By Chris M. Barkley
HATE: it has caused a lot of problems in this world, but it has not solved one yet.
–Maya Angelou
In the waning hours of July 31, my partner Juli Marr and I submitted our ballots for this year’s Hugo Awards. The next morning, I attended the funeral mass of Margaret Kiefer, a longtime member of Cincinnati Fantasy Group. As I sat and filled out my ballot, I could not help but think of the life she led, my life in fandom and the events leading up to Puppygate.
Margaret Ford Keifer worked as the principal’s secretary for Loveland City Schools for over 30 years. She was also a volunteered her help for the Loveland Historical Society Museum, the Cincinnati Pops, and a longtime member of the Loveland Women’s Club. In addition, she was a member of St. Columban Church for 58 years. Margaret was a founding member of the Cincinnati Fantasy Group and attended 66 consecutive Midwestcons, the last of which she attended this past June, just weeks before her death. She was also the last surviving member of Cincinnati’s only Worldcon, Cinvention, which was held in 1949.
At Margaret’s service, I heard several testimonials to her strength, fortitude and devotion to her community. Warren McCullough, one of her former school principals lauded her as the woman who saved his educational career. Several previous principals had left recently and he was the third hired in three years for a troubled elementary school that no one wanted to send their children. He described that first meeting where he was introduced as being very tense and after what he called a “rousing call to arms” to save the school, his speech was met with dead silence. At that point, Margaret Keifer, who was seated in the front row of the assembly, stood up and faced them down and loudly declared, “I will follow this man…and I will take the first bullet for him, too!” McCullough stated that his career as an educator took off after that incident and was incredibly grateful for her support.
Her parish priest, Father Lawrence Tensi, adamantly refused to call her a mere volunteer, but as true disciple in the purest sense of the word, as one of the few people in the community who could be counted on time after time to organize, work and deliver whatever was needed.
Contrast this with Mr. Beale, who, on the surface seems to have some moderate amount of talent as a writer, editor and publisher, who has gone out of his way to trumpet and advance notions of homophobia, sexism, racism with provocative slander, libelous insults and threats, wildly delivered with what I can only describe as a pseudo- intellectual flair. However, those talents, which could have been used for the betterment of literature and culture, are instead being used to soil and defame it. Beale’s latest attempt at seeking attention, a worldwide call for a boycott of all TOR authors and books, is as pathetic as it is futile.
All of the activities of the Sad and Rabid Puppies might have been easily laughed off, had they not made good on their threats and effectively gamed the Hugo Award nominations this year.
Millions of words have been spilled, pounded, spit out, spit upon, leveraged and expounded upon this subject by thousands of commentators, bloggers, pundits and literary critics since the nominations were announced.
I tell friends and acquaintances that are not familiar with sf fandom that this is not the first fannish feud to spill out into the consciousness of the public, nor will it be the last. With internet connectivity, hair trigger tempers and the willingness of people to stay up WAY PAST their bedtimes to correct stuff on the internet, it is certainly the most public display of asshattery in fandom that general public has ever seen.
I consider what Brad Torgenson, Larry Corriea and Theodore Beale have collectively done, is a direct attack on what fans, writers, editors, publishers and literature itself. And I consider this attack on fandom and the Hugos is a personal attack against me.
My involvement with the Hugo Awards began back during my high school days, when my good neighbor Michaele loaned me her copy of the SF Book Club omnibus edition of The Hugo Winners Volumes 1 and 2 edited by and with introductions by Isaac Asimov, which covered nearly all of the short fiction winners from 1955 to 1970.
(A side note: I wish all of the Hugo winning stories were still readily available, if not in book form, at least as inexpensive ebooks or linked online, so that everyone can appreciate the wide spectrum of authors, stories and styles that have won over the decades.)
These stories blew away my teenaged mind. What I completely ignored at the time were Asimov’s references to the conventions themselves. They referred to these World Science Fiction Conventions, were held in different cities in the US and overseas but not where future conventions were going to be or how to attend them.
Eventually, in 1976, my best friend Micheale and I found our way to the 27th Midwestcon and found out firsthand what conventions were all about. I missed the 1976 Worldcon, MidAmericon in Kansas City, but I attended the first of my 26 Worldcons the next year in Miami Beach.
Over the years, I have volunteered my time to help or head up various Worldcon Press Offices and other duties on 17 occasions, charged with trying to explain fandom and the Hugo Award to the mainstream press of the host city and accommodate fan writers as well.
However, I feel as though my important contributions to the Hugo Awards have come in the last sixteen years. I, along with a number of fellow fans and activists in fandom have been at the forefront of some of the fundamental changes in the Hugo award categories.
We fought for these changes, to the Best Dramatic Presentation, Best Editor categories and the creation of the Graphic Story and co-sponsoring the Fancast category were necessary to keep the Hugos diverse, fairer, engaging and most importantly, relevant in the 21st century.
I must admit, I was in a somewhat of a state of shock when the nominations were formally announced back in April. Almost immediately, some factions inside fandom wanted the Hugo Awards suspended immediately or stopped altogether. Others have organized to either shun or vote No Award in all the categories where Sad/Rabid Puppies nominees are dominate.
Then, as the story spread, news outlets, pundits and commentators outside fandom started to weigh in; Salon.com, Slate, National Public Radio and even the National Review went out of their way to get a grip on what most of them characterized as the ‘geek culture war’.
I do not believe in destroying the Hugo Awards in order to save it.
I repudiate the No Award movement and those that support it. I believe that a No Award given in any category damages the prestige and reputation of the awards. I will vote No award above a nominee in a category ONLY if I can determine if it is warranted by my personal standards and taste, NOT because it was part of a knee jerk reaction to what has happened or for any other political concern. Those who do so blindly, without any consideration of the work itself, are, in my opinion, NOT ethical votes. (And I can report that I cast at least one vote for a nominee in all of the fiction categories.)
Secondly, when an institution is under attack, you fight back. Not with irrational hate speech, subversion of the voting rules and threats but with reasonable speech, more impassioned defenses and more democracy.
I am heartened that from what I have observed, our communities of fans, authors, editors and artists have collectively risen above this controversy. The Puppy movement and their supporters wanted to prove a point; that a small number of voters can impose their will on an unsuspecting public. They have wholeheartedly made their point.
However, in doing so, the Sad-Rabid Puppies have lost the war. Despite their fervent claims, I think the tide of public opinion has turned decidedly against them. Fandom does not have to obsess about the Puppies and their overall effect because whatever influence they had has waned as the controversy has played out.
Their seemingly endless displays of ignorance, buffoonery, arrogance has not gained them any more traction or supporters for changing or eliminating the Hugos. Since the beginning of this crisis, Supporting Memberships for Sasquan were sold in unprecedented numbers. It is my fervent hope they were bought for the sole purpose of voting for the Hugos this year. I also hope that on the night of the Hugo Ceremony, those of us who have opposed this farce will be vindicated.
Science fiction, fantasy or literature as a whole, is not about the future or the past. It is all about the time it is written. It is about the consequences of change, for good or for ill. There will never be any definitive, wholesale agreement from anyone on what it means, what it should contain or what stands for; that’s a debate for historians, literary critics, fanzines and bloggers.
Personally speaking, I don’t believe in applying any sort artificial means of affirmative action to either the voting process or the awards, as the Sad Puppy contingent has asserted with their actions. And, if you think these sort of controversies all come from the conservative wing of fandom, I offer this, an amendment that was briefly considered by the 2009 Worldcon Business Meeting:
4.3.3 Short Title: Female Hugo Award Nominees
Moved, to amend the WSFS Constitution by inserting the following
into the end of Section 3.8: 3.8.nIf in the written fiction categories, no selected nominee has a female author or co-author, the highest nominee with a female author or co-author shall also be listed, provided that the nominee would appear on the list required by Section 3.11.4
This amendment, proposed by a feminist blogger named Yonmei, who was not in attendance at the convention and Hugo Award winning fan writer/editor Cheryl Morgan (who was). Yonmei conceived it as a way to spark a debate at the Business Meeting about the lack of women on the ballot and described on her blog this way:
…it occurred to me cheerfully that as a WSFS member, I could propose an amendment to the Hugo rules. A sort of Joanna Russ amendment. An “up yours!” amendment to all the fans so smugly certain that the only reason there are so many all-male shortlists in the Hugos is because men are just more excellent writers of SF/F than women are: if women were as good as men, this reasoning goes, there just naturally would be equal numbers on average from year to year.
As I recall (and anyone can verify by going to www.thehugoawards.org), the 2007 and 2008 ballots were particularly top heavy with male nominees. In retrospect, it would have been an interesting debate but a majority of those attending voted down the opportunity to debate the issue. I can only tell you that I voted against it because I did not believe that imposing a rather extreme measure at that point in time was unnecessary. I believed those nominations were aberrations and not the result of systemic sexism on the part of the fans voting.
Had she done any research at all about the history of the Hugo Awards, Yonmei would have known that these fans that she deemed as clueless, had also given the award on multiple occasions to the likes of Anne McCaffrey, Alice Sheldon (writing as James Triptree, Jr.), Ursula K. LeGuin, Vonda McIntyre, Susan Wood, Kate Wilhelm, Joan Vinge, C.J. Cherryh, Connie Willis, Lois McMaster Bujold and a host of others.
We can only speculate what Ms. Russ, a writer I admire and respect, would have thought about such an amendment. (For the record, I am of the opinion that there would have been a gratuitous amount of eye rolling on her part.)
You can read more about this kerfluffle and draw our own conclusions from this link from Mike Glyer’s File 770: https://file770.com/?p=1304
Take particular note of the exchange of messages between Yonmei and Jo Walton. It is typical exchange between someone who feels that her dogmatic approach and theory is superior to the experiences of the person who is actually in the situation. Dogma and opinions do not win arguments, logic, reason and facts do.
(You will also note, with some measure of irony, that Jo Walton went on the win the Hugo and Nebula Awards for her 2011 novel, Among Others.)
I never talked Margaret Keifer about Puppygate. I don’t even know if she was aware of the situation. I am fairly certain, knowing her, that she would have thoroughly disapproved of the actions of the Puppies. Her life‘s story stands in stark contrast to everyone involved, especially Theodore Beale’s.
I do not obsess about it but I have been wondering whether he really understands that a life is a legacy for those who follow him.
There is room in fandom for rational discussion, debate and even dissent. There is no room however, for empty rhetoric and false conjecture, death threats, bullying, hateful and blatant racism, sexism and gay baiting, which is what the Sad Puppies now stand for, forever tarred with the same brush as and the Rabid Puppy crew, whether they like or not.
Moreover, this means that while we may have to listen to the inane and idiotic diatribes of Theodore Beale/Vox Day, we do not have to endorse or accept them.
Margaret Keifer’s life is an exemplary example of what every fan’s, every person’s life should be.
What Theodore Beale and his followers have forcefully shown, is that they are incapable of empathy, kindness or human decency.
They have my pity, and little else.
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Hampus, the logo on my blog is just a cynical ploy to maintain my current traffic of thousands of puppy visitors per day.
Lydy, don’t look at me, I was quoting what they posted in the FAQ on the WSFS new business page.
and you are taking back the Hugos!
Your courage brings tears to my eyes.
Brian, do you realise that we can actually go read the FAQs and see that you are lying?
Brian Z,
Here’s what the proponents of the E Pluribus Hugo proposal have to say about that, as documented at the Sasquan site:
Portraying that as supporting slates is . . . not the most direct interpretation.
Lydy has this 100% correct. E Pluribus Hugo is about enfranchisement. I support it because it will result in a greater range of works and more voters seeing something they nominated on the final ballot. That will, I hope, encourage greater participation.
Idiosyncratic use of “quote” there, Brian.
Brian Z:
Sanction has two different meanings. I think you’re using the wrong one in discussing EPH,
Another day, another pile of lies from Brian Z. Business as usual.
Aaron: it seems like hes using a bigger shovel than usual, but I could be wrong
Brian Z. We have two possible courses of action, assuming we don’t want minority slates to overwhelm majority non-slate nominators..
1) Completely eliminate slates, by fiat. Throw out all slate ballots. This requires setting up an Anti-Slate Authoritarian Panel of Authority, Whose Judgments Are Final, with the authority to discard any Hugo nominations that they deem are slate nominations. NO FAN WILL TOLERATE THIS. You won’t. I won’t. Nobody will. This is the worst possible solution for the problem.
2) Mathematically work to find a fair system that means that people (all people, whether or not you think they’re a slate nominator) gets nominations on the ballot proportional to their representation in the nominating pool. This is what EPH does. (By the way, I posted better data on short fiction results over the the 2015 Hugos – Perspectives thread. Felice’s figures were over-pessimistic.)
3) Something undefined that Brian thinks is more effective. (Please, do feel free to explain exactly what you propose and how it will get results. Since the Rabid Puppies show no sign of stopping their behavior, your proposal must take historic Rabid Puppy behavior into account, as EPH does.)
You seem to be calling for disenfranchising nominators based on their politics or affiliations. Please correct me if I’m wrong. I’m not for disenfranchising ANYONE, even Puppies. Puppies have a right to nominate, too, and I refuse to take that away from them or anyone else.
If 20% of the nominators are Puppies, then they *deserve* their voice to be heard, to the tune of 20% representation. Just like everyone else.
Brian Z.: RP initially wasn’t going to copy the SP3 “slate of recommendations” model. The RP organizers were going to try to burn down the awards. They were talked out of doing that as a result of another group within fandom (the SP3 organizers) having a civil conversation with them and persuading them not to do it. (Remember that part.)
Yes, remember that part. Because that part is the pre-slate-announcement SP/RP collusion that Brad Torgersen has sworn up and down, until he is blue in the face, didn’t happen.
Your comment seems to indicate that you think that the Sad Puppies deserve a medal for colluding with the Rabid Puppies, and then lying about having done so. I think it merely indicates that they have no basis for complaining when people conflate the two groups.
It’s a mystery to me as to how the RP slate as published, which is full of mediocre to just plain unreadable works, differs from “burning down the Hugos”, for which you seem to think Puppies deserve commendation.
Not to mention that the story about the Sad Puppies persuading VD to not “burn down the Hugos” during the nomination stage is pure bullshit. As I recall, Day was announcing his intention to burn it all down, in those words, in comments in this blog, well after the nominations were announced.
Mind you, about a week later he was saying that he didn’t care about the Hugos at all, man, and he’s been silent about the subject ever since. [/sarcasm]
Not to mention that the story about the Sad Puppies persuading VD to not “burn down the Hugos” during the nomination stage is pure bullshit.
Yeah, having a “civil conversation” with Beale sure worked. After all, he hasn’t announced his intention to “burn the Hugos down” since well before the nominations process started. What’s that? He’s spent hundreds of pixels talking about doing exactly that? And so has the Marmot?
Oh, well I guess that shows just how well “civil conversation” works when one is dealing with the Pups. Well, maybe that’s just Beale. Perhaps one could have a civil conversation with Sad Puppies like Torgersen, Hoyt, and Correia. Like George R.R. Martin did. What? Torgersen was still banging on about CHORFs and SJWs despite Martin being unfailingly polite to him? And Hoyt kept screaming about Marxists under her bed? And Correia retrenched even more firmly in his ridiculous culture war bunker? I guess that “civil conversation” just isn’t something that can sway them either.
What was your recommendation again Brian? Oh right, civil conversation with the Pups. Yeah, that will work. This time they will listen to reason. Sure.
@Cassy B
It may be intolerable, but ASA-PAW-JAF actually has a pronounceable acronym!
@JJ
You reminded me of something that keeps on bugging me re the alleged “non-involvement” of VD in SP: How did the Castalia House works get on then? If I squint hard enough I can see the slim possibility of Brad choosing JCWs works on his own initiative (and some were actually suggested by his readers), and the same goes for Tank Marmot as a Baen author (despite no reader suggestions), but how did Jeffro come to his attention unless VD pushed him? I mean, there’s no sign of Brad being a fan of Car Wars or any other rpgs that Jeffro talks about on his normal blog, and what would lead Brad to have read a series on D&D on Castalia House?
Yeah, having a “civil conversation” with Beale sure worked. After all, he hasn’t announced his intention to “burn the Hugos down” since well before the nominations process started.
Brian Z is even more clueless than this. If you read the post on Mr. Beale’s blog that sent all the trolls over here, he has stated, in his typical frothing-at-the-mouth manner, that Social Justice Warriors/Wendigos/Wenches are the scum of the earth, and he and his Vile Minions intend to stomp them flat.
(Just an aside: Awww, gee. I’m so scared of just under 400 people scattered throughout the world and the USA, with a “leader” who apparently can’t enter the country again because of tax problems, and is trying to lead this so-called “war” from Italy or wherever the hell he’s at. Yeah, I’m just going to cower in a cave like the hobbits hiding from the Eye of Sauron. Not.)
As John Scalzi has pointed out, the best thing to do is ignore him. He’ll burn himself out soon enough, just like his Tor “boycott.” But the idea of reasoning with an irrational jackass like this is clearly off the table.
In the context of the continuing struggle to keep Creationists from cramming thinly-veiled religious dogma into science classrooms, “quote-mine” is the term-of-art used to describe the Creationist tactic of extracting a passage from its actual context to make it appear that the quote-mined writer said something very extremely unlike what they actually did say.
What BZ did here was a thoroughly typical example of quote-mining.
That’s a somewhat incomplete quotation to judge from, but I don’t draw the same conclusion as you. EPH was created because it was noted that slates are a problem. In my judgement of your selectively quoted use of the word “should” (it would probably be better if you quoted it in context?), I’d say the EPH creators are going on with their theme that slates are bad for the Hugos, BUT that legally banning slates is a nightmare that would end up with Hugo staffers doing slate hunts and throwing out ballots cast by voters in good faith…something impossible to distinguish from statistical analysis. IMO, a small number of really dedicated people who’ve read a bunch of works (even, specifically, five works) and sincerely think they are the best should NOT have their votes discarded simply because it’s impossible to tell them apart statistically from a group who voted for a list of 5 without reading it because they were reactionary toadies told to by an asshole.
To me it’s like seeing a town council talking about how the Westboro Baptist Church is making a nuisance around funerals by picketing them with their usual “God Hates Fags” signs. If Councilman X stood up and said that the WBC “should” be able to picket, because it’s part of their right to free speech, and making a law allowing the sheriff to summarily arrest them would be wrong no matter how revolting the WBC happens to be, I’d have to (reluctantly) concede he was right about it. If he then proposed a law stating that no picketer should approach closer than 40 feet to a funeral, I would sadly accept it as a necessary compromise…insufficient, since the mourners can still see the hateful signs, but much better than having the WBC assholes close enough to shout in mourners’ faces in their grief.
If I then leave the council and see a guy on the street shouting about how Councilman X is saying that the WBC “should” be allowed to picket, and that means that Councilman X approves of the WBC and similar groups disrupting funerals and wants more of them, and that passing Councilman X’s proposed law will mean that ALL funerals will soon be flooded with hateful picketers and therefore everyone should oppose Councilman X’s law with all their might…well, if the guy isn’t patently stupid (and he doesn’t seem to be) I do have to wonder if he is arguing in bad faith.
Cassy B.:
We have many possible courses of action, depending on how we believe the laws of nature and the whims of fandom operate. Even you came up with three. 🙂
That’s a somewhat incomplete quotation to judge from, but I don’t draw the same conclusion as you.
What Brian seems to want to skip over is that EPH recognizes that people voting for a slate are, in fact, voters. We may think they have bad taste and bad manners, but they are still casting votes. The point of EPH is not to disenfranchise them, but rather to try to prevent slate-voting from having a disproportionate impact on the results. If 20% of the voters vote for something, then they should have an impact on the results that is at least somewhat in line with their numbers. While EPH is not a perfect solution, it definitely ameliorates the disproportionate effect that organizing a slate has on the nominating results.
And that is what I think terrifies Brian about EPH. Despite his claims to be opposed to slates, his frequent references to how he would organize a slate of his own under EPH are far more revelatory than I think he realizes. He is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is: His pro-Puppy and pro-slate sentiments are readily apparent to anyone who has been paying attention over the last couple of months. He doesn’t like EPH because it will be effective, but even he knows he can’t say that and expect to get any kind of traction with the Sasquan voters, so he desperately tries to raise other fears. But since they aren’t his actual fears, they are incoherent and easily shown to be bullshit.
Continuing to smear and lie about people isn’t going to lead to any peace. On the one hand you bemoan activists acting to prosecute a change in the Hugos, while on the other – hypocritically – lauding your own actions in doing so.
Sad Puppies has helped make a point about the vulnerability of the Hugos to agenda pushing rather than merit, but people like you seem fine with that, so long as it’s your agenda being pushed.
If you want a reasonable debate in this as with the other aspects of the Geek Culture War (Gamergate, Atheismplus, unnamed clashes in comics etc) then you have to stop demonising the ‘enemy’ and calling them racist/misogynistic/fascist etc and need to start engaging honestly, because the smear tactics simply aren’t going to work any more.
All that outrage and annoyance you feel at someone else pushing an agenda onto the award is exactly what Puppies and others feel when you do it. Have some empathy.
Thank you very much for your service
“There is no room however, for empty rhetoric and false conjecture, death threats, bullying, hateful and blatant racism, sexism and gay baiting, which is what the Sad Puppies now stand for, forever tarred with the same brush as and the Rabid Puppy crew, whether they like or not.”
And yet who leveled the accusations against the Sad Puppies? Who called them misogynists, racists and homophobes? Why the good folks who had dominated the Hugos for so long!
I realize this is unpalatable to the taste of your koolaid, but Sad Puppies began when Larry Correia pointed out there was an extant sociopolitical bias in Hugo selections. The next year he proved it when the entrenched bureacracy railed against him. And this year, the crew of SP3 – which, by the way, consists of all races, personal preferences, and all genders – chose to promote stories they all liked. It was NOT a slate. That’s what occurred in the preceding years.
You know, it’s one thing to have a bias – everyone has biases. But it’s another to lack the personal integrity to actually refer to source materials that might convey a different story than the narratives you prefer to promote. You failed. And, you’re losing.
Grim — Empathy? Don’t make me quote your defence of rape in literature and RPGs back at you. How much empathy did you show in that case, and how much have you shown in your anti-SJW cavorting since then?
My moderately-enabled empathic sense tells me that at best, the Puppies have shown themselves to be a deluded rabble, at worst, cynical manipulators of the truth. Empathy isn’t magic, despite what bronies may tell you. Sometimes it just reveals unpleasant truths about someone.
Grim,
Continuing to smear and lie about people isn’t going to lead to any peace. On the one hand you bemoan activists acting to prosecute a change in the Hugos, while on the other – hypocritically – lauding your own actions in doing so.
Who, specifically, are you talking to, and who, specifically, are you talking about? Are you talking about Rabid Puppies smearing and lying about Worldcon voters? Or are you complaining about people smearing and lying about Rabid Puppies? I can’t tell from your words who you feel is attacking whom.
Sad Puppies has helped make a point about the vulnerability of the Hugos to agenda pushing rather than merit, but people like you seem fine with that, so long as it’s your agenda being pushed.
And hackers make a point about how vulnerable your computer is by loading it up with viruses. Does that mean we should thank hackers? Or work to stop the hacking?
If you want a reasonable debate in this as with the other aspects of the Geek Culture War (Gamergate, Atheismplus, unnamed clashes in comics etc) then you have to stop demonising the ‘enemy’ and calling them racist/misogynistic/fascist etc and need to start engaging honestly, because the smear tactics simply aren’t going to work any more.
Who, exactly, is smearing whom? You seem to be implying, here, that it’s the Rabid Puppies who are the victims. Which seems to me rather like blaming the computer owner for saying unkind thing about the hacker that trashed his computer….
All that outrage and annoyance you feel at someone else pushing an agenda onto the award is exactly what Puppies and others feel when you do it. Have some empathy.
What agenda, precisely, has been “pushed on” the Hugo Awards? (Until this year, anyway; we all know what happened this year.) Give examples, please. Is the short fiction and related works catagories in the Hugos this year representative of the works that you think should be winning the Hugos every year? Why, or why not?
I’m seeing an awful lot of generalize outrage here with absolutely no specific examples.
Grim: Sad Puppies has helped make a point about the vulnerability of the Hugos to agenda pushing rather than merit
That vulnerability has been in the Hugo nomination process for decades and was well-known to pretty much everyone. It’s just that up until the Puppies, no one has wanted to be the asshole who took advantage of it.
Grim: If you want a reasonable debate in this as with the other aspects of the Geek Culture War then you have to stop demonising the ‘enemy’ and calling them racist/misogynistic/fascist etc and need to start engaging honestly, because the smear tactics simply aren’t going to work any more.
Non-Puppies simply want the Puppies to stop gaming the Hugo nominations. Since the Puppies have made it clear that they have no intention of ceasing their table-overturning and crockery-smashing, Worldcon members are going to fix the vulnerability in the process.
If the Puppies think that a reasonable discussion is required, then the onus is on them to initiate it. They’ve had every opportunity to do that. But instead of doing that, they chose to game a bunch of mediocre-to-unreadable works onto the Hugo ballot. If Puppies don’t like being “demonized” for doing that, they shouldn’t have done it. If they don’t like being called racist or misogynist, then they should stop saying racist and misogynist things.
The Puppies’ smear tactics of claiming that a Sekrit Cabal has been controlling the Hugos have never worked, except to gin up outrage among themselves.
If you want a reasonable debate in this as with the other aspects of the Geek Culture War (Gamergate, Atheismplus, unnamed clashes in comics etc) then you have to stop demonising the ‘enemy’ and calling them racist/misogynistic/fascist etc and need to start engaging honestly, because the smear tactics simply aren’t going to work any more.
The problem is that no one is demonizing the Puppies.
Wright is a misogynist and a homophobe. This has been documented numerous times, most publicly in his nominated work Transhuman and Subhuman.
Beale is a misogynist, a racist, and a homophobe. This has been documented as well. His personal political philosophy also matches exactly with that of fascist organizations, which would explain his professed admiration of Brevik.
Williamson’s racism has been on display for all to see quite recently in the aftermath of the Charleston shootings.
Torgersen’s complaints about “pink and poofy” people and how people like Chu, Leckie, and Kowal could only have won their awards via secret affirmative action reveal him to have some fairly racist, sexist, and homophobic notions as well.
Your own apologia for rape is well-known. Your love of the farce that is GamerGate pretty much outs you as an entirely unreasonable person to boot.
And so on. Complaining that the Puppies have been “smeared” as being racists, sexists, homophobes, and misogynists when they are led by people for whom those are perfectly accurate descriptions kind of makes your claims look quite silly.
Further, the Puppies have no leg to stand on. Their claims about how the Hugo awards have been biased don’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny, as George R.R. Martin showed comprehensively, forcing Torgersen to make an embarrassing set of revisions to his position in response to actual facts proving him wrong time and again. The first step to “reconciliation” is that the Puppies need to start dealing in reality and not the fantasy they’ve spun in their minds.
But the more salient question is why should anyone care about the Puppies? The Puppies are a splinter group that most people look at, see the seething misogyny, racism, and homophobia displayed by the leaders of the “movement”, and are immediately repelled by it.
What we see now is likely to be peak Puppy, and even if it isn’t, who cares? Suppose the Puppies take over or even destroy the Hugo Awards. How will that affect the larger community? Tor will still publish more books than any other genre fiction publisher. People will still buy and read books you don’t like. Baen will still be a smaller company that markets to a small niche in the SF/F market. Castalia House will still be a joke. There are other awards, and those will still go to books that are regarded as being good, even though the Puppies don’t like them. Look at this year’s awards: Almost none of the Puppy picks have been honored by any of the other awards. Suppose the Hugos are destroyed. Do you think that will change? What will change is that another award will become the top dog, and fans will gravitate to that and still ignore the works of Puppy authors.
There is, in the end, no win state for the Puppies. You will never get what you want, not because anyone will rig the Hugos or anything like that. You will never get what you want because non-Puppy fans will simply move on from any Puppy occupied space and find something else that reflects their tastes, leaving the Puppies to stroke each others’ wounded egos in an otherwise empty room.
If you want a reasonable debate in this as with the other aspects of the Geek Culture War (Gamergate, Atheismplus, unnamed clashes in comics etc) then you have to stop demonising the ‘enemy’ and calling them racist/misogynistic/fascist etc and need to start engaging honestly, because the smear tactics simply aren’t going to work any more.
No — I have no desire to engage in a reasonable debate with you. All I desire is that you and your Puppy colleagues leave. Go start your own conventions and your own award system — your tastes are so different from the majority of Worldcon fandom it’s no wonder the stories you claim to love do so poorly.
We’ve read the drek that was finagled onto the final ballot, and find the majority of it unreadable — with plotting so plodding as to be laughable. Most of your so-called writers can’t write their way out of a brown paper bag, and the ones who can construct a coherent work produce pedestrian prose at best.
I have found no trace of the golden era of SF the Puppies claim to be longing for — at this point I would say that it was a legend in your own minds…
Brian Z can be annoying, but sometimes he makes interesting recommendations. My review of Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang is here.
“SJWs always lie.”
@Grim
Sad Puppies has helped make a point about the vulnerability of the Hugos to agenda pushing rather than merit, but people like you seem fine with that, so long as it’s your agenda being pushed.
Yes, they made their point quite well, by campaigning for works of no merit which pushed their agenda.
If you want a reasonable debate in this as with the other aspects of the Geek Culture War (Gamergate, Atheismplus, unnamed clashes in comics etc) then you have to stop demonising the ‘enemy’ and calling them racist/misogynistic/fascist etc and need to start engaging honestly, because the smear tactics simply aren’t going to work any more.
Well, it’s hard to engage honestly with someone who lies all the time. In his last exhange at George R. R. Martin’s blog, Brad Torgersen claimed every contributor to Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show has been “left in the cold” by Hugo voters (it took me half a minute to find five OCISM writers who were Hugo winners or nominees) and the same for the Writers of the Future winners because of its links to Scientology (ditto for the half a dozen WOTF winners I found who have been Hugo winners or nominees, including the very first WOTF grand prize winner, Robert Reed).
When Brad’s called out on his mendacity, he moves the goalposts. When he claims writers and their works can’t get on the ballot without passing an SJW affirmative action checklist, if you point out that conservative writers like Mike Resnick have 5 Hugos out of 37 nominations, then it’s because they’re “outliers” or not “outspoken conservatives” (like Brandon Sanderson, who wrote openly about how his Mormon faith won’t allow him to support gay marriage, and went on to win two Hugos).
When challenged for evidence of their argument that “SJWs” have been rigging the Hugos for years, Puppies can seldom point to any actual cases, and the few times they try their claims prove to be transparently untrue.
@DougInTexas
And this year, the crew of SP3 – which, by the way, consists of all races, personal preferences, and all genders – chose to promote stories they all liked. It was NOT a slate.
Right. That’s why Brad titled his post “Sad Puppies: The 2015 Hugo Slate.” That’s why Vox told people who value his opinion on matters of science fiction and fantasy to vote his entire list, as is.
SP3 “promoting stories they all liked” was Brad ignoring the recommendations readers posted on his blog, and asking his buddies which of their works they’d like to see on the ballot this year.
(“All races, personal preferences and genders”? Wow, that’s pretty inclusive!)
Hell, I’m still waiting on any of the Puppies to acknowledge that when you start claiming that previous winners were all benefiting from affirmative action, it might possibly feel a teensy bit like an attack out of the blue on some of those past winners. Every “anti-Puppies started it!” seems to neglect that all that rhetoric was talking about real, honest-to-god people, whose first experience with Puppies was being told BY PUPPIES that they hadn’t deserved awards that they had been given.
…I may have a teensy personal stake in that one, admittedly.
And yet who leveled the accusations against the Sad Puppies? Who called them misogynists, racists and homophobes? Why the good folks who had dominated the Hugos for so long!
Well, when your ranks include writers like Wright, Beale, Williamson, Torgersen, and the Tank Marmot, pointing out that they are racist, sexists, misogynists, and homophobes is merely pointing out an objective fact. I know you guys don’t like to deal with reality, but the rest of the world does, and the facts on the ground are that your leaders actually are what others have said they are.
I realize this is unpalatable to the taste of your koolaid, but Sad Puppies began when Larry Correia pointed out there was an extant sociopolitical bias in Hugo selections.
No, he alleged there was one, an allegation that has been refuted with actual facts over and over again, including the fact of his Campbell nomination and Torgersen’s nomination the following year. Never mind Resnick’s multiple nominations and wins, Sanderson’s nominations and wins, Stone’s nomination and win, and on and on an on. There are so many easily found examples to counter Correia’s claims that they are, at this point, little more than petulant whining.
The next year he proved it when the entrenched bureacracy railed against him.
Which bureaucracy is that? The only “bureaucracy” related to the Hugo Awards consists of the volunteers who run WorldCon, and they didn’t do anything other than list him on the ballot of nominees and count the votes that were cast. Are you under the impression that SFWA runs the Hugos? Or that Tor does? No, Correia was repudiated by the voters.
The backlash Correia received was because the worst thing that could happen to a Puppy author happened to him: People read his book and discovered that it was not particularly good and yet he had gamed it onto the Hugo ballot when other, better works were pushed off.
And this year, the crew of SP3 – which, by the way, consists of all races, personal preferences, and all genders – chose to promote stories they all liked. It was NOT a slate. That’s what occurred in the preceding years.
Torgersen explicitly called it a slate. He promoted it as a slate. Beale promoted his as a slate. You can try to rewrite history all you want, but the fact remains that it was a slate. Lying about it doesn’t help make your case for you.
Of course, it is also apparent to anyone who has paid attention that the purpose of the slates wasn’t to “promote stories they all liked”. It was to promote people who had close connections to Torgersen and who had business relationships with Castalia House. And, it turns out, the people and works that were nominated as a result were pretty terrible. I can say that because I have actually read them. Have you?
You know, it’s one thing to have a bias – everyone has biases. But it’s another to lack the personal integrity to actually refer to source materials that might convey a different story than the narratives you prefer to promote. You failed. And, you’re losing.
Actually, by promoting a slate, the Puppies lost. Having to resort to a slate is an open admission by the Puppy authors that their material is simply not good enough to get awards without collusion and conniving. Look at the other major genre fiction awards this year – do you see any of Puppy Hugo nominees on their short lists? No? I wonder why that could be. Could it be that the works that the Puppies promoted just aren’t very good? Or is it that every organization that hands out genre related awards is somehow biased against Torgersen’s close friends and Beale’s buddies? Which do you think is more likely?
As I’ve noted before, the Puppies will never get what they want. No one outside their insular clique will ever regard their fiction as being anything more than it is: Run of the mill. They will never get the accolades and adulation they so obviously desperately want. Even if the Puppies swept the Hugos, fans would just more on and regard some other award as a hallmark of quality. The Puppies have already lost, and will always lose.
Huh, Desborough’s a puppy. This is my surprised face.
Vox Day would like to thank you for your unwaivering service
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XEMX8VuqHDk/VUC0zw5OYpI/AAAAAAAABP4/gIUZoTrQSx4/s1600/Unwitting-Minion_512x512.jpg
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/08/those-who-serve-and-know-not.html
@Lis Carey
Folding Beijing was good, although I don’t think I liked it quite as much as you did. What was interesting to me was that the basic technique of showing a social issue through a big SF set piece could have come straight from a golden age tale. I did wonder if some of the elements were Chinese-specific and so I wasn’t getting them properly, such as some of the mentions of social mobility and relationships between classes.
I also recently enjoyed Influence Isolated, Make Peace by John Chu and An Evolutionary Myth by Bo-Young Kim
Vox Day would like to thank you for your unwaivering service
Beale has lost more than any other Puppy. His lack of self-awareness prevents him from realizing it. One might refer to the Wall Street Journal article he appeared in to see just why he lost.
By the way, how is his secret plan to buy Tor books coming?
@Majestic_Moose
Could you pop back to Vox and say we’d prefer a kitteh to a bunny, if he wouldn’t mind? There’s a good chap.
@majestic moose @mark
And an “unwaivering” kitteh at that. Waivered kittehs are not good things.
DougInTexas —
Sad Puppies began when he posted the piece “How To Win Larry Correia a Hugo” in his blog. And he has never shown his working for there being a “sociopolitical bias” in the Hugos, just baldly asserted it.
@Mark — Thanks for those story links.Saved for later reading.
Beg your pardon, found the link now, the post was titled How to get Correia nominated for a Hugo.
As “Grim” seems to have executed the single-flounce manoeuvre: some people were clearly familiar with him, but for those who are not, he’s a rpg designer named James Desborough, who you will be shocked to hear is a GamerGater. His top quality products include a “satirical” card game named “Privilege Check” about SJWs and its spiritual successor “#Gamergate – The Card Game”, and he has a delightful set of opinions on the appropriateness of rape as a plot element in rpgs. If you have an inexplicable urge to read more, this roundup is pretty good.
By the quality of their supporters shall you know them.
@NelC
Beg your pardon, found the link now, the post was titled How to get Correia nominated for a Hugo.
And oddly enough, after all these years, I still can’t track down the “snob European critic” that Correia claims wrote “If Larry Correia wins the Campbell, it will END WRITING FOREVER” – or, sometimes, “end LITERATURE forever!”
Once upon a time, it was possible to re-write history even in the face of overwhelming primary sources. Columbus being a hero of some kind, the Native Americans fading into the background of American expansion, Hellen Keller being a card-carrying Communist, etc. etc.
Not so today. Sorry, James D., but you can’t make SP and RP out to be anything but Larry Correia being unhappy his formulaic (but on occasion fun) stuff didn’t win any Hugos, and Ted Beale having a raging mad-on for anyone who recognizes women and non-white people as human beings. Just like you can’t make GG out to be anything other than a bunch of guys who saw an ex’s whining rant as an excuse to go an harrass a bunch of women; and then a bunch of white supremacists, channers, and PUAs hitching their wagon up and being welcomed with open arms. The Internet remembers and is sick and tired of your revisionist shenanigans. Better luck in a past life, since in this one you can’t shovel your crap around and hope people don’t call you on it. If you’re lucky, your own role in GG and SP/RP will go the way of Reaxxion and that “SJW” card game you tried to push onto DTRPG: Forgotten and unremembered after a few months. Lay down with puppies, wake up with fleas.
Beg your pardon, found the link now, the post was titled How to get Correia nominated for a Hugo.
I found the comments expressing derision towards Faulkner to be interesting. If you can’t at least appreciate Faulkner (even if you don’t like his writing), then something must be wrong with you.
So, the writer of this screen was at IguanaCon II.
I was in charge of Iggy. It was my idea (and Bill Patterson’s). I only trot this out to establish at least a modicum of familiarity with SF, with fandom, and all that jazz.
I support the Sad Puppies.
I am proudly a WrongFan. I think your article is Silly to the very core. Wake up, leave your simulator, get involved in the real world.
And you know what else? I think it’s time to take the WorldCon out and have it shot. Put it out of its misery. Leave it to push up daisies. Let it, AND the Hugos, go to join the bleeding choir invisible.
SF is dead. Haven’t you noticed?
Tim Kyger: Where did you get your certificate? Now everybody will be wanting one.
At least Tim hasn’t pretended that someone else labeled him a Wrongfan. He done did it himself.
I wonder if he’ll be the guy to explain why WISDOM FROM MY INTERNET was so good.
Tim Kyger — You can be a wrongfan if you really want to be. I mean, no-one’s putting that label on you (except for the Puppies); conversely, no-one’s trying to force you not to be a wrongfan, either. No, not even the dread SJWs. It’s kind of orthogonal to the whole business, really.
You can be a wrongfan, or a trufan, or a Westinghouse fan if you want to be. You can declare SF is dead, though you should expect others to disagree with your diagnosis. You can hate some SF and love other SF, and not care about the rest, same as everybody else. You can even pay your forty bucks and vote on the Hugos. No-one is stopping you.
Just don’t sell me shit and tell me it’s Shinola, okay?
So you *support* Sad Puppies and you also think WorldCon and the Hugos should be brought to an end?