187 thoughts on “Sad Puppies 4 List”

1. Meh

2. They sure didn’t leave people very much time to read these.

3. Greg Hullender: They sure didn’t leave people very much time to read these.

   Because I was wrong in predicting a rush to recommend things at the deadline, most of the tallied recommendations were made last year. People hypothetically could have been reading them all along. If they are so inclined.

4. Yep they are the masses kept out by the elite SJWs fersure.

5. Is There Will Be War even eligible in the Related Work category? I don’t recall any other short fiction collections ever being nominated for that, and I can’t imagine everyone has simply been overlooking this possibility until now.

6. I’m confused; if BDPSF had “something like a 15-way tie for 6th place, so I’ll just list down to 10.”, how did she determine which other 10 or so to toss? A 15-way tie for 6th would seem to mean that if they were merely reporting, their choices would be to either list 5 works or 20. Did they add their own editorial judgment?

7. Aaron: Is There Will Be War even eligible in the Related Work category?

   No.

   3.3.5: Best Related Work. Any work related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom, appearing for the first time during the previous calendar year or which has been substantially modified during the previous calendar year, and which is either non-fiction or, if fictional, is noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text, and which is not eligible in any other category.

8. I don’t know everything on this list, but what I recognize is good. And several of the categories actually have pretty diverse nominees.

9. Yep. Makes no difference to me.

   Now the fact that one of my computers refuses to reopen my Hugo nominations, and its the one with all the notes and bookmarks saved, that could make a difference…

10. The name Dustin Nguyen in the pro-artist category stood out to me because hey, second time I mention 21 Jump Street in one day! so I googled him. Apparently not the actor. No disrespect to Dustin, but his work doesn’t look any more impressive than any other randomly-clicked member of DeviantArt.

    (I dare you to say his name–the artist or the actor) without thinking of that Kansas song!)

11. Doesn’t “There Will Be War” contain some non-fiction essays, making it eligible? Oh, whoops, “not eligible in any other category.” Missed that the first time through.

    Also, a work by Clifford Simak is eligible? What am I missing?

12. Also, a work by Clifford Simak is eligible? What am I missing?

    Previously unpublished (intended for Last Dangerous Visions).

13. Also, a work by Clifford Simak is eligible? What am I missing?

    It looks like the story was originally intended for the as yet unpublished Last Dangerous Visions collection and sat in limbo for decades. The story appears to have been finally published (in an entirely different anthology) in 2015.

14. Too late to edit my earlier post, but I see that Dustin Nguyen is a published comic book artist beyond the underwhelming sample on DeviantArt. Oops.

    On an opposite note, Atomic Rockets is a profoundly useful and award-worthy site.

15. @James Moar – thanks!

    Also, in general Re: Puppy List… Glad they posted that. I keep forgetting what I’d planned to nominate, and had completely forgotten Inside Out. I need to keep a list next year. Every time I read or see anything I love I think to myself “Oh, I definitely won’t forget that come time to nominate…”

16. I’m confused; if BDPSF had “something like a 15-way tie for 6th place, so I’ll just list down to 10.”, how did she determine which other 10 or so to toss?

    Per the methodology noted, “Works are listed in order of the most recommendations received” and if you look at the raw data, that appears to be the case (but I’m not going to double check the original threads etc…)

    Some surprising works nominated (Ancillary Mercy?) and lots of overlap with generally popular work (Seveneves, Uprooted, Penric’s Demon) Doesn’t seem too controversial…

17. kathodus: Doesn’t “There Will Be War” contain some non-fiction essays, making it eligible?

    The operational phrase here is “noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text” — wouldn’t you say this anthology is primarily noteworthy for the fictional text? Therefore, not eligible as a “related work”?

18. @Mike Glyer

    The operational phrase here is “noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text”

    Sheesh. I also missed “primarily” the first _and_ second time through. In my defense, I’m operating on just a couple hours of sleep today.

19. The Semiprozine category is a bit of an embarrassment and overall it demonstrates a point I’ve been trying to make with regard to Dave Freer’s ‘analysis’: the ‘bias’ against conservatives (if there is one) isn’t at the voting stage, or the nomination stage or the publishing stage etc, etc down the line but at the fundamental stage. There isn’t much of any kind of supporting structure of fanzines, semi-prozines etc fostering the talent the Puppies are looking for. The Best Novel recs also indicate this – the obvious puppy picks are from a small pool also – the difference here is there is a wider pool of indie/self-published works that may conform with the Puppy/Human wave/superversive aesthetic but there is no way of picking between those works – they tend to be much of a muchness.

    Put yet another way. Sad Puppies 4 shows how the Hugos would be if somehow the nicer Puppies (i.e. the one who genuinely believe they are trying to do something positive for the genre) achieved their goal. Dull, thin, predictable and uninspiring.

    Kudos to Kate Paulk for a transparent system and dialing back on the slate-like elements and for the hard work of compiling all this but…
    …this isn’t the future of the Hugos, it isn’t the future of SF/F, it isn’t going to bring many more people into Worldcon or wider fandom (except in opposition to it) and it demonstrates *why* the books/works weren’t getting nominated in the first place.

20. Mark on March 17, 2016 at 11:19 am said:

    Some surprising works nominated (Ancillary Mercy?) and lots of overlap with generally popular work (Seveneves, Uprooted, Penric’s Demon) Doesn’t seem too controversial…

    There were a number of people who were overtly not Puppies who participated (Kate Paulk had indicated everybody was welcome). I think those people operated in good faith but they had a bigger impact on the result than they may have expected.

    Even in categories in which LOTS of people made recommendations (e.g. best novel) there were so many one-off votes (i.e. one person who recommended one work and nothing else and nobody else recommended that same work) that the ‘winners’ were works with a tiny number of recommendations. i.e. the distribution of votes was so flat that a tiny hill is a noticeable landmark.

    Nothing got 30 nominations for example. The very highest was about 25.
    I’ve joked about Declan Finn’s self promotion but even that was pretty mild – it wasn’t like some massive campaign.

21. @Cally – looking at the spreadsheet, it seems that the BDPSF list “tiebreak” just takes the first five in alphabetical order.

    @Camestros – the lack of a Puppy support structure of fanzines/semiprozines must contribute to the difficulty of getting nominations to coalesce around particular titles; there doesn’t seem to be anywhere for the buzz to develop.

22. I think it’s an improvement over last year. I bet compiling it was an exercise in discovering what a wide but shallow pool of nominations (very little overlap) looks like. It’s great that the recommendations were open to everyone and everyone’s recommendations were counted equally; they seem to have faithfully followed through on that promise even when the outcome was very different from previous Sad Puppy slates. Kudos for that.

23. The Sad Puppies 4 list is to me, an example of how hard it is to do awards recommendations well. This is not news to anyone who has been paying attention.

    The flatness of the recommendation distributions supports the desirability of more members nominating for the Hugos (c.f. the influence on SP4 of the relatively small number of “overtly not Puppies” recommending, not to mention the influence of Declan Finn’s self promotion). This is not news to anyone who has been paying attention either.

24. 1) Naomi Kritzer”s cat pictures please I think is over the line into novelette, and 2) she is certainly not a puppy.

25. Peter J on March 17, 2016 at 11:39 am said:
    @Camestros – the lack of a Puppy support structure of fanzines/semiprozines must contribute to the difficulty of getting nominations to coalesce around particular titles; there doesn’t seem to be anywhere for the buzz to develop.

    Yes, particularly in short fiction. Mad Genius does the thing it does but it is very much focused on aspiring book authors rather than short fiction.

26. Naomi Kritzer”s cat pictures please I think is over the line into novelette

    Clarkesworld says the story is 3,429 words long.

27. I agree with “meh”.

    This might have been worthwhile had it come out with more than a fortnight to go, but they did beat my prediction of March 31.

28. Well, that’s a mixed bag – a few items that are obviously self-serving crap, a few items that are actually pretty good picks, a few items that I haven’t seen before and might at least check out while I finish up my nomination lists.

    I don’t see any reason here to alter my behavior for the final vote. I suspect I’m going to be applying No Award somewhat generously again this year, but whether an item appears on this list or not will not have any effect on whether I put it under No Award on my final ballot.

29. TheYoungPretender on March 17, 2016 at 11:41 am said:
    1) Naomi Kritzer’s cat pictures please I think is over the line into novelette

    Aaron on March 17, 2016 at 11:55 am said:
    Clarkesworld says the story is 3,429 words long.

    @TYP, Naomi Kritzer’s other talked-about story this year, “So Much Cooking,” was a novelette. Maybe you’re thinking of that one?

30. @Aaron, Lenore

    Head desk. Yes, you are both right. Thank You. And So Much Cooking is actually the one I was really on fire to nominate.

    The certainly, absolutely, not a puppy thing stands.

31. I really, really wanted to nominate Cat Pictures Please because cats, but I thought the story was a little… one-dimensional? I liked it, but just not enough to nominate it. So Much Cooking, on the other hand, I really loved. That’s on my list.

32. If someone care for a crowd-sourced list, with better level of participation, at least for best novel, the goodreads’s one is not bad.

    https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/88604.Hugo_2016_Eligible_Works

    Or one could just wait for the hugo shortlist, i’ve been told that was the whole business was supposed to be about.

33. Howls of outrage! Gnashing of teeth! Whaling for scientific research! CHORFs and Puppies living together! End of times for the Big 5 Publishers!

    Whatever.

    Oh wait. Can’t use that.

    How about a standard shrug.

34. My annotations to the Sad Puppies 4 art nominations.

    Best Fan Artist

    Otaking77077 – TIE Fighter animated film (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN_CP4SuoTU)
    A very good piece of work! I didn’t think of looking at fan animations, but this is definitely worth considering. I’ll add it to 2015hugoart.

    Karezoid (Michal Karcz) – http://karezoid.deviantart.com/art/Within-The-Choir-of-Ascending-Spirit-571475023
    He’s also on the Rabid Puppies list. The image Vox used is not eligible, this one is. He’s what I call a photoshopologist, and IMHO he’s not good enough to be on the ballot given the other concept artists out there.

    Michael Callahan – http://www.callahanvisual.com/galacticwarfighters/zl8qd59i0iczlgvsm79u4rfqnxxa7q
    On the RP list, too. He’s actually doing something kind of interesting with posing action figures and taking pictures of them. Should I add him to 2015hugoart?

    Piper Thibdeau [sic: should be Thibodeau]
    I already had him. I’m somewhat surprised, I wouldn’t have thought his (mostly light-hearted and cute) style was to their taste.

    Best Professional Artist

    Abigail Larson
    On my list

    Sam Weber
    On my list

    Frank Cho
    This is more what I expected. Cho has been trolling this year, but he’s also the sort of comic artist whose website is called Apes and Babes.

    Larry Elmore
    Someone rec’ed him to me, but I couldn’t figure out which works are 2015, if any.

    Dustin Nguyen
    Difficult to figure out which works qualify, but doable. I’ll add him to 2015hugoart.

    Richard Anderson
    On my list.

35. So they actually have some decent stuff in there, and it’s NOT A SLATE! It’s ACTUALLY based on stuff people enjoyed! There are even some bona fide SJW’s in there. Congrats to Kate for not screwing it up like her male predecessors! She handled it just as she said she would, in an open process.*

    (I really am honestly complimenting her on this. Well done.)

    Other than the fact that several of their suggestions are ineligible in those categories. Offhand, the Redacted is not a Related Work, Scalzi withdrew from nominations, and ISTR someone said Sci Phi didn’t meet eligibility requirements. But that’s not Kate’s fault, rather the nominators’.

    I agree it came out late, but since this was based on what people actually had read, maybe the nominators have been keeping up.

    Not being a slate (huzzah! a Puppy understood the objection!) I think the works mentioned can be evaluated on their own merits. Like OGH. 😉

    (Except Fan Writer, of course, which is entirely bullshit.)

    I didn’t know about the Cliff Simak story and will have to track it down. So this list has been valuable to me already.

    I predict the things from here which make the Hugo ballot will be (just like last year) either stuff that everyone liked (Star Wars, Novik) or stuff that overlaps with Rabid.

    * Except I don’t understand the BDP Short note either. She should have put them all in if there was a tie, or left them all out. What did she personally decide to leave off? I mean, they may have been worthy of omission, but I’d like to know.

36. Mike:

    Please rescue my link-heavy comment when you have a chance …

37. So I guess my question would be…what was the point of this exactly? I mean, having eschewed obvious bias on the part of the nominators, and having chosen not to create a slate, and having decided not to ally themselves with the Rabid Puppies, and having in all other ways apparently given up on the various forms of bad-faith action that characterized the three previous Puppy campaigns…they produced a list of recommendations pretty much like anyone else’s. It even has the Puppy Poster Child for Sci-Fi That Only Gets Nominated Because It Ticks the Right SJW Checkboxes, Ann Leckie.

    I mean, I agree with everyone who says that it’s really, genuinely, legitimately great that they’re not acting in bad faith, and yes, real kudos to Paulk for reforming an ugly and nepotistic process. But doesn’t this pretty much retroactively invalidate all the Puppy arguments? If an open, transparent Puppy recommendation list doesn’t look anything like the Puppy slates of previous years, doesn’t that just pretty much admit that anything that takes the actual desires of wider fandom into account isn’t going to resemble the things that Puppies have been saying all along that the wider fandom really wants?

    Basically, doesn’t SP4 just kind of prove that there’s no need for a Puppy movement at all?

38. Much better than last year

39. How does Saturn Run get in to best new writer? Is it SF only, or does Ctein make it go that way as (IIRC) he’s more of an artist than a writer? Or Sandford doing other NY Times bestsellers doesn’t remove it from consideration.

    It’s an OK read but doesn’t feel like 50 years into the future.

    I’ve read quite a few on the list, the one that’s really really bad IMO is “And You Shall Know Her By The Trail Of Dead” – Brooke Bolander – it’d have been dated as hell back in the late 1980s, now its just embarassing, plus Peter Hamilton used a very similar “twist” in one of his shorts.

    Also not a big fan of the boringly long way to a small angry planet.

    In the webcomics, I really don’t get the love for Stay Silent Stay Still or Saga, but that clearly puts me into a minority.

    Apart from that, at least it’s a mixed bag of stuff and more than 5 per category, so well done to Kate Paulk.

    I think it also shows the diversity overall of peoples opinions, and why the RP/SP slates last year were so successful – ask 2 people, you get 6 different opinions, so any sort of brigading has a disproportionate effect.

40. All three of their editor suggestions work for Baen?!

41. @Alexvdl,
    [INSERT SNARK HERE]

42. Presumably those are the only 3 editos Baen has?

43. John Seavey: Basically, doesn’t SP4 just kind of prove that there’s no need for a Puppy movement at all?

    It certainly looks that way, doesn’t it?

44. How does Saturn Run get in to best new writer?

    Only science fiction or fantasy works are considered for eligibility purposes.

45. That’s how David Anthony Durham was eligible for and won the Campbell (he had previously published three volumes of historical fiction)

46. Mike:

    The operational phrase here is “noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text” — wouldn’t you say this anthology is primarily noteworthy for the fictional text? Therefore, not eligible as a “related work”?

    Noteworthiness is entirely in the eye of the beholder, so provided there is something other than fictional text to point to, I don’t see it can be declared ineligible. Perhaps the stories in this collection are very dull, while the factual articles are interesting. Actually, given what I’ve seen of similar books, that’s quite plausible. But even if it weren’t plausible, it’s an interpretation which couldn’t be ruled out.

    Kathodus: What other category is it eligible in?

47. @Andrew M – Actually, looking at it, I realize it’s Pournelle who’s eligible as editor of the collection. I was conflating the editor with the work.

48. Aaron and Joe Sherry: Also Lev Grossman, who had previously published a mainstream/mystery novel.

    As to the point: I suspect the point is that they couldn’t just stop, as that would be to concede that the CHORFs had won. So, they have an open recommendation process, some decent stuff gets on their list, the CHORFS don’t object to it, some things get nominated, some things win, they say ‘There, that proves we were right’, and then they either stop, or further moderate their activities until we end up with something no more threatening than the Locus list.

49. Did they misspell Jim Minz’s name or did you?

    Or is it a sneaky tribute to Baen’s proofreading standards?

50. Cally wrote: I’m confused; if BDPSF had “something like a 15-way tie for 6th place, so I’ll just list down to 10.”, how did she determine which other 10 or so to toss?

    Mark wrote: Per the methodology noted, “Works are listed in order of the most recommendations received” and if you look at the raw data, that appears to be the case (but I’m not going to double check the original threads etc…)

    The thing is, in a tie, one generally either eliminates all or none of the things that were tied. Not half of them. Eliminating half of the tied works by where they fall in the alphabet seems an unusual choice to me. It’s a webpage; she’s got effectively infinite space. Why not just show all the tied 6th place works?
    Still, props to the organizers for backing away from a slate, and for transparency (modulo that wierd BDPSF thing).

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