The beginning, from Larry Correia's Monster Hunter Nation blog:
   The Idea is Born
   The Full Puppy
   Think of the Children!
   Think of Stephen King!

Jeff Duntemann's synopsis of the Sad Puppies movement (Conterapositive Diary)

My rambling below...

TRX
February 26, 2015 at 3:46 PM

It's too bad there's no "like" button. I'd be hitting it like a starving rat at the kibble dispenser.

I've essentially given up on SF published after the turn of the century. Most of the decent SF I've found lately has been packaged as "young adult".

TRX
February 27, 2015 at 6:02 AM

There are various "science fiction" groups:

1) the people who actually read science-fiction-as-I-define-it

2) the people who only read movie spinoffs, "urban" or traditional fantasy, shared-world series, and vampire/werewolf/zombie books

3) the manga/comics people

4) the "fans" and conventioneers, who often don't read at all. And their cosplay subset.

5) the SFWA, which used to be an organization whose purpose was to keep publishers and agents from abusing authors, but now seems to be gnawing off its own limbs

6) the "gatekeepers"; the acquisitions editors and the marketers 7) the authors

I casually follow a few SF author blogs; most of them have had something to say on the SFWA issues of the last couple of years. I get the idea that this isn't the first time the SFWA has gone through an "ethnic cleansing" phase; it's just that this time it is a lot more public. The SFWA, like the "fans" and conventioneers, seems to have the idea that it speaks for SF in general, when the majority of readers have probably never heard of it, nor would they care.

TRX
February 27, 2015 at 10:39 AM

Most of the post-millennial SF I've read has been British. Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross, Jasper Fforde, etc.

They were all successful in Britain before getting American publishers, so they passed a different set of gatekeepers to make their first sales.

The Gatekeeper Problem has been around a long time. Back a couple of decades ago I was in casual contact with Harry Stine. (mostly chatting about old cars; he was a Mopar fan) One day I got a sizzling message from him; he'd had some kind of space book in print for several editions. He'd prepped a new edition and sent it to his publisher, who promptly kicked it back. It was then that he found out the editor he'd worked with for decades had left, and the publisher had turned him over to some Sweet Young Thing fresh out of school. She was outraged that Stine had sent her a manuscript that "advocated polluting space.” I’m not sure he ever dealt with them again; shortly afterward he got a multibook contract from Pinnacle writing what he called "techno-porn", that they sold on the men's-adventure paperback racks in gas stations and truck stops. Harry said it was way more profitable than SF or nonfiction.

TRX
March 1, 2015 at 2:08 PM

> getting bookstores to shelve our books was a hideous problem

That was the other side of the gatekeeper problem - not the publishers, but the distribution network, which was dominated be a couple of huge players, to the point where "in print" became synonymous with "still some in the warehouse at Ingram." The third link was the retail chain; bookstores in one part, the racks in department and convenience stores for the other.

In my local area, we have gone from four to zero new book stores, and from a dozen used book stores to one. So, basically, the retail endpoint has ceased to exist; if you want to buy a book, you're limited to what's on the aisle at Wal-Mart or K-Mart, or the racks at the grocery store or truck stop. The gas station and convenience store book racks have been gone for a long time, though there's still some magazine sales at a few convenience stores.

True, this is just my local area, but it's a good example of where the publisher/wholesaler/retailer triad has almost completely broken down.

I've been seeing the decline since long before Amazon popped up 20 years ago. Amazon wasn't the bogey man popping up from under the bed to steal their business; Amazon was what was filling the holes where conventional publishing was collapsing from its own incompetence.

TRX
March 1, 2015 at 6:35 PM

John Varley: "Red Lightning"
Charles Stross: "The Atrocity Archives"
Alastair Reynolds: "Century Rain"
Richard K. Morgan: "Altered Carbon"
SM Stirling: "In the Courts of the Crimson Kings"
William C. Deitz: "Runner"
Jasper Fforde: "The Eyre Affair"

There's still good post-millennial stuff out there, but you have to search for it.

TRX
March 2, 2015 at 7:39 AM

"Red Thunder" was okay, but nothing to write home about. It went in the trade pile. I thought "Red Lightning" rocked.

I give all of the above my official seal of approval, but I particularly recommend "Century Rain." It's Reynolds' best work by far, but for some reason not nearly as popular as many of his other novels.

TRX
March 1, 2015 at 2:33 PM

> that tastes converge on what a relative handful of social alphas deem acceptable.

Case in point: Mickey Spillane. You don't hear a lot about him nowadays, so it's easy to forget how wildly popular he was in the 1950s and 1960s. His Wikipedia entry says 225 million copies worldwide, and that seven out of the top fifteen all-time fiction best sellers in the US were his.

Over the years I've read various horrified diatribes from people who couldn't understand why Spillane was allowed to write and sell such schlock, and how it was ruining American culture, and causing blood to run in the streets, and then off into real whackjob-land... these rants were mostly written by "scholars" or "writers of literature" who were certain they knew what the lumpenproletariat *ought* to be reading... the reeking schlock they tried to ram down our throats in school, probably.

TRX
March 10, 2015 at 5:51 AM

I just came across an article by Norman Spinrad called "The Future of SF", written back in 1980 for Asimov's SF Magazine.

Spinrad made many of the same points about readers vs. the fans/conventioneers vs. the filmgoers being different markets, and how the majority of the "science fiction" And market were not traditional SF readers, or even readers at all.

TRX
April 5, 2015 at 1:56 PM

Through pure chance, I have read or re-read a large number of former Hugo winners and nominees over the last few years. Mostly, I never knew they'd been part of it.

I can therefore tell you authoritatively that there were *much* worse books than Redshirts that won a Hugo, and many of the nominees would properly have been used a birdcage liner.

It seems I'm far more familiar with the older books than the ones in the last 5 or 10 years, many of which I'd never heard of.

HP Lovecraft probably had a line in one of his stories, something like "That which was read, cannot be unread." Then I could quote it when trying to describe books like that.

TRX
April 11, 2015 at 1:41 AM

The Warrior/Puppy thing has become astoundingly bitter, and a number of authors on both sides who I had assumed were sensible adults have sunk to a monkey-poo-flinging level while gleefully attacking publishers, editors, and readers as well as each other.

Meanwhile, their supporters seem to be going persecuted, defensive, and tribal.

Of course, I personally benefited from learning how small the group who votes on the others is, and that they're composed of "fans" and conventioneers, whose preference in novels might well be vastly different from my own. That probably accounts for most of my WTF? events when looking at the Hugo award list on Wikipedia. The Hugo award ceased to have any relevance to my ideas of a decent book long ago.

Meanwhile, people who really should know better are sawing off the limbs they're squatting on, shaking their fists at their enemies... there are authors on both sides whose work I like, but they seem to be devoting more time flinging poo than in writing new books. I guess one definition of "success" as "I can afford to stop working while slagging off big chunks of my potential market."

TRX
May 2, 2015 at 7:06 PM

"Give a man a platform and he will speak his mind. Deny him a platform and he will build his own... and you will never silence him again."

The only hit I got on Google pointed back to a comment by Theodore Beale on his web site. Which seems appropriate, somehow.

TRX
May 3, 2015 at 4:28 AM

As the smoke from burning bridges continues to rise, I foresee some sizeable changes in the publishing industry.

I think the Tribal Effect is going to close a lot of doors for potential sales for the Puppies and the Ilk. Any editor who accepts a manuscript from them is going to get the fish eye from their peers and potential future employers, as they move about the industry. It's already hard enough to sell a book; as the Editor Tribe circles the wagons it's going to become harder.

That leaves Baen in the catbird seat... and Beale's Castalia House. Which, while small, appears to be a real publisher. Actually printing paper, if needed, is just a matter of passing the task off to the kind of people who do that sort of thing.

In the short term, this is likely to depress advances and royalties even more. I doubt Baen and Castalia will pay any more than they have to, and they’ll have plenty to choose from.

In the longer term... that's likely to look very nice on their balance sheets. And while editors are what writers and agents deal with, editors are near the very bottom of the pecking order at a publisher; they’re workers, not management. And management is generally far more interested in profits than their lower-level employees jumping into an internet-wide poo-flinging contest.

There are also probably some publishers out there who don't normally do SF, who may look around and wonder, "Hey, people might actually buy this stuff?" and branch out a bit.

It's going to be years at the very least before this plays out.

TRX
May 3, 2015 at 10:07 AM

So far I'm seeing quite a bit of "No Award" and "burn it down" rhetoric from the AP side. I haven't noticed any from the SP side.

I saw "Planet of the Apes" as a kid; when Charlton Heston blew up the world at the end, I wondered WTF?!, but eventually forgot about it. Then years later, someone commented that Heston's character had nuked an entire, working civilization, more or less out of spite. His people had killed themselves off, so he'd do the same to their successors, for reasons that were so obvious they didn't need to be explained.

Being somewhat dim, I'm still trying to figure the explanation, but I'm seeing some of that mindset now. "Well, *obviously* we should trash the whole thing rather than let someone else play!"

TRX
May 5, 2015 at 7:14 AM

> Manhattan publishing coevolved
> with B&M consumer bookselling.

Their whole business model centers around a concept few young adults are familiar with nowadays - retail.

Sure, you could buy some paperbacks directly from the publisher with the handy order form on the back page, but paperbacks were a fringe market. *Real* books sold by retail, with distributors, wholesales, brokers, and whatnot, multiple levels providing little or no value, but each taking their cut of the cover price.

There's not much left of the retail market nowadays. Good riddance to the leeches and vampires.

TRX
May 6, 2015 at 3:24 AM

Back in the late 1980s, when the internet was a kinder, gentler place, I saw a comment on a security newsgroup that stuck in my mind.

"It's hard to defend against a highly distributed enemy."

Larry Correia ran SP1 and SP2. He handed it onto Brad Torgerson for SP3. Theodore Beale forked RP1. And Brad has already passed the baton for SP4 to someone else.

I've seen comments from writers in other genres that express the same sort of dissatisfaction that led to the Puppies. Heck, the SFWA was formed because a number of SF writers felt they were being shafted by their publishers.

It's not about the Hugos any more. By this time next year there may be half a dozen groups of puppies. And kittens, and wombats, and fruit bats...

All this time, the industry has been circling the wagons to defend itself against the Evil Amazon Empire and ebooks, oblivious to the peasant revolt in its own back yard.

note to self: buy more popcorn.

TRX
May 10, 2015 at 3:41 PM

What I find most interesting about the SJW take on "slate voting" is their apparent belief that their readers, or at least the paying fans at the convention, are such mindless drones that they will nominate and vote according to some list they saw on "the intarwebz."

Well, I guess it worked well enough in the old days, when the "slates" were sub rosa instead of being out in the open... but it still shows what they think of the people who do the voting.

TRX
May 16, 2014 at 8:57 PM

You might enjoy Scott Westerfeld's "Peeps", which has a *lot* of parasites in it, including toxo-wossname. It's a "young adult" novel, but it reads just fine. I've found myself reading a lot of YA lately, as I've gotten tired of nihilism and angst in my light entertainment...

Back to Jeff's subject, a lot of people, including some I've met "in real life" and who should know better, have problems dealing with disagreement.

They don't just refuse to disengage, they view anything less than wholehearted support as a personal attack and react accordingly. To me it seems silly, but they'll work themselves up into "impending stroke" levels over it.

I mentioned magazine-letter squabbles earlier, but I just remembered reading about proceedings of the Royal Society in England, which sometimes devolved into ungentlemanly acrimony. And that was in the 1600s...

TRX
May 24, 2015 at 7:45 PM

I'm still amused by the AP's assumption that their readers are so gormless they'll vote according to some list instead of forming their own ideas.

Of course, this might be an insight as to how voting was done in earlier times...

TRX
May 25, 2015 at 2:14 PM

Until Larry Correia started talking about it, I had no idea who was behind the Hugos. I've probably read all of Asimov's "The Hugo Winners" anthologies at one time or another, and I can't remember him ever mentioning the award process. I had the vague idea it was something from within the publishing industry.

TRX
May 26, 2015 at 6:11 PM

I can think of many better things to do with my money than to spend $40 to vote for an award. Particularly one that doesn't seem to be financially rewarding for the winners.

I can see where a con would charge *something* for voting; someone has to count them all up, after all. But frankly, if I had $40 worth of enthusiasm, I'd just send a check straight to the author(s) and let him blow it on beer and pizza instead of giving it to the people running a con. Interesting word, that...

TRX
May 27, 2015 at 12:02 PM

> Steely Dan

Perhaps appropriate to the cultural shift in fandom:

"she don't remember / the Queen of Soul
hard times befallen / the soul survivors
she thinks I'm crazy / but I'm just growin' old"

> more slates

I'll start one myself if I have to. And there are other genres watching how things shake out. Apocalyptic Armadillos, anyone?

TRX
July 28, 2015 at 2:31 PM

My crystal ball tells me there's going to be at least one major shakeout in the traditional publishing industry.

I expect they'll quit accepting submissions at all.

Instead, they'll pick through the indie list and offer a contract if it looks like someone has enough sales already. And we'll see a big expansion of packagers and house names like James Patterson, Janet Evanovich, Franklin W. Dixon, Ken Robeson... everything tidy and in-house, under full control.

I figure agents-as-we-know-them will become packagers themselves or go out and find real jobs. Agents are a relic of the retail system anyway, vampires embedded in the system eating from the author's meager percentage.

TRX on 2014-06-02 at 09:12:05 said:

TRX' "10 Books for New SF Readers"

1) "The Nagasaki Vector" by L. Neil Smith
2) "Voice of the Whirlwind" by Walter Jon Williams
3) "The Witches of Karres" by James Schmitz
4) "Peeps" by Scott Westerfeld
5) "The Atrocity Archives" by Charles Stross
6) "In the Courts of the Crimson Kings" by S.M. Stirling
7) "Necrom" by Mick Farren
8) "The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fforde
9) "Retief of the CDT" by Keith Laumer
10) "Century Rain" by Alastair Reynolds

Several are parts of a series, but complete of themselves. There were a few I passed over that are parts of series that either aren't complete or not worth much without the others.

"Witches of Karres" and "Peeps" are YA genre, but well-written and enjoyable. "Retief of the CDT", "The Eyre Affair", and "The Nagasaki Vector" are ROFL funny. "The Atrocity Archives", "In the Courts of the Crimson Kings", and "Necrom" are good workmanlike SF. "Century Rain" and "Voice of the Whirlwind" are pretty hardcore. I debated including them, but they are novels you'll either like a whole lot or just say "WTF?!"

TRX on 2014-07-04 at 15:09:11 said:

I think part of the problem here is that the publishing houses have traditionally had sharply defined categories that their wares were required to fit. SF wasn't so much a true genre as where all the weird stuff that didn't fit a specific other category went.

You'll still see Len Deighton's "SS-GB" or John D, MacDonald's "Wine of the Dreamers" in the military-fiction and mystery sections due to marketing, not genre considerations. And the people who read those, or Robert Harris' "Fatherland", probably didn't notice they were reading "science fiction" instead of "real fiction."

TRX on 2014-08-03 at 08:12:48 said:

> Scalzi admits that he intentionally "colored by numbers" the Heinlein model,

Considering how many SF writers have publicly admitted the same thing, there'd be a whole lot of passengers on that bus.

Robert Silverberg, among others, has commented on the difference between writing what will sell and writing what you want. And... while he had a point, I prefer his earlier short stories (which he has referred to as "shlock") to the pretentious likes of "Tower of Glass" or "The Book of Skulls."