We’ll split the Scroll again today. Guess which part this is!
(1) NOMINEE STATEMENT. For those who are interested, Cora Buhlert sent a link to “What Price Humanity?” author David VanDyke’s statement regarding his nomination at Kboards.
Re: KBoarder David VanDyke is a Hugo Award Finalist
Thanks everyone.
I wrote this bit and posted in the other thread before I saw this one, so I’ll copy-paste it here:
As we poker players say, I’ve tried to put myself into a position to get lucky, and it seems I have. Or, as another quote goes, it takes years to become an overnight success. I submitted a story to a Jerry Pournelle anthology (There Will Be War X), got accepted, then suddenly got nominated for a Hugo in a relatively easier category (novelette – novels, novellas and short stories seem much more competitive), and boom, somebody notices me after 4 years and 25 books as an indie…
I’ll be going to WorldCon in KC, but I don’t think I have a snowball’s chance of winning…not with a Stephen King novelette in there. But the nom is nice, and the networking will be nice.
…and for those who might wonder, I’m apolitical about the whole Hugo process and on nobody’s side. I just submitted a story to one of the grand masters of military sci-fi and it got picked up for the anthology, and then nominated. That’s it. No investment in puppies, kitties, gerbils, tortoises or other animals. I’m not really a joiner of special interest groups or parties anyway. Hopefully my work stands on its own.
Thanks again for all the well-wishing.
(2) MORE VOTING ADVICE. WTF Pancakes makes a modest suggestion in “Hugo Awards 2016: Geez, not this shit again”.
I’ve read suggestions that this year’s troll-fest was a direct response to the Hugo voters’ failure to reward the Puppies to force the voters to give them trophies even if the voters didn’t actually believe they were deserved. No, really, that’s the argument (although it was phrased slightly differently.) The desire, then, is to receive an award, regardless of merit. The sort of thing that Puppy authors might call “affirmative action.”
Fortunately, I have a solution which I think every reasonable person will agree is wise and just: If what the Puppies really want is recognition, then simply reward every Puppy candidate with a “participant” award. You know, the kind they give to grade school children when you don’t want anyone to feel bad. This way, the Chuck Tingles and John C. Wrights of the world can have their recognition without having to try to abuse the nomination process. Then, simply discard any nominations which match the slate proposed by the Rabid Puppies. Problem solved…for a little while at least…maybe.
(3) IT’S DEAD JIM. Joe Follansbee conducts the autopsy in “The Hugo Awards are dead, and the xPuppies killed them”.
All this wouldn’t matter, except for the fact that science fiction readers worldwide depend on the Hugo Awards as a mark of quality. While some of the xPup-inees are worthy, such as Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, and sci-fi master Jerry Pournelle for his editing, the nomination ballot-stuffing by the xPuppies has permanently damaged the Hugos’ credibility. How can any discerning reader look at the phrase “Hugo Award-nominated” or “Hugo Award-winning,” not think of Butt Invasion, and not drop the potential purchase like a hot potato?
Likewise, how can any publisher associate itself with these kinds of brand-threatening shenanigans? They’re risk-averse enough as it is. Why take the chance with printing the Hugo rocket ship logo on its project without thinking of two years’ worth of Hugo train wrecks?
A second year of “No Award” winners will put the final nails into the Hugos’ coffin because it would demonstrate readers’ lack of faith in the award.
Hope is not completely lost, however. WorldCon, which manages the Hugos, has a chance to fix the problem with proposed nominations rules changes, though they won’t take effect until 2017, assuming they’re approved. If not, they might as well kill the awards program altogether. No one will believe in it anymore.
(4) TOO GRAPHIC. GamerGate Life responds to its nomination.
Some comic strip characters discover they’ve been nominated for the #HugoAwards https://t.co/flxpJD96i0
— Robot Archie???????????????????? (@RobotArchie) April 28, 2016
(5) AH SWEET. Russell Newquist boosts the Castalia House signal in “The Perversion of Science Fiction and Fantasy Fandom”.
The 2016 Hugo Awards are important, and not for any of that. There is a critical message this year that far exceeds anything else to do with the Hugos. It boils down to two specific works, both of which have been nominated in the “Best Related Work” category:
The first is “Safe Space as Rape Room: Science Fiction Culture and Childhood’s End.” Written by Daniel Eness for the Castalia House blog. The second is “The Story of Moira Greyland” by Moira Greyland.
These two works are not just the most important published works of the science fiction community of 2015. They are the most important works of this millennium….
(6) DEJA HUGO. Jim C. Hines presents his thoughts about the Hugos, and the difference between anger and abuse, in “A Few Hugo Requests”.
2. No asterisks, please.
I did make a crack about asterisks and the Hugo last year after the trophy was released. And I think a lot of people had a mental asterisk over the whole thing, because let’s be honest, last year was anything but normal for the Hugo awards. So yeah, I definitely get it.
But at last year’s Hugo award ceremony, they handed out wooden asterisk plaques, and later sold additional wooden asterisks.
I don’t believe this was done with malicious intent (though I obviously can’t read anyone’s minds). Maybe it was an attempt at humor, and/or to acknowledge the elephant in the room. I appreciate that the sale of the asterisks raised several thousand dollars for a good cause.
Whatever the intentions, it resulted in a lot of people feeling hurt and attacked. I know from experience how nerve-wracking a Hugo ceremony can be in a normal year. Last year, and this year, tensions and anxieties and fears are exponentially higher. And for many of the people in attendance, the asterisks felt like a big old slap in the face.
Like I said, I don’t think that was the intention. (Others will disagree, and have gleefully pointed to the asterisks as “proof” that “the other side” is evil and nasty.) In this case, I don’t think intention matters so much as the impact it had, including hurting some good, talented people.
(7) THE ESTIMATE. Rocket Stack Rank’s Gregory N. Hullender attempts an “Analysis of Slate Voting for the 2016 Hugos”.
Overview
I estimate there were about 205 “Rabid Puppies” this year, essentially identical to the estimated 204 Sad+Rabid puppies last year. The reason they did so well despite a doubling of the number of “organic” votes is that they managed much better slate discipline this year; last year, not everyone voted for all five candidates nor in every category, but this year it seems they did….
(8) THOUGHTS THUNK WHILE THINKING. How come nearly everybody titles their post “Thoughts on the Hugo Nominations”? Like Anthony M at the Hugo-nominated Superversive SF blog who is thoroughly okay with the reason that happened, so why should you have any problem?
Does this bother anybody? It shouldn’t. It doesn’t bother me. We’ve been growing a fanbase since we started, and the fact that the Sads AND the Rabids both had us on their lists does mean we’re leaving a mark. I don’t believe we were picked as a parody, for the simple reason that Castalia likes our work enough to give us a weekly column on their increasingly popular blog. An anthology unassociated with us recently opened up submissions for superversive stories. We’re doing very well, and this only gets us more exposure. This is great!
And yet, if we weren’t on the Rabid Puppies slate, we still probably wouldn’t be on the Hugo shortlist. So why doesn’t this bother me? My answer is simple: I agree with what Vox Day is doing.
(9) MY HUGO NOMINATED PONY. At anthropomorphic fiction blog Fayrah, Brendan Kachel reacts: “’My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic’ episodes nominated for 2016 Hugo Awards as part of ‘Rabid Puppies’ slate”.
However, furries and bronies perhaps shouldn’t celebrate so soon; last year’s Hugo Awards were pretty controversial, and this year is apparently the sequel.
Looks like the ponies are actually Trojan horses. For puppies.
The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies are “slates” of nominees designed to abuse a loophole in the Hugo Awards rules by which a group of voters can assure nominations for a pre-approved set of nominees by agreeing to vote for them. These slates were begun in order to fight what they describe as “political correctness” (and opponents would describe as “progressive social stances”) in the works nominated and winning at the Hugos. The politics of those running the “puppies” slate are frequently described as “neo-conservative;” the founder of the Rabid Puppies, Vox Day, is described by Wikipedia as a “white supremacist.” And the My Little Pony episodes were on his list.
The obvious question is how a children’s television show like My Little Pony (one created by feminist Lauren Faust known for its progressive themes, no less) came to be associated with someone like Vox Day. Part of the answer may be that Day is looking to further embarrass the Hugo Awards, especially after none of his slate won an award last year (even in categories where his slate swept the nominees, “No Award Given” received the most votes, leaving many categories unrewarded), and perhaps figured a nomination for a cartoon about magical horses was an embarrassment. This year, one of his short story selections was “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” by Chuck Tingle, a story of what Wikipedia delicately calls “niche erotica” (and, yes, is exactly what it sounds like). Or perhaps Day is just a legitimate fan of both ponies and “niche erotica”, after all.
However, the two episodes in question were praised by conservative sources as “anti-Marxist”, which may be on point about the episodes in question (and, admittedly, the show, being based on a toy line, can hardly be called anti-capitalist), but hardly holds up as a valid interpretation of the show’s ethos overall.
(10) DEDUCTIONS. Barry Deutsch at Alas! A Blog has his thinking cap on, too: “Hugo Nominations Are Out, And The Rabid Puppies Dominated The List. A Few Thoughts”.
1) My guess is that we’ll see Noah Ward win on at least a couple of categories this year, but most categories will have a named winner.
2) Next year, assuming the voters at this year’s Worldcon agree to this, there will be a change in the Hugo vote-counting rules – E Pluribus Hugo – which might reduce the ability of a minority of slate voters to game the process and unfairly dominate Hugo nominations. Early data may indicate that EPH won’t make as large a difference as people are hoping. If further changes are necessary to prevent the Rabid Puppies from gaming the system to dominate nominations, I expect further changes will be made.
3) By a wide margin, more people voted to nominate works for the Hugos in 2016 than in any prior year. And the Rabid Puppies still dominated the outcome. If there are hundreds of possible nominees, and if most nominators vote honestly, then a small group of slate voters can overpower the large majority of honest voters. I hope that this result will persuade people who have been saying “all’s that’s needed is for more people to nominate” to change their minds.
(11) PATRICK NIELSEN HAYDEN.
https://twitter.com/pnh/status/725841445291216896
(12) ALTERNATE AWARDS. Adam-Troy Castro told his Facebook readers what else they can do for writers.
The Hugos are broken. These people broke them. I don’t see them going away and I don’t see it getting any better.
This is a sad thing, but you know what?
The Hugos were once fandom’s way of honoring that which touched them.
Today, the readership is more balkanized. Nobody reads everything published in fantastic fiction. Some of you only read novels about women in tight pants fighting vampires. Some of you only read novels about spaceships going pew-pew-pew in the asteroids. Some of you only read literary sf. Whatever gets honored in any particular year will leave the partisans of one kind of fiction feeling left out. The Puppies are nothing if not folks saddened by a couple of years of awards going to more diverse choices: people going boo-hoo-hoo because of not enough love for pew-pew-pew.
You want to honor your favorite authors with awards?
Telling others about their great books is an award.
Telling them you loved their books is an award.
Expressing your enthusiasm with online reviews is an award.
(13) THE OTHER HUGO. James H. Burns points out this ’70s toy that later was featured as “a guest” on both The Uncle Floyd Show, and Pee Wee Herman’s first stage show and HBO special!
(14) GALACTIC STARS. The Traveler at Galactic Journey decided over 50 years ago that the Hugos were not the answer, and started giving out his own Galactic Stars every year. The latest set were announced last December.
The chill of winter is finally here, heralding the end of a year. It’s time for eggnog, nutmeg, presents, pies, and family. But more importantly, it’s time for the second annual Galactic Stars awards.
Forget the Hugos–here’s what I liked best in 1960.
In a tradition I began last year, I look back at all fiction that debuted in magazines (at least, The Big Four) with a cover date of this year as well as all of the science fiction books published. Then I break down the fiction by length, choose the best by magazine, and finally the best overall. All using the most modern and sophisticated scientific techniques, of course.
Last year, my choices mirrored those chosen at the Labor Day Worldcon for the Hugo awards. We’ll see if my tastes continue to flow in the mainstream. I break my length categories a bit finer than the Hugos, so there are bound to be some differences from that aspect, alone.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cora Buhlert, Jim C. Hines, and James H. Burns for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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According to Pournelle he couldn’t get a better deal than Castilia House. He’s not new to publishing
Fine, that’s his decision. Just as it’s our decision to apply costs he may not have considered.
Now, I like Pournelle’s work. I own some of his books. But one of the basic facts of my life is that I have way too much good sf to read, so I have to pick and choose. So from now on Pournelle goes towards the bottom of my discretionary spending list because he’s chosen to get tainted with Beale’s stench.
That’s not a boycott – I might buy something of his that was lauded as truly spectacular. But it’s a simple fact – outside the very few truly magnificent works, what I read and therefore what I buy will be affected by factors outside an author’s skill alone.
@Cally
Glad you enjoyed the movie and found your old mooing bear. I didn’t have a mooing bear as a kid, but I had one of those moo-cow boxes.
Regarding the toys seen in the Trapp Familie clip, this Punch and Judy set was in production well into the 1970s, though it wasn’t the set I had. I also spot a Steiff gnome (I never had one, but my Dad supposedly did), a black poodle that looks a lot like the one I had as a kid and several Schildkröt dolls, which are still produced from the same molds used in the 1930s and 1940s. Like pretty much every German kid in the 1940s/1950s, my Mom had one, though not the model shown in the clip.
@Heather Rose Jones
I nominated you. I think you might be underestimating Hugo voters.
May slates go bye-bye and no one have to go through this inhuman agony ever again. I hate people being used for someone’s sick game.
Thankfully we have many ways to reward creative types and fans from buying their work to promoting it to dropping them notes to let them know how much we’ve enjoyed and appreciate what they do.
Regarding what to read/how to vote for the Hugos, I think everybody will have to decide for themselves. Though I don’t think anybody should have to read anything they don’t want to read.
My personal stand is that I will vote on merit, slates be damned, and that I will take a look at everything I haven’t seen already. However, if I find that I hate it, I won’t feel obliged to finish it and will no award it. Also, what I have seen of such poison pill nominees as Safe Space as a Rape Room, SJWs always lie and If you were an award, my love… was enough that I don’t feel the need to subject myself to that sort of disgusting stuff any further. Ditto for Superversive SF and Sci Phi Journal. I did read Moira Greyland’s piece last night and now wish I hadn’t.
I will look at the There Will Be War stories, though given my previous experience with Castalia House and that military SF isn’t my thing, I suspect there won’t be much of a difference between no awarding them on merit and no awarding them because they’re published by Castalia House. “What Price Humanity?” (which I haven’t yet read) might turn out to be a conflict of conscience for me, because I know the author personally.
Regarding Chuck Tingle, I will read Space Raptor Butt Invasion, when it’s in the voter packet. Erotica isn’t really my thing, though I don’t have issues with it either. As for how to rank it, I suspect it will go first under No Award, since I don’t expect liking the There Will Be War story and “If You Were an Award, My Love” is just nasty crap. Though “Assymmetrical Warfare” is decent and I hope whatever replaces the withdrawn story will be decent as well.
As for the fan artist nominee with the naked superhero drawings, I’m pretty sure that sort of thing is not illegal in Spain, since 16 is above the age of consent there, which is really low (though apparently they raised it to 16 recently, it used to be 12 or 13). However, the fact that it’s not illegal doesn’t mean that it’s not icky and not even good as a piece of art either. Also Vox Day slating this artist proves once again that he doesn’t give a flying fart about paedophilia in SFF beyond using it as a weapon against those he hates. That’s really typical for rightwingers BTW.
For an SF bent, the mooing sound can made an appearance in the Invader Zim cartoon “Dark Harvest“. Warning, this episode is not for the faint of heart.
Ok, I’m not going to defend SRBI, since it was clearly put on the ballot as a pathetic attempt at a joke. BUT! I must say that I find the notion that erotica is inherently unqualified for a Hugo to be as offensive as the idea that stories featuring women, gays, or people of color are inherently unqualified for a Hugo.
“But I didn’t sign up to read erotica!” Hey, y’know what? I didn’t sign up to read Epic Fantasy. It’s one of my least favorite subgenres of SFF. And just a couple of years ago, there was a huge, multi-volume Epic Fantasy on the ballot. I was so glad I wasn’t a voter that year, because I would have felt obliged to give it a fair shake. Life isn’t always fair.
Many great SFF writers have dabbled in erotica, going back at least as far as Grandmaster Philip José Farmer, who has a few Hugos to his name. In fact, his first story, “The Lovers” (1952), managed to get banned as pornographic in some places, but still helped him earn a Hugo for Best New Artist or Author the next year. And while a modern reader might boggle at the claim that that piece was considered pornographic (standards have changed), several of his later works were far more explicit. And some of them were pretty good.
If a piece of erotica makes it on the ballot on its own merits, I would expect and hope that people would judge it on those merits, rather than dismissing it because “erotica is evil” or because it can’t actually be good literature, or some such nonsense.
@Xenu:
You’re very welcome. As it happens, my wife Deirdre was an early Scientology critics and, as she puts it, ‘that Deirdre, the Deirdre censored based on first name in the Scieno Sitter, Scientology’s net nanny’. (Scientologists were conned into installing software that applied secret content filtering to their computers, so they could not view anything with the word ‘Deirdre’, or anything else on the banned list — including the phrase ‘Operation Clambake’).
Yes, quite so. In fact, I just got through talking on Eric Flint’s blog about the Black Genesis nomination to illustrate one of the several regular use-cases for inserting No Award into one’s Hugo final-ballot rankings.
@JJ:
Judging by another superversivesf.com post late last year, Anthony M is editor and also one of the eight participating authors of an ‘anthology/collaborative novel ‘ about ‘theological robots’. Collaborating authors include John C. Wright, Steve Rzasa, and Mr. Beale, available soon from you’ll-never-guess-which-micropress. There, he mentions what the M stands for.
A cynic might see Mister M’s concept of ‘agree with’ as difficult to distinguish from commercial advantage. Shocking, I know.
Oh wow, I managed to trip the moderation filters for the first time ever! I’m not entirely sure why, though I suspect that it may have to do, not so much with which words I used, as that I repeated them enough times to raise a machine’s suspicions that I might be spamming. Interesting.
Rick Moen: ‘theological robots’
WTF. 🙄
@JJ:
I know! But consider how much easier a time Martin Luther would have had, posting those theses onto the church door in Wittenberg, if he’d had the services of a squad of theological robots, each (reverently) bearing a nail gun. It’s a matter of industrial efficiency!
Mister M and company could be really onto something big. No salvation without automation!
There’s always Reverend Lionel Preacherbot from Futurama.
Clifford Simak’s A Choice of Gods (1971) had a whole monastery full of theological robots.
@Greg-
I don’t see any reason for you to add “In my opinion”. To me, that’s already given.
I find the attitude of “If you were really a decent person, you’d remove your name from the Hugo list” or deliberately mis-reading what was said more offensive.
We’d also be able to say that fans are willing to tolerate slating.
Different voters will have different priorities.
The Young Pretender: I think Mr. Tingle is a performance artist, who’s going to get a kick, and produce some funny material out of this either way. I think we can No Award him as not Hugo-worthy and still be very nice, even appreciative of him.
That’s my take on him. A hilarious wild card to have in the mix, and deserves any boost he gets out of the situation, but probably not the Hugo for best short story. (Best long-form performance, I’d consider.)
I cannot even, with your acronym. How could you betray the prince that way?
Actually, I said that if he himself thought it was only on the ballot because of the slate, then he should withdraw it. I did give my own opinion that it wasn’t Hugo quality, but I said that before it was on the ballot.
You said that directly to the author of the story? Oh, honey, bless your heart.
In a perverse way, I kind of hope Tingle wins. After all, it’s the ultimate message to the various Puppies that have been desperate to finagle Hugos of their own that, given the choice, Fandom would rather claim Tingle and Space Raptor Butt Invasion than them.
Ryan H on April 30, 2016 at 10:19 pm said:
I think having it end up anywhere above Noah Ward would send that message just fine! 😉
Still, I’m not going to rank it above no award unless I actually think it’s award worthy, after I read it. Which seems pretty unlikely. But unless it’s a lot worse than I expect, I doubt it will be at the bottom of my rankings! (As much as Mr. Tingle might enjoy being a bo… No, never mind, that’s probably going too far.) 😀
Bottom line (gah, I keep doing it), it is thanks to VD that Mr. Tingle now has as much right to call himself a Hugo-nominated author as JCW does. I bet JCW is thrilled about that! <voice style=”Nelson Muntz”>Ha ha!</voice>
@Cora Buhlert
I’ve seen “Liederhosen” used quite a bit by non-German speakers, so it’s probably an accident. My own association would be that Liederhosen are formal, yet non-constricting pants that serious Schubert performers wear for their concerts (“Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau knows that it won’t do to have a wardrobe malfunction while singing “Der Zwerg”, so he will only wear Hochleistungs-Liederhosen made by Schnarlhuber”).
…or in Switzerland. One of my Jazz-loving friends once asked “Has anybody ever tried to write lyrics to My Favorite Things?”
@Greg Hullender
I’m all in favor of voting for quality, and I do intend to start reading all of the nominees (reserving, however, the right to stop reading as soon as I’ve established I won’t be voting for something).
However, in categories dominated by slated works, for me to vote for something, it’s not enough that it be superior to the competition (“Vote for this JCW novella! It’s better than the other JCW novellas nominated”). The standard I’ve used last year is that a work had to be, in my opinion, of comparable quality to some past winners of the category.
Furthermore, since Castalia employs slating as a blatant marketing strategy, I can’t see myself voting for any works they publish. Authors knew who they were signing a contract with.
Stuffing the ballots and then insisting that we HAD to vote for one of the works was a strategy employed with great insistence by last years’ nominees. I’m not planning to go along with that any more this year than I did last year.
Heather Rose Jones:
You forgot a few things in cases 2b and 2c. You have to add: You stay, but you always wonder if you’re actually worthwhile because people not only colluded to put you on the ballot, but colluded to keep other people out. This is no longer impostor syndrome, there is now evidence, a real reason, and a very good chance that you are, in fact, an impostor who has taken an award that in a fair fight would have gone to someone else.
Example: Sandman: Overture. Neil & co. will always have to wonder if they would have lost to The Sculptor in a fair contest, or anyone else who came in 6th to 9th thanks to the slate. Even worse: if they find out they would have been 6th without the slate push, and never made the final ballot if they weren’t slated in the first place.
So in case 2, staying, which breaks down into 2a, 2b, and 2c, every outcome feeds into feeling that you are an impostor.
So again: why would you stay?
@Amoxtli:
Gentlebeings: Suppose a couple of us (and I’ll be in for at least US $50, if this is a thing) buy Famous Hugo Finalist Short Story Author Chuck Tingle a full attending membership for MidAmericon II.
I’m envisioning a special Chuck Tingle-led (tingled?) writing workshop and/or dramatic reading. Perhaps in a nearby pub, if necessary. (Ethanol may actually be necessary for this plan.) But I do think tinglifying Kansas City approaches being a moral imperative.
(Transportation and hotel bills would, alas, remain his own affair. In the event of Chuck Tingle turning out to be a hive-mind of several deeply strange individuals, we’d have to talk about quantity of memberships, I guess.)
Rick Moen: I’m envisioning a special Chuck Tingle-led (tingled?) writing workshop and/or dramatic reading. Perhaps in a nearby pub, if necessary. (Ethanol may actually be necessary for this plan.)
This could be amusing. However, I suspect that revealing the person(s) behind the performance would pretty much spoil the persona for the future, and that they would therefore decline.
@JJ:
One fallback alternative would be to temporarily assume the awesome mantle of Chuckness, ourselves — for the cause. #JeSuisChuckTingle
Do it for Chuck, I say. Do it for Jim Theis and Grignr. And, of course, do it for the bheer.
Set The Pixel Scrolls For The Heart Of The Hugos.
Cora Buhlert: Though like all German speaking people, I vastly prefer the original 1956 German film version Die Trapp Familie to the Hollywood/Broadway version The Sound of Music, which BTW is largely unknown in Germany.
Well, there goes 2 hours of my life — but thank you. That was spectacularly enjoyable. It was interesting to see just how much of the original movie Robert Wise lifted for the U.S. version.
Apparently, Maria was quite a powerful personality and softened considerably in the dramatized versions. The Baron was 25 years older, and it’s sad that she had to live another 40 years without him after his death.
I’ve been to the Trapp Family Lodge and the family cemetary in Vermont. After growing up with a mother who was quite musical and loved musical theatre — and therefore having seen The Sound of Music repeatedly from an early age, it was a rather moving experience for me.
I’d much rather see Zoe Quinn, the game developer at WorldCon for Chuck Tingle. She’s developing a game for him, and it’d piss off puppies.
alexvdl: I’d much rather see Zoe Quinn, the game developer at WorldCon for Chuck Tingle. She’s developing a game for him
Oh hell, I’d totally help sponsor that attending membership.
This could be amusing. However, I suspect that revealing the person(s) behind the performance would pretty much spoil the persona for the future, and that they would therefore decline.
Yeah, Tingle seems very careful to stay anonymous.
I’d much rather see Zoe Quinn, the game developer at WorldCon for Chuck Tingle. She’s developing a game for him, and it’d piss off puppies.
Is she? Goddamn, that’s funny.
It would be amazing. It would also be an incredible escalation of the situation in terms of con security issues and griefer numbers.
@Rick:
But I do think tinglifying Kansas City approaches being a moral imperative.
It occurs to me that a wealth of Tingle panels could be put on even without Tingle’s actual presence. I’m sure you could still get some dramatic readings, maybe talk to Tingle about putting out a story called “Inspired In the Butt By The Writing Method of Dr. Chuck Tingle” that could be used by a volunteer to teach a writing workshop…
@Amoxtli,
I don’t think increasing security is necessariyl an issue. Other than Lamplighter attempting to wedge herself into PNHs conversation, there didn’t appear to be much of an issue last year.
The only gater in meatspace issue that I’ve heard of is the Ralph Retort showing up at one of Wu’s panels at Ravencon. He was kicked out, and the con went on.
Will Mark Oshiro be going to Worldcon? Because at conventions where he’s a GOH, if the convention itself doesn’t hand him something to read cold for his “Mark Reads Stuff” reading, he’ll typically read a Chuck Tingle piece. I’ve seen him do it live twice now, and on his website several other times.
@Amoxtli
I’m sadly going to agree with you on Con security. I’ve seen our regular puppies talk about their guns. And Zoe Quinn is what brings those trolls out, either to the real world, or to phone-called threats to the real world.
@Barry Deutsch @Jim Henley: Originally I was opposed to the idea of 3SV, for similar reasons to JJ, and also because I was afraid that it could be easily gamed by a small minority to knock works off the ballot. However, you’ve convinced me, in combination with Kevin Standlee’s discussion of ways in which it could be implemented. I don’t want to see several years of ballots in which there are only a couple of worthwhile entries per category, which could still be the result even with EPH. This is especially true for the short fiction categories, because the distribution of votes tends to be so flat, and I love short fiction – I probably read more of that than I do of novel-length work. I would like to see a 3SV proposal at this year’s business meeting.
Last year, I bought a Sasquan supporting membership out of disgust at the slating of the awards – I hadn’t followed the Hugos closely for a long time, simply because they don’t really align very well with my tastes in fiction. (Not one of my novel nominees made it onto the ballot this year, but since these aren’t the PhilRM Awards for Excellence in SF – which would be awesome, by the way – that’s okay.) Everything that was on a slate last year got left off my ballot. This year, since Beale changed tactics, so have I. However, anything from Castalia House doesn’t exist, as far as I’m concerned. Actions have consequences.
@ Glenn Hauman
I’m going to start off by saying that the challenging and demanding tone of your posts on this topic is very off-putting to me. I posted something that is clearly based on personal, subjective experience and you have argued that my subjective experience must be justified to your satisfaction.
I’m not going to do that. I both suspect it is impossible to justify it to your satisfaction, and I don’t feel that you have a right to my time and emotional energy in what would certainly be a vain attempt to do so.
In the first part of what I quoted above, you don’t seem to understand that it’s a GIVEN that the hypothetical nominee will “know” in their heart for the rest of their life that they didn’t deserve that place on the ballot. There are honors that I was given 40 years ago that–because of a minor irregularity in the context in which it was given–I will never completely believe I deserved, no matter that I’ve proven the matter 100 times over since then. That’s what impostor syndrome is all about. That aspect was so far from being in question so I didn’t bother in repeat it in every one of the variants.
What remaining on the ballot provides is the possibility of a glimpse of some hope of an implication that there might be evidence that at least a few people think that your work isn’t the complete crap you are certain that it is. That possibility is what allows people with impostor syndrome to do ANYTHING. And the last thing they need is to hear more voices demanding to know what the heck they think they’re doing bothering to try.
Do you get it now?
Again… there have been plenty of conventions rife with puppies and gaters in the four years the puppies have been around, and the two years that gaters have been around.
I don’t think that “security” concern trolling is a good look here.
@alexvdl – I personally doubt there are any Puppies who will bring guns and start shooting people, but not in a 99% sure kind of way, more like a “that seems pretty unlikely” kind of way. I say this because last year I read Puppies at least on the MGC site (could be others, too, but I definitely recall the ones on the MGC site) talking about how they were going to the con this year and they would be bringing guns. There was talk about how the con is being held in a open carry state. These Puppies weren’t threatening to shoot people up – some of them were making dumb jokes about feeling threatened by non-Puppies – but their attitudes toward gun safety and respecy were obviously on par with the average “shoots-himself-in-the-ass-at-Wal-Mart” gun nut.
So I don’t think it’s really concern trolling at all to worry about the weapons policy.
It is very easy. If a person is voted above No Award and wins in a category, then that person was deemed as worthy of winning a Hugo. There might have been other candidates that also should have been deemed as worthy, but the winner was deemed as worthy by Worldcon as a whole.
And that is all there is to it. To say that the person shouldn’t be deemed as worthy is merely being an asshole.
There’s a large difference between worrying about the weapons policy, and to assume that we’re going to need MORE security if Zoe Quinn is coming.
@alexvdl – Ah, I see what you’re saying.
A couple thoughts:
1) During last year’s Hugo disaster, Wright took the time to explicitly point out (and this is from memory, as I’m not about to waste more time searching Wright’s swamp of a blog) that- in addition to stuffing the ballot with Wright’s work – Beale had paid for Wright’s trip to WorldCon (….predictably enough, to be personally humiliated…) – and that Wright viewed Beale as a friend.
So we see that, in turn, Beale views Wright as simply another disposable tool for his asshole antics. One wonders if Wright – whose career certainly seems in need of a boost this year – has actually noticed that his esteemed editor now prefers antic gay erotica to anything published by Wright in 2015.
(As Johnny Rotten once asked: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”)
2. The other point that this raises is that Beale
a) either genuinely believes that Chuck Tingle’s work is one of the most Hugo-worthy stories that he saw in 2015, which is an interesting admission about his own taste in fiction;
OR
b) it means that Beale is admitting that he is a liar, and is an individual completely without honor.
(If one needs help choosing between the two hypotheses, there’s plenty of other evidence about Beale to be considered.)
5. The other interesting facet about Tingle’s nomination is Larry’s reaction: Correia – the guy who put unreadable trash by Beale on HIS slate “because Satan wasn’t available” – is now saying that he STILL doesn’t understand the Hugo Awards, and is trying to blame WorldCon for the asshole slaters’ nomination of Tingle.
Assholes can game the nomination process, Larry – how is it that he STILL doesn’t quite understand that?
‘AsYouKnow’ Bob,
Wasn’t JCW’s “Somewhither” on both Puppies’ lists this year?
Yes it was.
Hmmm.
I see Wright had an eligible NOVEL this year (“The Architect of Aeons (The Eschaton Sequence) Hardcover – April 21, 2015″ *): yet his editor and friend didn’t think it was worth nominating — OR that Wright’s career might be badly in need of a boost.
That’s…interesting.
*”Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #844,991 in Books”
Ah. I stand corrected, thanks.
OK, then, I was wrong, Beale is still working to promote Wright.
So let me rephrase the above:
How about: not even the Rabids had enough clout to sneak Wright onto this year’s ballot?
(I guess I was thinking backward from the finalists lists, because I try to ignore the slaters….)
since Mr Beale values Dr Tingle’s writing so much, will he offer Dr Tingle a publishing contract with Castalia?
How about: not even the Rabids had enough clout to sneak Wright onto this year’s ballot?
Because in Best Novel, though not in all categories, we have now gathered enough honest nominators to outvote them.
@JJ :
Well, we could always have a team of authors writing under the same pen name as “Chuck Tingle”, churning out screed after screed at a speed that would melt any one word keyboard in erotica, humor, sf, non-fiction, parody or whatever.
After all, it worked for the “Isaac Asimov” collective…
microtherion on April 30, 2016 at 11:22 pm said:
This is an important point which bears repeating. And I don’t think it should be limited to “categories dominated by slated works.” It should be a general principle: if you don’t think a work is good enough to join the ranks of Hugo winners, you should list it below No Award. I admit that I have not always followed this principle in the past. Before the puppies came along, my tendency was to rank the nominees in order of how much I liked them. While I always knew that ranking something below No Award was an option, I always thought of it as a nuclear option, to be used only in case I found something I absolutely hated! Which, as it happens, never came up. But the puppies forced me to raise my standards, and I plan to keep them raised in the future, even if the puppies fade away and vanish.
@Glenn Hauman: You keep arguing that it wouldn’t be fair to vote for anything in a slate-dominated category. Well, you know what? It wouldn’t be fair not to! In fact, it’s too late for fairness! The RP ruined our chances for a fair competition this year. But voting something award-worthy below No Award is also unfair! It’s unfair to the nominees, and it’s especially unfair to the good faith nominators who nominated that work because they thought it deserved an award!
Basically, you are asking me to lie, and claim that I don’t think “Penric’s Demon” (as a random example) is good enough for a Hugo. That’s unfair and dishonest, and I am not going to lie to further your agenda. I am also not going to lie in order to help VD prove that he can deny the award to worthy works simply by listing them on his slate.
Doing what you ask is unfair; not doing what you ask is unfair. Fairness is an option that’s no longer on the table, so I’m going to fall back on what should always be the primary criterion: quality.
OK, then, I was wrong, Beale is still working to promote Wright.
So long as JCW had a work published by Castalia House. Beale is nothing if not an entirely self-interested grifter.
@alexvdl: I’d much rather see Zoe Quinn, the game developer at WorldCon for Chuck Tingle. She’s developing a game for him
@JJ: Oh hell, I’d totally help sponsor that attending membership.
Oh, I’m again in for $US 50 on that.
I’d suggest that she insist that her badge say ‘Chuck Tingle’ but if asked explain to anyone curious that she’s not actually Chuck Tingle but rather someone else of the same name.
@xtfir: “My agenda?” You are aware Starbucks sells decaf too, right?
And I suppose calling “good enough” the same as “Best” isn’t technically lying. So go ahead, vote for what Beale lets you vote for. Sure. That explanation’s good enough.