Obsidian Wings

Two books: "Till We Have Faces" by C.S. Lewis, and "Redshirts" by John Scalzi

by Doctor Science

What do they have in common? Nothing I can think of, except I've talked about both today and I'm copypasting my remarks here, for reference and so other people can chime in. Talk about books! It's one of my favorite things.

Redshirts by John Scalzi.

John Ringo decided to Explain It All To You: Understanding SJW logic and why it is destroying science fiction. He changed his mind and took down the post, but not quickly enough. Among his gems of wisdom:

To the Social Justice Warriors of Science Fiction publishing and fandom, the true and only purpose of science fiction is to promote increased equity in the arena of social justice.
...
One clear example that I know of: Redshirts.

Redshirts by John Scalzi was a fairly banal Star Trek fan-fic that featured a cast of Security that as I was told (never read it) was a fair SJW cross-section.

John Scalzi, although a cis-male, has relentlessly promoted social justice in various venues including purging the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America of persons who oppose the militant social justice approach or were otherwise in the way of promoting social justice.

-- by that last sentence, Ringo means "voted to kick out Vox Day for using organizational resources to make grossly racist and insulting statements about other writers." Militant stuff, you see.

Anyway, Scalzi thought this was absurd:

It is, in fact probably the least racially/sexually diverse book I've written BECAUSE the characters were supposed to reflect a BAD show.

Indeed, when the TV script for it was written, they CHANGED the sex of a couple of characters to make it more diverse! This is true.

So it really is a bad example of a Social Justice-y sort of book. Much worse, in fact, than my OMW series in general.

In the subsequent discussion of Redshirts and how social justice-y it isn't, I commented:

I spend a lot of time on tumblr, native habitat of SJWs — I'm told I'm really more of a Social Justice Druid, myself.

For me, Redshirts was a pitifully inadequate, even timorous take on an issue we spend a lot of time discussing on tumblr. The reality in the TV & movie industry is that characters who aren't SWMs are disproportionately redshirted, or fridged, or otherwise killed off for the sake of the SWM leads' manpain and "personal growth".

Most of the redshirts in Redshirts are SWMs, so the text completely avoids noticing how many classes of people, watching a show like this one, have to armor ourselves against identifying with the people who look like us — because the people who look like us are going to be killed, or raped, or otherwise end badly.

I'm really glad to hear that the TV series may be including more non-SWM redshirts, but I wonder if that means they're going to engage with issues of representation, with how it feels when having a certain identity means you're bound to die "for the sake of the story".

---

Meanwhile at Making Light, a discussion of the Hugo awards drifted into talk about C.S. Lewis. Kelly Jennings commented:

I recently taught Till We Have Faces in a class on Mythic Fiction, here in Northwest Arkansas. About a third of my students were Evangelical & Homeschooled Christians, and thus big fans of Lewis, since he was very nearly the only fantasy writer they had ever been allowed to read, growing up (or even yet, I suspect). The rest, though, were standard issue American young adults / returning students (Veterans and older women and laid-off workers).

All of which is to say -- nearly all of them, even many of the Evangelical students, disliked Till We Have Faces intensely.

I also didn't like it. While I can see what Lewis is after, it feels very much as though he is rigging the game in that novel, if you see what I mean -- manipulating the actions of the characters to achieve the outcome he desires.

I don't (that is) believe those characters would in fact act that way. I believe Lewis wants to say something about mortal love v. Holy Love*, and thus constructed a plot that would let him say that thing.

It feels like a dishonest book, is what I am saying, I guess.

I replied:

How odd. I LOVE Till We Have Faces, it's my favorite Lewis by far.

Why I love it (caveat: I haven't re-read it in 15-20 years): it's the *only* book I can think of which is really, truly about the "ugly princess", the one whom no-one *ever* thinks is beautiful, and who is never the object of anyone's desire.

Lewis really seems to understand, on a gut level, how defining beauty and its lack can be for women, how bitter and helpless it can make a woman feel.

Kelly replied:

See, that's one of the things I dislike most about the book.

For two reasons: (1) Yes, I know beauty is *supposed* to be the only thing that is important about a woman, but that is very much working from the Male Gaze, isn't it?

I mean, I know plenty of women who don't, in fact, have their lives ruined by their lack of beauty -- who have perfectly rich, valuable, and happy lives despite not being as lovely as the dawn.

And (2) I was also deeply annoyed that Lewis used the Queen's ugliness as both a symbol of her fallen soul *and* as the cause of her bitterness -- that is, it is her ugliness that makes her betray her sister: because she envies and hates her sister's beauty. So ugly women, you see, are wicked women. Only the beautiful woman is a good woman.

So I suppose what I mean is not that I dislike Lewis making an ugly woman his main character; I dislike what he then does with that main character.

I replied:

I read it almost the opposite to you. Lewis didn't *make* the character "wicked", he started with a character who was supposed to be wicked and showed how she was human.

Lewis was writing fanfic, based on Cupid/Psyche (and any number of other myths & fairy tales). He asks the question, "why is the ugly sister always the bad one, and the beautiful sister the good one? How is that fair and right?"

Growing up (I was born in the mid-50s, so I'm probably a generation older than you) I felt this question *very* strongly and personally. It was a revelation to me to see a man who felt it, too.

What Till We Have Faces shows, for me, is Lewis saying that where men have the power and the Male Gaze is in fact a determining factor in women's lives -- a situation that seemed to me, as a child in the 60s, an accurate description of reality, not to mention accurate for historical reality -- ugly women become non-persons, and being a non-person is *bad* for people.

He's saying, suffering doesn't "ennoble" people, it doesn't make people better -- it *hurts*, and it keeps hurting, and the scars it leaves are actual impairments.

Orual isn't "wicked" (as the ugly sister is in a fairy tale or the original story), she's *hurt* and does the wrong thing in her pain. But she's also strong -- and her experience with suffering, her ability to keep going even though she's hurting, actually helps Psyche. Orual bears Psyche's pain and lightens her burden -- but Lewis doesn't show that making Orual's life all good and sweet.

Leo and Diane Dillon's covers for Till We Have Faces. I have this edition, and I've spent a good deal of time staring at these pictures.

Coincidentally, the only non-Puppy nominated for Best Pro Artist this year is last year's winner, Julie Dillon. I was surprised to learn that she's no relation to Leo & Diane, because the ethnic diversity of her models reminded me of theirs -- a rarity in SF/F, then and now.

Some satire over the transom

by liberal japonicus
The kitty got this url
http://www.theniladmirari.com/ from the author, Bill McCabe, who offers it up for the commentariat's views and thoughts.

The Varieties of Fictional Pleasure

by Doctor Science

The Puppening continues in SF fandom, and File 770 is taking suggestions for naming each day's link collection.

One much-discussed Puppy statement is by Brad Torgersen, from January:

In other words, while the big consumer world is at the theater gobbling up the latest Avengers movie, "fandom" is giving "science fiction's most prestigious award" to stories and books that bore the crap out of the people at the theater: books and stories long on "literary" elements (for all definitions of "literary" that entail: what college hairshirts are fawning over this decade) while being entirely too short on the very elements that made Science Fiction and Fantasy exciting and fun in the first place!

Among the many problems with this statement is that Worldcon members (that Hugo-voting "fandom" of which Torgersen speaks so sneeringly) did in fact give a Hugo to The Avengers, in the same year they gave the Best Novel Hugo to John Scalzi's Redshirts -- a work which, Scalzi admits, can only be called "long on literary elements" if you're making a joke.

So a lot of us having been talking about literary quality, writing quality, what is a genre, what is our genre, etc. I'm going to use this as an excuse to set down some things I've been thinking about for a while.

One of the most important things about fiction is that we read it for pleasure, for fun. What literary critics rarely discuss is that we all have different ideas about what is "fun".

This is one thing that being part of the fanfic community has taught me a lot about:

Your Kink Is Not My Kink, But That's OK

(I believe this expression, like a number of other useful concepts, came into fanficdom from the Usenet group alt.sex.bondage in the 1990s, before the World Wide Web was up and running.) The point of YKINMK is that you should never assume that what is pleasurable to you is pleasurable for everyone else in general or any one person in particular. People have different pleasures, and that's OK, that's one of the cool things about being a person.

Here's my preliminary typology of the pleasures people get, and seek, from fiction:

1. Prose, especially on the level of sentences, aka "literary style".
2. Characterization: how much the characters seem like real and/or vivid people to the reader.
3. Plot: both in the sense of narrative drive, and in the sense of logic and complexity.
4. Ideas: which probably also includes the "themes" beloved of high-school lit teachers. Can also be disparaged as "message".
5. World-building. Rarely discussed in lit classes, this is IMHO the pivotal literary value of SF & fantasy.
6. Tropes: the stuff you like. For instance, there was a time when I read every time-travel story I saw, and I'm still likely to give one a try even if all signs point to "you'll regret reading this". For another instance, Mister Doctor Science will try almost anything involving sailing ships, or fencing. Maybe you like fashion, maybe you like space battles, or amnesia, or talking animals, or psychic powers, or divorce ... and now I'm wondering if I know of a novel with all these tropes at once.
7. Emotions: the feelings evoked in you, the reader. Reading about negative experiences and emotions can be a real, sought-after pleasure: sometimes you want to feel sad (or angry or depressed) about something that isn't you and that isn't real, if only to get the closure that comes from getting to the end of the book.

Different genres -- including literary fiction -- provide pleasure of different types and mixtures.

Literary fiction, IMHO, emphasizes the pleasures of prose and characterization above all, and is often quite shoddy about world-building.

For instance, I recently started Michael Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, which was on the Locus Recommended Reading List for Science Fiction, but which I decided is litfic. I quit in Chapter 1 or so, when our hero was leaving to talk to aliens … from a carefully-described airport, vintage 2014. The world didn't match the story: sucky world-building, beautiful prose and characterization = literary fiction.

The science fiction and fantasy the Hugo awards voters like usually rates really high on world-building and ideas, but pretty often the characterization can go hang. In recent years there's been *slightly* more of a tendency than in the past for prose to be a factor, but it's still not really the most important thing.

I haven't spent all that much time trying to figure out What the Puppies Want and why they're so convinced the Hugo Awards have Lost Their Way, but a lot of it seems to be that they don't actually believe that recent award-winners are works the voters actually *like*. They don't think it's possible that Ancillary Justice ran the table on the awards last year because people *enjoyed* it, it must have been for a tremendous groundswell of affirmative-action-mindedness.

And this, it seems to me, is why (and how) the Puppies broke the Hugo Awards. Jeet Heer explains:

Taste is individual, not collective. Slate voting makes no sense because it is impossible for even a small group of people to have exactly the same taste, let alone a mob.

Agreeing on a slate allowed the Puppies, especially the Rabids, to overcome their numerical disadvantage and shut other voters' choices out of the running. But that agreement -- to pick the slate instead of thinking about, and then voting, their individual preferences -- is profoundly against the spirit of the awards.

But then, we're also talking about the kind of people who can claim they just want to promote "diversity on the Hugo ballot!" while making sure it reflects the choices and lines the pockets of one person in particular. Not to mention that they use the word Reactionary to describe their *opponents*. I can't figure out if this is Newspeak, or just ignorance.

Literary Reading, by Vladimir Makovsky (1866). I think maybe this is how the Puppies think the readers of "literary SF" make our decisions. What I want to know is, why does the standing man in the pale waistcoat look just like the reader? Is he supposed to be another writer?

Your Obergefell v. Hodges Oral Argument Open Thread

by Ugh

On Tuesday we have the oral arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges regarding whether states can constitutionally discriminate on the basis of sex when it comes to granting certain contract rights and obligations to consenting adults.  Some call this "same-sex marriage."

As usual, SCOTUSblog will be live blogging here beginning at 10:45am Eastern.  I look forward to seeing whether Scalia explodes like that guy in Big Trouble in Little China (which is awesome, BTW (the movie, not Scalia exploding)).

I maintain my prediction of a 6-3 vote in favor of those attempting to get married, with a reasoning breakdown of 5 (Kennedy + 4), Roberts (concurring in the result but writing separately in an amazing tap dance of "I'm not really doing this even though it looks like I am" legal reasoning), and a "fiery" dissent (from the usual suspects, written by the aforementioned Scalia).  

Unfortunately we will likely have to wait until the last day of the term to get the opinions.  In the meantime, it would be irresponsible not to speculate!

UPDATE:  Feel free to talk about Baltimore too.

Broken Windows - Friday Open Thread

by wj

The "broken windows" theory of policing was made widely known by the policies implemented in the 1990s by William Bratton in New York City. Basically, it suggests that small crimes (e.g. vandalism, public drinking and toll-jumping) going without response leads to major crimes. And that dealing visibly with small crimes helps to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness, thereby preventing more serious crimes from happening. But does it?

On one hand, when that approach was implemented in New York City, the crime rate dropped. On the other hand, the crime rate was also dropping nationwide at about the same time. So, what other examples do we have?

In the 1960s, the speed limits on Interstate highways were 65 or 70 mph. In the mid-1970s, in response to the 1973 "oil crisis," the national maximum speed law set the maximum speed limit down to 55 mph. I don't know what happened as a result in the rest of the country, but in the West (specifically California) the result was minimal. Which is to say, people kept driving at nearly the same highway speeds as before.

But the interesting thing is what happened when the limit was largely removed in the late 1980s. In my observation, what happened was that people continued doing what they had been doing: which was typically driving on the highways at 10 mph above the speed limit.

Today, on the Interstates, one does see a lot of vehicles moving at 70 mph -- mostly big rigs (maximum legal speed 55 mph, as it always has been). Cars, on the other hand, most travel at 75-80 mph. Officers in the Highway Patrol will tell you (unofficially and off the record!) that, absent other factors, their threshold for writing speeding tickets is . . . 83 mph. So, massive -- one might almost say universal -- small crimes routinely in progress.

What one has not seen is
a) an outbreak of lawlessness in general, or even
b) routine speeding on roads other than the highways.
Which leads one to wonder, is the "broken windows" theory is simply wrong, at least as a theory of criminology?

Perhaps what dealing with small crimes, like those listed, actually does is merely give people to see that their local government really has some interest in them and their circumstances, and wants to make things better for them. (A feature which, in a lot of neighborhoods, has been not much in evidence previously.) And, therefore, makes the people more willing in turn to work with the city (including the police department) to make things better.

Congratulations to Castalia House's Marketing Department!

by Doctor Science

That would be the Sad Puppies.

I sent a summary of my previous post to the Sasquan Hugo Committee, and they wrote back very promptly:

Thank you for your concern and suggestion. We have reviewed the nominations received this year thoroughly and are convinced that the nominations did not violate the rules governing the Hugos.

If you feel the rules should be changed, then that is something to be addressed at the Business meeting at Sasquan. Kevin Standlee is chairing the meeting this year and he can advise you of the procedures for initiating that discussion.

In that case, we can say that SP3, and almost certainly SP4, are working as the marketing department for Castalia House -- and doing an *outstanding* job. Congratulations.

As far as I know, a publisher has never before successfully manipulated Hugo nominations to get an entire slate, not just a single work, onto the ballot. The closest documented case was the 1987 Hugos, where Scientology publishers pushed L. Ron Hubbard's Black Genesis onto the ballot, along with a bunch of promotional material and displays that *really* put fans' backs up. Black Genesis finished below No Award.

It's a curious coincidence, or something, that a number of the Sad Puppies have been involved with the Scientology-sponsored Writers of the Future program. It's also coincidental, probably, that they frequently harken back to the Campbell era, and that Campbell heavily promoted Hubbard, Dianetics, and Scientology.

Back in 2015, I'm going to think of the Sad Puppies campaign as a stalking horse for Castalia House and Vox Day's profits. I don't think for a moment that the urge to get money for Vox Day is *motivating* the Sad Puppies, but that's what they're *doing*, regardless of their motives. This probably means that next year will see a lot of No Award action, too, because I can't imagine that Day is going to stop using this proven technique to promote Castalia House and his pocketbook. I await with interest to see when (or if) the Sad Puppies will notice how they're being used. I also wonder if they'll respond by trying to distance themselves from Day, or if they'll double down and embrace him as the conservative SF publisher of their dreams.

How to use a stalking horse, from an early 15th C illuminated manuscript version of the "Book of the Hunt" by Gaston Phoebus.

Vox Day is exploiting the Sad Puppies for personal gain

by Doctor Science

As the Hugo flustercluck continues (Mike Glyer continues to keep track at File 770), I have come to a realization:

The Sad Puppies 3 slate was hijacked by Vox Day for his direct personal profit.

I think (hope) that there may be a way to salvage something -- including community good will -- from this year's competition, and to prevent a re-run or worse next year. My solution: remove Castalia House, specifically, from eligibility, on the grounds of ballot-stuffing for profit.

What I think happened

John O'Neill's statement about Black Gate's withdrawal from Hugo consideration says:

I have serious concerns about the legitimacy of the 2015 Hugo ballot, as it was largely dictated by a single individual, Vox Day, who campaigned for a slate of nominees on his website (the Rabid Puppies slate).

This made me realize the degree to which the Sad Puppies are a stalking horse for the real problem, the Rabid Puppy slate as tool for Vox Day's personal gain.

I'll be honest, I don't agree with the Sad Puppies' strategies or tactics. But I really, really don't like seeing conflict amplified and exploited for profit.

Here's what I think happened:

1. Brad Torgersen and friends put together the SP3 slate without Vox Day's direct involvement. Torgersen and Larry Correia say they are *not* Rabid Puppies, and I am taking them at their word.
2. Nonetheless, the SP3 slate included several works published by Castalia House, Vox Day's publishing company.
3. Day tweaked the SP3 slate to include more Castalia House publications, and to include himself, twice(!), as editor. He put up the Rapid Puppy slate one week after the SP3 slate went up.
4. Day then urged his fans to vote this Rabid slate in its entirety:

   I encourage those who value my opinion on matters related to science fiction and fantasy to nominate them precisely as they are.

5. Analysis of the ballots indicates that the RP slate was more successful than the SP3 slate (see below).
6. Day, in consequence, profits -- in an literal sense, via more sales and publicity for Castalia House.

The Rabid Puppy slate was extremely successful for Castalia House

I analyzed the first-draft ballot to show overlap between the SP3 and RP slates and the successful nominations. In these Venn diagrams, the area of the circles and intersections is proportional to the numbers they represent -- unlike the others that I've seen floating around. I started with the File 770 data, but went back to the slates to double-check everything.

Here's the diagram showing the overlap for all categories except Best Fan Artist (where the slates made no nominations):

As you can see, the RP slate was somewhat more successful than the SP3 slate overall.

Then I started looking at the distribution of nominees associated with Castalia House, Vox Day's publishing company. As I went through the lists, I realized there was no point analyzing categories where Castalia House couldn't possibly have a candidate -- the Dramatic Presentations, for instance. So I ran the data again, using just the categories where Castalia House (and Vox Day) might be eligible: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Related Work, Editor Long Form, Editor Short Form, and Campbell Award.

Here's the result, with Castalia House candidates represented by the red pattern overlay:

In sum, for these categories:

• SP3 was successful if and only if its nominee was picked up by RP (29 cases). The SP3 slate included 5 Castalia House candidates; all were picked up, all succeeded. There were 3 SP candidates that weren't picked up by RP; all failed.
• All but one of the nominees the RP slate added to the SP3 slate were successful (9 total, 8 successful).
• All of those successful added candidates were associated with Castalia House.
• That one RP candidate that wasn't successful? That would be Brad Torgersen, for The Chaplain's Legacy novel. As far as I know, Torgersen did not ask to be taken off the RP slate.
• Altogether, of the 40 nominations in these 8 categories, 13 are associated with Castalia House -- one-third. This is the sort of dominance that wasn't uncommon in the 90's and earlier, when there were many fewer sf publishers. But to see it in the present day, and with a brand-new publisher most of us had never heard of, is unprecedented.

Now, of course, everyone involved with science fiction has heard of Castalia House. I think we can assume that their sales are taking off proportionately. I don't think it's coincidence that this week has also seen Castalia announce a major deal with Jerry Pournelle, reprinting his "There Will Be War" anthology series. The project has doubtless been in the works for a while, but it all goes to make Castalia House more of a real, profitable publisher, not a Vox Day vanity project.

Details of Castalia House nominees:

On both SP3 and RP slates:

• "One Bright Star to Guide Them" by John C. Wright, Castalia House
• "Big Boys Don't Cry" by Tom Kratman, Castalia House
• Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth, by John C. Wright, Castalia House
• "The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF" by Ken Burnside, Riding the Red Horse / Castalia House
• Eric S. Raymond, "Sucker Punch", Riding the Red Horse / Castalia House

On the RP slate only:

• "The Plural of Helen of Troy" by John C. Wright, City Beyond Time / Castalia House
• "Pale Realms of Shade" by John C. Wright, , The Book of Feasts & Seasons / Castalia House
• "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus" by John C. Wright, The Book of Feasts & Seasons/ Castalia House
• "Turncoat" by Steve Rzasa, Riding the Red Horse / Castalia House
• "The Parliament of Beasts and Birds" by John C. Wright, The Book of Feasts & Seasons / Castalia House
• Vox Day, Riding the Red Horse, Castalia House
• Vox Day, Castalia House
• Rolf Nelson, The Stars Came Back / Castalia House

Moving forward

I don't know the details of the rules, but I figure this is probably enough evidence for Sasquan's Hugo Awards Committee to decide that Castalia House engaged in illegal ballot-stuffing under the current rules, and to remove all Castalia House-associated nominees from the Hugo Ballot. If it's an option, I'd suggest that Vox Day and Castalia House be considered ineligible for nomination for at least a few years going forward, too.

To the Sad Puppies, I'll say: I believe you put SP3 together in good faith, without an eye to personal gain -- as is proved by Larry Correia declining the nomination for Best Novel. Vox Day took your work and your honesty, and turned it into a tool for his own profit. This was very successful for him, and it would be illogical to assume he won't do it again next year: he'll wait for SP4 to be announced, then edit it into an RP2 slate packed with as many Castalia House nominees as he can fit. I know of no way you guys can stop him.

I'm aware that the Committee has said that the ballot is locked and has gone to the printers. It seems to me that this is a problem that can be solved with money, and I am 100% certain that people in the Worldcon community would chip in to cover the expense at no cost to Sasquan. Pulling the Hugo Awards out of at least a little of this mess would be well worth it.

In the long term, there may well be changes to the Hugo Awards rules one way or another. But in the short term, I hope this is a solution that both Sad Puppies and anti-Puppies can agree on.

Pension Reform -- The Wisdom of Crowds Weekend Open Thread

by wj

One of the on-going problems for numerous governments, from Chicago to Greece, is that they have made big pension commitments without setting aside sufficient funds to meet them. (As distinct from those, like Social Security, which were basically designed to pay-as-you-go.) Pensions are funded based two parameters: demographic data on how long people will live and some assumptions on what returns they can get on their money over time. If the rates of return are wildly optimistic (as they so often have been, because it reduces current costs), the money won't be there.

The Economist as an interesting blog post on what a realistic long-term return on investment would be. It's based on some research comparing discount rates for leasehold vs freehold properties in Britain and Singapore. The idea being that, since the leases involved are for decades, the discount rate they display reflects what people really think returns on long-term investments should be. (Note: that same rate, it is suggested, should be used when evaluating other possible investments, such as infrastructure investments by governments, etc.)

For example, the Economist notes that: "If the fund’s assets are expected to return 6% each year, then a pension liability of $1m in 50 years’ time would warrant setting aside $50,000 of assets today. But if the assets only grow by 2% per year, then in 50 years’ time the $50,000 will only have grown into $135,000." Sound familiar?

The "wisdom of crowds" expectation for very long term returns: 2.6%.

What that means is, if your local government body has made pension commitments assuming an ROI higher than that, you are looking at a big problem down the road. And, if it has done so in the past, "down the road" may be upon you already.

Objective standards of literary merit: the Hugos, the Puppies, Sturgeon's Law

by Doctor Science

One of the things the Sad Puppies said an awful lot last year was that they just wanted the works they'd nominated for Hugos to be read and judged "on their merits". In many ways the most surprising thing for me about last year's Puppy nominees was that none of their horses was fit to race. None had what I think of as baseline qualifications for an award for literary (including science fictional) merit. What I still don't understand is *why*: why a group of people who wanted me to judge works "on their merits" would nominate things without significant merit. And, especially, things that are *objectively* bad.

You may think there's no such thing as an objective standard of literary quality, but it's quite possible to tell the basic difference between competent writing and the stuff that isn't.

It might be easiest to think of this in the context of Sturgeon's Law:

90% of every human creative endeavor is crud.

With fanfic, if it's a very large fandom and/or the fan writers are generally very young (median age 20 or younger), you'll be lucky if the "Sturgeon factor" is only 90% -- it's often more like 95%, with barely 1 in 20 stories being not-crud.

But just because something is crud doesn't mean I won't read it, and even like it. It depends on what I'm in the mood for; it's quite possible for a story to be enjoyable or just what I wanted right then, while still being objectively bad.

When I recommend stories, though, I kind of insist on not-crud, and the recs lists I trust come from people who have similar standards. But sometimes I'm just, "gimme everything you've got with time travel" or whatever, and I'll at least look at them all -- even though around 90% of them are going to be cruddy. There's nothing wrong with reading and liking crud.

The problems come when writers and people who make influential recs lists don't seem to grasp the difference between crud and non-crud. In fanfiction, I think of that line as tracing "basic competence in English prose". Is the text laced with SPAG (spelling, punctuation, and grammar) errors? Do verb tenses and POV shift a lot? Are character names misspelled? Are names misspelled in the summary? (this is usually a sign not to read the story at all, or you'll be s-o-r-r-y.) Are words chosen poorly or mistakenly? Are the sentences clumsily constructed?

As far as I'm concerned, the interesting part of voting for the Hugos or other awards is taking a nominations list that is all not-crud, and deciding which is best in my opinion. What shocked and even offended me last year was that the Puppy nominations didn't pass the basic, not-crud standard.

Cut for length, including some close, editor-like reading.

Gyrocoptic Terror from the Skies!

by Ugh

As I'm sure you've all heard, a Florida Man^TM landed a gyrocopter on the Capitol Grounds yesterday, resulting in a lock down on Capitol Hill for a time.  This of course has now led to usual discussion of "how-could-this-happen-and-who-fell-down-on-the-job-and-what-are-we-going-to-do-going-forward-OMG-OMG-OMG!!!"  (technical term).

At a certain level I find this event amusing, although I recognize that it has caused a lot of unnecessary trauma, stress, endangerment, and delay (e.g., my wife was in a cab heading to meetings at the Capitol at the time and was not thrilled about this on several levels).  And certainly this guy should probably do some time in prison.*  But what is less amusing, I think, is what is going to be a push to "do something" to ensure this doesn't happen again.

What will be missing from this discussion is any recognition that, perhaps, nothing can be done.  Or, indeed, should be done.  At a certain level, if someone wants to fly an ultralight aircraft into restricted airspace there's not anything to do to prevent that (and this is not the first time something like this has happened).  And what is going to be proposed going forward - shooting it down?  Is launching missiles in the middle of Washington DC really a good idea?**  There's already some sort of missile battery on top of the New Executive Office Building.  Similarly, is there really any way to eliminate, e.g., the use of truck bombs once someone has managed to load up a truck with one and head off toward the target?  And yet there are signs saying "No Trucks" and uniformed secret placed around DC pulling over people.  Isn't that a little late and plainly ineffective?

No recommendations here, just wondering what the next form of theater is going to be put in place. All of which is a long winded way of saying is that I think this was handled just fine.

*It's also an interesting contrast between this guy, who flies through some of the most restricted air space in the world and crash lands on the heavily secured Capitol grounds, and is still around to talk about it, and some poor guy pulled over for a broken taillight who ends up dead with several bullets in his back.  Or between the latter and the guy that jumped the White House fence and made it all the way inside.

**Credit giving - the former Secret Service agent on CNN I saw earlier made exactly this point, whereas the CNN host was nearly apoplectic, "NORAD wasn't alerted!!!  Why wasn't he shot down!!"