#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
I await with amused interest the avalanche of articles declaring the pressing need for acceptance of homosexual incest in the game industry and the declaration that there is no place in the industry for the legendary Mr. Miyamoto.
Meanwhile, at Bioware, some poor disturbed gentleman wearing a dress is thinking, “incestuous homosexuality, how did we ever neglect to include that character option in Dragon Age? But maybe we could work it into the plot for the next Mass Effect!”
Atari’s legendary ET dump in the desert has been found:
A decades-old urban legend was put to rest Saturday when workers for a documentary film production company recovered “E.T.” Atari game cartridges from a heap of garbage buried deep in the New Mexico desert.
The “Atari grave” was, until that moment, a highly debated tale among gaming enthusiasts and other self-described geeks for 30 years. The story claimed that in its death throes, the video game company sent about a dozen truckloads of cartridges of what many call the worst video game ever to be forever hidden in a concrete-covered landfill in southeastern New Mexico.
The search for the cartridges of a game that contributed to the demise of Atari will be featured in an upcoming documentary about the biggest video game company of the early ’80s.
I’m of two minds about this discovery. While I’m glad to know the dump was real, (which I always assumed to be the case), I would have preferred for the cartridges to be left for far future generations to discover, just so their archeologists could come up with the usual cockamamie theories about the items they are uncovering.
One of the more amusingly wry gems of The Hermetic Millennia is when the ur-history of the Witches is mentioned in passing:
Mickey turned and turned again, and drew a large circle on the snowy ground with his staff. “Here is my circle of Power! Within it, all who walk tread lightly on their Mother Earth, leaving no trace when they die; and all goods are held in common; and all class-enemies, all enmities, inequalities, and patriarchy must be left outside, and cannot pass my ninefold wards! I call upon Jadis and Jahi, Phoebe and Prudence, Sabrina and Samantha, Willow and Wendy, to watch the sacred bounds!”
Menelaus went up to him, stepping into the circle, and said softly, “Uh. You do know all those people watching your sacred bounds are, um, made up from kiddie pixies and texts and toons, right? Make-believe?”
Mickey drew himself upright, which thrust his belly out even farther, and the scowl on his face was like a line drawn in a pie pan filled with raw dough. “Many records survived from the Days of Fire—the Final Archive listed nine hundred thousand references to the beloved Witch Hermione alone, not to mention Gillian Holroyd and Glinda the Good! Would you have us believe that the ancients devoted so much emphasis, effort, and attention to what they knew to be merely idle fictions?! Next you will claim that the warlocks Klingsor and Castaneda are unreal!”
There can be little doubt that the development of the novel during the present period of civilization is going to seriously screw up future historians if Man ever passes through another post-literate period. Which, based on the present trends, looks increasingly likely.
This for those who have read the book to discuss it. Do not open up the comments if you do not wish to encounter spoilers.
Back when I first responded to NK Jemisin’s various attacks and lies in my inimitably calm and factual manner, the SFWA writers reacted with much the same combination of outrage and vitriol with which the Pink SF/Fers have met the news of the nomination of one of my works for the Hugo Award. However, when I invited them to attempt to prove that anything I said was a) false, or, b) racist, every single one of them tucked tail and ran away. Every single one of them.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden was nothing but talk. John Scalzi was nothing but talk. Stephen Gould was nothing but talk. Jason Sanford was nothing but talk. Teresa Nielsen Hayden was nothing but talk. Charles Stross was nothing but talk. Every single one of these self-proclaimed champions of the marginalized and the oppressed fell silent rather than defend their supposed principles.
This may be because they were afraid that I could make my case, or perhaps they simply feared to have their own secret racism exposed to their peers. It’s even possible they were sufficiently self-aware to realize how silly they would look if they attempted to define racism down to “being insufficiently obsequious to an individual of predominantly sub-Saharan descent.”
So, perhaps the larger community of fen is capable of doing what the SFWA community was not, which is actually proving the truth of their oft-repeated charges. I’m therefore extending an invitation to publicly make the case for my supposed racism to anyone who has asserted that I am a racist on the basis of my statements concerning “the educated, but ignorant half-savage” NK Jemisin.
If you truly believe what you are asserting about me, then I invite you to demonstrate the truth of your beliefs here. It should be easy, after all, right? If my statements are so blatantly racist as you claim them to be, how could you not show it to all and sundry. I will not only post your argument here in its entirety, but am willing to honestly answer any questions you might have, without evasion, with the sole requirement that you must agree to honestly answer my questions, without evasion, until we mutually agree that no further discussion is possible.
And if no one steps forward, well, everyone will then know that these accusations of racism are spurious, those making them don’t truly believe what they are saying, and none of the accusers have the courage of their supposedly anti-racist convictions. The black community will know that for all their talk of inclusiveness and equality, not a single white individual in SF/F was willing to stand up and defend them. And let’s face it, if every single anti-racist in the community is afraid to publicly confront racists, then it should be readily apparent that the racists are going to win in the end.
Nate poses the question:
Faulkner? Hemingway? Poe? Some other? Go. I lean towards Faulkner myself… but I am an inveterate southron rebel.. and so I confess bias. That doesn’t mean I’m not correct.
I have to admit that I admire Faulkner, for his attitude towards publishers and prizes if nothing else. But I am not especially fond of his work. Hemingway I find to be considerably overrated, more a product of his self-promotion than anything else. His lean, stripped-down prose was innovative and influential, but I think it has had a seriously deleterious effect on literature. One has only to read John C. Wright to lament the world of rich and expansive prose that we have lost.
We are all the children of Hemingway and we are the worse off for it.
I am strongly partial to Edgar Allen Poe, but I am concerned that may be more due to my inclination for the morbid than anything else. Before I cast my vote for him, perhaps we should cast a broader net.
There is John Updike. No, he is too self-conscious, too inclined towards literary posturing. Everything reads as if he is looking expectantly at the readers and anticipating their approval: “look, Ma, I’s writin’!” John Irving has a way with words, but he wrote essentially the same book over and over, and I found his petty, exaggerated absurdities to be insulting. Saul Bellow is boring and tedious. Philip Roth is perverted, self-absorbed, and tedious.
There is O. Henry, whose short stories are among the best ever written, but there is more to literary greatness than tight plotting and clever twist endings.
Neal Stephenson merits being at least mentioned, as I would consider his Reamde to be a legitimate candidate for a Great American Novel. But his grasp of the human condition, to say nothing of his difficulty with endings, is too shaky in comparison with the other greats. Ray Bradbury is the most sentimental American author, and I would argue that Dandelion Wine is the most perfect portrait of the traditional America to which every sane American would like to return, but, like Stephenson, the mere inclusion on the list is sufficient. I would say that Bradbury is the greatest American SF author, however.
I am an F. Scott Fitzgerald fan, but his work is too little and too light to merit serious consideration. I have not read Thomas Pynchon, and I seriously hope that no one would so foolish as to propose David Foster Wallace with a straight face. Tom Wolfe’s novels have always struck me as cartoons, insightful and observant cartoons, to be sure, but cartoons nevertheless. Kurt Vonnegut is an unfunny clown; I put him below Stephen King. Hell, I’d put him below Stephanie Miller and Laurell K. Hamilton. Jack London might be the quintessentially American writer, but his style was far too limited to merit serious consideration.
At the end of the day, I don’t see how it is possible to go with anyone but Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain himself. He had the complete package, prose, plot, characters, and commentary on the human condition, in addition to fully representing the American spirit.
It is, I think, important to distinguish between the rabbits who are doing their usual rabbiting and the people at the organization that gives out the Hugo Awards. There may be some ideological overlap, but it is quite clear from everything that I have experienced and observed that the WorldCon people take their responsibilities seriously and have every intention of remaining above the fray. Kevin Standlee, who is one of the site administrators for thehugoawards.org, comments on the matter:
I have not seen any serious proposals to attempt to limit eligibility for the Awards based on the content of the works. What I have seen are “right-wing” people saying that they’re sure that “left-wing” people will show up and pass rules prohibiting “those people” (whoever they are) from being on the ballot. These are the sort of oppression fantasy that both the left and right are prone to embracing, and they won’t happen. Even if someone would be so foolish as to try to introduce such a tom-fool motion, I predict it would be shot out of the water faster than you can say “Object to Consideration!”
I mean this. The regular attendees of the WSFS Business Meeting are a fractious lot who disagree profoundly over many things (there are many people posting here who can probably substantiate this, starting with Our Gracious Hosts), but I’ve seen the meeting’s members stand together as nearly one when this class of proposal comes before the meeting. Indeed, one particular fugghead proposed four bonehead proposals naming an individual and attempting to do something similar to trying to disqualify individuals for the Hugo Awards (albeit it was about Site Selection rather than the Hugos). The four proposals were killed within four minutes. And the fool was naming someone who was not particularly well-liked and was a notorious gadfly. WSFS will stomp on such things, and the entire governance process of the society makes it so difficult to change the rules without being able to get a broad consensus in two widely differing locations (London and Spokane, in the current case) that I dismiss talk of trying to regulate the content of Hugo nominees (as opposed to their technical form) as delusions.
Every communication I have received from the Hugo Packet Administration from the moment they informed me of OVA’s nomination has been professional and polite. “Opera Vita Aeterna” will be in the packet along with the other nominated works, including all 14 volumes of The Wheel of Time, so it’s actually an astonishingly good deal for the $40 price of a supporting membership. And, if you recall, even when the nominations were announced, they were announced by the LonCon representatives in a level and impartial manner.
My impression is that the Awards people are primarily concerned that everyone follows the rules appropriately. Since Larry and I both did so, they have no inherent problem with our nominations nor do they have any desire to sabotage their own system merely because a few people on the Left don’t happen to be overly enamored of us. Indeed, they seemed to be pleased to announce the fact that a record number of nominating ballots were cast and I have heard they are anticipating a record number of votes for the awards. Supporting membership sales are also up. All three things are historical feathers in LonCon’s cap.
So, I strongly suggest leaving the Awards people out of it. Many of you have argued that it is important to separate the professional from the personal and the political, and they appear to be doing precisely that, regardless of what their personal sympathies and political inclinations may happen to be. For which, I would think they are to be congratulated, not condemned.
Now to speak of an unfair playing field. One of the site administrators of Making Light, Abi Sutherland declared:
(You know what I would love? adore? enjoy the heck out of? A genuine Larry Correia fan coming here and enthusing about the work. Taking about what it is, not what it is not; talking about why they love it rather than why they hate Librul SF and the Libruls who read it. And that is the difference between Correia and Day, in my view. I can’t picture a Day fan doing that and making it work.)
I think she’s wrong. In fact, I think my fans are every bit as capable of explaining why they love what they love in a positive manner as Larry’s fans. So, if you are inclined to enthuse about one of my works, talk about what it is rather than what it is not, and explain why you love it, I would encourage you to go there and do so. But I will caution you that you will be attacked, ridiculed, insulted, disbelieved, and most likely, disemvoweled by the Toad of Tor, so don’t even think about doing it unless you can remain calm and resist the temptation to respond in kind. Remember, you’re never going to convince the closed minds of the sort that will respond to you, but you can convince the larger numbers of more reasonable people who read in silence.
There have been 13 senior financial services executives deaths around the world this year, but the most notable thing about the sad suicide of the 14th, a 52-year-old banker at France’s Bred-Banque-Populaire, is she is the first female. As Le Parisien reports, Lydia (no surname given) jumped from the bank’s Paris headquarter’s 14th floor shortly before 10am.
However, this one looks considerably less suspicious than some of the others.
As the Torlings double down to concede his point. Lest any of you Hugo voters feel any need to be objective, or to avoid downgrading authors for their political views or being published by Tor, consider the publicly expressed perspective of one of the larger Torlings, Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden:
Here’s the deal for me:
Why should I vote to tell the rest of the world that SF is a place where the only difference between James White and Vox Day is their commercially published texts?
The awards we give out are are a giant signal saying “This is what we love, this is what we value, this is what we think is important.”
Why the hell am I supposed to lie about what those things are?
Why have I not been flaming hairless people who refer to the bizarre text-only voting protocol they’re trying to push on me as “honest”? It’s obvious they’re suggesting that doing anything else is dishonest.
The way they want me to vote is not honest. It’s not how I think. Nor is it how I’ve ever voted. Nor is it how most of fandom has thought, or how it’s voted, year after year, for many decades.
The Toad of Tor could not have underlined Larry’s point more clearly: the Hugo awards are nothing but a giant signal. Voting based on literary merit is not only unnecessary, it is entirely irrelevant. To even suggest people should vote based on literary merit is “not honest”. She openly claims “the artist’s work can’t be divided from the artist’s politics.”
How very Marxian of her. Forget the personal. The professional is the political.
Very well. So those are the rules. Now you have to ask yourself what is important to you? A lady astronaut on Mars? The truth of feelings? Or a work of eternal life? What do you value, courage and camaraderie and the triumph of well-armed good over evil, a vast and meandering morass of moral equivalency, or parasitism? What do you love, the humble faith of a beleaguered chaplain or ersatz horses or the feminist retellings of fairy tales?
You have Tor’s blessing to send them an unmistakable signal. If Tor publishes it, it goes below No Award.
RW provides a second review of WITCHFINDER, by Sarah Hoyt:
3 parts Fantasy
2 parts Fairy Tale
1 splash of Science Fiction
1 dash of Mythology
Mix ingredients thoroughly with magic. Garnish with a slice of Romance.
Sarah A. Hoyt has ambitiously attempted to tie together fantasy, fairy tale, and a bit of romance; and for the most part she pulls it off brilliantly. It is a difficult work to review without being a spoiler since part of the enjoyment of reading this book is watching how she develops the worlds in the multi-verse and how she incorporates many elements from well-known stories from fairy tales and mythology, with an occasional nod to religion, into a coherent whole.
CHARACTERS: Hoyt does an exceptional job bringing her characters to life. She uses a formulaic approach to how most of them are developed throughout the story, where she describes them in three stages of growth. The first stage is she portrays them as they seem to be to others or how they believe that they have to act. The second stage occurs as they interact with each other and start to learn each other’s secrets and true selves. For the final stage Hoyt shows the characters starting to understand what they really need to be in order to fulfill their destiny. In lesser hands this template approach would seem two-dimensional, but Hoyt uses this approach to good effect aligning the character development within the scope of the overall story. (8/10)
PROSE: Hoyt’s prose is hard to describe; in some places it is fluid and conversational, but in other places it borders on being poetic. Her ability to create word pictures aids in her development of new worlds as she masterfully describes exotic places, Fairyland in particular. She mentioned in her write-up that the story was written as blog postings over many months, and there is a slow evolution in the use of punctuation and grammar as the story progresses. Similarly, there were quite a few typos, but she has already claimed these too. (7/10)
PLOT: [Warning: this section contains a few spoilers, so if you plan on reading the book I suggest skipping down to the IDEAS paragraph.] The general structure holds nicely as she develops a modern-day fairy tale of a young lady coming to terms with the fact that she is a princess in another world. Simultaneously Hoyt creates a concurrent plot about a family of world-jumping witches, closer to the fantasy genre. The stories intertwine early, with heavy doses of mystery and suspense as the Duke of Darkwater realizes that he is being targeted; and all of the characters begin to question the motives of each other, even their closest family members.
However, there are a few items that weaken the story in my opinion. The first is relatively minor: the character of the matriarch, the dowager duchess Ainsling, is very interesting and plays a large role in the early part of the story, but then she disappears for most of the second half, making a brief cameo at the end. The second is that the novel’s climatic showdowns don’t quite live up to the promise of the escalation of the conflicts. The third issue might be related to Hoyt’s stated goal that she was writing more of a romantic work to lure female fantasy readers. The issue I had is that there are discussions of cross-species relationships, necrophilia, child prostitution, and a heavy dose of homosexuality. The cross-species relationships is understandable given that the book is somewhere between fantasy and fairytale, but the other items seemed somewhat forced. My reason for bringing this up is that with the exception of these items, along with maybe two or three unnecessary expletives, I would have liked to pass the book along to my young adolescent daughter to read, as I’m sure she would enjoy the story. If the author feels that the homosexual relationship is integral to the story, then I’d suggest that she continue to use vague references and hints, as she used earlier in the book where she was modeling it after Regency romances. (6/10)
IDEAS: I thought that the most creative aspect of Hoyt’s universe is that all of the worlds have their own versions of legends and fairytales based on actual happenings, mainly in either Avalon or Fairyland. As with any fairytale, there are a couple of morals to conclude the story: lead when called upon, and be a servant-leader, not a tyrant. (5/10)
TOTAL: (6.5/10) In truth I liked Witchfinder better than that score indicates, mainly because it equally weighs all four of the elements above. This book is the first of Hoyt’s works that I have read, and I found it enjoyable enough that I expect that I’ll soon be reading other books from her. Men concerned about the “romance” label need not be scared away since the love story is in the background through most of the book. If Hoyt were to address the issues mentioned above, then I would give this book a high recommendation to young readers as well.
It appears I unfairly lumped Alan Heuer in with the rest of the spineless Torlings yesterday. He commented:
I see that one of my Tor.com posts is quoted in this post. It seems that my post is being lumped in with the posts of people who are declaring that they will vote against certain works because of the political views of their authors. This is not my stance at all.
My post states that I will be voting “No Award” ahead of THE WHEEL OF TIME in the Best Novel category. I know nothing of what Robert Jordan’s politics were or what Brandon Sanderson’s politics are. I simply think it is ridiculous that a 14-book series published over the span of 23 years is being allowed to compete for a Hugo for best novel of the YEAR. I do not see it as a legitimate nominee.
This will be my 41st consecutive year of Hugo voting and, as always, I will judge the works, not the authors.
I don’t agree with Mr. Heuer’s perspective, since the fact that the rules may be ridiculous is not sufficient to make THE WHEEL OF TIME’s nomination illegitimate, but it is a perfectly reasonable and defensible one. Not that I will be voting for THE WHEEL OF TIME myself, as Rand al’Thor is the most loathsome protagonist I have ever encountered in fantasy, I lost interest in both the story and the characters, and I wound up failing to make it past the fifth or sixth book in the series.
I have removed Mr. Heuer’s comment from the post and I apologize to him for the erroneous implication that he lacks integrity in the manner of the other quoted individuals.
And speaking of the Hugos, at the Castalia blog Daniel Eness has a post comparing past Best Novel winners in which he shows that there is a long tradition of a) forgettable works beating out superior ones, and, b) ludicrous No Award votes.