And when rebuffed, that only makes them furious at people denying them what they feel they should be entitled to.

    Well. More furious.

  47. Okay, I’ve heard enough. Zen Cho’s latest is now lurking on the Kindle, and has moved to the top of the TBR pile.

    The Sads do seem to have some grasp of the nature of the problems they’re up against. There’s much talk about somehow finding thousands more nominators/voters. Setting aside for the moment the likelihood that these will be found, it does seem to indicate that they’re aware of just how badly they’re presently outnumbered.

    As obvious as this may seem, it wasn’t a fact that they were prepared to confront in those heady between-the-nomination-and-the-Worldcon days when puppies just couldn’t seem to understand that they’d played a trick that magnified their strength.

    Also, in that plea to attend the MidAmericon business meeting, I detect an early hint that they understand that freeping the ratification of EPH is their only hope of preserving slate tactics.

  48. @Mark Dennehy: “Small problem with your logic though. I said “a thousand pairs of eyes reading and recommending”. The reading comes first.”

    You’re still equating popularity with quality, which is the core of the “bestsellers are best” argument. A million people recommending Fifty Shades of Grey because “OMG so hot” carry much less weight with me than a hundred people in the BDSM scene saying “that’s offensively inaccurate and the relationship is horribad abusive” and a dozen critics denouncing the quality of the prose by showing examples.

    The common denominator really is extremely damn low. Multiplying its numbers to give it more weight is a Bad Plan. Many hats will be lost.

  49. Mark Dennehy on September 3, 2015 at 8:25 am said:
    Much as we all love you Kevin, I’m going to go disagree with you there. No amount will ever be enough, even if you got nine billion people nominating (though we might ask to check the math then too). The reason is that the more people nominate, the higher the value of the Hugos to everyone else. So if next year we see three thousand submit nominations, that’s better than this year. And we should strive to see four thousand the next year, or more. And that should never stop.

    And I say that for purely selfish reasons – the Hugos act as a giant mechanical turk of a search engine for me. And while a thousand pairs of eyes reading and recommending means I get a good recommended reading list, two thousand gives me a better quality reading list. Three thousand and its better still, and while it’s not a linear thing, more is always better.

    I have to disagree. We know that quality and popularity have some relation but that they aren’t the same. The bigger the Hugo voting pool gets the more it will tend to popularity. Popularity isn’t particularly useful information because there are plenty of ways of already finding out what is popular.

    We know that the Hugos work well as a non-juried award but we don’t know they will work better with a bigger participation of voters. What the Hugo Awrds should be good at is saying – this is where the field is at with people who pay particular attention to the state of the field in general. Of course making that group of people larger (i.e. people who pay particular attention to the state of the field in general) is good but simply increasing the number of people who vote in the Hugo Awards is not *IF* it reduces the signal from relevant group.

    This, I think, is the one bit of FUD that the Puppies injected successfully into the debate. That because the Hugos is a vote then the Hugos are about democracy. They aren’t and more importantly they CANNOT be – i.e. there is no way for their to be a successful Award based on a popular vote of all people who are in some ways fans of SF/F because
    1. [people who are in some ways fans of SF/F] is a shitty category to define and you’ll never get a sufficient proportion of it to make it possible to say that is unbiased.
    2. If you actually wanted to know what was most liked by [people who are in some ways fans of SF/F] you wanted have a vote you would use market research (which should help indicate how dull that approach would be)
    3. Finding out what [people who are in some ways fans of SF/F] like isn’t that hard. What are commercial publishes pushing? That is what their marker research is telling them their audience wants. How interesting is that? Not very at all.

    What is the ideal number of people to vote on the Hugo Awards? I’d say it should be around whatever the number of people is that feel they can make a reasonable decision on the least popular story category (Novelette? I haven’t checked historically) – i.e. how many people are taking an active interest in SF/F Novelettes published in English in a given year. I don’t know what that number is but those are the interesting people. Why? Because they are people looking at newer writers and people doing interesting things and who are interested in trends etc.

    Note: I don’t want that to sound disparaging about the other categories. I’m restricting my attention to the story categories on the basis of the Hugo Awards (particularly Best Novel) being INTERESTING information that can’t be got from somewhere else/

  50. It seems to me to make sense that nominations should come from people who are quite knowledgeable about the field. Yes, I know you don’t have to read an enormous amount; you don’t have to have read enough to claim you have surveyed the field and found the best things. But you do have to have read enough to find a few things – at least one and preferably more – that stand out. if you know five works in each category that are plausibly Hugo-worthy, you are much more knowledgeable in the field than the average reader. Indeed you are much more knowledgeable in the field than me.

    That, I think, limits the likely number of nominators. There must be lots of people who read, say, two works of SF in the course of a year. Does having their nominations help the process? If it’s just a measure of popularity, it should. If it’s a way of finding good SF, not so much (not because what they are reading isn’t good SF, but because we would already know about it).

    I think some expansion, say to twice the present level, will increase the variety of what gets nominated (which is actually a problem if you are trying to beat slates – and EPH mitigates the problem, but doesn’t make it go away – but is in principle a good thing). But really massive widening, say to a hundred times the present level, which seems to be what some people want, will reduce variety, as many voters who know only bestsellers are drawn in.

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