I meant that if the art is good, it'll get noticed sooner or later. Therefore it would benefit the Puppies to faint and declaim less, and improve their writing more.
Merged 2014 Hugo awards.
- Thread starter catsmate
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I meant that if the art is good, it'll get noticed sooner or later. Therefore it would benefit the Puppies to faint and declaim less, and improve their writing more.
Meed
boy named crow
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Agreed (although I wouldn't have a problem with them complaining about the Hugos if I actually thought there were major problems with it).
kookbreaker
Evil Fokker
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What is interesting about this? I.e., the point of posting it?
catsmate
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Not surprising though given the past actions of the puppyboys, and their resurgence in recent days. Poxy has dropped writing the Castalia blog to devote more time to organising his minions in smearing his opponents.
kookbreaker
Evil Fokker
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Have you read the thread?
dudalb
Penultimate Amazing
I was not overly familiar with John C.Wright ,but Scott Lynch;s above blog made me check out Wright,and IMHO Lynch is way too kind in his descriptions of Wright. Wright is a religious fanatic,a total bigot, and wants to turn the clock back to circa 1000 A.D.
His calling out of Patrick Nielsen Hayden as being Anti Christian, when Hayden..like Wright..is a practicing Catholic was particualry ripe. And Hayden response was just classic.
kookbreaker
Evil Fokker
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I had just read about that. Falling flat on his face and calling it a victory. S.O.P.
carlvs
Critical Thinker
You might be interested in this blog post that I just found via Google. It includes links to screenshots taken by the person who discovered what Mr. Day and his followers were planning to do on Goodreads. It seems that they were planning to do a lot more than just dumping bad reviews on those they did not like...
catsmate
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Yeah Wright is nuts, in the ultra-con catholic sense. Very anti-abortion, keep women in their place and apologetic about the RCC's child sex abuse scandals. He's disturbingly homophobic and supportive of violence against gays.
Plus, and relevant to the Hugos, he's just a poor writer. Not as terrible as Poxy or Tom "Ammonia King" Kratman but pretty bad, and with some frankly disturbing overtones in his "Chronicles of Chaos" trilogy regarding rape and adolescent sex.
Well otherwise they'd have to face up to their own failure and insignificance. Not forgetting the fact that fandom has publicly declared that their opinions aren't widely held.
Curiously some of the puppys advocated suing Tor because of the opposition of some it's staff to the puppy slate, suggesting that losing (humiliatingly) in the Hugos would damage their sales.
Noticeably, Poxy isn't trying to whip up his minions into a campaign against Amazon. I suspect he's smart enough to know that if Amazon dropped Castalia (Poxy's vanity press) they'd be finished.You might be interested in this blog post that I just found via Google. It includes links to screenshots taken by the person who discovered what Mr. Day and his followers were planning to do on Goodreads. It seems that they were planning to do a lot more than just dumping bad reviews on those they did not like...
asydhouse
Master Poster
honestly, those people are sick excuses for sf fans, let alone writers
They are almost like caricatures of the sort of dinosaurs who were throwbacks even in the 50s, the decade they apparently want us all to be stuck in when it comes to sf writing!
I followed the link and read Scott Lynch's report of Wright's allegations against Hayden, which included quotes from Wright. I found it interesting that the only authors he mentioned were all first published before the mid 60s (I haven't checked that, but it was my impression at time of reading, and I'm pretty sure that's the case, and if not, maybe one or at most two could have first seen print slightly later).
The point is that they seem to have completely missed all of the amazingly brilliant sf that has been published since the 80s, even stuff they probably should enjoy under their own criteria!
Given that they haven't moved with the times and think that it's wrong to have an open accepting mind when it comes to people's innate sexuality, race etc, they seem to be incapable of grasping that the reason so many novels and stories that depict that kind of cosmopolitan future have been nominated is the natural consequence of the evolution of sf fandom along with the rest of the populace, rather than by some kind of ridiculously unlikely and unwieldy conspiracy.
Personally, I don't divorce my moral sense of compassion for humanity from my enjoyment of fiction, which is why I found the short story nominated last year (by some author I can't be arsed to look up), which was war porn involving murdering Chinese astronauts, an offensive piece of ignorant and callous bs xenophobic trash that I would have dismissed as worthless even if I had read it in the 50s!
That's not my literary sensibilities being dictated to by my politics, it is my human sensibilities being offended by an author whose thought processes I find offensive.
Lucky for me the rest of the human race is growing more aware and humanist, so I feel more comfortable living today than back in the stultification of the conformist and small-minded society of those times. I would have been with the Beats!
We are winning, in the sense that everyone is now much freer to be themselves without conforming to an ill-fitting suit. Those dinosaurs are dying out. In fact they are already dead, they just don't realise it yet.
They are almost like caricatures of the sort of dinosaurs who were throwbacks even in the 50s, the decade they apparently want us all to be stuck in when it comes to sf writing!
I followed the link and read Scott Lynch's report of Wright's allegations against Hayden, which included quotes from Wright. I found it interesting that the only authors he mentioned were all first published before the mid 60s (I haven't checked that, but it was my impression at time of reading, and I'm pretty sure that's the case, and if not, maybe one or at most two could have first seen print slightly later).
The point is that they seem to have completely missed all of the amazingly brilliant sf that has been published since the 80s, even stuff they probably should enjoy under their own criteria!
Given that they haven't moved with the times and think that it's wrong to have an open accepting mind when it comes to people's innate sexuality, race etc, they seem to be incapable of grasping that the reason so many novels and stories that depict that kind of cosmopolitan future have been nominated is the natural consequence of the evolution of sf fandom along with the rest of the populace, rather than by some kind of ridiculously unlikely and unwieldy conspiracy.
Personally, I don't divorce my moral sense of compassion for humanity from my enjoyment of fiction, which is why I found the short story nominated last year (by some author I can't be arsed to look up), which was war porn involving murdering Chinese astronauts, an offensive piece of ignorant and callous bs xenophobic trash that I would have dismissed as worthless even if I had read it in the 50s!
That's not my literary sensibilities being dictated to by my politics, it is my human sensibilities being offended by an author whose thought processes I find offensive.
Lucky for me the rest of the human race is growing more aware and humanist, so I feel more comfortable living today than back in the stultification of the conformist and small-minded society of those times. I would have been with the Beats!
We are winning, in the sense that everyone is now much freer to be themselves without conforming to an ill-fitting suit. Those dinosaurs are dying out. In fact they are already dead, they just don't realise it yet.
Bingo.
The book that stuck in my mind as being the first that I stopped reading because of that was Crash by JG Ballard, sometime in the early 1990s.
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
I once read an interview with Ballard in which he quoted an early review of Crash - "the author of this book is in urgent need of psychiatric help" - which immediately became my favourite book review ever.
I've read a few Ballards, but I have no intention of ever reading that one.
catsmate
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You'll be able to watch an adaption of High Rise soon.
bruto
Penultimate Amazing
I did, long ago, with a sort of morbid fascination the reason for which escapes me now.
Bump to the beginning.
I have just read the Ancillary trilogy, and it was indeed excellent.
asydhouse
Master Poster
Wait, so you read a review and never actually read any of the book? (No, sorry, you saw Ballard quoting a review!)
I read the annotated edition of Crash, which came out in the 80s or so, and it was not a perverted or mentally ill gross out at all. It was intense, as he wrote it after his wife died in a car crash, and it was densely Ballardian surrealist poetic psychological extremity, but not pornographic or grovelling decadence.
It was a science fictionally "New Wave" consideration of extreme reactions to modernity, or something like that. I'm writing all this on my remaining impressions decades later after reading it, so it's all simply an attempt to describe my experience of reading it, rather than a description of the text per se, I guess, but even though I'm easily grossed out by revolting sadistic pornography, which I avoid, and other violence etc, I did not have any of those reactions while reading it. I remember having some trepidation before reading it, and if it was simply some kind of gross porn I wouldn't have continued with it, but I remember it as an intensely poetic and interesting experience, which I found not at all disgusting or perverted or whatever.
I'm not saying you should read it, as it is not a light read, but it's not what you seem to be thinking it is.
Just sayin'.
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
There was a lot more about the book in the interview than just that quote (which Ballard was delighted by, by the way). More than enough for me to know it was not a book I particularly wanted to read.
asydhouse
Master Poster
Fair enough.
I wonder if the reason Jimbob was put off was because he came to the book with no prior expectations, and was disturbed by what he found, whereas I went in with trepidation, and found it to be different from what I had feared?
Whatever, it's definitely a work of art, not trash. And not "entertainment". Art can be disturbing, challenging etc, which can be tricky.
Too tricky for rabid puppies, at any rate, I'm sure! Haha! They couldn't cope with Ursula le Guin, let alone a surrealist poet like Ballard!
(Desperate attempt to get back on topic!)
