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!
"A note of caution: reading this thing may cause temporary brain damage."
Dear Writer, Your posting of the Press Release Text is rejected as it does not seem to have paragraphs of any kind. Regards, Slashdot readers.
elSpike out.
copy-paste any chapter of Battlefield Earth
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
How do you think stories get published on Slashdot?
Life in Orange County
Maybe the editor who accepted the book for publication could fill michael's position at slashdot - sounds like he'd fit right in !
I understand that SF can be meant to stand for "Science Fiction," though I don't think I've ever heard anybody say "I like to read a lot of SF." However, when we have virtually unlimited screen real estate, is it really necessary to shorten 'SciFi' to 'SF'? It's just a difference of three letters. Living in the Bay Area, I immediately thought this was an electic group of liberal-minded San Francisco writers publishing something scandalous under a "traditional" publisher. Guess the joke's on me.
Forget trying to read the very short sample... it hurts. The quotes at the end, however, are a hoot. All of them are things someone could easily say about a true masterpiece of any literary era. Verne, Asimov, Clarke, Hemingway, Chaucer, Homer... and coming to a bookstore near you, a genius named Travis Tea who will soon be storming the NYTimes bestseller list!
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
An earlier effort by 25 Newsday staffers produced the 1969 best seller Naked Came the Stranger.
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
I worked with a guy once who fancied himself a writer of love poetry. I thought it was pretty awful, saccharine stuff myself, but he had a couple of fans on some amateur poety website. Who was I to criticize?
I always felt bad, though, because he put together a book and found some vanity publisher to publish it for him. He apparently didn't know how the publishing business worked, though, because he was convinced that he was being published for real, and that the book would be his ticket to fame and fortune. I remember him being very excited when they "accepted" his book, and would publish it as soon as he came up with $4000. He then started hitting up everyone he knew to "invest" in his book, which he was sure would be a bestseller. I never had the heart to explain to him that real publishers pay you when they put out your book.
This is an example of the brilliant hoax first devised by "Naked Came The Stranger" (first link in Google), where a group of reporters wrote a book deliberately designed to be bad to show the crap and lack of taste that was coming out of the trashy romantic novel genre. At least 2 explicit sexual acts per chapter, the more deviant the better. Good writing and grammer were to be thoroughly sponged out of the book. They hired the sister of one of the writers I think to play the author and go around on TV shows saying rediculous stuff supposedly to promote the book.
The funny thing was that the book was published and then became so popular and the money grew so much that they spilled their guts and told the world about the hoax.
The abbreviation "SF" for speculative fiction arguably includes fantasy as well.
Pain. .
Whispering voices.
Pain.
Pain. Pain. Pain.
Need pee--new pain--what are they sticking in me? . .
Sleep.
Pain.
Whispering voices.
"As you know, Nurse Eastman, the government spooks controlling this hospital will not permit me to give this patient the care I think he needs."
"Yes, doctor." The voice was breathy, sweet, so sweet and sexy.
"We will therefore just monitor his sign's. Serious trauma like this patient suffered requires extra care, but the rich patsies controlling the hospital will make certain I cannot try any of my new treatments on him."
"Yes, doctor." That voice was soooo sexy! Bruce didn't care about treatments. He cared about pain, and he cared about that voice, because when he heard the voice, the pain went away, just for a few seconds, like.
I'm not a nerd. Nerds are smart.
The Washington Post also has a very interesting article on the likes of PublishAmerica at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25187-20 05Jan20?language=printer
You'd think someone would have realized something was wrong with the pen name Travis Tea...
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
I hear WB bought the rights to the stories and have hired Travolta.
to The Eye of Argon
This could simply support my own theory that science fiction is like flan: there's no difference between the good stuff and the bad stuff.
Actually, I'll amend that: reading nearly any science fiction is like eating flan, but reading Neal Stephenson is like eating flan from between Jennifer Connelly's breasts while you're high.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Associated Press has an article about it and points out: "Some writers organizations will not accept PublishAmerica authors or offer only limited memberships. Those organizations include the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the Mystery Writers of America and the Authors Guild, whose members include Stephen King and Scott Turow. The organization gets about 50 membership requests a year from PublishAmerica authors. All are rejected, said executive director Paul Aiken." Here is the link to the article: http://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/Stories/0,1413,2 09~23371~2682604,00.html
Sun and Fun
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 once again with markup:
http://critters.critique.org/sting/
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
... 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? "
Use http://www.sfwa.org/members/aburt instead, has manuscript, blurbs, more info.
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...
"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
Yes yes, karma-whoring again, go ahead and say it.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
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
I bet some people will buy it just for fun.
The Complete Guide to the Publishing World, by Teresa Nielsen Hayden
You have to scroll down a bit, and there's a lot there to read, but believe me, it's worth it. Teresa knows what she's talking about.
I think we're cheating 30-odd authors out of their hard-earned five cents or so of royalties each if we get the PDF instead of buying the book. Think how many milliliters of Starbucks Coffee that represents, and buy a copy or ten to support pranks everywhere.
And Starbucks.
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 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.
If we are going to be talking about absolute crap, somebody should mention "The Da Vinci Code".
There is a reason it's called "pulp fiction" people. Pulp is what your brain turns into.
Andrew Burt, the owner of the site which I linked to, wrote one of the chapters in the book we're all talking about. He runs critters, an SF/F critique group, which is also hosted on the site where the PDF is stored.
I'm an author myself, so I'm hardly going to link to illegal copies of books floating around the web.
As the link no longer works, perhaps he and the other authors involved just realised they have a potential best-seller on their hands and asked aburt to remove the PDF so they can cash in. If so, more power to them. On the other hand, perhaps he took the PDF down because their server is melting under a slashdot-induced feeding frenzy. It's almost 600kb, and a few hundred thousand simultaneous downloads would be painful.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Akk. apologies if this multiple posted...
1) Get bunch of writes to write "crappy" novel
2) Advertise how bad it is on slashdot
3) Profit!
Just because its horribly bad doesnt mean some of you wont be buying it out of curiosity.
It's easy to forget that there are real people whose dreams are being taken advantage of here. Not the publish america people- but their authors. Some of the rationalizations they come up with to explain the sting:
http://www.publishamerica.com/cgi-bin/pamessageboYes, I am one of the thirty-odd writers who collectively make up "Travis Tea," a pseudonym (and a pun -- say it outloud). :-)
Here is some background on this wacky collaborative sting project that we cobbled together.
Several months ago, in response to a claim by a certain publisher that writers working in the SF/F genre believe it "does not require believable storylines" or "does not need believable every-day characters," genre writer James D. Macdonald got approximately 40 mostly science fiction and fantasy writers to cobble together an intentionally horrendous monstrosity of a novel (read it here as an FTP download in RTF and PDF format) and then submit it, in order to display the less than discriminating tastes of that same certain publisher in regard to the kind of work they accept for publication.
Earlier last week, the sting has been revealed, the publisher fell for it (retracting the acceptance as soon as news spread, of course), and I proudly own up to having authored Chapter 13 of ATLANTA NIGHTS by Travis Tea .
Here's a bit of an excerpt from my chapter:
Yes, you can even buy your own copy at Lulu.com to read for gut-wrenching hilarity and educational purposes (lessons on how not to write can be derived from the perusal of this book). Here is the stellar lineup of blurbs from the back cover. And that's just the ones that fit the back cover. There are twice as many additional blurbs inside the front matter of the book. Some of them are truly classic....
I predict this will replace THE EYE OF ARGON as midnight panel reading material at science fiction conventions. This book, is purely and genuinely bad. So bad that it's great. In all seriousness, The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest should give it a special achievement prize. :-)
For more detailed coverage, including a list of contributors, of the ATLANTA NIGHTS atrocity -- or should we say, travesty -- see the Cold Ground blog , and Tor Books editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Light . ..
Also, looks like the LA Times has picked up the story .
Vera Nazarian
http://www.veranazarian.com/
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.
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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.
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.
You are clearly defensive about what postmodernism has to say regarding science. You need not be because a deeper understanding of what most postmodernist philosophy has to say about science cannot be characterized as "attacks on science." In particular, the postmodernist assertion that all human systems of knowledge, science included, are affected by dogma and cultural bias is simply a fact. However, science has a system of evaluation that endeavors to correct for those effects that involves non-humans to an extraordinary degree. Bruno Latour, for example, discusses this in both Science In Action and We Have Never Been Modern.
Non-scientific systems of human thought also have mechanisms of correction. Law, philosophy, psychology, art theory--all of these have means of offsetting the bias inherent in human systems. This is not news. Even what you charge to be a "pseudofield" has a means of achieving consensus.
Postmodernism has many facets in the different branches of human endeavor. It is different in architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, and music (the humanities). It is generally misunderstood as saying that nothing has any meaning, perhaps deservedly so. But postmodern philosophy in its best forms recognizes distinctions between fields and reveals that all fields are prone to error.
I agree, also, that there are criticisms of scientific studies that "have nothing to do with privilege or dogma," critiques which require "literacy" (what I also would call expert knowledge) to deal with. So your argument with me is what?
There is some real beauty in some of the postmodern philosophers. People like Derrida, Foucault, Irigary, Barthes, and Baudrillard have startling, provocative things to say about the world we live in. They often don't understand science very well, and I definitely would not turn to them to understand the value of a scientific report qua science. That doesn't mean their writing is without value.
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