Reading Wednesday 26/10

[liv]

Recently read: Very misc collection of essays and such

• Via soon_lee: Ann Leckie on guilty pleasures. Leckie makes some fairly obvious points about how the concept of a "guilty" pleasure is often snobby and sexist, but expands on that with some interesting thoughts about criticizing tastes of those who don't belong to the group you want to identify with.
  
  
• kalypso wrote Strange and Norrell fic. It's explicitly based on the TV series (which I've watched slightly under half of), not the book, and I think it really captures the atmosphere but not so much Susanna Clarke's distinctive voice. Massively spoilery for either the series or the books, though. And, uh, the fic is about gaslighting someone with memory loss, in case you don't know the books but want to read anyway.
  
  
• Following links from something else, I found this Q&A with a sleep scientist, which makes a nice accessible summary of recent evidence. There's also quite a lot of discussion about SIDS (cot death) risk, which might make it hard reading for some; I really pricked my ears up at:

  But most people who want to ‘ban co-sleeping’ don’t think any of [the relevant evidence that the risk may be lower than thought] matters, because it isn’t an important or valued behaviour for them. It is valued by cultural minorities and breastfeeding mothers, not the people who (previously) made up the guidance.

  
  
• History of the song L'homme armé, with a long and fascinating diversion about the Crusades and the fall of Constantinople.
  
  
• siderea has a lovely piece Forward into light about the history of the US women's suffrage movement. Which reminds me, I am most grateful to all my American friends who are talking about voting, and especial kudos to people who've looked into ballot measures and elections for offices other than PotUSA where that's relevant in their locality. We don't do democracy quite like that but I'm alwyas impressed when people put serious effort into participating and citizenship.

Currently reading: Still In a time of gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor. He's in Austria atm and I have a weird second-hand nostalgia for 1930s Austria, since many people in the community I grew up with were refugees from there. It's a little too poignant to read Fermor looking back on the way of life that, writing in the 70s, he knew was about to be destroyed with the massive swing to the right and eventually the Anschluß.

Up next: I am not sure, I'm leaning towards Two serpents rise by Max Gladstone.

Comments

[kass]

Ooh. Thank you for the Ann Leckie link.

[liv]

Glad to pass it on!

[seekingferret]

I'm thinking about the Leckie post with respect to the Sad Puppies, because Leckie was generally speaking someone who criticized the Puppies. And whereas I think it's clear that the Rabid Puppies were just vicious trolls seeking to mess with SF fandom, a lot of the talk from the Sad Puppy community was about how the books that they liked were never getting Hugo recognition, in spite of the fact that those books outsold a lot of the Hugo winners. It seems like, given this post, Leckie might say that the Puppy nominees were objectively bad according to 'standards', but we shouldn't shame the Puppies for liking them anyway. And I'm pretty sure "It’s entirely possible to like bad things and dislike good things." is just a more polished form of condescension, and is exactly what the Sad Puppies were revolting against.

[liv]

I'm not quite sure where you're going with this comment. If it's that Ann Leckie is being a hypocrite because she's saying not to be condescending about other people's taste and in the past she has been condescending about the Sad Puppies' taste, that could well be right; I didn't read everything she wrote about the Puppies. I have more sympathy for her than for Correia and Torgersen &co, in that the Puppies spilled really a lot of ink about how the Ancillary series is everything that's wrong with SF, and nominated a lot of stuff that really doesn't showcase the best of what they claim to like. If I were in Leckie's position, I would have found it hard to resist the temptation to mock the claim that Warbound: book III of the Grimnoir chronicles is a better book than Ancillary Justice.

I think the Puppies are rather doing the thing that Leckie is describing with Or maybe I’m sure someone is sneering at me, so I pre-emptively sneer at them, those snobs and their fancy moldy cheese and wine that’s no better than two buck chuck. A lot of the objection to the Puppies is that the method of setting up nomination slates makes the whole Hugos system work less well, but even if you ignore that, they don't seem to be promoting works they're sincerely passionate about, but rather almost randomly selected works by and about straight white men that happen to be eligible, or works they think will annoy Hugo voters they perceive as liberal. Over the last few years, the nominations from the Sad (rather than Rabid) Puppies slate in categories like graphic novel and film / TV have massively overlapped with what the rest of fandom likes anyway.

I agree it's not right to mock the Sad Puppies for having different tastes from the mainstream of literary SF fandom. And I'm sorry for them that they feel that many fans (perhaps including Leckie) are in fact mocking them. But I'd take them more seriously if they were in fact nominating SF stories which are about exciting adventures in space and don't make the plot secondary to political message and literary cleverness, rather than a lot of John C Wright and wargaming tie-ins. I find it hard to believe that anyone really thinks that a loosely edited selection of funny political chain emails is a more significant contribution to SF than the Patterson biography of Heinlein (whom the Puppies often claim as the exemplar for what SF should be!) that the slates pushed off the ballot.

[rysmiel]

The Patterson biography of Heinlein is a hot mess of hagiographic terrible, though. Particularly in the "nobody could possibly have a reason for disliking late Heinlein other than malice or Not Getting It" bits.

[liv]

Yes, but. If the Puppies had nominated something like that, and some people with longer standing involvement in Worldcons and the Hugos were saying, no, it's rubbish, it's terrible hagiography, we'd be having a totally different conversation. I would be happy in that case that the Puppies were legitimately expressing their tastes. I might still disapprove of the slate thing but I would absolutely argue that there's room in the world for different people to appreciate things for different reasons. Instead, what happened was a bunch of people making a noise about how they wanted more Heinlein, yet nominating Republican noise machine email forwards, while the fandom old guard who are supposedly excluding the poor ickle conservatives nominated... a Heinlein biography. That's why I'm inclined towards Leckie and against Correia, not because she happens to write books that I personally like more than his books.

[vatine]

I think it's doing the SPs a disservice just saying "Puppies". The Sads that I've spoken to are clearly decent human beings, with a taste in books that does not conform entirely to my taste in books. The Rabids, I frankly try not to interact with, based on the image they're projecting.

They (the Sads) started out going "oh, look, we can game this thing and get One Of Ours to win!" and eagerly proceeded to do so. This, not entirely surprisingly, was not popular. I don't really care what people nominate for the Hugo(s), as long as they nominate in good faith (basically, they should have consumed the work(s) they're nominating; they should nominate the "up to N" (currently 5) works they consider most worthy of winning in each category). Slating really isn't within my definition of "good faith".

Then the whole "them/us" thing started a figurative wild-fire, drawing in the Rabids, who seem to mostly be motivated by a "no kindness, alt-right rox, keep non-us DOWN!" and exceptional slating. Including, but not limited to, managing to get Chuck Tingle's Space Raptor Butt Invasion on the final voting ballot, with the explicit comment "this will melt the brain of the SJWs!" (in this context, "social justice warriors").

And for the 2016 nomination round, I think the Sads did the right thing, they had a list of (roughly) 12 works, saying "read these, your fellow Sads have said they're good". They didn't manage to get nearly as much onto final ballots as the Rabids did, but I suspect that EPH may actually change that. And during this year's WSFS business meeting, I did thank Kate Paulk for doing a recommended reading list, rather than a 5-item slate, and wished her luck going forward.

[liv]

Yes and no. I hold the Sad Puppies morally responsible for inviting the Rabid Puppies to come and shit all over book SF fandom. And not only should the SPs not have used slates, they should especially not have packed their slates with essentially random filler that vaguely falls under the heading of conservative, because they couldn't find enough good works that they sincerely wanted to support in each category. And I think Correia and Torgersen are personally disingenuous, they're doing a lot of "but lefties are supposed to be tolerant! Why aren't you tolerant of my misogyny and homophobia?!" But I agree there are many perfectly reasonable people who are not at all trolls or racists who attached themselves to the Sad Puppies group and I am definitely happy to see the change towards recommended reading lists rather than slates.

And SJWs love Chuck Tingle, particularly for his hilarious responses to finding himself the unwitting champion of the Rabid Puppies. The RPs can't even do offending people right.

[vatine]

I genuinely don't know the true history between the Sad and the Rabids. But my recollection as a somewhat interested outsider was that the Rabids basically split off because the Sads were insufficiently radical (with, admittedly, some of the Original Sads rapidly jumping into the Rabid camp; at least Torgersen did).

I accidentally ended up with a "Puppy Flagship" book (for want of a better word) as part of a book bundle, back in 2013. Here's the bookmeme post that resulted, and that is the main reason I am never, ever, reading a Kratman book again.

[davidgillon]

I had an interaction with Sads, pointing out that when they rant about SJWs ruining fandom, they're also arguing against things like people working to ensure people like me (wheelchair users) can actually get in the front door of cons, in a hope that would let them gain a better understanding that SF/F does need change to better integrate minorities. When I pointed out that most SF work that features disabilities are cure narratives that have done no research within the community whatsoever, flying in the face of what many disabled people actually believe, Torgerson himself popped up to inform me that disability isn't a community, it's an affliction that should be pitied, and that all disabled people want to be cured. Well, that's me told.

At least one of the other Sads in that conversation was repeatedly and violently homophobic in his comments and none of them saw any need to challenge his behaviour. But apparently my arguing that they should respect minorities enough to do the basic research was beyond the pale.

So if it comes to arguing there's a clear divide between Sads and Rabids, I'm not sure it holds up in practise.

[vatine]

That is horrible.

I think what I was trying to say is "just because you happen to like one type of books doesn't automatically make you a horrible person", but I don't think that being a horrible person excuses you from being called a horrible person. And by their own keyboards everyone who self-labels as a Rabid Puppy is a horrible person.

[davidgillon]

"just because you happen to like one type of books doesn't automatically make you a horrible person",

Oh, absolutely. I mostly like those sorts of books myself, apart from the ones that turn into didactic Libertarians shall conquer the Earth tracts. The problem isn't the books, but the politics some people surround them with. They see the books failing to win awards, and presume they are facing political exclusion. But if you step back and look at the books they're advocating, the quality of writing that raises it to award winner just isn't there. If certain professional authors doesn't understand the difference between 'best seller' and 'award winner' is a qualitative one, not a quantitative one, then I think that they're deluding themselves on several levels.

But I think the reality beyond that is a reasonably significant portion of the people calling themselves Sads really do have a problem with writing that doesn't pander to their view of the world and that forefronts the perceptions of minority groups. We're seeing that same phenomenon reflected in US politics, there is a considerable grouping on the right that is not comfortable with actual equality and will see commonality of views with anyone who rails against that, whether it be Donald Trump or Theodore Beale. They might protest at labels, but their actions and beliefs speak louder.

[damerell]

I don't think one can really argue that the slate-era Sads were just acting in good faith promoting works they liked. One can't ascribe it all to the slate compilers, either; either the individual Sads were nominating works they hadn't read (which is clearly bad faith), actually agreed that the stuff was brilliant (see below), or were grinding axes by nominating stuff just to annoy.

Besides the obvious inclusion of Beale, who manifestly did not end up on the slate purely by coincidence, it stretches belief to suppose that a movement opposed to "boring message-fic" could have so consistent an admiration of John C Wright, when all his output is extremely obvious and ham-handed Catholic allegory.

[jack]

FWIW, I had reservations on most of seekingferret's post, but I thought the point was, "i like it but it's bad" may be an unfair description of "guilty" pleasures, for the same reason "guilty" isn't right. Although I'm not sure what description WOULD work -- I think there is a way in which "guilty" pleasures are less good than other things, but I'm not sure what it is, when I agree that they are "good" if the ways they are being enjoyed.

[liv]

I think this is what Screwy would refer to as connoisseurism. I like lots of things that I'm also happy to say have little artistic merit. I don't feel guilty about liking them, I don't think they're morally bad, but they just aren't great human achievements, and it's not snobbery or elitism to say that. Yes, snobbery and elitism may in fact bias my or anyone's judgement, but that doesn't mean it's completely wrong to make any such judgements of artistic merit, separate from personal taste, in the first place.

[davidgillon]

I would have found it hard to resist the temptation to mock the claim that Warbound: book III of the Grimnoir chronicles is a better book than Ancillary Justice.

I actually did read Correia, and burst out laughing when I heard he felt he should be nominated for a Hugo. I really liked his Monster Hunter books, but I liked them because they were good pulp adventures, not because they were good writing. If you looked at the quality of the writing, there were at least three other urban fantasy series I was reading where the writing was better than Correia's, and I still wouldn't have nominated any of them for a Hugo.

Correia's a good action writer, but that's about as far as it goes. His characterisation is nothing to write home about, and he cannot write female characters (or isn't interestd in female characters). If I'm nominating books for a Hugo, I'm looking for a good story AND good writing. The Ancillary series did that, and with an innovative setting, Correia is standard urban fantasy, with extra guns - which is true of a lot of the Puppy authors.

[rysmiel]

The thing is, Leckie makes very clear in that essay that she likes some bad things too, so reading that as condescension seems off to me. (Unless you are arguing for abandoning any distinction between bad things and good things altogether, which as a person who writes with ambitions to get better, is a thought that I am not willing to entertain because it makes me want to slit my wrists.)

Fwiw, I'd be willing to argue that what I have read of John C. Wright's fiction is bad by several plausible metrics. (Not that he's selling hugely enough for a purely market-based metric to show him up as a great figure in the field either, sfaik.)

If the Puppies were sincere about wanting to recognise good books in the directions they felt were not being recognised, they could have set up an award of their own for it for less effort than they put into complaining about it and trying to hack the Hugos. It's not like the field does not have numerous other awards for specific directions within SF.

[seekingferret]

Unless you are arguing for abandoning any distinction between bad things and good things altogether, which as a person who writes with ambitions to get better, is a thought that I am not willing to entertain because it makes me want to slit my wrists.

Well, yes, and no. I'm arguing for de gustibus non est disputandum, which doesn't require that I abandon my own sense that there are good things and bad things, but does require that I not try to insist that my taste for which things are good and which are bad is in any way objective.

I'm not really clear on how to parse 'liking bad things' in this context. If she likes them, in what sense are they bad?

[rysmiel]

I'm arguing for de gustibus non est disputandum, which doesn't require that I abandon my own sense that there are good things and bad things, but does require that I not try to insist that my taste for which things are good and which are bad is in any way objective.

That is a subtly different thing from arguing that such objective standards do not exist, though.

I'm not really clear on how to parse 'liking bad things' in this context. If she likes them, in what sense are they bad?

I don't pretend to speak for Ann Leckie in this context, but speaking for myself; there are plenty of things I like to read betimes that I recognise as bad books. I have a sweet tooth for some shapes of intricacy of plot which I will read even in contexts where characterisation is weak, where implications of worldview or political positions have clearly not been thought through beyond the immediate, and such like. I am not willing to claim that books that have qualities I enjoy are thereby good books.

[vatine]

I suspect that's what I tend to class as "brain candy". Tastes good, fills you up, short-term, but probably not what you want to consume all the time.

[liv]

This is really interesting, because I think you've uncovered quite a fundamental philosophical disconnect. Or it is possible that there is just confusion because "good" and "bad" have a ridiculously huge range of meanings. I do believe that personal taste (about which, yes, non disputandum) can be separated out from analysis of artistic worth. Not completely, not that judgements of artistic worth are purely objective like decisions which number has the greatest magnitude, but even though they may be biased by personal taste and societal values, they are still meaningful judgements.

For example, I can't stand Britten, but I can still perfectly well tell that he's a great composer. And I love random commercial extruded 90s soft rockers like Bon Jovi, but I'm not going to go around claiming that Bon Jovi is a better musician than Britten. Nor that anyone who says they like Britten is just being pretentious and showing off their cultural superiority; people who like Britten are perfectly sincere in liking Britten. And I don't think rating Britten higher is just an expression of society valuing high brow orchestral music more than popular music; I could also say that I'm pretty sure Michael Jackson is a better musician than Bon Jovi too, incomparably more innovative and musically interesting, while at the same time I never personally formed a taste for Michael Jackson's music.

I don't think Bon Jovi is a "bad" thing to like, in the sense of morally bad, I just think he's a pretty ephemeral, forgettable and formulaic pop star.

[seekingferret]

I'm sure our definitions of good and bad are stepping all over each other all over the place, I have no doubt that's part of the discrepancy. But I don't understand at all what it means to say that you can't stand Britten, but think he's a great composer. Or rather, I can understand it if by great composer you mean something different than 'composes music that moves me greatly', but I don't see the value in that definition. What value do you place in Britten's greatness?

[liv]

Can we go easy on the suicide rhetoric in this discussion, please?

I am happy to back the position that good and bad art can be distinguished and the difference is more than just personal preference. (Good and bad things is maybe a bit too broad.) I also agree that it's possible to like and enjoy things one reckons to be artistically bad. It may be that there is a misunderstanding here over which sense of the word bad is applicable. Something that gives pleasure and enjoyment but doesn't have much artistic merit, I would talk about in terms of liking bad things, but I think another person might say, that work isn't bad because it's doing only good by giving pleasure and no harm.

Regarding the Puppies, there's absolutely no point in simply giving the Hugo to whatever sells the most copies. And I think Correia was being disingenuous in arguing that some of his novels have sold more copies than Hugo winners; I think he is perfectly capable of understanding that this is not a meaningful metric. I disagree that the Puppies should have set up their own award; there's nothing wrong with nominating things for the Hugos that are good but you believe are not getting the critical attention they deserve. I'm fine with initiatives encouraging people to nominate more works by women and writers of colour and works that fall outside the most obvious tramlines of what's historically been popular with SF fans. And I'm equally fine with encouraging people to nominate works that espouse more conservative values and are more plot driven with less literary language and style; the problem is that that's not what the Sad Puppies did, they made a slate of generally poorly written formulaic writing. As vatine points out the Sad Puppies, have been moving more in this direction in recent years, recommending and encouraging eachother to read and nominate, which is exactly how the Hugos are supposed to work. But since they've already invited Vox Day in they're unlikely to be able to undo the harm done, but that's a problem with slates and (at best, I'm inclined to suspect malice) injudicious choice of fellow travellers, not an argument against trying to change the direction of the Hugos by legitimate means.

[vatine]

My recollections of what I've seen Ann Leckie say about Puppies can be summarised as "you know, slating is not on".

As someone who nominates for and votes in the Hugos, as well as reading MilSF, I almost never nominate the MilSF, because as much as I may enjoy reading them, they're seldom as good as the things I nominate (and as and when they are, I have and will nominate them; if they're on the ballot, they'll get ranked as I feel appropriate).

I also don't think she's saying "objectively bad", but "subjectively not as good" (which may look like an equivalent statement, but I will argue at length that they're entirely different value judgements, even if they end up with the same "rank these from best downwards" order). But I am basing that mostly on having spoken to Ann, not on having read everything she's been writing on the subject.

[liv]

Yeah, Leckie strikes me as an extremely nice and considerate person, so I can easily believe she's remained entirely civil in her comments about the Puppies. Sometimes being pleasant and civil to someone who's ranting and wailing at you about how terrible you are does come across as condescending, though.

And yes, I read and enjoy lots of things I wouldn't nominate for the Hugos, because there's nothing wrong with enjoying generic, formulaic stuff but that isn't deserving of awards. As far as I can tell Leckie would agree with me that it is in fact possible to tell what's artistically excellent even while also enjoying more accessible but less accomplished products.

[seekingferret]

Her post includes this line, which is really one of the only things I'm reacting against, because without this line I don't think I have much of a problem with what she's saying:

And not because I think there’s no such thing as standards–just because I like something doesn’t mean it’s particularly good.

I'm trying to understand what 'standards' means if it's not supposing some external objective scale on which merit is evaluated, because otherwise how could she think something is bad that she likes?

[jack]

I had quite a long response saying I mostly understood your last sentence, and that a lot of people did have a legitimate objection that a sort of work they liked was under-represented in hugos, but explaining why I didn't think the sad puppies (at least the higher-profile people organising it, not everyone who agreed with them without knowing as much about it) were actually acting ok. But I think other people have mostly covered it, I can unpack more if needed.

[seekingferret]

No, I'm certainly not defending the sad puppies' behavior.

[emperor]

Thank you for the pointer to the article on L'homme Arme. Very interesting, and I have a number of settings with that cantus firmus (as well as the recent Jenkins Mass for Peace).

[liv]

Ooh, cool, I'm really glad you found that interesting, as a singer familiar with the song in question. I can't remember who linked me to it in the first place, probably sunflowerinrain. I was kind of interested in the music history and the anti-militarism and all of a sudden I was reading about Vlad the Impaler, and I was like, wow, this is a cool piece of non-fiction writing.