Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Sad Puppies: You want an example? Here's an example.

Ok, so everybody on one side of this Sad Puppies thing wants an example of The Problem. They keep saying "What's your [expletive deleted] Problem you [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted].

Alrighty then. Compare the non-Sad Puppies pick for Novelette:

 "The Day The World Turned Upside Down" by Thomas Olde Heuvelt.

with Sad Puppies pick for Short Story:

"The Parliament of Beasts and Birds", by John C. Wright,

or Sad Puppies pick for Novelette: "Championship B'tok", Edward M. Lerner.

Yes, you should READ them. Go ahead, they're small.

For my money that comparison pretty much encapsulates the issues at hand.

The Phantom

4 comments:

Rob said...

I guess I was mistaken. I didn't think anyone would have nominated The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere if it had featured a straight couple.

The Phantom said...

I rage quit Upside Down when the main character let some woman fall to her death while he rescued a gold fish. Later I skimmed the rest of it, it didn't improve.

Anonymous said...

Rob - if the narrator in The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere had been straight, would he have been so worried about how his family would react?

(and yes, The Day The World Turned Upside-Down annoys me too, for a lot of reasons. The fact that the protagonist is a stupid fuckup who accidentally lets a woman die... is not one of them, surprisingly; not everyone in every story is able to always make the right decision -- see, for instance, "The Cold Equations" -- and sometimes a reflex attempt to grab a moving object can have lethal consequences.)

The Phantom said...

"...not everyone in every story is able to always make the right decision..."

True. Personal failing of mine, I can't suffer fools. So reading stories where the MC is some kind of doofus or moral midget is torture for me.