Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 378

Noblesse Oblige and Mare’s Nests

I was raised with noblesse oblige, which, as we all know is a kind of almond and mare’s milk pastry made in the mountains of outer Mongolia and eaten at wedding feasts to assure good luck.

Okay, I lie. Noblesse Oblige is literally – as all of you know! However, let me unpack it, because sometimes it’s good to reflect on things we know – the obligations of noblemen.

In a world in which station was dictated by birth (most of the world, most of the time) the way to keep society from becoming com...

Le Deluge – David Pascoe

Le Deluge – David Pascoe

When I was a wee, young creature – not so wee as Wee Dave – shortly after I learned to read, I discovered the world was going to end, and there was nothing I (or any of us, I learned) could do about it. The Coming Ice Age was coming! The world was going to freeze, probably solid, my young (and febrile) mind suggested. Earth would be this glittering ball of ice, with people frozen like Otzi or woolly mammoths.

Either that, or the world would go MAD, and everything woul...

Lying to the Young

One of the really interesting things about cleaning up the rest of the other house, to move, is that we’re hitting exactly the sort of things we’d even forgotten had happened/existed.

For instance, we opened a box last packed away in 1990, when we moved from our very first house together. It would have been exciting if it hadn’t been packed by movers, who don’t seem to have the ability to distinguish between trash and office stuff. So, we had Dan’s business cards hoard, now with a lot of name...

Front Line Blogging From Tentistan – a blast from the past Sept 2007

The other day while I was shopping I was struck with a sudden idea: why don’t I buy a toy for the pretty cats?
(I’m convinced this is caused by feline mind-rays. There is no other explanation. The impulse strikes randomly and has nothing to do with what they’ve been up to lately. It’s never “they haven’t broken any good china recently” or “they haven’t played slamlom with my prized glass floats”.)

Like many other bad ideas, this one was fairly irresistible, and once it presented itself, I had...

Another Exciting Episode In the Writer’s Life

I thought I’d catch everyone up on what’s going on. I did a post about the health thing on MGC, and I’ll quote a little bit here:

Here’s what I found so far, since the surgery: I was much more ill than I realized.

It started with them finding a large amount of scar tissue and endometrial tissue binding all my internal organs and filling up my abdominal cavity. That amount had to be causing pain, but other than some bad nights in the last two years, I kept saying I’d never been in pain.

There...

Unintended

It is trite to talk about the law of unintended consequences because at this point — I think — everyone knows everything they do has unintended consequences, that is consequences other than the ones they were looking for. Well, almost everyone. I still hear people say things like “We should outlaw x” and never thinking of what that will mean for x, y and z. More interestingly, I heard people saying “we should compel x” and never think of the consequences of evading that particular law.

But th...

“Selective Outrage” – Jeb Kinnison

“Selective Outrage” – Jeb Kinnison

What I call “outrage porn” is stories designed to stoke outrage and make you feel passionately that your group (us) is righteous and some other group (them) are not just misguided or ignorant, but actively evil and out to get the Children of Light (us.) The “porn” in the phrase means something that irresistibly attracts you by appeal to your baser needs, but is ultimately bad for you and false.

I’ve been mostly a spectator to the storm of media and blog post...

The Great Divorce

This is not a blog about writing. This will only sound like a blog about writing at the beginning.

Here’s the thing: fiction is not real. I know, I know, this was my exam in my last year of Theory of Literature, and I spun a whole lot of cr*p on fiction being the reality and the reality we think we know just the shadows on Plato’s cave wall. Sue me. I’m good at spinning fiction after all, and that’s what the teacher wanted to read, and I could serve it up. (The second question about the use o...

Signposts on the Way to Oblivion by Caitlin Woods

*So I’m an idiot and set this for the wrong date and just noticed. Sorry Caitlin! Note I only noticed because I wondered why you weren’t getting comments. DERP – SAH*

Signposts on the Way to Oblivion
by Caitlin Woods

From what I can tell, a lot of us here at AtH have had a lot of the same experiences when it’s come to reading Science Fiction and Fantasy.

When we’re young, everything is pretty awesome–we’re reading everything we can get our hands on, and our brains are exploding outward with...

Requires Abasement

*This post is unusually typo-ey because author is finishing novel. Deal. And say a prayer for my copyeditors.*

In yesterday’s post, Jason didn’t openly point out what was absolutely weird about the fisked post. Yes, it was part of invoking Zombie Heinlein to come scold us. (They are so wrong. Even as a Zombie the man would get what’s going on better than they do.)

I’m going to post the two/three points of weirdness below. The first, is the normal accusation of what the Sad Puppies want is a r...