One of those little tid bits one stumbles over

[james_davis_nicoll]

While doing some background reading on Apeman, Spaceman I found this:

It was a mention in Stover's unpublished biography of Heinlein [he had originally been authorized to write a definitive Heinlein biography, but later had a falling-out with Heinlein's widow] that led researcher Robert James to discover the hitherto-unpublished Heinlein novel For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs.

I'd be very interested in seeing Stover's book. It could hardly be worse than the authorized biography and its slapdash approach to history.

This bit

He published a criticism of Heinlein in 1987 when the book was actually read it was shown that he had made mistakes in every part of the book.

has the grammatically mangled whiff of offended Heinlein fan about it.

The referenced essay is here.


People may recall its author from such Ansible entries as

Outraged Letters. James Gifford, author of the Heinlein companion shortlisted for a Hugo as Best Related Book, applauded the winner with good grace but later issued a polemic [since withdrawn – DRL] about the transferable-vote process: 'I won the first, second and third rounds of voting by a significant margin. That the fourth and fifth rounds were allowed to determine this award is a travesty. In this case, the elaborate and complex vote analysis method obscured the winner instead of clarifying the results. When there is significant and spirited voting in a category, determining the winner by highly "cooked" totals is wrong, no matter how right it may be for sparser and highly mixed voting. For 700 votes, a simple plurality should be enough to show the voters's preference. A plurality that persists through three of five evaluation steps is not ambiguous, and to corrupt that result by "overcooking" the votes until a different winner is determined is – I'm sorry for the repetition – a travesty.

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Stover's was the most worshipful Twayne book I ever read. He kept referring to the subject as "the Admiral." Totally inappropriate.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

What did you think of the authorized hagiography biography?

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I liked it and eagerly await the second.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

This is the Hugo-nominated one from a couple of years ago, where the author got details of one of the most famous battles in WWII wrong, revealing that at no point was the book passed by an actual military historian? And then when confronted the author and his half-witting lackey tried to defend the veracity of their work?

If so, I was somewhat less impressed than you were.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I didn't say I was impressed; I said I liked it. Finding out how one of the two great nonfamily influences on my thinking (RAH & RAW) got to be like that is more important to me than military history.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

But the obvious errors on easily checked stuff throws the veracity of everything else into doubt. If the author got the easy stuff wrong, why should I trust him on details I cannot check for myself?

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I hear you. It does make me more wary, but I always read at least somewhat warily.

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

Is there somewhere a bookessay that points out the mistakes in the authorized biography?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Would Bill Patterson's Errata and Revisions page offer what you're looking for?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Looks like Patterson hasn't bothered to correct his hapax of the microorganism which infected Heinlein's prostate. Not impressed.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Also, what was Heinlein's rank when leaving the Navy? Weirdly, it's not in his ginormous Wikipedia entry.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

According to this (http://www.nndb.com/people/710/000023641/) he was got given the rank of lieutenant after catching TB and then acquiring seasickness and had to take early retirement.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm almost tempted to go to alt.fan.heinlein and ask what his rank was when he was kicked out of the Army, but, I don't need that lifetime of trouble following me.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Yes, IRV is an awful voting system. I wonder what would be involved in getting the Hugos to switch to a Condorcet method. (Or to publish the raw ballots - anonymized, of course - so that people can see who would have won if they were counted sanely.)

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I can tell you exactly what would be involved with getting WSFS to switch:

1. Come up with parliamentary language that would replace the existing language in section 6.4 of the WSFS Constitution.


2. Be a member of Worldcon willing to attend the Business Meetings for at least a couple of years.


3. Find at least one other Worldcon member willing to second your proposal.


4. Submit your proposal to change the WSFS Constitution to the WSFS Business Meeting.


5. Attend the Business Meetings, which are likely to run 10 AM - 1 PM on the second, third, and fourth days of Worldcon.


6. Muster enough support to keep your proposal from being killed without debate on the meeting on day 2. (That meeting can and often does kill new proposals without debate, which can be done by a 2/3 vote. No, you don't get a chance to make your case. If 2/3 of the people voting don't want to hear about it, your proposal is dead.)


7. Convince a majority of the people voting at the meeting (probably on day 3) to vote for your proposal.


8. Attend the following year's Worldcon business meeting. If you've made it this far, you don't have to worry about your proposal being spiked at the day-2 meeting.


9. Convince a majority of the people voting at the meeting (probably on day 3) to vote to ratify your proposal.


10. Keep monitoring the situation, because if you managed to just barely squeeze through, there's always a chance someone will introduce proposals the following year to undo it, which would also take two years.

I helped write a longer version of these instructions for TheHugoAwards.org.

Also, in practical terms, you'd have to start campaigning and convincing the people most likely to show up at the Business Meeting that they want to change a system with which they are relatively comfortable and have been using for around fifty years or so.

Is this difficult? Yes. It's not supposed to be easy to change an organization's basic governing document. And WSFS is a direct participatory democracy. Everyone represents him or herself, and there's no Board of Directors or representatives to lobby. But also, you have to show up in person; you don't send proxies, and you don't vote in advance or online.

I don't want to sugar coat this: getting changes passed isn't easy. I've gotten quite a few passed, some minor and some major, but it means devoting a lot of effort, so you have to really believe it's worth doing, not just a casual "They should do this" sort of thing. WSFS doesn't have a "them," only an "us."

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I wonder what would be involved in getting the Hugos to switch to a Condorcet method.

I recognize these words as a spell to summon kevin_standlee, but I am a bit surprised that the spell worked.

I also applaud the clarity of Kevin's breathtakingly literal answer.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I recognize these words as a spell to summon kevin_standlee, but I am a bit surprised that the spell worked.

Should I start calling myself the Wizard of WSFS?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Sure. When one pulls back a curtain, you are often to be found standing behind it.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Ah, so I'm a humbug, am I?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I will not be placed on the defensive. I was not the one who brought up "The Wizard of $SOMETHING" trope.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

(Say, how did "the defensive" become a noun, anyway?)

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

"On the defensive" has been steady around one mention per million words since around 1800, with mild surges in usage following major wars involving English-speaking combatants.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Well, played, sir!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Oh what a great userpic to go with that comment!

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Thank you! That's how I presided over the 2007 WSFS Business Meeting in Yokohama. I think that makes me the WSFS BM Chair with the most individual countries in which I've presided (USA, UK, Canada, and Japan). Maybe I'll re-label that icon "The Wizard of WSFS" now.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, I suspect it would be easier to convince the members that the anonymized raw ballot data should be published than to persuade them to change from IRV to any other system. It would at least be consistent with a commitment to open information on the Hugo Awards voting, which has increased over the years with the requirement to publish the They-Also-Ran list, the nomination totals, and the voting tallies per round.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

It could be called the Fandorcet method (yes I know that like most such coinages it makes no sense, but heh).

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

It's amazing to watch the legacy of an American writer as important as Vonnegut or Dick or Bradbury be leveled into nothingness by the ineptitude of his fanboy acolytes. Even Rand, the patron saint of B-listers, has attracted competent biographers.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

With Philip K. Dick, his fans can often write competently, but always seem to be writing from the premise that his late revelations were something more than mental illness filtered through a highly imaginative and well-read mind.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I'd be very interested in seeing Stover's book.

You could get in touch with Robert James, who may have seen it.

I don't know where Stover's papers are. Here in Chicago, perhaps?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

My interactions with him in the past have not been such that I desire any more.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Ten-four, good buddy.

[eyelessgame.livejournal.com]

(None of this has bearing on the discussion itself, but I know Jim Gifford a bit from having worked with him (in his technical-writer capacity) a decade or so ago. I am not enough of an aficionado of Heinlein or fandom to comment on his relationship to either, but I can say this much: he has a flair for the meticulous, and while he is wildly passionate about Heinlein and cannot claim to any sort of objectivity, he at the least makes effort to regard Heinlein's oeuvre as a whole, rather than to filter it through a preference for what he wished he had written. The existence of the linked essay surprises me not at all, regardless of the quality of either the authorized or unauthorized biographies.)