alexandraerin

CORDUROY

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

The SJW clique that runs the publishing world loves to twist things around. When people clamor for them to make books with honest covers, books with covers you can judge them by, they twist things around. They knew we wanted them to change the  inside of the book to match what the covers promised us.

Instead we get books with covers like this one, which shows the male hero half-undressed in a cheesecake pin-up pose, about to bend over while his suspender slips off his shoulder.

I have to hand it to the SJWs: it’s exactly what the cover promises, an emasculation manual for young males and nothing more. It’s barely one step above a forced feminization fantasy story. The Feminazis say they want equality but they are not content to let men be men and women be women. Gender abolition is the real goal of all feminism, and that means male extinction. This so-called storybook is a thinly veiled feminist fable designed to indoctrinate men with passively accepting our fate.

The so-called hero of this book just sits on a shelf all day next to girly stuffed animals and dolls, just waiting for someone to come along and claim him. It’s only after a girl comes along and says she wants him that suddenly his life has meaning and he’s up and walking around, doing stuff to try to please her. What kind of lesson is that for our young men to be learning, I ask you?

If I tried to write a book where this was the other way around, nobody would touch it. The PC Patrol would see to that. Just imagine it: say you have written a story where a girl is locked up in a tower or something never questioning anything about it until a man comes along and rescues her. You’d be eaten alive for proposing it! No one would dare touch it or you. Your career would be completely ruined. You would never be published again, never invited to or even allowed inside a convention, and never be nominated for an award.

This has happened to literally every other author who’s been labeled a misogynist by the SJW bullies, and it would happen to you if you tried to write a story like that.

As you might guess from how he meekly accepts his fate, the hero is a delta male at BEST. When he is rejected by the little girl’s mother for not having a button on his suspenders, he sets off at night to find it. Why should he have to improve himself to please her, though? It’s not like the girl was anything great, even if her mother thinks her precious little angel is too good to pay department store prices for broken toys. Feminism has women convinced that they should be allowed to let themselves go but still get whatever man they want. The sexual economy has been completely thrown out of balance by feminism and that is why the birth rates are declining.

So while the miserable little cuck is stumbling around the department store, he keeps deciding that whatever happens to him is exactly what he wanted. He stumbles onto the escalator. “Oh, I guess I wanted this?” he says to himself, until he believes it. He winds up in the furniture department. I remind you, he was looking for a button that fell off his suspenders. That’s not going to be in the furniture department. But he takes a look around and decides, “Oh, this is where I ended up so I guess it’s where I wanted to be?”

The lesson here is passive surrender. If you wind up married to some skank who doesn’t lift a finger because feminism taught her that she deserves to be up on a pedestal popping out squalling babies while you work to support her, it must be what you wanted or else it wouldn’t have happened.

I take it back. This bear isn’t even a delta male. He’s a full-on gamma. His sad little quest ends in a pathetic anticlimax as the night security guard—a proper man—literally puts him back in his place, where he stays until the girl comes for him.

And then the little girl does come back and buys him, and sews a button on him anyway. The Feminazis talk about agency, but where’s his agency in all of this? He never found his button. He never got a chance to be a man. Instead he needed the girl to “fix” him, playing mind games on him all the while.

“I like you just the way you are,” the temptress coos, “but I’m sure you’d be more comfortable if you let me, oh, I don’t know… change everything about you.”

And of course he succumbs. Even after seeing the palatial inside of the department store, he looks around her tiny matchbox of an apartment bedroom and decides he’s happy to be there. He was better off where he was. If he would have stopped looking for his button to please a girl when he decided he wanted to stay in the furniture department, he could be living there like a king to this very day. Women trick men into thinking that we need them to hide the truth that it is they who are dependent on us. Take the red pill and wake up.

What the Corduroy should have done is refused to change anything. Play it cool. Let the girl know that he doesn’t need her, and then she would have been the one changing for him. This works on every woman. Don’t believe me? Try it. It doesn’t matter if you try it on a hundred different women or even a thousand different women, eventually one of them will probably go home with you. Then you’ll be a believer.

There is one other issue with this book that I know the SJWs will never forgive me for bringing up, and that’s race. I was taught that all men are equal and I don’t even notice the color of a person’s skin. When I look at a person I only see the content of their character. If I cross the street or put my hand on my wallet when I see someone, it’s because I don’t like the content of their character and no one can prove otherwise. Accusing me of racism without proof means that you are the racist.

So what I want to know is why the little girl and her mother in this book can’t just be white like everyone else. There’s no reason for it. The story never even mentions it. They just show up, without a word of warning or explanation, like this is a normal thing that happens. I was trying to read a book about a walking, self-aware stuffed animal and suddenly there’s all this extra side stuff it wants me to swallow without explanation. We’re just supposed to accept it without question, I guess.

It’s even more jarring because I was reading the bear as white and I can’t think of any reason why that would be if he’s not deliberately written that way. It’s not that I have anything against children of one race playing with stuffed animals of another. I just can’t imagine why it’s here if not to push an agenda that doesn’t belong in a children’s book.

Understand that my problem is not the race of the characters. I personally didn’t even notice their race. My problem is that it doesn’t make any sense. The SJWs made the decision to insert race into this book, probably because they knew it would be divisive. It’s straight out of the Saul Alinksy-type playbook that they all follow.

I’m sure when this book was published back in 1968, right when we had just decided to give everyone civil rights, this kind of PC pandering was a no-brainer for the marketing types. Well, I’m not about to give a book points just because it checks off the right boxes in a demographic checklist. I judge books on quality and merit, not the skin color of the characters. I don’t even notice such things.

Two stars.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

MADELINE

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

Let me cut right to the chase: Madeline is some straight-up misandrist Feminazi SJW bullshit.

It starts off right away talking about twelve little girls in two straight lines. Seriously? Twelve characters introduced in a single page and we’re supposed to believe they all just happen to be girls? Not one of them is a boy? Last time I checked half the human race was male. So what are the odds that twelve people in a row—or two rows—will be female?

Listen, I’ve studied statistics. The odds that one character will be a female are 50%, no matter what any SJW wants to tell you. Science doesn’t come any harder than numbers. That’s why SJWs hate dealing with them. Numbers are not susceptible to feelings. You cannot “transgenderqueer” a number away just because you don’t like it.

50% is not very high, but high enough that if there’s occasionally a female character somewhere we can allow that it’s still a bit realistic. Take Black Widow in the Avengers movies. There are six main characters, so if you want to say that okay, well, there’s a 50% chance that one of them will be a female, so we can go ahead and make one of them a female to placate the SJWs, that’s fine. Not that they’ll actually be placated. To hear them go on, it seems they won’t be satisfied until half the characters on the screen are females!

So if the author wanted to make one of those twelve characters a girl, so be it. But two in a row? The odds drop to 25%. Three? 12.5%. Four? 6.25%. Five? 3.125%. Six? 1.5625%. By the time we get to the second line of girls, the odds of what we’re seeing have dropped to less than one percent.

You know what the odds of all twelve being girls are? Less than one in four thousand. That’s how unlikely this little fantasy scenario the author has concocted is.

I don’t know if the SJWs really don’t understand math or just think that we don’t, but this cannot be a coincidence. The author deliberately chose to make this whole boarding school female on purpose and no one said a word. No one stood up to say it was wrong. The editor didn’t stop it. The publisher didn’t stop it. The corrupt journos who reviewed the book didn’t say boo against it. Meanwhile no one has ever published a book set at an all-boy’s school. The powers that be would never allow it. They’d call it “sexism” and “patriarchy”.

Also, SJWs are such hypocrites. If anybody outside of their little protected circle tried to write this book they would be eaten alive for saying the lines are straight and not “LGBTQ” or whatever the PC term is these days.

I’ll be honest, I had a hard time engaging with this book after the opening lines. My suspension of disbelief was shattered. There was no one for me to identify with. It was like the author had written across every page “JOHN Z. UPJOHN, THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR YOU. PEOPLE LIKE YOU DON’T GET BOOKS. PEOPLE LIKE YOU ARE THE BAD GUY, IF YOU EXIST AT ALL.”

I read books to enjoy good stories, not to be hit over the head with messages even if it is a message I agree with. I should pay my own money and spend my time reading a book that spreads a message that is against me? No, thank you!

In the interest of a fair review, I made myself flip through the rest anyway. What I picked up is that the character of Madeline is everything that Feminazis say they want in a “strong female character”, as we are told from the beginning that she’s not afraid of anything, including mice and a tiger in the zoo.

Are we supposed to impressed? Mice aren’t scary and the tiger is clearly in a cage. Does anyone think this precious little snowflake would have lasted five seconds against that tiger in a real fight? Hell no! She wouldn’t have. Not even five seconds and that’s the truth this book takes such pains to conceal from you.

SJWs want us to believe that women are just as strong as any man but then they stage this kind of ridiculous pantomime where we’re supposed to be impressed that they aren’t frightened of zoo animals. But it is the SJWs who are sexist against women by suggesting women should be afraid of caged animals and tiny rodents.

Anyway, it seems like Madeline isn’t such a “strong female character” when her appendix gets inflamed! She cries like a little girl, and guess what? That’s right, a MAN comes to her rescue. The doctor makes the diagnosis but the book still carries on like men don’t matter as he doesn’t appear once she’s at the hospital, even though two different nurses do (again, that’s only a 25% chance).

So who took out her appendix? No one important enough to mention, I guess! In the hands of a competent author, the doctor would have been the hero of this book. But I guess that would be ~*misogyny*~ and the SJWs at the American Library Association would never have made this a Caldecott Honor Book.

Caldecott Honor, what a joke! As long as the SJW clique is in charge there will be no honor in the Caldecotts.

Then ten days pass and suddenly out of nowhere Madeline has all these toys and candy. Some of it came from “Papa”. Between that and the swanky private school I think we can say that Madeline is another privileged trust fund baby typical of the SJW set. Her hair’s probably dyed, too. They all dye their hair these ridiculous sherbet colors for no reason, with no regard for how much less attractive it is to me.

She probably set up up a Patreon account for the rest of the swag we see, crying about how victimized she was by the tiger and the evil doctor man who dared to touch her. She clearly loves the attention, as the first thing she does when her friends visit is to show off her belly scar like a total tramp.

I only respect scars forged in battle. Surgical scars are like the caged tigers of battle wounds.

And what do you suppose happens in the end? Why, suddenly all her friends claim to have appendicitis, too! Why wouldn’t they when they saw all the sweet hand-outs Madeline got just for fluttering her eyelashes and shedding a lot of crocodile tears and showing off her belly?

If you ask me, the whole thing calls into question whether Madeline really needed or even had an appendectomy to begin with, or if she was just angling for some of those sweet victim bucks from the word go. Once someone starts accepting toys and candy and flowers for being sick, they have a fiduciary duty to disclose certain details to make sure things are on the level. That’s why real charities have oversight and accountability.

If I had contributed to Madeline’s hospital room, I would want to see the chart. I would be curious why we never saw her with a doctor after she arrived. I would demand an accounting of exactly what happened during the ten days that passed between when she was dropped off and when her friends visited.

This book teaches women to see themselves as victims. Even if Madeline’s so-called bravery at the beginning of the book is a hollow lie, it’s only when she starts bawling that she has anything to show for it. Nobody brings her a dollhouse for pooh-poohing a tiger. Nobody gives her candy for taking risks.

No, she plays the victim card and is rewarded and her friends all learn the lesson: here is the easy money. Be careful your kids don’t learn the same lesson. This book is basically an Alinsky-style rulebook for the rainbow-haired she-twinks of Twitter and Tumblr.

Two stars.

Editor’s Note: Madeline does not, to my knowledge, have a Patreon account, but I do: https://www.patreon.com/alexandraerin

If you’d like to support my fiction, poetry, and—yes—humor writings, please do so. As these reviews have attracted more attention, I’ve had to upgrade my webhosting.

Thank you for reading!

<3 AE

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

Green Eggs and Ham

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

I just noticed that my editor is titling these pieces “Sad Puppies Review Books” and while she says that the title has stuck I wish to make it clear it was not my idea and I do not approve of it. SJWs try to make it out that we are sad because they believe everything is about emotions and not reason. That makes me so angry I can’t even think straight.

We of the Sad Puppies campaign are not actually sad and we are not actually puppies. The puppies are a metaphor, and while I do not approve of metaphors in general the puppies are a good metaphor because we can say the puppies are sad whenever things we don’t like are allowed to happen, and no one can say that we are sad ourselves.

We aren’t sad. The puppies are. We’re not crying. The SJWs are crying. Got it?

Symbolism is an SJW weapon and they don’t like it when we use their own tactics against them. The salt in their tears nourishes me when they cry out, “John, that’s not how symbolism works.” I had a bullying SJW bitch of an English teacher who said the same thing. Cry harder, Mrs. Vandroogenbroeck. You can’t hold me after class anymore.

If I was a puppy and not a man, I might be crying after I read Green Eggs and Ham. This book is pretty much an illustrated Saul Alinksy-style Rules For Radicals manual for the kindergarten SJW set. The hero of the book is an unnamed, but proud revolutionary figure in full-on revolt against a tyrannical bullying Big Brother type who calls himself Sam-I-Am.

Sam-I-Am is a finger-wagging scold who thinks he knows better than everyone else when it comes to what’s good eating. Just as the SJWs try to convince us that stories that are not good stories are good stories by lying and saying they are good stories, Sam-I-Am tries to convince the hero that bad food is good to eat.

Well if you know anything about the gynocentric lesbian supremacist branch of Satanism that calls itself “Wiccanism”, think SAMHAIN and you will know who this man really is: Satan, the father of lies and son of Saul Alinksy.

And talking about the granddaddy of lies, this book has some whoppers in it. Just like how 1984 shows the power of The (Communist, AKA Social Justice) Party to compel Winston Smith to say that there are five lights when there are only four, this book hinges on the Satanic Sam-I-Am trying to force the narrator to accept that green eggs and ham are a natural and nutritious food. He accomplishes this by gradually wearing down the man’s resistance by exposing him to stressful shocking and even unnatural situations involving foxes and goats. This is a classic SJW tactic for shifting our culture to the left so slow you almost don’t notice it. But we notice it. We notice it.

Sadly much like 1984 this book ends with the protagonist giving in before the onslaught. He does love Big Brother. He does like green eggs and ham. He will eat them with the fox. In a perverse mockery of holy communion, he will eat them with the goat (like Pan or Baphomet, or other guises worn by Satan). This is preparing our children to have not just their food supplies controlled but also their minds and very souls.

A child indoctrinated by this book is not only trained to give in to the illegitimate application of government authority but is also primed to use these techniques to convince others. Unless your children are strong-willed and well-trained to recognize these tricks and traps I recommend keeping this book the hell away from them.

If you have raised your children right as I have done with mine then your best bet is to take a hands-on approach. I read this book to my children, taking care to explain the subtle SJW traps that were on every page. I am pleased to report that they showed no interest in it afterwards.

I think it will be a long time before any of them bring home a book by this joker, who has written numerous SJW propaganda hatchet jobs. The very title of Hop on Pop is a matriarchal assault on male authority. The Sneetches and Other Stories is a fable about the extinction of the white race due to targeted immigration and interbreeding. His books are about the political obsolescence of the straight white male and he is so shameless he doesn’t even bother to hide it.

If what was being done to us was being done to any other race they would call it genocide but if I say “keep the white race pure!” suddenly I am the one who is a racist? The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior would have wanted people who believe the races should be separate judged by the contents of our characters, not the colors of our skins, but SJWs preach that because I am a proud white man I must be the enemy. That is the lesson that this “Dr.” Seuss would teach my children, if I let him. So I do not let him teach them it!

If my sarcasm quotes were not apparent enough, let me speak plainly (unlike those two-faced SJWs, who always lie): I don’t believe the author is any kind of doctor. I don’t even believe his name really is “Seuss”. In fact, I think I know exactly it was who pinned this little propaganda tract.

Nice try, Alinsky. Better luck next time!

Two stars.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

A while back, I challenged any Puppy on Twitter to show that they really valued truth and honesty and factual reality as so many claim by acknowledging that the idea—widely promoted by Vox Day, including with a made-up quote—that David Gerrold had threatened the career of Brad Torgersen was not supported by facts. I asked them to either cite Gerrold doing so or label Day’s pronouncement a lie.

No one did. When pressed, one person said he couldn’t call it a lie because he felt that what Day had said was “essentially true”. He couldn’t cite facts or quotes, but it was “essentially true”. Its essence was true, or at least, it rang true to him.

Now, in fact-based reality, David Gerrold did not threaten Brad Torgersen. He did not imply that Puppies wouldn’t be welcome at Worldcon or the Hugos ceremony in particular, or that they would be treated discourteously as winners or losers. In fact, when it came to the ceremony, he laid down the law in the opposite direction: all are welcome, all are welcome. Connie Willis turned down a presenter gig specifically because she didn’t feel like she could abide that directive.

But if he didn’t do those things, the feeling among the Puppies is, he ought to have. It fits their worldview, their narrative, so much better if he did, so it doesn’t take much prompting from even a middlingly talented wordsmith to get them to believe that he did.

“If it’s not true, it ought to be!” could be given as a summation of it.

I’ve been calling Day out obliquely (as in, I’m not challenging him directly so much as pointing out what he’s doing) on Twitter for a while, whenever he engages in these lies. I don’t know if I’ve actually made anyone think by doing so, but I believe he’s afraid that might be happening. I mean, I don’t flatter myself to believe his blog post entitled Bi-Discoursality is entirely a response to me. Rather, I believe I’m a part of the general situation he is attempting to defend himself from.

Day’s supporters like to trot out “You don’t understand Vox, he’s a troll. He’s trolling. It doesn’t count.” when someone pins them down with something he said that is 1) too egregious, 2) too much of a lie, or 3) too egregious a lie for them to defend. This response ignores the fact that we do understand him, we know he’s a troll, and that’s irrelevant to the point at hand.

Well, Day is attempting to codify “Was trolling, didn’t count!” into a defensive shell against people calling out his lies. See, they’re not lies, they’re rhetoric, which is the only language those silly emotional irrational SJWs understand, you see? He has to use rhetoric to deal with, even though as a creature of pure logic and reason it’s such a foreign language to him that if he wasn’t also a certified supergenius he would never have been able to internalize its principles in order to communicate with us!

He would much rather use the reasoned method of dialectic to communicate with everyone, except he has to reserve that for those minds that are susceptible to reason and influence, you see, and…

Wait.

Wait.

Wait a minute.

Vox… Mr. Day… when you said “SJWs always lie.”, the example of a rhetorical statement that you put forth in that post, were you addressing us, those you call “SJWS”… or were you addressing your followers?

When you made your famous essentially true statements about David Gerrold, were you trying to convince those wily SJWs they were allied with a skunk, or were you trying to whip up your own base?

And regardless of your intention when you engage in these, ah, rhetorical flourishes… take a look around. How many of supposedly overly emotional, irrational SJWs that you claim to be trying to persuade with them wind up being persuaded? And how many of your own followers wind up repeating the lines and running with them like they’re God’s own truth?

God’s own essential truth, that is. The facts may not bear it out, but emotionally, the target of the rhetoric knows it to be true.

The post I’m referencing is itself a piece of rhetoric. It lays out no actual logical premise, no evidence, and no conclusion. It’s just a pre-emptive defense against anyone questioning his lies, wrapped up in hollow flattery towards his audience: you are so reasoned, so rational… and because I’m writing this dialectically, anyone as smart as you will understand that it is true! It’s a hedge against the day when the intellectual debt incurred by one of his lies overcomes the emotional investment his chosen audience has in agreeing with him.

He winds up the post by predicting that those who only speak rhetoric will see his post as nothing more than a man attempting to sound smart and then attack it. I suppose that, grade school gamer that he is, this is what he regards as a particular cunning trap and he takes this post as a sign that it worked. Or that’s what he would say, anyway.

In reality, it’s just another hedge. It gives his followers an out for ignoring any criticism. Don’t listen to the child who says the emperor is naked. The wise can totally see the clothes!

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

The Puppies keep describing the enemy they imagine they’re fighting in Orwellian terms. Well, if you want to see an example of groupthink setting out to punish badthink in action, head on over to Vox Day’s blog. Actually, that statement could probably stand on its own at any random instance in time, but I’m thinking in particular of this post, where Day wants to contrast three reviews he says are by “Social Justice Warriors” with one that isn’t: http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/05/smells-like-success.html

He starts the post by saying that the first review “precisely underlines the central point made by the Sad Puppies campaign and single-handedly serves to justify it”.

Now, I’m not sure which central point it so perfectly illustrates, as the central point of the Sad Puppies changes from day to day. Is it supposed to prove that there’s a clique that judges books by demography rather than merit?  Is that which central point Day is saying it supports? If so, I’d like to know how, as the critique is specific and refers to the text and not the author. Is it supposed to be a counterpoint to Brad Torgersen’s famous lament that he can no longer judge a book by its cover? If so, I would think the third review would serve better, as it points out that the ending of the story is explicitly spoiled by the title, Turncoat.

No, taking the three “SJW” reviews in total, I believe the specific one of the Sad Puppies’ nebulous and ever-shifting “points” which Day believes is being proven is just the general idea that some people who are reviewing books (and nominating them for awards and such) are choosing to lie about what’s good and bad on the basis of how they feel about the author or other externalities.

This is not actually something that I’ve seen articulated by any central personality of Sad Puppies, but by those lurking in the comments and on Twitter. It’s more Gamergate thinking than Sad Puppy thinking, at least in its explicit form.

The shortest review and Day’s response to it really hammer it home.

The review reads:

“I hated Turncoat – compared to how Iain Banks, Neal Asher, Peter Hamilton write sentient battleships and describe space warfare it was unbearable, then there were lines like ‘the men who…’ versus ‘the people who’ really jarred against me – it felt like a story written about AIs written by somebody who has ignored any progress in fiction, computing and so forth in 20 years. The opening battle scene at the start of The Reality Dysfunction is better than Turncoat in every way, and that was written in 1996.”

And Day’s response reads:

“I found that to be rather amusing, considering how spectacularly boring Iain Banks’s space battles are. But considering that Daveon hates Sad Puppies and hates Rabid Puppies, how surprising is it that he – mirabile dictu – just happens to hate ‘Turncoat’ as well?”

The first line is great: “I found it amusing that you profess to like A Thing, when I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that A Thing is unlikeable!” Yes, Day has caught another lying liar in another filthy lie! SJWs are so dedicated to the cause they will lie and say that boring things are interesting!

Or, y’know, different people find different things interesting.

See, the actual central point of the Sad Puppies that Day proves with these four reviews—all of which seem perfectly fair to me, as they all are rooted in the specifics of the text and all seem to honestly reflect how the reviewer received it—is the new central point that Brad Torgersen pivoted to last week when he said there’s no such thing as an objective standard and that the Sad Puppies are about packing the Hugos with people whose tastes reflect his own.

Because that’s what these reviews demonstrate: differing tastes. And given that there are three of them where the story is not to the reviewer’s taste and one where it isn’t, maybe Day is right and this does prove the need for a Sad Puppies campaign, from the point of view of the Puppies.

I know that’s not what Day means, of course. His own commentary on the post reflects his inability to grasp the concept of differing tastes, differing yet honest opinions. Understanding those things would require Day to possess some shred of empathy or a working theory of mind, neither of which he shows any evidence of. I suspect that like many people who rely on being able to brag about what society has told them is an objective measurement of their superior mental ability, Day has never bothered much with actual mental development. Why not? The test says he’s already at the top. There’s nowhere to go except for down.

This puts me in mind of a blog post by Christian blogger slacktivist, which started off as part of a scene-by-scene sporking of the first Left Behind movie and digressed into a meditation on Kirk Cameron’s progress as an actor, contrasting Cameron as an actor who believed that he was at the top of his form as a child on a sitcom and had no more room for improvement with fellow sitcom actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, who has never stopped trying to improve himself.

And this brings me to one of the more curious things found at Day’s post, in the comments. One of the reviewers is quoted as saying that Turncoat reads like it was written by an AI that ignored the past decades’ worth of progress in writing. One of the commenters responds to this in part with, “Progress in fiction, HA!” He would like us to read a book published 24 years ago and concerned only with the shape of plots, which he considers to be not just the last word but the only word in what makes writing good.

Progress? Ha! This is what the Puppies represent: people who believe there can be no advancement in the state of the art of storytelling, because to them there is neither state nor art. No room for improvement, and nothing to be improved.

I know Vox Day has something of a fanboy’s interest in the history of Rome. If he ever gets past the “playing with tin soldiers” phase of things and looks into it a little more deeply, he might notice that there was a trend during the late decline of the empire of poets and authors who trafficked in little more than polite and politic rearrangements of what had come before. No new ideas, no new forms, no new shapes. Aldous Huxley might have been thinking of a grammaticus of this age when he had a teacher in Brave New World ask pupils if they thought they knew better than the World Consensus Textbook: “Do you think you know better than Virgil? Do you think you can do better than Catullus?”

Despite Torgersen’s latter-day admission that it’s actually a matter of taste, this state of art in decline is broadly what the Puppies (and their incestuously close ideological cousins the Gators) are fighting for: stability to the point of stagnation, based around a global consensus of what a story is allowed to be.

Oh, sure, the zealous believers in free speech found in both camps will wring their hands and say, “No, no, no! We want people to be able to both make and enjoy whatever art they want! It’s just the dishonesty of it all that we’re fighting against!”

But when you define “dishonesty” as anyone who evinces an opinion that deviates from the accepted consensus… well… you wind up with things like this, where three reviews that independently arrive at similar conclusions, each making explicit reference to the text, are used as evidence that the reviewers are lying, which is used to justify a “revolutionary” campaign to root out such liars.

As I said, this is the triumph of “groupthink” over “badthink”.

Well, “triumph” might be too strong a word. It remains to be seen if the group is big enough to actually enforce and maintain their consensus reality, outside the carefully insulated protective aegis of their own spaces. Day likes to boast about his millions of monthly page views, yet when he was handing out numbered badges to his “minions” he ran out of takers in the low three hundreds. I suspect he has yet to learn the difference between browsing at someone and browsing with them. I’m also suddenly curious how many hits the Time Cube guy was getting at the height of its notoriety.

Oh, brave new world that has such people in it!

Progress? Ha!

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

Another way of looking at it is that maybe they have a point. That some people have taken politics into fandom and awards, and that they are judging writers by the color of their skin, their gender and their politics, rather than by the stories they write.

This was part of a comment left on the preceding post, “Sad Puppies and magical thinking“, which used a rather extreme yet pointed example furnished by John C. Wright to illustrate a phenomenon.

The idea that people have been judging stories politically rather than by their contents is an example of this phenomenon, which is assuming there must be a sinister explanation for when reality doesn’t conform to one’s expectations.

The idea that there’s a horde of “Social Justice Warriors” who judge stories not on quality or enjoyment but only on political agenda is oft asserted, but has never yet been demonstrated. This is an example of what I’m talking about when I say it appears the Puppies have fallen into the trap of assuming there must be a sinister explanation for when reality doesn’t conform to their expectations. It’s touted about as a proven fact, but any time this proof is offered round, it’s… not compelling.

In the first place, even when we find people discussing the identity and background of an author or character, this does not amount to judging these things “rather than” quality, does it? You might suspect that quality is being ignored, but you cannot objectively say that it is proven by the fact that other things are discussed.

And really, how likely is it that people would bother with work they don’t actually enjoy instead of work they do? I know that the stereotype of an “SJW” is someone who is soulless, joyless, and completely immune to (or opposed to) fun, but… what’s the motive to read at all, then? The very existence of the stereotype and the attributes… attributed… to it are part of the process.

If you just can’t understand how someone else might not enjoy the things that you enjoy, but enjoy things that you don’t, you have to explain it away when people say or demonstrate that this is the case. The people who said they liked that story did so for the wrong reasons! The people who said they enjoyed that game were lying! The sales figures, however modest they may be, are too high for a thing that you found to be un-fun, so they must be propped up artificially! And look, positive reviews! Award buzz! Why, isn’t that the proof of what you suspected? All these people wouldn’t be lying about their enjoyment of this thing without a reason, after all, and a mass campaign like this would account for the obviously inflated sales…

If you’re immersed in the viewpoint, then it all seems so reasonable. You miss the fact that there’s a step missing: proving that the people who review/praise/nominate/whatever the thing are lying. You’re using the unsupported premise that no one could actually enjoy a thing you didn’t enjoy as “proof” that people are lying, and using that “fact” to prove the rest.

“But why do you care at all if the book has a feminist perspective or queer characters or a Black author?” You might ask. “Why not just focus on quality, like we do?”

Well, there are two reasons, only one of which could be written off as “affirmative action”: in order to counter the extent to which books like these are ignored for reasons having nothing to do with quality.

Oh, here you think I’ve just confirmed what you’re saying? Nope. The reality of the situation (and even the reality of most formal affirmative action) is that it only means giving consideration to a book/candidate (which in this case means giving it a read, or at least starting to), not deciding it has merit before you’ve even seen it. Something like Ms. Bradford’s reading challenge doesn’t call on people to pretend to like books that they otherwise find bad. It asks them to give said books a read. If any of them wind up nominated, the balance of probability is that the nominator found them good enough to be worthy of that, isn’t it?

The second reason is what I suspect the more powerful and more common reason, given that we do read for pleasure and diversion and self-fulfillment. And that is… well, you know how sometimes people want to read books with, say, a Christian perspective? You know how sometimes people want to read a book with military settings and characters? You know how sometimes people reading a military science fiction story or a Christian SF/F story are interested in knowing before they plunk their money down if the author has lived the life they are describing?

The predictable response to this is something like, “Well, but nobody ONLY wants to read those things! I like mil-sci stories but I don’t read them to the exclusion of others! And yes I might think a story is more likely to be authentic if it’s from an author who has served, but ultimately what I care about is quality and if a good story is told!”

Just so!

And this is why when somebody asks you for a military SF recommendation, you don’t assume that’s all they ever want to read. You don’t assume they mean, “Tell me any random military SF story and I will read it. I don’t care about quality, only this one superficial characteristic.” No. You recommend something you think they will like and that fits the requested parameter(s).

This is the function of a book recommendation. That a person is asking for a book of quality or a person recommending a book of quality, a book that’s enjoyable, according to their tastes, is the most basic function. It doesn’t need to be stated as a parameter.

If you can see people talking like, “Can you recommend some books with a queer protagonist of color?” and you can only conclude that they’re ignoring quality and asking others to do the same, you’re ignoring the basic meaning of “to recommend” in association with books.

You might not understand why they care if the protagonist is a queer protagonist of color. But maybe they wouldn’t understand why you prefer libertarian-leaning heroes with military backgrounds, or whatever it is you prefer.

Maybe you’d look at the books that are put forward as fitting the bill and you wouldn’t enjoy them. They don’t do it for you.

And that’s fine.

Where you lose the plot is when you conclude on the basis of your own personal taste that the books are objectively unenjoyable, THEREFORE the people who praise them are lying and the people who recommend them are doing so only for reasons having nothing to do with quality, THEREFORE any success or acclaim it garners must be undeserved, THEREFORE if several of these books continue to garner any success or acclaim there must be some entrenched cabal with the power to make this happen…

Let me put forward an alternate explanation for why, year after year, book after book, people keep buying and reading and praising things that leave the Puppies puzzled and—unaccountably—sad:

Different people enjoy different things for different reasons.

That’s all it takes to explain what’s happening. No inventing entities in direct contravention of Occam’s razor. No conspiracy theory boards of imagined or intuited connections. None of that is necessary.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

Eric Flint, author of the time displacement/alternate history 1632 series, has written a really interesting essay in support of his original comments on the Hugos and the Puppy mess. In his attempts to clarify a point that was apparently misunderstood in the original post, he has a lot to say about the actual size of the genre fiction audience.

I feel like this is an important point that is often overlooked, not just in this brouhaha but in general. We aren’t really wired to grasp the size and shape of things as large as an industry, or a global community, or the internet, or even smaller communities within the internet.

This inability to grasp a gigantic scale is why people outside the industry like to ask authors they’ve never heard of but just been introduced to questions like, “What have you written that I’d have heard about?”

It’s why those of us who hang out on websites like Twitter, Tumblr, or Reddit that act as a sort of mega-community have a tendency to imagine that the feeds we watch reflect the website as a whole, which is what leads to the assumption that anything we see all the time must be well-known in an objective sense, and any opinion that is shared by a majority of those around us must be widespread.

It’s also why, absent a little reflection, so many people conclude that any opinion with which they disagree that has any kind of penetration at all must be unfairly propped up somehow. Because it doesn’t reflect the composition of the community as a whole (as extrapolated by the view of our own virtual living rooms) but it keeps cropping up all the same.

I think that at a baseline, Sad Puppy founder Larry Correia started out working on the assumption that it should be impossible for an author to enjoy his level of success without being, objectively speaking, A Successful Author. And if someone is objectively A Successful Author, this should be recognized in objective fashion. Awards, plaudits, praise. If he’s not getting them, and/or he sees people who are not doing the things he’s doing (and thus, not legitimately Successful Authors) getting them, then he can conclude that something is wrong.

If you read the blogs of his self-professed allies like Brad Torgersen and Sarah Hoyt, you’ll come away with a very definite sense that they see themselves as playing to the real mass audience. Torgersen in particular has talked about his idea that the SF/F audience is shrinking because the mass audience is over here (where he is) and yet people are writing stuff over there (where he’s not).

Flint’s blog post, although it’s not specifically addressing those claims, serves as… well, I was going to say a great counter, but the thing is, Torgersen’s claim isn’t one that actually needs to be countered. It needs to be dismissed. It’s not just wrong in its conclusion, but mistaken in its premise.

I said in my previous post about the Puppies that I hope they wake up one day and realize that they’re writing to a niche. I don’t say this as a criticism, as I’m also a niche writer. I think it’s one of the smartest things you can do in this world.

An indie author I follow recently tweeted the realization that her furry space opera stories outsell the rest by three to one. If you’re viewing the marketplace as winner-take-all and you’re seeing supply and demand in the simplistic, one dimensional terms that many people view it and above all if you’re not contemplating how vast the SF/F marketplace is, you have to conclude one of two things from this: either she is lying or cheating somehow and her stories aren’t really that popular, or there’s three times as much demand for furry fiction as for conventional space opera.

If you reject the second one as not true, then you’re left with the first.

Neither possibility is actually true, of course. The real truth is that the marketplace is bigger and more complicated than either of those conclusions allow for. But if you’re dead set on thinking of it in small, one-dimensional terms, then the only possible conclusion is that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.  This kind of small-time thinking is at the root of both the Puppies’ and the Gators’ discontent.

What’s really happening, of course, is that the furry stories are serving an under-served niche. In the mass market, every space opera story is competing with every space opera story… although the market is so big that in truth, every space opera story is competing for the right to compete with every space opera story, and we could really add a bunch for iterations of “competing for the right to compete” to that.

But if you tell a story that few people are telling, if you put something in your stories that’s hard to find elsewhere, if you address your story to a smaller audience, but one that has a hard time finding what they’re looking for elsewhere… why, you can clean up.

People who squabble over a piece of “the pie” in general terms aren’t likely to get anywhere, and if they do, it’ll be in part by accident. The mass market audience has room for a few big winners and a lot of runner-ups who don’t really go anywhere. But if you realize that “the pie” is actually a bunch of different pies, it’s just a matter of finding a pie you like that has gone overlooked in the general rush for the more obvious choices.

Hoyt, Torgersen, Correia, Michael Z. Williamson, all of those ilk… they aren’t writing for the mass audience. They’re writing towards particular audiences, seeking particular things. And they are doing—by all indications—pretty okay with it. Good for them.

The problem is, they don’t have any real idea how much pie there is in the world out there. They don’t understand that it’s possible (and inevitable) for authors to do the same thing they’ve done but in a different direction (writing from and towards a queer perspective, writing from and towards a feminist perspective, et cetera) because they don’t think of what they’ve done as anything other than “writing quality books that people will want to read”.

They don’t realize that it’s some people who see their books as quality and want to read them. They have no concept of how big and diverse a group people really is, or what an uphill battle it would be to compete for the attention of people generally.

And in fairness to them, nobody really does.

But some of us have at least recognized that we don’t know this.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

So, one of the things that’s motivated me to start a proper blog is that I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter, tackling some subjects that are much bigger than 140 characters. Because of this, some of what I’m saying here is going to be a rehash of stuff I’ve already said. But for people who don’t follow me on Twitter, or haven’t otherwise followed what’s going on enough to make sense of things, this post should stand as a primer on what we might (laughingly) call #puppygate.

If you want to know more about it, I recommend checking the tag on George R.R. Martin’s blog, where he has written about it with his customary brevity and the restrained, almost laconic turn of phrase he is so often known for (as the pot said to the kettle). There has been some interesting and insightful analysis of specific Puppy claims elseweb, but he tends to link to most of it.

The Basic Terms: Hugos, Worldcon, and Sad Puppies

The Hugos are an award regarded as one of the top two prizes in the field of science fiction and fantasy. Which of the big two is more prestigious depends on who you ask, and the general consensus (if such a creature is not itself a matter of speculation) has flip-flopped a few times. They are, nonetheless, credibly A Big Deal.

The Hugos are awarded by the members of the World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon. Worldcon is a bit like the Olympics in that it is an international thing and people bid to host it. This is why you see references to “LonCon” and “Sasquan” and other conventions in this: these are the local cons that host Worldcon.

Being a convention, membership in Worldcon (and thus, participation in the Hugo voting process) is open to anyone who pays the price of admission. Like many long-running cons, Worldcon offers a lower priced supporting membership, mostly intended to allow people who know they can’t afford the room and travel and other expenses of going this year to still keep their stake in things. Supporting members have full voting rights.

While Worldcon is pretty firmly in the big deal category, the percentage of members who vote to nominate works for the Hugo or vote on the final ballot has historically been pretty low, which is part of how a relatively small group of people coming in from the outside were able to effect a pretty substantial swing in the nomination process this year. These people are the Sad Puppies.

(Well, that’s a simplification, as there are actually two very closely related groups, one piggybacking off the other, but for the purpose of this post, we’ll keep it simple.)

The Sad Puppies are a group ran this year by writer Brad Torgersen but first founded by writer Larry Correia, who came to the conclusion that the Hugos were unfairly stacked against him and others because of their perceived politics. The evidence of this primarily consists of the fact that sometimes a book is nominated, praised, or awarded that they don’t understand the appeal of, from which they intuit the existence of a shadowy cabal that props up unworthy books and keeps deserving ones down.

In short, the Puppies exist because a handful of people decided that the wrong people were winning recognition for the wrong reasons. This is important, insofar as they demand that people ignore their actual origin and focus on what they’ve been doing, which, they say, is to bring fresh voices to the table. You could say that’s what they’re doing, but if we ignore that they’re bringing in these fresh voices specifically in the hopes of crowding out the voices they disapprove of, then we’re missing an important point.

My Stake In This

…is basically nothing. I of course grew up seeing “Hugo award-winning” labels slapped on various things, and recognized that it was an achievement. I of course am excited when an author whose work I know or whom I consider a friend receives this or any other honor.

I didn’t grow up dreaming of winning a Hugo, though. At the point where I began my career by self-publishing stories on the internet, it was not clear that this counted as publication for purposes of Hugo eligibility, and there was little reason at the time to think it ever would be so counted. Times have changed, of course, and the award has changed with it, but the point is the same: if ever I dreamed of silver rockets, they were vehicles, not trophies.

Let me put it simply: I don’t care that much about the Hugos.

I wouldn’t like to guess how much I’d feel like I belonged at Worldcon, but I’m not terribly interested in spending the time or money necessary to settle the question. I have nothing against Worldcon. I have nothing for Worldcon.

As a self-published author who is more than a bit abrasive herself and incidentally terrible at networking, I don’t really stand to gain much professionally by poking at the Puppies. If anyone’s handing out or redeeming “PC Cred Points” (PCCP?), I somehow missed out on getting my swipe card for it.

I certainly don’t care about winning the approval of any of the people that the Puppies tend to identify as the all-powerful kingmakers and puppetmasters of the ruling clique. Part of the ideology that undergirds the Puppies’ approach to things is the idea that everybody a certain distance to the left of them is an “Social Justice Warrior” who is marching in lockstep with every other “SJW”, following the same agenda and answering to the same leaders. You couldn’t call me a fan of the Nielsen Haydens on any level and while I acknowledge they have some influence, I find the idea that they could command a unified army of “SJWs” laughable. I’ve admired some of John Scalzi’s blog posts, but I couldn’t say I’m that invested in him. I’m not a member of the SFWA or Worldcon, et cetera.

From the beginning, I’ve made my own path when it comes to writing and publishing, and I’m in no hurry to change that now. There’s no job offer waiting for me, no book deal, no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.

I’m just one person, speaking her conscience.

So, Why Do I Care?

Simply put, when I see people making claims based on the most tenuous of intuitions and calling it hard evidence, that bothers me. When I see people trying to police what other people are allowed to write, read, and like while pretending that this is being done to them, that bothers me. I am disturbed at the idea that someone can take such exception to the fact that other people like other things for other reasons that they would reject that in favor of a conspiracy theory and then take drastic action to overturn the supposed cabal.

Basically, I don’t want to read and write in a world when a man who equates the existence of books he doesn’t approve of to false advertising is able to set himself up as some sort of tastemaker-in-chief because he throws a big enough tantrum whenever a book or author he disdains gets too popular for him to make sense of.

The original Sad Puppies initiative predates Gamergate by a couple years, but they’re both powered by the same sense of aggrieved entitlement cloaking itself in phony virtue. Some people, rather than acknowledging that an entire medium/genre will not always reflect their own personal tastes, decide that the relative success of anything they don’t like is a kind of cheat, and by golly, they’re going to do something about it!

So the stakes here are, we either label this nonsense as what it is and find a way to work around the tantrum-throwers, or we just sort of give up and give in. If we give in, then for the remainder of our days we all must tiptoe very carefully and very quietly around the known pet peeves of Messrs. Correia, Torgersen, Day, et al. We can write books from diverse perspectives only as long as we coddle them sufficiently, as long as we pander to their delicate sensibilities, and as long as we realize that only a certain amount of these things will be tolerated, as needed to provide them with a shield against charges of bigoted homogeneity.

…well, that actually makes the stakes sound a lot more dire than they really are.

Because “not giving in” isn’t actually that hard? As much as the Puppies and their good friends the Gators like to cast this as a war, using war imagery and honest-to-goodness wartime propaganda… it’s really not? There’s no win condition. There’s no lose condition. People being forcibly removed from the field is the rare exception rather than the order of the day.

This is not a great struggle. This is one small subset of a larger group of people, clamoring for attention and making things difficult for everyone else.

When I finish writing this post, I’m going to start writing material for a novella I meant to publish myself, then write a chapter of my serial story that I will also self-publish. The Puppies aren’t going to seize control of the means of production and distribution, so nothing they can do is going to affect this. As I write this, numerous authors they would identify as “SJWs” are working on their own projects, for publication through numerous channels.

The Puppies were able to turn the Hugo nomations in their favor because of the relatively low participation rate in the voting and because of the utter lack of any kind of organized slate or bloc voting or clique or cabal. When everybody else is voting based on their own taste and judgment, it’s easy for the guys who decided to band together to turn the tables on everyone.

But what they cannot do is turn back the tide of history, and what they cannot do is turn the world upside down. People have predicted the end of the Hugos. Others have predicted a renaissance of sorts for the venerable award, as it’s getting more attention (and participation!) than ever. Still others have predicted that they’ll continue on a slow downward spiral, as each year’s award becomes a mess of competing alliances and bloc voting, so the whole thing looms larger and larger as part of the landscape while being less exciting or relevant or joyous or meaningful.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to the Hugos. I hope it’s something good, in the way that I hope for good things for people generally. But they’re not my award. It’s not my con. A lot of pixels have been filled trying to suss out whether an award given by one organization and meant to represent the best of all science fiction and fantasy “belongs to Worldcon” or “belongs to everyone”, but this is a glass half-full, glass half-empty sort of thing. And by that I don’t really mean “it all depends on how you look at it” so much as “both answers are obviously correct, why are we wasting time talking about this?” I don’t care.

I have vague good wishes for the Hugos and everyone involved, including the Puppies whom I hope are able to accept one day that their tastes are not universal, that the commercial success they enjoy is a function of their ability to appeal to under-served niches by writing about things that they themselves are passionate about and not a reflection of some sort of universal appeal that is being stymied by the shadowy hand of the Social Justice Clique, and that I’m not trying to put them in their place by pointing out that their tastes aren’t universal and their appeal isn’t either because this is true of us all. This is how it works! This is especially how it works in the age of the internet and the long tail. If they can figure out that this is how it works, they’ll be happier and honestly more successful, because they’ll have a better idea of why what they’re doing works as well as it does.

And we’ll be happier, too, because once they figure that out, they won’t flip the table every time they notice people gathering to praise a book they don’t see the appeal of.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.