Hugo Aftermath Post

The Hugo awards were announced last night at LonCon. Congratulations to the winners.

As expected I came in last place for best novel. The surprising part was that I was originally 4th, but then Australian voting rules kicked in, the last place is removed and the votes are recalculated. It is a weird system, and basically what it does is settles on the least disliked candidate as winner. I thought for sure the outraged SJW contingent would make sure I was dead last from the start, but as I’ve seen over the last few weeks from reviewers, many honest reviewers were surprised that it was actually a really good book.  

As for the rest of the Sad Puppies slate, they did about what we expected. The shocking one was Toni Weisskopf was actually 1st for best editor, but after the Australian thing lost. Too bad, because Toni is truly an amazing editor, but I’ve heard that Buchannan is really talented, so good for her. Brad had a pretty solid showing. Most of the others came in last or close. Vox came in 6th out of 5. (we actually had a side bet about which one of us would do worse because he figured he was far more hated than I was, and he won that bet).

Now I’ve got to respond to some of the stuff I’ve seen online. I’m playing catch up because I got in from GenCon late last night (I was informed of the awards results in the Indy airport waiting to board) and I’m still exhausted and brain dead (It was a crazy busy con, but that’s a whole different blog post).

First off, some people are upset and saying there was fraud. I understand your disappointment, but I truly don’t think so. In all of my dealings with LonCon they’ve been totally professional and honest. On things like Toni’s, yes, that is confusing as hell, but that is how the Australian system works. One of the original goals of Sad Puppies was to test the Hugo nomination process just because there had been allegations of “lost” noms in prior, and as a retired auditor, I’m a sucker for statistical analysis. SP1 gathered data, and SP2 gave me comparisons. I saw zero indication of fraud. I’ve only been awake for an hour, so I’ve only skimmed the new numbers, but they appear to have shaken out about where expected. So don’t get mad at LonCon, they did their job (and as I can attest, getting accused of fraud without evidence is annoying as hell).

Next, there is a whole lot of gloating. As an example, here are some excerpts from John Scalzi’s twitter feed.

John Scalzi @scalzi 
I’m not going to lie. I’m going to be THRILLED to snarkread the whiny “I didn’t want it anyway” nonsense that will squirt forth tomorrow.

John Scalzi @scalzi
WE ARE GOING TO MAKE THE HUGO SLATE A REFERENDUM ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE FICTION (loses) THE HUGOS DON’T MATTER ANYWAY

John Scalzi @scalzi  
SHUT UP I AM NOT CRYING IT’S THAT LITTLE FLECKS OF GUNPOWDER FELL INTO MY EYEBALLS SOMEONE GET ME A FLAMING SWORD SO I CAN FLICK THEM OUT

John Scalzi @scalzi  
WHO IS CALLING ME PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE I AM ALL AGGRESSIVE DON’T YOU SEE THIS HUGE GUN I HAVE WITH ME AT ALL TIMES (breaks down, sobbing)

John Scalzi @scalzi
AND NOW I WILL IGNORE THE HUGOS AGAIN UNTIL NEXT YEAR WHEN MY FEELINGS OF PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE INADEQUACY ANGRILY WELL UP ONCE MORE

John Scalzi @scalzi
I’VE LEARNED MY LESSON AND MY LESSON IS THAT WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH PATENT RACIST SHITBAGGERY ON OUR SLATE WHAT THAT WAS GOOD WRITING MAN

John Scalzi @scalzi
ITS PROOF THAT ALL THE FEMINISTS NEED TO DO TO WIN AWARDS IS WRITE BETTER STORIES ACCORDING TO THE JUDGEMENT OF THE FANS SHEEESH

John Scalzi @scalzi
I NEVER WANTED THE AWARD THAT’S WHY I’VE WHINED LIKE A KICKED DOG ABOUT IT FOR A COUPLE YEARS RUNNING.

Yeah… I think Scalzi still might be a touch bitter for that time I publically beat him like a rented mule.

I do enjoy the constantly moving goal posts of the perpetually outraged, like how Sad Puppies somehow turned into a crusade for racism/sexism/homophobia in their heads. I never expected to win the Hugo. My stated goals this entire time was to get some political untouchables onto their sainted slate, so that they would demonstrate that there was serious political bias in the awards.

Just like how the Guardian crowd sourced a witch hunt to comb through everything I’ve ever written to find examples of me being racist, sexist, or homophobic (and sadly turned up nothing), I’d invite my doubters to comb through anything I’ve written on this subject to find where I ever had any goals other than exposing bias in the system. Put Sad Puppies into the search engine above to see just how serious I took this.

Seriously guys, when I was a corporate accountant I got paid a lot of money to do statistical analysis of complex financial systems, so I’m fairly good at the cipherin’ and gazintas. I predicted that the SJWs would mobilize to stop the untouchable barbarians, so I got some barbarians through the gates, and the SJWs mobilized like I said they would… And I’m supposed to be sad about that for some reason, why?

I lost last night, but I won back in April the other side had a come apart and started lobbing absurd obviously false allegations about me, when editors from major publishing houses told their followers to vote based on politics rather than quality, and when the USA Today and the Washington Post picked up the story.

https://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/24/an-explanation-about-the-hugo-awards-controversy/

I got to give a little victory speech every time I had an author thank me for doing this. As much as the rejoicing Twitter crowd isn’t going to want to hear this, I heard from a lot of authors, from all over the spectrum of politics, fame, and success. I put a target on my head so the world outside one narrow clique of fandom could see what awaited them if they strayed too far from the path of approved goodthink. I simply showed what some of them knew and many suspected. Shockingly enough there are plenty of authors who don’t like the idea of having angry mobs sabotaging their careers and slandering them if they exercise their free speech in an unapproved manner.

Here is a fun one from last night. One of my fans caught this one and put it on Twitter which I read when I got off the plane. Orbit Books posted congratulations to the winners, and how they’d published in one way or another 4 of the 5 nominees (you get one guess which one of us wasn’t) and they wrote this:

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. Here is the cached version:  http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1PlJ5Jf0XigJ:www.orbitbooks.net/2014/08/17/hugo-goes/+&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

And here is the current version where that bit about Warbound being good was deleted: http://www.orbitbooks.net/2014/08/17/hugo-goes/  I just hope that poor writer didn’t get fired for accidentally admitting I don’t suck!

I didn’t watch the award ceremony, luckily for me I was at the gate reading a John C. Wright novel at the time. The most important thing is that menace Jonathan Ross was prevented from making any fat jokes! I heard it was mostly crying and social justice, but I saw on FB that one of the most telling presenter quotes of the evening was something along the line of “Many of our winners have gone on to be very successful, well… not financially… but…”.  Yeah, that sums up a lot right there.

So if it makes the SJWs fe
el better to imagine that I’m all broken up and sobbing because everything happened like I publically predicted it would months ago, feel free to gloat. After all, these are the same folks who have no problem imagining my sexism, racism, homophobia, bigotry, spousal abuse, vote stuffing, and rape apology, so what are a few tears?

EDIT: Just saw this, Dave Freer gets it. http://madgeniusclub.com/2014/08/18/a-different-modest-proposal/ 

Various people have sounded off about the Hugos – My only real comment is ‘Pyrrhus’. Look, the point being made by Larry Correia about the Hugos was the award was not for the best SF/Fantasy of the year, but for the most popular among a small left to far-left bunch of the WorldCon attendees. What he did was to make make this proposition (now established as fact) known very widely and publicly. As the reading population, logic states, is a reflection of the demographics of the total population, and maybe 10-15% of that group could count as left wing. Stretch to 25% who will put up with it… still leaves 75% who are unrepresented, for whom the Hugo Award was at best meaningless or actively signaled a book they would not want to read. Now, obviously, even if you personally are further left than Pol Pot or Kim il from-too-much-caviar or Stalin, as an author signalling that 75% do not want to read your book is not a win. By Larry making this bias obvious, by having to recruit nominations, despite being a very very popular author… The previous Hugo winners, the current nominees, the normal greying crew of voters, the WorldCon organizers and the Hugo organizers were caught in a trap. The only way to win (to establish that this was NOT true, there was no left wing bias) was to LOSE. To have a right wing, (or several of them) author (or editor) win (no matter how good the various proponents were. It was like an international road-race which somehow only Germans won… once this was publicized, even if the best runner was German – if he won, your race’s credibility was in the toilet, now and always) That would re-establish the credibility of the award as essentially picking ‘best’ rather than left wing flavor of the month lose and 75% of your sales. It was kind of a lose or lose badly equation for the left wing of sf/fantasy, lose and have a Damian in tears surrounded by exploding heads, or ‘win’ and lose badly by destroying your credibility. The best option would have been to divide and rule and get behind say Toni Weisskopf and Brad Torgersen. But that would take brains.

GenCon 2014 Report
Geeky Hobbies: Still Cheaper than 3gun

246 thoughts on “Hugo Aftermath Post”

  1. Larry, I hope you will find the strength to carry on despite all of this. I’m sure that strength is located somewhere in your very large house. Perhaps your lovely wife and wonderful children can help you search for it?

  2. Thank god that idiotic dino crap didn’t win the Hugo to go with the Nebula. I like to think the Evil League of Evil fans were enough to shoot it down.

    1. If I were an SF writer, my love, I’d write a good SF story, one that people want to read. But I’m not, so here’s this shitty little ditty instead. Plus “F” the white man.

      1. I suggest a new nickname for Scalzi: Janus. It’s got a J and an S, he’s two-faced, and of course the last four letters sum him up perfectly. 🙂

      2. …I was going to make a comment about Scalzi only driving away potential readers with his bafoonery, but I cannot possibly top gicing him the nickname of Janus.

      3. I regret that I really enjoyed OMW. I even liked GB. After that the series when into the toilet and his silliness since then has kept me from shelling out $ for his newer stuff.

        Did he really tweet all caps? If so, what a little man he is.

      4. Larry, you need to write a western or genre bash mixing in some western. Just so there can be a Mule named “Barefoot” who has been branded “Beat me like you rented me!”

        The line about your previous Twitter encounter with Scalzi + soda = I’ll be cleaning the keyboard a while.

      5. Mr. Chupik:

        Good suggestion. I read a howlingly funny one-star review on Amazon one time, part of which disparaged the book in question for being insufficiently soft and absorbent. The reviewer was British, and used ‘Samantha Janus’ as rhyming slang for the body part in question.

        Maybe I shall take to calling Scalzi ‘Sammy’.

  3. Here is the comment I left at Orbit books:

    Dear Editors,

    Nice to see that you edited out Correia’s Warbound from the list, and the commentary about the book. Sadly (for you) the cached original article is now on the wayback machine (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1PlJ5Jf0XigJ:www.orbitbooks.net/2014/08/17/hugo-goes/+&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us) and your attempt to install approved speech codes and censorship is pretty apparent.

    Unless you apologize to Larry Correia, his fans, and to the writers who you unceremoniously edited, I will never work with your organization. I will never promote your organization. I will never work in conjunction with any organization that directly supports you. Enjoy standing next to Ozymandias.

    I would wish you well, but I really don’t think you would want me to, nor do I really care.
    Jason Bieber

    1. It looks like they moderated out your comment. When I just looked there were no comments on the article. Color me surprised….. Not.

  4. I think Scalzi’s chest-beating display was meant to show his “dominance” over Larry for the SJW crowd. To the rest of us, it looks like he did a little too much LDS. 😉

      1. He did try to warn me that my actions were making all Mormons look bad. I asked him if that lame ass concern trolling bullshit ever worked on anyone or if he was just used to dealing with people who had no convictions. 🙂

      1. And today’s is almost worse:

        “RATIONALIZE YOUR HUMILIATING DEFEAT SOME MORE PLEASE IT GIVES ME THE TINGLES IN A DEEP AND PRECIOUS PLACE YES YES THAT’S IT”

        A few years ago, I would have never believed a major SF figure would behave so ridiculously in public. I was very naive back then.

    1. Star Trek 4 reference FTW!

      And of course that bings to mind the old joke: What ydo you get when you cross LSD with LDS? A high priest!

    2. The sad thing is, there were numerous opportunities for Scalzi to keep out of the fray and “stay classy” about the whole thing. However, he chose instead to wallow in snark and concern-trolling in order to posture for his corner of fandom. And that, I think, is the “dominance” he was shooting for: by demonstrating he can fling poo from one end of the intertubes to the other, he retains his “alpha” status over the rest of the perpetually outraged, poo-flinging SWPL monkeys that swell the ranks of the SJWs and GHHs.

      1. Actually, Scalzi’s twitter rants just reinforces the sore winner/loser trope that he’s become. He gets all shout-y when he thinks that the coast is clear, which is the response and actions of an intellectual coward.

        Plus, it’s hella projection. He’s afraid, because he knows he (and his) came close to losing. So, they have to goalpost shift and trumpet strumpet.

      2. I kind of thought he was setting up his excuses ahead of time, explaining how he will be posting sporadically while out on his book tour, and of course, shutting down comments before he left. This, with the Hugo announcements early into his trip.

        Could have been honest, but it is definitely convenient.

      3. > The sad thing is, there were numerous opportunities for Scalzi to keep out of the fray and “stay classy” about the whole thing.

        Oh, that was settled as soon as Larry asked Vox to be on the slate. Scalzi just loses it whenever Vox is involved.

  5. Well having gone through their proportional representation (P.R.) vote counting system I found the 1st place calculation made perfect sense to me – I will admit to being from Ireland which used P.R. for all elections except the yea or neigh constitutional amendments.

    However the vote counting for ranking of other places confused me greatly (2nd 3rd 4th)…

    1. The vote counting for positions after first place works just like the voting for first place, except that you eliminate any candidate who has already placed from the ballot, and start with the highest remaining candidate on your ballot. For example, if you voted A 1, B 2, C 3, No Award 4, and D 5, and then candidate B won after the initial count, when we start the counting for 2nd place, your vote for A still counts first; but if A is eliminated (by having fewer votes than any remaining candidate, we look at your ballot and say, “We’d ordinarily take B because it’s your second choice, but B already won, so now we move your vote to C, who is your next-highest choice.”

      After someone gets a majority for 2nd place, we start over again, but again, all candidates who have already placed are eliminated before starting the count.

      There is of course no reason to count for the absolute final position (sixth place in a normal five-candidate-plus-No-Award slate), because whoever loses the fifth-place election places sixth, being the only candidate left standing.

  6. I actually hadn’t realized the Hugos were this weekend. I was in the middle of the Nerd IronMan Triathlon of Pennsic, GenCon, DragonCon.  26 days of events in 39 days, and 100K people.  I thought about doing Chicago ComicCon as well, but I have to pack for DragonCon.

    Great to see Randall Munroe win a Hugo for “Time.” Very well deserved.  

    Larry and I were at the same signing table, and apparently, a lot of his Asian, black and female fans didn’t get the message from the white liberals about what a hater he is.

    Anyway I hope the LonCon attendees had as much fun at their little con as we did at Gamer Mardis Gras (GenCon), and will again at Nerd Mardis Gras (DragonCon).

  7. Well, I’ve read my last Scalzi book. Congratulations, Larry, on proving your point, and driving it home with a sledgehammer. So when’s the next Monster Hunter novel coming out? I’m jonesin’ here!! Take my money!!

  8. I have read one of Scalzi’s books. I didn’t hate it. But i won’t buy any more because i refuse to support someone who has so little grace, manners or sportsmanship. I used to think that Tweet was what little yellow birds did. Now I know. It’s what big strong Men do to show thier dominance.

    1. I read and enjoyed Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. I read the first sequel and enjoyed it as well. I read the third installment, and that was enough. I haven’t been tempted by any of his work since.

      Personally, I couldn’t care less if someone is a poor sport and has no grace or manners if their story is good. I don’t see my purchase of their books as an endorsement of their personality. I’m not paying money to hang out with them, I’m paying money to visit a world of make-believe, preferably with guys shooting each other, hitting things with swords, or blowing shit up with magic.

      I do draw a line eventually, however. The absence of anything written by Marion Zimmer Bradley on my bookshelf is testament to that.

      1. Yes, I enjoyed the first book as well. But then I reached the end of the trilogy, and realized the solution of the “good guys” was to simply claim the rest of the galaxy as their own. If you didn’t join their gang, and play by their “One True Way,” you were forbidden from colonizing any new worlds, and if you tried, the “good guys” would bomb your settlement. At that point I was done with Scalzi, long before I’d read what his politics were. Though I had a pretty good guess.

      2. The third installment was” LOLZ OBAMMMAAAA PEEEACE IN IWAK”

        It felt like he had completely forgotten where the plot and storyarcs were in the first two books, and it took so much bullshit to get to his “revised endgame” in the third book that it was so transparently about his politics, and how he forced it on his readers…….most of whom he gained in the first place from Instapundit.

        It was a giant slap in the face of the fans who made him and followed him, and all so that he could take over SFWA and bask in the egoist glory of the SJWs.

      3. Didn’t even manage to get all the way through Old Man’s War. Got about 2/3 through it and got bored. I was planning on finishing it some day, not so much now…

    2. He’s a good writer, but he hates me and would deny me the right to speak (at the least) if he had power. Money is power, and I can’t give him any more in good conscience. YMMV

  9. From Michael Z. Williamson as he’s being spamtrapped, or something :):

    I actually hadn’t realized the Hugos were this weekend. I was in the middle of the Nerd IronMan Triathlon of Pennsic, GenCon, DragonCon. 26 days of events in 39 days, and 100K people. I thought about doing Chicago ComicCon as well, but I have to pack for DragonCon.

    Great to see Randall Munroe win a Hugo for “Time.” Very well deserved.

    Larry and I were at the same signing table, and apparently, a lot of his Asian, black and female fans didn’t get the message from the white liberals about what a hater he is.

    Anyway I hope the LonCon attendees had as much fun at their little con as we did at Gamer Mardi Gras (GenCon), and will again at Nerd Mardi Gras (DragonCon).

    1. I don’t see Mike in my spam trap… Weird.

      It is true, we were at the same table. I had a long line and they were way more diverse a bunch than the Nebula’s Diversity Panel. 🙂

  10. So are the puppies still sad, or what?

    And how did Wendell take the verbal beating that Scalzi… nah, I can’t even type it with a straight face.

    G-d, what a little toad Scalzi can be.

    1. The puppies are laughing. The SJWs are like the Grinch: they think their pettiness could steal our happiness. But we’re still singing. Who knows, maybe Damien’s heart will grow three sizes one day . . .

  11. I’d boycott Scalzi for his little victory tantrum buuuuut…I’m already boycotting Scalzi for being a douche. At least the damn dinoporn short story didn’t win…

    Leckie can keep her Hugo; I’ll stick with my complete hardcover collections of WoT and MHIs, thank you very much.

    1. Why is Scalzi tacking out ranting screeds with his I assume opposable thumbs? It came off like a golden chain of stink. That’s unfortunate for the self-proclaimed Oscar Wilde of SFF.

      1. Oscar Wilde was a brilliant fantasy writer (Dorian Gray, ‘The Selfish Giant’ – need I say more?) who unfortunately got remembered by the Modernists as a gay man who made cheap wisecracks. I’d say that makes Oscar Wilde the Oscar Wilde of SFF. Maybe Scalzi can proclaim himself the Dorothy Parker.

      2. I guess what I meant is that Scalzi wipes his ass with handfuls of stinging centipedes and sandpapers his eyes every night after squirting lemon juice into them.

        I’m not sure why he’d do that though.

      1. I’d say it’s more his life. I’d bet money I’ve had 40 weeks, any one of which has been more eventful than any 10 year period in Scalzi’s entire life. As far as I can tell the source of the heady wisdom of his life has been a ride on a cruise ship. That’s gotta sting as you age.

    1. Maybe he spilled Coke on his Caps Lock key and can’t switch back to lowercase. If so, I can sympathize slightly, for my backspace key has gone pht the same way.

      Fortunately, I have a spare keyboard. You’d think a Big Name like him would be able to pony up the ten bucks for that.

  12. The funny thing about Scalzi’s comments is that he is either being deliberately stupid: Correia claims he won back in April and has no expectation to win tonight? IMMA JUST GOING TO IGNORE THAT AND MAKE FUN OF HIM FOR NOT WINNING!!1!

    Or… well, no, I don’t think he’s actually that unintelligent. I think he knows full well what the purpose of Sad Puppies was, but is trying SUPER HARD to show everyone that *we totes got reasons to gloats, you guys!* because, lets face it, Larry WAS proven right back in April- and repeatedly ever since.

    Every time a weenie takes to twitter to encourage all their fellow twits to not bother reading a certain author because of their super Bad-Think ways…

    Every time a whiner runs to their blog to tell his readers about the OMG SO MEAN YOU GUYS comment section in the Monster Hunter Nation…

    Every time a hack columnist implies that an author is guilty of racism/sexism/fartsism so his readers can feel good about NOT thinking for themselves and judging a person fairly…

    Every time that happens, somewhere out there, a puppy wags his widdle tail.

    1. Yeah, Scalzi “doesn’t care” so much about Larry’s Hugo slate that he posted a dozen gloaty all-caps Twitter rants about how much he didn’t care. OK, then.

      1. And a few weeks ago, the day his second TV show was announced, he declared that his first Twitter feud with Larry was nothing at all. Hmmm.

      2. [blockquote]And a few weeks ago, the day his second TV show was announced, he declared that his first Twitter feud with Larry was nothing at all. Hmmm.[/blockquote]

        It’s call know which side the bread is buttered on. While the detail is being hashed out, he has to be on his best behavior. Now that it’s done, there’s nothing to hold back his true feeling.

  13. Beautifully executed, Larry! You expose their bias, and they deny it. You get a few “pariahs” nominated. The propagandists have outrage spasms, duly circle the wagons to win, and celebrate by gloating about how they proved your point!

    And for anyone who’s depressed about the Hugo results, cheer up. The future belongs to those who win the marketplace; not awards. Jordan/Sanderson’s loss proved it. Just sit back and enjoy. It’s one hell of a ride.

    1. Well said. They sure are trying hard to squeeze a win out of this, aren’t they?

      I mean… we already won. Months ago. Sure, they can be silly if it makes them feel better. *You may have beaten us intellectually, but our clique of friends likes us more than they like you! SO THERE* //flounce//

  14. Larry posited that the overly-political denizens of the Worldcon cotillion would experience a dramatic amount of heartburn, should their award be “invaded” by uncouth outsiders. The denizens could not have responded any better even if you’d scripted them. They went directly to the political block playbook, and they have since been patting themselves on the back for being precisely what Larry said they were: narrow, closed, insular, and prone to identitarianism. I was happy to participate in Larry’s experiment. I think it worked beautifully. And I agree with him: Loncon was ever-gracious and professional in their handling of the entire thing. There may be some fans (cough, “fen” cough) who are stuck on stupid, but Loncon 3 was class.

    1. You nailed it. Sad Puppies definitively refuted any claim that the Hugos reward objective merit. Winning a Hugo means only that one’s book appeals to the tastes of a particular and rather small block of SFF fans–just like Larry has always said.

      Invasion is an apt metaphor. Leave the identitarians in peace to hold their conventions and give each other awards. The illusion that they represent fandom as a whole has been shattered. Their credibility is dead. You, Vox, and Larry gave them the ammunition; but they pulled the trigger themselves.

      Now back to entertaining people and selling books!

  15. I posted the following message to the Orbit site:

    “I notice the original post you put up had praise for Correia’s Warbound. But that was edited out in this later one. Might I ask why?”

    What’re the odds on it making it to the site? Anyone? Bueller?

      1. I didn’t really make it sound like anything at all. I posted the two links and you guys can draw whatever conclusion you want. The only leading thing I said was the bit about I hope the guy didn’t get fired, because come on, that’s just funny. After he gets tossed out the door we’ll hire him at the ELOE headquarters.

    1. I think you guys are barking up the wrong tree here.

      The original text “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.”

      reads to me like BRILLIANT was intended as total sarcasm and was written by someone who thinks the series is anything but. Why would they call out Larry’s books as brilliant, and not heap similar praise on the others? It’s difficult to be certain, since sarcasm often doesn’t come through well in writing.

      I think it was changed because cooler heads prevailed and told the original author that it made Orbit sound like an insufferable winner.

      If I had been in a decision making position at Orbit I would ordered the change.

  16. The Hugos and Sad Puppies 2 have come and gone, but the most important thing to remember is that at least a mixed race/native American author, a second generation latino immigrant, and a successful single Mom were shown their place. /sarc

      1. I recall people were also upset that Zoe Saldana wasn’t cast as a “person of color”. I’m guessing only white people can play green people or something… Honestly, still not sure what’s up with that. Guessing it’s just trolling?

      2. Hispanics must be visibly identifiable as Hispanic at all times. Perhaps Jennifer Lopez will remember that from now on.

        Also Zoe Saldana not only shouldn’t play a blue person or a green person, she also should not play a black person. These things make NPR very sad.

  17. Wow. That whole twit-feed thing hurt my eyes and killed a few brain cells. If I’d actually seen that on Twitter, I would’ve unfollowed whoever did that because they appear to be insane and who needs more insanity thrust at them these days. So I went and checked (because I almost never use Twitter these days) and sure enough, at some point long long ago, I had followed that screaming meemee. Error rectified and life is once again mellow here on my little acre of happy. Thanks, Larry. Now I have to go kill some fictional people.

    1. The end of the sequence ends with “I am now done channeling Angry Rationalizing Hugo Losers.”

      So in other words, Scalzi believes that he is parodying the behavior of Larry and Vox. Where he is getting the gun stuff is beyond me. The part that might make a bit of sense to a bystander is the bit about why conduct two sad puppy campaigns if Larry doesn’t really care about the Hugo?

      I sure hope that proving points about the Hugo being a popularity contest isn’t the whole thing. I want to see a permanent widening of the voter base. Yes it is a popularity contest. Is that bad? Imagine if it were a juried award? Who do you suppose would get on that jury? It would be GHHpalooza.

  18. Larry,

    I plan to award you with the George Washington Award for many years to come. I am listening to Spellbound now, and both it and Hard Magic are hands down the best audibooks I have ever listened to. Warbound is already bought and waiting. This month I bought MHI 4 and MHI 5 (already have the 1-3 omnibus) and I’m looking forward to listening to them.

    I am having a blast listening to your stories. So thank you for writing them.

  19. Well I was down at Worldcon (aka Loncon3). I was only down on the Saturday and even than it wasn’t for all day. Mainly for mechanical and some personal reasons, but it was fun and I’m glad I went.

    Nice atmosphere, lot of people in costume, lot of nice stuff in the dealers room, lot of very nice stuff in the art show and a nice fan room. I only made it to one panel, cover art in YA fiction, which was interesting. At least I now know that the expression “Philosophers Stone” translates into Danish as “The Stone of the Wise.”

    I thought it was very well organised, check-in could IMHO anyway be used as an example of “how-to.” Though one negative I heard about was that some programme items were in rooms far too small for the item i.e. fans had to be turned away.

    Demographically it was fairly mixed, okay maybe more old than young, but not so much that youngsters looked out of place. And if you do see greys(Note, lower case g) at an SF con, or any other sort of event, it just means that some people have been enjoying this sort of event for a long time.

    Okay my observations on Larry’s post:

    1. Anyone making accusations of cheating without any evidence; not classy.

    2. John Scalzi’s comments; well hopefully they were tongue-in-cheek. But if not, then not classy.

    But . . .

    3. He does have a point, the Hugos are decided by the votes of the fans. True, not every fan in the world, just those fans who made the effort to turn up at Worldcon and paid good money for the privilege.

    And I think everyone who voted at the Hugos (I wasn’t eligible) voted for what they thought was the best entrant in each category and not what was the most PC. (Well I’d like to think so.)

    That said your politics/beliefs/ideals/experience do shape your tastes e.g. I’m guessing that a practicing Christian who is a big CS Lewis fan is, probably, going to have a hard time warming to the works of Phillip Pullman.

    Anyway the world will keep on turning and books will keep on being read, and while I was not eligible to vote in the Hugos, I have in a small way voted with my wallet.

    1. “The fans.” Worldcon is 1/10th the size of GenCon or DragonCon and not even 1/20th the size of SDCC or SLCC. Hell, Indy’s first year Comic Con was 3X the size. Most city comic, anime, steampunk or media cons are bigger.

      Worldcon stopped being relevant around 1993, when the type of people who attend dismissed the DragonCon NASFiC bid as “A comic convention, not REAL sci fi!” (I quote more than one BNF.)

      If you survey D*C or CC attendees, 80% of them have never heard of the Hugo, 80% couldn’t name it if you told them what it was, and 95% would have no idea how it was tabulated.

      Quite honestly, I no longer pay any attention to when or where it is, that it still exists, or what they do.

      I spent an hour helping a friend at GenCon at his T shirt booth—actually, he had two booths, totalling $10,000 in outlay. He doesn’t bother with literary cons anymore. With few exceptions they’re old, stodgy and have no money.

      Worse, they insist that SF is only books–not movies, not comics, not games, not phone apps and only certain art.

      Time to ignore them and leave them behind.

      1. “95% would have no idea how it was tabulated.”

        I didn’t either. Someone had to link me to a website that explained the process after I saw the PDF of the vote tabulation.

      2. Sort of aimed at Mike; I was at LonCon and was pleasantly surprised to see Hawk Wargames there. They make Dropzone Commander, a cool tabletop miniatures wargame that I reviewed for Miniature Wargames magazine, and I was very flattered when they mentioned they liked my article on Steve Jackson Games Ogre, and then proceeded to tell me I wrote good articles. It was therefore heartening to hear at the end of WorldCon that they had done good, and that it had been worth their while to attend. Awesome I say. Comics were very thin on the ground, with only graphic novels in any great number for sale, with the Foglio’s in attendance selling Girl Genius being a highlight.

        As a big media fan I would tend to agree that the WorldCon focuses on SF literature, but there again the foundations were built on written SF, so bravo for keeping true to their core beliefs and mission, rather than trying to please everyone. There is room in this world for all types of SF fandom, not just literary fandom, and I rather have the choice of going to a con knowing what it’s all about, rather than going to one that tries to pander to all segments and fails at pleasing any.

        As an aside, interestingly Nine Worlds con promoted itself as having a wider remit, but the first one had a literary stream that was oversubscribed, and by that I mean the rooms were packed and people were standing in the aisles. I only mention this to show that the written form attracts a lot of people, and having a convention that focuses on the written form is not a bad thing, but a good thing.

        The other thing LonCon did well was the art show, and Chris Foss was there. Also, the costume fans were out in force too. Did I mention Chris Foss was there? Not to forget to mention other great artists too, but Chris Foss.

        As for movies and TV show there were panels galore on this stuff, and real rocket scientists talking about their work; Skylon boss Alan Bond presented in the main auditorium about what they’ve been doing and how they are progressing. Single stage to orbit shuttle guys. How cool is that? Cooler than a cool thing.

        The highlight for me was being on a panel with Joe Haldeman on Military SF: Continuity and Change with Myke Cole as the moderator. Even more awesome he and his wife Gay Haldeman came up and told me how much they appreciated my input into the panel. Joe and Gay Haldeman, how awesome is that? So WorldCons do have lots of things to offer, as long as you remember books and writing come first, because that is the remit of the World Science Fiction Society.

        I would add it’s a convention run by fans for fans, and if you want to change stuff then all you have to do is put your money where your mouth is and step up to the plate. And BTW Larry, a lot of what might be described as SMOFs would have been happy to have seen you at the convention; don’t confuse volume of voices with the reality that the fans like writers of books.

        1. Oh totally. When I’m talking about the perpetually outraged I know that they’re one extremely loud clique, not all of fandom (though they like to think they are).

      3. That’s sad. Being into science-fiction and not knowing what a Hugo or a Nebula is? 

        Hmmm . . . actually I hope it is a sign of the awards irrelevance and not general ignorance. I mean these same Hugo-challenged people at D*C or GC could tell you Heinlein was? Or Larry Niven? Or Harlan Ellison? Or George RR Martin? “Oh, the guy who does the tie-in novels?” –eg-

        And yes I realise that I am getting close to the sort of intellectual snobbery that I’ve come across that “media” fans aren’t really into SF. Okay, some of this has been a bit of good natured joshing, but some of it has had a rather nasty edge to it. 🙁

        Mind you some trufans won’t acknowledge anything existing outside the works of Phillip K Dick . . .

        But having said that I have come across some shocking examples of ignorance amongst “media” SF fans. “E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith? Never hear of him!” -rolleyes-

        Maybe written SF is a minority interest these days . . . but I think ashley858 said it better than I could. 🙂

        And always remember, in the beginning was the –written- word. 

      4. Well obviously if you are at a point where Worldcon, or regional SF con is too small to be worth your time as a vendor, I can’t argue with that. Congratulations.

        I game frequently, but I don’t really want to go to a gaming convention, where nearly all of the events are game sessions. I game locally. One great thing about the Gencon I did visit was the huge display of original cover art from all of the artists who did the gaming books I grew up with. The huge size of Gencon does make doing that practical.

        I don’t particularly care if GenCon is 10 times bigger than a Worldcon when a Worldcon is big enough to keep 10 programming tracks running in parallel.

        The Worldcon dealer’s room may be smaller but it’s still pretty darned big.

        To the best of my knowledge, owners of Aeorspace Companies don’t turn up at GenCon to discuss their projects. Cool stuff happens at Worldcon, and other regional SF cons that are more or less modeled after Worldcon. Watching Connie Willis trying to play Just A Minute at Lonestar Con was priceless.

        I went to a couple gaming panels at Lonestar Con. There were also comic and TV and film events. Yes I suppose that it was more heavily weighted toward written SF, but I’m OK with that. I like written SF and most of the SF that I’ve encountered that was more substantial than a shiny setting for explosions was written SF.

      5. ” I mean these same Hugo-challenged people at D*C or GC could tell you Heinlein was? Or Larry Niven? Or Harlan Ellison? Or George RR Martin? “Oh, the guy who does the tie-in novels?” –eg-”

        I love Heinlein, but in all fairness, those Scribner’s juveniles are 50-60 years old. Quite a few voracious readers are unfamiliar with Heinlein. I’ve read one E.E. Smith book. I don’t have plans for more. I expect everyone has heard of George R.R. Martin, but at this point that is more because of TV.

        Kids these days are reading other people more. That’s what happens.

      6. @knazlek – The point I was getting at with ”I mean these same Hugo-challenged people at D*C or GC could tell you Heinlein was? Or Larry Niven? Or Harlan Ellison? Or George RR Martin? “Oh, the guy who does the tie-in novels?” was did they not know what the Hugos where because they were “irrelevant” or because they didn’t know anything.

        The depth of ignorance of some people can be a bit scary e.g. some people thinking that Larry was ripping off X-Men in the grimnoir series. –sigh-

        Disclaimer: no I am not trying to insinuate that anyone who goes to a gaming con etc is a numpty loser. I’ve been to gaming cons too.

        2nd Disclaimer: ignorance is not the same as stupidity and it certainly isn’t the same as being a bad person. A colleague of mine, back in the nineties, who was a lovely lady and had a degree in astronomy was blissfully unaware that the RAF had –back then anyway- VTOL capable aircraft.

        3rd Disclaimer: just because I think something is important to know doesn’t mean that everyone else has to think it’s important. Or even that, on some objective scale, it actually is important.

        As to people’s reading habits moving on; yep I guess that’s the nature of the things. And there is an awful lot of good new stuff out there.

        And SF is a genre that can date very badly. Technology, attitudes and science itself move on e.g. the crew of a science station on the darkside of Mercury are stunned when a new arrival is a “dame,” but she wins them around with her wizard slide-rule skills. 😉

        But it’s nice to have a sense of history, to know who Gary Gyjax was and that before H.G. Wells table-topped.

        I know, thinking of she and Artie settling down with some 6th edition ancients in a corner of the Wharehouse . . .

        Btw, I liked your post about Worldcon.

  20. I watched the whole thing online; I was pretty happy about XKCD’s Time getting an award (I was sort of expecting Girl Genius to get another one), but otherwise nothing I cared about won. At least Frozen didn’t get a Hugo, but Pacific Rim really deserved one.
    (Also, I think I might have heard booing when Vox Day’s entry was announced? It was hard to tell with the sound quality though.)

    1. Pacific Rim was a hard one for me not to vote for, because out of all the films nominated, it was by far the best one. However, I didn’t vote for it, and here’s why:

      The award wasn’t for Pacific Rim, the film, it was for Pacific Rim’s SCREENPLAY. Also, the Hugos just in general, are an award for writing, not for directing, effects, acting, or other elements of cinematography. Pacific Rim was a brilliantly directed movie with some great actors who could deliver ANY line and make it sound amazing, but you have to admit, the actual writing was kind of shit. Where Pacific Rim excelled (and where Del Toro excels in general) was in telling a visual story; You could watch it with the dialogue track disabled and no subtitles, and would get just about the same experience. As much as I love Pacific Rim, I couldn’t, in good conscience, give it an award for its writing.

      Gravity, on the other hand, and even Frozen (as bored as I may be getting with Let It Go mashup videos on every corner of the Internet…) had some outstanding writing and dialogue. I actually voted for Frozen on this one, because seriously, you can’t deny that the dialogue was pretty snappy.

      I’m definitely with you on the XKCD win, though! That’s the only #1 pick I voted for that actually made it. I never expected Larry to win, obviously, but I’m still bitter about the Wheel of Time loss. I thought for SURE it had a chance. I guess Larry’s right about message fic being more important to these people than telling a good story…

      1. Yeah, I’m sad for the WoT. I thought for sure it was going to blow everyone else away, and I had no problem with that. If only Brandon had boldly decided to get rid of gender pronouns!

      2. I disagree that it was for the screenplay, the category is dramatic presentation so it’s the presentation, which is the final product not one part of the whole. Also there is more to a screenplay than dialog; all those effects were planned out in writing, someone wrote what kinds of music should be where. (Also the music was written.)

        If it was for the screenplay then why didn’t they include the screenplays in the voter packet? I’m sure the studios would have been fine with that.

        Were the artist/fan-artist categories contingent on writing?

        1. @pyredynasty

          On the voting page, the item available to vote for was specifically listed as “Pacific Rim Screenplay.” Same with Gravity and Frozen. Not sure about all the rest. Admittedly, I could very well have been misinterpreting the criteria. It was my first attempt at voting in the Hugos, after all. But reading the entry on the voting page, it seemed pretty clear to me.

      3. I honestly didn’t think the writing for Frozen was that great—dialogue, yes, but the flow wasn’t that good and a lot of it felt like it had been rushed through editing or something. But then I’m still mad about the hand-animated Snow Queen we COULD have had that was benched for Frozen (I’ve been upset about that for about…4 years now). Not really an equivalent exchange in my book. However, I can see what you mean about Pacific Rim, although I would disagree.

        1. Well, durr. I feel like an idiot now. I guess I can take solace in the fact that my one vote wouldn’t have pushed Pacific Rim over the edge? Still, it was worded quite confusingly, and I can’t help but wonder how many OTHER people thought the same thing I did…

      4. I’m not sure where you got the idea that the Dramatic Presentation awards are for screenplays. They aren’t, although the writers are included among the credits. There is nothing in the definitions of the Hugo Awards that says that the nominations are for screenplays. They are for Dramatic Presentations, which means the entire package including what appears on the screen, not just for the words written on a sheet of paper. Just because most of the Hugo Awards are for written works does mean that they all are.

        1. @kastandlee

          I kinda’ covered this in a comment above.

          On the voting page, the item is listed as “[title] screenplay by [x]…” rather than “[title]: screenplay by [x]…” or “[title], screenplay by [x]…” or some other format that would actually make sense. It’s quite confusing, especially to a first-time voter.

          Also, seriously, who lists the screenwriters before the directors on a movie? That would be like, for example, listing the audio version of a Monster Hunter book as “…by Oliver Wyman and Larry Correia.” This is especially true of a work like Pacific Rim, where the director was absolutely brilliant, and was the guiding hand behind the entire story, but just kind of let the writers phone it in. Even if you ignore the odd formatting in the actual voting item, this decision alone led me to believe the writing was weighted more heavily than the film as a whole.

      5. re: “I never expected Larry to win, obviously, but I’m still bitter about the Wheel of Time loss. I thought for SURE it had a chance. I guess Larry’s right about message fic being more important to these people than telling a good story…”

        Well, I’m not sure about the message fic part in this case. To be honest, Wheel of Time started out great and then dragged a lot in the middle. While the story was interesting, it really got to a point where it seemed every minute of every day was being described in detail. I think this is where Wheel of Time really lost. Not to mention the fact that very few new readers were going to start a 10+ book series in time to finish it before voting time.

        I would also point out the fact that Leckie’s book, besides having a very clear political viewpoint, did have a pretty good story. I’ll admit that a lot of people may have had trouble getting past the gender stuff in the writing to see the story, though.

        When it comes to the best novel award, I think that the winners have fairly consistently told a good story. Sometimes there is a message there, sometimes there isn’t. The shorter categories often times drift a bit more toward message. And sometimes in those categories especially, cleverness seems to win out over story or message. (If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love – for example. But it didn’t win, just got nominated).

        In the end, it all comes down to who registers and votes for the Hugos. If people want other books nominated and selected as Hugo winners, it just takes registering and voting.

    2. I think that the Girl Genius team have permanently recused themselves from ever again receiving a Hugo, because they kept winning.

      1. No. They recused themselves for one year, and the voters mistakenly thought they said “forever,” so they had to explicitly said they meant one year. They then were nominated this year. I was talking about this with them just yesterday on the last day of Worldcon.

      2. You have to accept the nomination to be on the ballot. If they were still recusing, they wouldn’t have been on the ballot.

      3. @Khazlek – I’d heard somewhere that Neil Gaiman asked that The Ocean At The End of the Lane not be included in the Hugos. I actually have no idea it’s true. I’m admittedly a little scared to go look online (because I expect finding lots of SJW screeds as opposed to reality) … so I guess that the author having to accept the nomination in order to be on the ballot makes sense, and I didn’t know that.

        And yeah, I didn’t find anything on it, only how people were unhappy about how ‘manipulative’ it was of Gaiman to remove his Hugo pin because of the overreaction regarding Ross. The rest are about his previous nominations and wins. ^^; So I still do not know if it’s true.

        1. @Shadow

          Huh, interesting. That was one of my nominations, and more than any other I was flabbergasted that it didn’t make it in there. Even more than things like Warbound and WoT, Ocean at the End of the Lane was not only a good book, but it ALSO seemed like something that would be right up the Hugo voters’ alley. All I could think of when I saw the final nominations was “WTF? How did all these beat Ocean at the End of the freaking Lane?”

          I never stopped to consider that the whole Ross controversy would have soured the whole thing. Yet ANOTHER example of politics preventing a good work from being recognized at the Hugos, it would seem…

          1. I preordered Ocean at the End of the Lane and it’s sitting on my “To Be Read” bookshelf in the bedroom. I had no idea it was nominated, until I’d read somewhere (I can’t remember where, I’m afraid) that the nomination was supposedly turned down. As said I can’t find confirmation. =/

  21. You’ve been asking for a Hugo every year since you asked for a Hugo and a Campbell in the same post. Now granted, it *has* only been four years… but still, given that you’ve been asking for it for four years, people are naturally going to assume it’s something you actually want.

    So I’m not very impressed by your declaration that you always thought the grapes were sour. You certainly spent enough time jumping for them. If you could have jumped that high, you’d have eaten them and told us all how tasty they were.

    But by all means, prove you didn’t care. Don’t ask for a Hugo next year. Go on.

    1. Uh, how is Larry pointing out what he thought would happen happening is sour grapes? He never said he wouldn’t be happy to win, but that he expected to lose badly. He also said his commercial success is more important to him (like any logical person).

      Nice try.

    2. Well, that makes about as much sense as my wife beating, so go ahead and run with that.

      Of course, a smart person would do a cursory search and notice that I didn’t do any further promotional posts after the nominations were announced because my goals had already been reached. Heck, I didn’t even bother to tell the new visitors who showed up as a result of the controversy that they could still register to vote in the finals. If I was actually focused on winning rather than exposing bias, you’d think that once I was a finalist I’d have put forth some effort to gather more voters, but nada… Go figure. It is almost like I’m telling the truth about exposing the bias, truly don’t give a shit, and am enjoying myself immensely while the other side is completely incapable of not taking itself too seriously.

      EDIT: to add, as for next year I’ve not decided what to do yet. A smart person would look at how many things I could get nominated before the controversy and quit fucking with me. Perhaps if you’re nice I’ll go away? 🙂

      1. It’s hilarious when people get mad because you aren’t conforming to the straw-man personality they’ve made for you. *YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE MAD, DAMMIT. SHOW ME SOME TEARS!*

        1. Oh yeah, Straw Larry is totally broken up today. Real Larry wrote 3 blog posts and worked on a V Wars story that is due Friday.

      2. Since I’ll be involved with the Hugo awards next year and thus will be in a position to meet the finalists, I hope you do get nominated so I can say hi. 🙂

    3. Let’s see, according to the checklist, we have a possible #1, a strong #3, a very solid #4 & #5, and an arguable #7.

      Kit, you forgot to make up a charge of racism.

    4. I only became aware of this this year. I never got the impression that Sad Puppies was about winning so much as it was about increasing diversity and representation at the Hugos. A whole world of science fiction exists outside that fortress wall. Breaching that wall is a win. Anyone who believes in diversity or who believes in science fiction should view it as a win.

      Of course, if your goal is to exclude the unclean, then you probably prefer the fortress walls.

      1. Well, to be fair, nobody who actually participated or followed any of it was under that impression, but it is way easier to just make crap up.

  22. Dang it, Mr. Correia. I discovered your Monster Hunter series before I was aware of your political views! I now have no choice but to continue to immensely enjoy your work! It’s especially funny because I discovered Mr. Scalzi through his political(I.E. “social justice”) views and, as a consequence, haven’t bothered to read any of his books.

  23. Exposure equals a win, and you did that Larry… And you’re a winner in the thing(s) that count. Real readers and bank accounts… 😉

      1. Don’t know. But I can say that I found a number at Loncon 3 who said they were surprised at how much they enjoyed Warbound.

  24. Yes, Larry, you should cry. For it turns out, that Vox outhates you so much, that he managed to get twitter psychoanalysis from the Guardian village idiot.. so weep Larry, cry and sob!

      1. While of course, not a massive exercise in psychological projection. Not at all!

        Almost as funny as Scalzi melting down that Vox is going to meltdown.

        It’s a truly a testament to both you & Vox that I found your books more entertaining that the SJW freak show circus!

      2. That’s the dude who gets paid for the British government for not writing a book, isn’t it?

        Sweet gig, if you can handle looking at yourself in the mirror afterward.

  25. I see on Scalzi’s blog that he’s using the argument that what you did would have been ok if you hadn’t recommended Vox Day because his political views show that he’s clearly eeeeviiiil. Yet Scalzi has in the past said very positive things about China Mieville. (In fact, I don’t remember any controversy when Mieville won all those awards for ‘The City and the City’.)
    So is Scalzi unaware of Mieville’s political views? (Which would seem unlikely since Mieville is quite open about them, in fact he stood in a General Election.)
    Or does Scalzi think that these political views are perfectly acceptable? If so, then I would suggest that Mr Scalzi’s moral compass is so clearly broken that we shouldn’t take him seriously.

    I mean, I’d prefer that we judge a literary work on its merits, not the political views of its author, but that’s clearly not what Mr Scalzi wants.

    1. Y’all are living in Scalzi’s head 24/7, rent-free. He can’t get over you. You’re his moon, sun, and stars.

      Disturbing, but true.

      And yeah, anyone who hangs with China “Come for the Communism, stay for the Anti-Semitism” Mieville has no business casting aspersions on anyone else’s associates.

      1. There was a poster on Scalzi’s blog who declared that people who didn’t have goodthink should be denied awards because of the harm their ideology caused, regardless of the merits of their work. I innocently asked if that meant she couldn’t stand China Melville.

        Guess who deleted that question? 🙂

      2. Yes, it’s decidedly odd that “has demonstrably murdered 100 million people” doesn’t count as a ‘harmful ideology”, or at least not to the same degree as calling someone names on Twitter.

      3. By “ideology” she meant being white and not admitting to racism. That’s the ant farm’s idea of an “ideology.” Meanwhile they all use this shared gutterspeak unknown in America even a few years ago and think it’s just another day on the farm, as if Aristotle complained about “rape culture” and the Ottomans took white slaves because they were angry about their privilege. If Scalzi’s crew was any stupider they’d be scraping them off the hulls of garbage scows.

    2. The notion of the anti-hegemony, which means straight white Western Anglophone male being the norm, is straight out of Marxism. So Scalzi could care less.

    3. Screw Mieville, that’s small potatoes – what about Scalzi’s and the Rabbits warren association with MZ Bradely, Delaney or having a convicted child molester as a member of SWFA, what about those associations?

      1. “Don’t forget that Equoid won best Novella. That was the one where Unicorns raped young girls.”

        In fairness, the unicorns were the bad guys, and the characters’ entire mission was to exterminate them. So it’s a little hard to claim the story endorsed the unicorns’ behavior.

        I rather liked that story, actually. Not as much as Torgersen’s, but more than the others. *shrug* Different strokes, and all that.

      2. I also liked the Stross story and picked it 2nd after Torgersen’s. It isn’t the first Laundry files story I’ve read.

        Stross is pretty politically outspoken, but he doesn’t seem to feel to urge to drag me through that to enjoy his work.

        1. Two words for you: Merchant Princes. When the antagonist is a very thinly disguised Dick Cheney, I think we can safely say his politics has intruded.

          Also, his Laundry stuff has acquired strong traces of “UK spies are well meaning but a bit incompetent, whereas the CIA is EEEEVIIILLL”

      3. Khazlek: except for the constant harping on the eeevuls of George Bush, Maragret Thatcher, the English Conservative Party, Republicans…
        Frankly I’ve stopped buying Stross’ stuff. He doesn’t need my money.

      4. I too am a bit confused by the EQUIOD win. Oh, not the unicorn rape. I believe it was meant to be disturbing rather than salacious, and it succeeded. Indeed, I think many of the individual scenes were brilliant.

        But the plot, the protagonist, and the Laundry made no sense. To string those scene together required that the protagonist and his agency be blithering idiots. Perhaps it’d have made sense dramatically if at the end he reflected on how his decisions, and his politics, resulted in the death of so many people.

  26. Congratulations to the Hugo winners for their work in anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-Anglophonics, anti-Western, anti-hegemony, anti-Islamophobia, anti-erasure, anti-marginalization and anti-homophobia.

    It was so successful I propose an award for literature. Could be a smash hit. Stranger things have happened. Remember! It’s a genre of the strange and weird so give it a shot WorldCon. And pass it on to the Nebulas as a brazen idea out of my own eccentric skull.

  27. Woo-hoo. Cited by Correia, retweeted by Instapundit (different tweets) all in the same day. 🙂

    My first thought on the Orbit posting was that the writer was serious, but with enough sleep and reading comprehension, I’m thinking now it was sarcasm. @orbitbooks, of course, has gone silent.

    Suppose I could check the writer’s political musings to determine which, but that sounds too much like work.

  28. I forgot how much of a prick Scalzi could be. Which is sad, since his Old Man’s war series is pretty darned good. If he and his ilk want people to judge art by the artist’s politics, then he can reap the whirlwind. I won’t buy any of his stuff ever again. I hear Redshirts is rather subpar for a Hugo winner anyway. Maybe it’s a reward for being an SJW in good standing.

    He was also pretty gracious over the “ballot stuffing” flap which makes this Twitter rant pretty juvenile.

    1. Redshirts is OK, but forgettable. It should have been a short story and didn’t deserve an award. 3 stars out of 5.

      I really liked Old Man’s War. The sequels weren’t quite as good but the first book was excellent and strongly reminiscent of golden age Robert Heinlein. Which is ironic because if Heinlein was writing today, Scalzi would be trying to get the Dean blackballed.

      I don’t usually care about an artist’s politics. I’m a huge Stephen King fan and he’s a dyed in the wool liberal. I like The Smiths and Radiohead even though I don’t agree with Morrissey or Thom Yorke on anything.

      However, Mr Scalzi has decided to make other people’s political opinions an issue and has been such an obnoxious little prick about it all over the internet that he won’t be getting any more money from me.

      Scalzi doesn’t have the talent to write something like the Dark Tower so I’m confident I won’t miss much.

      1. I really liked Old Man’s War. The sequels weren’t quite as good but the first book was excellent and strongly reminiscent of golden age Robert Heinlein.

        In short, he milked Heinlein for all he could, but the well went dry.

        Damn you, Heinlein, why didn’t you write a sequel to Starship Troopers?

      2. Scalzi is a funny guy. He’d for sure throttle Heinlein the same way he goes after anyone else who doesn’t confess to their white privilege. That whole PC crew at the Hugos is a laugh riot. They act like they’re freedom riders fighting the KKK or something. A lot of them Tweeted stuff like they’d struck a blow for freedom. The problem there is the PC were on the wrong end of bombs in WW II and would’ve been KKK in Mississippi.

  29. I haven’t paid attention to the Hugo awards for many, many years. I’m just glad that Larry is winning the most important award: A large bank account and plenty of contracts.

    Keep up the great work!

  30. The bottom line is that you proved that the goddess-king can bleed, (note the post-binary honorific for the institution, I understand it puts great stock in that, ) and we all had some laughs along the way.

  31. John Scalzi is a straight up douchebag. He has consistently built strawmen to attack Larry and anyone who supports a more SF dynamic field. Fascist that he is, he attempts to thwart all conversation that diverges from his world view by the aforementioned strawman building and character assassination, as well as by supporting organizational efforts to purge dissenters.

    And they think Larry’s awful. Talk about unawareness of self.

  32. The problem with Scalzi isn’t that he’s a prick, although he is. The real problem is that he is shamelessly two-faced. The commenter who described him as “Janus” is keenly observant; Scalzi is a relentless suck-up right up until he believes he is in a position of power. Then he exhibits his true face.

    Anyhow, I’d like to publicly thank Larry, who has fully merited his International Lord of Hate title, as well as the rest of the Sad Puppies crew, authors, Worldcon voters, and general well-wishers, for what was easily the most entertaining literary award season I have ever seen, experienced, or even heard tell. That was, in a word, EPIC.

    The pinkshirts don’t understand that we are not angry and upset because they don’t understand us at all. Even when we tell them, they don’t believe us. And that’s part of what makes the whole thing so damned amusing.

  33. I’ve been an on and off Hugo voter and WorldCon attendee since the late 70’s. My first convention was Miami Beach in 1977.

    I thought this year’s slate of nominees was, for the most part, excellent. I’ve been a fan of the Grimnoir Chronicles series since book one and was pleased to see “Warbound” nominated as best novel. I enjoyed the book as I’ve enjoyed the two earlier ones but wasn’t at all surprised that “Ancillary Justice” won the award. It was a great book and deserved the win.

    However, I was very surprised at the overall voting results. “Warbound” deserved second place. Other than winning the category, the only thing that really matters commercially is that it was nominated. All the rest was meaningless internal politics that had nothing to do with the quality of the books.

    Larry, keep writing and I’ll keep buying your books. Ignore the idiots and the politics behind the voting. You’re writing good stuff.

    1. Actually, commercially it doesn’t matter a lick. The Hugo doesn’t make a statistical blip in sales. I get more sales off an Instapundit link.

      1. What Mike and Larry said. I took my Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell nominations to some editors and agents in 2012, and all of them (politely) told me that while nominations and wins were nice, nobody with money to spend considered the Hugo, or the Nebula, or the Campbell, to be a bellwether of sales. To say I was shocked is an understatement. But it makes sense, given the fact that these awards no longer represent entertainment value, but are identitarian political tokens.

    2. but wasn’t at all surprised that “Ancillary Justice” won the award. It was a great book and deserved the win.

      Everyone on the planet seems to like Ancillary Justice except me. I realize that these sort of things are a matter of taste and all that, but I dearly wish someone could explain to me the appeal of this particular book. Seriously.

      The plot struck me as both ridiculous and highly derivative, the dialog as silly and the characters as flat beyond belief. A city (or was it a planet?) named “Rrrrrr”? Really?

      Though this may also have been a case of approaching the book with far too much in the way of high expectations. The squee factor on this one seems just about off the charts. Perhaps if I’d gone into it cold I’d not have been nearly as annoyed?

      1. Right there with you. I couldn’t make it past chapter two, it was so boring and obtuse.

        Maybe I missed something better later on? *shrug* I’ll never know, nor am I interested in finding out.

      2. I finished it, at least. I thought it was okay, but not more than that. Take away the pronoun dancing, and it was a pretty derivative revenge drama. There were 4 (really, 18) other novels on the short list I enjoyed more.

        I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest Ann Leckie may end up being a one-trick pony. The one thing about AJ that set it apart was her handling of gender issues in language; I’m not certain one can build a career on that alone.

      3. I actually liked AJ quite a lot, and I think it deserved the win – but it undertreated a great number of things – the divergent personalities, hive mind vs ant mind, – heck, it could have been a decent examination of post-invasion/occupation ethical conflicts. But it wasn’t. I’m hoping in the rest of the trilogy that the author expands on those, because I’m not sticking with the story if her only trick is to erase an entire gender via word choices. (A neat trick, to be sure, but what else can she do?) (And here’s hoping she at least touches on the dangers of ignoring gender differences…)

  34. “John Scalzi @scalzi
    RATIONALIZE YOUR HUMILIATING DEFEAT SOME MORE PLEASE IT GIVES ME THE TINGLES IN A DEEP AND PRECIOUS PLACE YES YES THAT’S IT”

    Is that a live feed from his 40 acre Bar-Privilege lawn-ranch in Albinoville?

  35. Larry, you are too vanilla, Sad Puppies 3, Black Tide Rising series. “Oh no John Ringo NO” I would not want to stoop to SJW levels but i would be tempted to buy memberships for my cats

    1. Oh dear, the meltdown if Mr Ringo made it on the ballot would be wonderful.

      We thought we’d seen crazy, that would being out a whole new order of magnitude.

      1. He was only a couple votes away, as was Sarah. But a ballot next year consisting of To Sail a Darkling Sea would be cool. (And John C. Wright’s Judge of Ages.)

  36. Dear Larry – of course I got it. I’m an obnoxious lunatic, but I’m not stupid. You’d have to be 2/3 brain dead or so far up a place where the sun don’t shine not to see it. I’m still mildly gobsmacked that our dear little friends took a long hard look at the ‘beware open cesspit’ signs and walked forward into it even faster.

    As one of those authors I’d like to add my name to those thanking you. Now I would like to see the victory dance. My choice is the Limbo, because it is fairly important to see how low International lords of hate can go.

    For me the most bizarre part of all of this is the chronic insecurity it exposes. Hell’s teeth, if I see someone else coming to shoot wallaby here, I don’t go into hysterics trying to get rid of them. Firstly there are plenty of wallaby (readers) and if I can’t still manage to get enough then I really am too useless to live.

    again, well done on all this effort. We need more people writing and reading sf, not less.

    cheers

    Dave

    1. “My choice is the Limbo, because it is fairly important to see how low International lords of hate can go.”

      I admit. I snorted.

      1. Brain bleach? Heck, I need a limbo stick, and to see if I can talk Bridget and the kids into pressuring Larry into it, in the spirit of laughing good fun!

        That, or get Larry, Sarah Hoyt, my husband, and some other authors and families together for a rousing couple rounds of minigolf.

  37. What really grinds my gears is hearing these delusional SJWs crowing that this was “a victory against fascism”. My grandfathers fought in WW2. They did a helluva lot more to fight fascism than these keyboard commandos. If a real war against real fascists broke out tomorrow, most of these bozos would be protesting against it.

    1. I suppose the SJWs crowing about their victory for fascism would be cutting too close to the truth.

      I mean, fascism does not brook disagreement with the ruling body, no?

    2. Roger that. My two uncles who served in the ETO could talk some about a “victory over fascism”. These goombas? If they ever saw real fascism (or, come to think of it, the reality of the socialism they claim to want) they’d faint.

    3. Hear, hear. Only one of my grandfathers served in WWII, but he was in WWI as well, so I think I have standing to agree with you.

      (I say ‘served’ because he volunteered in 1939, when Canada entered the war, and was turned down because of his age. Then they drafted him a couple of years later, and he spent the rest of the war as groundcrew for the RCAF. He was epically angry that they drafted him instead of letting him honourably volunteer.)

    4. “Victory against fascism”
      I can’t imagine any American author of our time writing to actively promote fascism. Americans really don’t do fascism, its not in their character. You’d have to grab something European or Asian and high literature to get some of that – maybe Ezra Pound or Yukio Mishima. I’m a history student and did a lot of research on real Fascism few years back, so the constant abuse of the term is really irritating. Its just not an ideology that you see in science fiction.

  38. Shockingly enough there are plenty of authors who don’t like the idea of having angry mobs sabotaging their careers and slandering them if they exercise their free speech in an unapproved manner.

    And not just authors, as Brendan Eich and Gavin McInnes recently proved. Say band think not related to how skilled you are at your job and the hounds shall be released to chase you down and bring you at bay.

  39. John Scalzi basically said he likes Larry’s books in his blog post about the Hugos. His only issue with the Sad Puppy Slate is Vox Day. He had positive things to say about everyone else. His only criticism was including Vox Day. Thats it. The guy has made some statements that are questionably racist. No one else on the slate has ever done that.

    1. “Unquestionably” is a funny word in the SFF community when it comes to racism. Unless you are using a prank George Orwell 1984 dictionary, one must face the fact all four Hugo story winners and the J. Campbell winner have their own “unquestionably” racist quotes. Them claiming they’re not and that they’re in fact anti-racists doesn’t move me at all. I have a normal dictionary that takes no prisoners when it comes to racist comments.

    2. If all Mr. Scalzi had done was make that blog post about the Hugos, I’d agree with your point. Unfortunately, he went quite a bit beyond that with those ersatz (at least I hope they were ersatz) Tweets. Not funny and not true. And, to my mind at least, a smear against the entire “Sad Puppy” slate, applicable as they might be to VD personally.

  40. Alas, I’m at work and can’t post a link to a YouTube clip I have favorited for when I run into antics like Scalzi’s little twitter screeds.

    (Hint: Scalzi’s playing with his dolls again.)

  41. Now that radical feminism has conquered the Nebulas and Hugos, it won’t take people long to start ignoring each. The credibility of each is shot and these folks have nothing else to infiltrate into really. They can’t infiltrate into mainstream SF for the simple reason no one wants what they’re selling and future franchises like Harry Potter, Hunger Games and Twilight will remain completely decentralized and insulated. Mainstream SFF best-sellers have no conventions or connected fandom so there is no one to shame and persecute though trust me, they’ll try.

    It’s important to note the great liberal genius editors completely missed the boat with those 3 franchises. That’s because they were too busy Tweeting and blogging PC bullshit and wishing their gay daughters or Arabs or PoC were in an SF story instead of thinking how entertainment was in a story. The PC are incapable of writing interesting SFF for the same reason they wouldn’t allow Jonathan Ross to host the Hugos: by the time they’re done editing badthink out and correctthink in, there’s nothing there. If it were a novel, which would you rather read – Jonathan Ross, a woman dressed as a man emceeing the Nebulas who co-wrote the anti-white and SFF-less “Wakulla Springs,” or the two PC stiffs who emceed the Hugos? At the end of the day, bigoted and boring conformist rednecks aren’t all that interesting.

    Ironically, we are the very people that gave radical feminists in SFF the credibility their own brand, namely the Tiptree Awards at WisCon, could never attain to. Without us these folks are going to fade, and fast. The reason the PC infiltrate into us and we not into them is they have nothing we want. They can’t build what we can build.

    1. What, pray tell, constitutes “mainstream SF” in this day and age? I’m quite serious with this question, since I personally have no idea. As in, has there been a “must read” book on a level with the Foundation series or, oh, I dunno, even Starship Troopers published in the past twenty years?

      It’s important to note the great liberal genius editors completely missed the boat with those 3 franchises.

      And of those “3 franchises,” only one comes close to being SF at all, doesn’t it? I also find it hard to believe that Suzanne Collins was rejected anywhere. She strikes me as being extremely savvy vis a vis the business end of things. Hell, when my son was a toddler he was even into Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! 🙂

      1. I meant those 3 young adult franchises as an example of a non-genre background not in terms of their literary merit or lack it. The authors don’t interact with or reach out to the SFF community in any way shape or form. None of the 3 come from core genre or seem influenced by it.

        There’s always been a divide between genre and mainstream SFF. Thorne Smith’s novel Topper is an example and so is the film Bell, Book and Candle. I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched on TV are two others. The entire decade of the ’50s SF movies was one of a mainstream take on SF, not a genre take.

        As for Hugo’s representing the old Hugo, the core group that voted the Nebulas and Hugos this year despise the Gernsback era and everything it stands for. They see it as racist, sexist, and influenced by colonialism and imperialism. I don’t think they’ll change the name but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a petition soon. The name isn’t as offensive as Lovecraft and there is a petition right now to change a fantasy award trophy from Lovecraft to – surprise – Octavia Butler. The guy doing it says Butler was a better writer and human being than Lovecraft. Butler is symbolic of all that’s happening with all this. The PC are more interested in her race and gender than her actual literary legacy, which compared to Lovecraft is non-existent.

      2. What’s the proper term when elitist fans of a shrinking genre decry something popular as not being “real” examples?

      3. In terms of science fiction, I’m drawing a blank on a must read book from the last 20 years. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series comes close. I discarded it, but not for political reasons. Too much of that series consists of the characters wandering around Mars, giving Robinson a chance to info dump on areography, ecology, politics and the condition of the colonies. It’s dull.

        Alistair Reynolds is too depressing. One of Ian Banks’ Culture novels?

        Vernor Vinge’s Fire Upon the Deep was twenty-two years ago.

        the Vorkosigan Series by Bujold
        To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis.
        Leviathan’s Wake by S.A. Corey
        Commonwealth saga of Peter F Hamilton

        But I had to think about all those titles and I’m not really sure they are can’t miss, must read works.

        For Fantasy, Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles came to mind instantly.

      4. What, pray tell, constitutes “mainstream SF” in this day and age? I’m quite serious with this question, since I personally have no idea.

        Go read The Martian by Andy Weir. Right now.

        Why are you sill here? GO.

      5. I don’t know about must-read but I liked Palace and the sequel The Eyes of God an awful lot. Katherine Kerr and Mark Kreighbaum wrote the first, Kreighbaum the second. I think Peter Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star/Judas Unchained and Commonwealth Saga is a must read and Fallen Dragon is pretty good. Infinity Beach by Jack McDevitt is definitely a must-read. Alistair Reynold’s The Prefect and Revelation Space are pretty good.

      6. Hey Mike, Writing Excuses promo’d The Martian and it’s on my list. With another recommendation, I’ll move it up a notch.

        I’m only halfway through.

        READ IT.

        What are you still doing here?

  42. I’d like to see the Hugo’s go to good stuff Hugo Gernsback would have liked. The only guy still doing that is Larry Niven. Not even on the ballot for The Goliath Stone this year. Bowl of Heaven probably won’t be on next year’s ballot. So the Hugo’s won’t represent old Hugo.

  43. Ok, not winning an award is no big deal for you. Fair enough.

    However, I don’t think you demonstrated that there’s a “serious political bias in the awards”. What you demonstrated was that Hugo voters didn’t enjoy Warbound as much as they enjoyed Ancillary Justice.

    I am a first time Hugo voter and I didn’t vote for your book (even though I think it was entertaining) because it didn’t blow me away like Ancillary Justice or Neptune’s Brood did. Simple as that.

    I was not a part of any left-wing conspiracy (that I know of :D).

    1. I think you’re missing the point that I really don’t care about the normal voters. I was hunting for rabid weasels. The only surprise in the voting for me was that WoT didn’t take it.

      You didn’t see any bias?

      Yeah, it is probably easier to miss when you’re not the one being sabotaged, libeled, and slandered for 4 months. https://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/24/an-explanation-about-the-hugo-awards-controversy/

      Oh, and there were so many more examples since. I was a rape apologist, a racist, a homophobe, a sexist, a misogynist, a wife beater (this one was so insidious that people my wife hasn’t spoken with since college contacted her to make sure she was okay), I wanted to drag homosexuals to death behind my pickup truck, my nomination was like punching women and minorities in the face, and all of this was spread around about me to tens of thousands of complete strangers in the hopes of damaging my career and my calm.

      They went after my friends too. Most of them don’t have rhino hide for skin, and they’re not used to being called racist neo-cons for no reason. Some of them fled or threw me under the bus. Factions mobilized, planned, and campaigned. Voting based on ideology became a rallying cry. It was even more absurd than I’d expected. There were even blog posts from smart folks on the other side who realized they’d publically blundered right into doing even more than we’d hoped they do, but by then it was already too late.

      So, gonna have to go with your last () there. That you know of. Those of us who’ve been paying attention have had a delightful time.

    2. Fair enough as unlike some other places….Whatever…Larry is not going to delete you for your opinion. That said it was not the voting, it was the vicious attacks aimed at Larry when the nominations were released that demonstrated the double standard and bias.

    1. I guess it is pretty easy to impress someone who has never accomplished anything of note in their life. 🙂

    2. In the first sentence from Buhlert: “…the slate of winners is highly diverse.”

      Here’s Scalzi from last Feb.:

      “The nominees for the 2014 Nebula Awards have been announced. Once again, it looks like a good and pleasantly diverse shortlist with lots of women and writers of colour included.”

      Ummm… and oh, by the way. Is the work any good?

      Buhlert links to Natalie Luhrs’ post with a title whose irony Luhrs cannot detect: “Faith in Humanity: Restored (For Now) or, The 2014 Hugo Award Winners”

      “Faith in humanity” as in Yaaay! good stories won? Luhrs writes “‘No Award’ coming in fifth place for Best Novelette. Delightful.”

      Is that because she’s passionately against bad fiction?

      Ancillary Justice essentially swept awards season. Anyone who truly believes that type of artistic gap exists between that novel and the rest of 2013’s field might own up to a dozen Brooklyn Bridges. Ancillary Justice swept because it is proper intersectionalist fiction by an author who makes no secret of her disdain for “white cis males.”

      Leckie once put put “white straight cis guy,” “white straight cis guys,” “non-white, non-cis, non-straight, non-guys,” “white straight cis guys,” “white straight cis guys,” “white, straight, cis dude” all in one blog post. No, she wasn’t expressing admiration.

      The PC are worthless anti-straight white male racist intersectionalists whose interest in art, literature and SFF is minimal. The Orwellian irony their entire community cannot detect is that if they are truly so against institutional expressions of racism, supremacy and segregation, then the group they most hate in SFF is themselves. Unfortunately they have no principles that would show them the beast they hunt is in their own mirrors and exists on an institutional level solely within their own culture and community.

      When “diverse” comes to mean “good art,” that is a literary movement that is essentially dead. In principle, though they also cannot detect it, they are saying the National Basketball Association is a depraved racist construct cuz no “diverse.” That would go for Delta blues and Mexican TV too among a kazillion other things the PC conveniently ignore. What can you say about such transparent cherry-picking liars who use bulldozers to move goalposts back and forth?

      Unlike the PC, who thrive on innuendo, fake histories and assumptions, the worst accusations against the PC are their own quotes. Mysteriously, the PC cannot provide quotes to back up their own claims. Instead they make up mindreading strawman stuff like I fear a loss of privilege I don’t even believe in in the first place or I hate “girl cooties” and I suffer an unreasoning phobia of gays and Muslims and PoC in general because micro-aggressions like confusing John Chu for Gordon Liu tells the tale of oppression, slavery, colonialism and white power since the “dawn of time” and may mean I want to rape and then nuke the entire world too.

      The PC like to pretend we read “The Dragon Masters” and went “Isn’t it great Jack Vance is white, and a man?” The PC are liars; they do that, not us.

      1. Well said, Fail Burton, well said. My mind is blown from the awesomeness of that post!

        Here’s something to ponder: this whole “cisgender” thing basically means that you accept the gender you were born with — you’re cool with who you are. Now, the PC/SJW/GHH crowd is constantly harping on us to “accept people for who they are,” ‘cuz accepting people for who they are is, like, really, really good and stuff. Yet, if you’re a “cis guy” — which means you accept *yourself* for who you are — you are the embodiment of double-plus ungood evil.

        So, going by PC logic, if you accept others for who they are, that is good, but if you accept yourself for who you are, then that’s bad. I’m sure it has something to do with that underlying venomous hatred of the individual that forms the core of all PC thinking. Likewise, I’m thinking that a lot of these people don’t stretch properly before performing these mental gymnastics. You can definitely tell that they’re pulling, straining, and tearing stuff upstairs.

      2. “Ancillary Justice swept because it is proper intersectionalist fiction by an author who makes no secret of her disdain for ‘white cis males.'”

        Urm. I don’t think so, necessarily. I voted for AJ myself and I have absolutely no clue what Leckie’s politics are. My guess is that most readers and Hugo voters don’t know and don’t care about what she thinks of white cis males (if she indeed has some quirky opinion on that). It’s a great book and an enjoyable read.

      3. I would agree most readers likely don’t know much about Leckie’s disdain for “white straight cis guys.” I disagree the Hugo voters were not aware of that. Look at these winners:

        BEST NOVEL Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
        BEST NOVELLA “Equoid” by Charles Stross
        BEST NOVELETTE “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” by Mary Robinette Kowal
        BEST SHORT STORY “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” by John Chu
        BEST RELATED WORK “We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative” by Kameron Hurley (A Dribble of Ink)
        BEST SEMIPROZINE Lightspeed Magazine edited by John Joseph Adams, Rich Horton, and Stefan Rudnicki (No doubt because of their “Women Destroy Science Fiction” radical feminist Issue)
        BEST FANZINE A Dribble of Ink edited by Aidan Moher (No doubt because of Hurley’s piece)
        BEST FAN WRITER Kameron Hurley
        JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER Sofia Samatar

        Every damn last one of those specifically advocates third wave intersectional feminism with the white privilege, and rape culture and the moral and spiritual inferiority of the white straight male and the whole frickin’ nine yards of the stuff that constitutes that bizarre and unnatural ideology. It is basically the same stuff WisCon would’ve gone for, not human beings in love with craft and artistry. In that line-up, how you think trumps your art.

        Do you think that kind of consensus is a coincidence? Am I to believe the best work at the Nebulas and Hugos by an amazing coincidence defaults to anti-white, anti-male, anti-Western and anti-heterosexual? Especially in light of how actually terrible to indifferent the work was? Why did so many Hugo panels have experts in white men but who otherwise are not writers or SFF historians? Who the eff is Rachel Acks, Amal el-Mohtar, and Foz Meadows for example? They don’t even do reviews. All they basically do is point out what jackasses white men are and how wonderful PoC gay women are and please read more of them cuz Hegemony and erasure. For that they get on panels.

        It’s not like these people weren’t on Twitter minutes after the Nebulas announcing how great it was no white men won and doing the same frickin’ thing this time.

        “OH MY GOD THE SCI-FI LADY AUTHORS ARE IN THE STREETS OF LONDON BEATING MALE AUTHORS TO DEATH WITH HUGOS THIS IS IT THIS IS WHAT WE FEARED.”

        That’s the moronic Chuck Wendig retweeted by the equally moronic Kameron Hurley. Is that how one celebrates a triumph of artistry or how an ideology of bigotry celebrates?

  44. I realized today that the person behaving most like Straw Larry right now is . . . Scalzi.

    Guess you really do become the thing you hate the most. 🙂

  45. You know, even after everything with Scalzi, I was going to keep my Old Man’s War books. I figured, sure, he’s an ass, but I like these books. I tried a few of his other books and just didn’t dig them the same way, but whatever, I still liked OMW. But this is the final straw. Seriously? Yet another Twitter tirade, using ALLCAPS, no less? If that’s seriously all the emotional maturity he’s capable of, I’m done with him. It’s not his politics that turned me off, it’s his attitude.
    So, I’m going to go sell my Scalzi books to a second hand bookstore. “Why not just throw them away?” you ask? Several reasons: 1. This way, I’ll get a little something for them. Probably not much, a couple quarters for the paperbacks they are, but it’s more than the nothing I would get otherwise. 2. If someone is interested in them, this gives them a chance to buy the books at a cheaper price without giving Scalzi any additional money. 3. It helps out a local business. 4. It keeps the book out of the dump.
    If anyone else has also decided to get rid of their scalzi books (or books by anyone in the SJW crowd) I suggest you do the same.

  46. I made the mistake of actually trying to read Salzi’s blog post about these tweets. The bit that pissed me off most was this:

    “Who is this Twitter rant modeled on? Oh, you know. It’s an amalgamation of a couple few folks.”

    Seriously? And he has the gall to complain about the “I’m not passive aggressive, I’m active aggressive” line, after saying THAT? I’ll admit, I’m not a big fan of authors getting into twitter/blog fights with each other in general, but at least when you insult him, you have the guts to ADMIT that’s what you’re doing. That kind of equivocation really pisses me off.

    His concern trolling about how he’s only concerned about the OTHER people on your ticket who will have their “careers ruined” by association with Vox is almost as bad. Not only is it blatantly untrue (this is an industry where one of the hardest things is getting your foot in the door/getting your name known. Even more than usual, no publicity is bad publicity.) but it’s just so disingenuous it hurts. More than anything, it reminds me of a mobster walking into a shop and saying, “It would sure be a SHAME if something were to happen to your fine establishment…” as he knocks a vase onto the floor.

    It’s the passive-aggressively complaining about passive aggression that really irks me, though.

    I was THIS close to posting something along these lines on his blog, but I didn’t want to waste my time. We all know what would happen to that comment…

  47. “Retweeted by Cora Buhlert Paul_Cornell @Paul_Cornell · Aug 18 The biggest ever Hugo vote, and they voted for progress, they voted for an inclusive future.”

    Scratch one very important Dr. Who novelist off my list I never would’ve read anyway as long as I have a telephone book or coffee grounds in the bottom of a cup to read.

    1. I stopped being a fan of Paul Cornell back in the 90s when he used to post on rec.arts.drwho, after he started going out of his way to mindlessly attack fellow DW novel writer David McIntee.

  48. “Retweeted by Cora Buhlert The Worst @popelizbet · Aug 17 Dear SF/F bigot brigade: enjoy the knowledge that even if you sell a few books you remain entirely irrelevant to the field & the future.”

    But I guess skin is relevant because that’s by Elizabeth R. McClellan the proud author of “50 Books By POC Suggested Reading: Updated 2014 & An Evolving Work in Progress”

    I’m pretty sure in my world a bigot is someone who recommends art by skin color. That’s the future of SFF – choosing work by skin because you claim it’s wrong.

  49. Loncon 3 attendee here.

    At the official panel for the Hugo Novel short list, the panelists were actually quite complimentary about Warbound; several even described it as “a fun read”. And keep in mind, the panel was made up of mostly professional editors and reviewers. The only major criticisms they made were the violence, and that while fun, it wasn’t by any stretch the imagination Literary. Parasite came in for far more negative criticism than Warbound did.

  50. Larry,
    Thanks for making the point of the politicization of the awards process. It’s been true forever (Asimov writes about Hawks vs Doves at some conventions in the sixties but without the rancor of our current discourse—and those were pretty divisive times!). Still that era managed to recognize both Henlein and LeGuin, it doesn’t seem like we see as much diversity of thought now.

    You have written some good novels and it was great to see you recognized by a nomination–congratulations. I hope that after the dust settles from this Hugo awards that people will be more reflective about their automatically dismissive and hostile attitudes towards people with different viewpoints. Hooefullt there is an awareness raised and people will venture out of their comfort zones to explore an even wider range of writers.

    I do love the Hugo Awards warts and all, the passion of the fans the way movements like yours will get people yelling at each other, the breakout surprises (Rowling’s win, the Graveyard Book, etc). I loved your nomination and The Wheel of Time. There was something important about the genre, about fandom, about our history and future in both nominations.

    Thanks for challenging the status quo, some of us lefties are listening!

    Rick

  51. What you said, “I believe I made my point about the Hugo Awards, which is that it slants so heavily to the Left as to leave three fourth of the readership unrepresented, and I wish, like a gentleman with dignity to congratulate the winners…”

    What I heard, “blah blah blah blah …. I was at the gate reading a John C. Wright novel … blah blah blah….”

    This is because I have the brain of a Garry Larson dog named Ginger: http://www.scifiwright.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/larson1.jpg

  52. I was reading some comments on the Fisking at tor post about the hugo awards, and while I find it a shame that Brandon or Larry didn’t win I can understand why. Brandon Sanderson posted a very good reason as to why he did not win.

    “Reading, digesting, and keeping abreast of an epic fantasy series is a time-consuming process, which sticks us with a catch-22 when it comes to awards. If volumes get nominated on their own, as George R.R. Martin’s were, they can’t be read alone, and have a handicap because they’re only one slice of a larger story. If they get nominated as a single story (as The Wheel of Time did) then they’re just too long to read in time for the voting. (Not to mention the controversy of having a series voted in the “novel” category.)” http://brandonsanderson.com/the-wheel-of-time-did-not-win-a-hugo-and-thats-okay/

    Warbound is a lot like an epic fantasy because of the amount of serious awesomeness that Larry was able to pack into the book but it really does need the reader to have read the previous two books to get the full greatness that is Larry Correia

  53. As of today, Scalzi is *still* complaining about Larry:

    “Over on the right-wing SF/F frothosphere, it’s apparently become the fashion to assert a particular conservative writer sell me than me…”

    “and apparently this is important for REASONS, and proof of liberal bias in the universe blah blah blah oh jesus why this again.”

    The “frothosphere”. Just remember that next time he tries to claim he really respects conservatives.

    1. There is no liberal bias in the SFF community that need concern anyone. There is a demonstrably blackballing bizarre cult of female-worship dug into its main institutions like a tick and Scalzi’s the head tick, water-carrier and useful idiot chumped into mainstreaming their racist garbage into that community. Not entirely chumped; in return he got attention for a relatively worthless literary output that on its own merits would’ve attracted no attention.

  54. And, amazingly, his tirades continue. Here’s Scalzi, yesterday:

    “Was informed I have ruined science fiction by being all social justice warrior-y. Responded by say BWA HA HA YES I DID SUCK ON IT LOSERS”

    and

    “AND I AM ABOUT TO RUIN TELEVISION TOO. AND VIDEO GAMES. THERE WILL BE NOTHING BUT RUIN IN MY WAKE BWA HA HA HA HAH HA”

    and

    “SO MANY MANLY MAN WRITERS HAVE SOLD MORE BOOKS THAN I AND YET I HAVE STILL CRUSHED THEM UNDER MY BOOT HEEL WHICH IS COVERED IN GLITTER”

    Breathtaking.

    1. “Success” in one field doesn’t related to successes in other fields. For instance, how’s Stargate Universe doing?

      What’s nice about Scalzi branching out is that his co-writers will likely improve upon his work and Orson Scott Card will still make more money than him for doing the same thing.

    2. Scalzi’s arguably done more than anyone to mainstream radfem insanity and affirmative action their silly writing into SFF.

      Scalzi writes a post about “white privilege” and asks us to “bone up on the concept of intersectionality”

      Alex Dally MacFarlane writes a post at Tor.com about ending the heterosexual norm in SFF and Damien Walter at The Guardian writes “Science fiction needs to reflect that the future is queer” and Tweets “Google ‘intersectional’ and move on”

      Scalzi chuckles about “ruined science fiction” and we now have a all-women segregation is diversity “Women Destroy Science Fiction” anthology full of radfem ideological drivel and their idea of literary art.

      Notice any similarity to what’s above and this below?

      “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.” – Audrey Lorde 1979

      ”I would like you to rise each morning and know that you are heterosexual and that you choose to be heterosexual — that you are and choose to be a member of a privileged and dominant class, one of your privileges being not to notice. There is so much pressure on women to be heterosexual, and this pressure is both so pervasive and so completely denied, that I think heterosexuality cannot come naturally to many women: I think that widespread heterosexuality among women is a highly artificial product of the patriarchy. . . . I think that most women have to be coerced into heterosexuality.” – Marilyn Frye 1980

      By an amazing coincidence the SF novel that sweeps awards season is written by a anti-“white, straight cis dude” nutcase and panders to transgender fantasies of a non-binary future.

      After all that, anyone who thinks they’re up against liberals or even Marxists needs to do a bit of rethinking. You’re up against radfem insanity Scalzi rode in on like Pecos Bill.

  55. And the Guardian’s Village Idiot can’t let it go:

    “‏@damiengwalter “No sir, I only tried to rig that literary award in response to a SECRET SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR CONSPIRACY! No sir, I don’t have any proof.”

    “Rigging”, Damien? Didn’t you learn a lesson about libel this year?

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