In the unlikely event that Winds of Winter comes out before you’ve finished reading the first five books – and the last we’ve heard is that it will be finished sometime in 2016 – you could still expect to have several years before A Dream of Spring comes out. And that’s assuming he sticks to his current plan of keeping it to seven books. It was originally going to be a short story, then a novella, then a novel, then a trilogy…
I’m basically hoping I get a chance to finish reading it all before the total collapse of the biosphere.
Martin has told the writer-producers how the whole things wraps up, but they’re going off book even moreso in S6. Supposedly they’ll end up in the same place – but take different paths, kill off different people*, etc.
* Unless ALL of them die off, which doesn’t seem improbably for Martin.
No, I dropped out in my first semester so I feel great!
One of my recommendation letter writers was more miffed.
I was still working 60% time at Mozilla in Silicon Valley, married and recovering from a multi-month viral illness acquired in Egypt. Needless to say, I felt a little stressed and I then realized that I’d have to back to tech, probably, because there isn’t a lot of work in Buddhist Studies,
Yeah, but then you’d have a degree in buddhist studies (teach at a uni?)… Also, you worked at Mozilla and acquired an illness in Egypt… your life is far more interesting than mine!
In the security program manager at Mozilla l. I’ve been here eight years in June. I also manage a team with six people but I’m not going to be professional scholar.
SP/RP have introduced party politics into what was an election among independents. And by doing so, they may have permanently destroyed the Hugos, which, while a popularity contest among fans, at least told you what works were popular among fans.
After all, party politics works. It’s why they’re everywhere. Rather than having to know anything about a candidate, you simply have to know what the party stands for. And that’s a whole lot less work than actually evaluating a bunch of single candidates.
Once you’ve introduced a slate, people aren’t voting for a book, they’re voting for a statement. And since a lot more people are interested in making a statement (mostly about how awful the other side is) than are interested in reading and judging books, you’ll get a lot more voters. Which means that non-slate works won’t have a chance, and the Hugo’s are dead as even a quasi-evaluation of what works are the most popular among fans.
I think the only hope for the Hugo’s survival is for this year’s awards to basically be shut down with “No Awards” and a cancellation of the ceremony. That has at least the possibility that no author will consent to be associated with a slate. Note, this says nothing about the quality of the works involved, or the culpability of Sad Puppies or nominated works. I see no point in trying to cast blame, slight SP supported works, etc. The drastic action I’m hoping for isn’t punitive, it’s entirely about killing slate voting while there’s still some slim hope that it doesn’t become permanent.
Otherwise, expect a Democrat and Republican Hugo slate (possibly with different names) within a year or two. And each slate will tell us that to abandon a slate system and vote on individual works is to surrender to the other side. And they’ll be right.
Yesterday both Marko Kloos (novel nom) and Annie Bellet (short story nom) withdrew from nominations because they were on the slate. It should be noted that, like with many of the authors on the slate, they did nothing wrong and don’t have a vile history of bigoted statements or anything like that (quite the opposite, if anything), and I believe they weren’t asked before being put on the slate, they just don’t want to be associated with it and would prefer to win an award, if they are due one, honestly.
My gut is that this is not a broader trend, that most of the rest will stay in (I’m not going to say that this is definitively the case, but if there WERE people who were included on the slate solely for cover so that the SPs could say “See, we’re diverse, we don’t care what your politics are”, these would probably be those people) and that the SP will spin it as “see, the liberal conspiracy bullied them into withdrawing.”
Still, I think it was a good move, and I hope others follow.
Kloos had a few not so nice things to say about Beale but it was clear that even if he won the award, people would forever wonder if it was only because of these puppy campaigns and not because of any merit.
Indeed, the letter from Annie Bellet was very sad. The collateral damage of stopping this is very real.
However, I bear no animus against anyone (okay, maybe VD, but he seems to enjoy it).
I don’t care if people did consent to be on the slate. Nor do I care about the quality of their work, or whether they should have received a nomination, etc. Nor do I care about who set up the slate. This is not an us against them, no matter how tempting.
This entirely about whether we can stop the “slate-virus” before it gets off the ground and makes non-slate works winning an award about as common as independents winning in the U.S. Senate races.
The sniping at nominated works, or nominated authors, or slate voters, or anything else only makes the central problem more difficult. Recriminations can wait (and hopefully be forgotten about) until the real threat is dealt with.
I can get that. It’s hard to get distracted on a computer with likely no internet access and very limited (by modern standards) multitasking abilities. And if all the controls have joined your muscle memory over the years…
While I have many complaints about modern word processors, I’d also heard it argued that word processors enabled innovations in long-form writing. For instance, they facilitate writing parallel narratives, with different point-of-view characters, because it’s easier to compare the texts side-by-side. Newer tools make it easy to keep track of notes, such as research, or detailed notes on a secondary world.
In short, I suspect GRRM is trying to write in a very modern style, but refraining from using the tools best suited to facilitating that style, and that may be slowing him down.
I am heartened to hear Marko Kloos is pulling out because he he wants no part in this cluster fuck. I am also really sad to hear about too. I understand why he did it, but it is such a downer because I think he deserved to be in there. He really is a fantastic up and coming writer. His military SF is, hands down, the most interesting military SF I have ready in a very long time. I haven’t read the rest of the nominations and so can’t say he is the best on the list, but he sure as hell deserved to be there. I truly hope the puppies fuck off next year.
