I seriously need some helpful soul, or maybe some kind of crowd-sourced thing that can tell me what I should be reading as things come out so I¡¯m not floundering under drifts of pages on book mountain when the Hugo nomination period opens. Preferably some recommendation engine where my fellow writers, bless you guys I love you all but damn I know how we are, are not allowed to nominate or push their own books. I don¡¯t want reviews, I don¡¯t even want opinions, I just want a simple but large list of titles and authorsRachael Acks about the plight of next year's Hugo nominators looking for worthy candidates in a field in which at least 4201 new novels in English were published in 2014.
Both sides of this argument have made the claim how undeserving and deserving works are not being and being nominated for the ballot. Both sides are correct. Five possible nominations out of 50,000 eligible works? I mean, what certainty do we have that those five nominated works are superior to any number of the other eligible 49,995 works? Nor can any one individual read hundreds of works per day. Thus the decision of superiority falls onto the shoulders of the fans raised above the rest by their willingness and capability to spend at least $40 for the right to nominate and vote in the Hugo awards.And if it does, how can any reader know which books/stories/people/etc are eligible in a given year if they don't follow fandom all that closely?
If you really love a thing ¡ª if you think your stuff is awesome! ¡ª you owe it to your stuff to not try to send deterrent messages or set boundaries on who else gets to love your stuff too. This is not hipstertown, where the moment somebody else loves your stuff, you have to stop loving your stuff and/or actively hate your stuff you formerly loved. You love your stuff! Somebody else loving your stuff, doesn't devalue how you feel; nor does it devalue the stuff proper.- Brad Torgersen
Oh, sure, maybe the new folk aren't replicating your exact "passage" as a fan, but the truth is, they don't have to. Let it be organic ¡ª like it was for you! ¡ª and just be glad somebody else wants to celebrate your stuff too.
Because without people to celebrate stuff ¡ª newbs and fans (small f) especially ¡ª all of this crap we're engaged in, is just a closed loop. No light or energy getting in or out. Nobody to keep the *feeling* for the stuff fresh, and alive.
Used to be, that when you ordered a book from [B. Dalton], you'd sign a card, and a good year later they'd send it to you saying they can't get it from the publisher.Another poster backs that up:
Now, (and I've done this twice in the last 2 months) you sign the card, and a week later you get it saying they're out of stock of the book in the warehouse.
I have to agree on this one. In the past 6 months, I tried to order two books at B. Dalton. Each time I signed a card, and each time a short while later I got a card back saying they were out of stock.Some of the folks in that thread are talking about textbooks (which apparently they simply refused to deal in), but neither of those posters were. My own negative experience with the process would have come from trying to buy SF/F.
The two books were not especially rare or unusual and I later found both of them on the bookshelves at other bookstores.
Nina Allan. The Raceposted by Chrysostom at 12:13 PM on May 14, 2015 [4 favorites]
James L. Cambias. A Darkling Sea
William Gibson.The Peripheral
Daryl Gregory.Afterparty
Dave Hutchinson.Europe In Autumn
Simon Ings.Wolves
Cixin Liu (Ken Liu, translator).The Three-Body Problem
Emily St. John Mandel.Station Eleven
Will McIntosh.Defenders
Claire North.The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Laline Paull. The Bees
Adam Roberts.B¨ºte
John Scalzi. Lock In: A Novel of the Near Future
Andy Weir. The Martian
Jeff VanderMeer. Area X (The Southern Reach Trilogy: Annihilation; Authority; Acceptance)
Peter Watts. Echopraxia
"He represents the better, truer aspect of liberalism, now mostly lost to the of mindless modern progressivism of the shrieking harpies, glittery hoo-haas, and those immortalized by the inimitable Kate Paulk as Tempests in B CupsThere's also 'Vox Day Talks About Extinguishing Gene Pools', 'Vox Day Talks About Women' and my personal horror favorite, 'Vox Day Talks About The Dangers Of Non-White Neighborhoods'. His fiction piece is literally 'Heroic Soldier Is Attacked By Brown People Who Threaten His Pretty Blond Wife.'
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posted by Going To Maine at 2:03 PM on May 4, 2015 [9 favorites]