Sucky Hugos

Oooh, I have to go look at my reading log now, but big yes to the Emrys recommendation! I have enjoyed everything of hers I’ve read, including “The Litany of Earth”.

Glad to see the recognition for Elizabeth Bear in this post; she’s one of my favorite living authors. She also had another book out last year, “One-Eyed Jack” (part of the Promethean Age series, but it stands alone). Didn’t get as much attention, but I’m in the middle of it right now and enjoying it.

Walton’s “The Just City” is also great, though as you say not eligible this year.

Seth Dickinson’s “Morrigan in the Sunglare” is a great short story about love and war in space. Dickinson’s first book, “The Traitor Baru Cormorant,” is coming out this year. I’ve been lucky enough to read it and it should be a nominee next year, no doubt.

I don’t read hardbacks – they’re too bulky as well as expensive – and I’ve never really got into my Kindle so I don’t tend to read a book until it comes out in paperback.

Meaning, of course, I read little that is still eligible for awards.

Leckie’s Ancillary Sword came out immediately in paperback. It’s a more linearly constructed narrative than Ancillary Justice but takes us deeper into Radch society, spacially as well as thematically. I miss Breq being an ‘outsider’ but it may be a better book.

I haven’t been this excited about a trilogy since Robinson’s Mars

Josh @6:

The Martian isn’t eligible for any of the major awards for 2014, as it is copyright 2011. If this whole Sad Puppies business hadn’t happened, we’d be having a *far* more interesting and IMHO important discussion about how the current system is hard on independent ebook originals, which can take several years to get up a head of steam. As with The Martian, which would have been the book to beat for the Hugos had it been eligible.

Zen Cbo’s book was reviewed by James Nicoll: http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/award-worthy-fiction

Discussion on his LJ.

I should add that I edit James’ reviews. I have not read the Cho book, but it sounds interesting. I often, but not always, like the books he likes.

How do you maintain a passion for fantasy and sci-fi while taking the real world seriously? Staying informed about politics and current affairs has shaken out my capacity for being carried away by imagination. Not to Bernard Salt’s extent, but it seems so frivolous now.

The Peripheral and The Martian, of course!

From left field, I thoroughly enjoyed Edgar Cantero’s The Supernatural Enhancements, which strikes me as science fiction masquerading as gothic horror.

I read great things about The Book of Strange New Things, read it, didn’t enjoy it, and keep thinking I missed something.

On the other hand, Station Eleven lived up to the hype.

I’m not a huge sci fi/fantasy etc fan, but am reading Just City at the minute (I think on the rec of someone here) and am enjoying it a lot. Jo Walton can really write.

I have lost touch with SF over the years, so there are lots of authors here for me to follow up, which will be fun. Thanks.

I doubt that it was eligible (though it came out in 2014 in Canada and the UK), but I thought Sandra Newman’s “The Country of Ice Cream Star” was really original and entertaining, as well as thought provoking. And I finally read the final two of Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” trilogy which I thought got better as it went along, with MaddAdam in particular being excellent.

This post, along with Cosma deciding to attend to his primary responsibilities, has lengthened my queue to 12 books. Now I need to get sick.

I suppose that’s a weird way of saying, thanks!

@Tom —

Of course you know that Margaret Atwood isn’t really science fiction, given there are no talking space squids, right?

Rachel Swirsky’s Grand Jete is a lovely, heart-breaking novella — you can read it here: http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/summer_2014/grand_jet_the_great_leap_by_rachel_swirsky

A short story I’d like to recommend, though I have some interest in it, is Rachael K. Jones’ Makeisha in Time. Read it here: http://crossedgenres.com/magazine/020-makeisha-in-time/

I had hoped to see both of these as Hugo nominees this year.

One of the important functions of awards is to point readers towards good work that they otherwise might have missed.

According to this, there is a bias towards the familiar, so I’d question the job they’re doing. I was going to point out the bias against fantasy, but it looks like they’re getting better.

WorldCon just got forty dollars out of me that they wouldn’t have gotten had this nonsense not happened. Ironically, these right wing morons may end up swelling WorldCon’s coffers.

Brett Bellmore is an obnoxious Far Righter? Whhhhhaaaaa……..? Mind blown

Shame Jonathan Ross isn’t presenting this year.

Well, yes. The people that are organizing this slate voting campaign (as well as the notorious GamerGate) are utter garbage.

What 12 said: what is to be done?

28: Brett’s been clear for a very long time.

“What 12 said: what is to be done?”

Well, you can calm down – cool it with the outrage culture, not overact to trivialities – and it’ll all blow over soon enough.

Or, you can campaign to vote ‘No Award’ on the slate, so the Hugo’s don’t get handed out. And then you can pump up your own campaigns for next year, so the nominations come down to mass backing of dueling ideologically correct lists in order to maximise your chances to defeat purely political opponents. And then, whoever gets the noms will have the fun of staving off the other side attemping to sabotage the awards again, and again, and again, ad nauseam.

That’ll be great for SF&F fandom. Hordes of people who don’t give a shit will be drawn in for the politics; either from Tumblr/Twitter outrage battlegrounds or international brigades from the various communities (comics, atheism, gaming, indie music, etc etc etc) Social Justice Warriors have tried to rip all the fun out of in previous wars. This crap will escalate and carry on forever. Congrats all – you’ve a bright future to look forward to.

Since some folks here aren’t steeped in the lore of the morally rancid scumbags Brett wants us to cheer on…ladies and gentlemen, John C. Wright, winner of more simultaneous nominations in a single category than any author in Hugo history, on the end of the Legend of Korra animated series.

You were not content to leave the matter ambiguous, no, but had publicly to announce that you hate your audience, our way of life, our virtues, values, and religion.

Surely you can trust a man who responds to a same-sex relationship that way to be a good guide to the kinds of values and insights that can and should help us find our way in the new millennium.

@39 and 40
Christ what an asshole.

@37
Yes truly “social justice warriors” are history’s greatest monsters.
*rolls eyes

What the hell does John C. Wright know about attractiveness? He is the literally epitome of a fedora sporting neckbeard. He is hair trigger whiny reaction given physical, repugnant form.

42: funny, I’m a man, & I detest Wright on a visceral level.

Farias’s gibberish aside, either the nomination process is reformed, or the Hugos lose any merit they ever had. If anyon

I won’t be bothering to read SP-etc nominees because I did that last year, and discovered, in fact to my surprise, that their stuff is technically incompetent. Brad Torgerson put together the SP slate this year, and his stories last year proved that he lacks basic writerly skills such as grammar, spelling, and sentence structure. For instance, he doesn’t know when to use “X and I” and when to use “X and me” — and his editors aren’t in the habit of correcting him, either.

I’m still shaking my head in wonderment that this circle of professional writers has grown up without even the ability to screen out high-school level mistakes. When the highest praise Brett @22 can come up with is “like some kind of modern day Lester Dent” — this is the very definition of “damning with faint praise”.

cf mefi

Conservapedia is hilariously conflicted about Vox Day. On one hand, PZ Myers refused to debate him, proving that his ideas are highly dangerous to the theory of evolution, but on the other, “By using this nom de plume, Beale implies that he presumes to speak on God’s behalf, while also showing off his knowledge of ancient languages and pun-making ability.”

Well, okay. You can stay in the treehouse, but we’re calling you Ted around here.

As regards Brett Bellmore, what Belle said. If you aren’t going to respond to the questions she raised, please don’t comment on any post of mine in future.

Seeing as you’re talking about racism and this is Henry’s post, just thought I might tell Henry (hopefully still reading comments?) that this comment was made on his St Patrick’s Day thread:

“Given the violent nature of pre-colonial Australian aboriginal cultures, as evidenced by the skeleton record and early settler/explorer accounts, their subjugation and inevitable extinguishment is a blessing for humankind.” (Crytandra @ 517)

Crytandra has subsequently apologised for some of the things he said (without specifying which in particular), and I’m not just trying to keep a fight going, but several of us were pretty shocked by that particular comment. Anyway it seems like the sort of thing a CT author might want to respond to, so I’ll just leave it at that.

Belle, and all other posters here:

WTF? Brett has slimed his way around things, but he’s said enoug to make his politics clear. He had done so for as long as I can remember reading his comments, here, on Obsidian Wings, and on Mark Kleiman’s blog.

I’m mystified why people give him the alightest benefit of the doubt, since he’s blown that benefit away almost daily for several years now.

Brett Bellmore – I’d logged on this morning to put a version of Belle’s question – unsurprisingly, she has done so far better and more eloquently than I could have. My gloss – were you just engaged in an exercise in lazy trolling where you hadn’t bothered to actually check out the people whose cause you were defending? In which case, if you want to continue to comment on my posts, you had better make a very forthright apology right about now to the posters and commenters whose patience you are presuming on, and also be aware that you’ve burned a lot of our willingness to forebear on arguments straddling the thin line between provoking debate and active trollage. Alternatively, if you actually want to embrace the cause of Vox Day and his friends, don’t bother coming back.

Val – thanks – I often don’t follow threads after #200 or so, since at that point they have usually become a debate among a few commenters that doesn’t bear on the OP.

Warren Terra 04.06.15 at 1:35 pm
“Barry,
I’ve clashed with Brett many times, back when Kleiman’s place had usable comments, and to my mind he’s often been reprehensible (especially his prolonged birtherism), but he’s always shown flashes of humanity, and I don’t recall him openly flirting with the kind of vicious racism Vox Day is infamous for. His apparent refusal to take a stand on this issue is disheartening.”

‘flashes of humanity’ is something that can be true of almost everybody – I recently found out that when OBL was killed, Rush actually credited President Obama for it, saying that Obama went for it, and took the risky option (i.e., killing him face to face, rather than dropping some bombs and never knowing). However, that’s very much the exception for Rush.

As for Brett’s flirting with racism, that’s his technique, and people who are fooled by it are – well, fools. The guy does it again and again and again.

I din’t even know who Vox Day is. I am, however, somewhat familiar with Larry Correa, and my understanding was that Sad Puppies was HIS gig.

Here’s his side of it.

I for one really didn’t to read the story Belle used to end her comment just now. OK, maybe I did need to read it; it’s important to know people like that are really out there, whether they’re deluded and wishing to be romantic or they are more violently inclined. But it’s just so deeply sad.

Belle, I’m more, “I’m not a racist, because you’re misusing the term.”, actually.

Belle: ” That is, I thought he was “I pretend not to be racist” racist, not “I’m racist because racism is scientifically accurate” racist. ”

That’s sort of like the difference between the KKK, Christian Identity, etc. It might matter a lot to the core membership of each group, but other than that it’s ‘tomato, tomahto’.

And it leads me back to my original question – Belle, did you actually think that because he’s flavor A of quite nasty racism, that that’s different than if he was flavor B?

“Actually, the Hugo Awards WILL be doing exactly that this year. Just for a different group of SF fans, possible a group more representative of SF fandom as a whole.”

Brett’s absolutely right. The point isn’t whether you approve of the politics. The point is that most SF&F fandom don’t believe in the politicisation of art. Most the writers who shaped the genre are politically awful. Much of the fan base was and is still drawn in by the books of misogynist, homophobic, racists like Leiber and Howard and Lovecraft etc – but capable of looking past the politics to enjoy the work.

This sits very uneasily with ‘progressive identity activists’ (or whatever term won’t offend you all) attempting to ideologically cleanse the field. So activists who vent outrage over a chainmail bikini on the cover of the SFWA bulletin, or the fact Jonathan Ross might make a fat joke at the Hugos, or HP Lovecraft statues, and so on, likely aren’t speaking for those fans capable of looking past the opinions of a misogynist, athletic fetishist, racist like REH.

The sad thing is, the Hugos were very ideologically diverse. You used to have people like Leiber and Dick and Heinlein alongside Bradley and Le Guin and Wilhelm. That’s dead now. Outraged assholes have politicised the fandom and triggered a counter-reaction, books are now going to be judged on conflicting views of their ideological merits and the fandom has lost something.

And now I’m going to sit and wait for everyone to accuse me of being racist.

I hesitate to jump in here to somewhat defend Brett but looking at his post, it doesn’t seem like he is alining himself with Vox Day. What he is saying is that the works on the Sad Puppy slate (not Vox Day’s) is more representative of SF fandom as a whole than the usual Hugo lists. I do very much believe he is wrong and that the SP slate is filed with cruft but that doesn’t mean most of the authors on it would have anything to do with VD’s agenda.

I wonder, did the authors and artists on the SP slate agree to be on it?

Barry: honestly, there is a difference when people feel like they have to pretend not to be racist. I don’t think this is only a Southern thing. Feeling constrained to acknowledge racism is bad is different from being Strom Thurmond. It’s not just a different flavor of Pixy Stix, like “yum, Red!” It’s more like suddenly Pop Rocks: “‘race realism’! Tastes like…burning!” This is like what I was saying in the other thread about Republicans trying to pretend opposition to gay marriage is about ethics in catering; it’s because they themselves know that “we hate the fuck out of gay people” is already a losing proposition now, and is going to look realllly bad in ten years.

When Brett — or anyone else — takes cover by saying they’re just siding with Correia, you should know what that means.

Correia, Brad Torgersen, and Vox Day all worked together to game these Hugos. They worked together with foreknowledge; they planned it together; they did so openly. They commented frequently on one another’s blogs and referred reader’s to one another’s blogs and slates as they did so.

Brad Torgersen is now pretending he is a different boy entirely than Vox Day. So is Larry Correia. Well, they carried his water, and climbed into bed with him. His slate is the one that (mostly) ended up on the Hugos.

Make your own judgments.

Bill Jones at #77: “…did the authors and artists on the SP slate agree to be on it?”

No. Torgersen had claimed in several places that he contacted writers and artists and editors before putting them on his slate. (I don’t know Vox Day’s position.) This has proved a number of times to be untrue. Writers who discovered they were on the slate before the nominations closed have asked to be removed; others only discovered they were on it after they received notice of the nomination.

As you can imagine, this puts (at least some of) these people in a difficult position.

What’s this, conservatives acting like whiny babies when it turns out they can no longer impose their will on others? Well I never!

To a close approximation, “SJW” is this decade’s “feminazi”; a slur that lets you know that the person using it is a misogynist cretin.

Abbe Faria #37 seems to be ignoring/ unaware that this is the 3rd such slate. The last two years they were, as far as I recall, generally ignored or sometimes slagged off, but I’ve not read of anyone saying/ doing anything in opposition. So why try something which failed to work the last two times? These people will keep trying, no matter what. Even if SP approved awards won every category, the evidence so far is that they’d keep trying for as long as necessary, until strange people (like women, gays, people of colour etc) are driven out of SF and it’s back to it’s pure unsullied strong men in rocket ships to the stars form.

Jerry, “literary” DNE “well written”. And perhaps that’s the point, that the Hugos had been taken over by people who didn’t understand that.

look at you being all dumb and wrong on the internet

just look

Doug: “even though or maybe because you tell us things I’d rather not think about.
agree, the “pretend not to be a racist” racists are preferable to the other kinds, at least they may have some dim uneasy notions of being wrong.”

My point is that the pretense is as thin as a ‘suicide’ who shot themselves in the back seven times (with a revolver).

Best related works that should have made the list: Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great?

Also — though some disliked it — the second half of Patterson’s Heinlein biography was at least worth a nomination.

Both My Real Children (which just won the Tiptree Award) and Just City were wonderful. Just City is the first in a trilogy, so it lacks a real ending. My Real Children doesn’t have that problem.

I’m using Just City in the Utopian/Dystopian class I’m teaching in the fall.

Of course, Walton’s never written anything I didn’t like. Bear that in mind.

Arriving after dusk in Gorzom,grignr descended down a dismal alley, reining his horse before a beaten tavern. The redhaired giant strode into the dimly lit hostelry reeking of foul odors, and cheap wine. The air was heavy with chocking fumes spewing from smolderingtorches encased within theden’s earthen packed walls.

The point post was that Correa was able to trick the SJWs, (typically women of course) into unwillingly revealing their hypocritical political biases.

To Correa this is just like tricking a women into unwillingly showing her “pretty pink panties” to the world.

HaHa, silly SJWs, Smiley Face.

Nope, No connection with rape culture at all.

Brett Bellmore playing the innocent is even more disgusting than his usual posts.

If there is one thing I hate worse than a reactionary bigot, it’s a hypocritical reactionary bigot.

Brett Bellmore is either completely clueless about the Sad Puppy slate (in which case he backed something without researching it), or he’s lying about not knowing who Vox Day is. Either way, it’s a pathetic defense.

What is ‘literary’-as-pejorative supposed to indicate if it’s not literally about lavishing care on the prose of a story (as opposed to just having an exciting plot or ideas)? If Terry Pratchett had had the same Discworld stories to tell but only the words of Stephen Baxter to tell them in, Pratchett wouldn’t be one of my favorite writers. Love of and command of the language matter a lot. A book with clumsy prose is like a filmed period drama where the costumes and sets appear to be borrowed from a high school production of Hamlet.

Doug 04.06.15 at 6:48 pm
“Brett Bellmore playing the innocent is even more disgusting than his usual posts.”

It’s a standard trick – it’s derived from somebody who turns red in the face and screams that they are ‘Shocked! Shocked and Outraged!’ when accused of a crime which they actually committed.

Brett,
1) People are upset because, contrary to the spin you and others are putting on it, this was not an attempt to secure nominations and attention to award-worthy works heretofore unjustly overlooked and blackballed by a clique of biased progressives unwilling to countenance the inclusion of conservative writers. Instead it was vandalism of the nomination process (albeit within the rules, apparently), an attempt not to highlight selected writers and works but to completely sweep the nominations and prevent anybody else from having a chance – and doing so not in the service of sterling exemplars at risk of unjust exclusion, but instead a cobbled-together collection of hacks, cranks, has-beens, never-will-bes, and bewildered draftees. John C Wright is simply not a well-respected writer, on the basis of his writing (and everyone here enjoys and respects the work of particular writers they believe are human slime). Even so, perhaps in the last year he wrote a novella worthy of consideration – but three of them? This really gives the game away, truly demonstrates that the attempt was not to bring into the limelight works and writers that would otherwise be left out, but instead to perform some exclusion of their own y dominating entire fields with lists selected not for their sterling qualities but merely to send a message. The intent is perhaps less obvious elsewhere (because more care was taken at least to find more than one writer), but an inspection of the works selected will rapidly inform you that they just aren’t especially worthy material.

2) And that brings us to the actual motivation: as anyone who has watched this story develop over the last several years can tell you, it is not about Conservatism, whichever of the many meanings of that word you may use. It’s about Hate. It’s about resentment, and about anger, and petulance. Let me repeat that, because it’s going to matter later: this process has been playing out over the last several years. This is not new, and from the beginning it has been characterized by rage not that specific works or writers aligned with the conservatives weren’t being considered, but instead complaints that others not aligned with them were.

3) And so we come to Vox Day. Vox Day would be a ridiculous figure, if he didn’t have followers and useful dupes. His offenses are manifold, obvious, inexcusable, and he frequently brags about them himself; his merits and nature aren’t really open to debate. And he has been a prime mover in these efforts to engineer the nomination conservative and perceived-conservative writers and works, for years – the problem, I say again, being not that he has works he wants brought forward for consideration but that the works in question are frequently lazily selected and sub-par, and are brought forth not to recognize their merits but to make a political point, and to exclude other, actually worthy works. He has been central to this electoral-slate tactic for the last couple of years, such that anyone closely involved could hardly have been unaware of him. Anyone endorsing the slate would have to account for their affiliation with him, and doubly so for anyone actually working to organize the slate.

4) Obviously, when I say the last I refer to Correia. And this is just one of the many things that gives the lie to the self-serving blog post you linked to. I will not say Correia lies, precisely, but in that blog pot he omits, over-emphaizes, and otherwise distorts continuously. He claims to have seen complaints of vote-fixing, or other corrupt practices – and yet you can read literally hundreds of outraged comments here, or at the Niesen Haydens’ Making Light, or elsewhere, that manage to denounce Correia and the Puppies without so traducing them. I’m sure some of the responses he claims to have seen exist, but they don’t typify the response. He claims the use of the slates was normal practice, and claims John Scalzi admitted this; neither claim is true. There are many more such examples, but I’ll skip them and get to Vox Day. Correia writes as if he’s just recently discovered the involvement of Day, and it has not been influential – but Day has been one of the prime Puppy organizers for years now, and his involvement has been a focus of the angry response of the F/SF community that whole time. Part of the controversy in last year’s Hugo balloting was the attempt to secure a nomination for Vox Day.

5) Obviously, this has become an absurdly long comment; it may even get filtered for same. So, I’ll summarize: the Puppies slates are openly an attempt not to celebrate conservative authors unjustly liable to be overlooked, but a thumb in the eye using a mishmash of work selected not for its merit but for its political resonance, used to exclude politically incompatible work. Day lives to give offense in just such a fashion, and for years has been a prime mover in the efforts to do so. Correia’s narrative is profoundly unreliable, not least in its attempt to gloss over Day. And you, Brett, have jumped into all this with your celebration of the Puppies’ act of vandalism, and by claiming to delight in their efforts you have incurred the responsibility to know what it is you’re cheering on.

“My Real Children did *not* work for me, because what I wanted was a clear sense — preferably a chain of evidence worthy of Sherlock Holmes — of how Patricia’s pivotal choice led to the alternate realities.”

Eh, I see your point, but I guess I just wasn’t reading it as that direct. As I saw it, the choice dumped Patricia into alternate worlds; it didn’t *create* those alternate worlds. You’ve got billions of different actors in each of those different realities making billions of different choices — those created the different worlds.

I would put Ancillary Justice in the “hard because of alien setting” group, not the “as dense as Pynchon” group. (I did not manage to read it; it was one of those “bounce, try again, bounce again” novels for me, but many people loved it.)

I endorse Warran Terra’s comment at 109 wholeheartedly. All that. Yes.

Brett,
as I tried to make clear above, this was not an attempt go “VOTE on the Hugos”, it was electoral action as vandalism. Towards this purpose Correia invited a horde of slavering jackals noted for their enthusiasm for online vandalism.

McManus,
the Naderites were electoral action as idiocy, and as self-destruction, which is I think an important if slight distinction. At least Correia and his Gamer Gator brethren got their actions and their purported aims in sync.

73: “books of misogynist, homophobic, racists like Leiber ”

Uh what?

Yes, it’s not just about them winning: it’s very important to them that others lose, and be seen to lose, and to know that they’ve lost. So ruining a thing as something anyone cares about anymore is an entirely acceptable outcome – they’ll go on to tell stories about how the rest of us destroyed this wonderful thing of value that they would have saved if they could. And, when it’s convenient, crow about how they destroyed this terrible thing we’d corrupted, too.

1) Our comments have declined in quality a lot over the past four years without there being any change at all in our moderating process, so it can’t be entirely the fault of the hypothetical (because roughly non-existent) moderators. This place is sometimes like if everyone in the comments section at a newspaper article had an MA and whose fault is that? To quote Pogo, “I points the fingerbone of scorn at you!”
2) It’s true that if I were willing to devote many hours a week to moderating comments they would be better (if I managed to make them worse, I would be a surprisingly bad moderator).
3) I am partially deterred from doing so for the same reason I am deterred from even from posting as frequently as it occurs to me to do so. Because what the fuck even with you…people…loveable rogues…entities?
4) Nonetheless you all could moderate one another–if not with complete success then some success. “Don’t feed the trolls” is utter bullshit advice given to women or minorities faced with harassment. It’s non-terrible advice given to communities. If, every time Brett Bellmore posted (in the past, since he won’t be able to post here anymore) all of you had said only “fuck off with your tired racist bullshit” and then ignored him completely, he would have gotten bored and gone away. Swift “fuck off you racist” lets POC readers know they aren’t unwelcome; follow-up not getting into a pointless fight keeps things more or less on track.
5) Yet some trolls are irresistible, because their troll-fu is strong, even like unto that of mcmanus-sensei. And what do I do with my life, me, personally, Belle Waring? Get drawn into pointless fights, surely. No! Get drawn into impactful fights! No! Impactful is a horrid word! Pointless! Or perhaps, of uncertain value.
6) And wrt to mcmanus-sensei, why is he mcmanus-sensei, and the rest of you aren’t even anything-san? Because I am so fond of him, but also I admire his subtle trolling abilities. Sometimes, it’s true, he blunders out of the gate with some obvious gambit, as above. That wasn’t half- or even quarter-hearted. But at other times, wow, he can really troll a person. Say what you like about bob mcmanus, he can troll the fuck out of someone. Daaaamn. And I am mildly pro-troll on principle, as I have mentioned. This is rather at odds with the goal of pruning the garden of the mind in here. I am mildly pro-poison ivy. Why? I partly don’t know. Maybe it’s because I am crazy and I tend to see in proper thoroughgoing trolls the signs of mental illness which is not entirely controlled, and this makes me sympathetic to them even when I want to garrotte them. But then a proper troll then, as you can see, isn’t in it for the bitches, or the money, or the anti-feminist assholery; he is nuts. He is coming at the thread sideways. Brett B. was never like this; he’s just an asshole, so really I should have banned him sooner. This isn’t even really true of mc-manus-sensei either; he’s simply devoted to trolling as an art form. It’s…charming.
7) “How do I even get anyone banned?” wonders roughly equally trollish right-thinking commenter? Just start bitching about it in the thread where the horrible trainwreck is happening. “Belle, why do you let Mao comment here? Rilly tho y? I am totes serious. Srsly y u do this to us?”

For those interested in the controversy:

Doctor Science has a post up at Obsidian Wings; follow the Fwooomp link for a good linklist

io9; Elizabeth Bear; Scalzi

Saved my link for N K Jemisin … Guest of Honor speech at WisCon 38 2014

I agree with Doctor Science. If you look at the Hugo novel winners alone over the years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel
the things they all have in common, regardless of ideology/politics, are at the very least a competent use of language, serious world-building chops and and a willingness to explore big ideas.

The SP nominees don’t seem to exhibit many of those characteristics judging from what work I’ve investigated online.

And I once read one of Vox Day’s joints on someone’s kindle during a holiday weekend and fuck it was awful. A pompous prose style like an 19 year student discovering esoteric words, dangling participles all over the place, world building that basically consisted of smearing ‘Lord Fiddlefang: The Iron Ostrich Chronicles’ level fantasy over the Roman Empire, totally predictable plot surprises, Mary Sue and anti-Mary Sue characters all over the place and evil minions called ‘Orcs’. A mashup without the ‘mash’ or the ‘up’.

So yeah, as Doc Science pointed out, they’re just crap writers. Dull, incompetent and derivative. If they were good and reaching the audience they think is out there, then why aren’t serious publishers who like to make money publishing them? The market is the market.
http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com.au/2005/07/i-wish-hollywood-was-that-organized.html

However I remain rather baffled that Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix never got a Hugo guernsey.

To whomever banned Brett, thank you very much!

Delagar@97- yeah I’m enjoying just city and was gonna go to my real children if not next then at some stage (but might put it off for a bit after doctor sciences comment )
Tell me this, as I said above I’m not a huge fan of fantasy/ sci fi etc ( primarily through ignorance no doubt) but have enjoyed jo Walton so far . Could you take these two very general bits of info and point me towards an author(s) in the genre that you might think it worth ny time reading . I promise to take any recommendation seriously, read it and get back to you with a review ; )

Many vile substances are soft and yielding. However, they leave stains on the toe of your boot.

So did he. He left stains on every thread he sullied.

I’m still rather hoping that the management will clear up the stains on this post, but I suppose that’s a lot to ask.

Well, given that it’s banning of dissenters day: I think that Kevin Drum’s lead/crime theory is convincing.

(A corollary would be that poor people are on average less intelligent and more impulsive that wealthier ones, in the 1950-present timeframe.)

Brett argued dishonestly, derailed threads & deserved banning for that. But thread-derailing trolling & espousing repugnant views aren’t at all the same thing, even in an environment where doing B is a good way to achieve A. (And even when an awful lot of people with repugnant views seem to communicate mainly through trolling of the opposition, even when they’re talking among themselves. The Left isn’t immune to this – it’s a tribal thing – but the contemporary Right seems to do little else.)

I guess what I want to say is (firstly) that I’m not happy about anyone being banned for expressing repugnant views, unless they’re also actively disruptive – still less so when we’re really imputing those views to people on a “why haven’t you repudiated X, with whom your position appears to align you?” basis. (This isn’t to say that “why haven’t you repudiated X?” isn’t a perfectly good question; it is. But only if it’s being asked as a question – i.e. if the person saying it is willing to stay for an answer.)

And (secondly) that there are more ways to derail a thread than being a racist git (or a you-calling-me-a-racist-huh? coat-trailer) – and when it comes to policing discussions I’d rather the whistle was blown consistently on trollers (like Brett) than being blown consistently on bigots (like Brett).

Cranky Observer @74: I actually quite like the term “social justice warrior” because it’s such a useful marker: anyone who uses it seriously is a jerk I don’t have to pay attention to.

There’s a button-maker who’s started offering the World of Warcraft class icons with terms like “social justice cleric” and “social justice hunter”. I find this hilarious.

Yes, good points well made Phil. I don’t think Brett set out to be a troll in his own mind but he did seem to revel in attracting opprobrium as a substitute for engagement. I was like that when I was twelve. Still got some good fart jokes tho.

I must admit, I do find it hilarious that Wright’s comment concludes:

One cannot hold up a homosexual couple, not even Socrates and Alcibiades, which men will not find gross and unsightly.

… because the real “no homo” test case, as the Greeks knew full well, is Achilles and Patroklus.

I thought Alcibiades went and whined about Socrates not giving him a piece?

> That, and Brett was fundamentally civil.

If he acted in a manner that made you want to punch him, and he knew this — and he did know this — where is the civility?

[but, again: this is a fundamentally medical problem and requires a medical solution through medical approaches]

So, electoral action as vandalism: does that include voting for the least electable candidate in the opposing party’s primary when one’s own candidate is running unopposed and the system is sufficiently open to allow this? Are you all ready to forever eschew such tactics?

“Indeed yes. I looked up the page on Google’s cache — dated Jan 28 2015 — and there’s the comment in full. I took a screencap and saved the cached page as a web archive, should anyone wish to verify.”

Well I am glad you found proof as I never even thought about taking a sceenshot and I have been called a liar by certain commenters here before.

“That’s one of the worst things I’ve ever heard anyone I’ve had any kind of contact with say. I feel a stand-alone post coming on …”

Yeah. The hate present in the quote is disgusting.

[aeiou] Vox Day has nothing to do with the Sad Puppies. The proprietor of this blog, in claiming otherwise, is simply flat-out lying for propaganda purposes. This proves his or her dishonest intentions — this is so blatantly false that it can’t be pretended away as anything but a deliberate attempt to mislead.

You didn’t care when SJW Scalzi was advancing his slate. You only care because you don’t like the political leanings of the current crop. But a lot of people are getting sick and tired of the fringe preachiness of the Hugos. The stories advanced there don’t make anyone thing about anything, they simply make the outermost fringe of the left feel the warm and fuzzies as they read stories about Dino other-kin romancer that honestly have no real place in sci-fi to begin with.

I am about halfway through Ancillary Justice now and am likely to finish it soon. It is compelling reading though I can’t quite say enjoyable due to the various atrocities. It’s full of military conquest and empire building: a perfect pick for Sad Puppies. Or maybe* they only like military-and-colonies books where the author is unambiguously approving of these structures. I think my favorite of the 2013 Hugo novels still would have been Neptune’s Brood — weaker writing, but not bad, and less-seen ideas — but this is a solid book. And for all I know the author will so impress me in the second half that I pick it over Neptune’s Brood.

*Probably

Simeon Beresford @66: Here’s what I wrote about Goblin Emperor’s grammar when I reviewed it, “…The “thee” and “thou” are part of how Addison alludes to the language the characters in her world are speaking — one that retains the distinction between a formal and informal “you” that has largely fallen away in modern English, and one that uses a formal “I” that is only seen in English as the royal “we.” (This will seem a lot less foreign to readers of many other languages.) Addison is consistent with using in-world titles, and with the ways that names decline according to gender, number, and other factors. Both of these tendencies helped to reinforce the depth of the world that the characters are acting in. …”

What was your reading of Ancillary Sword that you think is unusual?

You know, soullite, I still have this bookmarked. In case anybody is under any illusions about you.

I know that (probably) every reader here knows this, but 155 is filled with blatant misrepresentations, if not outright lies, as well, which I am am driven to correct.

(1) Vox Day does, in fact, have everything to do with Sad Puppies. He and Correia and Torgersen outright colluded. His slate, the Rapid Puppies, and their slate, Sad Puppies, were assembled together. They share commenters; they talked with one another; they are in the same camps.

(2) Vox Day *was* a Sad Puppy, up until this slate.

(3) Scalzi has no slate. This is a flat lie which is being pushed by the Sad Puppies and the Rabid puppies, and that Soullite repeats it tells us where he’s been getting his information. Scalzi, like many SFF writers and readers, puts a list of SFF that he has published during the year which qualifies for the Hugos. He then invites readers to list any work which they recommend for the Hugos. (I listed, for instance, everything from Crossed Genres, the magazine I publish for, which qualified.) This allows Hugo nominators to read through and recall works they had read which they would like to nominate. As *anyone* can see, this is a far cry from putting up five works in each category and TELLING your minions to vote for THOSE FIVE WORKS.

As I said, I know we all know this. But lies from lying liars annoy me.

You know, I on principle hate the whole thing.

But reading what that failure of a human being said about Pratchett, so close to losing him, who if only did “entertain our idle afternoons” did a billion time better than any of his hateful rants…

And then has the GALL to play at “Christian humility” and giving himself a medal for it…

We are so diminished by losing Pratchett; he would have written this cretin into a amusing tale of the Discworld to be treated as the moral disease he is, and would do it with grace, with style, and with a fundamental humanity, even toward him, that this “Christian humility” idiot cant even come close to imagine.

Come to think of it, he already did, several times, because he is nothing but a two-dime clone of Vorbis.

If they want this war of them, I know where I stand, and they dont have anybody with a quarter of the stature of Pratchett, as writers. Or a hundred, as human beings.

While I agree with Phil’s distinction in principle (that the espousing of repugnant views is not per se ban-worthy, while intentionally disruptive behavior is), I think I would add another distinction:

If someone who comes here regularly with generally sensible views utters a repugnant view on the rare occasion, then they should be offered indulgence and understanding.

If some one’s entire presence here, and entire reason for coming here, is to utter repugnant views, then they are ipso facto trolling.

Look, I don’t go to right-wing hate sites and offer my counter-intuitive views on things. Nor do I pretend that I am trying to save their souls from “epistemic closure”. If I did that stuff, I’d be trolling, and I’d be banned in no time flat.

It is a characteristic weakness (and in the long run, strength) of the liberal outlook that it is open to opposing view points and cares about avoiding epistemic closure. So it makes us easier to troll, and more willing to suffer them for a long, long, time. Like, years long this has been going on.

All he ever did was come here to disrupt stuff and be hateful and then pretend a surface civility. Enough of that noise.

But the occasional repugnant view? Sure, for that we ought to be tolerant I mean, christ, just think about some of Belle’s views on music, to begin with. Banning her for that stuff would surely be an over-reaction.

oldster: “While I agree with Phil’s distinction in principle (that the espousing of repugnant views is not per se ban-worthy, while intentionally disruptive behavior is)”

This is not how CT works. The explicit policy, right up there in the tab called “Comments Policy”, is that bans can be for content or for disruption. In practice, bans are for annoyance. I’ve been partially banned or had comments deleted four times on CT (as far as I can remember) and two of them were for expressing anti-war views in ways that were deemed uncivil. (For instance, Henry banned me for saying that a guest poster here who was defending the humanitarian intervention i.e. war in Libya had been hired by the UN specifically to make plans for the humanitarian intervention i.e. war in Libya, which was as far as I know true.)

“Up shows soullite to prove your point. WA-BAM!”

Obviously, Soullite is a sock-puppet I’ve invented for dramatic effect, because no one could be that hateful in real life.

Sebastian H 04.07.15 at 5:58 pm
“It has to do with a breakdown of norms. Which is ironic, because in this case the right leaning people are breaking down the norms–which is exactly what they say they don’t want.”

At least as far back as Gingrich (with his pamphlet on how to use language), and the unending ‘pin something on Clinton’ charade of unending investigations, the right has openly broken down every norm which was even mildly inconvenient.

bruce – are the tor articles the same as the articles in the book or is there a substantial difference ?

At least as far back as Gingrich (with his pamphlet on how to use language), and the unending ‘pin something on Clinton’ charade of unending investigations, the right has openly broken down every norm which was even mildly inconvenient.

Which is behaviour symptomatic of a particular mental-health condition, in this case narcissistic PD.

Problem is medical.

you all could moderate one another–if not with complete success then some success. “Don’t feed the trolls” is utter bullshit advice given to women or minorities faced with harassment. It’s non-terrible advice given to communities.

So right! Some of us have tried to make the point in threads past, but I guess responding to dumb, easily refuted arguments is too tempting. (Due exceptions for comments like Warren Terra’s @109, which in addition to being a devastating response to Brett Bellmore is also hugely illuminating for (some of) the rest of us, but I think it’s fair to say that such comments are very much the exception.)

Bruce – I decided to get it. I read the first of them through google and the amazon contents page so decided to splash out the £6 for convenience sake. It seems to be the introduction I was looking for.

Ronan: Cool. :) Looking at the table of contents for stuff that feels to me like it connects in various ways to Jo’s own work….

China Mountain Zhang, by Maureen McHugh. I like this because it’s a story of people learning how to improve their own lives without needing a glorious global revolution to Fix Everything Forever. Its various characters never actually do all meet up, and that’s another thing I like about it – it’s pretty ahead of the curve even now in portraying how rich and meaningful online interactions can be.

Fire On the Mountain, by Terry Bisson; also other work by him. Bisson may be about as close to an American counterpart to Jo as is handy at the moment. He writes warm stories about people in weird situations, and their ups and downs. This novel is set in an alternate history where John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry led directly to the American Civil War, rather than there being a two-year delay, with drastic ongoing consequences. Neat stuff.

When Gravity Fails, by George Alec Effinger. Personal bias: George became a friend of mine in his last years, and I still miss him a bunch. This is the first volume of an unfinished series, but stands alone. The narrator is a dealer and fixer living in an unnamed Middle Eastern city a century and a half or so from now, when nation-states have broken apart into shifting conglomerations of smaller entities. The Budayeen, the cordoned-off bad part of town, owes a lot to George’s beloved French Quarter of New Orleans, and the story, involving murders there that the cops of respectable town don’t care about, began with George’s anger at the murders of prostitute friends that got dismissed and buried. Among other things, it is possibly the most viscerally convincing anti-drug storyline I can think of this side of Requiem for a Dream: Marid, the narrator, is charming, intensely likable, very well-intentioned…and at the crucial moments, fails to save those he cares about because he’s too stoned to act. I love the setting and the story.

Oh, by the way, for those who don’t know: Brett’s posts are getting replaced with snippets from The Eye of Argon; the Wikipedia entry does a fine job explaining its place in fannish history, and has a link to the full text. Which is really something.

the unending ‘pin something on Clinton’ charade of unending investigations

Around the time the Lewinsky story broke, I remember telling a Republican-leaning contact that I wasn’t wildly impressed with the Ken Starr investigation – they’ve had that long and they’ve come up with this? He told me I shouldn’t be misled by appearances – Lewinsky was just Starr Investigates Clinton Volume 1, possibly not even Volume 1, more like a Prologue. I wonder if he ever got tired of waiting.

js – I might have been a little overly dramatic.

Bruce – thanks very much for that ! Having read the relevant Walton review, I think ‘When Gravity Fails’ is the one I’ll have to start on. (I promised a review above, so I’ll be back with it in….give me a month or so. I’ll link to it here)
A question on ‘cyberpunk’ if you dont mind. Is cyberpunk a specific sub-genre in science fiction, or just a name that’s put on a certain type of story ? Walton seems to say ‘When Gravity fails’ *isnt* cyberpunk, but some of the reviews Ive come across imply it is. Does this distinction matter ?

One of the things that makes CT wonderful is the creative responses the mods have to these sorts of trolls. Disemvowling, text replacement, etc. I love it.

@168

MPAV,
But oldster is Belle under a pseudonym, under your theory?

Bianca–that is demonstrably false.

My taste in music is impeccable.

“When Gravity Fails” is surely cyberpunk – noir, check; implanted technology, check; virtual reality, check; gender modification, check; world-weary small-time hood turns hero, check.

It is also spectacularly good fiction. It doesn’t hurt that Effinger gives a hat tip to Rex Stout’s immortal Nero Wolfe / Archie Goodwin series, either – both with the broad character framing (armchair detective and loyal dogsbody) and an actual (well, virtual, I guess) cameo.

js@181 – “Yeah, but how is an internet troll going to “escalate”? ”

The internet troll doesn’t have to escalate because someone will always take the bait. As evidence, I give you mattski@166 – “I still feel sad because there were embers of humanity in Brett that maybe/possibly could have been stoked here.”

Like the groupie in a movie who tries to save the abusive rockstar … fricking unbelievable !

@ Bianca

Rings within rings Bianca. This thing goes all the way to the top. We are through the looking glass here people.

oldster: oh dag. You hate my late 70s/early 80s ConFunkShun, don’t you, you magnificent bastard. I AM CUT TO THE VERY MOTHERFUCKING QUICK.

Doug,

“Simeon Beresford @66: Here’s what I wrote about Goblin Emperor’s grammar when I reviewed it, “…The “thee” and “thou” are part of how Addison alludes to the language the characters in her world are speaking — one that retains the distinction between a formal and informal “you” that has largely fallen away in modern English, and one that uses a formal “I” that is only seen in English as the royal “we.””

As a dictionary stalinist (how very cruel, Brett Bellmore is seen as having glowing embers of residual humanity, whereas I alas and alack get likened to Stalin) that is not quite right. Rather than making a distinction between formal/informal I/me Thou/thee Ye/you makes a distinction between subject and object (persons possess both properties so you can use both forms eg. for an good tempered person “shall I compare thee to a summer’s day Thou art more lovely and more temperate”). In the first person singular this is still popularly extant ie. I do something, whereas something is done to me, but the second person singular (Thou/thee) — except for maybe in Yorkshire — has collapsed into the second person plural object form of “you” (Ye being the second person plural subject form I think). This collapse started in the south of England and spread from there. As for why, I think it may have been because of the printing press or maybe because of Londoners preferring to be subjects and everyone else be objects, but that is just a supposition since I’ve not read an account for why this grammatical event transpired.

Belle Waring,

“4) Nonetheless you all could moderate one another–if not with complete success then some success.”

From my observations efforts by commenters to moderate threads often end up in them being slurred as self-appointed hall monitors or similar insults. If anyone would be willing to volunteer the posters could nominate them as official mods with lesser powers, but I think without anyone having any authority efforts just usually end up in a squall of name calling interrupting any arguments.

“my fav scene in the book, the row of pay phones in Istanbul.”

Yes, that’s a great bit. I love the first two books, but was very disappointed in the third. If anyone knows whether this is the critical consensus or simply my failure to appreciate great art, that person can illuminate me. (Nicely please.)

Third person gendered forms also retain the subject/object distinction – he picks a pear and gives it to her/ sits it on her head – but I think they can move into being genitives as well at that point like mine, thine, yours, ours, theirs.

Peter T, I read it somewhere. If you go to the definitive 20 odd volume OED at the entry for Thou pronoun there is a definition “The subjective case of the second person singular pronoun” and there is etymology and discussion. I am on the train so can’t cut and paste it for you right now.

What, you think I am Sir Nose D VoidofFunk??
au contraire; I love those meeces to pieces.

(Dangling modifier; Case, not the sky. Haven’t had coffee yet.)

Ronan
Sorry off topic but I just received a family photo with my brother looking exactly like Gerry Adams
Can’t even

bianca steele I definitely don’t want to be a volunteer moderator. Look how many aggrieved comments I’ve made to try to exact an apology for being likened to Stalin, and I still haven’t succeeded in getting one

And @216! Posts crossed

My Dear ZM,

Do not be alarmed. Everyone has a little Stalin in them! I just thought I saw yours showing, however fleetingly.

With Brett, OTOH, it was more a case of getting fleeting glimpses of his humanity. See the difference?

:^)

Anderson @ 211:

Case is used to living inside digital reality. Stranded in the physical world, despairing in Tokyo, the sky is mockingly “electronic” but it’s white noise, no data.

[APPLAUSE]

I don’t know anything about SF fiction, but after this, I think I’ll be checking out Neuromamcer in the near future. Anything that bears comparison to Blade Runner has to be something I’ll at least sort of like (and I love old noir, film and fiction, so I’m thinking I’m on relatively solid ground). So thanks to Bruce Baugh et al.

js @#224
If you love noir, also look up George Alec Effinger. To my mind there’s a lot of homage to Philip Marlowe in there.

An excellent post from Cat Valente on this topic: http://catvalente.livejournal.com/690416.html

Val 215 – I have a theory (admittedly not very well thought through) that for *at least* 15 minutes in every persons life, they’ll end up looking exactly like Gerry Adams.(honestly. Keep this in mind for the next week or two and I guarantee you’ll see Gerry everywhere)

js 204 – you’ll always be more than welcome. There might even be an opporunity for investment ….

Mattski @221

Thank you, that was very graciously phrased ;)

:-)