aka Crate Expectations
The Memorial Day roundup begins with Dave Freer and carries on with Cheryl Morgan, Jeff Duntemann, Sam Finlay, Adam-Troy Castro, Lisa J. Goldstein, Joseph Tomaras, Andrew Hickey, Rebekah Golden, Martin Wisse, Declan Finn, Steve Leahy and Dcarson. (Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editors of the day William Reichard and Jim Henley.)
Dave Freer on Mad Genius Club
“Making a living, and things that may interfere with it” – May 25
So far, to best of my knowledge, the Puppies, both sad and rabid, and their followers have avoided attacking things which make people a living. They’ve asked people to NOT take it out on the authors who have been pressured into stepping out of Noms. They’ve spoken out against punishing Tor Books despite the Neilsen Hayden’s and friends attacks on ‘Making Light’. No-one has called for a boycott or blacklist of David Gerrold, or Glenn Hauman, or to have their reputations tarnished and Amazon reviews deliberately lowered.
That’s of course NOT true in the converse. And while there’s been some passive-aggressive ‘semi-plausible-deniability’ ‘who will rid us of these turbulent puppies’ basically from the get-go it’s been attacks on the ability of the Puppy organizers and the nominees ability to make a living. We’re immoral destroyers (we obeyed the rules to letter. Patrick Nielsen Hayden broke the embargo rules with absolute impunity, not a word of criticism offered. Rules are only for little people.) who break every convention of good behavior (David Gerrold, the MC of the event, has been campaigning relentlessly against the Pups and the nominees – which is so far outside the canon of ‘acceptable behavior’ as to be a light-year beyond the pale). They organized smears on Entertainment Weekly to label us racists and sexists – which the magazine had to redact because they’re demonstrably untrue. It didn’t stop the smears mysteriously cropping up in ‘friendly’ outlets across the English Speaking world. Gerrold and TNH carefully listed all the nasty things –exclusion from Cons, denial of space in publications, editors closing doors to subs, reviews being denied… that just would happen to us. All things that would, had to affect the puppies ability to make a living. Not one of them said ‘hey, these people have families. They’re human too.’ In fact we had phrases flung about putting us down. Untermench. Then we have Glenn Hauman calling for people to use the Hugo package for a way to game the rankings against the puppies. “Oh, and to answer the title question: what do you do to rabid puppies? You put them down.”
Jeff Duntemann on Jeff Duntemann’s Contrapositive Diary
“Sad Puppies Summary and Wrapup” – May 24
Eveybody’s got a theory on how to fix the Hugo Awards process, but to me the process is fine; what’s missing is about 25,000 more involved nominators and voters. A large enough voter base is unlikely to be swept by something like a slate of recommendations. Whether so many new people can be brought into the Worldcon/Hugos community is unclear, but I doubt it.
That’s about all I’m going to have to say about the Sad Puppies topic for awhile. I’m turning my attention back to writing, to the concept of the Human Wave, and perhaps to a suspicion I have that fandom is in the process of splitting. The problems of fandom are caught up in the problems of publishing. Once Manhattan-style traditional publishing becomes more or less irrelevant, fandom may become an overlapping group of online communities centered on authors and genres. Each will probably have its own awards, and the Hugos will become only one among many. Is this a good thing?
You bet!
Sam Finlay on Return of Kings
“How Female-Dominated Publishing Houses Are Censoring Male Authors” – May 25
We continued talking about why the industry seems to be so focused on just playing to the tastes of upper-middle class women in New York City, and I then told him some things that Sci-Fi author Larry Correia had said recently in a podcast concerning the Sad Puppies-Rabid Puppies controversy, and how it struck me that by pursuing their current strategy the publishing houses are ignoring huge markets of people willing to buy books and are cutting their own throats.
He broke in saying, “I know, I know…But look, Sam…you gotta stop thinking. Just stop thinking! Thinking about all this will drive you crazy! Don’t go to bookstores, if they even still have any where you live. Don’t look at other books. You’ll just wonder how in the world this thing even got published,” and then told me some more anecdotes about how the sausage is made. He then quoted Otto Priminger, saying “Nobody knows anything.”
It was sad. He’s a good man, and was just as frustrated about it all as anybody, but he’s stuck fighting a literati who only look for books that support the current narrative, and is left trying to sneak in what stories he can, however he can.
Adam-Troy Castro on Facebook – May 25
So if somebody unfamiliar to me wins an award I was up for, and more importantly gets a big contract while I’m left begging for more porridge at Mr. Bumble’s Workhouse, I honestly give serious thought to the premise that I have missed something that excels in a way my efforts do not.
By contrast, a glance at some of the rhetoric issued by {Gay-Basher McManly-Nuts} establishes a deep and unwavering belief that he, and those who work in his wheelhouse, represent the bastion of greatness against which the rest of us hammer in vain, like zombies trying to get past a boarded-up window.. To wit, if he hasn’t set the world on fire, if he is not met at the convention gates by a swarm of screaming groupies like the kids at the beginning of A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, if books that are nothing like the books he writes get more acclaim than his, the answer can only be that it MUST BE A CONSPIRACY, that justifies an EVEN MORE BLATANT CONSPIRACY. He has no doubts at all. He deserves this. He is angry, Mr. {Gay-Basher McManly-Nuts}. And it is not just regular anger. It is righteous anger, bringing us to the point that being righteously angry is not necessarily the same thing as being justifiably angry, not even close.
The difference between Mr. {Gay-Basher McManly-Nuts} and myself is therefore significant, and it boils down to the statement that while I am very capable of being an asshole about many things, I am not an asshole to that extent or in that particular way.
I also possess discernment about some things that apparently still confuse him.
For instance, I have absolutely no difficulty identifying my elbow. It’s the place in the middle of my arm that bends.
Lisa J. Goldstein on theinferior4
“The Hugo Ballot, Part 15: Back to Novellas” – May 25
Okay, I’m surprised. Tom Kratman’s “Big Boys Don’t Cry” actually reads in places like an anti-war story. Well, let’s not get carried away here — it’s more a story about the harm that fighting wars can do, the ways in which a personality can be twisted and perverted by the aims of those in command.
Maggie is a Ratha, an intelligent fighting vehicle who has been through countless battles, and been made to forget some of her more disturbing actions. She has been mortally wounded and is being taken apart for scrap — but the more the workers drill down, the more she starts remembering things that now seem to her to be problematic…..
Joseph Tomaras on A Skinseller’s Workshop
“Hugo Short Story Ballot” – May 24
“Totaled” by Kary English is too good a story to be tarred with the brush of a slate. It makes good use of not-as-far-future-as-those-unfamiliar-with-the-field-might-think neuroscience to explore the mind-body problem, the relationship of emotion to cognition, and the furthest limits to which careerist self-sacrifice can drive a person. I wish it had first appeared either in a free online venue, or a magazine with broader circulation than Galaxy’s Edge.
Lou Antonelli’s “On a Spiritual Plane” attempts to cover similar ground, but there’s a crippling contradiction between the short story form, which requires some measure of crisis for the protagonist, and the author’s evident desire simply to set up a world that is confirmatory of the narrator’s Thomistic metaphysics….
Lis Carey on Lis Carey’s Library
“Jeffro Johnson Hugo Nomination Fanwriter Sample” – May 25
This might be the best of the Puppy Fan Writer nominees. At the very least, I can see real substance in it that doesn’t work for me, but surely will for its intended audience.
Andrew Hickey on Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!
“Hugo Blogging: ‘Best’ Related Work” – May 25
For fairly obvious reasons, I am not going to give anything on those slates a ranking above No Award. Once again, however, I am grateful that my aesthetic instincts match my moral ones here — while these are (with one notable exception) much less incompetent than the fiction I’ve read so far, none of them are actually, you know, good.
Here’s how I’m ranking them.
Letters from Gardner by Lou Antonelli is half writing autobiography/how to break into SF manual, and half collection of short stories. Basically imagine The Early Asimov, but with Antonelli replacing Asimov and Gardner Dozois replacing John Campbell. Antonelli tells the story of how each of his stories was written, and how it was accepted or rejected. The difference is, though, that Antonelli has had an undistinguished career, lasting roughly a decade, while Asimov was one of the greats of the genre (at least in sales and critical status). There is an intrinsic interest in Asimov’s juvenilia which there just isn’t for Antonelli. The stories were pedestrian, and there were no real insights, but this might be of interest to someone. It’s not *bad*, just also not *good*…..
Rebekah Golden
“2015 Hugo Awards Best Short Story: Reviewing L Antonelli” – May 25
“On A Spiritual Plain”, Lou Antonelli (Sci Phi Journal #2, 11-2014)
If this had been longer than fifteen pages I would not have finished it. After I did finish it I looked up the elements of a story to see what was missing.
Martin Wisse on Wis[s]e Words
“Preliminary thoughts — Best Graphic story Hugo” – May 25
During the various discussions about the Puppies, the Hugo Awards and everything somebody, I think it was Erik Olson, made the excellent remark that new Hugo categories only make sense if there are enough good candidates each year for it. If there only one or two or even five different candidates in any given year, what’s the point? It occurred to me that the converse is also true: any given Hugo category only makes sense if the Hugo voters are knowledgeable enough to actually vote for more than just a handful of the usual subjects year after year. Otherwise it means you just have an even smaller than usual group of people nominating and most people either not voting, or only voting for names they recognise.
The Best Graphic Story category, which was first awarded in 2009, at first seemed to fail that second requirement. The first three awards were won by Girl Genius and you do wonder whether that was because people recognised Kaja & Phil Foglio from fandom, rather than for the comic itself. The Foglios themselves were gracious enough to withdraw after their third win and since then the category has improved a lot, having been won by three different comics since. I’m still a bit skeptical of how well it will work out in the long term, or whether it’ll become just another category most people won’t care about, like the best semi-prozine or best fan artist ones and just vote by rote, if at all.
On the other hand though, if there’s one thing the Hugos, as well as Worldcon needs if it wants to stay relevant, is to get in touch with wider fandom, to not just focus on the old traditional categories. And comics suit the Hugos well. There are plenty of science fiction comics published each year, even omitting superhero series and there does now seems to be a core of Worldcon fans invested in nominating and voting. Since there isn’t really a proper comics orientated sf award yet, haivng the Hugos take up the slack is an opportunity to make them relevant to a primary comics geek, as opposed to a written sf geek audience.
Cheryl Morgan on Cheryl’s Mewsings
“The Wages of Sin” – May 25
Yesterday Sasquan, the 2015 Worldcon, announced that they now have 9,000 members. Fannish mathematics thus makes it the first billion dollar Worldcon1.
On the back of this unexpected windfall the Commie Pinko Faggot Feminazi Cabal that controls Worldcon via Tor Books has announced the 10-year, $3.4 million deal for its primary gamma rabbit author, John Scalzi.
Scalzi’s editor at Tor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, explained the rationale behind this move. “It was a tough decision,” he said, especially as none of Scalzi’s books have sold more than a dozen or so copies, mostly to his friends and family. The convention revenue simply doesn’t cover the shortfall.” ….
Declan Finn on A Pius Man
“The Anti-Puppies (Sad Puppies Bite Back VI)” – May 26
[Putatively humor.]
[GRR Martin …gapes, blinks, then turns to NKJ] And you, hold on a second. You’re not content with having a personal vendetta and an online feud with Vox Day, but you want to deliberately taunt the Dark Lord of the Fisk!? Have you no sense of self-preservation?
[Scalzi frowns] I thought he was the International Lord of Hate
[Jemisin] Anything he says to me will prove that he’s a racist!
Declan Finn on A Pius Man
“Putting down the puppies (Sad Puppies Bite Back VII)” – May 26
[Three hours later, down the road, lying in wait, are the Evil League of Evil. Tom Kratman tirelessly watches the road, awaiting the dog catcher truck. John “Dr. O. No” Ringo, now that the sun is down, furiously taps away on his laptop, cranking out a rough draft of a 15-book series on an alien invasion. Larry Correia, the International Lord of Hate, is fisking the entire back catalog of The Guardian. The Cuddly Skeletor, Brad Torgersen, clutches the flamethrower on loan from Larry, looking like a kid waiting for Christmas morning.]
[LC looks up] I’m running out of Guardian articles. Are they coming or not?
[TK growls, frustrated] I don’t see them sir! We still have the Claymore mines ready and waiting to blow them straight to Hell at the first sign! Assuming the land mines in the road don’t get them first! Or the three backup snipers!
[LC] Geez, Tom, are you sure that we’ll even need to fire a shot, assuming they ever get here?
[TK] Better to be prepared than not, sir!
[LC sighs, closes the laptop, and stands up, taking care not to hit the flagpole above him] Okay, everyone, we’re packing up. Brad, sorry, no flamethrower for you tonight.
[Brad, frustrated that he never got to use his flame thrower on the self-destructed anti-Puppies, fires it off into space. The massive fireball makes it way to low orbit. It impacts and explodes against a low-flying alien spacecraft, a scout for the incoming armada. The armada, thinking their surprise has been ruined, turn around and retreat. The wounded ship hurtles in an uncontrolled descent, slamming right into Tor’s officers, taking out the entire suite of offices, and a few cockroaches — including an intern named Joe Buckley, but no one noticed one way or another, since interns are all disposable anyway. But Joe died happy. He FINALLY got to see an exploding space ship!]
Dcarson on Steve Jackson Games Board & Dice Forum
“Mars Attacks (Worldcon)” – May 24
Played Mars Attacks this weekend at Balticon. We noticed that the cities showing were all ones we had been to a Worldcon in. So for the next game we sorted through the city deck and if we allowed San Diego as the site of a Nasfic we had 16 city and monument cards. So a 4 player game of Mars Attacks the Worldcon.
I wonder if all those people trying to rig the Hugo Awards have one of these at home: https://t.co/evPJzSyK7Z
— Steve Leahy (@oz_penguin) May 25, 2015
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Name and links to remarks in original context.
“Hot puppies!” I burst out excitedly. “This isn’t prose— it’s frozen music! The gink who wrote this is the bee’s knees!”
by SJ Pereleman seems applicable somehow somewhere in all this.
Eric said: “Well, Worldcon has certainly gone out of its way to inform the casual SF/F fan whats needed to participate in the process, haven’t they? Thats why the number of voters steadiliy rose in the internet age, to that dizzying height of almost 1000 voters….wait, that’s not the narrative, is it?
Maybe it’s all those posts from people saying “I had no idea I could be part of this process”, ut then maybe they are just outliers?”
Well, I Googled “Hugo Awards”, and the very first link was to the official site of the Hugo Awards. When I clicked on it, right at the top was a banner that had, as the fourth item from left, right after “Home”, “About”, and “The Awards”, “Participate/Vote”. When I hovered over it, I saw a link to, “I Want to Vote”. That took me to a page that contained all the information about purchasing a supporting membership, including the phrase, “You do not need to attend the convention in order to nominate or vote.”
All of that literally took me less than a minute. And that was with me accidentally filling in the search box with “Hugo Awa”, because I clicked the wrong auto-complete entry. 🙂 Short of buying ad time, I think that they couldn’t make the process clearer or more explicit.
Jeffro Johnson:
I haven’t read Vance myself (shame on me), but I have Dying Earth on my nightstand. So I’ll get there. What I liked was your reasoning about magic and the impact on games. I have played AD&D. 😉
However, I will discuss Leiber and Lovecraft anytime! 😀
Pratchett was nominated in both 2000 and 2005. You continue to make basic errors.
The thing about Fritz Leiber– when I trawled the web looking at what everyone had written about “Ill Met in Lankhmar”, I realized that everyone regardless of political persuasion could praise the man’s genius. But even more surprising that that– people that played different versions of D&D came to the same conclusions about the debt the gaming owes the man. Incredible!
I call Fritz Leiber fandom’s last best hope for a Kumbaya moment!
Don’t waste it, people!
I enjoyed that book and wrote a review on my blog. The story has some flaws but the setting is absolutely fantastic. It’s a world built on the inside of a miles-long cylinder in which sentient AI software has engineered a species of slow-moving, spider-armed primates who cling to roots growing on the edge of the world and live only as long as they can hold on. They’re called Brachiators and they fight among themselves in battles so slothful it looks like they’re not moving at all.
@Eric, at this point you might want to make an overall judgment call about your information sources’ accuracy, and whether you can really rely on any conclusions you have drawn based on them.
@bbz ” also don’t understand their sense of entitlement to Hugo awards”
It’s the ‘entitlement’ part. As Freer’s posting here makes clear, they are tired of all the awards going to good books and want the Hugos to be spread around more so that they can make money.
When you think about it, the awards have been pretty one-sided. Why not give some of the ‘Best-of’ trophies to average writers, instead of insisting that they only go to the best authors. Doesn’t that sound more fair?
Haha, Leiber was never my kind of fantasy. Ok, but nothing special (arrrgh, don’t kill me). Maybe because I came into him several years after AD&D-campaigning.
What I liked with Lieber was his semi-horror stories. Like Conjure Wife, You’re all alone, Our Lady of Darkness…
Yes, they have, and this outreach has been done for years.
I began voting in the Hugo Awards in 2007. Finding out I could do this required a trivial amount of time — a half-hour at most. I sought out the Worldcon and Hugos sites and did a little digging.
Like everyone else with a blog or social media account, whenever I talked about the Hugos I mentioned that anyone could vote and shared a link to the site where a supporting membership could be purchased. I talked about how cheap it was and said there’s a Hugo packet voters for free with many of the nominated works.
I don’t think there’s an audience out there of casual SF/F fans who aren’t voting in the Hugos because nothing is being done to get them involved. I think the idea just isn’t on their radar, probably because they don’t spend any time on the Internet reading about the awards or searching for information about them.
When you think about it, the awards have been pretty one-sided. Why not give some of the ‘Best-of’ trophies to average writers, instead of insisting that they only go to the best authors.
Senator Roman Hruska (R-NE), speaking in defense of a certain Supreme Court nominee: “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.”
The bias argument is flawed on several levels as an argument that a bias exits against conservative writers within the Hugo nomination process. However one of the key flaws is that identifying a statistical bias (assuming that had been done correctly) does not tell you the source of the bias.
Assume for the sake of argument that it has been shown that in years other than 2015 the proportion of Hugo nominees is less conservative than we would expect given the general population. Secondly let us assume that the RP slate of 2015 was a genuine attempt to redress that unrepresentative proportion. What do we see?
A high proportion of nominations from one author John C Wright and a high proportion of nominations from one minor publishing house. What does this tell us about bias ASSUMING that the RP nomination process was a sincere attempt at nominating better works?
1. Lots of John C Wright suggest the pool of conservative writers is very small. Imagine a bag filled with the names of all the Hugo-quality conservative writers who published eligible work in 2014 – a name appears per eligible work. Assume that the RP is an unbiased sample of those writers. The answer “John C wright” comes up an awful lot! Of the 25 nominees for single author work (Novel, Novella, Novellette, Short STory, Related Work) on the slate 6 of the nominees are John C Wright. Put another way, assuming an unbiased selection of conservative authors there was over a 1 in 5 chance (nearly 1 in 4) of picking John C Wright. Looking only at Novella the chance is 3 our of 5.
Assuming all that then the source of the hypothesized ‘bias’ in the Hugos becomes clear the actual number of conservative authors producing eligible Hugo work of nominatable quality is very, very small and disproportionately John C Wright.
If we regard the RP slate as being not necessarily political but nominating from a pool of any authors somehow left out of Hugo consideration for nefarious reasons then the figures only look worse. RP demonstrates that the ‘bias’ lies within conservative circles – either they aren’t celebrating or encouraging conservative writers or they are unfairly promoting a very small slecet number.
2. Treat publishers in the same way. Of the 30 nominees on the slate with named publishers 8 are from Castalia House. Again assuming an unbiased selection the chance is over 1 in 4.
So either:
1. the eligible pool of conservative writers is disproportionately small (with John C Wright being head and shoulders the most prolific)
or
2. those complaining about bias do a poor job of promoting conservative writers
or
3. both
Given that we would expect in any given year without a slate there to be very few conservative nominees – WITHOUT ANY shenangigans by Hugo voters or malice or prejudice against conservative writers.
Now a rejoinder could be this: the source of the bias is not important. If the pool of women sci-fi wrters or some other group was small I as a card-carrying member of the International SJW Workers of the World (ISJWWW) would still regard that as evidence of inherent sexism. Fair point. I would assume that a restricted field of eligible candidates was due to some wider social bias, prejudice or social discrimination against that group. Is that the case with conservatives? Given the existance of conservatives in many high positions of power and wealth I can reject that hypothesis.
A second rejoinder could be that as a card carrying ISJWWWCHORF I should be striving for diversity in all things. Again fair point but this would imply that ISJWWWCHORFSMORFs should take affirmative action to promote conservative writers and help nurture a wider field of aspiring conservative sci-fi writers. As such writers OPPOSE affirmative action, to do so would be to fundamentally disrespect their beliefs and rob them of agency.
So in short, assuming there is a statistical bias against conservative writers in the Hugos, Rabid Puppies demonstrates the source of bias lies withing the conservative community (you just aren’t writing enough good stuff by your own admission and you aren’t promoting enough authors). Secondly given your antipathy towards affirmative action we on the left can’t help you out. Thirdly given the ample wealth and resources of American conservatives you should mybe complain in that direction. 🙂
“do you realize that if what they’re saying is true, then this is still the most pointless f**king bulls**t anyone has ever forced us to read?”
I bet they hadn’t had to read “Wisdoms from my Internet” though.
Why are the Puppies so obsessed with PNH?
Well, PNH is responsible for unleashing the Great Satan Scalzi.
Jeffro
I think you may overlook the impact of an adulatory review on, for example Correia, who as I hear it, thinks that his books (and conservative books in general) don’t get enough reviews.
It’s a wonderful thing when people find books they love. In the meantime I love MRK’s work in no small part because she showed me a world where what I wanted existed. A world in which women like me are real characters with their own talents, skills and concerns, who play a serious role in the plot and are not just swept under the rug except where we are totems and trophies handed about to particularly spectacular members of the race of Man.
Now I get that Puppies are perfectly happy (to the point of shoving them on the Hugo ballot) with stories like _Flow_ in which women don’t do enough to be worth naming and the most salient characteristic they can have is breasts, or stories like _A Parliament Of Birds And Beasts_ in which women are mentioned only as temple whores and associated with disease and ugly death–except we might also count the only female animal (!?) the cat, who, as step up and an example of what women can aspire to, is an avatar of disloyalty.
Of course the Puppies are also perfectly happy with stories that have no endings, see _Championship B’tok_ or even no story at all to speak of see _On A Spiritual Plain_. So perhaps you’ll bear with me when I don’t run to seek out the other works that have given you so much pleasure; your tastes and mine don’t seem to align.
Has “The Scarlet Litter” been done already?
The House of Seven Beagles
Finished TGE. Loved it more and more as it progressed.
Tentative voting, without everything read yet.
1 TGE
2 AS
3 TBP
4 NA
I suppose I should probably plough through some puppies next…
@Hampus – Same here. His fantasy never did much for me, but Our Lady of Darkness I thoroughly enjoyed. (Still a trifle bemused by Conjure Wife, I admit–I find the notion of a worldwide conspiracy of women does not just break my disbelief but shatter it into tiny safety glass squares, but arguably it’s because I know firsthand there isn’t one.)
Cat,
I do not know Brad or Larry. I have no idea what they think of my work or of me personally. I don’t really want to know. Of course whatever Brad thinks, it appears that he is able to overlook the fact that I wrote this about his collection:
“But I don’t understand why so many of these stories are up for awards. I’m honestly trying to wrap my head around how this collection could be as big of a deal as it is.”
That’s my review where I was supposedly sucking up to him and his pals. If you followed my blog, you would also know that I gave negative reviews this year to both “On a Spiritual Plain” and “Championship B’Tok.”
Finally… if you are serious about wanting this:
“A world in which women like me are real characters with their own talents, skills and concerns, who play a serious role in the plot and are not just swept under the rug except where we are totems and trophies handed about to particularly spectacular members of the race of Man.”
Then you really shouldn’t thank Mary Robinette Kowal. Although I’m glad she can write and that the target audience which you’re a member of can get what you want from her. But seriously, though… I really have to recommend the work of Stanley G. Weinbaum to you. He was writing your kind of fiction in the nineteen-thirties well before Kowal was even born.
Yeah. I didn’t want to be a poop about it, but “Conjure Wife” seriously tripped my WTF-ometer.
I love CONJURE WIFE. It’s essentially a comic novel about how clueless men are regarding women. (It’s also a classic campus novel.)
I don’t see why not.
We can thank whichever author introduced us to a particular concept. We can thank whoever blew our preconceptions or changed our worldview or opened our minds to new ideas.
Just because some other author may have written something like earlier does not mean that we are wrong for being grateful to the particular ones who we encountered.
Brianna Wu and others have said SP/RP dominated because of GG in the voting.
There’s a difference between reaching out and active involvement though. Correia said he reached out and had next to no interest from the GG crowd, until the Breitbart article came out after nominations were closed.
They can’t both be right. If GG were truly involved before the nomination process closed, given how visible and active GG is, there would have been a lot more noise and numbers from the GG side.
I think there are some GG members who are also SF/F fans that voted, but those numbers were pretty small. I think the increase in voters from last year to this year is almost entirelt SP/RP related (in a 75/15/10 way of SP/RP voters, new voters, GG voters.) How many of the new members are voting because of GG, I’m not sure. A lot more than there were before the nominations were announced, that’s for sure.
I get that, and I do think it is brilliant at that. In many ways it is as subversive as James Tiptree Jr.’s work on gender relations.
But the all-women-are-in-on-the-conspiracy thing totally threw me out of the concept. It was like running into matter-of-fact assertion of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as part of the worldbuilding of a modern fantasy novel.
Jeffro
GRR Martin noted in his ‘Appreciation’ piece in the Jack Vance Treasury that he wrote so well that it seemed effortless, with the story pulling you along, and for some people that’s all they see. But Jack Vance had depth; he invested enormous amounts of thought into the societies he was writing about, down to the creation of a sport which is not only believable as a sport, but as a sport which developed through the history of that society and that world.
It’s really hard to do that, just as it’s really hard to excel at both SF and Fantasy which Vance did, with apparent ease. Nowadays CJ Cherryh is the only person I can think of capable of such multifaceted writing; I greatly enjoy her work but the market has changed to favour long running series, so that is what she writes. I’d love to see more of Morgaine, which starts out looking like a fantasy novel but is in fact SF, but Foreigner is fascinating in its own right and professional writers write for their markets.
This is a fact which some people have difficulties grappling with; markets differ strongly within countries and across countries. The results of the 2014 Hugos were undoubtedly influenced by the fact that Worldcon was held here in London, England, and we don’t share the same perspectives. That isn’t conspiracy, it’s a simple fact of life…
@Andrew P
There’s a difference between reaching out and active involvement though. Correia said he reached out and had next to no interest from the GG crowd, until the Breitbart article came out after nominations were closed.
Vox Day has been a significant member of GG since almost the beginning. Considering how much more successful his RP only slated works were compared to the SP only slated works, I’d hazard that it was the involvement of GG influenced votes that put them both over the edge for the nomination.
“Pratchett was nominated in both 2000 and 2005. You continue to make basic errors.”
In 2000 he was nominated for Best related work with 2 other authors. Oddly enough, none of the followup works in that series were nominated.
I think the argument being made, and poorly, was that he wasn’t nominated for what people know him for best, his novels.
Crichton has a few Hugo awards by affiliation (Movies adaptations of his works), but I think very few people would go around saying “Crichtons won a Hugo for Jurassic Park.” when it was the movie that won, and not the novel? Crichton wrote the original screenplay, but the final resulting movie and novel are much different. I suppose if he had wanted to he could have had “Hugo Award Winning Author” on his books after the movie won, how many fans would think that a dodge of some sort?
I seriously wonder if the GamerGate people had that much presence in the Puppy debacle.
They don’t need to have for the Puppies to get the results they did.
And the mere act of reaching out to them, which the Puppies proudly boast about doing, is itself an immoral act of such enormity as to condemn the Puppy effort from the start, whether or not any GamerGaters responded.
@Stevie,
Yes, I am continually surprised by the way the old grandmasters could do both. Fritz Leiber’s impact on D&D is well known. His impact on Marc Miller’s actual game mastering is less well known.
Even more curious (at least to this particular child of the eighties anyway) is the fact that the old school writers did not seem to think of fantasy and science fiction as even being separate genres. Lovecraft and Howard incorporated both space aliens and evolutionarily themed creatures into their respective tales and both of their most famous works are even part of the same mythos!
It’s my opinion that the obsolescence of weird fantasy and science fantasy is a huge loss to fandom. While my personal preference is for planetary romance, I have to say I quite enjoy having my mind blown by this other stuff! I love just how different it is, though.
The person I was responding to said
He did not say “novels only”, he said “the only time he was ever nominated” was in 2005.
The nomination status of later books in the series is irrelevant to the fact that Pratchett as an author was nominated for a Hugo in 2000 as well as 2005.
‘There’s a difference between reaching out and active involvement though’
I got the impression that GG involvement was overestimated early on, until it be, came apparent quite how relatively small a number you needed to vote the slate to game the nomination. Beale claims to be a GG leader, but that’s an ‘I’M Spartacus’ role, it seems, and was making ‘Oh, now you’ve gone and done it’ noises for a while, suggesting that being mean about the Gators would bring down their wrath on the Hugos. Maybe he still is, but who cares? There’s crossover, but no great actual support.
Dear God. ‘Until it became apparent how relatively small.’ Sorry.
I question your premise that GamerGate is either massively involved in something or not at all.
Correia reaching out to GamerGate’s favorite journalist, Milo Yiannopoulos, in February and getting this coverage on Brietbart …
breitbart.com
… drew 590 comments and a lot of attention from the kind of people who think social justice warriors are conspiring each morning to piss in their cornflakes.
How many of that crowd would it take for the Puppies to hijack the Hugo ballot by voting like sheep?
KimberleyK said:
(emphasis mine)
Yes! This is one of the things that drives me nuts about this whole thing. Women, people of color, queer folks have all been SFF fans the whole time. And most of that time we have managed quite nicely identifying with the mainly white, mainly male, mainly straight characters (or maybe mentally editing them so we could identify with them better). I didn’t want to be Princess Leia when I was a little kid–I wanted to be Han Solo, and so did a lot of other girls.
We like a lot of the SFF out there just fine, including many of the classics. But we really get excited when we see characters who look and act more like us — plus since diverse characters haven’t been the focus for most of SFF’s history, there are a lot of new stories to tell, and new twists on older tropes.
It’s not like there is no room now for the same old characters and tropes and stories. Plenty of authors (Sad Puppies among them) do just fine with it. But there are more options than there used to be, and like every other subculture and sub-sub-culture, the Internet has let people find each other and talk about what they like together, so instead of a lot of women/POC/LGBT folks being the only ones they know who like this stuff, they have found other fans like them and a visible fandom has brought even more people in.
On the whole it’s good for the health of the field, frankly. More stories to be told, more readers to attract.
When I first learned about this Puppy business I popped over to the Correia and Torgersen blogs to see what was what. Comment threads were all SJW this and SJW that, filled with exactly the same resentments that I already knew well from paying attention to the Gamergate/MRA/PUA culture.
At a glance, Puppyism was obviously just another head of that same beast. At that point I had no idea who Ted Beale was, nor did I have any direct evidence of connections between GG and RP. Based on the available evidence, though, I confidently predicted that such evidence existed, and I wasn’t a bit surprised when I later found truckloads of it.
I’m gobsmacked that any puppies would try, at this late date, to insist that there’s daylight between them and the gaters. Any writer who suggests that there is can’t be taken seriously.
Jeffro Johnson:
I’m unclear on the definition of weird fantasy and science fantasy — I’m guessing WF is something like Lovecraft, and maybe pre-1970s horror? Science fantasy is what I think of as superhero stories — imaginary science a la Tony Stark or Superman but consistent within its universe, while not being magical like say, Kim Harrison’s or J.K. Rowling’s or Jim Butcher’s settings.
Do you have author suggestions in these areas (I’m assuming Fritz Leiber is one). Also, I would be interested in reading some Stanley Weinbaum if you have any suggestions on where to start there)…
I think the thing for me was that it was such a…stark? Not even sure what word I want to use here…line of “You are not my audience.” There’s plenty of books that I’ve read where it was pretty clear that men were the target audience, but I could at least come along for the ride. By the very premise, though, in CONJURE WIFE I couldn’t. My existence negated the premise.
I’m not saying it was a bad book, or that it should have been written differently, merely that it’s rare I find a story where I am so bluntly shown the door.
A few years back, some radical Christian evangelicals got ahold of one of my posters for a library reading gig. They decided it was Satanic, and that while the librarians might not have known, the creators of such things always did, ergo I was a Satanist, possibly in the Iluminati, and one woman started claiming she was seeing the poster in banks. (One hesitates to call her a liar, but one does wonder why the banks were so invested in summer reading programs.)
Mostly I thought it was funny because I know full well this is all hogwash. But it’s the same effect–any conspiracy that hinges on me being one of the conspirators is going to be eye-rollingly out there, because I already know I’m not, if that makes any sense?
@Brian Z
It seems like Red Plenty passing me by is my own fault, considering the number of people who are saying they liked it or had heard good buzz about it. I guess that’s the point of swapping recommendations! I did find Nick Mamatas’ comment that he nominated it for Best Related quite telling though – I would speculate that it doesn’t take much splitting of your vote, be it between categories or multiple novels in a year, to drop you out of the running.
In general, it seems like people’s opinions here on the 2011 Hugos lead to the conclusion that there was a fair set of possibles that didn’t make the actual slate, but nothing that everyone’s pointing to and exclaiming “Why didn’t that make it?”
Thank you. You put my feelings about “Conjure Wife” very clearly. “Bluntly shown the door,” yes, to any potential woman reader and anyone with any deeper acquaintance with any woman or girl beyond distant paranoid lust.
It was like reading a novel where it turns out that yes, every liberal in existence is secretly a spy for the Soviet Union. It was alarmingly pod-people, and I say that as someone aware that the Pod People is one of the Puppies’ tropes about anyone who is upset at their upturning of the tables and smashing the crockery of the Hugos.
Demonstrably false. Correia has been openly courting GamerGate for a while now. VoxDay has openly declared his support for GamerGate on many occasions, and has stated that the Puppies are a skirmish in the “wider culture war” being engaged in by GG. Puppy leadership has appeared in pro-GG spaces appealing for support, including an appearance by Torgersen on a podcast put out by HoneyBadgerRadio who were thrown out of the Calgary Expo for GG related shenanigans.
@May
Puppy’s Progress
Voters in the Paws of an Angry Puppy
Stevie says:
If you ever get bored waiting for her next book, try some Dave Duncan.
The Slaters of the Purple Rage
Correia said he reached out and had next to no interest from the GG crowd, until the Breitbart article came out after nominations were closed.
GG is entirely amorphous, and its advocates always choose whether they were responsible for something or not based entirely upon whether it would be of the most advantage to them at the moment. Anything that is bad that happens that a GGer is involved in is always dismissed with “they weren’t real GGers” or “that was the work of some other third party troll”, while anything that anyone even remotely connected with GG that is done that looks good is immediately claimed by all those who identify with the group.
What is known is that Correia and Beale both actively courted GGers. The likelihood is that a fair number of GGers responded, but given the fact that the numbers of actual GGers is probably fairly modest, the level of support from that quarter is probably not going to grow, and since most GGers aren’t actually invested in the Hugo issue, it is likely fairly shaky support.
Correction: The Slaters of the *Puppy* Rage
The Prince and the Puppy
cmm: Science fantasy is what I think of as superhero stories — imaginary science a la Tony Stark or Superman but consistent within its universe, while not being magical like say, Kim Harrison’s or J.K. Rowling’s or Jim Butcher’s settings.
When I hear “science fantasy”, I think either Star Wars or Operation Chaos – sci-fi stories with a fantastic element (the Force) to them. Operation Chaos, by the way, is excellent – possibly Poul Anderson’s finest work.
There was a huge boom in weird fantasy over the past decade: Mieville, Vandermeer, etc.
@cmm
Lovecraft and Howard seem to have defined the “weird” genre in the pages of Weird Tales. Modern horror is not weird. Derivative “swords & sorcery” is not weird. Maybe someone else can explain it better, but it’s shocking how different it is if you haven’t seen it. (What we think of as the fantasy genre is a relatively recent development and it’s hard to get a grip on that.)
The most iconic science fantasy series has to be Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories. “The Dying Earth” and “Eyes of the Overworld” are exquisite. Not everyone gets his style, but it is nevertheless a compelling and influential masterwork of the field.
Gamma World was billed as a science fantasy role playing game. The sub-genre it is based on was created by a female author– Andre Norton’s “Star Man’s Son”. Sterling Lanier’s “Heiro’s Journey” is basically seventies era far left message fiction. Both books feature themes of racial harmony that were quietly retired from the role playing game’s overall emphasis. Anyway, over the top mutant mayhem in post-apocalyptic America would be another style of science fantasy. Vance is technically better, but I have a soft spot for this strand of it.
If you are looking for strong/competent female characters in classic science fiction, then I recommend the following from Stanley G. Weinbaum’s Planetary series:
“Parasite Planet”
“The Lotus Eaters”
“The Planet of Doubt”
“The Red Peri”
You can get the whole set for 99 cents at Amazon and I quite enjoyed them all. No they do not entirely fit our present day standards for guy/girl stuff, but it is still astonishing how old those stories are. The tales feature prominent female scientists, explorers, and space pirates. They are not trophy wives, but co-adventurers and arch-nemesis types.