Larry Correia won’t be one of the guests when the Origins Game Fair takes place June 13-17 in Columbus, OH. Shortly after publicizing that Correia had been added to the lineup, John Ward, the event’s Executive Director, received so many negative social media comments (on Twitter, particularly) that he announced Correia’s invitation has been rescinded.
Ward wrote on Facebook:
I want to discuss our invitation to Larry Correia a guest at Origins. By all counts he is a very talented author.
Unfortunately, when he was recommended I was unaware of some personal views that are specifically unaligned with the philosophy of our show and the organization.
I want to thank those of you that brought this error to our attention. Origins is an inclusive and family friendly event. We focus on fun and gaming, not discourse and controversy.
I felt it necessary to recend [sic] his invitation to participate in the show. I apologize again to those of you that were looking forward to seeing him at Origins.
John Ward, Executive Director
Many of the critical tweets mentioned Correia’s history with Sad Puppies.
Correia subsequently responded on Facebook with a statement that begins:
So I’m no longer the writer guest of honor at origins. My invitation has been revoked. It was the usual nonsense. Right after I was announced as a guest some people started throwing a temper tantrum about my alleged racist/sexist/homophobic/whatever (of course, with zero proof or actual examples), and the guy in charge (John Ward) immediately folded. He didn’t even talk to me first. He just accepted the slander and gave me the boot in an email that talked about how “inclusive” they are….
His statement also says “none of these people can ever find any actual examples of me being sexist, racist, or homophobic.”
BEFORE AND AFTER:
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@ Cassy B:
The Skin Game was actually one of the books that made me think a Series Hugo was a bloody brilliant idea.
3BP was a “meh” book for me. I ended up being between books late-ish last year and decided to re-read it. I think I made it some 20 pages before I went “nope, sorry, doesn’t work for me”. I did finish it before voting back then, but cannot recall where I placed it (certainly after both TGE and AS, but I also can’t recall the order I put those two in, apart from “in the top two spots”).
ULTRAGOTHA:
After having paid close attention to your well-stated, sound, and sensible statement, and thinking through all the issues pro and con, and taking all matters into consideration and giving due consideration to all matters, I have to say, Goblin Emperor wuz robbed.
Incidentally, if you’re a subscriber to Early Bird Books, you can get Joanna Russ’s The Female Man today for $2.99.
Ferret Bueller on May 15, 2018 at 7:46 am said:
I share your sadness that it lost legitimately. 😉
Admission up front: in my real life, I am a professional freelance table top game writer/developer and friends with many of the same. I was even nominated for an Origins Award once — for game tie-in fiction at that!
Talk around the water cooler is that the mea culpa is legit because GAMA and the Origins concom are, in fact, actually that incompetent and out of touch with the general social zeitgeist within both the broader scifi/fantasy/horror community and and inside the gaming community itself. In fact, the first controversy to arise from this announcement in my professional game writer/developer circles wasn’t Larry Correia, it’s that all the GoHs are middle aged dudes, because why would Origins ever invite one of the women currently making outstanding tabletop games to rep the industry? In fact, at least one of the announced GoHs (Tony Steele) offered to step aside if a woman colleague wanted to take the slot.
I should say, despite the fact I put 3BP under No Award, I do believe it won legitimately. It was a “marmite book”; you loved it or you hated it; not much middle ground. I can see intellectually what in it appealed to those who voted it in first place, and I can recognize it as Hugo-worthy and a valid winner… but I still desperately loved TGE and barely finished 3BP, scowling at the cardboard characterizations all the way.
Liu earned his Hugo, fair and square. But I still wish that Addison had won.
Short form; my head says, sincerely, “congratulations, Cixin Liu”. My heart says, “Goblin Emperor wuz robbed.” <wry grin>
Pax—I, like the Devil, drink a whole lot of Coke Zero. My corporate loyalties thus are probably suspect.
Re: Hoyt went indie because publishers wanted her to censor herself, or whatever it is—meh, cry me a river. I write kid’s books. You know how many things I don’t get to put in? (Answer: lots and lots and lots. Also, lots.) And indeed, I started up a pen-name and self-pubbed a bunch of stuff and am deliriously happy with how it’s worked out…but what I don’t do is complain that somehow my publisher owed me publication of all the other stuff, or that it’s a conspiracy to keep my views down or whatever.
I am here to write books. My publisher is here to sell books. When our goals overlap, yay! When they don’t, that’s just life.
@Nate Harada
Interesting – and facepalmworthy. I was having a look at twitter to see where the story had been coming from, and the single most common objection to LC cited was Sad Puppies, often from quite big name designers. It’s clearly common knowledge in the games community, unsurprisingly given the crossover – and yet no-one at Origins had a inkling of “say, isn’t he that guy…”
It may be that the person who floated his name in the first place was someone who saw LC’s Sad Puppy activity as a feature rather than a bug, and the others on committee were all, “Whatever, Mitch, that’s your area.” and went ahead with it without further examination.
@Marshall Ryan Maresca
Sounds very plausible, unfortunately. Someone had to think the invite as a good idea to start with.
Have to speak in defense of 3body problem here- it is a fantastic book.
Everyone gets that Larry Correia has never written that book.
I would be very curious how one “objectively” measures a work of fiction as the best. What are our metrics? How does one quantify?
Eric Ashley: While it is difficult compared to Jesse Owen’s feat to suss out who deserves the Hugo
It’s not “difficult” to compare the two. It’s nonsensical to do so. Jesse Owens won the race by all rational, objective measures. He won according to the rules.
Eric Ashley: it is nonetheless, an objective fact that one SF book was the best that year, and thus is worthy of the Hugo, and thus that author deserves the Hugo. Its interesting that no one got that.
“Best” book is always going to be a matter of opinion, and therefore it is never going to be “an objective fact”. No one “got that” because it’s not true.
Just out of curiosity, what book are you claiming was “best” that year? By what measures?
RedWombat, well, obviously you put them all on a track and fire a starting gun and the first one across the finish line is the best book. Isn’t that how it works?
A couple of things I’ve noticed: the FB announcement has been deleted, although a Very Angry Person On Twitter announced that he’d archived the evidence, and Larry has made a statement on his blog that’s mostly just a longer version of his FB announcement.
Eric Ashley:
Really! Do tell! Please, share your wisdom with us. What are these objective standards of quality and values that assure us that there was one and only one objectively best book that year! I do hope the arguments are better founded and reasoned than this guy’s.
@Eric Ashley–
No. It is not an objective fact that one sf book was the best that year. “Best” in artistic achievement is inherently and unavoidably subjective. What works for one person doesn’t work for another, and you can see that in the back and forth over The Goblin Emperor, Three-Body Problem, and the other nominees that year in this very thread.
There is no objective measure of “best” in the arts. There is no mechanism for purely objective measurement of the arts.
There are things that can make a work of art objectively bad–and every single one of those weaknesses can be used by some better artist to do something interesting, creative, insightful.
“Best” in the giving of awards for artistic achievement is and always will be the subjective judgment of whoever the judges are, and the standards that they think important, and what works for them. For the Hugos, those judges are the members of Worldcon who choose to nominate and vote. All your outrage and frustration that what the Puppies produce doesn’t work for them doesn’t make the results illegitimate or the process corrupt.
If you think there are clear, objective standards by which to judge “the best” sf novel of the year, please, by all means tell us what they are, and show us how they make our results objectively wrong.
Many of the Puppy nominees were in fact just objectively bad, with not enough original or creative or insightful going on to overcome basic writing failures.
Look, I think we’re all well aware that Objectively speaking Chuck Tingle should win every award, including The World Series of Baseball and “#1 Boss” (Along with the coveted mug!) But sadly the flawed voters continue to, yanno, vote for things that they subjectively think are the best, and funny enough Larry wasn’t high on that list it would seem.
RedWombat said:
I would be very curious how one “objectively” measures a work of fiction as the best. What are our metrics? How does one quantify?
I think the formula is #nouns+(#adjectives*#verbs)/(# of times author uses “said”)^(log #adverbs). Whichever book has the highest number is the best. Very scientific and objective.
@Schnookums Von Fancypants: I’ll drink to that!
@Ferret Bueller: You don’t have to be a subscriber of Early Bird Books to get The Female Man for $2.99. Also, if you want to pay $20 at Humble Bundle, you can get a whole bunch of other Hugo/Nebula award winners in addition to The Female Man.
The Goblin Emperor was also my first choice that year. I thought 3BP started off interesting, but by the half-way mark I was considering DNF, and I’ll have to admit that I didn’t bother to even attempt to read the third one when it was nominated.
I’m curious, but too lazy to check. Did Larry ever post any opinions about GamerGate? If I were running a major gaming convention, I’d be concerned about inviting someone who defended the misogynist scum behind GamerGate, or is closely affiliated with people with it. Since LC and VD were closely aligned with their puppy campaigns, it makes me suspect that he may be like-minded with respect GamerGate as well.
Bruce A:
Thanks, good to know. I mentioned one book on sale like that a few weeks ago and later discovered it was limited to EBB subscribers.
Or even as little as $15 for all of them; you just have to play with the slidy things. Unfortunately, I already had all but three or four of the books in the bundle.
3BP had an excellent prologue, and the people who loved the book really loved it. It deserved to win the Hugo because it was good enough to get on the ballot, and because that’s what the Hugo voters decided. (Like I said, only the occasional bit of dark muttering.) My general hope is that every single Hugo finalist deserves to win. That’s how it should be for a competitive award.
Being a Hugo Finalist is a serious achievement and should be considered as such because at the end of the day, there can only be one winner, and being a Hugo Loser is still something to be proud of. I can’t quite fathom taking it as an insult; I’m pretty sure I’d never descend from Cloud 9.
I will note that in 2014 (the year Correia lost Best Novel), the book that won the Hugo also won most of the other major sf/f awards and was nominated for a reasonable chunk of the remainder. I doubt the existence of an objective “best” but if there was an objective “best” then Ancillary Justice is probably the closest we’ll get to finding it.
Re: Benevolent Airships, I’ve put feelers out as to whether that sort of donation would be welcome – the info will be UK-specific but I don’t think libraries are that different across the pond. I have my doubts as to whether I’d be able to pull off the Real Work but I figured I could at least do a bit of school librarian market research. Initial response was that it would be appreciated so long as the quantities were reasonable (shelf-space is always limited).
Because someone is wrong on the internet!!!12!!
Eric Ashley: What I allege is that the voting was … corrupted by corporate power. It is shameful the way the Hugos were run. Prove it. Prove it here, where you’ll have a number of past Hugo administrators to take apart every lie and distortion you come up with, not in your echo chamber.
@ULTRAGOTHA: WSFS members tend to like novelty . This varies widely. Neuromancer won when cyberpunk was new (although I remember trying to explain cyberpunk to a semi-mundane and being told every one of my points wasn’t novel), but it was also the only non-conservative (in various senses) work on the ballot; OTOH, look at serial wins for Card’s Ender, or Bujold clustering. (Yes, all these examples are old enough that they may be less relevant now.)
Count me on the list of those left cold by TBP; I skim-finished it and didn’t touch the rest of the trilogy. I didn’t care that it slammed the excesses of Maoism, but I kept seeing the plot wrenched around, apparently to make some point or perhaps just so the author could say “Christ! What an imagination I’ve got!”. It’s possible that I was failing to understand a substantially different tradition of storytelling, but that’s not the impression I got from what I read about it. I wasn’t completely won over by TGE either, but it did hit one sweet spot: I’m a lot more likely to stick with stories where the characters are making their ways as they can rather than miraculously always making the right move.
@RedWombat
I believe the generally accepted criteria are:
Balance: overall appropriate proportions in size
Weight
Size
Eyes: color, size, shape
Ears: shape, length, position
Head: shape
Muzzle: shape, length
Whiskers: thickness
Teeth: kind of bite (e.g. level or scissors bites)
Tail: how it arches and sets (e.g. how high or low)
Shoulders: bone, muscle
Legs: muscles, stance, proportionality
Coat: texture, length
Color: accepted breed colors
Then again I might be confusing my awards…
😛
@ Mark ~
Last year, Origins had a “true facts of GamerGate” panel moderated by an open and unambiguous GamerGate apologist on the schedule until community outcry got it scrubbed and the Origins concom issued a hasty apology about how they would do better vetting such things going forward. Fast forward one year, and Larry Correia is the writer guest of honor and the explanation is that they were somehow unaware of his behavior within the fannish sphere. “Incompetence” is the kindest possible interpretation of the decision-making here.
He praised GamerGate many times, saying on Twitter it was “awesome.”
I believe that the Best Book assists the Book Grip, although some Best Books assist the Gaffer.
“The problem is that we live in a society where being a self-aggrandizing victim gets you social status.”
Correia just wrote this on his blog without even a scintilla of recognition about the irony.
I think that it is entirely possible that absent the Puppies gaming of the nominations 3BP would not have won. While it certainly won by the rules, I think the peculiar situation that year taints that victory.
I will note, however, that the response to the Puppies produced a system that is not only harder to game but draws the nominations from a larger pool of the voters – if the Puppies genuinely thought that conservative writers were underrepresented they should have seen that as a positive for them. That they didn’t says a lot.
There is one fairly objective measure of how good a work of art is: How long past its creation people are still consuming it for pleasure or edification.
Chip Hitchcock on May 15, 2018 at 9:51 am said:
Unfortunately, having been down this path multiple times, it’s impossible. All evidence that refutes the argument is dismissed as a fabrication. The Administrators lie, the rules are a lie, the published numbers a lie, etc. Like all other conspiracy theories, it cannot be disproved. It’s not really a theory so much as it is a religious belief, and True Believers’ faith is unshakable by any objective fact.
Ok, I’m a bit worried now. As a Dr Pepper drinker am I classified with the virtuous pagans or am I stuck with the people running around the vestibule of Hell?
Pull Correia: Origins.
I suppose that I agree in 3BP winning over TGE in that I actually managed the willpower to finish reading 3BP while I never made it past maybe 30 pages into TGE. But I would put both in the “dreck” category.
@Bruce A
Yes, there was a FB conversation between him and Brad where he was supportive of it, he went on a pro-GG podcast to drum up support, and he tried to get some prominent GGs interested in the puppies. The latter wasn’t very successful until later when his attempts to attract them were being criticised.
@Nate Harada
Gah.
No fooling – just look at what people are saying around here about the book I voted for a Hugo, Three Body Problem!!
The Filers of 770 quietly proving that defining what’s the objectively “best” novel isn’t easy. 🙂 We’ve never unanimously agreed on a story’s excellence.
Re: Benevolent Airships, it strikes me that there’s two options:
1. Set up non-profits specifically for the task.
2. Talk to charities already engaged in distributing books to schools and seeing if they’re willing to work with us (Elisa’s looking into this in the USA, I think).
Anyone with experience in the third sector who can hazard a guess as to which would work best? I really like the idea of managing to pull something off the same year as the first YA Award but I am the very embodiment of the meme dog saying “I have no idea what I’m doing”. 🙂
(Also, fair warning, my energy has some pretty hard limits. So I wouldn’t be able to do most of the UK work solo.)
I guess I’m not following that line of thought. 3BP got on because Marko Kloos withdrew his book. Unless you think Kloos would have won, that still left 3BP up against The Goblin Emperor and the second book in Leckie’s Imperial Radch series, plus two Puppy picks. Are you saying a stronger book was out there that didn’t make the ballot?
@Ferret: In general, Early Bird Book emails are promoting one day sales of Open Road Media books, and they usually are good at all major US retailers. Once in a while they’re only on sale at a couple of retailers, like Amazon. Lately they’ve been experimenting with having you click on a link to get their public domain free book of the day, but it looks to me like they still have that ebook available for free at the retailers. They’ve been free at Kobo, anyway, when I’ve bothered to check.
BTW, the first 3 in the Jo Clayton Diadem series are on also sale today in an ORM omnibus edition ebook for $2.99. I have the first one, but I haven’t read it yet, so I probably won’t pick it up at this time. ORM will likely have it on sale again in the future.
Wasn’t there a system for measuring greatness in Dead Poets Society. Here, let me stand on my desk, it may come back to me…
I’m having a hard time finding something racist in what you have quoted here as Correia having said. If anything, he’s accusing other unnamed people (these SMOFs, whatever that means) as being racist by implying that part of the reason they nominated this Saladin was because he had an ethnic name. If you find saying something like that racist, I don’t think it means what you think it means.
@Mike: IIRC, the Puppies urged their followers to vote for 3BP, and there was some discussion of whether they had put 3BP over the top.
StoicCynic sez
And of course, you must properly stack the book when you display it for judging.
Mike <laughing> You know, that’s what I love about this place. People love what they love, and dislike what they dislike, and yet you rarely see anyone saying “How dare you prefer XXX over YYY! You’re Doin’ It Rong!”
Instead, for the most part people shrug, say, “tastes differ”, and move on. Perhaps noting who loves what we hate and hates what we love, and who loves what we love and hates what we hate, but only to help weigh future book recommendations. “If X liked this, I probably won’t. If Y liked this, I should buy it right away!”
@Mike Glyer
I assumed he meant that absent Puppies 3BP would also have been up against Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Stairs and John Scalzi’s Lock In – which while it would have been a sliver of my own personal hell trying to rank those two against Goblin Emperor, I’m not sure it would have changed the result. CoS is fantasy and I don’t think Lock In is loved by as many people as 3BP is. Maybe CoS might have given it a run for its money – it’s often popular with the same people who liked GE and it has more magic moments, which I know GE got marked down for – but I wouldn’t say it’s so likely as to taint 3BP’s win. 3BP at least was up against legitimate contenders unlike some of the other winners which, while good and worthy works, won partly because their main competitor was No Award.
I’m just guessing, of course!
@Ian Scott: Translating it from dogwhistle: Saladin didn’t deserve it for being good, but is just there because of SJW virtue signalling.
That phrasing has a long, long, looooong history in the US.
@Lurkertype
The free market has spoken.
Having him as a random attendee would maybe be okay, but making him a GoH says the con thinks he’s a draw for their audience. Obviously the backlash shows that he’s an anti-draw for their audience, and would cause them to lose money. As a businessman, I’m sure Larry understands that idea.
That said, who are these dumbasses who don’t bother to do a quick Internet search before they invite someone as a guest?!?
I don’t really think you can use this as an example of the free market speaking because there is no way to tell how many of the people who were complaining to the people in charge of Origins were initially going to go and decided not to because Correia was invited, nor what subset that weren’t going to go have decided to go because of Correia being dis-invited.