It was a prolific day, with new posts from Sad Puppies’ Torgersen and Correia, and Rabid Puppies’ Vox Day, puppy supporters Dave Freer and Amanda S. Green, and detractors John Scalzi and David Gerrold. A host of new voices joined the exchange. And Adam-Troy Castro has penned something that is either a satire, or a candidate for the Sad Puppies 4 slate — decide for yourself.
Dave Freer on Mad Genius Club
“Battlers” – April 20
It’s been interesting to see how this has spun in the little circus that has been the Hugo Awards this year. The big guys, Nielsen Hayden, Stross, GRRM, Scalzi – you know wealthy, powerful white men who have won huge numbers of Hugo Nominations and indeed awards, are up in arms because some rag-tag bunch of uppity little battlers who’d never been there before, from across the social, political, racial and sexual spectrum got nominated, instead of a narrower group they approve of – including… just by chance, themselves and friends, many of whom who have multiple prior noms and awards. It’s taken away diversity and these nominees want women and ‘PoC’ (‘People of Color’ which bizarrely is not offensive, but ‘Colored People’ is just vile. It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?) Of course these rich, powerful white men are feminists and oppose racism. Are they leading the charge because they think white men are just naturally better at it?
Look, all we’ve really got is making fun of the bastards. I feel kind of guilty sometimes because it is so easy, but hell’s teeth, they’ve brought enough weight to bear against us. I’m kind of losing count at the rent-a-hit journalism (a plainly very ethical field, full of honest honorable folk) informing us we’re all rich white men oppressing everyone and winding the clock back. Is it daylight savings over there already?
Still, I’m glad to be learning my place from David Gerrold. I’d never have guessed that I was one of the little people otherwise.
John Scalzi on Whatever
“Keeping Up With the Hugos” – April 20
At this point Correia and Torgersen have to decide whether they want to be known either as Day’s fellow travelers, or his useful idiots. Or both! It could be both. Neither of these options makes them look good; nor, obviously, fits with their own self-image of being Brave Men Fighting the Good Fight™. But in fact, they aren’t fighting a good fight, and in fact, they got played. So: Fellow travelers or useful idiots. These are the choices.
* Also, can we please now stop pretending that this whole Puppy nonsense began for any other reason than that once upon a time, Larry Correia thought he was going to win an award and was super pissed he didn’t, and decided that the reason he didn’t had to be a terrible, awful conspiracy against people just like him (a conservative! Writing “fun” fiction!), as opposed to, oh, the voters deciding they just plain liked something and someone else better?
…(And yes, I know, Correia declined his nomination for the Hugo this year. Let’s talk about that for a minute, shall we. It takes a very special sort of fellow to allow himself to be on a slate to get nominated, marshal people to nominate him for the award as part of a slate, and then decline — and write a big ol’ puffed-up piece about why he was declining, social justice warriors, blows against the empire, blah blah blah, yadda yadda. Yes, nice he declined the nomination and let someone else on the ballot. But it’s a little like wanting credit for rescuing a baby squirrel when you knocked the baby squirrel out of the tree to begin with.)
To be clear, the Puppy nonsense now isn’t just about Correia really really really wanting validation in the form of a rocketship; Day’s stealing the Puppy movement right out from under Correia and Torgerson has changed things up quite a bit, and it’s certainly true at this point that this little campaign is about a bunch of people trying to shit in the punchbowl so no one else can have any punch. But at the beginning, it was Correia hurt and angry that someone else got an award he thought was his, and deciding that it was stolen from him, rather than being something that was never his to begin with. And I’m sorry for him that it didn’t go his way. But actual grown human beings deal with disappointment in ways other than Correia has.
Nick Mamatas in a comment on Whatever
If the Hugos have really been dominated by leftist material that prized message over story since the mid-1990s (Brad’s timeline), it should be very simple for members of the Puppy Party to name
a. one work of fiction
b. that won a Hugo Award
c. while foregrounding a left message to the extent that the story was ruined or misshaped
d. per set of winners since 1995.
That’s all. Just a list of twenty books or stories—a single winner per year. Even though a single winner per year wouldn’t prove domination, I’m happy to make it easy for the Puppies.
Any Puppy Partisan want to start naming some names?
Brad R. Torgersen
“Nuking the Hugos from orbit” – April 20
The chief sin of Sad Puppies 3 seems to be that we were transparent and we were successful beyond all expectation.
Many a red herring has been lobbed at us over the past three weeks. All of these are colossal distractions from the central question I’ve been asking my entire (short, so far) career: do the Hugos even matter anymore, and if they don’t, how to we get them to matter again?
My logic has been: get more people to vote, and bring those people in from diverse sectors of the consumer market, and the cachet of the award increases because more and more people from a broader spectrum of the totality of fandom (small f) will have a stake in the award, pay attention to what’s selected for the final ballot, and will view the award as a valid marker of enjoyability; or at least notoriety.
Especially since the Hugos have already been subjected to numerous manipulations (again, all behind the scenes) by authors, voters, and publishers, who all seem to want the Hugo to better reflect their tastes, their interests, their politics, and their pet points they want to make with the award.
Brad R. Torgersen
“Ringing the bell” – April 20
Picking up where I left off with my post on tribalism. Because I wanted to talk specifically about a recurrent kind of “broken” I am seeing in arguments all over the place — beyond the tiny halls of the Peoples Republic of Science Fiction. This “broken” is most commonly manifested among well-meaning straight Caucasian folk, but is often fostered and preached about by non-straight and/or non-Caucasians of a particularly aggressive “progressive” persuasion.
Adam-Troy Castro on Facebook
The irrepressible ensign, whose blonde hair and pale complexion had put him on the fast track to command from the very first medical determination that he was not gay, reported, “It’s a SJW vessel, Captain. They’re demanding our surrender!”
Captain Christian White grimaced, heterosexually. He remembered the last time a Federation vessel had allowed an SJW cruiser its way, sashaying across the universe at multiple times the speed of light. The Federation’s resolve had weakened, the rockets had sagged a little on their pads, and one of the medals for valor that year had actually gone to somebody with a slightly ethnic last name. Only the keen perception of Captain White and his fellow cabal had recognized that this was the sign of a vile conspiracy, and allowed the institution of safeguards to make sure that this would never happen again.
Kevin Standlee
“Combatting Hugo Despair” – April 20
If you don’t clean up graffiti, it typically spreads.
- Cleaning up graffiti is hard work.
- It is easier, when you see graffiti defacing something nice, to say, “Oh, what a shame. I loved that once, but now it’s defaced, so I guess we’d better abandon it” than to break out the scrub brushes and solvent and to organize the community to help clean it up.
- Initially, when you clean up graffiti, it’s not unusual for the vandals to consider it a nice clean slate for their next attack.
- If you consistently clean up graffiti attacks, after a while the vandals discover that almost nobody ever sees their works of destruction, and eventually they will give up and go away because they stop getting any egoboo out of defacing things.
My position with the Hugo Awards, the World Science Fiction Convention, and the World Science Fiction Society? Well, I’m putting on my coveralls, buying some heavy duty scrub brushes, picking up the box of old rags, and rummaging around in the garage for that industrial-sized can of solvent I know we had in there somewhere.
David Gerrold on Facebook – April 18
Some draconian measures have been suggested. Those cures would be worse than the disease and would pretty much hand a victory to the self-appointed super-villain. He would have succeeded in destroying the award.
I think there’s a simpler solution. I’m tossing it out here for discussion. What if we gave the Worldcon committee the discretion to create a committee of qualified individuals who would review the nominating ballots and set aside any that show strong evidence of ballot stuffing? So if a hundred ballots come in and they are all identical — and if they all contain nominations for works or individuals that are not represented or significantly under-represented on any other ballots, then that can be seen as evidence of a ballot-stuffing effort and those ballots can be set aside.
This would not disqualify recommended reading lists. Those would still be encouraged.
Notice the separate components. The Worldcon committee themselves will not have the responsibility for adjudicating — instead, they have the option of creating an independent committee of qualified individuals, preferably past Worldcon committee members. Second, they cannot set aside ballots willy-nilly, only those that show evidence of a slate. If the slate-mongering has been a public effort, it’s an easier job. But if a hundred ballots come in all voting for the same stories and there are no other ballots that also include any of those stories, then that’s evidence of a ballot-stuffing campaign and the ballots should be set aside.
Had such a rule been in place this year, the entire rabid slate could have been nullified, while still allowing the majority of voters their rightful opportunities to be heard.
Rogers Cadenhead on Workbench
“Brad Torgersen’s ‘Science Fiction Civil War’” – April 20
There’s a lot about this situation that gets me all het up, but I’m beginning to savor the insane grandiosity of Torgersen (pictured above), a previously obscure SF/F author who led the bloc-voting campaign this year and dubbed it “Sad Puppies 3.”
On April 8, Torgersen wrote a blog post on his personal site called “The Science Fiction Civil War” that he later deleted.
Here’s the text of that post, which offers a fantastic glimpse into the preening self-regard that inspired him to lead a culture war against a much-loved SF/F award that fans of all political beliefs have nurtured since 1953….
John C. Wright
NPR Upholds Morlock Journalistic Ethics – April 20
Well, well. The NPR weekend show ON THE MEDIA has joined the lynch mob, and done their level best to add hysteria and contumely and smother any trace of rational dialog in the little sortie of the Culture Wars known as Sad Puppies.
They were paid for by my tax money, my dear readers, and yours.
And before you ask, no, no journalist, no editor, no one contacted me or interviewed me or made any attempt known to me to hear from the counsel for the defense. At a real witch trial held by the real Inquisition, even the devil gets an advocate and someone speaks up for defendant being accused of witchcraft.
Vox Day on Vox Popoli
“Puppies on NPR” – April 20
KW listened in and heard NPR doing their usual bang-up job on Sad Puppies. For me, the most intriguing aspect of the media coverage has been the near-complete lack of interest in actually talking to anyone involved in the actual news-making activity. I mean, I am about as cynical a media skeptic as it is possible to be, and yet somehow, these journalistic incompetents haven’t even managed to rise to my very, very low level of expectations.
Larry Correia on Monster Hunter International
“Catching up, then back to work” – April 20
Apparently there were a bunch more stupid articles and news reports this weekend, still running with the angry straight white men, anti-diversity slate angle. I don’t even bother reading them anymore. It is all the same script. I didn’t even know Popular Science was still around.
In the interest of full disclosure, none of the hit pieces tried to talk to us, but NPR’s On The Media did try to reach out. They sent me an email, they wanted to speak on the phone to gather info, but it was on a day when I was running around the wilds of Yard Moose Mountain and I missed their call. I sent them an apology the next morning.
I haven’t listened, but I heard they brought in professional outrage monger Arthur Chu to explain everything. Ha! But to be fair, they at least tried.
Vox Day on Vox Popoli
“Black Gate withdraws” – April 20
Or rather, they have asked to not be considered for the Hugo award for which they will be on the ballot. While I disagree with John’s decision, I respect his right to make it. I find it ironic, however, that people are responding to a large group of people dictating the ballot by unilaterally dictating to people for whom they will not vote.
I also find it telling that a threat to support No Award next year is supposedly worse than a vow to do it this year. I am curious. Would they consider it better if I accepted what passes for their reasoning and announced that Rabid Puppies will join the No Award movement this year? Because that is certainly an option. (Settle down, you bloodthirsty bastards, I said no more than the obvious. It is an option.)
The goal is to improve the Awards, not destroy them. But if the SJWs would rather destroy them than relinquish their control, well, that will tell the world exactly what sort of totalitarians they are. That’s two birds for the price of one. We’ve already got them on the record stating that our views are invalid and should be suppressed by force; seeing them demolish the awards without our assistance will communicate that more effectively than we can do ourselves.
Joe Sherry on Adventures in Reading
Hugo News: Black Gate Edition – April 20
What I am most curious about here is that because the ballots are already at the printer, Sasquan is unable to remove Black Gate from the ballot (apparently some people still use paper ballots – because science fiction is a genre of the future…) – but will Black Gate’s request be honored? Will votes for Black Gate just not be counted? This might be the easiest solution.
Lou Antonelli on Facebook – April 20
Got my annual Mensa membership card in the mail today. I’m not showing this out of vanity, it’s just I’ve found it’s a good idea to keep it handy because the first slur the Anti-Puppy snobs usually toss out when disrespecting you is “stupid”.
Amanda S. Green on Nocturnal Lives
“No winners?” – April 20
And that is the problem. They are making Vox the issue and are, in all too many instances, refusing to even consider a nominee he might have liked or recommended. That is, as I have said before, a disservice to all those authors and artists who have done good work, worthy work.
Look, here’s the truth of the matter. Vox is but one man. Yes, he might say things that make us uncomfortable. He might believe things that seem further out than left field. But, as writers and artists, we have no control over who reads/sees or likes our work. If you don’t like Vox and can’t bring yourself to read his work, that’s fine. But don’t condemn others who have no relationship to him except for the fact he nominated them. (Full disclosure here, I was one both SP3 and Rabid Puppies. I didn’t realize I was on Rabid Puppies until well after the nominees were announced.)
Doctor Science on Obsidian Wings
“Vox Day is exploiting the Sad Puppies for personal gain” – April 20
I don’t know the details of the rules, but I figure this is probably enough evidence for Sasquan’s Hugo Awards Committee to decide that Castalia House engaged in illegal ballot-stuffing under the current rules, and to remove all Castalia House-associated nominees from the Hugo Ballot. If it’s an option, I’d suggest that Vox Day and Castalia House be considered ineligible for nomination for at least a few years going forward, too.
Rjurik Davidson on Overland
“The Mad Puppies revenge” – April 21
How do we best understand this culture war? The immediate cause, it seems, is the fact that in recent years, the Hugo Awards have been transformed. In other words, there has been a slow, molecular, and very incomplete growth of progressive values within science fiction and fantasy, along with the concomitant breaking down of established racist, homophobic and patriarchal barriers. The number of women nominees, for example, reached rough parity between 2011-2013. In this way, again, it parallels the Gamergate controversy: games having been once the protected turf of white males.
https://twitter.com/johnmarkley/status/590293279545110529
My reaction to the #HugoAwards controversy? I just paid to attend @SasquanSF in Spokane Aug 19-23. There's too much I love about the field.
— Frank Catalano (@FrankCatalano) April 21, 2015
Jon F. Zeigler on Sharrukin’s Palace
“My first (and last) word on the Hugos” – April 20
[Here is the most novel approach to the voting process I have read (no pun intended.) (Well, maybe a little intended.) The decision to use a concrete example as a reference point sets Zeigler apart from most in the “I know quality when I see it” camp. And it is also a solution that is not obviously driven by an agenda. Very interesting idea:]
In each category, in so far as I am able and with only one general exception, I plan to examine all the works on the ballot and give them fair consideration. I will rank them in order of their quality, using my own tastes and criteria. So far I doubt I’m planning to do anything unusual.
Where my strategy may be distinctive is that I plan to examine six items for each category – the five on the ballot, and the item that I consider to have been the best eligible work that did not reach the ballot.
So for example, in the Best Novel category this year, on the final ballot we have:
- Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
- The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson
- The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
- Skin Game by Jim Butcher
- The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu
I know some of those works got onto the ballot because of slate voting and some did not. At least one novel, in fact, was added to the ballot only after an author whose novel was on one of the slates withdrew it from consideration. I’m not going to take any of that into account. As much as I disapprove of organized slates, it’s still possible that a slate might have selected the best available work.
On the other hand, it’s also possible – even likely – that a slate will actually push some of the best available works out of consideration. In fact, the people organizing this year’s slates allege that this has already been happening for a long time – that other parties have (informally) manipulated the nominations process to exclude otherwise deserving work.
All right, so let me correct for that possibility. That’s where the sixth work under consideration in each category comes in. I’ll read and evaluate that work too, but it will hold the slot for No Award in its category. Thus, if I find that a work on the ballot is markedly inferior to the one that did not get nominated, I will have to assume that something went wrong. Either my tastes are really unusual, or some form of manipulation of the nominations process pushed the more deserving work off the ballot. In either case, I’ve identified a work that will rank below No Award in my selection.
To return to my example, the sixth work I’ll include in my decision-making process will probably be Echopraxia, by Peter Watts. I read that novel a couple of months ago, and it quite impressed me at the time. So any novel that I find is at least comparable in quality to Echopraxia will get ranked above No Award on my ballot. Any novel that I find is clearly not comparable will get ranked below No Award.
https://twitter.com/deirdresm/status/590345129199730689
Mark Ciocco on Kaedrin weblog
“The Three-Body Problem” – April 19
However, since this year’s Hugo awards are so weirdly contentious, one of the Best Novel nominees dropped out of the race. I’m not sure if this is unprecedented or not, but it’s highly unlikely nonetheless (authors often refuse their nomination, but are given a chance to do so before the finalists are announced – this situation where an author sees the lay of the year’s Hugo land and simply opts out was surprising) and many were expecting this to mean that the Best Novel category would only include 4 nominees. After all, adding the next most popular nominee would tell everyone who got the least nominating votes (info that is only published after the awards are handed out) and honestly, given the current situation, this precedent seems ripe for abuse. Nevertheless, the Hugo administrators opted to fill the open slot with The Three-Body Problem (a non-Puppy nominee, though from what I’ve seen, the Puppies seem to really enjoy this book). From left off the ballot to potential winner, quite a turn of events. Of the two nominees I’ve read, this is clearly ahead and could possibly take my number 1 vote. It is a bit of an odd duck, but I quite enjoyed it.
John C. Wright
“Not so much Dino-hate, Please!” – April 20
At the risk of alienated my beloved fans who voted either for Sad Puppies or Rabid and elevated my humble work to a world-record number of nominations, I would like to state something for the record.
A lot of us are ragging on Rachel Swirsky’s prose poem ‘If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love‘ which was Hugo nominated and won a Nebula for its category.
And, for the record, I for one do not think ‘If You Were a Dinosaur’ is bad. I do not think it is great, but tastes differ.
The author with admirable brevity of space establishes a gay and playful mood, using a stream of consciousness technique and adhere to a strict textual scheme (lifted from IF YOU GIVE A MOUSE A COOKIE) and then fishtailing into a surprise ending that is poignant and moving, all within less than 1000 words.
Stevie Carroll in Women & Words
“This Year’s Hugo Awards, Diversity in SF and Fantasy, and the Bechdel Test” – April 20
Diversity in SF and Fantasy has been a major discussion topic at both the conventions I’ve been to this year as well as on a lot of author blogs in the genre that I follow (most of which fall into a group of bloggers that the anti-feminist, anti-diversity complainers derisively refer to as Social Justice Warriors because they’re somehow offended by the idea that straight white men might actually support feminism and other forms of equality campaigning). I think two of my favourite comments came from a discussion panel on Dr Who – one from a white woman who described her feelings of alienation when she moved in the 1980s (IIRC) from a typical inner city in the UK to Cambridge where the population was far less diverse than she was used to, and the other from an audience member who asserted that these days if the Doctor is to be invisible (in the sense of generally ignored by those around him) in a lot of places then he could do worse than being either a young black man or a woman in her fifties or older.
William Reichard on Plaeroma
“RE: Update on sci-fi & the ‘Hugo Maneuver’” – April 20
Just a quick update to let everybody know our plan is working better than we could have anticipated. “Debate” on the subject of the Hugo Awards has become a self-perpetuating firestorm that shows no signs of lessening. Writers on all sides of the issue are fully engulfed, and the conflagration even shows promising signs of spreading to the larger culture.
Rest assured, any dangerous minds on all sides will be doing nothing else of significance for months if not years thanks to this coup, and thus we are safe to continue our diabolical work with impunity for now as the discussion descends into ever more atomic and arcane levels.
Wikipedia adds section to entry for “Theodore Beale” – April 20
2015 Hugo Awards
In 2015 Beale’s slate of candidates for the Hugo Awards, which placed most of its nominees on the ballot, led two authors to withdraw their own nominations, and for one presenter to withdraw from the event.
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I don’t know Lou personally but I googled the small town paper he runs near the Texas-Arkansas border. He is the author of “Mayor hosts Day of Recognition for volunteers,” “Bridges resigns; Davidson appointed new sheriff,” and now, “Deirdre Saoirse Moen an Irish Nazi.”
J.L. Walton was right: time to embrace war. Let everyone endorse a slate and let’s agree to put top slate winners meeting a reasonable eligibility cutoff during nominations on the ballot. There may be no other way out of this.
Gah, all this talk about war. Just an after effect of a dysfunctional american political system. Take your slates and create the Follow The Party Line SF Awards. And leave the Hugos as they were, individuals voting for the SF works they themselves liked best.
Hampus, by war, of course, I mean vigorous and civil debate. By the way, I’m not a conservative, nor a fan of anything that made it onto any slate.
Although I do sometimes feel discouraged from participating in the Hugo Award because stuff I like rarely makes on the ballot.
Well, I’m putting on my coveralls, buying some heavy duty scrub brushes, picking up the box of old rags, and rummaging around in the garage for that industrial-sized can of solvent I know we had in there somewhere.
Incidentally, this also the professional methodology for covering up a successful wetwork. Have the SMOFs put a contract out on voters?
Especially considering that there is no evidence of vandalism. Worldcon voters have been asked to vote for years. Yet somehow, this one is different because new voters are coming on board? Was Black Gate really undeserving?
I guess you can whack the whistleblowers if you really want to. Doesn’t make you a good guy.
Black Gate was not undeserving, but the block voters thought so. Otherwise they wouldn’t have used block voting tactics, a method used primarily to push up undeserved candidates.
And it is because of those tactics Black Gate withdrew.
I’ll have to admit I’m jealous, Mike. My wife Deirdre Saoirse Moen has now been called a ‘Nazi’ by a Rabid Puppy-endorsed author for putting an efficient end to crude misrepresentation of her comments on her own blog, and I got nuttin’ by comparison. How will I hold my head up high?
Concerned,
Rick Moen
[email protected]
Rick, what Lou just did was wrong, and it is obviously fine to criticize him for not more vocally distancing himself from people you find anathema. But there is also a danger that calling for what might end up being more or less a sort of effective blacklist in a literary award is not an effective solution in the long run. (Even if you have reasons to think it is a principled response for you at the moment, which I am not disputing).
DF: ‘I’d never have guessed that I was one of the little people otherwise.’
Not so much little. But going by Correia’s non-win and TB’s grudge against the NHs, small. Small, small people.
Set against that, it’s only right to acknowledge Wright’s defence of Swirsky’s story. Odd that one of this affair’s few grace notes should come from him, but there you go.
Excellent idea from David Gerrold. Let’s create a committee of qualified individuals that will decide what votes are counted and what votes aren’t. That will restore all of the Hugo awards’ credibility.
Let’s also not open the door to more voters by selling cheaper voting memberships. Sure, that might take care of voting blocs, but who knows what kind of things people might actually vote for?
Apart from that we have the usual crop of hysterical insults… idiots, shit in the punchbowl, racist, homophobic, patriarchal… yep, the usual. Seeing the level and viciousness of the hissy fits clearly shows any outside observer that there was something wrong with this closed club in the first place.
Nothing particularly funny or ingenious, unfortunately. Adam-Troy Castro makes an attempt at satire, but satire is difficult to do well and he is not as talented at it as Jim C. Hines, so it doesn’t get that funny. Satire needs to be more subtle to appeal to anyone else but the already devoted to your cause. It needs to contain a core of truth and exaggerate it to show its defects.
After this huge “no award” counter-slate campaign, I hope that nobody will object people voting however they like next year. Why not, it seems that it’s what most people already do, the merits of the actual works be damned.
>it’s only right to acknowledge Wright’s defence of
>Swirsky’s story. Odd that one of this affair’s few grace
>notes should come from him, but there you go.
I also didn’t dislike Swirsky’s story. I thought it was well-written from a technical point of view. Slipstream is really not my favorite subgenre, but if people like it more power to them. What I found strange was that all the short stories were slipstream, along the same lines and sharing similar themes. The other years I read the short stories my impression had been that there was always a lot of variety. However, all of them seemed well-written to me. My favorite among them was the one that won, the one about the water falling out of nowhere.
I joined Mensa in 1982. The first Special Interest Group I heard from was devoted to the thought of Elizabeth Clare Prophet, who had her followers digging a gigantic hole under the state of Montana to hide from the nuclear war the Ascended Masters had warned her about. I am not surprised to find puppies in Mensa.
Lou Antonelli posting a photo of his Mensa card to ward off people calling him stupid is kind of stupid. I haven’t seen people calling the Puppies unintelligent. Plenty of other insults, yes, but not that one.
I like what one of his friends said in response to the photo: “Your intelligence expires on 3/31/2016.”
Back when I was an undergrad at a certain technical school in Cambridge, I attended a lecture by Isaac Asimov. When he referred in passing to Mensa, the audience booed.
If the most you can say about your intelligence is that you have a little card attesting to it, which you earned with a high score on a standardized test… dude, the Ming Dynasty called, and they want their status marker back.
Black Gate was not undeserving, but the block voters thought so. Otherwise they wouldn’t have used block voting tactics, a method used primarily to push up undeserved candidates.
Right. That’s why the insiders thought to nominate the Magazine so many, many, many times before that. So you say.
Well, Antonelli has written some interesting things in his comments:
“I agree, although it wasn’t the Sad Puppies intent, in the end the slate hurt more than it helped. The fact Vox Day piggybacked with his Rabid Puppies just made everything go straight to hell. Yeah, in retrospect it turned out to be a mistake. Hindsight is 20/20, you know. I think already declaring there will be a Sad Puppies 4 is also a mistake. I will be at a convention in Richmond next weekend and I will have a chance to express my opinion to Kate Paulk about that.”
http://louantonelli.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/an-orphan-of-storm.html
I kind of agree with him.
xdpaul:
Black Gate couldn’t be nominated as a fanzine before, as it wasn’t one according to the rules. If I remember correctly, it used to be defined as a semiprozine.
Looking forward to hearing the NPR piece. Thanks for pointing that out.
The Sad Puppies are still valiantly struggling to fail to understand that the slate itself is a problem.
The slate encourages a group of people who would normally nominate a wide range of things (in the Sad Puppy call for suggestions, less than 10% of the suggesters were “nominating” even the most popular thing) to converge on a set of things they wouldn’t ordinarily have nominated–acceptable “second bests” that they nominate to artificially increase their nominating power ten-fold or more. This is unfair to every non-slate work, including works that the Puppies themselves would have loved, like _Three Body Problem_ which we now know was pushed off the ballot by the Puppy Slate.
If Vox Day didn’t exist, so the Puppies hadn’t put Vox on the ballot last year, the annoyance about a minority of nominators locking up the Hugo ballot would still remain.
Deciding to No Award slate candidates isn’t because “Vox Day liked them.” It’s because you don’t run the race when the finalists got there by doping.
Hampus: In the comments at your link, Lou Antonelli speculates that he, Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen are in danger of being physically attacked at Worldcon: “As far as physical danger is concerned, I’m thinking of when Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was so demonized (rightfully so) for what he did in killing President Kennedy that when Ruby saw an opportunity to kill him, he did.”
If you’re paranoid, I guess it’s a short jump from “a secret cabal is conspiring against my fiction” to “a secret cabal might attack me at Worldcon.”
Comparing the Puppies to an assassin who killed a liberal president is an interesting choice.
Cat, the most highly rated field in decades us not second best. Your point is incoherent. If slates are the problem, go after Scalzi. Or Harry Potter fans. Or Dr. Who. Sad Puppies innovated nothing.
rcade:
I don’t see that as paranoia. I think there are a lot of people who are nervous about peoples aggressions now. I know I am, and have stated that in the comment of another blogpost here. It doesn’t need to be conspiracy, just someone that is really, really pissed off.
The puppies scare me. Puppies might be scared of other people. Personally I skipped going to sci-fi and game convent of my hometown this year because of the gamergate debacle. I’m kind of happy of not going to Worldcon this year. And even more happy of living in Sweden where we mostly shake our heads at these weird american conflicts.
I *will* to to Helsinki, if they get the bid for 2017. I paid my support. And I’m kind of happy that it propably will be a bit too expensive for americans to go there if their only reason for doing so is to get a release for their political aggressions.
xdpaul:
You mean that the Harry Potter fans had a slate where they would fill all the categories for the Hugos with their own candidates, keeping everyone else out? I must have missed that. Can you give me a source?
>Deciding to No Award slate candidates isn’t because
>“Vox Day liked them.” It’s because you don’t run the
>race when the finalists got there by doping.
However, the finalists were already getting there by doping. Even leaving aside political cliques (which are getting more important in the last few years, although the effect is more noticeable in the categories with less votes), certain authors have excelled at doing the social work between Worldcon regulars and have popular blogs which they use heavily to promote themselves and their work for the awards. At least the Puppies have served to exposed that the whole process is becoming a joke, and have made people of all kinds discover that they can actually become involved. Making the electorate bigger and more diverse is the only way to return the prize’s relevance. We have already heard that in terms of sales winning the Hugo no longer means anything, and the only remaining effect is that it makes it more likely to get foreign sales, since foreign editors have less knowledge of the English-language market. However, Worldcon regulars do not want to lower the price of voting rights and let fans of all kinds in. They just want the puppies to go away so that they can return to their usual business.
Nick Mamatas’s challenge (which he has since posted on his LJ) is crucial. If you assume that the Hugos were corrupted by the Secret SJW SMOF Cabal before the Puppies arrived on the scene, then justifications for everything the Puppies have said and done follow quite logically. But I keep seeing people take this cabal’s existence for granted, and keep not-seeing evidence presented.
In a exact analogy to what happened in the visual fine arts in the ’50s and ’60s, much of the award-nominated work in SFF today isn’t even fantasy or SF, so much has agenda and outside context come into play. In the visual fine arts, Tom Wolfe called this “The Painted Word” – the textualization of the visual arts. What was happening outside the work far superseded the work itself; the work became a conversation piece, not an end in itself. There was open collusion to intellectualize the visual fine arts and discriminate against and marginalize the merely figurative painter or merely straight photographer. The non-verbal power of each medium was destroyed and cast aside.
The same thing is happening today in core SF. The new hillbilly is the mere story-teller, straight white male and even heterosexuality itself, which is considered a quaint anachronism. Predictably, this is reflected in a passage in a bit of fiction by Elizabeth Bear where “medieval horrors as dentistry without anesthetic, binary gender” are compared one to the other. Given that, it’s no surprise gender feminists so often refer to straight white men as “dinosaurs,” as if they are an evolutionary cul-de-sac or a quirky Victorian faddist ideology that never quite worked out.
It’s no coincidence the Damien Walters who asked us to “Google ‘intersectional'” would write an article at The Guardian titled “Science fiction needs to reflect that the future is queer.” In SJW ideology heterosexuality is deprecated like old HTML code or even “medieval horrors.” It’s clear there is no room for heterosexuality in future science-fiction, or even room for science-fiction, which itself has been deprecated as too unwieldy to act as a suitable political conveyance for the cause. All those rocket ships and nebulas, or even dragons and sorcery act as a derailing mechanism when it comes to writing about Jim Crow in mid-century Florida, gay men rained on or vibrant bi-sexual women in a medieval England unfortunately still otherwise wrapped up in the “horrors” of “binary gender.”
As in the fine arts, there is once again open collusion to discriminate against and marginalize, over-intellectualize and over-politicize the power of an art form. In the case of core SF, SJWs are essentially succeeding in the clownish act of textualizing text. The work becomes a mere conveyance for the more important social justice platform, which in this case is a kind of ditzy post-modernist or post-structural intellectualism passed off as racialized French Queer Theory. That’s why merit-based work is of no interest to intersectionalists. You are either on the barricades or you are not, and in fictional terms that means a new intersectional sub-genre of racial (and sexual) revenge fiction.
Hampus, stop guessing what I am saying. You aren’t very good at it.
AG: According to Antonelli, the Hugos seems to have an effect on sales:
http://louantonelli.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/big-increase.html
“However, the finalists were already getting there by doping.”
Name any finalist in the past 10 years who got to the ballot unfairly, and provide actual evidence. I posted this challenge to Larry Correia on his blog: “I will buy a copy of every novel you’ve written if you can prove that even a single novel/novella/novelette category was stuffed with a secret bloc’s nominees in the past 10 years.” He responded, “Luckily for you, they’re not that stupid, but I won’t miss the sales.”
The Puppies have no evidence of any wrongdoing. Their whole campaign is a bunch of malarkey to motivate angry right-wingers into supporting their slates, begun by a guy who will never get over losing the Campbell Award vote in 2011.
xdpaul: Then you should learn to speak in clear words. What do you mean with the Harry Potter fans using slate voting? Please, explain.
AG: If Torgersen, Correia, Day, and Wright had simply wanted to make the Worldcon electorate bigger and more diverse, they wouldn’t have had to present slates of Hugo candidates. They could have just told their fans, “hey, if you think the stories that win Hugos don’t represent the best of the field, join the next Worldcon, nominate and vote for stuff you like”.
Fans voted. Fans voted. Fans voted. Now the anti-fans are mad. This surprises no one.
Come off it Seth. Scalzi could have done the same. Instead he did “award pimpage.” You didn’t go after him…so your complaint now is not consistent.
Torgerson: ‘The chief sin of Sad Puppies 3 seems to be that we were transparent…’
Nope. In fact Mr. Martin has questioned how the SP voting process works and several others have pointed out there’s been little transparency since the numbers of works nominated on the forum don’t add up to the final slate which included several works never mentioned. Meanwhile the Hugos have annually given out their voting information.
People have been pretty clear with their reasons for disliking the slate, it’s pretty disingenuous to ignore actual criticisms and claim that the reasons are because it’s so popular and transparent.
Then again statements like:
‘Especially since the Hugos have already been subjected to numerous manipulations (again, all behind the scenes) by authors, voters, and publishers, who all seem to want the Hugo to better reflect their tastes, their interests, their politics, and their pet points they want to make with the award.’
I guess ‘all behind the scenes’ is another way of saying that it’s complete conjecture without any evidence or well, any proof to back up these wild accusations that people have been asking for. Many have asked even for just a couple of works that won because of these sekrit SJW cabals instead of on merit and none have been provided.
So far the only evidence of any kind of grand manipulation on the Hugos for anyone to get them to better reflect their tastes, their interests, their politics, and their pet points they want to make with the award has been, well, Sad/Rabid Puppies. Congrats on becoming the exact thing you claim to be fighting against.
Scalzi pimped his own stories, which some fans consider to be in bad taste, but is not generally considered an abuse of the process. If TCD&W had merely done the same with their own stories, people might have had similar complaints about bad taste, but you wouldn’t have seen this kind of outrage.
Scalzi had a thread in which his readers recommended stories that they had liked. Torgersen, I believe, had a similar thread on his blog. Nobody complained about that part, either.
The thing that got everyone’s dander up was the elevation of a few stories in each category to a “slate” which seemed engineered to help a small minority of voters swing the Hugo nominations in their direction. If you can find evidence of Scalzi (or any SMOF) taking things to this level, please, share it with the rest of us.
“Set against that, it’s only right to acknowledge Wright’s defence of Swirsky’s story. Odd that one of this affair’s few grace notes should come from him, but there you go.”
Odd, why, Nigel?
That is the way I always act. I am not a creature of emotion. You did not notice before this?
Ask yourself how much of your opinion about me is based on reading things I myself have actually written – when read in full and in context – versus how much is based on proof text, misquotes, and what others who do not know me have said about my motives.
Sad Puppies began with Larry Correia pimping himself to win a Hugo, five months after he lost the Campbell Award:
http://monsterhunternation.com/2012/02/23/how-you-can-make-a-difference-getting-me-nominated-for-a-hugo/
“… if you are part of that tiny group of a couple hundred voters out of several million readers that gets to tell the rest of us what is good or not, I’d like for you to consider my novel Hard Magic.”
He also encouraged people to vote for three of his personal friends, his publisher and two editors at his publisher.
So the thing that Puppies are now claiming as justification for their bloc-voting abuse of the Hugo process — promoting yourself and your friends for Hugo consideration — is exactly what Correia did.
@Seth Gordon:They could have just told their fans, “hey, if you think the stories that win Hugos don’t represent the best of the field, join the next Worldcon, nominate and vote for stuff you like”.
To overcome all cliques, puppy or not puppy, many thousands of new voters are needed, not just hundreds. Potentially, there is interest in fandom, but people are not going to come at really large numbers at the current price point. Voting rights at 5$ would do it (and no matter what insiders say about costs, 5$ is much, much more than online voting costs per person). No physical mails are needed.
Now, doing something like that is in the hands of those same insiders that are throwing hissy fits. Most puppies cannot attend. However I can tell you this: those insiders are never going to do something like that. They much prefer No Award everything.
I have no particular opinion on whether lowering the price of Worldcon membership is a good or bad thing, but even assuming it‘s a good thing, the Puppy campaigns strike me as a very roundabout way of achieving that goal.
AG:
Nah, I like the idea with all eligible voters getting a reader package. And that won’t be possible for 5$. Also, no, online voting costs more that 5$ if you want to have all the necessary administration to make sure that no one may vote more than once.
I have no idea who these “insiders” you keep referring to are, but I will vote and prefer to actually vote for someone I think is worthy. Puppies can attend on the same conditions as anyone else.
“Odd, why, Nigel?”
I’m not Nigel, but I’ll answer anyway.
Seeing a grace note from you is a surprise because you’re so often vicious on your personal blog in your remarks about gays, atheists, Democrats and any other group you dislike.
Your outrage over Legend of Korra prompted you to declare, “Men abhor homosexuals on a visceral level. … I have never heard of a group of women descended on a lesbian couple and beating them to death with axhandles and tire-irons, but that is the instinctive reaction of men towards fags.”
I read that when you posted it, when all I knew about you was that you were a SF author. I was so stunned by the ugliness of your sentiment that I read your entire post and all of the comments you made in it, so you can’t say I am judging the above comment without context.
If there was an award for the most vile comment in SF/F for 2014, it would have my nomination.
So when you spoke up for Rachel Swirsky’s story after so many Puppies have been maligning it (and sometimes her), I’d call that welcome and unexpected.
AG, the costs of sending out material related to the Hugos and other Worldcon publications (program book, etc.) to supporting members is what that $40 is paying for.
@rcade: “If there was an award for the most vile comment in SF/F for 2014, it would have my nomination.”
And if there was an award for the more hate-filled commenter you’d probably have mine, although the competition is fierce.
@David W.: And as I said in my post, sending out physical material is not required for voting. There is no reason for not opening the doors, other than the same group wanting to keep control.
Also, just in a few days after the nominations were announced, more than a 1000 persons registered to vote, so I think what AG is wishing for is already taking place. Without having any changes in price.
The good thing with this debacle, more people are informed on how to register to vote.
I can see that the $40 membership cost keeps out some people who would otherwise want to participate, but I don’t see how it effectively filters for fans of a particular artistic taste or political view.
John C Wright: I’d not noticed the lack of emotion either. Your bitter post about wanting to punch Terry Pratchett sounded fairly emotional. As did your later piece of hypocrisy when you complained the Hugo Awards never recognized his greatness.
Have you spent any time being taught by Jesuits because it doesn’t sound like it and as a Catholic I think you’d find it instructive.
AG, the reason why those published materials are sent to Supporting Members of Worldcon is that they’ve *wanted* to receive them, not because there’s a desire to, as you put it, keep the doors shut. If you would like to propose a Worldcon “Hugo Voting Membership” at a level of $5 at the WSFS business meeting, nothing’s stopping you.
@Seth Gordon: “I can see that the $40 membership cost keeps out some people who would otherwise want to participate, but I don’t see how it effectively filters for fans of a particular artistic taste or political view.”
Certainly it keeps fans of all kinds of taste and views out. However, the ones who are in are self-selecting. In the past the WorldCon was fandom. Nowadays it is not. People with tastes different than most Worldcon regulars are not interested in going to the Worldcon. They might go to DragonCon or to other convention more to their liking, or simply go to no conventions.
If people want the Hugos to be something relevant for fandom in general they need to open the door for electorate from the outside. The Hugos had problems. The electorate was too insular, too cliquish. If you say that the SP is not the solution I won’t argue, but I’ll tell you that at least it has pointed the problem out, in case anyone cares about it.
Now Kevin Standlee might appear in all his fury and say that if people want an award not controlled by Worldcon regulars they should start their own award. Probably he is right. But people from outside the WorldCon still care about the Hugos, for sentimental and historical reasons.
@rcade: Did you also tell Vonda McIntyre she was being paranoid when she posted that absurd “I’ll Walk With You” piece? Just curious.
@David W: “If you would like to propose a Worldcon “Hugo Voting Membership” at a level of $5 at the WSFS business meeting, nothing’s stopping you.”
Nothing’s stopping me from proposing it, true. Well, I’m at the other side of the world and can’t be an attending member, but I’m sure somebody else will propose it at the business meeting. However, I’m equally sure it will not be approved, for the reasons I have mentioned. Time will tell.