Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Puppies 5/5

aka The Puppy Who Mistook His Bark For A Hugo

Today’s roundup gathers together excerpts of Puppy-related thoughts from Mercy Pilkington, Paul St. John Mackintosh, Mike Glyer (who let him in here?), Deborah J. Ross, T.C. McCarthy, Kevin Standlee, Vox Day, Michael Kingswood, Tom Knighton, Lisa J. Goldstein, Jane Frank. Steve Davidson, Alexandra Erin and players to be named later. (Title credits go to File 770 contributing editors of the day Danny Sichel and DMS.)

Mercy Pilkington on Good E Reader

“The Sad Joke That Is the Hugo Awards” – May 5

Unfortunately, this year’s nominations have allegedly been shanghaied by a small collective of people under the name “Sad Puppies” and a rival group “Rabid Puppies” who are disheartened with the “touchy feely” decline of science fiction into a genre that allows gay couples and women who don’t have giant breasts to exist. The groups have garnered enough voting support to send their favorites to the top of the lists, then have seemingly been quite open about achieving their goals.

Paul St. John Mackintosh on TeleRead

“Locus Awards finalists show the power of open voting” – May 5

You’re either forced to assume that the liberal-left-loony conspiracy beloved of the Sad Puppies ringleaders extends across the entire internet – or that the SP promoters are just a bunch of histrionic opportunists who hijacked the voting process of a particular set of awards in the name of a particular ideological agenda. Which also makes you wonder what future history will make of the 2014 Sad Puppies Hugo list, if not a single one of them has made the cut in a more open ballot. Apologies to any fine writers besmirched by that comment, but in the circumstances, it’s understandable. And apologies too to the Locus Awards for casting their fantastic slate of contenders in the shade of the Hugos/Sad Puppies fiasco. All the same, people, compare and contrast.

Mike Glyer in Uncanny Magazine

“It’s The Big One”  – May 5

Does The Award Matter? The award was forged as a weapon in the original culture war—the battle to earn acceptance for science fiction itself.

Isaac Asimov gave readers a taste of the mockery early science fiction fans endured in his introduction to a collection of Hugo–winning short fiction:

“You can imagine the laughter to which we were subjected when sensible, hard–headed, practical, every–day people discovered we were reading crazy stories about atomic bombs, television, guided missiles, and rockets to the moon. All this was obvious crackpotism that could never come to pass, you see.”

….Openly campaigning for a Hugo has long been culturally discouraged in fandom, however, that old–school tradition has not survived a collision with some other significant forces. Individual authors have been forced to shoulder the publicity burdens once carried by their publishers and one aspect of gaining attention is through awards – an approach discussed by Nancy Fulda (“Five Things You Should Know About Award Nominations”) on the SFWA Blog in January 2015. Furthermore, people steeped in the social media culture of constant self–expression and self–celebration have been conditioned to feel reticence is unnatural: Why wouldn’t they recommend themselves for an award?

Deborah J. Ross on Deborah’s Journal

“In Which Deborah Learns A New Word” – May 5

Normally, this is a politics-lite zone. Growing up in the ’50s with the McCarthy nuts breathing down my family’s neck has not endeared me to rancorous public discourse. I have, however, been following PuppyGate because I know some of the folks who withdrew their stories from the Hugo ballot and/or Puppy slate. The online debate has at times been pretty vile.

One of the few delightful things to come out of this mess is a new word: Puppysplaining. Akin to mansplaining, it refers to “Explaining to you how you really have no idea how completely wrong you are about your own lived experiences.” It comes to me from Gamer Ghazi. If it follows you home, you have my permission to keep it.

Kevin Standlee on Fandom Is My Way of Life

“Scheduling WSFS Business” – May 5

Because of a comment on the File 770 web site, I find that I’d better write about the subject of when the Business Meeting in Spokane will or might consider specific items, because it would appear some folks are taking this spot as the journal of record on such things.

Parliamentary Neepery about Business Meeting SchedulingCollapse )

So it’s possible for the meeting to put off consideration of proposals until Day 5, the morning after the Hugo Award Ceremony. How could it do this?

Agenda-Setting MechanismsCollapse )

I hope this explanation makes sense. It gets into a number of the finer points of parliamentary detail, but given the complexity of the tasks we may fact this year, I think it important that people understand what tools they have at their disposal.

Vox Day on Vox Popoli

“Bi-discoursality” – May 5

The interesting thing about rhetoric is that it makes no sense to those who are limited to the dialectic. I didn’t fully grasp the way it worked until reading RHETORIC for the second time. It can be bewildering when people tell you that they have been convinced by something that you know can’t logically have persuaded them. In such cases, you know they have been persuaded by rhetoric, not facts, reason, or logic.

I wouldn’t expect an individual who only speaks one form of discourse to be any more able to follow me into the other than if I abruptly switched to speaking Italian or French after beginning in English.

For example, this was written for dialecticals. Rhetoricals only see “blah blah blah, I’m so smart, blah blah blah, Aristotle” and scan through it seeking to find some point of attack they can use to minimize or disqualify me. And if they can’t, that’s when they strike a bored pose or return to the snarky ad hom.

Michael Kingswood on Magic, Swords, and Laser Beams

“Myke and Brad” – May 5

Look, I’ve had to set fellow officers straight before because they were messing up.  Mostly those junior to me, occasionally a peer, and once or twice more senior officers, up to and including my CO.  It’s part of the job, and expected: forceful backup is a primary tenet of submarine operations.  So I have no issue with one officer correcting another.

That said, there is a way to do that sort of correction, and I do take issue with the nature, style, and content of Myke’s open letter.

The entire letter is condescending, and lacking in professional courtesy or respect.  Does he honestly think that Brad doesn’t know that, as an officer, he has a duty to all of his men, regardless of their personal situation?  Or does he just think Brad knows but doesn’t care?  Brad’s been doing this for a long time now.  I think he gets it.  And who the hell is Myke to lecture anyway?  He doesn’t work with Brad, doesn’t serve with him.  They’re not in the same chain of command, and neither has authority over the other.  Has he ever observed Brad’s professional behavior?  If not, he’s just speculating not even based on hearsay, and has no standing to judge or cast dispersions.

Tom Knighton

“An Open Letter to Myke Cole” – May 5

Dear Myke,

As a veteran who is now firmly ensconced in civilian life, I’m writing you to discuss your open letter with CWO Brad Torgersen.  This is not to defend Brad’s comments, because there is nothing I feel like defending.  Brad was out of line, and I think he knows that.  One thing I agree with John Scalzi on is that being gay is not anything to be ashamed of, so there’s no reason it should be categorized as an insult.  Thus far, we are in agreement.

However, you chose to address this issue in an open letter.  In and of itself, this wouldn’t normally be an issue.  Open letters are quite common in this day and age.  However, you opted to do so as a commissioned officer who is addressing a warrant officer.  This is where I must take issue.

You are a commissioned officer, a lieutenant in the United States Coast Guard Reserves.  You are addressing a warrant officer in the United States Army Reserves.  In essence, you are addressing a junior officer in a different chain of command.  As you are an officer, one would assume that somewhere in your training, you were instructed in how to address junior personnel while counseling them in matters such as proper execution of their duties.

If you were, then I am quite sure that the Coast Guard instructed you similarly to the way the Navy instructed me in such matters.  Simply put, you handle stuff like this behind closed doors.  A private message, an email, something.  You address it directly and privately and, if that doesn’t resolve the matter, you address it with his chain of command.

However, that’s not what you did.  Instead, you opted to put your disagreement with Brad’s comments out in public.  Again, had you done this as one writer addressing another writer, then so be it.  You didn’t.  Like most other things on your website, you couched it all under the color of your own uniform and did so publicly.

Font Folly

“Visions and Ventures: why I love sf/f” – May 5

As an adult, I’ve been attending sci fi conventions for decades. I’ve even been a staff member at a few. I’ve had some of my own tales of the fantastic published, even though most of my published stories have been in fanzines and other small semi-pro publications. I’ve had the good fortune to be the editor of a fanzine with a not insignificant subscriber base. I count among my friends and friendly acquaintances people who have been published in more professional venues, people who have run those conventions, people who have won awards for their sf/f stories and art, even people who have designed some of the trophies. Not to mention many, many fans. I have even occasionally referred to that conglomeration of fans, writers, artists, editors, and so forth as my tribe.

All of that only begins to scratch the surface of why I find the entire Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies mess so heart-wrenching. Yes, part of the reason the situation infuriates me is because the perpetrators are all so unabashedly anti-queer. For this queer kid, sf/f and its promise of better worlds and a better future was how I survived the bullying, bashing, hatred, and rejection of my childhood. To find out that there are fans and writers who so despise people like me that they have orchestrated a scheme whose ultimate goal is to erase us goes beyond infuriating.

Wikipedia  entry on “Science Fiction”

A controversy about voting slates in the 2015 Hugo Awards highlighted tensions in the science fiction community between a trend of increasingly diverse works and authors being honored by awards, and a backlash by groups of authors and fans who preferred what they considered more traditional science fiction

Sappho on Noli Irritare Leones

“The flames of the Tigers are lighting the road to Berlin” – May 5

This year’s Hugo Awards have proved more controversial than usual, with the sweep of several categories of Hugo Award nominations by two slates known as Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies.

I don’t mean this to be a post about Puppies. If you want to know more about puppies, you can check out the blog of, well, almost any science fiction author right now, or Google “Hugo Awards 2015? and look at all the Puppy posts and articles. But the debate about Puppies raised a meta-Puppies point that interests me: the relationship between politics and art.

You see, two things are true, at the same time. The first thing: Art has always been, and always will be, political, and in the sense in which “politics” is being discussed here, politics can’t be extracted from art. The second thing: What Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, and Money likes to call aesthetic Stalinism – preachy message fiction where the message overwhelms the story, and preachy reviews that evaluate books, movies, music, or other art solely on their political implications – is really, really annoying.

Lisa J. Goldstein on theinferior4

“The Hugo Ballot Continued: Short Stories” – May 3

The next story up is “Totaled,” by Kary English.  English is the only woman to make it onto the ballot in the writing categories (short story, novelette, novella, novel) from the Sad Puppies’ slate, although another woman, Annie Bellet, made the ballot but withdrew her story from contention.  Elsewhere the Puppies tout the diversity of their nominees, but their record in this slate is pretty terrible, at least concerning women who write.

Lisa J. Goldstein on theinferior4

“The Hugo Ballot, Part 3: Short Stories” – May 5

The story after Diamond’s is John Wright’s “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds.”  Wright’s style here is deliberately archaic, in a stately, somewhat pompous, King James Bible vein, and for the most part this serves him fairly well.  Every so often, though, he will stray from purple into ultraviolet and become lost to human ken.  What, for example, is one to make of “All about the walls of the city were the fields and houses that were empty and still,” which seems to have one too many “were”s in it?  Or a description of leaves as “wallowing”?  Leaves may do a lot of things, but I’ve never seen one wallow.  And then sometimes Wright will leave this style altogether and use words King James would have a hard time recognizing, like “sangfroid.”  The effect for this reader at least is to be yanked, hard, out of the story.

[There should be a law that anyone who wants to write in this style has to read Ursula Le Guin’s essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie.”  Sorry, no exceptions.]

Jane Frank on Amazing Stories

“The Artful Collector: On the Topic of ‘Puppies’ from a Former ‘Loser’” – May 5

And It’s not that attempts to skew Hugo outcomes have been solely the province of that literary set.   Lobbying to get certain (overlooked) artists on the ballot has been attempted, as well. In years past I’ve been approached to participate in these efforts, to garner support (assuming I had such influence!) from other voters I knew, and get them to nominate one artist or another. I guess I was seen as the perfect lobbyist for such a cause, considering I was then selling original art for such well –known (but never nominated) artists as John Berkey, Paul Lehr, Darrell K. Sweet.  To name just three  . . that never enjoyed that honor during their lifetimes.

Not that such efforts would have been without merit, or weren’t well-intentioned. But even I – an outsider who actually never minded the objectification of women AND men on the covers of books and magazines (how else are you gonna get young men to READ, duh?) – knew enough to know that such lobbying was simply NOT DONE.   Voting has always been an individual thing – and I never had any interest in influencing the votes of others. Indeed, I have always been able to act as has been suggested by others. That when I wasn’t familiar with the work, if I hadn’t read the story, if I never heard of the artist, saw the TV episode or movie, I just didn’t vote for it.

Steve Davidson on Amazing Stories

“OMG! That SJW Fannish Cabal is WAY Bigger Than They Thought!” – May 5

So lets get this straight.  Locus Magazine publishes the final ballot for this year’s Locus Poll – a poll of the readers of science fiction and fantasy, one that costs nothing to participate in*, one that doesn’t require special membership in a special organization, a poll of the READERS rather than just a poll of those nasty liberal WSFS Trufans and Message Fictioneers, a poll presumably participated in by the folks who really count – consumers!, the ones untainted by the crushing weight of 75 years of special cabal-think (libprog, social justice creep), the Goodread and Amazon four-star-review-unless-we-don’t-like-you crowd, the great unwashed masses of REAL FANS(tm), the folks who supposedly believe that sales figures and best seller lists are the only markers one needs to confer awards, the readers who the Suicide Puppy Squad claim want nothing more than entertaining adventures  (weirdly homoerotic broad chested man adventures at that) is published with NOT ONE SINGLE WORK BY A Puppy of any breed!  (Thank goodness for super lungs!)

Aaron Kashtan on The Hooded Ultilitarian

“The End of Comic Geeks?”  – May 5

This piece originated as a paper presented at the 2015 University of Florida Comics Conference. A slightly different form of this paper was incorporated into my lecture “Change the Cover: Superhero Comics, the Internet, and Female Fans,” delivered at Miami University as part of the Comics Scholars Group lecture series. While I have made some slight changes to the version of the paper that I gave at UF, I have decided against editing the paper to make it read like a written essay rather than an oral presentation. The accompanying slide presentation is available here ….

Now in other fan communities, the opening up of previously male-only spaces has triggered a backlash from the straight white men who used to dominate. The obvious example of this is Gamergate, where the inclusion of women in video gaming has led to an organized campaign of misogyny which has even crossed the line into domestic terrorism. SLIDE 6 A less well-known example is what’s been happening in science fiction fandom. In recent years, novels by liberal writers like John Scalzi and female and minority writers like Nnedi Okorafor and Sofia Samatar have dominated the major science fiction awards. SLIDE 7 When this started happening, certain mostly white male writers became extremely indignant that science fiction was becoming poiliticized, or rather that it was being politicized in a way they didn’t like. So they started an organized campaign known as Sad Puppies SLIDE 8 whose object was to get works by right-wing white male authors included on the ballot for the Hugo award, which is the only major science fiction and fantasy award where nominations are determined by fan voting. And this led in turn to the Rabid Puppies campaign, which was organized by notorious neo-Nazi Vox Day and which is explicitly racist, sexist and homophobic. SLIDE 9 And these campaigns succeeded partly thanks to assistance from Gamergate. On the 2015 Hugo ballot, the nominees in the short fiction categories consist entirely of works nominated by Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, and this has led to an enormous public outcry.

Alexandra Erin on Blue Author Is About To Write

“Sad Puppies Review Books: THE MONSTER AT THE END OF THIS BOOK” – May 5

monster-256x300

The cover of this book promises a monster, which implies there’s going to be a battle. But there’s no battle. There is barely even a monster! Just some blue gamma male wimp who begs and pleads with you to stop reading the book on every page.

Looking at the obviously inflated Amazon reviews I can only conclude that a number of weak-willed liberal readers gave in to this blue cuck’s loathsome SJW bullying tactics and stopped reading before the disappointing reveal. Of course this doesn’t stop them from lavishing it with glowing reviews. These people care only about politics and demographics, not merit or value.

Well, I read it all the way to the end. The last thing you want to do is tell this red-blooded American he mustn’t do something or shouldn’t read something because I believe in the first amendment and I will read whatever the hell I want.

474 thoughts on “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Puppies 5/5

  1. @Brian Z:

    “Pouring yet more vitriol over them might be one way to goad them into doing it again, though.”

    Would you recommend silence and compliance then? In the hopes of not “goading” the Puppies into doing this again next year?

    My goodness, that sound like a … familiar argument.

  2. Brian Z: “Pouring yet more vitriol over them might be one way to goad them into doing it again, though.”

    You keep posting these thinly-veiled threats about what the Puppies might do based on whatever the WSFS members decide to do to reduce the effect of slate voting.

    I’m going to put this as kindly as possible: Who gives a sh|t about how they will respond? They’ve already behaved incredibly badly. There’s no reason to expect that they will stop behaving badly now.

    Those of us who oppose slates have no reason to take into consideration what their possible response might be. We’ve all seen what appeasement got Chamberlain. The goal here is to stomp on slates — hard.

    If that gets the poow widdle ow Puppies’ feewers huwt — well, gee, isn’t that too bad.

  3. You can pour more vitriol over them if you want. I just won’t join you.

  4. Brian Z:

    Puppies by themselves aren’t interesting. Beale is just one troll among others on the internet. This is not the first contest that trolls have tried to hijack and it won’t be the last. It is not that interesting if it is the puppies, gamergaters or whoever next time.

    The thing is that when the internet exists, it is much easier to put together flash mobs. And the rules have to be aware of this and have possibillity to counter them. When setting up the rules, puppies shouldn’t even factor into the equation. The existence of flash mobs and trolls should.

    Same with discussions here. The puppies aren’t that interesting by themselves. Sad Puppies has gotten nowehere by themselves, and the rabies squad is just a subset of larger trolling groups.

  5. Hampus, if that is your assessment, do you agree with VD that the way to prevent this from happening again is the raise the barriers to entry to the point that a flash mob can’t form? (Significantly more than 40 bucks?)

  6. Brian Z:

    There are a lot of possible solutions. I think all of them should be discussed for several months before I would agree on any of them.

  7. Hampus Eckerman: “There are a lot of possible solutions. I think all of them should be discussed for several months before I would agree on any of them.”

    Yes, there is a great deal of serious discussion and consideration going right now. I am pretty confident that, come Worldcon, there will be some excellent modifications proposed at the WSFS Business Meeting.

  8. One Bright Star To Guide Them sounds like a summary of really bad Narnia fanfiction.

  9. Just finished all the alternatives for Graphic Story now. Zombie Nation from the puppy slate can only be seen as a bizarre joke, so will of course go below No Awards. From the others, Sex Criminals was mostly boring, Ms Marvel was the standard superhero cliché. Rat Queens was ok, but tried a bit too hard with the Riot Grrrl thing.

    Saga 3 it is for me.

  10. Hampus, I think that you would have a hard time finding a physical location for Castalia House as though they are “Finland based” Beale is living in Italy. His tech henchman, Markku Koponen (no cluse if that’s a name or a handle) might be in Finland but…

    As for TC wanting the WorldCon to be in DC, I’m assuming that’s for the same reason I do, i.e., so he can go. I’m pretty sure that he’s based out of the DC area.

  11. Brian Z: do you agree with VD that the way to prevent this from happening again is the raise the barriers to entry to the point that a flash mob can’t form?

    Keep up Brian. Today’s argument by VD is for the utter elimination of the supporting membership category.

    Also Brian calling criticism of their efforts, and pointing out that they have created justifications out of thin air for their actions is not really vitriol now is it? You seem very interested in toning down the effect of the slate voting guys, while at the same time tarring arguments against slate voting as terribly as you think you can get away with.

  12. Snowcrash, obviously I know what Vox Day just wrote; I just read it like everybody else. I restated it in a different way, but it is clear to you what I’m referring to, and Hampus was able to answer the question without any trouble understanding what I was talking about.

    If you are that unhappy with me remarking that some critics have been vitriolic, then I withdraw the remark since it was not the central point of the comment and I have no desire to point fingers or evaluate how vitriolic any particular person’s criticism is. OK? Instead, I was discussing how good an idea it is to make radical changes as quickly as possible, and what unintended consequences there might be.

  13. “Post-Breivik, Helsinki, like the rest of Scandawegia, is far less forgiving of some of the Rabid Puppy fellow travellers and leaders. I suspect that they’re aware of just how much scrutiny they’d be under there.”
    So, fellow SFF readers with a slightly different taste in what fiction they like, or who violate a “gentleman’s agreement” (without breaking any rules in doing so), are now to be regarded as terrorists, or as potential mass murderers?

    Do you really think Interpol is monitoring SFF blogs in order to place Larry Correia fans on no-fly lists?

  14. “Today’s argument by VD is for the utter elimination of the supporting membership category.”

    Not an argument, just an observation based on a lot of experience preventing things from being gamed. All the stuff I’ve read being proposed won’t even slow anyone down.

    As I mentioned on my blog, given that we’re already labeled “misogynists” and “racists” everywhere from the UK to New Zealand, and now it’s suggested we are dangerous international terrorists, the threat of being accused of “behaving in bad faith” isn’t exactly intimidating. That bullet was done and fired a while ago.

  15. Clack:

    It has more to do with their adherence to white supremacy than to any taste in books. And why are you mentioning Larry Correia? He’s not a rabid puppy.

  16. Brian Z:

    Daveon, then maybe WSFS picked the number 5 for a good reason and we should pay more attention to it when we nominate?

    I wasn’t there (it was before I was born), but I doubt it. WSFS rules aren’t imposed by The Great and the Good with some special insight. They’re hammered out by democratic consensus among people with differing views. Our current rules include quite a few codifications of ad hoc solutions to individual issues. The January 31 deadline for being a member, for instance, is a patch to the issue of the 1989 attempt to stuff the ballot box and get a single work nominated by sending in a bunch of memberships (with ballots) simultaneously paid for with money orders from the same post office.

    Peace:

    Wouldn’t a DC site mean that WorldCon would be in the USA three years in a row? I thought the site was supposed to alternate between the US and elsewhere.

    There is no such restriction. Site Selection rules are in Article 4 of the WSFS Constitution. The only restriction is that no bid may be for a site within 500 miles (800 km) of the administering Worldcon. Thus this year places like Seattle and Portland and Calgary were ineligible, but anywhere outside of that 800-km exclusion zone was eligible.

    With the exception of a two-year period in the early 1970s, there has never been a requirement that Worldcon alternate between US and non-US sites. What you’ve seen is an increasing number of non-US sites bid and win, not a rules requirement.

    There are people who have complained that not having Worldcon in the USA every year or two makes Worldcon irrelevant. For that matter, there’s a theory that unless Worldcon is held in the Northeastern USA, Chicago area, and California at least once every three years, it is an irrelevant event because the only people in the world (where “world” = “USA”, of course) who actually matter live there. (I am not one of those people, and I’m over-simplifying their argument partially because I deeply disagree with it.)

    Also, there appear to also be people who complain that unless you have more than 100,000 people attending, it isn’t a real convention and that you can’t possibly be the “World” convention unless you’re larger than any other SF/F pop culture event on the planet (where again “planet” is defined as “USA”), conveniently ignoring events in Japan and Europe because those are Skerry Furrin Countrys.

  17. The problem with the “nominate three” proposal that I see is that we are already dealing with two slates, which give every appearance of coordinating. If the “nominate three” rule goes into place, the Sads nominate books A, B and C and the Rabids nominate books D E and F and we end up with slate picks across the board.

    There was a proposal floated that ran roughly “count the nominations–highest number of votes puts a work on the Hugo ballot; all nomination ballots that had that work now count for half in that category. Count the nominations again, highest total of votes and fractional votes puts a work on the ballot; all nomination ballots that had that work now count for half (so a quarter if they had both works) and so on.” It’s designed so that as many nominators as possible get at least one work they like on the final ballot. That was the one that seemed to me to work the best. It would work against known slates but also against those hypothetical “secret cabal slates” that the Puppies assure us are such a hazard that they had to run slates to counter them.

  18. I, too, like the fractional-vote proposal that Cat mentioned. It would be a good reform even if Puppygate had never happened.

    If SP and RP put forward separate slates in a nominate-three system, I strongly suspect that SP would get zero of their choices on the ballot. The pure SP enthusiasts (as oppose to RP enthusiasts who hang out with SPs) are trying to sit between two chairs.

    Raising the price of a voting-for-Hugos membership would only dilute the impact of Puppy-like tactics if griefers who want to score political points have, on average, less disposable income than honest fans who want to express their opinions. I see no evidence for this being the case.

  19. the Sads nominate books A, B and C and the Rabids nominate books D E and F and we end up with slate picks across the board.the Sads nominate books A, B and C and the Rabids nominate books D E and F and we end up with slate picks across the board.

    Nah, the mathematics of how the nomination work is that if they do that then it’d split their vote and the overall 10% threshold won’t be alarmingly increased in general – remember you’re dealing with ~200 voters out of ~3000

    Plus forcing them to split their slate increases the probability of infighting breaking the whole thing apart.

    The downside however is that it’d make it easier for the puppies to find enough nominations to fill out a full 6-per-category slate – being unable to find 6 works per category that will actually stand after nomination is going to be a real challenge for them next year, 3 works are probably a lot more doable.

  20. Mr Beale: not sure how much of a problem it shows other than most people haven’t read 5 shorts they feel should be nominated in any given year. The Best Novel category has been 2 unique works Per voter in the same period. As that category is harder to game it just shows how easy this is to ‘grief’

    Of course, the person who has largely being doing the griefing complaining about that is hugely ironic.

    You could just stop. The Sads, I suspect, are only marginally more effective than a normal rec list, you’ve proven you can do it.

    Slow clap.

  21. Kevin,

    I’m sure they were thinking something when they chose the number five, even if only in vague terms, like “if people choose two are three things they’d probably dig in their heels with personal favorites, and this way a broader consensus can emerge.” Anyway, though, whether it was thought through that way in advance or not, it did work well for a long time.

    Cat, Seth,

    “all nomination ballots that had that work now count for half in that category… It’s designed so that as many nominators as possible get at least one work they like on the final ballot.”

    That’s what makes me a little bit wary of it. The goal is to choose the best work of the year, not to make sure everybody feels happy because they got something on the ballot. Are we sure there are not unintended results of going about it that way? If can be demonstrated that there are not, then sure, why not think about that option.

  22. Fred Davis @ 7:32 am- Assuming the 200 RP estimate is correct, then your analysis fails. There were 1,827 nominating ballots for Best Novel. The other categories were lower. Per Chaos Horizons, for 2015, to make the ballot, the average nominations to be the “high nom” in best novel is 260 and the average nominations to be the “low nom” is 120.

    If the RP has 200 votes, then they’ll have no problem making the ballot, regardless of rule changes (absent doing away with supporting memberships).

    There are also two other issues which tend to get ignored. First, Larry Corriea was likely the high nom. But he declined his nomination before the finalists were publicized and the “high” and “low” nominations released. This act probably obscures the SP/RP strength.

    Second, RP can always increase their strength in the final round of voting by getting a popular author on the ballot. I think people are seriously underestimate the fans of Jim Butcher (I am one). A significant number will show up.

    If RP nominates a sci-fi leaning romance author next year, then watch out.

  23. Brian. As Kevin says you’re crediting the people who are prepared to get up in time to come up with the rules with more thought and planning than they necessarily put into it.

    The reality is most people haven’t read enough fiction of any kind to nominate stuff that should be nominated. Assuming you are nominating for reasons other than I like author X, author X wrote book Y, I will therefore nominate it.

    I liked Terry Pratchetts work, I read Raisinf Steam. It wasn’t good enough to nominate.

    Personally speaking, I have no real basis on which to nominate editors. I do not nominate them as my nomination would be largely worthless. My art appreciation isn’t great either which makes artist a bit of a lottery too.

    Making it 3 would actually make me think more seriously about those 3 slots myself.

    Finally, looking at the data from previous years, I don’t expect to see more than 100 puppy votes actually being evident when we get the numbers. What will be evident is the Rabid Puppy slate.

  24. What I gathered from reading all the comments on that piece: when I lie, it’s lying, but when an Aristotelian lies, it’s rhetoric. When I ask a question, I’m stubbornly refusing to accept the truth, but when an Aristotelian asks a question, it’s dialectic. And conveniently, only Aristotelians can tell the difference. I’m sure I’m proving their point here.

  25. “So, fellow SFF readers with a slightly different taste in what fiction they like, or who violate a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ (without breaking any rules in doing so), are now to be regarded as terrorists, or as potential mass murderers?”

    I guess you didn’t know Day wrote on his blog in 2013 that Breivik might one day be “regarded as a national hero in Norway.” I suspect that’s one reason why the commenter thought a Helsinki Worldcon might not be a receptive environment for Rabid Puppies and their rhetoric.

  26. Not surprising at all based on the Aristotle stuff I just slogged through. He was, after all, one of the great defenders of supposed innate superiority.

  27. I think people are seriously underestimate the fans of Jim Butcher (I am one). A significant number will show up.

    People said that last year about Jordan/Sanderson, and The Wheel of Time got swamped.

  28. Daveon,

    “The reality is most people haven’t read enough fiction of any kind to nominate stuff that should be nominated.”

    20 minutes later, I’m still chewing on that sentence.

    Whatever foresight or lack thereof early WSFS members had, they surely designed a system based on the assumption that in the future people would still be reading stuff.

  29. Martin: Templeton’s CD was a historic accomplishment. I still have my copy. It wasn’t distributed free to Worldcon members like the HVP.

  30. Mr. Day, you’re right that no one is going to persuade you to stop acting in bad faith by pointing out that it’s happening, but you go further than necessary in your attempt to formulate a reason.

    See, the reason that pointing out someone is acting in bad faith is insufficient to make them stop is they are acting in bad faith.

    The mistake you’re making here is the same one you make when you point out, again and again, that you and your ilk don’t care if people observe that you are racists and misogynists. You assume the point of such remarks is to make you feel bad and stop doing it. Of course, this doesn’t happen. And when it doesn’t happen and people go on pointing out the racist and sexist things you say and do, you assume that it’s because they are so used to having those words instantly end any argument that they can’t adjust to the reality of someone who is, as you put it, immune to “feelbads”.

    The mistake you’re making, Mr. Day, is assuming that anyone cares how you feel. The mistake you’re making is assuming that the whole world is capable of opening its mouth only to address you, that if someone lays out a case then they are perforce laying it out to you and if they fail to persuade you then they have failed.

    You’re right that it’s hard—verging on impossible, I’d say—to prevent griefing through rules and systems. The reason for this is simple: sooner or later, everything comes down to an assumption of good faith. Every class of interaction between human beings needs an assumption of good faith to be useful.

    Even if we had a world where every transaction was done between heavily armed parties scrutinizing every aspect of the deal for a trick… well, if deals really were a bloody double-cross more often than they were legit, nobody would make deals. In fact, while I can’t say what the threshold would be, I’d hazard that the whole thing would fall apart long before we reached parity between deal and double-cross.

    Everything of what we might call “civilization” depends on widening the space in which people can deal with each other under the assumption of good faith, which is why you will never be more than a self-proclaimed rabid dog leading a slavering hoard against its gates. With your interest in systems, you notice where the assumptions of good faith are and think you’re some sort of mastermind for realizing that they’re there and that you have the power to break them.

    And, broadly speaking, you’re right that no one can stop you. It’s not worth the trade off of what we get from civilization to go back to a world where being a bad faith dealer would be dealt with swiftly and harshly.

    What we can do is label you a bad actor and move on. The label is not there for your edification or education. We are not the Ghost of Christmas Past. We need not concern ourselves with your welfare, or your salvation. It is not our job to reform you or re-educate you, as much as your rhetoric depends on the idea that we’re constantly trying to do this and failing.

    We label you a bad actor for our own benefit; that is, for the benefit of anyone who is looking to deal in good faith.

  31. Was the Wheel of Time backed by SP/RP voters?

    Even if it had been, it would have still lost. The voting for the winner is done by a different process than that for selecting nominees.

  32. BrianZ
    “Daveon,

    “The reality is most people haven’t read enough fiction of any kind to nominate stuff that should be nominated.”

    20 minutes later, I’m still chewing on that sentence.”

    I think (and the fact that this is where the Puppies won supports the theory) that this is more true of the short fiction categories than Novel. There’s an awful lot of short fiction out there. I read a little, but not so much that I could be sure I was nominating The Five Best works.
    With Novels there are fewer obvious targets. 3 Body was on my list, Station Eleven, something else I forget. I can understand the Imperial Radish book getting on. probably only half a dozen more real contenders. With short fiction who reads enough to consider the whole? And is that a Novellette or a Short story?

  33. Hear, hear, @Alexandra. And a fine blog post as well–I wish I’d seen it before I made my own remarks above, as you summed up my feelings better than I could have.

  34. Dear Mr Beale and Correia and Torgessen and Wright,

    I am not a fan, have no enormous knowledge of SF, its history and authors. I come from a small country that in the past 30 years have – not taking into account those sciencefictional romances as Hunger Games of Divergent sagas – published approximately around 20 SF books.

    When I read a book lauded as the top of the what SF has to offer, and notice that every male character is portrayed as a failed, stupid, pathetic, and every female character as perfect, going up to having three pages of text which have two female characters gloating about sticking it to the boys, and there are exquisite pains of prose manevauring to convey that main villain is european looking, not to mention propaganda of polygamy, and making fun of traditional families and relationships between genders, and even I sense that something is off, and copule of months later discover this thing of Puppygate, yeah I tend to believe the assertions you claim.

    By the way, Locus awards are done primarily through their reccomended lists. You know, Locus is closely connected to Scalzi, Stross, and Doctorow. I think it posts highly biased descriptions of upcoming books, and likewise I think still links to discredited EW post about Puppies. Enough said.

  35. not to mention propaganda of polygamy, and making fun of traditional families and relationships between genders

    I see that you have found Heinlein’s books.

  36. I mean, using Aristotle, one of the great defenders of slavery and innate privilege, to support a statement like “I strongly prefer dialectic, but that is reserved for those who are intellectually honest and capable of changing their minds on the basis of information”–is that rhetoric itself? Because it sure sounds like superiority doctrine, especially when you start reading the IQ comments that follow. But perhaps I, a “rhetorical,” am just not “capable” of seeing the point. (Though I wonder why so much breath is wasted by these groups in trying to get to me to see it if that’s the case. Besides Aristotelians, I have found only their cousin Ayn Randers to be more generous with their time in this regard.)

  37. I don’t personally see any need to decrease the number of nominating slots each voter has to fill in each category, though it doesn’t strike me as terribly important whether than number is three or four or five. If it were up to me, I think I’d just double the number of nominees that make it onto the final ballot (which might also mean lowering the 5% threshold I understand nominated works have to meet to make the final ballot). Puppies ought to be happy that more works get consideration in the final voting, presumably including the works they favour if those works are actually as broadly popular as they claim. Everyone else ought to be happy that the impact of nominating slates (any slates) will be significantly diluted, though not eliminated. Unless there are a lot more potential puppies waiting to be mobilised in future years than appear to be in action this year, I expect they would continue to be able to push some works onto the ballot but not to dominate whole categories. Not as good as a prelapsarian ideal in which everyone decides what to vote for without any influence from slates, secret or overt, but I would find that a more than acceptable outcome.

  38. Nitpick on the Uncanny article: You have the wrong year for the Mercury Theatre War of the Worlds. The Retro Hugos awarded in 2014 were meant to be as though they were awarded in 1939, for works released in 1938.

  39. “I see that you have found Heinlein’s books.”

    LOL. That comment is today’s mic drop moment.

  40. Notes for anyone who clicks on that TC McCarthy tweet and reads the followups:

    Worldcon is not required to be in or out of the US in 2019 or any other year.
    There is an additional fee for voting on top of your Worldcon membership.
    That fee does not ultimately go to Sasquan. It buys you a supporting membership for the 2017 Worldcon, wherever it happens to wind up being held. Sasquan is merely administering the site selection vote on behalf of the 2017 bids and has to hand the money over to whoever wins. Sasquan didn’t even get to pick the size of the fee; that’s negotiated between the bids.

  41. And a note for me: WordPress doesn’t allow the ol tag in comments. Darn.

  42. ‘attempt to stuff the ballot box and get a single work nominated by sending in a bunch of memberships (with ballots) simultaneously paid for with money orders from the same post office.’

    Happened in 1984 also – on a smaller scale. (We didn’t think of a membership deadline for nominating.) They were nominating a bunch of works, in shorter fiction, by one author.

  43. Mike – ‘The award was forged as a weapon in the original culture war—the battle to earn acceptance for science fiction itself.’

    I thought your entire post for this was great as it included a great number of points related to the Hugos I don’t think have been widely discussed, such as the increased burden for authors of their own publicity, I highlighted this because I felt it stuck out to me after the reading the links File770 listed yesterday. In particular Mark Nelson when he said:

    “The truth is SFF needs to grow up. At times I have felt that our genre heading allowed us to adopt a mock superior tone; mostly as a response to being ignored by “real literature” and those who write criticism. We reveled in being aberrant. We rallied around our awards and celebrated our words in spite of the roaring silence from the wider world.”

    Sci-Fi and Fantasy is longer battling for acceptance or relevance in the wider world. It’s pop-culture now. We won (I say we as in general, I’d nothing to do with it). Now the war for acceptance is over and Sci-Fi is diversifying and expanding is some of this backlash just the growing pains from doing exactly what Mark Nelson said it needed to do, grow up?

    At least to me it feels similar to other areas of nerdom, whether it be comics or gaming or SFF or whatever, there was this insular thing that people fought to get acceptance for and once it was accepted and started evolving, instead of putting down their swords and shields and enjoying the victory instead turned them on each other because it’s not just their pulp books with rocketships on the cover (or shoot em up games, and so on). Your mention of the Hugos starting as part of the original culture war just made me remember what Mark had said and got me to think what if SFF is growing up and this is just what it looks like, the awkward pubescent stage just amplified by social media.

    Or maybe I’m just rambling.

    Either way I liked your piece in that it summarized not just the current argument well but also provided an interesting history and facts about the Hugo awards. I hope it shows up in a google search for reporters doing Hugo research before shoving inaccurate articles out.

  44. Very nice, Aaron.

    Steve Moss, you know perfectly well that SP had Correia as their champion. Look how well that turned out…

    http://www.loncon3.org/hugos/2014%20Hugo%20awards%20full%20details.pdf

    Correia was 110 votes away from getting beat by No Award. Just about half of the Hugo voters thought that Warbound didn’t deserve to be there. Interestingly enough, the amount of first place nominations warbound got (332) was only 2 more than the no award nominations that Anc. Justice got in the runoff.

  45. Opus – ‘When I read a book lauded as the top of the what SF has to offer, and notice that every male character is portrayed as a failed, stupid, pathetic, and every female character as perfect, going up to having three pages of text which have two female characters gloating about sticking it to the boys, and there are exquisite pains of prose manevauring to convey that main villain is european looking, not to mention propaganda of polygamy, and making fun of traditional families and relationships between genders, and even I sense that something is off’

    Since SP/RP is about the last decade Hugos, would you care to list Hugo nominated or awarded books fall into this description?

  46. Steve Moss – ‘ I think people are seriously underestimate the fans of Jim Butcher (I am one).’

    I am one as well, of both his Codex Alera and Dresden Files series. But being fans doesn’t mean they’ll vote for him automatically, for instance I wouldn’t vote Skin Game. It wasn’t the best book I dead last year by a long shot or even the best Dresden book. I think you’re under-estimating his fans if you think they’ll vote for him by default.

  47. PJ Evans: As one who was on the 1984 committee and at the meeting where alleged ballot stuffing was discussed, what the committee ultimately determined was that the person seemed to have rounded up a bunch of family and friends and had them join and vote for him — and that it wasn’t against the rules, much as we disliked the outcome. That’s why nothing was publicly said about it. (Til now? I guess.)

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