(1) Michael A. Rothman accuses Fandom of disillusioning his teenage sons.
I took my kids to WorldCon to expose them to Fandom and I’ve consciously shielded them from any of the politics of the kerfuffle associated with the literary “sides” that were in play.
When we attended, we had good seats and they were excited to see if some of their choices would make it.
Let’s just say that my boys ended up being exposed to some of their categories being utterly eradicated from eligibility due to this thing that I’d shielded them from.
They couldn’t understand why their short story choice evaporated into something called “NO AWARD.”
As I briefly explained, the audience was cheering because of that decision and the MC made a point of saying that cheering was appropriate and boos were not.
My kids were shocked.
Shocked not by not winning but by having an entire category’s rug being pulled out from under it and then having all the adults (many of which were old enough to be their grandparents) cheering for something my kids looked at as an unfair tragedy.
I’ll admit to having feared this outcome – yet this was my children’s introduction to Fandom.
We are driving home and they are of the opinion that they aren’t particularly interested in this “Fandom” thing.
I find that a great shame – and I blame not the people who established the ballots to vote for (for my kids enjoyed a great deal of what they read on the ballots), but as my kids noted – they blame the ones who made them feel “like the rug was pulled out from under me.”
…I’d offered Fandom my boys – my boys now reject them.
(2) Larry Correia on Monster Hunter Nation – “Sad Puppies 3: Looking at the Results”
…Editor Toni Weisskopf is a professional’s professional. She has run one of the main sci-fi publishing houses for a decade. She has edited hundreds of books. She has discovered, taught, and nurtured a huge stable of authors, many of whom are extremely popular bestsellers. You will often hear authors complain about their editors and their publishers, but you’re pretty hard pressed to find anyone who has written for her who has anything but glowing praise for Toni.
Yet before Sad Puppies came along, Toni had never received a Hugo nomination. Zero. The above mentioned Patrick Nielsen Hayden has 8. Toni’s problem was that she just didn’t care and she didn’t play the WorldCon politics. Her only concern was making the fans happy. She publishes any author who can do that, regardless of their politics. She’s always felt that the real awards were in the royalty checks. Watching her get ignored was one of the things that spurred me into starting Sad Puppies. If anybody deserved the Hugo, it was her.
This year Toni got a whopping 1,216 first place votes for Best Editor. That isn’t just a record. That is FOUR TIMES higher than the previous record. Shelia Gilbert came in next with an amazing 754. I believe that Toni is such a class act that beforehand she even said she thought Shelia Gilbert deserved to win. Fans love Toni.
Logically you would think that she would be award worthy, since the only Baen books to be nominated for a Hugo prior to Sad Puppies were edited by her (Bujold) and none of those were No Awarded. Last year she had the most first place votes, and came in second only after the weird Australian Rules voting kicked in (don’t worry everybody, they just voted to make the system even more complicated), so she was apparently award worthy last year.
Toni Weisskopf has been part of organized Fandom (capital F) since she was a little kid, so all that bloviating about how Fandom is precious, and sacred, and your special home since the ‘70s which you need to keep as a safe space free of barbarians, blah, blah, blah, yeah, that applies to Toni just as much as it does to you CHORFs. You know how you guys paid back her lifetime of involvement in Fandom?
By giving 2,496 votes to No Award….
Oh, and all that bullshit you spew about fighting for diversity? Everyone knows that is a smokescreen. You talk about diversity, but simultaneously had no problem putting No Award over award nominated females because they were nominated by fans you declared to be sexist. Wait… So let me see if I’ve got this straight, you denied deserving women like Toni, Cedar, Kary, Jennifer, Shelia, and Amanda, just to send a message, but we’re the bad guys? I don’t think so. Or as one of our female nominees said, this Puppy has been muzzled. http://cedarwrites.com/this-puppy-has-been-muzzled/…
…Here’s something for you crowing imbeciles to think through, the only reason Vox didn’t have Three Body Problem on his nomination slate was that he read it a month too late. If he’d read it sooner, it would have been an RP nomination… AND THEN YOU WOULD HAVE NO AWARDED IT.
(3) Barb Caffrey – “Nightmare at the Hugo Awards: No Award ‘Wins’ Five Times…including for Best Editor Categories”
Look. I understand that the SF&F community has been rent asunder over the past few years. But one thing I thought everyone could all agree on was that books do not produce themselves.
To have a book that reads well, you need not only a good writer with an interesting plot and some excellent characterization, but a highly competent editor to pull the story into its best-possible form.
Why? Well, the best writers in the world can and often do make mistakes, and it’s up to your handy-dandy, trustworthy, hard-working editor to fix them.
The people who were nominated for Hugo Awards all have a great deal of experience as editors behind them. None of them were people who just came in off the street and started editing yesterday; most have edited for at least ten years, and some a great deal more…even the casual fan is aware of Toni Weisskopf of Baen Books and Sheila Gilbert of DAW Books, to name two fine editors who were passed over for “no award” in the long form category, because these two ladies have had long and successful careers as editors to date.
How “No Award” can be voted for by anyone in good conscience over either of them bothers me.
(4) Vox Day on Vox Popoli – “They proved Larry right”
This is the difference between game designers and normal people. We think, we HAVE to think, in terms of consequences, both obvious and non-obvious. We started last year with 1,100 reliable anti-Puppy votes and 160 reliable pro-puppy votes. That meant we were 900 in the hole before we even got started. That’s why I was urging everyone not to adopt the tactics of the other side and mass-mobilize. Last year wasn’t a good test because I wasn’t involved in the organizing and the Dread Ilk really didn’t get involved. There was no point in throwing the full weight of our effort into this year’s awards when we had the chance to see a) what our core forces looked like and b) what their maximal forces looked like.
That’s why I told everyone that this year was about the nominations and the best we could reasonably hope for was to provoke them into voting No Award… which they dutifully did.
Our execution wasn’t flawless. I made two mistakes, one which was fortuitous as it permitted Three Body Problem to make the shortlist and win, and one which was stupid as it cost us a 6th category in novelette. Our discipline could also have been better, although I don’t see that it would have made any difference at all with regards to either the nominations or the awards. But I trust the moderate approach is now sufficiently discredited in everyone’s eyes.
(5) John C. Wright – “Smeagol Nielson Hayden” [sic]
Besides, like me, they came to have a good time and to celebrate our mutual love of science fiction, and applaud in the fashion of good sports what we each severally take to be the best the genre offers. I thought there would be no incident.
I am sad to report that I was mistaken. The Archmorlock himself displayed his courage against the short and girlish figure of my meek and gentle wife.
At the reception just before the Awards Ceremony itself, my lovely and talented wife, who writes for Tor books under her maiden name of L Jagi Lamplighter, and who had been consistently a voice of reason and moderation during the whole silly kerfluffle, approached Mr. Patrick Nielsen Hayden at the party to extent to him the olive branch of peace and reconciliation.
Before she could finish her sentence, however, Mr. Hayden erupted into a swearing and cursing, and he shouted and bellowed at the tiny and cheerful woman I married.
(6) John C. Wright – “In Memoriam”
My fans voted for the works of mine they read and judged worthy in record numbers. (In terms of raw votes, my nominated works received more votes than some of the masterworks mentioned above.)
But those who are enemies of all honest men turned out (as expected) in even more record numbers: however, listening to the backstage chatter among voters after the awards, I heard not one comment, no, not one, of someone who said they voted for ‘No Award’ on the lack of merit of the works nominated.
And if you haven’t had a surfeit of John C. Wright’s abuse, it gets a lot more overwrought as he builds up a head of steam.
(7) And Wright passes along a fresh Hitler video about the fate of the Puppies.
(8) Matthew Foster – “The Hugo Results – Don’t Be A Dick”
Fandom said, “Dude, you are way over-thinking this. Those guys are dicks!” And…well…I think Fandom pretty much nailed it.
So, if it was a puppy, Fandom rejected it. They celebrated everyone who got on the ballot fairly (even those in categories where they ended up with zero competition) but didn’t get near any pup nominee. They threw the party-asshole out the door and went back to dancing. This works out better than my way of doing things. I might be more consistent, but there is nowhere to go with mine, and not much fun. Fandom booted the pups, put on blinders to ignore the wreckage, and had fun.
(9) Nicholas Whyte on From The Heart of Europe analyzes the Hugo nomination statistics and points out a few items that almost made the final ballot despite the Puppy deluge.
At the nominations stage, there were also very few near misses, thanks in part to the lock that the Puppies managed to achieve on this part of the process.
- The tightest squeeze for the ballot was in Best Fancast, where The Coode Street Podcast missed by one vote, Verity! by three and The Skiffy and Fanty Show by nine.
- Saga vol 4 missed Best Graphic Story by a single vote (was it eligible?) and the latest Schlock Mercenary by nine.
- Seanan McGuire’s Each to Each missed Best Novelette by three votes, and Kai Ashante Wilson’s The Devil in America missed it by seven.
- Maurine Starkey missed Best Fan Artist by three votes, and seven others were less than ten below the cutoff.
- The Drink Tank missed Best Fanzine by eight votes. For Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), Agents of Shield: Turn, Turn, Turn missed by nine votes and Game of Thrones: The Lion and the Rose by ten.
- The Book Smugglers missed Best Semiprozine by 10 votes.
- Charles E. Gannon’s Trial By Fire was 11 votes off the Best Novel ballot, and Andy Weir was likewise 11 behind Wesley Chu for the Campbell Award.
(10) John Scalzi on Whatever – “Being a Jerk About the Hugos: Not as Effective a Strategy as You Might Think”
[Lists 10 things Puppies did that he classifies as “jerk moves,” then concludes –]
The Hugo vote against the Puppy slates was not about politics, or cabals, or one species of science fiction and fantasy over another, no matter what anyone would like you to believe — or at the very least, it wasn’t mostly about those things. It was about small group of people acting like jerks, and another, rather larger group, expressing their displeasure at them acting so.
Mind you, I don’t expect the core Puppies to recognize this; indeed I expect them to say they haven’t done a single thing that has been other than forthright and noble and correct. Well, and here’s the thing about that: acting like an jerk and then asserting that no, it’s everyone else that’s been acting like a jerk, is the biggest jerk maneuver of all.
(11) Michael Rapoport in The Wall Street Journal – “No ‘Puppy’ Love at Science Fiction’s Hugo Awards”
In response to the Puppies’ success, thousands of anti-Puppy fans bought Worldcon memberships, enabling them to vote on the final ballot and turn aside the nominees from the Puppies’ slates. According to Worldcon organizers, 5,950 convention members voted on the final Hugo ballot, topping the previous record by more than 65%.
The increase in participation in the Hugos is the important thing, said author Brad Torgersen, a Sad Puppies organizer. “If participation grows, the Hugos mean more,” he said before the results were announced. That “goes way beyond which ‘side’ can construct victory narratives.”
But author Adam-Troy Castro, an opponent of the Puppies, wrote in an online post that the results “mean one thing: fandom rose up in revulsion and cried, ‘We don’t want this system gamed with block voting. You want to win a Hugo, win it the way you’re supposed to: by blowing away the readership with such brilliance that people can’t abide the idea of NOT giving you a Hugo.’”
(12) Tegan Moore in Slog on The Stranger – “I Went to the Hugo Awards in SpokaneThis Weekend. Here’s What I Saw”
Surprisingly, the mood in the auditorium was genial and relieved. It was almost over. My illustrious companion and I passed a flask of Scotch. We decided we would drink every time someone said “George R.R. Martin.” The flask was nearly empty before the winners were announced.
The first contested award went to the only non-Puppies nominee on the ballot. My illustrious companion clenched her fists in the air.
“Yes,” she hissed. “That’s the bellwether. They won’t win a damn thing.”
(13) Peter Grant on Bayou Renaissance Man – “A second look at the 2015 Hugo Awards”
My overwhelming emotion in this whole mess is sadness. I’m watching people tear apart one of the great institutions of science fiction, purely because they can’t bring themselves to agree that every fan of the genre has a place within its tent. It’s not one side doing it – it’s both. The SJW’s, who consider themselves ‘true’ Fandom, insist that SF/F is their genre and they alone get to decide who and what belongs to it. Those of a more conservative and/or orthodox bent disagree, and say that political correctness should not be the standard against which works of imagination and literature should be judged – but they can be very disparaging of the other side in how they go about that. (Perhaps that’s not surprising. Mutual tolerance and respect have been largely conspicuous by their absence in this field for many years.)
(14) John ONeill on Black Gate – “Dear Puppies: Your Taste Sucks”
In short, the Puppies insisted that their team had been unfairly shut out of the game for too long, and gamed the system so that their superstars could finally take the field. And when they did, it became painfully obvious fairly quickly that this team simply couldn’t play ball.
The Puppies have stayed in their echo chamber for long months, and to be honest, I don’t expect even this stinging repudiation of their selections to penetrate it. My guess is that they will lay this burden at the feet of another liberal conspiracy, or simply claim that the vast majority of the Hugo electorate voted against their slate without bothering to read it (just as I did).
But when your only defense is to convince yourself that the electorate spurned you because they found what you did to be against the very spirit of the Hugos and your ballot to be wholly illegitimate, then you’re hiding sub-standard taste behind moral bankruptcy.
I’m certain the Hugo vote is just the beginning of the discussion, not the ending that so many fans had sought. But at least, on one topic, we finally have general agreement.
Dear Puppies: your taste sucks.
News Flash: #VoxDay blames Social Justice Warriors for Male Pattern Baldness. #HugoAwards #Rabidpuppies
— Terry Frost -Physical Media Forever- he/him (@terryfrost) August 25, 2015
(15) Milo Yiannopoulos on Breitbart – “Set Phases to Kill! SJWs Burn Down The Hugo Awards To Prove How Tolerant And Welcoming They Are”
The facts of this case are the same as in gaming and in every other industry that social justice warriors touch. They do not care about art forms. They do not care about science fiction. They do not even particularly care about talent. They care about enriching and ennobling themselves and their friends, and pushing a twisted, discredited, divisive brand of authoritarian politics.
Worldcon is now designing a Byzantine new rule system designed to thwart a Puppies resurgence in 2016. But anyone who loves sci-fi knows that no matter how air-tight the bad guy’s rules seem, the good guys will find a way through. Does anyone really think SJWs can design anything without leaving an unguarded exhaust vent?
(16) Sarah A. Hoyt on According To Hoyt – “Burning Down The Field in Order to Save It”
Turned out I did [care]. Yesterday was even more of a victory to the Sad Puppies than I expected. And I wish it hadn’t been. And I’m absolutely serious about this.
I don’t mean I wish a different set of books/stories had won. That is only to the extent that the DELIBERATE and PARTISAN slighting of such unexceptionable luminaries as Kevin J. Anderson and Jim Butcher (Yes, yes Three Body Problem. Well, I didn’t find it worth it, but I bet you half the people who voted for it voted either under the illusion they were favoring Chicoms OR as a slam against the puppies.But quite beyond that the block voting for the clumsy Ancillary “but pronouns” would have won first place if it weren’t Australian Rules) is a blot on the face of our genre and makes me sigh and roll my eyes.
(17) Mytheos Holt on The Federalist – “The Hugo Awards: Why The #WaronNerds Is A War on Art”
The Hugo Awards have shown us that this is impossible. The Social Justice Left will not be satisfied unless it has complete control over the spaces it infiltrates. If it cannot control a space, it will burn it down and salt the earth. If they could, they would probably torch every script of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew for being anti-feminist, every score of Mozart’s The Magic Flute for its unflattering depiction of its one mulatto character, every print of Apelles’ Venus Anadyomene for catering to the male gaze, and every other work that portrays, or was written by, someone with objectionable politics. This book burning bonfire of the vacuous would be large enough to be seen from space, if the satellites weren’t taken down for being too phallic.
What Nerds Can Teach The Rest Of Us
Nerd communities have seen proof that social justice politics cannot be tolerated, because it will sooner immolate the very institutions it inhabits than tolerate the existence of disparate elements. The utter destruction of the Hugo Awards is a warning not just to nerds, but to Western Civilization that social justice is anti-social, anti-justice, and anti-just about everything else. It is to the body politic what an autoimmune disease is to the human body.
(18) Amy Wallace on Wired – “Who Won Science Fiction’s Hugo Awards, And Why It Matters”
After midnight, Martin announced that for the first time (and hopefully the last) he was bestowing his own awards—dubbed “The Alfies” in honor of Alfred Bester, whose book The Demolished Man won Best Novel at the first-ever Hugos in 1953. “This year all of us were losers,” Martin said, explaining that the Alfies, each made from a streamlined 1950s hood ornament, were his attempt to take a little of the sting off.
Late Saturday, Worldcon released data from a parallel universe, one in which the Puppies hadn’t intervened. That let Martin give trophies to the people who would have been on the ballot, as well as some extra winners decided “by committee, and that committee is me,” Martin said.4 Sci-fi writer Eric Flint got an Alfie for his “eloquence and rationality” in blog posts about the Puppy kerfuffle. So did legendary author Robert Silverberg, who has attended every Worldcon since 1953, just for being himself.
The biggest cheers, though, broke out when Martin honored two people—Annie Bellet and Marko Kloos—who’d been first-time Hugo finalists this year until they withdrew their names. The new data showed Bellet would’ve been on the ballot anyway; the Alfie clearly stunned her. “I want these awards to be about the fiction,” Bellet said, “and that was important enough to me to give one up.”
The final Alfie of the night went to Kloos, a German-born writer (now he lives in New Hampshire), for turning down his Puppy-powered nomination and making room for the winner, The Three-Body Problem. “I may get nominated again,” he said after shaking Martin’s hand. “But knowing why I got this and who gave it to me—tonight, this beats the shit out of that rocket.”
(19) Damien G. Walter on The Guardian – “Diversity wins as the Sad Puppies lose at the Hugo awards”
While we can write off the Sad Puppies as the clown show they proved to be, we should also give them a tiny thank you for the result of their actions. For many years, it was possible for sci-fi fans to thoughtlessly dismiss their diversity failure. When the sci-fi imprint Tor UK published (statistically incomplete) data blaming the lack of diversity in genre on a shortage of submissions, many hundreds of fans took to social mediaf to voice all the commonly heard excuses (“women just don’t write science fiction” and so on). The real problem for writers from any excluded background is not the extreme chauvinism of people like the Sad Puppies. It’s the general apathy to the entire issue of diversity which so often silences new authors from different backgrounds.
So. Thank you Sad Puppies. You have woken sci-fi fandom from its slumber and proved that diversity in sci-fi really is a problem. There will never be another WorldCon or Hugo awards where diversity is not addressed. Diversity will now be carried to every new world and parallel dimension we visit. And sci-fi writing will be all the stronger for it. The future of humankind is global and many-hued. By reflecting that reality, sci-fi makes itself a fit literature for and of the future.
(20) Andrew Wheeler on Comics Alliance – ‘Ms. Marvel’ Wins at Hugo Awards Dogged by Politics
The sci-fi and fantasy prose fiction that dominates the Hugos and the WSFW has experienced a steady progressive evolution in recent years, with more diversity in both talent and output — a phenomenon that may feel familiar to comics fans. Sci-fi has always provided intellectual refuge for liberal-minded writers and fans, but only recently have those writers made serious inroads into the sci-fi establishment.
The Sad Puppies exist as a reaction to that shift, but while the gradual liberalization of sci-fi has been organic and rooted in fandom, the conservative backlash was deliberately orchestrated to place politics first. The balance of the final ballot shows there was no organized liberal bloc vote equivalent to the Sad Puppies’ efforts, with several popular minority writers surprisingly absent.
Supporters of the Sad Puppies effort have indicated that the failure of their nominees to win any awards vindicates their belief that the Hugo Awards put politics ahead of quality, but of course, it demonstrates the reverse; the Sad Puppies nominees were chosen because of their politics first, and the voters were right to reject them.
(21) Vox Day is getting to work on next year. But then you knew that.
“Of this, that, and the other thing”
All right, a few things that require addressing. First, the Closed Brainstorm meeting to discuss the 2016 strategy will be Thursday, August 27th, at 7 PM EST. Annual and pre-existing monthly members only, since we don’t want to share our thoughts with the SJWs. No decisions will be made, this is simply what it’s called, a brainstorm session. I’ll also share some information about the No Award vote that has been brought to light; still working on documentation.
(22) Stephen Wise – “Hugo Awards and Politics”
The backlash against the Bad (and Rabid) Puppies resulted in 5 awards going to no one. Did the authors who were nominated for Best Novella, Short Story, Related Work, Editor Short Form, and Editor Long Form deserve the nomination? Perhaps. Was cheating the cause of them to be nominees in the first place? That’s the public perception. So by voting No Award, the 5950 members of World Science Fiction Society essentially said that they didn’t want politics in play for the Hugos. But it’s unfortunate that there may have been deserving authors who were cheated out of this recognition thanks to the maneuverings of a few individuals. Would I have voted the same? Probably. Because once an award is contaminated, there is no rightful winner. And once you start playing political games, then the award itself becomes invalid.
(23) Foz Meadows on Shattersnipe: Malcontent & Rainbow – “Hugos & Puppies: Peeling The Onion”
I guess what I want to say is this: despite what the Puppies think, the rest of us aren’t interested in diversity without quality, and as we’re all acutely aware, the failure mode of diversity is stereotype, which concept isn’t exactly on handshake terms with quality in the first place. That we want to celebrate historically silenced voices and perspectives doesn’t mean we’re doing so purely to spite you, or that we’ve lost all sense of judgement: if our tastes extend to seeing in fiction those versions of ourselves you’re disinclined to write, then who are you to tell us we aren’t entitled to our preferences? Nobody is saying you can’t tell your stories; we just might not want to read them, the same as you evidently have no desire to read ours. That’s not the genre being attacked – it’s the genre changing, and whether you change with it or not, we’re still going to like what we like.
Stop fighting the riptide, Puppies. As any Australian could tell you, it’s the surest way to drown.
(24) Space Squid – “The Squiddies Quiz”
[Question 5 of 12.]
Are you on your game? Do you have all the right high-fashion cosplay accessories? Do your boardgaming moves bring all the boys to the yard? Warning: If you’re not up on the 2015 Hugos dustup, you might want to bing up “hugo is sad in 2015” before daring the rigors of the quiz.
- You’re the Hugo Awards czar. After your awards got disgraced, it’s time to pick a new award design to replace the shiny silver rocket. Your best choice is: a) a shiny silver rocket encrusted with poop b) a bronze sculpture of an imaginary multi-ethnic group of scifi writers holding hands around the earth c) a shiny silver rocket ejecting certain unnamed persons into space d) a gold-plated carjacking diorama
[Thanks to David K.M. Klaus and Editor D for some of these links.]
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Eh, you’re kindof blurring the lines a little – by looking at the underlying algorithm you can mathematically predict where the breaking points would be… but that’s functionally the same as running simulations (and if you wanted to test for sensitivity to starting conditions you usually wind up doing simulation for monte carlo analysis anyway).
Yup, but when you say that, I want to know what the numerical value of “how diffuse” is “too diffuse”. Where do we say it breaks down? How do we define “breaks down”? If 20% of the voters can control 30% of the output if the other 80% are “too diffuse” is that statistically significant?
And does that even happen?
And happily, you can actually go and model those conditions, run EPH against them and come back with actual answers rather than yet more questions.
That’s a major strength in the system from my point of view.
Okay, but N=10, M=6e8 isn’t a useful example because there won’t be 6e8 unique eligible valid selections.
BUT, you’re pointing at what I was talking about; namely, what does the curve look like for EPH as you vary N and M? Where’s the breaking point? Is the breaking point out past the point where it’s a possible scenario (ie. N+M < MaxPossibleTotal and so on).
To me, that’s a lovely natty little bit of analysis to get into, and best of all, you get real hard answers out of it.
How unimportant is it? Or, to use the right terminology, how sensitive is the system to the N/M ratio? That’s a mathematically determinable value, right now. We can go and find it.
But is that right? Again, we can do an sensitivity analysis and get an actual numerical, hard answer. We don’t have to wave our hands about and guess. (And I love that about this approach).
Er, that’s just wrong. I mean, we’ve never seen half the things that this entire field of literature is talking about, but that doesn’t mean we can’t simulate them 😀
And simulation often finds completely new things humans have never thought of before – the memristor for example.
John C Wright does not seem to have considered that people are too polite to tell him that his work sucked to his face.
Since there was so much of his work on the ballot, it’s no great surprise that he, personally, didn’t hear much of the talk about how bad the work was. It’s rather more polite to say “I didn’t vote for you for, y’know, political reasons” than to say “I didn’t vote for your writing because it’s terrible”.
@Richard Gadsden
Some people certain told Torgersen that the Puppy nominees were one huge bag of suck on his blog, but he just kept on peddling the “Brad/Any Given Puppy is a victim of evil SJW persecution” line.
Having now read enough bad/mediocre/clumsy Puppyprose to last me several lifetimes, I would have trouble voting for any editor associated with their productions.
John C Wright does not seem to have considered that people are too polite to tell him that his work sucked to his face.
There’s also a reasonable possibility that the people who didn’t like his work didn’t bother to go out of their way to talk to him. I suspect there were some conversations that went like this:
WorldCon Fan #1: Who is that big bearded guy in a ridiculous fedora standing over there by himself?
WorldCon Fan #2: Oh, that’s John C. Wright.
WorldCon Fan #1: Oh yeah, that’s the guy who is a jerk and writes terrible stories and essays.
WorldCon Fan #2: Want to go talk to him about how terrible his writing is?
WorldCon Fan #1: Not particularly.
WorldCon Fan #2: Good. Let’s go listen to what Connie Willis is reading.
Translation is really easy to evaluate, if you can read the original. Ask European readers of SFF and they will happily tell you about the translation-quality into their native language of various English-language originals.
I think that simply giving a rocket to both the writer and the translator when a translated prose work wins is the easiest approach.
@Richard Gadsden
I can say that e.g. Murakami Haruki’s prose is generally smoother and easier to read in the various English translations than it is in the Japanese original. I haven’t had a chance to look at Liu Cixin’s Chinese yet, but I am very interested to see how Ken Liu measures up as a translator.
Er, some of us only speak English y’know…
I already have one Best Related Work nomination for 2016: E Pluribus Hugo. Because the maths is just so beautiful. If you can’t see the stark beauty and elegance of the maths in that, then I cry for the deprivation of your soul.
@Mark I’m English too. Sorry, bad mental habit of Europe starting at Calais.
Or to put it another way,
http://ak-hdl.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr06/2013/8/1/17/enhanced-buzz-24351-1375393362-24.jpg
@Mark Dennehy
Our post-Norman tongue, or, as we like to call it among friends, demotic Anglo-Saxon.
I mean, the editor improves the writer’s text. Presumably, an editor’s best work is when s/he improves the writer’s text extensively.
This is another popular misconception about what editors do. If you cannot already write text that the editor thinks is good, you don’t get the book contact in the first place.
Editors don’t teach us to write. Editors acquire works they think will generate earnings for their company. The editing process is about improving good work, not making incompetent work publishable. (Well, generally. If incompetent work comes in, sometimes they have to make it publishable; but mostly, they’ll cancel the contract.)
I haven’t had a line edit in… actually, I can’t remember my last line edit. It was probably 10 books ago, maybe more. And my last extensive line edit (where there was a word or phrase changed every few pages) was maybe 20 years ago. Line editing it still done (and sometimes overdone), but it’s often NOT done at all, or done very lightly (a word or phrase every 5-10-15 pages).
(A line edit is aimed at improving your text. Story editing is where the editor says things like, “I don’t think this character’s motive for committing the murder is sufficient,” or “why didn’t the detective see that glaringly obvious clue immediately?—either make the clue harder to see, or else come up with a good reason the detective doesn’t see it.” Copy editing, which is done by a different person (often a freelancer outsourced by the publisher), is where spelling, punctuation, and grammer and house style get corrected.)
Wow, my condolences on such a wretched experience.
Thinking about it, I know someone who wrote a science book, and their first editor, who boasted of having no scientific expertise but claimed to know a lot about what sells, wanted to change all their scientific terminology* to make it sound more sexy and mysterious and scary, and to remove all the humor from their discussion of a fairly complex field. They went through months of constant pressure and having to put back everything the editor had turned into ominous-sounding “In Search Of…” gee-whizziness.
Eventually that publisher dropped the contract and a university press snapped it up and it did pretty well.
I think the editor category is a very difficult one to judge.
*example: Changing “atoms” to “molecules” because it sounded better to the editor’s ear. I am totally serious.
Richard:
Hear hear!
@ Nick: ” I doubt the woman-led SPs will help much, since none of the leaders are articulate enough to sound like anything other than True Believers speaking in a private language that is all but incomprehensible to people who are normal.”
I also think that the steady harping on Marxists is going to leave most media and readers feeling pretty bemused.
Oh dude, and you were doing so well too — I’m Irish 😛
On my list. And I paid for my midamericon2 supporting membership this morning 🙂
On my running list of potential Hugo nominees, please see below. Most of these are available online bur i’ve never discovered how to paste links on a phone.
Novela: Pollen from a Future Harvest by Derek Kunsken in July Asimov
Novelette: The Great Pan American Airship Mystery, or Why I Murdered Robert Benchley by David Gerold also in July Asimov
Short Stories: The Ministry of the Eye by Dale Bailey in April Lightspeed
Crazy Rhythm by Carrie Vaughn in July Lightspeed
Planet Lion by Catherynne M. Valente in May/June Uncanny
Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer in Clarkesworld Issue 100
The Narrative of More by Tom Green in July Analog
“it’s no great surprise that he, personally, didn’t hear much of the talk about how bad the work was.”
Actually, I think the claim that he’s never heard of anyone criticizing the work or voting it below No Award on a quality basis is his new/revised version of events. I seem to recall (am I totally misremembering?) him posting a number of angry comments in spring and summer about voters’ negative commentaries on his nominated works.
I think Brian’s obsession of Doctor Who fans all voting one way is incorrect. I don’t think he has examined the stats in detail.
Let’s look at them:
2013: Asylum Of The Daleks – 93 ; Angels Take Manhattan – 91 ; The Snowmen – 89 ; Dinosaurs On A Spaceship – 35 ; The Power Of Three – 31 ; A Town Called Mercy – 23
2012: The Doctor’s Wife – 162 ; The Girl Who Waited – 76 ; A Good Man Goes To War – 36 ; The Wedding Of River Song – 28
2011: Vincent And The Doctor – 120 ; A Christmas Carol – 55 ; The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang – 53 and four other episodes between 21 and 33 nominations
2010: The Waters Of Mars – 86 ; The Next Doctor – 26 ; Planet Of The Dead – 24
2009: The Silence Of The Library / Forest Of The Dead – 91 ; Turn Left – 56 ; Stolen Earth / Journey’s End – 29 ; Midnight – 26 ; Fires Of Pompeii – 11 ; The Doctor’s Daughter – 10
I just cannot see that there is a huge Whovian conspiracy to get as many Doctor Who episodes on the short list at all. I think that the evidence is that if you list one Doctor Who story you may well list another but not anything more than that.
Brian Z. writes But so far I’ve scored pretty well with questions like…
I am, in all modesty, a skilled questioner, one of the finest questioning today.
@Niall McAuley
But are you a Christian conqueror, and if so, how many Christians have you conquered?
I agree with everything Malcolm Edwards said, re Best Editor, Long Form.
PS: I do have an anthology of short fiction coming out soon!
PPS: often anthologies are co-edited by several people. Is it so that Best Editor, Short Form, must not go to editorial teams? In semiprozine they can and do, of course.
I am not a Christian conqueror, I’m the Christian conqueror’s son and I’m only conquering Christians ’til the Christian conqueror comes.
Regarding editors:
There was a discussion on Language Log a little while ago on how to translate ‘editor’ into French. (Italian also came up in the comments.) The upshot was that there isn’t really a word for it; there is a word for each function that an editor carries out, but they aren’t seen as constituting a single function. The idea that there is a distinctive group of people called ‘editors’ seems to be extremely culture-specific.
In any case, my sense is now that this discussion shows that even if there is a rational basis for judging an award to be given to book editors, it’s not perspicuous; most people are not sure how to do it. This in itself is reason for reform.
This also intersects with the discussion of EPH and voter numbers. It seems to me that if there is a rational basis for nominating editors, the number of people qualified to do it would be small. In other circumstances this would not be a problem; I think it’s totally reasonable that a small number of people, those very familiar with the field, should nominate, a larger number vote, and a yet larger number benefit by learning the result. But it we need to maximise the number of nominations to beat slates, it will become a problem.
I know your suggested titles weren’t serious, but I’d love to see people take a real swing at any or all of them (especially “If You Were an Ancillary, My Love”).
I suspect someone has done it, though I can’t recall where I saw it. But when I got to DINOSAUR JUSTICE, I realized what an amazing piece of awesome that could be. I might buy a whole series of that.
@Niall McAuley
I suspect your talents might include pheasant plucking on occasion, with perhaps a venture or two into fuzzy duckery.
No no – it just happens that a lot of the people who tend to vote in the Hugos are also Whovians and they tend to cluster innocently around some of the best episodes. If you go to the Business Meeting videos, this was acknowledged by EPH creator Keith Watts and also Lisa Standlee. There was an announcement by the 2014 administrator that implementing EPH “produced a change” – if the full extent of that change has been made public, it would be interesting to know.
@Amoxtli
I believe there’s an entire Antonin Scalia/Clarence Thomas fanfic entitled “If you were an ancillary dinosaur justice, my love”.
@Laertes:
Just wanted to see that again.
Not if the insurance companies looked at your foot in mouth and went back over your original application and medical history to find out that you had neglected to mention that you had acne previously.
*blush* Sorry, dude.
And I have read all the way through! At last!
(Sandwiched in among some assigned reading with a deadline.)
And I have read all the way through! At last!
And the next thread has only just hit 100! We may catch up after all!
They can hardly be Fortresses of Solitude if they are full of Socialist Cock-Sucking Whores.
Hmm…I think I found the name for my next band…
Catch up? That’s not going to happen! 😉
Sorry for responding so late to all the Elizabeth Moon replies. Thanks by the way.
My general impression of Moon seems closest to tomas’s August 25, 8:33pm
I was reading Moon’s blog when she wrote Citizenship and she was clearly wrong. I commented myself to point out the factual errors, but there was a lot of pure negetivity and to be honest, Elizabeth reacted badly, (while not as badly as some{cough, Puppies, cough}), that showed she didn’t get the legitimate greivances people had hidden amongst the more purely negetive stuff.
I suppose I feel it is unfair for her to be permanently labeled ‘conservative’ for this one(as far as I am aware) non-liberal stance that was taken at a time of drummed up country wide media fueled outrage.
SocialInjusticeWarrior:
How well I remember, meeting each ship at the docks and calling out “Is Arya Stark still alive?” as we waited anxiously for the arrival of the next piece of the story…
OMG you win every internet I have to offer.
Yes, I do seem to be mildly obsessed with RequiresHoyt’s extra special epithet.
@cmm
Unless you skirt the regulations by equipping your Fortress of Solitude with glory hole embrasures.
Amoxtli,
Shouldn’t that be Strunk (left or fully?) Justified Warrior?
I saw a few people mention that they’d like to see some new faces (and some actual transformative-works fanart, as opposed to original art with SFF subjects) for the Fan Artist category, so I had a rummage though my own favorites. Some of these are more artists-to-watch than suggestions for next year, and most have art styles that are a little different from what usually winds up on the ballot. But I enjoy all of them tremendously. I don’t know everyone on this list’s real name, so some are credited by pseud:
mechinaries (scroll down for a lovely Pratchett tribute), Aimee Fleck, Sara Kipin, cy-lindric, grailknight, Celeste Pille.
There’s an astonishing wealth of good digital fanart out there, especially now that tablets are so cheap.
(Also, this year’s mess has got me fired up to read more widely, write more, and talk up the work I really love. So if one of the innumerable Puppy victory conditions was “make people who strongly disagree with you more determined to read, create, and share good work that features diverse authors and characters” then yep, I guess they won.)
@Hypnotosov:
You want to hear something astonishing? All humans cast themselves as the good guys, and most of us aren’t even aware of that quirk at play in ourselves. Self-awareness turns out to be a difficult and fallible thing.
(I most certainly include myself from my point about self-awareness being a sometime thing. In my early 50s, I finally attempted to figure out why I always chose for my sunglasses, and for my eyeglasses before I had LASIK, the exact style of frames: metal, with square lenses. Remembering the name of that distinctive style suddenly cured my clue-deficiency: aviator lenses. And my dad, who was killed in a 707 crash in ’68, was a captain for Pan American. 42 years after his death, I was still his after-echo in ways I hadn’t even been aware of.)
There’s a saying: ‘We’re all hero-protagonists in our own personal narratives.’ Which means you will almost never, as close to never as makes no difference, find a villain who sees him/herself as one. Instead, those villains will at worst see their deeds as unpleasant but necessary towards some greater good, and if there is no greater good in the picture, cognitive dissonance will supply one, along with reasons why the antagonists were base, venal, and leave toilet seats up.
Listen, some time: Tell someone that the things he or she did caused harm, and detail that harm. What you will almost always hear back is the person’s reasons and/or how it was an accident that nobody could have foreseen, even though that utterly ignores the point of what you were saying about harm. That’s the hero-protagonist framing being applied, to help the speaker reassure him/herself about being good.
Torgersen seeing himself as a nice guy is just evidence he’s a featherless biped.
Brian,
I feel you have personally insulted me with the positions you have put in this thread and demand an apology.
You responded to Spellproof by saying you voted on the same criteria, but prior to that you lumped Spellproof and myself in an amorphous 1000s who all voted No Award because they were told tto and because they hated puppies.
Not every one of the new voters is obligated to tell you the reason they joined Worldcon and your generalisations on our motivations is insulting to say the least.
DO NOT try being a weasel about this Brian. I don’t want excuses or justifications or insinuations. I want a simple “I am sorry I …” and say ONE thing you have done or said thst shows you undrrstand how badly you have maligned myself and all the new voters of Worldcon.
From Brad’s “Goldstein” piece, number 7:
Does he not realize that there actually is a book called Rules for Radicals, written by the infamous Alinsky? Either the “rile ’em up for a gotcha” rule he refers to is in there or it isn’t; there’s no “considering” to be done. Just more fuzzy-headed thinking…
Tintanaus,
I’m not sure what you mean.
I voted for 3BP and then No Award in Best Novel.
I voted for two slated novellas and then No Award.
I no awarded all the novelettes and short stories.
What group have I lumped you in without lumping myself?
Of course there are some who tried to read with an open mind and ranked what they liked (like me, spellproof and I gather you too).
Others no-awarded everyone proposed by the “puppy” organizers, including someone who had been nominated three dozen times before without receiving this kind of treatment.
How have I offended you in saying that? I certainly don’t mean to offend.
@Malcolm Edwards: That was a depressingly comprehensive rundown of reasons why Best Editor Long Form is inherently unworkable and ought to be retired. Depressing, but thank you.
Despite determined efforts this year to make an informed choice in every voting category, I’d been obliged to punt on BE-LF as usual. Nice to understand why.
Good point. EPH will be most effective against slates if people think of it as a preference system (even though you don’t actually state your preference). e.g. you nominate a work that you really, really like but which you know is a bit obscure or a bit overly specific to your taste (a bit like voting for a minority special interest party), and nominate a work that is less obscure but still a bit idiosyncratic, and so on to a work that you’d like to see on the ballot that you think will have broad support.
Nominating a not-a-hope-in-hell work has an opportunity cost (because you could have nominated something else) but isn’t a wasted nomination with EPH. If most non-slate voters, vote for something with a good chance of being nominated and are sufficiently different in their choices [i.e. a quarter of non-slate voters nominate X but not W,Y or Z and another quarter nominate W etc,] then the 20% voting for a slate have a run for their money.
Rick, that was a great reflection (so to speak) on legacies. Knowing this kind of thing about ourselves is good – whatever we may want to do with ourselves, it helps to know where we actually are, and why.
When I look at the results for the Puppy-dominated categories I don’t think “wow, most of the first-time voters must be neutrals!” Especially since I am a first time voter, and I’m definitely not neutral. I suppose since the categories in question were either largely terrible or largely opaque that might disguise neutrality. Voting No Award over things that aren’t Hugo quality (or are difficult to assess), and voting No Award over slate works, are positions that look much the same, with minor exceptions.
@Bruce Baugh
Thank you. 🙂 I’m expecting the healing to be a little slow (it comes with my overall thing), but other than that I’m sure it will be fine, just tiring.
@Laura Resnick
Excellent post on apologies.