Dreamer Easy

"A Series of Steaks" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad in the January issue of Clarkesworld was lots of fun. :)

Must gather up more stuff to nominate for this year's awards. Liu Cixin's "Death's End" is going in there.

The once-more Rabid Puppy-infested Hugo ballot is out, and File770.com is down, presumably from the strain of people slapping their foreheads and grinding their teeth. (Which means that for now I have nowhere to inflict these processes on myself except here.)

Since this year you-know-who has included some respectable material on his slate, just to fuck with us, the trick will be to pick out the worthwhile from the worthless and vote for it anyway, followed by No Award. No matter what we do, you-know-who will claim victory, so what the hell.

btw, there's tons of fun stuff in the 1941 Retro-Hugo ballot!

The Sad Puppies posted their list of recommendations for Hugo nominations on 17 March.

Two weeks before the nominations close.

That's a slate.

(The fact that they're acting like two-year-olds about authors being asked to be removed from their list tends to support this interpretation.)

I want everyone to read this short, untitled fantasy story, posted on Tumblr in February 2015. I plan to nominate it for the next round of Hugos:

when she is born, they name her mary.

I also plan to nominate Kelly Robson's short story "Two-Year Man" and Paul McAuley's "Wild Honey", both from the August 2015 issue of Asimov's.

I wish I had more stuff to rec you right now, but two obstacles intervene - not enough time to read, and what I am reading in the big magazines is, with rare exceptions, doing nothing for me. Alas!

A terrific privilege of buying a support membership for Worldcon, and thus voting rights for the Hugos, is the ton of goodies included in the Hugo voters' packet - even this year's one, which is of course stuffed with unreadable Puppy rubbish. The "graphic story" examples in particular were a joy to read - juicy slabs of the new Ms Marvel, Rat Queens (a D&D-like series full of blood and brio), and the, erm, remarkable Sex Criminals, which I think will get my #1 vote for sheer originality.

This morning I read Kary English's short story Totaled, a Puppy pick, but IMHO one of the few stories they slated which has any business being on the ballot. (Like the other authors placed on the slate, English was not asked, and recently gave head Rabid Puppy honcho Vox Day the finger.)

Anyway, being about creepy brain stuff, Totaled is right up my alley. (Basically, I've never recovered from reading Greg Egan's The Jewel.) I enjoyed it, the use of neuroscience was simple but clever, it was Twilight Zone nightmare poignant. Now I'm hopping from foot to foot trying to decide whether I should give it a vote in the Short Story category, and if so, whether I should put it above or below No Award.

Because it is good, but - and it shares this with pretty much every other SF short story I'm encountering in contemporary magazines and anthologies - it needed one more draft, or the input of a wise editor. It's far from being a dog's breakfast, like Flow was. It's just that there are dropped stitches here and there. An example: ( SPOILERS )

Totaled is available to read for free online. If you have a read, feel free to leave me a comment - it'd be interesting to compare notes.

This falls into two categories: reading stuff on this year's ballot, and reading stuff for next year's nominations.

It seems only fair to at least give the Puppy nominees a look. Like many publishers, Analog has made its Hugo candidates for this year available for free online. I've just read the novella Flow by Arlan Andrews, Sr, a likeable story of quasi-scientific exploration with strong world-building. Its Puppy appeal is obvious: no GURLS. And perhaps because of this, not much society-building; if you'd played D&D you're already familiar with the main setting, God's Port. The story's main problem is its repetition. Where our hero comes from east is called dimward and day is called dim. This is interesting, but the continual reminders become comical, then annoying, then excruciating. I lost count of those - there are dozens! - but to pick other examples, we're told twice about the scarcity of lumber back home and three times about the surprising hair colours in God's Port. It becomes maddening and gives what should be a good story an amateurish feel.

The first story I've found which I think might deserve a nomination next year is the beautiful Slow by Lia Swope Mitchell, from the online magazine Apex.

In my search I also stumbled across another online magazine, Unlikely Stories, and its Unlikely Cryptography issue. The Joy of Sects by Joseph Tomaras is hilarious and very rude. Dropped Stitches by Levi Sable has a terrific premise, but like so many of the stories I'm reading, seems to have come out of the oven before it was completely cooked.

The Hugos. Blog postings I've found particularly helpful in understanding what's going on:

The Psychology of Hugo Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies

Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: An Analysis of Theodore Beale and his Supporters by Phil Sandifer. Long, hard, and satisfying. I learned much.

Also see: the remarkable short-short story If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love by Rachel Swirsky. Brief, beautiful, beautifully structured. Hugo nominee last year. Loathed by Puppies, making it automatically worth a look. Not everyone's cup of tea, of course - but then, what is?

(There has, of course, always been a conspiracy to ruin art.)

Current events:

Mahatma Gandhi, Baltimore, and the Myth of Nonviolence: "What happens if 12.6% of the population, a disproportionate number of whom are unemployed or incarcerated or have minimum-wage jobs in which they're easily replaced, try to duplicate a tactic that worked for an overpowering majority? Not a great deal, unfortunately."

Police Killings Picked Up Where Lynching Left Off: "... it's estimated that two or three blacks were lynched each week in the American South during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Compare that to conservative reports from the FBI that, in the seven years between 2005 and 2012, a white officer used deadly force against a black person almost two times every week."

ETA: Commentary from David Simon, police reporter and creator of Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show' and Baltimore's Anguish. See also this report from Marci Tarrant Johnson, a habeas corpus lawyer working to get arrested protesters out of Baltimore's jails.

This one connects to the Puppy psychology piece linked to above. In Ferguson and Beyond, Punishing Humanity: "... white men have experienced a relative loss of status. And they now have more rivals for desirable positions. Add to that the fact that they may find themselves surpassed by those they tacitly expected to be in social positions beneath them, and we have a recipe for resentment and the desire to regain dominance."

Whatever you thought of SBS presenter Scott McIntyre's angry Anzac Day tweets, I'm grateful to him for opening my eyes to an unhappy piece of Australian history: sexual assaults on Japanese women by the British Commonwealth Occupation Force.

Homeless Diggers reveal Australia's double standards

I was reluctant to vote in this year's Hugos for a number of reasons, but what the hell, I can cast a meaningful ballot in good conscience even if I don't vote in every single category. Thank goodness for the voters' packet of stuff! I'd never be able to track down and sample everything in time if I had to do it myself.

I'm sure I'm not saying anything here that hasn't been or isn't being said by wiser and more deeply involved people elsewhere. It's just that it's coincided with my desire to start reading much more contemporary SF. So bear with me (or ignore me :) as I try to think this through.

Hugo Awards Become A Joke After Ballot Stuffing Affects Nominations

Technically I think "ballot stuffing" is the wrong term, but this article explains how the Hugos were successfully gamed: by asking voters in an already small pool to pick specific works. Immediately, the problem for anyone who wants to oppose them either for political or for general fairness reasons runs smack into the question of whether to push a different specific set of works. And then of course there'd be multiple selections, and a fight over whose was the right one, dogs and cats living together, etc. Even just voting for whatever stuff the Sad Puppies didn't push is kind of dubious.

I guess opposition has to take a two-pronged approach. One, increase the size of the voter pool, thus making it harder to game the system. That would mean getting more people who are eligible to go ahead and vote (but how to instill in them the necessary "breathtaking fervor"?); and getting more people to become members of Worldcon so they can vote.

Two, seek out the kind of work that the Sad Puppies eschew; if it's good, make it known. This is something that can be done with the help of a library and blog, if you don't happen to have fifty bucks lying around. So here's where it overlaps with my project to read more contemporary SF. (I'd already subscribed to Locus with this goal in mind.) If all goes well you can expect some reviews here as the year goes on.

Thinking just now about how my professional interest in catching up on what people are doing in SF these days has coincided with the Sad Puppies backlash, and how that in turn overlaps with my attempt to make half the fiction I read the work of women or of men of colour. Which probably sounds try-hard, but has been invaluable in opening up my reading, widening my knowledge of history, etc, and discovering writers and works which I might otherwise never have tried. (It's similar to just trying to read outside your usual genre - lots of discoveries to be made.) A useful side-effect has been that even when it comes to white male authors (dead or alive :), I'm still reading more widely: saving favourites - Neal Stephenson, for example - as treats, rather than powering through their oeuvres to the exclusion of all else. Comparably, because I have to save room for non-white and non-male writers, I'm also more choosy about who I read: which is fine, there are a jillion classic novels written by white guys which I want to get under my belt, including the rest of George Orwell's stuff (I've never read "Animal Farm"!). I'm currently reading Solzhenitsyn's "Cancer Ward" - wonderfully black and funny - and I'm pretty sure I picked that up because I came across "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" at Eastwood library and it was thin. So random chance still plays its role as well. :) Anyway, what I sat down to type was this: both last year's Hugo winners and this year's anti-SP voting suggestions provide numerous possibilities for additions to the groaning "read me" shelf. (Partly groaning because William Gibson's fat "Peripherals" is still on it.) I read Ann Leckie's Hugo-and-everything-else-winning "Ancillary Justice" because a Sad Puppy said it won because it was written by a woman. It reminded me of nothing so much as the Larry Niven stuff I adored as a teen. :) So if those guys hate something lauded by others, it's a pointer that there might be something worth checking out. I'd like to be more involved, more political about all this, but right now it's more self-interest than anything else. I guess what I'm looking for these days is as much variety as possible, and listening to less-often-heard voices is a great way to do that.