Doctor Science

by Doctor Science

The American premiere of Tom Stoppard’s latest play, “The Hard Problem”, is at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. We went last Saturday, and after we got back I looked up some reviews of the world premiere run in London. Most of them seem to have found it “slight”, “lesser Stoppard”, and to not have felt connected to the characters, or moved by them.

It’s like we’re not talking about the same play. I connected with (and recognized) the characters: insofar as they’re two-dimensional, it’s that of cubes seen head-on. Their depths are unexplored, left for fanfic writers, but I felt as though the depths were *there*. I don’t know how much of the difference is due to the production, and how much is due to me seeing things the London reviewers overlooked, but it’s very disconcerting.

Cutting here for a spoiler-laden review.

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by Doctor Science

The idea behind Jews going to the movies and Chinese food on Christmas Day was that these things were both open, yet mostly empty because the Christmas-celebrators were busy elsewhere. This concept has been breaking down in the past few years, and now we find that the movies are packed and we could only get a table at the good Chinese restaurant because we came at 4:00 — every table was booked and overbooked for the evening. mmmmm, Peking duck.

Like a significant subset of Everybody In The World, we’ve now seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I had been avoiding social media for the previous week (for fear of spoilers), but I went in knowing that my e-friends were divided into a large group of ¡Yays!, and a smaller group of Nays. The Nays all say the same thing: “The Force Awakens is too derivative in both plot and characterization.”

Spoilers within!

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by Doctor Science

Back in September, I wondered who is supposed to be the heroine of Ivanhoe, but I hadn’t read yet the book itself. Now, thanks to Project Gutenberg, Mister Doctor Science and I have both read it, and we’re struck by how different it is from what we expected.

Ivanhoe was one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century, with an enormous influence on the literary landscape and on culture in general. Some of that influence persists to this day: reading Ivanhoe, we could see the roots of epic fantasy literature, of the Society for Creative Anachronism, of Renfaires and Medieval Times.

But what we couldn’t see is the Ivanhoe many other people claim to have read. From 19th-century fans to 21st-century scholars, the majority of readers seem to have latched onto a few elements in Ivanhoe, but not to have absorbed the actual text as a whole. It’s as though all they know is a “Good Parts Version” — and it’s one that edits out a lot of *our* favorite parts.

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by Doctor Science

In Rebecca, Rowena, Puppies, Fanfic, Foz Meadows writes about reading Ivanhoe:

I was struck by the difference in characterisation between Rowena and Rebecca, and what that particular contrast still says about the way we write women in fiction. Rowena, as Ivanhoe’s beloved, is meant to be the personification of all the feminine virtues of Scott’s period — beautiful and pure and obedient and yearning — while Rebecca, reading between the very broad lines, is someone we’re meant to root for despite her Jewishness without ever liking her best.

Except that, for precisely this reason, we do; but even though he wrote her that way, Scott doesn’t seem to realise it. …. Rowena, passive and set on a pedestal, is what he thought women should be, while Rebecca, active and human, is what he grudgingly acknowledged women were; or could be, at the very least, if they actively tried to overcome the handicap of their gender.Like Foz, I’ve always assumed that readers are *supposed* to think Rowena is better than Rebecca, but I’ve never actually met anyone who did.[1]

I’ve been thinking about this for the past few days, and have turned up some interesting stuff about how authors write women, and also about how much control authors (don’t) have over what readers actually think they’ve written.

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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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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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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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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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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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