299 thoughts on “Dragon Con Launches Its Own SF Awards”

1. Sean:

   ” It’s always been my understanding that they (the Sad Puppies anyway) wanted the Hugos to be politically (as well as gender/race) neutral and they got involved because they saw them as biased in the current form.

   Problem is that they use words in such a strange manner. When they say “neutral”, they mean adjusted to their own political bias.

   “Sad Puppies 3 was Torgersen’s attempt to again get more mainstream authors on the ballot, not for trolling, but rather to (as he saw it) try and improve the ballot and move it away from the political/race/gender considerations he saw as currently prominent.”

   There is absolutely no truth whatever in this statement. Instead, Torgersen wrote a long statement about how the slate was the first canon shot in a cultural war. To start a cultural war to keep minorities away from the ballot (because their existence was seen as “proof” of political/race/gender considerations) was anything but neutral.

2. @Sean

   Your screed is similar, quite similar, to one you posted a number of days ago; and as such many past responses still apply. To be blunt, I describe Sad Puppies that way because I am literate in the English language. I read Correia’s justifications at length, and his varied screeds about CHORFs, about making SJW heads explode, etc. As I am not your parent, it is not my job to read them to you if you chose not to; but you’ll find my paraphrases close. Google – or if you’ve found your way to File770 already, it’s all here somewhere. And Teddy Beale was so not a part of it, Correia slated him that time.

   The mainstream-ness of some tiny Finnish imprint is debatable; as is the mainstream-ness of JCW for quite awhile; Aaron covered these more than capably. And of course again, the importance of literacy in English in a discussion mostly centered on online communications in that language. Torgerson explained exactly why he viewed SP3 as part of the ongoing culture war. You can read it yourself. As you can read various JCW rants about keeping sci-fi for those who at least act white. They are all about the gates, if you choose to read the words they wrote describing their project.

   And as far as bringing up race fail, well, it seems quite interesting that the public discussion of racial issues to far greater depth in far more public than had been done before, making such discussions the new normal, sees the next round of gatekeepers saying that we should ignore racism, sexism, and homophobia. And really dude – no tone argument can wipe away the blatant homophobia of John Wright; we can all read how Torgerson treated Ms. Wade on this very blog, and you can read about Beale, someone who was a sad before he was a rabid, about race. No pearl-clutching about how sharp I am being wipes away the reality of what they all wrote.

3. I can’t really say it’s great to see another award in the genre, which is already cluttered with them.

4. I just want to say I’m not opposed to the Dragon*Con Awards. I’ll probably even participate in them. Most of my commentary on them thus far has simply been that they have some fairly obvious flaws, not that they are a bad idea.

5. Cheryl Morgan and I (mostly Cheryl) ran SF AwardsWatch from its launch in 2007 until 2011, when Steve Davidson took over. It is has been moribund since 2013 because of the fairly substantial amount of work it took to try and keep up with the vast number of SF/F genre awards that are out there. Nonetheless, there’s no SF/F Genre Awards Authority from whom you need permission to start up your own Awards. I’ve been saying for a long time now that anyone dissatisfied with [insert Award name here, but usually the Hugo Awards] go out and set up their own awards.

   Most of these awards don’t last very long. Running awards is hard. Getting people to pay attention to them is hard. Even when you succeed, you may not even get proper credit for them. I was recently reading Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History, a scholarly (and IMO rather boring) study of “counterfactuals” (what SF/F genre folks usually call “alternate history”). At one point the book mentions the Sidewise Awards, but says that they are presented by the World Science Fiction Convention, not at Worldcon, which is actually a pretty big distinction in my opinion. What a difference a preposition can make, eh?

6. Always such a rush to conflate the Sad and Rabid puppies, those who want to reform the Hugos and those who want to burn them down. I shake my head.

   As to the talk of war and gatekeeping, if the puppies (and I speak for nobody officially) feel they started a war, they feel that it was a revolutionary war. They felt that the Hugos and Worldcon culture had homogenized around certain tastes, tastes that favored “politically correct” and liberal mindsets while being more likely to reject anything more conservative.

   I say “more likely to reject” because it was in effect an imbalance as opposed to open rejection. An author who was an outspoken liberal could and often did win the award and similarly a neutral or apparently neutral author had a good chance as well, but an outspokenly conservative author had a thumb on the scale against them.

   The perception was conceived from the fact that the most prominent movers and shakers in the Wolrdcon community generally had more liberal and often outspokenly liberal beliefs. Tell me, not counting any puppies of any variety, who would be the most prominent conservative-leaning member of the Worldcon community? What about the top 5? (I really do want to know because I’d be interested in talking to them and see if I’m perceiving the whole situation ass-backward.)

   So, the Sad puppies felt marginalized, unrecognized, and under-represented when it came to award season, and so they pushed back to ensure they could not be ignored. Opening salvo in a culture war? Perhaps. But only in the sense that say Lexington and Concord had the “first salvos” of the American Revolutionary War.

7. Look at how many movie awards exists. Most film festivals wants one. And every larger city wants a film festival. Together they will uncountable.

   But the question for me is not how prestigious or well-known an award becomes. It is about the participation. It is about reading more, discussing more. Outcome is less interesting.

   And well…

   …who wins is less interesting regarding prestige also.

   It is kind of weird that people thinks that making bad choices or voting for strange candidates would make something less prestigious.

   I mean, look at the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. A total mix of war criminals and saints. It is ridiculed most of the time and when not, it is more on the line of “at least they got it right this year”. Mostly people wonder what the hell they were thinking.

   And it is still the most prestigious peace prize. Because it has been around for such a long time, because of the people who have got it before, because of the sense of history and also because of how people follow it.

   Look at the Hugos. Puppies say that it isn’t prestigious, but look at what awards they follow. Which ones they talk about. Which they spend the most time bitching about, make up reading list and slates for. It is the Hugos. Always, always the Hugos.

   There might come other awards. Maybe who better lineup with my tastes or others. But it isn’t about that. What makes an award prestigious is a mix of several things:

   1) The history and tradition.
   2) The monetary part.
   3) How many people who follow the award.
   4) How many celebrities that will show up to accept it, wants to talk about it or wants to be there when the award is given away.

   What is voted on is of lesser interest. The interesting thing is the amount of people who follow the award, either direct or indirect. And it takes time to build up a following.

8. Aaron: Also, the nomination period ends July 25 and the final list for voting is supposed to be published on August 2. That seems quite ambitious. In at least one place they say that the voting is supposed to end on September 3. That means there is one month for the final voting and maybe a day for tallying of the winners. That doesn’t seem like a lot of time, especially if the organizers plan on giving some kind of trophy with an engraved plaque or something as the award. Maybe the awards will be generic and not personalized?

   It CAN be done — But as someone who worked on the Pegasus Awards, I’d have advised at least two weeks between close of nominations and the announcements of the finalist list. You need to have time to contact the potential finalists and ASK if they accept the nomination.

   As for the short time between close of voting and announcement of the winners, IF you’re doing all online vote, it MAY be possible. Regarding the production of the actual awards, you have the statuettes built during the voting period, and engraving the plates that go on the awards can be done 24-48 hours before the award ceremony.

   NOTE: Award committee WILL need to decide if they will allow ties, and how many awards will be allowed per category.

9. As to the talk of war and gatekeeping, if the puppies (and I speak for nobody officially) feel they started a war, they feel that it was a revolutionary war. They felt that the Hugos and Worldcon culture had homogenized around certain tastes, tastes that favored “politically correct” and liberal mindsets while being more likely to reject anything more conservative.

   Sure, they said that. On Tuesday. On Wednesday they said something different, and on Thursday something else. On Friday they actually acted and did something different from anything suggested by their rhetoric. Pretending that the Sad Puppies justifications made any sense is giving them much more credit than they deserve (and requires one to ignore all of the actual gatekeeping they did). When they were coming up with acronyms like CHORP and HSPP, what do you think they were doing except trying to exclude the tastes of others? When they were saying that all of the women and minorities who had won awards over the last couple of years had only done so as the result of affirmative action, what is that other than gatekeeping?

   An author who was an outspoken liberal could and often did win the award and similarly a neutral or apparently neutral author had a good chance as well, but an outspokenly conservative author had a thumb on the scale against them.

   That’s bullshit and has been shown to be bullshit many times. You lose all credibility when you post inanities like this. Conservative authors who are known to be conservative and who have been public about their conservativsm have been nominated for and won Hugos with the kind of regularity that one would expect given their prevalence in the general community. The problem is that the Pups fantasize about being a much larger portion of the science fiction fan population than they actually seem to be, so they think they are being shortchanged.

   So, the Sad puppies felt marginalized, unrecognized, and under-represented when it came to award season, and so they pushed back to ensure they could not be ignored. Opening salvo in a culture war? Perhaps.

   A reactionary pushback that was aimed at excluding people the Pups regarded as “progressive pink and poofy”. You asked how it could be seen as promoting white and male nominees. When you strip away all of the mealy-mouthed whining about “mainstream authors” and “pulp science fiction”, what you are left with is an explicit attack on non-white, non-male, and non-straight people receiving nominations. Your “defense” of the Pups at this point amounts to saying “sure, they are gatekeeping, but they have justifications”. That’s a pretty attenuated (and hard to justify) position.

10. Tell me, not counting any puppies of any variety, who would be the most prominent conservative-leaning member of the Worldcon community? What about the top 5?

    This is hard to answer, because the members of the Worldcon community change with every Worldcon. I’m a member now, but ten years ago I wasn’t. If I somehow decided not to get a membership in 2018, I wouldn’t be any more.

    But as to prominent conservative authors who haven’t publicly aligned with the Pups and have been to Worldcon, maybe Jerry Pournelle? Larry Niven? Gene Wolfe? Brandon Sanderson? Eric James Stone? I’m sure there are others.

11. Sean:

    “As to the talk of war and gatekeeping, if the puppies (and I speak for nobody officially) feel they started a war, they feel that it was a revolutionary war. They felt that the Hugos and Worldcon culture had homogenized around certain tastes, tastes that favored “politically correct” and liberal mindsets while being more likely to reject anything more conservative.”

    Right now you are saying more or less the opposite of what you did before. Then you said puppies wanted to be neutral. Now you say they wanted to start a revolutionary war where people they called “politically correct” shouldn’t be allowed to win as often and where conservatives should win more often.

    That is the opposite to being neutral.

    As Torgersen said:

    ” The Hugo award is just a thing; a mere football. These divisions go far beyond a silver rocketship. They are drawn along political lines — liberal, and conservative; progressive, and libertarian — as well as along artistic lines — taste, expression, and the desire for meaning.”

    For him, The Hugos just a football in his political war. He was the one who wanted to and did bring politics into the Hugos.

    You talk about perception as if it was being facts. But conspiracy theorists will always have weird perceptions regarding the rest of the world. That doesn’t mean that we should take their perceptions as truth. That we should think of the feeeelings of all these special snowflakes.

    Puppies will always think worldcon voters are wrongfans having wrongfun, voting for the wrong people. When they proclaim war against the whole of worldcon for having the audacity to sometimes vote for someone of a liberal viewpoint, it is not strange if they receive a backlash.

12. And regarding the so called conflation between Sad and Rabid Puppies, it might have been easier if the puppies hadn’t done that themselves. Is John C Wright rabid or sad? Both put his misogynistic and homophobic screed “Transhuman and Subhuman” on their slates.

    How about Theodore Beale? He was among the Sad Puppies both for slate 2 and 3. This after he had proclaimed that women liked to be raped and that it was good for evolution to throw acid into the face of small girls.

    If Sads do not want to be associated with Rabids, why do they never condemn Beale? And how come every discussion about this on Mad Genius Club instead make the commentariat there defend Beale?

    Please answer this, Sean.

13. @Sean

    How is mentioning the fact that Teddy Beale’s novel was on the SP slate prior “conflating the Sad and Rabids?” Or mentioning the writers and works the Sads stuffed the ballot box for doing that? The only thing to shake one’s head here at is your reading comprehension. If you want to Make Sci-Fi Great Again, you should at least be proficient in the language a lot of what we are talking about is written in.

    You asked about why I viewed the Puppies as culture warriors bent on gate keeping; I directed you to the words the people who organized the campaign wrote saying that they were doing this get the liberals and keep horrible lit-fic out. That is the very definition of gate-keeping. You’ve gone for saying the ballot stuffing was about mainstream works, not any kind of culture war to keep the Hugos one way – to saying that it was part of a struggle akin to Lexington and Concord… to make the Hugos what they think it needs to be.

    English words have meanings that remain fairly set. They can’t mean different things in the space of a thread. So I feel I have some pretty justified concerns about your ability to read and comprehend much of what’s been written on this matter, considering you start by accusing me of conflating the Sads and the Rabids merely because I mention the public fact that Teddy’s book was on the Sad Puppies slate.

14. @TheYoungPretender
    How is mentioning the fact that Teddy Beale’s novel was on the SP slate prior “conflating the Sad and Rabids?”

    It also ignores the fact that Torgersen admitted that Beale was part of the clique that finalized the Sad Puppies ballot. They didn’t start trying to disassociate with him until they realized how radioactive he was with the broad consensus of SF fans.

15. “It also ignores the fact that Torgersen admitted that Beale was part of the clique that finalized the Sad Puppies ballot. They didn’t start trying to disassociate with him until they realized how radioactive he was with the broad consensus of SF fans.”

    The opposite more or less.Correia, as an example, has written long texts defending Beale.

    Lets not forget that Correia also promoted the Rabid slate.

16. If you say the Puppies are fighting a “revolutionary war,” then you admit that they are fighting a war. Calling yourself a revolutionary tells me nothing, not even that you aren’t funded by and possibly answering to the government of a superpower. Are Correia and Torgerson George Washington or Ho Chi Minh, Garibaldi or Lenin or Pol Pot, John Brown or Jefferson Davis, Fidel Castro or Francisco Franco?

    (For irrelevant extra credit, name two men on the list above who lived in New York City.)

17. Vicki Rosenzweig <waving hand in the air> I know! I know! Without googling, I think it’s Trbetr Jnfuvatgba naq Svqry Pnfgeb.

18. N.B. Nothing in the above comment is a comment on DragonCon or its proposed awards; I wish them well in sorting out the obvious hiccups like the unclear deadline for nominations.

    I would guess that some of the subgenre awards, like military and apocalyptic, are more likely to be noticed than “best comic book” or “best sf or fantasy novel, other” (assuming for the moment that the ballot for “best novel” doesn’t wind up containing two paranormal, one alternate history, one apocalypse, and one military fantasy).

19. (For irrelevant extra credit, name two men on the list above who lived in New York City.)
    Without googling, I think it was Garibaldi and Castro or Ho Chi Minh. I know Uncle Ho worked as cook’s helper on a ship and at least visited NYC.

    What do I get for extra credit?

20. Sean: An author who was an outspoken liberal could and often did win the award and similarly a neutral or apparently neutral author had a good chance as well, but an outspokenly conservative author had a thumb on the scale against them.

    Please provide a list of, oh, hey, I’ll be generous and not expect too much — 10 SFF works written in the last 10 years by outspokenly conservative authors which were Hugo-worthy but ignored by the Hugo Awards.

21. Cathy: I think it is great that DragonCon decided to do this. I’d be curious to know how much planning went into it, in the sense of, has this been several years in the making, something the .Dragoncon folks have been working on since last year, etc.

    I don’t think that this is something being done at the initiative of the DragonCon concom. I note that there is no Awards Committee listed on their “Teams and Departments” page.

    I think that a group of Puppies came to the DragonCon concom and said, “Hey, your convention doesn’t have its own awards program. We’d like to create one for you, we’ll do all the work, and we’ll make it WAY more prestigious than the Hugo Awards”, and that the DragonCon concom said, “Oh, okay, we’ll let you do that.”

    Which is fine. Given the very haphazard nature of its implementation so far, the DragonCon concom may end up with egg on their face, but, if so, that will be their thing to deal with.

22. Nerds of a Feather: Also nice that they are taking interactive media seriously. *cough* Hugos could learn something here *cough*

    I am mystified by the continued insistence from some quarters that the Hugo Awards program needs to have categories for a bunch of things simply because those things exist.

    Worldcon’s programming emphasis has always been on books. In recent years, because of demand on the part of Worldcon attendees, that programming has expanded to some extent to TV series, movies, and comics.

    If there was really a huge demand among Worldcon members for an award category for video games and RPGs, there would be one. (I’ll point out that it’s already been tried, about 10 years ago, and there wasn’t enough interest and participation to make it work.)

    There are already plenty of other awards for interactive media. It’s not as if this is a category that’s being ignored.

    And of course, if you feel that it is so important for Worldcon to have an award for this, Kevin Standlee has created a how-to for it, and I’m sure someone will be happy to find the link and post that for you.

23. In my view, fighting for all works to be treated fairly, based on merit, and without regard to race, color, political persuasion, etc. would be the very essence of fighting for neutrality. Were the Sad Puppies “neutral” in the sense that they didn’t have an agenda to push? Well, no, of course not. They saw things as out of balance, and fixing that requires force.

    As to reading comprehension and ability, well, we are going to have to agree to disagree. I’ve followed all sides of this kerfluffle from its inception. I’ve had to make judgment calls on who to believe, and, frankly, I’ve seen bad behavior on all sides, equally as much on say monster hunter nation as I’ve seen here. Trying to be a voice of reason in either place is much akin to pissing in the wind. Both sides like to paint each other with broad brushes using the worst behaviors as tinctures.

    Fundamentally, I make the arguments I make because 1) I believe the Hugos to be a worthy thing, 2) I think the current majority of Worldcon members share similar literary tastes and political views, 3) Worldcon members don’t appear welcoming of outsiders with different perspectives, 4) this shuts out fans who could otherwise contribute to a vibrant community that helps keep the Hugos a worthy thing, 5) the Hugos will thus continue to become less relevant as it begins representing a smaller slice of fandom while being openly hostile to other parts of fandom, and 6) many of you just don’t care that this might/will happen, which makes me profoundly sad.

24. “In my view, fighting for all works to be treated fairly, based on merit, and without regard to race, color, political persuasion, etc. would be the very essence of fighting for neutrality.”

    Yes, but that the opposite of what the puppies did. They didn’t want works by people of colour to be treated equally, instead raged against them when they were nominated. Calling it “affirmative action”

    They saw a problem when people of colour or people belonging to minorities were voted on and thought it demanded force to oust them.

    Please, continue with your talking point monologues if you want. They show that you are not interested in any way to talking part in a discussion or listen to others. Your comments are mostly narcissism set to print. Otherwise you would in some way have addressed what others write.

25. JJ on April 6, 2016 at 3:30 pm said:

    And of course, if you feel that it is so important for Worldcon to have an award for this, Kevin Standlee has created a how-to for it, and I’m sure someone will be happy to find the link and post that for you.

    Changing the Rules is an article on the Hugo Awards web site. Generally speaking, I will also help anyone who asks draft proposals in the correct technical form. I will also usually tell you whether I think a proposal is viable or not. I have drafted proposals for changes that I personally oppose and have argued against. That’s because I’d rather have a clear question before the Business Meeting than spend our extremely limited debate time arguing over technical questions that could have been resolved at the drafting stage.

26. Sean: Fundamentally, I make the arguments I make because… Trying to be a voice of reason

    It’s all well and good that you’re making these arguments — but you’re not actually backing them up with anything but “Puppy Feelings”. You may call that “trying to be a voice of reason”. I don’t — and I suspect that a lot of other people won’t, either. So you should not be surprised if people here don’t take your arguments seriously.

    For example, you said An author who was an outspoken liberal could and often did win the award and similarly a neutral or apparently neutral author had a good chance as well, but an outspokenly conservative author had a thumb on the scale against them.

    And I asked you to back up that argument by providing a list of 10 SFF works written in the last 10 years by outspokenly conservative authors which were Hugo-worthy but ignored by the Hugo Awards — and you are apparently not able to do so.

    You say Worldcon members don’t appear welcoming of outsiders with different perspectives

    Well, first of all, no, Worldcon members are not particularly welcoming of outsiders who have never been to Worldcon, have no intention of ever going to Worldcon, and don’t give a shit about Worldcon, but come charging in, insisting that Worldcon members are doing the Worldcon awards wrong, and engage in gaming of the nominations to match what the outsiders think they should be.

    Gee, why would Worldcon members react in a hostile manner to that?

    Secondly, you say that the Hugos will thus continue to become less relevant as it begins representing a smaller slice of fandom, and my response to that is, 1) it hasn’t happened yet despite the fact that people have been claiming this for decades, and 2) if it does happen, so what? If Worldcon members don’t see that as a problem, why should outsiders be insisting that they “fix” it?

27. I don’t see the overlap as a problem. If the putative apocalyptic MilSF novel is really, really good, why shouldn’t it win in all 3 categories? If it hits the sweet spot of all of those, it’s probably an incredibly entertaining book. Which I would read, even though those aren’t my genres — if it could do all that, it’s worth looking at.

    If they wanna give out money, that’s cool too — after all, the Nobel Prizes come with a chunk of change and they’re certainly prestigious.

    Some fandoms aren’t going to be covered, since so much of it goes on on Tumblr these days. But I predict a BIG showing for “Sherlock”. The Victorian ep falls into alt. hist. (and I must admit I LOVED Watson’s Victorian mustache — don’t care about Cummerbund unlike most of the girls).

    I am not going to harsh their squee. Their mode of fandom isn’t mine, and that’s cool. They enjoy it, we sometimes overlap. Yes, I read a lot of novels and short stories and go to Worldcon, but I also have Doctor Who POP! figures, stuffed anime critters, comic books, a Star Trek uniform, and opinions on Watson’s ‘stache. It’s all good, whatever it is. IDIC.

    TYP is SO right about gatekeeping. I get it from man-boys all the time. Never mind I have Worldcon badges and comic books older than they are. Never mind I saw the original Star Wars and Star Trek in their original runs. Nope, I’m a woman (a horribly old one by their standards) so I can’t possibly know this stuff. And gosh boys, I even know about these new-fangled vidjamagames, both classic and current. I can program in FORTRAN and I have Google Cardboard.

    Gatekeeping SUCKS, whether done by Trufen, Puppies, or DudeBros. More so from the last two, I admit; certainly Puppies tried to enforce it on everyone, and I’ve never felt spited by Trufen, unlike Larry, Teddy, et nauseam.

    There are a lot of young ladies who attend DragonCon who are into girly cosplay and are bona fide SJWs. And oh Lord, can they ever freep. So Puppy-types may not have it all their own way. Manly Men may lose out to guys in homosocial situations (Sherlock, Supernatural, all the bishonen). There might be an entertaining split where the MilSF and Apocalypse will be SWM With Guns, and other categories will be the opposite. Which, frankly, would be the will of the people, representing different constituencies.

    I might vote on this with one of my little-used email addresses, simply because I don’t wanna be on their damn list.

    It is going to be WAY more work than they imagine, and I do not envy their voting administrators. I do wish them well, and hope this works out and continues.

28. I know Sanderson voted for Obama in 2008 (saw it in a blog comment years ago). Pour nellie is puppy aligned. The others I have not followed enough to say…

29. Sean on April 6, 2016 at 3:40 pm said:

    In my view, fighting for all works to be treated fairly, based on merit, and without regard to race, color, political persuasion, etc. would be the very essence of fighting for neutrality.

    When one particular group has had things nearly 100% their way as long as they can remember and suddenly see a few things not 100% their way, they sometimes react as if they are somehow being opressed. For example, the relatively famous quote that if given group is one-third women, the men in the group will perceive it as “dominated” by women. (See one reference here.) This is the very essence of “privilege.” And I say this as a member of the group sitting atop the privilege pyramid in American society. As Scalzi put it, I’ve been playing the game of life on the easiest setting. That doesn’t mean I didn’t still have to work; it means that the systems tend to be set at the lowest level of difficulty for me.

    We see this sort of backlash in places like North Carolina recently, where the groups that have heretofore had things 100% their way think that they’re being “oppressed” because society is changing to let other people have something approaching “equality” themselves.

    3) Worldcon members don’t appear welcoming of outsiders with different perspectives,

    As long as those persepectives aren’t, “My opinion is the only one is right, and the rest of you had better shut up and do what I say becaue I’m always right,” I think you’ll find this isn’t the case. How many Worldcons have you attended?

    5) the Hugos will thus continue to become less relevant as it begins representing a smaller slice of fandom while being openly hostile to other parts of fandom

    Funny, sentences broadly similar to this have been being written for nearly the entire lifetime of the Hugo Awards. Indeed, when I was younger, I wrote similar things myself. I learned better, I think. It’s very much like the people who are convinced that because Worldcon isn’t drawing a quarter million people, it must be about to die, because unless you have to start queuing today for a panel next August, you aren’t really successful.

    But you know, if you’re right, then the Hugo Awards and Worldcon will in fact fade away to irrelevance. And that’s their right. Worldcon and the Hugo Awards are organized by the members of Worldcon, who have the right to organize freely and run things the way they want to run them. If they continue, fine, and if they don’t, that’s also fine. Why should they reorganize themselves to suit you? What have you done to help run the event? Worldcons aren’t for-profit gate shows organized to generate money for shareholders; they’re non-profit events organized by fans for other fans to suit themselves. What’s so wrong about that?

30. @Sean

    Agree to disagree? You came in claiming that Correia, Torgerson, and the rest couldn’t have had gatekeeping further from their minds, and we all pointed to you to where they explicitly laid out their aims for Sad Puppies. Aims which included keeping out all the awful lit-fic, all the awful stuff that says that yes, racism/sexism is real and might be a problem. These are their words. In English. That they wrote.

    You’re far too post-modern for me Sean, asking me to agree to disagree that their plain words in English have any other meaning than their plain meaning in English. You may claim to get some meaning from them utterly the opposite of what those words mean, but I’m afraid I’m not going to follow you down that post-modern rabbit hole. And comparing sci-fi awards to armed revolutions and the like? Not what those words mean to those of us who like good plain English. If they say they did Sad Puppies 1-3 to make liberal heads explode and take back sci-fi from the crap that can’t be called sci-fi, I will take them at their word.

    I prefer nice simple space opera. Like the Ancillary series, in fact.

    @Lurkertype.

    That’s… a very good point. An image search of bishonen have enlightened me to what a good fraction of the costumes at my local convention were. Slash is a thing – a big thing. It might just be that any mobbing of the Dragon Awards could be more Kawai than… some gun manufacturer whose name begins with K.

31. In my view, fighting for all works to be treated fairly, based on merit, and without regard to race, color, political persuasion, etc. would be the very essence of fighting for neutrality.

    There is zero evidence that works were not treated fairly based on merit. The only evidence advanced by the Pups was that works they didn’t like were being nominated for and winning awards. The only evidence advanced by the Pups was that women and minorities had won awards, which was taken as de facto evidence of a secret cabal enforcing affirmative action.

    Were the Sad Puppies “neutral” in the sense that they didn’t have an agenda to push? Well, no, of course not. They saw things as out of balance, and fixing that requires force.

    They saw too many non-white, non-straight, and non-male people winning awards and decided to fix that problem. Torgersen said as much in his posts complaining about “affirmative action” awards. And yet you wonder why people saw the Pups as being a straight white male group pushing for more awards for straight white males.

    One might also note that if your idea of making something politically neutral is to be an actively conservative movement, then you are an actively conservative movement. You aren’t “neutral” because you want some vaguely defined balance to emerge from your conservative politicking, you are conservative. An actual politically neutral group would push a politically neutral agenda. The Pups didn’t do that.

    Further, the Pups, like you in this thread, were talking out of both sides of their mouths. On the one hand, when it was convenient for them, they said that they were just about promoting “mainstream authors”. On the other, once again when it was convenient for them, they said they were about redressing some sort of perceived political imbalance. At other times, they said they were about restoring the prominence of old-timey pulp science fiction (which, oddly, many of the prime Puppy proponents have said they never actually read). Which goal is it? Are they political? The pushers of Heinleinian fiction? The advocates for popular authors? The reason no one believes the Pups is that they shift rationales when it is convenient, and their actions don’t really match their rhetoric.

    Of course, the other reason is that their purported rationales are such patent bullshit. You said “conservative authors have the scales tipped against them”. Eric James Stone has said that homosexuality is a birth defect, and has stated that legalizing gay marriage is akin to legalizing bestiality. This is about as openly stated a conservative position as one can get, and yet he was nominated for a Hugo Award in 2011, for a story that, in my opinion, wasn’t actually that good. Allen M. Steele, whose fiction seems to be pretty libertarian in leanings, won the Hugo in that category that year.

    As to reading comprehension and ability, well, we are going to have to agree to disagree.

    The problem seems to be that you are very selective with what you read, and have only paid attention to a very small slice of the various justifications and arguments made by the Puppies.

    I’ve followed all sides of this kerfluffle from its inception. I’ve had to make judgment calls on who to believe, and, frankly, I’ve seen bad behavior on all sides, equally as much on say monster hunter nation as I’ve seen here.

    Really? Who were the people making up fancy insulting acronyms to describe the people they didn’t like? Who were the people trying to get people fired and contacting the Spokane police to “warn” them about people they didn’t like? Who was claiming that the winners of the last couple of years only got their awards because of affirmative action and not on merit? The “both sides” card just won’t work here, because you’re dealing with people who are knowledgeable about the subject at hand. If you want to sell bullshit, you should try your luck elsewhere.

    Trying to be a voice of reason in either place is much akin to pissing in the wind. Both sides like to paint each other with broad brushes using the worst behaviors as tinctures.

    It would help if you actually tried to be a voice of reason. Thus far, all you’ve done is repeat tired Puppy talking points that are based upon falsehoods and conspiracy theory fantasies. Unless you start actually engaging with the points raised by the various posters here in response to your empty speeches, there is very little point in bothering with you. You’re not actually supporting anything you’re claiming, and since the responses are pointing out where you are demonstrably wrong (and supporting their positions with evidence), you’re starting to look more than a little bit silly.

    5) the Hugos will thus continue to become less relevant as it begins representing a smaller slice of fandom while being openly hostile to other parts of fandom, and 6) many of you just don’t care that this might/will happen, which makes me profoundly sad.

    5. This is the sort of thing that I mean when I say you’re just repeating tired and false Puppy talking points. Before the first Puppy campaign, Worldcon was on an upward trend, both in terms of members and in terms of participation in the Hugo process. Measured in terms of participation and inclusion, the Worldcon conversation was as vibrant and relevant as it had ever been. The claim that the Hugos were somehow becoming less relevant and Worldcon was dying is a Sad Puppy claim that is counterfactual at best, and probably an intentional lie.

    6. Spare Worldcon your false concern. It did just fine for the sixty plus years before the Pups, and it will still be here long after the Pups are just a bad memory.

32. I know Sanderson voted for Obama in 2008 (saw it in a blog comment years ago).

    That doesn’t necessarily make someone not conservative. I’m also not inclined to take your word for it without some sort of evidence this is the case.

    Pour nellie is puppy aligned.

    He’s had an anthology published by Castalia, but that doesn’t necessarily make him Puppy aligned. Do you have quotes from him supporting the Pups?

33. @Aaron – Don’t forget Tank Marmot trying to track down an internet commentor he didn’t like so that he could punch/shoot/stab/fight/duel him (he was fuzzy on the specifics, though physical violence was definitely implied). Though now that I think about it, that’s no worse than that time Tasha and I had a disagreement and she threatened to run me down with her pack of wargs and make me apologize properly*. So, yeah, I guess the Vile Hive is just about equivalent to Greater Puppidom.

    Conservative authors who’ve won Hugos recently: would Scalzi count? His politics have always seemed a little center-right to me. Yeah, he’s not homophobic or misogynist, but that only automatically disqualifies a person from being conservative in the loonier parts of the US.

    Also, I’d like to echo JJ’s request for 10 neglected conservative authors in the past 10 or so years of the Hugos. Particularly novelists, as that’s my favorite category.

    * Caveat: I’ve been on a lot of cough medicine lately, so my memory of that may not be entirely accurate.

34. Also, I’d like to echo JJ’s request for 10 neglected conservative authors in the past 10 or so years of the Hugos. Particularly novelists, as that’s my favorite category.

    This shouldn’t even be that hard of a request to fulfill. Every year that I have nominated there have been several very good novels that I left off my ballot because I could only nominate five. The number of good novels that aren’t nominated for a Hugo is quite large, and you can make arguments for many of them being as deserving as the novels that actually did get nominated.

35. I want to meet Tasha’s pack of wargs.

    Scalzi, I think, is pretty much dead center. He might have leaned a little to the right before that came to include being homophobic and misogynistic. That was a place he couldn’t go.

36. @Sean

    Sad Puppies 3 was Torgersen’s attempt,… His execution thereof, as he has admitted, was flawed.

    You’re incorrect. He has, to the best of my knowledge, admitted no such thing.

    He has either defended his methodology as being open, transparent, and democratic (despite all evidence to the contrary), or simply declined to explain it by saying that it was all in the past and no longer matters.

    If you have anything where he has done what you claim he has, I would greatly appreciate a pointer.

37. Seeing as it was the Sads who put Theodore Beale on the ballot the first time–and furthermore by their own admission did it for his politics rather then the quality of his work–and the Sads who, according to John C. Wright, deliberately coordinated with the Rabids last time, it seems very strange to me that Sean has this big rush to separate the two now.

38. “If people don’t like how the Hugo Awards are administered, let *them* make up their own damn awards!”

    “Hey, we made our own awards! They haven’t got a damn thing to do with the Hugos!”

    “Here’s everything wrong with your awards!”

    heads explode…

39. To be fair, nitpicking and criticism is an essential element of geekdom.

40. kathodus: To be fair, nitpicking and criticism is an essential element of geekdom.

    … and, after 3+ years of complaining about other peoples’ awards, you’d think they would have been absolutely meticulous in preparing everything for the announcement of their own awards — instead of presenting something that is so error-ridden that a high school English teacher would have put an “F” on it.

41. “Here’s everything wrong with your awards!”

    Other than technical problems, has anyone said there is something wrong with the Dragon*Con Awards? Certainly there’s a problem if you say the deadline for nominations is July 25 in one place and July 30 in another, and your award needs work if it has the same name as another award in the same general area, but that’s pointing out technical issues, not a problem with the awards.

    People have said that some of the ways the new award is structured are odd, but that’s not saying they are wrong. If they want to exclude short movies, that’s their choice, but it is an odd decision to put a hard lower limit of 74 minutes on movies and then make the only other shorter filmed media only eligible as part of a series. It isn’t wrong, but it is oddly limiting.

42. Is this Dragoncon award coming from a Puppy-sympathetic angle? Some of the wording in the announcement made me wonder, but I’m not sure.

    The award seems a bit slapped together, definitely.

43. Oh come now JJ, is there any evidence that Sad Puppy organisers are also the DragonCon award organisers? I’d appreciate a link. If not, let us not conflate the two.

44. kathodus: Is this Dragoncon award coming from a Puppy-sympathetic angle? Some of the wording in the announcement made me wonder, but I’m not sure. The award seems a bit slapped together, definitely.

    As I posted above, I don’t think that this is something being done at the initiative of the DragonCon concom.

45. kathodus on April 6, 2016 at 6:29 pm said:
    To be fair, nitpicking and criticism is an essential element of geekdom.

    Essential?

    I didn’t realize I had to do either to be a member of geekdom.

    head explodes…

    (To be fair, I did more than my share of both back in the day. Behavior I honestly regret, because it just shits over people’s attempts to get things done. YMMV)

    @ JJ I’ll grant you, pointing out technical errors isn’t passing judgement on the awards. But, there’s still time…

46. @Ed Green: So you’re just being disingenuous? Okay, thanks.

    BTW @whoever: I was kinda being a little snarky about “best versus popular”; they’re not mutually exclusive, but frequently aren’t the same thing. 😉

    @Whoever Else(s): Paranormal Romance is usually a subset of Fantasy, so I was amused that they had to specify that the Fantasy category included that sub-genre.

    @Petréa Mitchell: I’m unsurprised to hear categories may match Dragon*Con tracks; I figured that might’ve been the case, seeing as how “Best Apocalyptic Novel” is so oddly specific. I seem to recall when I went, there was only one general SFF fiction track.

    @Various: Just like I feel strongly that not every medium/format/length needs a Hugo category, I doubt these new awards need to award Every Type of Thing. So they don’t have short fiction categories – meh. So they have a bunch of novel categories – okay, the fiction part of the awards is clearly novel-focused; meh. Goodreads doesn’t award individual short stories, novelettes, etc. either, does it?

    @In other news: Oh yay, Sean derails a bunch of people with Puppy Droppings. Gak. 😉 Y’all are made of sterner stuff than I am.

47. @ Kendall Damn it! I was trying for essential…

48. @Ed Green – I didn’t say it is essential to criticize or nitpick to be a geek, just that it is an essential part of geekdom. And I’ll stand by that statement, as it is supported by innumerable child- and adulthood memories about arguments over… well, everything. In my experience, “geeks” are highly invested in their interests and very interested in how things work. Put the two together, and you get the “60 fans, 300 opinions” thing someone mentioned in the thread about who nominated what for the Hugos.

    I was not saying it’s good to nitpick or criticize, or that it’s bad to do so. Keeping your mouth shut when people go about doing things in a less-than sensible fashion is, on the one hand, polite, but on the other hand, not helpful. But speaking up when you see people approaching things in a less-than sensible manner often hurts those people’s feelings and makes them resent your input. Like you said, though, “shitting over people’s attempts to get things done” is also an issue. Some people can take fair criticism, some people see any criticism as an attack. I like to try to get an idea which type of person I’m dealing with before criticizing. Except when I just jump right in with the criticism…

    One reason I didn’t chime in on the critiques of the site and awards is that there were a few people already doing a fine job of it, and I didn’t see a reason to pile on.

    @JJ – Oops, sorry, I missed that. That’s interesting, and goes along with this:

    Every fan anywhere is welcome, and encouraged, to both nominate their choices and then vote again on the final ballot! There is no qualification for voting – no convention fees or other memberships are needed. The only requirement is that you register your email address with every nomination or vote. This ensures that all fan’s votes count equally.

    Which has that frowning harumph vibe that Puppy statements often have. If I were particularly meowy I’d also point out that the inconsistencies and various spelling and grammar errors on the site point to the laissez faire Puppy philosophy of editing.

49. @kathodus Though now that I think about it, that’s no worse than that time Tasha and I had a disagreement and she threatened to run me down with her pack of wargs and make me apologize properly

    I have a pack of wargs? What is a warg? What do they look like? What do they eat? Do I want to meet one? Can they take care of themselves? I’m not able to cook for myself or even make sandwiches so if they need any kind of care the poor wargs are going to die? LOL

    I have no memory of such threat. I don’t think I’ve ever asked anyone on file770 to apologize to me. I may have implied apologies would be appropriate for others. But then I’ve been sick and fuzzy brained so maybe I acted out of character… I’m not perfect that’s for sure.

    Wargs? Are you sure it wasn’t a Jewish vampire disguised as a cat or an old lady and we’d suck you dry? Occasionally I jokingly threaten that. Jewish vampires turn into cute cuddly cats not bats.

50. ::reads Ed Green on April 6, 2016 at 6:48 pm::

    ::looks at Ed Green on April 6, 2016 at 6:26 pm::

    Regardless of the necessity of “nitpicking and criticism” as a signifier of geekdom, I think you’re safe.

    @JJ, to be fair, I guess (?) there’s a lot of stuff that gets done that doesn’t necessarily get initiated by a particular concom. Right now the biggest flaw is that they seem to have jumped the gun by issuing a press releasewithout adequately looking through their site and various write-ups. They’re fixing it though. Dan’s finally put up the links!

    (they’re still using the same definition for Best SciFi and Best Fantasy though…)

Comments are closed.