What I have is hearsay. One of my close writer friends knows people who used to game with him and they report that he is a jerk. That’s all I’ve got.
Yeah, that’s real possible. But like I say, the misogyny and smugness make him not a fun asshole. For my tastes, anyway, those character traits make him less enjoyable to read.
People have tried to make “speculative fiction” a thing since, well, since Heinlein re-invented the term in 1947 and called for its use.
It’s never caught on with the public, even if some academics and literary types use it. I see no future in which it will, either.
Interestingly, in 1947 the generic name for the field was “fantasy.” It turned over very shortly after to “science fiction,” influenced by the surge of atomic war novels and books about space travel. After 1952, when the Science Fiction Book Club was launched, science fiction was basically the only term that the general public used or understood.
This is the trouble for me. Of course it’s possible for someone to write a protagonist who is steeped in all the cultural tropes that the writer grew up around, who takes a particular sardonic view of human nature that maps very well to a person of the writer’s demographic, broadly and also specifically, and who is also an apologetic-but-not-really, self-aware-but-not-enough-to-stop, still-successful-and-never-suffers-consequences-for-it casual misogynist, but not actually endorse any of those views and not have any of those things be true because of an identification between writer and protagonist. It’s extremely possible. It’s just, like, if that’s what you’re writing, that’s not as cool as writing the part where the guy can freeze a whole lake while he’s in it.
And that is why I did not buy a book of short stories that included one from an author I love, because it also included one from him. I’ll wait for another collection that’s only her stuff to buy it, because I refuse to support asses like Correia.
Most of what I’ve learned about both Sad Puppies and GamerGate (mostly on rationalwiki) suggests that SP was a spinoff of GG.
They’re basically all the same thing, actually (including Q, I mean). It’s all just different hobbies 4chan got into.
Nitpick: In fact, the narrator and her love do seem to be intended as two traditional opposite sex characters, although the love might be somewhat gender-fluid or nonconforming:
Yeah, but Dresden is a fictional character, not Jim.
Lots of books have jerks are protagonists.
Dresden is flawed, which makes him better.
Like I said it was beautiful. And it was allowed in, so it met whatever criteria they had.
However, you could argue that it wasnt SF so the criteria was wrong.
Hell, I can remember back when people seriously argued that fantasy stories shouldn’t be allowed in the awards because they were being given for science fiction.
Sure, and maybe they were right, so they changed the criteria.
The criteria never changed, to my knowledge. Attitudes did.
I think you’re right. As early as the 1950s stories like “Or All the Seas with Oysters” which is certainly fantasy-tinged were winning the Hugo, and “The Lord of the Rings” was nominated for “Best All-Time Series” in 1966.
I have to elaborate on this - I agree with Exapno that attitudes about what was appropriate for a Hugo award shifted, while the actual rules didn’t change. In the early days, some unabashed fantasy was nominated for the Hugos (and sometimes won), but it was relatively rare (though the fact that it existed at all indicates that there was no rule against it) - but now attitudes have changed enough that fantasy wins moderately often (without any rule change - just with the attitude change Exapno referred to).
Yes, I understand it was a small but vocal group who were opposed.
Oddly, one major voice was Damon Knight, who founded SFWA. Since at least half the members also wrote fantasy I’ve never understood how he thought this would work. Just another example of writers being wackier than you think they are.
“Yeah, but”? The rest of your post is a paraphrase of what I wrote, except that I emphasized that he’s not a fun asshole (or a fun jerk), so his flaw doesn’t actually make him better. It’s subjective, natch, but when your character’s flaw makes them less fun to read, it makes your book less appealing.
FWIW, my wife has stopped reading the Dresden books entirely because of this.
Well said.
Dresden’s smart-assed, nigh-suicidal inability to shut the fuck up for a minute in the face of authority is a fun flaw, and I delight in reading those passages, just like Dresden’s ability to do crazy-ass magic and to solve battles in unusual and spectacular ways is really fun. There’s a lot to like about the books.
It just happens that there’s this one kind of glaring thing that I like a lot less about them.
Let’s face it, scientifiction was a dumb idea.
Yeah and even Gernsback changed it to “science fiction” after two years.
But I’ve found scientifiction used frequently much later in newspaper databases, not at all ironically. It lasted outside the core genre magazines much longer than you’d expect.