Slashdot Mirror
SF Writers Sting Supposedly Traditional Publisher
deeptrace writes "A group of SF writers all submitted purposely awful stories to a publisher that purported to publish only selected high quality works. They created the worst story they could come up with, and it was accepted for publication." Their press release is pretty funny -- and if you'd like a sample of their insane prose, it's available through the book's Lulu site. (Where, Yes, you could also buy the whole thing.)
How do you think stories get published on Slashdot?
Life in Orange County
Like here at slashdot there isn't a variety of styles mingling. One theory has won the darwinian battle and thus realising it they have gamed that system.
Entropy is a law after all.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
The same thing that's been wrong for years: people who don't understand that something that happened a few days ago - even a few weeks ago - is still news.
Great, you heard about it days ago, doubtless you monitor all sorts of websites and cable news channels 24/7 and know everything before the rest of us. Congratulations, you win. But those of us who occasionally turn away from the various glass teats appreciate hearing about things that may have happened more than five minutes ago.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
It may have seemed plausible, but man was it ever fucking boring. I'm glad I didn't pay to read any of them. I only read the third one because of inertia, something that will never be repeated for the third Dune prequel.
I'm a graduate student, the lowest rung of professional academic, in a hard discipline. Before I submit a paper anywhere, I submit preprints to experts within whatever field I'm writing about. I do this because I know the journals will do the exact same thing, and it's far better on my reputation if my reviewers find them than if the journal finds them. I know that it doesn't matter if my name is Alan Matheson Turing or Paul Erdoes--whatever I or anyone else submits goes through a formal vetting process which involves having experts pore over my paper with a magnifying glass.
The Sokal Hoax had glaring errors, errors so large that a college senior in mathematics, economics or physics could have spotted them--not only spotted them, but conclusively proven them to be false.
Social Text didn't catch this. Does it really matter if they thought the paper was of poor quality? They published it, and by publishing it put their imprimatur on it. "Here," they said to the academic world, "read this, we think it's worth your time."
Social Text was right. It was worth my time, in that it demonstrated to me precisely why I'm going for a Ph.D. in a discipline where rigor and peer review actually mean something.
It's not so much the story or the religious aspect of the book that I dislike. It's the quality of the writing that makes me gag (though I have seen worse). I imagine Slashdot won't approve of my position (given that the book is so popular), people get upset when somebody doesn't like their "you have *got* to read it" book of the month.
"The Da Vinci Code" sure does sell, but I don't see it winning any literary awards. There is quality and there is quantity, where the Da Vinci code fits in is an exercise for the reader (that's code for: I'm not game to trash it any more).
Not surprisingly, his previous unknown works are now selling quite well.
I blame my wife: I can't read or watch mainstream "entertainment" anymore eg hollywood blockbuster films and the majority of pulp fiction. Over Christmas I picked up a reader copy of a "best selling"/popular author, one which I had read a few works of previously, and couldn't get past the first chapter it was written so badly. The trouble with reading good literature is that reading anything below par becomes almost unbearable.
Still, the above is only my opinion. If you like the book, I'm glad, at least your reading something...
The da Vinci Code is utter tripe - and I don't have a religious bone in my body. Dan Brown also wrote almost exactly the same book, called it "Angels and Demons" with the same characters, the same plot, very similar errors about scientific institutions but it was set mainly in Rome.
... wait for it ... antimatter!
The pot-boiler writing is irritating enough without the wildly erroneous 'science'. Indeed, the 'science' in A&D is so laughable no one could be fooled by it. For example, the Big Bang was caused by [taa, daaa]
Did he inhale?
It's readable enough, but it is hackneyed and in general not well written. It overuses devices like cliffhanger chapter endings and foreshadowing, more like some bad soap opera than a novel.
Think "Days of our Lives" in Friends: close-up on character's face as they make a horrifying realisation, background music swells to jarring chord, fade to black and "To be continued...". It works a few times, it just gets annoying after a while.
I know it's pulp fiction, but there's far better pulp fiction out there: early Michael Crichton, for example.
Do you understand that the behavior that you're describing from the _Social Text_ editors is the very antithesis of peer review?
Just for the record, Social Text is not peer reviewed, nor did it ever claim to be. Quite the opposite. However, they could still have checked the science.
The only thing that Alan Sokal's credentials got him (and should have gotten him) was his foot in the door of Social Text. The reason they published his parody was because it pandered to their ideological bias.
The grandparent poster unfortunately has let the academic apologists of Social Text brainwash her (or him), rather than examine the evidence objectively.
Had the _Social Text_ editors not been charlatans, they would not have even been harmed by this experiment.
Had they not been charlatans, they would have admitted their goof and engaged in some self reflection. Instead, they circled the wagons.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
What matters isn't that they felt something was up, but that they published it. If they 'smelled the fish was bad' they shouldn't have published. There's not exactly a lot of integrity in rushing to press because the article was written by a scientist. If the standards of Social Text were anything like a decent scientific journal, reviewers would have taken it out to the trash until it was at least evaluable.
The tenets of postmodernism can change or not. From what standpoint are you going to argue that they are 'true'? If I accept these tenets, there's no point in them. If I don't accept them, it's pretty clear that postmodernist attacks on science are just penis envy from a pseudofield which has no purpose except to give people jobs. Truth is, there are real criticisms of every particular scientific study or conclusion, which have nothing to do with privilege or dogma, but which require some kind of literacy to deal with. But why bother if you can just spout some general blanket claim about science without even grasping the point? Postmodernism is a great existence proof for 'fooling some of the people all of the time,' though.
Might have been written by computer, but it reads like it was translated through The Fish a few times...
c.
Log in or piss off.