Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

I read Eric Flint's latest post on popularity, and something kept bothering me, until I realized that he had got one thing subtly wrong: He is measuring the popularity of authors,  not of works.

Sure, David Weber is more popular, by measurement of shelf space, than Lois McMaster Bujold: but that's partly because Weber publishes two to three books a year and Bujold one (fewer recently, as she hasn't been entirely well, I understand). More to the point: how do War of Honor and Paladin of Souls (published at about the same time, the latter winning both a Hugo and a Nebula) compare in total sales? How does Shadow of Freedom stack up against Ancillary Justice (both 2013 novels)?

Flint's measure regards a combined metric of popular and prolific. (Martin and Tolkien are the exceptions: small sets of volumes with massive popularity, but a general estimate of high quality.) The measure of popularity appropriate for the Hugos is not by the author but by the work, and I have not seen any evidence that the normal Hugo winner of the past few years is necessarily significantly less popular than an average work by the "popular" authors.

Perhaps I should draw back from that claim a bit: the figures I looked at before suggest that Hugo winners are not necessarily among the very most popular SFF novels of their years, and that the disparity probably does reflect a judgement by Hugo voters tilted towards best rather than most popular. But I also think that it is generally true that Hugo winners and nominees are among the most popular SFF works of their years.

And now for another couple of lessons in how to lose sales, if you are a bricks and mortar superstore chain.

1) If you carry a series, carry all of the series.

In particular, don't leave gaps.

About a week ago, I finished the second volume of Kadrey's Sandman Slim novels, which my daughter had given me for Father's Day. (I had already read the first one a year or two ago.) It's a nice, competent, somewhat blackly humorous series which is a cut above mind candy but not likely to be on my Hugo Nominations lists, and I'm not running out and buying everything in it at once. Still, the second volume set up an obvious sequel, in the way that second volumes do, and I went into the local (to work, five minutes' walk away or so) Chaptigo willing to pick up the next volume, Aloha From Hell, and possibly it plus its successor.

No luck.

Oh, they had other volumes, relatively heavily weighted towards the later volumes, but also including the first two. Just no third one. Because it was a fairly casual, mild interest, no immediate need, I didn't bother hunting down possible other copies, and (again, no great need) I'm not going to buy later volumes until I've read or at least have the earlier ones. So no sale, either of it or its successors.

A couple of weeks pass.

2) Get in books when they come out.

Tuesday was the release date for Jo Walton's The Philosopher Kings, which I am willing to go out of my way for, but even more willing to pick up as soon as possible (in paper, not electronic format -- I have people to lend it to after I finish it).

Chaptigo indicated, on Tuesday, that although it was available for order online, it was available at no stores in Toronto at all. (A Canadian author, at that, and the predecessor has been selling well enough that there are three copies in hardcover of The Just City at my closest IndigoSpirit (which has stock control policies which are, let us say, not very midlist-friendly).)

In conjunction with the fact that Bakka's weekly update on their weblog indicated that they had it as of Tuesday, this indicated a trip to Bakka, after the Dominion Day holiday was over. So I went up at lunch and picked it up, along with (as it was on my mind) Aloha From Hell.

So Chaptigo lost two, possibly three, sales right there.

If you have no competition, you can afford to be sloppy, but if you run a bricks-and-mortar store in a location with competition, if you aren't on the ball, it's easy to lose sales like that.

This is heightened by the fact that purchasers who will pay the premium for a hardcover over a digital copy or a later paperback copy are probably willing to go out of their way to get it.

I could have pre-ordered the Walton from Amazon or Indigo, but I would still have been unlikely to get it any faster than I actually did; and I ended up supporting a local independent bookstore. And a customer who's focussed on getting an online discount isn't a potential customer for a bricks-and-mortar store in any case.

In the first case, assume that I had been dedicatedly looking for the Kadrey the first opportunity I could get. There's a copy at another, smaller IndigoSpirit store downtown, so I could have gone there, which is fine for the chain as a whole, but it still represents a lost sale for the manager of the more major store; and calling to reserve the copy at the other store and sending the customer there is at least as inconvenient. So even in that case it's almost a wash for Indigo as a whole (slight hit taken from my irritation at their stocking policies) but a loss for the site itself -- and Indigo has been closing down sites in Toronto; you can be sure that headquarters pays attention to each site's sales figures.

Driving me to e-book purchases doesn't work either; if I had wanted an e-book of the Walton, I could have downloaded it from Google onto my phone, which is easier than getting it via the Kobo store -- a lot of people have Android phones and tablets -- and a subsequent download of an epub (no DRM, as it's from Tor) could be managed at any desktop PC where I was signed in. And I won't buy the Kadrey in digital form, as it has DRM and I can't read it in my preferred e-reader.

I honestly don't think that this is, as such, the result of having bean-counters run the chain; I suspect that it's the result of a "just good enough" stock software system that doesn't make connections, doesn't anticipate, doesn't have the flexibility that a human checking up on stock does.

I could make a guess at the scale of the cost side of that cost / benefit equation -- assuming that they already have a tailored stock-control system; if they don't, the cost is much, much higher. You'd need a ton of flags regarding authors, series, anticipated popularity as derived from media as well as sales of other works by the author, typical time between re-ordering and stocking by publisher, pattern tracking sensitive to individual stores, so you can assume both programming time and ongoing manual input costs. Call it a half a good developer for a year added to existing costs plus management overhead plus ongoing data-input (mainly centralized) of a fifth of a clerical person a month ... that's, um, somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars in the first year and a ongoing cost of between ten and twenty thousand dollars a year to feed the beast enough information for it to make a difference, plus occasional software tweaking.

If an average HC is $30 CAD and an average trade paperback is 15$ CAD (MMPBs have a different sales model, typically, and the considerations I've listed are mainly at a higher end), and the typical cut of the bookseller is 40% for non-bestsellers, then each sale gained gets about $6 to $12 in additional revenue. Amortise the software cost over, say, three years and expect to be in balance after five, and you need ... about 3,500 to 6,000 extra sales a year to justify the costs involved (and the costs are still less than hiring one full-time staff person each year, including benefits). If they have on the order of a hundred stores (6500+ employees, some of whom will be head office, so I'm guessing at on the order of a hundred locations averaging between small stores with four to five staff and superstores) that means an extra 35 to 60 sales per year per location. However, that has to come from a particular subset of dedicated readers who don't do e-books, don't order (much) online, and come in frequently, and I wonder whether even that number of gained sales is realistic.

A small specialty store can manage this sort of stock management inside the head of its manager. If a large store gives its local floor managers rein to order effectively it can make up some of the gap... but factors of scale and control (local people can slip up badly, too) are likely to keep that sort of freedom in check.

Even if the approach passed a cost-benefit test on its own, it would increase their gross revenue by about .0004% (revenue is about a billion dollars, according to Wikipedia). Chapters Indigo has announced that their strategy to increase profitability involves emphasizing non-book merchandise to a much greater degree. From an opportunity cost perspective, I doubt that this sort of attention to detail, as a business strategy, is going to make a lot of sense.

Originally, the Greek Kanon meant a rod or measuring-stick. Its use in English goes back to two Latin extensions of the word: first, there's an ecclesiastical use, which is applied variously to certain standards or people: Canon Law, the Gregorian Canon, Canons of a cathedral and which I don't want to address here immediately; and a literary one.

The literary one has its ground in the schools of later antiquity. Canonical texts were those which made up the standard for the (highly-standardized) set of books used on courses.

These have left a significant impact on us. With the exception of a handful of plays of Euripides which derive (we infer) from one volume of an alphabetically-organized collection of his complete plays, the classical tragedies we have, which are a tiny subset of the ones that Cicero, say, would have known, are those which had become the set text for studying Greek literature in the late Roman Empire. Those were the ones which were copied enough that they had a chance of survival. Likewise, we have Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Statius -- and a rich manuscript history for all five -- because they were standard texts. Lots of copies were made for schoolboys; a few survived.

In fact, it's probably not unfair to say that we have a fairly intact set of works from the late classical canon.

However, there were a lot of other great works. Some we have: Catullus, for example (one copy of the Carmina survived to be reprinted); the elegies of Sextus Propertius survive in a number of MSS but were certainly not in any sense "canonical" during the Middle Ages or the classical period. But of Agathon, for example, whom Plato includes in the Symposium and who was counted as a major tragedian, we have only scraps. The Prometheus Unbound we have in outline, and a handful of excerpts, only.

In addition, the canon by the end of the Middle Ages was not that of the Classical World: Curtius' European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages goes over that standard school-texts of the high mediaeval period.

Then the Renaissance humanists reset the canon again, removing the authors from late antiquity and adding back pretty well only the most "classical" of classical authors. That list remains the core of a Classical Studies degree today.

Note that "canon" continued to mean not only that works were studied, but that they were copied. One began early doing "composition" which means translating into Latin or Greek texts written in the style of a known classical author. (I still have a copy of Woodhouse; I remember in particular doing one composition modelled on Theophrastus, who as far as I know founded a genre with two examples: his own work, and that of La Bruyère.) Later on, when one was more competent, one was expected to do one's own composition in Virgilian hexameters or Horatian metrics. (Homer, being non-standard, was always canonical but not a model for imitation.)

Canonical is not the same as major, or "has lasted long enough". At least from about 1550 on, the Confessions were granted to be a great work, and had certainly lasted a millennium, but were not in any meaningful sense canonical.

To be honest, nobody really worried about canon in English as such until the late Nineteenth Century. Oh, there were rhetorical flourishes in the Querelle des Anciens et Modernes regarding modern equivalents of ancient writers (or as early as Meres Palladis Tamia, who makes an early mention of Shakespeare in one such list). But until the late Nineteenth Century, classical education remained the norm, and English literature, as such, was not a school subject.

There were recognized "great authors", and occasional works, like Johnson's Lives of the English Poets, which were based on an informal model of what the canon might be if there were one. There were authors who were pointed at as good ones from whom to learn technique, if you were a budding writer (not quite the same thing: imitating Shakespeare or Milton has always been a quick route to mediocrity: it's better to imitate solid examples rather than tight-wire artists).

The idea of an English canon (or, later, a comparative literature canon) is a product of the creation of English Departments at the university level, on one level; on another it is partly a result of reprint publishers like Dent (Everyman's Library) needing to define whom they were going to publish in their cheap editions for the masses[1].

There have been wars fought over how reductive the canon should be: F.R. Leavis' Great Tradition being the most prominent: "The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad."[2] There have been battles fought over whether there should be a canon at all ("Is there a text in this class?"). And Harold Bloom built his late career around it.

What I want to look at is small canons, though: the reflection into a genre of the idea of a canon. What does it mean for a work to be "canonical" in that context?

Most SF readers and writers are less than concerned with what might be considered part of a standard course curriculum in academia.

A few weeks ago, the Coode Street Podcast had an interesting talk about the SF canon. They took as a more-or-less-given that "canon" was, ultimately short form for "it's lasted a long time, or looks as though it will", and certainly works that are not read would not normally be considered canonical.

But I think that there is something more to the idea of canon, transmitted all the way from that original meaning of a ruler: a canonical work is one which is, or has been, taken as an exemplar of its type, or a model to be followed. Eccentric works with no following may last -- contrary to Dr. Johnson's dictum, Tristram Shandy has lasted -- but they are canonical, at best, only in an academic context, i.e. if they are studied. Of course, there are now academic courses covering SF, and eccentric works can be as good a topic of study as any other, but within the normal SFnal context to call something canonical is not to reference academia, but the field itself, of successions of writers in the context of successions of dedicated readers.

Consider, for a moment, Little, Big. It's a really major work, and I'd argue better than Downbelow Station, to which it lost the Hugo Award in 1982 (how it compares to Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, one of the component parts of which was also on the ballot, is another question). The writing is very, very good, the ideas are subtle, characterisation is fine. But it has had no real successors and stands as an odd sort of outpost in the Urban (really Rural) Fantasy subgenre. But is it canonical? It stands at the head of no tradition; it is a representative example only of itself.

A similar argument can be made regarding Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but it hasn't had the time to demonstrate a similar sort of splendid isolation, and it's possible to argue that it has "partial" successors in books like Kowal's Glamour series (books with a style reminiscent of Nineteenth Century novels, although the style is in detail nothing like Clarke's).

If I were to teach / supervise / run a seminar (academic-year-length, which is 20 weeks) on SFF generally, I doubt that either would make it onto the course list (although they'd be on an extended reading list). At a book a week, or two shortish and closely-related ones in some cases (Starship Troopers and The Forever War, or any Heinlein Juvenile and Rite of Passage), I might have up to 30 books to set out, and I would want to cover the major sectors and major authors of the field. It's not hard to come up with 30 authors who need to be represented, as well as a number of periods / movements. In the end, inclusion will be highly correlated to canonicity, and not pure quality.

On the other hand, for a mix of historical and influence reasons, Shelley, Verne, Smith, Gernsback, Campbell ("The Thing" -- any class covering the Golden Age can at least cover a good number of authors via short story), Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Tolkien, Pohl, Delaney, Zelazny, Sturgeon, Niven, LeGuin, Herbert, Silverberg, one or another fat fantasy author from the 1980's (which one isn't critical -- none are excellent, but they have an important historical role), Wolfe, Vinge, Gibson, Stephenson, Bujold, Martin would have to be on it at minimum. And that list manages to miss out on modern urban fantasy, steampunk, and other substantial subgenres.

[1]Hugh Kenner pointed out, in conversation at least, that one reason the canon cut off at the end of the Nineteenth Century for a long period was because the Copyright Act's extension of copyright placed the modern writers who immediately followed out of the hands of reprint publishers for a long time. T.S. Eliot is just coming out of copyright; Pound will not be out of copyright until the 2020s.

[2]Parodied by Frederick C. Crews as: "The great English novels are Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterly's Lover, and Women in Love. Some malicious persons, who have had the cheek to call me narrow-minded in the past, will doubtless welcome this statement as proof of their views." (Leavis later embraced the works of D.H. Lawrence fervently.)

One of the complaints which pre-dates the Sad Puppies regarding the Hugos is that a subset of authors dominate the awards. The SP's have picked up on this and given it a twist, but even before them it was not uncommon to see suggestions regarding rules for disqualifying authors for years immediately subsequent to wins.

This is a poor idea. Although there certainly are authors whose repeated nominations in the Best Novel category must be chalked up in part to the effects of self-publicity at the personal level (Scalzi, McGuire, and Sawyer, in varying ways and degrees) and some who are acknowledged masters who also have been nominated (and sometimes won) for inferior work (Asimov, Willis, Bujold), it's also true that a great author at the top of his/her form can produce a cluster of great novels tightly spaced, which are legitimately the best, or arguably the best, of the year.

Ann Leckie is a fair example. Ancillary Sword is not, in my opinion, the very best novel of 2014, but it's certainly arguably one of the best five, and I can see some readers legitimately considering it the best.

As for the authors of whom it could legitimately be said that they gain votes as the result of self-publicity: the self-publicity is real enough, but it's not about rewards: it's about sales. Scalzi, Stross, McGuire et al. maintain strong online presences with lots of readers not because they're in a permanent Hugo campaign, but because they want to sell more books. The Hugo posts are a minor offshoot of the general ongoing self-promotion. (Note that selling yourself on social media is standard advice to authors of all stripes these days; these are merely at the high (power-law) end of the scale as far as success goes.)

As a result of economic changes in publishing, social media self-promotion by authors is not going to go away. Some authors avoid doing this for awards, and are quite emphatic about it (e.g. Jo Walton), but it's a little unrealistic not to expect an author not noting when his or her book has come out, or what it's about.

It's worth remembering that the Hugos not infrequently are won by works by authors who have never been nominated before - Clarke, Leckie, Chabon, Bacigalupi, Walton.

Trying to correct for the impact of social media by setting up rules on the awards is the wrong approach. Generalized signal boosting for other authors' works - throughout the year, not tied directly to awards - is probably a better idea.

I don't read much short fiction, mainly because my years of getting enough value out of SF magazines to subscribe to them ended many years ago, so any useful contribution I could make regarding Hugo nominations applies only to novels.

I'm not making any recommendations as such. I have, however, pulled together a list of all the books I have read which are eligible, and I thought I'd make a few comments about each.

I don't read at nearly enough volume to cover the majority of the important (one way or another) works published in a given year; to boot, there are some areas I read in relatively little. (For example, although I used to read a lot of epic fantasy, I tend to give it a much lower priority these days unless it comes very well recommended indeed; too much of it comes off as just rehashing tropes I've already run into too many times. This doesn't imply that there's a problem with the books, but rather that I'm somewhat jaded.)

I also tend to avoid dystopian futures (same problem: very little new under the sun: I don't have anything against dystopian or grim backgrounds as such, but, well, many are pervaded by a certain fundamental sameness underneath).

I read a lot of non-fiction, which is about half my reading, which cuts down on SF, and I also spend a lot of time reading new-to-me SF from before 2014.

Plus, my current to-read list is about thirty books long.

All this together means that I'm missing lots or works which have been very highly recommended, including the following (all of which have good reviews, look interesting and I intend to get around to eventually):

• The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu


• All Those Vanished Engines, Paul Park


• Steles of the Sky, Elizabeth Bear


• The Magician’s Land, Lev Grossman


• The Mirror Empire, Kameron Hurley


• The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Genevieve Valentine

I may add that this year looks very unlike last year's crop. Last year was one of those years with one really strong candidate that everyone was talking about beforehand, and which won handily. (The year before was one of those years where all the nominees struck me, and some others, as weak novels.) This year seems to have a reasonable-sized set of strong novels of very different sorts.

That being said, here's my overview:

Ancillary Sword (Ann Leckie) The successor, of course, to last year's winner, with a far more focussed canvas (one planet, essentially) and far more exploration of the problematic elements of the Radch. Leckie also managed to avoid middle-book syndrome by having a localized plot which was wrapped up nicely by the end of the novel rather than leaving the reader hanging. I liked this, and I expect that it will get onto the nominations list unless there's a "let somebody else have a chance" reaction after last year's quadrifecta.

Annihilation (Jeff Vandermeer) As you might guess from the fact that the list doesn't include the other two Southern Reach books, I wasn't madly enthused about this, although I can see how someone with different tastes might be. There's a sense in which this looks a bit like the set-up in Wilson's Darwinia (without the cheating Wilson used to explain the alien appearance there) or Gerrold's Chtorr novels: the incursion of an alien ecology into our own. It is also clearly in conversation with tropes from the horror tradition,; and there's an additional dimension of concern with our ecology and natural world.

Assail (Ian C. Esslemont) The last of the novels set in the timeframe of the Malazan Book of the Fallen. Esslemont is a good enough writer, but not at the level of Erikson, and this was a perfectly readable episode tying up loose ends in the series and with a strong plot of its own. Still, I'd say that this is very much a book for people who have already become attached to the series.

Cauldron Of Ghosts (David Weber, Eric Flint) As with the other books in this subseries, this is a bit of a romp, although a little darker than its two immediate predcessors. Like Assail, this would be a really unlikely Hugo candidate; even the people who like it a lot are likely to put it in a heap of "fun reads" rather than "best of the year": like all of Weber's work (and Fiint's) its virtues are in plotting and "accessible" characterisation.[1]

City of Stairs (Robert Jackson Bennett) This is a really, really fine piece of worldbuilding and storytelling, with underlying themes regarding colonialism and issues about state authority. It's one of the least "escapist" fantasy novels I've seen recently, as it engages with a whole range of themes relevant to our present in our world, and it does so in ways which are not forced and are integral to the plot. I've seen a lot of enthusiastic responses to it.

Echopraxia (Peter Watts) As usual with Watts, this is diamond-hard SF, with a ton of fascinating concepts and a not-entirely-upbeat view of humanity and our place in the universe. It would be hard to come up the level of Blindsight, to which this is a sequel, and this doesn't quite get there, but it's still a very, very good novel.

Full Fathom Five (Max Gladstone) Usually considered the strongest novel yet of the Craft Sequence. Gladstone is one of the really outstanding new names if SF (he didn't with the Campbell non-Hugo but was nominated for it twice, and I like him better than the other nominees / winners of the last two years that I've read[2]). The sequence as a whole is a bit like an inverted Laundry Files -- set in a different world where magic replaces our technology, but where the social structures (corporations, economic ties, legal patterns) mirror in a twisted way our own corporate world. Like the other books in this series, this is built around an intellectual puzzle -- i.e. it's a kind of mystery or suspense novel -- with strong characters and an undertone of incongruity humour (from our perspective, not the characters) from the mixture of fantasy elements with modern sociological elements.

The Goblin Emperor (Katherine Addison) This is a wonderful piece of humane fantasy, with an appealing protagonist, plot, and prose style. (It's very unlike Addison/Monette's other works: I like the Mélusine books too, but they are very different and much darker.) It's one of the books I see a lot of positive reactions to. The whole book is centred around agency and impediments to agency, but handled in such a way as to be naturally integral to the story.

Hawk (Steven Brust) Another very good Vlad installment from Brust, with everything one might look for -- technical virtuosity, intricate plotting, advances the overall plotline, and lots of Vlad and Loiosh being snarky. The cumulative weight of Brust's achievement with the Dragaera books is immense: it's a pity that it's unlikely that any one installment will get a Hugo. (If there's an argument to be made for a series Hugo as opposed to a novel Hugo, the Vladiad is one of the better arguments for it.)

Hidden (Benedict Jacka) And another fine episode in the Alex Verus novels. I'd call this series a guilty pleasure, except that the quality of the writing puts it well above that level. This one in particular grapples pretty heavily with what is involved in evaluating different individuals' personal ethics and overall character (not just Alex, but several other people). An excellent example of the broad category I'd call "good but not great".

Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer, eds.) The one anthology on the list. In an odd way, this felt to me like the sort of book that someone who really felt the way Brad Torgersen, say, says he feels about the current field should be trumpeting as a Hugo candidate (or as a source for Hugo candidates for Best Short Story). It's driven by an explicit project to get back to a positive sensawunda but does so via stories which aren't trapped in any way by the past. Of course, the authors come from the "left" side of the field, as a whole, but of all the books I read last year this is what I'd hand to someone who had been brought into the field by the old, optimistic stories for engineers of the Golden Age.

The March North: A Novel of the Commonweal (Graydon Saunders) This was a very, very fine novel, which I have already reviewed. It is probably at a level where it deserves a shot at a Hugo, but its lack of distribution works against it.[3]

My Real Children (Jo Walton) Again, a book with a lot of positive reactions, and which I have also talked about before. Given the overall response to this, I'd be mildly surprised not to see it as a Hugo nomination.

The Rhesus Chart (Charles Stross) The Laundry Files continue to get darker in this installment. With this novel (coupled with last year's "Equoid" Charlie is moving away from the calquing on a spy novel template towards the subversion of fantasy memes; and Case Nightmare Various-Colours moves steadily closer. I really like this series (as a software developer I'm squarely in the centre of its target audience), and I also appreciate the ways in which (like his other work, notably Rule 34) it pokes at the edges of issues involving the panopticon, privacy, and big data.

Waistcoats and Weaponry (Gail Carriger) I read these as Felicity gets them (i.e. I get them for her) as they come out. I think they're better than Carriger's adult Parasol Protectorate novels, and it made for a quick, amusing read.

The Winter Long (Seanan McGuire) This is one of the better books so far in the series -- tightly constructed, good characterization, workmanlike prose – but it does require background in the previous books to appreciate; it's at least the best since One Salt Sea, and possibly the best of the series. It also sets up potential conflicts and issues for the next volume(s) without creating a "left hanging" effect. As with the rest of the series, I tend to feel that the fae are too "human" in their motivations (blind Michael possibly excepted), and that extends to the antagonist in this novel.

[1]Weber himself has cheerfully admitted that he's not the type of writer to turn out jewels of books, although he admires them; he sees himself as a storyteller who's always more driven to move onto the next story he has to tell than polish the current one once it gets to an adequate level of readability.

[2]Note: I haven't read A Stranger in Olondria in particular (on my to-read list (sigh)), so I can't compare Gladstone to Samatar.

[3]I see some posters indicating that they tend to discount self-published and small-press books with limited distributions when considering what to nominate, on the basis that the book in question won't get enough votes to be on the ballot in any case. From my point of view, if you think something was the best novel (short story / novella, etc.) of the year, you should nominate it regardless; maybe enough people have also read it and think well of it so that it might get in.

I have just finished Jo Walton's The Just City, which is the first book of a three-part whole (The Philosopher Kings and Necessity, which I keep thinking of as Ananke, never mind, being the other two). Brief summary: Athene decides to set up an actual attempt to build Plato's Republic during the Bronze Age, pulling in philosophers/classicists from throughout history as masters to start it up and populating it with ten-year olds purchased over several hundred years of time travel from slave markets. Socrates gets pulled in five years after the foundation and the sorts of effects ensue that you might expect. (There was a reason the Athenians voted to get rid of him[1], and that was in a city where most people ignored him as much as they could. In a city of committed Platonists, though, this is not going to be the reaction...)

This is at least as good as one might expect from Jo, given her current track record, and arguably her best work yet. The thematic elements that undergird it mesh effortlessly with the characterization and plot elements, and they are among the themes which are absolutely central not only to Plato but to a long succession of philosophers after him: justice/righteousness (both are translations of dikaiosyne), the good life, the nature of learning (via instruction and via experience (vide the Meno, not referenced directly in the work)), the nature of freedom. And there are hints of other themes which are promised to surface later (Necessity being an obvious one).

If the two following volumes keep to the same level, this will be a major work.

One's immediate reaction is to enter into dialogue with what it shows. My immediate reaction along those lines was to reflect on how and why it's probably impossible for a modern (say, post-1950) author to present an implementation of the Republic which is not fated to blow up badly.

Plato's city is designed not around how actual cities best worked -- that's an Aristotelian approach, and Aristotle spends a large chunk of his life bashing away at Platonic idealism by sticking to observed phenomena. He has a theory of the mind/soul, and designs the city to mirror the mind.

In this, as in so many things, he stands at the head of a long tradition: both the city as a representation of the individual (consider Bunyan's The Holy War, with its town of Mansoul) and the more general view of the macrocosm as mirrored in the microcosm (which gives us not only astrology but a long tradition in political science, and an immensely rich literary tradition (sometimes allegorical, sometimes merely symbolic)).

This is pretty much dead; recent (say, the last forty years') researches into how the mind works have thrown up models which are non-reproducible at a larger level (let's just say that nature doesn't build the way engineers do, and leave it at that, for the moment). Nobody setting out to design a community would think, these days, that the relation of individuals to the whole could be analogized to parts of the mind to the whole mind.

More generally, Plato also makes an assumption that is pervasive until sometime in the Enlightenment, but is not generally accepted now: he assumes both (in a connected way) that the internal structure of the soul is hierarchical and that the external structure of society is also naturally hierarchical. He doesn't assume a pyramid with a single point -- he's not a divine-right-of-kings apologist -- although that version of the model was the normative one throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance (the classic go-to in political science being Filmer's Patriarcha; most literature students probably encountered this in Tillyard's Elizabethan World Picture).

(Shakespeare expresses this view twice, memorably, in his plays (though not his most popular plays): in Ulysses speech regarding degree in Troilus and Cressida --

"How could communities,
Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows!"

-- and in Menenius' retelling of Aesop's fable of the belly and the members in Coriolanus (where he picked up that detail from Plutarch).)

Plato doesn't put a single king in place in his state, sticking instead to classes, but he does assume that there is a top-to-bottom ordering of human faculties with the reason on top, emotions below that, and instinctual behaviours below that again; and that because the mind is so ordered, the best state should also be so ordered.

This is the model of the mind which is at the foundations of the mediaeval (Thomistic) disparaging of sex: in fallen humanity, passion in sex overwhelmed the reason, inverting the natural and harmonious order of the mind. (In unfallen humanity, it was supposed by some scholastics, this inversion would not have taken place, and it is this view that Milton reflects in Paradise Lost.)

It is also the model which lies behind expressions such as "get a hold of yourself": that "you" are to be equated with the rational faculties on the top, and the appeal is for the ruling reason to take control of the subordinate passions.

Not only have we pretty well ditched the idea that you can choose a "best" stratum of society by nature to govern it (aristos + cratia), although you occasionally find traces of that view in technocrats of one form or another (obSF: Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll"), and it's implicit in much Randite discourse; we've also found that the mind isn't hierarchically organized, or even very coherently organized. Like most products of evolution, it's a Rube Goldberg machine, with multiple coordinating faculties and no clear centre. There are even those who take the position that conscious thought itself is an ex post facto construction by the brain, an illusion to provide a unified view.[2]

So it's pretty well inevitable that any early 21st-century take on the Republic would have it run headfirst into problems with the intractable nature of reality. There are -- we would generally say -- no natural kings and no natural servants or menials. (Occasionally you get the view that capabilities do sort people generally into heaps -- Arts students here, science students there, physical labourers yet another place -- but given the complex nature of intelligence and skills, and the fact that lots of individuals can have "natural" skills in several areas, and interests at odds with the natural skills, any attempt to follow that route (as in school streaming) runs into problems fairly quickly.) And the people who are most "rational" are often the people we want to keep as far away as possible from managing other people[3].

So it's pretty well inevitable that any modern examination of the Republic as a real city would focus on the failure modes. It stood at the font of the literary/philosophical stream that eventually gave us the Utopia (pretty well literally: More's Utopia is mainly the Republic with the numbers filed off, as are Swift's Houyhnhnms), but it's also very close to the modern dystopia by way of Bentham's panopticon.

Jo's take on it -- allowing the dynamics which break it down to operate effectively enough, early enough, to make it not become a simple dystopia is a welcome approach.

[1]He would probably just have been ostracized, if the procedure didn't require voting between a penalty proposed by the prosecution and one proposed by the defence one the verdict had been determined, and Socrates' proposed penalty hadn't been essentially a pension for life.

[2]An Augustinian would still be in a reasonable position to handle much of this, treating the inherent disorder as a consequence of the fall.

[3]Note the behavioural traits that Jo has handed her incarnate Apollo: he comes across as high-functioning Autism spectrum.

I see (via File 770) that the Sad Puppies slate looks as though it will be back for another year.

The logic involved is somewhat tortuous, but a big chunk of it seems to be tied up in the view that because the Hugo awards are a fan-based majority vote, popularity as shown in sales should match up with ranking in the nominations, and that therefore the usual nominees are somehow rigged by a clique… something like that.

The Hugos (as I've noted before) are not simply a popularity contest; an examination of the general pattern of nominations shows that voters do filter, to some degree, by a perceived quality in a way different from simple sales. Selecting "the book I liked best from the year" is not the same as selecting "the book that I read that sold the most copies last year". Every year, pretty well, there's a scuffle over the nominees regarding their relative perceived or real inferiority to a commenter's preferred slate, and that's the usual context for this question. The Sad puppies complaint is a little different: they want the vote to reflect simple popularity, and think that the books that they like are popular enough that their exclusion is an injury to them.

What do we mean by popular?

When people talk about a book being popular, we can mean two things: first, (usually) that a lot of people buy it (i.e. it's a "bestseller"), and secondly, that people like it a lot. These are not the same thing.

Bestseller lists get manipulated or otherwise mangled. Most involve some form of human judgement to filter them, even if only in selecting sources; Amazon generates its top 100 lists automatically, but it has to use some form of algorithm to age entries so that recent sales of new books are significant but ongoing sales of popular books also count, and once one starts to get into categories it gets a bit blurry -- books will sometimes be allocated to a "wrong" category and there may be multiple instances of the same book in different formats. Measures of how much people like things involving ratings are extremely difficult to calibrate (some people rate almost all books at 5/5 or 4/5, and this may reflect merely a reluctance to grade down, not that they think that hundreds of books are all the best thing since sliced bread).

However, LibraryThing has a "Top Five Books of 2014" set of lists, with (as of now) 962 books entered on members' lists. If we ignore internal rankings, and compare against a snapshot of the Amazon lists where (again) we don't worry about fine rankings but simply about presence on the list, we can come to some limited conclusions.

(I've taken the SF and Fantasy separate lists from Amazon, giving me a potential set of 200 books, although in fact (once I get rid of media tie-ins and duplicates) it's a lot shorter. I also eliminated Kindle books at less than 8.99, where popularity is artificially pushed up by comparison to other books by a low price.)

First, a lot of books appear on only one list and not the other. More precisely (because given the constraints we're comparing a list of 960 to a list potentially of only 200 items and actually of a little over 100 titles), most of the bestselling novels do not appear on people's favourite lists. Only 17 books are within the intersection of the two sets.

Secondly, although both lists have a heavy mixture of non-recent books, only a few books are older than the last five years (Oryx and Crake, The Sirens of Titan, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings). (Older books on the Amazon list look suspiciously, as a class, as though their numbers are inflated by course assignments; this is obviously not a major concern for the LibraryThing list.)

Thirdly, although the LT list had most of my preferred fiction of last year (it missed out of Saunders' The March North, which wasn't surprising, given its low readership), only one of those books was also on the Amazon lists: Ancillary Sword.

As an interesting additional datum, The Goblin Emperor was Bakka's number one hardcover bestseller for 2014, and Watts' Echopraxia is #6, but neither appear on the recent Amazon rankings (I know, apples and oranges, as one is cumulative over a year and the other is a cross-section at one point of time).

If I apply the Bakka cumulative list as a third filter, I'm down to "countable on the fingers of a mutilated hand": Ancillary Justice and The Slow Regard Of Silent Things.

(If I match the Bakka data against the LibraryThing Data and don't consider Amazon, 5 of the books are in the top 500: The Goblin Emperor, The Slow Regard of Silent Things, Skin Game, Lock In, and Ancillary Justice.)

The first thing that this all tells me is that except for narrow purposes the Amazon data is largely, but not entirely, useless. It is, in one context, useful to know that Tolkien and Martin continue to be highly popular authors, or that Star Trek / Star Wars spin-offs continue to be a licence to print money: especially if you translate that into the general conclusion that most of the profitable print media sales are driven by exposure on TV and in the cinema.[1] However, if you're the sort of person for whom that is useful (e.g. a Managing Editor at an SF imprint trying to work out a model for weighing publications in the next year's budget) you probably already have much better data than Amazon provides, e.g. via Bookscan and your own sales figures. For anyone else, the redundancy in products and the limited scope of the list -- a lot of very popular novels might make the list in a blip, if at all -- makes it not very useful. The further manipulation by including low-priced Kindle books further distorts any signal as regards quality or trends in taste.[2]

The second thing is that once one uses two or more filters of a different type, it tends to select works of high or at least highish quality (although not necessarily works to everyone's taste), but it cuts off too high. If you're looking for advice as to what to read and you follow any general review site at all or are aware of what is managing to make the NYT extended bestseller list you'll already be aware that all of the works selected are hugely popular, and (with a few exceptions, such as Leckie) tend to come from writers with a track record of years of popularity.

If I were to select books from any of these lists with an eye to ones which I think will last (ignoring ones like those by Tolkien and Vonnegut which already have lasted), I'd certainly be discarding a good number of even the top entries and probably promoting a number which don't make the very top. (It can be illuminating to look at the Locus awards runners up for, say, the 1970's and 1980's and realize that many of these books/authors were popular enough to make an end-of-year best list but have sunk without a trace since; on the other hand, some that are relatively low down the list are still around.)

Amazon top 100 overlap with LibraryThing best books of 2014

Science Fiction:

1. The Martian: A Novel; by Andy Weir; Paperback; LT2

8. The Bone Clocks: A Novel; by David Mitchell; Hardcover; LT39

35. Oryx and Crake; by Margaret Atwood; Paperback; LT732

52. Ancillary Sword (Imperial Radch); by Ann Leckie; Kindle Edition LT334

53. Red Rising; by Pierce Brown; Hardcover; LT44

67. Ready Player One: A Novel; by Ernest Cline; Paperback; LT20

91. The Sirens of Titan: A Novel; by Kurt Vonnegut; Paperback; LT740

100. Ancillary Justice; by Ann Leckie; Paperback; LT4

Fantasy

1. A Song of Ice And Fire; by George R.R. Martin; Mass Market Paperback; LT118

6. The Hobbit; by J. R. R. Tolkien; Kindle Edition; LT147

13. The Lord Of The Rings; by J.R.R. Tolkien; Paperback; LT147

15. The Ocean At The End Of The Lane; by Neil Gaiman; Paperback; LT5

16. Written In My Own Heart's Blood; by Diana Gabaldon; Hardcover; LT82

18. The Slow Regard Of Silent Things; by Patrick Rothfuss; Hardcover; LT65

23. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage; by Haruki Murakami; Hardcover; LT171

62. The Way of Kings; by Brandon Sanderson; Kindle Edition; LT113

76. Lies of Locke Lamora; by Scott Lynch; Paperback; LT72

Is the assumption that less popular books than the Sad Puppies are being selected true?

Now that we've established that the idea of "popularity" is slippery, let's look at the question of whether, in fact, less popular books are being preferred for the Hugos and whether the Sad Puppies preferred books are in fact more popular.

One can note from the list above that last year's winner, Ancillary Justice, is still in the top 100 Amazon bestsellers, and was ranked fourth on the LibraryThing list. Now it has undoubtedly had an awards boost: I doubt it (or its sequel) would be anywhere near as high on the current Amazon list if it had not won four major awards last year. On the other hand, the winning of four awards, and the high ranking by people who had read it, reflects an initial popularity (in both senses) which has merely created a feedback loop.

So let's look at the current popularity, as reflected by Amazon sales, among last year's novel nominees. To level the playing field as regards format (some books are MMPB and some only trade) we'll compare only Kindle rankings, which are more similar in terms of the price points.

1. Ancillary Justice, 1,473


2. Neptune's Brood, 34,494


3. Parasite, 23,439


4. The Wheel of Time (as represented by The Eye of The World), 2,006


5. Warbound, 30,604

(Order is the ranking of position 1, position 2, as determined by different runoffs.)

So Warbound, generally considered the best candidate on the Sad Puppies list, is fourth out of five by current popularity. (As regards the fifth, there's a reason Charlie is emphasizing The Laundry Files and the world-walker series: NB was considered relatively "difficult" and sold less well, for all of its favourable reception by a number of critics, Paul Krugman included. For that matter, it came in third on the Locus Award list, which is as close to a straight-up popularity poll as SF has, so it can't be considered all that unpopular.)

It's also clear that "popularity" in the sales sense isn't reflected in the order.

If we extend the consideration to all the nominated novels as shown in the final statistics, and order by Kindle store popularity, we get:

1. Steelheart, 390


2. Ancillary Justice, 1,473


3. The Wheel of Time, 2,006


4. The Golem and the Djinni, 2,033


5. Under a Graveyard Sky, 2,628


6. The Republic of Thieves, 4,109


7. London Falling, 56,720


8. Abaddon's Gate, 7,990


9. The Shining Girls, 12,805


10. Parasite, 23,439


11. Warbound, 30,604


12. Neptune's Brood, 34,494


13. A Stranger in Olondria, 48,153


14. River of Stars, 101,135


15. A Few Good Men, 354,878

If the sad puppies want a champion, Ringo is a far more popular writer than Correia. By the same token, Sarah Hoyt is probably not a good choice. Just sayin'.

If the Hugos were a genuine popularity contest based on sales, Sanderson would be taking home the rocket, probably on a regular basis (his two Stormlight books are currently at 1197 and 801, for comparison to the above list). He's not, but seems to be quite happy writing books he wants to write. Of course, he's laughing all the way to the bank. That being said, Steelheart gets a boost in sales as a YA book, but that's a negative factor in Hugo contention.

I think we can close the book on the complaint that the sad puppies are being deprived of a prominence their popularity entitles them to.

The overall sense I get is that their complaint comes from an alternate universe, coloured heavily by a subjective sense that all those other fans out there can't actually enjoy works X, Y, and Z which are talked up and then nominated, and must be insincere. De gustibus, and it's hard to believe that you're in a minority. (One of the things that emerged from some of the online discussion last year is that there really are engaged readers who authentically like Carreia's and Day's work, and equally authentically dislike the Leckie and Stross novels. I can even see why this might be true. But projecting your own tastes onto the population as a whole is risky, and when feedback tells you that the two don't match and you still persist in doing so, it's a sign of cognitive dissonance.) [3]

[1]This is actually probably the most important takeaway from the entire exercise, although it's so big and obvious that any glance at bestseller lists would confirm it.

A quick scan of Twentieth Century bestsellers will show a mid-century pattern whereby some bestselling novels generate later films (e.g. for the 1950's: From Here To Eternity (1951, 1953, film 1953), The Caine Mutiny (1951, 1952, film 1954), The Silver Chalice (1952, 1953, film 1954), The Robe (1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1953, film 1953), Auntie Mame (1955, 1956, play 1956, movie 1958, musical 1966, film of musical 1974), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955, film 1956), Peyton Place (1956, 1957, film 1957, TV 1964-1969), On The Beach (1957, film 1959), Doctor Zhivago (1958, 1959, film 1965), Lolita (1958, 1959, film 1962), Advise and Consent (1959, 1960, film 1962), Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris (1959, TV 1958). Dates are for bestseller status, not date of publication.

With a few exceptions (From Here To Eternity, The Robe, Mrs. 'Arris...) the film appearances do not generate a (major) later bump in readership (I'm sure that in fact every book benefits somewhat when an adaptation comes out, but it's not generally reflected at this level.) The pattern is far more Sydney Carter's "I'm waiting for the film to come": substituting the more accessible film for the less accessible book. Novelizations of works which first appeared as films, if they existed, (the novel of 2001 (not a top 10 bestseller) would be an early instance) never hit the bestseller lists (the only entries I can find are for "ET" (1982), "Return of the Jedi" (1983), and "The Phantom Menace" (1999)).

The newer pattern is of books which sold well when they first came out, but have been pushed into semi-permanent bestsellerdom by TV or cinematic adaptations. (It's not that there aren't other kinds of bestsellers, but this kind and direction of feedback is relatively new.)

To refer to Amazon again: Martin's ASOIAF is at rank 3 for 2014, 10 for 2013, 5 for 2012, 3 for 2011, and not on the list at all for 2010 (the TV series began in 2011). That's out of all books, by the way, not just SFF, as Amazon doesn't break out past bestsellers in fine detail. (Jeff Vandermeer must be hoping for a good adaptation of his Southern Reach Trilogy.)

North America is becoming a less print-driven society and a more "media"-driven society. This is actually a much bigger issue for publishers than the advent of e-books. The workers who used to take books to read on vacation are now as likely to take DVDs, or, more likely, expect to be able to stream video on demand.

The same observation can be made regarding YA series, beginning with Harry Potter, with a book series -> film -> books feedback loop.

[2]I once worked at a second hand bookstore, and am well aware that some customers will read just about anything in a category (e.g. romance, western, space opera, gaming-based fantasy) as long as it meets pretty minimal standards of readability and supplies a similar experience to the last book read. These people made up a good part of our bread and butter -- they would purchase N books a week and return the N books from the previous week -- rather as functional alcoholics provide the core market for the LCBO, accounting for the dominance of cheap just-drinkable product on their shelves. Very low priced e-books and subscription services cater to this market.

[3]That's one reason I reference the LibraryThing figures: there's no obvious skew in favour of fandom per se in their makeup. For the record, there are by my count 19 SF/F books in the top 100 of the collated top five books of 2014 lists; looking at the comments to Torgersen's post, about 3 of these would fall within the ambit of the works which they would aim at promoting (Sanderson, Butcher, and Weir).

Graydon's book was one of the best books I read last year. Here's a review I originally posted on LibraryThing:

This is a very finely written narrative which deserves far more exposure than it is likely to get.

To begin with, the craftsmanship is several cuts above what you would normally expect in a military fantasy. The prose is concise and precisionist-grade, pared down without being too spare. Incluing is gradual and details are subtly woven into the narrative.

The narrator is fully characterised and probably unreliable -if the reader doesn't pay careful attention at the beginning he/she will miss details clarifying the events which are expanded on only much further on. (I don't think it is clear by the end of the book which gender the narrator is.) Graydon's style, or rather, the voice he gives to the narrator, eschews personal pronouns, presenting a viewpoint from which gender is only of incidental interest. (It's worth contrasting Ann Leckie' Radch books which take a different approach to the issue.)

Thematically, the work definitely reflects the interest in societies as systems which pervades much of Graydon's discussions dating from his rasf[wcf] days on forwards. These have particular effect when contrasted with the reflex quasi-mediaeval autocratic polities which appear in most heroic or military fantasy.

This is far better than most of the novels published by the commercial houses, and in a world with any justice it would (a) be snatched up by a major publisher, with cash incentives to produce more, and (b) be a strong candidate for a Hugo nomination.

It is available via Google Books and Kobo in non-DRM'd ePub format, but not from Amazon, due to banking issues for Graydon with Amazon's payment model.

So Rebecca Mead has an article in The New Yorker about whether Percy Jackson is an effective "gateway" for children to better reading.

It sounds all very well - critical but not alarmist - until you start to think about what the gateway is supposed to be to. Do we really think of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths as what we expect reading Riordan to lead to? (I'm familiar with Riordan: my 12 year old daughter is a Percy Jackson aficionado.)

Why not Thorne Smith's Night Life of the Gods, which is far more "like" Riordan than the D'Aulaires? Why not Hawthorne's Wonder Book, in the whimsical retelling category? How about Mary Renault? For that matter, I had read Penguin Book translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid by the time I was 12. ( I confess to not having read the Metamorphoses until much later.)

Should we really expect a YA book to act as an immediate gateway to something directly connected? Is Percy Jackson the first step on a road leading directly by way of adult modern novelists such as Mary Renault via epics all the way back to reading the Agamemnon in the original?

Does anyone expect that reading a haunted house book along the lines of R. L. Stine will lead directly to House of Leaves via some connected set of intermediaries? Or that reading X the Y Fairy will lead to Crowley's Little, Big ?

Sure, it's nice if Riordan will inspire one in a hundred children to be a budding classicist. But in general reading one YA book or series is part of a general exploration of a field of YA books - some a little better, some a little worse. And even for the young adults who keep reading into their adult lives for pleasure, many are likely to stick to a diet of bestsellers which have no more "value" than Riordan (and in some cases arguably less - c.f. Dan Brown).

In my daughter's case, her Percy Jackson reading is associated with (I won't say led to, as the associations are more complicated) reading other YA authors such as Sarah Maas and Gail Carriger.

So the complaint comes back to that overly-familiar deprecation of popular fiction in favour of literary fiction; and there are so many well-known problems with that that I'm not even going to bother going there.