• While I applaud most efforts to annoy prissy leftists, I’m not all that concerned about the “Sad Puppies.” I’ve never regarded the Hugo award as anything but a popularity contest, no more significant than the Nobel Peace Prize. ((It doesn’t help that they’re named for a lousy writer.)) ((The Nebula awards, which are chosen by writers, are more meaningful, but only slightly: in 1971, Gene Wolfe and R.A. Lafferty, the best writer and the most original writer of our time, both lost to Noah Ward.)) It’s hardly worth all the histrionics.
• A useful term: “gong farmer.” (Via Professor Mondo.)
• Yesterday was the twelfth anniversary of the launch of my first weblog. It was not my first website, though; I’ve had a web presence of some sort since the final years of the last century.
I was just reading through the “Nebula Awards Showcase 2006” collection, and several of the stories jumped out at me as almost completely lacking in SF/F content. They were not the “message fiction” that SP despises, but they were “depressingly mundane with a faint hint of the fantastic”, the sort of thing that gets Sarah Hoyt to start grinding her teeth.
For instance: 1950s child recounts the tale of how his teacher found an old skeleton, called a pair of married archaeologists to investigate, discovered that it appeared to be a dead time traveler, and screwed the wife. Then the jealous husband blew up the site, smacked her around, and they left town. Teacher also left town and got killed in Korean War. The end.
The story that beat that one to win was: 1950s child with mean stepmother bonds with stereotyped black housekeeper (“maybe she mad that your daddy gone down to Florida”), housekeeper teaches child to hex stepmother and cause her hair to fall out, mean stepmother burns child’s favorite book, child accidentally kills stepmother with a short circuit while trying another hex, then disappears by wishing herself into becoming a mouse.
I bought it for the Vernor Vinge novella that’s otherwise hard to find, “The Cookie Monster”; that lost to Walter Jon Williams’ “The Green Leopard Plague”, which fortunately is also SF.
-j