Doctor Science

by Doctor Science

I never saw Breaking Bad — it’s really not my kind of thing, too morally dark and too realistic (no dragons, no spaceships) — but I could hardly avoid being aware of it. This was especially the case as it built to the finale in September 2013.

The reaction to the “Breaking Bad” finale on my social media sites (Tumblr, Livejournal/Dreamwidth, Facebook), both while it was airing and immediately afterward, was: “I’m weeping for the characters. What a great, satisfying ending.” As I saw viewers’ reactions, it was clear to me: “Breaking Bad” is tragedy in the classical sense. It depicts a person of noble character (in Walter White’s case, a man of intelligence and talent) overthrown by fate and their own flaws, evoking emotions of pity and terror, and leading the audience to a feeling of catharsis.

No wonder “Breaking Bad” is held in such high critical esteem: tragedy is still the most prestigious of genres, in Western drama, and the tragic sequence of emotions is still our standard for Most Important Art.

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by Doctor Science

This is a guide intended for fans from the transformative works/Tumblr ends of fandom who are voting for the Hugo Awards for the first time.

There are two basic principles for Hugo voting:

1. You do not have to vote in every category
2. When you *do* vote in a category, you have to at least look at all the legitimate nominees. You don’t have to finish them, but you’re honor-bound to at least try.

I’m cutting here to spare those of you who are uninterested.

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by Doctor Science

The last time I went by car through NYC I was driving, so I got no idea of what the city actually *looks* like these days. This past weekend the four of us traveled to Long Island together for a family celebration, and with Mister Doctor Science behind the wheel I was able to stare out the windows and absorb the sights.

Cut for image-heavy post.

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by Doctor Science

Jerry Useem’s Atlantic article Why It Pays to Be a Jerk is amazingly self-contradictory, probably because it’s written for and about people who really want to be jerks but aren’t willing to admit it.

Start with the title. The headline and the subhead — “New research confirms what they say about nice guys” — say that the article is going to tell you that being a jerk definitely pays off (at least in business), and why. But Useem writes:

To summarize: being a jerk is likely to fail you, at least in the long run, if it brings no spillover benefits to the group; if your professional transactions involve people you’ll have to deal with over and over again; if you stumble even once; and finally, if you lack the powerful charismatic aura of a Steve Jobs. (It’s also marginally more likely to fail you, several studies suggest, if you’re a woman.) Which is to say: being a jerk will fail most people most of the time.

[emphasis mine.] In other words, the headline + subhead — doubtless written by an editor, not the author — directly contradicts the article.

It’s maybe not entirely the headline-editor’s fault, because the text of the article also contradicts *itself* — as do the articles and experts Useem used as sources.

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by Doctor Science

I gave up trying to read the Rabid Puppy[1] nominations in the Hugo Awards story and (hawk, spit) Related Works categories, and went over to look at the two art categories: Best Professional Artist, and Best Fan Artist.

We Hugo voters get a packet of representative works from each artist, supposedly. The Worldcon Constitution states that:

In the Best Professional Artist category, the acceptance should include citations of at least three (3) works first published in the eligible year

— and images or links are normally part of the packet.

As I used Windows Explorer to scan through the Artist packets, I noticed that a number of the images had surprising time-stamps:

This is “Neverborn”, in Nick Greenwood‘s packet — but the “Date taken” (because Windows assumes you’re managing photos) is 2008. Greenwood is a Sad/Rabid Puppy nominee.

I’m cutting here for Hugo Awards Inside-Baseball, and many images.

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by Doctor Science

Last week, before I went on my road trip, the ongoing Hugo Awards wank led to the single most surreal conversation of my internet career — which goes back to about 1990, years before the World Wide Web even existed, so that’s a *lot* of surreality.

The setting: An Account of Juliette Wade’s Withdrawal from Sad Puppies 3, at File770.

Background: Juliette Wade‘s story “Mind Locker” was on the Sad Puppies 3 slate when Brad Torgersen first announced it, but she quickly asked for her story to be removed, and it was. There’ve been all kinds of rumors about how she got on the slate and why she wanted off.

Summary: Wade recounted how she was asked to be on the slate and why she withdrew. Torgersen commented that she did so because she was afraid of SJWs, and explained that this was a widespread problem. Wade said he was putting words in her mouth, and never to do so again. She reiterated that she withdrew because she was angry with him. Torgersen said he was sad and hurt by her reaction. Even when asked repeatedly, neither Torgersen nor his supporters in the conversation ever acknowledged that he’d put words in Wade’s mouth, much less apologized for it.

The surreality was seeing Torgersen re-write someone’s motives to their face, while people were watching. It’s always difficult to get a real sense of social atmosphere over the internet, but it seemed to me that I was watching Torgersen’s reputation sink before my eyes, in real time. It certainly happened for me.

Details, and spoilers for Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, under the cut.

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by Doctor Science

One of the things the Sad Puppies said an awful lot last year was that they just wanted the works they’d nominated for Hugos to be read and judged “on their merits”. In many ways the most surprising thing for me about last year’s Puppy nominees was that none of their horses was fit to race. None had what I think of as baseline qualifications for an award for literary (including science fictional) merit. What I still don’t understand is *why*: why a group of people who wanted me to judge works “on their merits” would nominate things without significant merit. And, especially, things that are *objectively* bad.

You may think there’s no such thing as an objective standard of literary quality, but it’s quite possible to tell the basic difference between competent writing and the stuff that isn’t.

It might be easiest to think of this in the context of Sturgeon’s Law:

90% of every human creative endeavor is crud.

With fanfic, if it’s a very large fandom and/or the fan writers are generally very young (median age 20 or younger), you’ll be lucky if the “Sturgeon factor” is only 90% — it’s often more like 95%, with barely 1 in 20 stories being not-crud.

But just because something is crud doesn’t mean I won’t read it, and even like it. It depends on what I’m in the mood for; it’s quite possible for a story to be enjoyable or just what I wanted right then, while still being objectively bad.

When I recommend stories, though, I kind of insist on not-crud, and the recs lists I trust come from people who have similar standards. But sometimes I’m just, “gimme everything you’ve got with time travel” or whatever, and I’ll at least look at them all — even though around 90% of them are going to be cruddy. There’s nothing wrong with reading and liking crud.

The problems come when writers and people who make influential recs lists don’t seem to grasp the difference between crud and non-crud. In fanfiction, I think of that line as tracing “basic competence in English prose”. Is the text laced with SPAG (spelling, punctuation, and grammar) errors? Do verb tenses and POV shift a lot? Are character names misspelled? Are names misspelled in the summary? (this is usually a sign not to read the story at all, or you’ll be s-o-r-r-y.) Are words chosen poorly or mistakenly? Are the sentences clumsily constructed?

As far as I’m concerned, the interesting part of voting for the Hugos or other awards is taking a nominations list that is all not-crud, and deciding which is best in my opinion. What shocked and even offended me last year was that the Puppy nominations didn’t pass the basic, not-crud standard.

Cut for length, including some close, editor-like reading.

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by Doctor Science

Last year’s attempt by the “Sad Puppies” to take over the Hugo Awards turns out to have been the warm-up act. This year, they succeeded (at least partway). Oy.

Let me sum up:

1. Last year Larry Correia put together the “Sad Puppies 2” slate, ostensibly to broaden the field of works nominated for the Hugo to counteract leftist “groupthink” by the usual nominators. A subset of the SP2 slate made it onto the final Hugo ballot.

2. I had a Supporting Membership for the Hugos last year, and read (or tried to read) everything nominated. My conclusion:

None of the Sad Puppies’ horses is fit to race. The only ones I can call reasonably competent works of fiction are Correia’s novel and Dan Wells’ “The Butcher of Khardov”. They also read way too much like re-tellings of unfamiliar video games, and lack the most important quality Hugo voters are looking for, world-building. They are, at best, B level works, not the kind of thing I think *anyone* would want associated with “Hugo Award Winning”.

Both of Brad Torgerson’s stories are shockingly badly-edited with regard to basic grammar, punctuation, and sentence-structure. “The Chaplain’s Legacy” might have become a decent story in another couple of drafts, under the whip of a stern yet understanding editor. Vox Day’s story is also technically very poor, and then there’s the fact that a lot of Hugo voters really, honestly dislike him.

3. This year there were two, largely overlapping “conservative” slates: Sad Puppies 3, put together by Brad Torgerson, and Rabid Puppies 2015, by Vox Day. The result: the Best Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Related Work, Editor (Long Form), and Editor (Short Form) categories contain *only* Puppies nominees, all others have been shut out. Only two non-Puppies are in the Best Novel category and in the two Dramatic Presentations, and there’s only one each for Pro Artist, Fanzine, Fan Writer, and the Campbell Award.

4. BOOM. More links: FWOOOMP. I’ve been participating at Making Light, Crooked Timber, and Whatever.

5. My Opinions, Which Are Mine:

A. Elizabeth Bear, abi sutherland, many commenters at Making Light, and especially Cat (in a comment she cross-posted widely) have persuaded me that slates wreck the process of voting for awards. Slates are useful and often necessary when you’re voting for people who need to work with each other (= politics), but they’re destructive to the process of choosing excellence. Slates narrow the field radically, and let (or force) voters to make their choices other than from their own personal perspective, which is naturally idiosyncratic.

B. The people linked in A are among the many arguing that the only way to save the Hugo Awards system is to put *any* work, however worthy, that was on a slate below “No Award”. Being on a slate (of your own free will) must be an unconditional disqualification, or else we’ll end up with competing slates — which will be the very opposite of choosing works on the basis of quality. Generally speaking, I’m persuaded by this argument, and that’s what I’ll be doing. I’m really sorry, Guardians of the Galaxy.

C. What’s kind of stunning to me is how resolutely the Puppies have ignored issues of *quality* in assembling and arguing for their slate. Last year’s slate was unbelievably, insultingly weak — and I say that as someone whose fiction reading is mostly fanfic. I know a *lot* about bad writing, but I also know the difference between “bad, but I like it” and “objectively well-crafted”. Since Torgerson put together the SP3 slate, I feel safe dismissing it out of hand — he’s demonstrated that he doesn’t have the minimum level of competence at English-wrangling necessary to pick lists of “the best stories”.

I often enjoy things that aren’t even trying for excellence, but that’s not what awards are *for*. Part of what bemuses me about the Puppies is that having high standards, believing in excellence, thinking that there are objective standards of value that don’t have anything to do with popularity — these are all things I associate with traditional conservatism. And yet the Puppies seem to be doubling down on a pugnacious rejection of high literary standards — and, in their work, even such bourgeois affectations as grammar.

D. Another reason I won’t vote for anything touched by the Puppies is that two of the most prominent people involved — indeed, the two most likely to benefit from the slate — are IMHO actually evil.

As a rule, I don’t believe in calling a person “evil”. Every human is capable of evil actions as well as good ones, you can’t split people into neat “good” and “bad” piles.

However. Sometimes there are people who are pretty consistent about doing evil and seem to be proud of it, so it’s fair to just cut to the chase and say they’re evil people. If they do something nice, then you can be surprised.

Cut for some pretty disgusting, hateful language.

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by Doctor Science

This picture has been going around tumblr:

sparking a discussion of “how do sculptors even *do* that?” and many pictures of Bernini works. Along the way, someone labeled this one “a Vestal Virgin, carved during the Roman Empire”. I immediately recognized that this was wrong.

The work is by Raffaelle Monti, a 19th-century Italian sculptor who created it in 1846-47.

I’m not sure what, exactly, makes me say the Monti sculpture is obviously 19th-C, while the Louvre statue of Aphrodite aka Venus Genetrix, also discussed in the thread, looks more authentically ancient.

Cut for images containing classical and artistic nudity — very likely to be NSFW.

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by Doctor Science

Mister Doctor and I were driving down a winding road the other day, and he asked me what the beautiful shade trees along it were. “Sycamores”, I said, “what in Europe are called plane trees.” He confessed that when he was young and heard of “plane trees” he was befuddled, not knowing if the grownups were talking about “just plain trees”, or trees that had something to do with airplanes, or if they were flat, or grew on the plains, or what. We also talked about how confusing it can be when British and American English have two different words for the same thing, and I said I was confused for years by British books that referred to “limes” as large European shade trees. Mister Doctor had just assumed they meant citrus trees, but I said no, they’re actually linden trees.

I promised him I’d look up why sycamores are called “plane” trees, and how linden trees got to be “limes” — and so I did, and now I shall share with you.

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by Doctor Science

A lot of people have talked very movingly in the past few days about how inspirational Leonard Nimoy and the character of Spock were in their lives. For me, Spock is a culture-hero on the level of Moses or indeed Abraham. My chosen subculture is transformative media/SF fandom; media fandom began with Star Trek — and Star Trek fandom began with Spock.

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by Doctor Science

I’m eligible to nominate for the Hugo Awards (closes March 10) and to vote as a subscriber for the Locus Awards (closes April 15). I generally take the Locus Recommended Reading List as my starting point. The LRRL is notable this year for not including The Martian (it would be under “first novel”), which I expect to be on the Hugo ballot and may well win. Yeah, it’s not all that well-written, but it hits a primal Science! Fiction! button that doesn’t get punched very much these days.

Under the cut are the LRRL for the novel categories. Books that have been read (or attempted) by members of the Science household are grayed out. Of the others, are there any to which you-all would particularly like to direct our attention? We certainly can’t read them all before the Hugo Noms are due …

I’m particularly interested in recommendations for works published as e-books, because Locus frankly admits that they have no idea how to even find the good stuff in the e-book torrent.

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