aka Destination: Loon
Today’s roundup features Brad R. Torgersen, Paul Weimer, Vox Day, Edward Trimnell,John C. Wright, Barry Deutsch, N. K. Jemisin, Adam-Troy Castro, Jared Dashoff, Jason Sanford, Rebecca Luella Miller, Spacefaring Kitten, Melina D, Lis Carey, John Seavey, Rick Novy, Helena Bell and cryptic others. (Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editors of the day Kary English and Rev. Bob.)
Brad R. Torgersen on Mad Genius Club
“So you want to write an award-winning Hard Science Fiction story?” – June 21
[Begins with a series of insights about writing sf professionally.]
Now, for a few personal caveats. These are just my prejudices and biases speaking, so take ’em or leave ’em.
Endless polishing is death on productivity, and death on learning. I never learned anything from spending months or years tinkering with the same piece of work. Give yourself a personal rule, for when you’re going to stop on a specific work, and move on to something new. Either how many revisions you’ll do, or how much time you’ll devote to finishing touches once you’ve put THE END on the tail, etc. Just don’t get locked into thinking you can make any story perfect. I can speak from experience: good enough really is good enough.
Downbeat endings suck. They are ‘literary’ and some critics and aesthetes love them. But they suck. If you’re going to roast your characters in hell, at least give them a little silver lining at the end? Some kind of hope for a more positive outcome? Your readers will thank you.
Stories that demote humanity to being puny and insignificant, also suck. We may be small and/or not as advanced as other intelligent life in the universe, but we didn’t get to where we are now by being meaningless dullards. Humans are crafty and stubborn. Never say die. We should be reflected as such.
Some of the best HSF I’ve ever read, inspired in me the notion: Wow, this is how it could really happen! Be it space colonization, or warp drive, or first contact with another intelligent species from somewhere else in the galaxy. When you play by the rules — keeping the universe as we know it relatively intact, accessible, and consistent — you’re shining a light on a possible path. Not predicting the future per se, but illuminating a way that things might develop. That’s the kind of story that may inspire some teenager somewhere to become a rocket scientist.
Speaking of which, leave the “playground equipment” around for your readers to mess with. That’s a Niven-ism. If the reader gets to the end of your story and can imagine events continuing on — populated by your characters, the reader in character form, or both — then you’ve really won. Because you’ve made your world and your story so engrossing, the reader doesn’t want to leave! That’s a reader who will want to come back for more. That’s a reader who will be loyal, and tell others about your work.
Paul Weimer on Blog, Jvstin Style
“Campbell vs the New Wave, and Brad Torgersen” – June 22
I do think that Torgersen is missing a large bet on a lot of stories. And I am not sure that Literary=downbeat=suck is an equation that works. HEA and HFA are fine and dandy, but those aren’t the only stories. Hell, look at Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee stories as an excellent counter example. I’m sure Baxter would be surprised to be called literary. And he definitely does not suck.
What strikes me from this article is how it fights the whole Campbell vs the New Wave argument that I’ve opined was at the heart of the Sad Puppies.. One of the File 770 group called him Neo-Campbell. So there you have it.
Torgersen post shows that SF fandom and authors are STILL fighting the New Wave conflict, decades later. The past isn’t dead, its not even past.
Vox Day on Vox Popoli
“A necessary endorsement” – June 22
Refusing to take a side and trying to remain above it all will no more bring an end to the tactics he dislikes than the League of Nations prevented World War II. Misbehaving bullies can only be stopped with superior force. To stop the lynch mobs, Mr. Trimnell should help us bring them to an end by multiplying our force. We will abandon the tactic as soon as the SJWs do… like Ronald Reagan with the Evil Empire, we will trust, but verify. But until the SJWs give up their rhetorical tactics of name-calling, marginalization, and disqualification, we will continue play by the Chicago Rules and exploit every mistake they make and every opening they give us. The TOR boycott is nothing more than holding TOR Books accountable for the wholly unprofessional behavior of its SJW employees, behavior that would have gotten a minimum-wage Walmart greeter fired on the spot.
Furthermore, there is no symbiosis. The SJWs are not dependent upon anyone’s outlandish statements; if an opponent has not said something objectionable, they will simply lie and claim he did, then run their usual insult-isolate-disqualify routine. We, on the other hand, have a rich and continuously replenished pool of outlandish statements from which to choose to use against them.
Edward Trimnell
“Debating the Tor boycott” – June 22
I expressed my disagreement with Vox’s position on the Tor Books boycott…and Vox expressed his disagreement with my disagreement.
My dislike of boycotts remains.
I remember the mindless campaign orchestrated against Orson Scott Card a few years ago. Card’s sin was basically to express a view of marriage that was all but universal (including among liberals and Democrats) until ten years ago. Yet the SJW mobs did their best to silence Card, urging a nationwide boycott of the movie adaptation of Ender’s Game, and barraging the offices of DC Comics until Card was dropped from the company’s Superman project.
Ah, but that is exactly the point….say the forces behind the anti-Tor boycott. The SJWs do it.
I believe it is important to remember what separates the freethinkers from the SJWs. The freethinkers seek to outthink their opponents with a more persuasive argument in the marketplace of ideas.
The SJWs seek to silence their opponents through harassment and intimidation. (This should surprise no one, since the SJWs are almost all anti-market and anti-free speech.)
John C. Wright
“The Three Laws of Morlocktics” – June 22
[Quotes a long string of comments from File 770 but purports not to know the source, then says –]
The fear seems to be based on the grounds that her calling me and you neo-Nazi homophobic bigoted misogynist racists was cricket, but my accepting her lame apology like a gentleman (so she and I could get back to work) means that secretly I, and the other fine people called Sad Puppies who would like to reform the Hugo Awards, and return the award to be granted for merit of the work, rather than for the political correctness of the work, now have or may soon concoct an cunning yet dastardly plan!
The women who sound indistinguishable from phobia-afflicted delusional neurotic believe I and mine intend to send Daddy Warpig (the one Gamergater who expressed support for the Sad Puppies slate) to New York to blow up public monuments there with Vatican-made explosive rosaries, and dox and vox and vaporize Miss Gallo.
Because my expressions of neutrality and your letters to Tor asking for professional courtesy are so appallingly frightening that is creates an atmosphere of unsaferiffickness. Or something.
I would say that if women are that easily frightened, it is up to us men to make sure that no cad and no blackguard is ever allowed to speak to them. And if political argument over a pathetic space-yarn award gets the ladies this scared this quickly, it seemed that the Victorian standards for male and female roles were entirely correct. The poor, fainting, delicate damsels in distress must be keep safe from all the bumps and jars of the real world.
Either that, or these nags and termagants are a scandal and an embarrassment to their sex, because they are pretending to be frightened, when they are not, to arouse the very feelings of Victorian protective gentlemanliness that they at other times despise.
Which is it to be, ladies? Equality of the sexes in political matters? Or ultra-damsel-gushing, shriekingly school-girlish, play-pretend hysterical so beloved of the Left? The two are mutually exclusive.
Leftism or Equality?
Pick one.
@CathyYoung63 Sad Puppies is literally led by published authors; obviously it's not true that only lefty sf writers get published.
— Barry makes comics. barrydeutsch.bsky.social (@barrydeutsch) June 22, 2015
N. K. Jemisin
“An open letter to the WSFS about unintended consequences” – June 22
Whoa. Did you guys think this through? No, seriously. Beyond whether “The Wheel of Time” could get a Hugo, or whether you, personally, like short fiction or not. Did you consider how proposal B.1.3 looks, both within and outside SFFdom? What message it sends about WSFS priorities? Consider the context. In a year when there’s been intense mainstream-media coverage of an attempt to ideologically tarnish the Hugo Awards, effectively making them less representative of the genre’s current dynamism and way more representative of racist white guys’ vanity publishing, this proposal compounds that problem. Let me break down how this looks to people outside of the WSFS process….
So let’s review. In a year when misogynists, white supremacists, and homophobes have already managed to use the Hugos to advance their own interests, along comes this proposal making it easier for privileged white men to gain recognition, at the direct expense of the marginalized. I’m going to assume it’s an unintended consequence that this proposal effectively reinforces the Puppies’ efforts; there’s been no reason to think that anyone on the WSFS is anything other than professionally neutral on the matter. Until now. So, c’mon ya’ll. Did you really think this through? Is this the best time for B.1.3? Are you really willing to throw short fiction under the bus just to give bestsellers another accolade? Do you mean to throw a level playing field under the bus, to give more affirmative action to successful white men?
Adam-Troy Castro
“Spaying the Hugos” – June 22
The proposal to simplify the Hugos by eliminating the Best Novelette category and replacing it with a Best Saga category is an excellent start, in large part because it will completely eliminate any interference with those fresh young talents who nobody is ever interested in and who just complicate things.
But it doesn’t go far enough. A few more appropriate changes would certainly help usher the awards into the twenty-first century.
First, eliminate the short story and novelette awards as well. As everybody keeps pointing out, the short fiction markets are dying and the annual competition for an award not supported by the free market is unseemly. Short fiction has never produced anything of worth, anyway. Name just one time it has. I bet you can’t.
Make the contest all about novels, the big awards that really mean something, and make the smallest award the one for best stand-alone novel, because everybody also knows that stand-alone novels are for writers with no staying power…..
Jared Dashoff in a comment on Whatever – June 22
Over the years, long fiction in the greater speculative fiction category has moved towards publishing works in series, rather than stand-alone works. Stand-alone works are still published and are eligible for Hugos in various categories, but some of us thought that the expansive works, where the individual volumes may or may not stand alone and be worthy of a Hugo themselves, deserved recognition. So we set out to create a Hugo for them. Best Saga became the title mostly because as the work gets longer, the title of the Hugo gets shorter.
Having attended many WSFS Business Meetings between us, and personally having been on the Head Table before and being on it this year, we felt the sense of the Meeting (i.e. how many that generally attend the Meeting feel) was that another professional fiction category would throw off the balance if a category was not removed. Based on long discussions and floating the idea past folks, we settled on the Novelette category. This bumped up the maximum word count for a short story, and dropped down the minimum word count for a Novella. No work that had been eligible was no longer eligible, it was just eligible in a different category….
In response to this opposition to the Novelette collapse, we contacted Kevin Standlee, Chair of the Sasquan Business Meeting, to ensure we could amend our proposal so long as it was before the deadline for the submission of New Business. We are now in the process of doing that and amending the discussion text to remove any reference to the Novelette collapse. Some original proposers have decided not to join us in this effort.
Going forward, the proposal will only include the addition of the Saga Hugo and that will need to pass or fail on its own merits. If it fails, we will be sad, but we accept that it was not the Business Meeting’s want to create an award for such works. If others wish to submit a proposal related to the shorter fiction works, that is their prerogative, but I will not be submitting one nor supporting it.
https://twitter.com/jasonsanford/status/612748644379267072
Rebecca Luella Miller on Speculative Faith
“Awards And The Problems Behind Them” – June 22
The irony of the brouhaha is that the Puppies seem to be arguing against the politicizing of science fiction and it’s preeminent award by politicizing the method used to select the award winners.
Having been behind the scenes for the Clive Staples Award in the past, I know a good deal about the ways people try to game the rules in order to help those they hope will win. One reason CSA instituted judging the short list—the finalists—by a panel of qualified judges was to avoid this kind of deck-stacking which would reduce the award intended to honor good writing and storytelling to a popularity contest (or a philosophical statement).
Yes, there are diversities among Christian writers, and some would push the point by “gaming” an award if they could.
Other awards have bypassed readers altogether in order to steer away from the popularity contest approach (come vote for my book even though you haven’t read it, just because you know me, sort of). But those are susceptible to other problems—unqualified first round judges, high entry fees, sponsoring organization promotion requirements, poorly conceived judging sheets, and the like.
In short, no award is likely to be perfect, but one that combines readers’ choice with qualified judging evaluations seems as if it has a better chance of honoring the year’s best book.
The Hugos? Seems to me they have gone the way of the Oscars and in the process have opened the door to a horrible mess. This long-running award is in the process of making itself irrelevant to readers.
The Clive Staples Award, on the other hand, is a tool which can help readers learn about the books that other readers value.
Spacefaring Kitten on Spacefaring Extradimensional Happy Kittens
“Kitten/Puppy Dialogues (on Pizza)” – June 22
In the comments to the last Wednesday’s post titled Answering Peter Grant, a Puppy supporter called Xephon has been vocally criticizing me for several things I’ve said. The arguments in his/her first few short comments made little sense to me, so I thought the discussion was going nowhere, but then this lengthy account landed on the comment section.
I’m still unconvinced, but Xephon brings up some points I want to respond to, and because this is going to take up some space, I’ll rather do it in a new post.
The sickening truth is that the anti-Puppies need Beale more than the Puppies do. He’s done nothing for my side except stir an increasingly rancid pot. Those of us who have distanced ourselves have learned that we are wasting our time, because all we hear from the other side is, “because Vox Day”. You need him to be your bogeyman, the focal point for your opposition. If he didn’t exist, someone would have invented him.
One of the funnies recent developments in the discussion around Hugos is that the second you mention Theodore Beale/Vox Day, somebody charges in and accuses you of “because Vox Day” fallacy. It sure is an interesting variant of “playing the ‘Playing the Hitler Card’ card”. Let me state once again that Beale’s Rabid Puppies slate swept the Hugo ballot. Your demand that everything related to him should be removed from the Hugo discussions does feel a bit odd — especially when we’re talking about his boycotts and other schemes.
Anony-Mouse on Cedar Writes
“Get out and Vote!” – June 22
Do NOT vote NO AWARD for anything. Yes, I know the temptation to make a statement by putting something below No Award at the bottom, but in the unlikely case of close races NA can have an adverse affect on outcomes because it’s a weighted ballot. And frankly, it’s a pet peeve of mine. NO AWARD is a political statement, and this isn’t supposed to be about naked politics.
Do NOT vote at all for anything you do not think is worthy, regardless of why you do not find it worthy. See previous.
DO try to vote for at least one good thing in each category rather than leaving the category blank. For example, some of the fanzine/semiprozine entries have been nothing but contemptuous of dissidents against the establishment. I will not vote for them. Others have been accepting of everyone, I will rank them.
World of Pancakes
“Retraction regarding the Sad Puppy John C. Wright” – June 22
I don’t do this sort of thing very often, but I’m retracting my last post. Let me explain why. In repose to charges of homophobia, Wright said the charges were a lie and responded in a fashion which could be described as equally “homophobic” and “bizarre.” I wrote a long-ish piece taking him to task for this. It’s a solid bit of work, but I’d like to disavow it as of now. Since posting this piece, I’ve read a good deal more of what Wright has written outside of his novels. I’ve come to the conclusion that Mr. Wright has enough going on his life that piling on like this is neither fair nor necessary. I stand by the content of what I wrote, but, given Mr. Wright’s situation, it was needlessly mean of me to write it.
Melina D on Subversive Reader
“Hugos 2015 Reading: Best Graphic Story” – June 22
[Reviews 4 of 5 nominees.]
It was so wonderful to read a category and understand why all the nominees (that I could access) were nominees. These had quality story telling, good art (and art telling stories which I appreciate so much), interesting plots and characters, character development, humour, and in some cases, extreme ‘feelings’. These are the things I want in all my fiction (except the art, of course) and they’re never restricted to one ‘type’ or ‘style’ of fiction – romance fiction can deliver these things as well as epic fantasy, historical fiction as well as apocalyptic fantasy.
When you hold the quality of this category – just the writing and story telling to start with – up against the others, you really see how bad most of the work in the short fiction and related fiction categories are. And you have to ask why? Why didn’t the slate people put forward work that is well written and engaging? (Or more of that work?) Is there a lack of well written and engaging work which is action oriented/classic age/milSF? Is there a publicity issue for works that are well written and action oriented/reminiscent of older stuff and? Or did this slate become a cynical/destructive force designed to reward certain writers/publishers while ‘punishing’ others?
Lis Carey on Lis Carey’s Library
“Beneath Ceaseless Skies, edited by Scott H. Andrews” – June 22
This is a 2015 Best Semiprozine Hugo nominee. Beneath Ceaseless Skies is an online magazine of literary adventure fantasy. It’s visually attractive, and it offers some impressive fantasy fiction. I was pleased to find an archive that allowed me to check out the 2014 issues, the relevant issues for this year’s Hugos. An extra delight is that it offers audio fiction as well as print. This is an altogether fine magazine, and I’m very impressed.
Reading SFF
“2015 Hugo Awards Reading: Cixin Liu – The Three-Body Problem (2008/2014)” – June 22
I liked that the novel posed lot’s of mysterious questions and even answered them in a way that made sense, at least most of the times. While there are a lot of things in this novel that I liked a lot, there are a few things that I did not like as much. Mainly, this is not a character driven novel. This novel is about the science, not the characters. It’s very hard SF (which is fine), but it’s so hard, that at times whole passages read as if they were taken from a popular science text-book on futuristic physics. I guess it’s difficult to have everything: an imaginative and engaging story, cool science and great characters. The Three-Body Problem scores 2 out of 3 of these, which is a very good score.
John Seavey on Fraggmented
“Review: Ancillary Justice” – June 22
I think that’s why, despite appreciating ‘Ancillary Justice’, I didn’t really enjoy it all that much. There is a plot, and it’s actually a very clever one. But Leckie takes a lot of time in getting to it; she’s got a lot to say about the Radch, the empire that controls vast segments of the galaxy, and she wants you to really get a handle on the reality of living in the empire they’ve created. Vast chunks of the novel are taken up explaining customs, linguistics (yes, including the bit the book is famous for, that the default gender is “she”) and politics of the Radch, long before the plot ever kicks into gear.
Rick Novy on Entropy Central
“Lampooning the Hugo Awards – Free Short Story” – June 22
aka…The Bluegills, the Bream, and the Shiny Stones
Every once in a while, a writer will produce a piece of fiction with a short shelf-life. Such it is with a story i wrote a couple of months ago. The intention was to make a statement about the 2015 Hugo Awards, so I lampooned it. I shopped the story to three pro markets that I thought might be able to handle the expiration date. One market called it amusing but not right for the magazine. I happen to agree it’s amusing, and the editor is probably right about it not being a good fit.
I decided the shelf life of the story is now way too short to try to sell the story again, so I’m posting it here for free. I hope you enjoy it.
Without further ado…
I don't think "I really like [Author]. He should have a Hugo. Lets fuck up all the awards to rig it in his favor!" is good justification.
— Helena Bell (@HelBell) June 22, 2015
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Brian Z.: But is my intuition that I should adjust my voting strategy based on the information available to me before nominating wrong? Kilo Watts followed up to say someone should help correct this kind misconception, and it would be helpful if someone could.
Yes, it is. And someone already has. On Making Light, as you are well aware.
Troll, get thee back under thy bridge.
@Aaron:
And I will tell you you are wrong. That your notion of “story” is so limited is not, in fact, the author’s problem.
(It has also been years since I read the Amber novels, but I cannot readily imagine someone coming in at #4 making much sense of it.)
That a middle novel in a series can be good is unarguable — but unless you are dealing with what I think of as Gibson trilogies (where books A and B stand alone*, and C relies on both A and B) — I think that the act of reading them out of order is almost guaranteed to lose you some of the value; there’s a reason the author elected to tell the story in that order, after all.
Now this may have been somewhat reduced by the tendency of prequelization — so the idea that you know who’s going to survive, say, is much less of a big deal — but I think that knowing where Corwin ends up in, say, Hand of Oberon, can significantly lessen the impact of 9 Princes.**
But a stronger case, I think, can be made by a saga that doesn’t appear anywhere I’ve seen in the discussion — that consists of one full-length novel, 4-5 novellas (or short novels), and a collection of short stories, one of which appears twice — for a total of 4 books of decent heft.
I’m talking about Return to Neveryon, by Chip Delany — and yes, that was not a typo, the first story appears twice, since it repeats at the end, where the reader can see it through very different eyes than the ones they used when they read it the first time.
There is simply no way to tell the “story” of Neveryon except at such length — because the story is complicated, full of internal cross-references, multiple viewpoints, etc. To compress it is to lose something, and that is not a sign of bad storytelling.
(By contrast, I love Michael Moorcock, but I think the Eternal Champion series could stand to lose a good chunk of their total pagecount (by which I mean removing entire volumes) and still not lose much; but it was not written, as Amber or Neveryon were, as a single series from the start. It’s an accumulation, a collection of tropes and repeated concerns and repeated images, which is by no means the same thing.
You can cut Neveryon down; but to do so is to significantly damage it, which I do not take to be a sign of bad writing, but a sign of complexity. Make of that what you will.
*B may slightly spoil C, in that characters might appear so you know they’ll live through book A.
** I am not rot-13’ing that one for a 40+ year old book.
Chris Hensley, you’re the one who brought up CoS – I wanted to know who the 1094 slate of filkers were, in preparation for my 2016 campaign to award as many Hugos as possible to Leslie Fish.
However, now that you mention it, it does seem concerning. And if nothing else, if one “faction” plays that game then there is still plenty of room on the ballot, but if several factions do it things start to get crowded.
then they could probably get all three of the Chanur books between two covers.)
They did. Sort of. From a recent review:
The Pride of Chanur was followed by the Chanur’s Venture trilogy (Chanur’s Venture, The Kif Strike Back, and Chanur’s Homecoming) which was in turn followed by the stand alone novel Chanur’s Legacy. Currently, if you want to purchase Pride, DAW offers it as part of the omnibus The Chanur Saga which includes Pride plus the first two books of the Chanur’s Venture trilogy. That seems like an odd way to package the books; I cannot guess why it was done that way. I believe that there are also plans to release all five books as individual ebooks.
@Aaron:
Even the one that basically ends in the middle of a sentence?
“The Cougar Gold tin is just decorative; it has one of those pop-off lids, and the cheese is wrapped in plastic inside, as I recall.”
Well…no. Cougar Gold, like the other WSU cheeses, is sold in a real sealed tin, in which it can–and should be–aged. I like to give it 3-5 extra years, personally.
Yum!
JJ, Quinn offered a general case against bullet voting (with exceptions that were confusing.) I’m not sure it answers the question about how one could or should vote strategically in my scenario, but if it does, could someone please spell it out me? Thanks.
Which scenario is that? The one in which the CoS employs puppy techniques?
Getting five competing blocs the size of the RP would require 60%-90% of the voters to be involved in voting slates. At that point it is not a small minority, it is a clear majority of the voters. I also don’t think that’s very likely.
Sealion is hungry.
Needs fish badly.
CoS didn’t succeed in getting Battlefield Earth on the Hugo ballot, but Hubbard’s Black Genesis did make it onto the ballot in 1987.
It finished sixth, below No Award. Precedent!
If the CoS had been sufficiently ruthless, they could have punished the Hugo voters by organizing the following year to push all non-CoS-approved work off the entire ballot.
Evidently there are depths to which the CoS won’t sink.
Politics! Illegitimate! Aristotle!
Laertes,
No, that was just a response to Chris’s interesting comment about 1984. My original question was about a Jordan/Leckie/Scalzi fan who before voting discovers a stunning, lesser known masterpiece. I’m trying to work out whether and how much voter behavior and strategy might change under EPH.
A precedent followed by Vox Day’s Opera Vita Aeterna last year.
No, I didn’t mean that. I was just already annoyed at the mere prospect of both Vox Day AND the ghost of L Ron Hubbard managing to take up more or less half the ballot. And if they actually did that, who is to say someone else wouldn’t jump in. (And note also that just because we don’t really think that any secret slate literally existed in the past, that doesn’t mean one couldn’t exist in the future.)
Brian Z: Is this useful in helping us understand better exactly what we mean when we use the s-word?
No.
Hey, is nobody going to tell me who the 1984 slate of filkers were?!? I’m hungry for fish!! And for Fish!!
@Aaron on June 23, 2015 at 8:20 pm said:
What, because he’s not concise? Pffft. Tell that to Dickens, Melville, Dumas, and Tolstoy. I believe Tolkien was a great writer, and I have an English lit degree, so I can prove it. I mean, I understand not liking the book — not everybody likes Shakespeare. But asserting that it’s poorly written is just… just…
…almost as bad as impugning the quality our Northwest cheese.
Gabriel F: I always picture someone with a mouth full of nightcrawlers.
Given the number of comments about cheese in this thread, surely it’s full of Cheddar?
I get you. So here I am, a fan of some works X and Y that I expect to make the ballot with or without my vote, and also a great admirer of the brilliant but obscure Z, and I’ve got to consider how I’d behave under current rules and under EPH?
Suppose my overriding priority is to see Z on the ballot. In such a case, under both current rules and EPH, my choice is simple: Nominate Z and only Z. (This is obvious enough that I needn’t show the proof, I expect?)
In the more interesting case, I’ve got a strong preference for Z but I’m also interested in getting X and Y on the ballot, even at some cost to Z’s chances. In that case, under current rules, I nominate all three. And under EPH, I nominate all three.
If there’s a pathological case here, it’s not an obvious one. Maybe you could elaborate a bit on the sort of ugly scenario that you’re concerned about?
I really hated Kvothe in Name of the Wind, but I liked Rothfuss’ writing style. I kept hearing rave reviews from people I respect so I pushed myself into the second volume and I’m glad I did. Kvothe is much more interesting when he’s away from school and out earning experience points. He still has occasional Mary Sue moments but there’s the added satisfaction of seeing that smug teenage know-it-all from book 1 getting humbled.
P J, we cross posted there, but I’ll ask you directly – what did you mean by saying you discovered a 1984 filking slate? I’m assuming you are referring to information that is publicly available so there is no harm in my asking?
I might also point out that the scenario strikes me as implausible: I just don’t care all that much if my favorite books make the ballot. I mean, I’d prefer it? I guess? But the Hugo voting population is large and diverse, and I’m perfectly content to just fill out my little ballot and let the chips fall where they may. If my idiosyncratic preferences don’t match those of the voters as a whole, I’m not going to stomp my feet and throw a little tantrum about it.
I guess I’m just not that quick to feel excluded or under attack just because other people like different things than I like.
What WOULD bug me is if I thought there was some group that was organizing to take a giant shit all over the nomination process and make my input, and that of everyone else who isn’t a member of their little club, utterly irrelevant. Should that sort of thing happen, and I mean happen for real and not just in the fevered imagination of a few idiots whose blogs I happen to like, then I’d probably start paying attention and even get behind an effort to change the rules a bit to prevent that kind of garbage.
@Scott Frazer: “and then you finally DO get to the end and even though you’d stated flatly that the gorram island WASN’T purgatory… GUESS WHAT!”
But the island wasn’t purgatory. Gur “synfu-fvqrjnlf” jbeyq jnf, naq nyy gung fghss unccrarq nsgre rirelguvat ryfr va gur frevrf. Big difference.
@Kurt Busiek:
It sure is why I am. Paying another visit to Castle Rock is kind of like coming home.
A home where lots of Very Bad Things happen, true…
@Greg: (tracking what you read)
I use Goodreads for that. It’s definitely a step up from scribbling the title on a calendar, and it lets me analyze the data in new and interesting ways.
@RedWombat: “slates (and salamanders and sloths and sorcery, to name a few other s-words) ”
How about… oh, what’s the one I’m thinking of? Edged weapon, couple of feet long, made of steel…
I swear, that s-word’s right on the tip of my forebrain…
@JJ: “Now you all are just giving me spelling trauma. Please. Just stop sighting these.”
Okay, I’ll ease up. Wouldn’t want to give you a feinting spell or anything. Like I tell my parakeet, I have no need to indulge in such cheep trills.
@LunarG: (UF/PR recs)
What do you prefer? UF vs. PR, serious vs. light, with or without steam…? ‘Cause I read a lot of the stuff.
Laertes,
Close. My example was “I’m also interested in getting W, X and Y on the ballot, and I have some reason to believe most or all will end up either on the ballot or very close to it.”
How can you define your “even at some cost to Z’s chances” and will those chances be the same?
Wait, are we seriously spoilering for Lost? Seriously?
See, Brian, was that so hard? You had only to state your terms. I don’t know why you didn’t do that to begin with.
Now that you have, of course, we (by which I mean you and I, Brian, and any innocent bystanders reading along at home) do have a small problem.
I hope you won’t take offense when I tell you that you do not speak for me as a reader of File770. In fact, I could get a smidge testy about that. There are so many people in the world who would like to speak for me that another one on the pile seems excessive. And I already know what I mean by “slate,” and have not the least desire to discuss it with you, or the filkers of 1984, who presumably did an amazing musical number about boots pressing down on the neck of humanity forever, etc.
Now Brian, we are both commenters of the world! I know you’ve been called on this before, and you know it, and you know I know it. I highly doubt that this will keep you from “we”ing all over the place yet again in another few weeks, and hoping it will pass without comment.
I am not demanding an apology, I am not slapping you with a glove, my seconds shall be asleep at dawn, like any sensible beings, and shall not call upon yours. But please consider this your reminder that you do not speak for me. And if you insist on doing so, I shall insist on reminding you publically that you do not. As many times as that takes.
Best Saga (Long): Njal’s, Laxdale, or Erik’s?
Best Saga (Short): Gisli’s.
Man. I kinda really love Red and Kurt tonight.
Brian Z.: My example was “I’m also interested in getting W, X and Y on the ballot, and I have some reason to believe most or all will end up either on the ballot or very close to it.”
How can you define your “even at some cost to Z’s chances” and will those chances be the same?
It’s not necessary to define any cost to Z’s chances. Either you don’t want to nominate additional books which might compete with Z, or you’re willing to risk that the additional books you nominate might compete with Z. Which is more important to you?
Oh, right, I forgot — engaging in endless meaningless mental masturbation and wasting everyone else’s time is what’s most important to you.
.
Somebody, please throw him a fish and call a taxi to take him back to the seashore.
Dogfight at the Hugo Corral
GF: Wait, are we seriously spoilering for Lost? Seriously?
Well, I’ve never scene it. Butt since I gave up on it after just a thew series, I don’t mind if people want too spoil it. Feel three.
I have to confess I always find myself bemused when someone insists artists need to do something, especially when there’s some sort of purely arbitrary limit involved. Imagine saying no painter should need more than 3,682 brush strokes to finish a canvas… and if they can’t paint a good picture with less than that, why, they must be a failure. Sorry, Rembrandt, if you were any good at your job you’d have done The Night Watch as charcoal on parchment and just left it there.
This isn’t to say that the process of winnowing and sharpening text can’t be glorious. Mamatas is right on the money on this subject; an awful lot of us could stand to discover how little our scenes actually suffer when characters spend fewer paragraphs crossing rooms, opening doors, wiggling eyebrows, and arranging sleeves. My own characters used to sigh an inordinate number of times per page, but they shaped right up when I started dropping loads of masonry on the repeat offenders. In fact, it’s been several draft chapters since any of my current cast has dared to sigh or sneeze at all.
Cheers,
SL
Even so, seems pretty straightforward: If you absolutely positively want to maximize the chances of Z getting on the ballot, nominate Z and only Z. If you absolutely can’t bear the idea that there’s a scenario under which Z doesn’t appear on the ballot, but would have if you’d filled out your nominations differently, then that’s the way to go.
If you can bear that possibility, then you go ahead and nominate the other stuff you like too, and probably feel some joy because it’s natural to feel joy when you’re thinking about works of art that you’ve appreciated.
Win/Win, says I. I don’t anticipate that EPH will change my behavior one bit.
I’m not clear on what you’re reaching for. Are you trying to construct a scenario in which some nominator modifies her behavior in response to EPH, and thereby brings about some unhappy result? Something like “Gosh, I’m sure X will get lots of nominations anyway, so it doesn’t need any help from me so I’m going to leave it off my ballot and vote only for Z? And then, crap, it turns out that lots of people thought the way I did and now X didn’t make the ballot?”
Two responses:
1. That could happen under current rules too.
2. If it happens, then it should happen. The scenario there is one in which tons of people don’t nominate X. If X consequently fails to appear on the ballot, that’s the nomination system working as intended.
@Gabriel F.:
That depends. Who do you mean by “we”? 😀
(gd&r,vvf)
For the record, Brian, I’m well aware that you’re sealioning. You’re obviously not operating in good faith here and are simply trying to spread FUD about EPH. It’s not like I’m fooled or anything? But the thing about fearmongering is that when you do it really badly, it emboldens the people you’re trying to frighten. People who might be genuinely concerned about the results of EPH will be reassured if they read your stuff. “Gosh,” they’ll think, “if that’s as scary as it gets, I suppose there’s nothing to worry about.”
You’re helping. Thanks.
To OLeg89: I’ve read all but the last two Discworld novels. Terry Pratchert, Tom Sharpe, and Wodehouse are some of the best writers in the world. Also Watterson but in different medium.
Yes Feet of Clay is far more message fiction than YPU. But message delivered with humour, is very effective. Sadly humour is the most difficult form of fiction.
P.S. trying to catch up and reply to random people as a courtesy. Not trying to re-ignite topic.
RedWombat, I’m not presuming to speak for you in any way. And just to be very clear, I’m not concealing any agenda, nor am I a crypto-Alinskyite nor crypto-counter-Alinskyite nor any sort who wishes to question the agenda of others, and I believe strongly that we are human beings with our own innate worth and our own valid perspectives who are participating together in a conversation, and I promise to listen conscientiously to all of your views, including why you think I shouldn’t say that something can help “us” understand something. I meant no offense by that.
I expressed surprise that there are now said to be two (!) slates in 1984 and wondered how that could possibly be the case if since slates are supposedly new. (I had heard about another Scientology kerfuffle later in the 80s but I was less clear about events of 1984.) If I’m the only one surprised, maybe no one cares, and maybe it is a big open secret and I wasn’t paying attention. In any case, it is no reflection on you.
@Charon D
re: Kvothe
I can definitely see how some would define him as a Mary Sue, but I’ve never read him that way, largely for two reasons.The first is that due to the framing device we are hearing his story from his own mouth. And there’s a strong whiff of unreliable narrator, although whether it’s due to deviousness or just natural bias is still up in the air.
The other part is that as a Mary Sue, he’s really terrible. 90% of his troubles are self-inflicted and he ends up relying on others to solve many problems, most of which he caused in the first place.
So he certainly checks a few of the classic Mary Sue boxes, at least as far as being the typical overachiever, but even there we are getting a biased view of his achievements, and what is ‘important’. And beyond that he doesn’t check most of the other typical parts of the definition. He wants to, but a lot of the conflict is driven by the fact that’s he frequently a messed-up disaster of a person.
Besides, Rothfuss’ prose is so damn good that it would be worth reading on that basis alone.
Actually, I think Kingkiller is an excellent example for why a Saga or Series Hugo would be worth having. Each section is explicitly building to the grand finale, and until we have seen the whole thing there’s no good way to judge how successful they have been.
It feels silly to say that is Rothfuss had managed to wait and release the entire thing as one humongous 3000 page un-bind-able brink the whole would be eligible for a Hugo, but because it was released in sections it is not.
@rrede : Thanks for that link to Griffith’s work; that’s an impressive argument.
On the Rivers of London series, I would say that Moon over Soho is the book I enjoy the least in the series. Unfortunately, it sets up key points of the story arc for the rest of the series.
Laertes,
Why do you consider asking questions in a public forum about a proposed amendment to the constitution of a venerable organization to be sealioning? If you said that you consider my questions nitpicky or edge cases, I might agree, but not that the questions are somehow invalid. My concern is with evaluating how WSFS members might react to this proposal and how it would impact their voting behavior.
I was putting myself in the shoes of an average voter who likes a bunch of popular things, to see whether the new rules might change such a voter’s behavior in some cases.
Maybe I should tell you how I vote in the Hugos. My own voting strategy can be best described as follows:
So in addition to thinking about other voters, I’m also interested in how EPH might change my voting strategy. I hope I’m being more clear.
Tad Williams Otherland? Personally, i think it should have been trimmed down to one book, much bettet for it. So many pages thrown away at describing just another virtual reality.
I found it horribly bad, and decided on the spot to never buy anything more from Williams.
Okay, I’ve got a technical question for the wordsmiths (authors, editors, et al.) in the gang. Consider the following sentence from a first-person, past-tense story:
Is that “now” correct?
On the one hand, I read “now” as present, which is a red flag, but the character’s describing a change in the moment of the story… and I’m not sure how else it could be phrased to convey the same sense of surprise. Help?
Brian Z:
Which two slates is it you say existed 1984? Stop hiding behind others with words such as “we” or “it’s said”.
*wanders back in, in the Australian afternoon*
Jon Seavey:
This prompts the question of whether the original complaint – that people were voting for substandard work for political reasons (see Kyra’s comment with another Brad quote, for example) was not the product of mere discomfort, confusion, or misunderstanding, but intentional code for “Who let all this riff-raff into the room?!”
Fred Davis: I’ve read that Bester essay at some point, because I remembered the unquotable “Brick Malloy” bit!
rrede: Much envy of your story of academia and your triumphs over its obstacles. And respect to your dad!
Would that I had similar credentials, because then I might actually have studied this Roland Barthes character, who seems to get in everywhere. Just this morning I tripped over him again (in a completely different context to yesterday’s treadmill discovery). This is Sharon McDonald (in the introduction to Images of Women in Peace and War):
The noticeable presence of the “Not-We” in the Hugos, as characters and as creators, is doing exactly that: challenging “the way things are”, the natural order – the unchallengeable (and suspiciously undefined) norms of SFF.
One other thing I wanted to throw in, re “immersive” fiction, ie fiction which doesn’t violate the reader’s expectations and is therefore “comfortable” (pace whichever commenter was bored by over-familiar stuff – I sympathise!). I’ve just read the very interesting Incognito: the Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman, which argues that consciousness is the teensy tip of an iceberg of unconscious thought processes. When we do something familiar, he explains, like driving to work, we do it automatically, without having to think about it – unless, say, a kid runs out onto the road, when our conscious mind comes on line to deal with the crisis. The kid’s unexpected appearance has violated our expectations, forcing us out of a largely unconscious state.
I don’t want to imply that anyone’s “comfort reading” is literally mindless*, but the idea that a violation of expectations, such as a disabled gay protagonist (two degrees away from “normal”!), kicks some readers out of their mental comfort zone, could be relevant here.
* Mine includes The Pillow Book of Sei Shonangon, which is incredibly soothing and very predictable – but I still have to constantly look at the notes at the back.
@Bob: Is that “now” correct?
On the one hand, I read “now” as present, which is a red flag, but the character’s describing a change in the moment of the story… and I’m not sure how else it could be phrased to convey the same sense of surprise. Help?
It’s fine. You have an intuition as to an alternative usage of the word “now”, which is correct but which is not often taught explicitly these days.
“Now” doesn’t only mean “in the present moment”, it also can mean “at the time being referenced”; you’re using it in this second sense in your sentence, as the thousands of novels and stories you’ve read taught you is correct, and it is correct.
…grrr…
@Brian Z:
How do you work out what’s brilliant, but doesn’t have a prayer? Lack of press?
“Is that “now” correct?”
Yes. At least, I use it that way. Some editors will disagree, but it looks perfectly fine to me.