Speaking of fear, here's who's really afraid!
Cough, cough ... BRRRRAAAAAPPP!
Apparently I'm Brother Gatling Gun of Enlightened Compassion.
I note with interest the conflation of "kidnapper" with "terrorist", and ask what political agenda it furthers. In a country with 70% unemployment and where every family has automatic weapons, kidnapping rich folks has become a cottage industry. Foreigners are rich folks in Iraq -- the remaining journalists are employees of organizations with relatively deep pockets. Finally, as noted elsewhere, ordinary criminal kidnappers have nothing to lose and quite a bit to gain by declaring themselves to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Terror, Inc.
I'm deeply suspicious of the "no negotiations with kidnappers" crowd -- they're wilfully refusing to look at reality on the ground, and they're pricing human life at a steep discount, both of which are symptoms of the kind of political fanaticism that gave us WW2 -- on the bad guys side.
This reminds me eerily of a local (Scottish) anti-drug campaign, launched by the government about 8 years ago. The campaigning organization went on the road with the message "drugs are uncool", and even went so far as to drag in some hapless politicians, such as the late Donald Dewar (First Minister of Scotland) to explain that they were actually not entirely fossilized -- indeed, DD confessed that he had a collection of records by Status Quo.
The name of this campaign was: Scotland Against Drugs. Yes, you're right, it appears that nobody under the age of 40 was asked to comment on the backformed acronym. Or alternatively ...
Anti-drug campaigns directed at The Yoof Of Today always try to imply that drugs are uncool, while setting new benchmarks for coolness-deficiency. (Beadwork, Status Quo ... see the connection?) Somehow or other all these campaigns seem to fall victim to a bizarre form of cultural autism that fails to engage with the people they're talking at, because the anti-drugs campaigners don't understand (or aren't allowed to admit they understand) why people take drugs in the first place. At risk of over-generalizing, I suspect those of the campaigners who used to use illegal substances themselves feel somewhat guilty about the hypocrisy implied by participating in these schemes: and those who haven't ever smoked a spliff are so uncool they're unaware of it. But whatever the cause, they're doomed to fail until and unless they come to grips with a key problem of campaigning against drugs -- drugs are fun.
Life is too short to put up with ass-hats, so I'm out of here. Teresa, you might want to chuck the welcome mat out in the trash and fumigate the porch -- the buzzing suggests something died here and the stink is attracting flies.
Beth: The number of completed books which are contracted but not published by the originally contracting publisher is so small as to make each instance a colorful industry legend.
Been there, done that. (Is Singularity Sky a colorful industry legend? :)
"I'm generally anti-democracy as were [snip totemic gods]"
Well, that's nice to know.
"why giving women the franchise was literally the first plank in the Fascist program" ... not in my time-line. I think you may be using "fascist" in some new and non-standard context. Which in turn implies a certain jerking of knees (or indeed, elbows).
Anyway, thanks for clueing me in about whether to write you down as a troll or a bigot. Congratulations: you appear to be both.
Vox, apropos your mean culpa over KSR's gender, I'd just like to add that "I meant to do that" is an acceptable excuse from my cat -- after all, she's small, furry, and has a brain the size of a wallnut -- but it does not make you look good in a flame fest. Which, after all, is ultimately about scoring points before the peanut gallery because you're not going to change your mind, and neither are the people you're debating.
As for making an economic argument against enfranchisement of women -- feh. Would you also make an economic argument against enfranchisement of non-white people? Or an economic argument in favour of slavery? Methinks your value system needs a little fine-tuning if you think economic arguments against human rights have any validity.
John, whether or not there's any merit to his claim that women can't/don't write hard SF[*], women edit SF. And work as agents. And lots of those who do are SFWA members or get to hear about this sort of thing.
Getting right up your prospective editor's or agent's nose is a great way to start a business relationship, right? And even if it isn't an insuperable obstacle, it's still a handicap he'll have to overcome.
([*] I tend towards the "don't" rather than "can't" explanation, and attribute it to social patterning that includes redefining hard SF as "stuff women don't write". As the old joke about problems in Artificial Intelligence goes, if a machine can do it then it is no longer AI.)
Vox, as the old saying puts it: "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog." (At least, nobody knows you're a dog unless you bark at them.) By the same token, nobody knows (or gives a shit about) your personal views unless you wave them about and yell "look at me!"
Now, I've never met you. I therefore have no way of knowing whether you really mean the things you're saying, or whether you're just trolling for flames. So, because I'm a nice guy, I'm going to give option #2 the due consideration it deserves and keep an open mind on the matter. (Just so you know I am not automatically assuming you're a vile bigot, by my lights.)
Anyway. My main point is ...
You've chosen to lay your bedroll in the field of SF, as witness your membership of SFWA and presence on an SFWA panel.
You have then burped up a mass of rhetoric that -- to my eyes -- looks calculated to alienate (a) women and (b) anyone remotely to the left of the political spectrum. For the purposes of assessing the impact of your words, it doesn't matter whether they're supported by the evidence or not -- we're talking perceptions here. Draw a Venn diagram of the population. You've started by pissing off 50% and then dropped another great big circle bracketing close to another 50% halfway over it.
The people who live and work and pitch their tents in this field have long memories. You'll have to share the same field with them for a long time -- decades, maybe -- if you want to be in it at all. And you've just offended 75% of them?
This is Not Clever. You may not need them now, but you have no idea what your circumstances will look like in ten years' time. Twenty years. Thirty. Five minutes hence. (Etcetera.) Pissing people off for no good reason is counter-productive. In a corporate environment it's sometimes termed a career-limiting move.
I think you just made a career-limiting move.
Take some advice from Uncle Charlie, who did his trolling back in the stone age, when the net was young -- start barking, very loudly. Yap your head off and make damn sure everyone knows you're a troll. That way, when you meet editors and agents and other writers in person you can charm them and they'll maybe forgive you your youthful errors.
But for your own future sake, do try to stop digging before the hole caves in on you.
I should add that the matter of Mr Beale's membership of SFWA is encouraging me to retaliate in the only appropriate way -- by upgrading to lifetime membership. (If you're worried about an organization you're a member of being infiltrated by people who hold views you disagree with, get in there and do something ...)
Oh dear. I've had email correspondence with Mr Beale; all I can say for sure is he didn't sound like a loon -- a Christian conservative, certainly, but that's not a hanging offense in my world. Patrick's diagnosis of his public pronouncements as being "an exercise in "look at me, I'm outraging your sensibilities" very plausible. On the other hand, he's been asking for an interview, and this fracas isn't exactly encouraging me to say "yes". And on the gripping hand, I've been known to give credit where none is due.
(I wonder if he already knows that my father avoided Auschwitz by coming down with a summer flu, and that I'm married to a feminist?)
Getting back to Patrick's original topic ...
I have, in the past couple of years, been asked to keep quiet about the money at stake in a book deal ...
... by my agent. While the offer was on the table but not yet officially accepted, and she was trying to get another publisher to make a counter-offer.
(Funnily enough, I went along with this :)
Otherwise, no: I don't think I've ever wrriten for an organization that asked me not to discuss what they were paying me.
Hugh: I'm taking this line because I've been here before, in relation to the whole free software thing, back in the mid-nineties.
There is a huge amount of money at stake in the form of the big corporate copyright franchises. The people who make their living off of those franchises (and we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people) do not want to see the apple cart upset in any way, however trivial. There's as much potential for corporate dirty tricks -- astroturf campaigns, SLAPP lawsuits, lobbying -- as with the tobacco business, or polluting industries.
If you approach this issue (copyright reform) in any manner other than deadly serious and with extreme paranoia, you might as well paint a target on your chest and label it "AIM HERE".
This is about money. Billions and tens of billions of dollars' worth of money. And people down on the plantation get funny when they think you're planning on taking their money trees away from them.
Minor quibble, Will:
But the whole point of copyleft is to improve capitalism, not end it ...
I don't think that's true. Every time I've heard Richard Stallman speak, or read one of his polemics, I've had the feeling that he was gritting his teeth and trying not to come out with the anarcho-communist-utopian version of Dr Strangelove's unfortunate arm-twitch.
(I'm deeply cynical about big business capitalism, but Stallman makes me suspect he's cynical about the concepts of private property and money. Which is another matter entirely.)
Will: life plus fifty is a step in the right direction relative to the current state of life plus seventy. And it's long enough post mortem that the "but what will the starving orphans live off?" argument doesn't hold water. (If you leave a newborn baby as your heir, few people will argue that it should still be living off your work when it turns fifty.) Reduce that to life plus ten and you'll run up against starving-baby arguments and, whether they're right or wrong, they're certainly effective at stirring up an emotional shit-storm.
I tend to take a pragmatic view of things. I'll settle for what I can get, one step at a time. (This leaf was stolen shamelessly from the current loonie right playbook.) The goal is to reduce the degree to which copyright terms trample on the commons, preferably without destroying the ability of writers and artists to earn a living. Any step in the right direction is therefore to be welcomed, unless it comes with a poison pill.
Back from the vet. Frigg wants everybody to know that she hates hail, and thinks the appropriate term for copyright is the duration of the author's cats' lives (all nine of them). At least, I think that's what she wants: she's hiding at the back of the bedroom closet right now.
(I'd back life plus fifty at a pinch: it's a lot easier to defend that life plus seventy or life plus ten. Although I still think life plus X where X is shorter than fifty but optional extensions are available would be better.)
Jane: Peak wind speeds hit 120 miles per hour. Lots of roads, railway links, ferries, bridges, and (naturally) airports are closed. Worst gales I can remember since I arrived here in 1995.
And in about half an hour I've got to lug a cat carrier, complete with feline occupant, a quarter of a mile down the road to the vet for her annual check-up. Happy joy.
(No, Lucy, driving is not an option: there's no legal parking outside the vet's, and with cars routinely double and triple parked on my street -- it's just outside the central controlled parking zone -- parking spaces are like gold dust. And funnily enough, the architects didn't design garages into these flats when they were designing them in the 1870's.)
Avram: that last word in that last sentence is, how shall we put it politely? Not encouraging me to read the trilogy.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
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| 2005 | 31 |
| 2004 | 33 |
| 2003 | 29 |
| 2002 | 17 |
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