A couple of folks at the Geek Cons group on Facebook are having a hard time swallowing the premises of the show, and while I understand where they're coming from (American exceptionalism rules OK) I think they're missing the boat on this one.

First of all, the source material is a PHILIP K. DICK novel. Secondly, the production team is Frank Spotnitz from The X-Files and some guy whose name I don't recall from Twin Peaks. This means you absolutely cannot trust anything said by any of the characters! One character says the Resistance is weak and thoroughly penetrated by the SS, and yet they manage to almost pull off an ambush of New York's Obergrueppenfuehrer in broad daylight. We are given hints that the conquest of America may not have happened the way the Reich's history books say it did - otherwise, why the massive hunt for the makers and distributors of what is apparently a homemade alternate-history movie? We are also given hints that there is a secret war going on between the Army's SD (Security police) and the Party's SS. There are rumors that Rommel, who apparently didn't get swept up in the July 20 conspiracy in this timeline, may step in and play Zhukov as Goebbels and Himmler squabble over Hitler's rapidly cooling corpse. (The time is about right for this parallel, in fact.)

Secondly, America passive under the occupiers' boot is an old trope, and arugably first used outside SF by Sinclair Lewis, who wrote It Can't Happen Here, about a Fascist takeover in the 1930s. This was an actual fear of many folks in that decade - retired Marine General Smedly Butler even testified before Congress about a conspiracy to remove Roosevelt and his New Dealers in favor of oligarchic capitalists. You can look it up. Dick's book isn't even unique in SF; there is Cyril Kornbluth and Fred Pohl's Not This August and more recently, Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang, though in both of those stories the occupiers are Communists. The fear of a Fifth Column goes back a long way, and had a kernel of truth to it; not all the Japanese in the internment camps were innocent of collaboration with the Japanese, and quite a few members of the German-American Bund went to jail after Pearl Harbor for being a little too cozy with the Reich. Even Star Trek went there - have you all forgotten why Kirk's Depression-era girlfriend had to die? I could go even further down the rabbit hole and posit that in an America where FDR was praised for his Mussolini-like actions, and the Germans were the only ones with the atomic bomb, a lot of folks who supported Roosevelt (or Long, or Coughlin) might sign up with the winning side. You may not want to believe these things, but I submit that Dick was a lot closer to that time than we were, and better able to craft them into a novel fans found compelling enough to give the Hugo for Best Novel.

The bottom line is that these folks are making assumptions based on the statements of a whole cast of unreliable narrators, who may not actually know the truth themselves and sure aren't blurting it out in front of God and everybody in a time and place when the truth is liable to get you beaten half to death and then shot. I personally thought the first two episodes were excellent, possibly better than the book (which I haven't read in decades), and chock full of delicious, hallucinatory surrealism.

I was noting on the Book of Faces that Amazon's video production of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle manages to pull off the feat of being both better than the book (which won the Hugo for best novel back in 1963 when the Hugos still meant something) and at the same time being even more paranoid and hallucinatory than Dick's later works. meep asked just how much PKD I'd actually read, to which I didn't have a good answer. So resorted to Wikipedia and found that I'd barely scratched the surface of his output.

For the record, this is what I've read of his novels:

• The World Jones Made
• The Man in the High Castle
• Clans of the Alphane Moon
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
• Deus Irae (with Roger Zelazny)
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
• Radio Free Albemuth
• VALIS
• The Divine Invasion

The short fiction is more of a grab-bag. Some of the titles ("The Defenders", "Oh, To Be A Blobel!","The Father-Thing", and "The Golden Man") sound familiar, but more do not - then again, it's been a long time since I read any of his short fiction.

"Let me take you back...back into time.
When the only people that existed were cave men...cave women...
Neanderthals...Troglodytes!"
-Jimmy Castor Bunch, "Troglodyte"

In the long-distant past when I was young, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth (or were they Cadillac Coupe DeVilles?) and times were so different we referred to them by different numbers -MCMLXIV, I believe it was- it was a proud and lonely thing to be a science fiction fan. Reading that "trashy Buck Rogers stuff" was definitely frowned upon by most right-thinking Americans, middlebrow and high-class alike, and the same was true of comic books, which were regarded as fodder for children and the immature. TV shows and movies with science-fiction plots and themes were few and far between, and SF fans, many of whom were, to be completely honest, more than a little socially retarded, tended to get together at small "conventions" where they could talk with other people who also read Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert, and this disturbing young fellow Ellison. It was regarded as quite remarkable when the 1974 World Science Fiction Convention held in Washington topped four thousand people in its membership.
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In the long term, though, perhaps what fandom (as opposed to Fandom) needs to do is build up a fan organization that welcomes all fans of science fiction and fantasy, no matter what door they enter by. Fortunately, one already exists, and has existed since 1941: the National Fantasy Fan Federation (N3F). The dues are lower, there's more to do between conventions, and eventually, given enough time and members, what the membership of the N3F thinks about anime, books, comics, games, and movies may prove to be more important than what an insular group of graying old WSFS members think.

UPDATE: Okay, closing the comments now for two reasons. One, the vast majority of you seem intent on beating the dead Sasquan/Hugos horse, which was merely an example of the larger issue. Two, I'm not particularly interested in hosting that beating.

That having been said, thanks to lydy and dd_b for politely correcting me on stuff I got wrong about Diversicon and providing another POV on the whole HRMP kerfluffle, respectively. No thanks to nwhyte for accusing Brad Torgersen of shenanigans regarding the SP3 pre-nomination crowd-sourcing and insisting Brad prove his innocence after being called out. That's not how it works, Nick, and you should be adult enough to know better.

A- Age: 55
B- Biggest Fear: Slow death. It's better to burn out than to fade away; besides, it's a family tradition. >:)
C- Current Time: 1342 PDT
D- Drink you last had: Diet Coke, and lots of it.
E- Easiest Person To Talk to: Pretty much anyone, really
F- Favorite Song: "Too Long In The Wasteland", by James McMurtry.
G- Ghosts, are they real: No. But spirits are.
H- Hometown: Forest Heights, Maryland - as much as any place is, I guess.
I- In love with: The modern world.
J- Jealous Of: Nobody
K- Killed Someone? You mean today?
L- Last time you cried?: You're not cleared for that information, citizen. Move along.
M- Middle Name: Thomas
N- Number of Siblings: 1
O- One Wish: A fully functional, healthy pancreas.
P- Person who you last called: A client
Q- Question you're always asked: "How do you pronounce that?"
R- Reason to smile: Still alive and living on Planet Earth.
S- Song last sang: "Rip and Tear" by L.A. Guns
T- Time you woke up: 0900
U- Underwear Color: White
V- Vacation Destination: Man, I'm living in a vacation destination.
W- Worst Habit: Indiscipline.
X- X-Rays you've had: All of them.
Y- Your favorite food: Homemade chili with cheese, onions, sour cream, dark red kidney beans, and a big-ass flour tortilla.
Z- Zodiac Sign: Libra.

Not tagging anyone since I don't work like that.

The National Fantasy Fan Federation (N3F for short) is the oldest fan organization for fantasy, SF and horror fans - but that's not why you should join.

The biggest reason to join the N3F is that it's open and welcoming to all fans of SF & fantasy, no matter how they were introduced to the genre. Did you start out as an anime fan, watching Sailor Moon or Star Blazers or Astro Boy? You're one of us.
Did you cut your teeth on Batman, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four or Superman? You're one of us. How about gaming? Did you play Dungeons and Dragons, HALO, World of Warcraft, Traveller, or Sonic the Hedgehog? You, too, are one of us. Did your interest in the future and its possibilities come from watching Star Trek, Star Wars, The X-Files, or Fringe? Welcome to the club. You might even be old enough to remember a time when science fiction and fantasy were hard to find on TV or at the movies, and you looked forward to finding new books in the library or new issues of Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Galaxy at the drug store.

We don't think you ought to have to fork out forty or fifty bucks to have a say in what is best in the field - plus travel, hotel, attending membership fees and other expenses. We don't think people should look down on you as a second-class fan because you can't afford these things. We don't think people should look down on you because you're a gamer or an otaku or comics fan or a media fan. Very few of us are interested in just one aspect of fantasy & SF, and we'd like to know what you think is good in the parts of fandom you like to hang out in.

We want you to draw, write, and talk about your passion. We want you to reach out and share that passion, find other people with the same passion, help us all get to know it - and help make fandom bigger and better.

After all, you need to do something between conventions besides work, right? ;)

Join the N3F today!
At just $6 for a year's electronic membership, how can you afford not to?

So John Wright posed a challenge to his readers the other day: were the Hugo winners for Best Novel in the first twenty years of the award better than their counterparts from the last twenty years?
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Well, that went about as well as it could have, if you were one of the Old Guard of Fandom, determined to destroy the Hugos in order to save them, or one of Vox Day's Dread Ilk, who've been waiting for an excuse to nuke the Hugos and sow the smoking ruins with (radioactive) salt.
tl;dr: a block of about 2500 members voted No Award for every category dominated by the Sad Puppy/Rabid Puppy nominees, which meant that half the written fiction categories got No Award, plus both Editor categories and the Related Works category.

If you, like me, were hoping to see some rationality and adult behavior out of the Hugo balloting, you were cruelly disappointed. Not only did the assembled Worldcon members cheer for each No Award vote, they smugly went out on Twitter and elsewhere and BOASTED about their accomplishment, thus proving themselves beyond a shadow of a doubt to be the hypocritical, politics-obsessed liars Larry Correia had accused them of being four years ago. Not satisfied with having destroyed the village in order to save it, according to a tweet from Charles Stross, they're going to "fix" the "problem with voting" that forced them to do this. Yeah, "fix", like the way the vet fixes your dog or cat. Some of them didn't even wait until Sunday; apparently a bunch of folks whined about Daddy Warpig's tweets in the #HugoAward feed, with the result that he couldn't publicly tweet and you couldn't retweet his private tweets. Which availed the SJWs nought, since a bunch of his followers found ways to get his private tweets into the feed anyway.

Well, we'll be back next year. KC is a lot more accessible than Spokane, and anything done at this year's business meeting has to be confirmed next year. If the CHORFs brought 2500-3000 votes to the con this year, we'll have to do better. And then we'll burn the fucker down. Vox was right. Mike was right. The SJWs want to make what used to be a mark of honor into an empty and meaningless joke? Sure. I'll help finish the job you CHORFs started.

It occurred to me sometime today that I'd never gotten around to actually posting my Hugo votes here, as I said I would on Facebook, but I did post them over at Stacy's joint (with guest appearances by Vivian James WH40K-style and Wendell the Manatee from CorreiaTech) so anyone that's really interested can go look at it there. Too much work to retype it, or even worse, copy and reformat.

I was going to take some Tylenol and crash. No time like the present.

A bunch of :words: about the Hugo nominations follows. You is been warned.
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Seth Breidbart over on Facebook questioned whether any of the nominees on the SP deserved a Hugo. "Did it demonstrate wonderful ideas? Brilliant writing?" he asked. Setting aside whether any of the winners in the last few years could meet that standard (especially in the shameful "Best Related Works" category), the question makes we wonder whether Breidbart even bothered to read any of the works in question. Pick any one of John C. Wright's works. I defy you to find any of them that is less than brilliantly written, or that doesn't at the very least ring new changes on old tropes.

Let's start with the novels. Lines of Departure was an excellent combat SF novel with great characters, Monster Hunter Nemesis combined esoteric theology and the finest ultra-violence in a tale of how even fallen angels might find redemption, Skin Game was another excellent urban fantasy by Jim Butcher, and Trial By Fire combined technothriller with space opera with strange & wonderful alien cultures. I was sorry it didn't make the cut.

In novellas, well, we already talked about John C. Wright. Tom Kratman's Big Boys Don't Cry took the familiar tropes of the Bolo Combat Units, Keith Laumer's legendary cybertanks, and flipped them in a very unpleasant but very hard-hitting story. Arlan Andrews' "Flow" was a very pleasant read - a voyage of discovery on a planet very unlike Earth, but oddly familiar.

The novelettes were probably the weakest category. To me, only Michael Flynn's "Journeyman" and Gray Rinehart's "Ashes to Ashes..." stood out as being self-contained stories of quality; the others felt to me like the opening chapters of longer works.

In short stories, while I liked Wright's "The Parliament of Beasts and Birds", Kary English's "Totaled" was clearly a better story - just as well written, but with more emotional punch to it. Rzasa's "Turncoat" was one of the few stories I've read talking about the possible conflict between transhumans and AIs and regular humans, and how the AIs might not necessarily be on the side of the transhumans. I didn't find a copy of Antonelli's story and overlooked Steve Diamond's story. Oops.

Of course, this is just my opinion (as it is equally just my opinion that a lot of people howling about the SP/RP slates and the people supporting them are stuck-up, cliquish shitbags) but considering that most of what I've read since second grade (way back in 1968) has been SF and (less often) fantasy, I think it's an informed opinion. You're entitled to your own, of course, but I went to the trouble of ponying up money this year to pay the Worldcon poll tax, and for the first time since I attended my first Worldcon in 1974, actually voted for the Hugos. Think I might do it again next year, if only for the pure pleasure of annoying a bunch of CHORFs who ought to be a little more mature about these things.

Weight dropped like a rock today, BG went down a little.

Revised What Did You Do in the Cold War, Dad? for the last time and sent it off to Joy, Andrea and Rick for editing and beta reading. It'll be ready in mid-August, I guess.
Did the In The Mailbox post, went off to Palace Station to stuff myself at the buffet for half off, and then lost $3 at video poker.

Did a little ingressing at the casino as well as some drive-bys on the way home; rebuilt Landmark and the Convention Center, which were missing some of their resonators. Linking and fielding ensued.

Posted a bunch of military life events, including my assignment to the 331st, to Facebook and found several people from that unit I'd lost touch with or hadn't known that well to begin with. Also got friended by Asia Carrera, who I can add to Claudia Christian and Patricia Tallman as awesome women I'll never actually meet in real life.

Started reading the massive Churchill bio by his son Randolph. The structure reminds me a lot of The Patton Papers.