The Canine Billion Names of Dog 5/17

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aka There are few things in this world that can simultaneously delight and dismay in the same manner as a Puppy dinner party.

The lead dog returns in today’s roundup which starts with Brad R. Torgersen, followed by the rest of the team, Brianne Reeves, David Gerrold, Adam-Troy Castro, Kristene Perron, Roger BW, Ace, EJ Shumak, Lisa J. Goldstein, Lis Carey, Barry Deutsch, Sarah A. Hoyt, Vox Day, and Jim C. Hines. (Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editors of the day Jim Henley & Morris Keesan, and ULTRAGOTHA.)

Brad R. Torgersen

“Fisking the broken narrative” – May 17

Someone forwarded me a copy of Kevin J. Maroney’s editorial from the April New York Review of Science Fiction. I don’t normally read Maroney’s column, and I don’t even normally read NYRoSF, but some of Maroney’s commentary screams BROKEN NARRATIVE at such a high decibel level, I thought it might be worth it to examine some of that commentary in close detail….

The only real way I see the Hugos being a “smoking ruin” is if the CHORFs fulfill their stated pledge to bork the 2015 awards by placing “NO AWARD” at the top of every category; thus no awards will be given. This will be an entirely self-inflicted wound (by the so-called devotees and cherishers of the Hugo) because clearly you have to destroy the village, to save the village. I mean, that’s just good common sense. If you love a thing and think it’s awesome, you absolutely must obliterate it — to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. Because this is what open minds and open hearts do. They destroy something they claim to love, so that something they claim to love can be kept pure. Because the “wrong” people must never be allowed to have it the “wrong” way.

If there is any other way to leave the Hugos a “smoking ruin” this year, I haven’t thought of it yet.

This is not to counsel despair. But we need to be aware that the battle against the arrayed forces of assholery will, at times, be unpleasant to watch and wearying to fight. But the fight is genuinely important, and it won’t win itself.

—Kevin J. Maroney speaking for himself

Thanks for the pep talk, Kevin! I agree with you wholeheartedly! The Forces of Assholery have been trick-or-treating at my virtual doorstep for 45 days and counting. They’ve smeared me, smeared my family, smeared my friends, and smeared Sad Puppies 3. Again, clearly the way the Forces of Assholery save the thing they love and cherish, is to be complete pricks to whoever they feel like, whenever they feel like, badger and threaten and cajole and shun and shame, all that good old fashioned 12th century village stuff. Torches and pitch forks! Tie them to the stake! Burn them! Infidels!

Or maybe “your” side needs to just settle down and vote on the ballot like normal?

 

Brianne Reeves on Bree’s Book Blog

“2015 Hugo Awards and the Sad Puppies Slate” – April 9

Politicking has always gone on at the awards, to some degree or another. We’re not so naïve as to be unaware of that. Authors and publishing houses have always campaigned for works to be chosen. After all, the Hugos does provide a sales boost.

However, the dominance of a slate that advocates the blind nomination of works based on political ideology is fairly unprecedented.

Because the voting population for the Hugos is fairly small, approximately 2,000 voters for the most popular category and much fewer in less popular categories, it’s easy to skew the results of the nomination process. And, of course, when it’s derailed and by a large, but distinct minority of voters, the rest of the community is going to be upset.

Slates themselves are problematic. They reduce the number of potentially nominated works, undercut the deliberations that go into the nomination process, and potentially flood the awards with non-vetted works (read: works that have not actually been read). This means that the stories we are awarding may be extremely obscure, non-representative of the genre and its advances, or non-representative of the stories readers want to consume.

It should also be noted that slates are distinct from suggested nomination lists. Plenty of people put up lists of works they think work well in categories and suggest their readers, friends, fellow SFF lovers read the list when considering who to nominate. To me, this is a distinctly deliberative act. It allows for people to read and decide on their own without suggesting or advocating blind voting (to me the biggest problem with slates).  They are often include far more lists of works than the voter can nominate and act as a substitute longlist for readers. This is especially important for readers who want to sample and become more involved in categories like short fiction which have a much smaller readership.

The creation of a slate for political reasons is objectionable. What I will say here, is that the use of politics in this case is a limiting factor and detracts from the inclusive and representative goals we have for the Hugo. Again, they are within their rights to limit based on this factor, but I think that it suffers from a lack of consideration for new types of stories, and increasingly popular stories in the genre.

We all have limitations in our reading. Time, length, interest are all factors we have to balance. I think it is inkeeping with the spirit of the award, however, to push ourselves to read what we may otherwise ignore or not prioritize. As readers, we should always be pushing ourselves to empathize and expose ourselves to stories that are not familiar to us or that show a part of humanity we may not often see.

 

 

David Gerrold on Facebook – May 17

Yes, there has been pushback to the sad-rabid slates — because too much of the rhetoric from sad-rabids justifying the slates has not been about the merits of the nominated works, but about the context of the awards — the existing narrative, created by the sad-rabid supporters themselves, is that the slates are motivated not by merit, but by a political agenda. And the larger body of fandom has been appalled by that. That’s the source of the pushback. Not the mythological SJWs. Nor any other acronym of disrespect.

The Hugos are not awards for political correctness. They are not awards for any political opinion. They are awards for merit. They are a recognition of what the community deems as “best of the year.”

The awards are voted on by a large disorganized body of people — a continually evolving, changing, amorphous body consisting of whoever bought a Worldcon membership that year and felt likle voting. Sometimes you vote for a story, sometimes you vote for an author you like, and sometimes you even vote for a friend, but in general the awards represent a cross-section of the opinions of those involved in the Worldcon.

To ascribe any kind of conspiracy to a circumstance that is rooted in anarchy is to misread the evidence.

But … even more to the point, to expend so much time and energy on this effort has to be seen as an eyebrow raiser. Is this the most important thing you can be doing with your time? Reading some of the discussions, I’ve rolled my eyes so hard so many times, I can describe in great detail what the bottom of my brain looks like.

Real writers don’t worry about awards. Real writers write. (In my never-humble-opinion.) Real writers don’t worry about feuds. Real writers write. (IMNHO.) Real writers cherish their time at the keyboard as so precious that any distraction at all is seen as the enemy.

 

Adam-Troy Castro

“On the Roar of Approval For Self-Defenestration” – May 17

You’re a decent person. You really are.

Oh, sure, you have some bad habits, some irritating beliefs, some things you do that get on the nerves on people around you. But by all the low bars, you’re a decent person. You don’t molest children. You don’t attack people with broken bottles. You don’t set bombs. You’re good to your family and polite enough to people who are polite to you. In some ways, you’re admirable. Even noble. Your worst enemy, considering the way you live your life, would acknowledge it.

But then we get to the part of you that is objectionable. You’re just a little bigoted, just a little misogynistic, just a little homophobic, just a little xenophobic – any one of those four things, to some level, in some combination.

You are not any of these things to the degree of all-out, full-bore toxicity. They are trace elements, the same things that many of us have. Maybe they are a bit stronger in you than they are in some people who we would consider more enlightened – and maybe you have many compensating virtues.

As a character flaw, this is like a managed medical condition, in that it is possible for you to live with it comfortably, and for you to control it without causing too much offense to others, possibly even without them being visible to others.

But here’s the problem. You then surround yourself with the wrong people.

 

Kristene Perron on The Coconut Chronicles

“The Evolution of Cinderella” – May 17

There is one aspect of the Sad Puppies I am interested in, however, and that’s the assertion by many of their supporters that the sci-fi of old was better, purer, and more important than its modern day incarnation. Men in space ships, having adventures and solving problems with technology, that is “real” science fiction.

Anyone who waxes poetic about any kind of halcyon age makes me roll my eyes. And, when it comes to stories and storytelling, that kind of “Back in my day…” thinking is absurd. By such standards, Cinderella would forever and always be the story of a commoner marrying into royalty because the original was the “true” version regardless of social changes. In the 1600’s, the original story of Cinderella was subversive. In the 2000’s the original story of Cinderella is irrelevant.

I can and do still read and enjoy the “old time” science fiction stories, sexism and racism be damned, but my world has evolved and I expect stories written today to reflect those changes. If Crocodile Dundee was made today and the crotch grabbing scene was still included, I would boycott the movie and I would encourage everyone else to do likewise. There’s still room for stories of men in spaceships, having adventures and solving problems with technology but, given social changes, how could anyone complain that there is also room for science fiction stories of women and non-binary genders of all colours having adventures in all kinds of places?

 

Roger BW’s Blog

“Thoughts on the 2015 Hugo Awards” – May 15

But forget about the specific politics of this case. What institutional slate voting gets you, no matter how well-intentioned or how much it is aligned with your own views, is political parties. Nothing can get onto the ballot unless it’s part of a slate, so the people who run the slates become the kingmakers; any author who wants any chance at an award has to get in with one of them. (We’ve already seen popular works getting knocked off this year, and once the full nomination totals are revealed after the awards are made we’ll have a better idea of what missed its one chance at a Hugo.)

For this reason I will be voting “No Award” over any slate-nominated work this year, and I shall probably not bother to read it either. I’m glad to see that some of the slate-nominated authors have had the grace to withdraw once they found out what had been done, and disappointed that so many of the others haven’t.

In the long term, I don’t believe changes to the nomination procedure are worth it: technical solutions to social problems rarely work. Getting more people to nominate seems like a worthwhile effort. Clearly not all that many people are actually reading SF short stories in magazines any more; should Hugos even be awarded for them at all now?

 

Ace at Ace of Spades

Sunday Morning Book Thread 05-17-2015 [OregonMuse] – May 17

As we talked, I told him about Ace’s interview with Larry Correia concerning the Sad Puppies controversy in that by pursuing this strategy the publishing houses are ignoring huge markets of people willing to buy books and are cutting their own throats. He broke in saying, “I know, I know…But look…you gotta stop thinking. Just stop thinking! Thinking about all this will drive you crazy! Don’t go to bookstores, if they even still have any where you live. Don’t look at other books. You’ll just wonder how in the world this thing even got published,” and then told me some more anecdotes about how the sausage is made…

It was sad. He’s a good guy, and was just as frustrated about it all as I am, but he’s stuck fighting a bunch of Goliaths who only look for certain types of books (that support the current narrative and are framed by the postmodern cultural marxist analysis of race, gender, class) and is left trying to sneak in what stories he can, however he can.

 

EJ Shumak on Superversive SF

“WorldCon Members review GOBLIN EMPEROR” – May 17

First we will look at the positive response to this novel, comprising about 25% of the group. Bill, after reading all the other nominees, believes that this work will be at the top of his Hugo award list. He likes politically based tomes and enjoyed this iteration of that concept. Though the book was, admittedly, not what he had expected, he had a pleasant experience and was very positive overall.

Another vocal supporter had much good to say about the concept and purpose to the book. In many ways his reasons for liking the book paralleled the reasons others disliked it. He felt it exemplified white privilege imposed upon black (or Goblin) society. He felt we need to consistently look at and focus on our societal problems with racism and sexism. He felt we should examine these problems deeply, while assuming ignorance. While agreeing with another reader that the work was truly a lecture, he asserted that it was “…a lecture we need to have…”

The rest of the group was solidly in full disappointment of the work. Several people actually opined that this kind of lecture and message fiction was the best possible justification for the sad puppies’ slate. Mike loved the story through to the middle and then it overcame him to the point that he observed he could now understand the sad puppy position.

 

Lisa J. Goldstein on theinferior4

“The Hugo Ballot, Part 10: Novellas” – May 17

[“One Bright Star to Guide Them” by John C. Wright.] …Tommy goes to his old friend Richard but discovers that Richard now serves the Winter King.  There’s a battle with the king’s servants, and at the chapter’s end “the smell of the sea filled his nose, and Tommy could neither see nor breathe.” We don’t get to see what happens next, either.  Instead, unbelievably, the next chapter starts with Tommy meeting another of his old friends, Sally, and telling her what had happened.  It’s as if someone had taken an entire book, cut out all the interesting parts, and published the rest.  (Amusingly, in “John C. Wright’s Patented One-Session Lesson in the Mechanics of Fiction,” included with Wright’s stories, he stresses the importance of “showing, not telling” to the narrative.) Gradually, though, the story grinds to a start.  It becomes the usual fantasy quest: Tommy has to go various places, do various things, collect various objects….

 

Lis Carey on Lis Carey’s Library

“Flow, by Arlan Andrews” – April 17

As the opening section of a novel, this is great. As a complete novella nominated as a complete story, not so much. I don’t think it’s asking too much that a nominated piece actually fit its category in ways beyond arbitrary word count. This doesn’t. It’s not a novella; it’s a novel fragment.

 

Barry Deutsch on Alas

“A Quick Primer For Those Who Wonder What The Issue With Slate Voting And The Hugo Awards Is” – May 17

THREE POPULAR PROPOSALS TO REDUCE THE INFLUENCE OF SLATE VOTING

Many have suggested that all that’s needed to reduce the influence of Slate voting is more voters, that is, for a larger number of people to vote in both rounds of Hugo voting. However, since Slate Voting is a strategy that mathematically allows a collectively organized minority to overcome the preferences of a disorganized majority, I don’t have much confidence in this proposal. (Although it is a nice idea for other reasons.)

Another proposal is the 4/6 proposal, in which individual Hugo voters can only nominate four works per category, and there will be six nominees per category. In this case, rather than a successful slate controlling 100% of nominees in each category, it will only control 66% of nominees in each category. If there are two slates, then the most successful slate will control 66% of nominees, while the next most successful slate will control the remaining 33% of slots. This seems like an insufficient solution, to me.

The proposal I favor is “Least Popular Elimination,” in which voters could still nominate up to five works per category, but the votes are counted in a way that mathematically favors works that appear on the broadest number of voters’ ballots while diluting (but not completely eliminating) the power of slate voting. A detailed explanation of “Least Popular Elimination” voting is available here. While LPE voting is not as intuitive as the other two proposals, I believe it would be more effective

 

Sarah A. Hoyt on According To Hoyt

“The Privilege Of Not Caring” – May 17

So who am I betraying by not conforming to the baneful Marxist stereotype of who I should be? Oh, right, the SJWs. That’s okay, I’m fine betraying them. Or at least fighting them. Hard to betray what you never belonged to. And, you know, most of them, even those with exotic names and claiming exotic identities (rolls eyes) are pasty-assed white people with real privilege as defined by having money and having attended the best universities and hanging out with all the “right” people and having the “right” (left) opinions. If they knew the meaning of the word privilege, they’d see it all over themselves.

But there are more egregious definitions of privilege. You see “check your privilege” is a tool of would-be elite whites to keep competition and challengers in check, while riding to glory by defining themselves as champions of the downtrodden. (It’s an old game, in place at least since the French revolution, but it’s the only one they have. Remember they lack both empathy and imagination. And since they have more or less overtaken the press, no one on the street realizes how old and tired this “clever” gambit is.)

 

Vox Day on Vox Popoli

“Sexism and ideological bias in science fiction” – May 17

TOTAL: 65.7 women have won 24.7 percent and 19 conservatives have won 7.1 percent of the 266 Hugo Awards given out since 1996. This is despite the fact that conservatives outnumber liberals by a factor of 1.6 in the USA, which means that conservatives are underrepresented by a factor of 11.3, versus women being underrepresented by a factor of 2.

Now, if the SJWs are to be believed, sexism is a serious problem but there is absolutely no evidence of left wing ideological bias. They keep repeating this despite the fact that the anti-right wing bias in science fiction is observably 5.6 times worse than the purported sexism about which they so often complain.

 

Jim C. Hines

“’Do You Wanna Take The Hugos?’” – May 16

[First of two stanzas]

To the tune of “Do you want to build a snowman?”

Brad
Larry? Do you wanna take the Hugos?
Come on let’s change the game.
I’m tired of those liberals
Like criminals
Who steal our rightful fame!
This used to be our genre
But now it’s not.
They make all the puppies cry.
Do you wanna take the Hugos?
(And also puff up both our egos…)

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402 thoughts on “The Canine Billion Names of Dog 5/17”

  1. Point of Order: Some organizations do give out awards for media tie-in fiction. I’m thinking in particular of the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design which has been known to honor tabletop roleplaying game fiction in both short and long forms with an Origins Award. GAMA doesn’t do this EVERY year and, in fact, this year there are no media tie-in categories.

  2. For those of you who are proposing a YA Novel Hugo, in the belief that this will make young readers more interested in fandom . . . I don’t think it would help all that much. The only young readers a YA Hugo would attract, in my opinion, are the ones who are already aware of fandom, and conventions, on some level–and (again, my opinion, based on my experience) most of those are sophisticated enough to see the establishment a YA Hugo for their favorite books as at least slightly patronizing.

    I’m not saying that a YA Novel Hugo isn’t a good idea, mind you. I think it might be, if we can define the category in such a way to keep it from overlapping with the Best Novel Hugo (don’t ask me how to do that, because that’s where I personally always get stuck). But making the Hugos, and SFF, and SFF fandom/conventions more appealing or relevant to young readers? I can’t see it really making much difference.

    Here’s a possible historical parallel, off the top of my head: when the Graphic Hugo was instituted, did it pull in a perceptible number of comics fans? Those of you who are comics fans, was that how you became interested in the Hugos, or were you already interested? Might be worth trying a survey, somewhere along the line . . .

  4. I’ve refer to it as “The Lost Cause of Science Fiction”. It is a romanticized version of what SF used to be, back when it was noble and pure. Of course, that romanticize version never really existed. Message fiction has been a thing since H.G. Wells. For every classic of the genre there were a dozen stinkers abandoned on the compost heap of history, just as there are today. There were a lot of things that were pretty racist/homophobic/etc/etc. I don’t just mean in retrospect. It is easy to forget that some of the stuff that Campbell wrote was pretty f’ed up by the standards of his day.

  5. Nobody on Sad Puppies 3 has been harassing anyone; though some of the people on Sad Puppies 3 — and myself and Larry Correia in particular — have been harassed a great deal. Maybe I should uncork my little screenshot store of all the nasty, petulant, histrionic, mean-spirited, false, slanderous, and downright disgusting things which have been said against Sad Puppies 3, the contents of the slate, myself, Larry Correia, and many others?

    Whatever anyone’s opinions, I’d like to stand up and say that personal harassment should have no place in this discussion. Saying nasty, petulant, histrionic, etc things about the SP3 movement and the contents of the slate are one thing. (Or the SJW movement and the Hugos previously given out or that one dinosaur story (that didn’t actually win a Hugo.)) Turning those things on individuals is something completely different. Yes, maybe they did something you didn’t like for reasons you really hate. They are still people and deserve to be treated with respect.

  6. My complete WTF moment with Arlan Andrews’ “Flow” was when he finds out that women in the south have breasts, something he has never seen before. He instantly finds this attractive and assumes that women back home would be jealous of the woman with breasts. Somebody please tell Arlan Andrews that breasts are not an overriding and automatic win in the sexual attractiveness stakes.

  7. Stacia @ 7:56 am: Thank you. I wondered, but not enough to go searching myself . . . good to be corrected.

  8. Nobody on Sad Puppies 3 has been harassing anyone; though some of the people on Sad Puppies 3 — and myself and Larry Correia in particular — have been harassed a great deal.

    Uh-huh. Given that Brad seems to have trouble keeping his lies straight, I’m inclined to take this with a giant grain of salt.

  9. @Mary Frances: “I think it might be, if we can define the category in such a way to keep it from overlapping with the Best Novel Hugo (don’t ask me how to do that, because that’s where I personally always get stuck).”

    I see a couple of options to choose among. Both abide by the principle that no one work should be eligible to win more than one Hugo.

    1. If a novel is nominated for both the YA and general novel categories, the author has to choose one and only one category for the final ballot.
    2. In the above case, automatically list it on the general novel ballot and take it off the YA list.

    Obviously one of these would have to be The Rule; you can’t do both. I can see arguments for either, but that’s just everyday tragedy. Either functions.

    You may well be right that a YA category wouldn’t materially draw younger fans. I think a lot would depend on two factors: a) Do YA publishers start putting “Hugo winner” stickers on their authors’ books, so kids notice that Hugos are a thing? b) Does the YA Hugo build up cred over time with readers? (“Hey, if it says ‘Hugo winner’ on a book, it’s probably worth checking out.”)

    Maybe a longer-term concern is that, right now, we’re in a golden age of both YA fiction and SF/F YA fiction specifically. What happens if/when the boom ends? Will there still be enough works so that a short list of five represents substantial winnowing?

  10. Re: The Puppies’ “True Intentions”.

    I find this kind of talk reductive and naive. What Brad Torgersen and Larry Correia believe they are up to is a question of academic interest only. As far as I’m concerned, the vast majority of GamerGate really believe they are sticking up for integrity and freedom of speech. And all those white supremacists who proclaim that they’re not racist, just standing up for that natural order of things/defending their nation from an existential threat/et cetera really do mean it.

    Very few people—presumably not even Vox Day—are mustache-twirling cartoon villains in their own minds. Most people are in favor of good things and opposed to bad ones. This is why we’ve evolved this remarkable capacity to take the things that fit our own narrow self-interests and tell a story to ourselves where the thing we want just happens to be the thing that is Just And Right And True And Fair.

    It’s something that every human being is susceptible to, and I don’t mean to suggest that I’m somehow above the Puppies in this regard. But being aware that one’s professed and acknowledged motivations aren’t the only factors in play helps to guard against excess of shaky self-justification… and on the other hand, whenever you see someone whose response to pointed and specific criticism is “BUT I’M DOING THIS BECAUSE I’M IN FAVOR OF [GOOD THING]! ARE YOU TELLING ME YOU’RE OPPOSED TO [GOOD THING]?”, odds are they’ve bought their own spin in a big way.

    It’s like… yes, Brad, I like democracy quite a bit. I like good things. I dislike bad ones. Now that we’ve covered that, you want to talk about the things you’ve done that people have a problem with?

  11. @Mike Glyer and others: I have a question for the wiser and more experienced members of what seems to be becoming my home. And that is this: Clearly, we’re having some problems here, right? I mean, a lot of this is Not Fun. For any side, from what I can tell. Even poor VD sounds harried sometimes. So my question is this: I can’t believe it was any less difficult in fandom in the late ’60s. Would you agree? And if so, do you have any insights on how the community negotiated that? Mike, in particular, your comment the other day about the institutional revolution party really struck me as a deep one. Teach us, Obi-Wans of fandom. You’re our only hope.

  12. Having been drawn into active participation in the Hugo voting by the controversy, I have planned and continue to plan to read the nominated works. I have already read some in each category, and have been following the discussion in various places.

    Honestly, one of my questions is, based on what I’ve read so far, do the Puppy organizers REALLY feel that these are the best works representing their corner of the SF world? “Flow” was almost entirely lacking plot, certainly not enough to support the length of the story, and is the middle segment of a trilogy of stories that does not stand on its own, particularly in terms of the ending (there isn’t one other than that the words stop and there’s a period at the end of the last sentence).

    I have been listening to the Anderson novel on audio. First, since it was described as book 1 in the something-something series, I assumed it was something you didn’t have to have a lot of prior knowledge to read. It gets off to a pretty good start — dad taking his son, stealing a ship, and running from a planet that he believes is unstable and heading for disaster, opposed by his wife and his boss who don’t agree that there is any danger.

    But once the scene opens up beyond that moment, OMG the exposition and exposition and exposition! It turns out that this book is apparently following on from some other series (or multiple series) that describes a lengthy war, diplomacy, and political intrigue between and within at least six factions/alien species/civilizations, some of whom have been defeated and left the scene, others of whom are still dealing with the aftermath of what apparently was a huge and widespread war. Just about all of the characters introduced have apparently been onstage as part of the earlier stories, and all the catching up and infodumping on who people are is clunky and tedious as all get out. I don’t know if this is a fun action-packed story because I’m nearly 3 hours in and almost nothing has happened yet other than bunches of people being introduced and backstory filled in. I’m really bored and this audio is 22 hours long. I’m going to try to stick with it but if I didn’t feel responsible to get through it to keep my promise to myself for the Hugos, I’d already have returned it to Audible and asked for my money back. It is definitely not going to be my pick for Best Novel. Either one of the others will pull ahead of it (likely based on the discussion I’m seeing of some of the other nominees) or I will vote for No Award because there is no way this book represents the best of the year.

    I’m a very eclectic reader, and I like a lot of different genres and subgenres both inside and outside of SFF. I am not fanatic and deeply read in the mil-SF subgenre but I don’t shun it and have read books by some of the well known authors, including Correia, David Weber, and John Ringo (I’m sure there are others but those are 3 I know off hand).

    I just don’t understand why, with the chance to get their favorite stuff under the eyes of new potential fans (including ones who didn’t necessarily read the stuff but were joining up and voting to fight the phantom SJW cabal), the Puppies didn’t pick better work. If these are truly the best–I don’t know, action stories, mil SF, conservative SF of the year, then it wasn’t a good year for that field.

    Moreover, some of the nominees (and I understand that the Wright material, which is the worst of it, were Rabid not Sad picks) don’t fit the bill at all in terms of being non-message-heavy, fun, action-oriented stuff. They are the exact opposite.

    If you posit that pushing slates was perfectly okay (and a lot of people think it was pretty crappy, regardless of what the legal rules said), if you want to make the case that you had to do it because your high quality material is otherwise overlooked, then you should at least have high quality material on your slates. I’m not talking in terms of ideology, either, I’m talking in terms of just plain bad writing and boring plots (if there is a plot).

  13. One of the reasons I’ve come around to supporting a YA Hugo is that it’s HUGE. There is SO MUCH STUFF being written there. It’s good stuff. It’s GREAT stuff. Garth Nix, Meredith Ann Pierce, Terry Pratchett, Tamora Pierce, Diana Wynne Jones, Peter Dickenson, Robin McKinley, Edith Pattou, Lois Lowry, Suzanne Collins, Shannon Hale….

    I think it deserves a Hugo category of its own.

  14. @ Doctor Science: “Have any of the Puppies yet indicated any understanding of why many of us object to slates of any kind?’Why we say that “slates break the Hugos”?’

    No, I have only seen Puppies insisting that their orchestrated group campaign for a slate–complete with campaign title and logo, and fueled by stated sociopolitical motives to “reclaim” the Hugo awards and stated angry personal motives to poke the “SJWs” in the eye–is the Exact Same Thing as a lone individual publicly posting (1) the titles he intends to nominate and/or recommends for a Hugo this year and/or (2) publicly listing which titles of his own are eligible for an awards nomination this year.

    So this, too, seems to fall generally under the Puppies’ oft-noted inability to understand words and what they mean.

  17. @cmm: I have yet to see Brad Torgersen explain how the SP slate was chosen, other than insisting it was democratic.

  18. @Happyturtle I’m with Aaron’s Uh-huh here. I’d be delighted to see Brads Little-Black-Book-Of-Post-Facto-Justification. And as for “Nobody on Sad Puppies 3 has been harassing anyone”, I’d like to point to him, Correia, Wright, Hoyle and Williamson dogpiling into the comments at file770, belittling our host and continuing the harassment in blogposts. Or perhaps Torgersen throwing homophobic remarks at Scalzi (for which, to be fair, he apologised). There’s plenty more. A narrative from SP of “We’re innocent victims of those terrible harassers over there” doesn’t bear even the most cursory examination.

  19. Mary Frances: I’m not interested in a YA Hugo to bring in some whole new constituency. I’m in favor of it because there’s a lot of good YA sf/f and I want to give it an award for being worthy, on my own behalf. 🙂

    Will: Some participants died. Some dropped out of fannish activity. Some got tired of fighting and just stopped talking about it, while continuing to talk about other things. Some gradually changed their minds about the merits of some work in the rival camp. And other things to argue about came along. So…”all of the above”, basically.

  21. @ HappyTurtle: “Barely related, Brad Torgersen complained about media tie-in novels not getting nominations, but I can understand there, when the world-building and characterisation is already done.”

    Additonally, no one except the people directly involved in the work (who typically sign non-disclosure clauses in their contracts) know exactly who is responsible for what in a media tie-in novel. Did the plot come only from the writer, or mostly from the media company, or was it a 50/50 (or 30/70 or 70/30) collaboration effort between author and media staffers? What portions of the book were completely written by someone else? (Ex. I’ve written one media tie-in novel, and 1-2 chapters were removed and replaced by an in-house writer; I didn’t even know until after the book was released.) Which characters or premises in the novel were created by the media empire, and which by the author? (In the tie-in I wrote, Hugo readers would have to know the media property really, really WELL (which is unlikely for anyone byt dedicated fans, since it was a huge, long-running, very complex gaming world) to have any idea what I had created and what I had not.

    And so on.

    I tend to think the suggestion to include tie-ins in the Hugos is based on knowing little or nothing about how tie-in novels are planned, created, written, edited, and produced.

  22. @brightglance: “Jim Henley, you are already too late to be the first to complain that Perry Rhodan has not won a Hugo. Yes, really –”

    I…should have known. Somehow I should have known.

    😉

  23. ” I have yet to see Brad Torgersen explain how the SP slate was chosen, other than insisting it was democratic.”

    After Torgersen claimed in a blog post that his slate selection process was democratic and “100% open,” I challenged him to prove it in a comment:

    https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/05/13/musings-not-sorted/#comment-12385

    Others challenged him as well. He never responded to any of us. His use of the words “democratic” and “100% open” is as dodgy as the rest of his reasoning. He’s not a honest person.

  24. @ULTRAGOTHA I’m with you. A lot of the best stuff is in YA anymore. Partly because it’s unencumbered of all this other stuff–it’s sci-fi that’s free in many ways.

    I didn’t think the Hunger Games was brilliantly written, but I do think it’s one of the best *stories* in…well, a long time. It’s an incredibly powerful and savvy metaphor for our times. But a Hugo…I don’t know how it would fit right now. Like, a Hugo for a Series I Thought Was a Really Important and KICK-BUTT Story? I dunno. But it probably could have snuck in through YA, maybe. Happens a lot in the Academy Awards (sorry, but that’s sort of what I think we’re dealing with here): someone gets “best cinematographer,” which means, “beautiful, artistic.” And someone gets best “director,” which can include that or a lot of other things, and someone gets “best picture,” which means…who knows what. 😉 But more options would seem to help.

  26. I tend to think the suggestion to include tie-ins in the Hugos is based on knowing little or nothing about how tie-in novels are planned, created, written, edited, and produced.

    Correia has been flogging the “Hugos for tie-in novels” horse since at least SP2. He’s been boasting about how awesome the tie-in novel he’s writing will be at the same time. So one has to assume he knows, and either just doesn’t care about any of the points you just made or thinks it is just a convenient club to wield against those he considers his political enemies that will convince people who don’t actually know how tie-in novels are made..

  27. I agree that there is a lot of very good SF on the “Young Adult” shelves these days. I’ve read and enjoyed some of it. But when I appreciate a YA novel, I am appreciating it as a… not-young adult. An actual teenager, looking for SF that speaks to his or her current experience, might not benefit so much from the opinions of people my age.

  28. I thought THREE-BODY PROBLEM was very messagy.

    And the message was: “You should have paid more attention in science class, Laura.”

  29. I’m pretty sure the tie-in novel argument is just part of the anti-elitist narrative that Larry is spending.

  31. @cmm Part of the problem, it seems like, is that, if I’m honest, part of what I like about a story is that it validates “me” in some way. Now, I happen to think I’m pretty great, but not everyone does. And I have caught a very clear whiff from my new puppy compatriots–and I think it’s somewhat justified–that there’s a sense that it has to be “literary” or “high minded” somehow. I don’t think that’s true, but they do, and really, that’s what matters if we want everyone, isn’t it? Their answers in truth might not be much more complicated than that they _like_ the stuff. And sometimes I couldn’t say much more of my own choices. I just like it. Nothing wrong with that. Again, more choices, it seems, would help, to go back to the Academy Awards model. (You could imagine awards for “most beautiful” writing or “most clever” writing or any of a billion things that were specific. But “best” is…subjective. Going to be, always. I’m with you, FWIW: not my cup of tea, by and large [what I’ve seen of Wright, frankly, makes almost no sense at all to me]). But everybody’s entitled, aren’t they? That’s why it’s so helpful to keep coming back to how we comport ourselves doing it: figuring out the ground rules so no one’s surprised later, not savaging each other, calling each other on savagery (as we did the other day with the drowning T-shirt), etc. Because then, the only argument is: I liked it, you didn’t. Endy story, as they say in Scotland (usually with another couple of syllables).

  33. As far as I can tell, the Puppies argue that their slate is “democratic” in the sense that when you fill out your actual Hugo ballots, you can choose to vote for items on the slate, or not.

  34. Regarding the YA category. When I was young YA novels were called juveniles, and I wouldn’t go near any of them. I didn’t read the Heinlein juveniles until I was in my thirties. OK, many of the pulps I read were juvenile in outlook, but they weren’t so labeled. I resisted reading what older people said I should read. I imagine modern kids would do as much.

  35. In regards to media tie in novels: I’ve read several, and fo the most part, they’re not very good

    Yep, even though I like many, like some of the older Shadowrun books. For all the talk about tie-ins I noticed he never mentions any as an example of what he considers worthy. Then again saying stuff without any attempt at citation is a common theme among his blog posts I’ve read so far.

  36. I’m pretty sure the tie-in novel argument is just part of the anti-elitist narrative that Larry is spending.

    This is likely, but it’s been part of the narrative for a loooong time. Back around the time of Sad Puppies 2, Brad Torgersen was posting on his own site about how a tie-in work was the the “kiss of death”, although I was unclear whether he meant that it doomed the author for a single work or for the rest of their career; Torgersen has also been a vocal supporter of Kevin J. Anderson, whom he has noted wrote as having a career incorporating lots of tie-in novels.

  38. @seth That’s true too. That actually makes me see a point that someone brought up on my blog about ensuring the awards work for the people they’re meant for. Are the Hugos going to start carding voters?

  39. @Milt Have you read any recently? Curious what your experience was. Because the ones I’ve read have actually been well-written in the sense of “well-structured, clearly written,” etc. YA seems more like an outlook to me than anything “dumbed down” at all. In fact, there’s a feeling of…not naivete…but possibility, maybe, that really appeals to my old sci-fi soul. Plenty of today’s YA novels would happily sit along more popular stuff from the ’60s, say, in terms of reading level and such. I think. Not all, but many.

  40. @Lois Tilton: The second chapter? Really? And you had to tell me this why, exactly? You couldn’t leave me my one thin thread of illusion on Flow?

  41. Laura, while I agree Correia, Torgersen, et alia, exhibit very little knowledge of how tie-ins, or indeed much of publishing, works, I’m not convinced by your arguments as reasons not to vote for tie-ins for Best Novel.

    The Best Novel Hugo is for *Best Novel*, regardless of who wrote it. If it was one author diligently tapping away at her keyboard, or one author as the Idea Generator and the other who does 9/10 of the writing, or nine billion monkeys, or a chimera such as James S A Corey, or if there are two authors in the cover, one of whom has been dead for years, or a shadowy cabal of Star Trek show runners despite the one author listed on the cover, if it’s a good novel, it’s a good novel.

    If a tie-in made it to the finals and was a Hugo-worthy book, I’d vote for it no matter who was behind how the words ended up in the book.

    I think the answer is mostly behind door number two. Tie-ins haven’t been nominated because they’re not as well written as the other novels that were nominated. Not that the K9 Brigade seems to be able to spot bad writing when they see it, on evidence presented.

    There may also be a touch of door number three: Hugo nominators just don’t think if tie-ins (or YA or Paranormal Romance or Urban Fantasy) at nomination time.

  42. Decloaking to comment on the Interzone 258 which has just landed in my doormat having a great essay by Nina Allan on the puppies and how this whole mess turns into a political election strategy…

    I’m not sure if it’s available on the net but anyone who’s a subscriber might like to read it.

    (I know, still subscribing to stuff printed on paper, in this century, what am I thinking, right?)

  44. @will: Re: late 1960s-1970s fandom

    Yes there were arguments — maybe more fierce because in that era you COULD keep up with the SF being published, and therefore had more ammunition to hand. The saving grace was that New Wave SF didn’t replace Classic SF, instead the field expanded, so that stories fitting both categories were published and, for that matter, continue to be published.

    I will confess a lot of the Morose Canines’ complaints remind me of how I felt about Delaney’s Dhalgren and anything by Kurt Vonnegut, I bounced off the latter and only read the former because we were discussing it in an SF book club I belonged to… But I didn’t go out and try to brute-force a nomination procedure to exclude works of that type from the Hugo ballot, nor did any other Fen. Most folks back then had enough common sense that they weren’t making their defense of their favorite type of SF a bastion they chose to die on.

    Fandom survived because at its core were a group of people who loved it enough to look past the disagreements, who valued fandom enough that they became the glue that kept it together, and kept finding others who were willing to put their shoulder to the unforgiving wheel and keep the neverending party going.

  46. Milt:

    I resisted reading what older people said I should read. I imagine modern kids would do as much.

    You’d be wrong there. There’s a REASON YA ficiton is hotter than a very hot thing right now. And it’s not because modern kids aren’t reading it.

    It’s very very good and very very relevent to their interests. Thus it is very, very popular.

    It also appeals to many adults, but that’s just frosting on the hotter than hot things cake.

  47. @Mitt Stevens: “I resisted reading what older people said I should read. I imagine modern kids would do as much.”

    You probably shouldn’t assume that.

    Be aware that “Juveniles” are astoundingly popular now, one of the very few genuine growth areas in fiction publishing.

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