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.)
with the people on one usenet group submitting intentionally
bad manuscripts to some company and get most of them
published?
Oh yeah, not first post!
remember, its not shortening "scifi" to SF it's shortening "Science Fiction" to SF. The abbreviation does come in handy, for example I belong to a group on my campus known as the "Science Fiction Forum", abbrev. to SF4M, :-).
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
The abbreviation "SF" for speculative fiction arguably includes fantasy as well.
PublishAmerica claimed "As a rule of thumb, the quality bar for sci-fi and fantasy is a lot lower than for all other fiction.... [Science fiction authors] have no clue about what it is to write real-life stories, and how to find them a home." It described them as "writers who erroneously believe that SciFi, because it is set in a distant future, does not require believable storylines, or that Fantasy, because it is set in conditions that have never existed, does not need believable every-day characters."
;-)
Unfortunately this is a valid point.
Sorry, Mr. Beckett, but you need a more coherent story.
An alternative weekly sent stories by famous writers (Beckett, Garcia Marquez, Angela Carter) out to 20 literary magazines under different names. 12 were rejected and 8 got no reply. Choice quotes from the rejection letters:
and
... and chapter 34 was written by a computer program. It starts:
"Bruce walked around any more. Some people might ought to her practiced eye, at her. I am so silky and braid shoulders. At sixty-six, men with a few feet away form their languid gazes. I know I was hungry, and impelling him lying naked. She slowly made for a man could join you I know what I ought to take you probably should have. He wants it worriedly. About think what to wear? "
There was a time when real science fiction fans, the ones that actually read books rather than just watched movies or flipped through comics, considered "scifi" (as Ellison pronounces it, "skiffy") to be a term used either derogatively or only by wannabes, and the real abbreviation was SF -- which could also stand for "speculative fiction", as the New Wavers were inclined to call it.
A few old timers still feel the same way, but those who were still in diapers when the original "Star Wars" first appeared on the big screen have grown up with "sci fi". "SF", though, is still easier to say and shorter to write.
-- Alastair
The general concept is that people who write 'good' stories regularly, as well as journalists, editors, and posibly even critics, can at least recognize when something has been written poorly.
It may be really bad use of the english language, consistently transposing the words 'to', 'too', and 'two'. It may be telling the story in one long paragraph, possibly with chapter marks every 2000 characters. There are many other possible indicators that a story is either written poorly, or is otherwise not worthy of the time necessary to read it, or for that matter spend money on it.
The publication process, outside of vanity press, makes a very strong effort to weed out the stories that are submitted that carry those indicators. They know that if they print it, distribute it, and try to get book stores to sell it, they are going to have two things happen: Extreamly low sales, with high returns; and customers writing letters (to the publisher, newspapers, etc.) rightfully berating the publisher for letting the story see the light of day.
If a writer deliberatly writes a bad story, gets it printed in a vanety press, then lets the public know that the vanity press is doing this sort of stuff, while claiming to be part of the legitimate publishing business, the publishing house pretty much deserves the reputation it is going to get.
You can bet that the author has gone through 'The Elements of Grammar' and 'The Elements of Style', to make a concerted effort to violate every rule of writing they can. I suspect that they had some fun doing it as well.
If they spent $10,000 in the process, I would suspect that to them it has roughly the value of a vacation to you or me.
No I have no illusions that abiding by every rule from the 'Elements' collection insures a good story. Nor do I believe that violations are a sure indication of a poor story.
Enjoy,
-Rusty
You never know...
In the next paragraph they include three of the four things it was suppose to leave out, a Plot, and character development, and certainly purports to have some social insight. Even if it was minimal, it existed.
However, given the American fascination for sex and violence, it's no wonder the book sold well. None of the pr0n "novels" I've read have had much of a plot to them.
When VCR's are outlawed, only outlaws will have VCR's.
I'm surprised noone has brought up The Woodside Literary Agency.
The Woodside Literary Agency spammed certain Usenet newsgroups looking for authors.
For a fee, they would represent an author to get his work published.
They apparently never met a manuscript they didn't like.
So some of the participants in one of the misc.writing newsgroup had a contest to see if anyone could get a manuscript rejected.
For example, see Even Hitler got the blues
No, plenty of people do use 'SF', perhap not in your circles though. This is a case of your not being familiar with the history of the genre, no offense meant, papaskunk. Actually, 'SF' was the main term used for the genre up until the time when the malapropism 'Sci-Fi' was coined by Forrest Ackerman. Sci-Fi as a term verbally analogous to 'Hi-Fi' is of course a lazy unthinking bastardization of language. Anyway, quite a few in the field with an ear for language use objected to 'Sci-Fi' but Gresham's Law seems to have dominated over time, and now mostly only serious readers use 'SF' and the masses use the illiteracy. Now that sci-fi media-based pabulum has replaced serious thinking and good writing, it is all a moot point anyway. The marching morons have taken over the field.
It's true that LitCrit professor are not physicists. Nor do/did they claim to be. They deferred to someone who really was in a position to share expert knowledge, and put it in a context of postmodernist theory.
The postmodernist literary criticism school of thought held that all forms of human understanding were best understood through the microscope of literary criticism. That is, literary symbols and imagery were supposedly a valuable way to study sociology (especially gender and race relations), politics, and even the 'hard' sciences such as physics.
So you had Jacques Lacan writing:
"Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of enjoyment, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image. [...] That is why it is equivalent to the square root of minus one of the signification produced above, of the enjoyment that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of the lack of signifier -1."
Or, from Katherine Hayles, a proponent of the philosopher Luce Irigaray:
"The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders."
In short, you mischaracterising Sokal's complaint and the whole point of his hoax.
For more details, please see this book review by Richard Dawkins.
Was there any announcement about why he went? Did he jump or was he pushed? Anyway, good riddance to bad rubbish.
At the bottom of the
Please, don't blame your location for your ignorance
...." on the other hand is pretty clear.
Why ever not? "SF" as a term is an Americanism. Over here in Blighty the term "SciFi" is almost exclusively used (I can certainly never remember anyone I've met using the term "SF" with repect to Science Fiction, and I've reading Sci-Fi for over 30 years). I know what it means through exposure to US culture, but is someone in the street asked me "Did I like SF?" I'd assume that they were taking about my visit to San Fransisco, mainly because you'd expect someone talking to you to have the same cultural context.
As far as the headline goes, without the context of "writers" and "publishers" then the headline would have been confusing to me. What would the average slashdotter have made of "SF Group Sting Supposedly Traditional Business"? My parsing would have been to do with San Fransisco, and not to fiction. "Sci-Fi group
So I hope that this post has been the dog's bollocks and you have given a monkey's and got to the end. I still think it is odd that the mere use of a term can give some people the screaming abdabs - it's not particularly chav. I'd suggest that they relax, skin up a fag, and perhaps roast some faggots. It's not like we're all from north of Watford.
Pip pip old bean
If for no other reason, this hoax is important because it points to the deep cultural divide between the Sciences and the Humanities.
Sokal's hoodwinking of the editors and readers of Social Text is more complicated than the real split between what C. P. Snow termed "The Two Cultures" of humanites and science. The issue is in fact complicated enough that it does not compress into anything nearly attractive as the sensational claim that postmodern intellectuals don't know their anuses from a hole in the ground. Still, I'm going to try to point out ways that the popular reading of the Sokal affair ignores some important features of the events which led to the publication of Sokal's article as well as some important questions regarding the final signficance of the debate.
To start, one of the features regarding Sokal's hoax and also GLARINGLY ABSENT from the wikipedia entry is the initial efforts by Social Text's editorial board to have Sokal revise his article. Andrew Ross and Bruce Robbins respond to Sokal's hoax in a subsequent issue of Lingua Franca (news of Sokal's hoax was published in May/June 1996 and Ross and Robbins' response in July/August 1996). That response does not seem to be available on the web, but from what I remember it details the dodgy back-and-forth of Sokal and Social Text's editors about publishing the article. Sokal refused to conduct any of the revisions and so the editors of Social Text--perhaps a touch too eager to have a scientist speak on matters normally of interest only to postmodern humanities scholars--published the article without revisions. As Jack Slater would say: "Big mistake."
In other words, the editors of Social Text smelled that the fish was bad, but ate it anyway. It wasn't so much that the article was considered a good one as much as the editors wanted the prestige of publishing a credentialed scientist's views regarding postmodernism, even if those views were a bit cranky.
The issue becomes much more complicated than Sokal's cheer of "egg on your face" circulated by the popular media (especially the web). For one, the editors of Social Text to this day maintain that Sokal's article does in fact have some good points, especially to the extent that it raises problems of authority and validity regarding how disciplines like science produce what is taken as knowledge and fact.
Some of Robbins' articles regarding the aftermath are available on the web, such as his "On Being Hoaxed" and a later article entitled "Anatomy of a Hoax. Both were originally published in separate issues of Tikkun"
The real points of this Sokal affair, in my opinion, are 1) a bad editorial decision was made by editors of a humanities journal, 2) Sokal's unethical trick is now enshrined and will probably be his greatest claim to fame as a "physicist," and 3) the primary tenets of postmodernism remain unchanged because it is too easy to see how culture and dogma shape what people perceive as truth, something that is true not only in religion, philosophy, and cultural studies, but also to some extent in the sciences.
A final real question which tends to get ignored is what would have happened if Sokal had waited a year or two before revealing his hoax. Would a humanities academic have given the lie to the nonsense? I'm guessing the answer is yes, but given the tendency to cull a quick headline from a very complicated series of events, such a question and many others simply get ignored.
blog