Nope, not going there, not over _that_ ramp!

There's another festival on in Rochester (Fuse, which is Jazz IIRC), so they were building a prefab stage in the castle moat as I wheeled past (don't worry, it's a dry moat...). When I wheeled past again on my way back to the car they were building an access ramp to get you over the kerb that separates the footpath and the moat. And I do mean building, they had a carpenter making it on the spot from rough timber (never mind that they had a perfectly finished and properly surfaced one in exactly the same spot for Dickens only a couple of weeks ago).

As I got up to it the carpenter stuck out a toe and prodded one of the planks (yes, he'd built it from planks, longways, with no reinforcement other than at either end, rather than using a sheet of board or properly reinforcing it). Plank promptly deflects downwards two inches under just tow pressure (I'm not exaggerating!). When I glanced back over my shoulder they had it turned on its side and were muttering about 'battens, maybe we could use some battens underneath'.

I did think about offering to try it out for them, but nope, not going there, because I'm pretty sure 'going there' would be 'going through'!

Where do they find these people?

Oh. Tom Doherty, No!*

This blew up at the start of the week, but I haven't had the energy to write about it until now.

Apparently a couple of months ago Irene Gallo, Tor's Creative Director, noted , on her own, non-company, Facebook page, how glad she was that Tor would be publishing Kameron Hurley's The Geek Feminist Revolution, and especially because it would make the Sad Puppies sadder.

Someone asked her who the Sad Puppies were, so she explained, not unreasonably that:

There are two extreme right wing to neo-Nazi groups called the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies respectively, that are calling for the end of social justice in SF and Fantasy. They are unrepentently racist, mysogynistic and homophobic. A noisy few, but they've been able to gather some Gamersgaters around them and elect a slate of bad-to-reprehensible works on this year's Hugo Ballot.

Apparently the Puppies pitched a shitstorm about it last weekend, calling for Tor to sack Gallo. A weekend which curiously just happened to be the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards weekend - that would be the same organisation that expelled Rabid Puppy guru (also noted racist, mysogynist and homophobic Neo-Nazi) Theodore Beale (aka Pox Dei, sorry Vox Day) over his use of the organisation's twitter feed to direct appalling racism towards Afro-American writer N K Jemisin**. Which would have been more of the usual really, but for how Tor responded.
 

On Monday Tor publisher Tom Doherty didn't tell the Puppies to take a flying f*ck, he disciplined Irene Gallo, for something said on her own Facebook page. Nor did he discipline her in private, in accordance with every principle of good leadership, he did it in public, through an open letter on Tor's website, throwing one of his own people to the wolves, er Puppies. Nor did he leave it at that, but he felt compelled to defend the Puppies as pro-diversity because they had some authors from diverse groups on their slates.

Do we really have to explain sub-text to the publisher of Tor? Do we really have to explain how the Puppies dressed up their slates with tokenism?

Apparently we do.

And then just to make things perfect, John C Wright, Tor author and recipient of _6_ Hugo nominations courtesy of the Puppies turned up in the comments to protest that it is a lie he is an unrepentant homophobe, and he could prove he wasn't a homophobe because {several hundred words of extremist homophobic rant deleted}.

Needless to say I'm seriously unimpressed with Tor in general, and Tom Doherty in particular.

OTOH I was impressed by Chuck Wendig's I Stand By Irene Gallo. Amongst other points he notes that Doherty said precisely nothing when Jim Frenkel's years of sexual harrassment of female fans while attending cons as a representative of Tor came out, but now he's oh so anxious  to discipline Irene Gallo in public.

The Gawker also has a reasonable summation of the clusterf*ck.

America's Largest Sci-Fi Publisher Gives in to Reactionary "Sad Puppies"

*Headdesk* *Headdesk* *Headdesk*



*In the anti-mysogynistic tradition of 'Oh, John Ringo, No!'

** As I came across it while checking links etc, Amal el Mohtar's*** complaint leading to Beale's expulsion from SFWA can be read here, be warned it has all the evidence you'll need to realise just how horrendous Beale's views are, and that calling him a neo-Nazi is only the half of it. (This is a man who calls Anders Breivik a hero, that would be the same Anders Breivik who murdered 77 people in Norway, 55 of them teenagers).

*** One more reason to like Amal el Mohtar's work :)

Currently Reading - 13 June 2015

The Truth, Terry Pratchett

Or this being Ankh-Morpork, The Truth Will Make Ye Fret.

The printing revolution and newspapers come simultaneously to Ankh-Morpork. (I've been re-reading the Watch books, but I've decided that actually needs me to read anything Sam Vimes appears in). Clearly the printing revolution is an idea whose time as come, and the revolution is mostly in Lord Vetinari deciding not to oppose it, but newspapers come about purely by accident - the cart carrying the press accidentally knocks down William de Worde, who writes a small newsletter about Ankh-Morpork goings on for foreign nobles, and Gunilla Goodmountain's crew of dwarves, whose press it is, spot a potential good thing and run-off a few hundred copies while waiting for him to wake up. Vetinari, canny as ever, decides to let them run with it, and, as he does in later books such as Going Postal, makes a chosen victim personally responsible for the new technology, in this case William.

It's worth remembering with The Truth that Pratchett got his start on a local paper, and his experience of doing it for real shines through in some of the observations such as 'names sell papers', though there was one moment where I thought the observation strayed into outright cynicism about the nature of most readers, in a way I don't remember ever seeing from Pratchett in other books.

William, Goodmountain and the dwarves soon start to accumulate a staff to write The Ankh-Morpork Times (and it's clear The Thunderer is the model Pratchett's drawing on), there's Saccharisa the engraver's daughter as reporter and to bounce ideas off, Rocky the troll to make sure no one (such as the rest of the engravers) burns down the presses, Otto Chriek the photographer (and vampire), and Foul Ol' Ron and the rest of the Canting Crew (and Gaspode, their thinking dog), the beggars not even the Beggar's Guild will have, to act as street sellers.  But there are murderers abroad in the city, murderers who aren't Assassins, and there's a plot against Vetinari (isn't there always?) and suddenly the Times has its first big story as Vetinari's assistant is stabbed and Vetinari is the prime suspect, and it's a plot that throws William and Commander Vimes on a collision course.

And that's where I run into problems. Not with the plot per se, but with the characterisation. Mr Pin and Mr Tulip, our two murderers, are Pratchett showing off his ability to write colourful, unforgettable characters at his best. Mr Tulip is an out-and-out thug, who'll kill anyone sooner than blink an eye, usually while attempting to shove anything even vaguely reminiscent of chemicals up his nose, but can be reduced to tears by works of art, on which he is an ___ing expert (he also has ___ing unusual speech patterns), while Mr Pin is like a smarter Nobby Nobbs (with somewhat better personal hygiene) who turned to the dark side. And in a sub-plot we have the first appearance of the King of the Golden River, Harry King, a businessman who is taking 'where's there's muck, there's brass' to its most elemental level. William, by comparison, is down right dull, and Sacharisa is worse. She's the only recognisably female character (bar William's Dickensian landlady* and a couple of walk-on appearances by Sergeant Angua), but she has almost no agency, and what she does is mostly directed towards making her a pastiche of what an unreconstructed old-fashioned newspaperman would expect a woman reporter to cover. I went back to Tansy Rayner Roberts' Pratchett's Women to see what she makes of her, and while she actually thinks that Sacharissa is much more empowered than I do, she doesn't quite seem to know what to make of her either. On the other hand I did say recognisably female, and there are a hoard of dwarves running the presses, and knowing which dwarves are female and the development of dwarvish feminism are an ongoing arc. We find out quite late in the day that Gunilla Goodmountain and Gunilla's second in command Boddony are engaged, but it's not entirely clear who's male and who's female. I think it's Goodmountain, which would make for a second major female role (well technically, at least), if it's Boddony, then we're back to women as sidekicks.

And then there's the Watch, seen through other's eyes. Mostly we're talking about Sam Vimes, because it's Vimes we're used to having as the primary character. I found having Vimes in a supporting role less than entirely convincing, which I think is mostly because in comparison to Sam Vimes most people are unconvincing, but I don't think William's the best character to give us our first view of him, and particularly not to outsmart him. Vimes is a character with too much agency for his own good, and the story requires him to run into a brick wall. His passivity isn't entirely convincing, nor his crude attempts to intimidate William - Vimes is smarter than that, he can recognise who that will work on and who it won't, except this time he can't. As for the others, Angua gets a couple of scenes, one of which does show her off as as smart as Vimes, but the other shows her off as comic victim, there's a running joke around Nobby, Cheery has precisely one scene, despite this being a novel in which dwarves have a large role, and Carrot and Detritus drift across the screen a couple of times, and that's it. It isn't a Watch novel, I simply happen to be re-reading it because I'm reading all the books where Vimes shows up, but I'm not convinced that's the only reason I'm having problems with their portrayal.

It's Pratchett, it'll make you laugh, it'll make you think, but I'm not convinced it's one of his strongest works.

* the scenes around the guest house dining table are almost throwaway, but some of the best obseved writing in the book, particularly the one with Mr Longshaft and the egg....

One Salt Sea, Toby Daye Book 5, Seanan McGuire

I said when reviewing the last book that I was unhappy with the way the Luidaeg's part in the affair was curtailed and hoped it was because of a plot point that would be picked up in a later book, this is that book. But the cross-overs in plot-points between the two are strong enough I can't really discuss One Salt Sea without mentioning spoilers for Late Eclipses, so most of the rest of the review is hidden behind a cut.

( Spoilers Lie Within )

Once you finish One Salt Sea, go to Seanan's website, and the Toby Daye Short Stories page, which has two short stories best read afterwards. In Sea Salt Tears is about the Luidaeg, and first loves, and the price of desire, and gives the context needed to truly understand something that happens towards the end of the book, while Forbid the Sea is about Tybalt, and love, and the price of desire, and throws yet another perspective on the story.

(When you finish the book and the stories, flip back to the Luidaeg's first appearance in chapter 2, there's a detail you'll likely have missed, but now have the context to appreciate, and wonder).

Other Stuff:

Weber's Hell's Foundations Quiver and The Sword of the South have new preview chapters up at Collected Driblets of Baen, while the first nine chapters of S M Stirling's The Desert and The Blade are also there. I talked about the Webers a couple of months ago, the only revelation in the new stuff is how much later Sword of the South is set than other books in the series - about 60 years later, which I guess gets Weber around the previously established prophetic hook that one of the characters was going to do something fundamental, but not for a good few years. The Stirling is the latest in the Change Cycle, book 12 (15 if you count the Nantucket books), and I guess now counts as a generational saga as the third generation of characters are now off on a quest, only rather than looking for the mystical, and Change related 'Sword of the Lady' their parents quested for, they're looking for a sword out of Japanese myth, Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, the Grass Cutting Sword, which is part of the Japanese Imperial Regalia. It's a tightly written sequence with multiple threads involving parties travelling by land and sea, other groups who are about to get caught up in everything, and the previous generation tearing their hair out that their kids have gone and done exactly the same thing they did 20-odd years ago/haring after them to try and stop them getting themselves killed as they walk into an ambush (you know it's an ambush from the prologue). It's another story set in San Francisco, only in this case a post-apocalyptic San Francisco populated by tribes of cannibals - I did like one character being ordered to activate Plan Baywatch, the pacification of San Francisco, though as the Change Cycle premise is basically the Society For Creative Anachronism shall inherit the earth that's an invasion by knights in armour, horse archers and Roman Legionaires, not David Hasselhoff in swim trunks.