Guest post by Tuomas Vainio: It seems to be a popular question today. Thus to determine the answer, I went to Amazon and searched for science fiction in e-books. As I scrolled down I noticed an option to refine my search to contain only the new releases from past 30 or 90 days. Respectively that is 2,472 and 6,807 works, which gives us the average of 82,4 or 75,6 new science fiction releases per day. Hence we can expect to have more than 27,000 new e-books released this year.
Then out of curiosity I did the same for regular books; I got 4,809 works for past 30 days, and 14,460 works for the past 90 days. That gives us the daily averages 160,3 for the former and 160,6 for the latter. Hence we can expect to have more than 58,000 new books released this year.
Naturally both electronic and paper based books will have overlap, not to mention that some of the new releases in Amazon could very well be; re-releases or even translations. Hence I suppose a rough annual estimate of 50,000 new works should suffice for argument’s sake. (I openly admit that I pulled that figure out my own arse.)
Both sides of this argument have made the claim how undeserving and deserving works are not being and being nominated for the ballot. Both sides are correct. Five possible nominations out of 50,000 eligible works? I mean, what certainty do we have that those five nominated works are superior to any number of the other eligible 49,995 works? Nor can any one individual read hundreds of works per day. Thus the decision of superiority falls onto the shoulders of the fans raised above the rest by their willingness and capability to spend at least $40 for the right to nominate and vote in the Hugo awards.
Whoever these fans are; they are likely to nominate the works they have read and liked themselves. Yet we have to consider how only a low percentage of those eligible to nominate and vote use their right. So if fans encounter a list of recommendations they deem favourable, then they might follow it out of their own volition. Therefore; if you contact your friends and families and share recommendations of eligible works on the blogs read by the wider audience, it becomes possible for anyone to affect the end result of the Hugo awards.
Now since these awards are something of an annual community highlight, you can check the various blogs of authors and see how they have listed their favourites year after a year. How they have shared their thoughts on if a work is deserving or not. Or more bluntly; who they think should win the award this year.
Thus I have to wonder what is so different this year, what sets the Sad Puppies 3 apart from the earlier attempts to game the awards? The most notable differences that I can see are that instead of having Brad’s and Vox’s recommendations we got Sad and Rabid Puppies’ recommendations, and both came with their own funny pictures. So for others to game the next year’s awards in their favour; it seems you only need a catchy name and a funny picture.
And frankly, if the Hugo awards were not gamed during previous years, then how can people make claims that the Puppies took the awards away from more deserving authors? And why has the awards literally exploded with varying degrees of online vitriol?
I mean; every year most authors do not get nominated, it is a fact. Thus, if the award is not gamed by anyone, no one can be sure who gets to the top. Hence there is no reason to be upset. Even if the Puppies were the only ones gaming the award, no one could be sure of their exact impact. There would be a reason to be mildly annoyed, but ultimately we would not know of their exact impact.
Thus the claims that there were more deserving authors pushed aside simply implies that there was pre-existing expectations on who would come out on top. Expectations that are not so unreasonable if you consider the effect of friends and family, the usual blog posts, and check what the combined effort amounted to on the years before in order to estimate the impact for this year. In a way it is almost like you had paid a boxer to go down on the fifth round, and when he does not, you have reason to cry out of the outrage.
So to sum it up; what we have is kettle calling the pot black during a school yard popularity contest with the associated level of immaturity.
And we get back to the question at hand; who deserves a Hugo? The only answer is as follows; it belongs to whoever that was nominated and voted for by those who were willing to fork out at least $40.
P.S. Oh, and I have not paid that minimum of $40. I ran into this whole thing by stumbling onto that original Entertainment Weekly article, which proved utterly nonsensical with just about 30 minutes of googling all the listed names, which in turn sparked my interest on this back and forth.
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Ha. Well said. Having gotten into this last year I would actually prefer a sort of pre-sorted, This-Is-The-Hugo-Stuff-You-Should-Read-And-Is-Guaranteed-Eligible. Books, as the recent ruling show, are evidently more complicated than movies.
I see the Puppy facility for logical reasoning has not improved in recent days.
A much more reliable indicator of numbers would be the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, which indicates that around 4,000 novels were released last year. Although it is not possible to determine how many of those were re-releases, or paperback releases of previously-released hardcovers, it is safe to say that the actual number of likely possibilities for Hugo nominations is significantly less, perhaps 2,000.
“how can people make claims that the Puppies took the awards away from more deserving authors?”
Easily. By pointing out all those entries which would have managed to earn a place on the slate through good-faith nomination by individuals, had they not been pushed off by concerted bloc-voting of Puppies.
” I mean, what certainty do we have that those five nominated works are superior to any number of the other eligible 49,995 works?” Community, in iteration. Each of us reads some stuff, and we talk about it with others. We find that some of us are really good at aggregating info from a bunch of sources, and that some are excellent at providing places for people to speak up about work of their own and/or work of others that we’d like to know about. We read, and comment, and reflect.
It’s not like every single work labeled sf/f needs equal consideration. A vast swath of what’s published in any given year just isn’t any good – technically poorly written, ill thought out, expressing dull ideas, simply not worth award consideration. (It is an innovation of the Puppies this year to pack several categories with work of this sort.). Even so, though are hundreds or thousands of potentially deserving works, and that’s why a community of people with overlapping but wideranging interests is so important.
It’s not something that works every year, either. Most of us can point at winners and nominees that make us go “WTF?” in our various ways. So the next year, participants who felt that the outcome wasn’t satisfactory make some extra effort to draw attention to what they regard as worthwhile, and the overall composition of serious contenders changes. (By serious contenders I mean here the eventual winners, the 5-6 per category that go on the final ballot, and the pool of, generally, 20-50 works that also get nominated.) There’s no final form of the awards, just what happens this year in light of what’s happened previous years.
It appears to be a system ill-suited to Puppy temperaments because it inevitably involves disagreements. People say things like “No, wait, that was crap” and “How on Earth can you miss the excellence of this?”. If you respond to such things by quickly threatening duels or violence, or by immediately assuming that it’s a dismissal of everything you are and believe (and then accuse everyone else of assigning you the most offensive handles you can think up and apply to yourself on their behalf), or anything like that, well, then you’ve hosed yourself. If, on the other hand, you’re comfortable with the idea that intelligent people of good will can and do disagree about all artistic matters, then you’re fine. I presume that essentially everyone involve has times of feeling sick of it all – “gafiate”, or “get away from it all”, is a stock verb in fandom for a reason – and nearly everyone who feels it eventually gets over it and comes back for some more.
And that’s how it works.
Not a very good text, as it totally ignores the question of block voting and slates. Which makes it totally irrelevant in the debate around the Hugos.
‘it seems you only need a catchy name and a funny picture.’
Well, making up a cause, throwing around insinuations and making up a threat (the SJWs are coming!) to turn it into an Us vs Them narrative instead of just telling people what you liked this year it pretty different in context than just a catchy title and funny picture. Those help too though when a person is trying to create a separate identity with which to rally folks around. A slogan or mantra that can be repeated normally helps as well.
Am I wrong in thinking that, if the Hugos were ended for all time, the SF community could look to the Nebulas as a set of awards directly analogous to the Academy Awards for film? Would that be a bad thing? Could the SF community then create a new set of awards for SF writing, if it wished, with the eligibility for nomination and voting based on something other than BUYING a membership in a convention? Would THAT be a bad thing?
It also makes a not very smooth attempt to draw an equivalence between lots of people publicly posting what they liked in a given year (and encouraging others to check it out) and organized slate voting. By this puppy logic, any votes cast by anyone who hasn’t totally isolated themselves from all fandom communication for the previous year is a de facto slate, and thus the puppies have done nothing wrong.
Tsk tsk. This a porrly written article indeed. It seems to be based only on the premise that either a) The Hugos have previously been gamed regularly, and this is just a different bunch doing it, or B) if it was never gamed, then there is absolutely no way to tell who should be nominated, and as such everyone is a valid candidate.
Perhaps the author should consider some alternative scenarios. For examples, what if there was no evidence of previous regular nomination gaming, and there was a blatantly public campaign to game the nominations this year, a campaign that wound up successfully getting a majority of the nominees?
Would that not go some way towards explaining the current, how shall we say, kerfuffle?
Just some food for thought. Would very much like to hear the OP’s comments on this alternative scenario of mine….
Pacific Standard Simon: Could the SF community then create a new set of awards for SF writing, if it wished, with the eligibility for nomination and voting based on something other than BUYING a membership in a convention? Would THAT be a bad thing?
The people in the SFF community who are unhappy about the way the Hugo awards program works could have done that at any time. In fact, I’m sure I saw a dedicated group of Puppies do that at some point.
No, wait. That was The Tiptree Awards. Oops, that’s not it, I’m sure I saw a “P” in the name. Oh, yes, here it is: The Prometheus Awards.
Since you feel so strongly about it Simon, please post here once you’ve got the Disgruntled Puppy Awards system created and set up, giving us all the website address so we can participate.
No? Too much work? You prefer just to attack and criticize the awards system another group set up decades ago and has lovingly nurtured since then, with hundreds of volunteers, and hours, and massive effort every year.
How surprising.
‘the SF community could look to the Nebulas as a set of awards directly analogous to the Academy Awards for film? Would that be a bad thing? Could the SF community then create a new set of awards for SF writing, if it wished, with the eligibility for nomination and voting based on something other than BUYING a membership in a convention? Would THAT be a bad thing?’
The community, or any segment or member of it, could do that at any time regardless of the continued existence of Worldcon. The Nebulas might not work as that is specific to the SFWA and are voted on by members of that. The Hugos are specific to Worldcon.
Analogous to the Academy Award would be the Nebulas currently since you have to be a member of the Academy to nominate/vote. If you mean a more public/open structure Goodreads might be the closest though it doesn’t have subcategories.
Any structure that isn’t dependent on a company like Amazon/Goodreads will cost money because the organization process takes time and money. So if a community wanted to get sponsorship from companies to create their own award that was open and free they could do so.
“And frankly, if the Hugo awards were not gamed during previous years, then how can people make claims that the Puppies took the awards away from more deserving authors? ”
Well, even Vox Day thinks that the slates kept a deserving work (The Three Body-Problem) off the ballot originally.
And if the puppy lists are just recommendation lists, why not publish the list of everything that was suggested? Surely the more recommendations, the better. And why ignore things like “Domo”, which 5 people suggested in the original thread, more than anything else except for Interseller, which also had 5 people suggest it?
JJ suggest looking at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database for the number of actual books published, says “around 4,000 novels were released last year. Although it is not possible to determine how many of those were re-releases, or paperback releases of previously-released hardcovers …”. Yes it is, and unknowingly, JJ has already done that. In fact, isfdb.com (for which I’m an editor) says 12,771 novels were published in 2014 (including duplicates for those in multiple formats), and 4,201 “titles” were *first* published in 2014. That latter number excludes re-releases, newer editions of earlier books, etc. So for comparison purposes, that’s the number to use. Of course this includes large numbers of books that aren’t really aimed at the “award-winning” market, e.g. most “paranormal romances”, and the 57th book in some long-running series. If we believe Sturgeon’s law that 90% of everything is crap, then this means that there are probably about 420 books worth seriously considering for all of the many awards we give out. Of course we might have great disagreements on what counts as the ‘crap”, so the ability to shove 5 books into that group of 420, or promote 5 of those books to the top of that list, becomes a pretty significant achievement. For example, SJW’s and Puppies might easily agree on clumping paranormal romances with Sturgeon’s 90%, but if a bunch of fans of that sub-genre got themselves organized, they would certainly have the strength in numbers to take over the Hugos and a few other awards.
Darrah Chavey:
Thank you for that!
Does the 4,201 titles which were *first* published in 2014 include or exclude anthologies, omnibuses, and collections?
(Also, my profound thanks to you and all your hard-working colleagues at ISFDB. It’s a fantastic resource, and I use it frequently. If I didn’t already have volunteer commitments elsewhere, I’d have asked to help you out.)
Referring to the ISFDB, exactly how accurate is it, and where does it collect its data from. For instance, I did a search for my own name, and none of my work came up, yet I published a fantasy novel last year and the year before that (and yes, I know I’m small-time). In quickly looking at their site, it appears anyone can edit or submit something, which would count on one of two factors to keep the site up-to-date: Popularity or authors putting their own works on display there. Both could run into the same sort of issue that’s already been brought up—weeding out everything. If they’re pulling from aggregate data or information, where from?
I’m not saying the site is flawed, nor that their work and data aren’t worth considering, but only pointing out that on a quick look, they’re missing at least a percentage of the new works out there, which would mean that there’s even more works being overlooked than anyone thinks, and may also add a margin of error to some of the numbers being thrown around.
@JJ “You prefer just to attack and criticize the awards system another group set up decades ago and has lovingly nurtured since then, with hundreds of volunteers, and hours, and massive effort every year.”
I fail to see how a couple of questions constitutes an attack or a critique in anyone’s eyes. But carry on frothing at the mouth.
Good lord!
I am still boggled at the assertion that if the Hugos must have been gamed in previous years because otherwise how could we know deserving books were gamed off the list this year.
It is as if the words “deserving” or “Hugo quality” were not a shorthand for the perceived craft and art and impact of really well written works on human minds, but were simply identity tags attached to writings for arbitrary reasons to be manipulated and redeemed in some abstract wargame, with no intrinsic connection to reality which can be observed and gauged.
For thousands of years there has been a lively and ongoing debate about what makes a piece of writing good. It’s open to anyone.
Any normal Hugo year we as readers can see that “deserving” works were left off the Hugo ballot. That’s not new.
One difference this year is that we can see that noticeably pedestrian works — in terms solely of writing quality, which I speak of directly as someone who has read them — are overwhelmingly all over the ballot and on the whole remarkable and well-regarded works are not.
We see this and we infer from it that deserving works were left off in favor of pedestrian ones. No previous fixing of the match is required for this perception.
Most of the Puppy arguments I am seeing right now are this kind of disconnected sterile abstraction about how numbers prove everyone else wrong, rather than any kind of committed support to the works themselves, the sort of loving analysis and presentation of choice phrases and scenes, the engagement of the characters, the normal arguments of bibliophiles presenting their case.
I would love (seriously, I love a book-lover geek-out as much as anybody) to see the Puppies tell us why their books are great by their content rather than their numbers.
Pacific Standard Simon: “I fail to see how a couple of questions constitutes an attack or a critique in anyone’s eyes. But carry on frothing at the mouth.”
Perhaps you’re coming in late to the discussion here. Perhaps you’re commenting without having bothered to do any prior reading, without having bothered to inform yourself.
If so, what you’ve missed are a whole lot of people who’ve been insisting that The Hugo Awards are Doing It Wrong.
There are plenty of critics here. There are very few people complaining about, or criticizing the Hugo Awards program, who’ve actually offered viable, well-thought-out solutions for changes. As you’ve fallen into the first group, perhaps you consider anyone pointing that out as “frothing at the mouth”.
I’ve been trained, personally, and professionally, to educate myself thoroughly before I opine. It is a strategy you may wish to consider.
Back in them old days (to reference the 1960’s), there was released as much science fiction in one year by publishers that is outdistanced in one month these days. So there is room for confusion, assumptions and poor thinking in regard to what is worthy of attention.
Back to what I wrote some time back here: write good stories, and be nice to people. If you can’t be pleasant, shut up.
“Am I wrong in thinking that, if the Hugos were ended for all time, the SF community could look to the Nebulas as a set of awards directly analogous to the Academy Awards for film?”
Any long-term loss in stature for the Hugos will lead to the Nebulas being more well-regarded. If the Worldcon business meeting doesn’t do anything about bloc voting, I think the most likely outcome is for the Nebulas to become the gold standard for SF/F awards.
Compare this year’s Nebula ballot to the hijacked Hugo ballot and it’s obvious which group did a better job finding excellent works in the field:
http://www.sfwa.org/2015/02/2014-nebula-awards-nominees-announced/
JJ: The 4,201 titles refers strictly to the number of new novels released during 2014. It includes only English language books, but does include books originally published in other languages, but first released in English during 2014. In addition, there were 404 (single author) Collections, 383 (multiple author) Anthologies, and 326 Omnibus’s. There are always some titles missing for a few years, i.e. those not known as SF/F to Locus, Amazon, or any of the other major reviewers, primarily (nowadays) self-published ebooks not listed with proper tags and books marketed under other themes but with enough SF/F content to count.
And thank you for the kind words about our group; it’s a labor of love from a gang of guys (and a couple women) who are all a bit OCD about our fandom.
What is this “earlier attempts to game the awards” garbage? Do you mean Sad Puppies 2, the Vote Your Hate campaign and Great Fan Exchange Program? Because that’s the only one I can think of.
State what you mean and provide proof. The Puppies have shown us all that arranging block voting leaves big fat tracks that anyone can see.
If you mean people recommending works and or people for reasons having do do with things other than the work, so what? Everyone is entitled to nominate and recommend to others things that are their honest favorites, whether that is because the author’s body of work is that good, because the editor is retiring soon and this is their last chance, because the author’s dog died recently and they want to show their support–whatever.
That is quite different from a slate promoted item for item on several linked popular blogs, (and a second slate that supports the first in most particulars,) which combine to directly benefit, sometimes substantially, the people who organized and promoted it, and that shuts out even works that the slate-makers themselves agree were better from the ballot.
Good grief.
“If the awards were not gamed in previous years, then how can you claim the puppies took awards away from more deserving authors?”
Are you even listening to yourself? We can claim that because we have seen Puppy works withdrawn and more deserving works the Puppies had shut out placed on the ballot. But even if that hadn’t happened, we can get there from first principles: slates by definition and purpose give a boost to the works and people they push. In so doing they push them ahead of works and people who didn’t get that unfair advantage The works and people so displaced were the ones who deserved to be on the ballot. Duh.
I’d ask what is wrong with you people, but I think I know.
Mike, who is this guy? Why did you give him a platform? Presumably you thought he had some knowledge or insight to offer, and I’d like to know what it is, if you don’t mind telling us.
“Mike, who is this guy? Why did you give him a platform?”
I had the same questions. File 770 is full of takes on the Hugo Awards, covering the full scope of the debate. Tuomas Vainio doesn’t sound like a person who has followed any of that.
No rcade, he got interested in it from the now retracted Entertainment Weekly hit piece. He is an excellent example of a an otherwise neutral party to this issue who has been drawn in by the publicity and put off by the lying.
You Puppies sure have a bug up your butt about Isabella Biedenharn’s EW piece. You talk like it was part of an orchestrated smear campaign by social justice warriors.
The most likely explanation for why it was so bad is that online news organizations post a massive number of blog posts and don’t fact-check or edit them any more. They hire inexperienced writers — Biedenharn is still a journalism student in college whose title at EW is “editorial assistant” — to shovel out content all day long.
These writers don’t take the time to learn anything. They skim a few web pages, throw some paragraphs together and hit Publish.
Biedenharn has written 70 blog posts for EW since that Puppies piece ran on on April 6. She produced a work of shoddy journalism because that’s what online media is doing all over the web today. The only secret agenda is to get clicks as cheaply as possible.
“Thus the decision of superiority falls onto the shoulders of the fans raised above the rest by their willingness and capability to spend at least $40 for the right to nominate and vote in the Hugo awards.”
This would be interesting if it were true, but in our universe, until the recent kerfuffles, most of the people eligible to nominate and vote for Hugos were people who had paid membership fees to, you know, be members of the convention.
‘No rcade, he got interested in it from the now retracted Entertainment Weekly hit piece. He is an excellent example of a an otherwise neutral party to this issue who has been drawn in by the publicity and put off by the lying.”
In short, he knows absolutely nothing about the Hugos, and is just running his mouth.
This post lacks any insight into the history of Hugo recommendations, and doesn’t seems particularly informed about the slates this year. Looking to Amazon, with its flood of poorly written self-published work, as an indicator of the quantity of potentially award-worthy titles, seems particularly clueless.
Why on earth has this been published anywhere but on the writer’s own blog?
Tuomas Vainio seems to think there is no way those of us who nominate for the Hugos can discover which of the thousands of novels and stories and other sorts of media are worth nominating each years UNLESS someone puts them on a slate, for there are just too many works out there.
But this is nonsense, as anyone who is an actual SF fan knows. Not only do we read SF ourselves (all the time, obsessively), we read about SF (all the time, obsessively). There are reviews on Locus, on Strange Horizons, in Lightspeed, on countless blogs. There is word of mouth — our friends and family wondering if we have read this book or that story, since it’s really good, or wow, what a barker.
We get to know the works worth reading. We discover the works worth reading ourselves, and the writers worth following, as well.
It ain’t rocket science, is what I’m saying, and anyone who reads SF, instead of just speculating about it, know what.
(I would also recommend that Tuomas Vainio look up how to use a semi-colon. Please. For the love of God.)
Mike, I believe you’ve been played. Here’s Tuomas Vainio chatting with Vox Day on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, and dismissing concerns about Gamergate a couple weeks before the Entertainment Weekly piece. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that anyone following Beale and responding to him definitely heard a load about the Puppies and the Hugos well before Entertainment Weekly came along. I don’t think Vainio wrote this in good faith.
Boom!
Hmmm. The following also seems to conflict with his claim that he’s not a Hugo nominator or a voter:
https://twitter.com/OddlyDinosaur/status/591285244243927040
Snowcrash, I didn’t read that as any statement of “I’m in a position to vote on it”, just that he thinks it’s a good idea from worthy people and wishes them well at it. (He’s not on the Sasquan membership list, either, though of course that’s not dispositive.) I use a similar construction to endorse efforts I’m not really part of myself.
“You Puppies sure have a bug up your butt about Isabella Biedenharn’s EW piece. You talk like it was part of an orchestrated smear campaign by social justice warriors.”
No, the fact it appeared the same time as about a dozen or so other similar articles on other sites that lean to the left makes that unlikey. It would mean that there was a behind the scenes effort of message coordination taking place, and as anyone who is anyone knows after following this years Hugo travails, the other side does not, never has, and never will engage in that sort ill conceived, ill considered and below the belt behavior.
…as opposed to there being a bunch of fannish interest about the impending nominations announcement, spilling over some to folks who don’t follow fandom all the time but can look at a calendar, see that there’s news coming up, and get a sense of the moment, and who can see that an announcement has occurred and look for reactions among well-known, hopefully representative people.
Calendars are not a conspiracy.
Pretty sure Vox has said he didn’t put Three Body Problem on his list because he hadn’t read it by the deadline.
Eric: “It would mean that there was a behind the scenes effort of message coordination taking place”
Y’all don’t have much familiarity with how the Internet works these days, do ya? People who work for “News” websites are constantly checking the websites of their competitors. If a story breaks on another website, then they jump to get a story to put together on their own site.
All it takes is for one site to break a story on something, for there to be a cascading series of articles on the same thing to appear on a bunch of other sites.
But hey, keep telling yourself it’s all part of some vast “conspiracy by SJWs to keep the good Puppies down”. After all, there’s nothing like a hefty dose of echo chamber bias confirmation to make you feel validated.
Good point about news sites checking each other. Also, Google News isn’t a conspiracy, either.
JJ,
“After all, there’s nothing like a hefty dose of echo chamber bias confirmation to make you feel validated.”
Pot, I’ve got a collect call from Kettle….
Andrew, does it matter why vox didn’t put it on the slate, or why he didn’t get brad to put it on the SP slate? the point it that it was initially kept off the ballot by the slates.
Andrew: “Pot, I’ve got a collect call from Kettle…”
As soon as the Puppies actually produce evidence of their claims that the Hugos have been rigged for years by a secret cabal of SJWs, I’ll be happy to take that call and pay for it.
But it’s been what, a couple of years now? And the Puppies have still never produced any such evidence. Because it didn’t happen. So I’m quite sure the contents of my wallet are safe.
No, the fact it appeared the same time as about a dozen or so other similar articles on other sites that lean to the left makes that unlikey.
Just last week there were dozens of articles about a murder in Baltimore. They were on a variety of different websites and many were very similar. Must have been a conspiracy.
Or, you know, people responding to current events. Nah, couldn’t have been that. Must have been some giant “SJW conspiracy”.
Seriously do you Puppies have any idea how ridiculous you sound?
“Y’all don’t have much familiarity with how the Internet works these days, do ya? People who work for “News” websites are constantly checking the websites of their competitors. If a story breaks on another website, then they jump to get a story to put together on their own site.”
Also, SF/F is not actually an obscure genre that only one journalist in the world reads. Or doesn’t read but he’ll write a story if it’s spoon-fed to him. The story in which the prestigious Hugo nominations are sudddenly dominated by a slate promoted by an obscure right-wing blogger with an obscure right-wing publishing house in Finland, and some other people, is actually newsworthy. No conspiracy is required beyond the one behind the slates.
Good lord. The news reporting news. Clearly, a conspiracy!
NOTE: For given values of news.
…Why did this random guy get a guest post?
Wildcat: “Why did this random guy get a guest post?”
That’s a very good question, especially since he’s hiding behind the name of a very famous European CrossFit competitor, and since he describes himself in his Twitter account as a “professional online troll”.
Presumably, Mr Glyer had his reasons. I won’t presume to guess at his motivations for posting it, but my personal conjecture is that he knew this guy’s tissue-paper arguments would be torn to shreds in no time flat by people posting actual facts — which is, indeed, what actually happened.
@JJ — I don’t quite know a gentle way to break it to you, son, but there’s some of us fen who don’t really give a damn about the Hugos, and never have. You might well say something like, ‘Why are you sticking your ignorant nose in this, then?’ And I would then reply, “BECAUSE THIS HUGO CONTROVERSY CRAP APPEARS TO BE HIJACKING ALL OF FANDOM, JEEZ!”
Just my 2 cents.
Pacific Standard Simon: “You might well say something like, ‘Why are you sticking your ignorant nose in this, then?’ And I would then reply, “BECAUSE THIS HUGO CONTROVERSY CRAP APPEARS TO BE HIJACKING ALL OF FANDOM, JEEZ!”
And you’ve not got anything better to do with your time than participate unwillingly in all this Hugo controversy crap? I’ve managed to read 2 novels (and work a full-time job) in the past week, despite participating in it.
I’m sure someone of your advanced age and wisdom is perfectly capable of avoiding participation and accomplishing even more than me. 🙂
I really don’t understand people who come onto a comment thread about $SUBJECT, and essentially say “I don’t care about $SUBJECT, please stop talking about $SUBJECT”
What is this mysterious force that compels you to comment on $SUBJECT that you care not for? Have you sought medical advice for it?
“It would mean that there was a behind the scenes effort of message coordination taking place …”
You Puppies sure love your secret conspiracies. I’d challenge you to prove it, but we all know you won’t even try.
Anyone who knows SF/F fandom knows that we agree on little and argue about everything. There’s no group less likely to pull off a conspiracy. So if we were plotting to control the online news world to smear a few jealous conservative authors who don’t socialize well with others, it would come to light quickly.
Any similarity in Hugo Awards stories about the obnoxious Puppies stunt is likely because sites steal news from each other. Nobody wants to pay for original reporting any more. It’s easier to get an intern to cut and paste and move a few words around.
I skimmed through most of the comments. It is a shame on me for not reading them all in detail.
But here is how I address some of the issues raised:
As for ISFDB as more credible source for the number, well, just go to Amazon and pick up a random work of SFF and see if you can find it in there. For example, page 200 for Amazon’s science fiction search results when sorted based on publication date:
– Evanescence, by Karen Nelson, not in ISFDB.
– Experimentation, by Rafaela Hamann, not in ISFDB.
– The Experiments, by Cody King, not in ISFDB.
– Fallen Stardust, by Brian Wheeler, not in ISFDB.
– Flipspace: Derivation, by John Steiner, not in ISFDB.
– …
I have not read any of the above works. I do not know the authors. They simply appeared in the search results as published on 2nd of April 2015.
When going through the list for new and popular;
– Ryk Brown’s Ep.#13 – “A Show of Force” (The Frontiers Saga) is not.
– Christopher Nuttall’s A Savage War Of Peace (Ark Royal Book 5) is not, though his earlier works are.
– Ruby Dixon’s Product Details
Ice Planet Barbarians: The Complete Series: A SciFi Alien Serial Romance is not.
– S. E. Smith’s Dagger’s Hope: The Alliance Book 3 is not.
– B. V. Larson’s Death World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 5) is not, though his other works are.
In otherwords; 5 out of the first 16 new and popular works in Amazon are not yet on the ISFDB. What does that say of the credibility of the ISFDB in estimating how much new SF there is? Naturally, you can choose to read the database akin to a holy scripture, but personally I am far more interested in what I can actually find and read in reality.
And yes, I did make that tweet to Vox Day, particulary because he was the first person to actually link the author behind the image. Do you realise how rare it is for anyone to mention the actual sources when they post stuff online?
Oh, I have also posted a comment on one of Vox’s blog posts about gay marriage. (Hint: I am not against gay marriage.)
And yes, I have dismissed concerns regarding the hashtag GamerGate in an attempt towards poetic verse. In addition, I have also dismissed concerns regarding the sky falling down, but not yet in poetic verse.
And no, I have not spent $40 for the right to nominate and vote in the Hugo awards. I hear the reading packet is great, but at the same price I can purchase about 13~ novels from Amazon.
And finally, I apologise for the lateness of my reply.