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OK just checked and the Hugos are for works published in the previous calender year. Both Slow Regard and Legion Skin Deep were published at the end of 2014 so both were eligible this year. Also I forgot Sanderson's Sixth of the Dusk which was also eligible.
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I would be ok with Sanderson getting on the ballot twice. Forgot about him as well. His story from Dangerous Women was also among the best things I read last year.
Neither of those guys are complaining, so we have to do it for them.
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Which bears a resemblance, no surprise, to the usual pattern at play most times Angry White Male starts to complain about how women and minorities are being too exclusionary: it usually but not always winds up that what is actually at play is a hypersensitivity to actual competition and criticism in some things, born usually from a lack of experience in either.
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I think Sad Puppies is a huge, insane overreaction, but Correia may not be deluded, exactly. If he's not lying about his treatment during Worldcon and the lead up to it, it sounds like people's behavior toward him was pretty inexcusable. And if he were liberal rather than conservative, he would probably not have been treated that way.
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Much of it is standard loosely-Bell-Curve-inspired scientific racism and loosely-evolution-inspired PUA sexism. Some parts are especially weird and pseudoscientific:
quote:Yes, I am claiming that societies are incapable of moving from full primitivism to full civilization within the time frame that primitive African societies have been in contact with what we consider to be civilization. It is a genetic argument. It takes that long to kill off or otherwise suppress the breeding of the excessively violent and short-time preferenced. African-American men are 500 times more likely to possess a gene variant that is linked to violence and aggression than white American men.
quote:The reason women shouldn’t vote in a representative democracy is they are significantly inclined to vote for whomever they would rather f***. Hence the studies about height and hair being relevant to US presidential politics. That’s why women’s suffrage was pushed by the Communists and why it is the first plank of the Fascist Manifesto.
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I started reading that post when it popped up on my reader this morning. I got to Vox's first response and decided he was crazy. I didn't read the rest.
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quote:Originally posted by Destineer: I think Sad Puppies is a huge, insane overreaction, but Correia may not be deluded, exactly. If he's not lying about his treatment during Worldcon and the lead up to it, it sounds like people's behavior toward him was pretty inexcusable. And if he were liberal rather than conservative, he would probably not have been treated that way.
I can't speak to Correia's experience precisely because I wasn't there. What I can speak to is that even if every aspect of his account is true-which you must admit, Destineer, is extremely unlikely, human beings being what we are-then it's special why, exactly?
Don't get me wrong: if it is accurate, then the people treating him thusly were schmucks of the highest order and he is right to be outraged. Is that Affirmative Action in sci-to and fantasy writing? And is such an experience so different from that the same people he...reviles is May e too harsh...have in many other contexts themselves?
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: I wonder why Vox thinks women are more likely to want to **** communists and fascists.
Ha, yeah, I was just thinking, does he think commies and Nazis are tall and have great hair or something?
quote:Don't get me wrong: if it is accurate, then the people treating him thusly were schmucks of the highest order and he is right to be outraged. Is that Affirmative Action in sci-to and fantasy writing?
No, certainly not that. It is exclusion of an author from due consideration for an award because of the author's conservative politics, though, which is one of Correia's complaints. (I haven't seen him harp much on "affirmative action," but it's not like I've read his whole corpus on the subject either.)
quote:And is such an experience so different from that the same people he...reviles is May e too harsh...have in many other contexts themselves?
Well, two wrongs don't make a right, you know. Or are you saying that in other, equally prominent SF award contexts, Correia's political opponents would be excluded the way he claims he was?
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quote:Ha, yeah, I was just thinking, does he think commies and Nazis are tall and have great hair or something?
I think Tom meant to point up the 'women won't sleep with me, which means they have a ulterior motives' thread of thinking which so often runs through misogyny like Vox's.
quote:No, certainly not that. It is exclusion of an author from due consideration for an award because of the author's conservative politics, though, which is one of Correia's complaints. (I haven't seen him harp much on "affirmative action," but it's not like I've read his whole corpus on the subject either.)
I believe Correia was the one who likened the Hugo Awards to Affirmative Action in recent years, but it may have been another SPer. Anyway, if his account is true-to my mind it's very possible it's partly or maybe even largely true, almost unthinkable that he's giving the straight unvarnished dope-then as you said, Sad Puppies is an enormous overreaction.
quote:Well, two wrongs don't make a right, you know. Or are you saying that in other, equally prominent SF award contexts, Correia's political opponents would be excluded the way he claims he was?
No, though I would be surprised if it were true. What I am pointing out is that his particular demographics-conservative, white, male-have historically and in living memory been very, very active, both actively and passively, in exactly the sort of suppression he complains about now, and gee whiz if he raised a stink about it then, I haven't heard of it.* And to point out the irony.
It doesn't mean that makes it OK, if his account is true. But I think it is some useful context for his outrage and campaigning.
*Which, to be fair, if he had I wouldn't be surprised not to have heard of it. I couldn't have named him before SP.
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Why would you be surprised if Correia's story were true? Just because people's memories are fallible?
I actually suspect it's pretty close to the truth. During the previous year of Sad Puppies I read a million and a half comments from liberal people who said they would vote against Correia's nominated book, sight unseen, because you can't separate the art from the artist and Correia is a bigot. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there were a bunch of people saying the same thing when he was up for the Campbell.
(I actually haven't seen much evidence of prejudice from what I've read of Correia's blog posts, although he may be a bit homophobic and transphobic and he is certainly in the dark about a lot of systematic oppression.)
quote:What I am pointing out is that his particular demographics-conservative, white, male-have historically and in living memory been very, very active, both actively and passively, in exactly the sort of suppression he complains about now, and gee whiz if he raised a stink about it then, I haven't heard of it.* And to point out the irony.
It takes a rare kind of person to raise a stink about the bad behavior of people you agree with, or even the bad behavior of people who you don't really agree with but are more radical members of your "team." Correia seems even worse about this than most people, as evidence by his largely cooperative relationship with Vox Day.
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It's worth saying. If you have a view, or belong to a group, and those things make people who do not know you weary of associating with you, it's worth thinking about.
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conspicuously not associating with people like vox day is as easy as conspicuously not associating with, say, white supremacists who stalk women. he is so far beyond the pale in terms of the open loathesomeness of his views that any fairweather collab already says something.
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: conspicuously not associating with people like vox day is as easy as conspicuously not associating with, say, white supremacists who stalk women. he is so far beyond the pale in terms of the open loathesomeness of his views that any fairweather collab already says something.
I agree with you for the most part but it can be easy to get associated with people like that just because you share an unrelated (or only slightly related) viewpoint with them. I don't agree with the Sad or Rabid Puppies but I do have some conservative leanings. So while I do not agree with them in any of their racist, sexist, religious or other craziness, because I am a gun owner and enthusiast there are plenty of people that would be happy to lump me right in with the Vox Days of the world.
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While I can certainly feel your pain with the whole gun owner situation (having people assume you're a crazy-overthrow-the-government gun nut because you own several firearms that you shoot recreationally, and otherwise keep locked up in your safe is never fun), I think this situation would be more analogous to you being a highly active and vocal member of the NRA, and never discussing or repudiating a lot of their more troubling members and aspects.
Your analogy is more like you simply owning and enjoying literature written by some of the Sad Puppy nominees.
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quote:Originally posted by theamazeeaz: It's worth saying. If you have a view, or belong to a group, and those things make people who do not know you weary of associating with you, it's worth thinking about.
Absolutely. Correia did post something about how he doesn't agree with Day recently, but it's hard to believe he doesn't see how useful it would be to his position if he just said in no uncertain terms that Day is scum.
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quote:What I can speak to is that even if every aspect of [Correia's] account is true-which you must admit, Destineer, is extremely unlikely, human beings being what we are-then it's special why, exactly?
Not Destineer, but firstly, I don't admit anything of the sort; why should I? And secondly, have you considered what would happen if someone not somewhat to the right of you politically made such a complaint? Imagine, for a moment, that a woman, or a homosexual, or a disabled person, said that "At such-and-such a con I met with hostility". Would you then
a) Instantly, at 95% confidence, assume that the tale was false? b) Shrug and say "so what"? c) Say that, as a member of <whatever> group, they basically had it coming?
I suspect that you would do nothing of the sort.
I must say I'm finding it rather ironic to see the roles so reversed: A straight-white-whatever says "I was excluded", and the left, of all the possible movements - to a human! - collectively shrugs and says "Yeah, yeah, suck it up." Are you people sure that this is really who you want to be? Does diversity really mean you have to actively exclude people you disagree with, even if diversity is one of the things they disagree about? And having done so, do you really want to take on the most objectionable traits of the behaviours you were complaining about? Do you really want diversity to be just a case of the boot being on the other foot now, and then brag about it? Because that is, honestly, the vibe I'm getting here.
quote: I can't imagine these three short works of his are much good.
You know, one of the complaints of the Puppies is that people were voting against works without reading them, for political reasons. And here you are, saying that hey, this stuff that I haven't read can't be much good. Are you really, really sure there is no justice in their charge?
I have read two of the three nominated Wright short stories; I don't think either of them was his best work. But a man who can produce "Twilight of the Gods" is not to be taken lightly as an author of short fiction.
[ April 18, 2015, 12:46 AM: Message edited by: King of Men ]
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I must say I'm finding it rather ironic to see the roles so reversed: A straight-white-whatever says "I was excluded", and the left, of all the possible movements - to a human! - collectively shrugs and says "Yeah, yeah, suck it up." Are you people sure that this is really who you want to be? Does diversity really mean you have to actively exclude people you disagree with, even if diversity is one of the things they disagree about? And having done so, do you really want to take on the most objectionable traits of the behaviours you were complaining about? Do you really want diversity to be just a case of the boot being on the other foot now, and then brag about it? Because that is, honestly, the vibe I'm getting here.
I completely agree that work ought to be judged on its merits, but I think you're seeing a symmetry that is not actually there.
First, I don't think diversity has to be an absolute first principle. It obviously can't be, seeing as all of us can think of extremist groups we would be happy to see excluded.
Do the sad puppies qualify as one of those extremist groups? I really don't know. Probably not. Even if they are much milder than a group to be obviously excluded (e.g. the KKK), it is still not the same as excluding left-sympathetic groups like gays or the disabled. The forces that have excluded those "good" groups in the past have been forces of cruelty, humiliation, and violence. The forces that exclude the milder "bad" groups, like the SPs might be, are at worst forces of adolescent silliness.
So yes, if the Tumblr left is excluding you, then a certain measure of sucking it up is in order.
Second, separating the author from the work is not quite as easy as it seems. This isn't about effort, but the fact that to some extent, the author's beliefs will show up in their work.
Take Jim Butcher, the Dresden Files author. He is very tight-lipped about his politics, but Harry Dresden is a pretty conservative guy in his attitudes towards women, and the books themselves aren't going to be winning any diversity awards. But none of that is the problem! The problem is that Butcher is stuck writing stock characters because all he has to draw on is a conservative vision of social life. Harry Dresden's 1960s sexism isn't the failing; it's the Butcher doesn't know how to write a protagonist that isn't a 1960s sexist.
His politics shows up on a literary level. And when that happens, it is fair game for analysis and judgment, which makes it relevant to whether or not it ought to win a literary award.
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quote:Take Jim Butcher, the Dresden Files author. He is very tight-lipped about his politics, but Harry Dresden is a pretty conservative guy in his attitudes towards women, and the books themselves aren't going to be winning any diversity awards. But none of that is the problem! The problem is that Butcher is stuck writing stock characters because all he has to draw on is a conservative vision of social life. Harry Dresden's 1960s sexism isn't the failing; it's the Butcher doesn't know how to write a protagonist that isn't a 1960s sexist.
Don't confuse 'doesn't' with 'can't'. Especially since the protagonist in his other series is not a "1960s sexist". Harry's attitudes towards women are more likely due to the series' genre roots than Butcher's personal politics. While Butcher doesn't always get it right, I don't think it's fair to say he has is a conservative vision of social life.
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quote:Take Jim Butcher, the Dresden Files author. He is very tight-lipped about his politics, but Harry Dresden is a pretty conservative guy in his attitudes towards women, and the books themselves aren't going to be winning any diversity awards. But none of that is the problem! The problem is that Butcher is stuck writing stock characters because all he has to draw on is a conservative vision of social life. Harry Dresden's 1960s sexism isn't the failing; it's the Butcher doesn't know how to write a protagonist that isn't a 1960s sexist.
His politics shows up on a literary level. And when that happens, it is fair game for analysis and judgment, which makes it relevant to whether or not it ought to win a literary award.
True, and I would never say that Butcher should get a major award.
On the other hand, there are many people who don't know how to write a non-liberal character convincingly, and they aren't penalized for this when award time rolls around.
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quote:Take Jim Butcher, the Dresden Files author. He is very tight-lipped about his politics, but Harry Dresden is a pretty conservative guy in his attitudes towards women, and the books themselves aren't going to be winning any diversity awards. But none of that is the problem! The problem is that Butcher is stuck writing stock characters because all he has to draw on is a conservative vision of social life. Harry Dresden's 1960s sexism isn't the failing; it's the Butcher doesn't know how to write a protagonist that isn't a 1960s sexist.
Don't confuse 'doesn't' with 'can't'. Especially since the protagonist in his other series is not a "1960s sexist". Harry's attitudes towards women are more likely due to the series' genre roots than Butcher's personal politics. While Butcher doesn't always get it right, I don't think it's fair to say he has is a conservative vision of social life.
Yeah, Harry is a deliberately anachronistic... pastiche? parody? homage?... of a 1940s film noir gumshoe, and that includes the gruff, rough around the edges exterior and the somewhat patronising sexism. ("She had legs that went all the way up...", him trying to act chivalrous to Murphy which she sees as annoying and he sees as hilarious, etc.) The books are written from Harry's POV and his worldview affects how he portrays the people around him.
If you read Butcher's other works or, hell, just get further into the Dresden Files, you'll see this isn't really indicative of the author's beliefs about women. (or if it is, he does a good job of suppressing it)
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Especially since Harry knows he's being sexist. Butcher's pretty consistent about problematizing Harry's attitudes when they rear their ugly head.
Speaking of diversity, I'd be inordinately pleased if Carlos "the Virgin" Ramirez was gay. All the boasting was actually a double fake-out. It'd also help make up for the Toe-mass jokes.
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quote: Even if they are much milder than a group to be obviously excluded (e.g. the KKK), it is still not the same as excluding left-sympathetic groups like gays or the disabled. The forces that have excluded those "good" groups in the past have been forces of cruelty, humiliation, and violence.
Allowing that there has been no violence done, exactly what do you call it when someone is told "You and your kind are not welcome here", if not humiliation? And when people then, to every outward appearance, rejoice in the fact of humiliation and laugh about it, that looks rather a lot like cruelty to me, taking joy in the pain of others. For example, consider the Scalzi tweets quoted in this post by Correia. I have got to say that this looks pretty cruel to me, in a way that you would utterly condemn if it were going the other way.
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Scalzi seems like a sanctimonious dick from his online behavior, although I may be biased against him because he's such a bad writer.
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That said, it really is a different kind of thing to shut out a lifestyle or a race from so much of what's good in life for hundreds of years, as opposed to shutting a political point of view out from a niche market in literature.
Doesn't mean the latter thing is right, but it is artificial to draw a full-on equivalence between the two.
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Nor did I do so. I drew an equivalence between meeting hostility at a con, and meeting hostility at a con, whether it happens to members of one group or another. Here is the comparison I was making:
quote: Imagine, for a moment, that a woman, or a homosexual, or a disabled person, said that "At such-and-such a con I met with hostility".
I suggest that if such a thing had happened, the left would be up in arms about it. When it happens to a man on the right, then it's "Well, the boot is on the other foot now."
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quote:For example, consider the Scalzi tweets quoted in this post by Correia. I have got to say that this looks pretty cruel to me...
Why? Bear in mind that it is in response to accusations of bias and rigged voting and the like; he wasn't just randomly taunting somebody.
(In an unrelated note: it is depressing how completely out of his depth Correia is in that conversation. He's simply not intelligent enough to argue his point effectively, which is a little embarrassing to watch.)
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quote: Even if they are much milder than a group to be obviously excluded (e.g. the KKK), it is still not the same as excluding left-sympathetic groups like gays or the disabled. The forces that have excluded those "good" groups in the past have been forces of cruelty, humiliation, and violence.
Allowing that there has been no violence done, exactly what do you call it when someone is told "You and your kind are not welcome here", if not humiliation? And when people then, to every outward appearance, rejoice in the fact of humiliation and laugh about it, that looks rather a lot like cruelty to me, taking joy in the pain of others. For example, consider the Scalzi tweets quoted in this post by Correia. I have got to say that this looks pretty cruel to me, in a way that you would utterly condemn if it were going the other way.
You mean this list of tweets?
John Scalzi @scalzi I’m not going to lie. I’m going to be THRILLED to snarkread the whiny “I didn’t want it anyway” nonsense that will squirt forth tomorrow.
Scalzi sounds like a dick, for sure. But do you actually think there is a symmetry between this and the lives of women, gays, and the disabled in the decades before the forerunners of the PC brigade got organized? There really is no symmetry here; saying that adolescent silliness is comparable to the world that conservatives pine for is just plain wrong.
Diversity and tolerance are supposed to be social virtues which protect the weak. They aren't absolute rules, and they can lead to silliness, but they are certainly not rules to be applied symmetrically to everyone.
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See, I dunno. I think that if you accuse a guy of helping to ensure that people who don't share his political viewpoint don't ever get a specific award, and then promise to rig the voting in a way that prevents him from winning the award while ensuring that your own picks will win, and then fail at that task, he might post something just like this in response to winning despite your efforts to prevent that result. Even without being all that much of a dick.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Nor did I do so. I drew an equivalence between meeting hostility at a con, and meeting hostility at a con, whether it happens to members of one group or another. Here is the comparison I was making:
quote: Imagine, for a moment, that a woman, or a homosexual, or a disabled person, said that "At such-and-such a con I met with hostility".
I suggest that if such a thing had happened, the left would be up in arms about it. When it happens to a man on the right, then it's "Well, the boot is on the other foot now."
That makes sense. In that case I'm pretty close to agreeing with you, although to draw an analogy, I think picking on the kid who everybody else already picks on is a little worse than picking on the kid nobody else picks on.
quote:(In an unrelated note: it is depressing how completely out of his depth Correia is in that conversation. He's simply not intelligent enough to argue his point effectively, which is a little embarrassing to watch.)
Yeah, Correia's not the smartest. He's not an idiot, exactly, but he's pretty blind to relevant nuance on a lot of his points of disagreement with Martin.
On the other hand, I think Martin is a bit blind to the evidence. You really do not get many right-wing authors winning Hugos, and essentially zero works that have right-wing messages anywhere in them. And you also have a bunch of people all over the web saying that they will vote against such works sight unseen (that was true well before the first Sad Puppies). It's really not hard to draw the obvious conclusion from those data points.
quote:See, I dunno. I think that if you accuse a guy of helping to ensure that people who don't share his political viewpoint don't ever get a specific award, and then promise to rig the voting in a way that prevents him from winning the award while ensuring that your own picks will win, and then fail at that task, he might post something just like this in response to winning despite your efforts to prevent that result. Even without being all that much of a dick.
Yeah, my general impression from checking out his blog a few times is that he's a dick, though.
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quote:Originally posted by Destineer: The stories whose awards these guys are objecting to, like Ancillary Justice, are not like that at all. They are in fact message fiction, although I would say most of them are very well-done message fiction that deserves acclaim.
What's the message in Ancillary Justice?
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-Imperialism and class stratification = bad
-The non-reproductive differences between the sexes are culturally conditioned rather than biologically inherent
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It's true that the problems involved with empire and class stratification play a role in the book. It's also true that the one of the key qualities of the main character results in her viewing gender as irrelevant (I'm intentionally being vague here so as not to spoil anything for those who haven't yet read the book). What is it about the presence of these things in the narrative that makes the book into "message fiction"?
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Different people have different standards for how message-heavy something has to be to count as message fiction. To me, AJ counts, but it's probably not the best example for me to use because it's not very directly focused on its messages. Something like Windup Girl or 2312 (or Starship Troopers or The Golden Age) would be a clearer case.
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I found AJ to include an interesting exploration of when something (gender, in this case) matters to some people but not others, rather than having a message that gender differences are culturally conditioned. But I recently read a comment on how AJ's pronoun thing was seen as groundbreaking in the western world when the characters are basically speaking Turkish, which does not have separate pronouns by gender.
But really, the parts of the book that I found groundbreaking and making it worth of awards were the parts about the ships and the ancillaries, and the breathtaking scenes that were described from multiple viewpoints of one entity at once.
I am always surprised when people bring it up as an example of a feminist book. I didn't think it had a particularly feminist viewpoint or message. We don't know the genders of most of the main characters, at least not at first. I think people look at it that way because "she" is used as the gender-neutral pronoun thoughout the book, but given the premise that one culture doesn't differentiate between genders in their languages and others do, you couldn't use "he" as the gender neutral pronoun because people in our culture wouldn't notice there was anything going on because they're so used to books where all the characters are male. In order to make the conceit work, the author HAD to pick female pronouns. To take the reader out of the familiar, not necessarily to say anything about gender differences. The physical differences that matter in the book, after all, are ancillaries vs non-ancillaries. The implants that ancillaries get make them so much faster and stronger than other humans that the differences between male and female component bodies are irrelevant.
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ElJay pretty much my exact thoughts about AJ only said much better.
It also has, despite all that above, a message that Sad Puppies types should enjoy. It's basically a one man (or in this case, one female out of many ancillaries) quest for revenge against an authoritative regime.
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quote:Originally posted by Jake: Maybe I should back up and ask how you're defining "message fiction".
I guess I'd define it along these lines: Message fiction is fiction that has a political theme, where the reader's enjoyment of the fiction depends to a significant extent whether they can accept or agree with that theme.
My litmus test for whether something is "message fiction" is: how much would this book annoy someone who disagrees with the author's politics?
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My litmus test for whether something is "message fiction" is: how much would this book annoy someone who disagrees with the author's politics?
Maybe it's just me but I have read a few books with a message I strongly disagreed with but still enjoyed because that message fit the world and the people of the book well.
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quote:Originally posted by dkw: So Tom Clancy novels are message fiction?
Many of them are. It's not a perfect litmus test, but I do think of Clancy as a very political writer overall. Also a freaking terrible writer, so I'm not exactly fully qualified to judge the majority of his corpus since I have no interest in reading it.
But Red Storm Rising is absolutely a message novel, for example. (The poisonously wrong message: the US could fight and win a major conventional war against the USSR without nuclear escalation.)
quote:Maybe it's just me but I have read a few books with a message I strongly disagreed with but still enjoyed because that message fit the world and the people of the book well.
I like to think I'm like that myself. So think of the litmus test as asking whether an average or typical person on the opposite side would be annoyed.
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Destineer,do you see message fiction as being inherently lesser than non-message fiction written with equivalent craft?
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No, I love a good piece of message fiction! I guess that wasn't clear before. Handmaid's Tale is one of my favorite books ever, for example.
I was just saying before that the Sad Puppies aren't wrong when they say a lot of left-wing message fiction wins Hugos and Hugo noms. It actually seems to me like the average Sad Puppy actively likes right-wing message fiction (they seem to love JC Wright), so it's a bit disingenuous of them to complain about this. But they're not wrong.
I do think message has the disadvantage that you're cutting out a certain segment of your potential audience (your political opponents). But the same is true when you choose to write within a genre. If you write a fantasy novel, that means quite a few people are not going to be interested in your novel.
It would be nicer if there was a better system (like there is with genres) for alerting people to which novels they'll dislike on political grounds. But reviews function fairly well for those who read them.
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Okay, glad to hear it. I mean, by the definition you're using, Huck Finn, Grapes of Wrath, the Odyssey--all fairly indisputably great works--are all message fiction.
In thinking about it, I think that I'd refine the definition of message fiction that you gave by saying that in order for something to be considered message fiction, the message needs to be so central to the work that to remove it would be to unravel the story entirely. What do you think of that?
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: conspicuously not associating with people like vox day is as easy as conspicuously not associating with, say, white supremacists who stalk women. he is so far beyond the pale in terms of the open loathesomeness of his views that any fairweather collab already says something.
I agree with you for the most part but it can be easy to get associated with people like that just because you share an unrelated (or only slightly related) viewpoint with them. I don't agree with the Sad or Rabid Puppies but I do have some conservative leanings. So while I do not agree with them in any of their racist, sexist, religious or other craziness, because I am a gun owner and enthusiast there are plenty of people that would be happy to lump me right in with the Vox Days of the world.
It is a profoundly major leap on another person's behalf to take a person who "has some conservative leanings" to "is basically like vox day" so the few self-isolating reactionaries who do so can be safely ignored.
but people who are coming up with trepidatious and mewling caveats on why they are not explicitly disavowing their association with beale in this movement are at least helpfully providing all the room for being side-eyed necessary.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Jake: In thinking about it, I think that I'd refine the definition of message fiction that you gave by saying that in order for something to be considered message fiction, the message needs to be so central to the work that to remove it would be to unravel the story entirely. What do you think of that?
It seems like another useful place to draw the line, for sure, and I agree that by that standard Ancillary Justice isn't really a message novel.
quote:but people who are coming up with trepidatious and mewling caveats on why they are not explicitly disavowing their association with beale in this movement are at least helpfully providing all the room for being side-eyed necessary.
My guess is that they just don't want to come out and admit they were wrong. Correia, who put the whole thing together a couple years back in the first place, probably didn't vet Beale beyond making sure he was conservative. He may not have known about Beale's more bigoted posts until he was already committed to working with him. Then he started rationalizing the mistakes he'd already made by involving Beale and the rest is history.
Who knows, but I think it's the likeliest possibility given my read on Correia.
Posts: 4600 | Registered: Mar 2000
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