Tag Archives: Joe Hill

The All Bradbury Post

Posted on by

Something Wicked at Creature Features

(1) Creature Features and Intrada pay tribute to Disney’s 1983 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes on December 6, starting at 2:00 p.m.

We’re proud to host an unprecedented symposium celebrating Intrada’s brand new CD release of composer Georges Delerue’s chilling rejected score. This legendary original music was unheard outside of one fateful test screening, replaced with a new score by the late James Horner.

Join film music journalist Tim Greiving of NPR and the Los Angeles Times as we revisit the film’s complicated production with rare footage and behind-the-scenes photos – plus a panel discussion with Colette Delerue, editor Axel Hubert, film music agent Richard Kraft, soundtrack producer Douglass Fake, and other guests to be added.

Creature Features, 2904 W Magnolia Blvd, Burbank, California 91505) Admission is free with purchase of the new CD. Seating is limited and available on a first come, first served basis

(2) J.S. Breukelaar praises “Five Ray Bradbury Stories That Tell Us Everything We Need to Know About Writing”

  1. “Kaleidoscope”: Story v. Plot

“Kaleidoscope” appears at first to be either a story without a plot, or a plot without a story. A rocket explodes. Five astronauts plunge to their deaths. The end. No survivors washing up on steamy shores in their scanties. No alien rescue. No worm holes. Nothing. But what makes this story explode off the page is the sickening tensions between the Captain and his men, and how death is the sickest joke of all, a “black butcher” slicing off chunks of time, of space, of story.

Through colliding disembodied dialogue and unverifiable histories, Bradbury tangles several lifelines into the short dark knot of this ironically titled story. The men drift apart, betrayals surfacing across the intercom, confessions made and silenced, jealousies erupting in violence. Careening meteors slice off Captain Hollis’s limbs one by one and as each of his men disappear into space, he must face up to the fact that he was even less of a captain in life than in death, even less of a man.

With what’s left of him about to burn up in the earth’s atmosphere, all Hollis wishes for is one good thing he can do “to make up for a terrible and empty life.”Instead of letting this fizz into a cautionary, platitudinous tale about living every day as if it were your last, Bradbury turns it into a fireball.  Sears the soul. The captain must burn, yes, but at the last moment, Bradbury pulls a POV sleight of hand and plots a final twist. Something utterly unexpected and impossible that grabs the reader by the heart and won’t let go. Something wondrous.

Bottom Line: Plot exists in the most unlikely scenarios. A character trapped in stasis, doomed or fallen, unable or unwilling to act beyond a kind of desperate vision or incendiary dialogue, can be the set-up for some pretty twisted plotting (preferably without flashbacks!). Remember: a story doesn’t have to have a plot, but it usually wants one.

(3) Twenty-eight years ago, in December 1987, Playboy magazine published a new story by Ray Bradbury: “The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair.”

The story concerns a couple who meet at a fancy-dress party, dressed as Stan and Ollie. It was one of several Bradbury stories to refer to the comedy duo (who Ray had seen perform live on stage in Dublin while he was working on the film Moby Dick).

You can find the story today in two of Ray’s short story collections: The Toynbee Convector and Bradbury Stories.

(4) Ryan Holiday says he knows “The Real Reason We Need to Stop Trying to Protect Everyone’s Feelings”, at Observer.

The people in these examples are certainly a bit ridiculous—but by no means bad. None of them see themselves as censors, naturally. They were being sensitive, outraged, protective or triggered. And to be fair, most of their complaints and protests stop short of actually saying “This should not be allowed anywhere.”

But that distinction matters less than they think.

Let’s go back to 451, which I found myself re-reading recently. It begins with Guy Montag burning a house that contained books. Why? How did it come to be that firemen burned books instead of putting out fires as they always had?

The firemen have been doing it for so long they have no idea. Most of them have never even read a book. Except one fireman—Captain Beatty—who has been around long enough to remember what life was like before. As Montag begins to doubt his profession—going as far as to hide a book in his house—he is subjected to a speech from Beatty. In it Beatty explains that it wasn’t the government that decided that books were a threat. It was his fellow citizens.

(5) Subterranean Press is bringing out a Joe Hill limited edition broadside of his Bradbury-inspired tale, “By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain.” Only 250 copies.

By the silver water of lake champlain joe hill COMP

In addition to hand signing each copy, Joe has adorned each with a small doodle near his signature.

This broadside measures 24 x 36, and features a very small print run for a Joe Hill limited edition. We expect it to sell out quickly.

Limited: 224 signed numbered copies: $60

Lettered: 26 signed lettered copies: $125

(6) Natasha Shliapnikoff and Rodion Nahapetov want to make a “’Dandelion Wine’ movie based on Ray Bradbury’s iconic novel” and have opened a Kickstarter campaign to start funding the project.

The explanatory video includes a statement by Ray Bradbury (who died in 2012) endorsing Rodion’s efforts.

Ray entrusted Rodion to write the screenplay adaptation of his most personal and semi-biographical novel “Dandelion Wine.”

The two worked closely together, and, after several drafts, Ray gave Rodion’s script his final approval and Rodion gave Ray his solemn promise to produce a film that would never compromise the integrity of his novel. This is a promise we must keep to the great Ray Bradbury, one of the most celebrated writers of our time, who perfected the art of storytelling and left this world so much richer with his contributions to literature.

Unfortunately, the appeal has attracted only 13 backers and raised $637 of its $350,000 goal. It will continue through January 9.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian and Martin Morse Wooster for these stories.]

Pixel Scroll 11/22 The Lurking Fear Supports Me In Email

Posted on by

(1) David G. Hartwell posted his photo with the comment, “Signs of the cultural times: NYC subway cars entirely decorated in PKD.”

PKD in the subway, NYC

(2) “Red, Reich and Blue: Building the World of ‘The Man in the High Castle’”, a New York Times article:

Early production art for the Times Square sequence included billboards for beer and sausages, but Mr. Spotnitz had them changed to signs promoting the value of work and duty. A scene in the home of a Nazi Party boss emblematically named Obergruppenführer John Smith (Rufus Sewell) was shot as if it were a vintage family sitcom, the son complaining over the breakfast table about a self-promoting Hitler Youth chum at school. His father patiently explains that his son will be a greater credit to his country, because selfishness is what ruined America before the war.

“If you squint and ignore the fact that the guy has a swastika on his arm,” Mr. Spotnitz said, “it looks a lot like ‘Father Knows Best.’”

(3) John King Tarpinian shot this photo at an exhibit of Michael C. Gross’ work a few days before the artist died.

GB_LOGOs

 

(4) WIRED’s ”Geek’s Guide To The Galaxy” podcast  is talking about the new anthology of best American science fiction and fantasy with commentary by Joe Hill and John Joseph Adams. Also brief comments by Jess Row, Seanan McGuire, and Carmen Maria Machado.

The prestigious anthology series The Best American Short Stories tends to eschew science fiction and fantasy, except at the behest of unusually sympathetic guest editors like Michael Chabon or Stephen King.

But things are changing fast. The genre took a major step toward respectability this year with the release of the first-ever Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by John Joseph Adams. Adams feels the book is long overdue.

“The instruments of science fiction and fantasy—the tools in that genre toolbox—have been out there in the literary world and being explored for at least a decade now, in work by people like Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, and Cormac McCarthy,” [John Joseph Adams] says. “Science fiction and fantasy is part of the literary mainstream, and has been for a while now.”

Adams hopes The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy will prove that readers don’t have to choose between wild concepts and literary quality. Good sci-fi and fantasy deliver both, which is what makes them so hard to write.

“You have to create the compelling characters and have the beautiful prose and everything, but a science fiction story has to do all that and also build an entire world for you, or come up with some mind-blowing idea on top of all that,” he says.

(5) David Gerrold on Facebook:

I was reading an article about “the battle for the soul of science fiction” and I had to laugh.

Science fiction has no soul. We sold it a long time ago. About the time we started worrying about shelf space in the bookstores, share-cropping in other people’s universes, writing for franchises because they were guaranteed NY-times bestsellers, and campaigning for awards like a high-school popularity contest. Not to mention all those who talked about breaking out of the “ghetto” so they could have mainstream credibility.

If science fiction still has anything resembling a soul — it’s not going to be found in arguments about the soul of science fiction.

As I have said elsewhere, there is no single definition for science fiction. Every author who sits down at the keyboard defines it for himself or herself. Every author is his/her own definition of SF — and the genre continues to reinvent itself with every new author who arrives on the scene.

The idea that there is a specific definition for SF … well, we’ve been having that argument since Jules Verne and H.G. Wells got into a bitch fight at the 1902 Philcon. Okay, I exaggerate. Neither one of them were there. But they did hate each other because Verne’s view of science was optimistic and Wells’ view was dystopic — he didn’t think the human species was ready for high tech. He might have been right, but we’re here anyway….

(6) Winter is coming – on Titan

(7) Steve Davidson of Amazing Stories calls it “Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mistake”.

Kim Stanley Robinson published a major buzzkill on BoingBoing this week, essentially declaring that all of us science fiction nerds ought to give up on our dreams of visiting other stars (colonizing the galaxy…galactic empire…space marines…space pirates…discoveries of long dead highly advanced alien civilizations…discoveries of technological alien civilizations that want to be our friends…or eat us…incomprehensible artifacts…intriguingly bizarre ecosystems…) and instead focus our attentions on Earth and solar system centric futures.

There’s been a fair amount of pushback on this (we do love our space pirates after all), with the primary arguments being that –

KSR is being too pessimistic

KSR is making the cliched mistake of assuming that future technological growth won’t include unforseen breakthrus

KSR is not projecting far enough into the future

Those may all be true, but I have one other “mistake” to add to his thoughtful but bitter article:

KSR is making the mistake of trying to predict what will NOT happen in the future, as opposed to trying to predict what WILL happen in the future.

(8) Billy Dee Williams tells Parade that his Star Wars role keeps him in the spotlight – but it’s not always easy!

Fans have always wanted to talk about who Lando is and why he did what he did. Back when my daughter was in elementary school, I would go pick her up—this was right after The Empire Strikes Back came out—and I’d find myself in the middle of the schoolyard justifying Lando’s actions to a bunch of little kids. They’re all yelling at me saying I betrayed Han Solo. (By the way, I never auditioned for the Han Solo part and I’ve never not gotten along with Harrison Ford, who is a dear friend. Those rumors are completely false.)

Over the years, I’d be on airplanes and a flight attendant would accuse me of betraying Han Solo. I would just say, “Look, I—er, Lando—was just trying to prevent everyone’s complete demise and had to come up with a plan. Lando ended up losing and he had a lot to lose.”  Then I’d say, “Well, nobody died.”  That’s how I’d finalize it.

(9) Well, my eyes sure weren’t dry after watching this ad…

(10) Diana Pavlac Glyer is now in the author database at Worlds Without End, as is her forthcoming book about the Inklings, Bandersnatch, which you should unhesitatingly rush out and order.

(11) “Gal Gadot is adding to her fans’ building anticipation for the 2017 release of Warner Bros.’ superhero movie Wonder Woman,” says The Hollywood Reporter.

(12) Peter Finocchiaro, in an article about the Lovecraft controversy for Salon, volunteers an answer for the question “of what to do with rejected or discarded ‘Howard’ trophies:”

Send them to Providence, Rhode Island. Providence – founded in 1636; 2010 population: 178,038 – was Lovecraft’s hometown, and it’s where I’m currently teaching a semester-long class on the author at the Rhode Island School of Design. And no object better embodies the complexity of his legacy than these now-outdated trophies. They are the perfect teaching tool.

After all, Providence plays a major role in the Lovecraft story. It’s where he spent all but a couple years of his life. It’s a playground for the slithering, malevolent creatures he imagined. (See “The Shunned House” and “The Haunter of the Dark.”) And it’s a place that he loved with such fervency that he once declared in a letter “I Am Providence” – a quote now etched on his tombstone, in the city’s Swan Point Cemetery.

Lovecraft’s racial views are not irrelevant to his civic pride. In one letter, he wrote “New England is by far the best place for a white man to live.” In another, he added, “America has lost New York to the mongrels, but the sun shines just as brightly over Providence.”

For decades after his death, Lovecraft’s hometown love was mostly unrequited. But recent years have brought a long-delayed love-fest. Drive through Providence today and you’ll see “H.P. Lovecraft Memorial Square,” two plaques in his honor, and a Lovecraft bust in the city’s famed Athenaeum library. The city has Lovecraft-themed read-a-thons, walking tours, research fellowships, apps, writing contests, and bars that serve Lovecraft-inspired drinks like the “Bittersweet Tears of Cthulhu” and “Lovecraft’s Lament.”

(13) We have met the aliens, and they is us. Certainly some of the time.

There are a few known cosmic objects capable of producing bursts of radio waves. For instance, dense remnant stars called pulsars produce them, just not with such regularity or with as much power as observed in FRBs. Still, perhaps there are some undiscovered superdense stars that operate according to an underlying physics we don’t yet understand, which are spitting these radio waves across the cosmos. That’s one possible natural explanation, though mere conjecture at this point.

Some other scientists have theorized that FRBs could come from what is known as a “contact” binary star system, two stars orbiting each other at an extremely close distance.

It’s also possible that the signals are coming from something human. Perhaps an unmapped spy satellite is hovering about, appearing to send signals from deep space.

Human sources can be difficult to rule out. For instance, back in 2010 the Parkes Observatory picked up 16 pulses with similar characteristics to FRBs that turned out to be signals generated from microwave ovens operated at the Parkes facility. Though these signals were clearly of terrestrial origin, unlike FRBs, it goes to show that there may well be a simpler, human explanation for FRBs that has yet to be identified.

(14) “Reason enough to buy a Harley,” John King Tarpinian says about these Star Wars –themed motorcycle helmets described by BoldRide’s Jonathon Klein.

First-Order

Currently, a host of DOT-approved and other motorcycle helmets are being sold on eBay for all your cosplaying and motorcycling needs. You have everything from an almost perfect Darth Vader helmet to the all-new First Order Storm Trooper.

(15) Robert Altbauer, Fantasy Cartographer, has a series called “The Crusades and Lovecraft’s Monsters”.

This is a series of illustrations that imitates the style of old medieval paintings and adds a macabre flavour by incorporating some of H.P. Lovecraft’s famous monsters. The text is mostly medieval Middle High German.

robert-altbauer-furchtbar-drachengezucht COMP

(16) Phil Nichols of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies noted on Facebook:

R Is For Rocket (Doubleday hardcover, 1962) was a compilation of previously-collected Bradbury short stories put together for a young adult audience.

The cover art by Joe Mugnaini relates to the story “Icarus Montgolfier Wright.” If you look at the body of the spaceship, you will see the Montgolfier’s balloon, the Wright brothers’ plane, and a winged Icarus.

Curiously, “Icarus Montgolfier Wright” isn’t included in the book!

(17) Ray Bradbury wrote in Fahrenheit 451:

If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change.

(18) Uh-oh! [SPOILER WARNING!] This is the week they bumped her off!

Why Does Clara Face The Raven?

Peter Capaldi and Steven Moffat talk about that big moment in the latest episode.

 

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Josh Jasper. ]

Pixel Scroll 10/7 The Sprite Stuff

Posted on by

(1) “The Phantom Fame: ‘Space Ghost Coast to Coast,’ Secretly TV’s Most Influential Show”. Shea Serrano explains his theory on Grantland.

Repurposing existing Space Ghost images from the original cartoons, Lazzo created the first animated late-night talk show in 1994. Operated in tandem with Keith Crofford, a fellow Southerner with whom Lazzo shared an office as well as seemingly a brain, the show boasted a premise that was somehow both simple and endlessly, mutably ridiculous. Now retired from the business of fighting intergalactic evil, Space Ghost (real name: Tad Ghostal) and a support staff consisting of his imprisoned enemies Zorak (anthropomorphic mantis/bandleader) and Moltar (gravel-voiced lava man/director) flies face-first into show business, interviewing pop-culture luminaries through a monitor screen lowered into the chair where a guest would normally sit. Interviews with the celebrities involved were filmed separately, in largely improvisational fashion, then combined with the cartoon characters’ dialogue — often producing results diametrically opposed to the context of the original questions.

(2) Christopher Martin says “Everybody’s Invited To My All-Male, All-White Literary Panel” on McSweeneys Internet Tendency.

Dear Writers,

Congratulations on having a short story accepted for publication in the anthology Rusted, Lusted, Busted: Contemporary Southern Fiction, edited by myself and my good buddy Richard Head!

Richard and I, both of us straight cisgender nominally Christian white males, have put a shit-ton of work into this anthology, mostly over beers and hot wings at the local Tilted Kilt while our wives assumed 100% of the burden of watching our kids. Now this baby we’ve labored over is out and it’s time to party!

That’s why we’re hosting an all-male, all-white panel tomorrow at Lily White Books in Mansfield, SC, to celebrate the anthology’s release and your contributions to it. We’d love it if some of you could come be part of the panel!

Given the twelve-hour notice, however, along with our inability to compensate you in any way, and our unwillingness to compensate you even if we could, I completely understand that most of you — including all our woefully underrepresented contributors who do not identify as heterosexual white men — will not be able to participate in this seminal event, except perhaps as late-arriving, paying audience members ($5 at the door).

(3) SF Signal’s latest Mind Meld, curated by Paul Weimer, taps the contributors’ autobiographies.

For each one of us, there is a book, or a series, that hooked us on genre fiction. Maybe it was the first SF book you read, maybe you had to read a couple before you hit the one that hooked you.

Tell me what book got you to become a fan of SFF, and why?

Answering the question are Gail Carriger, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Yoon Ha Lee, Rachel Swirsky, Beth Cato, Tehani Wessely, Alan Baxter, Sarah Hendrix, Olivia Waite, Anthony R. Cardno, Ann VanderMeer, Sarah Williams, Pamela Sargent, Jaye Wells, Mike Glyer, Sabrina Vourvoulias, , Kerry Schafer, Jim Henley, Melanie R. Meadors, M L Brennan, Meghan B., and Jon Courtenay Grimwood.

(4) The author explains it all to you in “The Big Idea: Ann Leckie” on Whatever.

So instead of going over the AJ stuff again–what is a person? Who is anybody anyway?–I instead give you the Ancillary FAQ. These are all questions I’ve actually gotten (or oveheard) at one time or another.

Q: How can you possibly wrap the story up in one more volume? There’s too much going on; I don’t see how you could manage it.

A: The easiest way for me to answer that is to actually do it. Which I have, and you can see the answer for yourself wherever fine books are sold. Or at a library near you. I love libraries. They’re awesome.

Q: Will there be more books after this one?

A: There will be more books, and certainly more books in this universe, but not books about Breq. Nothing against her, I’ve had a lovely time these past three books, but it will be nice to do something different.

(5) Brian Fung’s article for the Washington Post, “’The Martian,’ NASA and the rise of a science-entertainment complex”, looks at the extensive cooperation between NASA and the producers of The Martian, and notes that NASA hopes to get more out of this film than other projects with which it has extensively cooperated (like the Transformers movies).

When Navy flyboy Tom Cruise got too close for missiles and switched to guns in the spring of 1986, what seemed like an entire nation got up to follow him. Military recruitment booths popped up in theaters, eager to attract young Americans who’d just seen Maverick tell Charlie about the inverted dive he’d done at four Gs against a MiG-28.

To say “Top Gun” was a boon for recruitment would be an understatement. That year, the Navy signed up 16,000 more people than it did the entire year before, according to the author Richard Parker, writing for Proceedings, the U.S. Naval Institute’s monthly magazine. Other estimates suggest that among naval aviators alone, this spike in registrations amounted to growth rates of 500 percent….

With “The Martian,” NASA has the same opportunity defense officials had in the 1980s, only now with additional social media superpowers. By highlighting everything from the real-world technologies depicted in “The Martian” to explaining the science behind Martian dust storms to calling on young women to take after the fictional Ares III mission commander, Melissa Lewis, NASA’s hoping to turn moviegoers into the nation’s next generation of scientists, technologists and the other all-around bad-ass eggheads celebrated in the film. In the run-up to the movie’s release, NASA even made a major announcement about the discovery of liquid water on Mars that some believed was simply too conveniently timed to be a coincidence.

(6) The Motherboard’s Jason Koebler eschews any idea of a jolly NASA/media alliance from the very first words in his post “NASA Wants Astronauts to Use Mars’s Natural Resources to Survive”.

Humans have thoroughly wrecked Earth’s environment, now it’s time to move on to using the natural resources of another planet.

Fresh off the discovery of flowing, liquid water on Mars, NASA said Wednesday it wants ideas for how to best exploit the natural resources of the Red Planet for human survival…. NASA plans on giving away modest $10,000 and $2,500 prizes to people who can come up with potentially viable ideas for Mars resource use.

(7) Todd VanDerWerff asked the editors of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 to name “10 of the best science fiction and fantasy short stories ever” for Vox.

Because some of the most exciting American writing is happening in the fields of science fiction and fantasy right now, I hopped on the phone with the book’s two editors, Joe Hill and John Joseph Adams, to hear their picks for the 10 best science fiction and fantasy stories ever written.

They included stories from Malamud, Tiptree, LeGuin, Keyes, Harlan Ellison, Link, Bradbury, Borges, and others.

(8) Today In History –

  • October 7, 1849 – Edgar Allan Poe succumbs to a mysterious condition, days after having been found delirious in the streets of Baltimore. Tragically, only seven people attended his funeral. Quoth the Raven: Nevermore.
  • October 7, 1960 — CBS broadcasts the premiere episode of “Route 66.”  Why do we care? Because Episode #79, “A Gift for a Warrior” was based on a story by Harlan Ellison.

(9) “Superman’s Getting a Brand New Secret Identity” and io9 has the name. Spolier warning!

Spoilers ahead for today’s Action Comics #45!

Now that Superman (and Clark) are taking the heat for Lois’ story leaking his alter-ego, Kal-El has had to go into hiding and lay low. Fired from the Daily Planet when his co-workers discover they’d been in grave danger simply by being in Clark’s vicinity all the time, and facing persecution from the Government, Superman has vanished… and replaced himself with a mild-mannered trucker.

Yes, Clark Kent is now Archie Clayton! It doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it?

(10) The Today show reunited the Rocky Horror cast for an interview, including Susan Sarandon, Tim Curry, Barry Bostwick and Meat Loaf.

(11) Unlike many other original Ghostbusters cast members, Rick Moranis turned down the offer to appear in the reboot.

When the new all-female Ghostbusters reboot arrives in theaters next summer, nearly all the living actors from the original 1980s films — Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, et al. — will be doing cameos. But not Rick Moranis, who was offered the chance to appear in a walk-on role but turned it down. “I wish them well,” says the 62-year-old comedic legend, who’s so stunned by the outcry over his absence in the film that he decided to grant a rare interview with THR. “I hope it’s terrific. But it just makes no sense to me. Why would I do just one day of shooting on something I did 30 years ago?”

(12) In a follow-up to his “Fisking the New York Times’ Modern Man”, Larry Correia’s “Update! Modern Manhood ACHIEVED!” shares photos of his important new acquisition —

Yes! That is a melon baller! Despite my never buying shoes for her, my wife purchased this for me when she saw it in a store. Because Modern Manhood ACHIEVED!

Now all I need is some Kenneth Cole oxfords and a crying pillow, and I’m set.

(13) Coin World discusses a silver coin commemorating exploration of the space-time continuum.

2015-Cooks-Island-Space-Time-Continuum

A four-dimensional concept is now presented in a three-dimensional format.

A 2015 $2 coin in the name of Cook Islands visibly explains the relationship between space and time, as created by scientist Hermann Minkowski. Building on Albert Einstein’s 1905 Special Theory of Relativity, Minkowski suspected the existence of a fourth dimension (time, in addition to height, width and length), in which space and time are connected geometrically, and he created a diagram illustrating the connection.

The Prooflike half-ounce .999 fine silver $2 Space–Time Continuum coin was issued by Coin Invest Trust. It was struck by B. H. Mayer‘s Kunstprägeanstalt Mint in Munich, Germany.

The reverse of the coin depicts the Minkowski diagram, a geometric illustration of the formula of special relativity, which is engraved in one of the diagram’s columns together with the inscription SPACE–TIME CONTINUUM. The center of the high-relief coin is marked with a magnetic sphere, which can be removed.

The obverse, whose shape is a mirror or inversion of the reverse, displays the Ian Rank-Broadley portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, the issuing nation and the face value.

Einstein incorporated Minkowski’s ideas into his general theory of relativity in 1915, six years after Minkowski died.

(14) A black eye for Myke Cole?

[Thanks to JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Rob Thornton and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]

2015 Best American SF/F Contributors Named

Posted on by

BASFF-2015-220x330

Writers whose stories have been selected by Joe Hill and John Joseph Adams for the 2015 volume of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy have been named.

Adams screened hundreds thousands of notable works published in 2014 by magazines, journals, and websites, then special guest editor Joe Hill chose the best pieces to publish in a blind reading so that the prestige of the venues or bylines were not a factor.

The writers with stories in the volume are:

  • Nathan Ballingrud
  • T.C. Boyle
  • Adam-Troy Castro
  • Neil Gaiman
  • Theodora Goss
  • Alaya Dawn Johnson
  • Kelly Link
  • Carmen Maria Machado
  • Seanan McGuire
  • Sam J. Miller
  • Susan Palwick
  • Cat Rambo
  • Jess Row
  • Karen Russell
  • A. Merc Rustad
  • Sofia Samatar (two stories by the author)
  • Kelly Sandoval
  • Jo Walton
  • Daniel H. Wilson

Adam-Troy Castro explained on Facebook that the authors are permitted to say they have work in the collection but are not allowed to announce the title. However, advance reading copies of the book are now circulating and a photo of the first page of the table of contents is on Twitter.

Joe Hill’s publicity strategy includes smacking the Hugo voters:

When I squint at the table of contents I see the introduction is titled “Launching Rockets.” Another Hugo reference? Or would Freud say, “Sometimes a rocket is only a rocket”?

Death Rides A Puppy 4/21

Posted on by

Featured in today’s roundup are David Gerrold, Vox Day, Jim Wright (no relation to John C.), Jason Cordova and Jason Sanford, Amanda Green and Edward Green, Mick and Mackintosh, Alexandra Erin, Philip Sandifer, plus all the other woofers and tweeters.

Eric James Stone

 “Ruminations on Nominations” – April 20

  1. Voting: Various people have suggested voting “No Award” above any of the Puppy nominees regardless of the merits of any particular nominee, as a way of protesting the use of bloc voting for nominations. I think that’s an understandable reaction, and it’s not against the rules, so I do think that’s a valid strategy. But I think it’s unseemly; not as unseemly as bloc voting, but still unseemly.  I don’t think it’s right to punish all the nominees on the Sad Puppies slate because they swept most of the available spot on the ballot, because I doubt any of them had any idea that was going to happen.  This whole Sad Puppies seems to have grown out of what happened a few years ago when some people in the WorldCon community deliberately snubbed Larry Correia because of his politics and religion. Larry decided to push back, and received pushback on his pushback, and things escalated from there. It’s time to stop the escalation. I think George R.R. Martin, John Scalzi, and many others have the right idea: check out the individual nominees, and vote based on whether you consider them worthy or not. If that means “No Award” in some categories, so be it, but I think you should at least give the nominees a fair look.
  2. Self-Correction: Given the reaction this year, I think it’s fair to say people should be on notice about what it means to be on a slate, and a blanket No Award strategy for any nominees who are willing participants in a slate next year would be appropriate. Also, people will be alert to warn others who might have missed this year’s controversy as to what being on a slate means. With regard to the Sad Puppies campaign, I hope that if they do decide to continue with Sad Puppies 4, it is with a recommendation list far broader than a slate of nominees. Hopefully, next year slates will not be a problem, and so amending the rules (which takes two years) will turn out to be unnecessary.

 

Vox Day on Vox Popoli

“There is a theme” – April 21

This is an interesting exercise in rhetoric. Mr. Gerrold clearly wants us to be very impressed by his feelbads, and thereby convinced of the pure and utter evil of those who would cause such feelbads.

With all due respect, Mr. Gerrold, you’re not exactly convincing anyone. We’ve read STARTREKSHIRTS. We’ve read “If a Dinosaur Had a Cookie, My Love”. We’ve read “I am Chinese and I am Gay”. We’ve read LOOK MA, I CAN DO WHAT DAVID SILVERBERG DID NEARLY 30 YEARS AGO. The only soaring that is taking place here is the Muse of Science Fiction leaping out the window in protest. More interesting is Mr. Gerrold’s threats of unpersoning and banishment from that fine community of SF fandom, which of course proves exactly what we’ve been saying from the start.

 

Edward L. Green on Facebook – April 21

And when the SP/RPs do the same next year? Declare the war is over, and the Hugo is done. Business meeting votes to retire the award and box the rocket.

And when we bury it, we tell the world that Vox Day, Larry Correia and Brad R. Torgersen killed it.

Every time the Hugos are mentioned in the future, we say that same thing.

Vox Day, Larry Correia and Brad R. Torgersen killed it.

Now, I admit, at least one of those people seem to not care in the slightest that will happen.

But I suspect Correia and Torgersen might care. Or not. Hell, maybe they want their one lasting literary accomplishments to be to destroy a prestigious award like the Hugo.

Wouldn’t that look kinda neat of the cover of a novel?

“From The Author Who Helped Killed The Hugo.”

Now some might say ‘Those guys weren’t part of the RP Slate. They may have hung around them, and maybe spoke with them, but they weren’t part of it.” Correia and Torgesen are trying to distance themselves in a not distancing kind of way from this madness.

 

 

Jim Wright (of Stonekettle Station)  on Facebook – April 21

Some day, I hope to be on that stage receiving my own shiny rocketship, should that particular fantasy ever come to pass I’d like to think it was because I earned it on the strength of my ability and not because a bunch of you people stacked the ballot box for political reasons.

As to the Con itself, I don’t care about controversies. I. Don’t. Care. We’re gonna have fun. Repeat, we’re gonna have fun, huge goddamned fun, with a lot of really, really amazing and fun and talented people. If you’re determined to be miserable, don’t come. Please.

And on that note: for minions who plan on being at SASQUAN, I’ll be happy to meet up and share a drink and a story or two – especially if you’re buying.

Look for me, I’ll be the guy in the hat.

 

Alexandra Erin on Storify

“Gamergate, Sad Puppies and the default narrative” – April 19

Alexandra Erin discusses how both GG and the Sad Puppies are both operating under the fallacy that the narrative that most closely aligns with their own world view and politics is the one “without politics”

 

 

Philip Sandifer

“Guided By The Beauty of Their Weapons: An Analysis of Theodore Beale and His Supporters”  – April 21

All of these tropes are, of course, immediately visible in the Sad/Rabid Puppy narrative of the Hugos. Torgersen’s paean to the olden days of science fiction is straightforwardly the golden age myth. The claim that a leftist cabal of SJWs, the details of which are, as is always the case with these things, fuzzy, but which at the very least clearly includes John Scalzi, Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and the publishing house Tor have since taken control of the Hugos is a classic stab-in-the-back myth. And the Puppy slates feature heroic men (Torgersen and Beale) who speak truth to power and call excitedly for the people to rise up and show their freedom by voting in complete lockstep with them. It’s a classically fascist myth, just like Gamergate (gaming used to be great, then the feminist SJWs took over the gaming press, and now Gamergate will liberate it) or Men’s Rights Activists (of which Beale is one).

 

 

Steph Rodriguez in San Francisco Book Review

“War of the Worlds: Slate Voting Games”  – April 21

“In science fiction, you cannot be an out-of-the- closet conservative without people sticking their nose in the air,” said Torgersen in a telephone interview from his home in Utah. “Science fiction is almost overwhelmingly, very progressive, very liberal, and there’s a monoculture that is formed, and, if you’re not part of it, you’re on the outs.”

…For science fiction author and Hugo Award winner Kameron Hurley, she noticed a definite shift in the science fiction community over the last five years, in terms of hosting a more diverse group of authors, whether it be male to female ratios, or even a more culturally varied lineup.

“Science fiction award ballots in 2009 through last year became more diverse and as it got more diverse, it started to frighten people, and they didn’t want their own slice of pie to get eaten by everyone,” Hurley explained. “[This year], there [are] nine nominations that come from this tiny, little [publishing] house in Finland, which one of the organizers of the slate, [Theodore Beale], actually owns. So, it’s an incredibly tiny minority. It’s not even really representative of science fiction publishers, let alone the full breath of science fiction.”

 

David Gerrold on Facebook – April 21

Some people have posted notes that suggest they believe that the host of the Hugo Award Ceremony will use the podium as an opportunity to take revenge on the sad puppies with some scathing ridicule.

No.

Absolutely not.

The Hugo Award Ceremony is the highlight of the fannish calendar. It is the most important fan event of the year. It is not a place for petty grudges, it is not a place for divisiveness. It is a celebration of excellence. It is a celebration of our community. And most of all, it is for the nominees — it is their moment to be recognized as the best in the field. And this year, despite the slate-mongering, despite the rancor, there are still many qualified works that have fairly earned their place on the ballot.

This is my commitment. We will do nothing to spoil their evening. We will honor them, we will celebrate them. We will congratulate them if they take home a trophy, we will give them an “attaboy” even if they don’t take a trophy home.

 

David Gerrold on Facebook – April 21

An open letter to Brad Torgersen,

Dear Brad,

It looks to me that there is a part of this situation that you have not considered.

Regardless of how you have justified yourself, you have failed to understand several things:

The Worldcon is created fresh every year — it’s a self-assembling village. It requires the work of hundreds of fans who volunteer their time and energy to have a five day celebration of science fiction. It belongs to no one. It belongs to all of us, regardless of politics, regardless of skin color, regardless of who we love, regardless of gender. It belongs to all of us — in the traditional sense of the word “all” — with no one and nothing left out.

While you may believe your slate-mongering was a moral act, a justified act, a pushback against some kind of social justice tyranny — at least that’s how it’s been characterized by some of those who favored the slate — while you may feel that your actions are not blameworthy, you have hurt the entire community.

 

Mick from Mick on Everything

“Why We Need Sad Puppies” – April 20

[First-ever post on this blog.]

Query: with everything I just wrote, does it surprise anyone still reading that I didn’t know I could vote on the Hugos until Sad Puppies 2? I was shocked to learn it. No wonder the insular cliques are running the show, the rest of us don’t even know we’re supposed to be contributing to the script!

The only way to change that is to erect a big tent and get everyone in. People like the trufen who scoff at me are already there. Sad Puppies have showed the rest of us that we can join too. And as a bonus, since SP3 started, I have a list of new authors to check out so long I can’t even remember them all at once. Everybody wins!

That’s what it’s really about. I just spent 1,300+ words telling you why my fandom should count. That doesn’t invalidate anyone else’s fandom. I am still laboring to understand how “fandom” became a contest. My whole life, “fandom” has meant that I can share books, and games, and movies with people with similar interests, and they will share theirs with me, and we will both get enjoyment.

Now, “fandom” is being construed to mean the taste-makers, the CHORFs who get to tell the rest of us how awful we are for simply enjoying our entertainment. I have rarely been so enraged as when I read Making Light, or George RR Martin’s attempts to sugarcoat the groupthink, with the supposed kingmakers telling me that I don’t matter. As if my 25+ years of actually reading and supporting these genres makes me unworthy of their eminence. As if they and their ilk are better than the rest of us.

 

Jason Sanford

“Thank you to our genre’s many volunteers (and please don’t attack them)” – April 21

One of the most disgusting things I’ve seen since the launch of the Puppy campaigns is how people are attacking these genre volunteers. Some of these attacks are subtle, such as the Puppies saying Worldcon and the Hugo Awards don’t represent the true fans (whatever that means). But if you’re saying that, then you’re also saying everyone who volunteers to make the Worldcon and the Hugo Awards happen aren’t true SF/F fans.

Other attacks aren’t subtle, such as the attempt to create insulting names to call our genre volunteers. Or saying you’ll destroy the Hugo Awards, which amounts to an attempt to destroy the work of generations of Worldcon volunteers merely to accomplish your political goals.

I recently read a comment which sums up the pain many of these volunteers are feeling over having something they love turned into a political football. Chris Barkley, who is a long-time WorldCon volunteer and has worked on the Hugo Awards, recently wrote the following:

“As someone who has been deeply and personally involved with the Hugos Awards for the past 16 years, I find this…situation, extremely distressing. I, and many others involved with the Worldcon and the Business Meeting have worked VERY hard to make the award categories inclusive, fair, engaging and most importantly, relevant, in the 21st century. To see all of that jeopardized, by people who should know better, for all the wrong headed reasons, is something I never saw coming…”

 

Paul St. John Mackintosh on TeleRead

“Hugo Gernsback: The man who put the Hugo – and the bad karma – in the Hugos” – April 21

The sad Sad Puppies saga in the Hugo Awards casts an unflattering light – in fact, two lights – on the man whose name they bear: Hugo Gernsback, “who founded the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories and who is considered one of the “fathers” of the science fiction genre,” as the Hugo Awards Wikipedia page says. In fact, in 1960 he received a special Hugo Award as “The Father of Magazine Science Fiction.” And the two lights are: first, Gernsback’s personal ethics when dealing with his stable of pioneering science fiction authors, which according to quite a few sources, were shoddy. And second, the whole notion of “good old-fashioned SF and fantasy, the stuff the readers really love,” as George R.R. Martin described it, which Gernsback personified and which many Sad Puppies proponents have claimed to be defending.

 

Tim Hall on Trebuchet Magazine

“Watching the Hugos burn. Sci-Fi Controversy Wreaks Havoc” – April 21

[Largely repeats two of Hall’s blog posts referenced earlier, for those who’ve been tracking these roundups since the beginning.]

At this point, the Hugo Awards of 2015 look as good as dead, and everyone is now fighting over a corpse. Whether The Hugos can be salvaged in future years is another matter, and it does need a consensus on what the awards actually represent, and who they belong to. At the moment it’s degenerated into a fight to the death which will only destroy the object being fought over. Science Fiction itself is the loser.

Maybe cooler heads will prevail in 2016. A few people have tried to build bridges and find some common ground, but they’re still being drowned out by the louder and angrier voices.

There do need to be changes, and there is still the chance that some long-term good can come out of this mess.

Slate voting has demonstrated how a relatively small minority voting the same way can sweep entire categories. But it didn’t start with the Sad and Rabid Puppies. It was broken before, and it didn’t need an organised conspiracy to do it. With a small voting pool all it took was a critical mass of people with heavily-overlapping tastes to crowd everything else off the ballot. That fuelled the perceptions, true or not, that second-rate work was ending up on the ballot simply because the author was friends with the right people, and even that the whole thing was being fixed behind the scenes by an imaginary cabal.

 

R. C. Hipp on The Drakehall Broadsheet

“Shakespeare and that Sad Puppies Thing” – April 21

…Othello wins hands down because the titular character has a full blown panic attack.  Contemplating Desdemona’s (invented) betrayal and the reparative action required of him by the demented Man Code of his time (murdering her), Othello becomes so unhinged that he babbles half-incoherently before falling “in a trance” to the stage.

Yup, that’s a panic attack.

You probably get the idea that while elves and aliens are important to me, so are more meaty and realistic things.  I like to see race, gender, and religion in my speculative fiction.  I like to read about mental illness (and wellness).  If the characters are fighting a daemon or a mega corporation that’s all well and good.  But when it becomes clear the dragon is a stand-in for something else, something I or my friends have to deal with in real life, that’s when I’m jumping up and down in my seat.

So I don’t get the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies.

If you haven’t heard (you probably have, I’m about two weeks late to this party and in Internet Years that’s a millennia) a bunch of dimbulbs worked together to ensure that only “fun” stories were nominated for the Hugos this year.  “Fun” as opposed to “niche, academic, overtly [leftist]”.  Mainstream escapism for the overprivileged as opposed to anything else.

 

Amanda S. Green on Noctural Lives

“An update, a thought or two, and a snippet” – April 21

Frankly, I am more than disappointed with how a number of them have reacted to the current situation. Here are authors who ought to know better trying to get their peers and fans to vote No Award ahead of nominated works simply because they don’t like they think something made it onto the ballot. They don’t give a damn about the author or the work. They are making a “statement” — well, I hate to tell them this but it is a chickenshit statement and one that shows just how petty they are. I have looked at the ballot and there are works on it that I have a pretty good idea I won’t like — and yes, they come from one of the so-called slates. But I am not going to vote No Award because of the slate it was on. Nor am I going to vote No Award because I think I won’t like it. What I will do is read it, as well as the other entries. Then and only then will I cast my ballot. The only way I will vote No Award is if I think a work — after reading or watching it — is not worthy of being awarded the Hugo. Too bad others can’t do the same.

 

The Prussian on The Prussian

“Don’t Bring A Toothpick to a Tank Fight” – April 21

Before I go on, let me say that I don’t give a damn about literary awards.  I’m a reader, not a writer, so I have no financial interest in the awards, and that is the only reason anyone should be interested in them.  I’m only interested in good books – words put together on paper in a new and interesting way.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that getting an award is a bad thing or that they only go to crappy authors.  Obviously not – Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison have won multiple Hugos and V.S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for literature.  But on the other hand, neither Nabokov nor Borges ever won the Nobel Prize in literature, and Ray Bradbury never won a Hugo, and Terry Pratchett, Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard were never even nominated.

So, yeah.  For someone who cares about writing and literature, the awards are irrelevant.

…Now usually in these issues, I wind up by pointing out that this is dangerous, because it opens up the field to truly scary types.  That’s not true here – as I’ve said, awards are pretty meaningless, so we’re not really playing for high stakes.  Just a word of warning: if you are relying on SJWs to defend issues that actually matter – anti-racialism, women’s emancipation, free speech, the defense of civilization – you are relying on people who cannot even rig an award competently.

 

Sci Phi Journal

“Lou Antonelli’s Hugo-nominated Short “On A Spiritual Plain” Available for Free” – April 21

You can get Lou Antonelli’s “On a Spiritual Plain” for free in EPUB and MOBI The download also includes the story of how “On a Spiritual Plain” came to be included in Sci Phi.

 

Jason Cordova

“#FreeSpeech” – April 21

I’ve been having a <<censored>> day so far, trying to <<censored>> <<censored>> before I <<censored>>. It’s a <<censored>> way to live, but hey, gotta <<censored>>, am I right?

A lot of <<censored>> have been contacting me this week regarding <<censored>>. One of the things I like to <<censored>> is that <<censored>> is open to the <<censored>> of <<censored>> speech. <<censored>> speech is one of the most important basics of our <<censored>> nation, yet the muzzle of <<censored>> has been slowly being applied to the <<censored>> mouth over the past 50 years. Not only is our <<censored>> of speech being attacked in the name of <<censored>>, certain individuals and groups are now <<censored>> their own allies, feasting upon them as the Ouroboros does its own tail. But it’s <<censored>> <censored>> who are <<censored>> and <<censored>>. Do I have that right?

<<censored>> of <<censored>> — it’s why we have such a great <<censored>>.

 

glaurung_quena comment on More Words, Deeper Hole

The theory is that one nominates the best stories you’ve read in the past year — stuff that knocked your socks off. Judging by the quality of the puppy slate, I can only conclude that they have very loose socks

 

Damon G. Walter on Patreon

Damien Walter is creating Nothing

Other than the things I already do.

 

[sic]

https://twitter.com/JackLint1984/status/590507566335045632

Every Puppy Has Its Day 4/16

Posted on by

What European writers call the Hugo Awards “hack” is getting international coverage. Today’s roundup features quotes from Polish and German articles… or as close as Google Translate can get.

There are geniuses who are mad, writers who are mad, and fans who are mad. No wonder there’s also a psychologist trying to analyze the Sad Puppies phenomenon. And if that doesn’t work, someone else has done a statistical analysis.

One writer thinks so many are alarmed by the controversy she needs to volunteer as a bodyguard —

Vonda McIntyre on Book View Cafe

“I will walk with you” – April 15

I’m distressed to see that some folks who were planning to come to Sasquan are thinking of skipping Worldcon this year.

Because they’re frightened.

I understand why people are frightened, given the racist, misogynistic, and dishonest screeds they’ve been subjected to. It isn’t — alas — unusual for verbal abuse to escalate into physical abuse; and anyway verbal abuse is no fun to begin with.

But I was thinking about what might help counterbalance the situation….

I will walk with you at Worldcon.

I’m not very fond of confrontation. I’m a courtesy 5’1? and my 67th birthday (how did that happen?!) is just after the convention and I’m walking with a hiking pole while recovering from a hiking fall, an injury that’s taking way longer to heal than when I was a pup.

On the other hand I’m a shodan in Aikido.

On the third hand, which I can have because I’m an SF writer, shodan — first degree black belt — is when you realize how much you still have to learn.

But I’m thinking that maybe it would make folks who feel threatened feel a little safer to have someone at their side, maybe even someone with a bunch o’ fancy ribbons fluttering from her name badge, even if that person is shorter, smaller, and older than they are, white-haired and not physically prepossessing. It’s another person’s presence.

 

Lou Antonelli on This Way to Texas

Two more scalps – April 16

Yesterday two people who previously didn’t mind having their names on the list and who are Hugo nominated decided withdraw the names. They are both young and probably afraid theircareers will be hurt. Quite frankly, I think it’s a futile gesture. Their flirtation with deviancy will never be forgiven by the SF establishment.

 

Jason V Brock on Facebook  – April 15

I feel sympathy for those trapped in the scenario who did nothing wrong, yet are suffering the consequences, when they should be able to enjoy themselves.

Additionally, people who take a side against someone should reconsider from the perspective of the folks that have been honored justly, and who do good work. In other words, there are people who have toiled for years building a reputation and then have the misfortune of an angry person/group trying to exact revenge, or tarnish everything (out of jealousy, I’d say, and a warped sense of reality). It’s not fair to block or unfriend people that genuinely did nothing but stand up and say “But I didn’t do anything bad.” These are the actions of cowards. People need to have cooler heads and try to understand things better.

 

Alastair Reynolds on Approaching Pavonis Mons by balloon

“On the present Hugo mess and while I still want one” – April 15

The odd thing is – or perhaps it isn’t odd at all – is that the ongoing trouble with the Puppies only makes me feel more warmly disposed to the Hugos. I certainly should have voted. It would have taken a lot more of us to outweigh the block voting effect of the slate ballot, but that’s no argument not to have tried. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’ve been striving to read a lot more short fiction this year, and I already feel a lot better informed about the state of the field in 2015 than in recent years. And yes, while the Hugo award has been damaged – it’s hard to see a way around that, irrespective of what happens later in the summer – I would still like to win one eventually. I hope the award can weather this storm, and continue on as it should be – a prized part of SF’s collective heritage.

 

Marcin Zwierzchowski on Geek Blog (Polish)

“Nagrody fantastyczne jest problem”  – April 8

[Google Translate from Polish to English] The latter is the nail in the coffin of awards plebiscite. This year, it hit a huge force in Hugo, where most nominations seized authors connected with the movement Sad Puppies. The initiators of action rightly pointed out that in recent years, this prestigious award has become a mouthpiece through which the environment was manifest on the strength of its tolerance and diversity.  Instead, the text of the loudest discussed whether the nominees and the winners are more women or men, whether it is enough ethnic minorities, whether they are homosexual, etc., Etc.

 

Der Standard

“Was George R.R. Martin zum rechten ‘Hack’ der Hugo Awards sagt” – April 16

[Google Translate from German to English] In the past, it managed to get individual groups to influence the nomination lists on their behalf: Be it the followers of Scientology -Gründers and (often forgotten) SF-author L. Ron Hubbard. Be it the well-organized fandom of “Doctor Who”, which manages year after year in the short film category, to give the impression that there is nothing price worthier throughout the film, television and web video world as the British endless series. But such initiatives were always based on individual works – there has never been such a comprehensive campaign, moreover, an ideological background.

 

George R. R. Martin on Not A Blog

“On the Darkling Plain” – April 15

My friend Janice Gelb, long time worldcon volunteer and SMOF, has suggested that the only thing we can do at this point is abolish the Hugo Awards altogether. When I first heard that notion, I dismissed it out of hand. Some good will, some civility, a mutual exchange of ideas, and surely we could find a way to salvage the situation.

I am no longer convinced of that. The Sad Puppies are digging in and doubling down, and so is worldcon fandom. Meanwhile, off in the cesspools, the Rabid Puppies grow ever more rabid. Nuclear options are being seriously considered, and Vox Day has apparently threatened that if NO AWARD wins in any category, he will see to it that no award is ever given in that category again.

My first inclination was to dismiss that threat as so much toxic wind. But I am not so sure. According to FILE 770 https://file770.com/?p=21877 there have been 1352 new Supporting Memberships purchased this month, an unprecedented number. Very few of these purchases, I fear, were motivated by a sincere desire to support WorldCon. No, all these new supporting members are plonking down their money for a vote on the Hugos.

Ah, but which side do they represent? Are these members of traditional fandom, signing up to take back their awards? Are these Sad Puppy supporters, anxious to vote their slate to victory? Are these all NO AWARDers? Or maybe these are the Vox Day fans. Beale seems to have much more control over his followers than Correia and Torgensen do over theirs… the ballot actually has more Rabid Puppies than Sad ones. Could it be that Vox Day has successfully roused the GamerGate bogeyman that he was been threatening us with? No one knows. Unless…

I think it is All of the Above.

And as for me… I don’t know right now. On odd numbered days, I lean toward opting out of SasQuan entirely. Stay home, work on the book, I don’t need this grief. On even numbered days, I am determined to go… and to go BIG. Take the Hugo Losers Party back. I started it, after all. And this year, so far as the Hugos are concerned, we are all going to be losers.

 

George R. R. Martin on Not A Blog

“Joining Sasquan” – April 16

I have been going to Worldcons for a long time. My icon is a picture of me at Torcon II, the 1973 Worldcon in Toronto, where I lost the very first John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Wasn’t I cute? It was my second Worldcon, following on Noreascon I in Boston in 1971. (I missed LA in 1972).

 

Brandon Morse on EveryJoe

“Exclusive Interview With Sad Puppies’ Brad Torgersen”  – April 16

EJ: In a blog post, Doctor Who critical historian Philip Sandifer recently said that “the moral duty of progressive voices to form a blocking majority, and to loudly admit that fandom as it stands is broken, and that any work proclaimed to be the best of the year by a fandom this broken is demeaned by the association.” Do you think the outrage against Sad Puppies is ultimately because you broke the “blocking majority” that Progressives feel is their moral duty to maintain?

Torgersen: I feel like this is very much about totems. I wrote a long article today, talking about tribalism, and how Worldcon Fandom has reacted to having outside tribe(s) coming to “take away” the totem that is the Hugo Award. We’re committing near-sacrilege when we do that. But the chief problem is that the Hugos self-label as being the award for everybody while Worldcon wants to keep the total deciding process internal to itself; no out-tribe people allowed. An award for all, decided by the few. That’s the core of the problem. So, if the progressives feel a duty to keep out-tribe people from participating, I feel a duty to put a hand to their faces and say, “No, you don’t get to decide who is and is not a fan, or who is and is not worthy.”

 

Maureen O’Danu on Am I The Only One Dancing

“The Psychology of Hugo Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies” – April 16

Larry Correia’s public attitude makes it pretty clear that he felt that he deserved to win and that the Hugo he was nominated for was stolen from him, rather than simply won by another contender. (Larry denies this verbally, but one of the first rules of psychology is that when there is a conflict between words and actions, believe the actions.) The subjective nature of literary awards makes this a not uncommon problem. In any award where winning is at least partially a matter of opinion instead of mathematics, the language of robbery holds sway. “He was robbed” “She stole that award” “How on earth did he take that away from her.” From ice dancing to dressage to debate to writing, any ranked creative competition is going to generate these sorts of claims.

Correia took this further, speculating on the basis of negative comments he had received from either fans or writers (he has never specified) that he was specifically denied his award because of his political views. He has said that he believes has been specifically denied because he owns a gun store, is Mormon, is conservative, or all or some combination of the above.

It is common for people who feel entitled to look for unjust reasons for exclusion from something they feel they are owed. Afraid to look within, they will search for any confirmations they can find that someone, somewhere has unjust views of them, and then work long and hard to build a case that these views somehow formed the basis of discrimination. The logical leaps and sifting for scant evidence that make up this process are the roots of paranoid beliefs and are pretty common among lots of people, not just people who have diagnoses.

 

Nathaniel Givens on Difficult Run

“Some Sad Puppy Data Analysis” – April 14

If the last chart depicted clearly the reasons why social justice warriors are so opposed to SP / RP, this chart depicts clearly the reasons why SP came into being in the first place. What it shows is the average Goodreads review for the Hugo best novel winners (in red) and nominees (in blue) for every year going back to the first Hugo awards awarded in 1953.8 The most interesting aspect of the chart, from the standpoint of understanding where SP is coming from, is the fairly extreme gap between the scores of the nominees and the winners in the last few years, with the nominees showing much higher scores than the winners. Here it is again, with the data points in question circled:

Let me be clear about what I think this shows. It does not show that the last few Hugo awards are flawed or that recent Hugo winners have been undeserving. There is no law written anywhere that says that average Goodreads score is the objective measure of quality. That is not my point. All those data points show is that there has been a significant difference of opinion between the Hugo voters who picked the winners and the popular opinion. What’s more, they shows that this gap is a relatively recent phenomenon. Go back 10 or 20 years and the winners tend to cluster near the top of the nominees, showing that the Hugo voting process and the Goodreads audience were more or less in tune. But starting a few years ago, a chasm suddenly opens up….

Closing Thoughts

I still think that Sad Puppies have a legitimate point. Their goal was to get a few new faces out there who otherwise wouldn’t have been considered. I think that’s an admirable goal, and I think that there are some folks on the ballot today who (1) deserve to be there and (2) wouldn’t ever have gotten there without Sad Puppies. And I know that even some of the critics of SP3 agree with that assessment (because they told me so).

 

 

Eric Flint

“Some comments on the Hugos and other SF awards” – April 16

[A very long and multifaceted post – this is just the first paragraph.]

I’ve been doing my best to stay away from the current ruckus over the Hugo Awards, but it’s now spread widely enough that it’s spilled onto my Facebook page, and it’s bound to splatter on me elsewhere as well. It’s also been brought to my attention that Breitbart’s very well-trafficked web site—never famous for the accuracy of its so-called “reporting”—has me listed as one of the supposedly downtrodden conservative and/or libertarian authors oppressed by the SF establishment. Given my lifelong advocacy of socialism—and I was no armchair Marxist either, but committed twenty-five years of my life to being an activist in the industrial trade unions—I find that quite amusing.

 

Ian Randal Strock

“Foolishly jumping into the Hugo mishegas” – April 16

So, to bring this back to the Hugo Awards: we have something which a significant number of people value. And it’s something that has a set of operating instructions, which can be followed and gamed. Now, after sixty years of giving out Hugo Awards, some of the voters have realized that acting in concert gives them power within the system, and the Puppies Party has been born and instantly proven its viability.

Many people who are not part of the Puppies Party are decrying their actions, rending their garb, declaiming their love for the Hugos, and announcing their hatred for those people who would dare to “hijack” the award with concerted effort. The Puppies Party appears to have issued an ultimatum that they will keep doing what they’ve done in the future; I don’t doubt they can (I do doubt the value of doing it, but not the ability to do it).

So, to those opposed to the Puppies Party, I can only say: welcome to party politics. If you don’t like what they’ve done, you have a few choices:

1. You can do away with the Hugo Awards, simply retire them as a concept.

2. You can change the rules to make party politics impossible (though off the top of my head, I can’t see an easy way to do so).

3. You can embrace the not-so-modern paradigm and form your own political party.

You can hate the concept of politics within the “purity” of the Hugo Awards, but now that a party has been formed and started operation, complaining about its existence will be a futile exercise. The Puppies Party has the power of unity that those who oppose it don’t yet have. So, who among you is going to step up and start the conversation to form your party?

And for our European viewers, none of this thinking is to deny the validity of the parliamentary system. Perhaps the Hugo Awards may evolve into a multi-party system. Although the awards, as winner-take-all prizes, do tend to lend themselves more to a two-party system.

 

Larry Correia on Monster Hunter Nation

“I’m not Vox Day” – April 16

I cannot disown what I do not own.

I neither condone nor defend any of his public statements. I did not make them.

Of course I do not like some of the things he has said.

Do you think the existence of Rabid Puppies has somehow made my life easier?

I’m not going to burn anyone in effigy. Stop asking.

I’m not going to condemn anyone by association. Stop asking.

 

Brad R. Torgersen

“Sad Puppies: We are not Rabid Puppies” – April 16

I’ll state it again for emphasis: we are not Rabid. None of us wants to burn the Hugos down. We want the Hugos to live up their reputation as the preeminent award in the combined field of Science Fiction & Fantasy. We want Worldcon to be an actually diverse thing with authors and fans participating from across the spectrum, without having to worry about litmus tests or being in the correct groups. We don’t want people to have to be chameleons who hide who they are — or what they like or what they create — because it’s not what the “cool kids” agree with.

The objectives of Sad Puppies 3 have been simple and consistent:

  • Use the democratic selection system of the Hugo awards.
  • No “quiet” logrolling. Make it transparent.
  • Boost authors, editors, and works — regardless of political persuasion.
  • Bring recognition to people who’ve been long overlooked.
  • Get some good promotion for new folks coming up in the field.
  • Have fun!

 

Kate Paulk on Mad Genius Club

“There Hugo Again” – April 6

Claiming that being nominated because people who agree with Vox Day or Larry Correia or Brad Torgerson, or any other person you care to mention voted for their works is some kind of horrible taint is beyond the pale. The more of that kind of totalitarian secret police tactic that’s used, the more I want to stand up and shout, “I am Vox Day.” Or “I am Larry Correia.” Or… you get the point.

Because we are all Vox Day. Or Larry Correia. Or Brad Torgerson. Or anyone else who dares to disagree with the opinions of the would-be power-brokers. If we are not, then Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, Freedom is Slavery, and two plus two equals five.

 

Sanford Begley on Otherwhere Gazette

“I’m sick and tired of the Hugos”

I’m a 57 year old politically disgusted heterosexual male. I can more or less claim white. Family stories say there are a few other things in there, but none particularly show so, who cares? Now that you know I have privilege you can dismiss me and move on to a more diverse writer. Or stay if you aren’t a bigot. I’m good either way.

 

 

Miguel on Gun Free Zone

“The Hugo Awards, Social Justice Warriors and Sad Puppies” – April 16

Oh dear gods of the pantheon! You would have thought the Barbarians broke into the Vestal Temple and proceeded to rape the curtains and burn the Virgins. First came the accusations of ballot stuffing which went down in flames when it was pointed out that the rules for nominations were followed to a fault. Then it came the generalized accusations of “gaming the rules” to introduce a “Conservative, all-male heterosexual, redneck, icky” slate which died under quick examination of the slate as it was actually more varied in every concept than previous Hugo nominations. Then it came to be that the works were not true SciFi/Fantasy or did not conform to what SciFi should be, but somebody just pointed out that previously nominated works like If You Were A Dinosaur My Love and the whole cookie went down in crumbs.

But something was puzzling the SJW clique: After all the attacks, the Sad Puppies not only were not cowed, they had the balls of actually laugh at them! How dare they! So they went even stupider attacking individual authors. Larry Correia is an official White Anglo-Saxon Supremacist (I reckon that you will find the Portuguese last name in the Mayflower list), death threats were issued which is funny as hell when Larry is the size of a shoggoth, knocked down cows for fun a-lo-Mongo in his youth and is a firearms instructor with possibly more guns and ammo in his basement than many police forces in rural America…and some urban areas too.

 

Alan Davis on LewRockwell.com

“Science Fiction – The Culture War’s Line in the Sand”  – April 16

Why is science fiction–as a book genre–dying, while simultaneously conquering Hollywood, television, and video games?

Over the last twenty or thirty years, the science fiction publishing industry has changed.  Now, all of the major publishers, save one, take the political viewpoints of writers into account before publishing their works.  And if that writer happens to be libertarian, or conservative, or holds any views that don’t mesh neatly with the left-wing attitudes of the editors and publishers, then the only publisher willing to read their material is Baen.  Political correctness has become the key to science fiction, so excellent writers who don’t fit the mold are almost completely excluded from publishing and awards.

 

Ty Burr on Boston Globe

“Trouble brews in the world of sci-fi writing” – April 16

What’s at the bottom of the Sad Puppy complaint? Exclusion, it turns out. Responding to Martin’s comments, Correia blogged of his own memories of being a youthful sci-fi outcast at the Worldcon party: “The cool kids told their cool stories to the other cool kids, and lorded it over those who weren’t part of the In Joke. Honestly, it reminded me of high school, and I was the poor fat kid who had inadvertently pissed off the mean girls.” To which Martin responded, “Surely you have been around fandom long enough to realize that there are no cool kids. We’re all the fat kids, the nerds, the computer geeks, the guys who always had their nose in a book, who loved comics and played chess and couldn’t get a date for a prom.”

This isn’t really about right versus left, in other words, but feeling like you belong. And while there’s a productive conversation to be had when the volume is kept low, the voices on the sidelines, anonymous and otherwise, just pour gasoline on the flames.

More and more, I’m convinced that the Internet is toxic.

The only thing to do, I think — and I’m talking about more than just the Sad Puppies and Gamergate — is to marginalize the crazies on both sides. Which means, in practice, marginalizing the crazies on your side. We have to start making a stand for a big, sane middle and allowing everyone on the spectrum of that middle to express emotions without going on the attack. Anyone who calls names, responds from anger, hate, or fear — block them. Ignore them. Do not feed the trolls.

 

Jason Sanford

On screaming “We’re not VD!” while ignoring your relationship with VD – April 16

I don’t need Larry and Brad or anyone else to say they’re not Vox Day. I know that. Everyone knows VD is responsible for his own actions and statements.

But what many people suspect is that Larry and Brad worked with VD on all this. And based on the evidence, it’s difficult to draw any other conclusion.

For example, Brad ran this year’s Sad Puppies campaign and posted their voting slate on February 1. I can’t tell you the exact time he posted the slate, but the first comment on the post appeared at 8:40 pm, followed quickly by many more.

Vox Day posted his Rabid Puppies ballot on February 2nd. Again, I don’t know the exact time but the comments began coming in a little after 1 am. Depending on the time zone settings of these two sites, that means as little as a few hours separated the posting of the Sad and Rabid Puppies slates.

But hey, let’s be generous and say an entire day separated the launch of their “separate” campaigns. If there was no coordination between the two campaigns that means in less than a day VD read all the stories on the Sad Puppies slate, decided which to discard and which to add to his own slate, and launched his campaign.

Oh, and he also found time to contact the artist who created the Sad Puppies logo and have that artist create a similar but different logo for the Rabid Puppies. (The artist is Lee Madison, who uses the name Artracoon on his art. He even set up a site to sell shirts with both Sad and Rabid Puppies logos.)

If it’s possible to do all that in such a short time frame without coordinating the two campaigns, I’d love to hear how it was done.

 

 

Jim C. Hines on Facebook

Another Hugo Proposal:

Three Hugos for the Mil-SF and their space marines,

Seven for the grimdark-lords in their halls of blood,

Nine for Mortal Fans doomed to blog,…

One for Neil Gaiman on his dark throne

In the Land of Worldcon where the Shadows lie.

 

 

Unpaid ad from Fandom Prime:

Kitten+in+Mail

Hugo Justice Warriors If some Puppy has been calling you an SJW lately, maybe you’d rather identify yourself as a Hugo Justice Warrior. Click through to see our noble shield on a variety of products.

Proudly stand up to the enemies of fair play and quality SF&F by flaunting our shield. The Latin motto means “I will fear no puppies.” either sad or rabid.  I’m sure Heinlein, a man of principle, would have approved.

Considering the merchandise is being marketed to fans, one of the funniest parts is that T-shirts only go up to 3X….

 

The Stan Freberg/Ray Bradbury Connection

Posted on by
Ray Bradbury and Stan Freberg at Comic Con 2009

Ray Bradbury greets Stan Freberg at Comic Con in 2009. Photo by John King Tarpinian.

Stan Freberg, yesterday’s birthday boy, was a close friend of Ray Bradbury’s. Ray served as best man when Stan married Hunter — Ray having introduced the newlyweds.

The two friends had a reunion in the aisles at the 2009 Comic Con: Freberg was 82 and Bradbury was 88 and both made the rounds in wheelchairs. (See more photos of Ray with famous people from that con in John King Tarpinian’s article John and Ray Attend Comic Con 2009.)

A few years later Freberg was a speaker at Comic Con’s Bradbury memorial (2012).

Stan Freberg

Stan Freberg

Ornament To The Profession

Posted on by

NOS4A2_by_Joe_Hill_Slipcase_IllustrationSubterranean Press has produced a Limited Edition slipcase for Joe Hill’s NOS4A2. It features a Gabriel Rodriguez illustration foil stamped on the outside.

Gabe Rodriguez asked what we’d like for the image.

 “Charlie Manx,” I said.

“A Christmas Tree,” was Joe Hill’s just as quick reply.

So what they got was a design for a Christmas ornament “that would proudly hang on any tree in Christmasland, Charlie’s seriously skewed home base.”

Just how long would it take a tree to wither once that was hung on one of its branches?

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]

Tarpinian: A Comic-Con Tribute to Ray Bradbury

Posted on by

Rachel Bloom speaks at Comic-Con's Bradbury tribute. (Photos by John King Tarpinian.)

By John King Tarpinian: The Saturday evening tribute to Ray was very beautiful and moving.  The hall sat 4,000 people and followed a Gleek Fest.  I know of a few people who attended the Glee event in order to get a good seat for the tribute.

Even with having a line-up and an outline we had fifteen minutes to set-up and decide how to actually do the panel.   It was decided to take the tables off the stage and have a single podium so each speaker would be able to give their personal tribute to Ray.

Sam Weller was the organizer-host (The Bradbury Chronicles, Listen to the Echoes & Shadow Show).  He shared podium duties with Mark Evanier (Kirby: King of Comics).  Each tribute was separated by video clips of Ray over the decades.

First up was Rachel Bloom who had prepared a PG-13 version of her Hugo-nominated song.  When she came on stage she asked the assembled masses if they wanted to hear the CENSORED version or the real version.  Not one person in the hall opted for the CENSORED version and Rachel added some audience “call & response.” 

A number of the people who spoke have known Ray for half a century or more, William F. Nolan, George Clayton Johnson and Stan Freberg.  Both Bill and George let people know how Ray helped those two young writers.  If you youngins’ do not know the name Stan Freberg, just Google “Ray Bradbury Stan Freberg prunes” then sit back and prepare to laugh out loud.  Ray introduced Stan’s wife to him and was best man at their wedding.

Joe Hill gave a lovely tribute, of course.  He mentioned he had only met Ray the one time at the 2010 Comic-Con and that a man came over to him asking if he’d like to say hello to Ray.  I am proud to say that I was “that man.”  Joe also read a moving tribute from Frank Darabont.

Margaret Atwood had never met Ray and was supposed to visit him earlier this week but that was not to be.  She talked about how she read, as a young girl, Ray’s books as they first came out. That she used some of his themes in her books.  In The Handmaid’s Tale she used that women were not allowed to read because of Fahrenheit 451.

Marc Scott Zicree told how he first met Ray.   As a young man, Marc had done a “mixed tape” mashing up various audio renditions of Moby Dick.  Marc handed this out to a few friends.  A copy wound up with Ray.  Marc says he came home one day to find a message from Ray on his answering machine asking him to call.  Marc was afraid he was in trouble when in fact Ray loved the tape and they became fast friends.

On a final personal note, the only times I attended Comic-Con were with Ray.  Not a bad way to visit the zoo.  I did not speak but in talking to the guest speakers backstage I told how Ray’s hearing aids really did not work well with the den of noise in the hall but that hundreds of times an hour you could hear people shout out such phrases as, “OMG it’s Ray Bradbury.”  “I LOVE YOU RAY.”  “THANK YOU Ray.”  But the one that really got to me was when a young father and his son, who was riding on his shoulders said to the son, “There goes Ray Bradbury the greatest writer of all time.”  Once a man came up to Ray, got down on his knees bowed three times, got up and just walked away without saying a word.  There were lots of laughs, hugs and tears backstage and that will be how I will always remember Comic-Con.

Sam Weller

Margaret Atwood

Gary Gianni

George Clayton Johnson

Joe Hill

Marc Scott Zicree

Mark Evanier

William F. Nolan

Stan Freberg