Speaking of gamma males, part of the reason I introduced the matriarchal rabbit society in The Northern Caves was so I could have a character be a gamma rabbit

dimitriarkady:

nostalgebraist:

“I’ve been doing a bit of spring cleaning,” says Miss S., kneeling in front of a Kienholzlike tableau of filth and decay.

You asked about writing tics earlier, I don’t care to dig up the post but ‘tableau’ is one of these for you, to the point where I almost wonder if you’re doing it intentionally.

Do I do this outside of The Northern Caves?  (In that case it was intentional.)

This post is a quote from someone else (tagged #quotes), so it doesn’t count.

(via dimitriarkady-deactivated201610)

[talking about Mundum]

Esther:  (Also my brain hears it and thinks “Moon dom” )

Me:  hahahaha

Esther:  (This guy, who is gonna whip you for not obeying arbitrary moral rules… on the moon?)

Me:  in the celestial realm!

Esther:  Of course!!!!

He is not intereseted in your sublunary concerns

because he is lunary!

Me:  oh my god

andrewhickeywriter:

reddragdiva:

philsandifer:

andrewhickeywriter:

reddragdiva:

stormingtheivory:

I’m never going to get over the fact that people looked at the Sad Puppies getting fucking slaughtered at the Hugos and were like “uh clearly this is a victory for the Sad Puppies”

just, you know, speaking of people existing in another dimension that has only cursory similarities to our own…

the RATIONALIST PUPPIES will surely repeat this success

while spamming their slate with “THIS IS TOTALLY NOT A SLATE HAHA” at the top ‘cos that fools everyone

because this is definitely the way to make people think you’re a good and sensible group of people and not some sort of STUPENDOUS COCKHEAD COLLECTIVE

* * hpmor 2016 * *

and red tidday UP white tidday DOWN 2017

Is there a thing I need to be angry about? This sounds like a thing I should be angry about, but haven’t heard of yet.

(Unless it’s just about Big Yud wanting his fanfic to win best novel)

There’s also a blog post circulating that’s very loudly “not a slate” that consists of a full slate for Best Short Story and a handful of recommendations in other categories of “rationalist” SF.

It’s basically the exact thing you’d expect the rationalist community to do, namely have their sole takeaway from Sad Puppies be “if you set it up very carefully you can get away with ballot stuffing the Hugos.” 

Mainly I’m surprised they’re the only ones so far. I’m still expecting someone on the left to be a complete fucking idiot soon. 

the post in question

from the author of this sociopathic gamergate apologia

and note also the use of the same literary form, i.e. paper thin disclaimer atop social parasite shittiness that makes the world a worse place

for people who did not take the hero of hpmor as a cautionary example

lw.txt

Fuck’s sake.

What’s really annoying is that there’s one thing on there I was definitely planning to nominate myself, and another I’ve been seriously considering (I thought The Northern Caves was excellent, but I’m not sure if it’s SFnal enough to nominate, and I loved Alexander’s story – for all that I disagree with his technolibertarianism, I think he can write). Now I have to seriously think about what the ethical thing to do is.

I can’t wait until E Pluribus Hugo is ratified, so all these fucking idiots who are only half as clever as they think they are stop playing silly buggers and just let SF fandom get back to talking about books.

(Incidentally, I do hope that nobody thought my post about what I may be nominating was an attempt to do this kind of thing. This is one of the many problems with the slates – it means one can’t talk about these things without appearing to be doing the same thing, and if one puts a disclaimer at the top, it looks like you’re doing what the linked post is doing).

FWIW, the explicit call to nominate HPMOR for best novel went out just two days before the Worldcon registration deadline (Jan 31), with a note (sincere or not) that EY didn’t want people to register just for this purpose.  By contrast, Sad Puppies 3 was announced 24 days before the deadline, with an explicit call for people to register.

Then again, EY has been talking about how he’d like HPMOR to win best novel for a long time, so there may be more potential slate voters than the above suggests.  I still imagine they won’t make nearly as much of a splash as SP3, because SP3 had time to go viral (partially via negative responses – all press is good press) well before the registration deadline.

(I realize I have a conflict of interest here, so take this as you will)

Also, @reddragdiva, “social parasite shittiness”???  Am I going to have to give you the talk about not sounding like a 1930s eugenicist reactionary again

(via andrewhickeywriter-deactivated2)

Floornight

lovestwell:

nostalgebraist:

lovestwell:

Floornight is the other web fiction by @nostalgebraist​, besides The Northern Caves, which I recently read and liked a lot. 

In Floornight, scientists figured out that minds (called “souls” throughout) exist independently of brains, which are merely convenient hardware to run minds. There’s weird mind-physics which allows for conscious radiation, transient literal Boltzman minds hovering in space, and splitting a single mind into many shards coexisting in different universes (QM Many-Worlds-like) which can later be reintegrated back, remembering all versions together (this reminded me of Coil’s power in Worm). A small community of scientists study all this on the ocean floor which for some reason is a potent source of non-human mind-radiation.

While the premise is intriguing and much of the tech-building is superb, I didn’t like Floornight overall and abandoned it somewhere around the middle. My main complaint is that it’s very much not tight. I’d call a piece of fiction “tight” if everything in it feels inevitable in-world, everything fits snugly with everything else. Nothing feels ad hoc, made up to advance the plot but not making sense on its own. In Floornight, almost everything is ad hoc and flabby. 

The intriguing sci-fi premise is stretched thin to enable plot twists that abuse its nature. E.g. at some point the entire community is forcibly “reintegrated” into a more “mainstream” reality, but none of them get double memories from their supposed counterparts, as they did before on a smaller scale. (It’s possible that this is explained later, or maybe even at that point and I missed the explanation. But even if there is an explanation, the fact that it’s needed makes it all feel artificial and arbitrary, flabby). Characters behave very unnaturally; they seem to follow emotional scripts preselected by the author, and barely react emotionally to the hugely important events around them, like the aforementioned “reintegration” that cuts them away from the entire world (this is lampshaded a little by the author, but still remains very hard to believe). Everyone is a rather clumsy puppet on a string. 

Some things are excellent. The writing overall is very good. The characters are distinct and well-designed. Terminology, special effects, suspense, all these are great. But I couldn’t look past the very flabby plotting and the NPC-like behavior of the characters as the plot unfolds. By the middle of the book, I was bored with all the characters, my suspension of disbelief was completely shot and I couldn’t see myself caring about what adhocish unmotivated stuff is going to happen next.

It’s quite amazing just how much better TNC is (written just a few months later, I think?). None of the problems above exist in TNC; everything is orders of magnitude more motivated, interconnected, “tight”, confident. 

Thanks for the commentary.  (I mean that – constructive criticism is valuable.  I hope the below doesn’t come off as overly defensive.  I’m mostly trying to clarify where I’m coming from, which may be interesting if you’re wondering how I could produce these two stories in such close succesion.)

I think the “loose” or “ad hoc” nature of Floornight was an inevitable consequence of the kind of story I wanted to write.  I deliberately wrote it as a “kitchen sink” story mixing together every cool idea or plot bunny that came to mind, with the hope that the sheer batshit weirdness, combined with my own enthusiasm for all of it, could create its own sense of wonder.  I tended to err on the side of gluing on new plot elements I liked even when the glue wouldn’t be totally invisble, because my goal was chutzpah and grandeur, not fastidious flawlessness.

 You’re right that TNC is “tighter,” but I don’t feel like this represents any kind of improvement on my part.  The developments in TNC are more sensibly motivated because they’re (for the most part) mundane events happening for familiar reasons among (in most respects) ordinary people; they’re easier to believe because they’re much closer to things we’ve actually seen in our own lives, not because I’ve gotten any better at writing “believable” events.

TNC is a story in which – for most of the text – almost nothing actually happens; Floornight is a story in which, so to speak, almost everything happens.  My hope was that the people and events in Floornight would get sufficiently far from familiar signposts that suspension of disbelief would remain because none of us really knows what it would be like for that stuff to happen anyway – but obviously it is possible for this strategy to fail.

---

The lack of multiple memories in the big reintegration is not ad hoc – it is presented as unexpected, and the characters remark on how surprising it is both at the time and afterwards.  Moreover, it’s not as though I temporarily suspended the “real” rules of the setting in order to make things more convenient for me as a writer; I certainly could have included multiple memories without messing up the plot (and indeed it would allow for some cool possibilities), but that actually wouldn’t fit into the full rules of the setting, and I’d have had to do something ad hoc (!) to make it happen.

I think the real issue here is that I was dropping too much novelty on the reader too fast – I didn’t tell the reader that a large-scale reintegration like that could occur, or show them what a “normal” one would look like, before giving them an unusual case.  I don’t think the inclusion of an unusual case is bad in itself, since after all this is (in part) a story about scientific discovery.

(None of this is to say that there isn’t plenty of ad hoc magic in the story, just that I don’t think this particular example is an instance of it.)

Thanks for the explanations, and no, of course they’re not overly defensive (actually, come to think of it, authors should be allowed to get overly defensive over their works. It’s the least we can do for those poor folks). 

I kinda suspected the lack of multiple memories was explained in the story, and I missed it because I was half-skimming by that time, but I deliberately decided not to go back and reread that part, and instead record the impressions I did end up with. 

What you’re saying about “chutzpah and grandeur” makes a lot of sense, but also, for me, ties into the way I felt characters in Floornight had inappropriately muted emotional reaction to events around them, as if the characters and the events were written separately. If the story was built with “anything goes, aim for maximum wonder”, maybe that’s inevitable, or at least likely to happen. By comparison, think about how much of TNC is descriptions of characters freaking out over something (very believably, too). Doesn’t seem to happen in Floornight much or at all, despite the fact that the wonder-stakes are so much higher (grr, I feel like I’m belaboring this too much and also unfairly since I only read half of the book. OK, I should stop here).

I can’t seem to let TNC go, so let gush a little more about it (I don’t really know what sort or volume of reaction you’d been getting over it, but I’m going to go with the crazy theory that the threshold of boredom over praise of one’s work is very high for most authors). I’m a literature snob, so tend to be disappointed by >90% of fanfics or web fics I try to read. TNC is Good Stuff the way very very few fics ever are. Salbianism is done in a way that’s as creepily effective as anything out of Gene Wolfe or, I don’t know, Pynchon (I’m thinking of “V”). I really think you should try to get it (possibly edited and) published. 

There is a fair amount of freaking out in Floornight, mostly (IIRC) in the later parts.  My justification for the muted responses to the big reintegration (which may just be what you mean by “lampshading”) was that the Sphere staff have self-selected for caring much less than average about people on the surface – they’ve agreed to work in an isolated facility, in most cases for years at a time without leaving, while dealing with dangerous and incompletely understood phenomena (making it less likely that they had loved ones on the surface waiting for them), etc.  If they cared that much about the world beyond the Sphere, they wouldn’t be on the Sphere in the first place.  (Jorge, who is one of the few Sphere employees with more normal social ties, is devastated by the reintegration.)

I’m not sure whether I did a good job depicting this sort of person, but then very few of us are that sort of person, so arguably we don’t have the experience necessary to judge.  But that may be assuming too much, and of course, if it doesn’t ring true to you, it doesn’t ring true, and there’s no solving that.

Thanks for the TNC praise.  I am proud of a lot of the sentence-by-sentence writing, if not so much of some other aspects of the story.  I think getting it published would be difficult, both because of the unusual length (it’s too long to be a novella but it’s a very short novel) and, more importantly, because of the forum sections.  It’s easy for us to ignore this, but I think those sections are really pretty inaccessible to people without the relevant experience.  (E.g. my father, who enjoyed Floornight, started reading TNC and literally could not make it through the very first forum chapter.)

(via lovestwell)

Floornight

lovestwell:

Floornight is the other web fiction by @nostalgebraist​, besides The Northern Caves, which I recently read and liked a lot. 

In Floornight, scientists figured out that minds (called “souls” throughout) exist independently of brains, which are merely convenient hardware to run minds. There’s weird mind-physics which allows for conscious radiation, transient literal Boltzman minds hovering in space, and splitting a single mind into many shards coexisting in different universes (QM Many-Worlds-like) which can later be reintegrated back, remembering all versions together (this reminded me of Coil’s power in Worm). A small community of scientists study all this on the ocean floor which for some reason is a potent source of non-human mind-radiation.

While the premise is intriguing and much of the tech-building is superb, I didn’t like Floornight overall and abandoned it somewhere around the middle. My main complaint is that it’s very much not tight. I’d call a piece of fiction “tight” if everything in it feels inevitable in-world, everything fits snugly with everything else. Nothing feels ad hoc, made up to advance the plot but not making sense on its own. In Floornight, almost everything is ad hoc and flabby. 

The intriguing sci-fi premise is stretched thin to enable plot twists that abuse its nature. E.g. at some point the entire community is forcibly “reintegrated” into a more “mainstream” reality, but none of them get double memories from their supposed counterparts, as they did before on a smaller scale. (It’s possible that this is explained later, or maybe even at that point and I missed the explanation. But even if there is an explanation, the fact that it’s needed makes it all feel artificial and arbitrary, flabby). Characters behave very unnaturally; they seem to follow emotional scripts preselected by the author, and barely react emotionally to the hugely important events around them, like the aforementioned “reintegration” that cuts them away from the entire world (this is lampshaded a little by the author, but still remains very hard to believe). Everyone is a rather clumsy puppet on a string. 

Some things are excellent. The writing overall is very good. The characters are distinct and well-designed. Terminology, special effects, suspense, all these are great. But I couldn’t look past the very flabby plotting and the NPC-like behavior of the characters as the plot unfolds. By the middle of the book, I was bored with all the characters, my suspension of disbelief was completely shot and I couldn’t see myself caring about what adhocish unmotivated stuff is going to happen next.

It’s quite amazing just how much better TNC is (written just a few months later, I think?). None of the problems above exist in TNC; everything is orders of magnitude more motivated, interconnected, “tight”, confident. 

Thanks for the commentary.  (I mean that – constructive criticism is valuable.  I hope the below doesn’t come off as overly defensive.  I’m mostly trying to clarify where I’m coming from, which may be interesting if you’re wondering how I could produce these two stories in such close succesion.)

I think the “loose” or “ad hoc” nature of Floornight was an inevitable consequence of the kind of story I wanted to write.  I deliberately wrote it as a “kitchen sink” story mixing together every cool idea or plot bunny that came to mind, with the hope that the sheer batshit weirdness, combined with my own enthusiasm for all of it, could create its own sense of wonder.  I tended to err on the side of gluing on new plot elements I liked even when the glue wouldn’t be totally invisble, because my goal was chutzpah and grandeur, not fastidious flawlessness.

 You’re right that TNC is “tighter,” but I don’t feel like this represents any kind of improvement on my part.  The developments in TNC are more sensibly motivated because they’re (for the most part) mundane events happening for familiar reasons among (in most respects) ordinary people; they’re easier to believe because they’re much closer to things we’ve actually seen in our own lives, not because I’ve gotten any better at writing “believable” events.

TNC is a story in which – for most of the text – almost nothing actually happens; Floornight is a story in which, so to speak, almost everything happens.  My hope was that the people and events in Floornight would get sufficiently far from familiar signposts that suspension of disbelief would remain because none of us really knows what it would be like for that stuff to happen anyway – but obviously it is possible for this strategy to fail.

The lack of multiple memories in the big reintegration is not ad hoc – it is presented as unexpected, and the characters remark on how surprising it is both at the time and afterwards.  Moreover, it’s not as though I temporarily suspended the “real” rules of the setting in order to make things more convenient for me as a writer; I certainly could have included multiple memories without messing up the plot (and indeed it would allow for some cool possibilities), but that actually wouldn’t fit into the full rules of the setting, and I’d have had to do something ad hoc (!) to make it happen.

I think the real issue here is that I was dropping too much novelty on the reader too fast – I didn’t tell the reader that a large-scale reintegration like that could occur, or show them what a “normal” one would look like, before giving them an unusual case.  I don’t think the inclusion of an unusual case is bad in itself, since after all this is (in part) a story about scientific discovery.

(None of this is to say that there isn’t plenty of ad hoc magic in the story, just that I don’t think this particular example is an instance of it.)

The Northern Caves

lovestwell:

I read The Northern Caves by @nostalgebraist today, in a single sitting. Well, not really. I had chores and responsibilities and stuff, so I sort of stumbled through the evening in a haze, doing this and that and then finding another half hour to stare at my phone, repeat until done.

It’s very good! A short original novel about an online web forum in the early 2000s, centered around an obscure series of ever-longer and ever-weirder fantasy novels. The author of the novels died in 1995, leaving behind a draft of a mammoth and nearly incomprehensible final novel, Finnegans Wake-style, that the community tries to make sense of. During a meetup they organize things go deeply weird and wrong, and the entire novel is a rambling report written a while later by one of the meetup participants, interspersed with typical screenshots from the forum.

Things that the novel does incredibly well: the distinct voices and personalities of the forum participants. The whole early-2000s phpBB-based webforum vibe. The literaty conceit of the series of novels, the central point of their imagined plots, their growing weirdness resulting in obscurity, the excerpts from the novels - all this is done as perfectly as I could have imagined, or better. The plotting and the metaphysics and the ending were not as perfect, and more about that below, but still good. 

The rest of this post is very spoilery, don’t read it now, read the book first.

Keep reading

Thanks for the post!

This is boilerplate, but if you haven’t read Floornight, you should try it.  It is arguably more successful than TNC and it is already done so you won’t have to wait for me to write it.

Spoilers below

Keep reading