So the Hugo awards happened. And last night was a pretty decisive defeat for the would-be awardwreckers behind the Sad and Rabid Puppies’ slates, and for Rabid Puppies ringmaster Theodore “Vox Day” Beale in particular: not only did his slate fail to crack the awards (aside from two nominees who didn’t need his help to win), but he also saw his longtime nemesis N.K. Jemisin take the top award for her novel The Fifth Season.
Teddy Baby is trying his best to spin the defeat as a victory (“we have the SF-SJWs exactly where we want them at this point in time”) but even the fake sci-fi boys on Reddit’s gamergate hangout KotakuInAction can see what happened. And they are indeed sad little puppies about it.
Here are some of their highly edifying reactions:
![YESmovementLaci Green raped me. 5 points 12 hours ago So was NK Jemisin the best author this year or are they doing exactly what they're shitting on the Puppies for doing? permalinkembedsavereportreply [–]BulbasaurusThe7th 9 points 10 hours ago No, she is the best black woman of the year. That is what matters. permalinkembedsaveparentreportreply [–]alexdrac 4 points 8 hours ago Black woman writes about "climate change". What more could they want ? I stopped caring what other people think of sci-fi writers when i gave Ursula le Guan (?) a try. The internet was all "omg, such great sci-fi. and from a woman, no less". Well, i couldn't be bothered to finish the book, because it was painfully obvious that it was a book written by a woman for women. The main character (a guy) was going through all kinds of shit, but it seemed his only concern was with the feelings of someone or another. 90% of his inner dialogue was what women think men should be thinking about more.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/urs2.png?ssl=1)
(I had to cross out YESmovement’s Reddit flair because it was a rape joke.)
And then there was this ever-so-slightly ironic comment.
Hey, speak for yourself, dude. The only science fiction, er, books I’ve read in ages have been Chuck Tingle’s Pounded By The Pound: Turned Gay By The Socioeconomic Implications Of Britain Leaving The European Union and My Billionaire Triceratops Craves Gay Ass.
But I do like the irony inherent in lambasting unnamed authors for not being able to “write a coherent sentence” in a group of words that is not actually a sentence.
anent the “ladies under pseudonyms” topic:
Probably most of you know this already, but it’s kind of a moot point; this has already happened.
For pretty much the entirety of the 20th century, most female Sci-Fi authors wrote under either outright male or plausibly androgynous names; sometimes this was mere good fortune( ‘Leigh’ and ‘Marion’, for instance, are gender-neutral names) and sometimes a pseudonym but in either case this was primarily because otherwise editors and publishers wouldn’t even read their work. This was true right through the ’60’s and into the mid-’70’s. It really wasn’t until the ’80’s that the major publishers got over their terror of publishing female authors and started marketing science fiction and fantasy to women directly.
A lot of these authors were able to ‘come out’ once they’d proven their writing ability and gained some name recognition. Here’s a short-and-by-no-means-comprehensive list of female sci-fi authors/pen names from the 1920’s on:
Alice Mary Norton/Andre Norton, Andrew North
Greye La Spina
C.L. Moore
Gertrude Barrows Bennett/Francis Stephens
Leigh Brackett
Dorothy Fontana/D. C. Fontana
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Janet Asimov/J. O. Jeppson
Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr.
Patricia Jo Clayton/Jo Clayton
Carolyn Janice Cherry/C.J. Cherryh
Robert Silverberg famously came under fire for using James Tiptree as an example of a ‘true (masculine) science fiction author’ during an argument where he was positing that women didn’t write good science fiction. When ‘Tiptree’ was revealed as a female author, he had to walk back a lot of his rhetoric, and he wasn’t the only one. (Shaenon can probably talk more authoritatively about this subject than I)
Wikipedia’s ‘List of female science fiction authors, by the way, is a wonderful rabbit-hole to go down. Find it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Women_science_fiction_and_fantasy_writers
tl;dr, a lot of these nimrods probably already do like ‘diverse’ golden-age science fiction, they’re just google-averse.
If you enjoy books from Baen publishers ( scifi / fantasy, generally competes with Tor ) you can get their books in many formats directly from their Webscription website. No DRM. I still have my account from back when it was called webscription ( you can still type in webscription.net but it’s here now and you’ll be redirected ), and I can still download every single purchase without worry or being locked into a format.
Baen did it right a long time ago and I’ve been rather happy with them for that. Otherwise basically limited to Smashwords / etc and / or Calibre + *cough cough unintelligible muttering about addons to fix Amazon DRM cough cough*
As an addendum to NiOg’s observation:
JK Rowling is known to us as JK and not Joanne because she let her publisher convince her that boys wouldn’t read her work if they thought it was written by a woman. The first HP book came out in 1997.
More on topic:
I’m super happy for NK Jemison. I just finished The Fifth Season and I’m now beside myself waiting for my library to get hold of the sequel and/or any of her other work.
On the subject of douchebros railing against “forced” diversity: Diversity is not forced. It’s what happens when you stop forcing homogeneity.
Speaking of fiction writing, can you say (in US English) that a car is “officer issue” when it’s been given to a high military officer for job-related personal transport? I wasn’t entirely sure about this.
This thread is becoming amazing. WHTM needs a new Books thread, with a link to this one.
@NiOg
Funnily enough I always assumed/knew Marion Zimmer Bradley to be a woman, without ever doing any more research, because LANGUAGE. In french, Marion is a strictly female name, not gender neutral*. I loved her Avalon series, by the way. Still have it on hand in case I wanna reread it.
*Although maybe that explains why her books are pretty much unknown here, come to think of it…
I can no longer bring myself to read Marion Zimmer Bradley. (It’s not pretty, possibly triggery.)
Oh, I think they’ll cling on for another year or two before they get bored. Even though they don’t get any of their candidates selected, they can taint the awards for that year and that’s enough for them. They will, eventually, run out of steam, I think. The whole thing is so pointless, even internet manbabies will not be able to sustain themselves on petulance alone.
I’ll, uh, just leave this plot summary of Gravity’s Rainbow here, then, shall I? It’s well-written, I think, but I wonder if it can be considered quite gender-neutral.
And let’s not forget, the utopia these fellows strive for was detailed in “The Screwfly Solution,” written by James Tiptree (who turned out to be a woman) under a further pseudonym.
@LindsayIrene
I read about that right after I posted, while doing the homework I knew I should’ve been doing years ago.
“Separate the art from the artist” they say. I find that increasingly difficult to do as years go by…
If I manage to live through the day without throwing up from stress, I will consider today a victory.
I’m thinking I’m going to have to get rid of a majority of my stuff, considering I have a 50 lbs per box limit, and my bathroom scale is kind of wonky so I literally have no idea what weight my boxes are.
@PI
No more beer to sacrifice in cheers but I reiterate my support for what it’s worth.
(it was damn good beer, surely it can count twice ?)
@msexception
Yep, talk is Disney fucked her head up pretty bad…
@PI
Gambatte!!!
OT : Irony is thick and sweet like honey.
Do the authors actually get paid in the UK? The series that gets the most use at my workplace doesn’t pay authors anything, it’s exclusively a CV thing. You get one free copy of the book, temporary free access to the electronic version, and a “certificate of publication”.
ETA: Another listed benefit is that if you are the general editor, your name will appear on the spine/cover. Seriously.
@ Lorcan Nagle
1) just… lolwhut.
2) there’s literally nothing magical/fantastical in there…? i mean, there are a lot of books in the “any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” genre that sits halfway between scifi and fantasy (I’d put 5th season into this category), but The Radch Trilogy has none of that. this is fucking ridiculous.
3) oh noes, real portrayal of real humans with real emotions and PTSD.
4) but… the British Empire… and feudal Japan…
Well, nobody is referred to as male (except Seviarden is described as ‘obviously male’ at the start when Breq finds her naked in the street, but let’s not bring details into things), so obviously Leckie is a RARR RARR SJW FEMINAZI MESSAGEFIC RARR
As best anyone who read that criticism can tell, it’s because a tavern is mentioned in the first chapter, and they’re called bars or pubs in contemporary or SF?
I know, I know
@ maisrechat
With the MOD stuff it all falls under a general contract I have with them to lecture on law and policy. So I don’t get anything extra for writing ‘JSPs’ as they call them (‘Joint Service Publications’); it’s all part of the remit.
With ‘civvie’ publications I usually clear a few hundred quid. That just about pays for the ink cartridges.
I was asked to write the new armed forces law manual when they introduced the new Armed Forces Act (the author of the previous version had snuffed it). But as I put it at the time “It’ll take a year to write, you’ll put (dead guy’s) name on the cover and it’ll be read by 50 people; most of whom I know”.
(And, knowing that lot, they’d have just pointed out all the mistakes)
@PI
*hugs* and sympathies. We’re moving first of next month, and scrambling to get everything packed (and deal with all kinds of bs paperwork because it’s an income restricted place and we need to prove we’re poor enough).
@Lorcan Nagle
I cannot imagine anyone who has read any significant amount of military fiction being genuinely surprised by a focus on tea. (Coffee is more common when the writer’s a Yank, but tea has certainly come up plenty. Sometimes it’s a fictitious caffeinated beverage that’s functionally identical to tea/coffee though.)
Moreover, as someone who’s read a lot of military SF, soldiers crying over lost comrades, horribly necessary decisions, and various other causes is also routine.
Every time these jackasses complain about this crap, it reinforces for me how little SF they must have actually read, and makes me wonder exactly which 4-5 Heinlein books they reread endlessly.
That said, I wouldn’t personally characterize the Radch books as military sf per se, despite the protagonist being a warship. It’s much more focused on intrigue and investigation, and relatively little of the narrative actually takes place in a military environment. It would be like calling Firefly military SF because Mal and Zoe are veterans.
@Arctic Ape
Offcial issue, perhaps, but not officer issue. Alternately it might be described as a motor pool vehicle,
@ artic ape
In the UK they’re called ‘staff cars’. Don’t know if that’s any use?
I can’t find it now, but some puppy or another actually did wax nostalgic about how great scifi was before the sjw’s invaded it because back then it was all about innovation and discovery. and he used star trek tos as an example of such a show and how he and his fellow star trek watching nerds got into engineering because of the awesomeness of moving doors on the enterprise.
people can be very obtuse about things when they’re sufficiently motivated to be so.
that is even more ridiculous than i expected
And Alan provided the part of my comment after the comma that got cut off. Thank you Alan.
@ dalillama
No worries. It was my mates at GCHQ who told me what you’d meant to write anyway, so the thanks should go to them. 😉
Huh?
Half the first book is set in a military environment. This gets maybe a bit fuzzier with the 2nd and 3rd books because it’s hard to tell whether stations count as military or civ installations, but a lot of the story lines happen on military ships and involve members of the military.
there’s certainly a lot less official war-making and large-scale battles than is typical for military sf tho, i guess.
Re: drinking establishments
Technically the names have specific meanings originally:
Bar – any place that serves alcohol
Public house – bar that’s not exclusively for members
Inn – provides accommodation
Tavern – not sure but think it’s something about serving food
ETA: bars, in the sense you went up to a counter for service were first introduced at railway stations. Prior to that it was all table service.