Tag Archives: Jay Maynard

Pixel Scroll 9/15 Scroll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — scroll!

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(1) On this day in history —

September 15, 1949: The Lone Ranger TV series debuted with American Clayton Moore and Canadian Jay Silverheels.

(2) It’s a small world. How small? Ann Leckie, while plugging David Steffen’s Long List Anthology Kickstarter, show how small in this startling admission:

If you’re a longtime reader, David Steffen’s name might sound familiar. He runs the Submission Grinder, an online sub tracker for writers, and he is also the current champion of Ferrett Steinmetz’s Rejection Challenge. He received a rejection to a story some five minutes after he submitted it. The submission was to Podcastle, and was very short, and was timed exactly perfectly for the slush reader to respond to it almost immediately. I know this because I was the slush reader in question. High five, David! I’m exceedingly glad you’re doing this antho.

(3) The first film Alfred Hitchcock worked on, once believed lost, will be shown publicly this week.

A “lost” Hitchcock film that has not been shown publicly for nearly 100 years is being screened this week at the British Silent Film Festival. Three Live Ghosts (1922) was one of the first films that the young Alfred Hitchcock worked on and had been thought lost forever.

It has just been discovered in a Russian archive and is being publicly shown thanks to Laraine Porter|, of De Montfort University Leicester’s renowned Cinema and Television History (CATH) research team. It is one of dozens of screen gems being shown as part of the festival – the UK’s largest event dedicated to silent films, supported by the British Film Institute. Laraine, who has organised the three-day film festival at Leicester’s Phoenix Cinema, said: “No-one has seen this since 1922 and many Hitchcock scholars thought it was no longer extant. He was credited as a title designer, but it is likely that he would have been involved much more than that. “When you read his interviews he is talking about helping out and advising, and in those days it would have been a much more communal atmosphere on set. ?“What is also interesting is the role that his wife, Alma, played because she was an editor and collaborator yet received little attention.”

(4) A wonderful video about Penguin Random House midnight launch of Terry Pratchett’s The Shepherd’s Crown.

(5) Gizmag says it’s time to sell you the Star Wars Devon Dark Side Watch.

Companies the world over are clamoring to release licensed merchandise ahead of the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The recent Force Friday saw numerous products launched on an expectant public, but while most are priced between a few dollars and a few hundred dollars, rarer items come with a heftier price tag. One example of the latter is the limited-edition Star Wars watch from Devon, which will set Star Wars fans with very deep pockets back US$28,500….

Star Wars by Devon is actually based on the Devon Thread 1 model, but with plenty of Star Wars details added to ensure it will delight fans. Owners will be able to spot Darth Vader’s helmet, the wings of a TIE Fighter, and the Imperial Crest embossed on the crown.

star-wars-by-devon-watch-2
(6) Where’s the Official WSFS Ears-Are-Burning Fire Extinguisher? Kevin Standlee sure could use it about now.

I’ve been getting e-mails now talking about unspecified “rumors” about what happened at the 2015 WSFS Business Meeting. Well, the minutes aren’t finished yet…., but there’s no secret about what happened at the Business Meetings this year…..

(7) Jim C. Hines has a take about the Maynard/Valente exchange in “Cool Kids”

I get that a lot of us struggled growing up. We felt excluded, and we envied those who were more popular, more successful, more comfortable with themselves and their friends. Most of us continue to struggle. It’s part of being human. But this whole “Nerds vs. Cool Kids” thing is bullshit. It’s the same artificial and simplistic us vs. them, left vs. right, puppy vs. anti-puppy, Hero vs. Villain garbage that’s been poisoning people for ages.

There will always be small-minded people trying to divide the world into Us and Them. Some of these folks have found that dispensing poison earns them attention and followers.

That doesn’t mean the rest of us have to drink it.

(8) Disney is working towards a new Mary Poppins movie (not a remake or a reboot) says The Hollywood Reporter.

The new story will be set around 20 years after the tale of the classic 1964 movie that starred Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. It will also take its cues from the book series that P.L. Travers wrote. (The original, published in 1934 is based largely on the first book. The last book in the series was released in 1988.)

Rob Marshall, who directed “Into the Woods” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” for the studio, will helm the new feature, which will also be a musical.

Songwriting team Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who worked on “Hairspray” and “Smash,” will compose new original songs as well a new score.

David Magee (“Life of Pi”) is board to write the screenplay.

As detailed in Disney’s “Saving Mr. Banks,” Travers’ had testy relationship with Walt Disney over the adaptation of the original. But the studio is working with her estate on the new movie.

(9) Not everyone appreciates astronaut and baseball fan Terry Virts as much as he deserves. Virts arranged to present a space-worn Orioles jersey to team manager Buck Showalter. But what was Buck’s response? He wanted to know —

“Do you have rubber gloves when you take it? It’s not like it’s been on the moon or something, right? … You don’t know what bacteria from Mars is up there or something. Next day you wake up and your arms are ate off or something.”

(10) Alexis Gilliland’s Rosinante series lives again in this review by James Davis Nicoll.

But I would credit his Campbell win to the fact that those two novels, The Revolution from Rosinante and Long Shot For Rosinante , really are fun little books, books I was certain I would not regret revisiting after a gap of twenty-two years 3.

(I do understand that’s like saying “Don’t worry, I know what I am doing” while playing with burning plastic.)

(And I hope including the parenthetical sentence spares you from unrealistic expectations of reading a nostalgic puff piece….)

(10) Lorraine Devon Wilke’s “Dear Self-Published Author: Do NOT Write Four Books a Year” at the Huffington Post has elicited much scoffing from some indie published sf writers – and now Baen novelist Larry Correia has deconstructed it in “Fisking the HuffPo because writers need to GET PAID”.

The thing is “good” is a relatively meaningless measurement. Ringo’s fans think they’re good enough to give him mid six figure royalty checks twice a year. Kevin [J. Anderson] lives in a castle. I’m pretty sure the average HuffPo writer considers me a hack, but then again, I get paid, and HuffPo writers don’t (no, really, I was shocked to learn that HuffPo only pays in “exposure”).  

That’s a knockout line as long as you don’t remember Correia is delivering this fisking free of charge on a blog.

[Thanks to both Marks, Will R., Martin Morse Wooster, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]

Pixel Scroll 9/11 ETA: The Scrollers Support Me in Email

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(1) James H. Burns recalls the effects of 9/11 on Broadway in “Delphinus, in the Northern Sky” (posted in 2012).

It’s eleven years later, and we’re still here. Still able to perform, or write, or otherwise create, or, also wonderful, to be able to embrace those passions.

I was just thinking of the guts it took for the actors who resumed their places on the stage so soon after that day in September.

Remember the courage it took, for some of us, just to walk down the street. And these folks were resuming one of the toughest challenges, in the arts.

(2) Melbourne has a website that maps every one of its city trees. Citizens can report a particular tree’s condition and get the city to attend to it. The website has a button “Email this tree,” short for “Email the city about this tree.”

Except, as fans will do, many take the label literally, and email the tree about life, the universe, and everything.

People around the world have been e-mailing trees in Melbourne to confess their love.

As part of the Urban Forest Strategy — implemented to combat the steady decline of trees following a 13 year drought — the city assigned all of the Melbourne’s 77000 trees individual emails.

The idea was residents could use these emails to report trees that had been vandalised or were in a severe state of decline.

Only, people decided to make another use for the email and began writing love letters to their favourite trees….

Weeping Myrtle, Tree ID 1494392

Hello Weeping Myrtle,

I’m sitting inside near you and I noticed on the urban tree map you don’t have many friends nearby. I think that’s sad so I want you to know I’m thinking of you.

I also want to thank you for providing oxygen for us to breath in the hustle and bustle of the city.

Best Regards,

N …

Variegated Elm, Tree ID 1033102

Dear Elm, I was delighted to find you alive and flourishing, because a lot of your family used to live in the UK, but they all caught a terrible infection and died.

Do be very careful, and if you notice any unfamiliar insects e-mail an arboriculturist at once.

I miss your characteristic silhouettes and beautifully shaped branches — used to be one of the glories of the English landscape — more than I can say.

Melbourne must be a beautiful city.

Sincere good wishes

D

The Urban Forest Strategy will see 3000 new trees planted in Melbourne each year and since its implementation in 2012, 12000 new trees have been added to the city’s urban landscape.

(3) Step inside Crew Dragon, SpaceX’s next-generation spacecraft designed to carry humans to the International Space Station and other destinations.

(4) Major league baseball’s Pittsburgh Pirates welcomed back devoted Batman fan A.J. Burnett by sending up the Bat-Signal.

(5) Need a little adventure in your life? Tor.com is seeking an in-house publicity coordinator.

This person will work with publicity and editorial departments and contacts throughout all of genre publishing, developing plans for comprehensive book coverage on Tor.com and assisting with publisher and author outreach. They will also be responsible for encouraging and moderating conversation between readers on the site and on social media.

This is a full-time position working in our New York office. Ideally, we are looking for a candidate with at least 2 years of publishing experience, who is outgoing, extremely organized, and detail-oriented. Applicants should be both highly enthusiastic and knowledgeable about science fiction and fantasy across a range of media….

(6) Did I forget to mention – issue 24 of Hugo-winning fanzine Journey Planet, the Richard III theme issue, is available online. This issue contains a series of articles by Steven H Silver, Joan Szechtman, Chuck Serface,  K.A. Laity,  Ruth Pe Palileo and  Pixie P.as welll as pieces by editors James Bacon and Chris Garcia. The cover, some interior and technical art work was provided by Autun Purser, a full-time deep sea ecologist, who has created a series of travel posters, advertising travel to destinations from unusual fiction – the “Fantastic Travel Destinations.”

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(7) Kevin Standlee shares several examples that show why Hugo Administrators aren’t activists.

  1. 1989 and A Brief History of Time (Scroll down and click “further detail” for a bit more information.) In 1989, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time had sufficient nominations to make the final ballot. The Administrator ruled it ineligible, as the definition of Best Non-Fiction Book (the title of the category now known as Best Related Work) at that time said that the book had to be about “science fiction, fantasy, or fandom,” and thus the Administrator ruled that science books weren’t eligible. This decision was controversial. There were attempted changes to the WSFS Constitution that year that were eventually rejected, IMO mainly because nobody could agree on a consistent proposal. It took several years of argument, but eventually the 1996 WSFS Business Meeting passed (and the 1997 meeting ratified) the change of the category from “Best Non-Fiction Book” to “Best Related Book,” thus:

Any work whose subject is related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom, appearing for the first time in book form during the previous calendar year, and which is either non-fiction or, if fictional, is noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text.

Note that ABHOT would have been eligible under this wording.

(8) Naturellement !

(9) These Black Mouse Printing Titanium Steel His and Hers Band Couple Rings are cute as the dickens and go for only $59.

Black Mouse rings

(10) Cat Valente in a comment on Jay Maynard’s award proposal at Black Gate

…Because it’s simply not right to say a good story has no message. Story and message are not separable, hostile camps demanding loyalty only to one or the other. A good story has themes. A good story is about something. A good story is not only about things that happen one after the other, but about why they happen, and how, and to whom, and how all those things interconnect. And all that can happen WITH ray guns and explosions and buxom princesses. It happens literally all the time. One does not kick the other out of bed for eating crackers.

The author always, ALWAYS, communicates their own culture and experience through their fiction. There is no writing without that cultural electricity animating it. It’s not good or bad. It just is. We cannot help it, we are human. To say that Ancillary Justice is message fiction and undeserving but Time Enough for Love is not is to say that some of those communicated experiences are good and should be promulgated and some are worthless and should be cast aside. And I don’t think there’s anything in the world that should be cast aside and never written about.

However, no one, not even the terrible, no good, very bad SJWs, has ever said that the best stories are ones where the “message” overrides the good story. Everyone wants a good story. Everyone wants to sink into a novel and get totally wrapped up in the tale. There is no need to split into camps on this topic because there is literally no argument. Everyone wants the same thing.

The difference lies in the fact that for some people, a story that communicates an experience that they are unfamiliar with, whether a gendered one, or racial, or sexual, or even literary, jars them out of the story and makes it harder to get wrapped up in it. I can even use my powers of empathy to understand that, because it jars me out of a story when I come across a message about how shitty and/or unnecessary women are, because I am a woman and I like to not feel like I am shitty and unnecessary. But unfortunately, for some people, me just writing a story that draws on my life experience IS political, because my experience isn’t theirs, and the central presence of women in a story is, for them, a political act….

(11) Ruth A. Johnston, author of Re-Modeling the Mind: Personality in Balance, was interviewed by L. Jagi Lamplighter at Superversive SF about her interpretation of the Hugo kerfuffle. It’s part of a series – later installments will apply her theory to characters in John C. Wright’s Night Land stories, and “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” as well as the larger Hugo/culture war picture.

Part One:  What Forces Drive the SciFi Culture Wars?

Q: In the Afterword to your new book, you suggest that ideas about personality might help us understand “culture wars” by showing how the sides just see the world differently.  What do you mean by “personality-based worldviews”? 

A: The thesis of Re-Modeling the Mind is that our brains can’t process all of the information that comes at us constantly, so each brain organizes itself around more limited options, depending on the neural strengths it already has. When we talk about “personality” we mean these limitations and abilities, which are usually clearly visible when we watch each other. We know ourselves this way, too. We know there are things we simply can’t take in, or if we can take in the facts, we can’t manage them to make decisions. There are things we pay close attention to, and other things we just can’t be bothered with. Personality is this very real neural patterning that filters the world so that it’s manageable.

But this means that our personalities also limit and even blind us to things other people can perceive and manage. We’re all in the same physical world, in the sense that we agree on where the objects are, so that we can avoid running into them. But at a more complex level, we really don’t all live in the same world. Our personalities can have such root-level different views of the world that we can barely have conversations. This is what I’d call a personality-based worldview.

I’m not a science-fiction reader, and I’d never heard of the Hugos until this year. But watching the ferocity of the battles made me feel convinced that at least some of this culture war is provoked by a clash of personality-based worldviews. In other words, probably the leaders and many supporters of each faction share some personality traits so that they all “live” in a similar world. In each faction’s “world,” its values are not only sensible but the only possible ones. Or if not the only possible ones, the only morally right or safe ones. This is why it’s so hard to have a conversation. It’s self-evident to each faction that its values are right, and the arguments offered by the other faction hold no water in their worldview. A lot of people on both sides feel that if So and So wins a prize, moral right or wrong will be rewarded.

(12) David Gerrold on Facebook is working out his own communication theory to explain “the recent squabble in SF fandom.”

…We now live in a world of self-organizing subcultures. Some of them are positive — organizing around the desire to address various challenges. Some of the clusters are negative, organizing around cult-like behaviors. Some are in the business of disseminating valuable information — some are in the business of misinformation and propaganda.

There’s a psychological phenomenon about new media — we give it gravitas. The first decade of any medium is the decade of education and assimilation. ie. We have to learn how to filter the information, we have to learn how to recognize that it is not an access to truth, merely one more way to be massaged. Example: The 1938 Orson Wells “War of the World” broadcast and panic. That happened while radio was still in its infancy for most listeners.

The internet is experiencing a prolonged childhood — most of us are still somewhere on the learning curve. We still trust too much of what we’re seeing on our computer screens, because we haven’t learned how to distrust it yet.

That’s the context in which we’re all operating. We’re being assaulted by an avalanche of data — we have to figure out how to mine it for actual information.

We have built the kind of technology that gives every person on the planet access to vast libraries of information and the ability to communicate with people all over the globe. But even if we’ve built a global village, we haven’t yet learned how to live in it. We’ve brought our prejudices and our beliefs and our parochial world-views.

Here, on this continent, we’ve built a cultural monomyth that carries within it the seeds of our own destruction — the mythic hero. We believe in John Wayne, the strong man who comes to rescue us. It’s a variation on the Christ myth. Or Superman. Or Batman. We’re incapable of being responsible, we need a daddy figure to sort things out for us. (The savage deconstruction of this monomyth is a movie called “High Noon.” It’s worth a look.)

Belief in superheros is an adolescent fantasy — it’s a way of abnegating personal responsibility. Whatever is wrong with the world, the Justice League, the Avengers, SHIELD will fix it.

The counterpoint is that whatever is wrong with the world — it’s not us. It’s THRUSH or SPECTRE or HYDRA or some other unnamed conspiracy. It’s always a conspiracy. …

(13) Steve Davidson has an advanced scouting report on next year’s Retro Hugos, which will be voted by members of MidAmeriCon II for eligible work from 1940.

But when it comes to the editor’s categories, we’re going to be restricted to one, that for Short Form.

Of course Campbell is the natural choice here, but take a minute to consider everyone who is eligible:

Mary Gnaedinger – Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Fantastic Novels (reprints)

Raymond A. Palmer – Amazing Stories, Amazing Stories Quarterly (reprint), Fantastic Adventures

Mort Weisinger – Captain Future, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories

Frederik Pohl – Astonishing, Super Science Stories

F. Orlin Tremaine – Comet

Charles D. Hornig – Future Fiction, Science Fiction, Science Fiction Quarterly

Martin Goodman – Marvel Tales/Marvel Stories

Malcolm Reiss  -Planet Stories

John W. Campbell Jr. – Astounding Science Fiction, Unknown

Farnsworth Wright – Weird Tales

None of the other editors had anything approaching the budget that Campbell had, yet Pohl, Hornig and Weisinger managed to put together some very fine issues from time to time (often relying on friends for copy at cut-rates), while Malcolm Reiss practically gave birth to the sword and planet sub-genre (not to mention introducing us all to Leigh Brackett!) with Planet Stories and several of the other magazines had a material impact on the field – if only by keeping certain authors and artists barely fed.

[Thanks to Mark (wait, not that one, the other one), L. Jagi Lamplighter, Martin Morse Wooster, and John King Tarpinian. Title credit to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]

New Award Proposal at Black Gate

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Jay Maynard has proposed “An Award for SF Storytelling” in a post on Black Gate, essentially the anti-Hugos, copying many of the existing Hugo categories and rules but purified of the tendencies Maynard disapproves.

The rationale for the (insert name here) Awards is simple. Over time, the Hugo voters have considered other factors than the most fundamental when evaluating a work. They have chosen works based on their political emphasis, or the race or nationality of the author, or other criteria aside from that which defines SF/F. Attempts to turn the Hugo Awards back to the foundations of SF/F have been met with derision and outright hatred. Despite their previous claims to the contrary, the Hugo Awards voters and others now say that the Hugos represent the World Science Fiction Society’s choices, not those of fandom at large.

The Novelette category would be eliminated, with short fiction receiving just two awards in the new system. There would be no editor or semiprozine categories. On the other side of the ledger, there would be a new YA Story category – one category for all lengths.

  • Best Novel – Written SF/F stories of 50,000 words or more in length.
  • Best Novella – Written SF/F stories between 5,000 and 50,000 words in length.
  • Best Short Story – Written SF/F stories 5,000 words in length or shorter.
  • Best Young Adult Story – Written SF/F stories of any length intended to be accessible to and enjoyed by SF/F fans under 18 years of age.
  • Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – Any SF/F story intended to be performed for an audience of over 90 minutes in length.
  • Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form – Any SF/F story intended to be performed for an audience in 90 minutes or less.
  • Best Graphic Story – Works of graphic art, with or without accompanying text, that tell an SF/F story.
  • Best Related Work – Any nonfiction or fiction work that is not itself a work of SF/F storytelling, but serves to advance the SF/F storyteller’s art.

Although he would make a logical ally for a new set of sf awards, none of Eric Flint’s suggestions for adjusting the novel category have been adopted — not that there’s anything keeping them from being considered in a later draft.

In the nominating phase, Maynard will implement the 4/6 and E Pluribus Hugo proposals given first passage at Sasquan. Then comes a most interesting twist — the finalists will be screened by a Judging Committee.

The judges shall evaluate each work solely by its storytelling. The judges may disqualify any work they find to have an emphasis on other than telling a good SF/F story. They may disqualify no more than three nominees in any category. The disqualified nominees will be replaced by reprocessing the nominating ballots from the beginning as though those nominees had never been submitted; the judges may not disqualify the replacement nominees. This power is expected to be used very sparingly, as the awards are intended to reflect the choices of fandom at large….

The Judging Committee shall consist of no more than five members. They shall be chosen by the Foundation Board of Directors, and selected for their knowledge of the fields of science fiction and fantasy and their commitment to uphold the ideals of the (insert name here) Awards. They may serve as long as they and the Foundation Board of Directors wish.

The final ballot will be voted on by the Single Transferable Vote method (which some traditionalists like to call “the Australian Ballot”).

Unlike the Hugo Awards, there will be no provision for No Award. (Take that, WSFSians!)

The awards will be administered by a nonprofit corporation with a 501(c)(3) tax exemption.

The voter eligibility rules seem difficult to reconcile with Maynard’s goal of truly representing all of fandom. To become an eligible voter for Maynard’s awards, a person must be vouched for by one or more existing eligible voters with sufficient status. A voter must have a “trust level of 1 or greater” —

When first registering to vote, a person’s trust level is 0. An existing eligible voter whose trust level is 3 or greater may raise or lower the trust level of up to three other people by 1 each, and this number rises by 1 with each additional trust level until a maximum of a trust level of 10 is reached. The undersigned, as well as prior recipients of a (insert name here) Award and current and past members of the Foundation Board of Directors and Judging Committee, may raise or lower the trust level of any person by 1. A voter may not raise the trust level of anyone who raised his own, nor of anyone in the chain of trust leading back to those holding unlimited trusting privileges.

What could be more welcoming?

Maynard still needs a name for his proposed awards, though he did express a preference:

Part of me wants to name it after Terry Pratchett and have the award be a silver asterisk on a nice mahogany base or some such, just to throw the asterisks back in David Gerrold’s face, but not only do I not know how Sir Terry would take it, the name would get people away from thinking about SF as well. I also want this to not be a Puppy thing, and that would detract from that.

Yes, it might. Have any successful awards been built on a revenge platform?

Puppies In Perpetual Motion

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(1) We begin with some choice misinformation from Charlotte Eyre’s “Five ‘no awards’ given at Hugos” on The Bookseller.

The groups [Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies] had allegedly paid for fans to go to WorldCon to have influence over the final winners, an accusation which lead authors Marko Kloos and Annie Bellet to withdraw from the awards, despite their work being nominated.

That’s a very confused accusation, to such a degree it has to be classified as a fabrication by Eyre. The Kloos and Bellet withdrawals, of course, happened back in April. The voting for the Hugos was over two weeks before the convention, and could not even potentially be influenced by someone’s physical presence at the convention.

(2) Lou Antonelli on Facebook

Some people have said I’m mad because David Gerrold snubbed me at Sasquan. That’s not true – I’m not mad that he snubbed me, because he didn’t.

He did offer to buy me a beer, but that I guess was little more than a rhetorical flourish. I’m sure he was very busy. It think it would have made a great photo, the pair of us quaffing brews – it might have even helped show some kind of reconciliation was possible. A missed opportunity, perhaps?

Bumping into him in the hallway outside an elevator, I absent-mindedly and rather spontaneously went to shake his hand. He refused, saying “I may have accepted your apology, but I haven’t forgiven you.” Realizing my faux pas, I turned tail and took off.

That’s not a snub, that’s him exercising his personal rights. He doesn’t have to be nice to me, and he wasn’t rude, just firm. I may have other complaints about how some things were done, but a beer and handshake weren’t two of them.

(3) L. Jagi Lamplighter in a comment on “Smeagol Neilson Hayden”

Folks,

First, I think John has made it sound a bit worse than it was…but this is not his fault. I did not repeat to him all of what PNH said because I did not him to get upset during the reception. (I was afraid he would be very angry if he knew someone had sworn at his wife.)

Mr, Nielsen Hayden did shout, swear, and stomp off…but he was shouting and swearing at/about John, not at me personally and, actually, as far as swearing, he just used the phrase “tell him to shovel it up his…” You can figure out the rest.

This may not seem like swearing to many of you…many folks speak that way normally. But I do not. Nor do people normally speak that way to me.

My first thought after he stormed off was; isn’t it interesting that he yelled at the one person in the room whose only reaction is going to be to pray for him.

I was not the least upset…but I did think it ironic that, of everyone present, I was the person who got shouted at. But I suspect Mr. Nielsen Hayden knows nothing about me personally, has never read my blog, and is unaware of the irony.

(4) C. Joshua Villines – “My Thoughts On An Award I Shall Never Win”

I’m not sure how any of this helps the industry or the genre. Just because my side “won” doesn’t mean that I can’t appreciate the value of thoughtfully-articulated voices presenting a loyal dissent. If, no matter what the other side says, we cannot listen to what they have to say because of all of the ways in which they are “obviously” wrong, how will we ever hear the things that they have to say that are right? How can we move forward in a way that makes speculative fiction fandom, and SF publishing, as broadly representative of the interests of readers and the politics of writers as possible?

Step one, I think, is moving away from slates and treating the Hugos as a battleground. Perhaps this is easy for me to say, since I know I will never win one, but I think it is abundantly clear that this conflict did not change anyone’s mind, did not broaden the tent of SF at all, and did not establish a framework for dialogue. The agenda of the Sad Puppies is a minority one. The more actively and forcefully they push it, the more aggressively their peers and the genre’s fans will push back. The slate-stacking strategy failed everyone.

What might help is establishing open and honest conversations – with clear rules against strawmen and ad hominem attacks – around the three Puppy concerns I placed in bullets, above. The conversation around popular pulp versus literary art has a long history in speculative fiction, and it is no more likely to be resolved in SF than it is in cinema or television or general literature. That doesn’t mean we should stop talking about it. Should we give equal weight to David Gemmell, Jack McDevitt, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Gene Wolfe? I dearly love them all, but is the writing of one inherently superior to the others because of popularity, or accessibility, or literary sophistication?

We should also look at the books we read and tell others to read.  Are there litmus tests? I know I have several. I don’t recommend books, even by authors I love, even by ones who are friends, if they contain graphic rape. Lev Grossman is a kind man with a style that makes me weep with envy, but I won’t go near The Magician King. On the other hand, despite my socialist politics, I still recommend Modesitt’s Recluce books, even though I think he’s trying to subtly convert me to capitalism. Surely most of us have litmus tests of one kind or another. Let’s be honest about them, and let our colleagues tell us what we’re missing out on as a result.

Let’s also put some thought into the value, and peril, of novelty. Speculative fiction thrives on pushing, challenging, and redrawing boundaries. It is the genre of limitless horizons, of finding new questions, of challenging old answers. Consequently, I think we should recognize that sometimes it is worth celebrating when someone does something new, and does it well. Ann Leckie’s treatment of gender drove me nuts in Ancillary Justice, but I loved the questions it raised for me when I thought about why it drove me nuts. In addition, she told a darn fine story, and told it well. There is enormous value in introducing a new idea in a way that gets people talking and asking questions. We should not lose site of that. But writing is also a discipline that is inherently conscious of history and tradition, and doubly so in a genre that explicitly builds on ancient, mythic structures. There are people reading speculative fiction who lead deeply conventional lives, and who love how those old stories reinforce their conventionality. Do they deserve a voice as well? At what point does our love of ingenuity silence them? Is it better to innovate, or to excel in craft? Are they mutually exclusive goals?

(5) Chris M. Barkley on Facebook

I was required to atternd the Hugo Ceremony Rehersal in the afternoon. Rajnar Vajra had asked me to accept for him if his novelette, The Triple Sun, was honored.Our masters of ceremonies, GoH David Gerrold, Tananarive Due and the ceremony staff put us through our paces, showing us how to carry the Hugo Award, hitting our marks on stage and what to expect as the show progressed. I found out a few hours later that someone STOLE the practice Hugo! WUT????? I hope it’s recovered, sooner or later. VERY BAD things should happen to that thief!

Chris’ post is an installment of his an extensive report about his Worldcon adventures.

(6) Lou Antonelli on This Way To Texas – “Back from Sasquan”

The usual suspects proved Larry Correia right as he claimed they were a tight inbred little social clique, by the way they reacted to the Sad Puppies. George R.R. Martin’s private invite-only “real” post-Hugo reception at an expensive rented historic mansion certainly clinched that. They proved Vox Day right when they nuked five of the most important Hugo categories rather than let “the wrong kind of people” win them. He said they’d do that all along, destroying the credibility of the award, and they did. They proved Lou J Berger wrong as he handed his “We are all fans” ribbons at Sasquan. No, we’re obviously not, and the people who cheered for No Awards at the Hugo ceremony proved that. I threw Berger’s ribbon in the trash as I left the hotel, along with all the others and my badge. No reason to bring home bad memories. Yes, you literary snobs, you got what you wanted. Happy now? Feel better? Wonderful.

(7) Darrell Schweitzer on Facebook

So now the Puppies are roadkill. I have to admit I predicted this, several times, right here on FB. The reason for their defeat is not, I think, politics at all, but the same reason that the Scientologist effort failed once they got Hubbard’s BLACK GENESIS on the ballot in 1987. This forced people to read it, after which there was no hope of winning. BLACK GENESIS finished sixth in a field of five, lower than No Award, which came in 5th. Sheer awfulness proved its undoing. I think that is what happened to the Puppy slate. It was clear from the Philadelphia SF Society Hugo Predictions panel (which was a No Award sweep) that fans who knew nothing about the controversy just found the material just outrageously bad. (The PSFS novel choice was THE GOBLIN EMPEROR, which I suspect will prove to have finished 2nd or 3rd.)

(8) NPR – “’Sad Puppies’ Fail To Stuff Ballot Box At Hugo Awards”

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

There was no love for puppies at this weekend’s Hugo Awards. The sad puppies are a group who say the fan-chosen science fiction and fantasy awards have become too liberal and inclusive, so they nominated their own slate of candidates. And as NPR’s Petra Mayer reports, Hugo voters had other ideas.

PETRA MAYER, BYLINE: Over the past few years, more Hugo awards have been going to women and writers of color. The sad puppies – mostly white, mostly male – came together as a backlash. Right now it’s relatively easy to get a work on the Hugo ballot, so the puppy slate pretty much took over this year, causing months of controversy. But when it came time to hand out the iconic silver rocket ship trophies on Saturday night, Hugo voters chose to give no award in five puppy-packed categories, including best novella and best short story.

The night’s big winner was Chinese author Liu Cixin, whose book “The Three Body Problem” was the first work in translation to win the Hugo for best novel. Award organizers have now approved a rules change aimed at making it harder to nominate slates, though, it won’t take effect for two years. Petra Mayer, NPR News.

(10) Nathaniel Givens on Difficult Run – “Lots of Hugo Losers”

And yet the Sad Puppy / Rabid Puppy tactics obviously were a mistake. First, as I said, there’s the immense problem with The Three-Body Problem not even making the ballot. Sure, taste is subjective, but this book was really, really good. More importantly, however, it’s a book that was originally published in China in 2008. You want real intellectual diversity? Well there you go: a book that is literally off the American socio-political map. Additionally, the Sad Puppies again and again defended many of their choices (like Kevin J. Anderson’s The Dark Between the Stars) by referring to the author rather than the work. Best novel is an award for best novel. It’s not some kind of lifetime achievement award. So the repeated references to Anderson’s contribution to the genre (he’s written over 100 books) were not only irrelevant, but a real give-away that the Sad Puppies 3 slate had basically no serious thought behind it. It was just a haphazard collection of books a few of the Sad Puppies folks had happened to read last year, without sufficient regard for quality of the individual works.

As a result, the anti-puppies movement was able to easily cast the Sad and Rabid Puppies as invaders who had come to ruin the Hugos. Their hysterical accusations that the Puppies were Nazi’s were silly, but their accusation that the Puppies were ruining the awards had real validity. Sad Puppy opponents insisted that the only solution was for fandom to rise up in righteous wrath and repudiate the incursion by voting “No Award” above any and all Sad / Rabid Puppy nominations.4 This surge was quite strong. Nobody knew how strong until the votes were announced this past weekend, but–according to some preliminary analysis at Chaos Horizon–the breakdown of the record-breaking 6,000 voters went as follows:

  • Core Rabid Puppies: 550-525
  • Core Sad Puppies: 500-400
  • Absolute No Awarders: 2500
  • Primarily No Awarders But Considered a Puppy Pick: 1000
  • That sums up to 4600 hundred voters. We had 5950, so I thin the remaining 1400 or so were the true “Neutrals” or the “voted some Puppies but not all.”

(11) Matthew Bowman on Novel Ninja – “The Hugos, Now With No Mask to Hide Behind”

My take away, thus far, is pretty simple. The Puppies absolutely have a legitimate grievance, and the vile slander that came out vindicates them. Furthermore, the “No Award” campaign clearly crossed a line from a legitimate attempt to punish the bad tactics of the Puppies to a witch hunt when, for example, it No Awarded the Editor categories.

Thousands of people gathered for the convention, far more than normal; tens of thousands have been paying attention, for the first time in the Award’s history. They’ve all seen this play out. It’s made mainstream media outlets. It’s been trending on Twitter and other social sites. More and more people have found out about it.

This year’s Sad Puppies campaign was about bringing more attention to the Hugo Awards. It has succeeded precisely because the other side — which I have taken to calling the Leucrottas, after a mythical animal that hunts humans and dogs, solitary because even fellow leucrottas can’t stand their own company — have crowed to the world about how nasty the Puppies are. And so the world has seen the ugliness of the Leucrottas.

In the interest of protecting women and minorities, they have hurt them. In the interest of increasing diversity, they have clung to exclusivity.  To protect against invaders, they have destroyed their prize. To proclaim their enemies are racists and hate children, they have embraced racists and support pedophiles. All in the name of fiction; but only the fiction they approve of.

(12) Tom Knighton – “My Thoughts on the Hugo Awards”

The award ceremony itself…hoooooooooo boy.

Look, I joke on religions all the time.  Yes, including my own.  In fact, I’d share a Presbyterian joke, but none have made it out of all the relevant committees just yet.

However, the people who opposed the Puppies are the ones who scream about intolerance.  We’re allegedly so intolerant, yet who made the joke about Hare Krishnas?  Now, I’m not saying I was personally offended, because I wasn’t.  What I was is better described as “baffled”.

You see, I’m baffled by the people who would eviscerate me for a Muslim joke–the same people who objected to a proposed host from last year who might have told a fat joke–and yet are silent on a Hare Krishna joke on the Hugo stage.  What I hate more than anything is hypocrisy, and that’s what I see right now from these people.

(13) Tom Knighton – “From Me to Patrick Nielsen Hayden”

It’s simple.  John C. Wright wasn’t hiding from anyone.  He was there, he was visible.  PNH could have sought him out to have his words directly with John.  PNH is one of Tor’s editors, for crying out loud.  John, as is his wife, are Tor authors.  I find it hard to believe that if he had words to say to John, he couldn’t find a way to contact him and say them.

He didn’t.

Instead, he does it when Jagi offers an olive branch?

Look, I’m not saying he had to accept it.  He didn’t.  But lashing out at the spouse of the man you have an issue with?  Pathetic.

Had he said, “I’m sorry, but your husband has said some things that i simply can’t find it in myself to forgive,” I’d understand. Oh how I’d understand.  I think all of us who fought on the side of the Puppies understands it.  We’ve been called some horrible things too.

But that’s not what he did.  He yelled and cursed at a woman who offered remarkable little of the critical dialog that John did, or Larry did, or Brad did, or even I did.

I’m not saying that he has to forgive or forget.  I’m saying that he at least needs to be a man about it.  Say it to John, or even say it publicly, but don’t take it out on a Tor author who was trying to be a professional and bury the hatchet who isn’t responsible for any of it.

(14) Laughing Wolf on Blackfive – “The 2015 Hugo Awards: Some Thoughts”

As I said, the response and results were not unexpected.  I honestly thought No Award would take at least two more slots than it did.

Where I’m not sparking is with how things were handled.  First, there was the biased and childish panel that preceded the Hugos.  Second, was the awards ceremony itself.  That one or more Hugo nominees walked out early (along with other professionals) says it all.  The deliberate and willful disrespect, and bias, shown says it all for me.

So, for me, it’s on.  For those of you ignorant enough to buy into the Social Justice Bullies lie that the Puppies were all angry white men, I simply point out that the Puppies were far more diverse than those that opposed them.  For a group of “neo-nazis” as an employee of Tor books called them (us, honestly), there sure are a lot of mutts in the group, and a lot females too.  In fact, one author attacked in this manner actually fought real neo-nazis and injustice, and has the wounds to show it.  Another author also schooled the idiots with the real deal.  I further note that only one, repeat ONE, reporter writing on the subject of the Puppies had the courage and integrity to actually interview the wonderful Sarah A. Hoyt, who is not a white male.  That Larry Correia is far more a mutt than I am, and hardly a lily-white male (unlike most of those attacking him).  That strawman Larry is not just a jerk, but an asshole and I want at least ten of the ribbons saying he is a jerk.  I could go on, but it is easy to pick apart the slanders, libels, and lies heaped upon them, Brad Torgersen, and others — for those with interest in the truth that is.

The blatant disrespect and insult offered to Toni last night is the final straw.  You attacked a friend.

So, I’m in on Sad Puppies 4.  If you want to destroy WorldCon and the Hugo awards, you will have your chance and you will own the results.  My hope, faint though it is, remains to make the awards truly relevant again as a means of promoting good writing, editing, and other efforts regardless of the message.

(15) Jay Maynard on Black Gate – “Dear Conservatives: Don’t Let the Door Hit You On the Way Out”

No more. It’s clear to me that a conservative cannot be accepted as an SF fan. One must kowtow to the leftist gods of diversity for its own sake and tolerance for only the approved subjects and equality of outcome, or else one is not a true SF fan. An author must be some oppressed minority to be considered worthy, and old white men need not apply.

Diversity? Great, as long as we all think in lockstep. Bring up diversity of thought and you’re immediately accused of only wanting to read stuff written by old white men.

I’m other things besides an SF fan. I’m a pilot, and a ham radio operator, and a computer geek, and more besides. I’d long thought that Worldcon was to SF fans what EAA’s Airventure at Oskhosh is to aviation geeks, and what the Dayton Hamvention is to hams: the premiere event of its fandom, to which any devotee should endeavor to go at least once in their life.

But I see no reason, now, to expend any effort at all to go to a Worldcon where those like me are plainly unwelcome. Oh, they’d happily take my money, but I’ve already had the experience of paying to go to a con where I was quickly made unwelcome — and that one didn’t require much in the way of travel. Paying a kilobuck to be miserable for a weekend is an experience I’d just as soon pass up.

Go ahead, fans. Hate Vox Day all you want. I am as repulsed by his misogynistic writings as you are (I’m not convinced he’s not simply trolling; to me, though, that is no excuse, as I consider trolls to be the scourge of the Internet). Don’t conflate me or the other Sad Puppies with him.

I am a conservative, and proud of it, but I also agree with the Left on subjects they hold near and dear to their hearts. As one example: I’m pro-choice. We’re not all monolithic in our beliefs.

But we’re all being treated that way, and repudiated by polite fannish society. The works we like are being held up as examples of our favorite writers’ inferiority and wrongthink to boot. “Your Taste Sucks”!

(16) Solarbird on Crime and the Forces of Evil – “and there was NO AWARDing”

Those of us who have been calling for a NO AWARD vote above any slate nominee for the Hugo have, I am told, won. We have doubled the number of NO AWARDs given throughout the previous history of the awards, and blocked the meaningful slate candidates pretty much in their entirety. We are being congratulated, and for that, I thank you.

But I cannot consider this winning. I consider it… oh, let’s call it the least bad possible disaster given the position in which their machinations put us. That’s important. It shows that the large influx of supporting members who voted were not a Puppy rush. It shows that World Science Fiction Society fandom cares about the Hugo awards quite a bit, in fact, and thank you very much. It shows that gaming the system and violating decades of voting tradition will not be rewarded. Well done, fandom.

But it is not a “win.” It is not even a victory, because it does not end anything.

(17) Frank Wu on Amazing Stories – “An Olive Branch for the Puppies”

I may not agree with everything you think but I’m big enough to let you say them. I’m not afraid of words. Science fiction should be a big enough tent for everyone.

What I am opposed to, is block voting. This is considered rude and will get you no-awarded every time.

My proposal?

What if you Puppies gave up block voting in exchange for Non-Puppies seriously considering your work for recommendation lists?

I’m defining block voting as the presentation of a finished slate, with the call or command for others to vote the slate, perhaps even without reading the pieces, for lols or to advance an agenda.

A recommendation list – and I’ve done this and been on them – is an acknowledgement that there are thousands of stories published every year, but, hey, look, I found a couple I loved. Maybe you’d like them, too, and if so feel free to nominate them. If not, whatever. One year I told everyone over and over how awesome Greg Van Eekhout’s story “In the Late December” was. Not because Greg asked me to, not because of his politics (which I know nothing about), but because I really loved that story. A recommendation list is a suggestion, not a command.

So, Puppies, my offer is this. If you send me some of your best 2015 publications – email them at [email protected] – I promise to read them and evaluate them on their merits. Regardless of your politics or anything else you may have said in any other venue. And if I like it (which is more likely if it has robots, spaceships, or aliens), I will add it to my recommendation list.

(18) Craig Engler’s eyewitness report of the Hugo Award ceremony — “I was there to witness the Hugo Awards (not) burn and here is what I saw”

In an especially smart (and kind) move, Gerrold asked the audience to applaud not for each individual nominee but for all the nominees in the category as a whole after all the names were read. That helped ensure no single nominee was ever booed despite the animosity of the voting process. The only time someone did let out a  boo…during a No Award result…Gerrold politely asked them not to and it didn’t happen again.

Gerrold also took on the burden of announcing the categories with No Award himself instead of having a special presenter on stage to do it. The five times no award was given, Gerrold handled it expeditiously and with no fanfare so the audience (and the nervous nominees in attendance) could move past the moment quickly. This helped focus the night on the 11 winners and not on the controversy.

For its part the audience was in tearing high spirits, applauding and cheering, laughing at the jokes and fun little skits (including having an award announced by a Dalek), focusing on the positives and spending little time on anything negative. Since there were still a lot of awards that were handed out, the night didn’t seem particularly shortened or bereft. Indeed, by the end it was full of such acceptance and good cheer that it was hard not to leave with a smile and a feeling of good will.

So, far from being “nuked,” these Hugos turned into the biggest, most well attended and most fun awards in history. They not only brought new attendees into the fold but also enticed lapsed people like me back to come together in a fantastic night of celebration. While it was unfortunate that some categories had no winner, it wasn’t catastrophic. Indeed it was fandom’s way of saying, this award has merit and needs to be earned and will never simply be given out to a slate because some people got together and mustered a certain number of voters. And if at times that means an award won’t be given in a category, that’s okay. The integrity and spirit of the Hugos is more important than that. We are not burning a village to save it, we’re simply inviting more people to the village and celebrating.

(19) Amanda S. Green – “Who should we be worried about impressing?”

To me, the only ones I need to be impressing are the readers. As I said earlier, it is clear from looking at the different genre and sub-genre lists on Amazon and elsewhere that there are more readers out there who want entertaining books than there are those who want books that put message first and story comes somewhere below that. No, I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a message in fiction. Let me repeat that for those who tend to skim until insulted: It is fine to have a message in your fiction as long as you remember that your message won’t be heard if you don’t write a story that entertains and holds the readers’ interest.

So quit whinging and whining over the decline of the field. Quit whinging and whining over the decline of literary numbers. Instead, ask yourself why? Do a bit of market analysis and realize that readers — just like folks who go to the movies — want to be entertained. That is what I strive to do. That is what so many other authors strive to do. So, to all the fans, thank you for your support. To the Fans and authors who want to keep their little cliques, go ahead. Keep doing what you’re doing. I’m not going to try to convince you to do otherwise. For me, I’m going to do my best to remember that it is the fans who really count.

(20) Andrew Trembley on Facebook

Comedy gold seen elsewhere: “RequiresHoyt”

(21) Alexandra Erin on Quietly Thinking Aloud – “Unfortunately for your side George R.R. Martin was caught”

I tell you, it has been seriously amusing to watch the narrative take shape around this.

Background: George R. R. Martin has been attending WorldCon since 1971, I believe when he was up for a Campbell (new writer award). He did not win, but as no more than six people are considered finalists for this honor each year and each writer has at most two years of eligibility, he recognizes this as such a signal honor that he lists it on his website alongside his awards and other honors.

(Contrast this with Larry Correia, who seems to feel like his own Campbell nomination constituted a contract that was broken when he didn’t win it.)

A few years after that, Martin, being a frequent flyer on the Hugo ballot, instituted what he called the Losers’ Party, for all the nominees who don’t win. There are alcohol, and ribbons. It sounds like a lot of fun, and of course, it’s all in good spirit… it is an honor to be nominated, and the Losers’ Party just reinforces what rarefied air one breathes in making it to the ballot.

This year, Mr. Martin decided to hand out his own award, which he calls the Alfies, after Alfred Bester (the author, not the Babylon 5 character named after the author).

He apparently made them out of hood ornaments, which award trophies are often mockingly compared to. That right there should tell you how serious this business was.

Now, Mr. Martin is not the president of science fiction and fantasy. He does not occupy a position of leadership or authority with WorldCon. He is not affiliated with the Hugos except insofar as they are occasionally affiliated with him. This party that he instituted is a Hugo tradition, but it’s not a Hugo institution. In short, the party is no more an official ceremony than a guy who looks like Drunk Scary Santa Claus is an official presenter, which he is no more than the hood ornaments he’s passing out are official trophies.

George R. R. Martin, in his private capacity as an individual human being, thought he would have some fun and recognize some individuals he thought could use some recognition/a laugh.

And a few Puppies “caught him” doing it, and immediately started casting around for “evidence” and wringing their hands with glee over the thought that they’d found proof that the Hugo award ceremony was a scam, that the fix was in, that the real awards were being handed out by Drunk Scary Santa Claus to the people ordained by the hive mind…

It’s funny, but you know, this is the difference between the Sad Puppies and everybody else.

(22) George R.R. Martin on Not A Blog – “Hugo Aftermath”

Then I hit a bump. Two bumps, in fact. Both editing categories went to No Award.

I had picked Mike Resnick in Short Form and Toni Weisskopf in Long Form, and indeed, each of them finished above all the other nominees in the first round of voting… but well behind No Award. This was a crushing defeat for the slates, and a big victory for the Puppy-Free ballot of Deirdre Moen. Honestly? I hated this. In my judgment the voters threw the babies out with bathwater in these two categories. Long Form had three nominees who are more than worthy of a Hugo (and one, Jim Minz, who will be in a few more years), and Short Form had some good candidates too. They were on the slates, yes, but some of them were put on there without their knowledge and consent. A victory by Resnick, Sowards, Gilbert, or Weisskopf would have done credit to the rocket, regardless of how they got on the ballot. (All four of these editors would almost certainly have been nominated anyway, even if there had been no slates).

((Some are saying that voting No Award over these editors was an insult to them. Maybe so, I can’t argue with that. But it should be added that there was a far far worse insult in putting them on the ballot with Vox Day, who was the fifth nominee in both categories. Even putting aside his bigotry and racism, Beale’s credential as an editor are laughable. Yet hundreds of Puppies chose to nominate him rather than, oh, Liz Gorinsky or Anne Lesley Groell or Beth Meacham (in Long Form) or Gardner Dozois or Ellen Datlow or John Joseph Adams (in Short Form). To pass over actual working editors of considerable accomplishment in order to nominate someone purely to ‘stick it to the SJWs’ strikes me as proof positive that the Rabid Puppies at least were more interested in saying ‘fuck you’ to fandom than in rewarding good work)).

(23) Otaku-Kun on Habibane.info – “Hugo Awards 2015 – the aftermath”

Make no mistake, EPH or not, it is still perfectly possible for Vox Day and whoever else to interfere with the results next year. There’s nothing I see in EPH that can forestall another wave of Noah Wards, since ultimately the outcomes are still gameable due to the small numbers involved. The time of hiding in the Shire is over – the world beyond has taken notice, and the stakes are higher.

What are the solutions?

For one thing, the Hugos were given a gift in terms of mass media coverage this year. From Wired to WaPo, Puppygate was media catnip as a proxy in the culture wars. This means that there are several dozen journalists who are now experts on Hugo arcana and who are an audience that can and should be cultivated. More importantly, all of their readers are now marginally aware of what the Hugos are, and the involvement of luminaries like GRRM also helps raise that awareness above background noise. Press releases to these journalists and direct advertising in their publications will maintain the interest.

Also, what about more aggressive marketing to Communities of Geekdom? For example, Comic-Con (and it’s satellites around the country, like Chicago’s version last weekend). AMAs on Reddit? A pitch to the writers at Big Bang Theory? How about a big party somewhere, a mass book signing of Hugo nominees?

(24) Brad R. Torgersen – “Emmanuel Goldstein is leaving the building”

4) The media — and the counter-media — see you as fodder for advancing their narratives. I’ve been talking to reporters and media people of various types for seven months. I was only ever interesting to anybody because I could help them tell the story they wanted to tell. Not the story I wanted to tell. The story I wanted to tell usually wound up on the cutting room floor. Now, in some cases — especially with the conservative counter-media — I didn’t mind too much. I agreed with what they were saying in most instances, and I was thankful for the coverage that helped me more than it hurt me. Because the negative coverage was plentiful, and too often I found myself offering the opposition-friendly press a pint of myself, for them to merely use a few drops; and then only if they felt it spun the way they wanted it too. Which was always against me and what I was fighting for….

12) You can’t control the fact that you have enemies, you can only try to make sure that they are the right enemies for the right reasons. I remember when my wife came home, bewildered, that afternoon when she first realized just how bad the opponents on campus had gotten. She couldn’t understand it. She wasn’t a threat to them at all. Or so she thought. But it didn’t matter how much she tried to mend fences or make offerings of olive branches, the enemy hated her guts. All she could do was push forward and focus on why she’d gotten into student office to begin with, and she succeeded handsomely. I do hope that of the committed enemies I’ve made — the men and women who now make it their business to spite me personally — that the dividing line between them and me, is values. It’s pretty evident that a wide gulf seperates me from the opposition; on perceived objectives. There was an Honest Opposition, because not everyone on the opposition side became an actual enemy. Only some did. And of those who did, I think it’s because my values so utterly clashed with the values of my enemies (and vice versa) that the matter was irreconcilable.

(25) Ann Leckie – “2015 Hugos”

I’ll start here: Thanks so very much to all the people I ran into over the weekend who either told me they were rooting for Ancillary Sword, or told me they were sorry it didn’t win. I love you all.

But the fact is, it never was going to win. If it seemed even briefly as though it might this year, it was because of this year’s…unusual aspects. Had the final ballot been what it ought to have been, I think ideas about AS winning would have been pretty easily dismissable. I find this pretty ironic, actually.

I knew from the start that a lot of voters were going to be thinking that I already got mine last year. And you know what? They’re right. Last year, my book did not just win a couple of awards. It stomped all over Award City making Godzilla roars as bullets bounced off its chest. That’s enough Win to last me for quite a while, and I am entirely happy to see other books and other writers get the acclaim and attention they deserve. The nomination was my win–I knew that going in, and was perfectly happy with that.

So I went to the Hugos as a nominee, with all the validation that brings, but also without any nervousness or suspense, so I could actually enjoy all of that validation. And it was awesome.

Yeah, there were some skunks at that picnic. The voters gave their very clear opinion of those skunks. And Mithras willing, E Pluribus Hugo will pass for the second time next year and in 2017 we’ll be back to ballots that are full of works the voters love. That will doubtless include some skunk favorites, but that’s as it should be. I just don’t think anyone should be able to make the Hugo ballot nothing but their own choices.

(26) Mike Selinker on Schrödinger’s Blog – “A Game Designer Tries to Fix the Hugo Awards”

Although I found the factual premises to be pretty thoroughly wrong, reading the author’s analytical process was entertaining.

[Second of five points.]

2. Don’t pay people to do things you don’t want them to do.

The above rule was coined by legendary game designer Jonathan Tweet, and I teach it to all my collaborators. At heart it requires you to look at what your game’s economy does and whether you want it to do that.

You might say, “The Hugo Awards doesn’t pay anyone!” And, Mr. Strawman, you’d be wrong. The Hugo Award has a value. Heck, even a Hugo nomination has a value. The ability to say “My Hugo-nominated novel…” is a real thing of worth. Ask anyone who has one.

So what’s the value of a Hugo nomination? I can’t say. But let me ask it like this: If I gave you a onetime chance to pay $2000 so that you could say you were a Hugo nominee, would you do it? And what if you could crowdsource the $2000? What if a mere donation to your GoFundMe of $40 could allow a friend of yours to say she helped you achieve your dreams?

And then, after all that, what if I told you that doing this can get a whole lot more of your friends nominations for no additional cost? Would you do it then?

And even if you wouldn’t do that, do you know someone who would?

Well, this analysis on the Amazing Stories site says it would work.

If it’s accurate (and I am not inside-baseball enough to know), then the problem of inequity is simply defined: the Hugo Awards are worth more to people who don’t have them than the price of acquiring them. For the price of $1600, you can suborn enough votes—in this case, 40 of them—to get a short story nomination; for a mere $6000, you can suborn the 150 votes to get a novel nomination. And once you have enough to get a novel nomination, you can get all the nominations you want.

So to solve your inequity problem, you should do one of three things:

  1. Lower the value of a Hugo nomination so that no one wants it that much
  2. Raise the price of buying a Hugo nomination so that no one can afford to game the system
  3. Be more equitable in your nominations

(27) Alison Herman on Flavorwire – “How This Year’s Hugo Awards Turned Into a Battle Over Race, Gender and the Soul of Fandom”

Blogger Chaos Horizon matched up the votes with Beale’s recommendations to arrive at his estimate that the Rabid Puppies made up about 10% of the final Hugo vote at slightly more than 500 members, with the Sad Puppies making up another 10%. During the nomination stage, those numbers were enough to guarantee five categories’ worth of all-Puppy nominees — in Best Novella, Best Short Story, Best Related Work, Best Editor for Short Form, and Best Editor for Long Form — and, according to iO9’s detailed analysis, greatly alter the makeup of the Hugo ballot.

But the Hugos ultimately didn’t go in the Puppies’ favor. In between the nomination announcement and WorldCon itself, the convention experienced a massive spike in membership. Over 11,000 people bought memberships, an all-time high, and nearly 6,000 people voted — 65% more than ever before, according to Wallace. Until this weekend’s award ceremonies, however, it wasn’t clear whether the new voters were heeding the Puppies’ rallying cry or reacting against it.

The numbers clearly indicate that most voters fell into the latter camp. Every single one of the all-Puppy awards resulted in a No Award vote; Chaos Horizon estimates that a full 2500 voters, nearly half the total voting pool, voted “No Award” across all of these categories on principle. Another 1000 voted “No Award” in at least some categories, indicating they were sympathetic to the anti-Puppy coalition and creating a consensus that dwarfed the Puppies’ vocal minority.

(28) Lou J. Berger on Facebook

WE are all Science Fiction.

When the fans who love the more popular Science Fictional stories abandoned WorldCon for other venues, those left behind became, by default, more literary. Literary fiction talks mostly about the human condition and is skewed to internal conflicts. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve handed out awards to many a square-jawed hero blasting bug-eyed monsters, but the overall trend has been left-leaning.

There’s nothing wrong with that, say the Puppies, until somebody notices that the Hugo awards are still labeled as the “best” of Science Fiction. And that’s when hackles raised.

We are a small community, even so, and our numbers, overall, aren’t huge. Who is to say that literary, left-leaning fiction is the “best?” Just because it USED to be the venue for handing out Hugo Awards, does it still mean that WorldCons are the measuring sticks for what is the “best” in all of SFdom? Even with it being so huge nowadays?

Our community is reeling, and it began when the Puppy movement started (rightfully) questioning the claim that Hugos represented the “best” of Science Fiction. It went off the rails when they pointed accusatory fingers and called the good people who have been attending, running, volunteering for, nominating and awarding Hugos “SJWs” and made it sound dirty.

What’s wrong with allowing others to love a type of Science Fiction not exactly like the Science Fiction you happen to love?

NOT A GODDAMN THING!

And that’s where we are, today. We have two large factions of angry people who both love Science Fiction and who both are passionate, and who both want to find satisfaction.

The mistake is assuming that we have to denigrate or push down the “other” side in order to “win” our side.

(29) David Gerrold on Facebook

Oh, one more thing. About those asterisks? Those asterisks raised almost 2700 dollars for Sir Terry Pratchett’s favorite charity, The Orangutan Foundation. Money will be delivered this week. Pictures will be posted.

(30) Steve Leigh – “Without an Obelix”

One item that bothered me about the Hugo Award ceremony was the use of the “asterisk” plaques. While I’m not at all sympathetic to the tactics of the Puppies (of either variety), the asterisks symbolize a slap in the face of every person who was nominated for a Hugo this year, puppy-nominated or not. I read the pre-Hugo comments by various bloggers about how if anyone won a Hugo this year, it should be considered as “with an asterisk” — as in, not deserved because the competition this year was changed and diluted by the packing of the nominations by the puppies.

To some degree, and in some categories, works and people who might have otherwise been on the ballot were indeed missing, but there were also deserving works and people nominated. I defy anyone to argue that Sheila Gilbert (who has been on the final Hugo ballot for three years running now in the Long Form Editor Category) doesn’t have the credentials to deserve her place there. She’s just one example… and not the only one.

For the convention to commission the asterisk plaques, and then to announce during the ceremony that they were going to be distributed to all the nominees this year is a blatant insult to every single nominee, with the sub-text being “Hey, if you were nominated, you didn’t deserve your nomination, and if you managed to win, well, your Hugo doesn’t mean anything.”

In my opinion, the creation and use of the asterisk plaques were entirely abusive and absolutely not in the spirit of the fandom that I love and consider myself part of. Shame on whomever decided that was a good idea, and those who supported it.

(31) William M. Briggs – “Social Justice Warriors! Marvel Announces New Movie At #HugoAwards”

Marvel’s new Social Justice Warriors! preview took the Hugo Awards by storm. And so did the team itself, who shocked and gratified attendees by using their mutant powers on the award ceremony itself.

Rather than hand out five major awards, which might have gone to authors who produced works of readability and quality, the social justice warriors of the Social Justice Squad slithered into action and, in an exquisitely staged show, mock-battled the Forces of Intolerance and squashed the awards.

The team snatched the best novella, best short story and three others out of the hands of judges mere seconds before they were given to deserving writers instead of favored minorities. The heroic team immediately called a press conference at which they shouted in unison, “Diversity!” And then they vanished!

Hugo Award judges who helped organize the faux-battle were quoted as saying, “This is good for speculative fiction. Our awards were in danger of being known for merit. With the help of the Social Justice Squad, everybody now knows our real purpose is inclusion and equality.”

(32) Vox Day on Vox Popoli – “What will Vox do?”

But in the interest of further demoralizing the already-retreating enemy, I’m not reluctant to reveal one of the new weapons in our arsenal. That’s right. The Evil Legion of Evil is training a corps of Amphibious Assault Otters. Armed with acid-filled squirt guns and supported by a crack squad of Attack Manatees, they will emerge from the rivers and literally melt the faces of the SJWs attempting to burn bridges as they continue to retreat. Good day, sir! I said good day!

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