Liking problematic writers

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I don’t know when I first started reading science fiction, but it must’ve been no older than seven or eight years old, going to the library on friday evenings with my mum and browsing the children’s bookshelves (that is until, inevitably and like so many others, I’d read everything in them and went on to the adult stacks). The first books I can remember reading were by Isaac Asimov: Buy Jupiter, I, Robot and a bit later the Foundation trilogy. One of the first books I bought for myself was The End of Eternity. I read everything of Asimov I could get my hands on and thanks to his writer, got to discover Clarke and Heinlein and Bradbury and all those other sf writers I’ve read since.

One of the things that made his collections so great was how chatty he was in them, writing introductions to each story, talking about how his life was going at that time, how he got to write those stories etc. From those, especially those in his later books, I slowly got the impression he was a bit of, as he would also call himself, a dirty old man, a lecher, somebody who had an eye for the women, all those other things we’d used to call men who were a bit dodgy regarding women, a bit too randy but harmless, and really, what’s the harm in being hold down by two strangers so dear old Isaac can grab your breasts?

Now of course you always hear that you shouldn’t judge the work by the person, but the more I hear about how much of a serial harasser Asimov was, the less comfortable I become keeping his books on my shelves. Fortunately for me I can justify it for myself because a) he’s dead and b) every one of those had been bought secondhand, so it’s not like I’ve been directly given money to a harasser…

A more difficult example is Elizabeth Moon, who back in 2010 said dumb, xenophobic things about Muslims. Which was one of those things I didn’t pay a lot of attention about at the time, but since then I’ve been reading a lot of Elizabeth Moon and it worries me now. Partially because, you know, I’d rather not give money to wingnuts if I can avoid it but also because that sort of politics has a tendency to bleed into a writer’s novels. Case in point: Dan Simmons.

Luckily again, Moon seems to have behaved since that outburst and so far her politics, as far as they appear in her novels may be on the conservative side, but nowhere near wingnut territory. Therefore I can justify keeping her books, which is a good thing, as I like them. unlike say Orson Scott Card, who has awful politics and who doesn’t write books anymore I like anyway. For the most part I’ve been lucky that the writers I like aren’t arseholes and those that are I don’t like.

Books read July

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Because I decided to go to Loncon as you may have noticed, this month my reading was dominated by Hugo related works, but I still managed to fit three more novels than last month in:

Hurricane Fever — Tobias Buckell
A fast moving near future thriller set in a Caribbean menaced by almost constant hurricanes. Read because Tobias Buckell was kind enough to provide a review copy.

The Lives of Tao — Wesley Chu
Wesley Chu is one of the candidates for the Campbell Best New Writer award this year and this provided as part of the voting package. A decent adventure read, but nothing special.

A Stranger in Olondria — Sofia Samatar
Another candidate for the Campbell, Sofia Samatar got my vote on the strength of this novel, a fantasy travelogue set in a world that’s not your average medievaloid setting.

Three Parts Dead — Max Gladstone
Another candidate, this was a great secondary world/urban fantasy story about a chartered accountant (more or less) investigating the death of a god.

Moon over Soho — Ben Aaronovitch
An urban fantasy murder mystery set in contemporary London; part of a series.

Six Gun Snow White — Catherynne M. Valente
My vote for the Best Novella Hugo, this retelling of the Snow White fairytale set in the Wild West, was published as a short novel. (And would’ve been a normal length novel forty years or so.)

Deep Wizardry — Diane Duane
Second in the Young Wizards series. This almost made me cry. Almost.

Your Happening World (July 28th through August 2nd)

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  • Why I’m spending today swapping out the dialect in my novel | Mary Robinette Kowal – My project today is replacing all the dialogue spoken by Antiguan characters in Of Noble Family with dialogue rewritten by Antiguan and Barbudan author Joanne Hillhouse. Let me explain why I’m doing this.
  • Google Groups – An code name is quickly picked for the exploration of Earth 1/4 Billion: Green Door. Like 'tanks', 'Manhattan District' or many other project names, it is designed to give away as little as possible about the project. As usual, the Soviet hear about GD in a few weeks.
  • EPONA – Third stone from taranis – Imagine that you have just landed on a planet twenty-one light years from Earth. You are about to enter a lush world where things are more than just a little different! Evolution has taken exotic paths and a whole new kingdom of life reigns over land, sea and air! You are the leader of a first contact mission on the planet named Epona. The mission you have organized has journeyed here in an interstellar craft that orbits Epona. Your hand-picked crew must provide all the information you will need about Epona from the 21st Century technology available to you. Your objective is to unlock the secret of Epona's remarkable life-forms and discover if there is intelligent life you can communicate with.
  • Markov Chains – Markov chains, named after Andrey Markov, are mathematical systems that hop from one "state" (a situation or set of values) to another. For example, if you made a Markov chain model of a baby's behavior, you might include "playing," "eating", "sleeping," and "crying" as states, which together with other behaviors could form a 'state space': a list of all possible states. In addition, on top of the state space, a Markov chain tells you the probabilitiy of hopping, or "transitioning," from one state to any other state—e.g., the chance that a baby currently playing will fall asleep in the next five minutes without crying first.
  • The Mouth of the WWE « – In a match between a 15-time World Champion and the most dominating real-life wrestler in the world, Paul Heyman is somehow the best pro wrestler in the story line. So forget Cena and Bryan and Orton and Roman Reigns — Paul Heyman is the face of the WWE. How in the world did that happen?

Hugo Awards: Editors and Retro Hugos

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So I’ve said before that I wasn’t sure if I was going to vote for the editor awards. I’ve ended up not doing so for a couple of reasons, mainly because I haven’t the faintest what makes for a good editor and I would mean largely voting by name recognition. Even with the stories/novels provided in the voters package it’s hard to say how much or how little the editor mattered for the success of them.

The Retro Hugos on the other hand I did vote in, though only in the fiction and artist categories.I know too little about the fan categories to make an educated choice there:

Best novel:

  1. The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White (Collins)
  2. The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson (Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1938)
  3. Galactic Patrol by E. E. Smith (Astounding Stories, February 1938)
  4. Carson of Venus by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Argosy, February 1938)
  5. Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis (The Bodley Head)

Best novella:

  1. “Who Goes There?” by Don A Stuart [John W. Campbell] (Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1938)
  2. “The Time Trap” by Henry Kuttner (Marvel Science Stories, November 1938)
  3. “A Matter of Form” by H. L. Gold (Astounding Science-Fiction, December 1938)
  4. “Sleepers of Mars” by John Beynon [John Wyndham] (Tales of Wonder, March 1938)
  5. No Award

Best novelette:

  1. “Werewoman” by C. L. Moore (Leaves #2, Winter 1938)
  2. “Pigeons From Hell” by Robert E. Howard (Weird Tales, May 1938)
  3. “Hollywood on the Moon” by Henry Kuttner (Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1938)
  4. “Dead Knowledge” by Don A. Stuart [John W. Campbell] (Astounding Stories, January 1938)
  5. “Rule 18” by Clifford D. Simak (Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1938)

Best short story:

  1. “How We Went to Mars” by Arthur C. Clarke (Amateur Science Stories, March 1938)
  2. “Hyperpilosity” by L. Sprague de Camp (Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1938)
  3. “Hollerbochen’s Dilemma” by Ray Bradbury (Imagination!, January 1938)
  4. “The Faithful” by Lester del Rey (Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1938)
  5. “Helen O’Loy” by Lester del Rey (Astounding Science-Fiction, December 1938)

Ubermawkish, sexist “Helen O’Loy” better not win.

Best Professional Artist

  1. Virgil Finlay
  2. Alex Schomburg
  3. Frank R. Paul
  4. Margaret Brundage
  5. H. W. Wesso

Damn, there were some great artists doing sf and fantasy illustrion back then. Any of them is a worthy winner.

Hugo Awards: Best Novella

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The last major fiction award I still need to talk about: the best novella. A bit of a mixed bag this category, with stories that are in that awkward stage halfway between novel and short story. Indeed, at least one could’ve been published as a short novel in its own right. As with some other categories, the two struck through candidates I haven’t considered due to reasons described in my first post.

To be honest, the remaining three stories were good but not spectacularly so, not nearly as good as some of the entries in the short story and novelette categories.

  1. Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente (Subterranean Press)
    As the title indicates, this is a Wild West retelling of the Snow White fairy tale. Well done.
  2. “Wakulla Springs” by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages (Tor.com, 10-2013)
    This is a great story about several generations of an African-American family living near the lake used to film Tarzan movies and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but the fantastical element is minimal.
  3. “Equoid” by Charles Stross (Tor.com, 09-2013)
    A typically fun, manic Laundry story about unicorns.
  4. The Butcher of Khardov by Dan Wells (Privateer Press)
  5. “The Chaplain’s Legacy” by Brad Torgersen (Analog, Jul-Aug 2013)

Hugo Awards: Best related work

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This was a relatively easy category to decide upon, though since it contains one blog post/essay, a podcast and three books, also one of the more confusing ones. My final vote was as follows:

  1. “We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative” by Kameron Hurley (A Dribble of Ink): a great essay and an important essay, which is why it gets the nod over everything else.
  2. Queers Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans Who Love It Edited by Sigrid Ellis & Michael Damian Thomas (Mad Norwegian Press): I’m not that interested in Doctor Who or its fandom, but this is a good book to show that at least some corners of speculative fiction indeed can be and are of special interest to queer people.
  3. Speculative Fiction 2012: The Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary by Justin Landon & Jared Shurin (Jurassic London): would’ve finished higher if they’d asked me to contribute, but they didn’t, so feck them.
  4. Writing Excuses Season 8 by Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler, and Jordan Sanderson: a decent enough podcast but no more than that.
  5. Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff VanderMeer, with Jeremy Zerfoss (Abrams Image): This was not for me.

Wiscon again

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Elise Matthesen talks about what happened after she reported being harassed at Wiscon 37, in a post also posted at: C. Lundoff, Mary Robinette Kowal, Stephanie Zvan, Sigrid Ellis and John Scalzi‘s respective blogs.

Last year at WisCon 37, I told a Safety staffer that I had been treated by another attendee in a way that made me uncomfortable and that I believed to be sexual harassment. One big reason I did was that I understood from another source that he had reportedly harassed at least one other person at a convention. I learned that she didn’t report him formally, for a lot of reasons that aren’t mine to say. I was in a position where I felt confident I could take the hit from standing up and telling the truth. So I did.

I didn’t expect, fourteen months later, to have to stand up and tell the truth about WisCon’s leadership as well.

Let’s get some backstory to this, shall we?

As discussed here previously, Elise Matthesen was harassed by somebody who was later identified as Tor editor Jim Frenkel. Shortly after this, he was no longer. It turned out that Matthesen’s experience with Frenkel wasn’t unique; he’d long had a reputation in some circles in fandom. Wiscon at first seemed to take the harassment complaint as seriously as Tor had done, but then it turned out that not only had Frenkel been allowed to attend, he had also been allowed to volunteer at this year’s Wiscon.

That was in late May. Wiscon was slow to react to this but eventually formed several subcommittees, one to look into the general problem of harassment and safety and two to look into specific allegations, with the one looking into what happened to Elise Matthesen finally reporting its verdict on the 18th of July, formally banning Frenkel:

WisCon will (provisionally) not allow Jim Frenkel to return for a period of four years (until after WisCon 42 in 2018). This is “provisional” because if Jim Frenkel chooses to present substantive, grounded evidence of behavioral and attitude improvement between the end of WisCon 39 in 2015 and the end of the four-year provisional period, WisCon will entertain that evidence. We will also take into account any reports of continued problematic behavior.

Allowing Jim Frenkel to return is not guaranteed at any time, including following WisCon 42; the convention’s decision will always be dependent on compelling evidence of behavioral change, and our commitment to the safety of our members. If he is permitted to return at any time, there will be an additional one-year ban on appearing on programming or volunteering in public spaces. Any consideration of allowing him to return will be publicized in WisCon publications and social media at least three months before a final decision is made.

Responses to this announcement were largely critical, with e.g. Kameron Hurley calling for Wiscon to be abolished completely while others said they’d be unlikely to attend Wiscon in future. Elise Matthesen herself had already said she wouldn’t, despite the loss in revenue this would cost her. EDIT: to clarify, she said she would stay away for a year, not forever; see the comments to this post.

In response to this criticism, one of the members of the subcommittee handling Matthesen’s case wrote two blogposts in a personal capacity explaining and apologising for the process with with the committee had handled the case.

From the discussion in those two posts it became clear Wiscon had been doing what Rose Fox had warned about two years earlier, in the context of a similar harassment case at Readercon:

When someone does something we find noxious, they become the focus of attention: how will they be punished? Will they apologize? Can they be brought back into the fold? Meanwhile, the person they targeted with their noxious behavior is forgotten, dismissed, or scorned. Harassers are often charismatic, which is how they get close enough to harass, and they often target the shy and vulnerable, who are that much easier to ignore if they manage to speak up at all. We are all intimately familiar with the narrative of sin-repentance-redemption, and it’s startlingly easy to try to follow someone through it while all but forgetting that they wouldn’t have even started down that road if they hadn’t treated another person badly.

They also pointed out that focusing on the harasser’s redemption means at least two other people would no longer be comfortable at Wiscon.

Following up on all this criticism, Wiscon put out an update saying that

1) In light of the intense community response to the Frenkel subcommittee’s decision, and the concom’s own concern about the “provisional ban,” the WisCon concom is itself currently appealing the subcommittee’s decision and will vote on the matter this week.

2) Debbie Notkin has resigned as Member Advocate, effective immediately.

3) The Bergmann subcommittee is assessing if they can continue given the valid concerns about Wiscon’s existing process.

To which Elise Matthesen’s post was a response.

Further reading:

The Warrior’s Apprentice — Lois McMaster Bujold

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Cover of The Warrior's Apprentice


The Warrior’s Apprentice
Lois McMaster Bujold
315 pages
published in 1986

As you probably know, Bob, The Warrior’s Apprentice is the second novel in the Vorkosigan Saga series of mil-sf adventures and came out in the same year as the first, Shards of Honor. Whereas that book starred Miles parents, this is the introduction of Miles Vorkosigan, the just under five foot crippled before birth by a neurotoxin attack on his mother, insanely charismatic, insanely hyperactive military genius who, at the start of the novel is trying to make it through the eliminations for officer candidacy in the Barrayaran Imperial Military Service. The written exam is no problem; it’s the physical tests that are a challenge for somebody who could break his bones just by sitting down hard.

His strategy is to take it slow and careful, but being seventeen he lets himself get goaded by one of his fellow candidates, takes an unnecessary risk and breaks his legs, with it shattering his chances to get into the military. Worse than his own disappointment is his grandfather’s, the liberator of Barrayar of the Cetegendans, who dies the next night — Miles convinced he killed him by breaking his heart. In his despair and sorry he’s glad to get away from Barrayar and, because of the political situation his father too would like to see him visit his mother’s family on Beta Colony, a nicely civilised part of the galaxy where aristocratic notions of honour are held for the anachronisms they are. He doesn’t travel alone; his bodyguard, sergeant Bothari, of course has to travel with him and he manages to persuade his mother to ask Bothari’s daughter, Elena, to come with him as well. He’s of course half in love with her and thinks a trip to another planet and perhaps the chance to learn more of Elena’s long dead mother, would get him into her good graces. Yes, Miles is somewhat of a nice guy but trust me, he grows out of it.

Read more…

Skip the movie, watch the video: Falcon and the Snowman

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Part one in what may become a series. Way back in the stone ages, or the eighties as it was know at the time, the movie footage videoclip became a common way to both promote a movie and provide a band with a cheap videoclip. For many of us growing up that time who were too young or lacked the opportunity to catch these movies in the cinema, these clips were the only way in which we saw some of the eighties’ biggest movies. And often once you did watch them, they were nowhere near as good as the video. Case in point, The Falcon and the Snowman, late Cold War spy thriller that never lived up to the promise of its melancholy Bowie theme song.