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.
Wins for Okorafor and Jemisin and defeats for the Puppies! Truly a good day for nerdkind.
My favourite Heinlein books were always his very early stuff, like The Iliad. It’s interesting to see how his style developed over time.
Thanks, Dalillama. I’m not writing about US military specifically but trying to narrate in third person for an American character’s POV. As an ESL fanfic writer I can perhaps hope that my word choices are at best 99 % accurate and 90 % in style 🙂
@EJ
I was gonna say The Epic of Gilgamesh but I guess that’d be redundant now.
@Sheila
I’m always interested in reading people’s stuff ! I’ll apply as soon as I can safely open gmail without risk of crashing my computer. (don’t ask)
EJ (The Other One):
Thanks for the recommendation! I think my earliest Heinlein was The Tempest. Or, as it’s also known, Forbidden Planet.
SF has always had progressive voices going back to Mary friggin’ Shelley, but the Futurians, the group of young fan/writers who founded Worldcon and eventually the Hugo Awards, leaned conservative and libertarian (even though their founder was an avowed Commie). Isaac Asimov was the most prominent leftist member, and even he could be reactionary on some issues.
Even though science fiction itself has been politically diverse, the core of traditional American SF fandom has long been a haven for white male libertarian types. That said, women have been prominent in fandom from early on and have all but dominated SF conventions since the ’70s. The continued insistence that SF is for men, and conservative men at that, seems contrary to observable reality.
FYI, the rape joke still shows in the image alt text.
(Feel free to delete this comment).
@Tara:
Which character(s) in Downbelow Station had this happen to them? I don’t recall that happening in that book. However, Cyteen does have that as a plot point; maybe that’s the book you were thinking of? And her Tripoint book (set in the same universe as the other two) deals with the after effects of a rape twenty years down the road.
@WWTH:
If this is the adaptation I’m thinking of, didn’t LeGiun hate it for making her black protagonist white, along with the rest of the cast (except for that one token dude)? I recall reading an essay about that ages ago.
That essay also had one comment in it that made me go ‘whut?!?’. She made a statement to the effect that the conservative fear of ‘sword and sorcery = witchcraft/Satanism’ is code for ‘fear of Black men’. I live in a conservative area, and I can tell you that S&S fear isn’t the codeword for fear of POC’s. It really is the codeword for fear of witchcraft and stuff like that.
Eassay was good otherwise, as I recall it.
Yes.
It created a huge uproar. I read Ged as more South Asian looking than black though.
I’ve never seen it but it was supposedly a pretty poor adaptation and not just because of the whitewashing.
Too late to edit it in. Here’s Le Guin’s response.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2004/12/a_whitewashed_earthsea.html
@WWTH:
Thanks. Though I swear I’ve seen a longer version of that response somewhere else. Unless Slate isn’t letting me see the entire article for some odd reason.
So. I was reading up on this, and I came across Vox Day’s website. It turns out his publisher is called Castalia House.
At first I was annoyed, because I thought it was a reference to Herman Hesse’s book The Glass Bead Game. In that book, Castalia is a province where only academics live (teachers, independent scholars, and members of the system’s hierarchy.) True, there don’t seem to be any women among them and it was published in the 40s – there WERE women in universities then, Hermie dear – but overall I liked the book. It was partly serious, partly satirical, and not quite like anything I’d read before. Anyway, I was all like, “Vox Day, GET OUT OF MY FANDOM.”
Oh yeah, Castalia could also be an ancient Greek reference… Hesse’s Castalia was presumably named after it.
On topic now: congrats to Jemisin!
What is it about Earthsea that seems to invoke really, really terrible adaptations of it? There was also a Ghibli film that was horrible, wasn’t there?
It’s really disappointing because I recall the books as being really good (I haven’t read them in ages, I should really revisit them).
@Tara
IMO the only males that have a right to yowl about misandry are male hani, and not only do they have reason, they’re fictional. Male hani are as stereotyped in their masculinity as being macho violent time bombs by their female counterparts as women are in human society are by what are considered to be ‘weak’, ‘feminine’ qualities. Never mind men like Khym and Hallan show themselves to be perfectly sane and sober hani and possessed of gifts and brains often overlooked or dismissed by hani society as a whole because, well, male.
Sexual harassment is also a lot less titillating when taken out of human context and gender reversed and put into the context of a scared, nervous young male hani being hassled by his female crewmates. Poor Hallan. You wanna cuddle him, because fuzzy hani is fuzzy.
tl;dr Cherryh did an amazing job of putting gender-bias/ stereotype stuff through a mirror and out of human context and showing just how damn stupid it all is in our own society.
@redsilkphoenix: Joshua Talley is the sexually-abused male character in Downbelow Station. It occurs offstage, by Signy Mallory, on her ship.
@SF Reader:
I forgot about Joshua! You’re right, that did happen to him there, plus the hint that one of Mallory’s male officers also has a go at him. Poor fellow. 🙁
And by the way, have you read the Cyteen sequel Regenesis? There’s hints there that what the Union military did to create Jousha and his partner Gabriel (the mission that I’m trying hard not to spoil here) wasn’t exactly legal. If that makes sense.
@Redsilkphoenix
Haven’t read Cyteen yet, but will get to it sooner or later. I really like Cherryh, and I like that she created this huge sprawling universe with multiple series to dive into.
Weirdly, today in a used bookstore I ran across a book of essays about the Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series. It included an interview with Stephen R. Donaldson, who said he had a strong sense of how “likable” Covenant is, and how he doesn’t understand why readers don’t pick that up. I’m like, Um, maybe you shouldn’t have had him rape a teenager at the start of the first book? Because that’s pretty much a dealbreaker for “likable.”
Takeaways from this thread: I need to read C. J. Cherryh.
@ EJ (The Other One)
I suggest starting with “The Pride of Chanur.”
@EJ
What Tara said. Pyanfar for the win.
Thanks Tara and banananana dakry.
@EJ:
In case you didn’t know this already, all the Chanur books have been reissued as three omnibuses (something about how paperback books nowadays are much thicker than paperback books from the 1980’s and before). In fact, a lot of her early stuff has been reprinted in assorted omnibuses, so it shouldn’t be too hard to track those down if you’re interested in some of them.
IIRC, you have an interest in languages, don’t you? Her Foreigner books (her most popular series to date) may be just up your alley, then. They’re set in their own universe, and feature the adventures of Bren Cameron, diplomat and linguist to the alien Atevi. Illisisdi (grandmother of the Atevi ruler Tabini) is someone you might get a kick out of, as is Cajeri (Tabini’s son and heir, and a pov character starting from about book nine, I think).
The series is set up as a series of trilologies, if that helps you with the overall storyline any. Also, don’t start with the most recent book, Visitor. It reveals some major secrets about certain events starting back in Book #1, and the WTF reveal works better if you don’t run into it cold.
@PI
I lost track of this being the thread where you mentioned moving troubles. Best wishes and hope it went smoothly as possible.
@Sinkable John
Well, what you do is put together a framing device to string them together, and call that the first novel; a storyteller who’s a bit of local colour in the novel is entertaining their audience with various tales of other goings on, a ruler or government official reading reports from various places, something like that. 🙂
Besides, you’re a sight farther then me, I’ve only an outline and a couple of pages worth of the novel and linked short story I’m pretending to write. For quite a while I put most of my literary urges into tabletop gaming related stuff, but I just saw recently that someone’s trying to start a new sci fi fantasy publishing house in town, and I thought I’d try my hand writing proper stories again.
Weirwoodtreehugger, are you intentionally trolling, or just so good it comes naturally? Lilly-white Shawn Ashmore is supposed to be Ged in that pic.
Huh?