aka Don’t ask for whom the puppy barks, it barks for thee.
Today’s roundup brings you K. Tempest Bradford, David Gerrold, Redneck Gaijin, Spacefaring Kitten, SL Huang, Brandon Kempner, Alexandra Erin, and Robert J. Bennett. (Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editors of the day James H. Burns and John King Tarpinian.)
K. Tempest Bradford
Unintended Consequences – A Post About The Hugos – May 11
There’s a fun irony in the fallout from the Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies Hugo thing.
There are now over 8,000 members of Sasquan (WorldCon). The con gained over 2,600 supporting memberships since March 31st of this year and about 350 attending memberships. I think it can be safely assumed that several of the 1,948 people who bought supporting memberships before March 31st were slate voters and GamerGators. Not a majority, perhaps, but a sizable chunk. And some of the post-March 31st folks might be puppy supporters. However, I’m fairly sure that an overwhelming majority of these new members are anti-slate or anti-puppy.
That’s thousands of people who don’t think that diversity is a dirty word, who don’t consider the larger number of women and authors of color on previous year’s ballots to be affirmative action or diversity for the sake of diversity or political correctness gone wrong.
That’s thousands of people eligible to nominate for next year’s Hugos, and with a big incentive to do so.
Uh oh. *giggle*
David Gerrold on Facebook – May 11
If we see 3000 or 4000 or even as many as 6000 (or more) Hugo votes and no sad-rabids win, then that will have to be seen as a very aggressive smackdown not only of the slate nominees, but also of the thinking behind the slates.
Seeing as how people on both sides are now saying, “Read the nominees, vote your conscience,” if such a smackdown occurs — even to the point of a couple “No Award” categories — then what?
(The day after the ceremony, it’s traditional for the committee to release the vote tallies. It will make for some very interesting reading and there will likely be a great deal of discussion and analysis.)
There are several possibilities:
1) The sad-rabids could acknowledge that people voted their consciences and the best works won. Because some of them have claimed they are for diversity and inclusion (insert eye-roll here) they might then pat themselves on the back for at least getting some of their candidates on the ballot and promise to come back next year.
2) Also possible, the sad-rabids could double down and claim that the voting was somehow unfair and that the secret cabal of leftist Social Justice Warriors had gamed the vote. (Insert another eye-roll here. Anyone who’s ever tried to organize fans knows that herding cats is easier. With cats, you only need an open can of tuna. With fans, you need pizza, beer, and a sneak preview of the next SF blockbuster, and the results still aren’t guaranteed.)
….If we have 3000 or more fans nominating for the 2016 awards, then it means that anyone trying to run a slate and game the nominations is going to have a much harder task.
So the unintended consequence of the sad-rabid exercise will have been to put more money in the Worldcon treasury and energize fandom to be more engaged in nominating and voting for Hugos. This is a good thing. (The analogy of white blood cells rushing in to fight an infected wound might be appropriate.)
Adult Onset Atheist
“Post Nuclear SNARL” – May 10
I personally don’t think the No Award option is nuclear enough. I would kinda like a refund on the purchase price of the books, and I would certainly like to prevent people in the future from being hoodwinked into purchasing any of these novellas by reading the endorsement implied by seeing “Nominated for a 2015 Hugo Award” on the cover. I would like these novellas to have never been nominated, and I believe that could be done. I almost would like for these novellas to have never been written, but I am afraid that is not possible.
Because Worldcon owns the Hugo trademark intellectual property they can manipulate it in order to maintain its value. They have done this incrementally in the past by adjusting the rule-set needed to be nominated for, or win, a Hugo. They can do it again by removing nominees that loose to “No Award” from the list. This would prevent unscrupulous publishers from realizing an increased prestige or profit as a result of stuffing the nominating ballot boxes.
I have no idea how to go about creating such a rule, or even proposing such a rule for that mater, but I do think it would be a good move. It may even be necessary, as the puppy thought police are not the only ones who might gain from a critically injured Hugo award process. The puppies are not the only ones who have the wherewithal to corrupt the nominating process for their own gain, and they are not even the ones who could do it best.
Redneck Gaijin on Redneck Gaijin’s Pitiful Little Life
“A post, in which I waste time and annoy Puppies” – May 11
It’s entirely possible to obey all the rules and still take an unfair advantage. It happens all the time in real life, which is why children of rich people get richer and children of poor people generally stay poor. It’s why black people in America are generally confined to slums and low-paying jobs and considered as criminals until proven otherwise.
Obeying the rules doesn’t mean you played fair. It might just mean you’re a very successful weasel.
“It’s your fault we won, because you didn’t bother to vote, because you didn’t organize your own slates, so nyah!”
Maybe so. As I said in my prior post, the Hugos themselves are not really important. I’ve never voted in the Hugos because I have better uses for my money, and also because I haven’t much interest in reading 90% of what gets nominated.
Neither I, nor anybody else, thought the Hugos were so important that it was necessary to devote the time and energy into campaigning for people to spend $40 or more simply to ram through a super-slate of politically acceptable works- until now.
Now that it’s happened, a lot of people are appalled- but the most appalling thing is that it was done with less than 20% of the vote.
Or, to put it another way, over 80% of voters casting Hugo nomination ballots did not vote for a single Sad/Rabid Puppy recommended work or creator.
So the 20% get to rule over the 80%, and in the minds of the Puppies, this is fair… because it’s them doing the ruling.
Spacefaring Kitten on Spacefaring, Extradimensional Happy Kittens
“Preliminary Thoughts Before Embarking on an Expedition to Planet Wright” – May 11
I’ve decided to read — or try reading — everything on the Hugo ballot this year, and that means there’s more than one novel’s worth of fiction by Wright I have to slog through. There’s a human experiment aspect to all this, as well: it will be interesting to see a) if I can make it at all, b) if I can give a sensible account of the experience and c) if I can do a more-or-less balanced review of this stuff knowing what kind of a person has written it.
I don’t hold any delusions of being completely objective, of course, because there’s no such thing as complete objectivity outside mathematics. Acknowledging Wright’s beliefs probably affects my judgment of his fiction in some way. What the effect will be exactly, remains to be seen.
Reading SFF
“Review: On a Spiritual Plain by Lou Antonelli (2015 Hugo Nominated Short Story)” – May 11
On a Spiritual Plain by Lou Antonelli is the second story from this year’s Hugo Awards ballot that I have read. I did not have high expectations of this year’s short story ballot because all nominees were nominated because of their presence on the sad and/or rabid puppy slates. (I did not like a single one of last year’s sad puppy nominees.) Totaled, the first story I read, was not a great story, but at least it had some positive moments. In contrast, On a Spiritual Plain fits right in with last year’s sad puppy nominees.
The story’s protagonist is the chaplain of a small human outpost on an alien planet. This is a bit familiar. One of last year’s sad puppy Hugo nominees by Brad R. Torgerson also featured a chaplain of a small group of humans on an alien planet. Now, this year Brad Torgerson put together the Sad Puppies slate. I guess he has a thing for chaplains in the military. Hm. I don’t have to understand this, do I?
Cirsova
“Post-mortem of A-to-Z challenge & Hugo Awards” – May 11
Based on some of the nominating numbers I’ve seen and taking into account a large section of the sci-fi blogosphere’s determination to nuke the Hugos from space, I have some worry for the smaller categories. From what I understand of how No Award works, if it gets a plurality in a category simply because of people who are voting a straight No Award ticket, it will knock out all of those works in minor categories voted on by folks who were actually approaching each category in earnest and trying to vote out of the five based on individual merit. Hopefully the number of jerkass ideologue who REALLY want to spend $40 just to vote a no award straight temper tantrum ticket and smash the trophies so that no one can have them constitutes such a small fraction of the Hugo voters that they won’t edge out even the most obscure categories.
SL Huang on Bad Menagerie
“Statistics of Gender on the Hugo Writing Nominees: Probabilities and Standard Deviations” – May 11
This will tell us whether a given gender distribution is within what we’d consider an expected year-by-year fluctuation from 50/50, or whether, assuming a 50/50 gender split, it would be…well, an extreme outlier.
Brandon Kempner on Chaos Horizon
“Hugo Award Nomination Ranges, 2006-2015, Part 3” – May 11
Even though the number of ballots are soaring, the % ranges are staying somewhat steady, although we do see year-to-year perturbation. The top nominees have been hovering between 15%-22.5%. Since 2009, every top nominee has managed at least 100 votes. The bottom nominee has been in that 7.5%-10% range, safely above the 5% minimum. Since 2009, those low nominees all managed at least 50 votes, which seems low (to me; you may disagree). Even in our most robust category, 50 readers liking your book can get you into the Hugo—and they don’t even have to like it the most. It could be their 5th favorite book on their ballot.
Alexandra Erin on Blue Author Is About To Write
“Sad Puppies Review Books: Corduroy” – May 11
Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)….
I take it back. This bear isn’t even a delta male. He’s a full-on gamma. His sad little quest ends in a pathetic anticlimax as the night security guard—a proper man—literally puts him back in his place, where he stays until the girl comes for him.
And then the little girl does come back and buys him, and sews a button on him anyway. The Feminazis talk about agency, but where’s his agency in all of this? He never found his button. He never got a chance to be a man. Instead he needed the girl to “fix” him, playing mind games on him all the while.
“I like you just the way you are,” the temptress coos, “but I’m sure you’d be more comfortable if you let me, oh, I don’t know… change everything about you.”
@RichardFPenn I suspect that very few voters for the Sad Puppies slate were literally dogs. Though it's hard to tell on the Internet.
— Not-So-OK Boomer (@Rand_Simberg) May 11, 2015
Hush Puppies community created on Facebook – May 11
Hush Puppies is for fans of science fiction, fantasy & other geeky pursuits who do not want the drama generated by Sad or Rabid Puppies.
the hugo awards grind to a halt as an excited @SamSykesSwears runs in and squeals he seen a big green lizard outside
— a taction for the take-tack on the terror shank (@robertjbennett) May 12, 2015
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The idea behind being “quoted out of context” is that there’s additional surrounding material which, when omitted, fundamentally changes the character of the quote.
That’s not what happened to you here. What happened to you here is that you lied, got caught, and regret having got caught.
In your post here at 6:08 you lied, completely reversing the meaning of the comment you were paraphrasing, in an attempt to deceive the readers here about what was going on at ML. If you think there’s some context that I omitted which mitigates that lie, I challenge you to produce it.
Mike – in re Whiteness enough:
One would infer that, when declaring that one is not “white” and then invoking Mexican and Native American ancestry as proof, then the inference seems to be that one considers being “Mexican,” as a class, to be non-white.
Although “whiteness” is really kind of an elusive state: for example, my bloodstock is solidly Irish (my beard used to be flaming red and I still take on cooked-lobster hues when in the summer sun for more than 45 minutes), some of my relatives by marriage are solidly Italian stock, and have handsome skin tones that are real hard to do anything but look burnished if they spend time in the sun, others are from Scandinavian extraction and make my formerly freckled puss look like I’ve been bronzed.
Yet, supposedly, I’m classed as “white,” as are all the aforementioned relatives. Then you get to “Mexican,” I’m presuming that TB/VD was referring to the Hispanic population, and not the native indian population. But there are Hispanics who have skin tones that are blindingly fair. So just what is this “white” quality?
Old MacDonald had a farm
O-H-U-G-O
And on this farm he had a puppy
O-H-U-G-O
With a “slate slate” here and a “slate slate” there
Here a “slate”, there a “slate”
Everywhere a “slate slate”
Old MacDonald had a farm
O-H-U-G-O
/earworm
Hm.
Perhaps that should be:
Old Mac
DonaldWorldcon had a farmOld McWSFS had a con.
Mike:
That’s a plausible interpretation, but inasmuch as nobody has ever pushed the boundaries, we don’t know. I do know that when I started distributing paper ballots for a given year’s Hugos before that calendar year started (and this was back before electronic voting), I got yelled at for doing so.
The fact that the ballot technology has evolved to where you could used the ballot as your personal scratchpad of things you read throughout the year may have changed the paradigm.
rcade:
Considering that we routinely order site selection ballots to be destroyed as the formal motion that finishes a Worldcon site selection, I’m not too fussed about the concept of destroying Hugo ballots after the election results are final. (There is no specific rule about it for the Hugo Awards, and I would say it’s up to the Administrators of that year’s election as to when or if they want to destroy (or preserve) the ballot information, baring action from WSFS.
influxus:
The problem I see is that it also brings up the prospect of constantly trying to re-fight a battle and to find ways to retroactively withdraw a Hugo Award by jiggering the counting system to your preferred system.
I administered the 1995 NASFiC Site Selection (held in 1992; different lead times and rules then), which had bids on the ballot for Atlanta (eventually won and the 1995 NASFiC was combined with DragonCon, New York, a goofball write-in bid for I-95 that managed to file a just-barely-legal bid 1 second before the deadline, and a fairly hefty campaign for None of the Above (cancel NASFiC and refund site selection fees). Atlanta won, as I mentioned above. (New York ignominiously finished fourth in a field of two, behind NOTA and the I-95 write-in bid. I restrained the temptation to recount the ballots on the assumption that I disqualified the I-95 bid, and instead destroyed them after the results were declared final. I remain curious to this day if the result would have been different, but for the health of the convention, it’s better that we never know for sure.
Chris Hensley:
Agreed. My mother says that I’m 1/4 Cherokee and 1/8 Ojibwe (Chippewa), thanks primarily to my ancestry running through northern Arkansas during the Trail of Tears, when, as family tradition puts it, those natives who could “pass” as white and didn’t want to be marched off to Fort Stinkindesert drifted off the trail and married into the “white” folks who were already there. However, I certainly don’t identify culturally as Native American, and never check that box on the census survey. (Genetically, I got dark hair, fair skin, no sun resistance to speak of, and a propensity to Type II Diabetes.) I reckon something similar could plausibly be said of TB.
Laertes –
One of the problems when one is trying to control the information flow is that systems such as the ones here at file770 and at ML are open to perusal, and anybody can go and check that what was reported to have happened in a thread actually *did* happen in that thread.
In fact, the culture at ML is to not delete really objectionable material (except spam) but to disemvowel it. And the commenting structure over there, while still linear within a thread (that is, new comments always drop to the end of the list) the fact that comments are individually numbered by the software is taken advantage of by the commentariat, by tagging the poster’s name and comment number into the text of the reply.
That kind of in-built audibility makes it real easy to reconstruct a comment’s stream of ancestry.
(I think that makes sense)
Craig R: I intend to let Will continue or leave that topic alone.
Whether someone from a Hispanic background self-identifies as white (or not) tends to be a decision bringing into play more factors than just an eyeball test.
Chris Hensley: “That being said VD seems to be of the opinion that the genetic differences between the races is more significant then what it is, and that culture (or in his own words how “civilized” an ethnic group is) is genetically determined.”
Fascinating. I wonder what his take is on genetic heritability of criminal tendencies, mental illness, and sociopathy.
@Kevin Standlee and rcade
Destroying the ballots is one thing. The comment got a bit further than this in basically saying to ignore and stonewall any question about it after that. Anyway – I think we got off that one for now.
@Kevin Standlee
Is there anything in the rules that stops a Worldcon (Kansas or the next one for example) from opening a scratch page accessible after a member login that looks like the ballot but is just a scratch pad (opening it as soon as their nomination year starts (January 1) and then providing a means to transfer/use that as a ballot for nominations? Or even have an automatic (use this as ballot if I do not submit one in time)?
Glenn: I mostly wonder when he is going to start espousing phrenology as a proven science.
Morris – “C’Nine’ — ::whimper::
This isn’t making light, so I wanted to avoid really bad puns….
You are a braver man than I.
@Mike –
Righto! High Ho, the Merry O, Self-Identifying as we go…
(besides, your house, your rules)
@Glenn Hauman –
“Fascinating. I wonder what his take is on genetic heritability of criminal tendencies, mental illness, and sociopathy.”
Can we *not* go down that particular garden path, please?
@Brian Z:
“I’m not voting systems expert but I understand that this is a valid topic for discussion and there are all manner of opinions about what the ideal approach should be. It is a good discussion to have. Note that we don’t have “a record of nomination tallying” right now, and the information we do have was not always available in the past.”
Yes, that is the conversation I was trying to have, I was probably too oblique.
I was disagreeing with your point that it is obvious or definitionally true that ballots should be destroyed after recounts are no longer possible. In fact, I would favour them being anonymised, preserved and made public as digital data. I am aware that is not current practice, but I think it would be one possible positive outcome of this mess.
influxus @ 9:30: I would favour them being anonymised, preserved and made public as digital data. I am aware that is not current practice,
Actually, it kind of is–the Hugo Awards By Year page has a link at the bottom to a .pdf which gives all the voting round totals and a list of every work nominated (I think) and by how many people that work was nominated. Is that what you mean by “anonymized, preserved, and made public”? Mind you, I’ve no idea how far back the numbers go, or if every WorldCon keeps this detailed a record, but the recent years all seem to be there.
Puppy is Three
Microcosmic Puppy
If All Puppies Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?
Mewhu’s Puppy
The Hurkle Is a Happy Puppy
Affair with a Green Puppy
@Mary Frances,
Yeah the fact that any data at all is available is great. I was meaning more an anonymised public dataset of each ballot submitted.
Apparently my mothers ancestors considered my fathers to be nothing but feckless drunks and inversely my mothers people were all untrustworthy Protestants.
I’m prepared to wager that neither Mr Beale nor his parents have been discriminated against in account of the ancestry he claims. My father was.
It feels like a sop akin to a cry of ‘some
Of my best friends are…’
@Daveon:
Beale discovered his minority heritage about a year ago, when a relative had some genetic testing done. (There’s a post about the discovery on his blog, but I am disinclined to search for it.) I have seen zero indications that he viewed himself as anything other than white before that, and he hasn’t stopped trumpeting his “minority status” since.
It’s almost as if he only cares about that part of his background when it can be weaponized…
“It’s almost as if he only cares about that part of his background when it can be weaponized…”
And suddenly I’m reminded of something Jim C. Hines pointed out:
http://www.jimchines.com/2014/10/gamergate-and-diversity/
I think a key test for ONEVOTE (thx Rev) will be testing it against this year’s ballots once the results are out. Will there be enough granular data to do such a testing though?
Assuming we know the bloc vote sizes, then it would be to see if they have a nil/minor /discernible impact?
Because I think this year, while maybe best novel and the BDP categories would’ve been protected under ONEVOTE, I think the other categories would still have been steamrolled by the slates
@snowcrash:
The usual post-awards data release is not sufficient to run a ONEVOTE test, as it counts total nominations per work rather than nominees per ballot. That’s why the only tests that’ve been run with real data uses the 1984 information; the ballot breakdown apparently still exists for that.
Unless this year’s committee finds a way to preserve this year’s data set – a business meeting proposal, perhaps – the best we’ll be able to do is guess about how ONEVOTE would’ve affected this year’s ballot.
Even if the full data is not available there is still robust testing that can be done. Once we know the percentage for the top 15 noms in each category the size of the slates should clear. We could then create synthetic data sets with the same statistical properties as historical data and simulate the effect of adding in various sized slates.
Directed at none of the posts closely preceding this one:
I never cease to be amazed at those who act as if it’s difficult to make people mad.
@influxus:
While true, I suspect that the noise introduced by such an analysis, especially in the smaller categories, may well outweigh the derived signal. It won’t quite be a wild-assed guess, but it will still be a guess.
@kurt “Howl’s Moving Rationalizations” << from Studio Dribbly?
Day says he’s part Native American because of a DNA test conducted by his brother that found a percentage of North American origin. The heritage supposedly comes from a great-grandfather who was a Mexican revolutionary and full Native American.
> If we haven’t read any short fiction this year and very few novels (for example) and don’t feel qualified to have an opinion, do you think maybe we should at least recuse ourselves entirely from the short fiction categories?
No!
An award is going to be issued (or not) to one of the five works in each category, and I think that it’s perfectly possible for each of us to (a) read all five works, (b) compare them against each other, and (c) compare them against a ‘hugo-worthy’ threshold we have in our minds. That’s true regardless of what other short fiction we’ve read.
Furthermore, by the time the ballots are due, Gardner Dozois’ annual anthology will be out, and it’s possible to read a bunch of the short fiction that way (which might help in determining whether the top rated story in each category reaches the threshold).
This is the process I’ve used in most of the years I’ve voted. And I think it’s *more* important to use it this year because I don’t trust the nominating process to have filtered appropriately – the more of the nominated works I read, the more convinced of that I become.
Lori Coulson,
> Why bother forfeiting some of MY precious time to try to be fair, only to be told because I was underwhelmed by the stories, I’m the spiteful bitch if I don’t vote for them.
Speaking *only* for myself – my motivation for being fair isn’t that people will thin I’m fair; it’s that *I will believe myself to have been fair*. This is true whether the RPs think I’m spiteful for no awarding all of their nominees in a category – if I read them and did my utmost to judge them honestly, then their opinion doesn’t mean anything; I know I was fair and I know I lived up to my ideals for my own behavior.
“Day says he’s part Native American because of a DNA test conducted by his brother that found a percentage of North American origin. The heritage supposedly comes from a great-grandfather who was a Mexican revolutionary and full Native American.”
Somewhere a grave is distrubed by a frenetically rotating corpse…
FWIW,
I take it this year’s Hugo nomination ballots are no longer available?
If next year’s WorldCon committee thought it was useful (and had time), would it be possible to write up a program to use the SDV-LPE (ONEVOTE) method to examine next year’s Hugo nominating? The current method must still be used to count the nominations and produce finalists in the usual way, of course, but that would allow side-by-side comparison of how the current nomination process and SDV-LPE handle one or more slates (unless the Puppies are so abashed that they don’t slate next year–but I think they’re already organizing next year’s slate nomination process, yes?).
That information could be released along with the nomination data after the Hugo voting next year.
Whether or not they do that, a different but also very interesting analysis would be a matrix of the top 15 showing how many people who nominated A also nominated B. Slates would show clearly here–and since many of the Puppies (especially Sads) are claiming that they didn’t follow the slate exactly, it would be interesting to have some data that would confirm that. Or not.
If the brave volunteers of WorldCon 2016 don’t want to take on the extra work, I do understand.
@anna “Somewhere a grave is distrubed by a frenetically rotating corpse…”
Poor Crazy Horse…a long time to go at this rate before he gets to rest.
That makes me wonder if anybody’s written some alternate-universe stuff where the Ghost Dance worked in a literal sense. That would be fun to read.
@anna Some very uncomfortable conversations would follow.
@Robert West, @Dela
I think this goes back to a certain inability? (I don’t think that’s the right word, maybe world-view/ lack of awareness?) for the Puppy-proponents.
They (for given values of they) can’t believe that works like Ancillary Justice or Redshirts or If You Were A Dinosaur… are liked by *anyone*.
They can’t bring themselves to believe that different people may have a different voting or judging rationale.
They can’t bring themselves to believe that *anyone* would vote their slated works below NA on the basis of quality, but thus far the quality is on par with the stuff SP2 got on last year.
@Cat, that sound’s like it would lead to a lot more acrimony then we’re already dealing with!
That makes me wonder if anybody’s written some alternate-universe stuff where the Ghost Dance worked in a literal sense
Shadowrun, kind of.
@matt y — thanks — will look that up.
Annie Y:
No, there is nothing in the rules that prohibits this.
Mary Frances:
That’s only the Top 15. It doesn’t include anything that isn’t in the top 15, nor anything that didn’t get at least 5 votes. It’s the information required under section 3.11.4 of the current WSFS Constitution
Worldcons have not always been required to release this information, and we’ve not always been great about preserving it. The Hugo Awards web site now attempts to preserve the data as soon as possible after the results are announced, by saving a copy of it on the site itself. (Individual Worldcons’ web sites disappear.) But not every year’s data was saved, so when someone finds a copy of a given year’s details that we don’t have, we want to know about it so we can fill in the blanks.
Cat:
You’d have to ask this year’s Hugo Award Administrators. But bear in mind that while you can ask for that level of detail, they’re not obliged to give it to you.
Robert West:
My first instinct when this s*** hit the fan was “nuke’em from orbit” and “No Award’ everything. Then I found out that there were some items that didn’t come from Slateville, so I decided that I’d read those and vote on them.
After about two weeks, when I had cooled down I decided I would at least take a look at the works from the slates, even though I knew that I hadn’t enjoyed trying to read last year’s selections. And so I find these tales tiresome, and with relief see that I can vote “No Award” because they’re light years away from being Hugo material.
And then I come here — and find some opining that those who vote “No Award” are spiteful. Which triggered all the rage I felt earlier when I got the news that the Hugos had been gamed. Dammit, I’ll never get the time back I wasted on those stupid stories. Yes, I’ve done the honorable thing by reading them, and my soul and conscience are clean.
But I’m tired of the Puppies who have NO manners, NO ethics, and NO personal honor trying to hold me to standards that they themselves can’t meet. I’ve reached the conclusion that eventually they’re going to raise their demand to “you must vote for our candidates and give us the awards because we’re the only ones worthy enough to win.” And I say we’ve paid enough Danegeld…
Call me a BITCH? Tell me I’m SPITEFUL?
Baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Yeah, because being called a racist, a misogynist, a cheater, not a true fan, and all the other invective is just water off their backs…
All they’ve asked is that you read the works and consider them, if you don’t like them, no award them.
And honestly, I don;t think they give a crap about your anger and hurt feelings. You want to try and “Bring It” to them, go ahead. I know who has the heavy artillery (literally) in that fight. Just let us know, I want to get the popcorn before hand.
Todd — “All they’ve asked is that you read the works and consider them”
Except asking for their works to be read isn’t all they’ve done, is it?
Todd, I don’t have to do anything — as I said I read the stories, and frankly they’re crap. For that matter there’s some stuff that wasn’t on the slate that I found equally disappointing, those will go below “No Award” as well.
It’s just frustrating to try to do the right thing and still get flack for it. If the Puppies want to convince some of those who are taking the nuclear option, I don’t think insulting them is going to accomplish anything.
At this point, it’s in the hands of the folks voting.
All they’ve asked is that you read the works and consider them, if you don’t like them, no award them.
Why should I? Why should anyone?
First, I read their selections from last year. They were all well below the “No Award” threshold in quality.
Second, I’ve read some of their selections from this year. They have all been terrible.
Third, multiple Puppy authors have said numerous racist, sexist things. This is true whether you want to acknowledge it or not. They’ve also spent copious ink attacking anyone who doesn’t share their narrow and limited view of what science fiction should be.
Fourth, the Puppies clearly did not select the books they chose based on the quality of the writing. If they did, their selections would not have been as really terrible as they are. And, of course, we have their admissions that the choices were made, at least in part, to wage a “culture war” against “SJWs”. If they didn’t choose the works on their slate solely on the basis of writing quality, why should anyone feel the need to go to the trouble of judging them on that basis?
They got themselves on the ballot by means of a purely political campaign, or as Correia himself styled it, a “culture war”. Why is a political response somehow out of bounds? They decided literary quality wasn’t an issue they were concerned about. Why should anyone else?
@snowcrash: “They (for given values of they) can’t believe that works like Ancillary Justice or Redshirts or If You Were A Dinosaur… are liked by *anyone*.”
I’ve read the last two and am making steady progress on the first. “Dinosaur” wasn’t really my thing, but I found it evocative and powerful. Redshirts worked for me on several levels, reminding me in pleasant ways of “Visit to a Weird Planet” (and, of course, “Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited”).
Ancillary Justice, though… my. At the 68% mark, there’s another one of Those Paragraphs, this time giving us an uncomfortably stark moment of clarity about Breq’s utter bafflement by (and, possibly, phobia of) gender cues. The galaxy is a big place, and local customs are so diverse that keeping track of them all is an exercise in futility. Breq is frustrated by the confusing profusion of contradictory cues, but mortified at the idea of getting them wrong, and we get to see that analysis paralysis approach the level of a full panic attack.
I can understand how someone could read “Dinosaur” or Redshirts and come away thinking they weren’t good fits for the Hugo. I cannot say the same for Ancillary Justice. This makes twice that AJ has simply blown me away with a paragraph, and I still have over a quarter of the book to go. This really is the level to which Hugo novels should aspire.
Todd:”All they’ve asked is that you read the works and consider them, if you don’t like them, no award them.”
1. As has been pointed out, that’s not all they’ve done
2. I take an exceptionally dim view of people who game a system to get results they want, and subsequently insist that not only should I let bygones be bygones, but that I have an *obligation* to spend my time reading their tripe.
@Will “Ghost Dance”
That is part of the premise of the Shadowrun RPG and associated fiction. The first Ghost Dance didn’t work, but by 2025 or so enough magic had returned to the world that the second one did.
“Yeah, because being called a racist, a misogynist, a cheater, not a true fan, and all the other invective is just water off their backs…”
Well, if the shoe fits…
@maximillian Many thanks!
Lori Coulson @ 11:45 am said, “At this point, it’s in the hands of the folks voting.”
Yes it is, Lori. Let’s see how that works out now.
Aaron @ 11:51 am said, “Third, multiple Puppy authors have said numerous racist, sexist things.”
Aaron, who are these multiple authors? I assume Vox Day is one. Who is (are) the other(s)?
Lioness @ 2:02 pm- Which Puppies are racists, misogynists, cheaters, not true fans, etc..?
@Steve Moss: “Who is (are) the other(s)?”
“Women either follow their men, or follow Big Brother, or act like mothers surrounded by a world of smelly and disobedience children whom they have no authority to discipline.” – John C. Wright.
http://www.scifiwright.com/2014/09/what-a-man/
If that’s not sexist, I don’t know what is.