629 thoughts on “Measuring The Rabid Puppies Slate’s Impact on the Final Hugo Ballot”

1. Lois Tilton on April 27, 2016 at 6:07 am said:

   The Gene Wolfe essays may be good, but they’re published by Castalia House.

   “An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth.”

   Very well said.

2. I downloaded the Chuck Tingle nominee. He may be a first for me, if he’s any good, going under NA as my ballot is usually ranked, NA, blank. Although given the genre I’m guessing it just won’t be SFF enough for me and I’m not going to make it more than a couple of pages in as it’s really not my cup of tea. Just reading the description was almost too much. I did get a kick out of his new book title and cover.

3. This came through via email subscription the other day. I’m not sure that it supports your implication about her position very well….or at all.

   I tried to read that … does she ever get to a point?

4. That idea is as ridiculous as thinking that a failed presidential candidate is going to get a civil war going.

   one hopes you are right. It would give me no joy to get to say “I told you so”.

5. @StephenfromOttawa

   As far as I can see there is no procedural way to prevent a certain level of vandalism, other than empowering someone to screen nominations and reject some of them, which I think most people still agree would be undesirable. So as long as Beale continues to get whatever it is he gets out of this, and his followers or hirelings or whatever they are continue to do his bidding, the Hugos are likely to be vandalized annually.

   Something that might work would be a form of “fan reversible screening.” This would allow some mechanism (a committee, the admins, a separate vote, a downvote mechanism, etc.) to stick an asterisk on problematic works. The Finalist list would contain the top 5 works without asterisks. BUT, the works with asterisks would still go on the final ballot, and if fans voted any of them above No Award, the asterisk would come off.

   But I don’t think people will be ready to consider something like that until it’s clear that EPH alone isn’t enough. Helsinki will be the place to start talking about it. If we’re lucky, it won’t be a problem anymore by then.

6. Chuck Tingle has already updated his Amazon bio to “Hugo Award nominee Dr. Chuck Tingle.” If having Tingle on the ballot isn’t embarrassment enough, I fear the title of the inevitable Hugo-themed novel.

7. I am so sorry I cannot attend Wold Con this year, if only to be at the business meeting to see EPH pass.
   I hope the meeting is well attended, and that it is run in an orderly fashion, as it was last year.

8. Once the SFF community ostracized VD, they lost any influence on his behavior. He no longer has to make nice.

   …you know, some of us remember Beale from before SFWA booted him, and I’m very sorry to say that he’s always been like this. If he was “making nice” before, it was mostly in his own little head.

   About the only difference I can think of is that he went from being obsessed with Watership Down rabbit metaphors to being obsessed with puppy metaphors, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t consider one’s flavor of furry-in-denial to be all that significant.

   ETA: Oh lord, has he been doing some kind of now-I-shall-unleash-my-wrath posturing thing? Yeah, no. It’s been the same, just more of it.

9. clack on April 27, 2016 at 6:52 am said:
   As Michael Corleone said, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer”. Once the SFF community ostracized VD, they lost any influence on his behavior. He no longer has to make nice.

   I am confused. When did Theodore Beale ever “make nice”?

   The SFF community has never had any influence on his behavior, so far as I can tell, except to give out awards that he appears to covet.

10. Pretty sure that inducing the WSFS to introduce a rightthink subcommittee which ensures that all nominated works are sufficiently SJW friendly to pass would be one of the XanD’Oh gambit’s victory conditions.
    But isn’t everything?

11. @alexvdl FURTHERMORE, I think that this line of discussion is ridiculous considering we’re on a thread about a Science Fiction/Fantasy award

    While I prefer we not talk politics I can’t imagine anything totally ridiculous on file770 if you mean off-topic. I’ve discussed soap operas, cooking, health issues, gun control & religion (hope to never do it again), travel, and many other non-SFF topics as tangents on much more serious threads than this one (racial & sexual abuse & harassment policies). Well I take those topics more seriously than awards. I might be a minority but then I am a minority.

12. I am only going to say NO ONE wants to publish a 300,000 plus word work of literary criticism, not even university presses, and the project on Wolfe was begun over 4 years ago, with a year of editing by my Castalia editor before its release in July of 2015. From an author’s perspective Vox is the only publisher who treated me with any respect, and certainly given the obscurity of my work it would never have appeared on a ballot without him. His contract included a hardback and a second volume to finish the job regardless of sales,which he expected to be negligible, and that was well before any Hugo issues of 2015. I expect that there is a better than 70% chance that No Award will take related work, but I know that I wrote my book with all of my heart, soul, and out of love and respect for Gene Wolfe, who should have won a Hugo years ago, regardless of the things which surround it. I believe it deserved to see the light of day and have the advantage of an editor capable of producing a book more professionally than I could in self-publishing. And that’s all I will say here.

13. As far as I can see there is no procedural way to prevent a certain level of vandalism, other than empowering someone to screen nominations and reject some of them, which I think most people still agree would be undesirable.

    There are fair ways to do that. One would be a two-step process where the nominations result in a longlist of 15 works per category. We each vote on a shortlist of 5 and the top vote-getters in that round are the Hugo ballot.

14. @clif

    I tried to read that … does she ever get to a point?

    **chuckle**

    I thought I had a problem with lengthy diatribes…until I discovered Ms. Hoyt’s blog.

    This is from close to the end and I think covers her thoughts reasonably well.

    What you have here is extreme suspicion of a vast majority (people outside the academic lounge and the entertainment industry) built by all our entertainment and news, until people decide a slightly less butch male and more butch female walking into a working class bar would get beat to a pulp for the crime of looking different. Which is insane. And which makes every little subgroup feel they need the government to protect them.

    This is a dangerous road to go down, because no minority fares well under a totalitarian regime. That is, the same people who help usher in the tyrant, because they think they need protection from their co-citizens, are the ones who end up suffering the most under it, because in the hard times that accompany tyranny, minorities must be made invisible or destroyed.

    Yes, there are new ways to reach the public, and I’m imploring you, if you have an ounce of talent, start running blogs, writing books, doing what you can to wake our co-citizens out of the unrealistic consensus reality that is pitching them against each other.

    We must — must — stop seeing each other without the blinders of the ideas pushed on us by those who would be our masters.

    Only that way can we remain free.

    Because when we get to the point we need the government to tell us where to go to the bathroom, the hour later and the situation far more serious than I thought.

    Regards,
    Dann

15. @Dann

    she falls, I think, into the same trap as those who say that the homeless should be fed, clothed, housed, and medicated by charity and not the gov’t. To which I respond … why hasn’t that already happened? What’s stopping you?

    to which the easy answer is racism, sexism, bigotry, etc.

16. If having Tingle on the ballot isn’t embarrassment enough, I fear the title of the inevitable Hugo-themed novel.

    You missed it?

    I don’t know. I’ve seen more anger over Vox Day’s/Castalia House’s work being on the ballot than I have over Tingle. He seems to be getting some fans out of this.

17. @Greg: Beale has said, on more than one occasion, that his goal is not to improve the Hugos but destroy them. Nominating “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” is perfectly consistent with that strategy. It’s like college students nominating their cat to run for class president.

18. @dan665: I…agree?…with Hoyt that we don’t need the government to tell us where to go to the bathroom. Is she saying that? I doubt she’s saying that, but it kinda reads like that. 😉

    @Camestros Felapton: 13 nominated works/people from Castalia? My research bites; I don’t get that.

    @JJ: “It’s SO awesome, isn’t it??? I’m thrilled that it will be eligible again this year due to its first US release!” – Oh, right! I keep forgetting that despite my slow reading, I have time to read it and see if I want to nominate it or not. 🙂

    @alexvdl: IMHO, Toni Weisskopf is a little less likely to get No Awarded this year, but I doubt she’ll win.

    @Cat: Methinks some of us were too charitable to SP4. I went back and forth a bit on how I felt about it, but ultimately decided they were irrelevant. I’m rethinking that a bit, although they were still mostly irrelevant – but mainly due to RP2. Minz’s nom was IMHO likely due to SP4. Also: I’m happy to hear the Butcher is pretty good! I doubt it’d’ve made it onto the ballot on its own, of course, but I may try to give it a fair shake. Although honestly, it’ll be tough for anything to edge out the 1.5 books I’ve read so far from the list, both of which I love/am loving.

    @airboy: “If the Hugos have any hope as a “fan” award” – ROFLMAO! Oh how cute, as if the Hugos hadn’t already “made it” as a fan award years ago and weren’t still prestigious. But they did, and they are.

    @alexvdl: Hurley’s next book will have no male characters? Or do you mean no male protagonists? Or is she going to pull a Leckie? I’m confused. Link/cite, please? Or were you joking? Or did I not get enough sleep?

19. Time enough to talk about additional changes to Hugo rules after we see what this year’s changes do. And whatever else changes in the meantime…

20. @clif

    This came through via email subscription the other day. I’m not sure that it supports your implication about her position very well….or at all.

    I tried to read that … does she ever get to a point?

    SAH seems to think its new that the US or local government controls who uses bathrooms. Also she seems to be saying we should talk to each other more instead of assuming what the other side thinks/does. If only she practiced what she preached she wouldn’t be a sad puppy and run around calling so many people Marxist, fascist, etc.

21. Clack wrote:

    As Michael Corleone said, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer”. Once the SFF community ostracized VD, they lost any influence on his behavior. He no longer has to make nice.

    ??

    Do you have any evidence that the SFF community ever had any influence on Beale’s behavior? Is there any reason to believe that he ever made nice with people who dared to disagree with him?

    And personally I think Dinosaur was a beautiful story but it probably would have gotten dinged by many Hugo voters for not being science-fictional or fantastic enough. As far as it being political, well a lot of people say “politics” when they mean “world views that differ from my own.” Like Aaron, I do wonder what kind of hell planet people come from when “beating people within an inch of their lives is bad” is a world view that differs from their own.

22. You missed it?

    I did. I forget how fast he publishes. LOL on the cover.

    I don’t know. I’ve seen more anger over Vox Day’s/Castalia House’s work being on the ballot than I have over Tingle.

    Tingle’s titles make me laugh, but having Space Raptor Butt Invasion as a Hugo nominee seriously damages the credibility of the awards. The longer we let Beale make a joke of the nomination ballot, the less anyone will care about the Hugos.

    EPH should pass, but we probaby need to do more. It stills allow trolls to put one or two Space Raptor Butt Invasions in each category.

23. “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love has the clear implication that the author desires violent justice towards people who beat the narrator’s lover into a coma over either their sexuality or their ethnicity.”

    OK, author talking about their own story follows. Feel free to skip.

    Desires it, sure, but then is like “wow, that would suck and leave victims like me which is not okay.” Or: “I have a base desire to hurt you despite my understanding that it is morally and ethically wrong and would have terrible consequences, and I can’t even really fantasize about it without being overwhelmed by that knowledge and returned to the reality of the real world where nothing helps, nothing changes things, and certainly not revenge.”

    (To a certain extent, isn’t that the *same* point Wright makes about homosexuals and tire irons? It’s his impulse, he says, but he’s not doing it, so presumably he’s aware that it is wrong–I hope–or at least that it has social consequences he doesn’t wish to encounter.)

    I’m not suggesting you didn’t understand this in your comment. Just that it is a thing that confuses and bugs me about the revenge reading that’s been put forward, since it’s specifically an *anti-revenge* story.

    It is an *anti-revenge* story because one of my intimate relations had recently uncovered a history of childhood physical and sexual abuse, and fuck if I didn’t fantasize about stopping or revenging it. But the damage is done. It is incontrovertible. And there is no revenge to be had; the abuser is still around, but what’s the point? It’s been thirty years. The person who did it, and the moment when it could have changed, are gone. All that’s left is the reality of the abuse and its long-lasting damage.

    Not that I realized that was the impetus when I was writing it. I didn’t put it together until a lot later, that the story, and the angst I was going through over that, were related.

    (I continue to have no problem with people who dislike it based on actual literary criteria, personal definitions of SF, or for sentimentality or manipulation. I would ask the folks in category two to consider noting that “it’s sff” or “it’s not sff” is actually a matter of opinion, not fact, since there is no reifiable SFF; it’s not like it’s a platonic thing that can be identified and pointed to. It’s a mobile boundary, interacting with a lot of other things. In this case, the interaction occurs around conditional tense and storytelling, which has a long history of being considered SFF in cases like The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and folklore, but I suspect there are also works that are considered realist that use the device. I don’t actually have an investment in whether it’s SFF or not, as I cannot be moved to give a damn about genres, but I think both positions are valid.)

    OK, done, thanks, needed a rant.

24. Dann665 quoting Sarah Hoyt:

    We must — must — stop seeing each other without the blinders of the ideas pushed on us by those who would be our masters.

    Because if there is anything Hoyt is good at it is seeing us without the blinders of her ideas….

    Wait.

    Yeah.

    Never mind.

25. Tingle’s titles make me laugh, but having Space Raptor Butt Invasion as a Hugo nominee seriously damages the credibility of the awards.

    There are a lot of things on this year’s shortlist that damage things more. All of them published by Castillia House. We are spoiled for choice.

26. We must — must — stop seeing each other without the blinders of the ideas pushed on us by those who would be our masters.

    I’m confused by this sentence.

    If we must stop seeing each other without the blinders, then we’re supposed to keep the blinders on. The blinders that are pushed on us by our would-be masters.

    Sarah’s channeling another Sarah with this word salad.

27. @Rachel Swirsky

    I liked the story, and while I had not seen all of those parts of it on my first (or even third) reading, I feel better for now knowing them. In an age of trilogies and universes, I like things that got straight to the point, quickly and elegantly and yet with many levels.

    I apologize for my lack of clarity. I was intending to focus on what I thought had the Puppies so fixated on the story, which I’d kind of thought was their discomfort with the condemnation of an action they, deep down, sympathize with on some level. I think Aaron above said it far better than I could, that it is a story as empathy mirror, and the Puppies do not like what looks back at them. Still though, I apologize for oversimplifying, which is on me alone.

    @Dann665

    The problem is quite frankly is Hoyt’s “myth” isn’t a myth, because I’ve seen the fucking blood from when it has happened. My lines for giving people credit for good intentions is crossed when that person wants their intentions to forgive their willful ignorance of real problems – and then deploy a straw man to say that problem does not exist. Their straw man is viewed as changing the real reality, and putting the onus on those who want to change the real status quo to validate their desire to wear rose tinted blindfolds.

    From your past implications (always implications, our Dann does not come out and *state* his conservative points, just “concerns”) about a wide array of social problems, I feel you’re in the same camp as Hoyt, quite upset that we don’t privilege your desire not to see the problem as highly as others desires to do something about it.

28. I am…puzzled that neither Mad Genius Club nor the Sad Puppies 4 site has any comment about the nominees. SP4 has seemed like a not-ready-for-prime-time endeavor for quite some time. It seems like the SP4 site should have been ready to post the finalists as soon as the information was known, even if they can’t generate a “what it all means” commentary quite so quickly. It seems so very disengaged from a process that they insist they are deeply invested in.

29. “I think Aaron above said it far better than I could, that it is a story as empathy mirror, and the Puppies do not like what looks back at them. Still though, I apologize for oversimplifying, which is on me alone.”

    No need, you didn’t really. I 95% just needed to rant about that because it’s been driving me up the wall for more than a year. 😉

30. The thing the Puppies refuse to grasp, and which is worth remembering to keep perspective, is that the embarrassing thing about Space Raptor Butt Invasion is not that it’s Space Raptor Butt Invasion, it’s that by all accounts it’s not very good. Ultimately all Beale has to offer is bad art.

31. Just got the e-mail notice for Marc Aramini’s comment. Comment e-mails are seriously messing me up today.

    @marc aramini: In fairness to “Wolfe should’ve been given a Hugo,” Gene Wolfe was nominated three times, and despite the cliché, it actually is an honor to be nominated.

32. @Lydy Nickerson: I suspect they are quietly gobsmacked and that it is only now setting in just how and how badly they were played. I have some sympathy for them. Not a lot, but some. I’ve been used before in a similar manner and it sucks. But it wasn’t an unforeseeable or an unavoidable outcome, so my sympathy is limited.

33. @clif

    My only point for the current discussion is that the article undermines the suggestion that Ms. Hoyt finds transfolk “icky”. YMMV

    @Kendall

    Yup. The longer essay has more to do with possessing uncharitable beliefs about people that are not in one’s immediate circle.

    @Tasha

    Also she seems to be saying we should talk to each other more instead of assuming what the other side thinks/does. If only she practiced what she preached she wouldn’t be a sad puppy and run around calling so many people Marxist, fascist, etc.

    It’s sound advice all around, IMHO. Especially based on my experiences here, there, and elsewhere.

    While it might not always reflect in the words I choose, it is something that I do keep in mind before setting fingers to the keyboard.

    @TYP

    From your past implications (always implications, our Dann does not come out and *state* his conservative points, just “concerns”) about a wide array of social problems, I feel you’re in the same camp as Hoyt, quite upset that we don’t privilege your desire not to see the problem as highly as others desires to do something about it.

    I’m really more libertarian leaning than conservative. I’m pretty blatantly anti-socialist/anti-communist and favor a constitutionally limited government, FWIW.

    Your inferences being….um….yours.

    —
    Regards,
    Dann

34. Yes, it is an honor to be nominated. I am first and foremost a Wolfe fan even more than an sf/fantasy fan, so obviously I am biased. I used to say, well, since Wolfe didn’t win, what do Hugos matter? And as the universe has a way of teaching us harsh lessons, suddenly I find that they matter a great deal to me now. I do hope that my essays can be examined on their own merit, because this is clearly my life’s work. 13 more essays left to finish the second and last volume, so it is over 90 percent done. Do the ends justify the means? Maybe sometimes – I guess it depends how many people get hurt.

35. @ Chuck Tingle ~

    I am fairly convinced that “Chuck Tingle” isn’t even one person but multiple authors taking the piss out of the entire self-published whackadoodle erotica sub-industry that’s sprung up on Amazon since the advent of direct-to-Kindle publishing. “He’s” writing self-evident parody, not actual too-weird-to-be-real-yet-sells-big erotica — and Mr. Genetically Superior Sigma Male Vox Day nominated him thinking it would make everyone’s head explode because he wouldn’t recognize an actual joke if it fell out of the sky and hit him across the face with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire while singing three choruses of a song entitled “I’m The Very Model of A Modern Porno Parody.” In attempting to troll, Vox has handed us the perfect opportunity to troll his ass back.

36. Hampus Eckerman on April 26, 2016 at 11:59 pm said:

    2) After the nominations are done, a long list will be sent out to all attending members (I think the original idea was to send it to all members, but attending makes more sense as they are the final voters).

    All members (attending and supporting) of the current Worldcon. Supporting members of the current Worldcon can vote.

    I guess I’m going to have to write it up again, because while I thought I wrote about it on my LiveJournal, I cannot find my own post. Maybe I only wrote about it in comments elsewhere or didn’t tag it properly.

    Andrew Hickey on April 27, 2016 at 12:07 am said:

    I *would*, however, support a motion that no works written, edited, or published by Theodore Beale can ever again be shortlisted.

    I would not. I would expect such a motion to be squashed by Objection to Consideration (not even the softer Postpone Indefinitely). You really don’t want to write an individual person’s name into the WSFS Constitution for this purpose.

    Happy Puppy on April 27, 2016 at 12:25 am said:

    I’m a MAC2 supporting member so the jukebox plays on and $50 is not much money to spend.

    I do so much want to put you in the same room with the people who complain bitterly about the enormous amount of money Worldcons shaft people to vote and how incredibly unfair it is and how $50 is a vast sum of money that it’s impossible to contemplate paying. Oh, and I even sympathize them. If you’re not that well off, $50 is a lot of money.

    Having said that, I am leaning toward removing the right of the previous/subsequent years’ members to nominate. Doing so effectively triples the out-of-pocket expense of drive-by vandalism. I’m not happy with the proposals I’ve seen to withdraw supporting members’ voting rights entirely.

    Tasha Turner on April 27, 2016 at 7:03 am said:

    I believe it’s Jared Dashoff [chairing the WSFS Business Meeting] this year. Kevin Standlee will be in the back assisting on the video. I hope this isn’t Jared’s first time running the meeting.

    Jared was Deputy Chair in 2015 and presided a few times during last year’s meeting, once when I recused myself to participate in debate, and again when he presided over the Committee of the Whole, and also when I presented the report of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee. It is his first time as the Chairman of the meeting, but not his first time on the head table.

    steve davidson on April 27, 2016 at 7:47 am said:

    I’m also thinking (though it is probably a long shot), that maybe enough people will get sick of seeing Space Raptor Butt Invasion and SJWS Always Lie and Safe Space as Rape Room on the long list of Hugo Finalists that we might pass a motion to have them removed and replaced with an asterisk.

    A meaningless motion that I expect the Chair would rule as out of order. The Business Meeting does not have the authority to do this. The Hugo Awards Marketing Committee would not pay attention to such a motion if it was passed. Therefore, the only way to do what you want here is to write the names of the specific works into a constitutional amendment, which would be IMO worse than leaving them on the list of Hugo Award finalists.

    OTOH, I can see a proposal that adds to the constitution a provision that any nominee that finishes below No Award shall not be considered to be a Hugo Award finalist for the purpose of WSFS records. That’s a more general rule that has a better chance of actually passing.

    rcade on April 27, 2016 at 8:25 am said:

    Chuck Tingle has already updated his Amazon bio to “Hugo Award nominee Dr. Chuck Tingle.”

    That’s okay. “Hugo Award Nominee” is an officially meaningless term, with the same value as “Nobel Prize Nominee.” I know that I’m a “Hugo Award Nominee” this year, too, because I know of at least three people who nominated me.

37. I do hope that my essays can be examined on their own merit

    You are only on the shortlist because of slating tactics, but you think people who saw their legitimate choices pushed off should ignore that?
    Your publisher’s stated aim is to burn down the Hugos, but you think people should give you a Hugo?

38. @Rachel Swirsky: As you know, I’m not a fan of Dinosaur specifically (though my respect for it grows as the years go by and people can’t stop talking about it). But having grown up in the era of authors like Kurt Vonnegut “denying Science Fiction three times” out of anxiety about their own literary reputation, I always have a soft spot for authors insisting that, “Dammit, this is SF!” Delany and Dhalghren is another classic example. So two cheers for you!

39. At least one comment on the MGC congratulates the SP/RP on their success and the usual comment on drinking the tears of the opposition. (A particular visual image I find stupid no matter who uses it.) Suggesting at least some of the canines haven’t been read in on the rift between the leadership of the two camps or else denial is still running strong.

40. Well, we all knew it might be pretty bad.
    The question was only how bad.
    There were some lovely related works this year, and some wonderful short stories.
    I’ll be curious to see the nomination data, just to know how close any of my best loved choices came.
    The (small) silver lining is that this time around one of Beale’s tactics to make our little heads all asplode was to slip some things we’ll like in among rest of his dreck.

    Well, my head actually doesn’t explode all that easily.
    Yeah, sure, certainly I’d rather be choosing from a full list of things fellow readers actually loved, but I’m not going to get that this year.
    EPH, and I’d hope as well 4/6, should clear the way for good faith nominations next year.
    So next time I’ll get the real nominating experience, with a chance to see how my choices fit in with everyone else’s.
    I look forward to it.
    In the meanwhile, though, there is this mess to deal with.

    Luckily Beale was silly enough to put things on his list that I myself actually nominated as well or that I know Real People take seriously, for non-ideological reasons, and I’m perfectly comfortable voting for them, slated or not, if I think they are award worthy.
    So I may be able to vote for something in most categories.
    (That said, I don’t think I will ever purchase or read or nominate or vote for anything from Beale’s press, ever.
    Sorry Pournelle, sorry Aramini – you sleep with a dawg, you get up with fleas.)

    So, yeah, I’ll vote for OGH, and a good few other things, slated or not, that I am sure deserve to be on the ballot.
    And I hope they win – I’m willing to vote for Noah, but he’s never my first choice.
    Beale’s welcome to swan about claiming it as a victory if Mike gets another rocket or two.
    That’s just a rude noise in the background – who cares about him?

41. Brandon Sanderson gives his response on his nomination, as well as interesting bits about some behind the scenes stuff last year.

42. Oh, feh. I’d stand next to Chuck Tingle on the Hugo stage if we’d been the same year. It’s not my thing, but I’d rather be next to him than Beale.

    It’s silly season, and everybody who knows about the Hugos knows it. I strongly, strongly suspect that the number of people who enthusiastically consume both SF with the word Hugo on it AND Mr. Tingle’s work but are ignorant of this controversy are…well, I can probably count ’em all without taking off my socks.

43. @Rachel Swirsky

    On the plus side, you wrote a short story that’s still getting critical attention and conversation, what, 3 years later?

44. rcade: One would be a two-step process where the nominations result in a longlist of 15 works per category. We each vote on a shortlist of 5 and the top vote-getters in that round are the Hugo ballot.

    While fair, I suspect that plan is still vulnerable to producing the same result we have now. The slate voters will direct their 500 (or whatever the number) votes to specific stories, and thousands of other votes will be spread over a spectrum, like they are now. Alternatively, a bunch of people might start voting tactically, leading to a more savory ballot at the cost of not really voting for what they love.

45. @Kendall,

    No male characters. Not as background, not as anything.

    After he’d made the offer he emailed my agent and was like, “Wait a minute… are there only women in this whole Legion of worlds? There are no men in this book?” and my agent was like, “Yes, Joe” and he was like, “That makes it even better!”

    http://io9.gizmodo.com/heres-your-exclusive-first-look-of-kameron-hurleys-upco-1758775487

    @rcade,

    Other than that fact is was put there by assholes, I don’t see Space Raptor Butt INvasion as any different than “Previous Year’s Acceptance Speech”. I think that if the Fen had put it on the ballot, you’d still have grousing, but there would be a level of playfulness. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Chuck Tingle won the damn thing. I mean… I’d laugh.

    @Marc Aramini

    Man, I think you picked the wrong horse to hitch your wagon too.

46. The sense I get from various websites and the blogosphere is mostly just eye-rolling. They slated the awards nominations. The slate nominees will get No Awarded. The Puppies will attempt to claim victory for popular mainstream works like Sandman or The Martian. The EPH ballot rules will pass and slating will be minimized. Unlike last year, there will be a minimum of sturm und drang.

    We get it, puppies. You like being assholes and trying to destroy an award some people care about. Everyone else will ignore or mock you and get on with writing, reading and enjoying a genre we love.

47. Brandon Sanderson gives his response on his nomination, as well as interesting bits about some behind the scenes stuff last year.

    that seems to be a pretty even handed take on the whole situation. I wonder what the response was to his emails to the sad puppy leaders who he shares his state with … I’m guessing not very positive.

48. Well, the main conclusion I draw from the shortlist is that the Rabid Puppies have successfully trolled the Hugo Awards and shown that a small group with similar tastes and interests can determine what is considered “The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy” for the year within the current nomination system and voting body.

    As to the list itself, well, I shake my head. There is some good stuff there, but there’s a lot of drek too, present for trolling purposes only. I do see a silver lining here, however, especially in the Best Novel category.

    Like some others have already said, I disagree that getting increased participation failed because (assuming none of the RP novel nominees recused–big assumption but impossible to know) the Best Novel category was not dominated. That’s fairly substantial proof that expanded participation marginalizes slates and/or static nomination archetypes.

    When I say “static nomination archetypes,” I am really talking about flavors; certain authors/creators, genre-types, and styles of writing have historically faired well in pre-puppy times. I think expanded participation limits that too as more flavors would be brought to the table (looking at you Dr. Who, and Scalzi too, while I’m thinking about it; FWIW, I like Scalzi and though Old Man’s War was excellent).

    *

    Personal voting-wise, some of my nominations made it: Uprooted, Cinder Spires, Perfect State, Slow Bullets, “And You Shall Know Her By The Trail Of Dead”, and Jerry Pournelle.

    But some I really wanted did not: “Tuesdays With Molakesh The Destroyer”, The Autumn Republic, Chaos Horizons, and any Daredevil episode (I picked the [IMO] five best, but it was soooo hard to choose).

    Failing to get things I wanted (and thought worthy) nominated on the list is, of course, disappointing, but such has been the case since I started participating.

49. The US military doesn’t fight on US soil.

    Well, except in a civil war I’d expect their oath to defend the Constitution against enemies both foreign and domestic would kick in, and they would operate on U.S. soil.

50. re Sanderson

    It makes me think that if SP continues in more of the SP4 vein, it’s… a settlement I can live with. Not with Hoyt et al. actual opinions or hysteria how criticizing them is as bad as the Holodomer, but with the fact that they would not longer be slating crap, they would no longer policing their ideological purity as much, and while they’d put the occasional stunt on, they’d have less of a way to push it through.

    People rarely admit they’re flat out wrong, even the ones who’ve been on the record as wrong as often as Hoyt and Paulk. Giving a future, rec only, SP the benefit of the doubt and not actively delegitimizing it seems to be a way to at least have some people feeling that they have other options besides Teddy Beale. It gives them a landing spot where they can feel safe where they may stop being actively objectionable.

    ETA: And I’m saying this as someone who thinks – with much evidence, that the difference between SP3 and Beale was the difference between the muppet and the puppeteer’s hand – a real distinction, but not one that has an effect. When SP had a slate, they were Beale’s useful idiots, a role they played to the hilt, with great enthusiasm.

    But if they’re willing to play somewhat well, and at worst walk in front of a parade and pretend to lead it, eh?

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