I gafiated (drifted away) from sf fandom in the early 1990s, and even when that was my primary social community I don’t think I ever voted for the Hugos associated with the handful of Worldcons I attended. But from that perspective, here’s as much about this year’s “Puppygate” as anyone not part of that fandom probably cares to know. Amy Wallace, for Wired:
… Though voted upon by fans, this year’s Hugo Awards were no mere popularity contest. After the Puppies released their slates in February, recommending finalists in 15 of the Hugos’ 16 categories (plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer), the balloting had become a referendum on the future of the genre. Would sci-fi focus, as it has for much of its history, largely on brave white male engineers with ray guns fighting either a) hideous aliens or b) hideous governments who don’t want them to mine asteroids in space? Or would it continue its embrace of a broader sci-fi: stories about non-traditionally gendered explorers and post-singularity, post-ethnic characters who are sometimes not men and often even have feelings?
With so much at stake, more people than ever forked over membership dues (at least $40) in time to be allowed to vote for the 2015 Hugos. Before voting closed on June 31, 5,950 people cast ballots (a whopping 65 percent more than had ever voted before).
But were the new voters Puppies? Or were they, in the words of George RR Martin—the author of the bestselling epic fantasy novels that HBO adapted into Game of Thrones—“gathering to defend the integrity of the Hugos”? On his blog, Martin predicted: “This will be the most dramatic Hugo night in Worldcon history.” He wasn’t wrong.
The evening began with an appearance by a fan cosplaying as the Grim Reaper, and it turned out he was there for the Puppies. Not a single Puppy-endorsed candidate took home a rocket. In the five categories that had only Puppy-provided nominees on the ballot—Best Novella, Best Short Story, Best Related Work, and Best Editor for Short and for Long Form—voters instead preferred “No Award.” (Here’s the full list.).
Laura J. Mixon, who won for Best Fan Writer, gave by far the most stirring speech. Her winning blog post had meticulously described the venomous behavior of a female, left-leaning troll (an Internet troll, not a troll-troll). “There’s room for all of us here,” Mixon said. “But there’s no middle ground between ‘We belong here’ and ‘No you don’t.’ I believe we must find non-toxic ways to discuss our conflicting points of view.” In closing, Mixon, who is white, added, “I stand with people from marginalized groups who seek simply to be seen as fully human. Black lives matter.”…
Also, small consolation to people impatiently waiting for the next book in his A Song of Fire & Ice (Game of Thrones) epic, but it sounds like George R.R. Martin throws a helluva party:
… Which brings us… to George RR Martin, one of the select writers at Sasquan whose works are considered both literary and popular. While surely more than a million words have been written about Puppygate (Need proof? All of them have been collected and linked to on a blog called File 770), few have been as well-considered as those on Martin’s own “Not A Blog.”…
Martin, the son of a longshoreman, rejects the idea that anyone has been excluded from the Hugos for not being either highbrow or politically correct enough. But just being popular shouldn’t be enough to win, he told me on the second day of Sasquan. “The reward for popularity is popularity! It’s truckloads of money! Do you need the trophy, too?” he said as we sat in his hotel room overlooking the convention center and the Spokane River. “Can’t the trophy go to the guy who sells 5,000 copies but is doing something innovative?”…
Still, by this past week, he was more optimistic. Optimistic enough, in fact, to throw a Hugo Losers Party—a tradition he’d started back in 1976, but then let fall into other hands. Martin printed up invites—“Losers Welcome. Winners Will Be Mocked. No Assholes!”—hired a band, and rented a 12,000-square-foot historic mansion. Winners who showed up—including Ken Liu, the translator of the Cixin Liu’s Best Novel-winning The Three-Body Problem—had to don rubber coneheads. Losers got magic markers to write on the winners’ cones.
After midnight, Martin announced that for the first time (and hopefully the last) he was bestowing his own awards—dubbed “The Alfies” in honor of Alfred Bester, whose book The Demolished Man won Best Novel at the first-ever Hugos in 1953. “This year all of us were losers,” Martin said, explaining that the Alfies, each made from a streamlined 1950s hood ornament, were his attempt to take a little of the sting off…
Patricia Kayden
“Not a single Puppy-endorsed candidate took home a rocket.”
YAY!! Dying to see what Scalzi has to say about this.
Gin & Tonic
Before voting closed on June 31
So voting for the SF awards took place in an alternate universe which has a different calendar? Cool.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
It does seem like whenever there’s a high voter turnout, conservatives who claim they’re representing a “silent majority” of some kind end up getting their asses handed to them.
No wonder Republicans spend so much time and money on voter suppression.
Gin & Tonic
From the Wired article: “But in recent years, as sci-fi has expanded to include storytellers who are women, gays and lesbians, and people of color, the Hugos have changed, too.” Um, wasn’t Delany winning Hugos and Nebulas in the 1960’s?
VFX Lurker
My takeaway lesson from this kerfuffle is that voter turnout matters. Puppy-voter turnout gave the Puppies their nominee victories earlier this year, and voter turnout of the non-Puppies gave the non-Puppies their say in the general Hugo election. In each case, the victory went to those voters who showed up.
EDIT – +1 to what Mnemosyne said.
sharl
@Patricia Kayden: Scalzi had a brief “video commentary” on the whole thing, but promised a more detailed response within the next day or two, once he recovers from his busy, sleep-deprived travel itinerary.
RP
Repeating a comment I made to that article:
Interesting article, although I think the author makes a big mistake by accepting a fundamental premise of the puppy people: “the balloting had become a referendum on the future of the genre. Would sci-fi focus, as it has for much of its history, largely on brave white male engineers with ray guns fighting either a) hideous aliens or b) hideous governments who don’t want them to mine asteroids in space? Or would it continue its embrace of a broader sci-fi: stories about non-traditionally gendered explorers and post-singularity, post-ethnic characters who are sometimes not men and often even have feelings?”
Scifi has ALWAYS been about broader social and ethical issues. White guys fighting aliens is just a small subset of scifi. Hell, the first scifi novel was written by a woman and addresses issues of scientific ethics, what it means to be human, etc. The writers may be more diverse these days, but any claim that there’s been some fundamental shift in the subject matter of the actual stories is bullsh*t.
Chad
I dont know what a puppy is and at this point, Im too afraid to ask.
Chad
So, I dont know what a puppy is and at this point, Im too afraid to ask.
Patricia Kayden
@sharl: Looking forward to that. I read him and PZ Myers all the time and learned about the Sad Puppies controversy through them. Not really a huge sci-fi reader but anything that pisses off Vox Day and his merry band of sexists/racists/bigots is great.
sigaba
@Chad: The names of the factions in these disputes always seem like self-parody. It’s because the internet is better at conveying memes than actual arguments.
Oatler.
Go to a Koch website like Reason or Ricochet and read all the sci fi oriented comments. Keep these Happy Warriors in mind when you hear rhetoric about the Rambos who should be running gov’t. The Big Bang Theory’s kookiest Sheldon antics don’t even come close. Here’s a favorite Redstate cry: “Huzzah!” ( always reminds me of Tobias Funke).
Tommy
I don’t know what to make of this. Pretty huge sf fan but I couldn’t even tell you there was a vote for Hugo or even aware of who wins unless it is noted on the cover of the book.
But I wonder how much it matters anymore.
Between the geeky emails I get and the reviews I can see on Google Play, since I have stopped buying physical books, pretty sure I am finding the best of the best.
NotMax
Tempest in a
teapotwormhole.schrodinger's cat
Not a fan of SF in general, the science in science fiction is mostly fiction and not very good fiction at that. It is hard to suspend disbelief when most SF even gets the most basic scientific facts wrong.
Mike J
@Patricia Kayden: The news was good enough to get William Gibson to drag his out of the basement.
https://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/635561572828516352/photo/1
Marc
Sadly, my biggest takeaway is that the Hugos are basically worthless. They come across as a popularity contest that can be engineered by a pretty small group of people. I’m glad that the reactionaries didn’t get to stuff the ballots, but it certainly appears that the status quo wasn’t pretty either. I’ve never been particularly attached to message writing, as opposed to storytelling, even when I like the message; the art almost always suffers. It’s not new to SF (watch Star Trek, for heavens sake), but it’s gotten pretty dreary and predictable recently. Substituting one set of Sunday School sermons for another definitely isn’t the solution, though.
Tenar Darell
@Gin & Tonic: Yes, he was. So was Le Guin.
But, it ‘s the usual subject matter/representative sample issue. Even the hint of nearing or approaching demographic parity (50/50) is seen as an invasion. Just as a minority of women in a group, once it goes over 20% (IIRC) is seen as a majority of women. The increase in diversity in writers and stories is seen as a foreign imposition by some, rather than a win for everyone getting increasingly diverse and wonderful stories. (ETA)
Bobby Thomson
@Chad: the Wired article sums it up well. Tl; dr: the puppies started as a snarky butt hurt thing about the Hugo awards being biased toward message over storytelling. “Sad puppies” was a dig on an SPCA ad’s appeal to emotions. Then the odious Vox Day, who you may remember from The Poor Man, started the rabid puppies, which was basically just a bunch of racist, sexist homophobes. The puppies took advantage of low voting to nominate candidates who were almost exclusively white and almost all male. There’s a poignant story in the Wired article about a female nominee who withdrew her nomination because she didn’t want to be a football and who has lost friends over this.
Mike J
@schrodinger’s cat: There’s a subset called “hard sf”, in which they take pains to get the science right. These days, even in non hard sf, it seems like more authors try to minimize the handwaving. For many stories you’re going to have to just swallow at least one big impossible (FTL being the most common), but they can have everything else obey the laws we know.
Bobby Thomson
@schrodinger’s cat: most SF is fantasy set in space/the future. But it’s always a modern allegory. Always.
Brachiator
Great article. Good to see that the good guys won.
Funny, SF always included women, gays, lesbians and people of color as authors and illustrators. And some of the best SF stories have been thematically rich, sometimes dealing with matters that were not just white guys with ray guns.
But there is more openness, and more overt treatment of a wider range of themes and topics (and I guess more fantasy over “hard” SF), even though you still have the sad tradition of female writers using their initials to disguise their gender.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Marc:
The winner of the main prize this year was a Chinese writer — his book was the first one to win that was not originally written in English. So it’s about more than whose Sunday School story gets priority.
NotMax
@Gin & Tonic
Not to mention (though just a tad later on) James Tiptree, Jr., who flouts categorization.
Tenzil Kem
The origins of the puppy nonsense are head-shakingly mystifying as well. A writer named Larry Correia got upset a few years ago when he was nominated for a Campbell Award for best new writer and didn’t win. Literally all of this stupidity can be traced back to Correia’s smallness of character. If I wrote an SF novel and it got me on the list of the five or six best new authors in the genre I would be over the moon. This guy is having a multi-year tantrum because he didn’t win. Pathetic.
sharl
@Patricia Kayden: I’ve avoided all things Vox Day for a long time, but did run across his scribblings in the aftermath of Ken White’s (primary coblogger at Popehat) from-the-heart post about his dealings with depression (link). Vox Day expressed confusion about why one would get so angst-ridden about a situation that clearly called for manning-up, ignoring, or – I dunno – maybe shooting it or attacking it with knives or nun-chucks.
White’s more conservative* co-blogger Clark, who has a positive view of both Ken White and Vox Day, wrote all that up, for what it’s worth. (It probably doesn’t present anything new for most adult readers, but if your interests include looking in on dudes wrestling with issues of masculinity, vulnerability, and male social roles and behavior in general – well, there ya go.)
*Contrary to Clark’s view, I wouldn’t exactly call Ken White’s politics left-of-center, though I can understand that it would look that way to Clark.
FourTen
As a gamer and a SF fan, here’s my advice: Don’t join things, don’t join anything. If you must, only participate in secret and never let anyone speak in your name.
Universally any group exists for the purpose of excluding non-members.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.”
– Adam Smith.
Laertes
Short version is that a few aging mediocrities decided to boost their profile by becoming culture warriors in the familiar redpill/gamergate mold. They’re aiming to attract readers by appealing to tribal identity, since artistic merit wasn’t getting the job done.
Last year they raised a bit of a fuss by getting some dreck nominated. Voters hooted their stuff down. So this year the culture-warriors upped the ante by exploiting a weakness in the Hugo nominating process that permits a discplined minority of about 15-20% of the voters to choose the entire field of nominees, thus presenting SF fans with no choice but to vote for one of the culture warriors nominees.
Last weekend, SF fandom responded to this gambit by simply voting to award nothing at all to the categories that were entirely dominated by this faction.
The butthurt has been deafening ever since.
NotMax
@Tenzil Kem
And a group of people for whom, space opera is the be-all and end-all of science fiction, rather than a subset of the genre.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Patricia Kayden:
My husband had never heard of Vox Day (we run in different lefty internet circles) but saw an interview in the wake of this and was disgusted. Typical trust fund libertarian who thinks he deserves automatic respect because his daddy has money and is perpetually enraged that he doesn’t get it.
Yurpean
@Gin & Tonic: There was a righteous twitter rant on this point, that’s well worth reading: https://storify.com/tehawesomersace/we-ve-always-been-here
Marc
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): The Three Body Problem is good work, agreed. If all of the pieces selected for Hugos were as good, it wouldn’t be a problem.
Lizzy L
@Gin & Tonic: Delany has never won a Hugo. Nominated, yes.
Brachiator
@Marc:
I don’t understand or accept this. There is no such thing as neutral storytelling. And good stories can embody a message, even be preachy. But all art has a point of view, often even an ideology.
You mention Trek, which could sometimes be subtle or hamfisted with messages. But the best of Twilight Zone often used SF and fantasy to include messages about gender, race, society, which might have been attacked had they been part of “serious” or adult drama. The same is true of the best of Rod Serling’s movie work, most notably his screenplay for Planet of the Apes, which is also by any standard a hell of a story.
And you have SF classics such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (Christian allegory) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (satire on paranoia about a communist takeover).
Steve from Antioch
It’s like gamer gate, but with even less at stake.
Robert M.
@Marc:
There hasn’t been an outbreak of message fiction over the past few years in the Hugos, though; you’re agreeing with the Puppies’ frame, which is a mistake.
What’s happened is that the set of people and ideas that are represented in the Hugos has shifted. The Sad Puppies are a group of reactionaries who can’t see the difference between message fiction and storytelling about characters and ideas they’d rather not confront. Take the case of Ancillary Justice, which won last year’s Best Novel. It’s about a zombie soldier animated by an AI, who’s trying to assassinate a political leader in a setting where a cold interstellar civil war is about to go hot. I’m not sure it’s a reasonable claim to say the Hugos present the best science-fiction of the past year, but Ancillary Justice was at least way above average.
But it was also a punching bag for the Puppies, who were incensed by the novel’s treatment of gender. And it’s one of the data points that, to me, indicate that the Puppies’ stated concerns over the quality of the Hugos are a cover for their actual concerns over the kind of content the Hugos (sometimes! but not always!) promote. Because the protagonist of Ancillary Justice has a completely alien perspective on binary gender (she finds it irrelevant and vaguely puzzling), there’s a risk that readers might come away thinking hard about what gender means to them. And the Puppies can’t be having with that.
Laertes
“Message fiction” is a culture-warrior term of art that means “Any book in which the protagonist isn’t a heterosexual white male.” Be aware that you are taking sides when you express the opinion that message fiction is winning awards because of the message.
Paul in KY
@Mike J: I read the 1st Divergent book. Which, I guess, would qualify as SF. Since it was told in the voice of a teenaged girl who was apparently completely uninterested in how things got to be this way, you never got any backstory on how these crazy ‘knacks’ or ‘affinitys’ or whatever they called them (gangs, it seemed) got started. In freaking Chicago, or what remains of Chicago.
Of course, that situation allowed the author to not have to have any coherent backstory for her tome.
Emma
C.L. Moore wrote more kick-ass sword and sorcery fantasy in the forties and fifties than all the puppies put together. Then teamed up with Henry Kuttner to write even more. She was Catherine Lucille Moore, and she created, imho, the greatest of the female sword-swingers: Jirel of Joiry. But she couldn’t use her full name, as she worried that the “boy’s club” wasn’t about to admit a female.
Hell, J.K. Rowling was told to use her initials so that Harry Potter wouldn’t be “only” a girl’s book.
Laertes
@Steve from Antioch:
And also way fewer rape threats. To be fair. The “sad puppies” or “fan-kickers” are animated by the same resentments that GameGate runs on. (In fact, much of their voting power results from their early efforts to reach out to Gamergaters and enlist them as Hugo voters.) But they’re generally just way less rapey than gamergaters.
Paul in KY
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I’d like to think that Karel Capek gets an honorary one.
schrodinger's cat
@Bobby Thomson: I don’t see why the law of gravitation would not hold in the future, for example.
The Raven on the Hill
There is an interesting Hugo nomination vote reform that has been proposed, E Pluribus Hugo. Put in terms of the election of governmental officials, it vastly weakens political parties. The system is relatively complex, and has some potential implementation difficulties, but if put into practice, and perhaps even just as a proposal, it has the potential to make history as a serious attempt to implement results of voting systems theory in a real-world situation.
Also, anyone who thinks the pups lost because of their politics hasn’t read most of their nominees. The field that embraced Robert Heinlein and Gene Wolfe does not have a problem with conservatism—quite the contrary. The puppy stuff just wasn’t very good. They sent their Z team.
Emma
@Yurpean: That was EXCELLENT.
Another Holocene Human
There is an ugly battle going on over the award Mixon got, it’s like Racefail 09 V. 2.0 with people taking sides. Also, the sociopath is following my wife’s twitter. She got off tumblr because a hateful jerk (and a TERF) was peeved that one of her posts was getting reblogged a lot in LGBT tumblr. So we’re both concerned that good old BS is following her now.
I went WAYYYY too far down the winterfox/RequiresHate/Benjanun rabbithole. I’m pretty sure I remember another pseud of hers, pyrofennec, from Fandom Wank on Journalfen. (Not searchable now.)
I don’t just run around calling people sociopaths for no reason. She is a sociopath, and a highly sadistic one. However, because of this fissure in the book community for other reasons there are still some people who should know better who are ardently defending her ass despite the path of destruction she wreaked across Livejournal for 15 fucking years (!) the multiple victims of her asshattery, the person she drove to attempt suicide, the writers she chased out of online spaces or out of writing entirely. The stuff she said, btw, just beyond toxic.
I survived childhood abuse (one of the threads actually linked to the ACES website, which was interesting) so I can’t resist a good internet trainwreck and reckoning. And it’s the latter part that interests me. Do people listen to the victims? Do they interdict the ongoing abuse? Does the troll ever suffer real world consequences or do they continue to prey on people ad infinitum?
People in SFF seem to be very forgiving. I couldn’t even read some of the stuff being said in BS/RH’s defense. My blood pressure soared and I couldn’t take it.
It bothers me how some stuff becomes established fact in certain communities and you become the “harmful” person for objecting to it, even if you are a part of that community. So right now in circles my wife is involved with, the people who voted for Mixon are wrongwrongwrong and proof that sci-fi is racist. It reminds me of when I was told years ago that “handicapped” was out not because it had acquired negative stigma, which was unfair but true, but because it mean a beggar. Well that is not and has never been true, although it does have that shine of truthy. (Handicap comes from betting, on cards, I believe, and from there jumped to sports, where it is still used in its original sense.) But when people BELIEVE it’s true, then it’s not a mild “Oh yeah, move on to the new term (even though you and everyone else including the people pushing it don’t actually care for it), reminder,” now it’s “What a vile person you are for calling crips beggars!” But that escalation and outrage is based on … a lie.
I don’t like liars.
Belafon
@Marc: Can you give me an example of a book that the story suffered from the message?
Gindy51
First world problems…
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
That’s why they call it fiction. And as another poster noted, SF, like all fiction is about the human condition.
That said, I know some geeks who insist on stupidly judging SF in terms of its scientific plausibility and the degree to which it correctly predicts some future tech development.
@Mike J
True enough, and I know some people who are holding up “The Martian” as an example of good hard SF (I have not read it yet, so I cannot say).
On the other hand, in college, my buddies who were physics majors loved Star Trek and Star Wars, and I admit that I find a lot of hard SF to be boring and sometimes downright unreadable.
Also, I used to take a bus whose commuters included honest-to-goodness rocket scientists shuttling between JPL and Caltech. Lots of fans of Trek, Star Wars, fantasy and Lord of the Rings.
WereBear
SF was always diverse. It was just that a lot of the readers didn’t know it.
someguy
I’m glad the Puppies got their asses kicked – and the “No Award” block voting was an awesome act of civil resistance.
But a lot of the Hugo awardees over the last several years have gotten really, really turgid – artists talking to artists type literature, or maybe not-very-good-artists talking to artists stuff. Sci Fi is dying, though Fantasy is alive and well. Well, except for this genre.
Marc
@Robert M.: Ancillary Justice left me pretty cold, honestly; it seemed to be a pretty standard “empires bad” sort of thing. Which is too bad, because an approach like that of Le Guin in Left Hand of Darkness can be very powerful, or in the Earthsea trilogy (sneaking in the ethnicity of the hero in the way that she did was brilliant.) I’ll grant that it may just be that I’ve just hit more duds recently than not, or that my tastes may simply have changed. It’s a bit similar to how I couldn’t take Game of Thrones after awhile; I only have so much tolerance for having the bad folks prosper and the good folks suffer for thousands of pages. After awhile, overturning the tropes ceases to be original.
Laertes
@Belafon:
Oh God. That’s easy. Dan Simmons’ Olympos.
It’s part II of the story that began with Ilium. It’s a pretty good SF yarn in general, far-future high-tech gods-are-real craziness with a bunch of interesting alternate-dimension stuff.
And then right in the middle of book II, we take this weird detour to smear 21st-century Muslims. Simmons introduces this inconsequential bit of backstory in which the Caliphate re-emerges in the 21st century, and being big durka durka crazy muslims, they immediately build a suicide-bomber submarine full of black holes that they can use to suicide-bomb the entire Earth. Through some fuckup or other, probably because they were just idiots, the sub crashed.
Then, after this bit of inconsequential and vile backstory, the plot continues along. In addition to being evil, it’s inconsequential–like a Buckaroo Banzai Watermelon of hate.
This message badly marred what would otherwise have been a pretty good book.
Tenar Darell
@NotMax: Want to know the funniest parts?
Even the type of fiction that Torgersen, Correia, and Hoyt said they were supporting was scarce on their lists. Most of the stuff that was slated, was all message fiction. ex. John Wright who dominated the Novella category, doesn’t exactly write action adventure stories. Even the BOLO story had a message. Worst, their slates didn’t even include their stated idol’s biography. Robert Heinlein’s biography was kept off the ballot by the slates in Best Related Work.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Brachiator:
The “If you want to send a message, use Western Union” quote generally gets misattributed to Samuel Goldwyn, but as far as Wikipedia can tell, the originator was Moss Hart.
Ironically, one of Hart’s most successful screenplays was for “Gentleman’s Agreement,” a message movie about a Gentile reporter who pretends to be Jewish to get inside information about anti-Semitism. So even the originator of the quip didn’t follow his own advice.
RSA
@schrodinger’s cat:
I’ve long thought (even as someone who used to read and like a lot of SF) that SF has multiple personalities. Some SF fans object to its being seen as a genre ghetto by pointing at high-quality literary efforts, but the Hugos have been dominated, historically, by space adventure stories, where literary quality takes a backseat to neat ideas.
(That also happens to be one of the stated motivations of the Puppies, if I remember correctly; I don’t know how credible that is. They apparently think SF would be improved if it were more of an adventure genre.)
Laertes
Oh God. That Bolo story. Was that the one where the robot tanks all chose genders, for whatever reason, and were really shitty to this one robot who didn’t want to choose a gender, and the idea was that they were totally right to be super shitty to that robot?
Another Holocene Human
@Gin & Tonic:
Did they think he was a straight white guy?
In all seriousness, I reallyreallyreally like Delaney’s work and was kind of like “where have you been all my life” when I discovered him, only a few years ago. I guess nobody I knew was reading him (I got recced most of the major stuff), my dad never bought his books (he likes Arthur C Clarke unironically, so whatever), it wasn’t in my school library, and he wasn’t featured from what I can recall in gay bookstores when I was trolling for books (despite the content!? there are gay geeks, hello). Of course, when you talk to SERIOUS SFF fans or writers, they know who he is (even if they haven’t read him). I liked Ender’s Game unironically and didn’t see the deep, evil subtext some people talk about so … there’s that. My personal incredulity is only worth so much.
I did read takes on the whole situation where they were failing to mention Delaney, until they brought up Delaney.
I guess, generalizing, if you’re part of a minority, you end up being the community that keeps the flame alive about your history, your authors, whatever. The mainstream is going to make certain things hyperpopular and then when the new kids come in, they’ll think that’s all there is to the genre. I think we’ve also gone through a cycle where increased representation was totally dropped and replaced with a sausage fest of straight white gentile seeming males, whether we’re talking TV, comics (oh god), movies, and so on. I know this happened with queer stuff, there was representation and milestones in the 80s and then like this silence, and then Ellen happened and look what happened to her. Things are great right now, but … it won’t last. Just look back. And comics? I ragequit comics over them literally going backwards in terms of representation of women, racial minorities, ethnic minorities, and queer people. I blame Geoff Johns and Dan Didio for a lot of it but they weren’t the only ones. Geoff Johns had bile to spill out about atheists as well, like how about that for some old-timey *ism? I feel like more Black people, women, out queer people were writing and drawing comics than ever but the powers that be were fucking killing off every single character that looked like them or silencing creators who were “too black” or what have you. (“Two black characters in a team book makes it an “urban oriented” book, and that’s not where we’re going with this title.”)
Grrr, I’m still pissed. They ruined something I care about. Not a part of my life right now, but I’m sure I’ll be back in genre soon enough. There were and are creators whose work I really liked and I feel sad I’m not supporting them.
Another Holocene Human
@RSA: I like the literary stuff.
I would read space opera, but the popular stuff was so badly written I just gave up.
I stick to space opera I actually enjoy, like Star Trek (lololol).
Mike in NC
Wife’s late sister was morbidly obese and lived on the 4th floor of a condo with no elevator. She seldom ventured outside but managed to subscribe to numerous mail order clubs, including some Sci-Fi book club. The deal with book clubs is that they automatically ship you a monthly package unless you decline it. So she had literally hundreds of unread books stacked in her living room. We had to sell or donate them after she died, but that was how I first heard of George R R Martin.
Captain C
@Belafon: This is probably one that the Puppies wouldn’t bring up, but as libertarian writer L. Neil Smith’s North American Confederacy series progressed, the books increasingly became made of Anvilicious, with a tiny side of plot mixed in. The first one, The Probability Broach, had a half-decent yarn to go with the Ayn Rand lite, but after that, well, it seemed like every other page, a character started giving a two or three page speech/rant about the Virtues of Selfishness And Freedom, or suchlike. Even when I was libertarian-curious, it was just way too much.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Gindy51:
This year was the first year that a non-English novel won:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20518872-the-three-body-problem
I’m pretty sure that China still doesn’t count as part of the First World, but I could be wrong.
WereBear
@Laertes: Dan Simmons is a damn fine writer who just went full Wingnut (never go full wingnut!) and I can’t read him any more.
Shame.
Grumpy Code Monkey
I haven’t followed this very closely, as I haven’t read much of anything in the last few years (sci-fi or otherwise). From what I understand, the Puppies are authors who believe they have been repeatedly passed over for nominations and awards in favor of authors who specialized in certain subject matter, regardless of the quality of the writing.
The thing is, the subgenres that these authors specialize in — action/adventure/marines-in-space sorts of stories — is very well-trod ground, and while the stories may be well-written, they don’t really do anything to advance the art (in my opinion, anyway). How many variations on Starship Troopers are worth the rocket?
Tenar Darell
@Brachiator: Andy Weir did a lot of research, but even he admits he got a thing or two wrong in interviews. (Like when he had to make his O2, he got the temperatures wrong. And he would have cooked himself in the way he went about making his air).
Another Holocene Human
@Laertes:
I got stressed just reading your description. That’s so sad, I mean who doesn’t like a sprawling SF yard with gods that are real? (rhetorical question, dammit!) That’s so sad. And stupid.
I feel like bigotry has destroyed good talents before, but I’m blanking on an example. Or fanaticism.
Captain C
@Captain C: Also, the various Ender series did, in later volumes, seem to have an excessive amount of “let’s stop the plot and moralize how getting married and making babies is the only good and right path for people to take.”
Sloegin
I’m glad the Hugos ended up the way they did (for the most part)
As for Space Operas and Het White Males being the be all and end all point of these zealots… Puppies would claim it’s more a conservative cisgender thing (and military SF in general that they were fighting for). I imagine they despise Iain Banks, even though he banged out some of the best works of the Space Opera genre in decades.
I’m also glad they (the Puppies) out themselves in their comment trails whenever they use the term SJW. So much easier to ignore that way.
Marc
@Brachiator: It’s a question of whether the message is everything. Look in movies – at, say, Dances with Wolves or Avatar. Good intentions in both, and neither wears terribly well as a result. See also: well, pretty much any Sorkin production. In politically motivated art there is a strong tendency to absolutes: there can be no good aspect of the wrong people and no bad aspect of the good people, because that could send the wrong message. I find it far more powerful to have the message come through without needing to have it spelled out for me in capital letters at every juncture, and to have believable human characters.
SF is unusually prone to this because a lot of it amounts to jumping off from some simple high concept (what if the world was just like today, except x…) If this is the only thing then it doesn’t wear well. What does is to then have the author use that as a jumping off point (well, then this would be different, and that, and people would react in this way, and maybe we’d start here instead of there.) So perhaps “message fiction” is a bad choice; it’s more like seeing clumsy fiction, or fiction that is just about conveying one concept instead of creating a living world.
jayackroyd
@schrodinger’s cat: When you want to engage in human/alien interaction, the fact that it’s impossible IS a problem. Likewise planetary colonization.
But there’s lotsa fiction that turns on the impossible. And there’s lotsa SF that is all human, earthbound extrapolation of current human society. Moreover science can be boring! Neal Stephenson’s latest, Seveneves, is chock full of ballistics but not nearly enough fiction.
Tenar Darell
@Laertes: I think so? I kinda blocked them out with other reading, and even often stopped reading the work if my gorge started rising.
Seriously, I think I’ve mentioned in a couple of comment threads that I pulled fic over my head recently. It was partly because of the Hugos. Well written fic is like the ultimate comfort read combined with going back to a beloved story re-told around a campfire by a new bard.
Marc
@Another Holocene Human: Orson Scott Card.
Tenar Darell
@Another Holocene Human: Feel better about it comic rec: Ms. Marvel. Just do it. (I’ve only read vol. one, but loved it).
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: I know it is fiction and I don’t expect it to correctly predict the future or read like a scientific paper. However, when SF writers flub basic science it detracts me from the plot. Basic things like the law of gravitation, remembering that sound needs a medium to travel and so on.
Mark B.
@Paul in KY: Thanks for mentioning Capek. He invented so many of the ideas that are now part of the landscape for modern speculative fiction, and he made his novels to be interesting meditations on the nature of being human. R.U.R. is fantastic, but everyone should also read ‘War with the Newts’, which says a lot about modern culture, and is written in an epistolary style which unfolds in a really interesting way. And it’s funny as hell.
Phoebe
@Another Holocene Human:
Your wife has all my sympathy. Which isn’t worth much on its own, but I suspect that if she looks beyond her immediate circle, she’ll find that the BS Defense Squad is very small, and has no influence outside its own moat and castle walls. If no one makes the mistake of starting to trust them again, it will stay that way; and since the defenses so far have been either incoherent or breathtakingly dishonest, it seems likely to stay that way.
Also, you remember right. Pyrofennec was Winterfox, or so all my sources say, and I think there are a couple of other identities that were too.
jayackroyd
@Mike J:
No, not really. Niven was a hard SF author–and his universes were entirely impossible. One hallmark, stemming from Asimov IMO, is a story, like Neutron Star, that illustrates a hitherto obscure fact–that tidal forces around a neutron star would be…messy. But the whole thing rides on an extended series of completely fanciful warp factor 10 pseudo science.
But you can’t have puppeteers, kzinti or outsiders with crazy impossible not science. Nor even trips to neutron stars…
Another Holocene Human
@WereBear:
In Far Beyond The Stars, Star Trek references its own history. Let me just quote Memory Alpha: Kay Eaton, who wrote under the name K.C. Hunter to hide her gender, was a version of Catherine Moore, who similarly wrote under the name C.L. Moore, as well as Star Trek’s own D.C. Fontana who wrote for The Original Series.
DC Fontana aka Dorothy Fontana.
But what I’d like to say here is that DC Fontana is kind of famous in Star Trek fan circles for fleshing out Spock’s parents and for creating the character known as the Romulan Commander. A woman, in command of a warship.
I think the viewers DID know. Especially the female ones. Until Star Trek, sci-fi fandom had women but was very male dominated, often in a rather nasty way. Star Trek conventions were mixed gender; I don’t know if they were 50/50 but they seemed that way. (Full disclosure: most of my cons were anime cons.) I also know that for years sci-fi people tried to argue that Star Trek wasn’t really sci-fi despite the very recognizable names affixed to episodes and the fact that it wasn’t doing anything radically different genre wise from Bradbury or Heinlein (I’ve read both). I’m pretty sure David Gerrold ripped off a short story by Heinlein in “The Trouble With Tribbles” even though he claims he was inspired by a real world environmental disaster. (The story is “The Rolling Stones” if you’re curious.) Some of Niven’s IP was used with permission in TAS. But whatever. Haters gotta hate. (Trek isn’t stupider than Flash Gordon. It’s not sillier than those martians and men in space suits made-for-the-landfill 1950s and 60s B movies and kid’s movies.)
Was anybody really surprised when “DC” came out as “Dorothy”?
Maybe some people, right?
In terms of the greater point, I actually think the little shits weren’t reading stuff by women and people of color. If you like the stuff that Vox Day wanks to then you might not have heard of Octavia Butler, for example.
Bobby Thomson
@Marc: it’s fantasy realism, aka Deadwood with swords.
Bruuuuce
@Oatler.: I use “huzzah!” frequently, but my usage derives from my short active time and longer peripheral time with the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism, or medieval recreationists). If I do use it here, it is NOT a shout out to the small, um, souled sorts you’re referring to.
Another Holocene Human
@jayackroyd: Niven has telekinesis in his Gil the ARM books. He had studied about as much physics as I did and understood his premise was impossible but it didn’t make his stories less enjoyable.
A late great scifi author told it to me (and about 20 of my friends … ah, college) that scifi audiences want to see that you’ve put in the effort to come up with a reasonable plausible sounding justification for your not science. Don’t just toss sciencefail out there, show the audience you respect that they know science, they know it ain’t so, and give them a way to suspend disbelief anyway.
I think his observation was very true.
Another Holocene Human
@Bruuuuce: MST3K: The Pod People.
Huzzah!
Mark B.
@Another Holocene Human: I had the opportunity to hear Octavia Butler speak at the Texas Book Fair in 2006 or 2006. Unfortunately, she passed away in 2007. She was incredibly gracious in acknowledging the people who helped her become successful as a writer, and it was interesting to hear how much of a struggle it was for her to come up with ideas, even though her writing seems seamless when you read it. Her life story is as impressive as any of her novels.
Paul in KY
@Mark B.: I loved ‘War with the Newts’ or my copy said ‘War of the Newts’.
schrodinger's cat
@Another Holocene Human: Far Beyond the Stars is one of my favorite DS9 episodes.
Duke of Clay
@Gin & Tonic: One of my favorite novels is Bomber by Len Deighton. It is a fictional account of a bombing raid that took place on June 31, 1943.
Tenar Darell
@Another Holocene Human: Yep. But then again, they find the effort to only read women and people of color for a year to be somehow offensive, rather than an attempt to expand one’s horizons/just read great stories. An example.
RobertB
@Captain C: Terry Goodkind’s _Sword of Truth_ series was like that. It went from plain vanilla Fantasy to squicky BDSM to flat out loony Ayn Rand crap.
RP
My 2 cents:
There are of course two widely recognized categories in this area of literature: scifi and fantasy. The former is spaceships and aliens, and the latter is swords and dragons. But I think a more accurate breakdown would be speculative fiction vs. world building fiction.
Speculative fiction imagines the consequences of the impossible (or at least impossible at present) becoming possible, whether it’s advanced technology in the future or an alternate history (e.g., the Man in the High Castle, which is set in a world in which the Nazis won WWII). Stories in that realm use the speculation to explore a variety of issues that couldn’t be easily addressed in a realistic setting, and are overwhelmingly about ideas, ethics, society, human nature, etc.
World building is about a make believe environment that isn’t necessarily tied to our own world in any way, and is largely used to tell more straightforward stories about characters, relationships, journeys, etc. Traditional fantasy like the Lord of the Rings is obviously in this category, but so is space opera like Star Wars. In other words, Star Wars has far more in common with Conan or Lord of the Rings than with something like Blade runner IMO. World building stories and books can and often do explore ideas and issues, but usually in a more subtle way than speculative fiction.
Mark B.
@Paul in KY: You’re probably right, I’m probably misremembering the title.
Wikipedia has the title as ‘War with the Newts.’ Might be a couple different translations out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_with_the_Newts
jibeaux
Ancillary Justice was wonderful, although I found it a challenging read. I had to put it down a few times until I was ready to concentrate. I may be weird, but I found the interesting treatment of gender one of the less challenging themes, actually. And why are people ostensibly interested in sci-fi, which by definition presents a world different from the world we live in, so vested in making sure gender is never reflected differently? Everything is allowed to change but the way we view male and female? Target stores can be on the moon with drone delivery but dammit the pink Legos better get labeled “girls’ building toys”?
someguy
@Laertes: Oh God. That’s easy. Dan Simmons’ Olympos.
It’s part II of the story that began with Ilium. It’s a pretty good SF yarn in general, far-future high-tech gods-are-real craziness with a bunch of interesting alternate-dimension stuff. And then right in the middle of book II, we take this weird detour to smear 21st-century Muslims. Simmons introduces this inconsequential bit of backstory in which the Caliphate re-emerges in the 21st century, and being big durka durka crazy muslims, they immediately build a suicide-bomber submarine full of black holes that they can use to suicide-bomb the entire Earth.
Da fuck? I suppose you’re equally upset about how Simmons treats Catholics and the Palestinians in the Hyperion Cantos? That’s his schtick, BTW. Taking a look at a social group and trying to extrapolate how they will screw up the future.
You know what you’re going to get with Simmons, or you should anyhow. It’s not really fair to be upset when you get it.
Another Holocene Human
@Robert M.:
It’s almost as if they haven’t read a word Ursula LeGuin wrote.
I read “Left Hand of Darkness” in junior high or high school (my friends were reading it in junior high but sometimes it took me a while to follow suit) and it blew. my. mind.
Another Holocene Human
@Brachiator: Please explain The Day The Earth Stood Still. I thought it was blah blah blah nukes bad. (This isn’t to say I didn’t like the movie and see it multiple times.)
goblue72
All I am taking away from this is “NERDFIGHT!!!!!”
That and apparently NERDFIGHTS are as prone to the same misogynistic/homophobic/racist/men’s rights movement crap as the rest of the Intertubes. The fact that I know what Social Justice Warrior and ‘cuckservative’ both mean in spite of every effort not to, tells you everything you need to know about how far down the pencil-neck dork rabbit hole that rightwing nut jobs have gone.
These RWNJ dweebs make D&D roleplaying enthusiasts look like prom king & queens.
jayackroyd
@Another Holocene Human: Indeed! Make counterfactual but logical rules, and then stick to them! Gil’s a great example of that. And Niven’s presentation of propulsion and colonization devices were always entertaining.
I don’t read much SF these days–too many authors, and nobody to filter them for.
Two I did enjoy with good science in the sense you’re expressing here are WIlliam Alexander’s Envoy and Erin Bow’s Scorpion Rules
Gin & Tonic
@Lizzy L: Delany has never won a Hugo. Nominated, yes.
Sorry, but you are mistaken.
“Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” won both the Hugo and the Nebula in ’68 or ’69.
Danack
@Belafon Can you give me an example of a book that the story suffered from the message?:
Dan Simmons book Flashback is probably the best example: http://sciencefictionworld.com/books/science-fiction-books/824-flashback-by-dan-simmons-a-qscarily-possibleq-future-or-right-wing-propaganda.html
Though I am also finding it to re-read some of Larry Niven’s work that I enjoyed when I was younger, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Fealty_(novel) which is basically how people who operate in high tech fields should be running the country, and are morally superior to people who are concerned about the environment.
Villago Delenda Est
@Marc: Yeah, Card has gone totally off the rails and into the swamp.
I really enjoyed The Martian and despite its flaws, it’s a very entertaining read. The best thing about it is all the snark in it, but it’s also damn near impossible to put down once you’ve started it. I like Ancillary Justice (and its sequel, Ancillary Sword) as well.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Another Holocene Human:
Guy comes down from the heavens to save the world, gets killed by idiots, rises from the dead for one last lecture about how people need to all get along or they’ll be destroyed, and returns to his home in the sky.
I’m guessing that part of the thinking on the part of the screenwriter(s) and director was that their anti-nuclear, pro-world peace story would be more palatable to 1950s audiences if they put Klaatu in a Jesus suit. They probably weren’t wrong.
Another Holocene Human
@jibeaux:
Orson Scott Card wrote some really gender bending, speculative social structure stuff back in the day. One of the biggest ass-showers and RWNJ’s in science fiction. Just for the record.
Villago Delenda Est
@Another Holocene Human: The Puppies are fucktards. Every last one of them needs to be hit, repeatedly, by a phaser on stun.
Laertes
So, yes, there’s tons of message-fiction out there. That was obviously the wrong question to ask. The better question is: What otherwise undeserving work has won a recent Hugo because of the message?
I’m not aware of one. Fan-kickers will pitch a fit about Ancillary Justice because among other things it’s got Some Ideas about gender, but it’s also well-written kickass space opera in the Iain Banks style, and is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to win a Hugo with or without Ideas about Gender.
The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere isn’t “message-fic” unless you think that the idea that gay people are ordinary humans like anyone else is a “message” in which case, show your fucking work. And in any case, it’s well-written and thoroughly deserving of the award. Again, if one thinks otherwise, one should make one’s case.
The culture-warrior charge that message wins to the exclusion of story isn’t even borne out by their own preferred examples.
SiubhanDuinne
@Tenzil Kem:
Had not heard of Larry Correia, so I checked his Wikipedia page. The second sentence of his bio is: He was formerly an accountant, a concealed carry permit instructor, and a part-owner in a gun store and shooting range.
Somehow, I’m not surprised.
karen marie
@Marc: I’ve been reading sci fi since the early ’70s, and my rule of thumb has always been if it is a Hugo winner, prepare for disappointment. It was like a mutual admiration society for wannabe writers who nominated and awarded each other. Turns out it seems I wasn’t far off the mark.
Another Holocene Human
@jayackroyd:
You’re right. I’ve bought books–well written books!–but ultimately got disappointed in series and author. I’ve gotten really into authors but they stopped writing or stopped writing anything good (dammit).
Hm, there was a book I thought I bought but I must have borrowed because I don’t have it any more. It was a kind of horror suspense sci fi book about people in a space ship and one of the characters is a female priest. It wasn’t overly long (fuck no, all my friends who recced Snowcrash, no way am I reading that). Anybody remember that one? Cannot recall title or author.
I’m better remember authors I got over (Spider Robinson, looking at you) than authors whose work I actually enjoyed. (Dammit!)
GregB
There Hugo again.
Paul in KY
@Mark B.: You are probably right. My copy came from circa 1978. A paperback.
Paul in KY
@Another Holocene Human: Her greatest book, IMO.
Another Holocene Human
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Ten years of Sunday school and that went over my head.
For one thing, I thought he was injured, not dead.
Also “be excellent to each other” was only one of the things Jesus said in the Sermon of the Mount. He also never lectured anything about Roman war machines. “It was one thing when it was shield formations and sharpened pikes, but these catapults are going to far, man. Knock it off with that shit.” (Why yes, the Lord does live in Southern California. It’s a good ministry.)
Another Holocene Human
@Marc: That’s fair. I actually haven’t read anything he’s done in the last five years because my friends told me it was awful and a waste of time. I did attempt to read that Ender’s Game material with the girl and her mom and wtf was that shit?!?
rikyrah
North Dakota’s governor says will not seek re-election in 2016
WILLISTON, N.D. | BY ERNEST SCHEYDER
North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple, who shepherded the state through an oil boom that made it the No. 2 U.S. crude producer, said on Monday he will not seek re-election in 2016.
Dalrymple, who helped tighten regulatory standards across the state’s Bakken oil formation, steps that some critics decried as too lenient, said he decided not to seek re-election in order to spend more time with his family.
“North Dakota has made incredible progress and I feel so blessed to have been part of leading our state,” Dalrymple, 66, said in a statement.
The retirement sets up a mad dash to replace the popular governor, a Republican who first took office in 2010. At least four senior state politicians are rumored to be eyeing the governor’s mansion, including Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem, a Republican, and U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat.
Heitkamp’s office declined to comment and Stenehjem could not immediately be reached for comment.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/24/us-north-dakota-governor-idUSKCN0QT20B20150824?feedType=RSS&feedName=politicsNews
Brachiator
@Marc:
Of course, Dances with Wolves won a bunch of Oscars, and Avatar earned over $2 billion in box office and Cameron has promised more movies in the Avatar universe. I didn’t care for Wolves (or Waterworld or Wyatt Earp), but thought that Avatar was visually dazzling if unoriginal in its story. But here, obviously, message wasn’t everything in a visually stunning 3D universe.
And here’s the funny thing. There are film and literary critics who deride any SF work, no matter how good, almost simply because the work is set in some speculative future. For many of these folk, the message is indeed everything, and they can only accept SF if they can see it as a political or social allegory.
This is the case with bad melodrama. It’s not just about political motivation.
“Little Big Man” is a strongly politically motivated revisionist Western. But it succeeds not because of, or despite its politics, but because it is a superior drama about compelling characters.
Yep. I think you are right here. Clumsy fiction is bad. And I guess that SF has a good share of clumsy fiction. I don’t know if it’s worse than other genres, but the clunkers can certainly stand out.
raven
zzzzzzzzzzzzz
Another Holocene Human
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yeah, that’s annoying. Star Trek was always rife with bad science and five impossible things before breakfast, but when they really annoyed me was getting really basic stuff about DNA wrong in TNG because DNA was the shiny object for science writers and popular culture at the time.
And I’m not the only one. Whole screeds were written about this in fandom.
Laertes
If Card wrote anything great after Speaker for the Dead it’s news to me. But there’s nothing unusual about an artist doing their best work early. I just called to say “I love you” is unlistenable dreck, but Stevie Wonder can write hours of such garbage and he’s still the man who wrote Superstition.
Card is a pretty awful human being, and trending worse by the day, and it’s been ages since he wrote anything good, but he’ll always be one of the all-time greats.
Peale
@jayackroyd:
Yeah. If only there was a body that would sift through a bunch of this stuff and try to call attention to what is worth reading and high caliber. Maybe someone should give an award or prize or something. Maybe with a short list. That would help cut through the noise.
Another Holocene Human
@Brachiator:
In sci fi and fantasy you have to world build as well as do plot and characterization.
Like some other other worldly genres, like historical settings, there’s just so much that can go wrong and only so much the author can do to research or game out what their created world should be like.
Shitty fiction set in the real world, present time, can also be guilty of getting basic facts wrong. Check out in movies and books how badly authors write about computers and hackers. But usually the failings are in being crap at plot or pacing, or creating characters nobody likes or can relate to, or having characters that never develop, or having characters that take 90 degree turns that aren’t set up and make no sense.
SF/F fiction really is different, which may be why there are percentage wise more failures, and there are also more rows. Let’s say Alvin Bester* does great suspenseful plots but is thin on the sci fi justification, two fans may have wildly divergent but justified opinions bout his work. *-I just stole his name because it’s better than writing “Example”.
The Raven on the Hill
@karen marie: The Hugos are voted by readers, not writers. You’re thinking of the Nebula Awards.
Another Holocene Human
@RP: That is a very interesting take. As for your last sentence, that is where I would put Delany. The whole act of world building was a treatise on human nature and human societies.
raven
Just when I thought this thread was hopeless!
Brachiator
@Another Holocene Human:
What Mnemosyne (iPhone) said. The Jesus references were apparent to some even on the film’s initial release. I swear to God, though, that some references were apparent even to me when I first watched the movie (I guess I was a precocious kid). But the Wiki drives it home.
Next, why Darth Vader is really Lucifer, and the Star Wars saga a variant of Paradise Lost.
Another Holocene Human
@Mark B.: That’s really interesting. She’s one of the few authors I really wanted to learn more about. Then I heard she had passed. :(
It’s hard to describe just how addictive her writing was.
rikyrah
Jo Ingles
@joingles
New Quinnipiac poll shows a majority of Ohioans oppose cutting off funding for Planned Parenthood (52-40%) tho Republicans support it 70-23%
Barry
@Laertes: “The butthurt has been deafening ever since.”
And one of the Rabid Puppy leaders, after having spent the last year working this, reacted to a 100% loss by saying that it wasn’t something he cared about (probably before going home and drinking himself into stupor among his smashed furniture).
Another Holocene Human
@Brachiator: Wow.
Tenar Darell
@Another Holocene Human: @Mark B.: I still facepalm that I didn’t make it to Readercon when she was GoH.
Mike J
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Old Man’s War was nominated, but it’s a space marine book written by a liberal.
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Not to mention that the guy’s name was Carpenter, which was J’s profession.
Another Holocene Human
@rikyrah: So this is where we are.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Another Holocene Human:
He was dead, Jim. That’s why they had to rush to bring him back to life — Gort was programmed to destroy the world if Klaatu was killed.
Obviously, it’s not a perfect 1-to-1 correlation to the Bible, but the theme is there.
rikyrah
Black women ‘humiliated’ after getting kicked off Napa Valley Wine Train
4:03 pm, Sunday, August 23, 2015
What started as a joyous ride through wine county Saturday afternoon turned into a “humiliating” experience for 11 African American women, who said they were booted off the Napa Valley Wine Train for laughing and talking too loud.
Accounts and pictures of the episode have been spreading across social media, spawning the hashtag #LaughingWhileBlack while the women involved have questioned whether they would have been treated differently if they were not African American.
“It was humiliating. I’m really offended to be quite honest,” said 47-year-old Lisa Johnson, who was among Saturday’s group. “I felt like it was a racist attack on us. I feel like we were being singled out.”
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Black-women-humiliated-after-getting-kicked-6460912.php
Another Holocene Human
@Captain C:
Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
jayackroyd
@Peale: Yeah. But I haven’t found that to be a terribly effective filter. When I was reading sf more extensively I subscribed to F&SF which worked great!
Brachiator
@Another Holocene Human:
True enough. I guess the challenge here is that the author has to create a world that doesn’t or never existed.
But I think that some movie fans make too much of world building, or come to it with a video game attitude in which they just want to see dazzling shit even if the story is lame. There are a number of reviews at the SF site Screen Rant Underground in which the reviewer goes overboard about the world building and talks about wanting to see other stories set there, even though the movie itself is boring as crap (see the abysmal “I, Frankenstein” as an example of this).
Another quick example: In the Star Wars prequels, you have a lot of impressive production design, but I never got a sense that the characters actually inhabited any of the rooms and palaces that were depicted. On the other hand, I was never a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings, never finished the novels, but when Peter Jackson shows us Bilbo’s home, I thought, yes, this hobbit lives here.
Cluttered Mind
@Another Holocene Human: It really is incredibly awful that it happened like that. Ilium and Olympos are among my favorite books, and Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos 4 book series is also quite excellent. The 21st century muslim thing in Olympos was a serious story misstep though, as it just didn’t go well with the entire tone of the rest of what was happening.
Unfortunately 9/11 seems to have set him on the path of full wingnut, and while the transformation was gradual, it was seriously seeping into his work by the time he released Olympos in 2005. In 2011 he published a book called Flashback which is set in the mid-21st century and is literally about a United States that was totally ruined by the Obama administration and almost all of its citizens are addicted to a drug that lets them live in their memories of happier times before liberals ruined everything and the Muslims and Japanese took over the world.
It’s really tragic. He was such a good author, once.
Paul in KY
@rikyrah: Some assholes just do not like to see people they hate having a good time. Feel sad for those women. Bet they were a fun bunch, would have liked to party with them.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Cluttered Mind:
The Japanese? I think someone needed to tell Simmons that 1985 was a long time ago. It’s all about the Chinese taking over the world now.
goblue72
@rikyrah: They were clearly guilty of DCSWB – Drinking Cab Sav While Black.
Laertes
@Cluttered Mind:
God he was good, before the rot set in. His collection Prayers to Broken Stones was full of great stuff, and one of the novels that followed, The Hollow Man, haunts me to this day.
The culture war corrupts everything it touches.
Cluttered Mind
@someguy: It’s not at all fair to compare what he did with Muslims in Ilium and Olympos to what he did with Catholics and Protestants in the Hyperion Cantos. For one thing, it very conspicuously was NOT the church that messed up the future in those books, the church was just the disguise that the real threat was hiding behind.
You can’t seriously say there isn’t a vast difference between the man who wrote the Hyperion Cantos and the man who wrote Flashpoint. 9/11 made him crazy, he’s not the only person who that happened to. A lot of people became quite radicalized by that.
Laertes
It’s probably also worth pointing out that I learned about Simmons because his novel Hyperion won the 1989 Hugo. I don’t follow the SF world all that closely, but year after year, the Hugo-winning novel is worth looking at, and often introduces me to a terrific writer I’d been overlooking.
Another Holocene Human
@Brachiator: Well, it’s not set designing in a vacuum, is it? It’s gaming out how this premise would really play out, with real people. When it’s done well, it’s amazing. When it’s done poorly … zzzzzzz, as raven would say.
I’m not mad at a nerd loving on some great world building when the movie stinks. That’s where you imagine your own characters playing in that playground. Or follow those artists’ work. I used to know some big fans of Giger. You might know his work from a little flick they call “Alien”. The guy I knew with the poster on his wall was an art student. Lots of geeks are in visual arts, and that’s their primary interest.
Another Holocene Human
@Cluttered Mind:
Daffyd ab Hugh had a disgusting right wing bilge blog after 9/11. I never read his Arthurian stuff which was apparently perfectly cromulent. I knew him from Trek novel hackdom as Not Peter David David.
Jparente
@jayackroyd: I used to enjoy Niven. In fact I would love to see a film version of “Ringworld”. (Guillermo DelToro, I’m looking at you!) I lost interest interest in his later works after his collaboration with Pournell. Right wing drivel out weighed the entertainment value, for me.
BTW, I’m able to suspend my disbelief to an amazing degree, an essential skill when entering the world of Fantasy, Sc-fi. Actually, to be able to suspend your dis-belief is, IMO, essential to enjoying entertainment, in general. “Buy the premise. Buy the flick” .
Another Holocene Human
@goblue72: “Will you be having an order of hate with your pinot noir?”
Laertes
@Jparente:
If you skipped The Mote In God’s Eye, you’re in for a treat. My winger radar was less sensitive then, but even as a young reader I was aware of the douchebaggery in Legacy of Heorot and Oath of Fealty, and perceived none of that in Mote. It’s a winner.
Paul in KY
@Jparente: Ringworld would be awesome. Might need to do it as a miniseries. A lot of stuff going on in his universe that would be hard to get coherently into 1 movie. I guess it could be a trilogy.
If so they need to do it better than 1st Compass one. That one probably ensured no 2 or 3 in that series.
Paul in KY
@Laertes: I read & enjoyed The Mote in God’s Eye. Could see a couple good movies made out of that one too.
Oatler.
@raven: “Not at all, friend, in fact I admire the style of it. Bring your sody-pop over here and come set a while.”-Jeff Corey as Wild Bill Hickock. Damn I miss that movie.
Doug R
@Belafon: A lot of later Heinlein. it became kind of hit or miss whether there was a story buried in there.
Laertes
@Doug R:
Didn’t he get wiggy at the end? I used to have a rule that once I’d started it I’d give any novel 100 pages. To Sail Beyond The Sunset was the very first to be angrily thrown aside at the top of page 101.
raven
@Oatler.: It’s popped up recently.
RobertB
@Laertes: I’d second that. I’d recommend that and _Footfall_. _Lucifer’s Hammer_ falls over the edge with Cannibals From the Urban Jungle, and all the other Nivel/Pournelle books I read just flat-out sucked at several levels.
Doug R
@Another Holocene Human: David Gerrold actually admits that he subconsciously ripped it off and Heinlein called him on it when they met In his grumpy funny Heilein way
Tenzil Kem
@Laertes: I am not a convention goer and 90% of my involvement in science fiction these days consists of me reading stuff that is a) available at the library and b) looks good. So the Hugo nominations have always been a helpful way for me to learn about new books and new authors. I feel bad for anyone who tries to do the same with this year’s list.
RobertB
@Laertes: I’d heard/read that Heinlein had a blockage that affected the blood flow to his brain. Hence _The Number of the Beast_ and the one you just mentioned. To be honest, though, _Job_ and _Friday_ weren’t all that much better, just more focused. I figure that he was old enough by then to come by his ‘Grouchy old man that knows everything’ shtick honestly.
Matt McIrvin
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): While you’re probably right about Jesus plus anti-nukes, The Day The Earth Stood Still was actually based on an old short story with a substantially different emphasis, “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates.
Much as in the movie, the robot and the humanoid Klaatu appear in their saucer, and the army shoots the guy and mortally wounds him. Then the indestructible robot spends a lot of time building a mysterious device that can apparently resurrect living beings by somehow using the sound of their voice, and resurrects Klaatu… but it doesn’t last: he dies again, pretty quickly. Moved by the tragedy of the whole thing, when the robot’s about to leave, the humans tell him they’re very sorry they killed his master… and then, the twist: the robot explains “I am the master.”
Which is also really the case in the movie, but it’s in a more complex and subtle way: the robots are “masters” in the sense that Klaatu’s interplanetary civilization has had to subject itself to their police authority to keep from destroying one another. And now that we’re in the big leagues, we can expect to be subject to their tender mercies as well.
Mike E
I think Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen “series” is instructive in understanding the Puppies mindset.
Robert Sneddon
@Laertes: The Hugos are a Delphic poll, the winners chosen by a couple of thousand (in a good year) fans of SF as what they liked best that year. There have been some stinkers voted the rocket though over the years, or works with serious flaws that make them unreadable for some folks (Connie Willis double-hander Hugo-Award-winning “Blackout/All Clear” is a fine example of a US writer who didn’t do her research and the glaring inaccuracies about Britain make me and a lot of others go “WTF?”)
The deal is that a Hugo award-winning story or novel is usually a decent read in the opinion of a bunch of people who read a lot of SF. It may not be an easy read — this year’s novel winner is one such — but it’s usually well-written. YMMV.
piratedan
@Tenzil Kem: its very much a ymmv kind of thing imho, tastes being what they are. Also, to remember that I can loathe an author’s personal politics but it doesn’t always translate to them being a crappy writer. Good storytelling is good storytelling. There are other mechanisms to find authors than just going by the Hugo’s and Nebula’s, Amazon and Goodreads have newsletters and heck, most of the publication houses have them too. Check out who published your favorite stories to see who else they have in their mix. Remember though, not all publishers limit themselves to specific genre’s and sub-genre’s. Some simply pick the stories that they like best and go with it and others have stables of established authors that they lean on but who’s works are varied.
Or you can simply ask here, lots of aficionados of various sub-genre’s here that will decloak upon need :-)
PurpleGirl
@Tenar Darell: I began reading vol. 1 of the Heinlein biography. I put it down to start something else and haven’t gone back to it. I know the writer was picked by Virginia Heinlein but the book was boring.
I knew the controversy was happening but I largely ignored it. I’m a periodic reader of Making Light, the blog hosted by Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. (Patrick is the Editor at Tor, Teresa has worked at Tor and does freelance consulting now.) I read some of their posts on what was happening. Last week Patrick wrote an answer to a posted essay by Sarah Hoyt about sf editors and their backgrounds. (“MOST of the editors [in the SF field] came from families where ALL generations had gone to college as far as they remembered (kind of like my husband’s family….”) Patrick and comments by readers demolished her thesis by detailing their working class roots and non-college backgrounds.
sparrow
@schrodinger’s cat:
I was a big fan of scifi in my team years, but I have always accepted that 90% is crap. But my test at the library shelf was very simple: crack open a book and read until I got to a female character. If they acted like areal person, didn’t exist to be dumb, scared, or saved, I went home with the book. Although sometimes I gave up before getting to a fem character because the writing was so bad…
PurpleGirl
@Mark B.: Asimov gave us the Laws of Robotics but Karel Capek gave us Robots. (FYI: R.U.R. = Rossum’s Universal Robots.)
PurpleGirl
@Mark B.: I met Ms. Butler at a Lunacon and spent a while talking with her… about how even having a house means you don’t have enough room for all your stuff. She was gracious, funny and interesting. I still haven’t read any of her work but love(d) her as a person. It’s so sad that she died so young. She would have had a great future of great books.
Villago Delenda Est
@Laertes: The only problem with Mote is the damned obsession with a hereditary nobility as the rulers of mankind. The assumption that hereditary rule is a good idea is kinda laid bare by actual history. There are reasons why Charles I and Louis XVI lost their heads.
Villago Delenda Est
@Laertes: Oh, and Oath of Fealty was just such utter drek. I didn’t mind Lucifer’s Hammer that much, but yeah, it was pretty fuckin’ preachy in its own way.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
Do they flub basic science, or just not care?
For example, Star Wars is a fantasy set in a galaxy far, far away? What basic science is it supposed to try to get right?
And even mainstream police, medical, legal shows with “consultants” working with the producers regularly have plot elements that are absolutely wrong, but which make for absolutely great storytelling.
But I know what you mean and understand why it may prevent your suspending your disbelief, but this issue is inherent to all fiction.
@Matt McIrvin
Great example of how a SF story was reworked to embody a different political and religious message than the source material, and still tell a good story.
J.D. Rhoades
@Tenzil Kem:
My first published novel got me nominated for ‘Best First Novel” in 2005 by the Private Eye Writers of America. I didn’t win, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t been a dick about it. In fact I’m still friends with the other nominees.
J.D. Rhoades
@WereBear:
Judging from the last Simmons I read (The Terror) his biggest problem is he’s reached that deadly peak of being Too Big to Edit. It killed Ludlum’s books, it killed Tom Clancy, and now it’s killing Simmons.
louc
@Cluttered Mind: Seriously. Hyperion and the Fall of Hyperion are crazy good. The Scholar’s Tale, the Consul’s Tale, were lump in the throat inducing and the Priest’s Tale was terrifying.
The prejudice against Islam was unfortunately always there. In Fall of Hyperion when the Hegemony collapses he does portray the inhabitants of a Muslim planet as bombing things in joy and the colonel assassinates some mullah on the same planet in the first book. IIRC, the mullah was described as spittle-flecked.
J.D. Rhoades
@RobertB:
And it did it all in the first novel. I never got to the second one.
jayackroyd
@Jparente: I like Niven! I purposely chose someone I like to make the point. Known Space is a great universe, as is the Moties’ I’ve read a lot of the bad books too, the various collaborations.
Anne Laurie
@PurpleGirl:
You should rectify that, because she’s a damned fine writer.
But heartbreaking. And not just when you realize she left us too damned soon.
Keith G
@raven:
I was thinking that who won matters to somebody, somewhere….but not to anyone I was interacting with today.
daveNYC
@louc: Flip side, one of the more bad-ass main characters is a Palestinian. Still, it’s noteworthy that only Islam still had violent nutters running around. Even the Shrike religion people weren’t that bad.
I’m still trying to get into Ancillary Justice. I wonder how the book would work in Turkish or one of the other non-gendered languages, since one of the hooks is the use of ‘she’ as the pronoun.
I’ve read Redshirts and Old Mans War and at this point I think I’m not a Scalzi fan. Redshirts was entertaining, but total Hugo bait, and Old Mans War was like Starship Troopers except it actively avoided trying to say anything. Like there were at least four solid ideas in there that were either avoided entirely or glossed over. Plus the main character was a straight up Mary Sue and a obvious author insert (a writer from Ohio).
celticdragonchick
@NotMax:
Tiptree was an amazing author. I was sorry to hear what happened with her.
Jparente
@Laertes: I nearly forgot about “Mote”. Good read but not up to “Tales of Known Space” and “Ringworld” and “Neutron Star”.
I also liked the first few books of Jack Chaulker’s “Well World” series.
Jparente
@Paul in KY: Lets get a few hundred million together and open a production company! I got some lights!
Villago Delenda Est
@jibeaux: I thought the “multiperspectiveness” of the AI was much more difficult to parse than the gender ambiguity. Leckie also used a structure through the first half of the novel similar to Le Guin’s in The Dispossessed, alternating between “current” events and “past” events.
Still, it was an enjoyable read, and set me up well for Ancillary Sword, which didn’t even try to mimic the structure of Justice, but was a fairly straight narrative.
Starfish
@Another Holocene Human: Well, the thing that The Wired article glosses over is that Benjanun Sriduangkaew is an actual minority, and Laura Mixon’s piece on her that “supports” minorities is attacking a minority.
I read Mixon’s piece, and I thought it was thorough, and it was the *only* piece that I had read in her category before it was nominated so it had a really wide reach. I thought that the points that she made were good ones. But a lot of people do not think that this category should exist at all because it is a total popularity contest that is not necessarily merit based.
I think that Benjanun’s “Requires Only That You Hate” blog was turning race on its ear in a way that only someone who was not black or white could do. She just ran out of material and started punching down instead of up. I thought that the quality of her writing was really good, and I wish that she would use her powers for good.
sharl
@Matt McIrvin, @Brachiator:
As it turns out, Harry Bates’ 1940 Farewell to the Master is available online for free, in three parts – Part_I is here, and links at the bottom of each part lead to adjoining (preceding or following) parts.
I’ve only given it a quick look-over – I’ll definitely delve into it later – but it is very different in character from the movie it inspired. I dunno, I’d call it grittier, and edgier with respect to drama and surprise.
Tim C.
Read a lot of SF as a teenager and for sometime after that. Still do on occasion, but not as much.
Orson Scott Card was “okay” until sometime in the late 90s. I agree Ender’s Game has some troubling parts, but as a 13 year old reading it in 1988, I loved every moment. Say what you want, the idea of the Bugs being misunderstood and that the war was fundamentally a mistake is a pretty liberal notion compared to the very simplistic narrow “us good, them bad, the complications don’t matter because I said so!” and “Hate teh gays!” he’s slipped into. Sad.
Heinlein was always a wackadoodle, and while his political solutions were nonsense. He clearly liked Ayn Rand a lot but even in his fiction he couldn’t get libertarianopia to work without a super-intelligent computer (Moon is a Harsh Mistress).
Anne Laurie
@daveNYC: Started reading Old Mans War for a book group — my impression, from the first 130 pages or so, was that it was the best-written Heinlein pastiche I’d read since Heinlein’s pre-brain-hemorrhage period. Reminded me a lot of reading Glory Road when I was twelve, in fact. But around the point where the protagnists, yet again, are informed they’re gonna be responsible for genocide of intelligent species because, shrug, reasons, I remembered I haven’t been twelve for going on fifty years, and I don’t have time to waste finishing books I don’t enjoy reading any more…
BBA
I’m an outsider to the SF “scene”, have not read nearly as much as I would have likes, but I’ve been discussing this on other sites and I think the Sad Puppies did have maybe half a point, buried in there somewhere. A number of recent nominees, mainly in the short fiction categories, have read more like literary fiction than SF, with the fantastic elements being incidental to the human drama. There was one Nebula winner and Hugo runner-up that simply wasn’t SF at all. The proper question to ask was, is SF something we value for itself or is it a minor league to literary fiction?
Instead the SPs made it about politics, because they were right-wing and the works and people they criticized were left-wing. And their slate consisted of the same Starship Troopers knockoffs that right-wing SF authors have been spewing for years. Add Vox Day and the Rabid Puppies, who really are misogynist white-supremacist scum, I mean far beyond your run-of-the-mill Romney voter, and you get this year’s disastrous ballot.
Both camps of Puppies will be expelled one way or another, and good riddance. But nobody’s discussing the “minor league litfic” problem and anyone who raises it will probably get tarred with the Puppy brush.
Starfish
@Anne Laurie: I liked the Old Man’s War series. I am reading The Android’s Dream now, and it started as a fart joke and was about how characters liked to eat lots of meat. I am still reading it because I needed something really easy to read, but …
Uncle Cosmo
@Villago Delenda Est: That wasn’t the only problem. Cracking good yarn–but most of the characters are cardboard cutouts. Took me until halfway through my 3rd read-through to recognize it…& I said so to Roger Zelazny (RIP) when he extolled the virtues of the book in a library talk just prior to its publication date (he ended up agreeing with me) & in my subsequently published review of The Mote.
@Villago Delenda Est: Lucifer’s Hammer (another one I got paid to review) is actually a pretty damn good end-of-the-world book through the end of the world as we know it. The bigoted Far-Wrong shit doesn’t really start hitting the fan until the survivors start sorting through the wreckage of civilization.
J R in WV
@jayackroyd:
Larry Niven is still alive, probably still writing. Perhaps with younger co-authors, but still, not dead yet… only 77, which isn’t that old now.
As I’m 64, 77 seems younger every year! He is quite conservative, along with Jerry Pournelle, but they can both write an excellent yarn.
Niven also has won both several Hugos AND a Nebula from other authors. So stuff that, puppies!
Feathers
@someguy: Fantasy has overtaken science fiction because the human future is now more at risk from biological harm and genetic engineering than it is from machines. At least that is the theory of John Stilgoe, who has been teaching visual representation of fantasy at Harvard for many many years.
I see a Requires Hate fan has shown up. I remember the RH blog blowup. I found her awful but intriguing, so i set out to find out what she liked, as a way to figure out what was going on. There was nothing. I spent a long time reading what I think was all of her blog and she just attacked and attacked, defending nothing, never admitting that there was anything worth liking. That was when I realized something was seriously wrong. I’ve stayed out of it since. Wasn’t surprised to discover how deep the rot went.
Another Holocene Human – must confess I haven’t read Delany, I just go to his Readercon reading every year. I know that his kind of books are ones that for me require an immersive experience that I just find so hard to make the time for anymore.
J R in WV
And looking Jerry Pournelle up, he has not won either Nebula nor a Hugo. Somewhat to my surprise, actually.
vheidi
@RobertB: ain’t that the truth, ugh
J R in WV
Just FYI, here are a couple of old timer authors who wrote really interesting things, fertile imaginations working overtime. Both pseudonyms, for what that’s worth:
James Tiptree, Jr. and Cordwainer Smith.
Both were involved with military and security agencies and were powerful intellectual academics, which was part of why they each used a pseudonym. Cordwainer Smith spoke 6 languages before adulthood, and received his PhD at Johns Hopkins at age 23.
James Tiptree was a Major in the Army by the end of WW II, and was with the CIA for some years after resigning from the Army. Very interesting lives, both of them. Odd people, but the better for that. Very weird fiction, still living in my mind 50 years after I read them.
Many well known SF authors had close ties to security/military/tech agencies.
Another Holocene Human
@Matt McIrvin: Thank you for this. I never knew any of that and it really makes sense.
Another Holocene Human
@Starfish:
This woman has been an internet troll of the worst kind since 2001 at least. I believe she is a clinical sociopath. She isn’t going to change.
That doesn’t mean she can’t be intelligent, talented, erudite, charming….
Another Holocene Human
@BBA: Ted Sturgeon wrote stuff that read like literary fiction. Some people like to combine spec fic with literary fic maybe? Regular literary fiction often bores me with its subject matter. But if you add a space ship or telepathy ….
Also, I think people can argue about what genre in genre is good (because I, personally like it, and you should share my opinion) without engaging in tactics like Sad Puppies. They were aping shit Vox Day had already done; no surprise he showed up to double down on what they were up to and light it all on fire. That’s just stupid and whatever point they were making deserved to get buried under it.
Also there’s that little detail of promoing works published by Vox Day’s company. Uh huh. So what deep point was there, more of the monies should go to meeeeeee?
mclaren
Gimme a break.
Science fiction is about tentacled aliens and babes in spacesuits and rocket ships. Nobody gives a shit which novel wins the Hugo award this year, or any year.
These geeks are puffed with wildly inflated delusions of self-importance.
Out here on planet earth, it really matters whether America attacks Iran. It does not matter who takes home some ferkakta rocketship statuette this year.
Besides, anyone who knows anything about science ficiton has been through this whole thing before. When Samuel R. Delany got nominated for a bunch of Hugos and Nebulas in the mid-1960s, we heard exactly the same goddamn thing we’re hearing today:
“These terrible new authors are destroying science fiction! They’re not really sci-fi writers! This is going to wreck the field! It’s the end of science fiction publishing!!”
Bullshit.
None of that tempest-in-a-teacup mattered back in 1966, nobody remembers it today and no one cares today…just as none of this hoo-ha matters today, nobody will remember the Sad Puppies in 5 years, and no none of this “ZOMG the puppies are destroying the Hugos!” crap will matter in another 5 years.
Tenar Darell
@daveNYC: If you’re still there, try one more… Lock In, which has a detective who uses a teleprescence robot to work. Well, thought out, and also a decent mystery.
Tenar Darell
@PurpleGirl: Yeah. That’s par for the course during this whole thing. Lots of research skills lacking by many of the pups, or very slanted research only. *sigh*
Paul in KY
@Jparente: Jack Chalker was a fine author. Many excellent books. Chris Rowley too. Unfortunately they are now dead or very old.
Paul in KY
@Jparente: I can edit a screenplay! All we need now is the 200 million!
daveNYC
@Anne Laurie: Or when the main character gets PTSD and is told “It happens to everyone around this time, just walk it off.” and he does. Or the fact that all civilian colonists are from Asia, which pisses off the western nations of Earth, but then it turns out that being a colonist is dangerous as hell and likely to end with you being killed and eaten. Or the ghost soldiers who are created solely as weapons.
So many good story hooks there, but Scalzi went nowhere interesting with any of them.
@Tenar Darell: Lock In you say?
I try and hammer into Ancillary Justice. It’s supposed to be good, so I hope I just need to get rolling and it’ll click.
RobertB
@daveNYC: Scalzi does take the _Old Man’s War_ storyline to some relatively interesting places. It goes from relatively straight Military SF to MilSF with a twist, and some of your issues are addressed in future books. It’s the first part of a series that’s not necessarily a trilogy.
My biggest complaint is that the characters don’t feel like they’re even as old as I am, much less being 70-80 years old. It’s. “I was old, now I’m a 30-something guy in Captain America’s body.”
Miss Bianca
@Marc:
I took it out of the library and couldn’t even finish it. Barely even got started. Might be a highly significant book, but left me cold, as well. But, tastes differ. Or, “that’s what makes horse races”, as my ma used to say.