(1) As noted by Patrick on Making Light, the Guardian has an editorial about the sudden turnaround in British public opinion regarding the need to help Syrian refugees, “a shift clearly caused by the heartrending photographs of young Aylan Kurdi’s drowned body washed up on a Turkish beach.” More commentary about the main topic in his post, but here’s the reason someone sent me the link —
Likewise, I’m as small-minded and focused on the local as anybody else. Normally the displacement of millions of innocent Syrians tends to weigh on me as merely one of a seemingly endless series of humanitarian crises for which there is never enough attention or care. But put one particular namecheck into a Guardian editorial and you have my undivided attention:
[I]t is also an astonishingly vivid demonstration of the inadequacy of statistics to move our moral sentiments compared with the power of pictures, and still more of pictures that bring to life stories, to affect us in ways that reasoning never could. As the critic Teresa Nielsen Hayden observed, “Story is a force of nature.” One single death and a refugee family have moved a nation to whom 200,000 deaths and 11 million refugees had remained for years merely a statistic, and not a very interesting one at that.
That was…unexpected.
(2) The impression I get from Larry Correia’s “MHI Challenge Coin Update” is that today – the 5th – is the last day to order Monster Hunter International challenge coins. Unlike another famous Puppy, he probably has only one 5th in his deck.
Monster Hunter International challenge coin
(3) Steve Davidson ends his new opinion piece about SP4 on Amazing Stories on a satirical note:
But until the event is scheduled, we’ve still got Sad Puppies IV to deal with, because the problem is, as spokesperson for that effort, Kate Paulk’s words do not match her stated intent.
I’ll shortly be announcing the creation of the One True SF/F Award Run by Real Fans for Real Reasons, which will be presented at a soon-to-be-announced convention, the One True SF/F Genre Convention Run by Real Fans for Real Reasons. Which no doubt will be quickly shortened to SFFGCRBRFFRRCon, just as the awards themselves (a silver flying saucer base, above which will be mounted a symbol for science fiction, fantasy or horror that will be crowd-sourced and unique every year) will soon be known as the SFFGCRBRFFRRies.
Everyone attending the convention will receive a ribbon to attach to their ID badge. That ribbon will state that the wearer is a REAL FAN for REAL REASONS. Additional ribbons, containing short, pithy summations of REASONS can be appended to the RFRR ribbons for those who wish greater specificity. Summations such as: “I’m clueless about fandom but it must be doing something wrong because I am not the center of attention”, “Money is the root of all evil, I earn so much I must be Evil”, “The message in my message fiction is that message fiction sucks” and “Someone on the internet told me that someone on the internet is doing it wrong”. For a fee, personal REASON ribbons will be made on site.
(4) Patrick May – “Sad Puppies 4: A Slate By Any Other Name”
Recommendations will be collected on the Sadpuppies 4 website, where one page will be dedicated to each category. In February or March, Paulk’s stated goal is to post “a list of the ten or so most popular recommendations in each Hugo category, and a link to the full list in all its glory.” Paulk goes on to say “If you want to see your favorite author receive a nomination and an award, your best bet will be to cast your nomination ballot for one of the works in the top ten or thereabouts of The List.”
And therein lies the problem. Even though SP4 is not positioning their list as a slate and even though the organizers plan to provide a recommendation list with more entries than allowed nominees, the approach of ranking the recommendations and suggesting that people vote for more popular works gives the appearance of attempting to game the Hugo nomination process. As we saw at Sasquan, this raises the ire of a significant percentage of Hugo voters. Yes, some people voted against the works themselves and, yes, some people voted against the Sad Puppies personally, but many voted No Award because slates violate what they see as the spirit of the process. Skewing the voting patterns from anything other than purely individual choices will be interpreted similarly.
(5) We interrupt this Scroll to link “If You Were A Platypus, My Dear – A Play In As Many Acts As Is Required” by RedWombat (Part I and Part II)
Puppies: DO YOU SEE THIS ANTI-RURITANIAN SCREED!? IT WON THE HUGE AWARD!
Commenter D: No, it was only nominated—
Puppies: THIS IS WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE HUGE AWARD!
Troll B: You’re all so racist against Ruritanians.
Commenter B: You’re the one who brought them up in the first place! No one was saying anything about Ruritanians!
Troll B: As an outsider, it’s obvious to me that’s what you were talking about. You should just admit that you all think they’re tax cheats.
Commenters J-Q: …we don’t. No one thinks that. That would be racist.
Troll B: JUST LIKE THAT RACIST PLATYPUS WHO HATES RURITANIANS
FFA: *makes popcorn*
(6) A post on Hackaday admires Sasquan’s Hugo base, made by Matthew Dockery (aka gfish):
A lot of hackers like science fiction. If you aren’t one of them, you might not know that the Hugo is a prestigious science fiction award handed out at the World Science Fiction Convention every year. The statue looks like a rocket ship, but every year the base the rocket ship rests on is different. Kinetic sculptor [gfish] realized the convention would be in Spokane (his hometown and near his current residence) and decided to enter the competition to create the bases. He won, so the 2015 Hugos all have [gfish’s] bases on them and it’s pretty neat that he’s shared the process he used to make them.
And base maker “gfish” takes you step-by-step through the design and manufcaturing process:
The image I had in mind was a kind of spiky, tessellated… something. Rocket blast, maybe, or the central plateau of Washington state, surrounded by mountains. I wanted to leave it ambiguous…
Once I was happy with the design, I needed to find a way to “unfold” it into individual polygons. I had heard of the Japanese papercraft program Pepakura being used by costumers to make armor, so I tried that. It worked — and it even let me test my design in paper first! I’m glad it did, because this let me refine the design in a very fast and cheap way. Things always look different in real life.
I’ve wondered whether people have been shanking themselves on the edges while carrying these Hugos. Flashback: In 1989 Deb Geiser says she cut herself working on a Hugo (mine, as it turned out) and those weren’t sharp at all.
Gfish/Dockery continued a tradition started by Hugo-maker Jack McKnight — missing part of the con to finish working on the awards —
There was a slight panic at the last minute because I sized the holes wrong on one of the nameplates before sending the file to the laser etching service, but that was easily solved with my dad’s drill press. And I missed the masquerade because I was stuck in a hotel room bolting on rockets. But you know what? That was absolutely okay. This is probably the closest I will ever come to winning a Hugo myself, and I loved every minute of it.
(7) Cracked delivers another round of honest movie posters.
(8) Thomas Olde Heuvelt comments on John C. Wright’s “Hugo Controversy Quiz Questions”
What struck me is your answer to question 6. You state: “Do you remember how science fiction began? We write stories about space princesses being rescued by space heroes from space monsters, pirates, and evil robots. Those who attempt to find a deeper meaning or a social crusade in that are ill informed illwishers whose ulterior motives are unfriendly to our genre.” This much boils down to something I’ve read was part of the main argument for Sad Puppies 3 (I believe it was Brad Torgersen who said it, but I may be mistaken): that they wanted stories about tentacles, not social issues. A pledge for more ‘adventure’, to generalize. Which is a fair argument, I think.
Except… your story that got replaced by mine, “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Clause,” is not a story about space monsters or tentacles, it’s a story about a Christmas miracle imposed by God, and fairly evangelical as interpreted by many. (Whether it can be taken as an ‘adventure’ story, is an argument I won’t go into here). I immediately take your word that your intent is not to “indoctrinate the readers into a particular [in this case Christian] worldview” and even “reject that premise with scorn and umbrage”. But I do know that for many who are not Christian (like me), the story *may* read as evangelical and indoctrinating. So, if you didn’t have any agenda and just wanted to tell a good story, the interpretation of indoctrination is purely based on a difference between what is close to you and what is close to non-religious readers. And that, I think, is exactly the same the other way around. I am fairly sure that John Chu didn’t have any political agenda when he wrote a story with gay characters (“The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere”), and I’m a 100% sure that I didn’t have a political agenda when I wrote my first Hugo-nominated story, “The Boy Who Cast No Shadow” (which also happened to feature a gay character). I’ve read many misassumptions that stories like these are always part of some bigger conspiracy to push a social agenda. But that’s nonsense. I don’t have an agenda, except to write what I think are good stories. They may differ from what you think are good stories, and that’s perfectly fine. That’s the real diversity in sciencefiction and fantasy.
Let me state this: people who write different stories than what you know or like, not necessarily have “sad and narrow lives”. You glorify what you know. I glorify what I know. Stephen King glorifies what he knows. Whether it’s God, or a gay tentacle, or an evil clown – as long as they are good stories, who cares?
I am, #inallmodesty, one of the finest people who kicked him out of the Novelette category to begin with.
— Thomas Olde Heuvelt (@Olde_Heuvelt) August 25, 2015
(9) Otherwise, a typical day at the office for John C. Wright – “More of the Same”
I note that Mr George RR Martin calls for a return to civility in the Sad Puppies debate (http://grrm.livejournal.com/440444.html). I welcome the idea and would not be displeased if the Puppykickers were men of such character as to be able to carry through with it. But I applaud the gesture….
They addicts of Social Justice seek forever to be outraged at some nonexistent injustice, so that they can paint themselves as martyrs and crusaders in a righteous cause, but without the inconvenience of suffering martyrdom or the travail of crusade which would accompany any fight against a real injustice.
One sign of Morlockery is to pen a missive asking one’s foes to abandon their arms and surrender in the name of compromise or civility or somesuch hogwash, while offering nothing, nothing whatsoever, in return, not even basic honesty.
Nor is Mr. Martin in a position to offer anything. Like the Sad Puppies, his side is a loose coalition of likeminded but independent members.
If he refrains from incivility, but his allies do not, I gain nothing by forswearing the use of such colorful terms as ‘Morlocks’ or accurate terms as ‘Christ-haters.’ If I wanted to be bland and inaccurate, I would adopt the flaccid language of political correctness.
And, by an entirely expected coincidence, during the same fortnight as Mr. Martin’s call for civility, we find other members of the SocJus movement busily not being civil or honest:
The surrealistic sensation of finding oneself subject to the two-minute hate for things one did not say by eager Witch-hunters (leveling silly, false and negligent accusations apparently in hopes of gaining a reputation for zealotry) is not one I would wish on any unstoical soul. In this week’s episode, we find that I call men bad names not because they betray my trust, ruin my favorite show, and seek to worm their sick doctrines into the minds of impressionable children, but because I do not like women befriending women. Who knew?
https://quoteside.wordpress.com/2015/09/05/the-weekly-round-up-592015/
(10) Philip Sandifer – “Weird Kitties: Best Novel Open Thread”
So far, for my part, I’ve gotten through Seveneves, which I thought a good but not great Neal Stephenson novel, and am about a third of the way through The Vorrh, which is very much the sort of novel you’d expect Alan Moore to call “the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy and ranking amongst the best pieces ever written in that genre.” The latter will almost certainly make my ballot; the former could be knocked off without too much trouble. I’ll probably not get to The Shepherd’s Crown, since I’ve not read a Discworld novel in decades, but may well nominate it just because a Hugo ballot without it would just feel wrong somehow.
(11) The argument against reblogging entire posts:
Famous economist quotes 100 percent of my blog post. That's capitalism, right? http://t.co/o3p2cqRR2P
— Nick Buy My Book Mamatas ??????????????? (@NMamatas) September 5, 2015
[Thanks to Shao Ping, Mark, Steve Davidson and John King Tarpinian for some of these links. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
@Kyra:
That requires a Web site? Who knew?
$ cat /usr/local/bin/rot13
#! /bin/sh
tr ‘a-zA-Z’ ‘n-za-mN-ZA-M’
$
About books, and great books.
Today I was chatting with a young Italian fan who managed to drive the patriarchy in Italian fandom into such a tizz that she ignited a sort of civil war worthy of the mightiest Puppy. (In fact, a lot of the arguments advanced against her had a very Puppy flavour, like “oh you only like Lekie because she’s politically correct.” Sigh.)
Anyway we agreed that one of the everlasting problems of Italian fandom is that it seems to be stuck in 1980 (when you’re lucky, for some it’s 1950). She them asked me, ok, which are the ten indispensible SF titles published in the last ten years?
I utterly failed to find more than two, because to be honest I haven’t read a lot in the last ten years (but I am now again, hurrah, thanks Puppies!).
So, opinions?
Aaargh, Kathodus, I read that one too, what WAS it called?
Was it Armor of Light, by Melissa Scott?
With regard with future aliens reading ROT13, you should switch to ROT39 right away. That’ll throw them off until we can set up the ROT65 system.
I have circumnavigated the temporal universe, and made it back to 362! Aristotle!
(assuming, of course, that this is BC.)
Andrew M: Why do they never complain about ‘Wakulla Springs’? It was much more blatantly not-SF than the the dinosaur story, and also more explicitly social-justicey.
I think the explanation is quite simple, really. They don’t see themselves portrayed in “Wakulla Springs”. But they do see themselves, or their friends, or their relatives, portrayed in “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love”.
How many Puppies agree with JCW’s sentiment about axe handles and tire irons? How many of them agree with VD’s racist comments? Probably quite a few of them, based on the things they’ve said, and things said by people they vehemently support. IYWADML puts that sort of ugly bigotry out on display in the main shop window with a big sign that says “THESE PEOPLE ARE TERRIBLE”.
(Actually, it says “These people did a terrible thing” — but the Puppies are the sort of people who are generally unable to distinguish between someone saying that a person’s behavior is terrible from saying that the person is terrible.)
IYWADML, I think, hits entirely too close to home for most of them. It holds up a mirror reflecting an image that they’d really rather not be forced to see. And that is why that story makes them so very, very angry.
@Daniela: Marlowe, irrelevant? The true Elizabethan blank-verse beast, irrelevant? Shurely shome mishtake!
OK, we here in the year 8787 have a higher regard for Marlowe than GBS did, we will undoubtedly get round to resurrecting him in the wetware nano-vats just as soon as we can stop them churning out copies of Natalie Portman. (No, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.)
Best to gloss over, I think, the idea that Marlowe faked his own death and then went on to write the plays of Shakespeare while working undercover as an agent for Walsingham. (And that’s not even the silliest “who wrote Shakespeare” theory I’ve heard.)
I’ve started reading The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu. I’m about 120 pages in and really liking it so far. Intriguing setting, and I like the idea of a fantasy world drawing on something other than medieval Europe.
I was apprehensive going in because it seemed like so many people here said they couldn’t get into it; I’ve actually been waiting for it go downhill!
So I’m wondering, of the folks here who bounced off it, how far in were you when you bounced? Just trying to get an idea if my experience is actually different or if the story is going to hit a wall at some future point.
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan: which are the ten indispensible SF titles published in the last ten years?
Of course, everyone’s opinion on this will vary. It will also vary based on what, exactly, “indispensible” means: great big adventures? books destined to become SFF literary classics?
A quick “must-read” based on my own preferences
Ancillary Justice
Leviathan Wakes
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Anathem
Eifelheim
Spin
Kage Baker’s Company series
@Cmm:
I gave up after three or five pages. No longer sure which. So you’re well past my Great Filter.
It’s 1397 here. The Idirans still think they have a chance against the Culture. Meanwhile, Richard II arrests members of the Lords Appellant.
I’m about to start making supper so this won’t be the most organized. Or neatly formatted. And reflect a lot of my opinions.
Karl Schroeder’s Virga series (5 books)
Hannu Rajaniemi’s Quantum Thief series (3 books)
Ramez Naam’s Nexus series
Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence
And that’s it as I start making spaghetti putanesca.
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan:
You asked a question I have been thinking about, so I shall (apologies) puppyback on your query. I have taught many university courses in SF/F over the years (currently teaching my Tolkien class), but I have not taught my “Modern SF” course (which starts with the first volume of the SF Hall of Fame anthology) in the last 15, so I am curious which 2 books later than, say, William Gibson’s early novels (Neuromancer/Count Zero) one would regard as essential to understanding where SF has gone subsequent to cyberpunk. Thoughts, anyone?
@Camestros
While smiling and crossing his fingers behind his back no doubt.
Jane_Dark Said:
Thanks Jane. I appreciate the insight.
> “… which are the ten indispensible SF titles published in the last ten years?”
Oh dear god um …
Defining that as published in 2005 or later, science fiction only and not fantasy, of the ones I’ve read I’ll go with, um, deciding quickly and probably forgetting a lot …
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
Shades of Grey, Jasper Fforde
God’s War, Kameron Hurley
Ancillary Justice, Anne Leckie
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
1Q84, Haruki Murakami
Anathem, Neil Stephenson
Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer
Farthing, Jo Walton
Uglies, Scott Westerfeld
@Ana Feruglio dal Dan:
The Chaplain’s War, Brad Torgersen
Monster Hunter International, Larry Correia
The Architect of Aeons, John C. Wright
Ghost Story, Jim Butcher
The Dark Between the Stars, Kevin J. Anderson
Witchfinder, Sarah A. Hoyt
Impaler, Kate Paulk
A Throne of Bones, Vox Day
Cuttlefish, Dave Freer
and the most important, surely…
Take the Star Road, Peter Grant
In all seriousness, I consider Jenna Katerin Moran’s Jack O’Lantern Girl indispensable, though it is too-little known.
@Cmm
If I recall correctly from when I asked about it, all the people who didn’t like it didn’t like it from the get go. The prevailing opinion among them was that the style didn’t appeal to them. If you still like it after getting a way in, you’re probably safe. 🙂
Oh, crap, I really need to get The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness on there. Put that one on and take off, um …
Um …
Um …
Shades of Grey?
Indispensible titles of the last 10 years?
tough, because I think it takes 10 years really to start to answer such questions.
Among Others by Jo Walton, maybe, because it is such a book about the love of reading and discovery?
I’m sure a lot of people searching for that title were occassionally somewhat confused by the results :-D.
So, how about titles published between 1995 and 2005 then? Let’s have some perspective.
No, leave Shades of Grey on and take off 1Q84!
No, leave 1Q84 on and take off Anathem!
No, leave Anathem on and take off AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH
@JJ
I think you have it to T. The Dinosaur story threatens them because it’s behavior they dream of doing if they could ever get away with it.
Ugh, that’s hard!
Ten years….urrrgh.
Post-Neuromancer is a little easier, because I can pull out Perdido Street Station and flail about with it, and babble about the New Weird as a follow-up to cyberpunk. And–damn, Always Coming Home pre-dates Count Zero, so there goes that theory.
I’d say Tad William’s Otherland books are an interesting and worthy relation to cyberpunk, in the “two roads diverged in a yellow wood and I took the one without all the chrome on it” sense.
Ancillary Justice, definitely. And I will stick to Perdido, if we’re actually doing 1995-2005! Curse of Chalion. (I hope we’re not going strict SF, no fantasy, or this gets hard.) Oh, hey, The Diamond Age is ’95!
@Vasha
Are you thinking of the Praxitilla fragment that goes something like: (after Adonis arrives in Hades he says) “The loveliest thing I left behind? The light of the sun and secondly the stars and the shining moon, but also cucumbers and pears.”
I love this, and it feels very modern to me. I also love it because we only have it thanks to some encyclopedist quoting it to explain where the saying “as silly as Praxitilla’s Adonis” comes from.
Which ties neatly into all our talk of the value of critical judgments.
I think this is the right thread… Someone asked if Armor of Light by Melissa Scott might be the academic/mystery about Christopher Marlowe’s murder. It’s not. Armor of Light, by Melissa Scott & Lisa Barnett, is an alternate history fantasy in which Sir Philip Sydney didn’t die when he did, and was therefore alive to prevent the murder of Marlowe. Oh, and magic works exactly the way the Elizabethans thought it did.
I loved that book. But here in 7016, even the NESFA Press edition, which I edited, is hard to find.
Oh, well, if we’re including fantasy, my ten indispensable fantasy novels from 2005 on would be the following ten … er, fifteen books:
The Blade Itself, Joe Abercrombie
Life After Life, Kate Atkinson
Ironside, Holly Black
Graceling, Kristin Cashore
Coraline, Neil Gaiman
Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone
Hild, Nicola Griffith
Cuckoo Song, Frances Hardinge
Seraphina, Rachel Hartman
To Ride A Rathorn, P. C. Hodgell
Let the Right One In, John Ajvide Lindqvist
The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J. K. Rowling
The Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson
In the Night Garden, Catherynne M. Valente
Meredith, about Ken Liu’s Grace of Kings:
Oh good, because I like the style. It is sort of fairy tale like.
And, putting the F and SF lists together and taking the top 10, my indispensable SFF from 2005 on would be:
Life After Life, Kate Atkinson
Ironside, Holly Black
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone
Cuckoo Song, Frances Hardinge
Seraphina, Rachel Hartman
Ancillary Justice, Anne Leckie
The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J. K. Rowling
In the Night Garden, Catherynne M. Valente
Fifteen out of the 10 best books. We need to coin a word for that and make it some kind of standard metric when we’re doing recommendations here.
Mike Glyer on September 6, 2015 at 6:09 pm said:
Hmmm…
Sesquidecimate?
Pentadecatheterize?
Alas, this puzzle remains yet unsolved in the glorious year 8224.
I finished Uprooted. I can see why so many people like it. Unfortunately it didn’t work for me. Not sure what I’m going to read next.
My TBR list has several thousand books on it so I’ll probably surf the kindle for “most appealing cover” or “comfort author”. Take a break from Hugo reading so it doesn’t start feeling like work.
“Do you remember how science fiction began? We write stories about space princesses being rescued by space heroes from space monsters, pirates, and evil robots. Those who attempt to find a deeper meaning or a social crusade in that are ill informed illwishers whose ulterior motives are unfriendly to our genre.”
So apparently “science fiction” is defined, loosely speaking, as the books in the school library with rockets on the spines.
I wonder why Moon’s Legend of Paksenarrion books (5 volumes, one story) don’t get any more attention. In my mind it’s a stunningly realized fantasy epic, with a compelling story and particulary compelling characters. Just the amount of research she had to do to pull it off makes my head hurt.
(oh, all done between 2010 and 2014, which is why they came to mind right now given the current discussion.)
Fifteen out of the ten best… is that like the fourth book in a trilogy?
(Looks meaningfully at Douglass Adams. And the band Rush, actually. Fourth item in a trilogy.)
> “Looks meaningfully at Douglas Adams.”
I propose that any books which are recommended in excess of the number allowed be called “Hitchhikers”. (E.g., “Here’s my top five post-apocalypic science fantasy novels featuring mimes. Plus two hitchhikers.”)
Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little: Even better, because then you reach the fifth book over the limit.
@rochrist She’s working on another Vatta book, so if you like the spacy side of her writing…
@Mike Glyer and the second fifth book?
@Jim Henley: Thanks for pointing me to Kimberly Unger’s “Sea Change”. It’s great, a deceptively quiet seaside story in a broken-down society in transition to who knows what (“Our perfect colony has become a perfect experiment in how to start over.”) from the peculiar point-of-view of a bioengineered Defender which is, itself, adapting constantly.
Made me want to go back and re-read some of Elisabeth Vonarburg’s stories about the post- or inhuman lives of engineered beings (collected in La maison au bord de la mer or, in translation, Slow Engines of Time).
@Vasha: Glad you liked it! I concur on all points. I tweeted my appreciation to both Unger and Trent over the weekend, figuring writers would be glad to know they’d connected with an audience.
Mike Glyer on September 6, 2015 at 6:09 pm said:
A ‘Kyra’.
So apparently “science fiction” is defined, loosely speaking, as the books in the school library with rockets on the spines.
That’s how I always looked for mine.
@CK Charles: That line is going in my personal anthology noe.
@Vasha Me too. When I was 9.
A LongShortList ?
@Vasha and Jim Henley,
I read “Sea Change” today and found it lovely. An oddly personal and touching story from a very unique point of view. There are lots of hints about the greater setting, but Maryanne doesn’t care about that. It’s one of those stories that leaves me curious about what happens next, but at the same time satisfied with how it ended.
@Dawn Incognito: Yup! I’m impressed that GE had two stories of that caliber in a single issue. I do think it was an editing mistake to bury the standouts halfway down the table of contents. If I were being less systematic in my magazine reading I’d never have gotten to them.
Onieros: Wow, “The Cellar Dweller” is SOMETHING. The flow of the language and the internal rhymes are really exquisite. And some of the sentences made me screech to a halt and catch my breath.
“Sea Change” was very nice. (And it’s about a good and loyal doggie!) How many words is it, that I may know what category? Solid work and real suspense. Just enough world-building.
I couldn’t articulate why about “Hic Sunt Monstra” didn’t do it for me, but Jamoche nailed it. What s/he said, plus it was kind of… Funznlyna-rfdhr. Once you get past the “Jung n GJVFG!” naq hcba er-ernqvat, vg xvaqn snyyf syng. And my suspension of disbelief fails at the same place as Vasha’s. It just struck me as “Gung’f vg? Jung n purnc gevpx. Tee.” Don’t think it would stand the test of time, even short-term. And we’re really not impressed by this kind of thing here in 3778; it’s been done.
(Just once I might like to visit another year NOT in mid-afternoon; OTOH if our time machine dial is stuck, 2:41pm is probably the least dangerous. You don’t get to see the nightlife, but on the other hand, predators don’t eat you in places without artificial lighting.)
“Wakulla” I thought was a beautiful piece of writing but not really SFnal. Perhaps the Pups hated it less than IYWADML because they’re willing to admit racism existed and was bad (safely in the past, of course) but not that gay-bashing exists and is bad right now? We know that one of the head Pups thinks gay-bashing is A-OK, and they all seem to be homophobic to greater or lesser degrees.
Oh, poopweasels. American Gods ought to be in there. And The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, which I think often gets overlooked in Pratchettiana, but stands on its own. And…crap, Night Watch is in that time range, and Night Watch hurts in all the best ways.
And The Wood Wife is 1996 which is in our range and I will FIGHT YOU for the right of The Wood Wife to be considered great.
Vurt is out of range but if anybody’s talking cyberpunk, Vurt is worth mentioning.