Sad Puppies Update: The Nominees Announced and Why I Refused My Nomination

The Hugo nominees have been announced. As you’ve probably already heard Sad Puppies suggested candidates showed up everywhere. We got nominations for dozens of talented, deserving people who would normally have been ignored or shunned.

I just want to make a comment about why I’m personally not on the list. I was contacted by the administrators on 3/20/15 and informed that Monster Hunter Nemesis was a finalist for best novel. I emailed them back the same day and turned it down. Whoever was next in line was then moved up to be a finalist in my place.

I refused the nomination for one simple reason. The Sad Puppies campaign isn’t about any one person. I felt that ultimately my presence would be a distraction from the overall mission.

The reason I refused my nomination is that as long as the guy who started Sad Puppies stayed in, the more our opposition would try to dismiss the whole campaign as being all about my ego, or some selfish personal desire to get award recognition. Nope. I really meant it when I said I don’t care about winning anything for myself. I hope this proves that once and for all.

To the fans who voted for me, I’m sorry for dropping out. But I want you to understand that I consider making the award represent more of fandom to be a far more important prize than another rocket ship lapel pin (I actually never even got the one from last year). Now I’m going to support the rest of our slate and read all of the nominated works to judge them fairly, and I’d ask for you to do the same.

This is just one little battle in an ongoing culture war between artistic free expression and puritanical bullies who think they represent *real* fandom. In the long term I want writers to be free to write whatever they want without fear of social justice witch hunts, I want creators to not have to worry about silencing themselves to appease the perpetually outraged, and I want fans to enjoy themselves without having some entitled snob lecture them about how they are having fun wrong. I want our shrinking genre to grow. I think if we can get back to where “award nominated” isn’t a synonym for “preachy crap” to the most fans, we’ll do it.

That’s what I want. Strategically, we get there faster without them trying to spin it as all about me.

Again, Monster Hunter Nation, I apologize if this offends any of you who voted for my novel. I just feel this is the best thing we can do to combat Puppy Related Sadness.

Now, if you’ll excuse the brief post, today is actually a religious holiday for me, and I’d much rather be hanging out with my awesome family than surfing the internet to see what vile things they’re saying about me and my friends.

I wish the best of luck to all of the nominees.

A letter to the SMOFs, moderates, and fence sitters from the author who started Sad Puppies
Sad Puppies Update: The Melt Down Continues

384 thoughts on “Sad Puppies Update: The Nominees Announced and Why I Refused My Nomination”

  1. I tip my hat to you, sir, for taking the high road and turning down the nomination. You talk the talk and walk the walk and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m looking forward to reading Nemesis as I’m gradually catching up on your work.

  2. It’s too bad. Nemesis was really good. I understand your rationale, but there is no inconsistency in saying, “I want good works that have been historically overlooked because they are actually fun to read be nominated” and recognizing that your work is in that category too.

    1. Nemesis is a really good book, maybe one of the best things I’ve ever written, but this was a tactical decision. I care a lot more about the healthy future of my genre than I do awards for myself.

      1. Sorry Chief, MH Alpha is still better. Nemesis is good, one of the top of the series. But Alpha just rocks on many levels.

        Now can I get the BIG showdown… please, pretty please. I wanna see the animal spirits, the fallen, the others, the eldritch squids, humans, demons, vamps, wolves, gnomes, elves, champions, guardians, and Franks duke it out in one epic battle.

      2. But you know they won’t give you any credit for bowing out so it is , I am sorry to say it, a futile gesture.

        1. It isn’t about them. I am under no delusions of convincing the willfully ignorant. When I argue it is to give ammo to my side and to convince the undecided.

          1. Job well done Larry. It deprives the SJWs of all kinds of rhetorical ammo and makes them look (even more) petty and tyrannical.

            Any reasonable observer looking at this thing will certainly see this whole thing has not been about getting Larry a Hugo.

            As for the UNreasonable observers… f- ’em. They’re all having a collective hernia this week, and I’m pretty pleased I participated in giving it to them. You get enough spear carriers in one place at one time, you call it an army.

            Confusion to the enemy!

        2. Recusing will absolutely not convince the critics. What it does is convince the middle. The undecideds. The people on the fence. It’s a principled move independent of trying to maneuver against opponents. I did the same. Frankly, seeing guys like Kevin J. Anderson get his due (at last!) is worth way more to me than a rocketship pin. I already have three. I don’t need more. Kevin’s never even had one. Which (to me) was a huge indicator that the award (or at least our detractors who are wetting their beds) is stuck on stupid.

      3. Did your ‘tactical decision’ had anything to do with the vast majority of fandom having no clue about sad puppies?

        Not wanting people to look on the rack and say:

        “Hugo award winner? Well shit, I remember back when his books were worth reading.”

  3. Enjoy the holiday, Larry. I’m taking my parents out for Easter dinner later tonight, and just surfing the ‘Net in the meantime. And trying (somewhat unsuccessfully, alas) to stay away from anything angry or political, in keeping with the spirit of the season.

    That said: Over at Tor.com right now, they’re in a state of shock.

    1. Good. I hope the ones who were taking small comfort in me not being on the list enjoy this post. 🙂

      1. Admit it, Larry: You just refused the nomination because the sound of SJW heads ‘sploding all over the interwebz brings you far more happiness than a Hugo ever would.

    2. Well, they got three books into the Best Novel catagory (Ancillary Sword, Dark Between the Stars, and Goblin Emperor). Ok, one of those was not the book they wanted, but still. They SHOULD have nothing to complain about (but you know they will).

      And I’m sorry, Tor-ies, but Kevin J. Anderson has deserved one for years. Now to get Alan Dean Foster a nomination….

  4. Unrelated dude here. What you’re doing is a really selfless and just plain neat.

    What are your books about?

    1. Larrys books are about characters you like and care about kicking the ever loving crap out of something then shooting it in the face. But in a funny way.

    2. Monsters are real, cowboy up kill them, get paid. And 1940’s film noir magic superheroes save the world from Nipponese invasion on giant dirigibles. And secret government anti terror hunt em down and kill em stories. And soul searching honor bound ” I will do what is RIGHT, no matter what” fantasy ( not out but you can read the earc). Pure awesome is what they are about.

      I have been lurking since before SP1, gafiated YEARS ago and really I just want to say thank you to you, Larry and Brad for what you are doing. SF is supposed to be about the ” what if” and follow the story where it takes you. And I like to watch tyrants heads splode

  5. Larry, I wish you’d stayed in. And not for any statement, but simply because NEMESIS is an amazing book. I do not say that lightly. I do not even LIKE Franks (as a “person”, he’s a strongly-effective character). He’s a right bastard, I think the Brit phrase goes.

    1. Remember, Franks sees all humanity and knows that the vast majority of humanity are going to heaven after they die. And Franks goes back to eternal torment.

      Meanwhile, if the MCB fails, heaven won’t exist any more because Cthulu and company will destroy God, angels and heaven.

      So kill them, and they go to bliss, or let the idiot humans live and blab, and the universe is destroyed. Pretty easy choice for Franks to make, and I agree with it.

      Remember, Franks doesn’t have an iota of faith. He KNOWS.

  6. If we’re really lucky we’ll get some TOS style logic bombs from the more rabid Larry haters.

    I’m actually sad 3-Body Problem didn’t get in. I didn’t nominate it (because I haven’t read it yet) but what I’m hearing about it is all amazingly good.

    Ancillary Sword… maybe she got better with her second novel.

    Goblin Emperor… don’t know much about it beyond the fact that my library system has only 5 copies.

    (Solid average is 10-12 for the 18 branches)

    1. You won’t be disappointed with 3-Body Problem … Cixin Liu approaches a situation which is often written about *badly* (I won’t spoil it for anybody here by revealing it) from a very different direction, at least partially because of his world view.

      Now we have to get the author to write a story in the MHI universe, it would be a *great* read 🙂

    1. Thanks. I just bookmarked the link in my ‘Health’ folders, ’cause that’s where it belongs and that’s where I’ll find it.

  7. Thank you, sir. And I for one understand. But don’t expect us to not keep voting for you!

  8. I’m a little bit bummed because I believe you truly deserve an award for Nemesis. I get it, though. It’s a brilliant tactical move to undermine the SJWs’ ridiculous arguments.

    I hope things will improve to the point you can accept the next nomination. And yes, definitely good luck to all the other nominees! Happy Easter!

  9. I support your actions in this, and I will continue to vote with my wallet (Take my money!). Before I do any voting I will try to read all of the books that I can.

  10. Larry, I know that recognition like this is important to a writer. All I can say is that I enjoy the body of your work. I devour it within hours / days of publishing. I will continue to do so because of the quality, storylines, imagination and talent. Thank You again from ViCAT MHI. Mg

  11. Totally understandable. I think that was a smart move, considering some of the accusations of ‘ballot stuffing’ certain people have been throwing around.

    Kinda bummed that only a handful of the ones I nominated got on the ballot (and most of those were movies/TV) but I look forward to reading the various nominees and voting on them.

    I haven’t done this before, so maybe someone can enlighten me. I didn’t get an e-mail about the nominations. Were we supposed to? Also, are we supposed to get copies of the various nominated things for voting? When is that supposed to happen?

    1. 1. Historically, the nominations are just announced. There will certainly be a list on your final ballot, and I think there’s usually a list with your voter packet of copies of works.

      2. The Hugo Voter Packet will be coming out “as soon as it is available,” according to the Hugo Awards website.

  12. *salute* Thanks for being an upstanding human being, Larry.

    Well, it’s down to Kevin J. and Jim Butcher for Best Novel for me; but I am CRYING at the slate for Dramatic Presentation Long Form. I ENJOYED ALL OF THOSE SO VERY, VERY MUCH. HOW COULD I POSSIBLY CHOOSE?!

    Happy Easter, Larry, everyone.

    1. Those I have already read but we will need to wait for our copies of the other books and read them to see if one of them deserves the award but I doubt they can beat “Parkour!”

      1. Reason why Kevin and Jim’s stuff sits above the others is because I’ve read Skin Game and while I’ve not read this book by Kevin J I have enjoyed his other works previously. I will give the others a fair go to the best of my ability / time before casting my vote though.

        I have talked about the ones I don’t think I could honestly vote on though, on my blog. (I don’t listen to podcasts/net radio for example.)

      1. I loved them both but… Guardians grabbed me. Gotta love Captain America and the movie was solid. It was great. Absolutely.

        Guardians, however, was SPLENDID. It was JOYFUL. It stands out in a way that the others don’t… sort of like Princess Bride. I think it’s just going to get better over time until we can all quote Rocket without half thinking about it.

          1. I rather like Scarlet Johansson but it’s more a choice between the two Chrises…

            Pratt or Evans…. Hmmmm….

          2. How can you forget Groot? Robert Redford made an awesome villain in Winter Soldier.

      2. I just watched Interstellar last night, and it was like watching a movie in the grand tradition of classic sci-fi, but with more hope and grittiness than I expected. It was also so human-positive, it made me really happy.

        I’m totally torn between, the Cap, Guardians, Interstellar and Edge, in no particular order. All of them were very good and I will have great difficulty in deciding.

        1. I nominated Big Hero 6. *Shrug*

          Of the ballot I’d say either Guardians or Interstellar, though they are all good.

    1. Dear Mr Glyer, you and I have differed in the past, and for my contumely toward you, I apologize. You have a courtesy and common honesty which is to be admired wherever found. Thank you.

  13. I completely understand why you are doing this and want to thank you for making such a bold decision.

    You have, essentially, cockblocked all the trolls, and I can’t help but love you for it.

  14. Larry, I loved Monster Hunter Nemesis. I agree, it’s one of the best things you’ve written, if not the best. I really, really loved it.

    All that said, I think doing what you did, and when you did, was a smart move. You declined before a lot of the “This is all about Larry getting a Hugo” stuff blew up, which means they can’t reasonably justify taking credit for that.

    Well played, sir. Well played.

    In the meantime, a lot of really good writers are nominated. I really enjoy Butcher’s work, and loved Lines of Departure.

    The fact that John C. Wright got about a bazillion nominations this year is just awesome. 😀

  15. So, you’ll not object to Son of the Black Sword getting nominated next year, right? Or shall you forever be at the forefront, taking the hits for the rest of the Sad Puppies slate?

    I’ve got to say that I’m greatly impressed – not that my approval (or that of any mortal man) was what you sought. Hell, awards or no, keep writing and I’ll keep buying.

  16. Kevin Standlee wants the “‘The TAR Babies'” Awards. (They Also Ran). Yes, he actually wrote that.

    “They’re Also Racists” sounds better. I’m surprised he didn’t propose the Sambo Awards. What an idiot.

    So just have an Alt-Hugo Awards but disemvowel it cuz SJWs are clever like dat. They’re thinking of holding a separate ceremony. I just had one right now. And the winner Issssssssssssssssss!!!! Monster Hunter Nemesis!!!

    (Jazz hands, jazz hands, jazz hands, etc.)

    Anyway, here’s the translation of the results if SJWs can understand this simple thought: Leave us in peace and we’ll do the same for you. Keep up the rabble-rousing and you’re liable to get more prank calls. We didn’t start this but we’re liable to finish it.

    1. Brad, thank you for organizing this – well done. However, why do you still post at MakingSlight? No one there is going to listen politely – I expect that ‘Cat’ is “Cat Rambo’ the current vice pres. of SFWA, no?

      The narrative on the reason that SP3 won is being shaped to be that ‘GG’ came to vote’ and ‘they are the wrong kind of fans’.

      The next move would appear to be addressing that ML posters to change the rules for 2017. I expect that the keepers to the key for the in-crowd, led by the SFWA, will organize to that end.

      1. “GamerGate came to vote” is a rallying cry that only appeals to the SJW’s who have already shown themselves to be outnumbered this year. The typical SP voter probably sees nothing wrong with it, because they rightly don’t believe the hype from anti-GG SJW’s.

        1. And from what I’ve seen… they didn’t. Not in any significant numbers though.

          Given all the stuff they’re saying about GG though that could well change for the final ballot.

      2. I tend to agree that Making Slight is more or less a bottomless hole into which I have occasionally cast my nickels during this whole brouhaha. Nevertheless, even when they’re jerks, they can’t combat a reasonable argument. While they pound their plastic forks and knives on their high chair trays, screaming and spitting, I can still be an adult. Maturity wins. Today, the opponents of SP3 staged one of the most epic toddler meltdowns in genre history. And convinced precisely nobody that they care about the field; they just care about having their way.

  17. It is rare and I feel awesome that an author can stick to his guns and do something truly selfless to prove his point, and show who the bigger man is. So Mister Correia to you I say Semper Fidelius.

  18. I’ve got a solution guys. Next year Kate doesn’t put Larry on the slate. If Vox can get enough votes without being on the slate, I’m pretty sure Larry can.

  19. “Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter 2m2 minutes ago
    There’s a lot to be said about these #hugoawards and I’ll be laying out my in depth analysis next week for The Guardian.”

    I sense another Correia frisking on the horizon.

    1. Honest… I thought you meant it to be frisking. I mean… frisking ought to lead to fisking… right? Cuz someone gets frisky…

  20. Ah, but what are all the “Larry Correia is desperate, DESPERATE to win a Hugo” trolls going to do now?

    Well-played, sir.

    1. They’ll keep repeating their ignorant misinformation. A few might correct their views, but not many I think.

  21. Happy Easter.

    You are definitely a man of his convictions, I applaud your doing this, I’m sure it was not easy.

    The world needs more people like you Larry. No matter how the SJW’s and their ilk may try to spin this, you have shown true class and will be remembered for it. And hopefully, maybe some will see the light and turn away from their hateful ways.

    Which I’m sure for you, would be the best award for this Easter.

  22. 1. Sad Puppies are happy today!

    2. It used to be more common to refuse nomination for various good reasons. This was a good reason, although it’s sad that things have gotten to such a pass that a sacrifice like this is a good plan.

    3. It looks like it really is a honor just to be nominated, in a diverse competitive awards race like this one. Congratulations to all the honored nominees out there!

    1. It wasn’t diverse. Shitty neighborhood.

      “The Book Smugglers @booksmugglers · 47m 47 minutes ago We have a ballot full of white males EVERYWHERE. We went back a few years now.”

      1. Of course we did! Back towards the time when the Hugos meant something. One can only hope we keep moving in that direction.

          1. You know, I’ve never said this to you, and I read your posts all the time in various places.

            I toast you, sir. Rarely in the history of fandom has anyone spent so much time looking at such annoying stuff, just to disinfect it with some sunlight. You are a man of fortitude and a fan of determination.

            Enjoy today’s breath of fresh air, because you helped open those windows.

          2. “You know, I’ve never said this to you, and I read your posts all the time in various places.
            “I toast you, sir.”

            Me too.

            Hadn’t hardly read any SFF for 25 years. Now I own 6 Larry Correia books. I blame you May, you bastard.

          3. Glad to have the company and for Larry to act as a central clearing house from which to stage a counter-attack. None of us like to be targeted by these bullies just for waking up in the morning.

            LC has emboldened the quiet and voiceless to come forward and join the fun and provided a platform from which to do do, and a lot more besides. That has proven infectious. People don’t like bullies and more and more outsiders are convinced by our simple truths, our willingness to do homework and use actual quotes.

            I just want to be left alone and not demonized by what are essentially an organized group of liars. People like Scalzi, Hines and elsewhere Shanley Kane and Brianna Wu and Sarkeesian are not sympathetic people but come off as broken people on some sort of revenge kick.

          4. “You know, I’ve never said this to you, and I read your posts all the time in various places.
            “I toast you, sir.”

            Me too. You have a stomach of cast iron, Mr May

      2. Well, _this_ year it is pretty darned diverse. I look at the nominees and say, “Wow, what a lot of great choices! How different these stories are from each other! What a lot of amazingly different sf personalities and writers and artists and podcasters!”

        Of course, the PC meaning of diverse is the exact opposite, I know…

      3. ATTENTION: Book Smugglers:

        “All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.” – Southern Poverty Law Center.

    2. > 2. It used to be more common to refuse nomination for various good reasons.

      The most common good reason was because the nominee had already won previously and wanted to give others a chance. I don’t think anyone has refused for fan politics reasons before.

  23. The fact that you put the cause ahead of your own successes is exactly why you get the support you have. As united as the Hugo people claim to be, they are clearly all top ready to stomp on each other to get their prize.

    Way to be Larry! And enjoy Conference weekend 🙂

  24. At first I was a bit disappointed to hear that you turned down the nomination, but at the end I understood your decision and I can also say that you convinced me that it was the best course of action.

    It is very easy to get “prestigious” awards and titles, one just needs to dance according to the music. But it takes real courage and and virtuousness to turn down all of this in name of the greater good. Classy.

    I also would like to take the opportunity to say that you were the one who last year made I start reading novels again. Last time before that was in 2002, when I was studying for the entrance exam of university. But the MHI series made me read for the pleasure of reading a good story, and I am also had read other authors since them.

    Thanks!

  25. I’m going to echo the other comments of being sorry not to see you on the ballot while at the same time understanding why you did it. Twas a noble sacrifice for the good of puppies everywhere. Wendell would be proud.

  26. Is there enough hazmat crews in the world to cover all the hazmat sites from all the SJW’s heads exploding?

  27. I see that the same editor who enjoys marching in Stalinist parades is having a hissy because some GamerGaters might allegedly have been involved.

    ‘Cause the GGers are obviously WAY worse than the folks who murdered a hundred million people. Somehow. In his head.

    1. Empress Teresa is saying the GGs were brought in by Torgersen “to wreck” the Hugos, but the GGs only became aware of this en masse the past week, as far as I know.

      1. As VD noted on Twitter, if GG had really been involved in a significant way, there would have been 20,000 votes, not 1,800.

        Once again we see their grossly inflated sense of self-importance at work.

        Maybe they should just embrace the butthurt and stop escalating at this point?

        1. No. Sarkeesian was ranting that GG had no place anywhere, including SF. They will ride this one all the way to the ground, like Slim Pickens on his A-Bomb.

          1. Wu, actually. She was slinging her husband’s four Hugos around like it conferred her status. It wouldn’t surprise me if we did get some GG votes because of that.

          2. ” She was slinging her husband’s four Hugos around like it conferred her status. ”

            Oh, God, a “hollywood wife.” I SO had my fill of them back when I worked security in Bel Air.

  28. So impressed. Grace is something seriously lacking in this SJW train wreck. And given the day and the seriousness of this weekend for much larger reasons even more so. When we meet I will have a box of 45-70 for you.

  29. James May: I suggested something that didn’t include “Hugo Award” in its name for people who wanted to do something regarding the top-fifteen “They Also Ran” nominees. That’s for legal (service mark) reasons: WSFS objects to anyone using its registered service mark to promote awards that aren’t The Hugo Award®.

    1. Why? Doesn’t that diminish the noms and the award winner? I fail to see how a “they were considered, but…” does anything, especially since Hugo wins and noms appear to not have any effect on sales.

      1. Nathan: There’s nothing stopping people from setting up any sort of award they want with any criteria of any sort they desire. But they cannot use the intellectual property of someone else to do so. (Analogy: you can invent and promote a cola soft drink. You cannot call it “Coca-Cola.” You can’t even call it “Not Really Coca-Cola.” Someone owns the trademark, and it’s not you.

        I’ve always said, many times, that anyone who thinks the Hugo Awards are broken beyond any redemption whatsoever should actually set up Real Award run the way they think Real Awards should be run. Indeed, I welcome people doing so, as long as they don’t use any of WSFS’s trade/service marks like “Hugo Award,” the Hugo Award logo, or the Hugo Award Trophy rocket.

        1. To be honest, I might have misread what you were saying. I read it as making a Consideration (TM) label based off of the top fifteen vote getters in the nomination process.

    2. Mr. Standlee, I apologize for calling you an idiot – really I do. I get carried away sometimes with anyone at R’lyeh’s House of Bats. I get the sense you’re not really part of this whole racial defamation culture.

      If you have any contacts at WorldCon who are scratching their heads and saying what can we do about this, I can’t speak for anyone but myself. A mission statement might help. What I want is only one thing: for SJWs to knock off the racial incitement. Just… knock it off.

      I mean… look what it’s gotten you. Is it really that precious? More than SFF? There’s people who throw rocks and there’s people who throw them back. See if you can understand which is which.

      1. James May:

        I apologize for calling you an idiot – really I do.

        Thank you.

        What I think people misunderstand when they see me riled up is that I’m not on the Sad Puppies “side,” or the so-called SJW’s “side” or anyone’s “side.” I’m on the Hugo Awards’ side. I’ve invested many years of my life as a volunteer for WSFS, have administered the Hugo Awards three times, chaired a World Science Fiction Convention, and am current Chairman of the only permanent body of the World Science Fiction Society. (Individual Worldcons aren’t permanent; each year’s convention is a one-time-only event.) I want things run legally, and I want the Worldcon as I know it to run smoothly for the benefit of its members.

        Being accused of fraud when you’ve been part of one of the most open, transparent voting processes that I’ve ever encountered can really rankle.

        1. Fair enough. Have you seen the posts Larry’s made here previously where he said, after looking at it, that he thought the Hugo voting was 100% honest?

          1. Have you seen the posts Larry’s made here previously where he said, after looking at it, that he thought the Hugo voting was 100% honest?

            Yes, I have, and I appreciate it. I also am one of the people who have said that nothing done this year was illegal.

            However, I have a big problem with people who are convinced that there have been publishing companies, political activists, or Secret Masters of Fandom putting together solid slates of five candidates per category with an avowed intention of completely dominating a category. Anyone who thinks that has been routinely happening is fooling themselves. Such conspiracies do not happen. Administrators know how to spot those kinds of patterns, and they talk to each other.

            Thus, claims that I’ve heard that “This sort of thing has been happening all along; we’re just doing it out in the open” are specious, in my opinion. The compilation of various recommendation lists (such as the ones I’ve administered for the Bay Area Science Fiction Association and published on the Hugo_Recommend LiveJournal) are not solid blocs of candidates; the very fact that there’s hardly ever the same number of recommendations as there are finalist positions on the ballot should be a sign of that. They are lists of “things we saw/read liked that we think are award-worthy and that we think you should check out as well,” and I think that’s a lot different than “here’s a solid slate of candidates put forward to legally attempt to dominate the choices of the electorate.”

            The Hugo Award nominations have almost never been made by a majority of the electorate, but of a . (That’s different from the final ballot, where the system produces the candidate least-disliked by a majority of those members voting.) But SF fans have been so traditionally disorganized that this really has never produced solid blocs of candidates. The fact that the finalists have not been to the tastes of every member of WSFS doesn’t mean that they were the result of a conspiracy.

          2. Like I said, fair enough. Larry used to be an auditor, he says everything is above-board, that’s good enough for me.

            You might want to pay a visit to Making Light with your message. They’re losing their minds over there right now, threatening to start a No Award campaign.

          3. You might want to pay a visit to Making Light with your message.

            I am a participant in some of the discussions there, where I have drawn the ire of some for my excessively pedantic and dry tone.

            But I’ll freely admit that I’m more attuned to the Nielsen Haydens (even when we disagree) because they have been working on Worldcons even longer than I have been. Both of them have spoken on matters before the WSFS Business Meeting have have in my opinion been constructive members of the Worldcon community. That doesn’t mean I agree with every word written by them or any other poster at Making Light. It means that I’m more likely to listen to (if not necessarily agree with) people who have worked on organizing one of the most complicated annual all-volunteer events in the world* than those whose involvement with the convention is mostly theoretical at best.

            *I say that despite it not being the largest genre event because every Worldcon is a start-up, one-shot convention. DragonCon is the same organizers and generally same site every year. ComicCon International has full-time paid employees and is the same organization in the same place every year. Worldcons have no full time staff, and every year it’s a brand new event with a new legal organization, new committee, and new site. Aside from a surplus-sharing agreement that most Worldcons have signed on to since the 1990s, there’s no legal or financial connection from one year to the next. You’re basically running a one-shot, $1 million turnover, 5-10 thousand member start-up convention that you will then dissolve after the five days is over. Under these circumstances, it’s hard for me to complain about the rough patches; it’s often seems to be a miracle that the event happens at all.

          4. When someone has said “this sort of thing happens all along” I’ve always interpreted that as… people have advocated for some books and authors in an informal way behind the scenes. Because that type of statement is usually followed by a “but” we’ve just done it out in the open.

            And I think it would be sort of difficult to claim that there isn’t genteel campaigning as a normal sort of thing.

          5. I admit I’d also prefer having a number of suggestions different than the number of nominations that can be made, but I’d prefer more and not less; I’d rather be pointed to 10 good stories than three.

          6. I would be delighted if y’all would accumulate long lists of works that you think are award-worthy. NESFA and BASFA do this. Each recommendation has the names of those people who recommended them. If you put such a recommendation site in a static location (i.e. one that does not change from year to year), it probably would be added to the Third Party Recommendation Sites that TheHugoAwards.org compiles.

            Such long lists are much different from curated lists that are limited to not more than the number of possible positions on the final ballot.

          7. I like the idea of a longer list but not a list too long to be reasonably read.

            Two lists maybe… one really long list of eligible work as part of accumulating suggestions of books people particularly like and a chance to point out something that might have been overlooked… but if the idea is that people should actually read them all instead of skim for name recognition, then a final “short list” is better than a super long list.

        2. I have never had the fortune to attend a workd con, but I have had to deal with the people running it a bit (some problems with my pin, nothing major) and I will unreservedly say they were curteous, professional, and prompt.

          My wish with all of this is a strengthened World Con, Hugos, and more fans from all over attending and supporting.

        3. The fraud part has never been an issue with me. I have no sense of that one way or the other. Here’s what I do sense:

          When I read the Hugo Winners Vol. 1-4 I loved the entire thing and saw a dedication to artistry to the exclusion of all else. They encompassed why I read SFF. I wish to return to that.

        4. Kevin, a question: given the instances where 3-4 purple have received nearly identical numbers of votes in separate categories in the same year, and that those people happen to have the same influential connections and support each other… Do you really think that a functional (if not conspiratorial) whisper campaign is out of the question? I mean, it’s certainly possible that there wasn’t even any coordination necessary, and it’s just the organic result of insular cliques in fandom, but those numbers strike me as very suspicious.

          1. …given the instances where 3-4 purple have received nearly identical numbers of votes in separate categories in the same year, and that those people happen to have the same influential connections and support each other… Do you really think that a functional (if not conspiratorial) whisper campaign is out of the question?

            Knowing many of the individuals personally, the answer is, “Yes, I rule out conspiracies.”

            I mean, it’s certainly possible that there wasn’t even any coordination necessary, and it’s just the organic result of insular cliques in fandom, but those numbers strike me as very suspicious.

            I don’t believe in most conspiracies, particularly those that require complete secrecy and perfect coordination. The SP/RP campaign had to shout from the rooftops, after all.

            Conspiracies are comforting theories, that’s all. Read Why People Believe Weird Things for more on why people are drawn to such mental comfort food.

          2. Kevin Standlee – Please reply to the questions as stated, not as you would like them to be stated. I asked about a campaign, not a conspiracy.

          3. You’re moving the goalposts. Claims that, say, two works got 40 and 41 nominations in the same category are trotted out as “proof” of Secret Marching Orders. I cited my own case that disproves this isn’t mathematically possible. I’m not the only one who nominated the Stross and not the Scalzi. (I can cite another person if you want.) So lay off on sifting through numbers until you find a few cases where there happened to be almost the same count between multiple categories. Correlation isn’t necessarily causation, and while I would expect there to be overlap between the 41 and the 40 in the case cited, the implication that there were 40 minions given marching orders on how to cast their ballots is laughable.

            Look, Hugo Administrators — actual human beings, not computers — have to read every nominating ballot, line by line, in order to sort out the variations in names of nominees. This means that Real Human Beings are watching what comes in. It’s not that hard to spot “campaigns” of a run of people all voting exactly the same way. With relatively rare outliers of single works, this simply wasn’t happening. So put away your conspiracy theory, please.

          4. See as I quite specifically asked about a *functional* whisper campaign (and *excluded* conspiracies), I don’t see how it’s difficult to just answer the question.

            But, you enjoy torching that strawman right to the ground.

          5. You’re asking for a negative proof of something that’s not falsifiable. All I can tell you is that I administered three Hugo Award elections, and did not see a pattern of bloc voting. But of course you think I’m lying. It’s very easy to prove conspiracy theories when any evidence to the contrary is part of the conspiracy.

          6. Less lying, but more “trust but verify.” A little heavier on the verify part, admittedly, but you are appealing to your own authority without accompanying evidence.

          7. Kevin Standlee –

            My question: “Do you really think that a functional (if not conspiratorial) whisper campaign is out of the question?”

            Your Response: “Knowing many of the individuals personally, the answer is, ‘Yes, I rule out conspiracies.'”

            I think it’s rather obvious that you are VERY SPECIFICALLY *not* answering the question I asked. In fact, you repeatedly used the word conspiracies in your response: 3 times.

            THEN you accused me of moving the goalposts, when I quite clearly did not, as my question never changed. You simply chose to respond to an entirely different question that I DID NOT ask.

            Then you claimed that I accused you of lying. This is demonstrably false.

            So, as stated above, continue torching the strawman. You are either unwilling to answer the question or unable to grasp it, and as such I see no point in continuing to argue with someone who is either completely disingenuous or incompetent.

          8. Do you really think that a functional (if not conspiratorial) whisper campaign is out of the question?

            Yes, I do think that any sort of “whisper campaign” is out of the question.

            Is that a clear enough answer?

          9. Yes, that’s all I wanted.

            As a follow-up: what, then, is the explanation for the incredibly close voting patterns in several nomination categories over the years? Do you think it’s purely organic?

          10. Yes, I do think so. Sift enough numbers — and boy, do we have a lot of numbers! — and you’ll be able to find some correlations if you look hard enough.

            Just to pick one at random, I went back to the 2005 Hugo Awards and looked at Best Novel, in which we find that Iron Sunrise (Charlie Stross, Ace) got 55 votes and Going Postal (Terry Pratchett, HarperCollins) got 54. Surely you don’t think there was some sort of collusion to make that happen, do you?

            (Pratchett declined nomination, incidentally, so anyone who claims that the Awards were somehow rigged to prevent PTerry from getting a nomination needs to get her facts straight.)

            On the same ballot, The Algebraist (Iain M. Banks, Orbit) got 33 votes and made the ballot (because of Pratchett declining). Newton’s Wake (Ken McLeod, Orbit) got 32 votes and didn’t make it. Someone trying to find evidence of a Dark Conspiracy could take these numbers and declare that one of the 33 Orbit Drones didn’t get his/her marching orders, and that somehow the Great Conspiracy twisted Terry Pratchett’s arm — a laughable proposition — into declining to let Orbit’s works onto the ballot.

            And that’s just one category picked from one year. Keep looking through the numbers and a paranoid person with a taste for numerology could easily find more.

          11. So instead of a whisper campaign, we’re back to… the original assertion that the Hugos were being decided by one specific clique of individuals who managed to nominate works by a few specific individuals/works who met the right criteria? And, oddly, managed to ignore some of the best and most popular works of the last 20 years?

            Huh. Weird.

        5. Mr Standlee, Please believe that I have made no statement, public or private, casting any doubt on the integrity of the process; nor do I hold any unspoken doubts in reserve.

          Indeed, were it not for my utter faith in the honesty of the process, I would not have asked my fans to vote for the Sad Puppies suggestions.

          I appreciate and admire your honesty. If anyone tells you that I have said otherwise, ask them to quote me word for word, and you will see that he cannot.

          Sad Puppies is about breaking out of an ideological feedback loop, a stasis, and returning some dignity to the award.

          John C Wright

    3. So what are the changes we can expect to find because we wanted to select our own nominees, Kevin?

      Will the WorldCon have our ‘betters” graciously offer us a prix fixe selection from which we will be kindly permitted to pay our $40 to choose? They certainly talk as though they want to, and looking at the ballots for the past few years, they have seem to have been doing so.

      Look at what happened this year, Kevin. A WHOLE bunch more people than have shown up for recent ballots this time, and paid their good money to YOUR convention, to exercise their RIGHT to simply have a say. Anybody who CAN be traumatized by that SHOULD be.

      These are people you could have had with you, revitalizing your genre and enriching your conventions culturally and philsophically. And turned them away. All. These. Years.

      Looking at your photo, I am guessing that I was a fan when you were, if not sperm, then certainly years short of long pants. And I will tell you, from being a fan all those years, and working in SF, and publishing in SF, that are a great many outstanding writers and creators in this field who have been criminally overlooked over the years in favor of “talents” we now know, because the people who did it admit it proudly, because of their politics and skin color and whether or not their genitalia dangled. And that is wrong, sir. Wrong, politically incorrect and simply indecent.

      Your only choice is whether or not you choose to facilitate it. After too long, we won’t anymore.

      1. My WordPress profile photo was taken in 2002, when I was co-chairman of the Worldcon in San Jose (and one of the Hugo Award administrators — incidentally, the lead admins that year were the same people who ran it this year), with me holding a 2002 Hugo Award trophy. I was born in August 1965.

  30. 1. Happy Easter!
    2. Congrats on the nomination for MH Nemesis. Even though you turned it down, it still is a winner in my not-so-humble opinion.
    3. Thanks for the whole Sad Puppies program. Reading about the SJW’s meltdowns gives me something to enjoy while waiting for your next MHI book.
    4. We both need to thank Audible. Without them I never would have found the Monster Hunter Nation.

  31. Bold move, sir. Well played. It looks like the SPs are taking the motto “When punched, punch back twice as hard” to heart. Along with the usual Easter festivities, I’m looking forward to the splodey-ness over the next couple of days. What’s the over and under on the time until Damien rears his head?

    Enjoy this most holy of days tomorrow. As far as I’ve heard, they haven’t found the body yet, so Easter is still on.

  32. Hell Larry, I respect ya for it. Still though, Nemesis deserves to be there on it’s own merits and the whole series simply for the opening sentences of MHI itself. Still my FAVORITE book opening EVER! LOL. As I keep telling people, how can you NOT love a book that starts off that way?

  33. Is that fireworks I hear, or crazy Lefty heads exploding all over the place at this “travesty”?

  34. “#29 ::: janetl ::: (view all by) ::: April 04, 2015, 04:27 PM: Vox Day has stated that many problems of the modern day are due to democracies ‘giving women the vote’, and that people of African ancestry are savages incapable of modern civilization. While stooping to GamerGate is very low, associating with Vox Day — a person who thinks that more than half of the human race is incapable of rational thought on his plane of being — that’s pretty low, too.”

    That’s pretty typical of the lack of self-awareness of SJWs. Their award nominees routinely talk about half the human race as oppressors who hate women and reinforce each other’s privilege and “rape culture” as well.

    As for N. K. Jemisin, she claims about VD “The future he apparently wants is one rooted in the past, during which a demographic minority of the human species constructed an ingenious system allowing it to dominate most of the planet. (Diabolical… but ingenious.)”

    Whites are “diabolical” in a planetary sense isn’t exactly what you’d call the moral high ground.

    OH, BY THE WAY…

    “Mary Robinette Kowal retweeted Con or Bust @con_or_bust · 33m 33 minutes ago
    Now seems like a good time to mention (1) Con or Bust helps fans of color/non-white fans attend SFF cons; (2) it has free memberships now; >”

    Send those li’l tykes money cuz they can’t do it themselves. They probably lack that diabolical quotient. hahahaha.

    #SegregationIsDiversity

    1. Look really… setting something up to try to encourage more POC to attend cons (because lets be really honest here… fen are frighteningly weird) is the *right* way to do it. Saying, we understand that some people might not feel welcome because fen are frighteningly weird but we really would like more people to take that first step through the doors and so we’re going to issue actual invitations” is the right way to do it.

      The wrong way is all these various… “you can come to the convention and stay apart from everyone else,” idiocies. Or the “lets vote for people on the basis of their under-represented status” affirmative action hires. Or, the super big wrong way… “We expect certain groups to “punch up” even if their targets are innocent of malice because certain groups simply can’t be expected to follow civilized behavior and must be granted the same “understanding” that we give children with mental issues.”

      But understanding that a whole lot of people of every sort find going to a con for the first time a bit intimidating, and doing something to help get them through the door? We’d all like to see more and broader participation, right?

      I mean, what really upsets me a whole lot about … well, it’s the ONLY thing that upsets me about being portrayed (by virtue of being on “this side”) as wanting something other than more participation by more people (the definition of “fan” is evangelism!) is that their little hissy fits involve them getting up on a big soap box and yelling YOU AREN’T WELCOME AND SHOULD JUST GIVE UP BECAUSE SCIENCE FICTION IS WHITE AND MALE AND YOU DONT’ FIT! (And if you come to a con we’ll segregate you.)

      Who’s doing the damage?

  35. I completely understand your decision but it does bum me out as I think Nemesis is your best work to date. But they -would – have made it about you. We’ll played and we’ll done!

  36. damn… was hoping to get all 6 monster hunter books in the voter packet since BAEN put your entire trilogy in there last year. 🙁

    Hopefully Jim Butcher continues the trend and gives us his whole series… I doubt it, but it makes the $40 a really good deal.

    1. Speaking of voter packets, anybody have any word when they’re coming out? I’ve got serious reading to do (JCW owns the novella category, and his works can’t just be breezed through …)

      1. It takes time, usually weeks, to assemble the packet, due to the necessity of contacting rights-holders and getting permission to include the nominated works. It’s also pretty typical for the package to evolve after originally being announced, as rights-holders who initially didn’t reply or said “no” decide to add their works to the package.

      2. I hear Memorial Day weekend is the target date, but it will depend in large part on the publishers. Last years got delayed somewhat because Orbit took their time giving them an answer on Neptunes Children and Ancillary Justice (and ultimately deciding to only include “extended excerpts” but not the whole novels).

        1. I’m not expecting the full copy of Ancillary Sword in mine this year. Which is a shame, since I can’t find it in the stores.

        2. The same ‘extended excerpt’ thing seemed to apply to Parasite last year, too. It’s why I No-Voted all three of them (though Neptune’s Children was also so wretchedly bad I didn’t even make it through the excerpt).

  37. And just gotta love one article I just read complaining about how the Hugo awards this year are horrible because so many of the Sad Puppies, AKA Rabid Puppies according to some of the people in the comments, got works nominated. Wanted to bring up the fact of your pass on the nomination, but could not bring myself to post there.

    http://io9.com/the-hugo-awards-were-always-political-now-theyre-only-1695721604?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_twitter&utm_source=io9_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

      1. That’s “Bring Back Bullying,” “Let’s Not Pay Our Interns,” and “Let’s Trick Coke into Quoting Mein Kampf” Gawker. But we’re the bad guys…

        1. And then there was that horrible Michelle Malkin bikini photoshop they tried to pass off some years back as “proof” that Malkin was a “hypocrite,” and only succeeded in proving that Gawker is full of shite.

          What’s really sweet is that all the little Gawkerbots at io9 – you did read the comments? – think they’re the victims…

    1. “Last August, the Hugo Awards were swept by a younger group of women and people of color” write the clueless morons who write posts titled “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like ‘Avatar'”?

      Problem, meet problem.

      Plus – fuck off.

      1. “Younger group of women and people of color”

        Leckie is 49 years old and is so white she’d damned near transparent.

        1. Mentally I’d guess Leckie, Hurley and Samatar add up to 49.

          Unless you believe we are a “white supremacy” where I want to drag them “to death behind the back of a truck” and punch them in the face “at random moments…”

          In that case they are as wise in years as Tarzan’s Great Apes.

          1. Kowal is 46 years old and likely gets a sunburn if she stands in front of the refrigerator too long.

            Stross is 50 years old and is neither a woman nor a “person of color” (unless “pasty white” counts as a color).

            Datlow is 66, and equally white.

            Yeah, looks like a “sweep”, all right.

      1. What would SJWs say if we went around writing posts titled “When Will Transgender Stop Writing Defamatory Posts About White Men”?

        SJW anti-bigots are completely brainless people. Maybe they don’t get prefixes.

    2. Io9 was fun for a while until I began to see a basic, ever repeating, pattern. The future sucks.

      Yes… we come from the future… and the lights are out.

  38. I felt that ultimately my presence would be a distraction from the overall mission.

    My butt! Larry just wanted me to pay for my copy of MHI: Nemesis. Instead of getting it for free with the rest of nominated works, like last year.

    Fine. I’ve bought it now. But I saw through your plan, Larry. I wanted you to know that.

  39. Larry,
    Many thanks to you and Brad for this exposure and this opportunity. I haven’t decided to come to WorldCon yet; I keep recalling the Hugo ceremonies in San Antonio in 2013 where, except for the Hugo’s given to Stan Schmidt, several times I wanted either to 1. Vomit, or 2. Scream out objections over the SJW monologues, or 3. Just walk out. Very unpleasant.

    If the long shot were to come through, I will have a designated picker-upper there if I am not. In the Novella category, at least, where SP3 swept, I hope Sasquan provides asbestos gear for recipients.

    Again, eternal thanks to you two, and good luck to all nominees, SPs or not.

    1. Arlan, I think I can speak for all of us Analog guys that I wanted to scream with triumph when Stan won. Then I wanted to punch some CHORFs in the face for having snubbed Stan for decades, because apparently having the most widely circulated SF mag in the english language and birthing many dozens of careers doesn’t “rate” with the CHORFs.

  40. Surprise, surprise: Tor has closed comments on their Hugo Noms thread for the weekend, so their moderators can give it their “full attention” when they come back to work Monday.

    Since their official count is up to 38 comments, but the final comment is numbered #41, it looks like they’ve already broken out the banhammer as it is…

    *rolls eyes*

    1. It’s Tor.com. What can you expect?

      Despite their frequent idiocy, they have some good features, though.

      1. I quit reading most Tor.com columnists after Jo Walton stated a straight white male character in an Edwardian romance novel she was reviewing MUST be secretly gay “because he’s so decent and good to the heroine”…and went on and on about how that’s definitive proof, as in real life straight men who are decent just don’t exist and bi men are just gay men who kind of, sort of pretend to like women. <_<

        I quit reading all of them after they published a lengthy, vitriolic, completely unhinged article on how Star Trek: The Next Generation was the most evil SF series to ever be shown on TV EVER.

        Why?

        Because Data, a humanoid robot built and given life by a human, raised and taught by humans, and operating on a human ship…WANTED TO BE HUMAN.

        When everyone knows that humans SUCK and are EVILBADWRONG.

        That's right. Even Gene Roddenberry's ultralibprog "Humans are the most AWESOME things EVER!" message is now just too rightwing conservative.

        And by the article's standards, Data's evil twin android brother who hated and murdered countless humans is now the good, smart one. o_O

        1. Jo Walton also thinks that Heyer, a woman of unshamed Jewish heritage, is being anti-Semitic when she writes about a Jewish character who isn’t a nice upper class person. But frankly, in the Regency, you weren’t going to find nice aristocratic Jewish people. It was respectable tradesmen, poor people in the slums, and criminals in the slums.

          So after all the talk in various novels about young men going to moneylenders, Heyer actually has a heroine confront one and get the money back, while presenting the laws that protected minors and the social IOU rules that prevented minors from taking advantage of the law after being taken advantage of.

          Heyer’s presentation of this particular criminal confronts head on the old English stereotypes about Jewish people. But if you read it carefully, it’s not in any way hateful about Judaism. It’s more about English fears than anything. It’s a great Dickensian bit of social history, too, as well as a comedic confrontation scene with very few parallels in English literature.

          And yet, all Walton saw was bigotry. Very sad.

          1. This is off topic but Minnie Driver starred in a 1998 film called The Governess. It is about a late 1830s London Jewish woman who has to support her family after the murder of her father. She passes herself off as a Protestant and goes to work for a wealthy Scottish family as a governess. It weirdly takes in the invention of photography but in a great way. I just love that film.

          2. Actually, Walton’s major misunderstanding of Cotillion was that when Freddy said that “I ain’t in the petticoat line,” he was saying that he wasn’t a womanizer who slept with tons of loose women and prostitutes, whereas she took it as “I’m gay, Dad.” After that, she was basically reading the book the way a slash fan watches Star Trek. Predictably, this led her to more misunderstandings about the characters.

            Learning new phrases by context is an important skill for the sf/fantasy or historical fiction reader.

          3. Of all the Heyer novels I’ve read the one that seemed to imply, strongly, that homosexuality was a thing was… the one I can’t remember the name of… um… the young heiress dressed up like a boy travels with the older Lord somebody incognito and their mail coach is overturned and they meet a thief and there is a stolen necklace… that one. There’s murder and shenanigans and when the couple is discovered by the lord who stole his mother’s necklace he *threatens to blackmail* the first guy. It doesn’t say exactly, but it seems obvious to me that the bad guy believed that the young heiress was a young man. But it’s implied, not stated, but what would be the basis of blackmail if she was a girl? There isn’t any. And at the end, our hero pulls the still disguised “young man” off the mail coach and kisses her where people can see and they are shocked. Same reason. Very sly, though.

            Actually, I take it all back… in the Reluctant Widow the one cousin (?) who is a foppish fellow, and also a murderer and cold blooded spy, is almost certainly meant to be a gay character.

    2. ROFLMAO, Why do I get the feeling that the TOR expense account is gonna make a number of liquor stores very happy!

  41. Someone else will have to collect the wisdom of Damien G Walter. I am now blocked by him on Twitter and I’m informed that he’s now protected his tweets.

    Kind of a relief, really. 🙂

    1. He has since hidden his Twitter Account, LMAO! Apparently the Breitbart London article didn’t sit to well with him.

  42. “Cora Buhlert @CoraBuhlert · 11h 11 hours ago @PrinceJvstin A combination of extremely high tides, bad planning, insufficient dikes and belated warnings.”

    Cora Buhlert and Paul Weimer brainstorm the no-show of women, PoC and lesbians at the Hugos.

  43. For me, it was going to be very difficult to choose between SKIN GAME and MONSTER HUNTER: NEMESIS for Best Novel.

    They are both hugely enjoyable books and their respective series’ are on my “shut up and take my money!” list.

    So now my decision is simple: SKIN GAME it is.

    Can you believe that it’s the fifteenth novel in one of the most popular and best-loved urban fantasy series – with millions of readers around the world – yet Jim Butcher has *never* been nominated for a Hugo best novel before today?

    Which would be understandable if the nominations were chock full of awesome every year. But they’re not. ZOE’S TALE, anyone?

    Hell’s Bells! This is an astonishing oversight. And SKIN GAME is an excellent novel. It deserves to win.

  44. James May – “Cora Buhlert and Paul Weimer brainstorm the no-show of women, PoC and lesbians at the Hugos.”

    Vox Day is a Native American and he’s been nominated twice.

    So they could vote for him.

  45. “… I am used to bigots dominating the conversation and being galled by my existence. I am used to people vilifying my name, my language, my ethnicity, my gender, my sexual orientation. I am used to resistance as default, as the condition by which I exist. So this year’s Hugo ballot — on which are heavily represented men far better known for advocating white supremacy, violence against women, and hatred of queer people than they are for their fiction, to the point where it appears they were chosen for their advocacy over their fiction — feels like business as usual where I’m concerned.”

    Amal el-Mohtar writing from the homophobic, misogynist, white supremacy where she is forced to live because straight white men won’t sell her a plane ticket out of the West.

  46. One of the strangest attacks on Sad Puppies to come out of Making Light is the exclusion of the second volume of Patterson’s Heinlein biography. Apparent, we should have nominated it. But if we had, they would then claim it was only because we’re crazed Heinlein worshippers . . .

    1. Second strangest. In principle, Chris Shankpunter believes N. K. Jemisin, Daniel Jose Older, Jaymee Goh and K. Tempest Bradford should be lotteried into Coventry and shot.

      “Chris Warcraft @ChrisWarcraft · 8h 8 hours ago The only thing that Vox Day deserves to win is a trip to a society that believes what he espouses so a random person can shoot him.”

      Shame on you Chris Shankpunter. Meanness will give you whooping cough, the rickets, incontinence, and mental retardation.

      Proof of the mental retardation is believing a society that believes in what Day espouses would shoot him. Did you think before you Tweeted or has meanness declared a revolution in your brain?

      Didn’t you mean build a statue to him? Karma, Chris Shankpunter, Karma. Every time you shanked a punt an angel lost a tooth. Thanks to you, Heaven is on a strict diet of Gummy Bears and mashed potatoes.

  47. There’s already talk among the ideologically pure about a lot of “no award” votes. I didn’t even realize such a thing was possible. It just further cements the idea in my mind that most of these offense-peddling outrage mongers are nothing but overgrown children. They’re literally saying “If one of us can’t win, then no one can.”

  48. Larry,
    Tactically, I agree with your decision. Personally, I am sorry not to have the chance to vote for you this year. Nemesis is up to your usual standards of edge-of-the seat action interspersed with brilliant humor.

    I hope the time will come when the Hugos

  49. Larry,
    Tactically, I agree with your decision. Personally, I am sorry not to have the chance to vote for you this year. Nemesis is up to your usual standards of edge-of-the seat action interspersed with brilliant humor.

    I hope the time will come when the Hugo process is a level playing field. I’m not optimistic about it, but it’d be a good thing if it happened.

  50. Stupid Android browser. Is there a moderator who can remove this post and my second previous post?

      1. my sides –> ——x——–

        low-earth orbit –> —————-

        stratosphere –> —————-

        me –>____x_____

    1. Sorry, the local rules are posts live forever, brilliant and dumbass alike.

      Except mine. I made one of two posts in the history of this blog to be removed by Larry. (don’t ask, the evidence is gone, and Google never cached it.)

      You’ll just have to work a LOT harder at your dumbassery if you want to join the truly elite.

  51. Nemesis deserved to be nominated. Nemesis was that good. I saw glimpses of Agent Franks personality in the first two books, and Nemesis really fleshed his character and motivations out.

    There will be other chances for Hugo Awards, because you have the skill and the drive to write great books.

    The Sad Puppies are going to make the Hugo the popular broad based, and important award it always was. It is hard work, but there is no other way to defeat the self-proclaimed elitist SJW. The Sad Puppies are made up of people who are used to hard work, and are willing to do what it takes. They will succeed.

  52. “That Locus could produce such an extensive list without including a single book published by Baen deters me from trying to argue that a book or story which doesn’t appear on the list must be presumed to fall below the necessary of excellence.”

    – Mike Glyer, going to bat for the basic honesty of SP at Whatever

    I know I appreciate that.

      1. We need more Glyers out there – don’t always agree with him, but he’s been trying to be fair and honest, at least the last bit that I’ve been paying attention.

        1. It is also important to remember – a lot of people don’t know anything about this but what their friends are telling them, and not all of those friends a) know themselves, and b) are being completely honest.

          I think it is important to assume good faith until proven otherwise, and not be too hard on people whose only fault is ignorance.

          Sway the undecided, after all.

        2. Even better, I think he was actually convinced of a number of claims on the basis of the evidence presented. That speaks volumes.

          And hey, prior to SP I had no idea his site existed, so now I have a new stopping place for my lulls at work.

  53. I must say, I love your books, not your politics. But I think your books SHOULD be considered for a Hugo, so I guess I’m on your side in this. Although I see a little differently – While I’m a huge fan of both series, I see the MH series as fun, of the guilty pleasure sort, but the Grimnoir series is GREAT science fiction (but fun too). The plotting and characters are simply world-class. I’d rather see a Grimnoir book as a hugo winner than a MH book. But do keep churning them out – I’ll buy them. Most of them I buy on audible, the voice acting is astounding.

  54. Good call, Larry. Their whole strategy is about isolating one person and making it all about him/her. That way they sidetrack the actual discussion and deflect attention. They don’t want facts or logic to interfere because they cannot honestly defend their position. It’s all emotion.

  55. I salute your integrity, sir.

    When I announced that I had received a Campbell Award nomination on my blog, I reiterated my previous request that people *not* vote for me for political reasons or to get up some other tribe’s nose.

    If more SF & fantasy authors did likewise, I think the field would be improveed by it.

    My announcement:

    http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6721

  56. “I care immensely about sci-fi. Purchasing fake memberships to force out authors that play by the rules and earned their spot is despicable. Gamergate hijacked this year’s Hugo Awards, and loaded them with extremist homophobic authors. My husband has 4 Hugos, and I have thoughts.” – Brianna Wu

    Brianna Wu used the word “fake” without a nose growing out to the Oort Cloud. And in a world where there is no word such as “heterophobic,” there can be no such thing as a “homophobe.” Without light there is no dark, and SJWs constantly use words like “bigot” as if they exist in a vacuum. But they don’t. They have meaning and substance that stand alongside someone who is not a bigot. So in fact, Wu does not have thoughts, only a failure of intellect where a moral ethos is men=wrong, women=right, whites=wrong, PoC=right, heterosexuals=wrong, gays=right. That doesn’t resemble any law I’ve ever heard of. It sounds like a KKK with designer sheets.

    Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian are not initiating a cultural dialogue about the failures of gaming on a humanistic level. They are targeting men, whites, and heterosexuals.

    In the late ’60s we initiated a cultural dialogue about sex and violence in films. We did it on a humanistic level, rather than targeting Hollywood Jews. Wu and Sarkeesian are the monsters they seek, they only need a mirror. I am not their Hollywood Jews, so fuck them.

    1. “My husband has 4 Hugos, and I have thoughts.”

      Well my wife has a vagina so I have some thoughts on menstruation. Makes about as much sense.

  57. Thank you, Larry: “… I want writers to be free to write whatever they want without fear of social justice witch hunts, I want creators to not have to worry about silencing themselves to appease the perpetually outraged, and I want fans to enjoy themselves without having some entitled snob lecture them about how they are having fun wrong.”

  58. Well big fella, I dunno if I agree with you here or not. Those ‘awards’ should be about the fans as much as the writers IMO, and if they want to give you one…or at least nominate you for one…maybe you should have graciously accepted it?

    On the other hand…it is a great way to flip the bird at the people that seriously need to be told to FOAD.

    From what little I’ve seen of the tempest in this particular teapot…it may be a ‘no-win’ situation. Best of luck to ya all the same.

  59. This was possibly the most revealing rant I read yesterday:

    :: Alex R. ::: (view all by) ::: April 04, 2015, 06:02 PM:

    Brad R. Torgersen @ 41

    (….) You have brought our ugly, vicious, modern American culture wars into the Hugo process. I will be registering for a supporting membership for the first time in my life and voting everything on your slate below No Award. I will be doing this because I hate your stupid, obnoxious, bullshit. I hate the nonsensical idea that people are prejudiced against your conservatism. I hate your association with Grand Master Racist Asshole Vox Day. I hate your ballot packing and your exploitation of the Hugo rules. I hate your bringing Gamergate scum into the SF community. I hate your selfishness. I hate your complete cluelessness about the history of SF.

    You have the very spoiled and childish idea that your religious and political beliefs give you license to be an asshole. You will be treated accordingly.”

    Breathtaking lack of self-awareness on display here.

    1. Perhaps you should look in the mirror and give that same speech. It wasn’t about Larry’s political beliefs. It is about a snobbish clique that has controlled the awards for the past 2 decades because of their non inclusive policies that they based on political ideals. So when someone decides that they have had enough and decides to make a move to expanded the voter base there is a typical full meltdown, which are the hallmark of typical vicious progressives who believe that selections should be based on some “social justice” issue and not on whether or not the nomination is deserved.

      So now the clique’s leader is leading a campaign to deny anyone of the award because she is doing the feet stomping toddler fit, because her and her clique didn’t get to have their way.

      There is no one on the list of nominees who does not deserve to be there.

      However, I realize that my words will fall on deaf ears, since the level of intellect I am dealing with is one that can only resort to personal attacks that are without substance.

      1. From the wording of your response I’m not sure if you realize Mr. Chupik is re-posting a comment from elsewhere, and not because he agrees but to bring the toxicity to wider attention.

        Directed to Alex R., I entirely agree with your sentiment.

        Caveat: I’m not around here as much (and with the server migration I missed a few posts) so you guys may know each other well and it was clear to everyone but me.

        1. Actually no, it was 100% my mistake and I have apologized to Christopher above and I thank you for pointing out my error.

          1. Is cool, I saw your apology just now, fair play to you.

            We’ll just redirect your response to Alex R. — ’cause I loved it.

    2. OMG, I am so sorry, I was responding through via E-Mail, I deeply apologize to you Christopher, my response was directed at the comment apparently by an Alex R.

    3. Wow. Somebody might want to check the air in Alex R.’s room. I suspect alarms should be going off.

      I’ma just gonna stick a Larry quote here, in response to Alex R.’s rant:

      “… I want writers to be free to write whatever they want without fear of social justice witch hunts, I want creators to not have to worry about silencing themselves to appease the perpetually outraged, and I want fans to enjoy themselves without having some entitled snob lecture them about how they are having fun wrong.”

      Seems applicable.

      1. If you think about it, it is a pretty typical response from people of that mindset, which is about the level of your typical toddler. They don’t get their way and you get a foot stomping fit with screeching about how it unfair and wrong. But if you pay close attention to their reactions, much like a toddler, it is really all about them and them not getting their way.

        1. Yep. And the shock on their face when confronted with someone saying “no.”

          Toddlers. As you say.

          1. Precisely, but I do so enjoy that look, especially when I cause it. Guilty pleasure I guess.

        1. Where was Alex R.’s little screed anyway, I can’t find it? I would like to resonate some understanding to him.
          🙂

  60. Classy, Larry, but to what avail? I’m afraid that, since the fence sitters have not understood even till now, your sacrifice on the alter of humility is in vain, but well played in any case as it shall surely crank up the volume even more.

    You’ve given them another opening to spill their guts out on. One way to hunt monsters is to yell, “Come get me, you bastards,” then slice and dice them when they do.

    The coming entertainment should be exquisite.

  61. I’m kind of confused on how “Rat Queens” got on the best graphic novel vote. They didn’t put out very many issues in 2014, due to one of the books creators being in trouble with the law for beating and molesting women.

    BUT several characters in the book are gay, so I guess that makes it just count so much more? o_o

  62. Larry – I think that your refusing the nomination is the right thing to do. “Tactically” and “spiritually.”

    I hope you enjoyed your holiday.

  63. I’ve been largely absent from fandom, and I hadn’t noticed these SFnal politics, but I have certainly noticed cyberstalking and bullying in the pursuit of conformity.

    Literature needs to be a refuge of true diversity, where every voice is heard, and I’m very happy to see that SPTOTC, while ridiculing the tactics of certain ideologues is largely hewing to the principle that we all get to believe what we believe and we all get to express ourselves. Besides, the artist and the art are separate. Books deserve to be assessed as if they had no author.

  64. Anyway, thanks for all that you’ve done to show that this battle isn’t about politics, but about political diversity; that it isn’t about personal ambition, but about ambitions for the genre’s future.

  65. “Vivian J. James ‏@RealVivianJames · 3h3 hours ago
    I’d like to take a second to thank Brianna Wu for bringing #SadPuppies to #GamerGate’s attention.

    I love making new allies!”

    🙂

  66. @John R. Ellis:

    I would guess that some of that is people voting for the incoming writer, even though they’re not supposed to vote on that basis. Stjepan Sejic is best known for an “emotionally sensitive” series about a lesbian bondage couple. Of course, Sejic is very white and very male, and one has to ask the what exactly the criterion is that separates “good” white male writers of lesbian bondage porn from “bad” ones. That doesn’t stop him from having a huge fan base.

    1. Mr. Hobbes, I am surprised at you.
      Surely you’ve been around long enough to know that if said white male is reliably leftist he is given a free pass by the SJWs.
      As to the other half of the political spectrum, they don’t care about the politics, they just want their porn.

      1. Darn it Wes, warn people before you do that stuff, I shot coke zero through my nose, LMAO!

        Bravo! Bravo!

    1. He has nice things to say about Tom Doherty, though. Doesn’t Tom have a piece of the action at Baen, since he and Jim Baen cofounded it back in the 80s? Thought for sure that I read that somewhere. If that is the case, someone ought to go over and inform those asshats.

    2. Heh. “I am so upset that I’m going to stop writing negative reviews of your books”.

      You’re right. That’ll show ’em.

  67. Do the various parties issuing calls for “No Award” imagine that tactic is limited to their own followers?

    ‘Cause I’m pretty sure it isn’t.

    Just sayin’.

    1. Because of a fair bit of misunderstanding about how No Award works in the Hugo Awards voting and because I’ve grown tired of answering the same questions repeatedly, I wrote an article about how No Award works and how you should mark your ballot depending on your actual preferences.

      None of this is new; there’s a different way of telling it on the Hugo Awards web site. I don’t want anyone saying that in the matter of explaining how to vote against any given candidate, I’m not equal-opportunity.

      Personally, I really wish we had a realistic version of No Award/None of the Above in mundane elections. But then again, I also wish we used IRV in our elections as well.

    2. That’s just it, I don’t understand how they can gripe and moan, when other than the childish “we didn’t get our way” argument, the net outcome of SP was;

      1: More money (no pay no vote!)

      2. Expanded fan base interested in the awards. (How is this a bad thing?)

      3. A very good list of very deserving nominee’s.

      The “No Award” thing is just petty and childish. Basically, it just says that the CHORF’s (sp?) are so petty and petulant they would rather see no one get the award than for an author that deserves the award to get it, all because they didnt’ get to choose the list.

      1. Considering that one of the apparent avowed goals of SP/RP was to say, “If our slate can’t win, then nobody should win” by deliberately excluding anything else by strategic nominating, I would suggest that your blaster shoots in both directions.

        And note that I’m not accusing anyone of doing anything that’s against the rules. The Hugo Award nominating rules clearly allow dedicated, devoted minorities to concentrate their works in such a way that they dominate against the traditionally disorganized group that the electorate typically is.

        (Don’t even start about conspiracy theories about Sekrit Marching Orders. They didn’t happen. If they did, administrators like me would have seen the voting patterns, which are rather obvious.)

        However, and this is very important: The SP voters are almost certainly a minority of the total electorate on account of every set of finalists were nominated by what amounts to a minority of the total nominations cast in a category. WSFS rules are designed so that the voting on the final ballot reflects the views of a majority of the electorate, not just a first-ballot plurality. Note that there have been many finalists who led at the end of the first round but did not win. In one of the most remarkable cases, Harlan Ellison had a work with a first-round lead that not only didn’t win, but it finished in fifth place overall. (This indicates that members either loved or hated the work, and nobody was in the middle.)

        Polarizing candidates rarely win WSFS elections because the organization’s final-ballot election system tends to select for consensus winners, not just those who can win a first-past-the-post horse race. In fact, as I’ve pointed out many times, the winner of an Instant Run-Off election is not so much the most-liked as the least-disliked candidate.

        From what I’m reading, if No Award wins in any category, it’s not really because a majority of the membership of WSFS who participates in the election really likes not presenting an award, but that a majority of the membership participating in the election thinks it is the least-bad choice.

        Y’all are of course welcome to rank works that are not Puppy Approved below No Award yourself. That’s how the rules work.

        1. Considering that one of the apparent avowed goals of SP/RP was to say, “If our slate can’t win, then nobody should win” by deliberately excluding anything else by strategic nominating, I would suggest that your blaster shoots in both directions.

          Quotes, please.

          Apparent goal.” That’s a short way of saying, “You maybe never said this, but I’m going to assign a motive to you out of my own head, and then I will treat you like that was your REAL motive no matter what else you might say about why you did what you did.”

          And “avowed” is another solid thought-stopper. It means something like, “That motive I just assigned you folks out of my own thoughts? You’re not allowed to disavow it or claim it wasn’t your actual motive, because reasons.”

          It’s not like there’s any shortage of material, were one looking for anyone’s motives in this whole mess. God knows everyone involved has thrown walls upon walls of text onto their blogs, explaining in great and excruciating detail why they’re doing whatever they’re doing and what they want everyone else to do about it.

          That being the case, we hardly need to be making up imaginary explanations for anyone else’s actions. There’s more than enough direct explanations out there to bless or damn every single actor in this little drama, using the motives they admit for themselves. Over and over and over again. In great and exhaustive detail.

          When we have to resort to “apparent” reasons and unstated motivations, maybe this means we haven’t seen an actual quote from one of the principals that states the motive we just assigned them.

          And if we can’t find those words and those admissions, given the great volume of material to work with, maybe just maybe that means that it wasn’t actually a motive that those folks had when they acted.

          1. The name of the campaign was “to make the puppies [i.e. the SJWs and Liberals and anyone else we disagree with] cry.” That’s pretty obvious from the get-go.

          2. Holy shit. You’ve commented on like every single thread about this topic on the entire freaking internet and that’s your take away?

            It was a take off on the infamous Sarah McLachlan sad puppies video. You know the one where she is trying to raise money and it comes on showing sad animals and kicks you in the nuts on late night TV?

            Hell, we’ve got a video. We’ve got cartoons.

            Good freaking grief.

            Here, let me help. THE PUPPIES ARE ON OUR SIDE. We want to help the puppies. The leading cause of Puppy Related Sadness is good books getting ignored in favor of boring crap.

            I mean seriously… After 3 years, and I don’t know how many hundreds and hundreds of times you’ve posted on this subject across on how many dozens of different blogs, and you didn’t even have that right? I mean come on, I’m hardly subtle.If I wanted to make SJWs cry I’d just have fun wrong somehow.

            Wow… Just wow.

          3. This is a reply to Kevin Standlee.

            The campaign was in fact “to combat puppy-related sadness”. It was to make puppies happy by bringing back the zip and joy in fun, challenging and cool skiffy tales of wonder.

            Combating puppy-related sadness (the stated goal, you can find it all over Larry’s blog) is the opposite of the lie you are telling about Sad Puppies.

          4. The name of the campaign was to *combat* the leading cause of Puppy Sadness.

            The Puppies were Sad.

            This got shortened to Sad Puppies, but it’s not to *make* the Puppies cry. How did you get that?

            Sure it got shortened to “Sad Puppies” but in no way could the “Puppies” be thought to be “the SJW’s and Liberals and anyone else we disagree with.”

          5. And while I’ve got NO idea what Rabid Puppies was up to, I am as absolutely certain (as you are that collusion never previously happened ever) that the “strategic voting” on this never went beyond thinking… “Hey, we’ve got five slots in each category. We should use them all.”

            Which has undoubtedly resulted in a really and truly weird distortion of ALL of the minor categories which, I’m willing to bet money, almost never get more than one or two nominations from any one person and most people don’t vote for nominations at all.

          6. Kevin,

            Again, it’s not as if there aren’t plenty of words out there explaining people’s reasoning for their actions.

            Maybe it might be a good idea to review the stated reasons before making up any extra ones.

          7. Shanks the Clown (formerly known as Shanks the Punter) is angry:

            “Chris Warcraft @ChrisWarcraft · 13h 13 hours ago And I would highly encourage everyone else to boycott Stardock as well until they make a change. Wardell is toxic and needs to go.”

            That reminds, me – after sad puppies, what about sad clowns crying down by the river? They need a hero too.

        2. I do love how it doesn’t really matter what I say, or the tens of thousands of words I’ve written on the topic, because they’ll just make up new arguments for me. Damn that Straw Larry. He’s such a jerk.

          Why did we have multiple nominees? Because we had multiple slots. 🙂 Plus, since I actually encouraged people to read stuff (and you can’t really say I didn’t since we book bombed everything and sold thousands of stories) I didn’t know if people were going to vote for everything. Not to mention, I had no way of knowing the size of the response we would get.

          But hey whatever, I’m super evil and very crafty, blah blah blah.

          Secret marching orders? Hell, traditionally it only took a handful of votes to sway anything. When I say whisper campaign, I mean all they had to do was talk to their friends in the insider cliques, boom, done.

        3. Since you’re here: I notice that you’re making reference to the “puppy slate” that Mike Resnick distanced himself from on File770.

          There were two different “puppy slates” that, while they do match in some respects (e.g., Resnick appears on both, and deservedly so), also have substantial points of difference. They were organized by two different groups of people.

          Resnick said he wasn’t contacted about the Rabid Puppy slate. Has he made any such statement about the Sad Puppy slate? I haven’t seen it, if so.

          Were you actually unaware there were two (which seems doubtful), or were you intentionally attempting to tar both with the same brush?

        4. Considering that one of the apparent avowed goals of SP/RP was to say, “If our slate can’t win, then nobody should win” by deliberately excluding anything else by strategic nominating, I would suggest that your blaster shoots in both directions.

          Really? Since you provided no direct quote of this avowing, I would suggest that makes something about you rather… apparent.

          1. Mr. Standlee is not being a liar. He is demonstrating that either he has been lied to, or that he made an assumption he failed to check, or both.

            It is not as though his friends are circulating our puppy memes; he lives in an isolated world, as do many people who rarely stray outside their corner of the Internet.

            The takeaway is that we have to repeat the puppy messages in every post, or at least link to a puppy meme.

            Otherwise we will have people making up something about us all supporting animal abuse, or something equally weird, just like Catholic bloggers always have to expect being told we worship idols and have a totalitarian pope. (Which I have seen being said on Making Light, come to think of it.)

            The leading cause of puppy-related sadness is being oppressed by boring books.

        5. Kevin:

          Thanks for poking your nose out/in. I think that offering up more options on a slate is a good idea. Surely, the critics would all die down if that had happened. Right? Like in the Novella category. SP offered up 3.

          Question: What is on Earth is an “apparent avowed goal”?

          And do you still think this:

          Quote:
          The name of the campaign was “to make the puppies [i.e. the SJWs and Liberals and anyone else we disagree with] cry.” That’s pretty obvious from the get-go.
          Unquote.

          You have been corrected on this point over and over.

          Again, thanks for bringing your viewpoint to this board.

          Viktor
          newly-signed-up Supporting Member

  68. I came across this post after googling “monster hunter” to look for any updates of the game. I haven’t read the boss, and I know nothing about you, but from this post alone, you have my respect, for being one of the people who take a stand against the social justice lynch mob, and the war those bigots are waging on art and free expression. Respect, fine sir. Respect

    1. Clearly Larry should get commissioned by Capcom to write a MH book. I mean come on the point of the game is a team of hunters(4 in the games) all with hilariously oversized weapons take down giant Fantasy Dinosaurs/Dragons/other weird creatures.

  69. “Again, Monster Hunter Nation, I apologize if this offends any of you who voted for my novel.”

    All will be forgiven if you would just hurry up and publish the next book in the series already!

  70. If you truly wanted your limit genre to grow, you’d quit your backlashing against multicultural elements and stop being a dicks only “my rocket is bigger than yours” boys club.

    Your anti literary attitude as well should be similarly stuffed back where the sun don’t shine.

    1. Wow. That was profound. Thanks for sharing.

      So, even though our slate was diverse, has a bunch of women, multiple cultures, and most importantly diverse politics including liberals, socialists, moderates, libertarians and conservatives… While last year’s Super Diverse Winners of Approved Diversity were almost all white folks with the same exact politics, I’d say BZZZZZZ wrong answer!

      Thanks for playing! Please, try again.

    2. Did you fail reading comprehension in school? Or are you willfully ignorant? You could not possibly have understood anything Mr Correia or Mr Torgersen wrote about SP3 to make those comments.

      “There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance – that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”
      – HERBERT SPENCER

      Please note that this was written before current PC rules, so Mr Spencer did not include us women, but it applies to us as well.

    3. If this multiculture was yielding such great dividends, wouldn’t it be obvious? I mean, what I see is a bunch of people flocking to America, not the other way around.

      The way we do things is the standard in forensics, technology, science, commercial aviation, literature, televised sports, film – frickin’ everything.

      Where’s all this non-binary non-white extravagant wisdom? What’s more mind-bending than putting people on the moon?

      I sense low self-esteem trying to blow itself up to the size of a blimp at our expense.

      “Cultural appropriation”? Really? LIke what? Incense? Cuz that’s changed everything.

  71. You’ve gone wobbly, and for no reason. They are going to spin it as about you no matter what you do. In their minds you are inseparably and perpetually linked to Sad Puppies. As I thought you knew, if someone’s whole existence resolves arround being outraged about you, nothing you say or do will keep them from being outraged. You don’t actually think you saying, “Oh, but I turned down the nomination” will matter in the least, do you?

    Turning down the Hugo nomination seems to me to be the same as someone “…silencing themselves to appease the perpetually outraged”, if not exactly, at least in kind. By doing this, you have in some small way, “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory”.

    P.S. The above vitriol has nothing, I repeat nothing, to do with the fact that now Nemesis won’t be in the Hugo pack, and I’ll have to find another way to read a copy. Nothing! You… you…! Argh!

  72. You are a class act Correia, and I’m sure that the fact you actually declined a nomination for a “oh so super important” Hugo is sending the CHORFs into even more of a frothing rage. 😀

    You’ve become my new standard write in for election ballots that don’t have anyone I like on them.

    Question- I’ve seen you mention Cracekd.com a few times on the site, have you or Torgersen thought about writing an article on this and Hugos for Cracked? They’ve shown themselves to be no fan of the SJW type and have a huge audience avaible to them.

    1. Unfortunately for that plan, Sad Puppies is now associated with GamerGate.
      Cracked, which is very pro-SJW, hates Gamergate with the fiery passion of 10,000 suns.

  73. What bothers me about the current Sad Puppy kerfluffle is that, at it’s core, it’s simply a get-out-the-vote campaign, and what’s wrong wih that? Even if it cynically trades on anger and frustration (as is alleged by the campaign’s critics), that wouldn’t be possible without existing anger and frustration. So either nothing ideological is at stake, and there’s no reason to fear a larger, more active fanbase, or there is already a pool of anger and frustration, and maybe something needs to change. The only way I can see justifing the resistance is the assumption that the voters really aren’t SF/F book readers, and they are only showing up to wreck a utopia that is currently being acheived. But that itself assumes a level of meanness which is ridiculous in a bumch of uninterested strangers.

    Anyway, the whole kerfluffle over such an innocuous tactic as a get-out-the-vote push is seriously damaging to my faith in humanity.

    1. What bothers me about the current Sad Puppy kerfluffle is that, at it’s core, it’s simply a get-out-the-vote campaign…

      In that case, prove it. Instead of SP4 being “here’s a solid slate of the same number of works as there are slots of the ballot, designed to push everything else off the ballot,” do what all of the other groups who encourage their members to vote do: Provide reading lists. Promote works you like. Object examples are those lists promoted by NESFA and BASFA (the latter through the LiveJournal Hugo_Recommend group). Participate in crowsourced eligibility groups.

      Do y’all really think that if there had been, say, 10 works suggested in each category rather than a curated list of 1-5, that y’all would have swept so many nominations? There’s a reason for that.

      Do you really want other groups to start forming solid slates of five works? The main reason that SP/RP worked is that there aren’t organized block votes out there.

      I’m all for more participation. I’m against bloc nominating groups trying to lock out all dissenting voices.

      1. So basically, there is One Approved Way to vote for the Hugos or support authors, and we are all supposed to magically know the One Approved Way.

        Mr. Standlee. I have been going to conventions for over twenty-five years. I spent my high school years memorizing fannish history books, before I was ever able to attend a convention. I have even made the pilgrimage to Bowling Green to do fannish and sf author research, and I go to pulp cons. I own two Hannes Bok sketches and a Dick Gaughan, and my dungeonmaster is one of your old buddies.

        I do not recall any sort of mandate that really long slates were okay somehow, and really short slates of the Scalzi type were okay, but medium-sized slates are Evil Badwrong.

        So was there voting done on this new rule? Did Emily Post make a ruling? Did I miss some new Vatican document on canon law?

        So here’s my question. Has this rule been pulled out of the butt of certain special people, in the same way that cliques in high school create new rules of fashion to allow them to laugh at everyone else’s gaucherie? Or is it more like the sudden declaration that wearing red pants on Friday means you’re a slut or a drugdealer?

        1. …really short slates of the Scalzi type…

          You keep using that word “slate” in that way. I do not think that word means what you think it means.

          Because I’m obviously a moron will you please explain to me once and for all what the difference between:

          1. “Here are the works I published last year; if you liked them and think they are award-worthy, I hope that you will nominate them”

          and

          2. “Here is a list of other people’s works, designed to completely swamp the ballot and crush all other discussion.”

          In my world, these are different things, but somehow to you, they are exactly the same thing. Tell me why, please.

          1. An all-me list, an all-me-and-my-friends list, an all-my-favorite-books-and-people-eligible-this-year list, or an overlooked-eligible-people-and-books list: they all look like the same thing to me.

            Saying anything is eligible, unless it is a complete list of eligible things and people, means that one is suggesting Hugo voting choices. Advocating any list of books as “recommended” and eligible? That also means that one is suggesting Hugo voting choices.

            So at this point, we are only arguing social or organizational rules; and apparently there’s nothing in the Constitution about this matter. So we must be talking purely social rules.

          2. a complete list of eligible things and people

            Don’t be silly. Surely you’re aware that it would be effectively impossible to compile such a list. This is why when people have come to me with variations of saying, “WSFS needs to compile a definitive list of every single work in the world that’s eligible this year,” I respond with variations of, “Because such a work would be practically impossible, if WSFS or any Worldcon created such a list, it would be officially favoring works listed on it over any other work, and that’s not going to happen.”

            …we are only arguing social or organizational rules; and apparently there’s nothing in the Constitution about this matter. So we must be talking purely social rules.

            Yes. And obviously you and I have deeply different views about such things. And the outrage you’re hearing from a lot of people who have been part of the Worldcon community for a long time is because they believe that social norms to which they are accustomed have been broken.

            Remember this appeal to rules if WSFS changes its rules over the next couple of years.

          3. “a lot of people who have been part of the Worldcon community for a long time”

            Not including us dirty outsiders? But yea there is not a clique.

            “they believe that social norms to which they are accustomed have been broken.”

            Wow, how like real life is that?

            “Remember this appeal to rules if WSFS changes its rules over the next couple of years.”

            Nicely veiled threat Kevin. So now its we will change the rules to get rid of you dirty outsiders.

            Up until now I have defended you and your attempt to remain objective, I can see my defense was misplaced.

          4. Nicely veiled threat Kevin. So now its we will change the rules to get rid of you dirty outsiders.

            No, you don’t get it. I am not going to change any rules at all affecting Hugo Award voting. In fact, I’m the co-author of a proposal that, if ratified this year, would give non-attending members a voice in the amendment-ratification process. (I’ll have to recuse myself from the Chair during the ratification debate because I’m the proposal’s co-author.) You’re attacking someone who authored rules that, if ratified this year, would give you a vote on changes to WSFS rules even if you don’t attend the convention.

            What I’m trying to tell you is that you should expect attempts to change the rules in various ways. What those ways are, I don’t know yet, although I know two of them because they’ve already been submitted. I’m not threatening you. I’m warning you that this bloc vote has touched off a vary strong sentiment among a bunch of people who hardly ever agree on anything (including, by the way, their Hugo preferences), and they are all saying that WSFS Needs to Do Something. I’m trying to warn you that if you see a bunch of rules changes pass this year, that you shouldn’t be surprised, nor should you claim that it’s “unfair,” because, in fact, it will be all done within the rules. Enforcing those rules is part of my job.

            What I’m saying, and what you don’t seem to understand, is that it’s hypocritical to say, “We didn’t do anything that was against the rules” and then also cry foul when the members (who make the rules) change the rules legally. Of course you, if you are an attending member, can attempt to change the rules too.

            Tell me why “but it’s within the rules” is just fine when you do it but not when people with which you disagree do so? Do you somehow deny the right of a majority of the voting members of a voluntary society to make and change their own rules?

          5. Then I sincerely apologize and I agree I would expect just something like that.

            I just wish that the outcome of all of this would be a welcoming of the new members and that I what I would expect the outcome to be.

            I fully realize that the loudest segment is usually the smallest minority. But some of the “older” ( no slight intended) members have really done a disservice (once again for the sake of form I refuse to name names) to the whole process by their over the top reaction.

            Once again I apologize for my misunderstanding.

          6. Second attempt:

            Thank you.

            [Wow, that’s the first time I’ve ever have a comment canned because it was too short. (It’s rarely a problem for me.)]

          7. Furthermore, there have always been numerous Internet posts, magazine letters, and personal comments about people’s voting and nomination choices. This is frequently done ahead of time, and frequently they include people urging others to nominate or vote for the same work or works.

            There have also been numerous people who don’t talk about such things, but most of them say they want to avoid hurting people’s feelings if one should hear they’re not voting for him.

            Maybe things are different in different parts of the country, but everywhere I have traveled in fandom, people discuss and lobby for this stuff quite openly. It’s exactly the same way people talk about which Worldcon location should win, in fact.

          8. Of course it would be impossible to compile a list of all eligibles.

            That is part of my point.

            If I want to recommend folks for Hugos, I will.

            Likewise, I am not going to throw away my red pants, or calmly swallow that they are proof I’m a slut or a drug dealer.

          9. If organized science fiction fandom wishes to cease being an inclusive community composed of people who like sf/f, and wishes to turn itself into something like the Baker Street Irregulars, which you can only join if invited, this is indeed the way to go about it.

            But the BSI is no longer all of Sherlockian/Holmesian/Doylian fandom, nor has it been for years. It is a single honor/awards society with numerous scions affiliated with it, among a sea of organized and disorganized fandom. Its major link to its original nature is that they still have a banquet and a journal. They don’t pretend that everyone who joins an affiliate is going to get into the BSI someday.

            Likewise, the SCA is quite open about not issuing everybody titles, and that group politics controls pretty much everything from soup to nuts. Everybody knows there are arcane social rules, which is why they are written down all over the place.

            But I never thought that sf fandom wanted to be like the SCA or Sherlockian fandom.

          10. “Social norms” like using the Hugos for group defamation? I dont’ know what you’re opinion is but in my opinion intersectional feminism outside of SFF is the ideology of about statistical 0% of all Americans.

            Inside the Hugos you have the very definition of a cult in 100% agreement:

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

          11. 2. “Here is a list of other people’s works, designed to completely swamp the ballot and crush all other discussion.”

            Mr. Standlee, slapping quotes around something you’re saying does not impart some magical legitimacy to a line you made up.

            Neither does repeating it.

            You’ve been posting all over the place regarding SP, usually deliberately casting the efforts in a negative light because they don’t accord with your feelings of propriety.

            You’ve staked yourself out as representative of WorldCon officialdom, wherein such exists.

            The net result of all that work, in my eyes, is to illuminate you as an officious, condescending ass. You’ve made it quite clear that your version of WorldCon is something I’d rather not have anything to do with. It is insular and irrelevant.

            Your officious priggishness undermines anything WorldCon might do to attract my interest.

            That you come here and lie and smear — this does nothing to increase my feelings of goodwill for you.

          12. “Here is a list of other people’s works, designed to completely swamp the ballot ”

            I understand you’re upset, but surely you must recognize that a list cannot “swamp” anything, it is simply a list, all it can do is list things. Only a large number of voters can “swamp the ballot.”

            It sounds like the complaint is that SP is better organized and has wider appeal than other, different lists.

          13. Frankly, Kevin, its because I left politics out of my decision of who to nominate. I never cared what the goal of SP was or was not. I voted for things that I had read before I knew the SP slate ever existed.

            The difference is that people are implying that everyone who voted for SP suggestions must have had the same motivation, which is space debris.

        2. I will also note that pretty much nobody voted for the exact choices as the list given by Sad Puppies 3 or Rabid Puppies. Both anecdotal evidence and the results table show this.

          Nobody is putting a gun to anybody’s head, saying they can’t vote for Ann Leckie and Vox Day. Given the weird and inclusive tastes of most science fiction readers and the tendency to vote for personal acquaintances, I could almost bet that several people did.

          So what is the problem?

      2. Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Standlee, but I think your problem is with offering a list of suggestions in which the number of suggested items matches the number of open slots. Right?

        Well, the distinction between offering a list of 3-5 suggestions per category vs. a list of 1-2 vs. a list of (say) 10 is a lot more obvious to you than it is to most of the other people in this thread.

        You seem to be interpreting this as a deliberate attempt to lock up the ballot. Right? I don’t know how else to interpret your comment about “trying to lock out all dissenting voices.”

        I’m confident that’s not the intent of Brad, Larry, or the vast majority of SP3 supporters. Furthermore, those without any such bad motive will naturally resent having it imputed to them. (Which includes me, actually, but I guess I can see how you might leap to that conclusion.)

        1. I just posted another blog post a few minutes ago addressing this charge. It is pretty much asinine if you think about it for a few minutes.

        2. You personally may not support the “Rabid Puppies,” but it’s highly unlikely that anyone not in your group makes much of a distinction between them. The net result is a campaign led by people who explicitly say they want to burn down the Hugo Awards and destroy the Worldcon.

          Imagine being a member of a club, with a clubhouse, and that your club has been around since the 1930s and you personally had been a member since the 1980s and have invested tens of thousands of dollars of your own money and thousands of hours of your volunteer time with the club. Your club has build up a modest good reputation in the community of which you are justly proud. Now imagine that a huge crowd of people (albeit fewer than the total club membership, but a significant minority) show up and say that they hate everything about your club and that you should change to suit them, and that if you don’t, they want to burn the clubhouse to the ground.

          I freely admit that there are individuals here who don’t believe this, but the fleas of the Rabid Puppies are pretty likely to bite the Sad Puppies unless they work a lot harder to apply the flea powder than they seem to be doing in my view.

          1. Yeah, how about no?

            I will not apologize for anything anyone not me did. Nor will I do so for groups I don’t belong to.

            Collective guilt was bull when it was called things like the one drop rule. It was dangerous bull at that.

            Vox can do as he likes. Nielsen-Hayden can do as they like. The only people responsible for their actions are they, and they alone.

          2. Yes. And thank you.

            The continued call for renunciations irritates me.

            Mr. Standlee, if you wanted things to continue with your own little club and your own little clubhouse why all the shock and upset when Larry declared it such 3 years ago?

            Why the declarations that if people wanted it to be different they should get involved?

            I’m sorry, you can’t have it both ways. It can’t be your own little club with your own little award and still demand relevance to the broader fanbase.

            The crowd of people is showing up because they’ve learned they have a voice. They want their voice to be heard because they’re dissatisfied with the results they’ve seen.

            They hear fan-voted award and decide they’d like to be counted. That’s all.

            Sorry if all the new voices make you uncomfortable.

          3. Yes, they do have that right. And every other member has exactly the same right to denounce them. It really does work both ways. People associated with the Puppy campaigns have repeatedly denounced the choices that the other members of WSFS were making for years.

            I do not doubt that you personally cast your nominations for works that you loved and that you think worthy of an award. So why is is that the SP campaign somehow thinks that the nominations cast by other people are not because they love those works and think them worthy of awards, but because of some Hidden Agenda?

            I personally never nominate any person or work that I would be ashamed to see win a Hugo Award. If I can’t think of enough things to fill my ballot (which is most years), I leave my ballot blank in those places. (Incidentally, in my own experience as an administrator, the ballot that contains a nomination in every space in every category is the rare exception, not the rule.)

          4. IFF Larry pulled in 250-350 ppl personally, and IFF VD pulled another 150 in (on his own, or about as good at SP2 did last year), AND the #’s of wrongthink fans that they attract grow over the next two years at the same rate as SP1-SP3, THEN pro-pups have a crushing plurality now (consistent with the voting results for 2015 -> 51 noms) AND in 12-24 months, will have an absolute majority, if growth persists.

            If I were the former gatekeeper(s) of the Hugo (not WSFS, mind you), hypothetical or otherwise, this growth pattern would deeply concern me.

            Since the former gatekeeper(s) of the Hugo have some degree of overlap with the SMOFs who make WSFS work, I can see how this would look scary to WSFS, but I haven’t seen anyone who wants to burn down WorldCon. Heck, judging from the budget numbers, the growth year over year of another 200 or so supporting memberships must generate some helpful revenue.

          5. I haven’t seen anyone who wants to burn down WorldCon

            Then you’re not reading Vox Day’s posts where he said he thought it would be best to just “burn the whole thing down.”

          6. “Then you’re not reading Vox…”

            Well. No. A lot of us aren’t reading what Vox said.

            If you have a problem with him, take it up with him.

            If he said that (and meant it, one of the reasons I don’t read Vox is he enjoys making it really hard to figure out what his actual position is) that is troubling. Complaining about it here is about as useful as trying to get redress from the Pope because of something Luther did.

          7. So, if the people here are guilty because of things Vox says, does that mean Kevin has to defend everything Teresa Nielsen Hayden says?

          8. Then you’re not reading Vox Day’s posts

            You do realize that VD is a semi-professional rabble rouser and a non-trivial amount of what comes out of his keyboard is deliberately provocative?

            Think Sam Adams to Larry’s John.

      3. TOR has been promoting a slate for years. They’ve just been doing it in secret. If they had published their slate this year, Three Body Problem would probably have made the awards, as a lot of people who are new to voting this year liked it.

        As for the other groups running slates? Sure, why not? Others have done it in the past and as mentioned elsewhere, it was never a problem when the ‘right kind’ of people were doing it.

        As for thinking that the TOR slate will automatically win? Not hardly. TOR doesn’t have enough guaranteed voters to win, because they don’t employ that many people. The vote statistics that Day release pretty much shows that.

        But if TOR’s list has good stories on it, instead of some of the crap they’ve been pushing the last decade or so, guess what? SP voters, and others, will vote for it.

        The whole tempest in the teacup boils down to this: A group of people who had been gaming the awards for over a decade finally lost. And now they’re pissed.

        Maybe if they hadn’t been gaming them, this wouldn’t have happened? But make no mistake, the awards have been gamed behind closed doors for a very long time now, and saying that they weren’t is not only foolish, but logically absurd.

        1. TOR has been promoting a slate for years. They’ve just been doing it in secret.

          If that were true, then Hugo Administrators such as myself would have seen the pattern of identically marked ballots, which we have not.

          1. Prove it. Show us all of the old ballots.

            Not to cast any shadows on you, but from your words here, and your misstating several of the known facts about SP leads me to find you as an unreliable source.

            The thing is Kevin, the ballots don’t have to be marked ‘identically’, just similarly. I’m sure the TOR people didn’t tell everyone how to fill out the entire ballot.

            But they definitely appear to have provided clear cut suggestions, and they had about 90 to 100 people who voted within those suggestions.
            They also obviously had a very good idea of just how many votes they needed to carry a category.

            Last of all, the way that they knew, before the announcement, of who had won, shows a rather high level of organization and coordination. They knew how many votes they had before the votes were even announced, that is obvious. When they failed to carry the day, they also knew that only the SP and RP groups could field enough votes to beat them.

            Say what you want, but your words and behavior make it pretty clear that you really have no idea at all how voting, and manipulated voting, works. But then that is the whole reason for such arcane voting systems as the one worldcon uses, because they are very easy to game.

          2. Nope not calling you a liar, but I am calling you mistaken.
            After all, you did complete misquote the idea behind SP. I’m assuming that you were mistaken when you did that. Which is why I find your credibility suspect.

            Trust me, if I thought you were a liar, I would have called you one.

          3. FWIW, the ballots are destroyed after they are counted, no?

            In the 2014 minutes, the destruction of the ballots for the WorldCon city for 2017 was noted. I thought that it was interesting that the vote was so lopsided in favor of the winner – something like 450+ for KC and 90 for Beijing and single digits for everything else.

          4. Kansas City and Beijing were the only candidates on the ballot. Beijing’s bid was not taken all that seriously. All of the other votes were for None of the Above or various write-ins, none of which were serious. It it therefore not surprising that the vote was lopsided.

            BTW, even running unopposed doesn’t guarantee a victory. The 2011 Westercon in San Jose voted down the only bid that was on the ballot in favor of a joke write-in bid, which threw the election to the Westercon Business meeting. (Westercon uses similar rules to Worldcon.) The Meeting gave the bid to the committee behind the hoax bid, which then went on to hold a fairly successful convention in Sacramento. I mention this to remind everyone that even having every single space on the ballot doesn’t guarantee victory in a WSFS election.

          5. Ah, I see. You’re calling me a liar. That helps clarify things.

            Well, you have repeatedly said things that are untrue. By my lights that doesn’t necessarily make you a liar. But by the standards George W. Bush was held to, you are.

      4. Kev, I think that nominating more works than there are slots is an interesting idea. However, the outrage factor is unlikely to die down – I predict that when Kate P. coordinates SP4, and brings in an additional cohort of the wrong sorts of fans and SP4 gets plenty of nominees, the howls of outrage will remain strident.

        It isn’t the method that really riles up the ML intelligentsia – it is the mere fact that the exclusive club has been breached.

        I am not questioning your personal feelings (you are a single data point, after all) – but the gestalt revealed in the comments at ML is pretty plain. NH’s comment that the additional couple hundred votes are GGers is a hoot.

        Back in the day, Scalzi responded (cited in many other places) to some comments about ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ in the Hugo award process by (paraphrasing here) participating, organizing and voting.

        What do you know? He was right.

        It will be interesting to see how many No Awards are cast – it will be the first data sourced indicator for the size of the core clique that some SPer claim to have gamed the Hugos for years. That provides a recruitment target for SP4.

        I found a WSFS constitution from 2001 that specifies how the Business Meetings are organized. Is there a newer constitution than 2001? Is the Business Meeting open to any member of the con, or are attendance and voting limited (there)?

        Who sits on the SFWS business committee?

        1. I found a WSFS constitution from 2001 that specifies how the Business Meetings are organized. Is there a newer constitution than 2001?

          The Constitution, Standing Rules, and other WSFS business matters, are on the WSFS rules site

          (They are also published in the current Worldcon’s publications and on their own web site.)

          I’m going to respond separately to the rest of your message because my first attempt to answer all of your questions was tossed as spam, presumably because I linked to all of the things that answer your questions.

        2. Is the Business Meeting open to any member of the con, or are attendance and voting limited (there)?

          The WSFS Business Meetings are open to every attending member of the current Worldcon. Every member can attend, propose motions, debate them (within the rules), and vote on them.

          There is a Guide to the WSFS Busienss Meeting on the current Worldcon’s web site that goes into the process in detail, and if you have questions, I will try to answer them.

          Note that the Business Meetings are not secret. They are listed in the convention program schedule. This year (like most), they will be at 10 AM on the second, third, fourth, and (if necessary) last days of the convention. Last year’s Worldcon actually put out special issue of the convention newsletter on WSFS Business. (It didn’t seem to affect attendance that much.

        3. Who sits on the [WSFS] business committee?

          I’m not sure what you mean by “business committee.” Can you clarify?

          WSFS has one permanent standing committee, the WSFS Mark Protection Committee, responsible for maintaining and protecting the Worldcon’s intellectual property (service marks like “Worldcon” and “Hugo Award”) and the Worldcon, WSFS, and Hugo Award web sites. The Business Meeting has some standing committees to deal with some ongoing work and sets up special committees from time to time to which it refers specific matters. Lists of all of the committees and their members (admittedly not in a particular handy one-stop-shop format) is in the minutes of the 2014 WSFS Business Meeting.

        4. As I said above (in a comment that’s awaiting moderation as I type this, presumably for Too Many Links), every attending member of the current Worldcon can attend and participate in the WSFS Business Meeting.

          There is no Board of Directors, Council of WSFS, or any other body to which you elect representatives to make the decisions about the basic governing documents of the society. Every attending member represents one person: him/herself.

          (Supporting members may submit proposals, but cannot attend or vote. There is no proxy voting or remote participation. You must be present to win vote.)

          Last year’s meeting was recorded (as have been most recent meetings. Links to the recordings are in the WSFS rules archives.

          If you have more questions about how WSFS rules work, I will do my best to answer them.

          1. Thank you very much for taking the time to thoroughly answer. If I had persisted in a little more Google-fu (beyond a single search term search) I likely could have saved you the time, so genuinely, thank you.

            I’ll post the link to the old constitution (thank I found) separately in order to avoid auto moderation.

      5. Do you really want other groups to start forming solid slates of five works? The main reason that SP/RP worked is that there aren’t organized block votes out there.

        Sure. See, bloc voting only works when the bloc represents a sizable fraction of the electorate. Since the number one goal is to get more SF readers voting for the Hugos, we expect that bloc voting will soon become impractical. The fact that the campaigns against puppy related sadness have doubled the number of nominating votes between 2012 and 2015 show that we’ve been very effective in rendering our tools obsolete.

        1. I’d love to get so many new fans involved that we become totally obsolete. This bullshit takes up too much of my valuable productive writing time as it is.

      6. I keep seeing people agree that all members have the same rights to vote and everyone’s votes mean the same thing.

        But then I read a post containing the word “y’all” do this and “y’all” do that.

        There is no “y’all” there is “US” and yes a certain number of “US” voted the same way, which is our right, it is not unethical nor is it immoral and frankly I am amazed that it has never happened before.

        That being said, what does it matter what the originators of SP said, I voted for works that I felt honestly deserved to be nominated and I have no reason to believe that the majority of the SP crowd did the same. (i.e. I don’t read graphic novels, so I did not nominate one, I have no idea who is the best so why would I? I also didn’t nominate anything that I hadn’t actually read.)

        In response to SP, certain members have called anyone who voted for SP suggestions, racist, bigots, sociopaths and worse. God forbid that they should agree with someone who happens to be disliked by the in crowd.

        So because I happen to agree that the authors on the SP list are deserving or recognition I am subjected to vicious attacks upon my character, suggestions that instead of voting for an author that I think deserves a Hugo I should just come up with my own award, and generally being made to feel like an outsider, but somehow I and the other SP folks are the one “harming the integrity of the award” ?

        What a load of space debris.

      7. Mr Standlee.

        I have but one question for you, which I have seen asked of you many times, but not yet answered. How did Mrs Neilsen Hayden and her husband know that the puppies had won 3 out of 5 nominations several days before the announcement was made.

        Now I can not say I know for sure, but it does seem to me that logically there are only two possibilities.

        Either someone in a position of Authority and responsibility gave them this very specific and accurate piece of information, or They knew because those they had “expected” to be nominated were not.
        The issue here is, that the only way the second reason makes any sense is if they had
        1) the expectation going in, that certain entries were “Guaranteed” winners
        2) Were contacted by those “shoo in’s” and were told they were not nominated
        3) Assumed that anyone not nominated were replaced by one of the puppy related nominees.

        If you know of another possibility, or can name and shame the “leaker” then please do so. Because I can not see any other way the people in question could have known the exact breakdown that was announced. Can you?

        1. I can’t speak for Patrick and Teresa about how they learned what they did, but it wasn’t as difficult as you think if you kept looking at various nudge-nudge-wink-wink posts.

          Your assumption of casual corruption in the Awards process says more about you than it does about the Hugo Awards.

          1. No Mr Standlee, I don’t think it does.
            You say you imagine its due to all the wink wink nudge nudge posts. So far as I know only two people “broke rank” and made an announcement. More to the point, How was their information that specific?

            It makes sense that Larry and Brad would know ahead of time because they cooordinated this as such, private communications between pro-puppy candidates would make sense.. But it only makes sense for the NH’s to know they outcome that specifically if they were coordinating a slate as well. Because I’m pretty damn sure the pro-puppy candidates weren’t informing the NH’s.

            Which kind of corruption are we dealing with here Mr Standee? Because its one or the other. Either there was a secret slate, and the NH’s were able to determine the success of the pro-puppy by the lack of success of their own, or someone leaked information.

            Which is it? How did they know the exact numbers Mr Standlee. We have proof of “casual corruption” in the PNH’s own words. My question is how bad is it? Is it simple conspiracy? Or is someone in a position of authority and responsibility colluding with the PH’s?

      8. Mr. Standlee, thank you for helping me understand how a normal person could be against a get-out-the-vote campaign. You feel that an institution you love is under attack by a group of people who simply want to destroy it. This angers and possibly frightens you.

        I am not here to destroy the Hugos. Vox Day may be, but I am not associated with him, and you do yourself a diserrvice if you assume all those at the gates are hostile. Some of them may be recruits, or volunteers. In my case I have not bought a membership, nominated anyone, nor voted for the final awards, but I am considering it more and more.

        When I was younger, I realized that most books that won awards were uninteresting, to the point where in the past 5-10 years when I ran across Lois McMaster Bujold’s work, I was very reluctant to read it, because it had earned a Hugo. Now Larry Correia has offered me hope that the Hugos could become something that makes me want to read a book, not avoid it, and I am deeply grateful for that.

        I want the Hugos to mean something, where right now, to me, they don’t.

        As you say, there is a mob at the gates if the clubhouse, but only some of the mob is hostile. Many of them want to reform and rebuild, and now the curremt members of the club have a choice: they can exclude the mob, making the club exclusive, or they can accept that maybe the next generation of fans won’t run things the same way, trust the system that they – you – have built, and let them in.

        Mr. Sandlee, I understand that you feel angry over an attack on the system you have been involved in, deeply, for decades. But please remember, when large numbers of people respond to an appeal to change, it is because something is wrong, or because something looks wrong. Accepting that the newcomers feel a greivance, and not being offended by that, may be the best way to keep your awards, and your work, relevant.

  74. SFF Wikipedia entry in the year 2040:

    THE CULT OF BUTLER 2009-2017

    The Cult of Butler is a derogatory term later given to a psycho-sexual cult of race worship in the core SFF community. The name is derived from the two iconic figures of intersectional gender feminism, French Queer Theorist Judith Butler and black SFF author Octavia Butler. The Cult of Butler maintained heterosexual males of ethnic European descent were out to get them. The cult fell into disfavor after several suicides following the mass murder of an outreach initiative by Science Fiction QUILTBAGS for Eternal Equality and Feminism (SFQUEEF) in the Islamic Co-Joy Syndicate of Peace and Justice (formerly N. Nigeria).

  75. The Justice League of Race and Gender is predictably angry about being pranked, specifically because they are the the justice league of race and gender.

    I don’t know about anyone else but I’ll be more than happy not to see people give acceptance speeches about the ongoing struggle against the failings of white men.

    Last year was a disgrace virtually from top to bottom. Yes, when you go into an ethnic neighborhood and start yelling ethnic slurs you are going to experience pushback. Either get used to not doing that or get used to pushback. There is no in-between.

  76. Most casual SF fans have no idea what’s been going on for the past 5 or so years. I myself was unaware of all of this gender-race obsession until fairly recently. I only started sending out stories in 2009, though I’d been writing for decades. Had a few published in tiny markets and one big market with a co-writer.
    Around 2012 we started getting odd rejection letters which harped on sexist language and violence. The strangest one I got was an editor who objected to the misogynistic tone a main character used towards a women. The “women” was an alien shapeshifter who had taken the form of his dead lover, and he was understandably upset at this alien…. kinda thought that didn’t qualify as misogeny.
    My buddy got a very nasty response from an editor who turned out to be well-known in the SFWA gender-race wars, but shall remain nameless. She took him to task for a fairly tame but definitely erotic description of a women in a doctor’s waiting room, telling him she had no interest in his “masturbatory fantasy”. It was way over the top for a fairly tiny portion of a pretty damn good story.
    Anyway, having gone down this rabbithole, the more I find out the more I wish I hadn’t bothered. This shit is truly batshit insane. I can’t even explain it to people on the outside–all I can do is give them a few links and let them see for themselves. Otherwise they’d never believe the painful stupidity of it all.
    I pretty much eliminated nearly three dozen short fiction markets from my list, as I know it is not even worth the time spent hitting send to submit a story.
    I don’t bother trying to highlight how wrong-headed these folks are; they do that just fine all on their own.
    As it is, kudos and thanks for shaking things up and putting a few folks who richly deserve it in their place.

    1. Self-publishing is your friend, sir. Why worry about fiction markets, when you can run your own fiction market on Amazon et al?

  77. Hey Brian (Hurrel)!
    PLEASE PROVIDE a list of links documenting the craziness you have experienced. If this exists, let’s PROVE it. Kevin doesn’t see it, and he’s in the middle of the process; as a moderate outsider, I surely can’t see it, since nothing of mine is ready for editing, let alone publication anywhere.
    IF there is a hidden conspiracy, let’s bring it into the light. If “MakingLIght” is manufacturing darkness, let’s shine some light on them. The PR battle seems to revolve around SP claiming conspiracy / discrimination, and others claiming “no such thing exists”. Let’s see what you’ve seen, and shed some more light rather than generating additional heat.

  78. I went over to io9 the other day and posted a reply to one of their posts. Here are both:
    **************************************
    4/04/15 8:18pm

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    I don’t think there’s ever been an instance where the image I had in my head of someone I was reading about, were so on the mark (and I almost was wrong again – the Avengers remark and their juvenile actions made me think for a second they were, well, juveniles) . The first thing I see after curiously clicking on Larry’s link, and going to “About Me,”:
    [MISSING PHOTO FROM LC’s WEBPAGE]
    Couple of white, Mormon, 40-year-old Utah natives? Is this an elaborate joke?
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    Pending approval JamestheWanderer
    xtlhogciao
    4/04/15 9:32pm

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    Yes, this is what Larry Correia looks like, I’ve met him twice at book-signings, once at a Barnes & Noble a few years back, and again last year at a campus bookstore. He is a real, caring human being, nice to me personally those two times, and straightforward.

    Now, why have all you Sad Puppies critics not mentioned that Correia, Torgerson & Co. have, besides choosing a slate of their preference, spent time and effort publicizing that slate, even sending links to EVERY STORY on Correia’s blog? While stating their aim was to make sure those authors gained AUDIENCE, FAME AND MONEY for writing good fiction that entertained their fans? THIS, really, is what I think the Sad Puppies slate was really about: SF that entertained, more than it LECTURED. And that is also what they are trying to get past: the idea that every SF work must push society to hear certain lectures, again and again, like the Germans were lectured about the Nazi evils for decades. What if you don’t agree that all white men are evil, racist oppressors whose every act caused pain and suffering to unknown numbers of minorities? What if you just want to read a work that explores alien ideas of belonging, of love, and escape your overdue rent payment, teenagers battling over the television and generally crappy job that pays your bills while sapping your soul?

    He may not be your cup of tea: Correia loves guns, violence and death-defying odds, and the good guys generally win. But then again, reading about how all white men are evil isn’t my cup of tea. Being an evil white man, I’m prejudiced, you will claim: but then, you know nothing about me or Correia personally, so go your merry way. I will continue to buy from Correia, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Keith Laumer, Timothy Zahn, Greg Bear, John Ringo, David Weber, Terry Pratchett and whoever else ENTERTAINS me. And when I want a lecture on equality, race relations, discrimination, oppression, gender studies or urban culture, I can turn on:

    the nightly news, most sitcoms, most movies, most newspapers, most magazines…..

    And when I want to escape the endless lectures, I can read an SF book – written by someone who isn’t carrying a chip the size of a dining table on their shoulder. Good luck selling your fiction, if I find it’s entertaining I’ll read it – I have seven of Modesitt’s waiting on my bookshelf unread right now. If you can write entertaining SF, I’ll add you to the list – no matter what your politics, gender, race or whatever is.
    *****************************************
    The above was so controversial that it has been “pending approval” since Sunday morning. I still have hope they may approve / release it, but in case they don’t, I thought it was worth reposting here.
    We’ll see.

  79. Just got a lovely email from Charlie Jane Anders saying that io9 does not allow personal attacks / insults, and that she considered the comment before mine (see above) unacceptable.The reason my comment was held up was she didn’t want to release the one I was responding to.
    I have asked that she delete the offensive comment before mine and post mine, so we’ll see.

  80. Hi guys, I’d like to say thanks for all the work you’ve put into the Sad Puppies campaign. Until the last few days I had no idea quite how much was wrong with the Hugos and fandom in general. I’ve been reading the stuff since early childhood but never really got involved with the social side.

    I have a bit of a dilemma. One author I’ve always loved was Charles Stross, but going through a couple of threads on Making Light has left Tor’s authors poisoned to me. The organisation is so bitter and hate-filled I just couldn’t enjoy reading its stuff any more.

    But I hoped Stross would be more reasonable, though he’s very involved with that group. I posted a comment on his blog making the obvious point: a business can only lose by insulting its customers. They ought to keep silent if they can’t at least be neutral. Likening their customers to child rapists will only drive those customers away. In essence, I said that if we could politely agree to disagree then I would carry on reading his books.

    His response was to accuse me of being a Nazi sock-puppet.

    The dilemma is this: if he actually understood the point, he might well agree. No-one in business would be so suicidal as to drive away customers on purpose; he must really think that I’m some kind of neo-Nazi with a fake account and a made-up story.

    How much effort, if any, should I put into trying to make the point? The whole thing is all very hurtful, though the Nazi allegation is ludicrous enough to be funny rather than offensive. I can’t help thinking that any time spent arguing with these people will add nothing good to my life, but I will be sorry not to read any more of his books. (They would give me no pleasure any more.)

    What do you think? Should I go back on his blog and press the issue?

    1. Nope, I’d leave it as it is. There are authors that write for Tor that I love. I won’t poke them, (or even name them) as it puts them in a position where they may have to either attack fans or tick off the management at Tor, which is basically shooting themselves in the foot. If any of them come out and went full “Nielsen-Hayden”, they’re kissing my business goodbye; I’ve got too much on my TBR pile to fund the life-style of those kinds of dingle berries. Likewise, there are authors who I have made the decision I won’t read. I won’t poke them either, but that’s because I think Global Warmong is caused by the hot air and bullshit they spew, and hey, I’m all about saving the planet.

    2. Trust me, Stross is immune to reason or logic. I frankly don’t understand a word he writes. He comes off as if he’s this very highly principled individual. Trouble is, I can’t tell what his principles are, unless it’s a roulette wheel.

  81. As an avid reader that averages about 100 fiction books a year with a small book group of only a couple of hundred I suppose my opinion won’t matter much, but I’m going to give it anyway.

    Until this Hugo fiasco I used to see “Hugo Award Winning…” and think “hmm, I wonder what they liked about the book.” It was, at the least, a small hook to acquire my interest.

    Since all this Sad Puppy drama I find that my first thought when I see “Hugo Award Winning” now is “so what? Big deal.”

    That seems to be the general consensus in my book group, too. For us, you’ve ruined the Hugo and it no longer means anything.

    You might as well accept it for all the good this fiasco has done anyone.

    1. Nice to know that a broader more inclusive Hugo “ruins” it for you. The only “fiasco” is coming from the insular inner circle that has manipulated the awards for the past decade and their griping and moaning.

      1. I need to clarify that when I say “inner circle” I am talking about maybe half a dozen influential individuals in the industry, not actually fans.

    2. Unfortunately, for many of us, the value of “Hugo Award winning” was devalued years prior by the taste of Worldcon drifting away from the tastes of the greater fandom. To us, the Hugos are already ruined, but we wish to polish up the shine and strip away the tarnish.

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