Charlie's Diary

[ Site Index] [ Feedback ]

Tue, 23 Mar 2004 Wow, it's a live one Yesterday I wrote a review of Bruce Sterling's forthcoming novel The Zenith Angle in Slashdot. Slashdot discussions are frequently banal flamefests, but this comment takes the biscuit. (Kudos to Feòrag for drawing it to my attention.) It's surprisingly grammatical for a slashdot flame, which on its own is enough to make me smell a rat -- but the way it rapidly accelerates in an outward-bound direction from terra firma, before losing contact with reality as it goes ballistic, makes me suspect that this is not your usual slashdot-reading troll but something far rarer and more interesting: Perhaps the single worst symptom of the general level of incompetence throughout the publishing industry remains the odious Teresa Nielsen Hayden. An editor who dotes on calling writers "twerps" and "idiots," she adores infantile name-calling like "auctorial insanity." Meanwhile, Hayden's own spavined prose sticks to the ear like congealed bacon fat, riddled with "to be" constructions of the kind that would embarrass a high school essayist. Don't get me wrong. Excellent writers abound in science fiction - they just can't get published. Kathe Koje and Carter Scholz some to mind -- but, alas...you guessed it. These superb writers barely squeeze into print once per leap year, while third-rate wannabes like Bruce Sterling and burn-outs who've made a career of rehashing their one good novel like William Gibson , and inept thugs like Teresa Nielsen Hayden rise to the top of the heap. Whimper. Where to begin ...? This has got to be a troll. Megatrope isn't so much wrong-headed as travelling at high subsonic speed down an alien reality tunnel: the thumbnail description of Gibson's recent novels doesn't bear any resemblance to the books I read -- is Megatrope somehow confusing Gibson with Samuel Delaney? Moreover Megatrope registered their slashdot ID very recently and has never posted another comment or, indeed, anything. But there's more: Megatrope is simply too damned literate to be your normal slashdot reading gruntmonkey. There's an axe-grinding agenda at work here, and it smells highly fishy. The authors Megatrope likes are indeed good at their trade, but blaming TNH for their absence from print implies that publishing is some kind of zero-sum game, and one editor could somehow swing the entire publishing industry around and force everyone to ditch the odious grandfathers of cyberpunk, in order to replace them with Megatrope's idea of something good, thus reforming the genre. It's ridiculous, on the face of it -- and indeed, Megatrope's real plaint is that Teresa Neisen Hayden is responsible for the state of SF publishing as we know it. Smell the heady aroma of crank-case lube emanating from the slashdot flame! For see, Megatrope's real complaint isn't that they doesn't like Bruce Sterling's novels, it's that evil New York editors are keeping the Good Stuff out of print. I suppose I should close by saying that the weirdest aspect of the whole business is that Megatrope is actually quite good at the ragged-assed polemic (even if their opinion of various recent novels are about 80% divorced from consensus reality.) Indeed, as Megatrope writes: Bruce Sterling excels, all right...but not as a novelist. His speciality? The chautauqua. A hallelujah-I-done-found-Jesus William Jennings Bryan old-fashioned rabble-rousing speech. Sterling does great chautauqua. His rip-roaring rodomontade "A Contrarian View Of Open Source" remains by orders of magnitude the best piece of persiflage Sterling ever wrote. This is halfway true, but as a paragraph it works equally well if you file off the serial numbers and drop Megatrope's own name in. It's easier to write a short, tight, controlled rant than a novel; after all, in a novel you've got room for the discursive structure to go all over the place and wander in and out of its own intestines before tying itself in a knot and dying of the literary equivalent of toxic megacolon. Right? Which leads me to ask, is Megatrope by any chance an embittered refugee from the Tor slushpile? And does their arrival on a slashdot thread I started mean that I'm about to pick up my very own critical stalker? [Link (caution, flammable)] [Link(review][Discuss writing] posted at: 17:31 | path: /writing | permanent link to this entry How Not To Do It (Links) Wow. That Salon magazine piece on the midlist writer's quandry has really triggered some foaming and pontificating by real midlist writers. Here's a sample of Nick Mamatas venting: The following do not necessarily make you wise: getting cancer, growing up po', growing up wealthy but in a former imperial holding, having a miscarriage, marrying well, paying $275 per square foot for an apartment, extramarital affairs, being very well-read, having a blog with lots of readers, living out in the woods and peeing in a creek, worrying aloud about how authentic you are, declaring that you'll leave the country if a Republican is elected, and giving birth to an autist. (Go read the rest; you know you want to.) Over in the blue corner, John Scalzi is also getting irritable: Articles like this just enrage the hell out of me and make me think that my tribe is populated by jerks with a sense of entitlement the size of a hot air balloon (and as subject to the random winds). Are authors as a class this disconnected to the real world? My personal experience tells me no, but then again most of the writers I know are genre writers, who despite their fanciful subject matter seem to be grounded in the realities of the economics of writing books. I doubt this woman writes science fiction or romance. And he also has some kick-ass general advice for authors. Finally, Teresa weighs in in Making Light, which means the rest of us puny mortals can relax because The Authority Has Spoken. Or something like that. The comments, in particular, are worth reading because Teresa has probably got more jobbing midlist authors in her regular correspondents than Jane Austen Doe has met in her whole damn career. And, funnily enough, most of them are being rude about Doe's apparent sense of entitlement. [Discuss writing] posted at: 11:30 | path: /writing | permanent link to this entry

specials: Is SF About to Go Blind? -- Popular Science article by Greg Mone Unwirer -- an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction Inside the MIT Media Lab -- what it's like to spend a a day wandering around the Media Lab "Nothing like this will be built again" -- inside a nuclear reactor complex Quick links: RSS Feed (Moved!) Who am I? Contact me Buy my books: (FAQ) Missile Gap Via Subterranean Press (US HC -- due Jan, 2007) The Jennifer Morgue Via Golden Gryphon (US HC -- due Nov, 2006) Glasshouse Via Amazon.com (US HC -- due June 30, 2006) The Clan Corporate Via Amazon.com (US HC -- out now) Accelerando Via Amazon.com (US HC) Via Amazon.com (US PB -- due June 27, 2006) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK HC) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK PB) Free download The Hidden Family Via Amazon.com (US HC) Via Amazon.com (US PB) The Family Trade Via Amazon.com (US HC) Via Amazon.com (US PB) Iron Sunrise Via Amazon.com (US HC) Via Amazon.com (US PB) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK HC) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK PB) The Atrocity Archives Via Amazon.com (Trade PB) Via Amazon.co.uk (Trade PB) Via Golden Gryphon (HC) Via Amazon.com (HC) Via Amazon.co.uk (HC) Singularity Sky Via Amazon.com (US HC) Via Amazon.com (US PB) Via Amazon.com (US ebook) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK HC) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK PB) Toast Via Amazon.com Via Amazon.co.uk Some webby stuff I'm reading: [ Engadget ] [ Gizmodo ] [ The Memory Hole ] [ Boing!Boing! ] [ Futurismic ] [ Walter Jon Williams ] [ Making Light (TNH) ] [ Crooked Timber ] [ Junius (Chris Bertram) ] [ Baghdad Burning (Riverbend) ] [ Bruce Sterling ] [ Ian McDonald ] [ Amygdala (Gary Farber) ] [ Cyborg Democracy ] [ Body and Soul (Jeanne d'Arc)  ] [ Atrios ] [ The Sideshow (Avedon Carol) ] [ This Modern World (Tom Tomorrow) ] [ Jesus's General ] [ Mick Farren ] [ Early days of a Better Nation (Ken MacLeod) ] [ Respectful of Otters (Rivka) ] [ Tangent Online ] [ Grouse Today ] [ Hacktivismo ] [ Terra Nova ] [ Whatever (John Scalzi) ] [ GNXP ] [ Justine Larbalestier ] [ Yankee Fog ] [ The Law west of Ealing Broadway ] [ Cough the Lot ] [ The Yorkshire Ranter ] [ Newshog ] [ Kung Fu Monkey ] [ S1ngularity ] [ Pagan Prattle ] [ Gwyneth Jones ] [ Calpundit ] [ Lenin's Tomb ] [ Progressive Gold ] [ Kathryn Cramer ] [ Halfway down the Danube ] [ Fistful of Euros ] [ Orcinus ] [ Shrillblog ] [ Steve Gilliard ] [ Frankenstein Journal (Chris Lawson) ] [ The Panda's Thumb ] [ Martin Wisse ] [ Kuro5hin ] [ Advogato ] [ Talking Points Memo ] [ The Register ] [ Cryptome ] [ Juan Cole: Informed comment ] [ Global Guerillas (John Robb) ] [ Shadow of the Hegemon (Demosthenes) ] [ Simon Bisson's Journal ] [ Max Sawicky's weblog ] [ Guy Kewney's mobile campaign ] [ Hitherby Dragons ] [ Counterspin Central ] [ MetaFilter ] [ NTKnow ] [ Encyclopaedia Astronautica ] [ Fafblog ] [ BBC News (Scotland) ] [ Pravda ] [ Meerkat open wire service ] [ Warren Ellis ] [ Brad DeLong ] [ Hullabaloo (Digby) ] [ Jeff Vail ] [ The Whiskey Bar (Billmon) ] [ Groupthink Central (Yuval Rubinstein) ] [ Unmedia (Aziz Poonawalla) ] [ Rebecca's Pocket (Rebecca Blood) ] Older stuff: June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 (I screwed the pooch in respect of the blosxom entry datestamps on March 28th, 2002, so everything before then shows up as being from the same time)

[ Site Index] [ Feedback ]

Powered by Blosxom!