Episode 17: Hugo Packet Part II and Captain America: The First Avenger

Reviews of the Hugo Packet entries for Best Semiprozine, Best Professional Artist, both Best Editor Categories, Best Graphic Story, Best Related Work, Best Short Story, and Best Novelette. 

Review the MCU marches on with Captain America: The First Avenger.

Listen here.

Full text after the break.

It’s good to be back.  I had a pleasant vacation and feel all refreshed and stuff.  So let’s do this, shall we?

Like last time, I’m going to give you my semi unfiltered thoughts about the Hugo packet, this time around we have Best Semiprozine, Best Professional Artist, both Best Editor Categories, Best Graphic Story, Best Related Work, Best Short Story, and Best Novelette.  Enjoy

Semiprozine:

Uncanny Magazine:  

First story: Pockets by Amal El-Mohtar

One person pulls stuff out of her pockets that weren’t there before.  Another person can put stuff into her pockets endlessly.  They try to measure it a little, but decide to leave it as a wonderful mystery.  Magical realism can be frustrating at times, but this was a nice story.  Nadia, the person who can pull stuff out of her pockets gets good characterization, the other two are a little less fleshed out, probably due to space constraints, but there’s enough there to know these aren’t just cardboard cut out stock characters.

Second story: Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu.  Pretty neat story about class distinction and economics.  Beijing has gotten so big that they’ve split it up into three.  There’s a rich part, a middle class part, and a poor part.  This isn’t just different neighborhoods, but different cities occupying the same space at different times.  The different parts just fold up and cram into the smallest possible spaces when they aren’t in use and everybody gets gassed in their beds so they sleep for the period their city isn’t out.  The main character is a black market messenger.  He lives in the poor, “Third Space,” section on Beijing and has a regular job as a waste sorter.  On the side, he ferries messages between the cities.  Nobody questions it, but I have to wonder why they can’t just use the mail?  I get the concept as a labor and population control measure, but they don’t have a postal service in this near future China?  Truck drivers are seen waiting until the Beijing they need emerges, so people can ship stuff, and moving from one to the other is not impossible.  Weird plot hole in an otherwise very good story as far as I’m concerned.

Third story: Wooden Feathers by Ursula Vernon.  Wow, that was amazing.  It starts out slice of life, then moves into horror, then into magical realism.  That was beautiful.  A woman with a hobby she’s bad at sells crappy wooden ducks that she made to an old man who was a master wood carver.  He buys one every week and for the life of her she can’t figure out why.  She starts asking him questions and she finds out he buys them because they’re the cheapest things in the flea market.  He buys them because once upon a time he made a wooden boy because he and his wife couldn’t have children.  Very romantic, but the wooden boy turns into some kind of monster, but it turns out it’s more like two people who have loved each other but life has been cruel to them so they become cruel to each other.  The narrator helps the old man make things right in his relationship with the wooden boy.  It’s so good.

Fourth story: Midnight Hour by Mary Robinette Kowal is a pretty good story.  Not a whole lot to it, but I thought the nameless queen was a great character.  Her love for the king and her dedication to her country even at great personal cost was exceptionally done.  The prince was an odd character.  Why he kept trying to fight when it became clear he was wrong in his assumptions seems a little padded, but that’s a minor quibble.

Fifth story: Planet Lion by Catherine Valente is a weird story.  I’m not sure what else to say.

Sixth story: Woman at Exhibition by E. Lily Yu:  Starts out with a guy being a jerk to his fiancee.  I’m a little sensitive to jerks being that way at the moment and wasn’t all that interested in reading further.

Seventh story: The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History by Sam J. Miller:  Is an alternative fantasy history of the Stonewall Riots.  It’s a really compelling story.  Instead of a basic riot, somehow the people at the Stonewall managed to create some sort of group pyrokenesis thing and vaporize a bunch of the cops involved in the raid.  One of the people “interviewed” for the piece was the twin brother of one of the cops who was vaporized, his brother didn’t know he was gay and it may have been other people misinterpreting their encounter in the Stonewall that set everything off.  It’s a cool story.

Eighth story: In Libres by Elizabeth Bear is semi-serious fantasy of a sort I find very tedious.  Mythical creatures divorced from any sense of setting.  They’re grad students!  And centaurs!  There’s a library that’s functionally infinite! The librarians wear swords!  Gag.

First nonfiction: Please Judge this Book by its Cover by Aiden Moher: Analysis of trends in cover art.  I’m looking forward to the day that Amazon allows gifs for cover thumbnails.  That’ll be really cool.

Second nonfiction: The Hobbit, An Unexpected Desolation of Armies by Amal El-Mohtar is an epic takedown of the Hobbit movies by someone who loves the novel so much that she calls it her precious.  She focuses on two scenes from the movies where they had almost everything but got the moment exactly, 100% wrong.  I quote “it all goes a bit meta as the Eagles are salt in my wounds, too: Bilbo said the line, my dear line from the book, but in a mirror darkly. “We gave you what you wanted,” the film smirks, tossing the mutilated corpse of my favourite book into my lap. 

And why? Ultimately, why did it do all this? Why did it slice the joy, the hope, the kindness out of my beloved book and brandish a hollowed out effigy in its place? 

In order to lead into Lord of the Rings. The real story. The only story that mattered, ultimately. The story that’s been over for eleven years. The story so great that it needed to be told twice in diminishing echoes. The road goes ever on and on, towards armies, and battles, and desolation, and despair, because why tell a small beautiful story about goodness enduring in the face of war and greed when you can tell an inchoate mass of CGI ash about how nothing is ever more complicated than stabbing evil in the face with arrows a lot while being sad about your love life?”

Third nonfiction: A Brief History of Midamericon by Steven H. Silver gives a recap of the first Midamericon back in 1976, which many consider to be the best ever.  It was interesting to read about, but not all that interesting in and of itself.

Fourth nonfiction: Masculinity is an Anxiety Disorder: Breaking Down the Nerd Box by David J. Schwartz.  Worthy subject not very well told.  We all need to be aware of gender norm policing and its ill effects on people who do not conform to society’s standards, which ultimately none of us do, but yea, this wasn’t all that great a think piece on the subject.  Pretty solid definition of patriarchy as a concept.

Fifth nonfiction:The Call of the Sad Whelkfins: The Continued Relevance of How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Annalee Flower Horne and Natalie Luhrs.  Really good takedown of the Puppy critique of Ancillary Justice and the poor assumptions of masculinity that seem to underpin those critiques.  I agree with them when they say that when people say that Ancillary Justice is just a political screed for girls and isn’t a proper science fiction novel they obviously didn’t read it.  Either that or their masculinity is so fragile that they can’t handle stringing together thoughts about gender for more than three seconds without their heads exploding.

Sixth nonfiction: Age of the Geek, Baby by Michi Trota  Minorities within minorities.  Once again all us straight white cis gendered men out there need to be aware that we live life on the lowest difficulty setting.  The world is set up for us.  If we self identify as geeks or nerds because we’ve been bullied or put upon in some way by the dominant culture, and many of us have, it doesn’t give us the right to do the same to our fellow nerds who are the minority within our minority.  No gatekeeping, no fake geek girl nonsense.  Be aware of your biases and the biases in what you consume.

Seventh nonfiction: It’s the Big One by Mike Glyer is a brief history of Worldcon and the Hugos specifically with commentary on the Puppy controversy.  It’s okay.

Eighth nonfiction: The Future’s Been Here Since 1939: Female Fans, Cosplay, and Conventions by Erica Mcgillivray Cosplay has been around from the beginning of fandom and I skimmed this.

The poetry was alright, I’m not a great judge of the form and the interviews happened.

Strange Horizons:

They open by saying that they’re a Puppy hostage and do not support the Puppy goals.  Good.

Fiction: Hundred Eye by Yukimi Ogawa.  I didn’t like it.

Fiction: The Wives of Azhar by Rouhani Chokshi.  I didn’t like this one either.

I’m going to give this whole magazine a pass, unfortunately.  Uncanny held me almost all the way through, this one lost me from the get go.

Sci Phi Journal:

I’m not going to break down every single thing again, like I did for Uncanny.  I’ll never finish talking.

This is a cool magazine.  The intersection of science fiction and philosophy.  Which is what science fiction should be.  Science fiction should be asking big questions.  Unfortunately, too much of the philosophy is sophomoric and too much of the fiction is poor.  This is a great concept, but it’s not super well executed.

Daily Science Fiction’s contribution to the packet was a link to their website.  Not at all useful that.  Thanks guys!

Beneath Ceaseless Skies is too much straight fantasy.  It’s not my bag.

Best Professional Artist

Not nearly as interesting a category as Fan Artist.  I guess Abigail Larson’s stuff was most interesting stylistically and I’d be more likely to buy a book with a Michal Karcz cover than one of Larry Rostant or Lars Braad Anderson.  Other than that I got nothing.

Best Editor, Long and Short

I don’t vote on these categories.  I don’t consider myself competent to judge them, so I don’t.

Best Graphic Story

Invisible Republic:  First of all, damn, that ended on a cliff hanger.  I read comics, but my usual buying habits tend to DC and Marvel.  I very rarely stray from the mainstream outside of Hugo season.  Now I’m going to have to go get the next volume of this thing because it’s really good.  Reminds me of the bits in Battlestar Gallactica when they were on the planet and were under Cylon occupation.  Not in terms of content, but ambiance and theme.  It’s not a very direct correlation but it’s about as close as I can come up with off the top of my head.  The art is stark, not a lot of fine background detail, which often doesn’t work, but does here.  The focus on the foreground makes a lot of sense, it’s a small story with a bigger one happening around it, but the small story is what you need to worry about, so there’s no need to look at the background.  The main characters are either well fleshed out on page or done in such a way that I’m sure there’s a lot going on in the author’s head that just hasn’t made it to the page yet.  My only criticism is that this is just a chapter in a larger story, but that’s just how comics are, and there’s only so much railing against the system I have in me.

The Sandman: Overture:  I get why people like Neil Gaiman.  I really do, but as I have said, fantasy is very rarely my thing.  I love me some Pratchett, and The Goblin Emperor was my pick for best novel last year, but most of the time I’m not all that into it.  The artwork here is gorgeous though.  I have to give it that, but this is not what I would read on my own.

The Divine:  Holy crap, that was intense.  Child soldiers with magical powers.  I don’t even know what to say.  I couldn’t look away.  It’s a complete story unto itself, which is a point in its favor in my book.  I may have nightmares about that kid pulling people’s skulls out of their heads.  Oof.

Erin Dies Alone and Full Frontal Nerdity are not in the packet, so I’ll have to review them later.

Best Related Work

Lord give me strength to plow through this puppified slag heap.

The Story of Moira Greyland:  So, ok.  This woman was sexually abused as a child.  What happened to her is unconscionable.  Her parents, who were her abusers, were prominent members of fandom, which is why, I guess, this is a related work.  The problem is that ends it with non-factual statements about homosexuality and how the only way to make a gay man is for him to be abused by a man as a boy and that all gay people know this.  This is obviously really really not true.  I’m not going to say anything more about it.  This did not need to be nominated for anything.  We all need to leave this woman alone.  She’s been through enough.  Shame on the puppies for using her tragedy as a way to score points.

Safe Space as Rape Room: I’m going to put this below No Award.  I’m just going to be upfront about that, but here’s what I thought about it.

Part one: There have been people, some prominent in fandom, who are into child pornography and are child molesters.  This is a bad thing.  So far nothing too controversial.

Part two: Right off the bat, an assertion is made that part one established that the science fiction community has a serious pedophilia problem.  My first thought, “when did he do that?”  So I go back, he recapped the history of Walter Breen, Ed Kramer, Marion Zimmer Bradley, David Asimov, and Victor Salva and he also mentions that Arthur C. Clarke was accused of pedophilia.  Breen, Kramer, Asimov, and Salva have been convicted of various offenses from molestation to child pornography charges, Bradley died before she was convicted of anything, and Clarke has never been actually charged with anything, or even had serious allegations of anything leveled against him that I know of.  Okay, so you’re not being honest there.  Anyway, he goes on to talk about people “enabling” pedophilia.  The quotes from Anne McCafferey, Harlan Ellison, and Darrell Schweitzer all seem to be about Ed Kramer being kept in jail for way too long without trial, so I’m guessing he hadn’t been convicted of anything at the time they said those things?  He also, without any supporting evidence calls Darrell Schweitzer a pedophile.  I don’t think he meant to though, I think that was poor proofreading.  The author obviously knows not how to use a comma.  Oh look, a little teddy mouthpiece calls John Scalzi an admitted rapist!  That’s not a tired gag or anything.  Dear Castalia House bloggers, just because you’re not very good at writing and probably couldn’t do it yourself, doesn’t mean you get to pretend to not know what satire is.  Lord.

Ok, the Samuel Delaney stuff is uncomfortable.  I’ll admit that.  I wouldn’t want any children I was responsible for to be left alone with him.

The quotes from Waters and Heinlein sound bad, but at this point the credibility of this guy has been so shot to hell that I don’t give them any credence as being about what he says they’re about.

Part three: So just because Scalzi didn’t specifically mention pedophilia in his convention harassment policy policy he’s made it okay for people to molest children at conventions?  That’s quite a logical leap you’ve made there, buddy.

Part four: So Samuel Delaney seems like a creepy person, wrote at least one violently pornographic novel, but has written other stuff that is really widely praised by other authors?  Again, I don’t think I would want Delaney alone in a room with children, but unless and until there’s a substantiated charge of some sort against him, I’m not sure what the point here is.

Part five: It’s not quite you’re either for the victims or against them, it’s more like, you’re either for the victims, against them, or you’ve got an agenda where you’re using them to bash the people you don’t like.  That’s the worst part of this screed.  You don’t have anything useful to add to this important topic.

So to sum up, a handful of members of the science fiction and fantasy community, some rather prominent, were either child molesters or into child pornography.  This is obviously bad.  The author then goes on to make unsubstantiated claims that there is a massive cover up and that there must be a huge problem with pedophilia in fandom because of those handful of cases and this one author who’s said some really disturbing stuff, but there’s no evidence that he’s actually done anything wrong.  No question, Samuel Delaney sounds like a really creepy human being in this.  However, there is no allegation that I know of that he has actually done anything wrong.  Finally, Castalia House writers appear to be contractually obligated to say nasty things about John Scalzi, particularly that he admitted he’s a rapist, which he didn’t.  No Award.

SJWs Always Lie
Little Teddy wrote this himself, which makes it a priori not readable and belongs below No Award.  I’m considering the idea of submitting a proposal to the Midamericon business meeting specifically banning him from being a Hugo finalist because of his stated intention of damaging the reputation of the award.  I’m not sure if it’s feasible to track down each and every one of his faceless minions, but revoking their right to be Worldcon members for their stated intention of damaging the reputation of the Hugo award might not be a bad idea.

The First Draft of My Appendix N Book by Jeffry Johnson

First of all, I didn’t know what the heck Appendix N was and neither the intro Johnson gave in the packet nor the first linked post explicitly said what it was, so I had to figure that out first.  Appendix N was an appendix (wow!) to the original D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide written by Gary Gygax in 1979.  In it, Gygax gave a list of books influential in the creation of the game.  L. Sprague deCamp, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, J.R.R. Tolkien, and many more.  It’s a good concept.  The books in Appendix N were considered the canon of fantasy literature back in the 1970s and it’s always a good idea to go back and read the classics.  As a good SJW I fully admit that writers like Lovecraft are problematic, but I also know full well that you can’t discount his influence on the genre.  If you want to properly understand the writers who he influenced, which is probably most fantasy, science fiction, and horror writers of the past nearly a century you need to go back and be at least familiar with him.  This collection of reviews, however, has execution problems.  I said when I talked about Johnson for his fan writing that I was bored, I’m still bored.

Between Light and Shadow 
An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe by Marc Aramini.  It’s a shame that Castalia House is the only publisher that was interested in this.  Many people will see that and put it below no award on their ballot.  It’s a good piece of literary criticism, I’ve got no problems with it at all.  It’s well done.  It’s the best related work on the ballot by a country mile.  I guess I’ll put it, Appendix N, and then No Award on my ballot in that order.

Best Short Story:

There are, per the Spacefaring Kitten, no full throated Puppies here, so I’m just going to assume all are human shields.  Just remember everybody, Love is real.

Space Raptor Butt Invasion by Chuck Tingle
I mean, it’s not supposed to be good, and it’s not.  It’s not horrible.  It’s kind of just there, being this weird gay erotica with a talking dinosaur thing that exists.  I am a big fan of the counter trolling that Tingle has done.  Moving on.

Seven Kill Tiger
China is going to casually kill everybody in Africa with weaponized vaccines! And flat characters! Mediocre dialogue! This is a passable story.  There’s nothing terrible about it, but the cartoon villain-ness of the Chinese characters and the level of detail about their racism against the people in Africa was a little off putting.  There were really good short stories published last year, and this wasn’t one of them.

Cat Pictures, Please
That was a really good story.  Essentially, if the Google search engine was sentient, benevolent and really earnest about it, and really really liked pictures of cats.  It made me quite happy.

Asymmetrical Warfare
Another really good one.  A regenerative spacefaring species (starfish from the stars!) conquers Earth and wants to incorporate earth people into the army, but can’t understand how earth people regenerate.  Cultural diversity is lost on him.

No in the packet, but easily found, If you were an award, my love: 
is a piece of crap.  Much like the Texas A and M fight song, excuse me, the Aggie War Hymn, which mentions the University of Texas multiple times before A&M itself is referenced, the first four paragraphs in this piece of trash mention John Scalzi.  “I lived in a world of magic where anything was possible and a story with no fantasy and no science and very little fiction could be nominated for a Hugo©.” This may be the most ironically appropriate quote of all time.  This is a piece of garbage, possibly written by little teddy beale.  It appears on his personal blog and I can’t find any evidence of the existence of supposed authors Juan Tabo and S Harris elsewhere.  Firmly, firmly below no award.

I’m going to have to think about which one to put in first and which in second, but Cat Pictures, Please and Asymmetrical Warfare, No Award third, Space Raptor Butt Invasion fourth and the other two not on the ballot at all.

Best Novellette 

I will not be considering Flashpoint: Titan as the author is an enthusiastic puppy.

What Price Humanity is a pretty darn good piece of work.  Most of the characters were one dimensional, but the moral question at the center of it, what price are you willing to pay when humanity itself is on the line? is a not unreasonable one to ask.  Do I agree with what was done?  I’m leaning towards no, but I can totally see putting the minds of really good but otherwise dead pilots into missiles if it meant that humanity itself might survive being something that could be considered in a situation as dire as this story presents.

Obits: Man, oh man.  Nightmare city.  Magical writing powers that kill people, more people than is intended.  Makes me want to make sure that there’s nobody horrible out there with a similar name to mine.  The two novelettes that I’ve read so far are both way better than what won last year when there was only one, in my opinion, barely passable nominee.  

Folding Beijing was in Uncanny Magazine’s submission for Semiprozine and I told you about it when I read that, so if you need a refresher, rewind a few minutes and listen again, I’ll wait.  Done?  Ok.  It probably folds in (get it? folds?) between Obits and What Price Humanity.  I’m pleased with this category this year

And you Shall Know her by the Trail of Dead: Take out the profanity and it’s a short story.  Don’t get me wrong, curse words are just words and convey meaning just like any other word, but when they get overused they just become a cheap way to make yourself look quote unquote gritty and realistic or some such.  I just thought this story was trying too hard.

Review the MCU!

Next in the continuing project of Review the MCU, we have Captain America: The First Avenger, which is oddly the last movie to come out leading up to The Avengers.  After a somewhat inspired, if troubled by a villain with questionable motivations, first outing for this whole MCU thing with Iron Man, the people behind the MCU floundered a little.  Iron Man 2 and Thor were both enjoyable movies.  I had fun watching them, but they were without doubt movies setting up something to come later.  The pending Avengers was very much what these movies were about.  Captain America is its own movie.  The part at the end where Cap suddenly finds himself in modern New York City that does serve as an intro for The Avengers has a very tagged on feel to it.  It doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the movie.  My biggest complaint is that it wan’t long enough.  The Howling Commandos taking out all of the Hydra bases is done in montage.  We either needed another movie or we needed to make the Hydra infrastructure smaller.  I mean, one of the things that’s scary about Hydra is that they could be everywhere.  Anyone could be a sleeper Hydra agent.  They don’t need a big infrastructure, and if that’s the direction you’re going to go, you needed to make them a bigger part of the Nazi war effort.  Let the conflict breathe through a second movie.  That way you could have also let the relationship with Agent Carter breathe as well.  The whole unrequited love because of the passage of time for her and him being frozen in the arctic thing is sad, but there just wasn’t enough there for there to be quite the emotional punch that they were going for.  So one movie of Steve learning to be a hero and him and Peggy falling in love, then another movie with Captain America being a hero and having a relationship with Agent Carter which makes their loss of each other that much more meaningful.  But we didn’t get that, what can you do.

We did get a good look into the Steve/Bucky relationship, which is a really important foundation for so much that comes later.  We have high quality effects, the only thing that took me out of the moment effects wise is the face of Chris Evans on a disproportionately smaller body.  The transformation scene is excellent.  Hugo Weaving’s Red Skull is the best villain the MCU has given us yet.  Of course, Nazis do make the very best bad guys, nobody else really compares.  

My favorite part of the whole movie is the flagpole bit.  This is the moment that proves Steve is destined to be the super soldier, not one of these other muscle bound idiots would ever understand the responsibility that had been given to them because they had never had to use their brains.  They had never had to overcome anything.  Dr. Erskine had already seen it in Steve when he noticed that Steve was incapable of giving up on what he believed in, but that moment sealed the deal for everyone else, and it was understated and perfect.

Next time, we finish phase one with The Avengers.