108 thoughts on “Hugo voting ends tomorrow”

  1. Looking forward to the results. On the extremely small chance you won, I’ll bring the popcorn so we can watch what would be an EPIC case of sandy yoo-hoos for the SJWs.

    Never happen, but I can dream.

  2. It looks like Worldcon is before Dragoncon this year.

    I’m not sure if you’ll be at Dragoncon, but it seems like a (sad | happy) puppy party would be fun.

    I can bring a single malt and a Husky….

  3. I’d almost like to see that exercise in Dino-Pr0n win for short story, if for no other reason than to show to what ridiculous depths the entire SF/F field has sunk over the past two decades. But, hell, it already won a Nebula, so a Hugo would be nothing but a victory lap, I suppose.

  4. No matter the actual results, I will forever remember this as the year Larry walked away with the Hugos.

    That said, I’m rooting for Wheel of Time, if only because I don’t want Ancillary Justice to be annointed.

    1. >>That said, I’m rooting for Wheel of Time, if only because I don’t want Ancillary Justice to be annointed.<<

      Same. It's a crime we never recognized Robert Jordan while he was still with us.

      And since Larry pumps out books I know I'll be voting for him for years to come.

    2. I’m also voting for WoT at #1, not least because, like Andrew, I feel RJ should have already won one.

      “Warbound” is my #2, and everything else is “No Award.”

      1. WoT got #3 on my vote. I enjoyed the series, but couldn’t in good conscience vote it #1 because I felt it was far too long. Multiple 800+ page books in a row in which little actually happens put it farther down.

        For the record, my novel rankings were:
        1) Neptune’s Brood
        2) Warbound
        3) Wheel of Time
        4) Parasite
        5) Ancillary Justice

        I have to admit, I’m a sucker for space opera and Neptune’s Brood was just too fun for me. I had fun with Warbound, but not as much. So when it came to voting time, I ended up going with my reactions. Sorry Mr. Corriea, but at least I’m being honest.

        Good luck!

      2. WARBOUND is my number 1, and WHEEL OF TIME my number two. While I enjoyed WoT, and thought it had many virtues (the way Jordan kept coming up with surprises, e.g.), I think its defects make it less good than WARBOUND.

        WoT is outrageously padded. Some of the books have only about a short story’s worth of plot.

        WoT threw out some good ideas, then never did anything with them. E.g., the Ayes Sedai who went to the Black Tower, and then never did anything with them. Or the Towers of Midnight, which exist to provide a title for a novel, but don’t figure in said novel in any way. Or Nynaeve’s cure of one minor character’s madness, a subject almost immediately dropped.

        WoT is annoyingly repetitious. About the twentieth time Mat reflected that he liked plain clothes, but a little lace on the sleeves of this coat would be nice, it got old. The same with Rand/Mat/Perrin thinking that he never knows what to say to girls, like Mat & Perrin/Rand & Perrin/Rand & Mat do. And don’t get me started about male character/female character reflecting on how illogical and gossipy all women/men are.

        And finally, WoT is idiot plotted. Rand’s ‘Oh, I can’t hurt a GIRL. I’ll stand here and watch an evil woman murder a woman I love, because to stop her I’d have to hurt a GIRL.’ And then suddenly he drops that, because the plot needs him to be able to kill women.

        WARBOUND, otoh, is tightly and intelligently plotted, has only the repetition needed to update readers to what happened in previous novels, uses its many ideas, and brings its trilogy to a magnificent end. I reread the trilogy and especially liked how Larry had cleverly planted information that would be needed a novel or two down the road, without being blatant but without cheating. I think it’s the better novel, considered alone or the trilogy as a whole.

  5. Mine’s in. When even some neutral reviewers are saying they might vote for Vox in the name of lolz (!), while also praising Warbound as a good surprise, I’m thinking pleasant things are gonna be possible. Would Damien be proclaiming that he can’t claim to be involved in sci-fi otherwise?

    Well, he has even less talent than Clamps, as at least one of them put actual fiction online, but don’t ruin this for me dammit.

    1. If anything on Larry’s slate wins, I predict rioting. By which I mean 5-6 SJWs running amuck in bookstores, tearing Baen Books off the shelf and screaming “No justice, no peace!”

      1. That statement happens to be true, but good old-fashioned truncheons tend to enforce justice and peace.

      2. I’m pretty certain that the SJW’s will consider any result that has a Sad Puppy story ranking above “no award” to be a complete travesty, no matter what the final ranking winds up being. And if Warbound manages to rank above even one of their darlings, then that will be proof positive of fandom’s entrenched racism/homophobia/fascism/close mindedness/whatever.

        I’m actually an attending member of Loncon and intend to be on hand for the Hugo ceremony. So no matter what, Mr. Correia will have at least one supporter in the audience. 😉

    2. The gap between Walter’s arrogance and his hideous writing is amazing. It may take him years to unlearn what he’s learned in creative writing. But then this is a generation which will nitpick The Mote in God’s Eye for character’s and planet’s names and sexism while somehow managing to ignore its amazing cleverness. Today you apparently having amazing names for planets and characters, no racism and sexism, lots of diversity and little idea of how to tell and interesting and innovative story. Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice may have been considered innovative in 1964 when it would nevertheless would have been the wrong end of an Ace Double.

      Normally I’d say the Hugo voters are about 70% at least passively in favor of the new political correctness, which explains the current nominees, even with the Sadness of Puppies campaign. But with the influx of the new blood, for at least this one year, don’t be surprised at anything that happens voting-wise aside from the short story category, which is a guaranteed pit of doom. It’s possible the best short story from any issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1950-65 surpasses them.

      1. the short story category, which is a guaranteed pit of doom. It’s possible the best short story from any issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1950-65 surpasses them.

        Hell, the worst F&SF short story from that period surpasses them.

  6. Another outpouring of anti-Larry, anti-libertarian, anti-Baen hatred is incoming, no matter what the results. I expect they’ll try to make next years Hugos more “inclusive”, with the opposite results.

    1. I wonder if Damien will drop another hit piece or use the time to gloat, just like he did prior to the nominations. Or is it possible that his recent “departure” from SFF is in response to a projected result?

      1. His “departure” was him quoting William Gibson without saying he was, that’s all. He was very unclear about it.

      2. Looks like he’s getting his hate on. Here’s Damien in response to something Arthur Chu said about Larry:

        “@arthur_affect They can team up to tether boobs and slap bitches.”

        Keep it classy, Damien.

  7. Charles Tan on Twitter:

    “This year’s Hugo voting is a fight of light over darkness, of good vs. evil…”

    No comment. I’ll let the absurdity stand on its own.

      1. I think we’re supposed to be the “darkness”. Good thing a leftie said that. Otherwise it would be offensive.

    1. Charles Tan is yet another of the weepy flock of the justice league of race and gender, with SFF literature a distant third place.

      1. And yep, it is.

        I’ll have to give him some props though; one of the first Philippine fantasy anthologies I’d read he helped put out and while it seemed to carry the usual theme of ‘must include X’ where X is some form of Filipino culture thing, the stories themselves didn’t strike me as message first story later. I actually felt hopeful about Filipino authors expanding in skill and story.

        This was some years ago.

        I don’t know how things have gone since though because I don’t know if any anthologies are available for purchase outside the Philippines.

    2. I don’t think I would go so far as comparing it to good vs. evil or light vs. darkness, both sides can have their good and bad points.
      I think this may be more of a “Guess what you pc loons, there are other people in the world and your going to have to suck it up because we have to put up with you too. O by the way we popped your insulated comfort bubble, here is some of the real world to patch it up for you.”
      Something along those lines anyway perhaps, sometimes people just need their world view shaken a bit to get them moving in a hopefully better direction again rather than sticking their head in the sand and pretending everything is the way they like it all the time.

  8. I can’t figure out the difference between semiprozine and fanzine. The explanation looked the same. The only difference to me is.. one had elitist book reviews so they got my first place vote. Its my favorite fantasy review site. However, when I checked out all of the sites, they seemed to all be very high quality. Those were tough categories. Way too many nerds who need to go outside and get some exercise…

    Voted for WoT. I am 40 now and started reading when I was 16. Have read them and listened to audio. Charles Stross is probably the biggest competitor because he is the only english author and the con is in London. I read all 3 of Larry’s books. I did like them. However, fanboy here. Sorry dude.

    Yeah go wheel of time. Also liked all of the shorter works (all 3 categories). Vox’s story was kind of ‘odd’, but I wouldn’t say it was bad.
    Brad got my vote for best novella and you guys won’t like this but Mary got my vote for Best Novellette. I thought Chaplains Legacy was really very good.

    I didn’t vote for some categories. I think its silly to not give awards if they don’t get enough votes. There were alot of categories to vote for… and its really hard to figure out who is deserving in the best editor fields in particular. I don’t think they should suffer because alot of us won’t know how to vote for them.

    1. I think the 25% rule is a bad one. I ended up voting in a few more categories than I would really have liked because of it.

      I found the Vox story to be OK though not really Hugo-worthy, but that makes it better than several pieces of shorter fiction I’ve seen on Hugo ballots. I also picked Mary’s story for Novelette. I picked Torgerson then Stross for Novella, and Stross then Corriea for Novel.

      I tried one volume of WoT. It struck me as yet another fantasy novel. It seems likely to me that the great enthusiasm for this series has much to do with the fact that many of the voters started this series when they were teenagers. I reread A Princess of Mars in my thirties; it didn’t fare as well as 12-year-old me would have hoped. The hardest decision for me was whether to put WoT above or below Ancillary Justice at the bottom of the pack.

      I really liked Warbound. I’ve been listening to Hard Magic lately.

      In short stories I only no-awarded one, the Dino story. I don’t think anything in the category really deserved a Hugo, but the others at least were recognizably stories.

      There were three Nebula-winning pieces in the fiction category. The best any of them did on my ballot was #4.

    2. Guess, on August 1, 2014 at 2:13 am said:

      “I can’t figure out the difference between semiprozine and fanzine. The explanation looked the same.”

      That’s because they are the same.

      Originally, the prozines were ASTOUNDING, GALAXY, THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION, etc. The fanzines were obviously amateur productions, usually available for “the usual” (a letter of comment on the previous issue, a cartoon/article/story, or a few books to cover printing and mailing expenses). But then a few fanzines began to get substantial paid circulations, such as LOCUS or the late Dick Geis’s SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW. Some SMOFs felt that these magazines were dominating the fanzine category by sheer number of readers. So the semiprozine category was created to allow the low circulation fanzines a chance at a Hugo.

      It’s the same reasoning that divides high school and college sports teams into different leagues based on enrollment size. Schools with big enrollments get better teams, because they have a larger talent pool to choose from, so if all the high schools competed in the same league, the champs would almost always be one of the big schools. The semiprozines have the most regular readers, so if all the fanzines competed in the same league, they’d dominate the nominations and awards.

      Now that most zines are internet published, the distinction may be obsolete, but it remains for now.

    1. “You really are a little obsessive, aren’t you?” Haha, priceless.

      Although Bookish’s assessment of the short story category was pretty funny, too: “Who I think will win? Swirsky and her dino-lover. F**king shoot me.”**

      A good review, by somebody who actually took the time to read the selections and make an informed judgement.

      (**Like a couple of others here, I’m really hoping “NO AWARD” is the runaway winner in that particular Hugo category this year…)

  9. so if you joined the crusade to combat the scourge of Puppy Related Sadness don’t forget to get your votes in

    Done and done.

    Rereading the slate from 1939 (I have a pile of classic scifi/fantasy in my house) was quite enjoyable. What was NOT so enjoyable was the obvious disparity in quality between the 1939 slate and the one from this year, with a few exceptions, of course. ::cough:: I see from the comments above that I was not the only person to vote “No Award” for the entire Short Story category. To be honest, I would have voted “Die In a Fire” for that category if it had been an option.

    1. The four stories are a perfect paradigm of the diversity/identity/non-Western agenda of radical feminism. It is quite literally the irrelevance and therefore death of any consideration for art and entertainment. What it tells you is that the Hugos is as lost as the Nebulas, and both virtually indistinguishable from the funhouse that is WisCon. The idea that you can just plug in race here and gay there and gender over there is a farce.

      No one comes to SFF from reading such trash, but they’ll certainly leave it. The word “embarrassment” isn’t enough to portray such stories. And that’s not including the silly bigotry that drives all this.

      1. I put “Ink Readers” above No Award, because while it wasn’t really ‘great’ by my taste, I thought it was at least ‘legitimately eligible’, ergo better than No Award. The other three were awful well past the level of ‘legitimately eligible’, so No Award gets #2.

        I’d like to find a source for actually good short stories. In general they’re my least favorite category; I usually prefer more story than a short can deliver. But short stories at least are very not time-consuming, and I’d REALLY like to see better candidates for next year’s ballot. Anyone have any suggestions?

      2. I also voted for “The Ink Readers of Doi Saket” for best short story.

        Beolach, every so often something good will turn up on baen.com

        Last year I particularly liked Freer’s “The Krumhorn and Misericorde”, Merz’s “The Sorcerer of Daigawa”, and Spoor’s “Skyspark”

        Michael Swanwick has also been penning some good stuff for tor.com (the “Mongolian Wizard” series)

      3. I considered “Ink Readers,” which was at least readable and mildly entertaining, but ‘readable and mildly entertaining’ struck me as too low a bar to set for ‘Hugo Award-worthy.’ Never did care for grading on a curve.

      4. How about “The Carnivorous Venus Fly-Traps of Doi Saket”? How hard would that be? “Ink Readers”? How about “What Crawled out of the Radioactive Pit of Doi Saket”? “Wakulla Springs” actually had the real Black Lagoon and no Creature. Who wants to read “The Cis-Racists of the Black Lagoon”? What if I wrote stuff like this all the time? Would it be “The Black Creature of the White Convenience Store Robbery”? Isn’t that what our SFWA crew is really doing and selling it as fantastic literature? Go write something like “Mommy I Wanna Be the Christian President of Egypt But I Can’t Cuz Muslims and Marginalization.” Just for a change of pace. And don’t forget to throw in some aliens smoking the pyramids.

    1. From http://loncon3.org/hugo_awards.php

      The Hugo Awards are presented at a formal ceremony, which is always considered to be one of the highlights of the Worldcon. The ceremony at Loncon 3 will take place on the evening of Sunday 17 August 2014. We hope to continue the recent tradition of streaming the ceremony live via the internet, enabling fans around the world to take part in this celebration of the best of the year’s science fiction.
      The Retro Hugos for 1939 will be presented in a separate ceremony at Loncon 3 on Thursday 14 August 2014.

  10. I only voted for Warbound for best novel. The only other novel I read was Parasite and it is not an award quality novel.

    I read all of the novellas, novelettes, and short stories except “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” which wasn’t in the voter’s packet for some reason. I voted:

    1. The Butcher of Khardov, 2. The Chaplain’s Legacy, 3. Six-Gun Snow White, 4. No Award (I liked Wakulla Springs but it’s not genre fiction and Equoid was just awful)

    1. The Exchange Officers, 2, Opera Vita Aeterna, 3. The Waiting Stars, 4. The Lady Astronaut of Mars, 5. The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling

    1. The Ink Readers of Doi Saket (the others were just dull)

    And Max Gladstone was my pick for Campbell for Best New Writer. If his debut novel had been nominated for Best Novel I would have voted for it there too. I still wish Frank Chadwick had been nominated though.

    1. My list was fairly similar.

      Novel: 1) Warbound. 2) Wheel of Time. 3) No Award. The other three, all I had in a readable format was crappy PDFs of the first hundred or so pages of each. Of those, only Parasite was even remotely interesting, and not enough that to persuade me to cough up so much as the $2 for the Kindle version.

      Novella: 1) Chaplain’s Legacy. 2) Butcher of Khardov (well-written, but I just wanted everyone in it to hurry up and die). 3) No Award. Wakulla Springs was fairly well done, but not genre. Six-Gun Snow White started great, then nosedived into present tense pretentiousness for the entire second half. And I couldn’t get past the first page of Equoid.

      Novelette: 1) Opera Via Aeterna. 2) Lady Astronaut of Mars (very powerfully written). 3) Exchange Officers. 4) Waiting Stars. 5) Truth of Fact.

      Short Story: 1) No Award. The only one of them worth the pixels was Ink Readers, and it just kinda meandered around for a bit before wandering off. Trust me, you missed absolutely nothing with Dinosaur. It wasn’t really even a story, it was like some drugged-out stab at free verse.

      1. Six Gun Snow White started off well, but then it veered off into “all men are evil”/womyn-power territory, and there it completely lost me.

        Brad Torgerson actually had my #1 votes on both his stories (REALLY liked Chaplains Legacy and hope he writes more in that universe). I agree about Wakulla Springs, but suspect it will win anyway.

        And yeah, the short story noms were all abysmal. The only good things about them were their brevity.

        Really interested now to see the final results.

      1. Oh dear God was that awful. I have to admit that I did not join the sad puppy brigade this year, was spending a lot of time on international travel, but I will next year if only just to vote against mind numbing crap like this.

      2. Two questions:

        1) Is that a joke?

        2) Seriously, is that a freakin’ joke?

        That must be a spoof. It can’t possibly be a genuine *Hugo-nominated short story*, can it? It isn’t even a short story, and I wouldn’t call it science fiction or fantasy. It’s like a poem from one of those godawful high school anthologies that put me off poetry for 15 years. It’s just so, so bad.

      3. If you were Godzilla my love, they you’d be a Toho Productions green giant. A small one, only 10 kabillion meters tall, the same height as the jet-stream as seen from Mars. You’d have pork chop bones and you’d walk like this: Aaarrrggh!!!! Ya ya ya!! Destroy!!! Your breath would laze building from many miles away, setting them on fire.

        If you were Godzilla, then I would become a running, screaming Japanese, so I could spend all my time mashed flat on the bottom of your huge paws. I’d sing you songs like “Rock Around the Clock” and I’d feed you blue whales and elephant petit-fors. Then I’d brush your teeth with a railroad engine.

        If I sang you songs, I’d expect you to use an aircraft carrier as a harmonica and learn to dance the mazurka. When you thought I was dozing, you’d send hot radioactive bad breath into the night, burning down birds, children, oxen, and cats.

        Once you learned the harmonica, we’d go on tour to Broadway and star in Li’l Abner. I’d be Moonbeam McSwine and you’d be my pig. You’d use your talons to tap dance and audiences would applaud before you burnt them to death.

        After they died, the audience would still give you a standing ovation from some seventh circle of hell, so I’d lob an atom bomb down the spout to finish them off. Then it’s quick back to Tokyo to Sumo-blast the city and maybe bite a few jets out of the air.

        If you were Godzilla, my love, nothing could break you but the sun, because giant sea-monsters need minus 38 spatrillion sun block. I would bloom into a beautiful cactus plant and reach out and sting the sun like a scorpion-girl. Then I’d make a ham sandwich and ream out your ears with a giant oil derrick.

      4. Fail Burton:

        Well, I know what I’ll be nominating for the Hugo next year. Do things published in blog comments count I wonder?

      5. I note, however, that despite winning the Nebula, Dino My Love has been curiously absent from all of the “Best of 2013” anthologies thus far released; it doesn’t even merit an honorable mention in those volumes. In fact, most of the short story, novelette, and novella noms are absent.

      6. … *shudder* I stared at that link for DAYS before I clicked on it. And goddamnit what the nine hells was that? That’s not a story. And that is not a T-rex, that’s an orinthomimus with limp forepaws with delusions of grandeur. The ‘writer’ has some seriously screwy sex fetishes and fantasies lumped into here as well.

        I read parts of it out loud to folks here and the responses were 1) laughter and 2) ‘What the fucking shit is that and stop killing my brain with it, it’s worse than crap. Did Yama write that?’

      1. It’s so hard to pick the dumbest line out of dreck like this, but I nominate “They’d grasp each other for comfort instead of seizing the pool cues with which they beat you, calling you a fag, a towel-head, a shemale, a sissy, a spic, every epithet they could think of, regardless of whether it had anything to do with you or not, shouting and shouting as you slid to the floor in the slick of your own blood.” So, her fiancée is an Arabic, Hispanic with breast implants who’s gay? Talk about trying to fit in as many victim groups as possible. I’m surprised she didn’t have the mob taunting him about his peanut and wheat gluten allergies.

      2. “It’s so hard to pick the dumbest line out of dreck like this, but I nominate”

        I’m pretty sure that is the strangest line. Either his tormentors are really uncertain about why they are persecuting the guy or she has a Schroedinger’s boyfriend.

        Fundamentally it isn’t actually a story. I’ve read blogs that lovingly describe Swirsky’s powerful use of language. I agree; the lines are beautiful, but that doesn’t make them a story.

        This story has already won the Nebula, and I think it has an excellent chance of winning the Hugo.

      3. Yes, I seriously doubt the men who beat Emmet Till to death were shouting, “You damn dago, mick, spic papist!”

        As I’ve commented elsewhere, the con also posted the 1939 retro award nominations, and just look at the short story list:

        Best Short Story

        1.”Hollerbochen’s Dilemma” by Ray Bradbury (Imagination!, January 1938)
        2.”How We Went to Mars” by Arthur C. Clarke (Amateur Science Stories, March 1938)
        3.”Helen O’Loy” by Lester del Rey (Astounding Science-Fiction, December 1938)
        4.”The Faithful” by Lester del Rey (Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1938)
        5.”Hyperpilosity” by L. Sprague de Camp (Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1938)

        How can anyone compare that list to the current short story nominees and not see how far the genre has fallen.

      4. How can anyone compare that list to the current short story nominees and not see how far the genre has fallen.

        —–

        KHorn, the answer is sadly simple. There are people who compare that list to the current short story nominees and claim that the genre has progressed leaps and bounds because the 1938 list is all white men, while the 2014 list isn’t. They’re more concerned about check boxes of race or gender instead of the quality of the literature. And those people are the ones who (usually) vote in the Hugos.

  11. Other results of note: Baen announced the winners of the Baen Fantasy Award on the same page they had the rules and submission guidelines on.

    GRAND PRIZE: “The Golden Knight” by K. D. Julicher

    FIRST RUNNERUP: “Phoenix for the Amateur Chef” by Scott Huggins

    SECOND RUNNERUP: “The Girl with No Name” by Travis Heermann

    So I guess I can go and put mine up on DA.

      1. *pouty face* now I’m even more sure my e-mail didn’t go through.

        (Just kidding).

        I’m just going to have to write a lot more shorts so I can do a collection. The shorts I already have don’t fit together into ANY kind of reasonable order.

        I can at least console myself that I got Larry to read something of mine. Although I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse that he didn’t know it was mine.

    1. Went to Larry’s first panel last night at OSfest. Travis Heerman was also on that panel (Character building). They didn’t realize they were connected (Larry being a judge on the short stories, Travis being a finalist) and they talked about this. Man, Larry is a great guy.

    2. Saw that yesterday. Now I just need to decide where I want to go with mine, now that it’s mine again…

      And, as Shadowdancer said: Congrats to the winners! I look forward to reading the winning story!

      1. One of the other non-winners is available via Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MAYJCVM

        Not a bad story IMO.

        On Sat, Aug 2, 2014 at 4:32 PM, Monster Hunter Nation wrote:

        > Eamon J. Cole commented: “Saw that yesterday. Now I just need to > decide where I want to go with mine, now that it’s mine again… And, as > Shadowdancer said: Congrats to the winners! I look forward to reading the > winning story!” >

  12. So, I’m hearing on Twitter that the 2014 Hugos have content guidelines for speeches, for the first time ever. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that they feel the need to control speech, but they aren’t exactly proving Larry and Company wrong by such a move.

    1. More likely they’re afraid one of the SJW winners will make the mistake of saying the kinds of things in front of a recording device that they normally only say in tweets to each other.

      1. That or they’re afraid Larry or Vox will win, and say something that triggers the SJWs in the audience. All those mobility scooters getting jammed in the doorway trying to flee … somebody might get hurt.

    2. What are they going to say? “Damn you, SAD PUPPIES!! Damn your Tea Party white militia all to hell!!”

      It’s not like they’ll even mention he who must not be mentioned other than all the time.

      What does that leave? “I’d like to thank all the non-binary marginalized PoC for their support while we go through this 5,000 year patriarchy phase into a future with fewer whites and stinking traditional families.”

  13. From a comment on the recent Tor review of Warbound:

    “I read the trilogy and found myself a bit surprised: I had thought that Correia disliked “preachy message fiction”. And yet it has a fair bit of message, particularly in the second book — the main antagonist embodies a collectivist philosophy, while the suicide-bomber dupe is a fairly perfect straw man for anti-capitalism. The portrayal of FDR is more than a bit on the preachy side as well.

    So why doesn’t this preaching make puppies sad?

    Is it somehow not preaching? (I’d be interested to know why not, since it certainly seems that way to me.) Is preaching okay when it’s messages Correia approves of? (Correia accuses people on the left of placing politics above fun. I’d be interested to know why, if this is the case, that’s not vile hypocrisy.) Perhaps there’s some other reason I’m not thinking of. (I’d be interested to know what it is.)”

    I found myself nodding along with this. I’d be curious to hear Larry’s thoughts. Also his thoughts in this regard about JC Wright’s Golden Age trilogy, which I would say is the most politically preachy science fiction I’ve read except maybe KS Robinson. (All stuff I enjoyed, btw, but I don’t have a problem with message fiction if it’s well done.)

    1. Larry’s replied to these kinds of comments before, and you pretty well sum up his responses with your last parenthetical.

      Story *first*, then message (if message is there at all). I’ll leave it to Larry and the rest of the Nation to elaborate beyond that.

      1. One of the things I liked most about the Hard Magic trilogy was how the bad guys had plausible – sometimes even noble – goals and reasons for behaving the way they did, and they made sense in the context of the story. Not just the Imperium, but the US government characters like J Edgar Hoover. And even the Grimnoir are capable of doing evil things in the service of what they believe to be right.

        In the Monster Hunter series, though it’s not hard to guess where the author’s sympathies lie, the federal employees Myers, Franks and Jefferson turn out to be more complex and heroic than you might expect. And the private sector folks aren’t always admirable – see PT Consulting or Briarwood.

        So I’ve never felt that I was being bashed over the head with a political tract or manipulated into supporting a POV while reading one of Larry’s books.

    2. Easy answer, and I believe other comments on that page already covered it too, but I never said not to write message fiction, I simply said Story First.

      The whole bit where I have forbidden message fic is just a narrative my detractors made up to try to make me out to be a hypocrite. Hur hur, you want to see how dumb Larry Correia is!? He said NO MESSAGE FIC EVAR but then had politics in a book! BURN THE HERETIC. Well, I could see their point, if I’d ever actually said that. But really, it is sort of like all the horrible homophobic/sexist/racist things that Straw Larry said to outrage the Guardian, in that is imaginary.

      How about this? Feel free to go through any of my blog posts and find where I ever said fiction couldn’t have a message. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

      See. Told you so. That’s because I have consistently said entertainment, story, and reader enjoyment comes ahead of message. Even in my super controversial response to Tor.com’s gender binary bullshit, and in the followup to Hines, I very specifically said story first, and even talked about how the greats had message, but they always put entertaining their readers ahead of any VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE. My enemy is message first, as in the ham fisted, boring, pushy, pretentious (albeit award winning) stuff that turns readers off. I do believe that if my detractors ever actually read anything I wrote they’d find that I was very specific about that, and I’m pretty sure your “Done Well” at the end got highlighted, spotlighted, and underlined.

      If you really want to know how your story shakes out on the scale of Message vs. Entertainment, just see what the reader reaction is. Not the critics, not a tiny group of like minded people who vote in awards, but the actual public that buys your stuff and pays your bills. If you’ve annoyed the shit out of a giant segment of your audience, you’ve failed. If you’ve annoyed a handful of people who are staunch opponents of your message, who cares? (FDR putting people in concentration camps? Outlandish!) It is a scale of sliding entertainment value, where things like ending a default that 99.9% of your potential readers default to, thereby annoying the shit out of them without any sort of valid entertainment/story reasons to justify that decision is just plain stupid.

      1. Got to be a little contrary here.

        One of my biggest problems with the Marvel Comic theme of “mutants = gays = victims” is that Marvel mutants are actually dangerous.

        The Marvel mutants include people who can crush submarines by waving their hands, people who can call up a hurricane, people who can blast holes in wall with a look, etc.

        Keeping a close eye on their activities (and knowing who they are) can be seen as quite reasonable.

        Larry’s FDR had better reasons to “keep an eye on Actives” even to the point of possibly putting them into camps than our history’s FDR had for putting Japanese Americans into camps.

        Doesn’t mean that it’s the “right thing to do” but there are aspects of reasonability to the idea.

        How does a society deal with people with super-human powers especially when some of the super beings have used their powers wrongly?

        How many of us would love to have such powers and have “little lists of people who won’t be missed”.

        Mind you, I like Larry’s Actives. [Smile]

      2. @Paul

        Fundamentally, it boils down to how we deal with people of different capacities. There are two strategies: A: restrain the people with abilities dangerous to society, B: incentivize people with dangerous abilities to use them for society’s benefit. The Active/Mutant/Telepath with a personal power beyond that of normal humans is a much more understandable target for control. We can sympathize with the impulse because they are so personally dangerous.
        However, in the end, the same principle, and power disparity, applies between the armed and unarmed citizen, those born wealthy, those born more clever, athletic or charismatic… People have always been born with varying talents and desires, and the trick has always been how to get people to make the most of what they have toward good. It’s the choice of which strategy to take, restraint or incentive, which defines what kind of culture you have. Restraint tends toward collective punishment and broad restrictions, loosing the majority of benefit those with extraordinary ability can give. Incentive exposes you to abuse of extraordinary ability and makes a culture vulnerable to envy.

        1. No argument Andrew.

          IMO one big difference between this crowd and the Leftish crowd, is that we’re more likely to accept that there can be no perfect/good answer to these sort of questions.

      3. Yeh, but the catch is that even if you adopt restriction, you still have to deal with abuse of power and envy.

      4. I’d say that if you’ve made a boatload of money on a political screed masquerading as a science fiction novel, then your name is Ayn Rand. The strategy has worked at least once, but it doesn’t seem like the way to bet.

        I ate up Warbound and I spent a year on Atlas Shrugged.

      5. It IS plain stupid to annoy the readers who default to human, because that is what the best SFF has and still does, contrary to the lies about classic SF spread about as white racism that excluded women, gays and non-whites, even made fun of them in its fiction.

        I don’t see this as a battle of message vs. non-message or conservative vs. liberal but identity fic vs. non-identity fic. Classic SFF defaulted to human, not white, as is asserted. It also defaulted to heterosexual, a thing determined by Mother Nature, not an ideology. It also defaulted to male-centric adventure fiction, a thing also determined by 5,000 years of human history, not a supremacist patriarchy. Gaugamela is real – Kameron Hurley’s Hugo nominated delusion called “We Have Always Fought” is pure BS yet slurped up like Kool-Aid by radical PC idiots. Not by me and not by reality.

        I know even our radical feminists agree with that last though they claim otherwise. With all their pie-charts they never scream for diversity in Vet’s Hospitals nor attack the draft board as a stupid patriarchy. That means the three legs of the tripod our feminists dug in like ticks in SFF’s core institutions promote are all lies that won’t work even in fiction.

        Damien Walter can say the future of SF is gay and MacFarlane can call for an end of the 96% and Jim Hines and all the rest can cry for diversity and women Julius Caesars but at the end of the day no one wants to read identity fiction that defies even fiction but supremacists.

        ESRaymond is right: this is not a fight the anti-PC crowd can lose. The reason it seemed so just recently is that everything seemed to be vetted through SFF’s intersectionally dominated institutions, which is like putting Jewish writers through a KKK publishing house. No more. As so many have predicted, writers and readers are going to do an end around and reform elsewhere. They already have. No one wants to be slapped around as a privileged woman-hating homophobic racist while they’re reading.

        The hell with the SFWA and their non-genre racial and gender revenge fantasies about the straight white colonialist male. Like was said in “Aliens”: “We are LEAVING.”

      6. @Paul

        Gah, the X-Men and the mutant=gay analogy. I got so fed up with the anviliciousness of that message and the X-Men’s utter, flaming hypocrisy and ineptitude that I worked the mutant/human friction into my Avengersverse game just to see it done right.

        The X-Men analogy that they’ve always been aiming for, unconsciously or not, is mutant=SJW (at least that was the case up until about a decade ago when I threw up my hands in despair and quit reading the x-books entirely). Mutants are portrayed as more advanced/evolved/enlightened, just like the SJWs fancy themselves to be. Anyone who questions that philosophy is a racist strawman (Kelly, Gyrich, Stryker, etc.). Any discussion of mutant/human relations is carried out between mutants, and the humans who make up 99% of the planet’s population are not invited (nor even consulted). The superpowers are the wish fulfillment overcompensation of a bunch of weakling twerps who think they deserve power without having to actually work for it.

      7. One of my biggest problems with the Marvel Comic theme of “mutants = gays = victims” is that Marvel mutants are actually dangerous.

        The Marvel mutants include people who can crush submarines by waving their hands, people who can call up a hurricane, people who can blast holes in wall with a look, etc.
        ————————–

        This is one of the (many) things that ticked me off about Marvel’s “Civil War” event a few years back. There are some very good reasons to consider things like registering individuals with dangerous superpowers. But the storyline ignored all of that in favor of making the pro-registration side look like a bunch of bullies.

        I’ve heard that originally the storyline was supposed to be more balanced, but a few of the authors went off the rails. But that’s just third-hand information.

        Another item that I’ve noted is that Marvel has identified a particular gene, called the “X-gene”, as something that all mutants share. Given real world access to genetic testing of fetuses, and easy real world access to abortion…

        I suspect Marvel’s going to ignore that potential storyline, however…

        1. Marvel touched on it once in IIRC X-Factor. Some doctor developed a way to test fetuses to see if they were Mutants and X-Factor had to protect the doctor from the “bad guys”. End of the story, the doctor is dead and his method was lost. Lost because Quicksilver wanted it lost. His daughter wasn’t a Mutant and Quicksilver would have “pushed for her abortion” if he had known she wasn’t a Mutant. Since he loved his daughter anyway, he couldn’t let the secret be known.

      8. The “mutants + gay” analogy falls apart because gays just are treated very well in the Western world now. And I don’t think Marvel wants to do a story about the Iranian mullahs executing mutants. That would be racist! /sarc

      9. That’s funny; I don’t remember ever seeing *any* of them say “don’t bother writing a good story.” Alex’s piece certainly didn’t; I read it twice.

  14. Paul, it sounds as if the storyline ignored what should be pretty basic stuff for the Marvel Universe. The so-called “X gene” was mapped back during the ’90s, iirc. And detecting genetic-based problems in kids is something that’s now done with modern real-world technology. It’s possible that the story took place before the latter became possible (I’m not familiar with it), but in the current Marvel universe it should merely be a matter of combining two separate known things. Or in other words, any major hospital should be quite capable of carrying out the necessary fetal testing.

    1. One of the silly things about the Marvel-verse mutant programs is that they’re always trying to *eliminate* mutancy. If I lived in that universe I’d want to see the source of mutant powers discovered *so I could get some for myself!*. Who wouldn’t want to be able to fly, or leap tall buildings in a single bound, or regenerate from any injury?

      Wanting to eliminate mutations is like wanting to eliminate good eyesight or high IQs.

      1. On one early episode of the Highlander TV series, Duncan recovers from a bad injury. The doctor notices, drugs him, and kidnaps him in order to discover the medical miracle. Granted, the doctor was in now way a “good guy”, but this seems like something even the good guys would want to know.

        Wolverine heals from everything… instead of doing everything possible to learn the secret of healing all wounds and repairing all injuries and living forever, we’re going to replace all his bones and turn him into a weapon?

        1. Most popular media suffers from a “nothing ever really changes” mentality. See every episode of Star Trek ever, where they discover/invent a miracle technology and then never mention it again.

          I didn’t much care for _The Authority_ comic series, but at least one of the sub-stories in it involved discovering the sources of the powers of super-heroes, and commercializing them. I don’t remember the details though.

      2. There was a Next Generation episode in which they accidentally make several characters younger, until they turn into children. They eventually figure out how to reverse the process.

        Nothing is ever said about this again.

      3. “Don’t give the SJWs any more bright ideas, Jabrwok, please oh please.”

        You mean they’re not already taking Harrison Bergeron as an instruction manual?

        “Most popular media suffers from a “nothing ever really changes” mentality. See every episode of Star Trek ever, where they discover/invent a miracle technology and then never mention it again.”

        DS9 was less prone to this, since they actually had a plot that had to go somewhere. (There are probably instances, but some plot threads get dropped in every long-running series.)

      4. TV Tropes, of course, has tropes for this. “Reed Richards is Useless” describes how, despite the fact that Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four can open portals to distant worlds and construct amazing devices, he can’t seem to do much more practical things, such as cure cancer. And there’s the related villain trope, “Cut Lex Luthor a Check”, which ties into the fact that most super villains could earn a lot more money selling their toys than they could using their toys to, say, rob a bank.

        1. “most super villains could earn a lot more money selling their toys than they could using their toys to, say, rob a bank.”

          There was an episode of *Phineas and Ferb* (*Backyard Hodge Podge*, to be exact) where they did that one: Dr Doofenshmirtz started receiving patent royalty checks for an invention that was being used in eve examinations, and it upset him that his success was coming from good rather than evil.

  15. FWIW, according to Dave McCarty (who sits on Loncon’s concom), this years Hugo Awards vote was the largest it’s ever been for a Hugo ballot.

    He lists it as 3587 votes cast for the regular Hugos (all time record), and 1307 votes cast for the retro-Hugo’s (not a record, but “respectable”).

    While the nominations kerfuffle undoubtedly contributed to the higher turnout , I’d like to point out that Loncon 3 is currently on track to be the largest Worldcon ever; 6k-7k attending certainly, 10k not outside the realm of possibility.

  16. Stumbled across something via Google you might find amusing when you wake up after a few days of post-GenCon hibernation, Larry.

    Orbit Books put up a congratulations note to Leckie for winning (http://www.orbitbooks.net/2014/08/17/hugo-goes/) which now reads like this:

    “Our heartfelt congratulations go to Ann and to all of the other finalists.”

    However, via Google cache (http://bit.ly/1oHFKln), you can see it used to read like so:

    “Our heartfelt congratulations to Ann and to all of the finalists – Mira Grant, Charles Stross, Larry Correia (for the BRILLIANT Warbound series, published by Baen Books) and Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson.”

    Can’t imagine why Orbit would choose to edit down that message, would you? 🙂

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