aka Muttropolis.
Last roundup tomorrow, July 6.
Banner art changes tomorrow.
What the future holds for File 770 arrives tomorrow!
Meanwhile, roundup content today is provided by Lou Antonelli, Joseph Tomaras, Jonathan Crowe, Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag, Mark Ciocco, Lis Carey, Len Schiff, and Bonnie McDaniel. (Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editors of the day Will Reichard and Brad J. Book cover lifted from Will Reichard’s “Wishlist: Soviet Space Dogs”.)
Lou Antonelli on This Way to Texas
“Genrecide” – July 5
The dispute that arose when the Sad Puppy selections did so well in the Hugo nominations has probably created a permanent split of science fiction fans – not one created by the literature, but for social reasons.
Both sides have said such horrible things about each other that I doubt the rift will ever be healed. I wouldn’t be surprised if some semantic distinction arises later – such as the Sad Puppies’ type of fiction being called spec fic as opposed to science fiction.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden and her blog Making Light started the civil war when she realized her chums – the usual suspects – were not getting their Hugo nomination notice emails as usual. She blew up and started the vituperation a week before the actual announcement was made – proving the point, as Larry Corriea was pointed out, that there is an insider clique after all.
Mike Glyer, who’s been running his fan site File 770 since dirt was invented, unfortunately has kept the wildfires burning by collecting up Puppy posts and republishing them on his site. The comments threads there have become the clearing house for all Puppy Kicker resentment.
I don’t believe either side of completely right or completely wrong, but it really doesn’t matter anymore, because regardless of how or who started it, and how it ends, thanks to the internet too much has been said attacking too many people by so many people that there will probably be a long-term drop in readership and popular support.
Perhaps in the future people will say they read magic realism, or space opera, or dystopia, or alternate history – but as a result of the Puppy Wars, no one will actually want to admit they read “science fiction” because of all the negative connotations in the wake of the current unpleasantness.
Joseph Tomaras on A Skinseller’s Workshop
“I Lied: A Few More Words about the Hugos” – July 5
….As more people post their ballots and/or their critical response to the items on the ballot, I have been surprised at how critical judgment on Kary English’s “Totaled” has lined up. People who fault contemporary SF for leaving too little room for ambiguity have criticized it for unclear, unreliable narration in the early sections. (To which I respond: As if a recently revived brain-in-a-jar would be a reliable narrator.) People who have a habit of calling for “good stories” in the whiz-bang mode of military SF have praised the story for its emotional trajectory. It has scrambled the factional lines, and that, I think, suggests a few points in its favor. There is room for dispute over it, and is worth being revisited and debated on aesthetic grounds.
What I think is indisputable, unfortunately, is how thoroughly English herself stumbled over the politics of this year’s hyper-politicized Hugo. She went months after the announcement of the ballots before disavowing both the Sad and Rabid Puppies slates on which she had been placed: Long enough that most of the anti-canine wings of the Hugo electorate had already dismissed her as a fellow traveler, but not long enough to avoid the wrath of the Rabid Majordomo himself. I take this as an object lesson in how the center-right, quasi-depoliticized “common sense” that passes as “moderation” in the U.S. context can succeed, in a global context, only in pissing people off, whether in small matters (e.g. the Hugos) or in big ones (e.g. Guantánamo, drone bombings).
Jonathan Crowe
“Best Saga Proposal Revised” – July 5
So the proposal for a Best Saga Hugo Award (see previous entry) has since been revised: they’ve abandoned getting rid of Best Novelette, which was needlessly zero-sum, and have lowered the minimum word count. The proposal now says 300,000 words; the draft posted to File 770 at more or less the same time says 240,000. A series cannot win more than once, but it can certainly be nominated multiple times (so long as two new installments requalifies it) until it wins — I think of this as the “my favourite series better damn well win this time” provision.
I’m still not a fan: it’s going to be a popularity contest for very popular (if not always good) ongoing series. And any minimum word count is going to be exclusionary. A 240,000-word lower limit would have rendered ineligible the original Foundation trilogy — which won a one-off “Best All-Time Series” Hugo in 1966.
And as far as I can tell the amendment would still allow series to appear on the Best Novel ballot when the final installment is published, like The World of Time did last year.
Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag on Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog
“Hugo Blatherings” – July 5
Still, it means I’m going to be part of Worldcon for at least the next two and a half years. I’ll be voting in two more Hugos after this one. And I’ll be trying to actively look for things to nominate, as well. I’ll be checking out Renay’s Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom and the Hugo Nominees 2016 Wikia regularly once I’ve finished with this year’s packet to look for suggestions to read. I’ve already got a couple of things I plan to nominate, and a few more I haven’t finished reading yet but I think might make my list. I’ll post a few lists of possible nominations as I go, and once the deadline for nominations has passed, I might even post my actual nomination form.
The round-ups at File 770 have slowed down, mostly because there just isn’t that much to talk about the Hugos right now. Everyone is busy going through the packets or have finished voting and are just waiting for the convention. I fully expect another fake outrage to be manufactured soon, but I can’t guess what direction it will come from. I’ve been continuing to read David Gerrold on Facebook… he’s the guy that got me into this whole kerfuffle in the first place. I don’t think I would have cared as much if not for him.
Mark Ciocco on Kaedrin Weblog
“Hugo Awards: Novella” – July 5
The other shorter-than-a-novel-but-longer-than-a-short-story category, these tend to be longer reads, which is a shame because I didn’t particularly care for any of them. It’s also one of the weirder categories in that three of the five nominees are from the same author. Two of the stories are also significantly expanded versions of much shorter stories (which, given my complaints below, would probably have been much better for me). None of the nominees are particularly terrible, per say, I just failed to connect with them, and it makes me wish there was a little more variety here. I don’t want too dwell on this, so let’s just get to it:…
[Comments on all five nominees.]
For the first time this year, I’m actually thinking about deploying No Award on my ballot, if only to get past the ridiculous notion that one author wrote the three best novellas of the year or something. I mean, I guess such a thing is possible, but not with these three stories. That being said, Wright also wrote my clear favorite of the bunch, so I’m not slotting No Award very high.
Lis Carey on Lis Carey’s Library
This is a Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form nominee for the 2015 Hugos. This is not a movie with any deep thoughts in its head. It’s pure, fun, over-the-top adventure, with colorful space battles and explosions…..
Bonnie McDaniel on Red Headed Femme
“The Hugo Project: Campbell Award” – July 5
(Note: This is the latest in an ongoing series of posts reviewing as many of the 2015 Hugo nominees as I can before the July 31 deadline, and explaining why I will or will not vote for them.)
The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer advertises itself, famously, as “not-a-Hugo,” celebrating what the Worldcon community decides is the best new science fiction/fantasy writer of the year. Unfortunately, like so much of the rest of the ballot, this category has been tainted by the shenanigans of the Impacted Canines.
(Forgive me for sounding testy. Several weeks of slogging through godawfully bad stories not worth their weight in puppy piss will do that to you. I mean, if you’re going to behave lawfully-but-unethically and game the awards, can’t you at least nominate something halfway decent? Apparently not, as most of the ballot proves.)
Listed from worst to best….
[Comments on all five nominees.]
Check out @CoraBuhlert's guest column "SFR and the Hugo Awards" in the free @SciFiRomance Quarterly #7 http://t.co/2EEdJ3p2L4 #scifiromance
— ThGalaxyExpress (@ThGalaxyExpress) July 5, 2015
[Nothing to do with Sad Puppies, but an interesting article.]
The Sad Puppies Desaturation Fund To Promote Whiteness In Science Fiction Awards #BadCharitiesToDonateTo
— Len Schiff (@Golem_of_Queens) July 5, 2015
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So I thought Wright’s new book title, scanned quickly, was SOMEWHITER, which is tragically funny, or funnily tragic, depending.
Oh and change is bad, and I yearn already for the days when you could read File770 for square-jawed round-ups, space-laser comments and rocket-shaped filk flying through the intercosmos rescuing star-princess puppy commentary from obscurity. SCHISM!
Let me fix it all with the healing power of Snoopy.
https://youtu.be/Z_Rfjl6tGW4
When I think of the Puppy-ideal story, a very specific anecdote comes to mind, and I wish I remembered it better. Heinlein related an incident where he had told the tale of how he had used a large sheet of butcher paper to work out the solution to an equation, specifically so he’d have the correct answer where the story called for it. Someone had asked him why he hadn’t just used a computer, prompting his response that this was in (specific year… 1964, maybe?) – and Heinlein had not needed to explain further, because the mere mention of the date illustrated that computers were not readily available at the time.
I get the feeling that the story Heinlein was talking about is exactly what the Puppies wish was getting published now, and since they don’t see it, they think suppression must be at work. It’s got everything: Heinlein, high-powered math, and thus by definition rockets, rip-roaring adventure, and a conspicuous absence of Message and Librulz. The nature of the actual story in question is, of course, an irrelevant detail…
Incidentally, since this seems to be Story Time With Unca Bob* – I left out one incident concerning LibertyCon, and I find it relevant now. I had a discussion on the last day with someone whose face I knew but whose name eluded me – an all-too-common occurrence. He took up the pro-Puppy party line as a matter of obvious fact, that “everybody knows” there’s a group of about forty people who controlled Hugo nominations until the Puppies came along. He went on to relate that the Hugo nominees used to be good reading, but of late – I want to say he said over about the last thirty years, but I can’t swear he used that figure – they were all by people he’d never heard of. He said that: people he hadn’t heard of, authors he hadn’t read.
I refrained from rebuttal, partly because I didn’t want to make waves and partly because some of his other friends came in right about that time and the conversation shifted, but my immediate thought was that maybe his reading pool could stand to be a bit wider. After all, authors do eventually become ex-authors, so adding some new blood to one’s lists once in a while just makes sense.
I won’t name him, because his surname is recognizable and I don’t want to pin this account on him that way without him having a chance to respond (and I don’t know how to reach him online), but he’s an older fan that some might even consider a SMOF. He’s certainly been on the con circuit for years. Hearing the Puppy dogma emerge as a statement of fact from him was, to say the least, a bit disillusioning.
* Disclaimer: As an only child, it is not possible for me to literally be an uncle. Yours or anyone else’s. However, on occasion, I can be persuaded to adopt said demeanor. This appears to have been one of those times.
The art style for the new Peanuts film is brilliant. 3D, but they’ve managed to suggest 2D and keep the feel – very impressive. Never seen anything quite like it.
@Rev. Bob
That does sound like an unlikely person to have bought in. What a shame. Also, I don’t think I’m that well-read, but even I’ve read a few of the nominees in the last however many years. I don’t think you judge the quality of an award without having read any of the fiction. It seems very silly to try.
Thanks for the roundups, Mike.
Guess it’s time for me to get back to work on finishing the draft.
I would like to add my thanks to Mike Glyer for doing such careful work and providing an invaluable resource on the SFF community. These roundups, containing long unedited excerpts and links and without editorial comment, have been remarkably illuminating on what has been going on.
@Meredith:
He didn’t say he hadn’t read the nominated books – he was very clear that he meant he hadn’t heard of the authors.
Once I figured out his name, though, things suddenly made a lot more sense. I really can’t say more than that.
Rev. Bob: He went on to relate that the Hugo nominees used to be good reading, but of late – I want to say he said over about the last thirty years, but I can’t swear he used that figure – they were all by people he’d never heard of. He said that: people he hadn’t heard of, authors he hadn’t read.
There have been several Puppies commenting here who’ve said much the same thing. And every time one of them does, I just “look” at them and think, “Do you understand that you’ve just admitted that you’re not well-read enough to opine on the Hugos?”
It’s just bizarre.
@Rev. Bob
But… Why would that mean that the nominations were bad? There are lots of authors I’d never heard of before I read their books or saw they’d been nominated for something. Its a big field. I do not understand his logic.
@Will R.
The graphic novel, ‘Laika’ is amazing. Read it. (and have tissues handy).
Mike, thank you for hosting these roundups. The roundups have been a great way to keep in touch with the thinking on both sides of this kerfuffle. I’ve read the roundups every morning as I drink my coffee and I am going to miss my coffee companions. I will especially miss the filking, the conversations, and the book recommendations… my wallet is thinner and my book request list at the library is longer thanks to all you wonderful posters.
Another dog-whistle perhaps.
@Rev Bob
Really? I bet if you had the Hugos memorised (and who doesn’t) and started with some names he would have found that there were still older writers being nominated, and winning, that he had heard of some of them.
Starting at 2013 – we have Kim Stanley Robinson, Nancy Kress, Pat Cadigan, Lois McMaster Bujold – all came to prominence over 25 years ago. 2012 only GRRM, Geoff Ryman and Mike Resnick. 2011 had Connie Willis, Ian McDonald, Bujold (again), Geoffrey A. Landis, James Patrick Kelly, and Allen Steele – and so on.
OK some of them are not writing the kind of fiction that this person would like, but a lot of them are. In fact look at Allen Steele – I would have thought that he writes just the kind of thing the puppies would love. He has been treated so harshly by the Hugo voting public that he has only 8 nominations and 3 wins since 1996
Certainly it is. You need only marry someone with siblings of their own.
human wave science fiction
http://accordingtohoyt.com/2012/03/21/what-is-human-wave-science-fiction-3/
seems to boil down to “don’t make your readers feel bad”
or, to put it another way, “make Nutty Nuggets that taste like the ones you remember eating when you were 12”
@Peace:
That requires marriage, which is not in my foreseeable future. Closest I get is honorary kinda-uncle to cousins who are young enough to be nephews and nieces. (Such as the grandkids of my mother’s siblings.)
@Meredith:
I don’t want to answer for him, but I got the sense that his thinking was somewhere in the neighborhood of “I go to a lot of cons and meet a lot of fans, this stuff hasn’t hit my radar, so how good could it possibly be?”
Which, if you’re old enough to remember when The Greats were still publishing* and it was possible for a small group or even an individual to keep up with most of the year’s decent SFF output**, is not an incomprehensible viewpoint. It just hasn’t been accurate for at least two or three decades. Word of mouth only goes so far, and I cannot remember a time when an utterly brilliant work was unable to escape my notice.
I’m not saying that’s definitely his perspective, because we didn’t get that far, only that I would find it a plausible one from him. (I’m trying really hard to walk a line between “possible answer” and straw-manning without venturing into the latter.)
* Guilty; I was in my teens when Heinlein died.
** Not guilty; the field’s always been too big for me to keep up with. The person in question is older than me, though, and not by just a couple of years. I know that some of his friends have retired; I do not know if he has.
RE: Human Wave, I’ve seen that on Hoyt’s site for years, long before the rise of the Puppy slates. So that’s something they’ve been interested in for a good long while. Definitely not a dog whistle
Puppygate will kill the science fiction genre? Seriously? Antonelli is really overestimating the number of people interested in science fiction who give a damn about this mess. The vast majority of the readers of the genre couldn’t care less about online kerfuffles between authors and what’s going on with the Hugo and the fandom around it.
Anyway, recently I’ve been making my way through Jonathan Strahan and Rich Horton’s Best of the Year anthologies for stories published in 2014, and there are so many excellent ones, makes me even more annoyed at the Puppies for their slate which got much worse stories nominated..
@Redheadedfemme you would think Lou as a journalist could distinguished between factual data from unfounded belief or maybe Lou is just a journalist in the “Fox News” sense of the word.
Joseph Tomaras whole post has me scratching my head especially his comments on Totaled.
Thanks for the round ups Mike.
I almost forgot anyone know whether Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds is a novel or novella?
I have noticed a weird echo of that kerfuffle of a year or two back, when there seemed to be a generational conflict in fandom and some real hurt feelings.
There seems to be some confusion on the part of a few from the older, more homogeneous side in that controversy, who seem to have conflated the younger, more heterogeneous side of that controversy back then with those the Puppies attack today.
Thus one has the uncomfortable sight of elder pros and fans one highly respects echoing the words of racist bigots and misogynists in, one hopes, a mistaken belief that such people have been assailed by the same people whom they themselves once found obnoxious.
“Human Wave Science Fiction” sounds Marxist to me….
Lou Antonelli’s split in science fiction is unlikely. I say this for two reasons.
1. Based on the recommendations in these threads it is clear that those who are criticizing the Puppies are indeed reading quite a bit of what I’ll call Puppy-Lit. Heinlein and the other old masters have been brought up a lot, as have MilSF works, space opera and high fantasy adventure. Even if the Puppies go off an form their own sub-genre, the works will be recognized as science fiction and I trust they will be given a fair shake.
2. As stated elsewhere in this thread, the Puppies lack the unity to do this. They’re take on science fiction is explicitly political. The Sads are populist-conservatives and the Rabids are a collection of reactionary and extreme right-wing fans. The Sads seem much more focused on Torgersen’s “Nutty Nuggets” fiction. That is to say that they want their vision of romantacized version of traditional Science Fiction. The Rabids seem to be much more about fiction that reinforces their right-wing political views and pushes their agenda.
I really appreciate what you’ve done in having these round-ups, Mike. Once again you demonstrate why you and your ‘zine/blog have been such a consistently strong presence in the field.
I’m disappointed to see you’re planning to end them; I was cherishing hopes of making a round-up one day myself with some of my filk, but life has kept me too busy to record anything properly. Oh well. I have only myself to blame for not acting fast enough I guess.
Alain: I almost forgot anyone know whether Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds is a novel or novella?
It’s a novella.
On Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds.
It is a tad under 40,000 words according to Reynolds himself. So it is a novella.
Ninja’d by JJ – although I used Reynolds’s blog for my source.
Cat: I’m disappointed to see you’re planning to end them; I was cherishing hopes of making a round-up one day myself with some of my filk, but life has kept me too busy to record anything properly. Oh well. I have only myself to blame for not acting fast enough I guess.
Even if Mike ceases doing Hugo-specific posts, I suspect you’ll find that the File770 posts will still include a “roundup” in the comments of the posts, if not the posts themselves.
From what I’ve seen in the Comments the last couple of days, it doesn’t sound as though anyone’s planning on going anywhere; we just may not be having the frenetic 20-page comment sections any more.
TL;DR: Post your filk, whenever you get it done. I’m quite sure that I’m not the only one who wants to see it. 🙂
Can someone explain the Canine meaning of ‘Human Wave’? Battle of the Somme style ‘just swamp them in our corpses’? Not sure that makes sense, but if it’s a Hoytian meme, I’m not sure I’d expect it to.
Tomaras seems to be correct in his assessment of the reactions to English’s actions and statements, insofar as first she upset the ethical people, then she angered the agenda-driven people. I feel sympathy for her impossible position. I can’t help but think of some Greek or Shakespearean style tragedy with an ambitious but not essentially bad person.
NickPheas: Can someone explain the Canine meaning of ‘Human Wave’?
Ray posted the link up above:
What is Human Wave Science Fiction – According To Hoyt
The interesting thing is that, judging by Hoyt’s criteria, most of the Puppy entries are Epic Fails.
@Peace: “I have noticed a weird echo of that kerfuffle of a year or two back, when there seemed to be a generational conflict in fandom and some real hurt feelings.”
If you mean the SFWA Bulletin flap in the summer of 2013, I don’t think the two are unrelated. At least, from where I sit, the sides* seem to match up pretty well. Conservative (trending older) “the way things used ta be” on one side, liberal (trending younger) “respect for minorities” on the other… yeah, I’d say the resemblance is pretty strong. The whole notion that non-white, non-straight, and non-male humans are real people deserving of actual respect and decent representation in SFF seems to align pretty well against the Puppies’ whole “gun porn isn’t a message but gay characters are” creed. Plus, consider the Original Puppy’s early-2014 rant about the evils of Alex Dally MacFarlane’s “Post-binary gender in SF” post at Tor.com (aka “talking about weird gender stuff is message fiction, which is Bad and doesn’t sell”), and…
Well, I don’t think you need to be Rembrandt to connect those dots. I might even go so far as to speculate that not only could the Bulletin flap explain how SP2 came about, but it would also explain pretty neatly why so many people seem to think SFWA’s involved with the Hugos.
* Yeah, I know. Insert standard disclaimer about the not-Puppy “side” here, but the Bulletin thing was definitely a two-sides uproar.
Well, I too will miss the daily round ups, though probably we can all do without me staying up far too late and transforming to the archetypal crotchety five year old, but I’m really looking forward to what comes next for File770.
There is a vast amount of great stuff which I would never have come across without the posters, one and all, just as I have learned a great deal from the excerpts provided by Mike for our delectation. Looking back I see that Mike has actually provided us with the alternative Hugo packet that was essential reading to make some sort of sense of the contents of the Hugo packet dispatched to us by Worldcon.
I’m still with Treebeard on the ‘sides’ issue, and I intend staying with Treebeard; Tolkien’s wisdom on this has been a light in the darkness, though not the light when all else fails. I think it’s generally the case that if you don’t want someone shining a torch on you then perhaps you need to rethink what you are doing; criticising Mike for shining the torch merely reinforces that.
I have not completed my ballot yet; I’m still brooding over some of the choices. The Campbell is hard, and I want to read more before I do the not-a-Hugo vote. Recommendations and analysis will be gratefully received!
@JJ @andyl Thanks. I got the paper edition and given the type and number of pages I thought it might be a novella but wasn’t sure. I highly recommend it and it is my second nomination for the novella category for the 2016 Hugo’s.
Alain: I highly recommend [Slow Bullets] and it is my second nomination for the novella category for the 2016 Hugo’s.
Oh, no, buddy! You don’t get to make a recommendation like that and just leave it there.
Fess up: what’s your first nomination for 2016 Hugo Novella?
Just finished Hoyt’s post about Human Wave sci-fi. It is definitely a populist conservative approach to science fiction. That’s neither a good or a bad thing. What is bad is that Hoyt, and the Puppies in general, insisting that it is the ONLY way to do science fiction. Sometimes humanity loses. Sometimes the morality is ambiguous and doing the right thing doesn’t guarantee victory. Sometimes, we need to admit to ourselves that the wunderkind is responsible for committing genocide.
the title “human wave” seems to derive from
1 – its a reaction against New Wave SF (Hoyt has another post about that), and
2 – human exceptionalism
2 is my inference from ‘don’t write as if humans are a blight, or the future must be dark, and have a positive feeling’. Plus, anti-new wave = back to Campbell = humans are the bestest!
I think the book was Space Cadet (still one of my favorites) and he was trying to work out the proper burn required for an orbital transfer, which worked out to about one throwaway sentence in the middle of the story.
Of course, per the available evidence, in a Puppy story there would’ve been a page-and-a-half discussion explaining how the exact burn duration was determined and how the fuel was fed into the engines. And it quite possibly would have been incorrect.
(Oh, and also, if I remember the story correctly (was it in an essay in Expanded Universe?), both he and Virginia worked out the solution independently, then compared their results to see if they agreed.)
As so often with the canines I find myself wondering what in the world drove them to say that.
The Human Wave manifesto sounds reasonable, if pointlessly limiting. Write what you want, make it interesting would surely achieve as much. If aliens winning is interesting, then that’s fine.
The name though. Human Wave to me says callous leader, sending out ill equipped soldiers against a strong position in the hope that numbers will overwhelm the defenders. It’s not a positive tactic, and honestly doesn’t seem to have anything much to do with what’s being described. Perhaps it means something different in Hoyt’s home time line?
2 – human exceptionalism
That’s told that Michael Coney how to write SF then. What was he thinking? An entire novel* with no humans whatsoever – it is sheer madness I tell you.
* Hello Summer, Goodbye (also published as Rax and Pallahaxi Tide in the US and Canada respectively) for those who are playing along at home. It is a great book and I highly recommend it.
Hoyt should have simply written “Write Campbellian Sci-Fi because it’s super awesome” and saved herself the effort. That’s her whole manifesto boils down to.
If only Hoyt and other Puppies stuck to that.
The puppies will result in everyone worldwide suddenly not talking about “science fiction” ever again?
Er, what? Seriously? Are globes banned wherever he’s living? Does he grok that science fiction is not something that solely exists within one nation’s borders? And that most people don’t know what the hell puppygate is/was and don’t care, they just want to read? And that most people who do know are going to look at puppygate and (sorry folks, but this is fairly accurate) put it down to “yet more craaaaazy americans” and keep reading.
What lots of people *will* be annoyed-to-pissed-off about is the drop in the standard of Hugo nominees that we’ve seen this year as a result. That might well do real damage over time. As in, people not using Hugo lists as buying guides, the commercial value of the Hugo falling as a result, and things getting more difficult as a result of that.
And we’re not talking fans who’ll go find out either, we’re talking casuals who’ll just vote with their feet. It’s not a good thing.
And also: Thanks for all the hard work Mike with the roundups; very much appreciated. I’m half sad to see them end and half interested to see what you’re planning next…
@NickPheas
Oh, that bit in the introduction is reasonable, but then Hoyt contradicts that with her conclusions. It is the difference between saying that “escapism is good”, which she says in the introductory segment of her post, and “escapism and reader enjoyment are the primary/only good” which is what she seems to be saying in the conclusion.
Why would you have a rule like that? What, in their minds the only options are either we’re dominant or we’re rats in the walls, there’s no other possible scenarios?
What the actual I don’t even.
What happened to science fiction being about new ideas and new viewpoints? Who cares if humans aren’t the dominant players in whatever the story is? Some of our best works of fiction in general have had no human characters at all. And how limiting is it to require your story to never ever have any characters in it that are better than humans?
I mean, that means no Alien. No Aliens either. No Terminator series. No Culture universe. Not even a Mote in God’s Eye. What a loss that would be!
Mike, thank you so much for all the effort you put into these roundups. They’ve enriched my life greatly.
My thanks to Mike for providing the roundups (and to the entire commentariat for the endless distractions and recommendations). Clearly the best thing to arise from the Great Hugo Brouhaha of 2015.
I have come away much better informed, and prepared to read more widely, and to seek out new work and to nominate what I like next year.
But I will miss my daily dose of File770.
I think Antonelli blows with the wind. For awhile he was exposed to a lot of anti-puppy sentiment on the internet and was all, “Oh the plane’s been hijacked! We need to get off!” Then he goes to Libertycon and hears a lot of pro-puppy sentiment and when he comes back it’s all, “Oh boo anti-Christian cliques run by Teresa Nielsen Hayden [the devout Catholic but shut up that’s why!].”
I have read, insofar as seeing letters on a computer screen constitutes reading, the Human Wave (what name is that, shouldn’t the name imply some meaning) manifesto, which is properly a ramble rather than a true manifesto, and it reeks of Hoyt’s regular writing style -at least the style she uses on her blog, for I have not yet partaken of her published fiction (or non-fiction for that matter), that seems intended to impart the impression (if you pardon the alliteration) of a writerly disposition, but that to me causes my thoughts to digress and wander (even as I read -or at least, to the best of my ability (which may not be much), try to read) the tract that she has “written”, or more accurately typed, presumably on a modern equivalent of typewriter (unless she used some kind of OCR to scan her handwriting of course, the future truly is now)….
TL,DR: I gave up after three paragraphs
Thanks, Mike, for the regular round-ups. As painful as it has been to read the puppies’ comments on the mess they’ve made, it’s often been enlightening. After my first foray into VD’s website, I don’t think I could stomach returning, so being able to read his words here was helpful.
I hope puppymess (puppygate is far too silly a term) will be forgotten in a couple of years as everyone moves on and get down to reading and writing and enjoying what they love instead of trying to tear down what other people love.
as so often with the puppies, it seems badly defined. Is this really a manifesto? Is this really
Dangerous Visions and Mirrorshades were products of a particular time. Could you imagine either of them being published in 1950? The Mundane manifesto from a while back – Mundane SF would always be identified with the time it was produced.
But if you could take a collection of shorts published by Campbell and sell them as a Human Wave anthology…
It does sound like “Human Wave” is a conscious, if really poorly named, reaction against “New Wave” SF.
I find it difficult to believe that people are still trying to fight explicitly against that (rather than just expanding the art in ways they enjoy).
@JJ Pollen From a Future Harvest by Derek Künsken in July’s Asimov.
I wasn’t sure about it going in and it pleasantly dashed my expectations.