The 2017 Hugo Award winners. I think we can state that the convergence of mainstream published “science fiction” is now complete. Notice anything about the winners?
Best Novel
The Obelisk Gate, by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit Books)
Best Novella
Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com publishing)
Best Novelette
“The Tomato Thief”, by Ursula Vernon (Apex Magazine, January 2016)
Best Short Story
“Seasons of Glass and Iron”, by Amal El-Mohtar (The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, Saga Press)
Best Related Work
Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer)
Best Graphic Story
Monstress, Volume 1: Awakening, written by Marjorie Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda (Image)
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
Arrival, screenplay by Eric Heisserer based on a short story by Ted Chiang, directed by Denis Villeneuve (21 Laps Entertainment/FilmNation Entertainment/Lava Bear Films)
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
The Expanse: “Leviathan Wakes”, written by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, directed by Terry McDonough (SyFy)
Best Editor – Short Form
Ellen Datlow
Best Editor – Long Form
Liz Gorinsky
Best Professional Artist
Julie Dillon
Best Semiprozine
Uncanny Magazine, edited by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas, Michi Trota, Julia Rios, and podcast produced by Erika Ensign & Steven Schapansky
Best Fanzine
Lady Business, edited by Clare, Ira, Jodie, KJ, Renay, and Susan
Best Fancast
Tea and Jeopardy, presented by Emma Newman with Peter Newman
Best Fan Writer
Abigail Nussbaum
Best Fan Artist
Elizabeth Leggett
Best Series
The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
Ada Palmer (1st year of eligibility)
The best part is that NK Jemisin is now the two-time Hugo Award winner for Best Novel. In succession.
Squeaks
The following is an excerpt from one of the many hilarious stories in LawDog’s second straight bestseller, THE LAWDOG FILES: AFRICAN ADVENTURES.
SQUEAKS, Part 1
Many, MANY moons ago—and don’t even ask, ’cause I won’t tell you—when I was still a pup, the family lived in Nigeria. We had a bungalow at the Odibo Estates, out near the Biafran border. Every evening peddlers, called traders, used to walk up and down the main road, offering various knick-knacks and merchandise for sale or trade.
Ali Cheap-Cheap was one of the busier traders, and he spent a lot of time on our front porch haggling with Mom. Now, Ali Cheap-Cheap was very proud of his ability to acquire just about anything you might want or need.
One evening, Mom was visiting on the front porch with the visiting wife of one of the English engineers. Said wife had never been outside of London before, and as a consequence, she loathed Africa. She and Mom were chattering and griping when along came Ali Cheap-Cheap. Old Ali Cheap-Cheap didn’t have anything that Mom or the English lady wanted, so, before he wandered off, he asked if, “Madams want for anything?”
The English lady got a funny look in her eye, tapped her snake-hide purse and said, “I want one of these.” “Yes, madam,” replied Ali, and off he trotted.
About three weeks later, Mom and her new English friend were on the front porch again, when along came Ali Cheap-Cheap. With a friend. Ali and friend had a cane pole slung over their shoulders, and there was a burlap bag hanging from said pole.
Now, at this point I should mention that also on the front porch, in addition to the two ladies, was a Mongoose-a-minium, in which lived our pet kusimanse, or as it is known to science, Helogale parvula, the pygmy mongoose. This Mongoose-a-minium had a Plexiglas ceiling which Dad had assured us was unbreakable.
Riiiight.
Up to the porch came Ali Cheap-Cheap and his buddy.
Mom was eyeing the burlap bag with some trepidation, having had some nasty experiences with what the locals tended to store in burlap bags, when Ali and buddy proudly lifted it and announced to the English lady, “Oh, madam! We have your beef!”
I should interject here that “beef” is bush slang for any animal.
Wait for it.
Mom had risen to her full height, and was about to order Ali to get his beef away from her house, when Squeaker, our pygmy mongoose, wandered out of his apartment, and screamed in sheer outrage. It was always amazing how much sheer volume that little hairball could put out. Ali and his buddy were startled by the shriek and dropped the burlap sack onto the Plexiglass roof of Squeaker’s residence.
The unbreakable glass promptly shattered and caused the burlap sack and its contents to fall into the Mongoose-a-minium. It turned out that inside said sack was one observably scared 15-foot python.
Squeaker, who was about the size and girth of a tennis ball, offered up a brief prayer to the Mongoose God for the meal he was about to partake of, and latched onto the snake’s tail with tooth and claw.
The snake discovered that he has been dumped into a place which reeks of mongoose, panicked and attempted to slide up the side of the Mongoose-a-minium and down onto the porch, but was hindered in doing so by Squeaker, who was not only still firmly attached to the python’s tail, but was bracing all four legs against the wall to prevent his meal from getting away.
Did I mention that the snake was approximately fifteen feet long?
Squeaker didn’t even slow him down.
The python hit the porch floor with Squeaks gnawing away at his tail like a chipmunk on speed, and noticed that, in the interest of ventilation, the sliding glass door in the front of our house was open about six inches.
Yep. You guessed it. In goes the snake.
Now, Dad and one of his Brit buddies named Tom were sitting in the house, drinking whiskey-and-sodas. Tom looked down and saw several yards of snake whip by, shrieked, and made a flat-footed, sitting-down leap all the way from the sofa to the top of the bar. Whereupon he proceeded to utter genteel curses upon all and sundry at the top of his lungs.
Dad looked down, lifted his feet, ensured that his drink didn’t tip over, and watched the snake haul scales with bemused interest. Dad didn’t ruffle easily.
And yes, things just got crazier from there. If you haven’t acquired a copy of LawDog’s African adventures yet, you really must. It’s genuinely THAT funny.
Mailvox: IT in a converged company
It will be poisonous if the tech right feels compelled to not only hide their beliefs but also to actively pretend to believe in progressive diversity values. This pretending will embitter them, probably pushing many to the more radical alt-right
This is EXACTLY what happened to me!
One HR director in particular was hard-core SJW and good friends with one of my managers so I was stuck. One of the things she did that still sticks in my mind was an online training/brainwashing course where 1) we HAD to pass it in order to remain employed and we were told that this was because it was the company’s responsibility to demonstrate nondiscrimination in order to meet federal requirements – which was, first of all, bullcrap, and second, a way to shift the responsibility for the nonsense onto the employees. 2) it contained questions such as “Check the boxes next to groups which are discriminated against” and “white men” was an incorrect answer. You could select it, and it would just make you redo the question over and over until you gave the “right” answer.
I wasn’t familiar at the time with Vaclav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” but he totally nailed what was going on: the point wasn’t to make us believe something we didn’t agree with, the point was to make us complicit.
My reaction – which SHOULD have been to quit and find another job, but I wasn’t wise enough yet – was to manipulate my own responsibilities and the work that needed doing such that I could get everything done for the week in a couple hours, then spend the rest of the time goofing off and surfing the net. Not a good use of time on my part; a worse use of employee resources by the people in charge. My morale basically went to zero for several years as a result of these sorts of policies, and the value they got out of me correlated.
I’m out of IT now. I’ve gotten the impression this sort of problem is too widespread for me to want to put up with it.
Why I don’t go to conventions
This pretty much covers it, in a nutshell.
Romance and the Power of the Female Gaze panel with Donna Maree Hanson, Carrie Vaughn, Nick Hubble and Cassandra Rose Clarke. #Worldcon75
Ye cats. I don’t care how big and influential Castalia House becomes in the future. You will never, ever, see me at one of those things. My one experience 20 years ago at MiniCon was considerably more than enough for me.
Besides, I have far more important things to do. Tonight, two teams from my soccer club are playing a friendly; the veterans are playing the men’s second team. I am the starting left wing for the former, while Ender is a starter for the latter. The kid is brimming with confidence, claiming his team just has to keep it close until the second half, when they’re counting on us running out of gas. It’s not a bad strategy, since we probably have an average of 16 years per player on them. Our oldest player is a few months older than me, and he’s 22 years older than their oldest player.
I realized how much is on the line when I ran into the star of the first team yesterday. He asked if I was playing, and when I said that I was, said that he’d see me there. I was a little surprised (and concerned, since he is exceptional), but he explained that most of the first team guys are coming to watch. Which means the losers will not hear the end of it any time soon.
Diversity in tech
A 5-time IT manager with 26 years of experience explains the reality of diversity in technology
Large Tech Company – Team of 11
Diversity policy that caused me a lot of problems. I didn’t have the proper control over who I could interview and my main problem was finding competent engineers regardless of race or sex. I did end up interviewing a very diverse set of candidates which made the process extra grueling as I wasted time with so many under-qualified diversity candidates.
Some of these diversity interviews were my most memorable for how bad the candidates were. As an example an Indian woman with a very impressive resume and monster SQL background. Only interview I ended after 10 minutes because the candidate asked me what SELECT meant in an example statement I white boarded and asked her to correct. Turns out the recruiting company had rewritten her resume for her and she was just a blatant diversity candidate. I complained to my manager about this as a waste of my time and was reminded my team was all white and with only one female.
I did so many interviews I knew were I waste of my time that I started just trying a few new techniques on the candidates as interview practice for myself. It was such a waste of time for myself and the candidate and I felt bad wasting time but I had no choice. There was no chance I would hire them but HR’s method of forcing diversity just kept tossing bad candidates at me.
I eventually worked around the process by finding my own candidates and secretly pushing them through the screening process. I could have been fired for this but my resource problem was so bad I didn’t have a choice.
For unrelated reasons I left that position. The single female on my team was promoted to take my place, against my recommendation. She was a pretty good engineer but had no experience managing and the team fell apart less then a year after I left. All my former team members all told me it was due to the ruthless micromanagement by my replacement. In my experience, micromanagement is the behavior of a lot of new managers thrust into a job that is too big for them to handle regardless of sex/race. Also, I never filled the SQL dev position but my replacement did hire a different Indian women as the SQL dev. I did hear she was incompetent and fired after 6 months.
I learned from this to always have full hiring control of my team or be doomed to fail.
Contra this, Google’s CEO, Pichai Sundararajan doubled down and claimed Google “really need to have people internally who represent the world in its totality. And yet, the company has yet to implement a policy of aggressively hiring Nazis, Eskimos, Christians, or Mbenga bushmen from Cameroon.
“To the girls who dream of being an engineer or an entrepreneur, and who dream of creating amazing things, I want you to know that there’s a place for you in this industry, there’s a place for you at Google,” he told the crowd gathered at a company recreation field. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise,” he said to cheers and applause. “You belong here and we need you.”
Pichai told the audience, which included about 50 contest finalists from seven countries including the U.S., that seeing the girls gave him hope for the future.
“At Google we are very committed to building products for everyone in the world,” Pichai said. “To do that well, we really need to have people internally who represent the world in totality. It’s really important that more women and girls have the opportunity to participate in technology, to learn how to code, create and innovate.”
Both perspectives can’t be correct.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Google’s CEO cancels a scheduled company-wide “townhall meeting” for fear of the public knowing who is doing what there.
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has cancelled its much anticipated meeting to talk about gender issues today. The move came after some of its employees expressed concern over online harassment they had begun to receive after their questions and names have been published outside the company on a variety of largely alt-right sites.
“We had hoped to have a frank, open discussion today as we always do to bring us together and move forward. But our Dory questions appeared externally this afternoon, and on some websites Googlers are now being named personally,” wrote Pichai to employees. “Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be ‘outed’ publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall.”
Pichai was set to address the search giant’s 60,000 employees in 30 minutes in an all-hands meeting about a recent post by recently fired employee James Damore.
Several sites like this one [literally, this one -VD] has been publishing internal discussion posts and giving out information on those employees. In addition, in a move that many Googlers found already disturbing, Damore did his first major interview with alt-right YouTube personality, Stefan Molyneux (ironic, I know, since Google owns the online video giant).
It’s cute they think we’re not going to find out what their internal discussions concern. Google spies on us, we keep an eye on them. Seems fair.
They’ll strike back soon enough. We’re expecting it. My prediction is a “surprise” leak of their critics’ embarrassing emails and URL histories.
Tech conservatives move Alt Right
My free trade debate opponent, Dr. James Miller, has published a piece on Business Insider about the way in which conservatives like himself are gravitating towards the Alt Right under the growing pressure from SJWs in technology.
Many Business Insider readers won’t trust an anonymous Breitbart interview, but for what’s relevant to this article, please do trust that this Googler’s views accurately reflects how many on the right think about SJWs.
Vox Day, a leader of the alt-right, wrote a book called “SJWs Always Lie” with the explicit goal to “show you how SJWs operate, teach you how to see through their words, explain how to correctly anticipate their actions, and give you the weapons you need to successfully thwart their inevitable attempts to disqualify you, discredit you, and destroy your reputation.”
Damore’s firing is probably going to cause many Silicon Valley Republicans to prepare themselves by reading this book.
The key difference in tactics between the alt-right and traditional right is that the alt-right doesn’t place much value on playing fair, and they mock conservatives’ seeming desire to lose honorably. On a recent Periscope video Vox said that his supporters in tech companies (which he claims are numerous) should “be the second or third most enthusiastic SJW in your group.”
He considers SJWs to be the enemy that’s beyond reason. When a commentator suggested that publically supporting SJW views might give them legitimacy, Vox said “F— legitimacy. You are thinking like a conservative…”
It will be poisonous if the tech right feels compelled to not only hide their beliefs but also to actively pretend to believe in progressive diversity values. This pretending will embitter them, probably pushing many to the more radical alt-right…. Business works best if different political tribes don’t seek to crush others when they have a temporary upper-hand. If, however, the right perceived that SJWs are after them, it’s understandable (if regrettable) that they will treat SJWs likewise when they have the power.
Although the left greatly outnumbers the right in tech, if the right uses stealth tactics and the left doesn’t, the right might eventually gain an advantage in the career-destroying game because they will more easily locate high-value targets.
As a free market Republican, I dislike most of the alt-right policy views. But my kind are not inclined to fight an underhanded company by company dirty political war, while the alt-right is. If SJWs force the tech right into these fights, they will push them into the eager arms of the alt-right.
People have no use for the McClellans and the parade ground generals once the shooting starts. They need Grants and Shermans and Pattons, and they know it. The Alt Right is the only right that fights. That is why it is the only Right that will command any allegiance from all the various right-leaning, pro-Western, pro-Christian, pro-freedom, pro-white, and pro-nationalist populations.
The LawDog Files: African Adventures
LawDog had the honor of representing law and order in the Texas town of Bugscuffle as a Sheriff’s Deputy, where he became notorious for, among other things, the famous Case of the Pink Gorilla Suit. But long before he put on the deputy’s star, he grew up in Nigeria, where his experiences were equally unforgettable. In AFRICAN ADVENTURES, LawDog chronicles his encounters with everything from bush pilots, 15-foot pythons, pygmy mongooses, brigadier-captains, and Peace Corp hippies to the Nigerian space program.
THE LAWDOG FILES: AFRICAN ADVENTURES are every bit as hilarious as the previous volume, as LawDog relates his unforgettable experiences in a laconic, self-deprecating manner that is funny in its own right. Africa wins again, and again, and again, but, so too does the reader in this sobering, but hilarious collection of true tales from the Dark Continent.
Already a #1 category bestseller!
From the reviews:
- Better than the first! Only two authors have ever made me laugh so much and so hard that I had to put the book down to finish later. One is Terry Pratchett, and the other is LawDog. I made it to the Independence Day story and was laughing so hard I couldn’t see the words.
- Not for anyone who is recovering from abdominal surgery. Seriously. I’m in pain. I don’t think any stitches broke, but OWww. Still an hour before I can have another pain pill.
- I had a hard time imagining how he could top those stories. But the new ‘African Adventures’ is even more enjoyable than expected. Even more than the first LawDog Files, this one is packed with absolutely hilarious stories.
A battered woman, still whining
Instead of simply admitting that she was wrong when she erroneously claimed that a BBC propaganda piece aimed at children was “pretty accurate”, UK “historian” Mary Beard is continuing to cry, and her supporters are continuing to move the goalposts as they attempt to salvage her tattered reputation.
Mary Beard@wmarybeard
It’sreally hard. & I am more battered than I seem.Just think I haven’t been paid to research Rome for 40 yrs to sit and let this crap go by!
Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
Then you should stop acting as a BBC-owned diversity propagandist. You are already a laughingstock outside the UK.
Mike Cernovich, Alt Journalist
Cernovich Media is on the rise; a surprisingly respectful profile on Mike by New York Magazine:
Cernovich claims that on April 2 an anonymous source called him on Signal to tell him that former national security adviser Susan Rice had requested the disclosure of the identities of Americans — including many related to the Trump campaign and transition — in raw intelligence reports, a process known as “unmasking.” He wrote up the tip on Medium, and then watched as it took off on social media, with help from the Drudge Report, Kellyanne Conway, and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, who suggested that were the media not rigged, Cernovich would receive a Pulitzer Prize.
The press, however, didn’t give him much credit for his scoop. A single anonymous source does not typically meet the threshold for publishing news at most media outlets, for starters. And then there was the issue of taking Cernovich seriously at all, given that his earlier work included stuff like a video where a sickly muppet rendering of Clinton collapsed and rose from the dead repeatedly. So when Bloomberg View reported the same news on the morning of April 3, citing “U.S. officials familiar with the matter,” it was treated differently — with total legitimacy. The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and the Washington Times, either unaware or dismissive of the fact that Cernovich was first, wrote that Bloomberg had broken the story. And when Cernovich was cited, by NBC for instance, it was typically within the context of stories that downplayed the newsworthiness of Rice’s actions — the implication being, if the Pizzagate loon is the one with the intel, perhaps the intel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
But by late July, everything had changed, both in how Cernovich perceived the Trump White House, and in how the press perceived Cernovich.
At 3:29 p.m. on July 28, Cernovich took to Twitter to report that a “source close to POTUS” informed him, “Reince has been told he’s out.” The president himself would not announce the decision until 4:49 p.m., while sitting aboard Air Force One on a tarmac in Washington. And although other reporters would go on to say they’d heard rumors of the decision before it came down, Cernovich had the advantage of operating without the barrier of an editor or publisher or any other organizational structure that might inhibit speed — but also lower the odds of a fuck-up.
“The reason that I’m so fast at what I do is — I’m not saying that I’m getting stories that nobody else has — the difference is that if a tip goes out to five people, and I know that it’s a reliable source, I just tweet it out,” he told me. “If you’re at a respectable news organization, that would be considered irresponsible. So, me, I’m just like, ‘Oh. Sounds good. This is a vetted source. I’m rocking and rolling. Let’s get out and get the conversation going.’”
Some people might be a bit torqued at the way that Mike is doing some things differently now, but you shouldn’t be. Men like him and Milo and Jack are playing a very different game than men like Stefan and me. Different rules apply. I don’t support Mike because I agree with him on everything, I support him because he’s a good man and he is a friend.