128 thoughts on “Entering the Lists”

1. Well, like the puppies of various breeds managed to pack the ballot. The BDP similarities could be a coincidence (who DOESN’T love Guardians of the Galaxy and the Lego Movie, after all) but everything else looks suspect.

2. Mike Kerpan – “suspect” how? Obviously, many of the nominees were placed there by nomination ballots from people who supported the Sad Puppies (and Rabid Puppies) campaigns, but how does this earn the negative connotations of “suspect”? The campaign was completely above-board, everything nominated was better than at least one of last year’s Short Story nominations, and more related to science fiction than at least one of last year’s Novella nominations. So what makes you suspicious?

3. Whoa, I didn’t expect to see Rabid Puppies take this. It really looks bad for the credibility of the award.

4. I am absolutely sure that at least a few of these people do not in any way support the Sad Puppies or their goals.

   Please remember that not all endorsements are mutual.

5. Mike Kerpan: have you actually *read* any of the works or is that your prejudice speaking? “Turncoat” was phenomenal. Butcher and Anderson are both renowned authors. Every movie or TV show on the list was deserving of recognition at least.

   But they’re “suspect?” Heh.

   Also worth noting that Larry Correia declined his nomination, and for my favorite of his works, one which features a semi-reformed demon; a sardonic, irreverent holy warrior, and a morally indifferent government agent as the most notable characters…

   But hey, to each his own.

6. Spacefaringkitten:

   I would suggest reading those nominees on the *Puppies ballots that managed to be nominated before dismissing them. I voted for some of them as they were of outstanding quality as science fiction stories. Well worth your time.

   If you dismiss them out of hand due to being nominated by those for whom you bear ill will, you will be playing into thier hands.

7. When the Sad Puppies were collecting suggestions for their slate, 41 people suggested 35 novels (and a number of short stories and such). Of the novels 4 were suggested by 3 people, 4 by two people and the remaining 27 by one person each. So in a group of fans whose tastes were known to converge, the most suggestions any one book got was less than 10% of the total.

   Brad curated the 35 suggested books into a slate of five. The other 30 novels were left to compete without the slate’s help.

   And that is how a slate works, folks. And slates are not just unfair to works “on the other side.” (To the extent that sides even make sense.) They’re unfair to works on your side too.

   And that is why “you can have your own slate” is not a good way to solve the problem.

8. @Anthony. Of course, nothing is suspect. No rules were broken. But it’s all about the slate voting. It reeks of an old-fashioned political machine.

9. The Puppies shut everyone else out of the nominating and graciously permitted the rest of us to meekly ratify one of their choices as the “best.”

   I think they may be in for a surprise.

10. roo_ster:

    I wasn’t saying that the works are shit, necessarily. A well-coordinated voting block that votes and nominates tactically managed to get nearly everything they wanted on the shortlist. That’s not a way art awards should be given out.

    It’s a sad day for SF/F, but we’ll get over it eventually.

11. “I think they may be in for a surprise.”

    At this point, the only thing that would surprise me is if people like you actually read the nominated works with an open mind and voted accordingly.

12. spacefaringkitten:

    Thus has it even been for the Hugos. *Puppies was just more open and honest about what they were doing. I find it difficult to get all worked up about a group of folks who vigorously play by the rules. Looks like the Hugos’s nominating process is on the up and up, rules-wise.

    I would liken the recent past Hugo nominations to the “smoke filled rooms” of Tammany Hall and machine politics and the *Puppies efforts to state primaries.

13. I haven’t read all the nominees, but I’ve read some. I’ve also read other works by many of the authors. That’s not really relevant to my suspicions, though. The suspicion stems from HOW a work got onto the ballot (as part of a large group nominating in near-Lockstep) rather than anything else. I actually agree with the stated goal of the Sad Puppies: to make the Hugos more representative of overall fan preferences and to help put well-crafted-but-fun works front and center ahead of message fiction. The problem is the method of presenting a more or less complete slate and encouraging people to vote for it in its entirety.

14. I’m sure Mike can guess my reaction to this turn of events.

    While some or all of the slated nominees may be worthy, block voting is as odious to me now as it was in the 70s, and contrary to the Fannish tradition of stubborn individuality.

    Perhaps it’s time to revive my old VOTE NO AWARD campaign.

15. ‘At this point, the only thing that would surprise me is if people like you actually read the nominated works with an open mind and voted accordingly.’

    You gamed the system. Whining that others did it first only in secret carries no weight, except maybe with people who need to self-justify. Political, gamed nominations are going to get treated as such. Hugogamers will whine, but their nominations are tainted, which will be a pity for some of the nominees. Maybe if you (royal you) had avoided all the culture-war rhetoric? Then again, there was probably no avoiding it.

16. What the Sad Puppies proves is that a secret slate isn’t possible.

    You need hundreds of people involved and you can’t coordinate that many people secretly. Nor can they keep a secret afterwards.

    Which means “everybody has always done it” is BS so pure I want some for my flowerbeds.

17. I wouldn’t vote “No Award” merely because something appeared on a slate. That would mean punishing work that I really like and which I feel DOES deserve recognition. This is especially the case in the Best Dramatic Presentation categories. There is no universe where Guardians of the Galaxy doesn’t deserve a Hugo or where I feel that any of the nominees is SO unworthy of an award that none should be given.

    I would put any work which I believe is NOT representative of the best of the genre below no award, however.

18. “I think they may be in for a surprise.”

    No, we aren’t. Absolutely nothing you do will be any surprise to us. Do you still not grasp that you’re playing checkers and we’re playing 3D chess?

    “Perhaps it’s time to revive my old VOTE NO AWARD campaign.”

    Go for it. Who knows, perhaps you’ll convince all of us to join you. As Larry Correia just demonstrated rather conclusively, we don’t care if we win or not. So, what is worse in your eyes, a few awards going to John C. Wright and Jim Butcher or no awards being given out at all?

    And more importantly, are you absolutely certain you know which option we prefer?

    “You gamed the system.”

    We were repeatedly accused of gaming the system last year. Are you willing to recant and admit the charge was false yet?

19. It’s most unfortunate that right-wing fans with a warped, paranoid vision of how the Hugo Awards have successfully functioned for decades, confabulated scenarios in which they imagined their favorite works had been kept off the ballot, or from winning, by non-existent left-wing conspirators. Sadly, they chose to respond with an _actual_ conspiracy of their own, and have, as a result, succeeded in demeaning and devaluing the awards. The fact that their conspiracy was open rather than secret makes it no less nefarious. I don’t know whether to shake my head or my fist.

    The Hugo Awards are not supposed to be political elections, but popular judgments of absolute quality. To bring organized campaigning into the process is to render the awards all but meaningless. I feel sorry for those authors whose stories deserved recognition but whose nominations have now been sullied by association with the conspiracy.

    I have to give this some thought, but I may have to conclude that an ethical fan with traditional fannish values has no choice but to only consider nominees _not_ backed by the slates and, if not satisfied that those deserve to win, to then vote No Award in as many categories as necessary. No Award is our last bastion against corruption. Unfortunately, to vote for any of the slate-backed nominees, no matter how worthy in the abstract, would be to implicitly endorse the cynical and unfannish way they got on the ballot.

20. Mike Kerpan: How can you know that there’s “lockstep” voting without the numbers? SP2 nominees had bores ranging from 80 to 260. That’s not “lockstep.” Why would you assume that changed?

    Furthermore, who advocated that people vote for the slate in its entirety? The slate was presented as a list of recommended nominations… or, colloquially, “read and this and nominate it if you like it.” That’s not even new.

    Nigel: it has already been demonstrated a dozen times that this is not a “political” slate. You’re late to the party on that one.

    Cat: “You need hundreds of people involved and you can’t coordinate that many people secretly. Nor can they keep a secret afterwards.”

    Except that 7 years ago you needed 40 people to get a novel on the short list. I know, I know, math is hard.

21. why do the puppies like andromeda spaceways?

22. Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead. In a time when 40 nominations could put a book among the finalists, the Hugo voting pool couldn’t take the kind of casualty rate that implies.

23. No, it’s more a matter of not understanding what a whisper campaign is our how it works. You only need a few people to pull it off. If you have 3-4 people who share, say, 40 fans between them, it’s very easy to convince them (especially the easily swayed) that x, y, and z are the best novels of the year and you’re dumb/backwards/tasteless if you disagree.

    It’s telling that the margin of vote for several years looked *exactly* like bloc voting, but SP2 didn’t. If you make the accusation that Puppies qualifies as a bloc, you also have to weigh that same again against a huge number of nominees in previous years.

24. S1AL: in respect to lockstep voting. Vox prmised the Dread Ilk would not break discipline the way last year’s SP voters obviously did. I believed him when he said it. The success of Rabid Puppies indicates to me that when the stats become available they will bear witness.

25. This is easily the most interesting slate of nominees in years, and for worldcon to so dramatically rectify the embarrassing past oversight of our industry’s greatest working author is a testament to the soundness of their system. members showed up in force to correct the oversight. Kudos to worldcon: don’t change a thing.

26. “I have to give this some thought, but I may have to conclude that an ethical fan with traditional fannish values has no choice but to only consider nominees _not_ backed by the slates and, if not satisfied that those deserve to win, to then vote No Award in as many categories as necessary. No Award is our last bastion against corruption. Unfortunately, to vote for any of the slate-backed nominees, no matter how worthy in the abstract, would be to implicitly endorse the cynical and unfannish way they got on the ballot.”

    Go for it. Light the match. Are you sure the gas is turned off, Torling?

    And you talk about corruption! It’s morbidly hilarious that after years of whisper campaigns and a very small number of Tor-connected authors magically, coincidentally, and REPEATEDLY ending up with almost precisely the same number of votes as the other darlings AND your fellow Tor editor, you’re whining and crying and sadly declaring the need to blow up the awards forever because we prevented you from collecting your annual tribute.

    You want to blame someone, blame your pet Scalzi. You know as well as all of us do that he’s been running his little organized campaigns, or as he called them, Award Pimpage campaigns, since 2006. The distinguished host here even called him out years ago and warned of the inevitable consequences. Now they’re here, and they will never be the same….

27. Well, a couple of comments (actually several) …

    There is playing by the rules and then there is gaming the system.

    I take with a grain of salt things said by people hiding behind pseudonyms. Note that while I normally post as paradoox (and googling that should show who I am), I have specifically used my real name here.

    I guess I will actually have to vote this year.

    Hopefully this doesn’t color the memory of Sasquan.

28. Yes, yes, tell me all about secret slates! And how you can control fiercely independent WorldCon fans by telling them they must think like you or they’re dumb/backwards/tasteless!

    Fertilizer costs $4 a bag!

29. Mike Glyer: Vox is his own man, and he reads here, so I’ll let him address that at his discretion. His goals are certainly different from SP, which is why he created his own slate. I, personally, did not bother with the nominations round because I couldn’t commit to reading enough works to be relevant. I’m more interested in testing the reactions to the slates, because this whole conundrum will inform me of how correct I was in a number of opinions.

    That said, am very excited to read a large number of works that are nominated, something I couldn’t say about a lot of the previous lists.

    Cat: Fiercely independent WorldCon fans? The ones who slander the same few people with the same insults from the same sources, regardless of accuracy? If that’s your best argument, you’ll never convince me. It’s specifically because of people like you, who make the same erroneous statements over and over across a dozen blogs, that I began to be interested in and support the SP campaigns. Your “fiercely independent” fans are guiltier of groupthink than almost any other clique I’ve ever seen.

30. “The Hugo Awards are not supposed to be political elections, but popular judgments of absolute quality.”

    Bullshit, Torling. You gave us freaking REDSHIRTS. You gave us that idiotic Swirsky DINOSAUR MY LOVE story. You even put bloody ZOE’S TALE on the shortlist.

    You abused your privilege. You heaped shit in front of us and told us to deny our lying eyes. And we’re going to make sure that everyone knows it.

    No one was listening before. Now, perhaps they’ll pay attention and start doing a little digging themselves.

31. ” To bring organized campaigning into the process is to render the awards all but meaningless.”

    I must agree with Moshe. Hugos have been campaigned into meaningless ornaments, starting back in the 1980s no less. Sad to see. Same for the Nebulas, it seems.

    I’m a judge for the JWC Best Novel (not the new writer one which came along later). NONE of the nominees this year made even our prelim cut. There’s much better work out there–for example, Cambias A DARKLING SEA, Gregory’s AFTERPARTY.

32. “There is playing by the rules and then there is gaming the system.”

    According to all these SJWs and Tor idiots, we gamed the system LAST YEAR. So what are they complaining about this time?

    We played by the rules. Entirely. Kevin Standlee even pointed out that our actions were more legal than past campaigns.

    “There clearly have been campaigns to get individual works on the ballot, some of them going beyond the technically legal. I agree with Vox that what’s been done (at least from the rumors rumbling around) isn’t illegal. It’s not against the rules.”
    – Kevin Standlee on April 2, 2015 at 9:41 am

    The media knows it too: “Strip away the spin, and what Nielsen-Hayden is actually saying is that the Hugo Awards belong to Tor books and their associated in-group. The anger of the Nielsen-Haydens has less to do with principles, and more to do with the fact that only three Tor-published works made the final ballot this year. Compared to their performance in previous years, this is a humiliating defeat.”

33. “NONE of the nominees this year made even our prelim cut.”

    I believe that. What about THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM. That’s legitimately great. I would have voted for it if it had made it.

34. I feel like I’d be more upset if the SP slate resulted in nothing but crap to vote on… but I see the usual mix of stuff I like, stuff I dont, and stuff I’ve never heard of. Surely, it’s not the lineup I’d pick (City of Stairs and Mirror Empire should be there, I think) but none of the novel nominations are out of place.

    I do think the category that is entirely John C. Wright is busted though. Nothing against him as a writer (I liked his Golden Age series quite a bit) but one author having 4 out 5 nominations in one category is too much.

35. I’d be interested in reading them if they were about half the current price. $10 sight-unseen for first-time-author e-books is a bit silly.

36. “The success of Rabid Puppies indicates to me that when the stats become available they will bear witness.”

    They will. They will also prove #GamerGate was not involved, except for me and perhaps 4 or 5 others GGers.

    There is a hidden reason behind the NH’s foolish shrieking about GG. The alternative is for them to admit that I am much more popular than they want to believe. So they’d rather scream at the much bigger enemy than do that, which is so astonishingly stupid that I find it hard to believe they’re doing it.

    When GG shows up, you don’t wonder about it. There isn’t any mistaking it.

37. @S1AL

    The Sad Puppies got me into the Hugos. I didn’t care all that much before, but Correia was thrashing around being himself all over the place and that was what convinced me I had an opinion and it was worth $40 to me to express it.

    And considering the company you are keeping, you have no room to talk about someone slandering people with insults regardless of accuracy. Especially when I haven’t said anything inaccurate, (except that is last year’s price for fertilizer; I haven’t checked yet this year, so it might be different.)

38. ‘When GG shows up, you don’t wonder about it. There isn’t any mistaking it.’

    And ye shall know them by their rape threats.

39. ‘it has already been demonstrated a dozen times that this is not a “political” slate. You’re late to the party on that one.’

    It’s also been demonstrated that gatekeepers have been controlling the Hugos via secret slates for years. To much the same effect. Which is it say, it hasn’t.

40. Ah yes, guilt by association. My favorite. Because which blogs I comment on tells you everything you need to know. So badthink. Much outcast.

    But at least you’re willing to admit that SP met a primary goal of getting a lot more people involved.

41. “It’s also been demonstrated that gatekeepers have been controlling the Hugos via secret slates for years. To much the same effect. Which is it say, it hasn’t.”

    You… do realize that there are three separate accusations in that paragraph, right?

    And seriously: Butcher, Anderson, Kratman, Wright, Grey, Gannon. Just to name a few. That’s 6 different political viewpoints spanning left to right and soft authoritarian to hard libertarian. That’s not political, by definition.

42. And ye shall know them by their rape threats.

    Actually, it’s usually the 7-digit losses, the advertisers cancelling contracts, and the number of people losing their jobs that gives it away.

    As I told Mike, if GG showed up, there would be 21,000 votes, the wreckage of Tor would be parted out, and half its authors would be begging for money on Patreon with the unemployed GameJournoListers.

    Last year they said we gamed the system. This year they claimed #GamerGate got involved. They’d better pray to whatever freakish Lovecraftian lizard gods they worship that there isn’t a pattern taking shape there.

43. ‘That’s not political, by definition.’

    ‘Suck it SJWs’ (whoever THEY are) is political. By definition. You can cover the motivating animus with a few choice elements of the slate all you want, because CULTURE WAR!

44. ‘Actually, it’s usually the 7-digit losses, the advertisers cancelling contracts, and the number of people losing their jobs that gives it away.’

    If you say so. The bullying, intimidation and threats are to be expected, though also the posturing, preening and self aggrandizement. But it’s the rape threats, doxxing and SWATting that really capture the hearts and minds, hey?

45. The SP nominees and the people who ran it (Brad and Larry) should atleast attend Worldcon and sit on some panels. It at a minimum shows they want to get involved.

46. @VD: TOR Idiots? TOR publishes John C Wright of the 6 nominations…

47. ” ‘Suck it SJWs’ (whoever THEY are) is political. By definition. You can cover the motivating animus with a few choice elements of the slate all you want, because CULTURE WAR!”

    I actually picked the candidates whose politics I know (sorta) or have been discussed openly. It’s not a political slate. It might even be argued that it’s an anti-political slate.

    And culture war =/= politics. Those are separate issues, which probably explains your confusion. An SJW is identified behaviorally and culturally, not politically. There are right-wing SJW’s. I’ve met them. I actually blame them for the “think of the children” idiocy.

48. Culture war is totally political and SJW is exclusively used as a label for left/liberals, ‘think of the children’ notwithstanding. Sky is blue, grass is green and we have no mouths and we must scream.

49. Errrr… Well, since you appear to be such on that setting, I’ll leave it with this thought as we’re staying ever farther from the original topic.

    Culture wars are usually apolitical. Politics is the crowning moment for a winner of a culture war. Attempting to take a cultural conflict into the political arena before victory had been achieved is often disastrous because the voters (or whoever) can backlash and undo all of the work leading up to that point. We’re beginning to see that with three or four different topics in the current political arena.

50. “Block voting is the evilz”

    to

    “Perhaps it’s time to revive my old VOTE NO AWARD campaign”

    Did none of you take a basic logic course? You know something like Argumentative Philosophy? Contradicting yourself in the same post should give one pause.

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