(1) Digg has the best space images from the month of August. They are beauties.
As we tediously while away our days down here on Earth, satellites are zooming through space, snapping incredible pictures of Earth, the solar system and outer space. Here are the highlights from August.
(2) Answer just 4 questions, and the William Shakespeare’s Star Wars Sonnet Generator will create a unique 14-line love sonnet just for you!
What Is Lovely As A Summer Slate
Based on the William Shakespeare Star Wars series by Ian Doescher
When sorely press’d by Sith-like enemy,
I think on thee, and soon have no regret.
My heart is lock’d, yet thou dost hold the key,
Our lives are join’d in lovers’ sweet duet.
Let us unto Naboo, its shores of green,
There meet the call of passion at our best.
If thou wert droid, I’d love thee, though machine
If thou would claim mine heart, I’ll not protest.
Love, like a lightsaber, one’s heart can slay,
Love is the new-grown fruit sprung from the heart,
Love plunges one headlong into the fray,
Love is the canvas, passion is the art.
Let rivals come, who chase me at the rear,
Thou hast e’er been my solace, dear.
(3) Radio Times learned nothing from Christopher Eccleston about Doctor Who in a recent interview.
When asked if he’d been watching his successor Peter Capaldi onscreen recently, Christopher Eccleston replied in the negative – in a pretty big way.
“I never watched Doctor Who when I was a child,” he retorted. “I never watched MYSELF as Doctor Who!”
(4) Pat Cadigan on Facebook
After recent events in which Bryan Thomas Schmidt did a solid for both me and everyone else working on MACII, I’ve had some thoughts:
Whatever else happens on social media, on websites, in review columns, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I want a kinder, gentler worldcon.
Worldon is our annual gathering of the clans, not a field of combat. We go there to enjoy ourselves and to be among friends. For a few days, we get to hang out on Planet Science Fiction/Fantasy.
Worldcon is *not* a battlefield.
This is not to say that those with opposing perspectives can’t have a meaningful, even spirited dialog. But there’s a big difference between a heated discussion between people who feel strongly about their respective positions and gladiatorial combat in the Colisseum for the lurid amusement of people who didn’t even bother to show up and in fact never intended to.
I don’t care what your point of view is; I don’t even care if you don’t like *me*––you’re welcome at MACII and I will do nothing to make you feel like you aren’t. But worldcon isn’t a passive, static thing like a department store. Worldcon is interactive (worldcon was interactive before it was fashionable)––what you get out of if, for the most part, is what you put into it. If you go to the panels, check out the dealers’ room and the art show, meet some writers or artists or other pros at kaffeeklatsches, literary beers, or signings, go to the bid parties, and make a little effort to meet new people, you’ll have a great time…
(5) Can you tell this book by the cover?
https://twitter.com/andrhia/status/639482703772024832
(6) Tom Knighton gives his “Thoughts on Sad Puppies 4”.
For most people, the idea of tens of thousands voting for the Hugos should make you giddy. For us, it has added benefits of rendering any small group influence on the awards non-existent. No, our favorites may not win, but you know what? That’s life. What we want to see win is the stuff the actual fan–the people that [George R.R.] Martin may dismiss but who buy books by the truckload–actually reads.
While Martin doesn’t think it will add to the prestige of the award, more fans voting on them will do one thing from my perspective. We’ll start to see some books win that actually look interesting and then deliver on the inside. With the exception of Three Body Problem (which I haven’t read yet, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt), that hasn’t been the default position of the Hugos in some time.
(7) Spacefaring Kitten on Spacefaring, Extradimensional Happy Kittens – “My first (seven) reactions to the surprise announcement of Sad Puppies 4”
4 reasons to pet the Puppies:
- Tone
The Puppy organizers Kate Paulk, Sarah A. Hoyt and Amanda S. Green have written things that I consider stupid, hateful and obnoxious, but the Sad Puppies 4 announcement was phrased very un-obnoxiously. Civility is a nice thing.
- It’s not a slate, really
Listing more works than one can nominate for the Hugos and stating up front that one should read the stuff before suggesting it are good and play down the slate aspect.
- No more shady correct taste comissars
With Sad Puppies 3, Brad Torgersen had a somewhat similar nominee suggestion phase (that had humorously few participants). After that, though, he ditched most of the stuff people had suggested and went on with the things that were written by his chums. There will be no more of that, it seems.
- Focus on MOAR
The Puppy trio has promised to focus on participation instead of ideological screeds. It remains to be seen if that is a promise they are able to keep.
(8) Barry Deutsch – “Don’t Be Fooled – Kate Paulk’s Kinder, Gentler Sad Puppy Slate Is Still A Slate”
For instance, in 2012 (before the puppies), 611 Hugo voters turned in ballots for short stories. The most popular short story, E. Lily Yu’s amazing The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees, was listed on only 72 of those 611 ballots (about 12%). At least 60% of those 611 ballots didn’t vote for any of the top five nominated stories.
And that’s fine. That’s how the Hugo nominations are designed to work. 611 Hugo voters, acting as individuals, each nominate whatever short stories they think are award-worthy. From that list of hundreds of short stories, the five most-nominated make it to the final ballot.
Unfortunately, it’s an easy system to game, as the Puppies have proven. If you can form a voting bloc of just 100 people who will nominate an agreed-upon list, instead of voting as individuals, that’s enough to completely overwhelm the much larger number of Hugo voters who are voting as individuals. 100 people voting for just 5 works will beat out 500 people voting from among hundreds of works.
(9) Philip Sandifer – “Weird Kitties: An Organized Anti-Slate For The 2016 Hugos”
The good news is that there are five thousand of us, united, if nothing else, by the facts that 1) We voted in the Hugos, and 2) We are not Puppies of any stripe. We are not a campaign. We are not a political movement. We are not playing some elaborate game of four-dimensional chess in order to topple Christendom. Indeed we, in the sense of “me and everyone reading this,” are not even all five thousand voters. But nevertheless, we are a bunch of fans defined by the simple fact that we’re eligible to nominate things for Hugos next year, and we’re not Vox Day’s pack of rabid dogs.
One of the most helpful things, then, would be if all five thousand of us nominated, and if we nominated a full ballot. Among us, we’ve got 25,000 open slots on our ballots in every category with which to push a work over the slate-busting threshold of 541. That’s doable, but it’s also hard. A lot of us, myself included, don’t identify five eligible Hugo-worthy items in every category in a normal year’s reading. In many categories, a lot of us don’t identify one. We don’t all have writing Winds of Winter to be distracted from, after all. And we could use some help.
So I’m creating Weird Kitties for exactly that. It’s going to be an ongoing conversation about awesome science fiction and fantasy that’s come out and is coming out in 2015, conducted for people who want to fill in their Hugo ballots with things they love.
(10) Camestros Felapton – “How big should the Hugo Awards”
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.
(11) John C. Wright – “Hugo Controversy Quiz Questions”
Theodore Beale, who writes under the pen name Vox Day, joined us as an ally, but disagreed with the goals. He thought the award could not be salvaged and restored to its former glory; indeed, the only thing that could be done would be to force the politically-correctness faction (which he calls by the mocking title Social Justice Warriors, at one time their own name for themselves) to reveal their true purposes. His plan was to make it clear to any honest onlooker that the awards were being given out not based on merit, but due to politics. For this reason, he promoted his own slate of suggested works for his fans to read and vote upon, called the Rabid Puppies.
The Social Justice Warriors did in fact react precisely as Mr Beale predicted, and after the Sad Puppies unexpectedly swept several categories in the nominations, the SJWs used their superior numbers to vote NO AWARD into that category rather than give the award to whichever work was most worthy among the candidates.
This was done purely and openly for political reasons. The mask is torn. No honest onlooker can doubt the motive of the Social Justice Warriors at this point, or ponder whether the claims made by the Sad Puppies were true or false.
(12) Sarah Mirk of Bitch Media interviews Ann Vandermeer in “’Sisters of the Revolution’ Collects Powerful Feminist Sci-Fi”
I was wondering what you think of the “puppies” pushback to the Awards and what that reveal.
Well I have to say I was really excited at the people that won. The best novel category, I was very, very excited about that, because I know both the writer and the translator, so that was—I mean the way that I look at the outcome of the entire awards ceremony is it was showing you that science fiction is bigger than just the United States and the U.K. That’s how I felt. The science fiction community is definitely making that outreach into the wider world. When you think about the Hugos, what you’re looking at is a popularity contest in a sense because the awards are going to be voted on by the people that buy the memberships. It’s plain and simple. It’s not a juried award, there’s no judge, it’s just who’s voting and how they’re voting. So it’s just by the numbers. When you look at it that way, the thing that was really exciting to me is that this past year they had more than double the average number of people voting than they’ve had in the past. I think they had close to 6,000 people who voted.
Did more people turn out to vote because they’d heard about the controversy over the awards?
Well, I think people were getting more involved in the discussion. If you take a look at the numbers, and you look at the number of people who are actually members of World Con, every single person who signs up for a membership, whether it’s supporting or attending, can vote. So, typically, only half of the people that have memberships, vote. Only half. It’s kind of like when you take a look at our Presidential elections, what’s the percentage of people that vote? Not everybody. But we had so many people that actually voted. Now, here’s the good thing about that. It’s not true for every voter, I’m not naïve, but a lot of voters went in and read the stories, which to me is amazing. So a lot of those stories got a larger audience than they ever would.
(13) Didact’s Reach – “So what now, Hugo?”
The detailed statistics behind the awards results showed very clearly that the voters at WorldCon and Sasquan were perfectly willing to undermine the legitimacy of their own award process in order to keep out those that they don’t like. LTC Tom Kratman, John C. Wright, Steve Rsaza, a number of Baen authors, and Toni Weisskopf herself, were all denied awards that they richly deserved and should have won for their respective categories.
Yet, instead of even bothering to consider the alternatives, five different categories were given “No Award”. The Hugo and Nebula Awards were, essentially, reduced to a farce. And all because politics overruled etiquette, courtesy, wisdom, and good judgement.
The SJWs who currently control the nomination and award process have made it perfectly clear that they intend to amend the (already incomprehensible) rules for next year’s ballot in order to prevent a similar uprising from happening again. Good luck with that; I have every reason to think that the Sad Puppies leaders for next year, Amanda Green, Kate Paulk, and Sarah A. Hoyt, will simply adapt, react, and overcome in order to get works by actual skilled authors that fans actually might want to read up for nominations.
(14) Jed Hartman on Lorem Ipsum – “Why I love the Hugos”
I acknowledge that the system is contentious and complicated and initially confusing, and I’m sad that people feel excluded, because I want everyone who’s interested to feel like they can be part of it. In general, I feel like bringing more people into the process means that the awards are more valid, because they’re less likely to represent the views of only a few people.
And there’s a whole lot of room for expansion. Even though I agree that the financial barrier to entry is high, that’s certainly not the only issue, because every year a large percentage of the Worldcon members who are eligible to vote don’t do so. So it’s great that the nominating and voting numbers have been going up and up in recent years, but there are still a lot of people who could vote but don’t, and a lot of other people who want to but can’t.
But even so. Despite all of the system’s flaws; despite my eye-rolling when an MC yet again does the “I’m going to make this ceremony last as long as possible” schtick; despite occasional bad behavior on the part of an MC or a presenter or a nominee; despite my personal disappointment that the magazine I edited for twelve years hasn’t yet won one (I’ve wanted a Hugo since I was a kid); despite the sometimes-contentious arguing about what should be nominated and what should win; despite my dubiousness about making nominees sit there tensely waiting to find out whether they’ve won, and about the basic idea of declaring one particular work or person to be the “best” of the year; despite everything—the Hugos are important to me.
And I especially love the Hugo ceremony itself, in all its disparate parts. The pause to honor the people in our field who’ve died over the past year, as their names scroll by on the screen. The awards honoring contributions to fandom, like the Big Heart award. The occasional very entertaining MCs. The beautiful designs for the Hugo award base. The passing-along of the Campbell tiara. The delight of most of the winners. The sometimes gracious and sometimes funny and sometimes overwhelmed acceptance speeches. The rush to analyze the stats afterward. The whole thing, flaws and all. It’s one of my favorite things about Worldcon, which is (despite its flaws) one of my favorite conventions.
(15) Robert Bevan on Caverns and Creatures – “Hugo Loss (Sad Puppies Can Eat a Dick.)”
- What do the Sad Puppies see as the problem?
SJW, the all-too-often abbreviated form of the “Social Justice Warrior”. It’s most often used as a lazy means for bigots to dismiss opinions which differ from whatever they were told by their daddy/preacher/grand wizard.
Having said that, I will admit to being annoyed by people I perceive as SJWs (in the derogatory sense) as well. In fact, they were an entry in my Reviewers Who Can Eat a Dick post right up until the final edit. I ended up removing that entry because I felt it made me sound like a whiny asshole, and because it’s so hard to differentiate an actual advocate for social justice, which is something that I admire, from an obnoxious loudmouth who’s only interested in scoring sensitivity points by pretending to be offended by innocuous words. (If enough people read this, I’ll get a few comments calling me a misogynist, in spite of the SJW nature of this post, for using the phrase “Cry like little bitches.” in the above entry.)
The puppies’ stated problem was that these SJWs had already compromised the integrity of the Hugos by voting along the lines of authors’ race, gender, sexuality, or politics, rather than based on the quality of the actual books they were voting on. Books with “messages” and meaning were winning out over good old-fashioned fun space romps, like the kind Puppies like to write.
That last sentence is paraphrased from what I read on one of the puppies’ blogs. The implication seemed to be that their books were more deserving of a prestigious award specifically because they were devoid of anything important to say. By that metric, my books should be pulling in Hugos left and right.
(16) Vox Day declares:
John Scalzi can ban all the parodies he likes. The VFM [Vile Faceless Minions] will just publish more bestsellers. Strike one down and two pop right back up to the top of the category within 24 hours.
(17) Scalzi looked over the goods and said…
Jerk: HA THE EBOOK YOU GOT TAKEN DOWN IS BACK WITH A NEW TITLE
Me: (looks; title doesn't falsely accuse me of rape) that's fine.
Jerk: …— John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 3, 2015
(18) Kevin Standlee is working on a proposal to drop some Hugo categories and add others.
I think we’ve reached a point, in small steps, where a significant proportion of the Hugo Award electorate doesn’t know how to actually nominate in at least three categories, and at worst derides those categories because they think they are so complicated or need specialist knowledge that they’ll never have. This is not good for the health of the Hugo Awards. I therefore propose that we should delete three existing categories that people find confusing and unclear and replace them with three new categories that, while not perfectly defined (it’s difficult to define things completely air-tight), are at least more accessible and understandable to the people picking up the ballot or reading the results list.
Categories to Delete
- Best Semiprozine
- Best Editor Long Form
- Best Editor Short Form
Categories to Add
- Best Professional Magazine
- Best Anthology or Collection
- Best Publisher
(19) Andrew Porter writes:
Couldn’t get to Smokane? The smoke made it to the East Coast … by the middle of last week, according to this report. That explains the haze and pollution so many places on the East Coast have been experiencing.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Steven H Silver, Mark, Barry Deutsch and John King Tarpinian for some of these links. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day John Seavey.]
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@bloodstone75: *applause*
Also, scarily, here’s my old personal web site from 1997, back when I was regularly reviewing for SFX and I still had a contract that reverted rights after 6 months:
https://web.archive.org/web/19970330115651/http://www.fehen.demon.co.uk/
@Guess–“ I am a conservative, but not a puppy. I never heard of Galaxy magazine. Most fans are not well schooled in SF history.
Oh, then you’re in for a treat.
Here–
https://archive.org/search.php?query=galaxy+magazine
And you can download them.
Ok, I just finished City of Stairs and mynhead is clangjng, partly with that particular kind of rush you get when you inhale a book in a day, partly with headache.
In light of JCW’s concern, it is a very interesting book in how it approches religion, its different faces, its relationship with history and identity, its wonder and mystery, as well as its complex relationship with colonialism and oppression.
And it does all that by being a thrilling, engrossing, passiinately rollicking story, with exchanges like:
@rcade I believe the recommendation from WSFS is to wait for the Locus list or something similar which has identical category definitions.
They do accept nominations for works even if you put them in the wrong category on your ballot by moving it to the right one (one reason administering is so much work). I don’t know what happens if your ballot is full and there is no space to move the nom to.
Following Harold Osler’s link, I almost immediately came upon this column from the March 1957 issue of Galaxy:
Just in case anyone needed a reminder that this is not a new dispute.
(ETA: Forgot the link. It’s on Page 4 of https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1957-03)
Re: Galaxy magazine.
I have stacks of SF digest magazines dating back to the early 1950s that I bought at a flea market years ago for 10 cents each, including a number of Galaxys. The most impressive single issue in the group is the April 1959 F&SF. Along with Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keys, it has an Asimov (Unto the Fourth Generation), a Dikerson (The Amulet), a McCaffery (The Lady in the Tower), a Poul Anderson (The Martian Crown Jewels), a Frederik Pohl (To See Another Mountain) and even an Anton Checkhov (The Flying Islands.) Not much reason for saying this, other than the bragging…
I also had (these I sought out on Ebay, not a 10 cent fleamarket find) the complete run of a digest called Vortex that was created to host short stories only. It was published for all of two issues in 1953. Out of the 55 stories I recognize only 2 of the names without googling—Jack Vance and Lester del Rey. Most of the stories are pretty bad, filled with clichés and often relying on a twist ending to give them substance, but I still wanted to digitize them. So I cut the spines (hence, the I “had” the issues), scanned and OCRed them and spent an ungodly number of hours spellchecking and formatting them into PDFs that look Pretty Darn Close to how the original copies looked (I even fixed a few typos that were in the original print version.) From a “snapshot into history” point of view they are well worth looking at. Mike’ll probably (understandably) delete the links because of copyright issues, but just in case he lets them stay.:
https://www.sendspace.com/file/vp361w
https://www.sendspace.com/file/ncwifc
Laertes on September 4, 2015 at 12:39 pm said:
Read it quickly or your Kindle may get depressed.
For tomorrow’s roundup perhaps, from Rachael (Dapper at the Hugo’s) Acks:
FAQ: What is SFWA in charge of?***
http://katsudon.net/?p=4413
I found The Doomsday Book sad, but not depressing. I didn’t find Blindsight depressing either, despite warnings that it will make you lose your will to live. I’m starting to think I’m a weirdo.
Also, apropos of nothing, I’ve just noticed that the preview box thinks I’m posting this on September 4, 1871.
@Daniella
Quite a few people seem to think he is from South America, perhaps because Latinos are more common in Hollywood movies than Spanish actors.
Simon Bucher-Jones: I await the book with baited (stet!) breath.
One of the many things Pups refuse to understand: No Award is a nominee.
I’m not feeling “Best Publisher”, but “Best Anthology/Collection”, YES we need that SOONEST. Would vote for it.
Be nice about JC Wrong contradicting himself on didactic stories for the younglings. He could explain it by saying “Very well. I am large, I contain multitudes”, except he can’t because Whitman was gay and that poem is chock-full of SJW-ness.
Lorcan Nagle: Sounds about right. Simplistic 70s-80’s slam-bang kids’ shows are about the level the Pups seem to have stalled at. And what they consider to be the beginnings of and the true nature of SF. They’ve seen Star Trek but didn’t understand it, obviously. Judging the state of books via the standards of TV sounds like another likely Puppy piddle.
So they’re not misogynist, but they talk about “great racks”. And they don’t understand what the words “Latina” or “Hispanic” mean, so they apply them to someone who isn’t. Par for the course. And Aaron summarized it nicely.
(Latino/a: someone who, or their recent ancestry is, from Latin America. Mexico and all points south.
Hispanic: someone who, or recent ancestors are, from countries where Spanish is the majority language.
Portuguese: non-Spanish speaking Europeans. FAIL TWICE.)
Antonio Banderas is Hispanic, but not Latino. (Spain)
Salma Hayak is both Hispanic and Latino. (Mexico)
Ronaldhino is Latino, but not Hispanic. (Brazil)
Miss Puppy Rack 2015 is neither.
So simple even a puppy could understand it if they wanted to!
Is my picture showing up here? Works fine at Scalzi’s. I see it below when I’m typing this. Of course, below also tells me it’s 8104, in which case I’m sorry to report that the 80th century looks exactly the same as the early 21st century.
bloodstone75: wah, la la la-la, la la la LA…
Stevie: I’ve been bloody jealous of your little epistles from parts historical lately, and I hope you’re happy about that. (I don’t think it counts as schadenfreude when it’s someone you like/they like you. Am glad someone is adventuring!)
Re: wordcounts: This is part of the reason I am so very much in support of short-fiction writers putting out award eligibility posts. (The other part simply being that I am prone to forgetting exactly when anything was published…)
This random date generator is pretty cool. (2489)
@kyra: For me, Cuckoo Song is the best Diana Wynne Jones book she never wrote. And I mean that as the highest compliment imaginable. It’s genuinely fantastic (in almost all senses of that word…)
From a couple of commenters:
JCW is fond of decrying how poorly read the “morlocks” are in classic works of the genre, but he seems woefully misinformed here. It is almost as if he has never bothered to do more than read the Cliff’s Notes versions of the books he says he loves.
Although his takeaway from Childhood’s End…good lord, has he even read it?
Maybe his reading comprehension is just really dismal. This is the same man whose blog post today indicates that he’d be an admirer of “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” if only it weren’t so bigoted against Southern Whites, a reading not justified by anything I can find in its extremely short text.
FWIW, my reading of “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” was that they were a bunch of drunken frat-boy types. Which is equally unsupported by the text.
I suppose you are in a parallel timeline, but is it steampunk?
I thought of Vincent Chin, myself. I don’t recall if that’s even vaguely supported by the text in any way as an actual connection, but it was the association my mind made.
re: DWJ/Hardinge: I found Verdigris Deep more DWJish in feel, personally, but they’re both excellent books.
@bloodstone75 on September 4, 2015 at 1:09 pm
Bravo!
(I’m still on kind of an Elton John high after seeing him at Jazzfest.)
Ditto that. Basically, I prefer awards that go to the work rather than a person.
Sometimes when the puppy types try to get specific about what truly constitutes Nutty Nuggets fiction, it seems like they get about as far as Edgar Rice Burroughs, and… you know, stop right there.
I’ve probably mentioned here that giant box of donated books that I plowed my way through as a teenager one summer. It had some great stuff, good stuff, weird stuff, classic stuff. And lots of things like EE Doc Smith, Burroughs, and John Norman that I just couldn’t work up an interest in. Although I did finish the one Sharon Green novel that was in there. I didn’t exactly like it, but I did finish it.
(My favorite of the weird bunch, this relatively forgotten novel Earthchild: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1295204.Earthchild)
Anyway, I was born in 1966, so I’m older than some of the key puppies. I’m also a second generation nerd.
I wonder which one filled up first.
“And they don’t understand what the words “Latina” or “Hispanic” mean, so they apply them to someone who isn’t. Par for the course. ”
Its not that they (or I) don’t understand what you want these to mean, its that we DISAGREE with the meaning you wish to assign them. There is “no controlling legal authority”, to quote Mr. Gore.
Yeah, me neither. Southern Whites don’t drink gin. I think he’s projecting again. In HIS mind, beating the crap out of Those People is something Southern Whites do, so naturally, Rachel MUST be talking about them. It’s nuts, really nuts where they come up with this crap.
Found what I was looking for.
Bat Durston rides again.
https://www.blackgate.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/youll-never-see-it-in-galaxy2.jpg
What a great discovery! Has it always done this and I just didn’t notice?
[I appear to be commenting from the year 3662 – greetings people of the past!]
Shuffles bashfully in:
Clicky
@Mike Glyer
The DoNotLink?
Has anyone ever written a Bat Durston story? Seems a shame to waste an immortal character like that.
Re “Dinosaur” – From Swirsky’s text –
“A T-Rex, even a small one, would never have to stand against five blustering men soaked in gin and malice. A T-Rex would bare its fangs and they would cower. They’d hide beneath the tables instead of knocking them over. They’d grasp each other for comfort instead of seizing the pool cues with which they beat you, calling you a fag, a towel-head, a shemale, a sissy, a spic, every epithet they could think of, regardless of whether it had anything to do with you or not, shouting and shouting as you slid to the floor in the slick of your own blood.”
Ahem. Since we live in a time of dog-whistles, it is hard to avoid concluding exactly what, and who, Swirski is talking about here. Pool cues. fag. Towel-head. sissy. spic. This thing has a message, and its about, partly, the people Swirsky doesn’t like, whom she imagines would behave like this and would speak like this. The thing is off mainly in the gin, which as has often been mentioned does fit well in the social milieu she is drawing here.
The entire thing is a polemic, hate speech really. Its like Nazi propaganda showing pictures of rats.
Maybe the preview year ( for this message apparently September 4, 4128 at 2:41 pm ) isn’t a time machine as such but a culturally diversity machine. The year is flipping between alternate calendar systems for he current year.
@Hypnotosov:
The bad news is, I’m posting to the Internet via telegraph. The good news is, it’s still better access than I have in rural areas on my cellphone in 2015.
@TechGrrl1972: I suspect the chain of, er, reasoning goes something like: Obviously, SJWs like Swirsky think that Southern whites are bigots who beat up anyone who’s different -> by saying that the characters in her story were bigots who beat someone up for being different, she obviously meant to code them as Southern whites -> including such a portrayal of Southern whites in her story shows she’s prejudiced against them. It’s the circle of
logiclife!@Camestros Felapton: I think it’s always 2:41pm on September 4, though. There’s a story in here somewhere.
I’m trying to write a cowboy story at the moment with a robot in it – who is called Durston. It will be called “Showdown at Polk’s Tavern”. Also it won’t be very good – which I maintain is deliberate and a victory condition.
@Mike Glyer
Found what I was looking for.
You, sir, are no Bono.
@Buwaya: I don’t like the story – I’m in the weird position of Rachel Swirsky having thanked me on Twitter for this* – but your characterization, “The entire thing is a polemic, hate speech really. Its like Nazi propaganda showing pictures of rats.” is LOLworthy. You were much more entertaining early in your tenure.
* Specifically, Swirsky thanked me for disliking it while saying it wan’t evidence of a conspiracy to destroy science fiction and hadn’t ruined the Hugos forever etc., and offered to suggest stories of hers I might enjoy instead. Nice lady.
It’s my understanding that the fact that “race” is a social construct means that all schemes of racial categorisation are equally valid — or equally invalid, if you prefer. You can’t actually point to a definitive source as the “right” definition of what constitutes a race and what doesn’t, because there is no such beast. If somebody wants to make up a race that includes most Hispanics and Latinos, then that’s as valid as a grouping that has me and a bloke from Caucasia and not the Turkish guy who runs my local kebab shop. Or as invalid.
Wow – September 4, 4257 – and it gives the time as 2:41 pm compared with a real time here of 23:07 (I know there’s an eight-hour difference between here and File770 time, but we seem to have drifted another 26 minutes apart).
So the comment timer seems to be moving rapidly into the future.
SpaceWesterns.Com found one from Asimov’s in 1978:
http://www.spacewesterns.com/articles/1/
@TooManyJens
@TechGrrl1972: I suspect the chain of, er, reasoning goes something like: SJWs like Swirsky think that Southern whites are bigots who beat up anyone who’s different -> by saying that the characters in her story were bigots who beat someone up for being different, she obviously meant to code them as Southern whites -> including such a portrayal of Southern whites in her story shows she’s prejudiced against them.
My head hurts now.
Thankfully, our old friend buwaya has popped up to supply an example of exactly the kind of projection you’re describing here.
@Kyra So … I guess that means Cuckoo Song is eligible!
Some other stuff (one of which I nominated last year) which is also eligible this year (in a similar manner) are
The Gospel Of Loki – Joanne Harris
Lagoon – Nnedi Okorafor
Astra – Naomi Foyle
The Child-Eater – Rachel Pollack
There are probably more as well. I hope I’ve just made your choice of what to nominate harder and not easier …
I know in the past I have always been lax about checking extended eligibility. I consider and nominate in the UK publication year. When it comes round to subsequent years the title doesn’t automatically register as being eligible as I had read it so long ago.
I think you’ve successfully decoded it. The Puppies are imagining that the attackers must be working class men from the US South and hence Swirksy is attacking those people but the stereotype is with the Puppies rather than Swirsky. I guess it would be fair to say that Swirsky does not overtly undermine a potential stereotype about where such kinds of violence comes from (i.e. that is not exclusively from people of lower socioeconomic status) but tht is a whole other matter.
[This message brought to you from Camestros Felapton on September 4, 4434 at 2:41 pm according to Preview. I think it might be the local timezone messing with the head of the preview box]
Yep.
\http://www.spacewesterns.com/articles/1/
In Asimov’s, September/October 1978.
(and this comment comes from 4585. Still 2:41pm, though)
ETA: beaten to the draw by rcade.
> “The Child-Eater – Rachel Pollack”
RACHEL POLLACK HAD A NEW BOOK OUT?!
When did this happen where is this it isn’t even on her wikipedia page one minute I have to go out and scour the internet until I find out more …
Cool – always the same date but always a different year and people can exchange messages to each other…
Apologies if my typing seems slower it is now the year 4880. Hundreds of years have passed since my last message.
More specifically, I think, it’s that the Puppies have a stereotype in their head, not of who beats people up, but of what “SJWs” think about who beats people up. Which they then use as evidence to back up their accusation, because Aristotle.
(5046!)
“our old friend buwaya”
Why thank you !
I appreciate such warm sentiments.
There has been a certain coolness in the past, but I am happy to hear we are becoming friends.
“the characters in her story were bigots who beat someone up for being different”
The dog-whistle, of course, is about the sort of people she imagines doing this for the reasons she says. The signal (the whistle) is to the like minded. She knows who she means, wink wink nudge nudge, say no more.
You say that even after we found the guns of America yesterday?
buwaya, what would I do without you around to illustrate precisely the logical fallacy I’ve been trying to describe?
The entire thing is a polemic, hate speech really.
Hate speech against what group? Please be specific, since you say “it is hard to avoid concluding exactly what, and who, Swirski is talking about here”.
Meredith: That would be right.