hugo nominations for 2009

Here's what I'm nominating for the Hugos, in all the categories where I feel like I've read or watched enough to be even vaguely useful. (Which is surprisingly few, really, but I spent five months of the year chained to MIT.)

Best novel:

1. Palimpsest, by Catherynne M. Valente, Bantam

Best novella:

1. Pelago, by Judith Berman, Asimov's February 2009

Best novelette:

1. "The Qualia Engine", by Damien Broderick, Asimov's August 2009

Best short story:

1. "Sleepless in the House of Ye", by Ian McHugh, Asimov's July 2009


2. "As Women Fight", by Sarah Genge, Asimov's December 2009


3. "Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four Hour Book Store", by Robin Sloan, robinsloan.com


4. "Bridesicle", by Will McIntosh, Asimov's January 2009


5. "The Horrid Glory of Its Wings", by Elizabeth Bear, Tor.com

Best dramatic presentation, short form:

1. "Belonging", Dollhouse season 2 episode 4


2. "Man on the Street", Dollhouse season 1 episode 6

...and that's all I've got. So many good candidates for best short story -- far more than I can actually list -- and so few for anything else, and so many categories left completely empty! But no time to fix that now. Maybe next year.

on blog commenting

One of the interesting things about blogs (to me) is that they're supposed to be a bidirectional communications mechanism. There are asymmetries, of course -- the blog owner has the soapbox and the megaphone, and commenters are (rightly) guests in the blog owner's virtual house, as it were, with the rights and responsibilities that pertain thereunto. But generally the people who read the blog are supposed to be able to talk back -- comment on, elaborate on, disagree with, or otherwise emend the original post. I've been a little disappointed that the Iron Blogger participants haven't commented as much as I expected on each other's blogs. Some of this is I think because not all the posts are necessarily comment-worthy. I seem to be the only blogger writing consistently about science fiction, and if the other people involved are less interested in the aspects of SF that interest me, it makes sense that they don't have anything to say when I go on about it. In the same way, I don't have a whole lot to add to the discussion of a grotty Linux kernel issue.

I think some of it is also that we're more likely to follow up with each other on MIT's zephyr system than in the blog comments -- it's one of the perils of us being relatively close socially and sharing a common forum like zephyr. Also, at least for me blog comments don't integrate nicely with my existing attention-management mechanisms (mostly BarnOwl), so they're out of sight and therefore out of mind. Oh, and we're hosed.

At any rate, in the spirit of discussion, and since writing these comments took up much of the time I'd allotted for writing a blog post, here are a few of the comments I've left recently on other blogs, mostly but not exclusively Iron Blogger blogs. Go, read the posts, and chime in in the comments if you have something to add!

• My response to phurst's post about Christian fundamentalists.


• My response to Alioth's post on learning styles and strategies.


• My response to Ed's post on learning to manage, or "The Art of Posing a Problem".


• And lastly, a bit of chit-chat about flashlights in response to TNH's post about this morning's power outage in Brooklyn.


• Edit 2/28/10: Today, I responded to Greg Brockman's post on meeting the needs of top students in the intro CS curriculum.

remains of the week

...or, five things make a post.

This week for me was very full of very little of import to the wider world, so here's bits and pieces of stuff:

1. I'm playing around with ikiwiki as the potential new backend for my blog and liking it a fair bit. (I know co-Iron Blogger spang uses it for her site.) It bills itself as a "wiki compiler", which seems not quite right -- or at least I'm using it as a more general web site compiler -- but it's impressively effective for something which generates static pages and uses only a cookie and a CGI script to do all its interaction with the user. It's backed by pretty much whatever version control system you want, which plays exactly to my kinks in software design -- I chose Git. I may at some point roll my own database-backed comment module, because the current file-backed one feels a little clunky, but for the moment I'm still working on more basic things. Web design is hard; good web design seems fscking impossible. Also, like, free time. I'm going to get the site looking halfways decent and then figure out how to move all my data (and URLs, and and and) over from Blogger. But I have a site that's stored in a Git repository and updates when I 'git push' to it, and that makes me really happy.


2. I finished the latest Asimov's on the T some time this week. I gave it to an acquaintance who was looking for reading material, so I'm just doing this from memory and the preview of the issue posted on Asimov's web site, but here's what I thought of the stories in it. (Since I'm trying to put my thoughts together for Hugo nominations this year and finding it frustrating to remember everything I read, I figure if I do it here I'll have something to consult come next year. I'll try to go back and do the first couple issues of the year in a bit. It's mostly for my own use, but I figure other people may be interested too -- if you have thoughts on the stories, feel free to chime in. :-)
   
   
   
   • "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down", by William Preston -- a really wonderful deconstruction of pulp/superhero/superspy stories, well-written and thoughtful; definitely potential Hugo material.
   
   
   • "The Tower", by Kristine Katheryn Rusch -- the novella; it didn't grab me, so I didn't read it.
   
   
   • "Blind Cat Dance", by Alexander Jablokov -- gene-modded animals and the people who manage them, and manage each other; interesting ideas, an arrestingly wrong protagonist and other interesting and well-developed characters. Hugo potential.
   
   
   • "Centaurs", by Benjamin Crowell -- Bleh. Hormones IN SPAAAAAACE. One-dimensional teenage protagonists, including a not-very-convincingly-rendered damsel in distressteenage girl. Its only saving grace is that it didn't have the expected ending, but that wasn't nearly enough to redeem it for me.
   
   
   • "Ticket Inspector Gliden Becomes the First Martyr of the Glorious Human Uprising", by Derek Zumsteg -- this one was amusing and included some trenchant observations on public transit. It mostly casts tensions of our own time into SFnal terms, but it does so without heavy-handedness. I'm not sure it's Hugo-worthy, but it made me smile.
   
   
   • "The Speed of Dreams", by Will Ludwigsen -- a cute and amusing story told by a well-realized 8th grader as her science report, with an icepick of an ending. I still can't figure out what I think of it.
   
   


3. Now I need something new to read on the T. The April/May Asimov's should be up soon -- I need to check Pandemonium for it -- but in the meantime I'm reading Valentine, written by Alex de Campi and drawn by Christine Larsen, a comic about two soldiers in Napolean's army in its harrowing retreat from Moscow who are entrusted with the future of magic on Earth. It was featured in a Big Idea piece on John Scalzi's web site and caught my eye. It's primarily being distributed for mobile devices, which is actually a pretty pleasant way to read comics, so I'm reading it on my G1 (though it's also available for iPhone and a bunch of other formats). You can download the first issue for free on the Android Marketplace and buy the next three for a buck apiece. Each one is about a T ride for me, and I'm enjoying it so far. Suggestions for other things to read on the T -- which is to say short things, especially fiction -- would be welcomed. :-)


4. MITSFS got the microfilm scans back -- thanks to NESFA for funding the project! They look good -- obviously the covers don't come out, but they didn't in the microfilm either, so that's not a loss, and the text is crisp and eminently readable. Now to figure out what to do with them... (My next MITSFS project is probably to find the legal people to make the Google Books thing happen? Gah.)


5. I just spent 45 minutes being interviewed by my housemate on my IM habits for his UI design class. It was amusing. Also apparently I have a lot of things I pay attention to. :-)
   

link salad

A little bit of link salad:

• The Daddening of Video Games -- article about how video games are starting to focus on the experience of parents, which I hypothesize has a lot to do with the aging of the hardcore gamer populace. It's interesting from a media studies perspective to watch gaming quite literally growing up (via Penny Arcade).
• SCE_HeavyRain, the blog of the writer-director of Heavy Rain, a new video game that looks to be pushing the form-as-art vastly further than anything before. It's fascinating reading. He sounds as stressed as I feel (also via Penny Arcade).
• This post on what happens when Google stops sending "I'm Feeling Lucky" searches for 'facebook login' to the Facebook login page (answer: hilarity ensues) led me to this excellent post on designing to counter learned helplessness, which in turn led me to this post on designing web forms to be spam-proof without CAPTCHAs.
• As a coder, these kinds of things -- cf. the recent Google Buzz privacy debacle (link sadly down right now) -- frankly terrify me. If code I wrote fucked up and exposed personal information in a way that got them killed by a vengeful ex, which is not unfathomable, I'd feel just as responsible as if I'd been more directly at fault. Considering how interconnected modern services, especially social networking sites, are, how many unintended side effects you have to be watching for constantly, to say nothing of actively hostile users, it's almost a wonder this stuff doesn't happen more often. I don't know that there's a good way to mitigate these kinds of privacy leaks -- not putting any information on the Internet, even privately, doesn't help when other people or organizations put it up for you. I'm well aware that it's in many ways a privilege of being white and male that I can be as public as I am.
• Google Buzz actually looks really cool -- the closest thing to MIT's Zephyr for the web I've seen yet. It's a shame many people's introduction to it was so frought with problems.
• Annoyingly, Blogger has decided to discontinue FTP support on their service, which is how I've been publishing this blog (though thankfully they've pushed back their original March 26 deadline to May 1). This amounts to an ultimatum -- switch to hosting my blog on Blogspot, or find another software package I can host myself. I haven't yet found a piece of blog software that I like, but I'd love to hear suggestions.
  
  (I've got two interlocked problems, really. One is the problem of finding blog software I like. Wordpress is out, because I don't want to deal with the upgrade treadmill. Hosted by me is really important, because I want to own my data, and ideally I could port the entire site to whatever software I switch to. The other problem is that most of the HTML for this site hails from about ten years ago, tables and embedded formatting and all, but I like the look and don't want to lose that. Migrating the bad old HTML to a new piece of blog software isn't an idea I find appealing. So I can either spend the time (which I don't have) to port it to CSS and modern HTML, or I can spend the money (which I don't have) to get a freelancer somewhere to port it for me. My CSS is somewhere between rusty and nonexistent, so I've mostly just tried to ignore this problem, but unfortunately it doesn't see to be going away very fast.)

new online pinkdex!

The new online Pinkdex[0] software that I alluded to in my very first blog post after my hiatus is finally up and public, after Inventory, a memory upgrade for the server, and a lot of swearing at Git last night. Poke it, prod it, tell me if it breaks or doesn't do what you expect. (Known bug, fix postponed for version 2.0: authors need to be entered as lastname, firstname.)

It's built using a lightweight Python web framework kcr developed, based on webob and the Tempita templating language. It's kind of an instance of the webob do-it-yourself web framework, and it's pretty nice to work with.

It's been a while since I last did web programming, but it was still pretty straightforward to write -- I got it to 90% functionality (which is to say all the functionality of the old grep-based version) in a couple days over finals week, and then the intervening two months was all the fiddly little details, mostly refactoring the display code out of the logic and tuning the database queries. My favorite feature is the series view (see eg. Discworld), which lists the books we have (which is most of them) in the order we think the series is in.

I'm trying a deploy strategy based on Git that I developed last night, where I have a production branch and a testing branch and move code between them, but Git doesn't handle tracking and propagating changes to files which have been renamed over top of another file, which is so far essential to my strategy, so I'm not sure how successful it is right now. It seems like it should be a clever idea, so I'll keep poking at it. I'd be curious to hear if other people have tried similar things. (A friend informs me that this failure is a bug in Git, so hopefully it will be fixed eventually, and then maybe my strategy will work better.)


[0] Generally, 'the Pindex' is the name of the catalog of books in the MITSFS Library, and specifically it's the name of the printed catalog indexed by author name (the others being the Titledex, Seriesdex, and Gooddex). It's named after Marilyn "Fuzzy Pink" Niven née Wisowaty, the first person to maintain it, who was known for her fuzzy pink sweaters.

we don't blog

It was ironic to read, a couple hours before the first Iron Blogger meet-up at the Cambridge Brewing Company that we don't blog ("we" meaning people under the age of thirty, which is to say most of the people doing Iron Blogger).
According to a just-released Pew Internet study, as summarized in the above RoughType post, "In 2006, 28% of teens were blogging. Now, just three years later, the percentage has tumbled to 14%. Among twentysomethings, the percentage who write blogs has fallen from 24% to 15%. Writing comments on blogs is also down sharply among the young. It's only geezers - those over 30 - who are doing more blogging than they used to."

Apparently we're all weirdos, or something. But I think we knew that already. Free beer with other weirdos never tasted so good. :-)

on science fiction magazines

I wasn't sure what to write about this week -- the obvious thing is the Amazon vs. Macmillan slapfight (short version: Macmillan says "we want to change the terms on which we sell you e-books, Amazon" -- to a system that makes Amazon more money per e-book sold, ironically -- Amazon says "fuck you, Macmillan" and pulls all Macmillan's books off their site for a week, hilarity ensues.) Unfortunately for me (but fortunately for you my readers), it's been talked to death elsewhere by people who know a hell of a lot more than I do (and are also a lot funnier than I am). Being, y'know, writers and all. My informed opinion as a reader and a member of the book-buying public is that it was a pretty dick move on Amazon's part. I don't know why they wanted to drag us readers into their pricing dispute, but they did, and now I'm annoyed at them.

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But that's not what I actually want to talk about. What I actually want to talk about is... science fiction magazines. A friend of mine asked me a couple days ago, "If I were to want to subscribe to a magazine of science fiction, what are my good options?" and I realized I had enough to say that there was a blog post in it. Here's what I told him:

the boring stuff, or, a little bit of history (repeating)

The Big Three SF magazines are The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (usually abbreviated as F&SF), currently edited by Gordon Van Gelder; Asimov's Science Fiction, ed. Sheila Williams; and Analog Science Fiction and Fact, ed. Stanley Schmidt (Wikipedia articles: Analog, F&SF, Asimov's). Analog is the longest continually-running SF magazine, founded in 1930 as the pulp magazine Astounding Stories, and made famous by editor John W. Campbell, Jr. from 1937 on. F&SF is next-oldest, founded in 1949, followed by Asimov's, founded in 1977, with noted science fiction author Isaac Asimov acting as editorial director. Analog and Asimov's are both currently published by Dell Magazines and share the same production staff. F&SF is published by Spilogale, Inc., founded by editor Gordon Van Gelder. (Many other SF magazines have come and gone over the past century, and even the big three have changed names, formats, and publication schedules the way you and I change clothes. SF is a notoriously hard market to stay afloat in.) SF magazines were the heart and soul of science fiction for a very long time, and all three still accept submissions from the general public, so a lot of new science fiction writers still get their start there.

All of the Big Three publish some number of short stories (under 7,000 words), novelettes, and novellas (7,000-20,000 words) every one to two months, and some number of non-fiction columns and book reviews. Asimov's also publishes poetry. Analog publishes science fact -- articles about developments in science aimed at the science fiction-reading audience -- and will often serialize 40-80,000 word novels, publishing part each issue. They're available on some newsstands for $5-10 an issue (I buy mine from Pandemonium in Central Square), and also for subscription for $3-6 an issue (Amazon: F&SF, Analog, Asimov's; B&N: Analog, Asimov's). Being magazines about the future, they're all also available a bit more cheaply -- though with more or less DRM -- as ebooks individually and as a subscription from Fictionwise (F&SF, Analog, Asimov's), on the Kindle, etc. It's worth noting, as I mentioned in my review of the Kindle DX that the newsstand and paper subscriptions run about a month ahead of the electronic subscriptions -- ie. I have the March Asimov's now, but it won't be available electronically until March 1 -- which is part of why I'm still on paper.

why do you read an SF magazine

I read SF magazines because they're fun. I like short stories, and I like discovering new authors, and being exposed to new ideas (see also: compulsive neophilia), and so on. There's a sense among some in SF fandom that all of the magazines are written for and read by aspiring SF short story writers -- I'm not at all convinced that's true. I have some small aspirations that way, but I don't really consciously read magazines with a sense of "scoping out the market". I read them because I enjoy their stories. I stick an issue in my bag and read it when I'm on the T -- most of the stories are short enough that I can read them in a few rides and simple enough that I can pick up the thread of one fast enough to enjoy it a bit before I have to get off. As a rule I don't generally read the novellas unless the first page or two grab me, because they're more complex and take too many rides, so I have to finish them not-on-the-T, which takes free time I don't always have. I seem to go through the output of one magazine about at the rate the issues come out, though sometimes I'll read through a whole issue on a plane or something, and also occasionally I'll pack an anthology, some other short story collection, or, say, ebook versions of this year's Hugo nominees on my cell phone to read on the T instead.

so which one(s) do you read

Analog I personally can't stand -- I subscribed for a year in high school, and it's very much SF in the "engineering/science porn" sense, stories where the scientific or science fictional aspect is the point and the characters are secondary, which I don't hugely care for. For a while I thought F&SF was the best SF magazine available, but it seems to feature stories written for (and generally by) old straight white men, so I got bored with it after six months or so. It's fine in moderation, but reading what feel like the same stories month after month gets old. Asimov's is the only one I read regularly any more -- more women writers, writers of color, and not-straight writers and characters (though by no means all), which is to say, more writers writing stories I find interesting. Generally speaking, Asimov's seems to run more stories that make me catch my breath or think or that stick with me for a while. Its stories also seem much more likely to be nominated for Hugo awards over the past five years or so (followed by F&SF, followed distantly by Analog), which are nominated by the membership of that year's Worldcon, which suggests that the bulk of people in SF fandom who read SF short-story magazines read Asimov's. Asimov's also seems to run more writers I've heard of outside the pages of the magazine -- Elizabeth Bear, Charlie Stross, Mary Robinette Kowal -- though of course when F&SF or Analog runs a Joe Haldeman or Geoffry Landiss story, I'll pick it up and read at least that one.

the stories themselves

It's hardly a representative sample, but here are some of what I think are the better stories that have run in Asimov's recently, with links to full or partial versions online where I could find them:

• "Shoggoths in Bloom", by Elizabeth Bear (full), published in the March 2008 Asimov's, which won the Hugo for Best Novelette in 2009.
• Pelago (preview), by Judith Berman, a novella published in the February 2009 Asimov's. One of the very few novellas in Asimov's I found interesting enough to read, and it utterly captivated me.
• "Sleepless in the House of Ye", from the July 2009 issue, which also blew me away with its alienness. The only thing I can think to compare it to is Amy Thomson's The Color of Distance.
• "Shoes-to-Run", also in the July 2009 issue, and "As Women Fight", from the December 2009 issue, both by Sarah Genge and both dealing with gender issues.
• "SinBad the Sand Sailor", from the July 2009 issue, for a very different take on gender issues, and also a neo-pulp style story, just to give a sense of the gamut the magazine runs.
• "Bridesicle", by Will McIntosh, from the January 2009 issue, on a potential unintended consequence of cryogenics.
• "Conditional Love", by Felicity Shoulders, on unintended consequences of human genetic engineering, and "Marya and the Pirate", by Geoffry Landiss (preview), which is a fun widescreen space opera story, both in the January 2010 issue.
• "Helping them Take the Old Man Down", by William Preston (preview) in the latest issue (March 2010), is a brilliant superhero deconstruction.

Looking back over the year's stories, I find myself remembering a lot of the stories from Asimov's I don't mention here as "well, this one had an interesting premise but fell down in execution" and so on, though there are some which I remember as "I completely skipped this one" or "I completely hated this one". Everything the magazine publishes isn't to my liking, but I find the hit rate a lot higher than the other magazines. Certainly some of the stories make me uncomfortable, sometimes in useful ways and other times not. ("Bridesicle" above is a prime example of the former.)

what else is there

In addition to the Big Three, there are also a number of smaller magazines and online things, some of which are free -- Strange Horizons (the granddaddy of online SF magazines), Jim Baen's Universe (online), Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show (online), Electric Velocipede (offline), Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (offline), Abyss and Apex (online), Apex Magazine (both?), Realms of Fantasy (offline)... The list is pretty long, and getting longer. Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet is the only one I read regularly. There's also the New York Review of Science Fiction, which is the literary criticism magazine of science fiction (yes, really), though there's also a lot of litcrit, book reviews, and original short fiction online at Tor.com, a SF community site run by one of the major genre publishers.

If you're looking for short fiction with more of a continuing storyline, there's Shadow Unit, which is a free online serial fiction project structured sort of like a television show, except with short stories (and apparently soonnow a novel???). It's a police procedural-meets-the-X-files with excellent characters and brilliant writing, it's awesome (though I'm not caught up on season 2 yet), and it's inspired me to check out the other work of the people involved. And then there are webcomics, which are predominantly SFnal. At some point science fiction conquered the world, and it's taking SF fans a little while to notice and adjust to that fact. :-)

So there's a lot of material available, and that's some of what I enjoy. Happy reading!

copyright and the Google Books settlement

As I said in my last post, the Google Books settlement has some fairly serious copyright implications. I was going to write up a lengthy discussion of them, but in researching them I discovered that Prof. Lawrence Lessig has an excellent article on the subject up at The New Republic. His argument is too nuanced to capture in a pull-quote, so go read it.[1] It's well-written and not terribly long. I'll wait.

In the settlement, Google really is trying to adjudicate significant changes to copyright law, notably a registry of works and a policy on orphaned works. I've heard a number of authors, in talking about the settlement, say, "It would have been fine if Google asked me before scanning my books, but since Google didn't ask me, they can't have them." The problem is that it's impossible for Google to individually ask every author or rightsholder for every work under copyright for permission to scan their books. Since creative expression is automatically under copyright once it is created, and the United States has no central registry of copyrighted works, every book published after Steamboat Willie is presumptively under copyright to someone. That means that, for Google to ask permission before scanning, they would, for each work, need to go through a lot of trouble and expense to locate the current rightsholder, and if that person can't be found, Google would be barred from scanning the book. It doesn't matter if the book is rare and falling apart -- if it's copyrighted, they can't scan it. (And the legal tangle around who got what rights when an author died, and what they did with them, is almost always a serious mess, or there wouldn't be a project up to make sure that authors have wills.)

To make it even worse, if an author has, say, quoted some song lyric in her book -- and, as a good- and copyright-observant author, went and obtained the rights to use that lyric from the company which owns it -- now, in this proposed world order, Google has two problems -- first to track down the author of the book, and second to track down whoever now owns the rights to the song (which may have changed hands since the author did their due diligence) and clear that separately. If the author has quoted multiple songs owned by different companies, Google has to find the rightsholder for each song, no matter how small the quotation. And even if the author allowed Google to scan their book, if even one of the song companies says no, Google is faced with the choice of using the book without the offending quotation or not using the book at all. If it removes the quotation and that happened to be a major plot point? Oops, sorry. Now repeat as necessary if that lyric quotes part of another song, and so on ad infinitum, and combine with ever-increasing copyright terms (pushing a century these days), for a scary picture of what the future could look like.

Basically, if Google had asked permission first, they'd never have scanned anything. Some people would say that would be right -- Google shouldn't have scanned anything. I'm too much of an information archivist and a librarian to agree with them.

Lessig is right that, considering the sad state of US copyright law, the settlement is really quite a good patch on it. He's also right that it's another worrying step in the trend towards the world outlined above, where copyright goes recursive and strangle culture abed. Then again, if the settlement falls through or gets amended as the complainants want, it will also be a step towards that world, and perhaps an even bigger one. Everybody is right that the US needs serious copyright reform, preferably spearheaded by Congress, sooner rather than later. Whether that will actually result in a better system -- or any system at all -- is unclear, given that body's current state of gridlock, but the current system is clearly broken, and Lessig has some good ideas on how to fix it.


[1] The Open Book Alliance's blog post on it, which brought it to my attention, misses the heart of it, I think. Their goals, in my understanding, are exactly what Prof. Lessig is worried about.