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.)
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 !
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.
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.
some posters above give the speculative fiction answer, but i read a long time ago (and i wish i could remember who wrote it) that SF was used by (serious?) science fiction writers to distance themselves from SciFi movies about giant brains attacking people.
I don't believe that the word "to speculate" is often used as "to make up ridiculous stuff in order to entertain 13-year-old girls with a Welsh fetish."
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
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
You clearly have never been the subject of the traditional rants of the written science fiction community about how they do not write "sci-fi" or "skiffy", which is the domain of bad '50s monster movies. They write "science fiction" or "speculative fiction", which is SF if you must shorten the term.
To understand, think "Linux" vs. "GNU/Linux".
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
I think parent is thinking of the Sokal hoax, in which Alan Sokal, a physicist at NYU, wrote a completely non-sensical physics paper and submitted it to Social Text, the leading journal of postmodern pseudo-intellectuals. Social Text accepted the paper and published it, thereby demonstrating their complete ignorance of modern science, which they purport to understand and be in a position to critique. Sokal then exposed their foolishness in a piece in Lingua Franca (sadly defunct). He has links to the hoax article, his Lingua Franca article, the statements by the editors of Social Text, and much other material here
... 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.
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...
"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
You're a real SF fan if you consider good SF to be "stfnal," but only a died-in-the-wool fan (like me) knows that that's because Hugo Gernsback referred to it as scientifiction.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
To understand, think "Linux" vs. "GNU/Linux".
When you put it that way, it makes me really care what the sci-fi community wants to be called.
The ______ Agenda
This is, of course, a very inaccurate characterization of the so-called Sokal Affair. Wikipedia does much better, as usual.
A more accurate characterization is that Sokal, through deliberate fraud,and playing on his legitimate reputation within physics, got the _Social Text_ editors to publish an article that they themselves did not think was of high quality. But the editors felt that allowing a professional physicist to publish positions--which they presumed he was expressing, because he said exactly such--informed by his background in Physics.
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.
I am a legitimate expert in a number of things, for example. I could certainly get journals or magazines concerned with other subjects to publish my deliberately misleading characterizations of those subjects I know, particularly if they were journals in other areas that had an interest in cross-discipline discussion. So what? You can lie and deceive, and still get published. Big deal!
It's true that Sokal doesn't really understand modern science studies and postmodernism. But the crude caricature he's formed of the area is unlike his simple, traditional and positivistic notions of science. And for whatever reason, it was easier for him to get a big chip on his shoulder than it was to learn about another area of knowledge. Hence the whole affair.
Buy Text Processing in Python
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'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.
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...
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
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?
I think you are referring to the Sokal Hoax. The Sokal Hoax was more important, IMO, because it took place in the heart of academia, and was an attack on the abuses of post modernism, or at least on some of the people who practice such abuses. In the words of Alan Sokal (a physics professor at NYU):
If for no other reason, this hoax is important because it points to the deep cultural divide between the Sciences and the Humanities. I think that it's also a terrific flame war, taking place on the pages of the New York Times, newspapers around the world, as well as academic journals. (Sure, the Empire of Meow is great, but did they ever cross post to the NYT?)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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.
"A note of caution: reading this thing may cause temporary brain damage."
Do they mean the manuscript or Slashdot?
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
You've bitten the apologia hook, line, and sinker. The point is not that they deferred to someone who really was in a position to share expert knowledge, but that they didn't bother to check this "knowledge" because it conformed to their prejudices.
It's true that Sokal doesn't really understand modern science studies and postmodernism.
He apparently understood enough to fool the editorial collective at Social Text and demonstrate their intellectual dishonesty. They were the real frauds in this case, which was proven not so much by the publishing of the parody, but by their responses afterwards. And by supporting and repeating the accusation that Sokal is the fraudster, you've brought your own intellectual honesty into question. You're buying into ideological fundamentalism that is just as corrupt as the Christian or Islamic equivalents.
Social Text was hoisted on it's own (Lacanian) absence of the Father, if you will.
I am a legitimate expert in a number of things, for example. I could certainly get journals or magazines concerned with other subjects to publish my deliberately misleading characterizations of those subjects I know, particularly if they were journals in other areas that had an interest in cross-discipline discussion. So what?
So maybe those journals lack integrity? Besides which, Sokal didn't write "misleading characterizations", he wrote things which were blatantly and obviously and absurdly (to even an undergraduate) false as part of his parody.
Perhaps you are so blinded by the text that you cannot read the words.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Yes, 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.
blog
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.