Shunning and Radioactivity

Brad Torgersen explains why shunning or ostracizing people of differing values isn’t a good thing.

Brad R. Torgersen

NOTE: I got my invitations from Loncon 3 today. They’re including my novelette “The Exchange Officers” and my novella “The Chaplain’s War” in the traditional electronic Hugo voters packet. So I wanted to take this opportunity to thank the Loncon 3 concom (and everyone who has been working diligently on the 2014 Hugos) for their professionalism during what has been something of a turbulent time — between the fracas over Johnathan Ross having been invited (and disinvited) to be host, and now the fracas over the Hugo ballot itself. I am reminded of the adage: you can make all of the people happy some of the time, you can make some of the people happy all of the time, but you can’t make all of the people happy all of the time. Kudos, Loncon 3. Thusfar, you’ve treated me like a pro, and I appreciate it very much.

Something else:…

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The vacuum of art

Hilarity ensued this week as the Hugo Award nominations were revealed and several authors who don’t eat at the cool kid’s table in the cafeteria appeared on it. Most of the controversy surrounds the nomination of Larry Correia and the sample slate that he posted on his website. Included on his slate (of which pretty much everything he nominated appeared on the short list) was an entry by Vox Day.  I reblogged Larry’s ideas earlier this week.

Some of my favorite criticisms have been:
PracticalFan Apr 21, 2014 at 11:55 am
Keep him close, see which of the SFWA members stand up for him or befriend him, and keep note of them as well. His attitude doesn’t exist in a vacuum; if he had found no willing ears for his poison, he would have gone elsewhere long since. Focus on finding the limits of his bigotry/racism/sexism/whatever, and all his sympathizers. Then expel the whole mess at once. And move on. He doesn’t even deserve as many words as this.
Ah yes, the vacuum. I wonder if this person has also been criticizing Barack Obama the past decade for his attending a church for 16 years that had a pastor who seemed to like to incite racial tensions?

There are accusations of ballot stuffing by Natalie Luhrs.
What I agree with, even less, is the campaign that went on to stuff the ballot box on the part of Larry Correia and Vox Day. They each wrote a post, shortly before the nominating deadline, exhorting their readers to submit a particular ballot…I would be extremely interested to know how many ballots match that list in all respects. I would also be interested to know how many supporting memberships were bought for spouses, children, and extended family who did not actually submit those ballots. It would be ridiculously easy to game the nominations that way…I am, very much, looking forward to ranking “No Award” higher than Vox Day, Larry Correia, Brad Torgerson, Dan Wells, Steve Diamond, and Toni Weisskopf.
Well, I seriously doubt there was any ballot stuffing, just a call to arms from one of the more popular writers of the SF/F genre mobilizing his fans to get out the vote. That’s nothing that many other authors haven’t done in the past. What really gets my goat though is that she’s willing to lump a bunch of people who had nothing to do with Larry Correia’s mobilization of fans other than to appear on his sample ballot. Toni is running one of the most successful publishing houses in the genre and you don’t think she’s worthy of even a nomination? Go read through the comments, it gets better. She actively defends not voting for anyone mentioned on Larry’s sample ballot “…as a matter of principle…”

An explanation about the Hugo awards controversy

Larry Correia explains some of reasoning behind Sad Puppies and the controversy it’s caused in the land of SF/F. Personally, I think they tortured some interpretations in order to get Wheel of Time nominated (I’ve always been under the impression that definition was there for serialized magazine fiction rather than dictionary length novels). Because I’m a cheap ass, I won’t be reading hardly any of these nominees for a couple of years. But, congrats to all the nominees.

A glitch in the matrix

Every so often I have an episode of deja vu.  Tonight I just had another sitting at my desk reading a passage from a book I last read about 20 years ago (Something In the Water by Charlotte MacLeod).  When I read this passage it struck me that I dreamed this exact event about two years ago. “Peter didn’t know what to think, he wasn’t at all sure he cared.  Dragon-slaying was not his profession.  He was just another middle-aged academic, tired from yet another year of teaching; he felt no great yearning to grab a spear and charge into somebody else’s war.”

 

These usually start out as extremely vivid dreams, and then some time later I experience actual event.  The first I remember is from when I was a child, about the summer between 3rd and 4th grades I think.  I dreamed that my friends and I went fishing down on the river under the railroad tracks a few blocks from our house in Minot.  Since we had never gone fishing in town before, this would have been slightly unusual.  But, the very next day, my best friend Scott and his brother Tim wanted to go fishing down on the river.

 

Another time in college I dreamed that I was peaking out from behind a pile of mattresses in some sort of factory or warehouse.  A few months later I found myself working in a futon factory for a couple of weeks down in Minneapolis.  About three weeks into the job I came around then end of one of the tables as I was cleaning up at the end of the day I happened to look up and was stunned to find myself looking at the exact scene I had dreamt months before.  I had never worked at this table before, so it was quite a shock to suddenly see something I had seen before in a dream, but never realized it might be the place I was currently working.

 

What struck me about tonight’s event is that I remember thinking at the time of the dream that dragons and spears didn’t seem to fit in with the book I was supposedly reading.  Reading that passage tonight made me look up and suddenly I recognized the entire scene.