Definition: Puppy Shit

Posted on 2015-05-31 by Dave

Puppy Shit is crappy fiction or non-fiction that’s a Hugo finalist because some dicks thought their favorite stories weren’t getting  nominated so they made a list that got co-opted by a troll and resulted in my Hugo Packet containing a bunch of stories I didn’t enjoy.

 

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2015 Hugo Fanzine

Posted on 2015-05-29 by Dave

My notes and rankings for the Best Fanzine category of the 2015 Hugo Awards.

  • Journey Planet
  • Tangent Online
  • The Revenge of Hump Day

 

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2015 Hugo Semi Pro Zine

Posted on 2015-05-29 by Dave

My notes and rankings for the Best Semi Pro Zine category of the 2015 Hugo Awards.

I’d just about given up on on the Hugo packet because of all the Puppy Shit.  Eventually I tried a few and was shocked to find a bunch of good stories. Still, I’m not a huge fan of short stories and I’m kind of burnt out. The first three below were all good but I’m not sure I can rank them. Read a story or two in ASIM and it was good as well. The thing is, while I think this was the category with the best fiction this year it’s also the hardest to rank because I’d have to go through and rank a bunch of individual stories and I really don’t feel up to it.  Writing this is kind of making me want to do it though.  I wish there was a way to indicate that this category had better fiction than anything else in this year’s crop.

  • Beneath Ceaseless Skies
    Enjoyed the first story, really enjoyed the second story, the third and fourth were okay.
  • Abyss and Apex
    Good stories all around. Poetry isn’t my thing but I did like the shape poem.
  • Lightspeed Magazine
    The SF and Fantasy stories were all good but I didn’t realize how long the magazine is. I’m not up for a novella so I’m moving on to ASIM and we’ll see how far I get there. I’m really tired of short fiction.
  • Andromeda Spaceways In-Flight Magazine (ASIM)
    Ugh, not because it’s bad (I suspect it’s not) but because there’s a lot of it and I’m kind of burnt out and I don’t generally care for short fiction because it’s so hit-or-miss. A good short story is a wonderful thing to find but there are so many that aren’t. Consequently I tend to avoid anthologies and what not.
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2015 Hugo Related Work

Posted on 2015-05-23 by Dave

My notes and rankings for the Best Related Work category of the 2015 Hugo Awards.

  1. Why Science is Never Settled, Tedd Roberts
    4 stars / OMG! The Puppies actually found something I enjoyed!  I bet the only reason that they like this is because they think can use it to bash climate change.
  2. The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF, Ken Burnside
    3 stars / Wow! Much numbers! So maths!  (insert doge pic of your choice)  Decent stuff if you want to make realistic space battles in SF. Personally, I’ll bet that would be pretty boring.  If I want realism in a story I’ll stick to something like The Martian or I’ll go read some non-fiction.
  3. No Award
  4. Letters from Gardner, Lou Antonelli
    DNF / Wasn’t bad but I wasn’t interested and I’ve got other things to read. I stopped about half way through the preview before the story S.P.P.A.M. and I’m wavering on reading on and possibly moving it above No Award.
  5. Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth, John C. Wright
    Haven’t read aside from the one “how to write fiction” piece.  I thought that had passable advice though I also thought it was very confusingly given.  He should probably direct folks who want fiction advice to someone else.
  6. Wisdom from My Internet, Michael Z. Williamson
    Why is this up for an award? It’s a collection of mildly humorous blog excerpts and if this is the “best” related work of the year then it might be time to drop that award category. Did it have anything to do with SF/F?

 

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2015 Hugo Graphic Story

Posted on 2015-05-21 by Dave

My notes & rankings for the 2015 Hugo Graphic Story category.

  1. Rat Queens Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery, written by Kurtis J. Weibe, art by Roc Upchurch
    4 stars / I enjoyed this. Modern language dropped in a fantasy setting. A bit gory but quite funny.
  2. Saga Volume 3, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples
    4 stars / I have V1 & V2 (from a HumbleBundle I think) but haven’t ever gotten around to them, in part part because I thought they were “serious”. I’m partway through V3 and it’s been pretty amusing so far.
  3. Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal, written by G. Willow Wilson, illustrated by Adrian Alphona and Jake Wyatt
    3 stars / Enjoyable YA/preteen comic. Not bad but nothing I really be interested in following.
  4. Sex Criminals Volume 1: One Weird Trick, written by Matt Fraction, art by Chip Zdarsky
    3 stars / Interesting idea, some funny stuff.
  5. No Award
  6. The Zombie Nation Book #2: Reduce Reuse Reanimate, Carter Reid
    2 stars / Read January through March of his 2014 posts. Amusing, occasionally funny. I wouldn’t mind the anti-Lib cracks except I’m sure they’re part of why he was nominated and I dislike that anyone would be nominated because of their politics.
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2015 Hugo Short Story

Posted on 2015-05-19 by Dave

My notes and rankings for the 2015 Hugo Short Story category.

  1. No Award
  2. Turncoat, Steve Rzasa
    Best of the worst. Apparently AI in the future are prone to change sides at the drop of a hat. That ought to make things interesting in a Chinese curse sort of way.

I’ve read all of the following and none of them deserve to be ranked though Totaled is right on the edge.

  • Totaled, Kary English
    A decent story but the language felt off, kind of like YA, and while it went for the emotional ending I didn’t even come close to caring.
  • A Single Samurai, Steven Diamond
    Started okay but I wondered how a single person was going to defeat kaiju, especially a super-sized one as described here. What the author came up with didn’t appeal to me but it might just be that I’m grouchy from all the really crappy crap the Puppies are making me read.
  • On A Spiritual Plain, Lou Antonelli
    I sure this supposed to be spiritual and shit but it just came off as silly. Thankfully it was short.
  • The Parliament of Beasts and Birds, John C. Wright
    I really hope this isn’t the best that JCW has to offer because this wasn’t good. A biblical fairy tale about what the animals do after “Man” is apparently taken to heaven. The best thing about it was that it was fairly short, and even then it wasn’t short enough.
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2015 Hugo Novelette

Posted on 2015-05-19 by Dave

My notes and rankings for the 2015 Hugo Novelette category.

  1. No Award
    Number one in large part because none of these holds a candle to last year’s crop and that’s the only one I have experience with. Seriously, the only good Puppy nomination has been Skin Game and that was number 15 in a series. WTF?
  2. Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium, Gray Rinehart
    Not bad, I think it’s the best of the RP slate so far, which isn’t saying much. An interesting form of “resistance”.
  3. The Day the World Turned Upside Down, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Lia Belt translator
    This author had a really good short work last year but this year’s entry falls short. I loved the idea of the breakup literally turning his world upside down but I thought the story went on too long and the protagonist never really got a clue.
  4. The Journeyman: In the Stone House, Michael F. Flynn
    Okay story about some pseudo-Indians who do Tonto-speak except when they call the only woman in the story “babe”. Yes, they really do. Author really needs to re-think how he writes fight scenes as the one in the story was overdone and boring. I neither know, nor care what the position is called so stop wasting my time and get on with it. That’s another common theme with the RP slate, they’re all desperately in need of editors to tell them their story is buried in crap and they need to excavate.  The one good thing here was that some of the dialog was amusing. I’m a sucker for smart-ass.
  5. The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale, Rajnar Vajra
    You know, I’m just now twigging to “A Golden Age Tale”. So this was intended to read like it came of the 1950s. In that case, kudos, you succeeded. Unfortunately if I want to read something from the 1950s there’s lots of much better stuff to choose from.
  6. Championship B’tok, Edward M. Lerner
    Holy shit this was boring. Part of a longer work, because the Puppies apparently don’t understand what “short” means.
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2015 Hugo Novella

Posted on 2015-05-19 by Dave

My notes and ranking of the 2015 Hugo Novella category.

  1. No Award
    Ranked #1 because nothing even broke three stars (“I like it”) vs three four 3+ star entries last year. If I only rank you “meh” then you don’t get an award.
  2. One Bright Star to Guide Them, John C. Wright
    2 stars / He’s a better writer than a lot of the Puppies noms but his stuff isn’t very interesting. What was up with Sally/Sarah? Did he get confused? He also seems to have issues with originality, this was a Narnia rip-off, the other story was a biblical fable.
  3. Pale Realms of Shade, John C. Wright
    2.5 stars / A noir ghost story that turns into a biblical morality tale. The ghost story was okay but the further it went from that the more boring it got.
  4. The Plural of Helen of Troy, John C. Wright
    2.5 stars / Would be 3.5 if he had stopped before the “Second Intermission”. Instead he kept going and gave us the tremendously confusing and not very interesting back story of how JK hired the PI.
  5. Big Boys Don’t Cry, Tom Kratman
    2 stars / I outgrew MilSF quite a while back (though I still intend to make an exception for Honor Harrington and Hammer’s Slammers) so I was unenthusiastic from page one and it didn’t give me any reason to change my mind.
  6. Flow, Arlan Andrews, Sr.
    1 star / Too long, too boring. Not exactly misogynist but women are only notable when they have breasts (apparently the chicks back home are pretty flat) and only useful as entertainment. Like many of the Whiny Puppy submissions it seems to be part of a larger work. I get the impression that they don’t know how write anything short so they just chop a random piece out of whatever bloated boring book they have laying around, and apparently they have a lot of those laying around.
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2015 Hugo Novel

Posted on 2015-05-19 by Dave

My notes and current rankings for the 2015 Novel category.

  1. Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie
    4 stars / An enjoyable read that left me wondering what I didn’t like about the first one. I’ll have to go finish it and see.
  2. Skin Game, Jim Butcher
    4 stars / A standard Dresden Files book, Harry gets his ass kicked throughout, smarts off constantly, but pulls it out in the end. I really loved the first two or three books but they got repetitive by number five and I lost interest at that point. Not sure that number 15 of a series is really deserving of an award, especially when it doesn’t stand out over it’s predecessors. Also, shouldn’t the “best” novel of the year do something besides just entertain? There’s nothing wrong with entertaining but saying it’s the “best” feels like saying the Kardashians deserve to be famous.
  3. The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette)
    3.5 stars / Good stuff with annoying names and barely there conflicts. Would rank lower if the Puppies had put something better against it. I’ve been wobbling between 3.5 & 4 stars and finally decided on 3.5.
  4. The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu, Ken Liu translator
    2 stars / Not bad but kind of depressing and I had a lot of trouble with the pessimistic scientists. I’m sure there are plenty of those but everyone in this book seemed ready to slit their wrists at the first sign of trouble.
  5. No Award
  6. The Dark Between the Stars, Kevin J. Anderson
    1 star / DNF. Made it through 28% (with a lot of skimming) of this overly wordy tome that time traveled from the 50s and multiplied to five times the necessary length during the trip. Advice to the author: Get an editor who understands the maxim “brevity is the soul of wit”.
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2015 Hugo Fan Writer

Posted on 2015-05-19 by Dave

My notes and current ranking for the 2015 Hugo Fan Writer category.

I never read the Fan Writer stuff from last year and that was my first year with a Hugo packet. If it’s always like this they should drop the award.

  1. No Award
  2. Laura J. Mixon
    She’s a thorough investigator and writes like an engineer (which she is)
  3. —
  4. —
  5. Cedar Sanderson
    Apparently every Fan Writer writes is part of the Mad Genius Club. WTF is with so many of the Puppy noms in this category coming from one web site? Must be a shortage of people who think “correctly”.  So, Cedar Sanderson was the best of sad bunch. I don’t think there was a single “SJW” in there which is a very good thing AFAIC. I agree that the shirt guy shouldn’t be pilloried but I’d also say the shirt was in poor taste for a guy who was involved a scientific milestone that day.
  • Jeffro Johnson
    Likes to review old fiction and compare it to D&D. Learning about the originals of D&D mechanics is kind of interesting but overall, didn’t care much for the sample. Seems a little, um, old fashioned.
  • David Freer
    He started much like a Amanda Green and I didn’t give a shit, then he finished with that “statistical” demonstration on the corruption of the Hugo awards and that was TOTAL bullshit. I agree with his numbers in the case of colored balls placed in a bag, the items in the bag are all equal. But the Hugos aren’t about colored balls, they’re about stories and they are definitely NOT all equal. Not only are the stories themselves different but you’ve got a huge number of readers with their varied tastes.  Freer, and the Puppies in general, seem to be making the mistake of thinking that because they like their noms then everyone should like them too and if those stories aren’t getting nominated it’s because of corruption.  I think, especially after reading this years Puppy nominations, that  it’s because their stuff just isn’t in sync with mainstream tastes. That and it’s not nearly as good as they think it is.
  • Amanda S. Green
    This is just some random blog posts and the first one leads with an SJW comment. I don’t give a shit about SJWs or CHORFs (that’s the Puppies, right?) or whatever. I give a shit about scifi and fantasy books. Even when she talked about those she didn’t say anything interesting.
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