“Finalist.” As in “Last”.
So remember when I mentioned that cryptic little page over on CBC with Echopraxia on it? The one whose origin and purpose was a total mystery? Well, not so much any more. Turns out Echopraxia is a finalist for this years “Bookies“, under the “SciFi/Fantasy” category. (No, I’m not blind; I swear that logo wasn’t on the page first time I dropped by.)
You may remember the Bookies. Back in 2012 Caitlin’s The Pattern Scars was nominated in the same category (though it was called “Speculative Fiction” at that time, since Margaret Atwood was on the list), and— after some odd lulls and surges in voting that revealed an interesting vote-rigging exploit— it ended up winning with more votes than all the other finalists combined (an especially nifty trick when you remember that those other finalists included both Atwood and Rob Sawyer).
First Place.
Last Place.
My own chances are somewhat dimmer, and not just because Echopraxia is up against William Gibson’s first balls-to-the-wall unrepentantly-SF novel this century. Both of us are getting our asses handed to us by someone called Emily St. John Mandel, who I’ll admit I’d never heard of until I followed the link and learned that Station Eleven is a NY Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the star of at least a dozen Best-of-Year lists. According to the Amazon synopsis the novel tells of a hopeful apocalypse, in which the tattered remnants of a decimated Humanity are decent and humane and (if I’m reading this right) continue to put on performances of Shakespeare in the Park while the bodies stack up. It almost sounds as if Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was written by the guys who do those Chicken Soup for the Soul books, which is a trick I could never manage in a million years. I wish I could; as of this writing, Station Eleven has nearly six times as many votes as Echopraxia.
This would be an even more remarkable disparity if Echopraxia wasn’t running dead last, and thus getting trounced by pretty much everyone. So, yeah; not much hope of taking home the Pixelated Golden Beaver this time around. But if you wanted to try and boost me out of last place, at least, you could always go over to the Bookies site and cast a vote or three (as before, multiple votes are allowed for some reason). (Now that I think of it, maybe that’s the way it works for all our federal institutions). Beating Queen of Stars is probably still within the realm of possibility.
If not, no biggie. I still don’t know how Echopraxia ended up on the finalists list in the first place…
You’re still not last Dr. Watts!
Well. there are a probably thousand platitudes to insert here, but I’ll refrain.
I like your writing!
You are in good company: Piketty is also seond to last.
I’ll go poke 01 (and lend a few steel tentacles here and there myself)
Station Eleven is actually pretty good – not the usual sort of thing you see when a mainstream novelist picks up SF tropes and makes a mess of them.
I still preferred Echopraxia.
Not last anymore. Fourth, creeping up on third!
Well, it’s a sublimely nasty book. Even more depressing than Song of Stone, though doesn’t hit as hard.
You can’t expect most people are gonna like it. Plus, you’re not oppressed enough – SF is full of white male and preferential treatment of the systemically oppressed is a must today if you want to be in.
Hope sells better – look at Barry O.
He sold such bushels of hope to the hapless Americans, and look where it got them. By now the death tolls due to the Nobel peace prize winner’s drone strike strategy is higher than that of the Spanish Inquisition**. If I were unreasonably optimistic I’d expect the people who have been had won’t trust the next person democrats nominate.
What’s the big deal with Gibson? I’ve read his stuff and found it wanting. Mucho style, not so much substance and very little thought given to internal consistency or sense. I mean, that ‘cyberspace’ idea of his. (groan) Artsy stuff, gave me indigestion.
**which has an unjustly blackened reputation, due to it’s later anti-protestant activities which resulted in lots of nasty propaganda. Also, it did not burn witches, in fact, it prevented witch-hunts in areas for which it was responsible.
Re: Y
Death toll by drones is near irrelevant as long as death toll of US citizens is low (the problem with fancy “wars of pointless whatever” is usually that you, at some point, start receiving too many of your own precious citizenry in one or more fancy boxes – a problem that Drone Strike Strategy solves graciously)
So Barry is doing exactly what he should be doing – playing a game Americans love to play, but without the usual risks.
Next step would be self-replicating drones to reduce costs.
I want to see you use that line of argument on the typical stars-in-their eyes voter who voted for Obama and felt good about it. Really I do. Could you covertly video it too?
To me it seems almost everyone but the Natsec establishment and has feelings of shame in regards to the drone strikes. It’s perfectly unclear who exactly gets blown up to bits by the strikes, due to ever-changing and slippery definitions.
Grief, talk about a palaver to find the bloody book. Anyway I’ve voted and tweeted.
You always get my vote. Side note- I’m going to be at a pow wow in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario at Algoma University on March 7-8. New venture- Deer tallow soap. Check out my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/nativeblendllc. Haven’t touched base for a very long time with you, but needed to cast my vote (or several) and wanted to say howdy.
I’ve done my duty as a proud Peter Watts Fan! You’re still not yet bumped up beyond third place, though. BTW, I also placed a vote in the non-fiction for “the Sixth Extinction” as some here may remember that I’ve been singing the blues (and being roundly ignored) about the Holocene Mass Extinction, for lo these many years now. (We have a “countermeasures” FB group which is sadly under-followed.)
Peter, I think you might have been “victimized” by On The Beach Syndrome. The thing is, that great novel itself rose to literary prominence largely because of the reaction of many of the characters to the impending end of the End of the World a.k.a Perth Australia, by “carrying on”. Not about to let a cloud of radioactive death interrupt a perfectly good auto race, dontcha know. It was, otherwise, a book chock full of depression as anything you’ve written, I’d say, or at least for the day it was a monument of fatalistic impulse hardly marred by any optimism whatsoever.
Yet what people remember about On the Beach is the relentless perseverance of the characters, determined as they were to dress formally for dinner despite being stationed in the Congo, so to speak. Last gasp of The English Way or some such balderdash, the stiff upper lip even when your severed head is bouncing around in the guillotine basket. What people forget about On the Beach is the equally relentless sense of foreboding, and the irrelevance of the human condition in the context of the aftermath of a planet-killer war.
Perhaps what people want is what they remember about the positive elements, sparse though they were, of On the Beach, “but now with more hope”. In such SF, some people live, and will continue to live, they may even Triumph Over Evil by not merely dressing formal for dinner whilst stationed in the Congo (so to speak), but also organizing theater for the adults and fingerpainting for the children. It’s the appeal of hopefulness, blatant positivism in the aftermath of disaster, with some bad guys thrown in to drive the plot. Now, I haven’t read Station Eleven though if it shows up in the bargain bin, I will grab the copy for my collection of post-apocalyptics. However, when I am reading Peter Watts I am not reading it because I want a warm fuzzy feeling that everything will somehow turn out to be okay even though 99-percent of everyone just died. I am reading Peter Watts because somehow the way you cover the science behind the storyline gives me one heck of a sense of wonder, even if the wonder is for the (fictional) socioeconomic backstory that means there’s no shortage of neurotechnically created voluntary zombies, or for the (fictional but frighteningly plausible) neurotech crafting those zombies from the socioeconomically desperate. I read it for the sense of wonder of a fictional (thus far) future world full of seriously awesome shiny stuff where even blinking lights are prehistoric, as glittering in the matrix as it is dark in the detail of the plot, where the driver is the science in the science-fiction rather than the humanism in the post-apocalyptic fairy tale of a triumph of human goodness through art.
Possibly another issue arises, about “number of fans” versus “dedication and quality of fans”, but someone else can take on that one. Cheers,
Re: Y
I don’t see anything unclear about the drone situation.
Obviously, targets get blown up.
Done.
I’ve read Station Eleven. It’s roughly 50% characters reminicing about their pasts, and when it isn’t alluding to the past it’s alluding to the near future where they’re all dead. It made Ready Player One look restrained.
Voted, and you’re 2nd. You’re welcome.
Yeah the Inquisition did not burn witches because it did not believe in witchcraft, so there’s examples of Inquisitors relocating suspected witches for their own protection and such.
It’s kind of like the Iranian theocracy’s amazingly progressive stance on transgender, sometimes the fundies come up with unexpected things.
Voted for Echopraxia, after some initial hesitation when it looked like it was forcing me to vote on every page despite the fact I have not read any other of those books.
voted, Echopraxia now leading.
Peter, your persistent self-deprecation (“Beating Queen of Stars is probably still within the realm of possibility” and all that jazz) reminds me of one of my exes, specifically, the Gorean one. Not in a good way.
Seriously, come on. You’re one of the most prominent Canadian writers to walk the third dirtball (counting from the star).
A fact currently reflected by the poll, by the way.
Well, for all the good Inqusition did in relation to witchcraft, it was still an organisation founded to hound the Jews and rob them of their money. Contemporary accounts suggest people thought it was at first mainly a way for non-Jews to get back at the very successful ex-Jews families amid claims of vast Jewish conspiracy. Later the same thing but aimed at protestants.
And it brought a lot of money in. Of course, this is something that’s hardly known these days.
Yeah. Targets. With the rules being that whoever is blown up is presumed to be a terrorist. This rule greatly diminished civilian casualties. Lawyers – gotta love them.
Wasn’t it complete BS though? Estimates of late 1980’s total nuclear war only predict something like a billion dead, mostly restricted to the US and Europe. A nuclear war in the 1960’s could have barely achieved that, as there was far less warheads.
There was never enough nuclear weapons around to produce so much radiation as to kill everyone.
Those are called mechadendrites, darling 🙂
Hum, Y, you’ve heard about that 28:1 ratio right?
Oh I see you haven’t. Well that’s bad luck for you. Hear’s a read: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147
Congratulations on taking the lead! See, even without Twitter you can mobilize an army of followers… at least on an obscure small-scale poll on a Canadian site. 🙂
Btw, since you haven’t already, I thought I’d point out that one of your short stories, Firebrand, is available in the first issue of Forever, a new magazine by Neil Clarke (the Clarke of Clarkesworld) focusing on reprints. That first issue is offered for free as an ebook: http://neil-clarke.com/the-future-is-forever/
I actually didn’t realize you were going to be in it, I grabbed it so I could check out the Ken Liu novella (since it was originally printed in a 2014 anthology and I’m preparing my Hugo noms and am woefully short on good novellas that I can read online free rather than purchasing), and when I opened up the table of contents, I got a pleasant surprise.
Apologies if this is stepping on toes and you plan this for your next post or something. Feel free to delete in that case. 🙂
I dunno. I haven’t read The Peripheral yet (though it’s on the list), so my comment wasn’t intended as an endorsement. But this is the first unrepentantly SF thing he’s done in the wake of his Bigend phase.
Oh yeah. What could possibly go wrong.
Holy shit, it is. It’s still leading, hours later.
I guess this depends on whose eyes you’re looking out of. Or maybe how you define “prominent”.
I mean, I’m delighted that you think I’m prominent way over there, but if I am it’s a classic case of prophet-without-honor syndrome. The Canadian media pretty much ignores me. You won’t see me getting reviewed in The Toronto Star or the Globe & Mail (actually, the G&M ran Spider Robinson’s review of Maelstrom, but that was well over a decade ago). I don’t get recruited to cultural panel discussions. You want to see “prominence”, check out self-promoters like Rob Sawyer and Madeline Ashby. Compared to them, I’m not even really part of the local con scene. (Hell, if I was truly “prominent”, you’d think my own publisher would at least be willing to pay me industry-standard royalties.)
So the self-deprecation isn’t false modesty. It’s not even self-deprecation; I actually think I kinda rock at what I do, in terms of the quality of the product. But I’m under no delusions that I’m anywhere close to being famous for it. I’ve seen my sales figures. I know how much exposure I get, and how much promotion. Believe me, Echopraxia‘s appearance on that list was completely unexpected (and in my further defense, it was in last place until I thumped my tub here. Which is not what prominence would lead you to expect).
A small scale poll on a Canadian site which has no protection against vote-stacking. Let’s not forget that. Not that I would ever resort to such a thing myself, of course.
Nah, that’s cool. Someone going by the handle Oldmiser sent me an email suggesting I pimp it too, a few days back. Just never got around to it, and it didn’t seem a big enough deal to base a whole post on. It’s old news anyway. “Firebrand” came out ages ago.
Wait a second: you’ve got a pen-name? You write genre? I did not even know this until ten minutes ago!
Is this directed at me? Cause if so, the only thing I can think of to give you that impression is that I mentioned working on my Hugo noms… but the Hugos are the fan-popularity awards you can nom just by paying a fee to Worldcon, not the one you have to have any actual credentials, so no, no pen name or writing career (or like a lot of fans, I do write genre but have yet to be published, despite a few attempts at submitting in the short fiction market) and no shame for not recognizing me.
I just wanted to try out nomming for the Hugos this year (especially cause it often includes a packet of free ebooks of the finalized nominees for voting purposes, which could be as many as 4 novels plus another’s worth of shorter fiction, a bargain). It’s a fun experience so far, it’s forcing me to read more contemporary short fiction (instead of waiting to read it years later in a Best Of collection, as is my normal habit… I’ve also read more of the current year’s novels than I usually get to) and expand my horizons a little in an effort to fill out my list. And to save you from asking, yes, you are well represented on my nom list (alas, the Hugo process is slightly more resistant to gaming the system than the CBC site, so my lone nom doesn’t count for much against the Scalzis and Gibsons… still, fingers crossed!).
Voted.
I thought Gibson’s Spook Country and Zero History were good. I like when he gets political.
@Peter Watts: […] So the self-deprecation isn’t false modesty. It’s not even self-deprecation; I actually think I kinda rock at what I do, in terms of the quality of the product. But I’m under no delusions that I’m anywhere close to being famous for it. I’ve seen my sales figures. […]
I suppose we could get you to mention that the industry itself isn’t anywhere near what it used to be. So, actually, in comparative rankings, are you doing so badly? And again, you really do rock at what you do, so much so that if you sold a copy of “Blindopraxia” to everyone fully capable of “getting” either one, with all due respect, you might have even less sales than you do. I mean, how many copies did Proust sell in his lifetime? Or even Pynchon? And these are widely celebrated “literary lights” in the more “baseline” genres. Or within SF, I don’t think that Kim Stanley Robinson sold a whole lot of copies of the Memory of Whiteness, but that certainly wasn’t because it wasn’t a very good book. Anyway: I know that pretty much all of my online friends from the IT and related industries have all heard of you, and probably most picked up a copy of Echopraxia. Our numbers may not be huge but I’m pretty sure we’ve all heard of you. Name recognition you have got.
@Y: There was never enough nuclear weapons around to produce so much radiation as to kill everyone.
Well, there are still enough nuclear weapons around for Mutual Assured Destruction to still be the deterrent of the day, not that it seems to be stopping the invasion of Ukraine. What has changed since 1992 is that the “MAD” is now pretty specific to North America, Europe and Eurasia. At one point in time, however, there was such a gross overload that the surplus overkill was measured in mega-megadeaths beyond the extant global population.
However, in the 1960s, nuclear wars were for the most part considered “winnable”, provided that you were the first to launch and did so in a completely unprovoked sneak attack. Hence the evolution towards a posture of gross overkill on all sides: removing Perverse Incentive is only commonsense, even if the means for removing it is quite to the contrary of commonsense. See also the “Cold War Theories” section of Wikipedia’s article on Herman Kahn.
That being said: if I recall correctly, in On the Beach, weapons used employed cobalt-jacketed warheads, etc. At any rate, it was pivotal to the plot that the end was inescapable by anyone.
Re: Gibson’s the Peripheral: Having read just enough of the Wikipedia article so as to not totally spoil it, I ran into the Zach Baron (“GQ”) review, in part:
How surreal. Just like where I live now. Ordered from Amazon. 😉
Re:Y
Wait a moment, are you being upset about the ethical “dimension” of murdering a bunch of people based on a tenuous (and classified! Two great tastes that taste better together!) connection to some other dudes in the process of a rather oxymoronic “war against a particular warfare tactic” ?
You know, seeing you do that is like seeing ED-209 cry.
I didn’t even suspect you have “all the parts” for that kind of thing, Y 🙂
Seriously though, USA loves war as much as any government, it just doesn’t like having its citizenry maimed, killed, and psychologically broken during this fancy war thing.
War is never fair, and rarely has a point (though perhaps wars on abstract tactical concepts have less “point” than an “average” war), drones merely allow one to carry out war without the need for some preposterous, dysfunctional pretenses and rationalizations.
Besides, would using traditional manpower really reduce civilian suffering and death? I think not.
Drones, at least, don’t go on “rapespeditions” into civilian settlements they get involved with. That makes them, ceteris paribus, “nicer” than live humans being present “in the flesh”.
Re: Peter Watts
Well, here’s a story idea:
“feral” self-replicating war machines become a problem after a number of moderate-scale deployments (ones in which all sides were throwing around selfrep war-machines as candy, including self-reps jury-rigged from remnants of other selfreps by enterprising guerrillas without much concern for failsafes or good coding practices).
Then, folks start hunting the bots for fun and profit ( there’s a government bounty for keeping the warbot population in check, scrap from ‘bots can often include some fancy expensive tech, and also unlike murdering furry little animals, this kind of hunting is actually a decent challenge)
As to your notability, I don’t know what a culture panel is (sounds like some weird thing from Biopreparat/Ft. Detrick, possibly something they used to grow anthrax on – I wouldn’t touch that kind of thing even with a very long stick 😉 ) but I recall you being invited to some pretty fancy meetings with pretty fancy political crtters in attendance.
You just aren’t as prolific as Sawyer or as good at promotion as Ashby (but hey, she’s a foresight consultant, that’s instant +150% to corpse* relations, instant cure critical marketing wounds” as a free action once per day…also possibly trap the soul, fear aura, phylactery transference and turn resistance +20 😉 😀 ) but you’re definitely among the most notable Canadian sci-fi writers (especially for us non-Canadians)
________
*corporate, I mean, he he he he.
@03: […] “feral” self-replicating war machines become a problem after a number of moderate-scale deployments […] Then, folks start hunting the bots for fun and profit […]
I’m guessing you never read Philip K Dick’s short story, Second Variety? Also known in the abominable film version as “Screamers”.
Peter Watts,
About “Firebrand,” I had the belated thought that you might want to update that story’s entry on your Backlist Web page to include the free download link supplied by Peter D.
What an awful site. I voted for Echopraxia, thus also had to vote in all other categories, many in which I don’t know any of the books. That makes it pretty much “pick the prettiest cover”. If you end up last that’s probably more because of non-appeal of your cover to non-SF fans (don’t know why, I love it) than anything else…
Mr Non-Entity,
Sounds more like Woken Furies to me, actually. I doubt that Mr. Watts would rip off his friend.
You know I don’t generally get into the middle when you and Y duke it out, but I love this line. Even though ED doesn’t actually cry so much as throw tantrums in stairwells.
Good idea. I’ll get on that now.
Actually, you don’t have to do that; you can just keep clicking “Next” until you get to the subcategories you feel confident in voting on, leaving the others unchecked. (Though I agree the site design is abysmal; it wouldn’t have killed them to mention somewhere that voting in all catagories is not mandatory.)
Not that it’s likely to matter at this point. Station Eleven’s troops have rallied and it’s way out in front again.
Okay, maybe not. I guess I got you confused with Peter Darbyshire.
@Pirmin: Mr Non-Entity, […] Sounds more like Woken Furies to me, actually. I doubt that Mr. Watts would rip off his friend.
I am utterly apologetic if anything I have written, here or elsewhere, could be read to suggest that I think Dr Watts ripped off anyone of anything. This wouldn’t be my intention at all. If this regards my post about “Second Variety”, it’s hard for me to see how any story written in a well-established sub-genre would be construed as a rip-off. I would think of such things as “contributing to the body of work in the sub-genre” or “fleshing out the literary corpus”. The whole notion of mankind’s creations getting out of control and becoming a danger goes back, at least, to the classic tale of “the Golem” with a major contribution by Mary W Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or, the new Prometheus”. Contrast and compare, for example, with the “Terminator” mythos. Harlan Ellison had a bit of a tiff over this and did in fact get recognized in the credits to the first film though I don’t know if he got paid. However, his creative contribution that might have been a bit “borrowed”, for “Terminator”, would have been the storyline of a soldier from the future sent back in time, more than the notion of creations-turned-against-us, which again goes back to at least Shelley.
So, if anyone thinks I am alleging a lack of creativity on the part of Dr Watts, please understand that I am doing no such thing, nor do I intend to be thought of as doing so.
Re: Peter Watts
I should have probably clarified that I mean “cry” as in “shed tears” and not “make a loud, shrill noise”
Re: Mr Non-Entity
I read it, and I don’t find Scanners to be a particularly bad movie (yes, it has a “romantically minded” warbot, but hey – if humans can evolve some preposterous and notoriously inaccurately targeted peer-bonding neurochemical delusions, why can’t warbots? 🙂 )
I think that bothunting-as-profession-and-pastime would be a rather different take on this whole thing, especially in the absence of distinctly humanoid killbots or crazy super-accelerated runaway robot evolution
The second time I voted; you were one vote ahead; so whee, that was me. But I checked a third time and you are now running a strong, but distinct second.
Every 5 years I try to read 1980’s Gibson and every time I think that having tried meth at least one time in your life is a requirement to enjoy him. I say this as a great fan of Sterling and WJW; so it’s not the genre or the tone or the subject matter. It’s his particular riff on Raymond Chandler I don’t dig. Though maybe his later writing is better.
About a hundred votes and about 36 hours separate us from victory!
Onwards to glory!
I think you mean Screamers.
Anyway, VOTES FOR THE VOTE GOD!
Yep, Screamers, of course.
That’s what I get for posting late at night and stuff.
Now, as to voting…
Okay, we have almost secured the lead.
Keep going people! The end is at hand! Our votes shall eclipse the sun!
The lead has been secured! Keep voting, though.
Okay I googled “Gorean” and … really? How does one land a gig like that ?
Mr Non-Entity,
oh, my apologies, I didn’t want to imply anything of the kind. I just meant that the story 03 described reminded me more off Richard Morgan’s book, less of Philipp K. Dick.
Oh, you just look at it – a pushback attempt in the vote!
LAY SOME EGGS THERE, GENTLEPERSONS!
Ah, what a nicely ambivalent question !
Are you inquiring as to how to become a Gorean girlfriend, or as to how does one go about finding such a partner ? 😀
Seriously though, I guess it’s luck. And hanging out in BDSM spaces for a considerable amount of time.
Only between 6 and 34 hours (I don’t know exactly when they close the poll) to go.
Let’s choke their vote machines with our blood!
Btw, it’s interesting to note, right now Echopraxia has the 2nd highest vote total of any book in any category. Are SF fans the only ones to notice how easy it is to vote stack, or are they just more passionate in general?
They are most likely to know the litanies and incantations needed in order to conjure Machine God’s little ancestors to do their bidding.
It is done.
Anyone see the final total before it closed? Echopraxia was ahead when I went to bed, but that doesn’t rule out a last minute push by another book.
Ooooh, the suspense is killin’ me!
Okay, their twitturd is saying that the vote is still in progress:
https://twitter.com/cbcbooks/status/569915923034873856
But the voting form says that “This SnapApp is no longer available”
Did our blut really clog their abstimmungmachinen ?
Looks like it’s back up. Maybe it’s just a matter of the ‘Midnight Ambiguity’ (ie, they meant to have the poll run until one minute after 11:59 on Feb 23, so they set the end date at Midnight on Feb 23, not realizing that the poll interpreted that as one minute before 00:01 on Feb 23, so it closed early until somebody woke up to sort it out)
At any rate, Echopraxia is still in the lead!
Yeah, it’s active again. Voting’s still on.
Maybe it was a psych.
Maybe someone didn’t like the results. 🙂
More likely set the alarm for midnight and didn’t consider where it fell. 200 lead right now.
Hey Peter, you won
http://www.cbc.ca/books/2015/02/echopraxia.html
(there are so many pixelated-beaver-jokes to be made, so many… but none I can think of are family-friendly, and since you’re a married man, I’ll just keep my crass fangirl humor to myself.)
I guess it’s official.
Thank you all for voting. Many, many times from the look of it.
I look forward to reading the headline “Bookie award winner arrested for threatening PM in blog”
(I know that’s not exactly what happened, but, you know, media). (Also I do not really look forward to that.)
Okay… Think Pete deserves a second award.
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