2015 Hugo Voting - Best Novel

I am a supporting member of Sasquan, which is the location of this year's World Science Fiction Convention. Because of this, I am eligible to vote in this year's Hugo Awards. In the Best Novel category there were three really excellent nominees, one mediocre nominee, and one pretty terrible nominee. Of the three nominees that I ranked above "No Award", the difference in quality between first and third was quite small, while the gulf between them and the remaining two novels was quite large. My ballot in this category was as follows:

1. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu) (actual finish 1^st): A hard science fiction novel that starts in the chaotic maelstrom of the Chinese Cultural Revolution that moves on to incorporate conspiracies, musings about big scientific ideas, a computer simulation of a confusing reality, and finally, the human response to an impending doom carried by an alien invader, The Three-Body Problem is simply brilliant. It does have some serious flaws insofar as the characters are generally incredibly stiff and somewhat two-dimensional and some of the science seems somewhat ill-thought out, but the excellent parts of the book far outweigh these minor foibles. The novel is made even more interesting by the fact that it is a Chinese novel written by a Chinese author with Chinese sensibilities, a set of facts that give it a distinctly unique feel that is very different from most books that a typical American science fiction fan will have previously encountered.

2. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (actual finish 2^nd): In sharp contrast to The Three-Body Problem, this novel is entirely character driven, with the narrative pushed forward almost entirely by the personal development of the titular character and his relationships with the other members of the elvish court. The novel has been criticized as slow and being somewhat short of fantastical elements, but those are minor, and I think off-base criticisms. The plot of the novel recounts the return of a despised half-goblin child who assumes the throne of the elvish empire after most of his family is killed by an act of sabotage. Addison weaves together multiple political elements to create an intensely gripping tale of courtly intrigue centered on a confused and uncertain protagonist that is laced through with just enough magical elements to give it an otherworldly feel.

3. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie (actual finish 3^rd): The sequel to last year's Hugo-, Nebula-, Locus-, and Clarke-Award winning novel Ancillary Justice, I liked Ancillary Sword a little bit better than its predecessor. So why, despite the fact that I think Ancillary Justice deserved every single one of the many accolades bestowed upon it, am I ranking this novel third in my voting? The answer lies in the fact that it is the second novel in a trilogy, and like most novels of this sort, it suffers a little bit from middle book syndrome. I found the novel to be excellent, but I had read the novel before it, and so the plot threads that carried over from the previous volume didn't bother me at all. Looking at it from the perspective of a new reader, this novel might have too much left over from the previous installment, and too much left hanging for the next, and so I ranked it slightly lower than the two novels listed above.

4. No Award (actual finish 4^th): If none of the three books listed above win the Hugo for Best Novel, I simply don't think that either of the other two should. Both are at least competently-written novels, but one is of indifferent quality while the other is simply weak and both are simply not good enough to win a Hugo. Everything below this mark simply got left off of my ballot as not being worthy of the Hugo Award.

5. Skin Game by Jim Butcher (actual finish 5^th): Skin Game is, at its core, a disposable urban fantasy heist novel with a wisecracking protagonist, scheming villains, and a kitchen sink approach to world-building. It is also the fifteenth book is a series. It is an entertaining book, but that is really all that it is. To be worth a Hugo win, a novel has to be exceptional, and while Skin Game is a reasonably diverting pieces of fluff, it is nowhere near exceptional. It is, in a word, mediocre. Being a competently written adventure romp makes for decent beach reading, or something with which to while away the hours of a long flight, but it doesn't make for a novel that is good enough to deserve a Hugo Award. I briefly considered ranking this one behind "No Award", but then realized that it wasn't really good enough for even that.

6. The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson (actual finish 6^th): While Skin Game is merely mediocre, The Dark Between the Stars is downright terrible. The book has competently written sentences, but that is about all of the favorable things one can say about it. The characters are one-dimensional, the villains aspire to be cartoonish in sophistication, what little plot there is evades the story for the first two hundred pages and then turns out to be incredibly thin and dull, while the tiny amount of science in the book is often ridiculously wrong. At seven hundred and forty pages, this novel barely has enough actual substance for a book half that length, and even if it were cut down that much it would still be a plodding snoozefest.

2015 Hugo Award Nominees     Book Award Reviews     Home

Book Blogger Hop August 21st - August 27th: Master Chief in "Halo" Is Also Designated John-117

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: When you read a book that isn't for review, do you still feel the need to write a review of it?

I review pretty much every book I read. I don't review all of the stuff I have read for work: I'm pretty sure that almost no one wants to read a review of technical manuals concerning the Federal budgeting process or even the Government Accountability Office's five volume set of Principles of Federal Appropriations Law and related annual updates.¹

For the most part, any book that I read on my own - be it science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, history, science, or really just about anything else - will be reviewed eventually. I've even been known to review role-playing game manuals and adventure modules. I suppose that the driving force behind my push to review everything is because the underlying reason for my reviews is to give myself a record of what I read, and leaving books unreviewed defeats that purpose.

¹ For the record, I have a copy from when Principles of Federal Appropriations Law was still published in print that includes both Volumes IV and V. The version that has been published electronically more recently has had the material from the first four volumes condensed into three, and seems to mostly dispense with the material from the fifth volume.

Previous Book Blogger Hop: Susannah Mushatt Jones Lived to 116 Years Old

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: The Roman Emperor Hadrian Executed Four Ex-Consuls in 118 A.D.

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Follow Friday - 223 Is the Only Number to Require 37 Fifth Positive Powers in Waring's Problem

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - The Book Junkie and Little Book Heaven.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: If you could have any animal in the world as a pet, what would you pick? Fictional ones count too!

Can I pick a dead animal? Because if I could, I'd pick my dog Harry, who was the greatest dog in the history of the world. I mean, I'd want him brought back to life, preferably as a puppy so I could get another twenty years with him, but really I'd be happy to take any amount of time available.

He's been gone for more than twenty years, and I still want him back.

Previous Follow Friday: "Room 222" Aired on ABC from 1969 to 1974

Subsequent Follow Friday: King Ardashir I Destroyed the Parthian Empire in 224 A.D.

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Review - The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu)

Short review: In the Cultural Revolution, China turned on scientists. In the present day, life is better for scientists but they keep committing suicide. Wang Miao wants to find out why.

Haiku
Secret red program
Disaffected scientist
Ends humanity

Full review: The Three-Body Problem is a near future science fiction novel set in China, authored by Chinese novelist Cixin Liu and translated into English by Ken Liu. A number of commentators have described the novel as hard science fiction. I'm not sure I would go that far, as the science in the novel seems to break down at times. A more apt description might be "hard-ish science fiction", as the novel mostly hews to science as we know it, with a handful of departures. But the interesting thing about The Three-Body Problem isn't the accuracy of the science, but rather the fact that it tells a story is both rooted in Chinese sensibilities, making it seem alien in some parts, and also evokes the classic science fiction style of writers like Asimov and Clarke, making it seem oddly familiar at the same time.

Perhaps due to its Chinese origins, the book isn't structured like most novels that western readers will be familiar with. Instead of a single narrative thread, the book wanders between a couple of interrelated stories, stopping at times to digress about a particular historical or philosophical point, and then plunge back into the action. The story is at various times an exploration of the ills of Chinese political history, a murder mystery, an exploration of a complex and as yet unsolved physics problem, an alien invasion conspiracy, and a description of some relatively dubious subatomic engineering. The various threads are all interesting enough when taken individually that even when the novel seems to have wandered off of the rails or become slightly didactic, it is still engaging and interesting. Even though Cixin Liu is not entirely able to stitch all of the moving parts of the story together into a completely cohesive whole, it still holds together well enough that some of the rough edges are forgivable.

The novel opens during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, as physicist Ye Zhetai is condemned by the Red Guards for teaching the reactionary theory of relativity and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. Unlike many of his colleagues who have recanted and toed the party line, or committed suicide to escape the humiliation and pain of a public savaging, Zhetai has chosen to remain true to his principles. His adherence to scientific truth in the face of ideological assault results in his death, and causes his daughter Ye Wenjie, a college-educated scientist herself, to be sent into exile in the countryside to work as a lumberjane. Years of hard labor and a betrayal that leads to a brief imprisonment and political disfavor later, Wenjie has been radicalized enough that when she finds herself in the unexpected position of being a technician on what essentially amounts to a Chinese SETI project, she elects to betray humanity the second that they make contact with extraterrestrial life. And this decision sets into motion everything that follows in the book. The element here that makes this novel so interesting is that this is an almost uniquely Chinese sequence of events, told from a Chinese perspective. The anti-intellectualism as represented by the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution, the exiling of educated urban people to become rural laborers, and the paranoia and treachery all meld together to form a believable backdrop for the betrayal of the human race.

After setting the stage, Cixin move the action forward to near-future China and turns the focus of the novel to Wang Miao, an expert in nanotechnology research who is called in by an international group of senior military and political leaders to help them try to figure out why scientists have mysteriously started to commit suicide with alarming frequency. Wang is provided a handy foil in the form of allegedly corrupt cop "Da" Shi Quiang, who supplies a layman's view of the events of the novel and also serves as a handy person to whom Wang can explain the science in the book. Wang follows up on his one clue - the suicide of a prominent scientist, and this leads him to her mathematician boyfriend who is working on solving the "three-body problem", and a computer game that doesn't seem to make much sense (or even be connected to the plot in any real way at first). The key to understanding the novel is understanding the nature of the three-body problem, which is a basic exercise in gravitational physics. In simple terms, it is easy to figure out the gravitational effects that two bodies have on one another, but devilishly difficult (and some might say impossible) to figure them out for three or more bodies.

The mysterious suicides and the odd computer simulation turn out to be connected, and in a bit of inside-out storytelling, the significance of what Wang has learned is backloaded into the narrative: First, Wang learns things, then he learns what their significance is, and finally, the actual events underlying what Wang has learned are shown. Although the computer simulation sequences can seem overlong, by the end of this portion of the book the reason for their length becomes clear - including the fact that the story simply could not convey the information needed if they were shortened. Through the computer simulation sequences, Cixin builds sympathy for the alien trisolarians, using their plight as a springboard to pull on the reader's emotions. At the same time, the author lays the groundwork for the sharp reversal that the book is building to, demonstrating how trisolarians culture had become so harsh and ruthless. In the broad sweep of events, Cixin's ability to hit just the right emotional note is almost masterful.

This mastery, however, highlights on of the serious failings of the book: Many of the characters seem flat and stiff, and their relationships with other people seem almost perfunctory. Wang, for example, has a wife and son, but his wife only shows up in a single scene in which he has her take some photographs so that he can test a theory. Other than this one scene, Wang's wife and son may as well not exist in the novel as the scientist sets about following the various metaphorical rabbits down their metaphorical holes - even when he nearly gets killed in an explosion or jets off to Panama, neither his loving wife nor his son show up to check up on his injuries or see him off on his journey. That's probably okay though - he doesn't really seem to think of either of them much when he's out all night drinking with Da Shi. And this sort of lack of characterization is endemic to the novel. Most of the characters in the novel seem to be defined, at most, by their job, and maybe by their political allegiances, but almost nothing beyond that. Maybe there is a cultural element unique to Chinese fiction that I am missing, but even so, the characters feel like little more than empty mouthpieces for the author to use to move the plot along.

On the other hand, The Three-Body Problem isn't really about characters, but rather about ideas about science on a grand scale. Through the novel, the scientists that Wang comes into contact with are grappling with fundamental issues concerning how the universe works ranging from the titular gravitational problem to subatomic particle physics. For most of the novel, Cixin is able to weave the science into his narrative quite convincingly, but near the end, when he shifts to the actions of the trisolarians, things seem to fall apart just a little bit as he ranges just a bit too far beyond the realm of believability. Liu also makes the somewhat controversial assertion that should the advancement of particle physics be blocked, all scientific advancement would grind to a halt, a notion that seems unsupportable. In the end, the novel is convincing enough that the reader should be able to roll with these quirks, although they do mar the fabric of the story somewhat.

Wang leads the story back to Ye, now the putative leader of a movement dedicated to a brutal and self-destructive, but idealistically driven goal. It is the structure and nature of this movement that illustrates that Cixin chose to start his novel with scenes from the Cultural Revolution not merely to radicalize Wenjie into action, but also to hold up a mirror to show the very nature of both Wenjie's resulting movement. Like the Cultural Revolution, Wenjei's movement is driven by an ideology that is unconcerned with the cost in human lives. Like the Cultural Revolution, Wenjie's movement is riven by factional resentments. Like the Cultural Revolution, Wenjie's movement is opposed to free scientific inquiry. Like the Cultural Revolution, Wenjie's movement drives scientists to suicide. The reader is shown that, in many ways, Wenjie has replicated the Cultural Revolution, but her actions are in the service of an inhuman and ultimately monstrous master. After making Wenjie an entirely sympathetic character in the first act of the novel, Liu succeeds in making her the architect of a terrible organization and keeping her sympathetic at the same time.

Attention must also be paid to Ken Liu's translation efforts. Although I cannot read Chinese, and so am unable to determine how faithful to the original text the translation is, the book has been rendered into English in a form that makes it quite accessible. Ken Liu also helpfully supplied a number of footnotes in sections in which Cixin cites specific events or references whose significance would be readily apparent to a Chinese reader, but whose meaning might be opaque to the average English-speaking member of the audience. The end result is a novel that manages to preserve what feels like a uniquely Chinese sensibility while also being comprehensible and even comfortable for a western reader.

Despite some pretty obvious flaws - whether the result of cultural differences between Cixin Liu and this American reader, or the vagaries of translation, or simply deficiencies in Cixin's writing ability - The Three-Body Problem remains a bold and at times brilliant book. Combining the savage sweep of relatively recent Chinese history with science on both the largest and the smallest scale possible (albeit often weirdly flawed science), Cixin Liu has created an intriguing, engaging, and exceptional novel that is sure to entertain any science fiction fan.

Subsequent book in the series: The Dark Forest

2014 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

2016 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

List of Hugo Award Winners for Best Novel

2015 Campbell Award Nominees
2015 Hugo Award Nominees
2015 Locus Award Nominees
2015 Nebula Award Nominees
2015 Prometheus Award Nominees

Cixin Liu     Ken Liu     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - Skin Game: A Novel of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher

Short review: Queen Mab forces Harry Dresden into working with some of his worst enemies to steal the Holy Grail from Hades. Butters becomes a Knight of the Cross.

Haiku
When Mab makes a deal
Harry becomes the marker
Payoff: Steal the Grail!

Full review: In the fifteenth installment of the Dresden Files series, Butcher gives the reader a caper story about a heist masterminded by evil genius Nicodemus Archleone who has assembled a collection of mostly willing ne'er-do-wells who are all looking for a big payoff, but otherwise don't really like each other much. The "twist" to the story is that Harry Dresden, wizard extraordinaire and Winter Knight beholden to Queen Mab of the unseelie court, is required to work alongside one of his most despised enemies because Mab owes Nicodemus a debt. The story winds along, hitting most of the predictable beats of a heist story involving an eclectic mismatched crew of supernatural beings, with one reversal that is only accomplished because Butcher pretty much lied to the reader, and then moves on to a somewhat desultory final fight before the book ends leaving numerous plot threads up in the air.

The story itself is simultaneously fairly straightforward and needlessly convoluted. In a previous volume, Dresden agreed to become the Winter Knight for Mab, the queen of the Winter Court. In order to deal with what he believes to be a dangerous psychic parasite of some sort locked inside his own head, Dresden also retreated to an island in Lake Michigan that serves as a supernatural prison so he can hide out and practice parkour. Then Mab shows up to tell Dresden she needs him to undertake a task on her behalf, and in return she will remove the dangerous entity inside his head. To keep the entity at bay, Mab gives Dresden an earring to wear, and in a display of juvenile homophobia, he makes her put it on his left ear. It turns out that Mab has a debt to pay, and she's using Dresden's services to do so, forcing him to work with all-around villain and member of the Order of the Blackened Denarius Nicodemus Archleone, although Dresden does manage to force Nicodemus to accept Dresden bringing a companion as insurance - Harry's policewoman friend Karrin Murphy.

Having secured Dresden's services, Archleone assembles the rest of his team, at least some of whom seem to have been selected specifically to irk Dresden: Hannah Ascher, a warlock on the run from the White Council, Binder, a specialist in summoning demons who Dresden had previously specifically warned to stay out of Chicago, Goodman Gray, a shapeshifter who seems to take an immediate dislike to the wizard, and Deidre, Nicademus' own demonic daughter. Eventually it is revealed that Nicodemus has also recruited a massive, mostly invisible bigfoot-like being known as a Genoskwa to his raiding party as well, and it seems almost inevitable that the creature takes an immediate dislike to Dresden.

Because heading off to accomplish the object of the heist (or even revealing the target of the heist) would make the story too short, Butcher has to introduce a couple of complications. First, everyone has to go and get the final member of their group: The thief Anna Valmont, last seen stealing the Shroud of Turin. Picking her up at a hotel would be too simple, so Dresden and Ascher run into some fomor servants who try to kill them while they are there, but not before Butcher spends some time having Dresden drool over how attractive Ascher is. The fomor serve absolutely no purpose in the story other than providing some random obstacles to pad out the length of the book, and the fight scene they supply isn't even really all that interesting, as the outcome is pretty much assured. On the other hand, it also provides an opportunity for Dresden to get injured, which seems to happen quite a bit in the story, although he never seems to be particularly discomfited by his wounds once he has been patched up by handy not-doctor Butters.

The story moves on, with the group needing to secure the identity of a banker so that Goodman Grey can impersonate him as part of the still undefined heist. This time the complication is Nicodemus' ex-wife Tessa, who seems to want to foil her ex-husband and daughter for unknown reasons and is accompanied by ghouls. Dresden fights to keep the innocent banker alive to no avail, and is injured again, this time by stupidly trying to block something in a way that anyone who has ever studied martial arts will tell you is the exact wrong way to do it. Grey gets what he needs, and the story moves on. Next, Harry's suspicious friend Butters tries to spy on Nicodemus and Dresden has to pretend to chase his friend and sometime emergency medic while surreptitiously fighting off Binder's demons and the rest of Nicodemus' crew. Everything leads to a showdown in which Murphy breaks something valuable before being horribly injured, and Michael Carpenter, armed with the sword of the cross Amoracchius and the grace of an archangel, ends up taking her place as Dresden's backup while Murphy is bundled off to the hospital.

Nicodemus finally reveals that the objective of his heist is a vault owned by Hades where the Holy Grail is stored. After this groan-inducing turn of events, he also reveals that to get there they have to break into an earthly vault owned by notable supernatural mob-boss John Marcone. The heist goes off mostly smoothly (although there is a brief side-track when Tessa shows up again to try to kill Dresden), with everyone playing their assigned role: Valmont gets past Marcone's security door, Ascher gets through the Gate of Fire, Dresden gets through the Gate of Ice, and Nicodemus kills his own daughter to get past the Gate of Blood. Once in Hades' vault, Dresden figures out that Nicodemus isn't really after the Holy Grail, but at the same moment Hades decides to stop time so he can have a little chat with the wizard, revealing everything to have been a carefully planned set-up before dropping Dresden back into regular time in the vault.

Once back, Dresden claims the other, mostly not identified items, that are lying with the Grail before Nicodemus shows up to claim his prize. Predictably, Nicodemus betrays Dresden as soon as he is able to do so without breaking his agreement with Mab, which is more or less okay as Dresden was pretty much going to do the same. With Michael at his side, Dresden faces Nicodemus who has Ascher and the Genoskwa to reinforce him. Things seem to be really bad for the good guys when it turns out that both Ascher and the Genoskwa are carrying black coins, making them also members of the Order of the Blackened Denarius. And at this point, the novel simply falls apart with a plot twist so poorly done that it completely destroys the entire story. The plot twist itself is not a terrible plot twist - the problem is that it is executed in such a hamfisted way, in a manner that is not supported by any of the previous story. In the famous adage about stories, if a gun shows up in the first act, it needs to be used in the third. But the converse is true: If there is no gun in the first act, having a character produce one in the third is playing dirty pool with the audience. Not only that, the "twist" is directly contradicted by some of Dresden's own internal monologue from earlier in the book. Plus, the twist is literally handed to Dresden by Santa Claus, which is an eye-rolling bit of silliness in and of itself.

After the twist, the battle is mostly resolved in short order, including a fairly silly sequence in which the demon-assisted Genoskwa who had previously been described as being almost indescribably supernaturally fast and strong is unable to keep up with Dresden as he parkours the creature to death. Despite having obtained the Holy Grail, Nicodemus seeks revenge against Dresden leading to an anticlimactic final fight that mostly involves ordinary goons and flash-bang grenades and seems to exist mostly so that Butcher can write the first Jewish Knight of the Cross into the story and give him a light saber. Yes, that actually happens, and it is really that groan-inducing. With the fighting over, the story wraps up a couple of the other plot threads in an almost offensively perfunctory manner as Dresden's supernatural brain parasite is removed entirely off-camera, Dresden decides to try to start up a relationship with Murphy, act like a father to his daughter, and no one seems to bat an eye at the idea of a Jewish man still being Jewish in a world in which actual angels walk among men and there are magical swords made from pieces of the True Cross.

Despite the silliness of the story, it is still a mostly fun romp, so long as one doesn't actually think too much about the various plot holes, the fact that the characters are pretty weakly developed, and the world-building seems to consist of simply throwing everything including the kitchen sink into the mix. Sure, this is the fifteenth book in the series, so one would expect that some of the characterization would have been done in the earlier books, but even so the various characters presented here come off as little more than broad sterotypes: The tough-babe who needs rescuing, the dangerous temptress, the solid man of faith, the surly hood, and the juvenile wise-ass, to name but a few. One might even be able to overlook the fact that Dresden himself is such a childish character who is so insecure about his manliness that he has to engage in alpha wolf style confrontations with pretty much every other male character he meets, except that with some very notable exceptions, most of the other male characters in the story seem to share those same traits. One has to wonder how any of these supposedly professional criminals are able to actually function in a criminal underworld without getting shot in the back of the head.

The biggest criticism of the book is that it is the fifteenth book in the series, and that means that a lot of the elements of this book are built upon relationships and events drawn from previous works, while several things get brought up in this volume that are simply left unresolved, presumably to serve as fodder for future installments in the series. To a certain extent, reading Skin Game is like watching a mid-season episode of a television show one is not familiar with: The direct story of the episode mostly hangs together, but the characters all reference things they did in previous episodes, and start conversations that won't bear fruit until later ones. This novel seems especially prone to this, as the entire plot of the book seems to be little more than a set-up for a future, as yet unwritten story. The Grail is stolen, as are a collection of other powerful artifacts, but nothing comes of it in this volume. A character steals a drop of Dresden's blood, an event that one would think would be of some importance, but the issue is simply dropped with no further comment. And so on. On the other hand, we are told that Dresden has has prior dealings with Valmont, last seen in Death Masks, and also with Binder, last seen in Turn Coat, but the reader is expected to get those references based merely upon the names being used, as nothing in this volume serves to explain anything more than the barest outlines of these previous relationships. Similarly, Ascher makes references to events that took place in previous books that affected her, but once again, if the reader is unfamiliar with the details the text of this book leaves them in the dark.

My biggest criticism of the Dresden Files series as a whole is the world-building, which is just a massive, sloppy hodge-podge of ideas that appear to have been thrown in almost at random. It seems that basically every element of myth or folklore exists in the Dresden universe: The Greek myths are real, the Norse myths are real, Japanese myths are real, vampires are real, werewolves are real, angels are real, Jesus was real, demons are real, Celtic myths are real, Santa Claus is real, and so on and so forth. There are knights using swords that incorporate metal from the nails from the True Cross, evil villains carrying around the thirty pieces of silver Judas was paid off with, the Holy Grail, and pretty much every other magical artifact one can think of floating about. I'm sure the Tooth Fairy, the Easter, Bunny, and Brer Bear are real as well. After a certain point, it doesn't seem so much like world-building, as it is simple laziness. Literally everything is up for grabs, and none of it really makes any sense at all. To a certain extent, it seems that this is intentional. After all, the Dresden Files books are supposed to be fun romps, so why not throw literally every mythical being and idea into the mixture for added zing. On the other hand, using this sort of melange of every fantasy concept ever conceived by humans as a fictional world serves to prevent the books from being much more than a collection of adventurous romps, which is, at times, somewhat disappointing.

In the end, Skin Game is what it is: An enjoyable but mostly disposable adventure story full of two-dimensional characters alternatively grudgingly working alongside one another with tense banter and then gleefully bashing one another over the head with magic and supernaturally enhanced weapons. While this isn't a great book, it is a reasonably enjoyable one, with a decently plotted caper at its core (so long as one doesn't mind the occasional eyeroll-inducing development), a collection of fairly standard-issue movie-style characters populating its pages, and a magical world in which literally every kind of magical being one can think of is lurking around the corner. It is, in short, a big dumb, mostly mindless, but ultimately fun collection of shenanigans revolving around a big, dumb, mostly immature but ultimately engaging character. There's nothing particularly special to be found here, but if one is looking for reasonably good mindless escapism, this would fit the bill quite nicely.

Previous book in the series: Cold Days

2015 Hugo Award Nominees

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Musical Monday - City on the Edge of Forever by Five Year Mission

So after opening the set with two fast-paced songs, I think we should slow things down just a bit with one of the very few actually romantic songs in Five Year Mission's oeuvre. The episode City on the Edge of Forever is a fairly quiet, and entirely tragic tale of a doomed love affair. Kirk and Spock travel back in time to depression-era United States hot on the tail of a deranged McCoy, and once there Kirk falls in love with Edith Keeler. He is then forced to let her die as a result of the cruel dictates of time travel as explained using the cold and unyielding logic of Mr. Spock. Chris Spurgin's lyrics perfectly capture the combination of hope and sadness that are the hallmarks of this episode, resulting in a song that is beautifully sorrowful.

The underlying Star Trek episode is also somewhat topical this week, as it won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1968, and the Hugo awards for 2015 will be presented this Saturday at the upcoming WorldCon in Spokane, Washington. I don't think there are any television episodes as well-written as City on the Edge of Forever up for an award this year (after all, it is very hard to top something that was written by Harlan Ellison), but there are several excellent movies nominated for the Long Form Best Dramatic Presentation category, so there is that to look forward to.

Previous Musical Monday: Balance of Terror by Five Year Mission

Subsequent Musical Monday: Miri by Five Year Mission

Dream Five Year Mission Set

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Book Blogger Hop August 14th - August 20th: Susannah Mushatt Jones Lived to 116 Years Old

Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.

This week Billy asks: Are you ever without a book?

Almost never. Not only do I take a book almost everywhere I go, I usually have a backup book with me in case I finish the book I'm currently reading. Sometimes I'll even bring a third book with me, just in case i need it.

Previous Book Blogger Hop: Limit 115 Is Also Called the Blue Flu and the New Plague in Fallout

Subsequent Book Blogger Hop: Master Chief in "Halo" Is Also Designated John-117

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Follow Friday - "Room 222" Aired on ABC from 1969 to 1974

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Bambi Unbridled and Piper's Book Blog.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: If you could have an endless supply of food what would it be?

If the choice is what type of food I would choose, then the answer is probably bacon cheeseburgers. When I was a first-year student at the University of Virginia, one of the options the meal plan provided for lunch every day was a cheeseburger. I think I ate cheeseburgers for lunch six days a week that year. Charlottesville used to have a hole in the wall burger joint called Big Jim's. They sold the Big Jim's Burger Platter: A half-pound bacon cheeseburger with a mountain of fries, a serving of cole slaw, and a pickle. It was magnificent. Until they closed, I always went there to eat any time I went back to Charlottesville.

But if the choice is for a specific version of a kind of food, then I will pick pizza from Bill Bobe's Pizzeria in Vincennes, Indiana. This is, quite simply, the best pizza in the world. Whenever I tell people this, they are always incredulous. At least they are until they try it. Then they are almost immediately converted. I have driven hours out of my way just to go and eat at Bobe's: At a recent family reunion in New Harmony, Indiana, the redhead and I explained that the day before we had gone from Louisville to Boonville via Vincennes, which, if one looks at the map one will see is a fairly circuitous route. Everyone we told this immediately said "Oh, you went to Bobe's", knowing that driving an extra two hours out of one's way is perfectly acceptable so long as one is getting Bobe's pizza. When asked our religion, my brother and I sometimes state we are "Bobeists".

In short, if I could eat Bobe's sausage pizza three meals a day, every day, I'd be a very happy man.

Previous Follow Friday: Sherlock Holmes Lives at 221B Baker Street

Subsequent Follow Friday: 223 Is the Only Number to Require 37 Fifth Positive Powers in Waring's Problem

Follow Friday     Home

Review - The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

Short review: Maia unexpectedly becomes emperor of the elven kingdom of Ethuveraz despite the fact that he is unprepared, uneducated, and a half-goblin.

Haiku
Returned from exile
Unready to be ruler
Must learn on the job

Full review: Imagine you were an outcast, shunned for both your heritage and for the fact that the head of the government despised you. Imagine you were condemned to live in a remote backwater under the authority of a guardian who abused you and seemingly despised you. Imagine you woke up one day to discover that relatives you didn't really know, and in some cases didn't like, had died and you were now wealthy and powerful beyond your wildest dreams. Imagine that this is quite possibly the most dangerous thing that could happen to you. This is the story of Maia in The Goblin Emperor.

Maia is the half-goblin fourth son of Varenechibel IV, the ruling emperor of the elvish land of Ethuveraz. In addition to being despised on account of being half-goblin in an elvish society, Maia is also disfavored because his father's marriage to his mother was something of a loveless disaster. As a result, after his mother's death, Maia was banished to a far-away estate in a dismal part of the country to be raised by Sethris, a distant relative who had angered the emperor and earned his ire. Maia's life changes when he is awakened in the middle of the night to receive a messenger who informs him that his father and all of his older brothers have died, leaving Maia as the only adult male heir to the throne of the kingdom. In just a handful of pages, Maia is thrown into the deep end of the Untheileneise Court and has no choice but to learn to swim or drown trying.

In large part, The Goblin Emperor is about the difficulty of exerting power and authority from a position of weakness - and not merely a position of weakness, but also of ignorance. When Maia arrives at court, he is at a serious disadvantage as his enforced exile has left him knowing no one, and the neglectful guardian has provided him with a relatively poor education. While Maia knows the basics of how to behave in polite society, he is woefully ignorant of the politics of the nation he must now lead and the history that underlies those politics. He is also quite poorly educated on a myriad of other subjects that one would normally expect a member of the aristocracy to be well-versed in: Art, literature, law, and so on. And Maia is painfully aware of the deficiencies in his education, making him self-conscious about his ignorance and, due to his painfully shy and awkward nature, unwilling to ask questions that might expose him to ridicule for his lack of knowledge.

Despite the fact that almost all of the novel takes place within the imperial palace, or perhaps because of it, the story is interlaced with intrigue and fraught with danger. This is not a story in which armies march across the battlefield and bold men engage in feats of derring-do. It is rather a story in which paying too much attention to the wrong person at a party or seating the wrong dinner guests next to one another will have consequences that will make a favorable political alliance impossible. It is a story in which knowing who is related to who and what happened thirty years ago to create animosity between two families is of paramount importance in understanding and unraveling the thorny political web of the present. And Maia's problem is that at the outset he simply doesn't know any of these things. He doesn't know who to trust, or even who to choose to serve in the most personal and critical roles of his household. He doesn't even know which of his own relatives he can rely upon not to try to stab him in the back when he is eating breakfast.

At the outset of the novel, Addison throws dozens of long and complicated names and titles at the reader, many of which are very similarly spelled. Sorting this out is something of a headache for the reader as it is very difficult to keep straight who is who, until one realizes that this is exactly the sort of disorientation that Maia feels. By employing this device, Addison manages to create a sense of unease and discomfort in the reader that reflects the unease and discomfort experienced by her protagonist. As the novel goes on, these names seem to become easier - in some cases because the names are more familiar, but in many cases because the names have been shortened from their most formal iterations, and in still others simply because the names are easier. This is a brilliant literary trick, and if Addison didn't mean to do this intentionally, it is the most fortuitous accident I have seen in a book in a long while.

The book is primarily a character piece about Maia's growth from an unsure adolescent thrust onto center stage to an unsure adolescent who has been sitting on center stage long enough to know who the other actors are. To this end, Addison surrounds Maia with a collection of characters to play off of including allies such as his personal secretary Csevet, and enemies, such as the power hungry Lord Chancellor Uleris. Some of these characters seem just a little too good to be true - Csevet is one of the very first characters from court that Maia meets and he turns out to be both an effective and loyal personal aide while Eiru Berenar is almost ridiculously altruistic in his dealings with the new emperor. On the other hand, characters who become Maia's allies are pretty much required for the story to actually work - if every hand was turned against Maia then there would have been no story as he would not have survived on the throne for any appreciable length of time. Even so, one of the very few weaknesses of the book is that, with one notable exception, every character Maia chooses to place his trust in turns out to be essentially completely loyal and honest. In short, all of the villainous characters in the book are pretty much outed as villains pretty quickly, and almost all of the loyal (or at least law-abiding) characters are portrayed as such from their first appearance.

The essential nature of the story is focused on Maia's journey, and he is an interesting character struggling to remain true to himself in a position that threatens to consume him. Even exerting authority when it is clear that he must do so proves to be a difficult task for Maia, as the need to mete out sometimes harsh justice is at odds with his fundamentally congenial nature. Throughout the story, one senses that Maia is often in danger of becoming much like his despotic and cruel father, driven by the needs of his office and the brutal nature of the courtly politics, but he is able to hold back just enough to remain faithful to his moral core. And it is in this struggle that the influence of Maia's goblin mother and his long exile serve to set him apart. Because of his somewhat relatively downtrodden upbringing, Maia can empathize with those who are outside of the power structure of the Untheilenese Court, a trait that brings him into conflict both with tradition and the power brokers of the kingdom, but which also makes him a sympathetic and interesting character to the reader. The ability to understand the needs and desires of those outside of his station give him an almost unique perspective which drives much of the plot of the book, and raises it above the ordinary.

One might also criticize The Goblin Emperor on the grounds that the fantasy elements in the book are fairly slight, and other than the details of the Untheileneise Court, the world-building is fairly limited. Other than the fact that the characters are all described as elves and goblins, the only real fantasy elements are a very modest use of magic, the existence of airships, and the heavy implication that some priests can communicate with the dead. Not only that, the distinction between goblins and elves is fairly poorly defined, as it is made quite clear that the two races can (and do) interbreed quite easily, and in some areas of the world do so quite often. Elves and goblins are not treated as two separate races so much as they are presented as one race split by prejudice based on skin pigmentation, the implications of which are almost certainly intentional.

Beyond the light fantasy elements, the world within which the book takes place is only vaguely defined. Other than the elf kingdom of Ethuveraz, the only other nation mentioned is the neighboring goblin nation of Barizhan. Ethuveraz' other border is apparently occupied by nomadic tribes of undefined racial stock, but other than that, there are only the vaguest hints that there might be a wider world. Even Barizhan is only described in rather ambiguous terms, although there are some indications that despite being looked down upon as a nation of uncultured boors by the elves that the goblin kingdom is more prosperous economically and substantially more progressive socially than their hidebound and stuffy elvish cousins. But all of these elements are only nebulously suggested in the text, leaving much of the world at best sketchily defined.

Despite a handful of minor criticisms, The Goblin Emperor remains an excellent book. Combining an in-depth character study with the tension of deadly palace intrigue, the story details Maia's struggles to at first survive, and eventually to prosper in a role that he never expected to have to fill. With a story confined for the most part to the chambers and corridors of Untheileneise Court, the book could have felt claustrophobic and confining, and at times it does, but at others the scope of the tale expands as the powerful nobles of the court work the levers of power to far-reaching effect. Caught at the center of the web of power is Maia, attempting to do his best avoid being either trapped against his will, or swept aside by other, more ruthless individuals. In the end, the book seeks to paint the picture of a fundamentally moral but unprepared boy who reluctantly becomes emperor, and at the same time provide a tense backdrop of shifting political alliances and shadowy cabals plotting treason, and it succeeds spectacularly at both.

2014 Locus Award Winner for Best Fantasy Novel: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

2016 Locus Award Winner for Best Fantasy Novel: Uprooted by Naomi Novik

List of Locus Award Winners for Best Fantasy Novel

2015 Hugo Award Nominees
2015 Locus Award Nominees
2015 Nebula Award Nominees
2015 World Fantasy Award Nominees

Katherine Addison     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

2015 WSFA Small Press Award Voting

As a member of the Washington Science Fiction Association, I may vote on the WSFA Small Press Award. Voting closed on July 31^st, and my votes are locked in. Although the stories are identified by author here, they are presented to members of WSFA anonymously, so all of the members vote based solely on the text of the story, as uninfluenced by the identities of the authors as possible. Nine stories were nominated this year, and although I ranked them one through nine, I will note that every story here was better than every story in the short fiction categories in the 2015 Hugo Awards. If any one of these stories had appeared on the Hugo ballot this year, it would have been my first place vote.

1. Cookie Cutter Superhero by Tansy Rayner Roberts: At the outset, this story feels a little reminiscent of the movie Sky High, as the protagonist, an Australian high school girl named Joey, prepares to head off to become a super-hero. But as the story progresses, the story transforms into something much more unique, as it is revealed that the superheroes that populate the world are manufactured by mysterious machines of unknown provenance that allow each nation a set number of super-powered beings drawn from the populace by a lottery and transformed. Through much of the story Joey and her friends speculate about what her powers might be, going through the various precedents while also assuming that she will replace Astra, the current female member of the team, because the team has always only had one female member. Tiny notes like this poking fun at the tropes so common to super-hero stories are one set of elements that make Cookie Cutter Superhero such an interesting story. The other major point that sets the story above the typical is that Joey is disabled - born with just one hand, the other arm ending in a stump just above where her wrist would be. As she goes through the process that will lead to her super-hero status, Joey encounters the sexism that she expects, but also unexpected support from Astra, and finally finds herself in the machine, where she realizes that she has at least some control over the form she will take. It is in the brief span of space that Joey is encased in the super-hero machine that an amazing amount of character development takes place, and Joey doggedly refuses to allow the fundamental nature of her status as a disabled person to be altered and still becomes a full-fledged superhero, highlighting the falsity of the "cookie-cutter" portion of the title. Much of the story is about the compromises Joey refuses to make: In addition to refusing to be cured of the disability she has lived with her whole life, she refuses to be referred to by a superhero name that includes "Girl", "Woman", or even "Ms.", and, in a way, she refuses to be relegated to the position of being the sole female super-hero on the team, which although that wasn't entirely her decision, seems to have been at least partially driven the machine's acknowledgement of the selection of someone with her contrarian personality in the lottery. One mark of an excellent speculative fiction short story is that it tells a satisfying tale but at the same time leaves the reader wanting to know more about the universe the story is set in, and on that score Cookie Cutter Superhero reaches excellence with a comfortable margin to spare.

2. Jackalope Wives by Ursula Vernon (actual finish 1^st): Told in a way that feels like a story told by an old woman to a rapt audience sitting in the light of a campfire, Jackalope Wives is about the wild skin-changing part-rabbit, part-antelope women who dance in the desert and are lusted after by young men. The plot gets moving when Grandma Harken's foolish and smitten grandson tries to catch one of the titular jackalope wives, seizing her rabbit skin and throwing it into the fire, but her screams so unnerve him that he foolishly pulls it out of the fire, whereupon the jackalope wife does an even more foolish thing and tries to put the half burned pelt on. Desperate, her grandson turns to his grandmother, who takes the scorched half-woman half-jackalope in, and tries to heal her as best she can. After much consternation, Grandma Harken reluctantly decides she must seek more powerful help, and sets out with her clumsy half-rabbit charge in tow. As the pair travel, the story throws in tiny touches, deepening the mythic underpinnings of the story as Grandma Harken steers away from help from coyote, javelina, and raven, pinning her hopes on one of the "patterned people". She also encounters the Father of Rabbits, who serves up a tempting offer to the old woman that makes the story take on an almost entirely different meaning. One interesting element is that other than the Father of Rabbits, none of the male figures mentioned in the story are referred to by their names: Not Grandma Harken's grandson, nor either her first or second husbands, and not even the patterned man who bargains to help the unfortunate jackalope wife. Only Grandma Harken and her daughter Eva have real identities, and Eva only barely does. This, combined with the mythic nature of the storytelling gives Jackalope Wives an almost dreamlike quality, allowing it to sit on the edge of possibility, such that it feels not so much like a story that was made up, but like a story that actually happened in one of the wild corners of the desert where everyday reality breaks down.

3. Careful Magic by Karen Healey: With a hint of Moorcock, a hint of Modesitt, and more than a hint of Rowling, Careful Magic tells the story of a misfit teenager named Helen who happens to be the only Order worker in her high school. With a life bound by rituals and routines that seem pointedly OCD-like, Helen maneuvers through her days tapping doorknobs, twirling pens, and apologizing to each of her classmates when she is late. She also has to walk widdershins around the building and bless a particular tree before she can enter her school. This makes her an oddball in a society that is made up almost entirely of Chaos magic practitioners, but things begin to look up when Gilbert Hill asks her to help out his pretty and popular sister Rosalind who has had a love spell cast upon her by fellow classmate Kinai Hayashi. Things aren't what they seem, and the best laid plans go awry, helped along by some rather chaotic and impulsive juvenile delinquency, but in the end Helen solves the problem and saves the day. The story creates an interesting magical world for the characters to inhabit and populates it with believable teens - most notably Helen, whose status as a neuro-atypical individual is what provides her with her power, but also serves as a source of embarrassment that she must come to terms with. A subtle touch in the story is that every character of note is dark-skinned, and everyone inhabiting the story finds this mostly unremarkable. Despite being a story about teenagers dealing with what starts out as a teenager-sized problem, it contains excellent writing, engaging characters, and a plot that has just enough twists and turns to keep things interesting.

4. The Magician and Laplace's Demon by Tom Crosshill: This story is built around a big and weird idea - what if magic does exist, but it only exists in ways that cannot be proven. Told from the story of an emergent and hidden A.I. that benevolently seeks to control humanity, the story also imagines that there are secretive magicians who live in the seams in the fabric of what is known, manipulating probabilities to make the improbable a certainty. Disturbed by the implications, the A.I. sets about hunting down and either killing the magicians or getting them to "spike", that is use up their entire affinity for magic in one big life-saving event. This sets up a confrontation between the last remaining magician and a tiny sliver of the A.I. as they face one another on a spacecraft in the far reaches of human occupied space. The story has something of a disturbing tone, as the A.I. holds all of the beliefs that one would normally expect a typical science fiction reader to have: That science always follows the same rules, no matter where one is, and no matter who one is. But it is presented as an inhuman perspective here, and contrasted with the human magician's view of how the universe works, and with how one might hope that the universe works. The story ends on a slightly ambiguous note, with the reader not completely sure if the A.I. has emerged victorious - as it believes it has - or if the magician has fooled its opponent, which the story gives hints that she might have. In an odd way, this story covers much the same ground that The Three-Body Problem does, but in a much truncated and as a result, more perfunctory manner. Further, while the characters in the story are reasonably well written, they aren't particularly fleshed out, serving mostly as expository props for the author to outline and contrast the opposing viewpoints. As a result, while this is an interesting and enjoyable story, it is just short of being a great one.

5. Vanilla by Dirk Flinthart: This story deals with alien assimilation and xenophobia from two angles. The tale is told from the perspective of Kylie Howard, a Somali teen whose family emigrated to Australia, and is about her friendship with the !gontok students from another planet who have taken up residence on Earth. Kylie occupies an odd position in the book - she's not quite regarded as an Australian by her classmates, despite her father's hope that she will blend in with their adopted homeland both her skin color and her father's conservative restrictions upon her behavior mark her as separate. But she is at least human, which makes her different from her !gontok classmates, who are hairy and purple, with joints that don't work the same way human joints work, eat live food, need vitamin supplements to live on Earth, and identify each other mostly by smell. The story moves along mostly predictably, with Kylie, who doesn't fit in with her Australian classmates, making friends with the !gontok students, who also don't fit in with their Australian classmates. There are a few hints of xenophobia from the other students, but the story mostly focuses on the displacement felt by the immigrant children, and how they find common ground in the fact that they are regarded as oddballs by their peers. There is something of a unexpected and biologically improbable twist at the end that changes the nature of the story somewhat, but doesn't alter its fundamental nature. Overall, this is a good story about teenagers who don't fit in with their peers, and the unlikely relationships that can result, but it isn't substantially more than that.

6. N Is for Nanomachine by C.S. MacCath: A story about the death of a people, N Is for Nanomachine confronts the question of what happens when a civilization knows it is going to die and there is simply nothing they can do about it. Set on the planet Vardigen, originally a prison colony populated by humans altered to live on its harsh, volcanic surface, the story details the last days of its inhabitants as nanomachines inexorably change the landscape they depend upon to live into a terraformed Earth-like world suitable for settlement by "organics". Unfortunately, this terraforming will inevitably kill those currently living on Vardigen, condemning them to slow, painful deaths from what amounts to poison and starvation. The Vardigen response is to preserve their art and culture: Opera, sculpture, poetry, and painting and store it so that those who come later will know exactly who they destroyed. Told in the form of a series of voice mails, e-mail messages, and news broadcasts, the story follows one of the hundred couriers sent across the planet to collect artwork from masters of their craft, giving a brief window into how each one reacts to the looming disaster: One with despair, another with anger, another with defiance, and finally, one with love. As the populace faces their extinction, they also react with inchoate rage, with resigned acceptance, with doomed but heroic schemes. The role reversal in the story, with terraforming the planet to make it habitable for normal humans being the harbinger of death, makes it all the more interesting, as does the fact that the rest of humanity seems entirely indifferent to the suffering of the Vardigen denizens, placing the reader into the ranks of the silent villains of the piece. N Is for Nanomachine could have been nihilistic and depressing, but it is instead stirring and almost lovely, as a dying people find meaning amidst the wreckage of their world.

7. The Lesser Evil by Day Al-Mohamed: A horror tale about a Mexican of Indian descent named Arturo and his obsession with saving a young girl named Jenny from her miserable life, this story starts off creepy and then moves from there to being very slightly creepier. This isn't the only problem the story has, but it is the most severe - starting off with a creepy thin man sitting and watching a small child play from afar serves to make the reader uneasy right off the bat, and leave the story without much of anywhere to go from there emotionally. In any event, Jenny's life is beset with problems the foremost of which is a foster mother who is interested in drugs, men, and the money that caring for Jenny brings her, in that order, but also include a drug dealer who supplies Jenny's foster mother with narcotics, and a vaguely defined life-threatening ailment that is only kept at bay by regular treatment. As the story progresses, Arturo worms his way into Jenny's life while stripping away the sources of Jenny's woes. As Arturo does so, it is made clear that living with Arturo is not a good solution for Jenny: Even a lesser evil is still evil, and Arturo is clearly only the lesser evil. Unfortunately, this story is not well-executed in several places. There are a couple of scenes that seem entirely extraneous to the story, and the oft-repeated mantra of "you can't save them all" is never really explained. One minor point that bothered me from a technical perspective is that human flesh is reckoned to taste like pork, but the story continually references it as "steaks". The central problem though, is that the story starts in such a creepy manner that there is no build up of tension, and no real climax. The Lesser Evil does paint a fairly compelling portrait of necessary evil, or at least rationalized evil, but it doesn't create a lot of tension because it starts and ends in mostly the same emotional place.

8. Qasida by Rosaleen Love: A quirky tale about an unlikely seeming Martian trip, Qasida is told from three distinct but interlocked perspectives - Del, a hoarder who figures out how to get stuff from and eventually go to Mars, Bronnie, the declutterer Del leaves behind on Earth, and finally Livia, the Edwardian-era British woman who had been a member of the Imperial expedition to Mars to try to communicate with the natives. In the opening paragraphs we are told that the Mars rover Curiosity has discovered something amazing, and Bronnie thinks she knows what it is. From there the story wanders between Bronnie, Del, and Livia, first showing how Bronnie deals with the junk and debris that has shown up at her house from Mars, then discussing Del's modest explorations, and interspersing both with Livia's account of her experiences trying to communicate with her Martian servant Ylle. The story is built on a moderately interesting idea, but feels oddly incomplete, as if the story was originally longer and then truncated to reduce it to short story length. Or possibly the story was too short, and sections were added to raise its word count - most of the sections told by Bronnie seem to be little more than exposition, and her portion of the plot is simply dropped in the middle of the story never to return. That said, the sections of the narrative that involve Del and Livia are interesting, and the Martians who are obsessed with dust turn out to have a story remarkably full of pathos. Despite the handful of problems it has, Qasida is an interesting story that could have been a really good one if it were either just a little longer or a little shorter.

9. All of Our Past Places by Kat Howard: Telling the story of two childhood friends who bonded over a shared love of maps now having grown to adulthood, All of Our Past Places examines what happens when someone wants to get away from their present life so badly that it becomes a almost dangerous obsession. Aoife is obsessed with maps. She loves them so much that she makes maps by slicing up other maps and creating new maps of nonexistent places. Miren is Aoife's best friend who accompanies her as she journeys to imaginary places via her maps, wandering their neighborhood using Miren's house as their starting point. And then Aoife becomes obsessed with St. Patrick's Purgatory, and one day, Miren discovers that her friend has gone missing and all of the maps she had collected showing St. Patrick's Purgatory as a location have a hole burned in them in the exact spot that it had been shown. Much of the story is told in flashback as Miren rummages through Aoife's map collection, trying to assemble the right combination of map pieces that will bring her friend back. The story is well-written, but a fairly short shrift seems to be given to the motivations of the primary character. Miren states that Aoife wants to escape her life because she comes from an abusive home, but there is no real reason given for her obsession with St. Patrick's Purgatory, and no inkling of what she expected to get out of going there. By the end, all is well, and the entire story is just ambiguous enough that all of the events in it might just be the fantasies of two young women, but they simply aren't fantasies that are engaging enough to compete with the best stories on the ballot.

Note: Ursula Vernon's story Jackalope Wives won the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Short Story.

2014 Nebula Award Winner for Best Short Story: If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love by Rachel Swirsky (reviewed in 2014 Hugo Voting - Best Short Story)

2016 Nebula Award Winner for Best Short Story: Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers by Alyssa Wong

2014 WSFA Small Press Award Winner: Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma by Alex Shvartsman

2016 WSFA Small Press Award Winner: Today I Am Paul by Martin L. Shoemaker (reviewed in 2016 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

List of Nebula Award Winners for Best Short Story

2015 Locus Award Nominees
2015 Nebula Award Nominees
2015 World Fantasy Award Nominees

2015 WSFA Small Press Award Nominees     Book Award Reviews     Home

Author - Antonelli, Lou

Birth: January 6, 1957.

Death: October 6, 2021.

Note: Normally I bury the author pages by backdating them to 1970 to keep them out of the blog stream as a workaround for the Blogger platform's limitations. I'm shifting this one into the blog stream because it deals with some topical events concerning the 2015 Hugo Awards.

Also note, for obvious reasons, the comment-eating goblins are on the prowl. Comments may be deleted without warning or recourse.

Comments: Lou Antonelli was an American journalist and science fiction writer with an outsize ego and a short temper. Originally from Massachusetts, Antonelli was educated at Columbia University, ran unsuccessfully for Congress, found his way to Texas, and eventually became the managing editor of the Clarkesville Times. He got a late start as a fiction writer, with his first published story not appearing until 2003, but he has made up for lost time, churning out almost a hundred stories in the roughly decade long period following that. Oddly, despite being a former student at an Ivy League university, Antonelli likes to claim to being put upon by those who regard him as a "peasant", and seems to view negative or even indifferent reviews of his fairly mediocre short fiction as being "hatchet jobs". But this is only the beginning of Antonelli's distasteful personality traits.

My one personal brush with Antonelli took place after I opined on Twitter that the reason many people don't like the authors who form the core of the Sad Puppy¹ group is that they are assholes, including him in the bunch. (I might add that Antonelli was placed in this company after he responded to being banned from Deidre Saoirse Moen's blog by suggesting she was a Nazi). He reacted to my tweet by confirming that he is, in fact, an asshole. Despite my tweeting on my personal twitter account, Antonelli took it upon himself to track down my work e-mail and phone number, first e-mailing a poorly thought out threat to come down to my workplace and do something or other, and then telephoning my office to confirm I was employed there. The entire text of his e-mail was as follows:

“Geez, you're a LAWYER for the GOVERNMENT and you call me an ASSHOLE? I have a news bulletin for you, 98 percent of average Americans would say you're an asshole "prima facie".

My parents immigrated from Europe in the wake of the devastation of World War II. They didn't speak English. I was the first member of my family to be a U.S. citizen, complete a public school education, and attend college. I've had to work hard all my life, and I certainly never had a job with the government. I've been treated like trash by privileged Americans like you all my life.

I'll be in D.C. later this week, I have family members who live in Great Falls. I'll stop by the GSA and drop off copies of your Twitter insult. I think people need to know what kind of person you are. As a taxpayer, I resent having my pocket picked for your benefit.

I have no idea how most people feel about government lawyers, but I do suspect that the 98% figure Antonelli gives is probably a fairly high estimate of how many consider us to be "assholes". As I work in an office full of government lawyers, one can imagine how well his statement about us went over when I showed it to them. What I don't think he realizes is that I, like most government lawyers, make much less money than we could in the private sector. I'm not complaining about my situation - the law firm life is financially rewarding but has its own downsides - but calling working for the Federal government evidence of "privilege" is kind of silly. But the element that kind of makes Antonelli's whole diatribe completely mind-boggling is that this is a message sent from a man who not only attended an Ivy League university, but whose first action after finishing school was to run for Congress at the age of 25 (he lost, by a landslide). His whining about how he's been "treated like trash by privileged Americans" in the light of these facts seems like the height of hypocrisy.

Also, given the size of the Federal budget and Antonelli's likely tax contribution to it, I'd be glad to give him the couple of thousandths of a cent that he probably contributed to my salary, just so he won't feel like he is "having his pocket picked".

This didn't go anywhere, since no one I work for or with regarded his outrage as anything other than the ravings of a clearly unbalanced fool, but it does show that, like most of the Sad Puppy proponents, Antonelli is poorly regarded not for his politics, but rather for the fact that he is a jerk. I'll also note that this was his first communication to me following my single tweet. He escalated from "someone called me an asshole on social media" to "I'll try to get them into trouble at their workplace" right off the bat. Antonelli isn't someone who responded in a measured manner and slowly rose to this kind of threat. No, he's the sort of person who's first reaction is to threaten to do this sort of thing. Anyone who wants to see Antonelli admitting to doing this and issuing some rather inane self-serving justifications can read this comment thread from File770.

One might note that in the linked comment thread, Antonelli announces that far from dropping the matter because everyone other than him reacted like he had gone way overboard, he had decided to wait until closer to the 2016 political campaigns, because he wanted to get his representative to engage in a Congressional investigation into the matter. One might also note that for someone who claims to be libertarian in sentiment, he's pretty quick to run to the authorities over trivialities. Like most internet libertarians, he's a closet authoritarian at heart and a fan of jackbooted thugs so long as they are his jackbooted thugs. Just to be clear here: I called him an asshole on Twitter, he then confirmed my assessment with his behavior, and he thinks that this deserves to be investigated by Congress. Let that sink in before reading further.

More recently Antonelli escalated from merely trying to give people difficulties at their workplace for insulting him to endangering their lives and trying to get them arrested because he didn't like what they had posted on their Facebook pages, writing to the Spokane police department to "warn" them about author David Gerrold, the Sasquan Guest of Honor and emcee for the upcoming Hugo award ceremony, stating:

“I really didn’t know much about [Gerrold] before the Hugo nominations came out. Following his discourse and his level of discourse as a result, I personally wrote a letter addressed to the police chief in Spokane and said I thought the man was insane and a public danger and needs to be watched when the convention’s going on, and I mean it. I attached my business card. I said this guy’s inciting to violence. Somebody—a weak-minded might attack somebody because of his relentless strength of abuse. I think, honestly, I think he belongs in a secure psychiatric facility.”

This quote was transcribed by Jim C. Hines from a YouTube video Antonelli appeared on titled Superversive SF Roundtable - The Hugo's Again. To be clear, Gerrold has never written anything that any reasonable person would even remotely consider to be an "incitement to violence". This is simply Antonelli trying to strike back at someone because they had the temerity to say that Lou and his buddies were in the wrong, were rude to have gamed the Hugo nominating process, and would probably find it harder to find friends and professional opportunities in the publishing world in the future. The fact that Gerrold is openly gay and a supporter of LGBT rights probably also factored into Antonelli's decision to try to bring the Spokane police force down onto the WorldCon Guest of Honor.

After the internet dropped on his head, Antonelli apologized, and Gerrold accepted. However, there is still the matter of Antonelli's letter, which is still sitting on the desk of someone at the Spokane police department. Has Antonelli retracted the letter? There is no indication that he has done so, so there is still every reason to believe that the Spokane police still have a letter in front of them telling them that Gerrold is a dangerous person. Then there is also the self-pitying tone of Antonelli's apology:

It’s become public that on July 1^st I wrote a letter to the chief of the Spokane Police Department expressing some concerns over potential security issues at the upcoming Sasquan.

I’m sorry for what I did. Without looking at the big picture I reacted in a manner that I thought I was being treated. It was stupid and wrong. My subsequent participation on a podcast was also a mistake because the environment further fueled my fear and I lashed out again.

I’m sorry I bothered the Spokane PD. They probably are ready to throw the butterfly net over ME when I enter the city. And I’m sorry and apologize to David Gerrold. He probably understands why I did what I did better than I do.

I need to ponder the hurt I have caused. To give me time to think, after Sasquan I am taking a half-year hiatus from attending any conventions and/or submitting any fiction.

I think I’ve become my own crazy uncle . . .

Let's unpack this a bit. First off, it only because public because Antonelli saw fit to boast about writing the letter on a YouTube video while surrounded by sympathetic ears such as John C. Wright and L. Jagi Lamplighter who all seem to have nodded along, and even engaged in joking banter over the matter. It was only when Antonelli's action got noticed by people who don't have their head stuck deep inside the Sad Puppy colon that he belatedly realized that what he had done might not be regarded as justified. But what if this had never come to light? What if Antonelli hadn't blundered about on the internet talking about how much of a complete jackass he had been? Would he have apologized for writing a letter to the Spokane police department? Would he have thought his actions to be beyond the pale? I really don't think he would have.

But then Antonelli goes on and says "I reacted in a manner I thought I was being treated". This is an evasion - an attempt to shift responsibility away from himself and back onto Gerrold. Except that it doesn't make any sense at all. Gerrold never wrote to the police. Gerrold never said that Antonelli should be placed in a secure mental facility. Gerrold never incited anyone to violence, no matter how much one squints at what he wrote. As in the linked File 770 comment thread, Antonelli seems to be trying to claim that even if his actions weren't correct, they were justifiable, or at least explainable. The problem is that this pattern of behavior on Antonelli's part shows extremely poor impulse control, and more than a little paranoia, traits that many of the core Puppy proponents seem to share. They, like Antonelli, say or do things that normal people look at with shock and dismay, and only after the fact do the Puppies seem to realize that they are well outside the bounds of normal civilized behavior. Some never do realize this, but instead retrench into their ridiculous and reprehensible positions and claim to be persecuted for their views.

Then Antonelli's self-pity takes front and center in the rest of his apology. The Spokane police will be ready to throw the butterfly net over him! He is going to take a half year off from conventions and publishing after WorldCon to reflect! He's become his own crazy uncle! Everything about the last couple of paragraphs of his apology is all about Antonelli and how this is so hard for him. Even when he mentions Gerrold he goes on to say that Gerrold probably understands why Antonelli did what he did, once again turning the discourse back to himself and how difficult this has made his life. He called the police on Gerrold, but when one reads his apology, it is clear that the person who Antonelli thinks has been really wounded here is Antonelli.

Antonelli's wallow in self-pity took an even bigger turn following his public mea culpa. Gerrold, myself, and many others have pointed out that the authors who form the core Puppy proponents had not been doing themselves any professional favors by attacking pretty much everyone outside of their insular little group, which the Puppies interpreted as threats to their livelihoods (which, given that they have spent time actually threatening the livelihoods of others, seems somewhat ironic) rather than merely an observation that people don't like to work with dangerous and paranoid assholes. This came to fruition in stark terms following Antonelli's ill-advised announcement of his letter to the Spokane police department when Carrie Cuinn, the editor-in-chief of Lakeside Circus, a quarterly speculative fiction publication, wrote him an e-mail in which she decided that the magazine would not publish a previously accepted story of Antonelli's. Antonelli then turned around and published the following version of Ms. Cuinn's e-mail:

Mr. Antonelli,

I have just become aware of comments you made regarding contacting the police about David Gerrold, over his comments about the Hugo Awards.

While your stance on, and involvement in, the Hugo voting slates is, we feel, a personal choice, and outside of our interests, taking this action moves away from protected speech, and into a concrete effort to threaten someone's safety and livelihood.

Because of this, we will not be publishing your story in our next issue, and would suggest that we are unlikely to be a good fit for your work in the future.

Thank you.
Carrie Cuinn
Editor-in-Chief

One should note that Cuinn sent her message to Antonelli after it became public that he had written to the Spokane police department, but before he issued his self-serving apology. That means she was responding to a man who, to that point, was unrepentant about having potentially endangered David Gerrold and any number of other WorldCon attendees by sending the local police force after them. In a complementary e-mail, Cuinn also made sure to follow-up to honor the terms of her contract, inquiring where to send the "kill fee" for declining to publish Antonelli's story. In a "woe is me" post, Antonelli made this version of the e-mail from Cuinn public after he had issued his apology, talking about how this turn of events showed that actions have consequences. Antonelli didn't bother to mention that his contract had been rescinded before he issued his apology, and also failed to mention that Cuinn had followed the terms of the contract she had signed with him.

Unfortunately, by publishing this version of the e-mail Cuinn had sent to him, Antonelli either didn't consider or didn't care about the consequences to her. Within hours the editor who had decided she didn't want to deal with Antonelli because he was too dangerous and unpredictable found herself targeted by an internet hate mob that Antonelli had riled up. Soon, Cuinn tweeted:

Less than 12 hours before today's publishing decision led to getting emailed rape and death threats, because evil SJWs something something.

Antonelli's action was either hateful and callous if he realized that his post would bring out the internet wolves to attack Cuinn, or merely thoughtless and careless if he didn't. And if he didn't, that's a lapse in judgment that is simply staggering. There are, however, a couple of points that indicate to me that this was not merely a lapse in judgment by Antonelli, because the e-mail he posted was not, in fact, the same as the e-mail he was sent by Cuinn. He edited the e-mail before posting it to leave out an important detail and add some information that made it easier for people to track down and harass Cuinn. The actual first paragraph of Cuinn's letter said:

I have just become aware of comments you made regarding contacting the police about David Gerrold, over his comments about the Hugo Awards. Specifically, the video linked in Jim Hines’s post, here.

Note that the last sentence in this paragraph, which specifically references the misconduct that Antonelli had engaged in, was deleted from the version that Antonelli posted. Further, in the original letter, Cuinn merely signed her name. The detail that Cuinn is "editor-in-chief" and the specification that he had received the message from "Lakeside Circus" were both gratuitously added by Antonelli. Had he merely wanted to show that actions have consequences, he could have simply left those details and Cuinn's name out of the post. He didn't. He not only kept her name on the letter, he made sure to delete a link to his own wrongdoing and add further identifying data that would be certain to send a harassment mob after her. To be clear on this point: Antonelli deceptively edited the e-mail he was sent before he made it public in order to make it more inflammatory. He lied in public with the effect of causing harm to Cuinn.

Carrie has reported on some of the private conversations between her and Antonelli related to this issue in a blog post titled A Statement about Lou Antonelli, Lakeside Circus, Harassment and Safety. In her post, Cuinn states that she had to contact Antonelli for him to decide to tell his fans to stop attacking her. And his public message on the subject was tepid at best:

OK, if anyone out there is contacting Carrie Cuinn and castigating her for her decision not to publish my story, knock it off.

He didn't tell his fans that rape and death threats are unacceptable. He merely told them to stop criticizing her decision. As she has noted, Cuinn found the threats to be disturbing enough that she actually contacted her local police department about them (and unlike Antonelli's letter about Gerrold, she appears to have good justification for doing so), but Antonelli dismisses the concern by merely saying, "[I]f you're reprimanding her, knock it off". Knowing that he edited Cuinn's letter to him before he made it public, the mealy-mouthed nature of the message to his fans is quite telling.

Given his clear disregard for the safety and well-being of anyone else and his poor impulse control, I don't think a half-year hiatus from conventions and publishing is enough for Antonelli. His constant refrain of "I'm Italian so I'm hot-headed" is an excuse that a twelve year old would be embarrassed to use. This is not an isolated incident from Antonelli - as documented by Natalie Luhrs he has engaged in similar behavior multiple times. This is a pattern of behavior that makes one wonder how many times he has done similar things that simply have not become public. Some people have praised Antonelli for apologizing to Gerrold, but he has never apologized to me, and he didn't even bother to respond directly to Cuinn when she alerted him to the rape and death threats against her that his actions had sparked. How many other people out there are owed apologies by Antonelli? My own opinion is that Antonelli should never publish again, anywhere. I think any convention should think long and hard before allowing him to show up at their venue, let alone invite him to participate in their programming. He's clearly not grown-up enough to operate in the public sphere without endangering other people's livelihoods and lives when he loses his temper over trivial slights and imagined offenses.

The larger point is that Antonelli is only one example of the dangerous and vicious behavior displayed by the various Sad Puppy authors and proponents. Tom Kratman turns up in comment threads and demands the right to challenge others to a physical altercation often enough that the use of his name triggers the spam filter on File 770. He also seems to like calling others "pussy" a lot, which would by considered fairly childish for anyone older than ten. (Further documentation of his shenanigans can be found here). In response to having his Facebook page reported and suspended for some of his racist comments, Michael Z. Williamson issued a tirade in which he claimed that once he found out who did the reporting, he would fly to their home and kick them in the teeth. (Once again, further documentation of more vile behavior here). John C. Wright has written about how the "natural reaction" of straight men to seeing two gay men together is to want to beat the gay men to death with ax handles and tire irons. (And again, further documentation of his jerkishness here). Theodore Beale has posted, among his many other hateful and vile musings, that one day the people of Norway will view the mass-murderer Anders Brevik as a hero for taking a stand against evil leftists². (And yet again, further documentation of misbehavior here). On a lesser scale, Brad Torgersen can't seem to write anything about the Hugo Awards without coming up with a new insulting acronym to call fans such as CHORF (Cliquish Holier-than-thou Obnoxious Reactionary Fanatics) or HPPC (Hyper-Progressive Pissypants Club). (Dare I say it, further documentation of assholery to be found here). Finally, Larry Correia seems unable to blog about the Hugos without raging about how he is engaged in a culture war against SJWs (Social Justice Warriors) who are destroying science fiction by doing something or other. And so on and so forth.

Antonelli fits right in with the reactionary and violent crowd he has chosen to run with. Don't think for a second that the effect of Antonelli's actions is unintentional: He is a bully who has repeatedly attempted to intimidate and threaten others because they did things he did not like. He only backed off his threats against me when it became clear they were not going to work. He only apologized to Gerrold when it became clear that he was facing widespread criticism for his actions. He only told his fans to stop harassing Cuinn when it became clear that their attacks on her would harm his image. There's nothing surprising about his behavior: Antonelli threatens and blusters until it becomes clear it isn't going to work, then he moves on to a different target to start again. And the larger point is that Antonelli is just acting in the same manner as most of the other Sad Puppy authors, flying off the handle in vicious outrage at imagined provocations. Antonelli's lying, his underhanded tactics, and his attempts to smear others are all simply par for the course for the Sad Puppy leaders. He's not a terrible author - his work is merely mediocre - but like so many of the authors connected with the Sad Puppies, his actions over the course of 2015 have proved that he is someone that is probably too dangerous to try to work with.

Update: On November 15, 2015, Antonelli took to his blog to launch some rather interesting accusations about, and make a bold, albeit entirely baseless prediction under the title You Heard It Here First:

George R.R. Martin will be the next recipient of the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Award (The Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award).

No, I do not have inside information, nor do I have a crystal ball. It’s simply a logical conclusion, especially if you know how the literary leaders of the science fiction community think.

Regardless of the merit of Martin’s literary output, he will get the award as a reward for helping trounce the dissident nominees for the Hugo awards this year (the so-called Sad Puppies). It’s not really any more complicated than that.

What evidence does Antonelli have to back up this wild assertion that Martin will be named an SFWA Grand Master as payback for being outspoken about the ill manners of the core of Puppy authors? Why, he tells you in his own words: None. Zero. Nothing. He's engaging in rank speculation based upon nothing more than conspiracy theory thinking. He apparently thinks awards are determined by a secret cabal who hand out awards as political favors rather than because the recipients have accomplished something notable with their writing. I suppose it is a comfort to him to think this way, as his own writing is mediocre enough that he would never receive an award nod for it, but to cast these sorts of aspersions about concerning others is pretty bush league on Antonelli's part.

What is interesting here is how Antonelli tries to obscure the facts. He calls the "dissident nominees" the "so-called Sad Puppies". One has to wonder exactly what the "so-called" is intended to mean. The "dissident nominees" were, in fact, called Sad Puppies. That is what Larry Correia called them when he started the whole affair back in 2013, and it is what Brad Torgersen called them when he took up the torch in 2015 and put Antonelli's name on the Sad Puppy slate. The term "Sad Puppies" wasn't coined by anyone outside the pathetic little clique of mediocrities that formed its core: They came up with the name themselves. Even the title of his post is a bit of deception, as "You heard It here First" makes it sound like Antonelli is reporting news, rather than making up a bizarre conspiracy theory.

In any event, I would normally not bother to update this sort of silliness from a Puppy. For the most part, Antonelli's actions surrounding the Hugos had already destroyed what little reputation he had before the awards were presented in Sasquan this past August, and as a result there's no real need to bother with reporting on an irrelevant nonentity like he is. But Mike Glyer included his fact-free commentary in his November 15 roundup titled Pixel Scroll 11/15 Scrolled Acquaintance, much to the amusement of many of the people who read that website, both because Martin has more than enough accomplishments to be named an SFWA Grand Master on his own merits with no conspiracy theory needed to explain it, and because there are so many other accomplished authors who are likely to get the nod ahead of Martin, mostly because it is very rare for an author to be named a Grand Master before they turn seventy (Martin is sixty-seven).

In a comment that was mostly about other things, I opined that Antonelli's speculation was "A train of thought worthy of a dim-witted conspiracy theory loving drunkard". And that is where Antonelli decided to show he is exactly that. He created a meme which he posted on his Facebook page, taking a picture of me and reporting my quote as:

Lou Antonelli is "a dim-witted conspiracy theory loving drunkard" - Aaron Pound, Obama admin attorney

So, while purporting to relate what I said, Antonelli sliced my quote and made it say something different than what I actually said. It is only a slight change, so that's not that big of a deal, but it is somewhat curious that a man like Antonelli, who prides himself on being a newspaperman, would be so cavalier with a quote. But the truly hilarious thing about this "meme" is that at no point does Antonelli actually attempt to refute what was said about his speculation about Martin. In short, at no point does he try to argue that my assessment is incorrect. I suspect that he didn't try because he knows he can't. His theory concerning Martin's supposedly impending Grand Master status is a dim-witted conspiracy theory that one would have to be drunk to come up with. Further, had he simply left it alone, the comment would have been a single sentence on the comments section of a blog post that would have soon faded into obscurity. Instead, it will now live on forever as a meme that associates Antonelli with being a dim-witted conspiracy theory loving drunkard.

The other thing about this "meme" is that he claims I am an "Obama admin attorney", which is false, and he almost certainly knows it to be false. I am employed by the Federal government. I do not work for this administration, or any other. I am not a political appointee, but rather I am a civil servant. When Obama leaves office in January of 2017, I will still be working for the Federal government, just as I continued working for the Federal government when Bush left office in January of 2009. The U.S. government relies upon a nonpolitical civil service to function. We are not beholden to a particular Presidential administration. Instead, our job is to ensure the continued operation of the government no matter who is elected. I have helped to implement Republican policies. I have helped to implement Democratic policies. I have worked on projects that I thought were good ideas, and I have worked on projects that I thought were terrible ideas. Either way, I did my job and will continue to do my job. Labeling me as an "Obama admin attorney" is so fundamentally wrong that either Antonelli is clueless as to the nature of how the government works, or he does know, and is lying. Given the volume of dishonesty that Antonelli has displayed in so many other instances, I'm leaning towards the "he's lying" explanation.

Voltaire once said, "I always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: 'O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!' God granted it." It seems that if there is a God, he granted my version of Voltaire's prayer and sent me Antonelli as an enemy.

My reviews of Lou Antonelli's books:
None

Other books by Lou Antonelli I have read but not reviewed:
Letters from Gardner

Short fiction by Lou Antonelli appearing in works that I have reviewed:

On a Spiritual Plain found in 2015 Hugo Voting - Best Short Story

¹ For anyone who does not know, the Sad Puppy campaign is the brain child of Larry Correia, a mediocre author of fantasy-themed adventure fiction who felt slighted at being nominated for and losing one of the highest awards that science fiction fandom can bestow upon a new author, and decided to try to leverage his fan base into a Hugo nomination for some decidedly ordinary works of fiction he had written. This mutated over the next few years to a full-blown slate in which a collection of aggrieved authors with nothing to actually be aggrieved about exploited a known loophole (that everyone had been too polite to use over the sixty year history of the award) in the Hugo nominating process to game themselves and their friends onto the Hugo ballot, effectively packing the Hugo ballot with their choices even though their supporters only made up about 20% of the voters. Although the Puppy slate was not against the rules, it is widely seen as unethical and against the spirit of the awards. The nominated works from the slate are also very poor in quality, ranging from mediocre down to unreadably bad.

² Some of the Sad Puppy organizers such as Brad Torgersen and Larry Correia have tried to claim that Theodore Beale is not a Sad Puppy and they are not responsible for his participation in the Hugo Awards this year, as Beale created his own "Rabid Puppy" slate and none of Beale's writing appears on the Sad Puppy slate. However, numerous works and individuals from the small press publishing company Castalia House that Beale owns and runs were on the Sad Puppy slate. Beale is part of the Sad Puppies, no matter how much people Like Torgersen and Correia want to claim he is not.

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