The Sad Puppies are what the gomers who undermined the Hugo nominations are calling themselves. I’m interested in seeing how they defend themselves…or was, until I read their arguments. And all I can conclude is that these are really pathetic, brainless people.
For example, this guy Brad R. Torgersen. He tries to explain their cause by first setting up an analogy.
Imagine for a moment that you go to the local grocery to buy a box of cereal. You are an avid enthusiast for Nutty Nuggets. You will happily eat Nutty Nuggets until you die. Nutty Nuggets have always come in the same kind of box with the same logo and the same lettering. You could find the Nutty Nuggets even in the dark, with a blindfold over your eyes. That’s how much you love them.
Then, one day, you get home from the store, pour a big bowl of Nutty Nuggets . . . and discover that these aren’t really Nutty Nuggets. They came in the same box with the same lettering and the same logo, but they are something else. Still cereal, sure. But not Nutty Nuggets. Not wanting to waste money, you eat the different cereal anyway. You find the experience is not what you remembered it should be, when you ate actual Nutty Nuggets. You walk away from the experience somewhat disappointed. What the hell happened to Nutty Nuggets? Did the factory change the formula or the manufacturing process? Maybe you just got a bad box.
OK…I can understand that. Sometimes you just want your comfort food, and you want it to be prepared the same way, every time. This is the force that drove McDonald’s to world domination — the same food available everywhere, all the time, nice and greasy. I understand, but I don’t think that way; I want something different, I like exploring new flavors. I go to our local Mexican restaurant and pick a completely different meal each time. But wanting the same thing? Fine. My wife discovered her favorite thing on the menu early on, and she gets it always. No problem!
Except the analogy he’s setting up is to justify books. He wants them predictable. He wants to look at the cover and know exactly what he’s going to get when he reads it.
And he’s an author.
Well, at least I know I’d only have to read one of his books, if I felt like it (I do not), and then I could skip the rest.
But you’re reading this and saying, no, that can’t be. Books are supposed to be different from each other. Just imagine if every time you picked one up it would just be a retelling of Harry Potter, over and over again. No author could seriously propose such a justification.
Really, he did.
That’s what’s happened to Science Fiction & Fantasy literature. A few decades ago, if you saw a lovely spaceship on a book cover, with a gorgeous planet in the background, you could be pretty sure you were going to get a rousing space adventure featuring starships and distant, amazing worlds. If you saw a barbarian swinging an axe? You were going to get a rousing fantasy epic with broad-chested heroes who slay monsters, and run off with beautiful women. Battle-armored interstellar jump troops shooting up alien invaders? Yup. A gritty military SF war story, where the humans defeat the odds and save the Earth. And so on, and so forth.
These days, you can’t be sure.
The book has a spaceship on the cover, but is it really going to be a story about space exploration and pioneering derring-do? Or is the story merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings?
There’s a sword-swinger on the cover, but is it really about knights battling dragons? Or are the dragons suddenly the good guys, and the sword-swingers are the oppressive colonizers of Dragon Land?
A planet, framed by a galactic backdrop. Could it be an actual bona fide space opera? Heroes and princesses and laser blasters? No, wait. It’s about sexism and the oppression of women.
Finally, a book with a painting of a person wearing a mechanized suit of armor! Holding a rifle! War story ahoy! Nope, wait. It’s actually about gay and transgender issues.
Or it could be about the evils of capitalism and the despotism of the wealthy.
AN AUTHOR WROTE THAT. Unbelievable. He wants purity of the genre: books with rockets on the cover must be entirely about machines and traveling. Books with a guy and an axe on the cover must be about barbarians killing monsters. Don’t you dare change the formula. These books are not allowed to be about race, or colonialism, or sexism, or oppressive social structures. He thinks those are bad things to bring up in a science fiction book.
Our once reliable packaging has too often defrauded our readership. It’s as true with the Hugos as it is with the larger genre as a whole. Our readers wanted Nutty Nuggets because (for decades) Nutty Nuggets is what we gave them. Maybe some differences here and there, but nothing so outrageously different as to make our readers look at the cover and say, “What the hell is this crap??”
Apparently, he stopped reading the genre with Hugo Gernsback.
Maybe he opened The Left Hand of Darkness
The Martian Chronicles
Let’s try Dhalgren
Hey, The Book of the New Sun
Lord of Light
I guess his only recourse is Robert Heinlein. Conservative politics, a bit of militarism, hyper-competent engineers solving mechanical problems all over the place. Like in Stranger in a Strange Land
I first started reading fantasy when I was six or seven years old, and my father gave me a copy of Tarzan of the Apes
And science fiction has always been this way. It’s always been a genre of new ideas and experimentation. It’s not like all of a sudden in the 2000s a few social radicals have hijacked the field and sent it off into wild new directions, discombobulating all of their readers. They’ve always done that. It’s got a readership that loves being discombobulated and twisting their brains around strangeness.
I see someone accusing authors of “defrauding” their readership because they are creative and explore novel ideas and think about more than just the gobbledygook pseudomechanics they’ll use to make their spaceships fly, and I see the real fraud: that is a person who does not understand science fiction and fantasy in the slightest.
Maybe the sad puppies should just pick up a copy of one of their own books and read it over and over again everyday. No surprises. They’d get exactly what they expect every time. And they’ve probably already got a rocket on the cover.
George RR Martin has spoken, at length and in great detail (Hey! Like his books!). He goes through the history of the Hugos and shows, with the evidence, that there is no pattern of discrimination against Conservative White Dudes.
How does somebody so completely miss the point? I mean, I can’t think of a single example of classic, good science fiction that isn’t allegory. Does he think Starship Troopers was just about guys in powered armor saving Earth?
Sad Puppy indeed. He compares an entire genre of literature with a box of cereal. Not an entire series of books, which would make slightly better sense (though still not terribly logical), but an entire genre. What a numpty (I beg forgiveness of the tone troll gods).
All of his “It’s a trap!” book plots sound infinitely more interesting to read than a barbarian swinging his axe for the millionth time.
Is he five? Jesus, dude. There’s this thing on the back of the book that will tell you what it’s about. It’s called text. You’re supposed to read it. Don’t just buy whatever book has the prettiest space ship on the front.
Of course, what this is really all about is that he and his fans want to make sure nobody else can read thought provoking/controversial/philosophical scifi/fantasy books, either, because it’s important to police the liberal thoughts out of people.
Because of course, speculative fiction NEVER addressed social issues before. Nuh uh. Just wasn’t done. *shifty eyes*
So Torgersen’s problem is that he can’t judge a book by its cover? Why doesn’t he complain about the cover artists instead of the authors then?
Well, at least he’s predictable. Books, history, people, thinking, caring… you name it, he’s ignorant about it.
1. If your analogy is that you’d throw a giant temper tantrum because your favourite breakfast cereal has changed, you’re not allowed at the adult table. You’re not allowed at the kids table either. The dog and the cat are carefully protecting their dishes.
2. No, he actually isn’t the consumer of Nutty Nuggets who’s upset that the flavour has changed. He is the producer of Nutty Nuggets (why do I keep typing Nugents?). His problem is not that the Nuggets taste different. His problem is that there are suddenly* Honey Loop and Fruity Flakes and Oaty’s Raisins. Because for a long time Nutty Nggets were like the only game in town. And now people who never ate NNs because of their nut allergy start eating cereals. And people who faithfully ate NNs decide that they might try some different cereal once in a while and damn, they like it and they all insist that they are cereal eaters just like those who always, always, always ate and who will allways, always, always eat NNs.
In short, he sees people taking a slice out of what he considers to be legitimately HIS market. And since it can’t be that the market fails the producer of NNs, it must be something different.
3. I’m sick and tired of NNs. I grew up on them. Cereals are my favourite thing to eat. But you will have to add something very interesting to the mix before I’m willing to
read another farmboy turned hero getting the pretty woman noveleat another bowl of NNs.*Not actually suddenly, as PZ demonstrated.
I hate people making me read posts by the SP gang. It hurts my brain. Their logic doesn’t work. The books and authors they adore didn’t write the stuff they want.
I want to give them a reading list from the good old days by their favorite authors and blow their minds.
Nostalgia it has a way of warping reality. Combine that with us SJWs pointing out the sexism and racism in those same books and they are totally convinced the books didn’t explore anything but space, machines, and blowing things up/killing/destruction.
It’s all about ethics in book-cover art!
Yes, in the old days, cover art was a reliable indicator of a science-fiction novel’s contents. For example, Asimov’s Foundation definitely has a pivotal scene in which a man in a spacesuit floats near a suspension bridge that is orbiting Jupiter.
And, if anything, Hollywood was even more reliable, like the famous poster of Robbie the Robot carrying off Anne Francis, which totally happened in the movie.
Robert Silverberg writes about the Good Old Days in his foreword to Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials (1987).
The other day, Saladin Ahmed asked for stories which should have been on the Hugo ballot (or, in modern parlance, crowdsourced a collection of curated content). I’ve been reading through the suggestions; they’ve been good so far.
My favorite short story is The Zebra Storyteller, the whole page and a half of it. This guy, reading his same story over and over, is going to get killed by a Siamese cat.
There should be a name for what these guys want. I was thinking of Apple-Pie Punk. You know, 1950’s social and literary conservatism, Charles Atlas in gold rocket pants, and ‘beautiful blondes with beehive hairdos who say ‘Show me some more of this Earth thing called kissing.’*
What they seem to have forgotten in their haste was that Charles Atlas Rocket Pants genuinely and sincerely believes in honor and fair play. Possibly he took it for granted that he was the best, and would come out on top by just and honorable means. And if he didn’t, what then? That’s the million-dollar question for all Charles Atlas Rocket Pants followers and I guess we just found out the answer.
Whereas, if they’d kept the kitsch and stripped it of the worst of its anti-social tendencies, I actually wouldn’t mind their existence at all. It could be like steampunk’s Victorian feel. Socio-politicaly, the 19th century wasn’t nice, but if people want to dress up in crinolines and clockwork, more power to them I say.
* Red Dwarf, I forget which episode.
Yes but you guys! The slate they championed had a woman of color on it and wasn’t all white men! So they’re totes on top of this social justice thing, they’re just not SJWs, you see, because SJWs poison everything with their… militant insistence that spaces be diverse and inclusive which is bad because… wait.
Tyrannical SJWs would see every single space you enjoy promoting diversity, which is obviously a 1984esque nightmare. *shudder* It’s just bad, okay!
I think I see a business opportunity here. How about if magazines, newspapers, and websites hired people to read books and do short accounts — maybe we might call them reviews — of what the books are about, and maybe even whether they’re any good? Then buyers could tell in advance whether the box contains Nutty Nuggets of Froot Loops.
This is assuming what he said is his motivation actually is his motivation. Personally, it sounds like so much claptrap he dredged up to justify his juvenile fucking around with the awards process.
I looked him up to see if he has written any screenplays. Not yet, but he sure seems to be Hollywood’s idea of a SF writer (that is NOT a compliment). Also, his first book The Chaplain’s War has a synopsis which includes this:
I think I’ll spend my money on another Diskworld book instead.
Coming soon
“PZ Myers uses hateful rhetoric towards equality and human rights campaigners, calling them “pathetic, brainless people” and “godamned idiots””
The Irish Wanker
If it weren’t for mistaken identity, I would never have read what turned out to be one of my favourite books; Randolph Stow’s Visitants. It was in the SF section of an Edmonton book store, with a lovely, sort of SFy cover, so I took a chance. Not SF at all, as it turned out, but a gem.
So this idiot wants to rip everything out of the science fiction genre that in any way makes it relevant or generally worth reading? All he wants is laser guns and improbability drives (no, scratch that last one, its too snarky for him – completely mundane ‘hyperdrives’ it is then) along with a few aliens to blast, and that’s a job well done? None of that politics or social awareness stuff in sight, right?
Only… that isn’t really true, is it? Even the kind of supposedly no frills ‘Nutty Nuggets’ science fiction he obsesses over is still very much the carrier of political messages:-
The heteronormative character of the invariably male lead.
The objectification of the female love interest who functions as the notional ‘just reward’ for the heroics of said male lead.
The default to the use of force when encountering most non-humans (the aliens who basically just have a few lumps on their foreheads are clearly still treated as basically human in this type of fiction – I am talking about the legitimately alien aliens) reflecting the ‘stranger danger’ mentality of the political right who enshrine knee-jerk xenophobia as a moral good, while simultaneously playing into the firearm obsession of libertarian gun-fondlers everywhere.
The far from subtle odes to the supposed moral authority/superiority of the fictional human societies of many SF settings that clearly reference notions of contemporary American ‘manifest destiny’ – the list goes on.
This is not about getting all political or social messages out of science fiction; this is about trying to ensure that only those political and social messages that fit the Sad Puppies regressive worldview are allowed to be present in science fiction. It is the standard controling, authoritarian mindset of the social conservative coming to the fore yet again. The hypocrisy seems to have been thrown in for free.
Of course, even if we were for some reason to take Mr Puppy at his word, it’s not like all those shitty pulp novels he seems to gush over have evaporated. If that’s all he wants to read, they’re easy to find.
There are, indeed, certain genre expectations.
If a book is marketed as a romance novel, it’s expected to have a romance as the central plot. If it lacks a happy ending–either Happily Ever After or Happy For Now–then it will be rejected by the readers as not meeting genre expectations. (This is why the loathsome Nicholas Sparks can, in all honesty, say he doesn’t write romance novels. Somebody’s gonna die of cancer!) The genders and races of the protagonists, number of partners involved in the romance, conflicts, character backgrounds, settings, etc, can all change, however.
If a book is marketed as a mystery, it’s expected to have a mystery as the central plot. If it lacks some resolution to the main mystery, then it will be rejected by the readers as not meeting genre expectations. Everything else? Up for negotiation.
If a book is marketed as fantasy, it’s expected to have…fantasy elements. Magic. Maybe some fantastic beasts. Unlike with mystery and romance, this isn’t a plot related genre, however. It just needs those elements there. The plots often differ wildly from one another, and thank goodness for that.
Same deal with science-fiction.
Certain markets may be very explicit in what they expect (some category romance will require authors to have only specific types of characters, meeting in a specific way, and having a specific kind of romance which will have a specific resolution), but the broad genres themselves don’t. And SFF has been far more adventurous on this front, for far longer, than many other genres.
We should do a hashtag #sadpuppieslogic (an oxymoron): Frankenstein was just about a monster chasing a guy!
#sadpuppieslogic: Dune was just about Spice
Doesn’t reading the same thing over and over basically make something analogous to a holy book? In an entertainment sense if nothing else? (Which is a serious fucking sense given that play is practice for more serious things)
I mean, I love my Popeye’s chicken and I like it over and over, but I still found awesome things to eat at the Mexican cafe up the street ( and learned that I like tripe breaded and fried).
I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that Torgerson would be complaining about the politicalization of the genre if they were stories about brave space Americans blowing away despotic space commies, or futuristic Christians trying to bring the faith to benighted heathen aliens.
EDIT …Torgersen wouldn’t be complaining…
Is there a word to describe nostalgia for a world that never actually existed? There should be. Of course, back in my day, this sort of thing didn’t happen.
@Jen
Agreed!
Also…..the solution to this noob’s complaint is simply to make the cover images more communicative. So the dragons are the heroes? Portray that somehow in the cover image. Focus on them to show they are the main characters, give them facial expression, something.
Like, it’s not even a complaint about stories. It’s a complaint about visual communication.
Here’s science fiction story that Torgesen might enjoy, full of rocket ships, and robots, and space suit clad explorers.
Oh wait…
Oops, sorry, HTML fail, here’s the link:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_Comics#.22Judgment_Day.22
I’m going to give him points for not comparing himself to Anne Frank because of the oppression he faces when he reads a book with a spaceship on the cover which turns out to have something else besides spaceships in it .
When I was a teenager I found out that one of my favorite childhood authors (eg”Caroline Keene”) wasn’t an actual author. The name was owned by a publishing company and different writers were hired to churn out Nancy Drew and Dana Girls mysteries. From what I can make out this Torgersen guy thinks science fiction literature should follow this sort of business model… and then something something leading to awards.
Wtf?
Hee hee.
@Anne Fenwick, #13:
Oh great gods of cultural appropriation, will no one rid me of this meddlesome trope?
What. These. Guys. Want. Has. Nothing. To. Do. With. PUNK.
I think that this is very helpful. It makes me realize that, in order to write something other than a shallow wad of bumfodder, an author has to think about the culture he’s writing about, and how it’s relevant to the social relationships taking place in that context. So I guess what I am interested in is the story arc, which ultimately is about the protagonist(s) encountering a challenge and dealing with it — and those challenges are cultural. Even a book like The Martian(*) which is kind of Robinson Crusoe in space, has an underlying drumbeat of how the protagonist remains sane, and the importance of interacting with the space-people attempting a rescue, etc. The books I like are explorations of culture. What else could a sci-fi book be, a technical manual? Even a shoot-em-up requires plausible culture, otherwise the protagonists’ actions are going to appear unmotivated and random.
A book without culture would be mighty dry indeed. And if you’re writing about culture you’ve got issues of … social justice. Why are we in a shoot-em-up? Why are the baddies bad? (**) Why are the protagonists doing what they do?
It might be interesting to see one of the sad puppies produce a book that had absolutely nothing to do with an underlying culture and cultural issues. No, wait, it wouldn’t. It might be funny. Uninentionally or otherwise.
(* I highly recommend it; great fun)
(** Other than that they have skulls on their hats. SKULLS!)
That’s stupid by my lights, but it doesn’t bother me. No accounting for taste; he can have his one-dimensional action/adventure stories dressed up in SciFi drag, and I can have my Wolfe and Banks (et al). Not like there isn’t a market for both.
What bothers me is them acting like fucking children who break the toy rather than let anyone else have it. Yeah, “No Award” is going to have a field day, but it’s a shame. There’s deserving work out there, and precious few opportunities for its creators to get the kind of boost to their careers and readerships that a Hugo brings.
@Dr Ken:
Nostoutopalgia
My irony meter just burned out and I’m only 1/4 of the way through the quoted nonsense. All this situation needs now is Jayne from Firefly to tell the masses, of the authors from the vetted and approved list, for which to vote.
I’ve heard it said that the Golden Age of Science-Fiction is 13. Not 1913, or 2013, but 13 years old: aka what you read as a teenager. And, to be honest, when I was a teenager, I wasn’t the most nuanced of reader because:
1. EVERYTHING was new! It didn’t matter if it was the oldest trope in the book and the author wasn’t doing anything new, if that was the book I read first.
2. I was probably not the most nuanced of reader. Which meant unless the writer was obvious, I would miss any subtlety.
3. Things outside my middle-class white suburban experience didn’t latch on as well. I remember spending half a novel wondering if I’d mis-gendered one of two characters because it didn’t occur to me that you could have a lesbian romance just by writing a romance between two women and everyone is fine. (Well, or not fine, but objecting for other reasons.)
So, I wonder if what Torgerson is seeking is the reading experience he had when he was 13. Which is impossible: even if you read the same era of books, you still come at it with an adult’s mindset.
Anyone who expects SF cover art and cover blurbs to have more than a distant passing resemblance to the actual content should have their head candled.
First off, how do you make quotes appear in Comic Sans?
Second, I’m does anyone else here really love Naomi Novik’s Temeraire novels? Oppressive colonizers of Dragon Land, indeed.
CD, R R F FT o D & H H @35
OK, then how about Apple-Pie Knup?…because these reactionary asshats are clearly the backwards of “Punk”…
No? Nevermind…
What the fuck do you want, Torgesen? A warning label?
ATTENTION: THE WORK CONTAINS MATERIAL THAT MIGHT CHALLENGE YOUR EXISTING NOTIONS OF RACE, GENDER, SEXUALITY, POLITICS, ECONOMICS, PHILOSOPHY, AND RELIGION. CONSERVATIVES AND LIBERTARIANS MIGHT EXPERIENCE HISSY FITS WHEN CONSUMING THIS MATERIAL. PLEASE CONSULT YOUR MEGACHURCH PASTOR, RIGHT-WING TALK SHOW HOST, OR GUN SHOP PROPRIETOR BEFORE READING!
Brad R. Torgersen? Any relation to Buck Turgidson?,
Steampunk, figure 1: Gentlemen Adventurers of Her Majesty’s Royal Airships. Not pictured: cholera.
I think you guys are being way too tough on Torgerson. He actually has an excellent point.
The other day I picked up an sf book with a cool-looking contraption on the cover. It said it was about time travel, and I thought it would star some strong-jawed American hero who goes back into the future or the past and proves our cultural superiority over every other possible culture that has ever existed or could exist. But instead, the story turned out to be total SJW crapola – this obvious, transparent metaphor based on modern leftie politics, where income disparity splits humanity into effete one percenters and the cannibalistic subhuman 99%. What a disappointment!
I don’t know who this Wells guy is, but if he represents the direction that science fiction is heading towards, then the sooner we nip it in the bud, the better.
Oh, I really don’t think Brad has that problem!
Is this guy really an author? Because, unless he’s getting his kid brother to do the cover art for his books, he’s showing a certain lack of awareness of how cover art gets done. It’s kinda “what you see is what you got.”
Science fiction and fantasy is never used for political commentary?
George fucking Orwell! Here endeth the lesson.
brucegee1962@47,
Yes, I’ve had similar disappoointments with the same author! There was this one about an alien invasion – Martians in giant roboticised exoskeletons no less. So naturally, you expect the heroic defenders of Earth to battle against tremendous odds, finally winning through a combination of brains, wizzo new technology, and sheer balls. But the aliens are just killed by microbes!!! Not even cunningly designed bioweapons, just ordinary bacteria! What a swizz! Then there was another one that just seemed to be a piece of so-called “animal rights” propaganda!!
Maybe we should just glue his books shut and he could just buy them for the cover art and imagine the contents. With one hand.
Everyone knows you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.
Thank you, I’ll be here all week.
So, (uhmm), he’s saying everything being sold in the SF genre is something other than SF, so the Sad Puppies will take revenge, by putting their homebrew-crap-SF on the nominations for Hugos?
That what’s marketed as SF, is NOT; so any piece of SF drivel they scribble is more worthy of a Hugo?
I guess he totally dismisses the idiom, “Never judge a book by its cover”, as bunkum.
Um, yeah. What you guys said, especially Blake Stacey @10.
Anyone who’s bothered to look at cover art vs the content of the story knows that it’s the exception, rather than the rule, when the cover art closely reflects the story. For example, one of the few redeeming features of the first paperback edition of the Thomas Covenant novels (vols 1-3) is that the cover art actually does accurately depict events in the book. I can’t recall too many other examples, come to think of it.
My favourite story about accuracy of cover art in SF&F:
Tanya Huff (best known for Blood Ties, both books and TV show) wrote a book called ‘Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light’, which was set in Toronto while magic was starting to leak in (much of it right around the University of Toronto). One of the scenes in the book, and the scene the publisher suggested for the cover, involved a police car accidentally running down a unicorn that had darted across the street.
Knowing that a lot of her fans were local, and how bad a lot of covers were for accuracy, Tanya Huff took a whole bunch of pictures of Metro Toronto police cars and sent them to the publisher to send to the artist so that the car would look right.
When she saw the final cover (too late to do anything), the car was spot on — but the unicorn was wrong. The unicorn in the story was the size of a large goat; the unicorn on the cover art was a gigantic rearing stallion that would have probably broken the front fender of the police car on impact rather than being nearly run over…
And wasn’t the contemporary tradition of science fiction started by a woman, Mary Shelly? Sure, there were earlier works like Kepler’s Somnium and the Iliad had robots, but it the tradition started with Frankenstein.
Since about, say, the 1960s, Science fiction has been the go to place to explore possessive issues. Hell even before that. Frankenstein, while looking like gothic horror, is science fiction at it’s core, ‘what are the implications if you found a way to raise the dead or make a wholly new person from spare parts. War of the Worlds was about the U.Ks Gunboat diplomacy. Star Wars changed all that neither for the better nor for the worse. George Lucas did nothing original story wise, but what he did do is show case the classical archetypes and epic story telling of classic myth to an audience that doesn’t read. In doing so he exposed people to Tolkien, King Aurthur, Frank Herbert, Joesph Campbell and Akira Kurosawa without them realizing it. The problem was that in doing so he deduced the genera to visual eye candy that all bang and no substance.
Conservative take on Science fiction is hit or miss. Despite Orson Scott Cards stance on gays, “Ender’s Game” is one of thee best books to look to about leadership, “Footfall” despite being a total GOP fluff with capitalist Americans fighting off communist alien elephants, is still a great yarn, if only for it’s sheer ridiculousness in some of it’s themes.
Libertarian science fiction is mind boggling and jumps all over. John Ringo’s “Live Free or Die” is not that bad of story, but it’s central character is so annoying and Rand/Ron Paulian that i had to put the book down after reading only a third of it.
On a side note i would love to read about how Dragons are the good guys and humans are the bad guys, I heard that Jacqueline Carey did something similar with Orcs and Gobblins.
Yes, and they’ve never forgiven her
I really enjoyed reading stuff like Farmer in the Sky, etc. when I was a teenager.
But the thing is, there’s a reason they call the Heinlein Juveniles the Heinlein Juveniles.
Coming soon to your book store: Science Fiction #2842443542 (Standard Issue):
Plot summary: Man has reached the distant star Mol and begun colonising the fourth planet, Sars. It’s not very nice there. Spaceships are involved.
Blimey! If I want to know what to expect I don’t pick my books by the cover art, which does tend to be a bit ‘standard issue’, I pick an author. For instance, Arthur C. Clarke is largely responsible for me actually reading novels (that and a fortunate mishap that resulted in me ordering the unabridged 2001 Odyssey rather than the hackneyed student version my classmates got). Reading the rest of his works I knew broadly what to expect and that I would find something I like in those books. But every story was new, interesting and had value to me.
Opening a book from a familiar author you tend to know what to expect in terms of the style. Not just the writing itself but also what kinds of stories the author likes to tell (with plenty of surprises) and how they tell them.
If you have never read a book by an author read the flipping back. Read some reviews if you might regret paying a few quid for a book you didn’t like after all or if you hate leaving books unfinished. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover. Literally. This might qualify as ironic but saying it to an actual author somehow seems over the top.
Does he also pick up candy boxes at the store and ends up disappointed that they do not in fact contain the happy children depicted on the box? Although they would have been delicious, I’m sure.
If there is any need for reform around the Science Fiction genre, it’s not the cover art but a phyiscal separation from the fantasy section. It seems the science fiction and fantasy sections are always getting smaller (thanks, self-help and military history books), so the two have now merged together (and half of that tiny space always appears to be filled with book-to-the-movie tripe.) Each section in a bookstore should at least be big enough to accommodate it’s own label. And the only self-help book available should be on how to google your problems effectively, followed by a list of problems not to be googled along with the appropriate professional to ask.
Others have touched on this, but in addition to all the other ridiculousness, “SJWs” have been complaining about misleading, often offensive cover art for years now. The reason I first heard of Jim C. Hines was because of his lampooning the trend of every urban fantasy novel cover featuring a sexy female contortionist in some combination of leather + tank top + midriff shirt + tattoos.
If this dipshit really wants to be able to judge books by their covers, he should be supporting the “SJW” cause. But then, isn’t that always the case with MRAs and their ilk?
Have not had time to read all the comments, but I have to say, Sad Puppies turns out to be “get offa my lawn, you pesky whippersnappers” write large?
Didn’t see that one coming.
Does Harlequin Books have a sci-fi imprint?
For years the story has been that those books are literally computer-written, or at least computer-outlined with writers fleshing them out a little.
That should satisfy the “Pointy 1950s Spaceship Cover Book” addicts.
Did someone tell this ignorant little fucker that sci-fi/speculative fiction and social commentary have been inextricable since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein (and did he even know a fee-male practically invented the genre)?
Authors discussing and dissecting the nature of humans and their societies via the lens of imagined future politics & technology or through the eyes of extra-terrestrials IS science fiction. Even the 2000 AD comic books I devoured in the ’80s and ’90s (before I discovered Asimov, who led me to literally everyone else) interrogated contemporary society in their own adolescent-focused way, in between all the robot fights, wise-cracking bio-chipped sentient weapons and righteous Judges.
I think this small-minded idiot needs to sit down with his Tang and Rice Krispie treats, watch some Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon serials and leave the actual SF to the fucking grownups.
microraptor @21:
That’s what kills me about his tirade. He acts like the type of sci-fi he likes won’t be around anymore.
It reminds me of the whiny comic book fans who complain about diversity. They act like pushing for more characters (and creative teams) of diverse backgrounds is somehow going to take over comics and that their beloved characters will disappear. Yeah, I really see Batman, Superman, or Spider-Man going away because (for instance) a gay character gets their own book.
The thing I don’t get is if they are gaming the hugos in order to get hugos for mediocre books, doesn’t that kind of make getting a hugo pointless? The whole thing seems self-refuting. In addition to stupid.
I think what Torgersen is lamenting about is that there is too much character driven science fiction and not enough hard science fiction. Hard Science fiction being define as something to the effect of the whole narrative is driven by the science, many of Arthur C. Clark books where driven by just purely the science like “2001” while he did more character focus stories like “At Childhood Ends”
That being said, I like character driven Scifi more.
I dislike pure SF, precisely because of the emphasis on pointless action and technological speculation, and de-emphasis on meaningful themes. There are lots of cool SF books, but not enough for me to have any high regard for the Hugos.
I would actually appreciate if sad puppies labeled their particular variety of SF so I could easily avoid it.
@Ranzoid #58
Wait wut?
Also on young children being naked all the goddamn time.
Sigh, I posted this in the wrong comment section a moment ago. Now I am embarrassed.
I read this to my girlfriend, her first reaction was that this must satire, making fun of these sad puppies, because no one could be this foolish. I wish that was true. This seems to be another person that watched Star Trek and thought it was about cool doors that opened automatically. It is simply amazing that anyone into science fiction could think that these complex themes beyond adventure and rousing battles, are new to the genre. It requires a person to be ignorant of a large body of classic science fiction, or to be illiterate in some sense, unable to read for comprehension.
Inaccuracy in book covers has a long and, well, storied history. As documented in the lyrics to “There’s a Bimbo on the Cover of my Book.”
http://lama8991.wix.com/unfinishedwebsite/page-11
#sadpuppy logic:
Beast master – only cowboys & spaceships
Star Rangers- only about ‘Star rangers’
Dorsai- only about mercenaries.
LOTR- only about adventures of wandering Hobbits
Babel 17- Just space opera
Had to add a few more.
Someone should introduce Torgersen to the 1954 Japanese film Gojira (known by USAmericans as ‘Godzilla’). He’d love that simple movie about a giant fire-breathing radioactive monster destroying Tokyo.
No social commentary there.
Nope. Nothing about the potential downsides to mankind attempting to harness forces they have insufficient control over.
****
John Harshman @42:
It doesn’t appear in the HTML list below the commenting box, but the ‘q’ tag is for comic sans:
<q>First off, how do you make quotes appear in Comic Sans?</q>
gives you:
Here’s that bastion of ‘traditional’ SF, Robert A Heinlein, from his first ever story (Life-Line) in 1939. A judge is speaking to a corporate lawyer:
Yeah, totally non-political, that.
Yes, it’s about leadership, (it was partly inspired by his brother experience at OCS), other wise why would that book be on a the Marine Corps reading list.
Ever been to a boarding school Tom, or did sports in Middle/Highschool? Although i do concede that the idea children being naked a great deal of time is questionable if not full blown creepy, have you consider the context of why those kids where in the buff?
Not a perfect match, but let’s take a quick look at Hammer’s Slammers (1979), by David Drake, one of the biggest names in military SF. The cover shows a giant hovertank shooting laserbeams. Inside, sure enough, you get giant nuclear powered hovertanks, tough-as-nails space mercenaries, and laserbeam-shooting action on practically every single page. What the stories are actually about, though, is the horror and futility of war, and the corrosive psychological effects it has on pretty much everyone involved.
@ Crip Dyke #35
17th C English -> punk means female prostitute (I had not known this).
1900s, esp. American-> Tinder, a worthless person esp. a trainee criminal, a passive homosexual, especially in prison (I had not known this either)
1970s -> reclaiming of the worthless person meaning by Punk Rock.
1983 -> Cyberpunk literary genre, originally named for characters who were ‘young, technologically facile, ethically vacuous, computer-assisted vandal or criminal’, so presumably the worthless person meaning again.
later 1980s -> steampunk, as a deliberate variation on cyberpunk.
1990’s -> biopunk, subgenre of cyberpunk.
I’m not sure which of these meanings you wanted to own, but it seems to me the horse shot through the stable for a moment and has long since bolted out the back door.
Jafafa Hots @ 64
The formulaic category romances I referenced upthread don’t require a computer. There are a set of tropes and archetypes which the authors, editors, and readers will be familiar with. Authors may write on spec based on a list of tropes the editor gives them. Romance tropes basically outline the entire plot for you. If they’re writing an Ugly Duckling with a Big Brother’s Best Friend and Opposites Attract romance, that outlines the entire plot.
But that’s only one type of romance, which is specifically designed to give you Nutty Nuggets every time. There’s as much variation within the genre as in any other. There are, unfortunately, a lot of misogynistic assumptions about how silly books primarily written by and for women are.
There’re plenty of Nutty Nuggets for other genres, too, if Torgersen wanted to go find them.
so to sum up, his problem is that he’s going to have to actually read the summary blurby thingy all books come with before deciding if it’s worth reading…?
merh; probably it’s actually that he only knows how to write 3 kinds of stories and is pissy cuz other people have more imagination.
Also, no way in hell has this dude ever read anything by Lem. Solaris and Eden would confuse the living fuck outta him.
And is probably half way to town by now if not out one or three towns over.
Later on in the comments Torgersen says this:
Again, he seems to think social issues in SF/F are a relatively new thing. Did he not read much as a kid?
****
Giliell @8:
From comments over there:
John Harshman@ 42
I love the Temeraire novels. Lucked up on a 3-in-1 hardcover of the first three in a bargain bin at the grocery store a couple years ago. I think I paid a dollar for it (and because of the way this store tags clearance items, I think the taxpayers bought it for me, at that, so thanks, taxpayers…yes, I’m that person sometimes buying books with food stamps). Best bargain EVER!
Jafafa Hots @64, Harlequin used to have a paranormal imprint that sometimes offered sci-fi/futuristic novels.
I admit I’d have that meltdown over the cereal. And to being a person who frequently likes things to be very…reliable… in being the same (sameliness? : ) ) But I also read from all over every genre, and reading material fortified with social justice doesn’t scare me. I have always loved fantasy and sci-fi, but cop to military sci-fi totally not being my thing at all. Until the day I picked up a copy of David Feintuch’s Midshipman’s Hope, felt that odd, tingly sort of ‘we’re going to be very good friends, you and I’ feeling I get sometimes with books, the whole time hearing in the back of my brain, Whyyy? You don’t like this stuff. Got it anyway, ended up hooked. Almost any book in that series, I can finish it, turn back to page one, and start it again immediately. (Which also helps keep me in reading material these days when there are no bargain bin books available; it’s not a bad skill to have.)
Not even the father of modern fantasy, Lord of the Rings, is really a stereotypical fantasy story. Violence is only postponing the inevitable if they do not destroy the ring, which can only be done by the humble.
Props for mentioning Dhalgren, which up to now I didn’t know of anyone else who’d read it. I also recommend ‘Stars in my pocket like grains of sand’ by the same author.
http://www.amazon.com/Stars-Pocket-Like-Grains-Sand/dp/0819567140/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1428623025&sr=1-1&keywords=stars+in+my+pocket+like+grains+of+sand
I can’t say that I have, but I have read a lot of books involving boarding schools and sports. I’ve only read one book that has such a fixation on children stripping down and waggling cartoon dicks.
That’s not fair. I’ve only read eight chapters of one book like that. I know a lot of people are real fond of Ender’s Game, but I just couldn’t get past the smug, perfect protagonist and his parade of sidekick stereotypes.
More from Torgersen:
@Ranzoid #77
For the same reason Starship Troopers is on military reading lists? It’s about self-justifying authoritarian warmongers?
I mean, yes it’s a book about leadership. Not really a “good” book about leadership unless you want a case study in why our military leadership is so fucked up.
Ender’s Game is masturbatory fantasy for kids who think they’re a lot smarter than they are and want everyone to know.
Oh, and it opens with an apologia for cold-blooded murder. Good stuff.
Sorry if this was posted
GRRM had something to say about the Puppies
http://grrm.livejournal.com/418285.html
Tony! The Queer Shoop: The faint humming you hear is Gene Roddenberry spinning in his grave.
I think there’s a genre where the covers always match the inside. I know it as “Harlequin Romance.”
(Yes, aware there’s a depth of romance stories as well.)
@ Tony:
no, he acts as if he now will have to put the effort of finding out what a book is about before buying it; as per analogy, he believes (falsely) that once upon a time, he could just grab a SF/F book glance at the cover, and this would get him exacty what he wanted. Now he’ll have to put in the effort of reading the blurb. Isn’t that just tragic? [/sarc]
Oh this is just rich. Here’s a guy who thinks that ‘white cis-dude’ is a racial slur:
but… Star Trek WAS a lecture on Women’s Studies! And other social issues!
Jesus fucking christ; at least now I finally know how Abrams could fuck up Star Trek, and none of these bro-fans noticed.
yeah; increased boredom is always best-cured by never-ending repetition -_-
no. go sit in the corner with Abrams and that other dude who thought Star Trek was about sliding doors in the “stay the fuck away from my Star Trek” corner.
I don’t understand Brad’s difficulty. He doesn’t have to decode the iconography of spaceships and loincloths or whatever. Just look for the “Baen Books” logo at the bottom!
Or if that is too hard, just look for, say, Larry Corriea’s name on the cover.
nomuse
Baen also publishes authors like Lois McMaster Bujold and Eric Flint.
Anne Fenwick
Oh, don’t play fucking stupid. Crip gave a quote and Cyberpunk got it’s name and made it’s name from punks. (If you knew a damn thing about the topic or bothered, you’d easily find out which one, if you’re not smart enough to figure it out yourself.) Steampunk on the other hand wasn’t. The name was a fucking joke about cyberpunk (not a deliberate variation that explores the same sociological and political issues in a different setting, the stories were already written decidedly un-punk-like) that people ran with and now -punk is the way to mark a subgenre. There’s far more than just the two, those are simply the most famous ones at the moment. After all, where else did you get the idea to put “punk” at the end of your made up genre? Granted you fucked up the nomenclature making it more than one word, but given how much of an ignorant ass you come off ass, that’s hardly surprising.
It went from a relevant outgrowth of punk culture to worthless. So yeah, I understand a punk being pissed about their movement, their lifestyle, being used for fads and particularly steampunk, which amounts to a bunch of rich white kids tooling about thinking they’re so edgy and progressive.
The problem with fandom was that it just wasn’t nutty enough. Sock Puppies to the Rescue!
Well, you’ve just invented my own personal hell. Thanks a hell of a lot, PZ.
Anyway. You guys have NO IDEA HOW PISSED OFF I AM ABOUT THIS. It’s like, it’s like… everything I like, all of my fandoms, all of my hobbies are routinely being shit on by a bunch of whiny piss baby men that don’t want to see people like me involved.
I can’t say I’m surprised that this comes on the heels of Gamergate (and there’s a certain amount of overlap), BUT OH MY GOD WHY CAN’T I JUST HAVE NICE THINGS
Oh man, quote from the original article:
But for Pete’s sake, why did we think it was a good idea to put these things so much on permanent display, that the stuff which originally made the field attractive in the first place — To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before! — is pushed to the side? Or even absent altogether?
Someone point a radio telescope at Mr. Torgersen, with that kind of density we may be granted an opportunity to study the formation of a Neutron Star.
also, for those who were thinking his hypothetical “bad” examples sounded fun If we’re going to do a Tolkien-type fantasy, this time we’ll make the Orcs the heroes, and Gondor will be the bad guys. exists. It’s called The Last Ringbearer, originally in Russian published in 1999, available legally in translation here
I wasn’t a science fiction fan but took a seminar in SF, which meant speculative fiction, when I was in the PhD literature program at University of Michigan because it fit into my schedule. I had a wonderful professor and was surrounded by knowledgeable fellow students, and it really opened up my eyes. But we didn’t read space operas. I really got engaged with the works we read. Later, when I taught Intro to the Novel at a community college, I always included The Left Hand of Darkness (which, obviously, is where I got my screen name). What in the world is this clueless dude going on about??
#77 Ranzoid:
I know about context. It’s what an author uses in order to show, say, scenes of naked boys running around. Well, they have to be naked! They’re taking yet another shower!
Gershon Legman talks about this in Rationale of the Dirty Joke, where the joke-teller painstakingly sets up a situation so we’ll think somebody’s getting, say, a good tongue-lashing, and then reveals it’s something else. Legman alleges, and somewhat convincingly, that the whole purpose of the joke was to set that up that way, even if the punch line is something different.
See also: youthful fantasies about being kidnapped by thugs who tie you up to Mary Ellen out of Algebra class, and you’re both nekkid, and you say, “G-gulp! I don’t want this to happen, Mary Ellen!” and she says, “I know, Binky! Let’s both pray for God’s guidance!” Gosh, that’d be awful! Darn those thugs! (A tip of the thorny crown to Justin Green. His story.)
html fail. sigh.
As a side note, since it was mentioned a couple of times – the closest thing you can have in SF to a Harlequin novel is probably German SF series Perry Rhodan which has surpassed 2700 books (well, when I say books, small pulp paperbacks each around 100 pages) and over one billion prints in total. They’re not bad either although my reading is limited to first hundred books or so.
#64 Jaffa Hots:
The notion that romance books are computer written may go back to an Avengers episode (from when Tara King was in Mrs. Peel’s spot). The investigation takes Steed to a romance publisher who does just that, and their computer looks like a white grand piano with keys labeled to indicate romance tropes. It’s one of my favorite Avengers, despite not having Diana Rigg, largely on the strength of a hilarious finale, which I will now ruin for you. The
You know, I read a “traditional” fantasy not too long ago. It was called The Dwarves. It was about a dwarf who had an epic adventure. It had… wait for it… a Tolkien-eske dwarf ON THE FRONT COVER
I think Brad just doesn’t want to bother to look at bookstore shelves– he wants to go to the sf/f section, stick out his hand and only be able to grab pulp adventure stories.
Hm. Cut off. Anyway, I forgot to mention that in the early 70s, my sister happened upon a Harlequin [or similar] Romance in which every “ee” pair was printed as “eee.” Having seen that Avengers ep, we did speculate a bit.
which up to now I didn’t know of anyone else who’d read it
Are you kidding?! It’s a masterpiece. Everything Delany wrote was good. I was in my disaffected youth stage and made myself an orchid out of solingen steel and managed to not get in too much trouble wearing it. The holo-avatars were the coolest idea, evah.
Baen also publishes the Liaden series by Lee and Miller, which the sad puppies would definitely not like.
Most publishers have a mix, and that is how it should be
Harlequin’s “men’s adventure” imprint is Gold Eagle, which is going to be shut down at the end of this year. They’ve published series with sci fi elements, the longest running ones being the post apocalypse series Deathlands and Outlanders. The backbone of the line, Don Pendleton’s Mack Bolan the Executioner and its spinoffs, occasionally incorporate sci fi elements, a la the James Bond movies, in their plotlines. And in recent years they tried to cash in on the urban fantasy genre with Rogue Angel, which revolves around archaeologist and sometimes TV show Anja Creed, who comes into possession of Joan of Arc’s mystical sword.
Seems to me that most publishers are already working fairly hard to produce “more-of-the-same”. As soon as a book sells well, they ask the writer to turn it into an open-ended series, and then they ask other writers to produce works in a similar vein that they can market with similar cover art and the phrase “If you liked that, then you’ll like this too”. Meanwhile, the competing publishers are all asking their stable to produce more of the same for them to sell under their own label. And suddenly, bookstores have a new sub-genre with its own section.
I get the impression that it is much harder to convince a publisher to publish something that isn’t in lockstep with the genre.
What is this book? Has someone written this book? I want this book. This book needs to exist. Shut up and take my money!
I have never read those books and know nothing about them, but for some reason the title seemed familiar. Then it clicked, there was an episode of Corner Gas involving a book club and Don Pendleton’s Mack Bolan Executioner #147: Payback Game is referenced multiple times.
“The way you used your knowledge of local geography to defeat the enemy was reminiscent of Mack Bolan Executioner #147.”
“Well, if there’s one thing Mack Bolan, executioner, has taught us, You can never leave the game.”
“Hey, if you enjoyed our episode about reading, why not check out some of the books we mentioned on our show: The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel; The Saint in New York, by Leslie Charteris; Don Pendleton’s Mack Bolan Executioner #147: Payback Game, by Jerry VanCook; and if you enjoyed our wildlife segment, check out Dingoes In Their Habitat, by Jay Robertson … which isn’t even a real book, actually. It’s just something our props guy, Jay Robertson, made for us. Actually not a bad read. So visit your local library and get into the magic of reading.”
I might have to go watch that again. I am not into pulpy adventure and sci-fi but Brent Leroy’s love of this stuff is sort of endearing.
And for that matter, can we stop calling things that have nothing to do with evil stars “Disasters?”
So if that hypothetical novel was about a gay or transgender power-armored space marine who faces discrimination in a hyper-macho military culture, would that cover be deceptive?
Iiiiiiiiit’s Classic Sci-Fi-O’s! All of your favorites from The Good Ol’ Days! Open a box and just taste the traditional and conservative minded futurism! UFOs! Pew Pew Lasers! Little Green Men! Robots! Sexy Green Alien Ladies! The Time Traveling Water Closet! Pneumatic Tubes of Some Sort! Soylent Green! And MIghty Whitey Iiiiiiiin Spaaaaaaaaace! Don’t think too hard about any of these or look into any implications or moral issues related them! That isn’t very traditional of you to do! That’s not what consumerism is about! Just Consume! Like the Good Ol’ Days! Good Ol’ Prolefeed! We have all of the classics that the liberal elitists at the FDA want to take away from you! Get your box now, while supplies last! And remember, folks, it is either goodthink or off to joycamp!
A sufficiently complex message is indistinguishable from POW POW BAM BAM WHIRR ZIP ZAP POW.
Buy yours today! Buy now! Buy tomorrow! Buy every day, the same thing, for the rest of your life, and it will never change, and it will never differ, and this is not only perfectly, but is the ideal! BUY!!
Honestly, this guy’s proposal is bordering on the premise for a dystopian sci-fi novel already.
@121, anteprepro
If the book is called “The Sad Puppy” and the cover picture depicts a giant television screen with this guys face on it, would that be misleading?
Even Harry Potter has a political message.
brianpansky: The cover wouldn’t be misleading, but the title is!
Rutee Katreya:
No, because you see, metaphor and allusions and allegories don’t exist. The Death Eaters aren’t Wizard Nazis because that requires connecting to facts outside of the books themselves, which is just simply unheard of, and frankly is unthinkable and something only hideous social justice warriors would ever think to do. They just see political messages everywhere and turn everything to a little crusade. Grow up, libruls. Every time, a cigar is just a cigar. Always.
This guy would make the greatest English teacher. Or English teacher. Whenever they would start to talk about symbolism, his eyes would grow wide, he would take a terror shit right on the carpet, and then shriek out in confusion and indignant fury for a full thirty minutes.
Second English teacher should be English student. Which is why I am not the former and haven’t been the latter in years!
112 Marcus Ranum: That sounds really cool. I dressed as a Scorpion for Halloween once, but nobody got it.
Mind you, on several Halloweens I’ve put on torn old clothes with ‘Mary Celeste’ on a sailors hat, carried a hand made basket with a coconut, a couple bananas, and a bottle with a note in it, and most people didn’t get it.
And here is Larry Correia response to George Martin:
http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/04/09/a-response-to-george-r-r-martin-from-the-author-who-started-sad-puppies/
It will all end in tears.
Rutee Katreya wrote:
It’s pretty much impossible to avoid making a political message. Even producing an apolitical work is a political statement by being an overt rejection of whatever the current politics are. Of course, those complaining about political messages are really complaining that messages that they disagree with are allowed and sometimes are even honoured. It’s basically true political correctness that they’re after (not the bullshit version RWAs complain about when they suffer social consequences after being cruel to someone).
I can’t guess if this is the book he’s referring to, but Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War comes close.
It’s a long time since I’ve read it, but I remember it being brilliant. (Online sources seem to agree.)
Spoilers below!
It features an interstellar war spanning thousands of years, aliens, space ships and powered armor. Perfect!
Only it’s really an anti-war novel, and serves as an allegory for the Vietnam war. Due to time dilation effects over the course of the war, the hero find himself more an more alienated from society and his fellow soldiers. Eventually he finds society has become exclusively homosexual (leaving the heterosexual hero a ‘queer’), and don’t even speak the same language any more.
Oh, and it won a Hugo. In 1976.
Didn’t Freud say that so his own cigar smoking habit didn’t bite him in the ass?
He may not have even said it…
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/12/just-a-cigar/
So much for the Xenogenesis trilogy by Octavia Butler. Before the first book begins, human have already wrecked the Earth and the aliens who rescued some of the humans did so because they are fascinated cancer.
It’s crammed full of them, and Rowling has even revealed some that weren’t obvious. Remus Lupin’s struggle with the alienation and shame associated with his lycanthropy are an allegory for the alienation of AIDS sufferers. McGonagall is a feminist (Rowling’s own words). And Umbridge is an authoritarian bigot who hides beneath civility, and how dare you question the Ministry….
..wait. There’s no one like Umbridge in real life. Nope.
If it contains more than a single sentient character with more than a single agenda, and the multiple agendas sprinkled among the multiple characters conflict or compete in any way shape or form, then it has a political agenda.
Because that is what, at its core, politics is.
antiprotons @ 120
Ah, but Soylent Green was nothing but an early SJW attempt to foist anti-FREEEEEEEDOOOOOOM propaganda about so-called environmental issues onto the science fiction fandom! It doesn’t count as Good Old Sci-Fi.
Did not know Lupin was a metaphor for AIDS. That makes some sense. And yes, the political really is that simple, but even on the level of overt, polemical text, Harry Potter am go too far for Torgerson
Star Trek is older than this man and he dares comment on how ‘back in the day, sci fi was without commentary.. Obviously Shelley and Verne also predate him, but still.
@Anne Fenwick, #79 and Azkyroth, #118:
I gave you a link, Anne Fenwick. If you can’t click on links, I can’t help you.
Moreover, I specifically referenced cultural appropriation – which is different than mere linguistic drift, Azkyroth – and which of those, Anne Fenwick, is a culture?
Evenmoreover, the trope you’re using to name a genre/subgenre SomethingPunk is directly in reference to cyberpunk which was directly in reference to the punk social movement. Cyberpunk took the name of punk and used it to market itself, though it did have decidedly punk elements in many of the early cyberpunk stories. Steampunk took the name of punk to market itself, though it took it 2nd hand, grabbing it out of the arms of cyberpunk. Did steampunk make any punk themes central to the genre?
Not a fucking one. There may, indeed, be individual stories in steampunk that incorporate punk themes, but the genre merely uses punk to market itself, to make money.
I believe that each of you are smart enough to know something about cultural appropriation and about cyberpunk’s importation of punk esthetics and ideas into sci/fi and about steampunk’s theft of punk without reference to any of the ideas or esthetics that are important to punk.
You both are playing word games. I believe that the central message you each are trying to convey is,
No. I don’t own the word. I’m not trying to say that I own the word. And yes, you can use the word however you like. I can make money selling short stories that use “voodoo” and “voodoo dolls” as plot points. That doesn’t mean I should.
Anne Fenwick in particular, you are being disingenuous and engaging in contemptuous accountability avoidance. The fact that you could look up new-to-you obsolete definitions of punk but couldn’t be bothered to click the fucking link (or, y’know, read the quote from the link that was actually in my comment that made it clear which “punk” I was referencing) shows that you knew or should have known the answer to your own question, and only asked it to clearly demonstrate that you don’t give a shit about cultural appropriation.
That may be so, but you aren’t going to win any points with me by demonstrating your contempt for a concept that has been incredibly useful in anti-oppression work and has key anti-classist implications here.
You may also not give a shit about me, but that matters a whole lot less to me than your willingness to write off the seriousness of cultural appropriation just to have an opportunity to look down at someone for a comment. The splash damage you’re willing to tolerate for a moment’s superiority is duly noted.
Dhalgren also had gaysex. OMG.
I can confirm that Haldeman’s “Forever War” has non-CIS powered armor, although I think at that stage they were using unexpected weapons of an entirely different sort. I won’t spoiler it.
Forever War is really good stuff. I highly recommend it. If you like powered armor, John Steakley’s “Armor” is also a really interesting (though spotty) take on the proposition of what happens when your irresistable powered armor meets an immovable enemy. And Haldeman’s “All my sins remembered” is also really good.
David Drake’s first book of Hammer’s Slammers stores is based on his experience in Vietnam in an M-119 APC. Anyone who might confuse it with a pro-war story has completely missed the point. Haldeman was a combat engineer in Vietnam, and The Forever War’s representation of the endless futility of war is based on his experiences there. He’s certainly more overtly anti-war than Drake.
Delaney caused a long-running war between me and my father, over the question whether grammar was important in a book. Dhalgren takes liberties – big ones – but I think it communicates very effectively. My dad argued that the essence of effective communication is correct use of language. I argued that understanding it was the crucial litmus test. He’s an academic, so it was a ferocious debate lasting years because nothing was at stake.
PS – Delaney’s “Babel-17” is also awesome. It touches on synesthesia in some cool ways, and is a weird Chomsky-esque story about a weaponized language, which can cause your politics to shift as a consequence of learning to use it (it requires new modes of thought)
Huxley’s “Brave New World”, however – that’s just plain old space opera. Nothing political in there at all.
…
Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.
…
I wonder what they make of Gulliver’s Travels?
Oops, sorry anteprepro, autocorrect conspired against me.
Torgerson is the annoying twit who couldn’t get the cool kids to put up with his crap, so he decided he’d have more friends if he sucked up to the bullies.
His nonlogic on the Hugos is pretty typical for him – this is a dude who is a huge fan of Star Trek, a show whose entire purpose was to promote social justice issues, and yet whines about how SFF used to be gosh-gee-whiz about 20 years ago or whatever, apparently having missed the entire history of SF as issue fiction, ranging from New Wave on down. I fear someday he’ll accidentally read a James Tiptree Jr. ‘classic’ and have an aneurysm.
He used to hang out on Scalzi’s blog, failing to stick the flounce and doing his imitation of a bad Neil Simon protagonist on the regular. Then Romney lost the election and he had some kind of meltdown, I guess.
Make the sword-swinger brown, and suddenly it’s already too political for the Sad Puppies.
139 Marcus Ranum: I also enjoyed Nova. I liked the plugging into the spaceship idea, novel at the time, and the overloaded, blasted out senses.
I was in Jr High when I read Dhalgren, and I didn’t understand quite a bit of it.
SPOILER ALERT!
Then I read a review that pointed out the main character had schizophrenia and it made more sense. It would also explain any grammar issues.
Or better yet, make it a woman in sensible gear.
My two cents for what it’s worth. I always thought “steampunk” was called that because “whimsical Victorian romance/fantasy” sounds not exactly dead edgy.
But yeah, nothing remotely to do with punk!
Nutty Nuggets? Jeez, how hacky.
Anyway, that stuff isn’t around anymore because people got tired of it and moved on. Just shows once again how much these champions of capitalism really hate the free market.
I guess that, having grown up beyond age 14, I find it strange that just as things like video games and science fiction are starting to become respectable, a huge group of people want to drag them back down into the dingy basement again and forever exclusively celebrate their most juvenile aspects.
good thread is good thread
.
Hello
Audley and Rutee
I hope you both are well.
nah; for one, he won’t notice that that’s the pseudonym of a woman. For another, he’ll just treat it somewhat the way the nerdbros of that time did, and assume the misogyny is played straight, not being criticized; and probably he will then sigh nostalgically for this dudely style of hard SF.
Cough
This is a cool treatise on putting actual cyberpunk sensibilities into steampunk.
#13, Anne Fenwick
TVTropes, being the other repository of all knowledge, suggests Raygun Gothic.
#69, siggy
Y’know, when I hear the term ‘pure SF’, I don’t think of the sort of pulpy things that you and the sad puppies apparently imagine.
#145, vaight
Or a warning against the Black Brute, right? I’m sure they’d be all about that sort of thing.
Favorite SciFi RPGs… Cyberpunk 2020 and Paranoia. No social commentary whatsoever there.
Tom Foss
Same here! And then I discovered that he’s a very enjoyable author as well. Which is one of the things the people who make puppies sad have achieved over the last years: Their constant personal attacks have brought a lot of people to my attention whose writing I greatly enjoy. I probably would neither have read Mary Robinette Kowal nor N. K. Jemisin without them.
+++
Damn, I knew it. There was a comment from Ranzoid that almost made sense and I thought “somebody must have hacked the account”. And then the next one appears and all is well again. 2001 was purely science driven? Maybe the book I read was 2011 or something…
+++
Most horrible book covers?
My kindle versions of Song of the Lioness. Thankfully the current edition seems to have a different one. The heroine of a medievalist fantasy novel is constantly portrayed in jeans and a T (close fitting, of course), while on one cover she is flanked by her two lovers, also in modern garb and the whole thing has a distinct Twilight-y feeling to it. Which couldn’t be further from the truth.
+++
Also, am I the only person to whom Torgensen’s descriptions sound a lot like, you know, penny novels? Stuff written by people paid very little money to cram out 150 pages of adventure every other week?
Also, this is the age of E-books. You can get a free excerpt to see if you like it.
+++
MM
That sounds a bit like Story Cubes.
Seriously, the best books and movies IMO are those that go for the trope and then smash it in your face.
++++
At least he’s honest about it: Women, who might not want to read SF because of buxom trophies are simply not included in the definition of people.
Ahhh, and here we have the Star Trek revisionism again.
Has he read Ancillary Justice? I doubt it. Or N. K. Jemisin? The adventure part is so fucking brilliant that you’Re losing sleep over the books. I guess that’s his main problem: a really good SF/F author can have both. One like him can only have one and he’s extrapolating from that perspective.
The lurkers agree with me in email!
Have people like him been actively stopped from writing? Is there a law that says you have to read ALL SF/F and not just those parts you like? Really, he should be rejoicing at the diversity of writers because it would mean that he could simply supply his core market with much less competition. You know, just let the new kids write all that fantasy with brown people and the SF with trans characters, I’ll write braod chested heroes and buxom trophy women and the market will give me a huge bucket full of cash. They all believe in the market, right?
But let’s talk about “the content of the package stopping to interest readers” a bit: Fantasy is MY genre (SF to a lesser extent). Since I’m German I’ve probably read a larger variety than most native English speakers. You know what stopped interesting me?
-Farmboy turned hero gets princess narratives
-White person saves savage brown/black people
-White man defends civilisation against savage brown/black people
-Hero overthrows tyrant and everything stays the same. The peasants cheer
-Add your own trope
Yep, my favourite genre and I became bored with it. But I guess a collection of some hundred Fanstasy books starting with children’s literature and spanning a few continents does not make me a Fantasy reader in Torgensen’s book. Wrong gender.
They’ve even pissed off George R R Matin
Lots of “both sides” there, but he’s really pissed at the people who make puppies sad.
And now I see that RBDC has already posted this…
+++
Tony
Sounds like all is well to me.
k machine
Also, who can forget Gandalf’s speech about deserving life and death, or Eowyn throwing the whole sexist gender roles at Aragorn? Oh, right…
Audley
*pouncehugs*
Just, I missed you!
vaiyt
I can fix it: He’s swinging a scimitar threatening a buxom blonde lady and all is well again.
2012 must have ended up a very disappointing year for him after starting out so well – in April he was a Hugo/Nebula/Campbell nominee, by August he had not won any of those awards, and then in November Romney lost.
Torgersen claims he was shunned by some of the people at that year’s WorldCon and he clearly carries a grudge over that (as does Correia over similar alleged shunning when he was attended WorldCon 2011 as a Campbell nominee). It seems they expected the same sort of lionising they’d become accustomed to when going out in public amongst people who really enjoy reading their blogs as well as their books, and they didn’t get it – they admit receiving a plurality of friendly appreciations and congratulations from people whose names they didn’t know, but what they are complaining about is that people whose names they did know via historical interactions online preferred to avoid them (and some of those avoidees were telling their online readers why they were doing that).
Now it seems rather obvious to me that if one repeatedly shows one’s arse on popular SF blogs, then people who like to read those popular SF blogs might remember one’s name when they go to WorldCon (and that would be a substantial proportion in most years) and make a rational decision that there are other people there whose company they would enjoy more. One of the consequences for showing one’s arse on the internet is that there will be a considerable number of people (not all of whom necessarily care that much about one’s opinions but who do care about one disrupting/derailing discussions they had been enjoying), will decide that the last thing they want to risk happening is that one will show one’s arse in a similar way while they are standing in the same room.
This doesn’t only happen to conservative authors who blog at WorldCons – there are plenty of progressives who are shunned at other gatherings by attendees who don’t want to hang around them because of statements they have made too, although progressives tend to express less surprise or aggrievement when that happens. Most people don’t generally like to hang around with somebody they perceive to have a habit of spoiling their fun or aggravating them, that’s all there is to it. Expecting people to pretend that what one’s said on the internet about people they like and admire is some sort of unreal game that doesn’t matter in meatspace is frankly bizarre, yet that seems to be what both Correia and Torgersen expected at the WorldCons where they were award nominees.
I’ve long noticed how often those who are the loudest of the loud about their Right To Speak Their Opinions Freely are equally loud about how others have No Right To Walk Away while they are sharing those opinions, that it is Terribly Unfair To Punish Their Opinions by declining to be their audience. I’m moved to pity by their deficit in the understanding department if they are being honest about Not Seeing How This Works, but suspect that a surplus in the hypocrisy department is more likely in many cases.
So basically The Sad Puppies want simplistic, predictable plots populated by simplistic, shallow characters that conform entirely to existing tropes, and a front cover so boringly literal that they can predict the content of the book simply from looking at it.
In other words, The Sad Puppies want shit books.
If he really wants proper pulp, Torgersen should just pick up the collected works of L Ron Hubbard.
@ Crip Dyke #38
Is that an existing word, or are you one of those people with sufficient knowledge of ancient languages to cobble together a word which actually makes sense?
Googling “Nostoutopalgia” returns this very thread, and nothing else.
Part of that story in my case might come from the fact that Harlequin’s printer is located in my home town, and so we got regular news stories about their high production rate, etc. You know, one of those useta-be big industrial cities with not much left, touting a booming remnant, etc.
So there are plenty of local stories of how high-end their printing operation is, how fast, how much output, how many books per day, etc. (If I’m correct they also print US postage stamps)…
My dad reads Harlequin romances by the boxload.
All I know about them from personal experience is as a former used bookseller – you can’t sell them. You just cannot sell used Harlequins. Period.
I have read some “formula” formula mystery, adventure, murder, etc., and while the formula for me can be fun at the start, after a few books I just get bored by it.
Utterly predictable books that get literary society awards.
My grandfather loved pulp westerns for his fun reading. Even more so after he was incapacitated by a series of strokes and could no longer walk unaided or speak clearly. They were his escapist joy. But as a mastercraftsman cabinet-maker himself, I don’t think he would ever have dreamt that any of these works of journeyman competence at best should have won any sort of award.
Plus, nobody else is to write anything else. Only Nutty Nuggets allowed!
#158, Thumper
Hey, when I was 2 I loved those sorts of books. Spot The Dog was a fucking classic, you philistine.
Try him on Riddley Walker! (John W. Cambell Memorial Award, 1982, Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award, 1983.) Here’s Riddley on the problems of the author:
Previous year around this time I had an idea about a comic with sword-swinging muscular white-cis-hetero heroine accompanied by her friend, a magic-staff-wielding black-gay wizzard-healer on whom she once had a crush before they sorted things out. Both employed as mercenaries in a conquering genocidal war against dragogriffs who were gender-fluid and had completely differend understanding of such concepts as ownership etc and tried and failed to sort things out rationally with humankind. The realisation that the dragogrifs are the goodies was meant as one of the major plots.
Of course I now realise, that the fact that the comic shall never be made and it is a good thing. Not because I do not have time for such big project, or because I might be decent enough drawer but I am definitively shitty dialogue writer, but because the whole idea is baddie bad-bad. After all I have it just confirmed by professional writer. Good, I can finally stop thinking about it. Thanks, PZ, for bringing this worthy opinion to my attention.
/above written paragraph might contain trace ammounts of sarcasm.
tigtog @162: The Hugos aren’t really “literary society awards”, they’re nominated and voted for by anyone with a Worldcon membership, so they’re fan awards. The Nebulas (awarded by the SFWA) are literary society awards, but much harder to… shit, I’ve just realised that the Sad Puppies are basically trying to Pharyngulate a poll!
Marcus Ranum #141:
Hell, even plain old ‘classic’ Space Opera (and you don’t get much more spatially operatic than Doc Smith) took a political bent, on occasion. (Please don’t take that as a reading recommendation, mind.)
Jafafa Hots #161
Eh, be careful with the absolute statements. Another former used bookseller here, and we did sell Halequins. They were a buck a piece with some quantity deal that I’ve forgotten.
Now to be fair we didn’t sell many, most folks traded for them two for one. But we did have a bunch of customers who would buy huge stacks, 30, 40 at a time and then trade them back in until they ran out, over and over again.
Hell, I even remember a specific instance where I sold 20 or so. After she left a bike courier who was hanging around asked me if I knew who that customer was. I didn’t and me informed me that she was one of the top trial lawyers in town.
I also had a customer who tried to write a Harlequin. She got their style sheet, apparently it’s free for the asking, wrote one and sent it off. It was rejected as being, and I really do quote here: “Too formulaic.” My customer saw the humour in that fortunately, but it does point out that even Harlequin has standards beneath which they will not sink. I suspect Torgersen would also receive a rejection letter from them should he try his had at a different genre.
#167 Dr Marcus Hill Ph.D. (arguing from his own authority)
The Hugos aren’t a juried award, but I took that “literary society” description from the Hugos official website – they are fan awards from members of a literary society:
@Karpad #104
I have downloaded The Last Ringbearer and will be reading it soon. Fantasy from the perspective of the “bad guys”? Hel-fucking-yes! I bought an omnibus written by Stan Nicholls simply entitled “Orcs” which has a similar theme. It’s interesting, but lacks… something. Thanks for the link!
@Audley Z Darkheart #110
I’ve read The Dwarves. Good story, entertaining, nice to have a fantasy not written from the perspective of a human… but beyond writing it from a dwarve’s perspective there was nothing particularly exciting about it, in my opinion.
This may be a time to recommend to Mr. sad puppy that classic SF novel by Harry Harrison, Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers.
Of course, he might not get the humor, or the point.
@ TigTog #162
Oh, of course. Brad’s (I hate that I share a first name with this douche) utter lack of imagination and complete terror of having his preconceived notions challenged simply must be validated by official awards, otherwise it might appear that he is merely a loud voice among a sad minority, rather than the Official Voice of the SF/F Fandom™.
Someone arguing that only “punks” from a certain time period / movement should be allowed to use the ending “-punk”?
How much more punk can you get?! None. None more punk.
(But seriously, Steampunk is obviously named in parody of Cyberpunk, and in that context the name makes perfect sense. No one thinks Steampunk is related to the punk movement.)
BTW, I’m not going to shit on people who enjoy their formula literature. My grandma used to read doctor novels, the most formualic stuff ever with some poor young woman falling i love with a lonely but utterly handsome country doctor and some bad people who wanted to bring them apart. Probably kept her dementia at bay for many years.
Go for it.
If you write that kind of stuff, go for it.
Giliell @ 156
I agree. But then I’ll see bad books with little going for them except giving the reader exactly what they expect and…they sell pretty well. So there’s a market for it and those who do produce such books know what they’re doing. And if that’s what somebody wants, it’s already available for every genre.
This isn’t Sad Puppies being sad because they aren’t getting what they want. They’re angry that other people are getting what they want.
Our once reliable packaging has too often defrauded our readership.
Um…does this guy know there’s little blurbs on either the back cover or the front-inner-jacket that give you some idea of what the book is about?
Like in Stranger in a Strange Land. There wouldn’t be any of that freaky social consciousness crapola in a book from 1961, would there?
Heaven Forefend! Why, that would be like a big novel called “Dune” from 1963 having a lot of crapola about desert people rising up against two empires and creating something that looks a lot like OPEC, ten years before the real OPEC was created by real desert people. We can’t have that kind of social-consciousness stuff ruining our steady stream of shoot-em-up space operas!
Doesn’t reading the same thing over and over basically make something analogous to a holy book?
Or something analogous to porn.
I hate to stereotype here, but a name like “Brad R. Torgersen” strongly implies a white guy from Whitest Europe (as in Germany or Scandanavia) desperately trying to resist any encroachment impurity from any other culture into the “pure” culture he’s known all his life.
TMM
My words exactly!
Of course, in these days of electronic self-publishing, it’s possible to carve out whatever niche formula you fancy…
Oh, and here’s GRRM’s take down of the recent Hugo ballots
It musr hurt the people who make puppies sad that he’s not on their side since they probably think he should be.
…even if you read the same era of books, you still come at it with an adult’s mindset.
Maybe that’s what’s upsetting him: having to read with an adult’s mindset.
Here is what Torgersen would have written if he wanted his metaphor to be consistent:
Imagine for a moment that you go to the local grocery to buy a box of cereal. You are an avid enthusiast for cereal, specifically the brand that started it all — Corny Flakes. You will happily eat Corny Flakes until you die, just like your great-grandfather did. Corny Flakes have always come in the same kind of box with the same logo and the same lettering. You could find the Corny Flakes even in the dark, with a blindfold over your eyes. That’s how much you love them, and you don’t have to think about it at all when you grab a box while shopping.
Then, one day, you get home from the store, pour a big bowl of cereal . . . and discover that these aren’t Corny Flakes. The box had the same shape and the same size and was in the same aisle, but they are something else. Still cereal, sure. But not Corny Flakes. Not wanting to waste money, you eat the different cereal anyway. You find the experience is not what you remembered it should be, when you ate actual Corny Flakes. You walk away from the experience somewhat disappointed. What the hell happened to cereal? Did another company invent a new kind of cereal, and did the grocery store stock it in the same place as real cereal? Maybe you accidentally grabbed the wrong box without looking (because why did you ever have to look before?).
So you go back to the store again, to buy another box of good old delicious and reliable Corny Flakes!
This time, you discover that your recent acquisition was labelled “breakfast cereal” and the aisle still says “breakfast cereal”, but this other stuff that was not Corny Flakes. The contents were something different. Maybe similar to Corny Flakes, but not Corny Flakes. There are now at least a dozen varieties of cereal in that aisle.
So you try one, on purpose this time. Maybe Freaky Flakes or Crunchy Bits? You give Corny Flakes a break, and you let some other cereal woo your taste buds. A cereal that is reliably what it claims to be on the outside of the box. The contents are not like what you knew with your old stand-by. You dutifully chomp them down, but even adding a spoonful of sugar doesn’t make the experience better. In fact, this time, the taste is that much worse.
What is the grocery store thinking?
Return to the store. Buy another box of something different from the first two. Bam. It’s sure not Corny Flakes. This time, you add bananas, sugar, and berries. This only makes up for the deficit a little bit.
Return to the store again for yet another box. Yup. It says BREAKFAST CEREAL proudly on the packaging. You are sure in your heart that you love and adore breakfast cereal, a staple since childhood. And yet, the magic is gone. This is not the cereal you first fell in love with. The box may say BREAKFAST CEREAL but you won’t be fooled any longer. Cereal is dead. Or at least the majority of it is no longer of any interest to you. Sure the good stuff is still on the shelf, but it’s crowded into a corner by all of these fakes, and ignored by all of those people.
There is only one thing to do. Lead a consumer revolt to restore the corny status quo ante. There can be only one kind of cereal, and you know exactly what kind it has to be. Pressure the grocery stores to only carry Corny Flakes, and let them proudly fill the entire cereal aisle with that one brand. This will compel the cereal factories to produce only the legitimate cereal that your distant ancestors knew. That’s the magic of the free market, after all.
And if the competition’s boxes are tainted with — oh I don’t know — something distasteful, word will get around and their sales will plummet. Or if the shipments never make it to the stores, there will be more room for the correct form of cereal. Or if something bad happened to my competition’s factories . . . not that I’m encouraging sabotage. Well, you get the idea . . . .
The “trans people in armour” thing might be a reference to Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, which he blogged about as being canonically kind to trans people. It’s nonstandard mil sf, in which the wars are fought by the minds of old people, in the young super bodies prepared for them by the military.
Scalzi admitted he hasn’t thought of trans people when he wrote it, so he blogged to say that trans people would be given their 25-year-old self as whatever gender made them happy.
Given Scalzi’s presence at the top of bigoted arseholes’ shit lists, and Turgidson’s own history with that worthy, it’s my suspicion that this was his target.
And much like his books, GRRM’s response is lengthy and merciless.
LOL
I haven’t read the books, I don’t think I will, because honestly, there’s too much other stuff out there I want to read before I ever read white men heroes beautiful women to be raped fantasy again.
I watched some of the TV show, which is Nutty Nuggets Royal IMO: Having a bit of fruit sprinkled in and coming in an extra large box. Which is totally OK some nights when my brain isn’t good for anything serious and there’s no Inspector Barnaby on TV: Yep, Nutty Nuggets: reliable, not challenging, not waking you up too much before you go to bed.
#1 as someone who eats a very limited number of foods and has no sense of adventure when it comes to eating because I have terrible reactions to so many foods, I’m offended by his metaphor. I get sick when I eat certain things so if I bought a food I’d eaten regularly and found it had been changed*, I’d be pretty pissed because it could be risky for me.
b) I’m very surprised the puppies approached this by gaming an existing set of awards. It was a prime opportunity for BT or Vox Day to create an entirely new award and charge people membership to vote ala WorldCon and make themselves some money. I guess the motivation of “defeating” and “undermining” the evil SJWs on their turf was a bigger factor this time. (Also I understand Vox has been trying to do this unsuccessfully for a few years?)
* – without, you know, announcing on the package that it was a new formula or something, which is unlikely. I compulsively read labels, for obvious reasons.
I wandered over to GRRM’s not-a-blog, and he has a couple of SPs over there explaining that the whole Sad Pupppy slate is just a way to ensure that the nominees are based on merit, rather than how well they push a political viewpoint. How the SPs expect to accomplish this by pushing a slate based on a political viewpoint, rather than merit is apparently left as an exercise for the reader
Giliell
Yeah, I should probably have made that clear too, lest anyone think I am shitting on their reading habits. Everyone likes some mindless escapism, myself included. I think Scr… Archivist said it best at #184. Eat whatever cereal you like, just don’t try to force the supermarket to stock only your favourite brand.
Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened #190:
A common thread amongst the self-entitled. Witness the annual kerfuffles over religious Christmas cards and Easter eggs, when stores stop stocking them ’cause they’re not selling.
As much as science fiction was my “pleasure reading” growing up … as much as I enjoy GRRM’s novels, or Scalzi’s, nothing they wrote made me care about this issue. I am very much a Sci-Fi fan (it’s the first section I’ll visit in a bookstore), but awards didn’t matter that much to me: while they were a signal of quality, I would just read what I like (award or no). I saw a few whispers about this last year, mostly on Scalzi’s blog, and after the awards I pretty much figured “game over”. How wrong I was…
This year, it is absolutely clear one side in this Danse Macabre is throwing an incoherent, rage filled temper-tantrum; flinging every sort of nasty name they can concoct and broadcasting as far outside their limited circle as they can just how terrible the awards process is becoming, and won’t the nasty, nasty un-persons in fandom GO AWAY.
The other side is patiently pointing to the rules, and explaining how the spirit of the contest has been savagely violated. The only response they are being permitted this year seems to be the pure Game Theory strategy of equivalent retaliation. (“Take off and nuke the site from NO AWARD orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”) However, just because pure logic says this is the route to take does not make it “principled” or “well reasoned” (because it sure as hell isn’t reasonable).
For the longest time, I did not care how the Hugos were nominated or voted: even after last year, when it was clear this was getting blown out of proportion I didn’t care enough to involve myself at the sausage-making factory. Well, it’s too late this year, but if these two sides want to “NO AWARD” the Hugos to death, it’s the responsibility of every person who has ever enjoyed speculative fiction to register, nominate, and vote.
Not nominate a slate, and not vote a slate: just do what should have been done all along.
We live in a world where an entire advertising campaign was built around the fact that a breakfast cereal named after apples does not, in fact, actually taste like apples.
There’s no accounting for taste, and I don’t know that I’d ever be willing to say someone was wrong to like what they do. I might not agree with them, but I’m sure plenty of people wouldn’t agree with what I liked either.
The problem isn’t so much their taste or lack thereof, but what they went and did about it. :P
Daz #191
Wait, there’s a War on Easter™ too now?
Noooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!! God. Damn. Lib’ruuuuuuuuls!
Wait.. we can’t have both?
Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened #194:
You didn’t hear bout The Real Easter Egg™? George Carey got a snit on about ’em.
arakasi:
It’s Conservapedia/Fox News Logic.
Start with the premise that everything in existence right now is liberally bias.
Add explicit and overt conservative bias to it.
Now the alleged liberal bias is neutralized and everything is now Fair and Balanced, objective, and unbiased.
#194, Thumper
Yeah, some aggressively evangelising apocalyptic desert cult has tried to hijack a perfectly acceptable pagan fertility festival with some message about how self-sacrifice is somehow better if you’re immortal. I’m not quite sure how they’re explaining the chocolate ova and bunny symbolism, though.
John Harshman@ 42
I love the Temeraire novels, too. The Napoleonic Wars with dragons!
Brad T. fails to acknowledge that some of us got bored with the usual SF because it’s the same old space opera, while we still eagerly await Ursula K. Le Guin’s otherworldly social anthropology and C. J. Cherryh’s First Contact Foreigner.
Just for the record, Delany’s Dhalgren is set in a modern-ish metropolis (and yes, opens with an explicit gay sex scene). It’s his Tales of Nevérÿona that uses sword’n’sorcery tropes (and, yay, has even more gay sex).
It’s exactly the same mindset of GamerGate: the status quo is apolitical, my own biases are invisible, anything that doesn’t cater to me is pandering (to the wrong sort of people).
Regarding ‘steampunk’:
One could make an argument that one of the first works of that form, Sterling and Gibson’s ‘The Difference Engine’, did have a rather punk ethos to it. Unsurprising given the authors.
Certainly most of the more popular works, though, are far more ‘gaslamp fantasy’ than ‘steampunk’. There’s a reason why Kaja Foglio explicitly made up the term ‘gaslamp fantasy’ for Girl Genius, because she’s one of the first to admit that there’s no real ‘punk’ in it.
@ Anym #198
*polishes internet*
Here you go. You’ve earned it.
Oh, for those of you who might be interested, there’s a little more news on this.
A number of people I’ve seen in my travels around the online SFF fandom have been saying things like “I don’t normally vote for the hugos, but I am this year, and I’m going to vote No Award before I vote for anything on the Puppy Slate.” I completely sympathise, and I’m a bit tempted to buy a supporting membership so I can do just that.
Well. It seems that VD has announced here That he will continue to cram a sad puppies slate onto the hugo nominations in retaliation for any fiction category that comes up with No Award this year.
He’s talking about Best Novella and Best Novelette, which the sad puppies swept with their slate. He’s threatening to continually salt and burn the Hugo awards for years to come if those categories come up No Award.
That’s what we’re dealing with.
Jafafa Hots:
No, Harlequin books are not written by computer. I have written a number of novels for H/S, and I have worked my ass off writing them. My editor makes as many demands on me as my other publishers (Random House, Berkley, Tor) have done in the past.
I really love the ignorant pronouncements of those who would rather be smug and superior than acknowledge that they don’t know everything about a subject.
Well, Charlie Stross in The Biggest Little SF Publisher you never heard of pulls on the jackboots suggests that Vox Day’s personal publishing company, Castalia House (source for several of the books on the Sad Puppies slate) was set up at least in part for the express purpose of getting several like-minded authors professionally published so they can qualify for the SFWA and be eligible to vote for the Nebulas.
Given that Vox’ father, entrepreneur and ‘tax protestor’ Robert Beale is a multi-millionaire, and it’s suspected that Vox helped hide some of the money (certainly the IRS would love to talk with him if he sets foot in the U.S. again), Vox may have the money to throw around on something like this.
Bumpy the Alligator @116: look for Tanya Huff’s Valor series.
Which shows more self-awareness than I’d normally expect of him (damning with faint praise). That’s actively supervillain posturing territory there. If he still thinks he’s the good guy after that, it’s a wonder I can’t hear the cognitive dissonance ringing all the way across the Atlantic.
As several people have pointed out, really, this was possible in large part because so few of the Worldcon members actually bother with nominations. (I’ll openly admit I never did, though I’ve only been to two Worldcons, the last one being Montreal in 2009.) One wonders if this sort of active messing with the slate will get more people to involve themselves in the nominations as well as the actual voting. The Sad Puppies aren’t the only ones who have ‘you can’t tell me what to do’ reactions…
Markita Linda, seconding your recommendation.
Somebody here recommended the Valor series recently. I’ve just started reading them, and I’m enjoying them greatly.
I thought the whole point of science fiction was to present a PROGRESSIVE vision of the future to inspire real people in the present time to make that vision a reality.
The simple fact that conservative bigots are trying to undermine that be manipulating an awards function shows how despicable conservatism itself is.
The Sad Puppies need to be sent to the pound and put down!
I wonder: is Torgo an avid gamer as well? Because his complaints about everything suddenly having a deep story could more easily be applied to the changes in video game plots. In years past, video games usually had little to no story, because they didn’t need them. You didn’t need to know why the Space Invaders were attacking Earth to enjoy battling them. But as the medium evolved, games got deeper, and stories followed suit. Now we have games that are primarily driven by their complex story, where the gameplay is almost secondary. I know there’s a lot of gamers who complain that these new-fangled games are all crap, and everything should go back to the way it was when they were kids. It’s usually the other way around, though, with pretentious snobs decrying everyone who likes Call of Duty or Madden as not a TRUE gamer because they like games other than Chrono Trigger. One thing they have in common, though, is that their complaints boil down to “PRODUCERS, STOP MAKING THINGS I DON’T LIKE! CONSUMERS, STOP LIKING THINGS I DON’T LIKE!”
dalehusband @210:
Nope.
SF is all about teleporters and warp drives, force fields and virtual reality tech. Trust me. Mr. Torgersen told me himself.
Charly @166:
Can I play him in the movie?
Check out #NewHugoCategories on Twitter. They’re hilarious
That’s one of the weirdest things I have ever read.
Oh god, do what Giliell says!
The first five I ran into that just required sharing:
https://twitter.com/fozmeadows/status/586604801863131136
https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/586608786992861185
https://twitter.com/jenphalian/status/586574642757947392
https://twitter.com/ethereallad/status/586570930358476800
https://twitter.com/Erinys/status/586563858862477313
Oh god.
https://twitter.com/nnschiller/status/586536557168865281
https://twitter.com/nnschiller/status/586536413971161088
https://twitter.com/MissCherryPi/status/586490748746522625
https://twitter.com/NMamatas/status/586397434059718656
https://twitter.com/SNova_101/status/586620683091718144
anteprepro @ 216 and 217:
Most Entitled Libertarian Manifesto will be the hardest choice.
My favorite tweets I saw:
https://twitter.com/rosebiggin/status/586602677745885184
https://twitter.com/jimpjorps/status/586619950833541121
https://twitter.com/wellplayd_ggate/status/586620850230534144
#109 kiptw
I seem to recall a scene in 1984 that had computerized novel-writing.
#156 Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
I recall one author-editor doing some female-heroine collection series (I don’t remember which, I’ve read several) writing about how turning the trope has itself become a trope, so she won’t (usually) accept those stories anymore … that must have been at least a decade ago.
(Fondly remembering Esther “only a woman can call a series Chicks” Friesner’s right now – should go look if there’s one I haven’t read yet …)
There is something to be said that humans are not structured mentally to deal with what has been going on at ever increasing pace since the industrial revolution. Our brains are structured to keep track of a small tribe of perhaps 150 people, to exclude outsiders, to avoid physical threats and biological, to crave fats, sugars and salt, to enjoy novelty but only in small doses.
The 21st century would be a very scary place to 18th century mind. Even the most flexible free-thinkers from the 1700s would, I suspect, spend the first few months if transported to our time in a fetal position sucking their thumbs. Quite frankly I sometimes feel that way thinking back to the simpler times of my youth. I gave up Conan novels because they were entirely too predictable but I remember Gilligan’s Island after a hard day at school and how brainlessly comforting it was. With plots so predictable that you didn’t need to have the sound on. It was like a white-bread cheese sandwich for the brain. You might swing for a bit of variety with a pepper jack or sharp cheddar in the middle but the beginning and ending were all the same. Sometimes that is what you want, need. Simple escapism.
On the other hand, I don’t think bland brainless escapism is the sort of thing that does, or should, win awards.
I’m going to give him points for not comparing himself to Anne Frank because of the oppression he faces when he reads a book with a spaceship on the cover which turns out to have something else besides spaceships in it .
He hasn’t done that, but he is comparing himself to being the equaivalenty of a stalwart defender of freedom consigned to a gulag. Seriously: https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/gulag-diary-day-6/
So the puppies have Larry Correia on their side? Now that’s funny, given how many times he manages to shoehorn in arguments for gun fondling as a method of protecting you from
brown peoplewerewolves and rants about libertarian tax policies.#222 aaronpound
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Now THIS deserves a Hugo! Is there a category for Most Unintentionally Funny Self-Pitying MRA Screed?
@ aaronpound, #222:
No no, it’s just rhetorical satire. See, he’s making fun of the SJWs who don’t do anything like what’s described in his description, by implying that they’re comparable… Wait, I’m confused. The hell was his point again?
I will say this: it made me laugh!
@ anteprepro: Thanks for linking that hashtag. :)
Because no other group will figure out how to organize and beat your tiny minority, Day? Come on. You got a good one in by surprising people with effort, but you really think you outnumber Whovians, much less the rest of Sci Fi?
The understanding I have is that when shitty nominations come in, ‘No Award’ is the standard recourse.. Why is someone who patently doesn’t care suddenly irate that the standard recourse of shitty nominations is being called for?
Perhaps Bimbos of the Death Sun would be suitable for the Sad Puppies.
Rutee Katreya @227
Vox Day’s anger at No Award is because his POS novelette lost out to No Award last year.
Via James Nicoll, exactly how badly Correia was treated at the Reno Worldcon.
It transpires in the comments that Correia thinks it unfair for people to link to what he said about it at the time.
@230, small world time: James is a good friend. One of the good ones, is Mr. Nicoll.
Read up on Correia’s explenation why that post is all cake and lemonade. “I didn’t want to complain at that time”.
Dear Mr. Correia, you gave to very different accounts of the same event. Which one am I supposed to believe, given that you obviously lied in one of them?
two, not to
Agreed. I used to shop at Imperiums to Order in Kitchener pretty regularly back when it was still open (and I was going to University there).
Monitor note
dalehusband@210,
Please, no jokes that could possibly be interpreted as death threats/wishes, incitements to violence, etc.
Because it fits: Original manly male writer ideas
Jafafa Hots:
Harlequin did in fact experiment with a science fiction imprint, Laser Books: which they tried to operate as they did other series at the time, on a subscription basis, where you pre-ordered three (ISTR) books per month. They shut it down because the few readers they had complained that the books were too different from each other (except for the covers by Kelly Freas based on a template provided by Harlequin), and they never knew what they were going to get. Turns out that SF readers tend to differentiate among writers, styles and subjects, and wanted some choice in books, rather than buying a heaping box o’ Nutty Nuggets.
In all fairness, there were some good books published under that imprint, although some of them were mutilated to fit a precise word-count requirement.
sueinnm@205:
Well, USENET is dead (waves at Tigtog), but I’m fairly sure that the World Wide Web can supply you with more than adequate quantities of what you love!
I realized s/f book covers didn’t mean anything when i saw the same cover art from a book a friend had loaned me on the packaging of a kid’s toy ray gun at the gas station.
@carolw- actually, if that ray gun was a cheap knock-off of a branded toy, the art was probably stolen from the book.
My copy of The Chrysalids has green bug people wearing fur and armed with weapons, posed menacingly on the cover.
Number of green bug people wearing fur and armed and menacing in the book = 0
The bastards.
@241
My school had that same edition! I remember it clearly. Glad we were assigned to read it.
Speaking of which; if you or anyone else here is down for (good) anime, I strongly recommend From the New World. Lots of similarities to The Chrysalids, but I feel it takes its concepts further and definitely qualifies as the kind of thoughtful, progressive sci-fi people have been sharing here.
dr2chase at #228 said “Perhaps Bimbos of the Death Sun would be suitable for the Sad Puppies.”
That was actually written by someone I know.
She was a single working mother, going to creative writing classes in the evenings. Two school-age kids. And she wrote that in a week.
I don’t think you should slander her by associating her with the SP slate. It’s not great literature, but it’s a fun little mystery novel, actually. And it’s a damn sight better than I’d manage. :-/
lynnebatik
The sequel’s pretty crap, unfortunately (Zombies of the Gene Pool), but I highly recommend her Ballad novels, and to a lesser extent the Elizabeth McPherson mysteries.
*belatedly waves back at leerudolph #238*
On some further reading of Correia/Torgersen, it seems they are attempting to justify the gaming of the nominations by conflating two things they were told by oldbies a few years ago: (i) that the Hugos are generally considered to be SF’s most prestigious award; and (ii) how great it is that any fan can be a nominator/voter for the Hugos. They are spinning this as somehow meaning that They Were Told the Hugos are the most prestigious award because it’s an everyfan award, yet the limited number of voters means that WorldCon Lied To Them, so now they are fixing things so that the Hugos will finally be what they were told they were.
So either they’re short on logic or they’re short on honesty. Because What They Are Saying They Were Told could not possibly have been What Was Actually Said by anybody familiar with WorldCon and the Hugos. The fact that voters for the Hugos have historically been the sort of people who love going to cons and spending days on end talking about the complexities of books is why the Hugos have the reputation they do – they are awards that come from dedicated booklovers, not just devoted genre fans. Correia even complained that there were too many panels for aspiring authors on the creative process (writing characters and worldbuilding) at WorldCon 2011 when what he was hoping for was panels for new authors about the business side i.e. self-promotion and deal-negotiation, so the man simply Does Not Get It.
I think the Guardian wants to make the puppies cry
After reading these comments, I am a happy puppy. There is hope for the world.
I have not taken the time to read ALL of the comments, but I did read a lot of them…and am happy to see that most (if not all…since there may have been one or two defending them…do not know) people see it like I do. These people are truly Sad Puppies. I am glad that I do not live in a world that has Nutty Nuggets books on EVERY shelf. I like Scalzi, Sanderson, Robinson, Gibson, Heinlein, Asimov, etc. All of them are different. Different time of writing, different style, different religious positions, different political positions, etc. Then my reading will inform me. Make me a better person. If I do not like someone’s writing…I stop reading it. There is too much variety out there…that everyone can be happy. If he is happy only reading Nutty Nugget books (good for him), but do not punish the rest of us. Even Star Trek OS series was popular, was wonderful (I think he would like it, but maybe not), cause it was very progressive for it’s time. It was social, it challenged the way we thought during the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, 00’s and hopefully some more. I cannot say that I liked all of them, but I love Star Trek (it IS a classic). Said too much, but really people…these Sad Puppies are truly sad.
Loved the post, and I agree that the Sad Puppies are a bunch of dull and vicious losers who’ve ruined the party for everyone else, *but*…
The pedant in me is compelled to correct:
> The Book of the New Sun … it’s a massive allegorical series of books on this far future world,
> using words from a language Wolfe invented.
Actually Wolfe made a decision early on in writing The Book of the New Sun that he was not going to make up any words at all, but was going to rely entirely on obscure, antique and forgotten real words – which is probably why so many of them have a nice flavour.