Exactly, and it’s another example of him trying to avoid the main point by nitpicking meaningless details.
Jim Butcher has wisely not said a word about the slate. Neither has anyone related to Guardians of the Galaxy.
I’m gonna make a guess:
- You’ve not read “Give a Mouse a Cookie” in a long time; and
- You’ve not read a story in a long time.
There’s a VERY superficial semblance between Dinosaur in mouse, inasmuch as each story has an “if then” motif. However, they’re used in different ways. In Mouse, it’s used to suggest the mouse will continue to take advantage of the reader. In Dinosaur, it’s used to introduce increasingly baroque flights of fancy.
As for stories, can you really not find the narrative? SPOILER ALERT!
A paleontologist was beat up by five drunken assholes and has slipped into a possibly irreversible coma. His fiancee sits by his bed and spins a tale of fantasy to tell him in which he’s a dinosaur, they sing together and become famous, and he marries another, but she is still happy because he is happy; the fantasy she spins ends in the same fight against five drunken assholes, only in her fantasy version of events her fiancee eats the attackers instead of dying.
It’s not told in a strictly sequential method, but the narrative is clearly there.
You don’t have to like it. But the reasons you gave for not liking it are false.
How can a retread of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie not have a narrative? It’s 100% narrative!
Ooh, good point. I apologize for denigrating Cookie. I meant the basic “lyrical” structure, but you’re right that the Mouse has much that the Dinosaur does not.
See, this is the sort of nonsense that just leads to eyerolls. You’re factually wrong about the lack of a narrative. Your snark is based on ignorance, and the more you double down on it, the sillier it gets.
Yep, it was wrong to make the comparison. Cookie is far better.
That’s the premise and the rambling. It’s utter garbage, and was the breaking point for a lot of the critics of the current SFWA parade of nonsense.
And yet “No Award” placed above it.
I’ve never read the story in question, but I’ll admit that your attack on it isn’t compelling. I’m not reading your posts and thinking “this guy is obviously a critical and thoughtful reader.” I’m thinking “these posts seem childish and ill-argued.”
:rolleyes:
Nonlinear structure != rambling. It’s a very deliberate structure with a deliberate unfolding of the plot. Your inability to follow it is not the story’s fault.
This says more about those critics than it does about the story.
Which sucks for Butcher. It’s reasonable to say that it’s not Hugo-worthy, just as I think it’s reasonable to say that nominating it is legit. The punch-bowl-shitters should realize that their antics are hurting authors who aren’t part of their movement, though, and should decide if that’s really what they want to do.
Again: recommend books. Recommend Skin Game if you want. But don’t go for a monolithic slate that tries to overwhelm everyone else’s tastes, and expect good feelings going forward. Don’t shit in the punch bowl and get sad when people won’t drink it.
Edit: jsgoddess, the Dinosaur story is here. It’s fairly short and a good read (as I’m sure you can tell by the absurd attacks it faces). When you read it and you read about the five attackers, you’ll probably understand better the real reason for its critics.
FWIW, while I’m with you on the general issue that Whipped & Rabid Puppies suck, I hated…HATED…the story. And not for any reason beyond the fact that it was non-SFnal (or fantasy. Non-Genre). Yeah, the woman was daydreaming about the dinosaur, but that’s it. It started nowhere, ended nowhere and nothing actually happened but a daydream told poorly. The writing was clumsy and…un-lyrical. Zelazny or Bradbury at their best might, with another few thousand words, have been able to pull something worthwhile out of it (maybe) but that didn’t happen and instead we got a “prose poem” (or whatever the current term for it is).
My main point for posting the above is that it’s possible to hate the story and yet not be a Whipped or Rabid Puppy.
How will JSGoddess feel after reading it? Will she side with me…or you? Only time (and JSGoddess) will tell. 
Swirsky’s story is a poem. Read it as such and it should be obvious.
It did not win the Hugo Award, but it did win the Nebula Award. The reason is also obvious. I’ve been in a number of writer’s groups and writer’s workshops. If anybody had put that story out to be read, the rest of the writers would be genuflecting, singing hosannas, kissing her feet, and contemplating giving up fiction for a life as a computer programmer.
First: I love poetry, so be warned.
Second: I couldn’t get the link to work. I tried googling and couldn’t get those links to work either. 
Please then, go and read it and form your own opinion. It’s actually shorter than most of these posts.
I read ‘Dinosaur’ when it was first posted earlier in the thread and I have to admit on first reading it I dismissed it as drivel. On a second (and third) reading after looking at the comments by LHoD, Fenris & Exapno Mapcase - I think it’s a lot better than the Puppies give it credit for. There are a few passages that have a lot of depth to their ideas.
I still don’t think it was that well written and I agree with a lot of what Fenris said - it’s certainly a fantasy, though I’m not sure how or where that makes it fit within Fantasy as a genre (which could be an interesting discussion for another thread).
I suspect this is very true in some of the circles that the criticism is coming from.
Really? I never paid much attention to the process behind them, but I did notice if a book or story I was looking at had a Hugo (or Nebula) ribbon on it. I bought some things because of them, read some things because of them, maybe paid more attention to some things, knowing that some people who took SF seriously had seen something there.
This does sound good, though.
Wow. I just read the comments on that story. They start in March 2013 and run overwhelmingly positive, like 90% gushing.
Until Groundhog Day 2015. Then the haters come in, en masse.
I wonder what happened around February 2015? Hmm? Hmm?
Edit: as for the critics identifying too heavily with the attackers, that shows up pretty clearly in the comments. Some of the critics are livid that the author and other socialists dislike working-class people, while others suggest in oh-so-coy language that really it’d be a bunch of black guys who’d commit the crime.
Yeah, I think it’s clear where the hate is coming from.
I read it. (The links finally worked.)
Full disclosure: I have sat and waited by many a hospital bed, wondering if I would become a sudden widow. I’m also a poet. And I love dinosaurs.
I think it’s clearly a poem, as Exapno Mapcase points out. And it strikes me as quite affecting. There is a great (intentional, I assume) irony in its central conceit, given what happened to the dinosaurs:
I think it’s quite beautiful, has a clear structure, and tells a story. A narrative prose poem.
It’s definitely worth reading. I’m not sure that it’s something I would categorize as sf or fantasy.
I get that. At the same time, for years I devoured The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, in large part because of the wide net they cast in selecting stories and poems. When I read something that uses some of the tropes of SF/F in a way I’ve not seen before, I’m delighted. It’s really fun for me.
Some people don’t like that. That’s cool. But me, I’d much rather cast a very wide net in what I welcome into our genre. This story requires a wide net, but that’s fine by me.
Kind of funny seeing the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie meme showing up so heavily in the comments there and in this thread. It really comes across as a sneering, superficial way to dismiss the work without making any effort to think about it.
I’ve never read that actual book (the text is on Wikipedia), but there was an Ayn Rand parody recently and I started a thread in CS about if that book were written by someone else. So I feel like I know that book inside and out!
You sound like me when I’m talking about poetry. 