aka Chronicle of a Slate Foretold
Hitched to the sled today are Spacefaring Kitten, David Gerrold, Vox Day, Jim Henley, John C. Wright, Jim C. Hines, Lis Carey, Martin Wisse, Chris Gerrib, Joe Sherry, Rebekah Golden, Bob Snyder, and the masterpiece of Brian Z. (Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editors of the day Rev. Bob and Kary English.)
Spacefaring Kitten on Spacefaring, Extradimensional Kittens
Unfisk / refisk / fisk² – May 19
All I know about smoking ruins is that if that’s to happen, Elric the Prince of Ruins will be pleased. Frankly, I don’t think that anything is truly lost in either case. A Puppy-sponsored work getting a Hugo is not the end of the world and there have been weak winners in the past (and maybe all Puppy-nominated works aren’t that weak). No Award winning means that the majority of the Worldcon voters didn’t enjoy the works on the Rabid Puppies slate (plus the two or three additions that Sad Puppies managed to get up there on their own) and/or they weren’t ready to give in to a campaign of tactical voting, and that’s fine too.
I wonder who are the “CHORFs” Brad’s talking about there. Kevin J. Maroney hasn’t been suggesting that you should vote No Award over everything, slate or not. Neither has Teresa Nielsen Hayden, or Steve Davidson, or Anita Sarkeesian, or John Scalzi, or Karl Marx, or Barack Obama. I’ve been following the discussion rather closely and I remember reading one single blog post in which someone said that the voters should do a blanket No Award thing, and I think nobody was very keen on the idea.
Brad, is it possible that you’re exaggerating?
David Gerrold on Facebook – May 18
Coming back to a comment someone made here about “threats of ostracism” — no.
In all the articles I’ve seen, nobody has said, “We’re going to shun X, Y, and Z.”
Because … nobody in fandom has the power to lock anyone out.
But what is possible is that people will choose on their own not to associate with those who they perceive as toxic.
It’s not even an organized boycott. It’s just a personal reaction.
An example from the 70s: There was a C-list author whose behavior toward women was so creepy that when he entered a room, several of the women would quietly and discreetly excuse themselves and leave. He was never specifically ostracized — but individuals were choosing to spend their time elsewhere. That’s the most you’ll ever see in fandom.
And here’s how that works on the larger level:
There are opportunities that are occasionally offered to authors. You get invited to speak, you get handed an award, you get to be a Guest of Honor, sometimes you even get a lifetime achievement plaque. All very nice. But if you have a reputation for being hard to work with, and there are a lot of authors and artists who have that reputation — or if you’re the center of a major controversy, one that you created yourself — the organizers of those opportunities are going to look elsewhere for honorees.
Vox Day on Vox Popoli
“King Log or King Stork?” – May 19
The moment that the SJWs in the science fiction community decided they could exclude individuals from it (and whether the SFWA expulsion was technically real or not is irrelevant in this regard), that meant the open community concept was dead. The principle was established. Now we can exclude Eskimos, people with big noses, people with little noses, people who look funny, or people who smell bad; in short, we can openly exclude anyone we have the power and the desire to exclude. There is no longer free speech in science fiction.
There is no longer freedom of expression or thought. It is now a simple ideological power game and we are ready to play that game with extreme prejudice. There is no need for discourse. There is no need for dialogue, for compromise, or negotiations. There is nothing to discuss. They laid out the new rules.
They laid out the new consensus. We not only accept them, we’re going to use make far more ruthless use of them than they ever imagined. Once we were content to let the twisted little moral freaks do and think and say what they wanted, but now they have claimed the right to tell US what to do and think and say we’re not going to tolerate them anymore. We are the sons of the Crusades and the daughters of the Inquisitions. This is a game we know how to win.
Jim Henley on Unqualified Offerings
“The Puppies of This Generation and the Trainers of Ever Afterwards” – May 19
What occasioned considerable jocularity in comments was Wright’s statement that
For the record, I write literary fiction…
People laughed at this because many of them have read Wright’s stories and/or essays and found them to be bad. But I have no problem with Wright’s claim whatsoever. Not because I think his stories and essays are actually good. I haven’t read them. People who seem to be acute readers have found his Hugo-nominated work wanting or worse, but even if, as I suspect, they’ve got it right, I still have no problem with Wright calling his own work “literary fiction.”
John C. Wright in a comment on File 770 – May 19
I notice this debate consists of two points, endlessly repeated: We say that for which we stand, what our goals and methods and motives are, publicly and repeatedly. The enemy pretends we said something else and that are motives are whatever impure and horrible impulse happens to be at hand. We state that we said what we said and that our motives are what we said. The enemy pretends we did not say it. And repeat.
Now, just as a matter of logic, who has access to knowledge about our inner secret motives? How did we communicate our goals to each other and to our voters aside from public statements of our goals?
https://twitter.com/ProtestManager/status/600578695925993472
Jim C. Hines
“Hugo Thoughts: Short Fiction” – May 19
No Award will be scoring pretty high in this category. That doesn’t mean I think all of the stories are bad. (Though I don’t think they’re all good, either.) But it’s one thing for a story to be competent or interesting or fun. It’s another thing for that story to be award-worthy, for me to consider it one of the best things published in the past year. Four of these stories don’t clear that bar for me, and the fifth I’ll have to think about a little more.
Lis Carey on Lis Carey’s Library
“The Plural of Helen of Troy (from the collection City Beyond Time), by John C. Wright” – May 19
There’s a plot here, but time travel can make even a simple plot complicated, and Wright has no interest in people following the story. The nonlinear storytelling was a “feature” I didn’t need in a story where I already had difficulty caring what happened to the characters.
Lis Carey on Lis Carey’s Library
“Pale Realms of Shade (in The Book of Feasts & Seasons), by John C. Wright” – May 20
Based on reading all the other Wright fiction nominees, I kept waiting for this to go bad places. It didn’t. It’s a solid story that, given it is explicitly religious fiction, expresses beliefs and values that have a strong and positive resonance for me. It won’t work for other people for the very reasons it does work for me, and it’s not so good that it blows me away, but this is the first of the Puppy nominees whose placement on my ballot I will have to think seriously about.
Martin Wisse on Wis[s]e Words
“My gods it’s full of puppy poo!” – May 19
That gets you two of last year’s best novels and nobody will force you to read the Kevin J. Anderson. Many of the other categories are of course soiled with Puppy droppings you don’t want even if free, but there are some gems among the dross. Especially so in the Best Graphic Story category, with no Puppy nominee included and complete PDFs of Sex Criminals Vol. 1, Saga Vol. 3, Ms Marvel Vol. 1 and Rat Queens Vol. 1.
Though the Hugo Voting Packet should be seen as a bonus, rather than an inalienable part of buying a supporting membership for Worldcon, for plenty of people this of course has been the main benefit of membership, after getting to vote for the Hugos and all that. For those people this year’s packet is far from a bargain, despite the presence of the books listed above. Another reason to smack down the Puppies..
Chris Gerrib on Private Mars Rocket
“Hugo Packet – Thoughts” – May 19
Best Related Mike Williamson’s Wisdom From My Internet is everything the Amazon preview promised, namely random crap half-assedly puked into book format. Yeah, I get that it was parody, but I’m not amused by it. Antonelli’s Letters from Gardner is better (small praise indeed) but seems mostly an excuse for an anthology of Antonelli’s short fiction. No Award for the whole category.
Joe Sherry on Adventures in Reading
“Thoughts on the Hugo Award Nominees: Short Story” – May 19
“On a Spiritual Plain” / “A Single Samurai”: One thing that I found very interesting about reading through the nominated short works is that they pair very closely in my head in how I would rank them. Antonelli’s story of a faith (of sorts) on an alien world and a man trying to lead a human spirit to wherever “moving on” turns out to be. It’s a simple story, but cleanly told. The comparison between human faith and that of the alien is interesting. “A Single Samurai”, on the other hand, is a story of action, of one samurai taking on a kaiju about to terrorize the samurai’s land. There is a certain spirituality to the samurai’s thoughts and actions and an economy to the movement and pacing of the story. On a different day, I could flip my ranking of these two stories.
Rebekah Golden
‘2015 Hugo Awards Best TV Show: Reviewing Orphan Black” – May 18
I can easily see how the whole series deserves a Hugo and this episode definitely has individual merit.
Rebekah Golden
“2015 Hugo Awards Best Graphic Story: Reviewing Sex Criminals” – May 18
Well this one definitely captured the “graphic” part of graphic story.
Rebekah Golden
“2015 Hugo Awards Best TV Show: Reviewing Grimm” – May 19
It was good, it was entertaining but I’m hung up on the history of the Hugo Award and the depth of respect I feel for past winners. Grimm is good, and this episode is good, but it’s not that good.
Adult Onset Atheist
“SNARL: Turncoat” – May 19
For a story where there is so much happening there is very little going on.
Trying to avoid Puppy slates and some publishers providing only excerpts is making #Hugo Award voting much simpler! #noaward @TheHugoAwards
— Bob Snyder (@fordan) May 19, 2015
Brian Z. on File 770 – May 19
The outlook wasn’t brilliant for Castalia House that day;
The score stood 16 of 20 with one story out of play.
And then when Kloos withdrew at first, and Bellet did the same,
A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.A straggling few turned off the stream in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought if only John C. Wright could get a whack at that–
We’d put up even money now with John Wright at the bat.But Vox preceded John Wright, as did Bryan Thomas Schmidt,
Resnick already had 36, and Schubert, he had quit;
So upon that Evil League of Pups a pall was settling in,
For there seemed but little chance for John Wright’s editor to win.Thomas Schmidt’s Kickstarter was still in its final surge,
And Vox, the much despised, had so far failed to reemerge;
And when the list was opened, and the pups saw what had occurred,
There was Resnick safe at second and poor Bryan hugging third.Then from 5,000 pups and more there rose a lusty bark;
It echoed through the group blogs, it rattled Riverfront Park;
It blasted like a ray gun shining from the Golden Age,
For John Wright, mighty John Wright, was advancing to the stage.There was ease in John Wright’s manner as he stepped into his place;
There was pride in John Wright’s bearing and a smile on John Wright’s face.
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
No rabbit in the crowd could doubt ’twas John Wright at the bat.Ten thousand eyes were on him as he dipped his pen in ink;
The hoi polloi applauded as he urged them to the brink.
Then as Social Justice Warriors began to jibe and snip,
Defiance flashed in John Wright’s eye, a sneer curled John Wright’s lip.And now the silver-plated rocket came from off the stage,
And John Wright stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
Close by the sturdy penman the trophy unheeded sped–
“Remember, nits make lice,” said John Wright. “No Award,” the Emcee said.From Ustream, thick with puppies, there went up a muffled howl,
While Torgersen swooped in again like Weasley’s Great Gray Owl.
“BOO HIM! BOO THE CHORF!” shouted someone in the thread;
And it’s likely they’d have booed him had not John Wright raised his head.With a smile of Christian charity great John Wright’s visage shone;
He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the show go on;
He signaled to the Emcee, and once more the rocket flew;
But John Wright still ignored it, and Mr. Gerrold said, “Strike two.”“Fraud!” cried the rabid puppies, and echo answered fraud;
But one scornful look from John Wright and the audience was awed.
They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his fingers strain,
And they knew that John Wright wouldn’t let that rocket by again.The sneer is gone from John Wright’s lip, his teeth are clenched in rage;
He scratches with hyperbole his pen upon the page.
And as Due holds the envelope, he continues to compose,
And now the air is shattered by the force of John Wright’s prose.Oh, somewhere on the favored fen the sun is shining bright;
The filk is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere pups are yelping, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy at Sasquan –mighty John Wright has struck out.
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Owlmirror: “in other words, they hate ‘wrongfun’.”
ROFLMAO.
Peace
Thank you. I would very, very much like that be be true, but looking at the track record I very much doubt it.
SIJ
Then they are even more twisted than I thought.
To people in general; this evening I went out to dinner with my daughter, who had spent the day taking exams for an advanced science degree. She already has her medical and surgical qualifications, has sat and passed all of the qualifications she needs to practise as a physician and to practise as a rheumatologist.
I appreciate that Beale et al would be horrified by this, but they are, in the words of ship’s Counsellor Deanna Troy, ‘nuts’. Negotiations don’t work with people who are barking mad…
@Jon – I don’t see that “don’t care” and “endorse” are mutually exclusive. One only has to look at some celebrity commercials to see clear examples of endorsements without a mote of care behind them.
As for all the “what could the puppies mean” posts, you people could go… look for their exact words or just ask.
PiMMN said:
“I confess to only skimming the comments at first… I should have read closer.”
It’s starting to look like that’s the standard operation of all sides in this debate. If everybody’s scanning, and nobody’s reading, then it’s no wonder nobody’s understanding anything.
Just checked my memory of the status of the nominees – it’s a bit weird that the Rabid Puppies are contemplating trying to No Award the Graphic Story category when it includes a nominee from their slate. Shouldn’t they, as a matter of principle, vote for the work their leader decided was the sole one worthy of being pushed on to the ballot?
I guess the Rabids, at least, are admitting either that they nominated something on a basis other than merit or that it’s okay to vote on the final ballot based on criteria other than merit. Or maybe most of them realise that hardly anyone else likes their nominee and they don’t have the numbers to actually push it ahead of No Award, let alone to beat any of the other nominees, so why bother trying. That would be more in touch with reality than I generally give them credit for but not beyond the bounds of possibility.
Challenger Grim: “It’s starting to look like that’s the standard operation of all sides in this debate. If everybody’s scanning, and nobody’s reading, then it’s no wonder nobody’s understanding anything.”
I’m sure you’re welcome to speak for your own methodology. As for others, I’ve seen a great deal of non-Puppies reading everything posted by Puppies here and in other locations, and asking questions which would indicate that they’ve read carefully and have considered the content of what they’ve read.
The fact that the responses generally tend to be non-answers or outright evasions or derailments certainly does say something to me.
@ Challenger Grim
“As for all the “what could the puppies mean” posts, you people could go… look for their exact words or just ask.”
So why is it that Correia and Torgersen have deleted multiple blog posts relating to the causes and motivations behind the Puppies? Why is it that the Puppies constantly claim that they can’t be judged on the basis of their own words, but only in terms of their certainty of their own innocence and perfect virtue?
@Aaron:
I had another thought, FWIW: VD has made it pretty clear that he considers his Ilk to be an army in the culture wars. Well, an army can’t have a soldier wandering off and doing his own thing if it might jeopardize military actions. So of course he feels it necessary to request permission from
DaddyTeacherthe Commander in Chief.I mean, if he does something wrong, he might end up not making SJWs sad! The mission would be a failure! No victory condition! It would be horrible!
One of the VP commenters Peace quoted, on the Graphic Story category: “this is a great example of what the whole slate of nominations would look like if we pups hadn’t have stepped in.”
Because god forbid the Hugo nominations actually be good, forward-looking fiction. Nebula nominee “When It Ends, He Catches Her” by Eugie Foster sent chills down my spine. “Turncoat” bored the ever-loving crap out of me.
Chancellor Grim
I can only speak for myself, but the stuff I have read so far has been so dire that I’ve got an elaborate approach of offering myself rewards if I manage to get through it.
Which reminds me, some Hagen-Daz vanilla awaits…
I would like to thank the mad, sad, bad, ra(bi)d puppies for getting me interested in a WorldCon for the first time in over a decade: without them I would not have read The Three Body Problem, or The Goblin Emperor, both of which I’m still pondering.
Because I’m trying to be a conscientious Hugo voter I am at least sampling all the nominees. I started with the Related Work – and I was stunned, but not in a good way. The best of the bunch is pedestrian at most; the rest are …Patterson was passed over for these?
So, based on the confusion, I decided to check the version of Turncoat in the published source. I haven’t done a line by line compare, but a couple spot checks indicates that the version in the Hugo packet copy of Riding the Red Horse is pretty much the same one on Rzasa’s website.
I also note that Riding the Red Horse is the stated work to examine in regards to Best Editor Short Form, so vote as you see fit on this knowledge.
@ Stevie
“Which reminds me, some Hagen-Daz vanilla awaits…”
You realize that you have now identified Hagen-Daz icecream as an SJW food? John C Wright will be putting it on the Index Comestibleorum Prohibitorum any minute now.
Which, of course, means ALL THE MORE FOR US!
Well played!
Stevie: “the stuff I have read so far has been so dire that I’ve got an elaborate approach of offering myself rewards if I manage to get through it.”
Mine is rewarding myself with a book/story that I’ve chosen, each time I finish a Puppy work. And not allowing myself to do so until I’ve finished the Puppy entry.
I’m a night owl, and one of those people who has to be careful of reading in the evening, because often a novel will be so gripping that I’ll stay up until 2 or 3am just so I can finish it.
The last two nights, I’ve gone to bed early. I’m only 170 pages into Skin Game, and I don’t know how I’m going to be able to force myself to finish it.
JJ, I give you Gene Wolfe, in a 1983 self-interview (collected in Castle of Days):
Sez I, feel free to stop.
ctrl+F, input terms I’m looking for or do a highlight. Quick filters the comments you need to pay attention to above the chaff.
Interesting. You have any evidence of it? (especially archives or echoes of the posts) Or even a good jump point (some of the stuff gets lost in the data flood around here).
Do you have a quotable example of this or is this another “skim and misread” situation?
I’ve been getting this stuff read by isolating myself from other reading material. I go to the coffeeshop and make myself read the nominees for an hour or thereabouts.
I considered rewarding myself with pastry, but I don’t think I can eat enough croissants to constitute fair compensation for reading most of this stuff. Not safely, anyway.
Bruce Baugh: Gene Wolfe is always right, but I tend to carve out an exception for invariably uneven first novels. (See: Ancillary Justice.)
If my past experience is a guide using pastries to fortify oneself against terrible fiction results in nothing but tears and being covered in crumbs. The worst part is the fiction leaves such an awful taste in your mouth, it drives out the fresh baked goodness.
@Challenger Grim
So now you want us to catch you up on the debates to which you have attempted to make a rather sanctimonious contribution based on yipping ignorance? Have you ever considered actually doing your own research, or would that be just too, too much to ask of your delicate Puppy mind?
Had you bothered to do even a minimal amount of work before asking for intellectual handouts, you might, for example, have found this:
http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/blog/2015/04/since-some-puppies-are-deleting-things/
JJ: “I’m sure you’re welcome to speak for your own methodology. As for others, I’ve seen a great deal of non-Puppies reading everything posted by Puppies here and in other locations, and asking questions which would indicate that they’ve read carefully and have considered the content of what they’ve read.”
Challenger Grim: “ctrl+F, input terms I’m looking for or do a highlight. Quick filters the comments you need to pay attention to above the chaff.”
Aaaaaand… you’ve just given a perfect illustration of not reading closely enough to understand what you’re reading. No wonder you’re accusing everyone else of doing it.
Bruce Baugh: “Sez I, feel free to stop.”
I’m jeeeeeeest about to the point where I’m going to be able to throw in the towel in good conscience. I’ve read 38%. To paraphrase Gene Wolfe, maybe the last 62% is marvelous. But I doubt it.
I’ve got all these fantastic books sitting here waiting to be read. At this point, I’m feeling a great deal of resentment at being deprived of that.
Thanks for the encouragement to let go and still feel that I am doing so in good conscience. I do appreciate it.
@Bruce Baugh
“Sez I, feel free to stop.”
Freedom’s just another word for no Puppies left to peruse.
Challenger Grim:
So why is it that Correia and Torgersen have deleted multiple blog posts relating to the causes and motivations behind the Puppies?
… any evidence…
To my knowledge John C. Wright removed his rant on the despicable childrens-TV-show-production of the creators of Legend of Korra, but since a) he replaced said post with a lengthy explanation of why he thought so, b) the original post is still up on his livejournal to this day, and c) people have the ability and the right to modify the contents of their blogs at any time for any reason they might wish, I don’t see how it is reasonable to criticize him for doing that (although one can criticize him for many other things) or read too much into it.
I’m not sure I am aware specifically of what posts Correia or Torgersen might have taken down (if they did), but again, that’s their business and they have a perfect right to do whenever they want with their blogs.
Freedom’s just another word for no Puppies left to peruse.
Are you going to write the damn lyrics already or do I have to do all the work around here? 😀
Brian Z:
That’s the problem with expressing talent, man!
No discussion of John C. Wright’s “A Legend Perverted” would be complete with out mentioning the comments section where he condoned bludgeoning homosexual men to death.
Source:
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2015/04/john-c-wright-tries-to-cover-up-that-hes-a-wannabe-gay-basher.html
I’m not sure I am aware specifically of what posts Correia or Torgersen might have taken down (if they did),
Torgersen took down a post in which he compared himself and Correia to Confederate generals.
As a reader of comic books from the 1940s til now, I have to say no, no they didn’t.
Arguably Wikipedia’s greatest crime has been to neutrally describe comic book characters so that their pasts appear coherent.
I tend to carve out an exception for invariably uneven first novels. (See: Ancillary Justice.)
Man! Loved the first part of AJ. It ended on a bit of a weak note -and the start of AS has left me a bit concerned- but I found the initial set up just so compelling & strange. De gustibus, yo.
Torgersen, at least, is well-known for having posted, and then deleted, a rant comparing the Sad Puppies to the losing side of the Slaver’s Rebellion.
@ Brian Z
Brian, you know how much I love watching you work, but I’ve got my country’s 500th Hugo conspiracy to plan, my big fat SJW wedding to arrange, puppies to murder and Gamergate to frame for it; I’m swamped.
Do you have a quotable example of this or is this another “skim and misread” situation?
When constantly asked what works won based on affirmative action, what Hugos were awarded to message fiction, how their democratic process worked for SP3, or really to back up any of their talk and accusations, they don’t. You just have to take their word for it. Don’t believe me? Go on and ask them. Let us know what you find out because despite being the cornerstone of Sad Puppies they’ve managed to avoid saying.
So I was looking at Twitter. And I found this.
“Funniest thing about SJWs: They think harassing 5 different Hugo nominees into withdrawing their nomination proves #SadPuppies is evil.” – Daddy Warpig, Rabid Puppy
This is utterly false. Completely. It has no shred of truth behind it.
People withdrawing because they don’t want to be associated with VD’s bigotry is NOT people withdrawing because of “SJW harassment.”
@Chris Hensley
Has John C Wright ever shown up here to defend those particular words?
If his gorilla consent diatribe hadn’t already been enough for me to write him off over, that alone would.
“I’m not sure I am aware specifically of what posts Correia or Torgersen might have taken down (if they did), but again, that’s their business and they have a perfect right to do whenever they want with their blogs.”
Didn’t Torgersen write a whole (later deleted) blog post fondly imagining himself as a Confederate general on the eve of a great battle, casting himself as a noble self-sacrificing hero for giving up his chances at a Hugo to join and fight for the Glorious Cause at the side of Larry Correia, who he pictured as Robert E. Lee? (No, really. It quite brought a tear to my eye, and my lunch back up to my throat).
Enjoy.
http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3742/brad-torgersens-science-fiction-civil-war
Whym – This is utterly false. Completely. It has no shred of truth behind it.
If SJWs always lie than Daddy Warpig is Emperor of SJWs.
Whym:”People withdrawing because they don’t want to be associated with VD’s bigotry is NOT people withdrawing because of “SJW harassment.””
And when writers that withdrew explain why they actually withdrew, the puppies have shown up to say “no, you withdrew because SJWs”.
Brad Torgersen did that right here practically to Juliette Wade’s face. It was a textbook case of mansplaining.
“I can only speak for myself, but the stuff I have read so far has been so dire that I’ve got an elaborate approach of offering myself rewards if I manage to get through it.”
I hear you. I would read parts of Ancillary Justice to get in prep for reading some of the material in the packet, and would reward myself with some Jim Butcher or Larry Correia.
However, I found AJ so boring and the preaching just tiresome. I thought I got away from preachers long ago.
So far I have failed. I have read on Butcher novel in entirety and have almost finished Monster Hunter International but have not managed to make it through more than about three chapters of AJ.
Of course, it has opened my mind to that genre.
Has he explicitly defended those specific words on File770? Not to my knowledge. He doesn’t seem to answer my questions. So it goes.
He has certainly defended his anti-gay comments generally as religious faith. In his Unwritten Code Post he wrote:
“No, my rivals say my fans must be silenced not because of some unwritten code — that is merely one more in a long series of unconvincing and ineffective lies — but because I am a faithful Roman Catholic, who correctly calls sodomy a perversion, and suicide a mortal sin.”
@ XS
And Annie Bellet went out of her way to say that she wasn’t withdrawing because of anyone pressured her. To quote her own words on the subject:
” I am not doing it because I was pressured by anyone either way or on any “side,” though many friends have made cogent arguments for both keeping my nomination and sticking it out, as well as for retracting it and letting things proceed without me in the middle.
I am withdrawing because this has become about something very different than great science fiction. I find my story, and by extension myself, stuck in a game of political dodge ball, where I’m both a conscripted player and also a ball. (Wrap your head around that analogy, if you can, ha!) All joy that might have come from this nomination has been co-opted, ruined, or sapped away. This is not about celebrating good writing anymore, and I don’t want to be a part of what it has become.
I am not a ball. I do not want to be a player. This is not what my writing is about. This is not why I write. I believe in a compassionate, diverse, and inclusive world. I try to write my own take on human experiences and relationships, and present my fiction as entertainingly and honestly as I can. ”
http://anniebellet.com/hugo-story-withdrawn/
Chris Hensley, I feel we could be more careful with what we say when condemning Wright.
Wright’s comment that is discussed in your link, beginning “I have never heard of a group of women…”, was offensive and gratuitous. But it did not condone violence, and it does not help one’s case to claim that it did.
The “nits make lice” line that Wright cited so approvingly on his blog yesterday is an allusion to the Sand Creek massacre: “Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”
Although Wright did not mean literally that he wishes to kill all of the adult progressive social activists of the world as well as all those who are still minors, I can still assert that republishing that kind of language on his blog and and with his imprimatur is either (at best) incredibly naive, or (and I suspect more likely, since as far as I know Wright is a thoughtful student of history) divisive, dehumanizing, destructive, and despicable. And I can say I wish he’d take it down.
Over on the other thread, this commenter claimed that Daddy Warpig (who was also the one who tweeted to #Gamergate to “humble SJWs” and “hurt SocJus”; alerting them to Correia’s SP blogpost) was an “unknown” Gamergater, which baffled me, because, as a quick Google found:
There is this comment on Correia’s blog (with a timestamp long before the current round of puppy slates were published):
Daddy Warpig, on October 24, 2014 at 7:58 am said:
Daddy Warpig here, reporting from neck deep in #GamerGate.
I don’t know much about Gamergate members, but Daddy Warpig certainly looks to be a fairly vocal member.
@Brian Z
For someone who doesn’t condone violence, John C Wright sure seems to spend an awful lot of time talking in terms of violence in pretty approving tones. Similarly, for someone who claims not hate gay people, he sure seems to spend a lot of time describing them and their sexual choices in hateful language.
Maybe he’s just a big old misunderstood ball of love and charity, but he’s chosen an exceedingly strange and unconvincing way of showing it.
SocialInjusticeWorrier: Yep.
Beyond Anon – However, I found AJ so boring and the preaching just tiresome. I thought I got away from preachers long ago.
I’ve said before here that I’m not a big fan of the story though I thought many of the ideas were cool. I don’t remember it being preachy though.
If you like something that’s more action-y but with spaceships you might like the Expanse series if you haven’t read them.
@Brian Z:
Since I was recently reading VD’s blog to double-check what he’d written, I am reminded of his similar dehumanizing language in referring to the victims of Breivik’s mass murder attack as “larval quislings”.
@ Maximillian
” I’m told that Wright thinks that uploading is an evil thing…”
I suggest not listening to whomever told you that. It is similar to people who claim I don’t like women, and quote passages where I praise women fulsomely in support of the contention.
For the record, the hero in THE GOLDEN AGE is an upload (of several different varieties in different parts of the trilogy) as is the hero of COUNT TO A TRILLION.
Indeed, this week I wrote the scene where there are a hundred different copies of my protagonist uploaded into war-dyson-spheres made of cognitive matter (computronium) circa AD 700,000 is forcing the surrender of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, which is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
GIlbert Gosseyn, come to think of it, is also an upload of a kind, and he is the hero of NULL A CONTINUUM.
So I suppose the question is whether anyone can name a science fiction novel I have written where uploading is portrayed negatively rather than positively.
I wrote an essay warning the Transhumanists not to place too much faith in the ability of science to usher in utopia, and that the uploaded people will not make people perfect, merely faster and smarter and perhaps longer lived, than flesh and blood humans.
It takes a true devotion to the one sole principle of Social Justice Warfare, namely, the principle of lying even when lies are unnecessary, foolish, and counterproductive, to turn a record like mine that into ” I’m told that Wright thinks that uploading is an evil thing…”
So take what you hear from gossips more skeptically, please.
Beyond Anon: “However, I found AJ so boring and the preaching just tiresome. I thought I got away from preachers long ago.”
Oh, NOES! I completely missed the preaching in Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword! Please, sir, can you tell me where to find it???
I wouldn’t have ranked Ancillary Justice among the novels I greatly enjoyed as fiction. I thought that the ideas and the world-building were better than the execution of the narrative. That said, it tried to do something new and ambitious, and generally did it well, which makes it worthy of consideration for a Hugo in my opinion.
@John C Wright
“It takes a true devotion to the one sole principle of Social Justice Warfare, namely, the principle of lying…”
Yes, yes, everyone is always lying about you, even though you are such a sweet, nice, generous person and your “literary” fiction could never be described as verbose, derivative twaddle with stilted dialogue and unconvincing world-building.
We’ve heard your little song before and it wasn’t convincing the first hundred or so times. It really doesn’t improve with repetition.
“In any case, I have never heard of a group of women descended on a lesbian couple and beating them to death with axhandles and tire-irons, but that is the instinctive reaction of men towards fags”.
It is that dismissive attitude, that it is the only natural reaction to perform the most brutal violence imaginable not on another man, but on a fag. That condones violence, it dismisses the immorality of the action and dismisses the humanity of the victim. Wright declares the statement the same way I might that the instinctive reaction of men towards mosquitoes is to swat them.