This. "Tommy’s"should also refrain from first inviting “Tommies” to be party of “Tommy’s”, support their decision to branch out and then collaboratively work with “Tommies” to create a menu.
Emphasis added. From here. Which I found wile looking for the trigger of the bile on Dinosaur.
I’m going to ask this again Fenris. Who did you claim I’m defending, and where did I defend him?
So, I’ve been spending my late August free time streaming Buffy, not having sufficient will to tackle “significant” entertainment. (I’m mostly reading history nowadays.)
These guys remind me of The Trio. Everyone knows what happened to Warren. (Watch out for those lesbian witches!) I guess the other two are Jonathan & Andrew…
I don’t know who you’re defending, if anyone. The thing is, when people participate who aren’t clearly stating a position, sometimes it’s hard to figure out just what they are saying.
So, can you just state your position on this whole issue?
Oh man THIS STORY. I hated this story sooooo much, for basically all the reasons you cite. (Also, a fish that is put into a can of Sprite, which… I’m fairly sure it doesn’t work that way.) What is up with you, non-Puppy Hugo nominators?
Wow. So you think the quotations I posted were actually non-incredibly-terrible writing? You even think that was marginally competent writing? Then we have nothing to say to one another about literary merit, because we will never agree.
It is fine that we disagree. The world is large and has room for many diverse opinions. But I think you will find that more people will agree with me that subject-verb agreement, words used in the correct way, and sentences that parse when parentheticals are removed are hallmarks of basic competent writing.
One author, this year, kinda… does, because his work showed up so much. I No Awarded all the fiction categories (except the Campbells, where I didn’t vote at all because I didn’t have time to read all the nominees). I did NOT vote for “The Day the World Turned Upside Down,” which was a non-Puppy nominee, because, as Fenris says, it is such a terrible, awful, no-good very bad story. I did vote for a couple of stories/novellas (NOT “Upside Down”) under the No Award line, because I thought they were decent although not Hugo quality. “Totaled” springs to mind as one that was pretty decent.
This also includes No-Awarding the Novel category, because I didn’t think anything on the ballot really deserved a Hugo for Best Novel. I did rank a couple of books below No Award. I ranked Three-Body Problem the highest, as I felt that it at least aspired to be the kind of book a Hugo award winner ought to be, but it had characterization fail and at least one fairly glaring physics fail (I’m not counting the proton computers; that was just… fantasy).
I also No-Awarded Best Related Work, which was a lot of drivel. And I confess that I did no-award Best Editor on less than complete information. The Wright story – edited by Vox Day, as you remember – had so much in the way of failures that should have been caught by a half-decent editor that I didn’t trust anything else slate-nominated.
Wow, really different strokes. The Three-Body Problem had me laughing in delight at a few of its conceits, which doesn’t happen often for me. The Goblin Kingdom was a very good political fantasy IMO. Ancillary Sword, while not quite as awesome as the previous book, was excellent. I’d easily vote for any of them, but agree that 3BP was the best and deserved the award.
Skin Game was a fun read, as are all of the Dresden Novels. But nothing in all literature will ever beat the climactic moment of Dead Beat:
a trenchcoated wizard rides Sue the zombie T-rex into battle while Butters the shrimpy coroner plays polka music as a one-man band on its back
I’m not sure that a book that’s not best in the series should win a Hugo. I wouldn’t have been mad if it did, but I don’t think I would’ve voted for it.
Except that books are competing against the other books of their year, not the other books of their series. If a series’ best book is a 9, and it was published in the same year as a 10, and the series’ second-best book is an 8, and all other books are a 7, then what result should occur?
Next time, take an extra 15 seconds to reread what you’re responding to. Wright’s sentence didn’t talk about “acclaiming the new king.” It talked about “acclaim[ing] one of us to the kingship…”
The “one of us” appears to be a direct object. The direct object of what you acclaim is the thing you’re enthusiastically praising. So far, that’s technically okay, although the meaning is weird.
But the “to the kingship” appears to be an adverbial phrase, if I’m understanding the sentence correctly. And that’s not the right preposition for that phrase. If it were “acclaim one of us as the new king,” it’d work. But as it is, it’s at best very awkward. It sounds like he means, “promote.” You don’t praise someone to a position, you praise them once they’re in that role.
FWIW, Wright also claimed to write, in an afternoon, a better version of the Dinosaur story. I’m curious whether folks agree with his opinion.
Yeah, I’m aware it’s a minority opinion 
I did like Ancillary Justice a lot and feel it justly deserves its Hugo, but I didn’t like Sword nearly as much – I felt that it suffered from a lot of middle-book problems, and the story was kind of murky to me given the absence of Mercy. (And, okay, a conservative opinion: I felt like Breq was kind of a SJW in this one. Let’s swoop in and talk about domestic abuse and workers’ rights! My main objection here is that it seems inconsistent with the Breq we saw in Justice, who never thought about that sort of thing.) It may be that when Mercy comes out it will make sense of a lot of things I didn’t quite get about Sword – but too late for the award voting. (I hope Mercy is good enough to nominate for next year’s Hugos, though!)
I thought Goblin Emperor was also a very-well written book, but I felt it didn’t really challenge me intellectually enough – I thought that Maia’s journey was really too easy. But yes, those are the other two I voted for under No Award.
3BP had a lot of really cool ideas going on (okay, the people computer? AWESOME) and I had a lot of good discussion with people about it afterwards, which is why I voted for it above the other two – I think that a Hugo winner should inspire thinking about its ideas. I just wish that there had been any characterization of anyone besides Ye Wenjie, and that he hadn’t said you could send information through quantum entanglement faster than the speed of light (this just happens to be My Particular Pet Peeve).
Thank you. I missed this reply somehow – but you’ve said everything I would have said if I had seen it. In fact, while I was writing the post he was responding to, I looked up exactly the entry that Rick cites, because I wanted to make sure the dictionary didn’t cite that weird adverbial phrase construction as some sort of special use case. It doesn’t.
And the word “acclaim” also doesn’t make sense in the context of the story anyway, where no one is praising or giving approval to anyone. I agree that “promote,” or some synonym, would have been more what he was aiming for.
Words! They mean something! Who knew?
Well, as a short story, it wins by mere virtue of having a story. There’s narrative structure (not great, but there is some). The Dinosaur poem doesn’t have a story at all. The narrator doesn’t grow/change and the situation (sitting by the boyfriend’s bedside) doesn’t resolve or even change. So…purely on the basis of which is a better story, he wins, IMO*.
If the question was "Which one of these two literary efforts is better, I’d choose “None of the Above” as I didn’t like either all that much but if I were forced to pick, I’d barely have to go with his. At least there was movement of plot and character. In his, the narrator starts out with a revenge fantasy and chooses forgiveness. In hers, she starts out with a revenge fantasy. That’s it. It doesn’t go anywhere from there. No movement of plot, no growth of character.
Comparisons aside,
His dialogue is horribly stilted in a way that’s almost Piers Anthony-esque (Forget everything else about Anthony, his dialogue never sounds right–Wright’s sounds off in a more pompous but similar way.)
“If you are thinking of a thing with a saddle and the sweep of years flashing by like a film in fast motion, or a blue box like a telephone booth, no, nothing like that.” This is just weird. Try saying it aloud without sounding like either a six-year-old doing. a. robot. impersonation or a pretentious jackass.
Also, somehow a few writers think contractions are inelegant. They’re wrong. It’s fine to say “If you’re thinking of a thing…etc”
That said, he has the occasional good turn of phrase**
He has redundant narration and his narration is redundant at times:
They’re not elephant guns so they’re not guns that could penetrate the hide of an elephant? Bwah? That’s just bad and in need of editing.
There’s a few anachronistic bits that were jarring. The story was set in the mid '60s, early ‘70s latest, but the narrator is calling it "The Democrat Party Headquarters’ (emphasis mine) as opposed to “Democratic”. That usage as far as I know didn’t exist before the '90s.
Also, the politics he shows in this story (I’m ignoring everything else I know about him) clog up the narrative at inopportune times. Here for example:
It could have been a great passage had he continued with the rhythm of the first two phrases: I would live beyond the moonshot, beyond the administration of Johnson, beyond Watergate, beyond the Hostage Crisis, beyond the fall of the Berlin Wall, beyond the dawn of the computer age into a better future. (or something like that.
Mine’s not great, but at least it doesn’t get into a didactic lecture (and I largely agree with him about Johnson. But it doesn’t fit the story, the sentence tempo or the mood)
If he had a good editor, a lot of these problems could be fixed easily.
*Stories have structure, just like sonnets do. Not as rigid a structure as a sonnet, but a structure nonetheless. The Dinosaur one is less of a story than that damn poem about the plums…
The narrator is a passive-agressive douche (more than we know about the Dinosaur girlfriend) and when the “you” in the poem sees the snotty note, the narrator is (rightly) gonna get his ass kicked. Not only does he steal “you”'s plums, he taunts “you” about how yummy the stolen plums were. (I hate that poem, but I don’t pretend it’s not effective at generating emotion. 
)
Meanwhile, in the Dinosaur one, she’s all “If you were a dinosaur, you would have beaten the crap out of those guys…but you’re not a dinosaur…so…um…nevermind?”
**He’s talking about how time is like a number-line with one past and a zillion futures and the narrator comments “I am in the zero between fiancée and wife.” which is a really good line.
Got it, you don’t like John C. Wright. Glad we have that settled.
I’m a fan of his work (particularly “The Golden Age” trilogy), and I’m used to his picking out archaic usages / forms. You picked three passages which were all fine, and claimed ‘acclaim’ is used incorrectly, whereas it seems fine to me based on some of the older usage.
That you no-awarded “One Bright Star” means you are right, we can’t agree on literature, because I don’t think you should be allowed to judge it.
I got about half way then got bored. But I’m not feeling well, I don’t like short stories generally, and I was only reading out of curiosity.
Also, and I think this is a very important thing, “rewriting a better version,” whenever it’s possible, is not the same creative act as writing the first version. When someone says “I could have done that!” my response is “But you didn’t.”
Unless you’re a sock, you didn’t make the claim. I’m asking the person who made the claim. Still waiting Fenris.
My position is that I’ve yet to see ANYONE on the anti-puppy side get the most basic facts right. It’s hideously pathetic. I didn’t even bother commenting until I saw the most pathetic truth claim that could have been answered had the person given the first damn about actually knowing the facts about anything. When people do this, it means they don’t really want the truth, they just want to posture.
I’m a fan of Wright’s and Correia’s (I found out about Correia because of Wright mentioning SP2 last year). This year found out about Torgersen and enjoyed some of his work as well. I saw a lot of dreck in SF getting awards, and generally agreed with Torgersen on his thrust of getting things nominated that I liked instead of just complaining.
But I didn’t sign up in time to nominate. I saw the sweep and the anti-puppy outrage and signed up to vote on the awards because I wanted to vote for what I liked. So I signed up and read up and voted.
And I didn’t no-award anything. I voted for what I liked and left a few categories blank. (For instance, I didn’t find any of the podcasts compelling, and couldn’t judge any of them as better than anyone else, but didn’t no-award them either.)
Silly me, voting based on the content rather than in opposition to someone’s personality or politics.
You’ve said this twice already. How about expanding? If the SPs are a bunch of “old white guys,” how does he fit in? What about Sarah Hoyt, is she an old white guy too?
shrug I didn’t, in fact, dislike his work. (Except the Best Related Work stuff, which I did find really awful – did you really just compare writing to a strip tease?? Seriously?) If I’d read it as amateur work (and I do for various reasons read some amateur work) I would probably have said nice things about it. As a contender for the best professional SF of the year I found it distinctly lacking.
(As I’ve said, I found most of the nominees this year lacking in one way or another, although Wright in more areas than some others. Also, I probably am more willing to press the No Award button than a lot of others, see also LHoD. I would have voted No Award over, say, Scalzi’s Redshirts as well, had I been a Hugo voter then.)
Archaic usage is fine; as a Mormon, you no doubt are very familiar with the KJV, as am I. I also studied medieval literature for a year, which may be my downfall (I also have similar issues with a lot of books set in a medieval background because the voice doesn’t strike me as quite right). I enjoy it when, oh, Tolkien or E.R. Eddison does it, because they never misstep. However, LHoD covered why Wright’s particular use of “acclaim” is poor usage, though it could easily have been very slightly changed to be proper usage (if still a poorly chosen word), and are we actually arguing that
isn’t bad grammar? (I could go on and on, but eh, who has the time.)
Anyway, grammar aside, I also don’t think you should be judging literature, so I guess we agree to differ. (But I will defend your right to judge literature, and I am glad you voted this year. I am glad for anyone who votes with regard to the content, even if they disagree with me.) I am going to say that, even though you think this kind of thing is fine and doesn’t indicate poor writing competence – which is certainly your prerogative! – I think you’ll find more readers agreeing with me.
…in fact, I think I read somewhere that the stats show exactly this, hold on… yes! Wright ended last in both the novella and short story categories. This can’t be blamed on political-SJW voting, because an SJW political vote would have treated all Puppy nominees equally (and left them off the ballot). (I did see anti-Puppy screeds urging people to do exactly that. It should be obvious that I don’t go for that.)
(For what it’s worth, apparently I’m a pretty average Hugo voter – the actual breakdown was almost exactly the breakdown of my voting, except I voted all the novels under No Award, I ranked “The Day The World Turned Upside Down” in last place, and I ranked “Championship B’Tok” higher than “Journeyman,” which I found extremely forgettable, to the point where I really can’t now tell you what it was about.)
Keep waiting. I’ve got better things to do on this board than waste my times with this kind of game.
Yes. YES TO THIS. His prose just sounds off, and it continually throws me out of the story.
In the sentence you quote, I can see what he’s trying to do – he’s trying to get a sort of breathless rhythm going – but he doesn’t quite accomplish it; it comes across as too many phrases piled on top of each other. I suspect it’s because he doesn’t quite get the parallelism working properly. The first bit is actually pretty good, to my ear – the “sweep of years flashing by” has the sort of rhythm he’s striving for – and then it kind of falls apart. And I just get that feeling constantly when reading his stuff, where I can see what he’s trying to do but he’s just not doing it.
Though yeah, I agree as well that I didn’t like the original dinosaur story much as a story. As a poem, okay maybe, but we’re not voting for best poem of the year, so maybe the Wright edges it out. But I didn’t like either.
Oof, I think we English speakers have lost that battle. These days I’m just happy when I don’t hear “She and myself went to the store” – shudder.
Yah, I missed the edit window or I would have changed “shouldn’t be allowed” to something like “should be ignored”. Coercion is not my boat.
Okay, what is the truth that others are getting wrong?