Running Through Hugo's Back Yard 3: The Man In The High Castle

Hugo winner: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, 1963

My view: It's not nearly as affecting to me - an old PKD fan if there ever was one - as either Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said or Ubik, but his alternate history version of a US occupied by a victorious Axis is both plausibly realized and suitably ominous, although the most important aspects of this novel (as with practically all of his work) are the disturbed inner psyches of the lead characters. It's a truism: the more deeply you read into a PKD novel, the more you get the sense that the workings of outward reality itself against those characters is the real enemy. This is a good place for a novice to start before heading off to even more challenging fare like the aforementioned novels and the likes of A Scanner Darkly, BTW.

Nuggety? Aw, c'mon. Not even close.

Running Through Hugo's Back Yard 2: The Big Time

Hugo winner: The Big Time by Fritz Leiber, 1958

My view: A war that runs through all of time and space as viewed through the setting of a futuristic USO station might have been a lousy idea in the hands of a lesser writer than Leiber, but although I don't like this nearly as much as his fantasy work he still pulls it off with a lot of flair and punchiness.

Nuggety? This is relatively close to what Brad Torgersen seems to prefer in terms of whiz-bang traditional (military) SF, but I doubt he'd find the moral ambiguity that underlies the plot and character motivation much of anything to write home about.

Running Through Hugo's Back Yard 1: The Demolished Man

So. I had this funny idea, and...

Yeah, yeah, I know - funny ideas are usually the death of good ones, but not in this case; what this idea was is to look through all of the Hugo Award-winning novels I've read (mere nominees will have to follow sometime later, but I'll get around to it) in order to see how they stack up both in terms of how I remember them and how they stack up to a certain Mr. Torgersen's ideal of breakfast cereal (pretty much beaten to death here by MD Lachlan). I know I have a tendency to overwrite introductions, so without further ado here's the first victim of this experiment:

Hugo winner: The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, 1953

My view: It's been a good, long while since I've read this, and the one thing that's a drawback is that the dialogue even seemed dated to me when I read it in my late teens/early twenties. Then again, so what? TDM came out in 1952, which essentially means that it would seem dated in most contexts since this is over 60 years later. A fun romp of a book that can almost seem like a positively cheerful alternative version of Minority Report at times.

Nuggety? There's plenty of action, but somehow I don't think that this is quite the kind of book that Sad Puppies would go for since it has about as much to do with military SF as it does the Bolshoi Ballet.

Not funny (revised)

(WARNING: this is going to be a mostly visceral reaction to what I consider a disgusting response to a national tragedy; you were warned in advance. If this doesn't bother you, read on.)

Sometimes I get the feeling that certain members of the human race were just put here to test the limits of my anger; this, unfortunately, is one of those times.

As mentioned on James Nicoll's More Words, Deeper Hole, a certain Hugo awards nominee who got there largely due to the efforts of the Sad/Rabid Puppies slate-voting him in under the Best Related Work category decided to have a massive brain fart and posted two nauseating comments about the Charleston mass shooting of June 18th. The two comments (reproduced here and here) were, apparently, an attempt to be funny to someone.

And I'm sure they were funny. To utter psychopaths, though. Not to human beings with anything approaching normal levels of actual empathy. 

Seriously, what the hell is this?

A steaming turd that was posted by an emotionally deficient individual is one thing - there are plenty of those to go around on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. - but here's the problem: the guy who posted this particular serving of Antisocial Personality Disorder du jour is a Hugo nominee who got there with the help of a faction of "fans" and pros who have done everything in their power to game the Hugos and get people nominated who don't deserve to be there. They don't even deserve to have their alleged reasons for gaming the nomination process taken seriously anymore - if they ever did in the first place.

Do you know what they do deserve, though?

Derision. Contempt. And your hard-earned money going to authors who write far better books and stories than they do.

The fact that the particular author in question here has a Hugo-nominated book made up entirely of his similar wit and wisdom should serve as a warning that this was never about anyone trying to reclaim a space in the SF universe for cracking good old-fashioned Golden Age tales, as Brad R. Torgersen said in his Sad Puppies 3 manifesto. That might have been what Torgersen claimed, but it's not what the Sads (as well as V*x D*y and the rest of the Rabids) wanted. What they wanted was for their pet bull to take a shit in the middle of the floor and dare people to call it what it obviously was. 

Guess what? Mission accomplished. All the Sad/Rabid Puppies stand for in my opinion is utter bullshit. The nomination of books such as Dysentery from my Internet (a book, BTW, that was a nominee on both the Sad and Rabid lists; originally, I thought that only V*x D*y's sycophants would stoop so low as to nominate it, but no such luck) is irrefutable proof of that.

Happy?

What's worse is that that those "jokes" about the Emanuel AME Church mass shooting was posted by someone I've known on and off in Chicago-area fandom for years. That fact alone makes this especially difficult to stomach. I wasn't more than a friendly acquaintance and I certainly never shared his politics, especially recently; however, I never realized what sort of a complete asshole he is deep down. And if he meant any of what he wrote, he is a complete asshole. If not, he's a tone-deaf publicity freak who doesn't care how he comes off as long as he gets enough followers and like-minded "fans" online. Both of those facts are sad and pathetic, but for him to take a national tragedy and try to crack wise about it in order to be King of the Dickheads isn't merely sad and pathetic - it's a sign that the man is mentally FUBAR.

As to anyone who wants to take issue with my language in this post, go right ahead and do that. I'm not the one mocking nine dead people who were killed by a fucked-up kid who was either a nascent white supremacist or psychologically addled to the point of committing mass murder. Too many people take issue with profanity even when it's fully deserved, and in this case it is. It's also funny that you didn't read garbage like this in the wake of the Sandy Hook or Aurora shootings. It couldn't be because the victims were - you know - black, could it?

Nah. Of course not. It was just a coincidence! And I just need to lighten up!

Both of which are utter bullshit as well, of course.

Boycott, Shmoycott

Although I think that Laura J. Mixon says what most needs to be said about the Puppy-proposed  boycott of Tor books (mentioned here by Laura Resnick via Facebook) in her letter to Tom Doherty, a few choice bits about the individual most responsible for initiating it need to be repeated here:

(Theodore) Beale has been pursuing a personal grudge against several people, including Tor author John Scalzi and the Nielsen Haydens, for years. The reason he has targeted them is that they have stood up for those who have been bullied and harassed by Beale and his supporters.

Beale was booted out of our professional trade organization, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), in 2013, after using official SFWA channels to promote a series of deeply offensive, blatantly racist remarks against SFF writer and SFWA member N. K. Jemisin. He has a long history of horrific reactionary public statements, not only against people of color, immigrants, and non-Christians (including citing Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who gunned down 77 people, mostly teens, as a national hero for his acts, and suggesting that we look to Hitler to solve our immigration problems [he has since deleted the offending paragraph from his article, but the original pro-Nazi text appears here]). His views on women (“a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages,” “[A] purely empirical perspective on Malala Yousafzai, the poster girl for global female education, may indicate that the Taliban’s attempt to silence her was perfectly rational and scientifically justifiable”) and gays (“Correcting the gay defect;” “How ‘gay marriage’ harms you”) are equally repugnant.

All of the above has been documented over and over again, but that's not the point: the point is that there are apparently people out there who've decided to still make Beale the champion of their cause despite the fact that he has repeatedly proven that all he seems to be is a singularly repulsive scumbag whose supply of grudges never seems to end, either in terms of the number or the expiration date. Mixon, again:

But there is no getting around the fact that a misogynistic, homophobic white supremacist, who has spoken approvingly of shootings and acid attacks on women, and of Hitler and the Holocaust, who has called a respected SFF scholar and popular writer an ignorant, “not equally human” savage, stands at the heart of this conflict. Beale’s followers and fellow travelers may not themselves hold all the bigoted views he does, but information on who he is and how he feels about women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and others has been widely shared by now. If people are emailing you calling for Irene to be fired, they are unavoidably supporting Beale’s hate-filled agenda.

What makes this worse, IMHO, is that the nonsense he's orchestrating about demanding Gallo's firing doesn't just stop there. Laura Resnick:

One of their explicit demands is that Tor must publicly apologize for "the attitudes, lies and libel expressed by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Moshe Feder and Irene Gallo, all current or former employees of Tor, and by the Tor-published author John Scalzi, concerning supporters of the 'Puppies' slates for the Hugo awards."  A second demand is that Tor must publicly reprimand those individuals. With so many different Puppies involved, I can't tell at this time whether they're still demanding that Irene Gallo's employment be terminated.
If anyone thinks that I was being far too harsh in my language when I called the RSHD a singularly repulsive scumbag, please feel free to tell me how. Come to think of it, my forgetting to use the term "egomaniacal" earlier is a bit of an oversight. My bad.

To be perfectly honest, the people who support his little campaign aren't much of an improvement, at least in terms of the outrageous chutzpah they're showing in demanding an apology here and a reprimand there. Okay, they may not be as hate-filled and venomous as he is. Few people are who already aren't in a prison cell, psychiatric hospital or currently running a torture program in a third world dictatorship. But let's face it - they let him take the lead in all of this despite knowing exactly what he is. Why they did so is beyond me, but the history of SF is chock-full of people who are more than a bit tightly wound. The RSHD is just one of the latest examples. I'm also sure that by the time this all ends he'll also go down as one of the worst.

Granted, I think that Tor won't just roll over in the wake of this bullshit. Too much of their reputation as a publisher is at stake for that to happen, and if you were thinking of picking up a book published by them over the weekend it couldn't hurt. Just keep in mind the following: a fanatic has a right to his views, but that right ends at the range he can punch someone who wants to violate it. The RSHD has gone way past that range.

But nothing bad can happen when you continue to incite people to such levels of hatred, right?

Nine people might disagree with that point if they could.

In Memoriam: Ornette Coleman, 1930-2015

Truly. But I'll let the music speak for itself:

In Memoriam: Sir Christopher Lee, 1922-2015

From the Guardian:

In an interview in 2013, Lee spoke about his love of acting. “Making films has never just been a job to me, it is my life,” he said. “I have some interests outside of acting – I sing and I’ve written books, for instance – but acting is what keeps me going, it’s what I do, it gives life purpose.”

 

I Stand With Irene Gallo - but that's not enough

So: the quote that managed to get Irene Gallo in such hot water is this one, as reproduced by Chuck Wendig:

There are two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups, called the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies respectively, that are calling for the end of social justice in science fiction and fantasy. They are unrepentantly racist, sexist and homophobic. A noisy few but they’ve been able to gather some Gamergate folks around them and elect a slate of bad-to-reprehensible works on this year’s Hugo ballot.

Now here's the problem, and it takes more than a bit of nuanced thinking to fully get it.

If Gallo had taken one word out of that paragraph, she'd have been fine. Problem is, she left the Godwin-friendly term in, and that complicates the issue to the point where defending her becomes a bit difficult. It is not, however, impossible.

As much as either group of Puppies deny it, a lot of the stuff they've posted is exactly what Gallo calls it. Her problem is that she didn't pay enough attention to the difference between the Sads and the Rabids. The Sad Puppies have come across repeatedly as a group of tireless (and tiresome, IMHO) self-promoters who decided that a strange dual attack on "the literati" and racial diversity in fandom was going to win them oodles of readers and supporters and thereby make them the unquestioned kings of book sales in the SF universe.

Probably not, but you can dream, can't you?

Except when the dream becomes a waking nightmare.

Then you've got a problem.

Enter one person we will call the RSHD, as it's a euphemism he seems to have earned.

The RSHD does not seem to know when to leave well enough alone, you see. He had already earned himself a reputation for unsavory behavior and the promotion of crank beliefs even before he used a Twitter feed belonging to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America to defame fellow SFWA member N.K. Jemisin for daring to point out that he wasn't really all that nice a guy in a Guest of Honor speech she gave at Continuum 9. For that action, the RSHD got his lifetime membership in the SFWA revoked, which led to what you'd expect: more evidence of his inability to leave well enough alone. This time, though, he got a new bunch of friends in the form of the creeper lobby gamergate, and they decided that they'd ride the coattails of past Sad Puppy bloc voting efforts in order to get a bunch of people nominated for Hugo Awards that, in all reality, probably don't deserve them - one of them being the RSHD himself. Another one was John C. Wright, who seems to fit the definition of "homophobic" in the old "there's a picture of him in the dictionary above that entry" sense of things. Come to think of it, if Gallo had just specified that the Rabid Puppies were racist, sexist and homophobic in their orientation she'd be completely right.

Unfortunately, all this amounts to is another distraction from the overriding ridiculousness of this clown show.

This is a debate in which men - grown fucking men, mind you - are willing to engage in vituperative attacks and even borderline-illegal online and in-person harassment against people whose only crime seems to be that they disagree with them. Or gained their ire on a more personal level. Or are even breathing the same air as they are. Shit, I don't know where any of this starts or stops any more and I've been involved in more than one internecine fandom-related war myself. I just haven't been involved in one where this sort of thing becomes the norm, and I don't like Irene Gallo's chances at being passed over for harassment now that she's become a target.

So she wrote something that should've been edited more wisely. Big deal. She wrote it on her own Facebook page, on her own time, and that's more than what the RSHD has done in the past.

So I stand with Irene Gallo. I also think that it's time that we didn't just stand with her; we need to tell the people who are now insisting on her being fired from Tor to get off their high horses, knock off  the selective outrage and think real hard about the sort of people they're allying with -such as the RSHD, for example:

"[I]n light of the strong correlation between female education and demographic decline, a purely empirical perspective on Malala Yousafzai, the poster girl for global female education, may indicate that the Taliban’s attempt to silence her was perfectly rational and scientifically justifiable."

And that would be the sexism that Gallo brought up doing the talking there, of course.

Ultimately, the right tack to take about all of this was written by katster in this post:
It strikes me that Beale doesn’t want dialogue. He doesn’t want us to understand each other, because if we can understand — if we can glimpse that the other side of the screen sits another human being not all that much different from us — then his culture war is dead. He cannot afford to lose that — it is his driving force and his motivator.

I’m a science fiction fan because I like to read, Beale. I’m not here for your bullshit culture wars, and I really wish you’d take them somewhere else.

"So what SF and fantasy has this argumentative bastard read, anyway?"

I'm sure you didn't ask, either. Too late.

Mark Adlard: Interface
 
Brian W. Aldiss: Barefoot in the Head; The Long Afternoon of Earth; Cryptozoic!; Earthworks

Isaac Asimov: Foundation
 
J.G. Ballard: The Terminal Beach; High Rise
 
William Barton: When Heaven Fell

William Barton and Michael Capobianco: Iris; Fellow Traveller
 
Alfred Bester: The Demolished Man

John Brunner: Stand On Zanzibar; The Jagged Orbit; The Sheep Look Up: The Shockwave Rider; The Traveler in Black

Algis Budrys: Who?
 
Terry Carr (editor): Universe 1 
 
Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle; Ubik; Martian Time Slip; Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; We Can Build You; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Now Wait For Last Year; A Scanner Darkly ; Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After The Bomb; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch     
 
Paul DiFillippo: Ribofunk
 
Harlan Ellison: The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World; Approaching Oblivion; Deathbird Stories; Strange Wine; Shatterday; Dangerous Visions (editor)
 
William Gibson: Neuromancer; Count Zero; Mona Lisa Overdrive; Burning Chrome; Virtual Light; Idoru
 
William Gibson with Bruce Sterling: The Difference Engine
 
Mira Grant: Deadline

Joe Haldeman: All My Sins Remembered; The Forever War
 
Harry Harrison: The Stainless Steel Rat; The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge; The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World; The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted: Deathworld; Deathworld 2
 
K.W. Jeter: Dr. Adder; The Glass Hammer; Farewell Horizontal
 
Stephen King: Night Shift
 
Kathe Koja: The Cypher; Bad Brains
 
Fritz  Leiber: Swords and Deviltry; Swords Against Death; Swords in the Mist; The Big Time
 
Frank Belknap Long: Mars Is My Destination

Ken MacLeod: The Cassini Division
 
China Mieville: Embassytown
 
Michael Moorcock: Elric: Elric of Melnibone; The Sailor on the Seas of Fate; The Weird of the White Wolf; The Vanishing Tower; The Bane of the Black Sword; Stormbringer; The Fortress of the Pearl; Corum: The Knight of the Swords; The Queen of the Swords; The King of the Swords; The Bull and the Spear; The Oak and the Ram; The Sword and the Stallion; Dorian Hawkmoon: The Jewel in the Skull; The Mad God's Amulet; The Sword of the Dawn; The Runestaff; Count Brass; The Champion of Garathorm; The Quest for Tanelorn; Jerry Cornelius: The Final Programme; A Cure for Cancer; The Condition of Muzak;  Oswald Bastable: The Warlord of the Air; The Land Leviathan; The Steel Tsar; Other: The Eternal Champion; The Silver Warriors (AKA Phoenix in Obsidian); Breakfast in the Ruins; Best SF Stories from New Worlds 2 (editor)
 
Frederik Pohl: The Merchants' War; The Cool War; Gateway; Beyond the Blue Event Horizon; The Siege of Eternity; The Far Shore of Time; The Best of Frederik Pohl; The Age of the Pussyfoot; Drunkard's Walk
 
Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth: The Space Merchants
 
Robert Sheckley: Immortality, Inc.
 
Robert Silverberg: Hawksbill Station; The Second Trip; The World Inside; Born with the Dead; Nightwings; Dying Inside
 
John Shirley: Eclipse; Eclipse Penumbra; Eclipse Corona; Wetbones; Heatseeker; (most of) New Noir
 
Dan Simmons: Hyperion; The Fall of Hyperion
 
Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash; The Diamond Age; Cryptonomicon
 
John Sladek: The Muller-Fokker Effect
 
Bruce Sterling: Crystal Express; A Good Old Fashioned Future; Islands in the Net; Heavy Weather; Mirrorshades (editor); Holy Fire
 
Michael Swanwick: Vacuum Flowers

Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-five
 
David Wingrove: Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom
 
Gene Wolfe: Endangered Species

Roger Zelazny: Nine Princes in Amber; The Guns of Avalon
 
Doctor Who novelizations: (Please keep in mind that these some 81 [!] books are the ones I actually remember reading and may not be a complete accounting of the ones I've actually read. Editions with an asterisk were published by Pinnacle in the US instead of Target UK.)

First Doctor: The Daleks; The Crusaders The Zarbi; The Tenth Planet; The Dalek Invasion of Earth; The Keys of Marinus; An Unearthly Child; The Aztecs; Marco Polo  Second Doctor: The Abominable Snowmen; The Cybermen; The Ice Warriors; The Web of Fear; The Tomb of the Cybermen; The War Games; The Enemy of the World; The Dominators; The Mind Robber; The Wheel in Space  Third Doctor: The Auton Invasion; The Cave Monsters; Day of the Daleks*; The Doomsday Weapon*; The Daemons; The Sea Devils; The Curse of Peladon; Terror of the Autons; The Green Death; Planet of the Spiders; The Three Doctors; The Invasion of the Dinosaurs; The Space War; Planet of the Daleks; The Carnival of Monsters; The Claws of Axos; The Mutants; The Time Warrior; Death to the Daleks; The Monster of Peladon  Fourth Doctor: The Giant Robot; The Loch Ness Monster*; Revenge of the Cybermen*; Genesis of the Daleks*; The Pyramids of Mars; The Seeds of Doom; The Ark in Space; The Brain of Morbius; The Planet of Evil; The Deadly Assassin; The Talons of Weng-Chiang; The Masque of Mandragora; The Face of Evil; The Horror of Fang Rock; The Android Invasion; The Sontaran Experiment; The Hand of Fear; The Invisible Enemy; The Robots of Death; Image of the Fendahl; The Invasion of Time; The Armageddon Factor; The Nightmare of Eden; The Creature from the Pit; The State of Decay; The Keeper of Traken; The Leisure Hive; Logopolis; The Sunmakers  Fifth Doctor:The Visitation; Time Flight; Castrovalva; Four to Doomsday; Earthshock; Terminus; Arc of Infinity; The Five Doctors; Mawdryn Undead; Kinda; Snakedance; Enlightenment; Warriors of the Deep

Yet Another Polemic about The Hugos - collect them all! (updated)

So. A bunch of guys got together, voted as a bloc and...

Ah, skip the intro, already. This has been detailed by so many people in the fannish community in so many different ways that it's not funny, but then again, it really shouldn't be. Why? Mainly due to two reasons which I'll go into in detail:

1) Like most people who happen to read these odd, antiquated things called "books" as a form of entertainment I have a finite amount of both time and money to spend on those books. That means that I pretty much read what I want to. Quite a bit of it would be termed "literary science fiction", for want of a more accurate description. That being said, the one thing that will not convince me to read a book is having someone engage in the online equivalent of screaming at the top of their lungs with a bullhorn outside my window at 3 in the morning about how "YOU'RE BEING A LITERARY ELITIST/SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR/CRAPTACULAR JUDGE OF SCIENCE FICTION FOR NOT READING MY BOOK INSTEAD THE ONE YOU'RE CURRENTLY ENJOYING, DAMNIT!!!"

That's pretty much what the entire Sad (and even worse, Rabid) Puppies crowd did with the 2015 Hugos. A number of more deserving nominees probably got knocked off the ballot as a result of all this, which directly leads to this observation:

2) All of this wouldn't be as grating on my nerves except for the following: although there was nothing particularly illegal in terms of  Hugo nomination rules as laid down by the WSFS in what the Sad/Rabid Puppies did, they chose to ignore the following truism: just because you can doesn't mean that you should. The Sads, in my opinion, were looking to continue a strategy of self-promotion that goes back to the first two Sad Puppy campaigns that Larry Correia organized in 2013 and 2014. Unfortunately, the current Sad Puppy front man is Brad R. Torgersen, who seems even more naïve than Correia about the company he keeps. Tactics like theirs would have pissed me off regardless of who engages in them, but the fact that the organizers of the Sad and Rabid campaigns are all to the right of my own political views (in the case of the Rabids very far to the right, since they make the likes of Bill O'Reilly seem like Bernie Sanders in comparison), have a very narrow definition of what constitutes proper SF and also undertook this as a politically motivated attack on certain corners of SF fandom is just icing on an already huge cake. I have a saying that if you scratch an Objectivist you'll find a Stalinist underneath. I think it's been more than adequately proven here.

Also, consider their online belligerence: if they hadn't ratcheted up the "you better listen to us because we're really angry and we'll call you names if you don't" element of their campaign, I wouldn't have cared all that much about this mess. Since they did, my response is this: if the Puppies' only way to present an argument is to engage in personal attacks against other pros in the field (such as here, here and here), they've pretty much lost my interest in reading anything they publish or even in taking them all that seriously as polemicists in the first place. Not only is it a complete non-starter in term of debating tactics, but it makes them look like a pack of emotionally stunted escapees from the Asshole Factory. That's not a particularly pleasant turn of phase, mind you, but I calls 'em as I sees 'em and what I see from them is behavior indicative of a bunch of supposedly grown men who are acting like anything but. 

So if the SRPs were looking to win any points with a run-of-the-mill, not particularly SMOFish Joe Fan like me by doing this, they didn't. Quite the opposite, in fact. As to whether they realize that there's an actual lesson in that fact...

Now reading

The Malacia Tapestry by Brian W. Aldiss.