The Bark Between The Stars 5/29

aka If All Puppies Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?

Here in today’s roundup: Martin Wisse, Sarah A. Hoyt, Alexandra Erin, Lela E. Buis, Bruce Baugh, Adam-Troy Castro, Vox Day, Daddy Warpig, Phil Sandifer, Shaun Duke, Spacefaring Kitten, Rebekah Golden, Dave Noonan, Lis Carey, Aziz Poonawalla, Charlie Jane Anders, Natalie Luhrs, and Kyra. (Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editors of the day Jim Henley and May Tree – who independently submitted the same item — and Owlmirror.)

Martin Wisse on Wis[s]e Words

“Your writer’s group would not be angry with this” – May 29

That’s the sort of bollocks you hear a lot of science fiction readers talk about, that they want prose that’s transparent, “doesn’t get in the way of the story”, doesn’t demand any attention paid, doesn’t challenge. There’s of course a huge inferiority complex running through parts of science fiction, resulting in the dismissal of everything that smacks of the literary and difficult. That’s what you see here. It’s not bad persé, it’s just a bit unambitious.

And to be honest, the Hugos too often have been that already. There are plenty of middle of the road novels that have been nominated and won it. Do we really need more of that, or do we rather have something a bit more challenging? Cetainly the Puppy nominees aren’t the answers: by all reports they mostly fail even Paulk’s rather low standards.

 

Sarah A. Hoyt on According To Hoyt

“Pure Gold” – May 29

We know the air of collegiate comradery is a lie, to an extent. Note I said to an extent, and I’ll explain later.

Part of my amusement at the reaction to the whole Sad Puppies thing has been the very same people saying there were never politics in SF being the very same people who once told me that there were rifts I didn’t see in the field and that some people in the early two thousands still didn’t talk to each after arguments over the Vietnam war back in the day.

And anyone who has read Heinlein’s bio knows about the other rifts in fandom and among professionals way back before that, a lot of them political.

But this is to an extent, because to another extent… Well, guys, we’re all pretty weird. We spend our days writing about worlds and futures that don’t exist.

Older son who aspires to medicine (and is engaged in preparation to practice it) tells me that only people with a compulsion to work at healing (and he says it’s a compulsion) understand other people with the same issue. Well, guys… Yeah, same for writers, and to an extent for fans.

I’m not going to tell you that I love all my colleagues. There are many I loathe, many I cordially detest, many I tolerate, and, yes, many I love dearly. Weirdly, this doesn’t rift across political lines (of course, my politics being what they are, they are at best cross-sectional to real world politics) or even correlate to those I like to read. Yeah, curse it, some of the ones I loathe write pretty good stuff. (Shakes fist at great novelist in the sky, who has a sense of humor.)

 

Alexandra Erin on Blue Author Is About To Write

“The Puppies come so close to getting it, so often.” – May 28

…I stumbled across a post by Dave Freer from February called “To Serve One Master — The Reader“.

The major thrust of the blog post is the idea that however an author intends a work to be received is secondary to how readers receive it, which… okay. This is something that it’s taken me a long time to accept as an author, but I have to say that I am in general agreement with it.

The thing is, it’s weird to see a self-professed Puppy saying this. After all, these are the same people who, whenever someone starts talking about the racist or sexist content of a work, respond with “BUT THAT’S NOT WHAT THE AUTHOR MEANT! YOU CAN’T KNOW WHAT’S IN THEIR HEARTS AND MINDS! YOU’RE JUST READING INTO THINGS!”

 

Lela E. Buis

“Puppy Debate Maxing Out” – May 29

I’ve been involved in work-for-hire for the last couple of weeks, and am just coming up for air. Checking around my virtual environment, I notice the debate about the Hugo’s seems to have gone past the point of raging insults and into slash and burn territory.

This is a process that’s encouraged by the nature of the Internet itself. If this were a space opera, for example, the plot would play out something like this: The Puppies make a raid and take over territory at the Hugo Awards. Because this is considered an aggressive action, defenders of the award would assemble a force to shake them loose. They’d all let fly with photon torpedoes and phaser cannons set to “kill.” If the forces had to resort to hand-to-hand combat, they might bring out their light sabers and go at it in Star Wars style. The result would either be that the Puppies are driven off, or else they prevail and put down roots in their new territory.

The problem with this scenario, of course, is that all the battles are actually virtual. They’re being fought on blogs, websites, Twitter and Amazon accounts and in a few news outlets. This means that there can be no really decisive victory. Defenders of the Hugos can score against the other side with a well-turned phrase, but not really take back the stronghold.

 

Bruce Baugh on Google Plus  – May 28

Kate Paulk will be organizing the Sad Puppies 4 effort for next year’s Hugos, so it’s interesting to see what her creative priorities are. Two things of note, for me…

#1. Her guideline #7, “The prose is invisible.”, seems like a good way to toss out some of sf/f’s best writers, including Vance, Wolfe, Lafferty, and so many others.This line from Jack Vance’s “The Last Castle”, for instance, is delightful and very much visible: “In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.” Prose I stop to admire in delight, or wonder, or the kind of bewilderment that leads to insight is a big part of why I read, and always has been.

#2. There’s nothing on her list about world-building, at all. This isn’t unique to this piece, either. None of the Puppies have much at all to say about world-building. I read sf/f for other places and times just as much for specific characters and stories within them, and one of the things that can make a work great is its setting. But seriously, they just don’t talk about world-building, which seems to me like talking about cooking shows and never wondering how something tastes.

 

Adam-Troy Castro on Facebook – May 29

…Even if you’re Eric Flint and write exactly the kind of fiction the Puppies like, if you think the Puppies have no case, if you write several blog posts addressing them with logic, if you criticize Brad Torgersen in particular, you are a CHORF guilty of Saul Alinsky tactics and should be subjected to demands for apology.

Can we just make a rule in life that if you invoke the name of an old lefty who has been dead for decades and who is in fact unknown to most people who harbor left-wing beliefs, to attack criticism for crying out loud, you are at best a silly silly person?

 

 

 

Vox Day on Vox Popoli

“The Olympian indifference of Johnny Con” – May 29

Mike Cernovich @Cernovich As a white straight male capitalist, I’m happy for @scalzi’s $3.4 million book deal. But how many women/POC are squeezed out because of it?

I had estimated 680 on the basis of other SF publishers’ current initial advances, but I stand corrected. …Tor is funding 13 more John Scalzi books at the opportunity cost of no less than 523 initial advances to new science fiction authors. As a side note, it is informative to see how much initial advances from major publishers have shrunk over time; the advance for my first published novel in 1996 was $20,000.

Those who have thrown hissy fits over Sad Puppies supposedly slate-blocking as many as 12 authors and preventing them from receiving recognition for their work at the Hugo Awards would do well to consider the fact that Patrick Nielsen Hayden and John Scalzi have combined to prevent more than 500 authors from getting published and receiving paid advances. Opportunity cost is a bitch, especially when you’re the one upon whose fingers the window of opportunity has closed.

 

Shaun Duke on World in a Satin Bag

“On the Hugo Awards: Two Scholarly-ish Projects to Come (An Announcement)” – May 29

A lot of us in SF/F circles heard of the rumors circulating about the Hugos in the weeks prior to their announcement.  I heard many rumors from some of my friends, and many more circulated (or were revealed as truth) through RP/SP circles and through those with far more industry clout than myself.  Since last year’s Hugo Awards were also controversial, I had the feeling that these rumors were going to indicate a blow-up that we hadn’t yet scene.  And so I turned to a friend of mine for help:  Aaron Beveridge.

Aaron is one of the co-creators of MassMine, along with Nicholas Van Horn. MassMine was created with the intent of helping academics acquire meaningful data from social media platforms (specifically, Twitter).  Their program is pretty complicated, so I’ll let you go to the website and learn all about it (there’s a video and everything!).  Aaron, it turns out, is one of those enthusiastic individuals who believes, as I do, that collaboration is critical to academic work, and so it didn’t take any effort at all to convince him to help me collect data and put together the projects below.

This post serves as an official announcement for the projects that Aaron and I are working on.  These include the following:

1. MassMine-ing the Hugo Awards:  Social Media Reactions and What the Data Tell Us….

 

Spacefaring Kitten on Spacefaring, Extradimensional Happy Kittens

“’The Day the World Turned Upside Down’ by Thomas Olde Heuvelt” – May 29

I was pleased that a Lightspeed story made it. It’s a very good magazine that won the semiprozine Hugo last year, after all, and it has published some pretty awesome fiction in 2014 as well. I’m quite sure I nominated two stories from the magazine for the Hugos, plus the whole magazine in the semiprozine category, plus the editor John Joseph Adams in the editor category.

I don’t read absolutely everything LS publishes, though, and Olde Heuvelt’s story was new to me. Naturally, I had some great expectations. Too bad this story let them down.

 

Rebekah Golden

“2015 Hugo Awards Best Short Story: Reviewing Single Samurai” – May 29

It’s fairly obvious that Diamond had a vivid image of this story in his head, the problem is that at the end I did not. I think some of this is related to the fact that Diamond so utterly identified with the character he was writing that he did not see the foibles of the character’s personality.

 

Dave Noonan

“2015 Hugo Semi Pro Zine” – May 29

Wow! A whole category with no Puppy Shit smeared all over it.  I didn’t intend to read these because I did want to read more shitty short stories. So Beneath Ceaseless Skies sat open in my Moon+ for a couple of days before I started reading and then… shock!  The first story was good! The second story is good too!  Holy crap. So I went looking and discovered the Puppies apparently couldn’t find any right-wing nutjob Semi Pro Zines so I may actually get to read some decent stuff. Finger’s crossed.

 

Dave Noonan

“2015 Hugo Fanzine” – May 29

My notes and rankings for the Best Fanzine category of the 2015 Hugo Awards.

  • Journey Planet
  • Tangent Online
  • The Revenge of Hump Day

 

Adult Onset Atheist

“SNARL: Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form”  – May 29

I watched all of these movies before I saw them on the Hugo nominations list. They are all good movies, and worth a bit of hard earned down-time to watch. I get to review them without reflexively asking “Would anybody want to watch/read this?”, and get down to the more important business of defining my own personal opinion. All good reviews are subjective because they arise in part from the reviewer’s enjoyment of the subject, and resonate with the reviewer’s reasons for picking up the subject of the review to begin with.

 

Lis Carey on Lis Carey’s Library

“The Zombie Nation, by Carter Reid” – May 29

A complete loss, in my opinion.

 

Aziz Poonawalla on Beliefnet

“G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel nominated for Hugo Award — and needs YOUR support”  – May 29

In 2013, Saladin Ahmed’s book Throne of the Crescent Moon was nominated for Best Novel, losing out to John Scalzi’s Redshirts – a tough loss indeed, but a significant honor in its own right. And way back in 1980, Steven Barnes’s The Locusts (co-written with Larry Niven) was nominated for Best Novelette, losing out to George R.R. Martin. There may be other Muslims whose works were nominated that I am overlooking, but to the best of my knowledge no Muslim has ever taken home the iconic Huge Rocket statue.

This year, however, that all could change: Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal, written by G. Willow Wilson, is nominated for Best Graphic Story. This is huge news and a tremendous recognition by the SF/F community of the cultural, literary, and social impact of Ms. Marvel – which is almost impossible to summarize, but this article at the venerable AV Club magazine is a pretty good primer: “One year later, Ms. Marvel’s influence is felt far beyond the comics page”

 

Charlie Jane Anders on io9

“Someone Will Livetweet Vox Day’s Debut Novel For Charity” – May 29

Before Theodore “Vox Day” Beale was the central figure in the Sad/Rabid Puppies Hugo Awards hacking, he wrote a series of religious-inspired fantasy novels for Pocket Books. And blogger Natalie Luhrs is going to live-tweet his debut novel, Eternal Warriors: The War in Heaven, for charity….

 [Update: In case it’s not clear, she will livetweet her reaction to the book, one page per tweet, not the actual text of the book.]

 

Natalie Luhrs on Pretty Terrible

“Bad Life Decisions: Make Me Read Theodore Beale” – May 29

So you can help me raise some money for RAINN (or a charity in your country which does the same sort of work).  For every $5 donated to RAINN, I will read and  live tweet one page of this 399 page delight with the hashtag #readingVD. I’ll also re-publish the tweets and add additional commentary by chapter here at Pretty Terrible–those’ll go up as I finish each chapter (there are 29 chapters in the book, as well as a prologue and an author’s note).

However, I’m not going to read any of it until we’ve raised at least $500–and I’d like to raise that by June 11.  If we manage to raise $2,000 I will read the entirety of Theodore Beale’s Eternal Warriors™: The War in Heaven™.

 

Alexandra Erin on Blue Author Is About To Write

“Rabid Puppies Review Books: HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON” – May 29

harold

Reviewed By Special Guest Reviewer Theophilus Pratt (Publisher — Hymenaeus House)

This instructive tale tells of a young man who all by himself creates a road which he then travels down, makes a mountain which he climbs, then saves himself from falling by conjuring a balloon which he hangs onto until he can bring into being a basket capable of supporting himself. His boundless creativity allows him to shape a whole civilization of buildings until, amusingly, he re-creates the very house he started out from and sleeps the sleep of the just, knowing that everything he has in life was fashioned by his own hand.

Amusingly, this book was sold to me as a work of fantasy when it is in fact the most realistic work of fiction I have ever encountered. If anything, it was too realistic to be fiction, a fact I found very amusing. Flipping through its pages proved to be instructive, as I began to see it was nothing more than a thinly veiled if amusing allegory for my own inimitable life.

Did I not provide myself with the only light I ever needed to walk by, as Harold did? Have I not always made my own road, and even left it when even it proved too stifling to my boundless intellect? Has not my dizzying intellectual magnitude taken me to the height of peaks so high that even I cannot long find purchase upon them? And when I fall, whom do I rely upon to prop myself up except myself?

 

Kyra in a comment on File 770 – May 29

Turning and turning in the widening blog
The puppy cannot hear the puppeteer;
Things fall apart; the Hugos cannot hold;
Mere doggerel is loosed upon the fans,
The canine tide is loosed, and in Spokane
The ceremony of awards is drowned;
The fest lacks all conviction, while the trolls
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some aggravation is at hand;
Surely the Slated Hugos are at hand.
The Slated Hugos! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image of a nominee story
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert prose;
A text with turgid body and an end wholly bland,
A phrase blank and meaningless about guns,
Is moving its dull verbs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant reviewers’ words.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That sixteen nominees in fiction slots
Were read like nightmares in my shaking Kindle,
And what rough book, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Sasquan for its award?

606 thoughts on “The Bark Between The Stars 5/29

  1. @ftumch

    I’ve already told you I don’t care about your attempts to whip up a right vs left pissing match. I’m talking about your statements on SF and the Hugos (brief as they were).

    BTW – the Daily Mail story you link to does not back up your statement. A story about Thatcher being left off of a fact sheet just doesn’t lend any weight to your story about some woman claiming Thatcher was a man. Not that the anecdote has any relevance anyway – we can all point to people with ‘unusual’ views on all sides of politics and none.

  2. “BTW – the Daily Mail story you link to does not back up your statement. A story about Thatcher being left off of a fact sheet just doesn’t lend any weight to your story about some woman claiming Thatcher was a man. Not that the anecdote has any relevance anyway – we can all point to people with ‘unusual’ views on all sides of politics and none.”

    Aye, but she was the wrong type of woman. This isn’t restricted to extremist loons.

    ” I’m talking about your statements on SF and the Hugos (brief as they were).”

    So brief you can’t remember them. Ok.

    I got things to do, people to see. Bye.

  3. @ftumch “Re: my Thatch story about her not being a woman:”

    You originally claimed that it was someone you met and had an argument with, but now it’s an article from the Daily Fail?

    In fact, it’s an article that does not even support your accusation. It just says that for some (silly) reason, the entry that listed ‘first female prime minister’ did not have her name. That doesn’t mean that they were claiming she was a man.

    Effectively, nothing that you have said in this thread has been true. Why are you surprised that people think that you are trying to troll us?

  4. I shouldn’t check my gmail. sigh.

    If it makes you feel better, here’s the same story from the bbc. I just googled and grabbed the first that came along.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8259036.stm

    The point is, as was, that Thatch wasn’t a real woman somehow.

    I suppose Larry Correia and Sarah Hoyt aren’t real hispanics either.

  5. @ftumch

    The Daily Mail story also mentions that the fact sheet didn’t mention Shirley Williams. Is she also “the wrong type of woman”?

  6. @ftumch – You should really read your sources before you post them, it would help you in avoiding this kind of embarrassing mistake. This article also disagrees with you, and in the same way. It even includes the same line showing that she was on the list.

    You would be better served by trying to come up with something about whoever made the list being petty in not using Thatcher’s name. That at least would have the benefit of bing true.

  7. @ftumch “I suppose Larry Correia and Sarah Hoyt aren’t real hispanics either.”

    Well, okay, you have said one thing that is correct in this thread. You are right about this, they are both Portugese-Americans and their ancestors are not from a Spanish-speaking country.

    See? Truth! Facts! Didn’t that feel better than your other posts?

  8. “The Daily Mail story also mentions that the fact sheet didn’t mention Shirley Williams. Is she also “the wrong type of woman”?”

    Hmmm… quite possibly, she did split from Labour to form the SDP. But then, Williams was small fry compared to the PM, who wasn’t named at all.

    “You should really read your sources before you post them, it would help you in avoiding this kind of embarrassing mistake. This article also disagrees with you, and in the same way. It even includes the same line showing that she was on the list. ”

    Whachootalkinbout?

  9. “I shouldn’t check my gmail. sigh.”

    At the bottom of each mail you get wuth an update to this thread, there’s a link that says “Unsubscribe from all follow-up comments”. If you click that you can change your settings so you don’t get any notifications,

    Alternately, if you click the “more” button at the top the gmail window, there’s an option “filter messages like these” Click it, add any additional criteria to the search that comes up, and then click “create a filter with this search”. One of the options is to delete any mails that match that filter.

  10. @Lorcan

    I still got lots to do, I just happened by my gmail while doing other shit. I can multitask, because I am awesome. (That’s a joke. Just for you Lorcan.)

  11. “I still got lots to do, I just happened by my gmail while doing other shit. I can multitask, because I am awesome. (That’s a joke. Just for you Lorcan.)”

    But where you joking when you said you shouldn’t check your gmail? I assumed you were expressing the opinion that you were upset about all the notifications you were getting.

  12. I’ve just been re-reading ftumch’s posts to this thread, worrying that I’d lost the thread of his argument — but I’m buggered if I can follow what he’s been trying to say at all. Is there a coherent argument there, or is it all the ramblings of someone having an imaginary argument with his lefty parents who made him go on CND marches when he was little?

    How do you get from Bidisha to a Greenham Common protestor to Harriet Harmon by way of there never being Aryan Nazi supermen in SF written fifty years ago, which is what’s wrong with SF today, not that he cares at all, you know? I’ve heard better sense from the nutter who always sits next to you on the bus.

    Oh, and hyperbole means he can say things that aren’t true, unless they are. I’ll just point out that hyperbole is an element of rhetoric, then move swiftly on.

  13. @ftumch “Whachootalkinbout?”

    You would know the answer to that question if you had read either of the articles you linked. Or, really, read my post, as I explained the problem. I thought I was fairly clear, but if there were any specific words or phrases you have trouble with, please let me know.

  14. NelC: I’ve just been re-reading ftumch’s posts to this thread, worrying that I’d lost the thread of his argument — but I’m buggered if I can follow what he’s been trying to say at all. Is there a coherent argument there, or is it all the ramblings of someone having an imaginary argument with his lefty parents who made him go on CND marches when he was little?

    Nah, he’s what I call I a “time-waster”. He shows up and posts a bunch of incoherent shit and then crawls back to his kennel, patting himself on the back about how clever he is, because he doesn’t have the intellectual capacity for anything more than kindergarten babble.

    I mean, really, you guys have made a heroic effort to genuinely engage with him. Good on you for that. But at this point, I think you just have to accept that there’s no “there” there, and write him off.

  15. Meredith on May 31, 2015 at 1:54 am said:
    I’ve been working my way through the (freely available on the internet) Hugo short stories nominees of past years. Its been a very pleasant experience. At first I was doing it just to double-check that I didn’t have way too high standards for the Puppy nominees, but now I’m doing it because the works are worth seeking it. I’ve yet to find one I hated, although there’s still lots of years to go through.

    That sounds lovely.

    I have been noticing that even past Hugo winners which once left me cold or baffled or shaking my head at the taste of voters now seem like a breath of fresh air compared to every piece of writing the Puppies have nominated.

    I very much appreciate what the Puppies have done in reminding me what good writing actually is.

  16. @NelC “Is there a coherent argument there, or is it all the ramblings of someone having an imaginary argument with his lefty parents who made him go on CND marches when he was little?”

    The latter. That’s why one of his earlier posts was talking about how ‘they’ claim that all homosexual people are just better and he has proof that they are only human. He has mischaracterized the people he thinks are disagreeing with him in almost every post.

    On the good news side, I did see that there were some puppies in the roundup today who were doing actual reviews of the slated works, so things might be looking up.

  17. I’ll just point out that hyperbole is an element of rhetoric, then move swiftly on.

    Aristotle!

    I’ve made the decision to grit my teeth and ignore our new Culture Warrior’s posts, as I don’t think this is really the place for discussing the details of right-left politics in the UK, and besides that I don’t think he’s here in good faith. (Hold me to that and tell me off if I re-engage, please. I think I’m going to find it difficult.) I liked Peace’s attempts to get us back to talking about books better.

    And on that note, people who’ve got started on 2015 stuff already: Found anything you’re planning to nominate yet? Anything that you don’t want to nominate but thought was really fun or interesting anyway? My to-read list isn’t totally unwieldy yet. 🙂

  18. @Meredith:

    I’ve heard rumblings about a few good works, but I haven’t read them yet (still working through Hugo nominees, plus I really want to read “Ancillary Justice” before “Ancillary Sword”).

  19. @Soon Lee: I read The Alchemist’s Gate by Ted Chiang recently and was intrigued. Is there a good place to start with Chiang’s other work?

  20. @Meredith: I really enjoyed The Buried Giant. But I’m a massive fan of Ishiguro and would probably read a collection of his shopping lists if he published them, so I’m a little biased there.

  21. Meredith: And on that note, people who’ve got started on 2015 stuff already: Found anything you’re planning to nominate yet? Anything that you don’t want to nominate but thought was really fun or interesting anyway?

    Well, dammit, I responded to your post, but put it over here in the other thread.

  22. Oneiros: I read The Alchemist’s Gate by Ted Chiang recently and was intrigued. Is there a good place to start with Chiang’s other work?

    Chiang’s not the most prolific of authors, he hasn’t published much — but every single story he puts out is a gem. A fair bit of his stuff is available online. There’s a list here, with links

  23. @jj –

    “… I mean, really, you guys have made a heroic effort to genuinely engage with him. Good on you for that. But at this point, I think you just have to accept that there’s no “there” there, and write him off. …”

    Is there still candy?

  24. Craig R.: Is there still candy?

    Nah, I think NelC, andyl, Lorcan, and Maximillian have scoffed it all. They didn’t even leave me a peppermint.

  25. The best 2015 book I’ve read so far is “Shadow Scale” by Rachel Hartman, the sequel to the brilliant “Seraphina”. Really, really great. (Don’t fancy its chances for a Hugo all that much, if it matters, since it’s a sequel, being marketed as YA, and the first book didn’t get a nomination. Ah, well.)

    “Love is the Drug” by Alaya Dawn Johnson was pretty good, but I liked “The Summer Prince” by her much better (I highly recommend “The Summer Prince”.)

    Same with “Persona” by Genevieve Valentine — not bad, but I thought it didn’t reach the level of her other books; “The Girls At the Kingfisher Club” and “Mechanique” were both fantastic.

    “Half the World”, by Joe Abercrombie (sequel to “Half a King”) was very, very good. I always enjoy the way he deconstructs fantasy tropes, and this one didn’t disappoint.

    “The Boy Who Lost Fairyland”, by Catherynne M. Valente (part of an ongoing series), had great writing, but felt a bit short; I’ve felt that way about the last couple of books in the Fairyland series, but am holding out hope that the next book will tie them together into a multi-book arc.

    2015 SFF books I have not yet read, but am looking forward to:

    “The Lie Tree” by Frances Hardinge
    “Radiance” by Catherynne M. Valente
    “Razorhurst” by Justine Larbalestier
    “A Darker Shade of Magic” by V. E. Schwab
    “Updraft” by Fran Wilde
    “Carry On” by Rainbow Rowell
    “The Just City” and “The Philosopher Kings” by Jo Walton
    “The Fifth Season” by N. K. Jemison
    “Trigger Warning” by Neil Gaiman (short stories)
    “Get in Trouble” by Kelly Link (short stories)
    “Last First Snow” by Max Gladstone (prequel)
    “A God in Ruins” by Kate Atkinson (sequel)
    “Stories of the Raksura, Volume 2” by Martha Wells (ongoing series)
    “Lair of Dreams” by Libba Bray (sequel)

  26. @JJ

    Well, it would probably have been better if I’d asked over there anyway, since its the more recent thread. 🙂

  27. Brian Z:

    In all charity, I don’t think that any amount of tweaking is going to salvage the Omegas filk. It would be like trying to fix the Disney Hunchback of Notre Dame by replacing the obligatory adorable sidekicks with different obligatory adorable sidekicks. Best to put it behind you and start fresh with something else.

  28. Oneiros: Every story is a good place to start with Ted Chiang. 🙂 He’s not prolific, but pretty much every piece is a jewel. He’s a real treasure of modern sf.

    Peace Is My Middle Name: I like Gardner Dozois’ big annual collection of sf, and Ellen Datlow’s big annual collection of fantasy and horror. If I’m interested in the theme of a particular volume, I can count on a volume on that theme edited by John Joseph Adams being a good use of my money.

    One of the many things people like ftumch don’t get about communities with actual practical ethics with regard to the process of social interaction is that liars aren’t owed the same credence as honest people. When everything one claims turns out to be directly dishonest (about oneself) or grossly misrepresentative (of what others are saying and doing), it sets a strong bias in favor of disregarding whatever one says next. The more lies one is caught in, the more work it is to regain the baseline trust that people with no history of lying get.

    As nearly as I can tell, a bunch of the Puppies’ gathering places are so focused on “winning” exchanges that they have little to no ethics governing social process, except for things like “submit to the winner, unless you can mount a successful attack and become the new winner”. So this must all seem pretty strange to someone accustomed to doing whatever comes to mind if it seems likely to gain advantage over a rhetorical enemy. But that’s how it is.

  29. I’m delurking( and late) to say the book Shambles was talking about ages ago is Thr Gameboard of the Gods

  30. Ann,

    If you liked Tehanu you may like The Other Wind. It has at least one strike against it right off the bat in that I don’t really like it when authors revist past writings and extend on them. I find they never get the voice right, since they have invariably moved on skill and style wise, and so the feel is wrong. Plus they often have new agendas and biases and these inevitably get written into the work.

    My main issue with The Other Wind was in an effort to explain why the school of Roke was boys only in WoE, LeGuin has made the Rule of Roke which says No Girls coz tradition and eww Girl Germs!(there is a seperate short story about how the school started as women only then co-ed until the women who started it got screwed over by the guys who made up the Rule because of their inferiority complex).

    The idea that Sparrowhawk would be party to such a policy offended me greatly.

  31. ‘So what short stories and short story collections do people enjoy’

    Replying to this without reading the rest of the comments , so apologies for duplication: Michael Swanwicks’ The Dog Said Bow Wow. He’s a masterful short story writer, and I think you can find some of this works on Tor.com. Do try him out. Any Howard Waldrop collection. If you like Kelly Link, have you tried Margo Langan’s collection Red Spikes? Slightly similar in tone and style. Her novels are bona-fide brilliant, too. I’m not sure if Gwyneth Jones has a collection in print, but she’s a fantastic writer. Kim Newman’s storie collections are great, usually alternative worlds with horror/fantasy elements combined with pop-culture trash film and tv characters and character types coming to life, a bit like Alan Moore’s League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, only Newman’s Anno Dracula came out first.

  32. @Brian Baugh:

    Ah yes, Gardner Dozois’ collections are reliably good.

  33. Sadly the topic of “gourding your loins” seems to have been dropped, because I was interested in XS saying “Well now I know what my RPG group is going to find in their next treasure stash.

    GM: You’ve found a +1 Penis Gourd
    Player: a +1…Penis Gourd?
    GM: Yes.
    Player: What does the bonus apply…
    GM: It’s +1 and that’s all I’m saying.

  34. Peace Is My Middle Name: Ah yes, Gardner Dozois’ collections are reliably good.

    His annual “Best of” doorstop is invariably chock-full of gems. My great sadness is that it comes out every July — too late for use in Hugo nominations. Every year when I read it, I think, “Oh! That should have been on the shortlist, damn, I didn’t nominate it!” — for ten or twenty of the stories.

  35. @ Will McLean

    In all charity, I don’t think that any amount of tweaking is going to salvage the Omegas filk. Best to put it behind you and start fresh with something else.

    I gave this some thought, and decided to make some small revisions here. But thank you.

  36. Maximillian: Though, I have to say, having read that debate from back in 2005, I can see why VD is still cranky about it. I’ve seldom seen someone lose a debate that badly. He really wasn’t prepared for a debate with people who write for a living, some of whom were trained in logic.

    He had a similar reaction to the David Pakman interview. Pakman rolled him and Beale has said that he’s going to vivisect him for it. Just as soon as there’s a second interview and he can find some way to interpret Pakman rolling him again as a victory. Maybe if someone is rolled enough they end up on their feet, looking like nothing had happened.

    Rebekah: Ted Chiang’s Exhalation is splendid. Not that he hasn’t been mentioned already!

    Mark: Great post, and some great quotes. I was talking earlier about how great speculation makes great SF, and I think you’re describing that first moment that you grasp the first thread of the world that is being built and something in the back of your brain starts shouting “New! Interesting! Read more!”

    Paulk’s guidelines are the components of a functional story. They don’t leave much room for invention. Her blunt description of award-worthy fiction isn’t Torgersen’s coin-op rocketship ride nostalgia, but it isn’t an improvement. In either case, they look at the finger instead of the moon.

  37. Brian Z @ 9:29 pm- John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War was pretty good. It’s been downhill since then, in my opinion, but who knows, maybe there will be an uptick.

    Rev. Bob @ 2:17 am- Ms. Paulk is organizing a slate. This effort will take the coperation of like-minded folks who will be, it is presumed, voluntarily associating themselves with the SP4 recommendation/slate process.

    Absent mind-control, I still fail to see how Ms. Paulk’s efforts to gain support for the works she prefers is in any way wrong, immoral or anti-democratic. Absolutely no one has been deprived of freedom of will or the freedom to vote.

    Whym @ 7:18 pm- What option doesn’t John C. Wright want to give gays? To live? Vote? Read sci-fi? Be gay?

    I’ve read things that indicate that he wishes they wouldn’t engage in homosexual acts, but I have not read anything that suggests that he’d take their right to chose to do so away.

  38. Steve Moss:Whym @ 7:18 pm- What option doesn’t John C. Wright want to give gays? To live? Vote? Read sci-fi? Be gay?

    Judging by his explosion of rage over Legend of Korra, he doesn’t want us showing up in SF/F. He certainly doesn’t want us showing up as heroes. He absolutely doesn’t want us getting any happy endings that don’t involve being “cured”.

  39. Neil W:GM: You’ve found a +1 Penis Gourd
    Player: a +1…Penis Gourd?
    GM: Yes.
    Player: What does the bonus apply…
    GM: It’s +1 and that’s all I’m saying.

    +10 to Slight of Hand checks

    It’s an effective distraction outside its home culture. 😉

  40. @Steve Moss:

    Suppose a group of Democrats votes in your state’s GOP primary for, oh, state senator. It’s not a large group, either in the absolute sense or as a percentage of the voters in that primary, but it’s big enough to win the primary – and this group has decided to vote for a Democrat. Thus, when the primary votes are tallied, the result is that the two major candidates for state senate will both be Democrats – one on the Democratic ticket and one on the Republican ticket.

    Would you see this as “in any way wrong, immoral or anti-democratic”? After all, “[a]bsolutely no one has been deprived of freedom of will or the freedom to vote.” Should the GOP rally around its nominee with lots of campaign contributions?

    (Before you dismiss this as a ludicrous scenario that could never happen in real life, I should tell you that it did happen. Flip the parties, and that exact thing happened in Tennessee in 2012. So.)

  41. Oneiros at 5:07 am:

    Ted Chiang has never been published at novel length (and he’s not very prolific either); most of his output is collected in “Stories of Your Life and Others”.

  42. Minor tweak to above: That should read “your district’s GOP primary” in the first line.

  43. At Barnes & Noble yesterday, I saw an early copy of Kevin J. Anderson’s Blood of the Cosmos, the second book in his Saga of Shadows series. The cover included the text “Hugo-Nominated Series” prominently under the title.

  44. >> Ok, wrong there, but hey, they still minorities.>>

    Everyone’s a minority if you pick the right description. If merely “being a minority” is as deep as you’re willing to delve, then you can find a description of absolutely anyone that makes them a minority, as well as a description that makes anyone you don’t want to call a minority not a minority.

    If you ever decide to think about it a little more, you may start to grasp why some minorities face discrimination and others, not so much. But I think you probably have to want to think about it; it won’t happen otherwise.

  45. Oh, I just remembered I was going to mention BBC Radio’s adaptation of Earthsea. Only the last episode is available to listen to at the moment, but the whole thing’s bound to be repeated at some point, and I’m told you colonials and other foreign Johnnies can still listen without any shenanigans with proxy servers or swearing allegiance to the Queen.

    Interestingly for a radio show, it tackles the colour question early on in the first episode, when Ged and Tenar (the show uses them telling each other about themselves as a framing device) explicitly mention it. What’s also interesting is that dark-skinned Ged is played by a man with a Northern England accent (I’ve got a terrible ear for accent so I can’t be more precise) while the pale Tenar has a distinct South Asian accent (although I could be wrong and it’s actually Romanian or something), which can play games with your head if you don’t pay attention.

    ObHugo: might be worth a nomination for next year’s Short Form award, but definitely worth a listen.

  46. @Steve Moss “John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War was pretty good. It’s been downhill since then, in my opinion, but who knows, mayb”

    I wasn’t that impressed with OMW, but The Human Division was lots of fun, like reading Keith Laumer. The sequel is coming out next month.

  47. Tintinaus, thank you.

    “The idea that Sparrowhawk would be party to such a policy offended me greatly.”

    Many good people are party to things whose evil they are blind to, because it boosts their societal privilege. Omelas in action, in fact.

    I’d have to see how LeGuin tackles it before I could comment on your opinion there.

  48. @Steve Moss As for JCW’s feelings on what to do with gay people, see the following. Note that this is from his reaction essay to seeing two female cartoon characters *holding hands*. Same essay that he edited to remove his comment on beating gay men with tire irons.

    “I have no hatred in my heart for any man’s politics, policies, or faith, any more than I have hatred for termites; but once they start undermining my house where I live, it is time to exterminate them.”

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