No. 5 / April 2015 Ecdysis About Jonathan Crowe (editor) now reviews books for AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review. Jennifer Hurd, a doctoral student in English literature at Oxford, appeared on Canada’s Smartest Person last year. Simon McNeil’s first novel, The Black Trillium, will Ecdysis be published by Brain Lag on June 24. No. 5 / April 2015 Jennifer Seely (art) successfully finished cancer Send hate mail, letters of comment, and treatment in November and is now back in the submissions to: classroom. mail PO Box 473 Tamara Vardomskaya’s first two short stories have Shawville QC J0X 2Y0 been published. See page 18 for details. CANADA e-mail [email protected] All content is copyright © their respective contributors. Grungy paper texture (page 38) by Back issues are available for free download at Dan Bashie Larsen, used under a Creative mcwetboy.net/ecdysis. Commons Licence. 2 EDITORIAL Breaking (Down) the Hugo Nominations LATE DOESN’T BEGIN TO DESCRIBE this issue of many people are doing it already that one ex- Ecdysis: I’d originally hoped to have it out at tra denunciation is hardly necessary—than I the end of December. But life got in the way, am in understanding how it happened. as it often does; and here we are. I think several structural factors have One of the problems with being this late contributed to the current mess. is having to rewrite this editorial. Timely has a First, as I’ve argued before, is the outsized limited shelf life. Last fall I planned to write a importance that the sf field places on awards. piece on writers’ bad behaviour in the sf com- The extent to which we obsess about them is munity, and why we really ought not to be sur- unhealthy: we don’t talk about whether a work prised by it; with the passage of time that topic is good or important, only whether it should seems less pressing than it once was, and my win an award. We’ve vested these overgrown plans only survive in the form of a couple of bowling trophies with awesome power. They satirical items found later in this issue. are to us what the Silmarils are to Morgoth: Then I wrote something in response to we covet them with a greedy lust. the news of Borderlands Books’ imminent clo- This encourages the less well house- sure. I argued that the sf field expected a lot trained to engage in antisocial behaviour. from its members: that we should expect to Second, as Nick Mamatas points out, is work for very little (minimum wage book- the shift in the sf community’s social norms. store jobs, internships, unpaid slush readers, Overt campaigning for awards was once a se- small advances) while being hit up for money rious taboo; it existed only in the shadows, above and beyond paying for books and sub- which minimized the impact of a little logroll- scriptions. But then Borderlands Books had ing. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it’s the bad manners to save itself, which required very hard to put it back in; the difference be- me to rewrite the piece from the ground up. tween tweeting one’s own eligibility, recom- But I left it too late. Now, as I write this, mending good work by friends and col- it’s Easter weekend, and the Hugo nomina- leagues, and setting up a full slate to nomi- tions have just come out, so fine, let’s talk nate is one of degree, not kind; this is simply in- about the Hugo nominations. dustrializing an existing process. To be honest I’m less interested in fulmi- Third is the overwhelming size of the nating against the machinations of the Sad field. It’s been decades since anyone could Puppies/Rabid Puppies slate—I could, but so keep up with everything; only the rare, best- 3 selling cases are read by anything more than a They completely swept six Hugo catego- minority. The fear of being ignored in so vast ries: Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Editor a field is the engine behind so much of the pro- Short Form, Editor Long Form, and Related motion, self or otherwise. It’s also behind the Work—and they might have swept Fan Writer desperation to win awards: it’s so hard to too, if Matthew Surridge hadn’t declined his stand out otherwise. nomination. On the other hand, they weren’t But it also discourages what might be able to sweep Best Novel, and in several cate- called organic (non-politicized, non-promoted, gories one non-Puppy nominee—Wesley Chu non-slate) nominations: there’s so much to in the Campbell-Not-a-Hugo, Julie Dillon in read that even avid readers may feel unquali- Pro Artist and Journey Planet in Fanzine—got fied to nominate. It’s also much harder to read through. I estimate that the number of Puppy work during its year of eligibility: you can’t votes required to accomplish this is between nominate for 2014 when you were just getting 60 and 200: fewer, and they wouldn’t have to stuff from 2012 that year. swept so many categories; more, and they And fourth, the overwhelming size of the would also have shut out The Goblin Emperor field leads to diffuse voting patterns: when and Ancillary Sword. there’s a lot of good stuff to vote for, a lot of The presence of so many nominees from good stuff gets only a few votes. This is the rea- Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies slate also suggests son why the five percent rule exists for Hugo that there was no significant difference be- nominations: there’s a real risk that votes can tween the the Sad and the Rabid Puppies. Ei- be spread too thinly. Just look at last year’s ther Sad Puppies voted the Rabid slate, or nomination statistics to see what I mean: even there were very few Sad Puppies that were not 10 votes could mean a top-15 finish. also Rabid, or the Sad Puppies were greatly This makes the final ballot easy to game outnumbered by the Rabid. Otherwise, we’d with surprisingly few people. Even with a have seen somebody else on the Novella, Nov- couple of thousand people submitting nomi- elette and Editor ballots. Brad Torgersen’s nations, the scatter-plot nature of organic claim that Vox Day was not involved is not nominations means that they can be over- only disingenuous, it’s irrelevant. whelmed by a tiny, organized minority. A lot has already been said about what This is what appears to have happened. to do about this debacle—voting No Award How tiny a minority the Puppies are is against the slate in the short term, making the something we won’t know for sure until after nomination rules harder to game in the long the Hugo Awards ceremony, when we get to term. But understanding the scope of the prob- see all the stats. But I think I can make some lem is the first step toward fixing it. educated guesses as to their strength. —Jonathan Crowe 4 In Defence of The Silmarillion I’m used to being the only one in a given con- I typically manage to ignore these com- versation who has read the posthumously- plaints, because for me, The Silmarillion is published prequel to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord only difficult in the way that King Lear or of the Rings—and I’m also used to hearing The Iliad is difficult. Yes, unless you have a about its flaws from people who loved either pretty stellar vocabulary and solid reading The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, started skills, both Shakespeare and Homer are com- The Silmarillion, and then gave up partway plicated. They’re still classics, and the fact through because they couldn’t take it, it was that we have to work a little harder to appre- too difficult, there were too many names that ciate them doesn’t detract from that. And the started with the letters “Fin,” and it just complaints were ones that I couldn’t really didn’t read like a novel. relate to—when I first read The Silmarillion, 5 I was thirteen and on a quest to read every- Hobbit was published in 1937, Tolkien’s work thing that J. R. R. Tolkien ever wrote, and I on what would become The Silmarillion devoured the book just as I devoured the His- started much earlier. The four “Great Tales”— tory of Middle-Earth series, all of Tolkien’s the stories of Beren and Lúthien, of Túrin Tu- academic essays on obscure philological top- rambar, of the Fall of Gondolin, and of Eären- ics, and his translations of Sir Gawain and the dil—were first written in 1917, while Tolkien Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. was recovering from trench fever. Together But within the last few months, I’ve with some additional framing material com- heard similar complaints about The Silmaril- posed around the same time, “it is not too lion from the most unlikely sources. Independ- much to say that the outline of The Silmarillion ently, two good friends—avid fantasy fans, vo- was visible by the end of 1917—or would racious readers, well-used to enjoying compli- have been if it had found any readers.”1 cated texts à la the Malazan series, one of These stories grew out of Tolkien’s love them has a degree in English and history and of invented languages.