Category Archives: Noisy Nonsense

Sad Puppies Review Books: STREGA NONA

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

strega nonaSTREGA NONA

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

If you want chilling proof of the radical feminist lesbian witch cult (also known as “Social Justice”) that has infiltrated all ranks of society, look no further than this book which blatantly glorifies witchcraft, matriarchy, and the creation of a loyal slave nation of emasculated beta male cucks.

Exactly as foretold in a literal straightforward reading of the Book of Revelation, this book portrays a near-future world where even the Catholic Church itself is in thrall of a woman. The church is no longer the Bride of Christ but the scarlet woman of Babylon.

“Although all the people in the town talked about her in whispers, they all went to see her if they had troubles. Even the priests and the sisters in the convent went, for Strega Nona had a magic touch.” If that isn’t straight out of the Bible then I don’t even know what the Bible says. I do know that it says to not suffer a witch to live, not to treat her as a valued civic leader.

I think we can all agree that this is an example of the kind of ideological, agenda-driven “message fiction” that has replaced real God-fearing SF/F that embraces and centers Christianity in the best traditions of classic science fiction.

This story shows a town that turns their back on God and then is almost crushed under a “flying spaghetti monster” of its own making. In their last moments they remember who made the heavens and the earth and cry out for Him to save them, and He, as was foretold in the holy book, looks down and whispers “no”. It is exactly what will happen in the end times, only in this fictitious example the witch returns at the last minute and spares them. When it really happens, though, she will find herself as powerless as the rest and the tide of pasta will roll over her with the sheep she led astray for Satan is the real “spaghetti monster” and like Saul Alinsky he is a great deceiver.

In the world that the SJWs seek to create, men don’t woo and win women as God intended but instead women go to a matriarchal elder and have a husband assigned to them and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Strega Nona decides she is too busy and important to keep a house, do the gardening, wash dishes, or do any of the things that women do for free. Instead she humiliates and browbeats a man who is denied any other employment opportunities because he is living in an upside-down society, forcing him to do a housewife’s work for no other compensation except security, food, shelter, and money.

As you might expect from a work of pure propaganda, the conflict in the book comes when her beta cuck housepet “Big Anthony” has had enough and decides to go his own way, daring to take for himself the power and prestige that Strega Nona decided only belonged to the approved feminist elite like herself. In a proper rollicking adventure story, his bravery would have been celebrated and duly rewarded. Because this is “message fiction” though he gets only bitter comeuppance for daring to seize power.

If this book is true to life in any way it exactly captures the nature of the backlash the SJW Hugo elite has had to the whole Sad Puppy campaign. I’m sorry, were we not supposed to touch your special pasta pot? Was it not polite to ram through a slate of nominees based on the fact that one of us said they were pretty good? Is that not how it’s done?

Well, I’m sorry if I’m not willing to “blow kisses” at the “sacred feminine cooking pot” in order to get anywhere, as this story suggests we all must do. Is it any surprise that the treasonous miscreants at the Caldecott Medal chose this book for an honor?

Two stars.

Because hope springs eternal…

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

…I went and left a comment on chief puppy Brad R. Torgersen’s blog, after reading the excerpt on the daily File 770 round-up.

My comment was prompted by his repeating a saw I’m pretty sure I’ve already seen multiple times from him: the idea that “social justice warriors” is a real thing that the people he spends his time taking written potshots at called themselves.

It’s a little thing, in the long run. But the insistent way in which the chief puppies stick to their guns about this is such a perfect representative example of the alternate reality they have constructed for themselves and from which they are conducting their campaign, and I just keep thinking—probably foolishly—that if they can manage to recognize the truth of this matter, it might make them more amenable to questioning the other fallacies they’ve taken as articles of faith regarding who their chosen opponents are and what we’re about.

I may be a poor choice for emissary, given how much time I spend skewering them… but the truth is the truth, whether it comes from a clown or a priest. The truth is still every bit as true when it comes from your most hated enemy as when it comes from your closest friend.

While hope springs eternal, my previous forays in bringing the truth to Brad Torgersen’s blog have not convinced me it’s worth sticking around to engage over there. So to that end, I’m reproducing my comment here (with a few typos and errors cleaned up). If anybody wants an actual discussion about it, I’ll be happy to have it here.

 

I’m sure I’m not the first person to try to tell you this, but the people who spew hot air about “warriors for social justice” are all over here with you. That’s not a thing people called themselves. It’s a pejorative made up to dismiss people, a la calling someone “PC patrol” or “feminazi” or “thought police”.

Some people have taken it as an ironic badge of honor or made geeky riffs on it (like “Social Justice Paladin” or “Social Justice Bard”), but by and large, you’re chiding people for not living up to the standards of a label that was foisted upon them in the first place.

Which is actually part of the function of the label. Most of the people I have seen getting slapped with the “SJW” label not only don’t describe themselves as social justice warriors, they don’t describe themselves as activists. They’re just people, living their lives, dealing with their own problems, and acting their consciences.

Example: I’m not an activist. I’m a writer. Like most writers, I try to write the books that I want to read. As a reader, it’s really kind of important that books 1) acknowledge the reality of my life, that people like me exist, or failing that, that they don’t 2) openly insult me, or 3) portray people like me in laughingly unrealistic ways that jar me out of the story. For “people like me”, you can read queer, women, disabled… any of that.

Now’s the part where you blather on about I-Dentity Politics and PC Police and imaginary quotas and the censorship you think I’ve just called for and wonder “What ever happened to telling a good story and not caring about politics?”

But is a story a good story if it is otherwise good yet portrays Christians all as being wrongheaded, narrow minded superstitious fools? I mean, can it be a good story if a significant cross section of humanity is rendered in an extremely unrealistic—say nothing of meanspirited, let’s focus on whether it’s realistic—fashion?

Some of this is subjective, obviously. We all have different life experiences, which means different things will ring hollow to us (which is one reason that so many thoughtful writers suggest having beta readers with different experiences). One example that I believe came up in the comments on File 770 is that it’s a sure sign a man wrote a piece if the female viewpoint character is described admiring her perfect breasts in the mirror. That’s a very small, very mundane, and fairly innocuous example of bad writing that happens essentially because of an empathy gap or experience gap, but it’s not going to jar every reader the same way.

Now imagine a book full of things that are all just “off” by that same amount.

Well, you probably don’t have to. You’ve probably read books that are like that, in their treatment of men, or Christians, or the military. And it didn’t just strike you as insulting, but also as bad writing. Right? Your ability to enjoy the story suffered, because while disagreeing with a writer’s politics is one thing, seeing yourself replaced by caricatures page after page is another.

When you talk about taking politics out of writing, what you’re doing is demanding everybody else stops noticing these things as they affect us, but you haven’t announced any plans to do the same.

Anyway, if all you wanted to do was open wide the tent flaps, then you weren’t competent. You were horribly inefficient. You stirred up a ton of bad will, you’re still spending your time and effort fighting the negative impression of you and yours that your actions have fostered, and you only succeeded in the wrong goal (getting a slate of nominees on the ballot isn’t “opening the tent flaps”, is it?), and if we are to take you at your word, you only did that accidentally (because it was demonstrably only the push from that totally-not-with-you guy and his rabid pack of dreadful elks that got any of your nominees on the ballot).

As I said on my blog: next year, if you want the world to believe that your goal is to raise awareness that anyone can nominate whoever they want for the Hugos, make a blog post that says, “Hey, everyone! Did you know that the Hugo Awards, one of the top awards for science fiction, is awarded by the members of WorldCon? And did you know that for $40 you can buy a supporting membership in WorldCon? Now’s your chance to nominate whoever you want!”

That’s all it takes. It won’t succeed in getting a slate of hand-picked nominees on the ballot and blocking people you think don’t deserve to be on the ballot because the wrong people like them for the wrong reasons…

But hey, that’s not what Sad Puppies is about, is it?

This JUST In

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

There is a game children play—or more often, try to play at—when they are caught doing something they know they shouldn’t. It’s called “I WAS JUST”.

Running around the pool deck? “I WAS JUST walking quickly.” No rule against that, right? The sign says not to run, not to walk slowly.

Teasing the new kid? “I WAS JUST talking to them.” Geez, don’t you want them to feel welcome?

Those of us who have dealt with bullying or harassment know how pernicious the logic of the JUST can be. JUST talking, JUST joking, JUST being friendly, JUST happen to be going the same way…

And while I think most parents don’t fall for the amazingly elaborate web of lies where a child claims they were JUST checking on the cookies to make sure no one else was stealing them, teachers and other part-time responsibility figures don’t feel comfortable moving against the worst, most entitled and self-justified troublemakers without a clear-cut rule and a red-handed violation of it. Challenging the lie doesn’t seem worth the headache. So the kids who make life hell for others while sleeping the sleep of the JUST grow up with the understanding that this is a winning move.

This brings us up to the Sad Puppies campaign, a mean-spirited and divisive campaign whose founders and leaders have never been shy about what they are doing and why… until people start calling them on it, at which point they pretend that no one said anything about poking a stick in anyone’s eye, no one on their side accused anyone of nominating the wrong works for the wrong reasons, no one ever alleged a clique was controlling the Hugos, no, no, nothing like that!

Oh, no. If any of that happened, we are supposed to ignore it because from start to finish, the Sad Puppies campaign has JUST been about raising awareness about the Hugo nomination process, so people know they have the ability to nominate whatever work or writer they think has been overlooked.

And who could object to a campaign that is JUST doing that? That would be like opposing a group that is JUST standing up for ethics in video game journalism. It would be like blaming children for breaking an expensive vase playing football indoors when they were JUST trying to get more exercise like you always said they should. Sheesh, what do you have against kids getting exercise?

To be real for a moment: I can buy the idea that some of the people involved in the Puppy campaigns have bought into this line. I think that even a lot of the children who proclaim that they were JUST have convinced themselves of the truth of what they’re saying.

So if you are a Puppy reading this, here’s how you convince the rest of the world that you mean all those high-minded ideals more than the snipping and sniping:

Next year, try actually spreading awareness of the open nature of nominations. Don’t buy into the slate. Don’t take your recommendations and hand them off to someone who may ignore them while assembling a slate of their own picks. Instead do what countless other people have done for years: post your own recommendations directly, as recommendations.

Add an explanation that anyone who buys a supporting membership to Worldcon can nominate their own picks, and bam… you will have just raised awareness of the nomination process.

What does participating in a slate do that furthers that mission? What does making vague, unfounded accusations that past nominees/winners benefited from some shadowy affirmative action program do to advance the cause? What does all the noise and mess and deliberate provocation and stirring up controversy have to do with anything? What does it add?

If you really JUST want to make sure everyone knows how the nomination and voting process works so more people can get involved, great! Focus on doing that. Some people might grouse about the outcome, but nothing in this world pleases everyone.

But no matter who is pleased or displeased with the final ballot or the perceived demographics of Hugo voters after such an influx, at least you’d be able to enter your house justified instead of JUST-ified.

How big is the doghouse?

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

So, Kate Paulk has been tapped as the standard-bearer of next year’s Sad Puppies campaign. She has declared that next year’s Hugo ballot-stuffing initiative will be done in a transparent and democratic manner. This does not fill one with confidence, since Brad Torgersen has made the same claims about this year’s ballot-stuffing initiative.

It also needs to be pointed out that it hardly matters who leads the Sad Puppies campaign or what they do or how they do it, as this year’s otherwise failed campaign only managed to achieve accidental relevance through the fact that the successful Rabid Puppies campaign largely copied and pasted their agenda.

With all that in mind, I have to say that I’m interested in Kate Paulk’s post about what she considers to be Hugo-worthy work only as an academic matter. If the list she assembles using it winds up being the ballot, it will likely be only because someone truly nasty as well as small-minded got behind her and started shoving, as happened this year.

But relevant or not, her list is interesting. Others have already noted that rather than being markers of excellence, her criteria seem to be more a sort of bare bones minimum quality. She even acknowledges in effect that if a book is excellent enough to pull it off, she’s prepared to be flexible.

So how do you take the entire field of science fiction short stories or novels, apply a filter this broad, and then wind up a list of five nominees? We could assume that she just intends to pick her favorites or, if she makes better on her claims to a democratic process, let the crowd pick its favorites… but she says in the same post that she judges quality separately from the question of whether she likes something, which suggests that she really does see this as a rubric for picking the nominees/winners.

All of which makes me wonder if once again we’re not looking at a failure to grasp the scale of things, the scope of the field.

Sad Puppies got started because Larry Correia conceptualized being nominated for a John W. Campbell new author award as a snub (he didn’t win) rather than a rare honor; this speaks to a sense of entitlement, but it also a kind of parochialism.

Surely he was intellectually aware that there were more new authors in the year than the ones on the ballot with him… but emotionally? Perhaps he felt that as a new author, the nomination was simply his due. Perhaps he cannot conceive of just how much competition he beat out to get there, first in having a novel published in the right year and then in having it noticed, and then making it onto the ballot.

The Sad Puppy campaigns seem to have been based around the idea that the SF/F writing world is a very small place, consisting of basically two groups of people: the authors Larry Correia, Brad Torgersen, Sarah Hoyt, et al, know and like, and the ones they don’t care for but keep unaccountably hearing about anyway. In the moments when they seem to believe their own press, they actually seem to think that the Hugo ballot has room enough for everybody… at least everybody who is not a “CHORF” or “SJW” or “affirmative action writer”. This tells you right off the bat how small their conception of “everybody” is.

So I think this is what we must takeaway when we note that Kate Paulk’s criteria could never be used to winnow down a broad field: it’s not meant to apply to such a field. It’s not meant to come near to such a field. This is a list of criteria meant to be applied in the following fashion: start with the tiny handful of works you’re prepared to accept are Hugo-worthy, then nod approvingly.

Rabid Puppies Review Books: HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

haroldHAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON

Reviewed By Special Guest Reviewer Theophilus Pratt
(Publisher — Hymenaeus House)

This instructive tale tells of a young man who all by himself creates a road which he then travels down, makes a mountain which he climbs, then saves himself from falling by conjuring a balloon which he hangs onto until he can bring into being a basket capable of supporting himself. His boundless creativity allows him to shape a whole civilization of buildings until, amusingly, he re-creates the very house he started out from and sleeps the sleep of the just, knowing that everything he has in life was fashioned by his own hand.

Amusingly, this book was sold to me as a work of fantasy when it is in fact the most realistic work of fiction I have ever encountered. If anything, it was too realistic to be fiction, a fact I found very amusing. Flipping through its pages proved to be instructive, as I began to see it was nothing more than a thinly veiled if amusing allegory for my own inimitable life.

Did I not provide myself with the only light I ever needed to walk by, as Harold did? Have I not always made my own road, and even left it when even it proved too stifling to my boundless intellect? Has not my dizzying intellectual magnitude taken me to the height of peaks so high that even I cannot long find purchase upon them? And when I fall, whom do I rely upon to prop myself up except myself?

If I am found to be apparently sinking into a morass of intellectual quagmire as Harold found himself floundering in a sea, you can bet that it is of my own devising and for my own purposes, and I will just as quickly pull myself out when the time is right for me to strike.

Like Harold, I am a master of fourth generational warfare honed over long epochs of electronic correspondence and nights spent around the table with my beloved custom Warhammer miniatures. Like Harold, I move in dimensions that the limited minds of the hated lying SJWs cannot fathom, though it is both amusing and instructive to watch them struggle to do so.

But as I raced back and forth through the text, admiring “Harold” and his facility with his purple poison pen, I began to wonder how this book came to be. Who could have written a book that so perfectly captures every aspect of my life in its instructive allegory? There is only one man I know who has paid such attention to my doings: that arch SJW, Johnny Con himself.

Yes, this book is clearly the handiwork of John Scalzi.

I ask you, does the man’s obsession with me know no bounds? It is as amusing as it is instructive to see what depths—or rather heights—his fascination now leads him to. Under the transparent pseudonym of “Crockett Johnson” (do I even need to begin to dissect the painfully obvious allusion?), Scalzi has published a whole series of thinly veiled paeans to the civilizing influence of my plus three standard deviation intellect and supreme force of creative will.

And is it so surprising? As amusing as it is that Scalzi plays up his apparent hatred of me, it has always been apparent to anyone with the wit to see that the root of his obsession lies in jealousy, and are we jealous of what we loathe or are we jealous of that which we admire? Here we see Scalzi’s grudging admiration of me bearing fruit in a most instructive if amusing fashion.

Well, rest assured, Johnny: your efforts have not gone unnoticed. I have added this rather instructive book to the copious other evidence I have compiled in my extensive files on your obsession with me. Most amusing!

7.5/10

The Puppies come so close to getting it, so often.

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

While reading the linked articles on Mike Glyer’s daily round-up of Puppy and Puppy-adjacent posts, I stumbled across a post by Dave Freer from February called “To Serve One Master — The Reader“.

The major thrust of the blog post is the idea that however an author intends a work to be received is secondary to how readers receive it, which… okay. This is something that it’s taken me a long time to accept as an author, but I have to say that I am in general agreement with it.

The thing is, it’s weird to see a self-professed Puppy saying this. After all, these are the same people who, whenever someone starts talking about the racist or sexist content of a work, respond with “BUT THAT’S NOT WHAT THE AUTHOR MEANT! YOU CAN’T KNOW WHAT’S IN THEIR HEARTS AND MINDS! YOU’RE JUST READING INTO THINGS!”

Of course, predictably, to the author of this blog post, “the reader” (also referred to as “the customer”) is a monolithic if not singular entity. “The reader” has a single set of tastes, which all authors are obliged to satisfy.

According to Dave Freer, its the people who remember what one commenter calls the “SHAZAAM!” factor of Star Trek who are Star Trek’s customers, not the people who appreciate the utopian social messages and the hope for the future, or the clever dialogue and rich characterization and interpersonal relationships, or any other aspect of the show.

According to Dave Freer, when people go to a movie that features a rich fictional culture and also laser battles, it’s the people who remember the laser battles (and only those people) that are the customers who deserve to be catered to.

Freer uses the piece to berate authors who don’t write for “the reader”/”the customer”, explicitly meaning consumers who want the sorts of things Dave Freer thinks consumers should want.

He advises writers:

Of course you can just hope they like your stuff. Or you can try and write what they want. Maybe slant it a bit in the direction that you want to communicate about. Of course if that slant fails to gain traction and overwhelms what they did want… you’ve lost. And, if they’re not a captive audience, they’ll find something they do like. … It’s really important to find out what customers want, and give it to them.

So a writer’s job is to figure out exactly what readers want to read and then give it to them? Yet when readers say they want more diverse books, or they want to read books with characters they can identify with, or they want to read books that don’t use real-life sources of trauma as set decoration, that’s “political correctness run wild” or “SJW thought police” or whatever buzzwords the Sad Puppies and their ilk want to string together today.

Why? Because the people who want to read those things aren’t readers. Only the people whose tastes and preferences are Dave Freer-approved are readers. To the Sad Puppies, an author’s job is to please the Dave Freers and William Lehmans of the world, not the K. Tempest Bradfords and David Gerrolds.

It’s really striking how often the Sad Puppies claim that “the other side” is all about dictating who is and isn’t “True Fans”, given how much of their rhetoric revolves around this kind of thing. It’s also striking how much this ideology overlaps with Gamergate.

Freer repeats a common Sad Puppy talking point, that SF/F is in some kind of death spiral because so many authors refuse to cater to “the reader”. This notion—insofar as it is based on anything—is based on the fact that in a diverse field where authors are free to write whatever they want that appeals to any audience (not just Dave Freer’s idealized concept of “the reader”), a market that would otherwise belong wholly to the lowest common denominators is instead spread out among more works.

The Puppies see this as a terrifying prospect, the end of the genre as we know it. Puppy standard-bearer Brad Torgersen, in his now-infamous “Nutty Nuggets” post (which might as well be subtitled “WHY CAN’T I JUDGE BOOKS BY THEIR COVER?”), lamented a future where SF/F is everywhere: SF/F romances, SF/F mysteries, et cetera.

I don’t know what the problem with that is.

Science fiction everywhere?

I call that winning.

It might be—I’m not in a position to know, but it might be—that the “fracturing” of the field in terms of more diverse voices writing for more diverse audiences is making it harder for the big publishing houses to churn out big blockbusters. I don’t know. But as an independent author, I don’t see much percentage in measuring the health of the genre by the performance of the biggest players only. I’d rather measure the field’s growth in terms of how many people are reading and writing science fiction vs. how many copies the most popular books sell.

Sad Puppies Review Books: GOODNIGHT MOON

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

goodnight moonGOODNIGHT MOON

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (aspired)

I suppose this book is supposed to be clever in that literary way that SJWs are so fond of, but I found it to be a confusing and unholy mess. It was very hard to follow. The prose was far too clunky and the signaling was all wrong. Good stories use signaling to tell you what kind of story they are, so you will know how the story goes and not be thrown out of it when something happens that you do not expect.

If a story opens in a tavern, you know somebody is going to go off on a sword-swinging fantasy adventure. If a story opens in a detective’s office, you know that a dame is going to walk in and she is going to be trouble. These stories are good stories.

The initial worldbuilding signals in Goodnight Moon were all for a story set backstage at a televised talk show. Right away in the first sentence we are told that it takes place in a green room, in “the great green room” so you know it’s not just a talk show but a good one. Then there’s a telephone, which is very sensible. The SJWs would never let me be on a talk show because they suppress my message at every turn, but I could believe there would be a telephone in the green room.

The next sentence is where they start to lose me. A red balloon? What does that have to do with being backstage at a television show? I had to go back to re-read the opening of the story a few times to make sure I had read it correctly, which is never a good sign. It turns out I had read it right after all, which meant the book was wrong. The red balloon was an unimportant and doubtlessly incorrect detail that could be ignored.

The next line breaks across the page, which just seems like bad editing to me especially since there was a picture on the facing page so you have to skip a whole page to find out how it ends. The picture included a young rabbit in bed staring at me in what I will characterize as an uncomfortable fashion. Between that and the unfinished sentence, I was in no hurry to study it further.

The next couple of pages simply describe the artwork on the walls of the green room. I began to form a picture of the main character, sitting idly in the waiting room of a talk show, waiting for his turn to be called out and interviewed by the host. What does he do? He looks around at the art that has been hung on the walls. The art is good, simple art. It shows cows and bears, not abstract concepts and feelings. This is going to be a conservative talk show, I decided. You can just tell.

Sadly this early promise is one the book promptly breaks, as the following pages reveal that the nonsensical addition of the red balloon was not a one-off mistake. The objects introduced include toy houses and mittens and random bowls full of mush, things I feel confident in saying would not be found in a green room.

About halfway through there is a major shift in tone. Before this the book had been concerned with introducing elements to set the stage. Right when I was sure the author must be done with all this world-building and build up, though, the book simply starts over, going back through the list of objects and saying goodnight to each of them.

Young writers, take note: this is not something you should do. The opening lines of your book forms a contract with your readers which you must not break. If you are clearly signaling in the first four pages that you are going to give them a story set around a conservative talk show, do not give them a mere bedtime story. This was so confusing I had to read back through the book several times to make sure I understood what had happened.

The mark of a good book in any genre is that you should be able to read it once, be satisfied that it did exactly what was promised, and then never read it again. You should almost not need to read it the first time. From the opening lines of Goodnight Moon I knew it was going to be about a man backstage at a conservative talk show, as surely as I know when I meet a liberal that he will start quoting Saul Alinksy chapter and verse at me.

This book was not up to the high standards I associate with storytime.

Two stars.

Of Dinosaurs, Legos, and Impossible Hypotheticals

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

A Super Serious Meditation on the Nature of Speculative Fiction

One of the squawking points that the Puppy campaigners keep returning to in their quest to prove the existence of a shadowy Social Justice Warrior cabal that at some point took over and subverted the Hugo awards (thus necessitating that they ride in as liberators) is the 2014 nomination of “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love“, a quirky yet haunting and deeply emotive short story by Rachel Swirsky.

The Puppies, who only understand that tastes are subjective when it’s convenient for them, take it for granted that this story is so awful the only possible reason it could have been nominated was that the SJW clique was rewarding it for pushing the “proper” message.

I’ve never yet had a Puppy who was able to explain, when asked, exactly what the message was. Dinosaurs are more awesome and less frail than humans? Five men should not gang up on one person and savagely beat them with pool cues for being different? What’s the controversial hidden meaning of this story, exactly?

It’s worth noting that the Hugo voting community was and remains pretty sharply divided about this, and it did not win. So one must wonder what all the fuss is about, even if the story does not seem Hugo-worthy. Of course, some people might say that if it’s an honor just to be nominated, then it’s worth asking if the honor was earned… but the Puppies’ individual grievances suggest that they don’t see nomination as an honor. Both Torgersen and Correia’s Campbell nominations have been treated essentially as pledges that were not fulfilled, for instance, and Torgersen acts as though Mike Resnick’s nomination was an unforgivable snub.

But I don’t wish to focus too much on the Puppies’ problems with this story, because there are complaints against it that go beyond their borders. As I said, the community has been divided about its merits, if not as a work in general than as a speculative fiction story in particular. The common criticism amounts to the idea that it is neither a story nor SF/F.

My John Z. Upjohn’s review of If You Give A Mouse A Cookie actually plays on the logic of this: that since the whole story is inflected in the conditional case, nothing really happens within it. The narrator is not telling us what happened when the person referred to in the title was a dinosaur, but merely relating what might have happened if they were a dinosaur. So while the story is full of science fiction-y concepts (though it explicitly paints them as magical and thus fantasy, but more on that later), it’s not actually a specfic story—the reasoning goes—because none of that stuff actually happens.

As it happens, I can’t agree with this logic. I just can’t. “A text in which the narrator explains what would happen if something impossible according to our current understanding of the world happened” is a pretty decent definition of a speculative story to me. In fact, I’m not sure how it could be improved upon. If Rachel Swirsky had written an alternate version of the story that simply straight-out related the events being described as hypothetical in the extant version, they would be no less hypothetical and no more real, would they?

Speculative fiction consists of speculation; that is tautology. It answers the question “What might happen if this other, currently impossible thing happened?”

Swirsky’s story does a number of things worthy of discussion. Making the question explicit, making the speculative nature of speculative fiction part of the text rather than the subtext is simply one of them. If there’s any doubt that this skillful play on convention is not deliberate and informed, it should be laid to rest by the line which follows another impossible hypothetical introduced into the text, the line that reads:

all those people who—deceived by the helix-and-fossil trappings of cloned dinosaurs– believed that they lived in a science fictional world when really they lived in a world of magic where anything was possible.

In this line, Swirsky is commenting on the porousness of the boundaries we try to draw when it comes to speculative fiction. This is science fiction, that is fantasy; this has lasers and star ships, that has swords and sorcery. But even without getting into Arthur C. Clarke’s apt but perhaps overworked adage about sufficiently advanced science… the divide really isn’t as clear as all that.

So much science fiction never bothers to address the why or how of its hypotheticals, because the question the author wants to address isn’t (for instance) “How can we make autonomous intelligent beings to serve us?” but “What happens when we do?” Isaac Asimov’s “positronic brains” weren’t a prediction; he grabbed the most scienterrific buzzword available to him at the time and used it to explain the leap necessary to answer the question of “If We Were Robot-Makers, My Fellow Humans”.

So much of the annals of science fiction require us to imagine not just a new technological breakthrough but a specific breakthrough in our understanding of the physical laws of the universe, some principle hidden to actual real-world modern humans, which when mastered allows us to do things that seem like magic.

Similarly, there are certainly stories with fantasy trappings that dress them up with what Swirsky refers to as the “trappings” of science fiction: magic may be explained away by the wise as simply “subconscious psionic talents focused through the use of repetitive motions and chants”. Actually, I haven’t read all that much that takes that particular route, but it apparently is or was once a common enough meme that I’ve encountered readers who just assume that all well-written magic must be this, and are shocked at the idea that it might not be the author’s intent.

The point I am making here is that you can interpret nearly all of science fiction as fantasy and nearly all of fantasy as science fiction, which might be why we get so hung up on the “trappings”, on the limbs and outer flourishes. This story is science fiction because it has atomic blaster rays, or cyberspace, or nanites, according to your epoch. That story is fantasy because it has elves and dwarves and dragons. Sometimes we focus on the feel when drawing the dividing line. Even a grim and gritty science fiction story is not grim and gritty in quite the same way as a grim and gritty fantasy story, though exploring why would probably take a whole separate blog post.

This porous divide is not the major theme or focus of Rachel Swirsky’s work, and I’m not suggesting that it is only in her acknowledgment of it that the work achieves relevance or eligibility as a speculative fiction story. If talking about the nature of science fiction and fantasy made a work science fiction or fantasy, this blog post would count as speculative fiction. My point here is that there is a lot more going on in this brief piece than a “mere” chasing down of impossible hypotheticals.

But that “mere” is used advisedly, because that’s “merely” what science fiction and fantasy are.

There’s another work nominated this year that has stirred similar questions in a more limited way, perhaps more limited because the Dramatic Presentation categories are seen as less serious and crucial in a literary award than the literary categories, and perhaps because as a Sad Puppy pick it is taken less seriously to begin with.

The work in question is The Lego Movie, which contains a couple of scenes near the end that make explicit the implicit framing device for a movie about Lego characters in a world made out of Lego blocks: it’s all a child, playing with toys. It is this moment, in my opinion, that elevates The Lego Movie from merely being charming and fun to actually pretty sublimely brilliant. It explained so many of the odd quirks of characterization and storytelling earlier in the film.

I mean, it changed the movie’s version of Batman from “weirdly out of character, but okay, it’s funny” to “…that’s freaking brilliant” because it wasn’t Batman as adult comic book fans understand him but Batman seen through the eyes of a child, with way more focus on the cool factor of everything and of course he has the coolest girlfriend and of course even the grimdark angst seems kind of fun…

But that’s just one representative example. Taken as a whole, the movie reminded me of the way my brothers and I used to play with our toys, not playing with this set of characters or that but throwing them all together in an expansive world, some with the figures “playing themselves” and others being creatively repurposed.

We had one figure of a female character with green hair in a red body suit. I believe it was a Robotech character, but she often stood in for Samus Aran because we didn’t have a Samus action figure available to us, but if you unlocked the armor-less playthrough and had the Varia, Samus had green hair and a red body suit. These are the kinds of creative compromises a child’s imagination makes on the fly, and The Lego Movie nailed that.

Here’s the rub, though: a movie that is about imagination and how children play with toys isn’t speculative fiction in any meaningful sense, is it? The story that the little boy is creating for himself is both science fiction and fantasy, but the story about the little boy creating that story through play is rooted firmly in the real world, right? Anybody could do that.

Except during those scenes in the “real world”, the main character maintains his consciousness and a small amount of ability to move independently of the child. There’s no narrator relating this to us. The child is not aware it’s happening. The Lego Movie thus is a fantasy movie, because it contains this element of the unvarnished fantastical.

But look at what a whiplash, razor-thin calculation this is: if we had a cut of the movie that removed the main character’s internal monologue from the scenes taking place in the basement and replaced the character’s independent movement with being accidentally swept to the floor or something similar, the movie wouldn’t be fantasy anymore, yet if we removed those scenes entirely, it would be fantasy again?

I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it.

It’s far less ridiculous to simply declare that The Lego Movie is a fantasy movie than it is to say that it all hinges on the explicitness or lack thereof of a framing device.

To use some other examples:

The Wizard of Oz is a fantasy movie because the story we’re told from the moment that Dorothy is knocked out until the moment she regains consciousness is a fantasy movie; nobody went to the theater to see the amazing adventures of a young woman’s misfiring neurons, but her magical adventures in a land of wonder.

Big Fish is a fantasy movie because it contains a fantasy story; that this fantasy story is intertwined with a family drama makes it no less fantastical. The family drama keeps us grounded and invested, but no one went into that movie thinking, “Gee, I really hope that Billy Crudup reconciles with Albert Finney before he dies.” People might have thought that—or felt it, rather than explicitly having those words pass through their heads—while sitting there watching it, but that’s not why they showed up for it.

How about Edward Scissorhands? If you casually think about that movie, you might not even realize it has an explicit framing device. But the movie is explicitly a story we are being told, which means that any or all of the more impossible, unlikely, and phantasmagorical elements of the story might be imagined or exaggerated or just plain fabricated. The whole thing could be another “Big Fish” story.

Then there’s The Princess Bride. The heartwarming story of Columbo bonding with Wonder Years over a beloved classic story is important, sure. It adds an inflection to the other story, the story that he tells.

But when you get right down to it, what’s the difference between a fantasy story the movie tells to you directly and one the movie tells by means of addressing it to a character within the movie? Not much, by my reckoning. I’m not saying it’s not an important creative decision. The Princess Bride, The Lego Movie, and Big Fish would all be very different movies without their explicit frames. It’s hard to imagine them not being worse movies.

But every movie—every story—has at least an implicit frame. Even if a text is written in third person omniscient style with the least discursive and obtrusive voice possible, we are still being told this happened and that happened and he thought this and she said that and they did this thing. Convention dictates that an invisible narrator presented without appreciable personality or agenda should be fairly reliable, but what does “reliable” mean when we’re told the story of a thing that never happened and never could?

The lover of the narrator in Rachel Swirsky’s story never was a dinosaur, yes! And Han Solo never flew the Millennium Falcon. Captain Janeway never tricked the Borg Queen and returned to the Alpha Quadrant. Link never reunited the Triforce. These things are all both fictional and also impossible.

If you subscribe to the more SFnal-friendly versions of the multiverse theory (or to borrow the trappings of the other genre, the “all stories are true” theory of The Sandman), then of course these things did happen, somewhere, somewhen, somehow.

There is a world where Han Solo exists. In fact, there are infinite numbers of worlds in which he existed, which means that not only are there worlds in which he didn’t shoot first, there are worlds in which a trusting and slow Han Solo was shot dead by a cagey Greedo, and there are worlds in which Han Solo never owed money to Jabba because he was a vapor farmer instead of a spice smuggler.

So even allowing that there is a “real” world of Star Wars somewhere out there doesn’t let us say with any certainty or authority that any cut of a Star Wars movie or any particular of its expanded universe is “what really happened”.

All that we have in any SF/F story is the story, not the story of what really happened, just the story, or maybe more accurately, a story.

If we can imagine that any SF/F story we tell each other might be happening somewhere, we can imagine the same is true that any such story told within any story we’re telling each other.

The Great Speculative Fiction Multiverse not only demands we imagine that there actually a world where a little boy played out his frustration with his too restrictive dad using the world’s most amazing Lego set, it demands we imagine a world where conscious and autonomous Lego figures lived out that story. This demand does not change when we tell these two stories in proximity to each other, does it?

The distinction between “speculative fiction” and “not speculative fiction” is important, sure, but at the end of the day I’d say that the nature of the boundary is more something interesting to explore than necessary to pin down.

And I don’t need to know exactly where the dividing line between “fantasy” and “non-fantasy” lies to know that a story in which the narrator explains what might happen if a human being could magically transform into a human-sized T-rex is a fantasy story.

The Banality of Despite

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Warning: This post contains mentions of child sexual abuse. Though I go into very little detail on the subject, there may be more explicit mentions at linked sites.

 

Recently a Wall Street Journal article appeared online, covering the noisy nonsense known as the Sad/Rabid Puppies—also sometimes referred to without a trace of irony or awareness by its proponents as “Puppygate”, under the mistaken notion that appending “-gate” to the end of something makes it appear like a serious scandal and not a trumped-up controversy.

Vox Day—an internet demagogue, unrepentant liar, demonstrated racist, unabashed misogynist,  and ineffective editor whom none would allege to be an author of any sort or a publisher worth mentioning (h/t TangoMan for keeping me honest there)—was delighted to have the SP/RP’s nonsensical, self-serving platforms correctly labeled as an attempt to drag SF/F into a culture war, but took exception to the description of himself as “probably now the most despised man in science fiction”, raising the question on his blog: if not him, then who?

Over in the comments on File 770, Glenn Hauman answered that question with two suggestions of persons more despised than he is:

Living? Ed Kramer. Deceased? Walter Breen.

The Wikipedia links in the quote are my insertions. I add them because I have every reason to believe that the vast majority of the people reading this blog post will not recognize those names or know what they have in common, which is the sexual abuse of children.

The thing is, while I agree that Ed Kramer and Walter Breen are more despicable than Vox Day, I disagree that they are more despised. You have to know someone to despise them, and Ed Kramer and Walter Breen are very obscure figures in SF/F.

…now, because I know that my satirical activities have attracted A Certain Audience to this blog, I can already hear the sharp intakes of breath as people rush to correct me. Obscure? The co-founder of DragonCon obscure? Am I really so ignorant to not know what a big deal DragonCon is? Obscure? The ex-husband of Marion Zimmer Bradley obscure? He was so active in fandom community circles! How can I call that obscure?

Yes, they’re obscure.

More obscure than Vox Day is, and let me tell you: Vox Day is pretty obscure.

Oh, there’s that sharp intake of breath again…

Let me back up.

This is the “ungraspable scale” problem all over again. We, none of us, really know how big a place the world of SF/F is. We, none of us, can begin to grasp what it means for a place to be even as big as we think it is.

I would bet money that if you had pollsters standing at the doors of DragonCon and ask everyone as they come in if they know who Ed Kramer is, a sizable majority of the attendants would not be able to explain who he is. I mean, a substantial majority. I don’t want to guess at the exact number, but I think closer to 90% than 50%.

To people embroiled in this imbroglio, the idea that people who are active readers and appreciators of SF/F wouldn’t know the name Vox Day might seem unfathomable. His deeds are infamous! The only man thrown out of the SFWA! (…or was he? Dun Dun Dun!) He is the most despised man in science fiction!

Let me tell you: since I’ve been writing about the Puppy incident, more people have learned the name Vox Day for the first time from me than participated in the Hugo nominations this year. I guarantee it.

You want to know who the most despised man in science fiction is?

If we’re limiting it to men, I can think of two strong contenders.

George Lucas and George R.R. Martin.

I’m going to pause to let Vox Day and his followers (the Dreadful Elks, I think they style themselves as?) have a moment where they consider whether or not to triumphantly crow that a rainbow-headed SJW just declared that George R.R. Martin is worse than a child molester. If dealing with anyone else, I’d say that me mentioning this possibility would head it off… but one never knows with the Elks.

For everybody who’s able to keep up, though, please note I didn’t say that Lucas and Martin are top contenders for the worst man in science fiction. I said they’re in the running for the title of most despised.

I mean, who despises Ed Kramer and Walter Breen? The vast majority by a wide margin of everyone who knows the history of their crimes, but how many people is that? Who despises Vox Day? I think at least a simple majority of people who run across him, but how many people is that, really?

Now think about how many people saw Star Wars Episodes I-III, was disappointed or even disgusted by them, and blamed it solely on one man: George Lucas.

Even that’s probably a smaller number than we in the various SF/F communities think. We move in spaces where those movies are despised, and everyone who despises them knows exactly what was wrong with them, and that’s Lucas. Right? But we forget how big a place the world is. We forget that there are millions of people saw those movies and enjoyed them. We forget how many people there are who, whether they liked everything in a movie or not, don’t really connect it to a person standing behind the camera. We in SF/F fandom communities forget how many people just go to the movies to watch the movies.

But even leaving out the vast multitudes of people who genuinely enjoyed those movies and/or have no inclination to despise George Lucas for them, I’d wager that more people do despise George Lucas than despise Vox Day, Walter Breen, or Ed Kramer.

I’d wager the same is true of George R.R. Martin.

I feel awkward pointing this out because I’ve enjoyed his blog and exchanged comments with him, and I am—despite some snark about his word choices—what can only be termed a fan. Mr. Martin, in the very unlikely chance that you find yourself reading this, please believe me when I stress again I’m not calling you a worse person than anyone.

But yes, I will say it: George R. R. Martin is more widely despised than Vox Day.

For what reason? I don’t know. Probably not one reason but many, from many directions.

He’s the better known figure. His work is at this weird intersection of being both strikingly different from most of what’s out there but also widely popular, which means it’s polarizing, which means people have opinions, and wherever there are opinions of sufficient strength and diversity, there will be despite.

Who else is more despised a man in science fiction than Vox Day?

Joss Whedon, probably.

Rob Liefeld, though being a comic book creator he’s more obscure than the other contenders I’ve mentioned. Still, I’d wager anyone who is a household name in comic book households is better known than Vox Day, and thus if they have even a slightly contentious reputation, they are likely to be more despised than he is.

Joel Schumacher? Maybe. The case could be made.

I’ll say again: I’m not saying these men deserve more acrimony than Vox Day, and certainly they have committed no transgressions to my knowledge that are the equal of sexual assault against children. This is not about who owns the crown of “Most Despicable Human Being Involved In The Production of Science Fiction And/Or Fantasy”, but who is despised the most.

And while there’s not a steady correlation between “how many people know about this person?” and “how many people despise this person?”… you do have to know of a person, and think about them, in order to despise them.

So whoever the most despised man in science fiction is, it’s going to be someone that people know about and think about more often than they know and think about Vox Day. The answer is thus likely to be surprisingly petty and banal, rather than salacious and sensational. It will be someone who ruined a franchise rather than lives.

To put it shortly: more people care about what they think Michael Bay did to their childhoods than even know about what Walter Breen did to children.

 

Sad Puppies Review Books: MAKE WAY FOR DUCKLINGS

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

make way for ducklingsMake Way For Ducklings

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

If you want evidence of the deep rot that has infested the once-great Caldecott Medal, look no further than this book, which is a putrid example of ham-handed message fiction given an award by Feminazi SJWs basically as a participation prize for having a “strong female protagonist who doesn’t need a man”.

This story is set in the liberal heaven of Boston, Taxachusetts and the action—what action there is—centers around what I am sure is a taxpayer-funded boondoggle called the Public Garden Lagoon. Where in the enumerated powers of the Constitution does it say that the government has the power to fund a garden, I ask you? If the people of Boston want a park so badly they should come together and pay for one, but taxation is armed robbery at gunpoint.

The characters in this book are a family of immigratory birds who come to America and immediately have eight babies. The woman duck is no lady and has no respect for her husband’s position as head of the duck household. She finds fault with everything he does, when he tries to make a home for her nothing will do but the finest castle apparently.

Even when they are given a handout of free peanuts (they aren’t free, though, because somebody paid for them. TANSTAAFL!) at the taxpayer-supported park, they have to leave because Mrs. Mallard thinks the world revolves around her and doesn’t think she should have to watch where she’s going when there are bicycles around. Pay attention because this is going to be a running theme. If Mr. Mallard has put her in his place the first time this foolishness arose, the worst excess of this book would have been avoided. But then if he knew how to be a proper alpha duck this book would have been a lot shorter.

So the ducks leave the city and they have their eight babies on an island in the river, but Mr. Mallard has had enough of his wife’s bullshit and decides to go his own way, swimming up the river. The shrew of a duck extorts a promise from him to meet her at the park (remember, the one she decided was bullshit?) in a week. If Mr. Mallard was me, he would have said, “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” and never looked back. Take the red pill wake up, Mr. Mallard. A better title for this book would be “Make Way For Cucklings” because Mr. Mallard is clearly a beta male cuck of the lowest degree.

The book makes a big deal out of the fact that Mrs. Mallard teaches the ducklings how to swim and stuff by herself, like this isn’t her job. Well, if single motherhood is so great, why did she need a policeMAN to stop her kids from being ran over by cars when she tried to lead them across the highway? Or was it misogyny to notice that?

This book goes from bad to worse as this deadbeat duck wants to go back to the public park to suckle peanuts at the hand of the public teat, but she decided to molt and have babies so oh no she can’t fly anymore, a police officer—that’s a public servant whose salary is paid by taxes—actually STOPS TRAFFIC on a busy highway.

He even calls for backup! Apparently, it’s not enough that one jackass is being paid to stop people with jobs from getting to and from work! Mrs. Mallard is such a special snowflake that they have to send out a cruiser to escort her! Are we supposed to believe that there’s no crime in Boston? Or maybe the police just aren’t allowed to bother with that anymore. We must interfere with anyone’s ~*civil rights*~ after all.

Who pays Mr. Police Man’s salary, I ask you? Is it ducks? Do ducks pay his salary? No! We do! So why is he doing their bidding? In any rational society he would have stood back and let natural selection do its work but we are far past the point of rationality here. Mrs. Unfit Mother and her brood have a goddamn pride parade up and down the streets of Boston where all the slack-jawed liberal idiots can admire what a special snowflake she is and congratulate her on having so many children she needs a police escort to control them!

Why doesn’t she just open a Patreon account while she’s at it? She could tell the sob story about how she was almost hit by a bicycle and the victim bucks would come pouring in, let me tell you. They all have Patreons for some reason even though they produce nothing of value to anyone. It’s nothing but welfare for hipsters. It should be illegal.

And when she gets to the park, Mr. Mallard is waiting for her. Of course he is. She has him so whipped. I threw the book across the room when I got to that part. The story was clearly set up to lead in one direction, where the precious little snowflake figures out that in the real world no one has to put up with her bullshit and the price she pays for whining and crying victim all the time is winding up alone, but the author caved to the SJW bullies and totally undid everything he had been building up to in order to shoehorn in their approved message. It broke the immersion completely. I knew it was coming, but until I saw it on the page I didn’t want to believe it.

But blue pill beta cuck or not, notice that Mr. Mallard didn’t need any police escort to find his way there. He didn’t need any recognition from the town. He just did what he said he would do, quietly and without demanding any special treatment or a parade. And yet we’re supposed to think the mother is the hero of the story? This is some SJW bullshit of the first degree.

This book is the biggest piece of crap I have ever read, and the Caldecott Medal on the cover of it shows that this once prestigious award has been degraded to little more than a shiny piece of toilet paper.

It should come as no surprise that the people of Boston love this book so much they literally built a statue to it. It’s like something out of the Bible story with the golden calf. Do you think the Boston SJWs would have cared about this book if it had been set in some place like Salt Lake City or Wasilla? Hell no! But it’s like I always say: they only care about demographics. The Caldecott Medal is supposed to be an award for children’s picture books, not illustrated love-letters to liberal bastions, which is what this is.

The fact that this book was lavished with so much praise just because it kissed Boston’s ass seriously calls into question the legitimacy of any award it was given. If we can’t know for sure it wasn’t affirmative action and favoritism, we have no reason to believe it wasn’t, and that’s the same thing as proof.

Did you know that only fifteen people in all the world choose the winner of the Caldecott every year? How are the opinions of fifteen people supposed to determine “most distinguished American picture book for children”, I ask you? The fifteen people are appointed by the so-called Association for Library Services for Children, or ALSC. What do you want to bet that some or all of those appointees come from Boston or similarly liberal cities? The ALSC is a division of the notoriously pro-liberal American Library Association, or ALA. If you want to know who they answer to, just spot the pattern: ALSC, ALA, Alinsky.

Follow the money. I guarantee it.

Two stars.