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Tripwander

Jul 24th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
14 comments

corinne backyard 500 wide.jpg

I’ve been away a long time. Sorry about that. We bought a house…at least three months earlier than we expected to.

As you may recall, Carol and I drove down to Phoenix back in May for two weeks in order to interview neighborhoods for a winter place. We hadn’t intended to look at individual properties, but after meeting a local real estate agent during a walk through one of Phoenix’s parks, we decided to accelelerate the process, and saw ten or twelve homes before we ran out of time.

Elva Weissman (who is perhaps the single most expert and energetic agent we’ve ever worked with) plugged our parameters into her MLS portal as a sort of stored query, and the system has been emailing us listings for a couple of months now. We jotted down a short list of properties we wanted to look at during our planned August trip, including a couple that stood out, one in particular in the NE corner of Phoenix that checked more of our boxes than nearly any other. It was about $50K too expensive by my reckoning, but it was at the top of our list as the closest match so far. We figured if it was still listed in August we’d arrange a showing. We were also following another strange and wondrous house that had a patio and a swimming pool right smack in the middle, with the rooms arranged in a rough pentagon all around them. That one sold about a month ago, but it was very cool.

Then, on July 7, the seller cut the price by…$50K. Suddenly the house was dead-center in the crosshairs. Carol and I looked at one another, ground our teeth for a minute, and then got on the phone to arrange a trip in record time. By that Saturday morning we were on a plane, and on Sunday morning we were walking through a 3000 ft2 one-level Southwestern midcentury ranch, which had been gutted to the walls and rebuilt in 2003. I gulped. This was a winner. I took some notes and some pictures, and we walked through another three or four properties that same day. All those other houses just pointed up how close we had already come to a perfect match. By the end of the day we had submitted an offer. 24 hours later, the seller accepted it. We were both nervous wrecks. But hey, do the math with us:

Pros:

  • It’s all on one level, and (like all of north Phoenix) over a mile lower in altitude than Phage House here in Colorado Springs. My lowest blood oxygen reading there was higher than my highest here.
  • It’s on over 5/8 of an acre, with 75″ block walls on two of three sides of the backyard.
  • It has a separate one-car garage to serve as a workshop. I may build a bigger shop later on, but for the time being, as soon as I have an AC unit installed, it will do.
  • There is no homeowner’s association, and having been built in 1966, the deed restrictions are simple and mostly concern setbacks. There is no mention of antennas whatsoever, and there are guys within a block or two with 50′ towers and rotatable beams.
  • The back yard has a great deal of vegetation (including several ginormous palm trees) but nothing with thorns. Carol and I did thorns when we lived near Cave Creek in the ’90s, thank you very much. No more.
  • It has a small walled courtyard with a newish 6-person hot tub.
  • It has a gorgeous PebbleTec pool with a gas heater and a granite-rock waterfall. There is room for a solar pool heater, which is in our five-year plan.
  • It has a nice 25-bottle wine fridge and a huge standalone freezer.
  • It has a dedicated fenced dog run, with a doggie door into the laundry room.
  • It has a huge tiled great room spanning 40 feet at its greatest extent. Good party house.
  • It has a pair of gargoyles to either side of the front courtyard gate. Or at least there will be when we cut enough of the vines down so you can actually see them.
  • The leaded glass design in the front door looks like it has a little Space Invaders guy at the center.

Cons:

  • The walk-in closets (like all the ceilings) are ten feet high, with three ranks of clothes bars, one right at the top. They’ll hold a great deal, but you have to fish your less-often-worn shirts down with a hookie thing on a long wooden handle.
  • The pool still needs a fence, to keep doggies out of it.
  • The walls around the yard and front courtyard are covered with some as-yet-unidentified thornless (whew) creeper vines that shed foot-long bean-ish seed pods.
  • It’s no longer $50K overpriced, but it was still $50K more than we had hoped to spend. Ahh, well.
  • There’s a grapefruit tree. I like grapefruit a lot, but I can’t eat them on one of the meds I’m now taking. Bummer. Maybe someday.
  • It has a gigantic wet bar in the corner of the great room with an icemaker, a fridge, and a two-keg beer keg cooler and taps.
  • It’s painted dark gray.

So as you can tell, the pros win by a Phoenix mile. Most of the cons can be fixed. In fact, we’ve already talked to Keith’s handyman, who says he can get rid of the mirrors behind the wet bar without much trouble. Whether we should keep the wet bar itself is something I won’t know until we throw a couple of parties. Such a thing might well be handy for buffet dinners. The beer taps will have to go, though. I have a reputation to maintain.

As I’ve already told my inner circle, the real work starts now. We’re going from 4400 ft2 to 3000. I will have nothing like my 12 foot high library wall with rolling ladder. We will have to manage two houses for at least a year, while we get Phage House ready to sell. I’m already throwing stuff in boxes to give Rescued Hearts, and our trash can is getting a workout every week.

We may well keep a (small) place here in Colorado, but what and where we just can’t know yet.

As for everything else, stay tuned. I had hoped to mount several ebooks (including The Cunning Blood) before the end of July. Not going to happen, sigh. May not happen in August, either. We’ll see. But the cover art for Ten Gentle Opportunities is going to be spectacular. A novella I’m calling Fire Drill is growing in the back of my head and starting to hammer on the inside of my skull to be let out. I really really want to be a writer again. The word “triage” looms large in my near future.

Whatever. With Carol by my side and an extra-large economy-size jar of Aleve on the shelf, we can do it. Gonna be a wild ride but a good one, trust me.

Odd Lots

Jul 2nd, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
19 comments

Paying by the Page Turn

Jun 24th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
15 comments

Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (KU) book subscription system has been a laboratory of unintended consequences since it launched in July 2014. If you don’t subscribe or don’t know how authors are paid, my 4-part series on it may be useful. I’ll summarize very briefly: Each time a work available on KU is borrowed and at least 10% of it is read, the author is paid from a payment fund shared by all such borrows in a given month. The amount of money in the pot changes from month to month, as do the number of borrows. So the payment per qualified borrow changes from month to month. It’s been converging on $1.30 for some time. The length of the work doesn’t matter: Read 10% of a 150,000 word novel, and the author gets $1.30. Read 10% of a 1000-word short story…and the author gets the same $1.30. (For another another few days, at least. Stay with me.)

Care to guess the unintended consequences? Authors of novels pulled their works from KU or never opted in to begin with. Authors of short stories suddenly started making significant money. Authors of flash-length erotica (basically, isolated sex scenes) began making a great deal of money. And scammers began posting the same (very short) story on multiple author accounts, and Wikipedia articles as original works.

I could have guessed all of that except maybe the erotica, since I don’t read erotica. I had actually begun turning my individual short stories and novelettes into separate ebooks, figuring that $1.30 was way better than the 35c that 99c ebook shorts earn.

Alluva sudden, wham! Everything changes.

On July 1, a whole new KU payment system comes into force. The new system essentially pays authors by the amount of the book read. Read the whole book, author gets X. Read half the book, and author gets X/2. Read 10% of the book (perhaps because it was so bad you wanted to throw your Paperwhite at the wall) and author gets X/10. In general terms, when you read some arbitrary number of pages, author gets a pro-rata per-page payment. This is true (and evidently the payment will be the same) whether the book in question is a kids’ bedtime story, a romance novel, or a calculus textbook.

As in the current system, the per-page payment changes every month, depending on the size of the money pot and the number of pages read during that month. The two big variables are the per-page payout and the number of pages in the book.

Wait a sec…pages? In an ebook?

Yup. And this is something completely new. Amazon has addressed the fact that ebooks are not divided into pages by creating the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC) algorithm. As best I understand it (details are sparser than we’d like) the KU servers will examine each book posted by an author, and impose a standard page layout on the book’s text in a buffer. (It will not actually change the layout in the published book.) It will then count how many “pages” exist in the book when expressed by the KENPC algorithm. I have seen no reliable description of what will go into this standard layout. It’s obvious that they’re trying to keep people from padding out margins or tweaking fonts to turn less text into more pages. They’re also trying to equalize the differences between devices with vastly different screen sizes. KENPC takes into account photos, tables, and technical art somehow. Again, details are sparse. However, I’m happy just knowing that they’re going to some effort to make a page on one device more or less equivalent in terms of content to a page on another device. I’ve seen some grumbling about page metrics for children’s books, but since that’s a genre I have no experience in whatsoever, I can’t say much. It does seem a little unfair that a 30-page kid book will only earn what 30 pages in a 500-page novel earns.

Pages will only pay off the first time they are read. Reading a book a second time on the same borrow will not generate any additional revenue. Nor will going back to reread a chapter generate additional revenue. Swiping/tapping rapidly through a book will not pay. Some sort of timer runs while a page is displayed, and if the page isn’t displayed long enough, the page will not be considered read. Countable pages begin with the book’s starting point, so dedication pages, review excerpts, and indicia will not be paid.

Now, what can authors expect as a per-page payment? Nobody knows yet. People are guessing somewhere between .8c and 1c per page read. We’ll find out soon.

Any system like this is a basket of unintended consequences. These are the ones that immediately occur to me:

  • Authors of art-heavy children’s books will bail.
  • A lot of that flash-erotica will vanish. (This may be an intended consequence.) Or maybe not. A nickel is a nickel.
  • More previews of other books will appear at the end of a book.
  • Reference books will bail. This may include computer books, which are rarely read from cover to cover.
  • Page-turners will dominate. Difficult books (fiction or nonfiction) will bail.

This last point bears discussing. Some books are bought to be seen in buyers’ hands or (more often) on their coffee tables. As Megan McArdle points out, Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century is purchased a great deal more than it is read. I think this is true of a lot of literary fiction as well. Authors will have to understand that they’re no longer selling books. They’re not really selling pages, either. They’re selling page turns. To make money on KU going forward, each page will have to compel the reader to move on to the next page, and repeat until EOB.

This is bad news for James Joyce. This is good news for George R. R. Martin. And, I suspect, me.

It may also be bad news for writers who just don’t know what they’re doing. To pay by the page-turn, Amazon will have to report how many pages were turned. How much detail those reports will provide is still unknown. It would be terrific to know how many pages were read per title rather than in aggregate across all of an author’s titles, but I don’t think Amazon will be doing that, at least not right away. However, if you have ten 300-page books on KU and get paid for 67 pages, the reader base is telling you something.

I suspect that this is a fully intended (if unstated) consequence: to improve the readability of the material on KU. Fistfights break out frequently over whether readability and quality are strongly correlated. This is the dotted line where literature is separated from fiction, especially genre fiction. But consider what KU is: a mechanism allowing maniacal readers to get all the books they can read for ten bucks a month. If you’re a normal human being, Finnegan’s Wake will take you most of a month to bull through, and you can get ratty copies for a penny plus shipping online.

No, it’s going to work like this: If you can keep a reader up all night with your hard SF action-adventures, you can make money on the new KU. Write page-turners, and put previews of all of your page-turners in the backs of all of your page-turners.

That’s certainly what I intend to do. I will make money. Watch me.

Bad Timing

Jun 15th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
15 comments

First of all, a hearty welcome to all the new readers who’ve posted in my comments here, and a fair number more who’ve left tracks in my webstats. I’ve had a number of links posted to my Sad Puppy Summary and Wrapup from some sites a great deal bigger than mine, including John C. Wright’s, Mike Glyer’s File 770, and Monster Hunter Nation, egad. Now you’re all probably wondering why I haven’t posted anything new since May 31. I don’t post as often as I did ten years ago, but two weeks away is unusual for me.

It’s just bad timing, timing we did not control: We got a decent offer for our condo outside Chicago, and accepted it. That meant we had to drive 1,100 miles, empty it out, clean it up, sort the garageful of artifacts transported to Carol’s sister’s house, complete the paperwork (which was complex, as there were multiple owners including a trust) pack a Durango and a half’s worth of artifacts into a single Durango, and then drive 1,100 miles back home. The process included some brute-force moving of furniture, many trips to Goodwill, and considerable exercise of my tessellation superpower in order to pack way too much stuff into way too little space. Forgive me if I’m exhausted. I’ll be turning 63 in two weeks, and feeling every nanosecond of it.

So give me a day or three to recover. There’s much to write about, most of it concerning writing, especially my plans for the coming year. I should be posting The Cunning Blood for sale on the Kindle store some time in July, for the princely price of $2.99. “Drumlin Boiler” will go up shortly after that, for 99c. “Whale Meat” is already there, for 99c. I still need a cover for my novella “Firejammer,” but the ebook is otherwise complete. Are you artist enough to draw a stone castle / warship sailing on an ocean of molten lava? I pay reasonably well for covers.

The big deal happens on January 7, 2016, when I’ll be releasing Ten Gentle Opportunities on Kindle, with paperbacks from CreateSpace. I have a cover contracted for that, from the dazzling Blake Henriksen, but I’m thinking of buying some interior art as well from other artists. Interested? Contact me. It’s my first new novel in ten years, and I’ll be putting my back into the launch.

In the meantime, I have to develop a Web presence for my fiction around the hardsf.com domain that I registered twenty years ago and never figured out what to do with. I’ll need some art for that as well, and I have a great deal of studying to do on WordPress extensions and internals. January 7 seems like a long way off. It’s not.

So hang in there. More stuff coming. As preface, you might go back and reread my New Year’s Eve 2014 post, which will be relevant to coming entries. Ditto my series on Sarah Hoyt’s Human Wave idea, at least until you get to the Sad Puppies part, at which point you can stop. I’ve already said most of what I want to say about that, and need to get on to other things.

It’s time to go take another Aleve, but man, (he said zenily) I haven’t felt this good in a long time.

Odd Lots

May 31st, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments

Sad Puppies Summary and Wrapup

May 24th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
116 comments

Sad Bichon Pillow - 500 Wide.jpg

As I mentioned a month or so ago, the whole Sad Puppies thing took me completely by surprise. I’ve been researching it pretty intensely for a couple of months now. I’m getting the impression that I’ve probably read everything useful about it, and what I’m seeing are mostly rehashes of things I’ve already read. So what I want to do today is summarize my research, then call it done and go back to my regularly scheduled life.

First, for those just tuning in, here in brief is what happened: Brad Torgersen, a writer of military SF, broadened Larry’s Correia’s notion of two years ago that more people should be brought into the Worldcon and to the Hugo Awards process. He explained how the Hugo Awards are decided, including the (suspiciously) obscure fact that $40 buys you a supporting membership in Worldcon that allows you to nominate and vote on the Hugos as well as vote on sites for upcoming Worldcons. Even I didn’t know that recent Worldcon members can download ebook versions (or at very least substantial excerpts) of most nominated works, which is a spectacular deal, and well worth the $40 whether or not you’re interested in the awards at all.

All of this was done out in the open. Nothing was sub rosa. Brad told people to go buy supporting memberships and nominate. He then presented a slate of works/artists that he and others in his orbit thought worthy of consideration, especially those who have been too obscure to be considered in the past. Brad’s slate leans heavily toward what Sarah Hoyt describes as “human wave” science fiction and fantasy; that is, fiction that embraces a wider range of techniques and themes than those popular with modern academic writing programs.

Some time in the past year, an author named Theodore Beale (AKA Vox Day) created his own similar slate of Hugo Awards recommendations and called it the Rabid Puppies. Vox Day is difficult to describe, much less explain. He’s a very bright guy with controversial opinions, and he suffers fools far more badly than I thought fools could be suffered. His opinions are off-topic here; don’t bring them up. He created his own slate similar to the Sad Puppies, and that’s pretty much all that matters for the current discussion.

There was some bitching about all this, just as there had been some bitching in the two previous years since Larry Correia had originally created the Sad Puppies concept. Nothing odd there; bitching about one damned thing or another has been the lifeblood of SFF fandom in all the 42 years I’ve been involved. The bitching and butthurt has gotten much worse in the last 20 years or so, which is one reason I’ve become steadily less interested in fandom, and have attended only a handful of cons since the 80s.

Then April 5 happened, and egad: The Sad Puppies recommendations swept the ballot. That’s when the hatefest began.

Some notes on terminology here: I use the abbreviation SP to stand for Sad Puppies, and to some extent the more general “puppies” notion of offering recommendation slates to the SFF-reading public. I use the term APs to indicate the Anti-Puppies, people who for whatever reason oppose the idea. I do not use the term “SJWs” for the APs because it’s inaccurate: I know people who oppose the SPs who are not themslves social justice warriors, and I suspect that the vast majority of SJWs have never even heard of the Hugo Awards, and would not care about the argument even if they had.

So that’s the short summary. Here are the points that I want to make:

  • First and foremost and above all else: The Sad Puppies organizers broke none of the rules established for the Hugo Awards process. None. All the Powers agree on this, including Patrick Neilsen-Hayden and George R. R. Martin.
  • There was no ballot-box stuffing. There are explicit rules against someone buying supporting Worldcon memberships in bulk and then voting them. This has been tried before, but the SPs were not doing it. Brad’s instructions to his readers were basically this: Go buy supporting memberships and vote them according to your judgment; here are some people who ought to be considered.
  • One of the APs came a lot closer to ballot-box stuffing by encouraging people to buy supporting memberships for people who can’t afford them. She emphasized that no effort would be made to influence how the recipients would vote, but c’mon: People know where the goodies are coming from, and the likelihood that the recipients of these gifts agree with their benefactors on the subject approaches unity.
  • The response of the APs to the SPs was venomous in the extreme. Brad Torgersen was called a racist mysogynist and much else. In truth, he’s happily married to an African-American woman whom he clearly loves and respects. The rotter haters among the APs who suggested that he was hiding his racism behind his wife and daughter did more damage to the APs’ arguments than anything the SPs said before or later. If I had to point to one single thing that turned me against the APs, it was this.
  • The media tried to slam the SPs, and mostly soiled itself in the process. Entertainment Weekly actually slid into libel and had to publish a retraction. Other outlets including Salon, The Guardian, Io9, HuffPo, Slashdot etc. published accusations that were all suspiciously alike, as though someone had offered a pre-written summary for them to follow. Most egregious of several lies was the claim that the slate was composed entirely of conservative white men. In fact, there were plenty of women and non-caucasians on the slate, as well as what might be a slight majority of liberals.
  • Several people hit me with the “You must condemn the Sad Puppies because GamerGate” gambit. I looked for a causal connection and didn’t find it. The SPs have been around two years longer than GG, and, yes, there is a certain amount of overlap between the two groups. There is also a lot of overlap between the gang attacking the SPs and the one attacking GG. I’m not a gamer and this entry is not about GG. I consider it off-topic; don’t bring it up.
  • As I said several weeks ago, the slobbering, high-volume, high-profile hate hurled by the APs probably took the SPs from a fluke to an ongoing institution. I call this “adverse attention,” and it cooks down to the Streisand Effect: Screaming about something attracts attention that makes that something a lot more visible. The sensible response to the SPs would have been silence.
  • Voting “No Award” against SP-recommended authors/artists is unfair in the extreme to those who were nominated. It’s an attempt to punish the SPs by hurting innocent bystanders, some or many of whom genuinely deserve the recognition. I predict that this strategy, if it succeeds, will destroy whatever credibility the Hugos have left.

And finally, the largest insight that I had, and the one that I think explains almost everything else:

  • The fight over the Hugo Awards is really about humiliation and loss of face. The Insider Alphas (i.e., the Right Men and Right Women) of the SFF community were humiliated on their home turf, and suffered a tremendous loss of face. High-status individuals can tolerate almost anything but humiliation. Their response to loss of face is generally one of igneous fury, and where violence is possible, physical violence. The fury was tactile, and Brad Torgersen received death threats. That pretty much nailed it for me.

Eveybody’s got a theory on how to fix the Hugo Awards process, but to me the process is fine; what’s missing is about 25,000 more involved nominators and voters. A large enough voter base is unlikely to be swept by something like a slate of recommendations. Whether so many new people can be brought into the Worldcon/Hugos community is unclear, but I doubt it.

That’s about all I’m going to have to say about the Sad Puppies topic for awhile. I’m turning my attention back to writing, to the concept of the Human Wave, and perhaps to a suspicion I have that fandom is in the process of splitting. The problems of fandom are caught up in the problems of publishing. Once Manhattan-style traditional publishing becomes more or less irrelevant, fandom may become an overlapping group of online communities centered on authors and genres. Each will probably have its own awards, and the Hugos will become only one among many. Is this a good thing?

You bet!

Rant: You Can’t Shame a Puppy

May 21st, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
11 comments

Really. You can’t. Lord knows, we tried. But Dash just keeps trying to pee on the furniture, and if we hadn’t discovered Pants for Dogs, the ottoman (at very least) would now be a total loss.

So I have to grin a rather sour grin to see people suggesting that the way to defeat the Sad Puppies and others like them (which are coming, trust me!) is to shame authors who were chosen to be on their slates, and keep shaming them until they withdraw their nominations. Several authors did in fact refuse the Hugo Awards nominations that they received back on April 5. Larry Correia refused his because he was the originator of the Sad Puppies idea, and felt that benefitting from it was unseemly. That’s legit, and he gets big points for doing the right thing. Marko Kloos and Annie Bellet withdrew because they didn’t want to be at the center of the ruckus, especially one with political overtones. Bellet said it very well:

I find my story, and by extension myself, stuck in a game of political dodgeball, where I’m both a conscripted player and also a ball.

I can sympathize here. I wouldn’t want to be the ball, either, and we have to respect their decisions. Trouble is, you can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game. My suggestion would have been to ride it out. Nobody has blamed the authors who were on the slate (yet) and anyone who would is a moron. (Alas, the world suffers no shortage of morons. We’ll have to remain on guard.)

The more important reason for authors not to withdraw is that withdrawing gives the anti-puppies (APs) this peculiar notion that they can use social pressure (shaming) to get authors to do things their way, up to and including refusing a major honor in the field. Note very well: I am not suggesting that either Kloos or Bellet withdrew because of social pressure. I take their explanations at face value. What I’m suggesting is that a certain nontrivial number of APs may assume it, and may further assume that social pressure is a tactic that can win, going forward. I’m already hearing that the 2015 Hugos need to be “asterisked;” that is, marked as disreputable, dishonest, and something that no upright fan or author will have anything to do with. The message is pretty clear: Any Puppy nominee who keeps their place on the ballot is to be shamed and shunned.

Now we can get down to business. The first of my two points today is this: Shaming is bullying. Shaming is about fear. Shaming is thug tactics. I’ll tell you what I hear when I hear people talking about shaming authors: “Nice little career you’re starting up here. Shame if anything happened to it.” Or, another interpretation that’s pretty much the same thing: “Stay on the ballot, and you’ll never work in this town again.”

In other words, we’re supposed to use mafia persuasion to get authors to refuse nominations that just might have been influenced by slatemakers like the Sad Puppies. (What if the works are just really good?) That’s bad enough. However, if you think about it a little more, you come to my second point for today’s entry: Shaming only works on people who value the esteem of the shamer.

That’s how shame works: You know that certain people are going to be displeased with you if you do something, so you don’t do it. You don’t do it because you like / respect / want to retain the goodwill of those certain people. The problem is this: The shamers will thus force only their own people–the people who agree with them and want to be liked by them–off the ballot. The people who then move up to take the vacated slots are more likely to be sympathetic to the Puppies.

Is that what you want? Really?

There’s this peculiar notion among some people that shame is the ultimate weapon, one that works every time, on everybody. My research suggests that it works best on heavily networked depressive teenagers, which would be all of us, right? Heh. So let’s try a thought experiment: Shame Vox Day off of…anything. (Divide by zero much?) Try shaming any of the Puppy sympathizers off the ballet. I’m sure I’d hear the laughter halfway up the side of Cheyenne Mountain. See what I mean?

There may be a way to “save” the Hugos from the depredations of the Sad Puppies. I think we first we need to agree on what those depredations actually are, and no such agreement currently exists. But whether such a fix exists or not, shaming authors is not only thug-like and unethical, it comes around like a boomerang and rips you a new one by driving your own people (the only ones who might conceivably be shame-able) off the ballot.

I honestly don’t think the Sad Puppies are any kind of problem for the Hugo Awards, Worldcon, or most ordinary fans. The whole business cooks down to this: A group who broke no rules made fandom’s Insider Alpha clique lose face in a very big way. Everything in the Sad Puppies dustup follows from that.

The Puppies are unshameable. Get over the butthurt, or bad things will happen, things that have nothing to do with shame, but everything to do with money, demographics, and the shape of SFF going forward. Give me a week or so (it’s nuts here) and I’ll tell you a little more about that.

Rant: Sad Puppies vs. Anti-Puppies, as the Kilostreisands Pile Up

May 2nd, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
54 comments

Yes, I’ve been scarce in recent weeks, but bear with me: I’m off doing something difficult but important, which I’ll tell you about later.

Although it’s been going on now for three years, I hadn’t ever heard of the Sad Puppies phenomenon until a couple of months ago, and what brought it to my attention was an ongoing rumble raging up and down the social networks and blogosphere. The rumble was just a rumble until April 4, when the Hugo Award nominations for 2015 were announced. Then, ye gods and little fishes, the Puppies swept the slate and it became Hugogeddon. I’ve already described the Sad Puppies thing here as part of a series that I’d originally intended to focus on Sarah Hoyt’s Human Wave SF manifesto. It’s a movement to bring new people into the Worldcon culture and perhaps get some attention for writers who for whatever reason are never considered for the Hugo Awards. The Sad Puppies 3 effort was all very much up-front and out in the open. The most powerful man in SFF publishing, Patrick Neilsen-Hayden, stated quite clearly that the group violated no rules whatsoever.

But oh, my, the dudgeon, the squealing, the bright purple faces, the curses and threats and slobbering on the floor. Writers of considerable stature, whom I had read and long respected, lost that respect instantly and went onto my Seventh-Grade Playground Tantrum-Throwers List. They seemed to think that anyone who put forth a list of recommended authors or works was trying to dynamite the awards, and (worse) that this was a brand-new thing that had never been tried before. Well…Mike Glyer, who belongs to the Anti-Puppy (AP) faction, pointed out that slatemaking has been practiced erratically since the very first Hugo Awards season in…1953. Apparently the difference between recommendations and a slate is that a slate is put forth by people we dislike.

Takeaway: Hugo Award slatemaking is nothing new, and does not violate the rules. You have a constitutional right to be upset about it. I have a constitutional right to think of it as a nonissue. I’m not going to argue that point any further in this entry. (I doubt I will argue that point further at all. Don’t even bring it up in the comments.) I have something else in mind entirely. Let me phrase it as a question:

How in hell could a couple of mostly unknown authors turn the venerable Hugo Awards inside-out?

My answer: adverse attention. For a definition, let me quote from a textbook that I made up just now: Zoftnoggin & Wiggout’s Fundamentals of Sociometry.

Adverse attention is a rise in the attention profile of a previously obscure phenomenon caused by the actions of an entity that opposes that phenomenon. In the vast majority of cases, the triggering force is outrage, though it sometimes appears through the action of envy, pride, lust, asshattedness, butthurt, or other largely emotional psychopathologies.

This being sociometry, adverse attention may be quantified, and there is a standard unit for expressing it:

The fundamental unit of adverse attention is the streisand, defined as one previously uninterested person achieving a degree of interest in a phenomenon sufficient to compel them to email, share, or retweet information about that phenomenon to one other person in a social network. As the information propagates across a social network, the connectedness of the network influences the total amount of adverse attention that arises. For example, if each of ten previously uninterested persons receiving the information passes it on to only one previously uninterested person, eleven streisands of adverse attention have been created. If one of those previously uninterested persons has 200 followers on Twitter or 1000 Facebook friends, the number of streisands increases rapidly. In a sufficiently dense network, the rate of increase can become close to exponential until the number of previously uninterested persons asymptotically approaches zero.

I’ve seen evidence for this in the comment sections of many blogs that have criticized or condemned the Sad Puppies. A common comment goes something like this: “Wow! I never knew that you could vote for the Hugos without going to Worldcon! And I just downloaded the free preview of Monster Hunter International. This is way cool!” Zing! The world gets another Puppy.

The emotional tenor of the criticism matters too. I’ve seen a few comments that go something like this: “I’d never heard of the Sad Puppies before. I’ve been trying to figure out which side is right, but the sheer nastiness of the Sad Puppies’ critics makes me think they’re just sore losers. I’m more or less with the Puppies now.”

Then, of course, there are the hatchet-job articles (all of them roughly identical) in what most people consider legitimate media, like Entertaintment Weekly, which later retracted the article once it became clear that it was libelous. The Guardian wrote another hit-piece that fell short of libel but still misrepresented the phenomenon. These are not just blogs. These are significant publications that have a lot of readers.

And those streisands just keep piling up.

It’s something like a sociological law: Commotion attracts attention. Attention is unpredictable, because it reaches friend and foe alike. It can go your way, or it can go the other way. There’s no way to control the polarity of adverse attention. The only way to limit adverse attention is to stop the commotion.

In other words, just shut up.

I know, this is difficult. For some psychologies, hate is delicious to the point of being psychological crack, so it’s hard to just lecture them on the fact that hate has consequences, including but hardly limited to adverse attention.

My conclusion is this: The opponents of Sad Puppies 3 put them on the map, and probably took them from a fluke to a viable long-term institution. I don’t think this is what the APs intended. In the wake of the April 4 announcement of the final Hugo ballot, I’d guess the opposition has generated several hundred kilostreisands of adverse attention, and the numbers will continue to increase. Sad Puppies 4 has been announced. Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen have lots of new fans who’d never heard of them before. (I just bought the whole Monster Hunter International series and will review it in a future entry.)

To adapt a quote from…well, you know damned well whose quote I’m adapting: “Attack me, and I will become more popular than you could possibly imagine.”

Or, to come closer to home, and to something in which I have personal experience: “Feed puppies, and they grow up.”

Actions have consequences. Who knew?

Odd Lots

Apr 16th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments

The Human Wave, Sad Puppies, and SFF Monoculture, Part 5

Apr 5th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
9 comments

(This series began here.)

I held back Part 5 of this series because the Hugo nomination finalists were announced yesterday, and I wanted to see whether the Sad Puppies (and a separate but related slate, Rabid Puppies) would make their mark on the ballot. The answer is, egad: What a broom does.

But I’ll get back to that.

First I wanted to mention a little pushback on a different subtopic of the series: The Human Wave. A guy I’ve known (if vaguely) for a long time backchanelled me a short note, the gist of which was this: “So you want to destroy literary SF.”

This is a familiar tactic in many brainless headbumps I’ve seen down the years: When somebody proposes that something you oppose should be permitted, you strike back by accusing them of wanting everything except what they propose to be forbidden. This tactic probably has a name, and a place of honor in some online Gallery Of Stupid Argument Tricks. I mention it simply to point out the general level at which much discussion of SFF issues these days operates.

I told him to go back and read the series again, quoting the significant bits.

I’ll say in summary what I said here: The Human Wave is about allowing things, not forbidding things. Yes, what the Human Wave stands against is mostly a certain brand of pessimistic literary fussiness. The solution, however, is to broaden the field. Do litfic if you want. But don’t claim that litfic is the best or only thing worth writing. If the Human Wave movement pushes literary SF out of the spotlight, that’s a choice made by the readers, not me. My take: We need a much, much bigger spotlight.

Now, to the Hugo nominations. The full list from Locus is here. I’ve been a little out of touch with recent SFF (for reasons laid out earlier in this series) and am not familiar with most of them. I got a little discouraged last year when I picked up Redshirts, which turned out to be the biggest piece of crap I’d read out of all Hugo novel winners. (I have not read every single one, obviously, so bigger stinkers than that may be still be lurking somewhere in the past.)

The really, really big question on everyone’s minds today is whether the Puppies had any effect on the final ballot. Mike Glyer did an excellent summary on File 770, with more detailed analysis here. Two-digit takeaway: 71% of the finalists were on either Sad Puppies or Rabid Puppies, or both. Only 24 finalists were not on either slate. A record 2,122 valid nominations were submitted. John C. Wright picked up six slots, a new record for a single year. Some other notes:

  • Brad Torgersen, coordinator of Sad Puppies 3, was very careful to keep everything legal and above-board. Even Patrick Nielsen-Hayden admitted that the Sad Puppies campaign had broken no rules.
  • Sad Puppies concept creator Larry Correia withdrew his nomination for Best Novel, received for Monster Hunter Nemesis . He did not want anyone to be able to say that he proposed Sad Puppies just to win awards. He now has the moral high ground against any accusations of corruption that will invariably be thrown his way. Larry’s a class act, in spades.
  • There will be a Sad Puppies 4, to be coordinated next year by Kate Paulk.

Heads are now exploding all over the Internet, which is the least surprising thing about the whole kerfuffle. Puppy haters are trying to figure out what changes might be made to the Hugo rules to make such a sweep impossible. The truth is that as long as you have supporting memberships who can vote, slatemakers will offer slates to their supporters. Eliminating supporting memberships would make Worldcon financially impossible. (I don’t see anybody complaining about the additional money that all those Puppy supporters added to Worldcon coffers.)

So: If you want to stop the Sad Puppies, you have to propose your own slates. (And have the followers to vote them, which is really the hard part.) Bored Beavers? Aggrieved Alligators? Mourning Meerkats? Go for it. The goal is to reduce monoculture, and broaden the spotlight. That’s ultimately what the Puppies thing is about. Let 2E20 slates bloom!

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