I’ll be offline for the next 48 hours. If you see me on the internet, yell at me to get off. This week has been nuts. I’ve written over 30,000 words of posts, comments, and emails responding to the controversy. I’ve read over 2000 blog comments here, I don’t know how many thousand tweets and FB posts, a slew of emails, and done some interviews. Talking to people–on all sides of the issue–about this is all that I’ve done, all day, every day, this week, from about six in the morning to midnight, and frankly I have argument fatigue and am in danger of severe grumpiness.
So one last quick note, because I saw this coming up in my comments from some of my regulars earlier.
The Sad Puppies campaign isn’t mad at Tor the publishing house. We have nothing against Tor.
In fact, one of our suggestions for novel is by Kevin J. Anderson, and is published by Tor. One of our nominees is John C. Wright, and he is published by Tor. There are other Tor authors who are secret members of the Evil Legion of Evil. And there are some Tor authors and editors who have reached out to us this week, and who have told the angry mobs to calm the hell down and knock off the asinine defamation, both in public and in private.
Don’t threaten to boycott anybody because of their business associations, because that’s exactly the kind of boorish behavior that’s been done to us.
Don’t post links to a torrent site and suggest that people pirate stuff instead of giving a publishing house money. Do you have any idea how offensive it is to do that on a professional author’s feed?
For those just joining us, if you are wondering where this is coming from, there are a couple of reasons many Sad Puppies supporters are leery of Tor.
There are a few Tor editors who have accused my people of some vile and outlandish things recently, but the Nielsen Haydens are only a couple of the editors there. Sure, they’ve been insulting, but I’m not going to tar the other editors by association, especially since most of them haven’t said anything, and some have been very nice to us.
Tor.com has posted some asinine stuff on this subject, talked a lot of trash about us, and run some absurd, preachy, social engineering, wannabe literati wankery articles.
However, Tor.com isn’t Tor the publisher. From what I’ve been told by some Tor employees, they are kind of their own thing. Most people don’t know that though. On that note, I don’t know who the marketing person is over there, but seriously, some of the stuff posted on Tor.com is ridiculous and has left a lot of people on this side of fandom with a bad taste in their mouth.
So, to the Sad Puppies supporters, be cool. There are a bunch of good folks over there, good authors and good editors, making good books, and some of them even agree with us.
Now, I’m going to bed until Sunday.
Will do, Cap’n! Sleep well!
Good night, Larry. Time for a break. Time for family. Time for some spring sunshine.
🙂
A weekend off sounds like just the thing. And its a soccer tournament weekend for both the kids, so plenty of time for family. 🙂
Recharge the batteries, Larry. And the re-engage to fight the good fight, You rock!
Great job on Ace’s podcast. Enjoyed listening to it. Ace’s book thread is what got me to read your Grimnoir Chronicles.
Keep up the good work.
I completely agree, let us not be guilty of the abuses committed by the other side. we are the ones who want fiction evaluated for its merits and not for its author, let’s not cut off one foot out of hysterical fanaticism.
have a good weekend Larry, I have to work all weekend, on the mid shift,keeping the skies safe so Larry can fly.
You’re good people, Larry. Enjoy your weekend.
Enjoy the break, and if you didn’t see it. this was my comment responding to you about the link you mentioned.https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/04/09/a-response-to-george-r-r-martin-from-the-author-who-started-sad-puppies/#comment-59785
I apologize for posting it, for any perceived disrespect, and for any offense I have caused. It was not my intent to do so.
Very Classy Sir!
Well said. Less tarring with the big brush, eh, folks?
Enjoy your break from the internet. IMO, that is a vital thing to do every now and then.
My Little Ponies from this week (I know, but have a gander) rips apart the idea of equality. In two episodes. On purpose. A little bit of subversion of our insane modern cult from an unexpected place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DuJ5okgqDM
Watch from 23:10 for a minute or two to get a taste.
Maybe this escaped the attention of the Commissars because they are too dumb to get it.
I loved “The Cutie Map.” Psychological horror, which that series has never done before. And done well within their S&P,
Agreed Larry. Tor has great authors. They publish people like Weber and Karen Traviss. They have good stories. And as we have people like Vox, they have people like Hayden.
I’ve actually seen something like you’re describing between Tor and Tor.com happen on a large (>1.5 million user) site I’m an admin on. A small group of fans will take over and form a clique to the point that the people they originally formed around just stop using the site. They leave it to moderators or admins – often picked from the same people who make up the cliques – to run the site from day to day, thereby cementing the authority of the group. And then the insular group sees the people who they originally clustered around doing things they don’t necessarily agree with and scream in horror. Since the moderators, either implicitly or explicitly, support them and the groupthink is so pervasive, little things blow up to the point that the original staff insulate themselves from their fans.
Then a trickle of new like thinking users arrive while the older ones either drink the kool-aid, keep their opinions to themselves, or leave for greener pastures. As the years pass by, all that’s left is a more and more fanatical core, to the point it’s completely isolated from the group it nominally claims to be a part of.
Yeah I’ve heard that Tor.com has very little to do with Tor itself & is written controlled by people with literally no insight into the actual industry. That’s why you get article after article about how there are no positive female protagonists coming out from publishers of science fiction & fantasy, while being connected to a company that does exactly that.
Or how a Tor editor came out a couple of years ago to state that on 32% of all manuscripts received were by women & that 90% of genre fiction editors are women.
An yet tor.com has article after article about how the boys club that is publishing is keeping out female writers because all those male editors that make up the industry are secretly conditioned to hate on any manuscript with a female name on it (even though for the most part they don’t have names on them).
The article, since I have it bookmarked:
http://www.torbooks.co.uk/blog/2013/07/10/sexism-in-genre-publishing-a-publishers-perspective
Written by Julie Crisp. Tor cut her loose last month: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/julie-crisp-departs-tor
It’s true most people don’t know the difference between the publisher and the web site associate/blog. I often don’t help matters by writing only “Tor.” I do that because if I add the “com” it often turns into a link and goes into spam depending which platform I’m at. I have nothing against the publisher. Even the blog isn’t mostly bad. It just has this persistent presence I feel it needs to get rid of. The fact there is confusion between the two is an example of why they should do that. I honestly don’t know why the publisher allows the named relationship. It appears it may do harm as well as good.
Some of the bloggers and authors TorCom publishes are so sociopathic against whites and men it’s staggering. That explains why 3 of the bloggers and some of the blog’s authors used to hang out at Requires Hate. It’s almost like TorCom has a special RH section, minus the foul language.
To get T0r.c0m to not show up as a useable link, try substituting 0 the number for o the letter. If this doesn’t work I’ll be really embarrassed.
Or try “Tor dot com” 🙂
I watched the very first episode of Startrek TNG last night, and apart from smiling about memories from so long ago, I was shocked.
Picard’s opening encounter with Q – I couldn’t help but think this is just like Puppies VS Social Justice Whiners !
When even Startrek TNG devolves into Puppies VS SJW’s, it’s time for a break.
“Do you have any idea how offensive it is to do that on a professional author’s feed?”
Using “too offensive” as a reason for anti-sjws not to do something is kind of asinine, and I’m sure not all authors think IP is sacred, because, you know, it isn’t.
People have the option to support works if they want, and that is reality.
Personally when an artist pisses me off I don’t even give them the honor of taking up space on my hard drive. I just take exception to the fallacy of righteous indignation when it comes to IP issues.
World of tanks is calling you sir. Or, or, or whatever other game to relax.
Either way, go relax bud!
Musical interlude time!
on youtube, search up Utopian Riot – Like it’s 1984
Good song well sung, as they say.
Hey, those 30,000 words belonged in a new book that I could be reading by now!
Enjoy your break. It’s well deserved.
I’ll keep your advice in mind. I long ago swore off Tor books because of Tor dot com’s SJW arrogance. Haven’t bought one since, and I buy a lot of books. (Too many to read, truth told.)
Not a boycott, didn’t announce it or campaign on it, just stopped buying. Better things to do with my money.
I’ll reconsider that position. Tor might want to reconsider their support of a site that’s making them look bad, though. (Including the NH’s.)
Again, enjoy your rest.
Cheers! : )
I do buy Tor books. But only visited the website once – and never again, but not so much because of the SJW garbage on it. Because it is SO POORLY DESIGNED.
I foolishly thought it was the place to look for when the next Weber Armageddon book would be out – wandered around, completely lost, for a good 15 minutes without even finding any evidence that they had books by someone named David Weber. And, sorry, when the first thing you see is what is on there right now – well, I figure that this is probably NOT the place for me.
(Contrast to the Baen website. The opinionated Bar is over there – for those of us who wish to visit. Otherwise, it’s the new featured books, and you can find anything they’re selling, or are going to be selling, in literally less than a minute.)
Tor the publisher publishes some GREAT authors and books, like David Weber (yes, that Weber, whose Honorverse books are published by Baen). Tor publishes his EXCELLENT Safehold novels (now if only an editor at Baen would tell him to do with the Honorverse books what he’s doing with Safehold, I wouldn’t be so frustrated with the guy), so that makes the publisher A-OKAY in my book.
I get the distinction between the website and the publisher and so should everyone else before they stop giving Tor their business. We shouldn’t be doing to Tor what SJW’s do to Baen.
Larry,
If you’re reading this before Sunday:
GET OFF!!!
I’m still pretty pissed that it was necessary to waste 30K words on SJW dipshits.
LC could have written about Melvin Skype DDOSing Rush until they agree to put him on the air. Then he transfers the call to Owen, asleep in 3 am Moscow.
Or a battered, bleeding Agent Franks with half his face burned to the bone by a swooping acid vomiting Other, plucks a rider from a passing motorcycle, asking him “You’re not colorblind, are you?”
Or Tom Strange posing disquieting questions for an uncharacteristically pudgy Libertarian Space Cowboy. It seems an insured metric half ton of Alliance ration vouchers delivered to the Department of Vote Purchasing mysteriously morphed into 500 kilograms of used romance novels.
Larry, I am one (on Brad’s FB page) who has said I will boycott Tor WITH EXCEPTIONS: If works are recommended by someone whose opinion I respect. For instance, I won’t boycott John C. Wright.
My reason for doing this is seeing that Moshe Feder, a Tor editor, is going to No Award EVERYTHING on the SP3 and RP slates, INCLUDING the works of Tor’s own writer, Mr. Wright! His own client! That is despicable and unprofessional. And isn’t PNH saying the same thing?
So in the future, if I see a book that looks like something I would enjoy, I will check to see who the publisher is and if it is Tor I will put it right back. Sorry, but I am not going to reward a publishing house with my money if they are willing to throw their own writers under the bus.
Just to clarify:
I am completely aware that SP3 or (1 or 2) have nothing against Tor.
I would have had no problem buying a book with no recommendation from Tor or any publisher, as long as it looked interesting to me.
This is my personal decision and has nothing to do with SP, only that SP3 has exposed what Tor is willing to do to their own writers. And I have a big problem with that.
Enjoy the break, Larry. And, again, heartfelt thanks for standing up and taking the blows.
Mr Coreiga – I hope that this weekend is just what you need.
“Be cool.” Who says Larry Correiga can’t do words of wisdom?
10-4 – Tor.com was getting a bit odd on FaceBook – I hadn’t realized until now that there was a disconnect between the two entities.
I’m one of those who read sf/heroic fiction/weird fantasy books from the late 60s and then lost all interest in the mid-80s. I did attend a few V-Cons in Vancouver (Canada) in the late 70s but otherwise didn’t have much contact with fandom. My reading interest turned to non-fiction history and I pretty much ignored any fantastic fiction. The closest I came in recent times was reading (and seeing the movie) The Life of Pi by Yann Martel (he’s a local author). Over the years I’ve become more politically conservative and found an article about Sad Puppies on one of the right-wing sites I like. I absolutely hate all this Politically Correct crap in our society so good for Larry and Brad and all Sad Puppies for standing up to and fighting it.Keep up the good fight. I have a few books sitting on the shelf waiting to be read but next time I’m at a bookstore I might just take another look at the Science Fiction section and look for some of your books. Who knows, maybe Sad Puppies will renew my interest in a genre I gave up many years ago. All the best !
You’re taking the next 48 hours off for the World of Tanks 4th Anniversary…. Aren’t you?
He’s playing a Maus:it’s the only ride he fits in.
LOL!!!
I can *SO* see that in my mind’s eye… Larry standing in the TC’s hatch, waving the Tetsubo Of Doom™…
“Drive me closer so I can hit them with my tetsubo” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
My Tier 10 is a BatChat now (traded in my T57). My favorite tank is the Luchs. I’m an assassin. 🙂
I made the mistake(?) of following the British Medium tier. I’m just about to get a Churchill. Although I have a certain fondness for my Medium III, just because it’s fast. I like to snipe long distance (I hate urban maps) but in return, I really hate arty.
I wonder what Tier a Bolo is….
Larry,
Your Rx:
200 rds/5.56 downrange /200 yds, 1 per day for 2 days.
50 rds/9mm on 10 spt /50 ft, 2 per day for 2 days.
Repeat if necessary. Call me Monday morning if this does not provide relief.
Sometimes Tor.com lets people with absolutely no social agenda, like me, write some articles. Except perhaps agenda to spread the word about cool sci-fi/fantasy media or, as his more often than not been the case, defending cool sci-fi/fantasy media against the critics.
And I wouldn’t just say sometimes. Your average post over there is harmless and interesting, if not for everyone. But I know sometimes some posters will grate on nerves over here (and abroad). But by and large Tor.com covers a lot of ground; not all of it is caustic!
Yes, the vast majority of articles at TorCom have nothing to do with SJW propaganda. They have plenty of cool articles about assorted genre geekery, and I really enjoy their reread and rewatch series, and also Jo Walton’s articles (the breadth of her reading is amazing, and she really loves good stories: each time I read one of her articles I want to run to the store and buy the book she is talking about, but I just can’t read at that pace). Nowadays she is writing articles less often, unfortunately.
The same Jo Walton who has no qualms about lying about the content of a book if she thinks the author is a bad person? And all too often “bad”=different from Jo?
That Jo Walton?
Not a fan.
When did she lie about the content of a book? That seems a foolish tactic if deliberate, given how eidetic so many fans are at committing books to memory. Is it not likelier she simply stopped paying attention to something she wasn’t liking and later misremembered it?
That’s a pretty serious charge. Have a link?
I agree the vast majority is neutral, but “caustic” is a funny word for supremacist racism and sexual bigotry.
“Caustic” is war or no war, abortion, socialist enterprises, etc. Those are legitimate topics whether I like them or not. No one makes me read that stuff if I don’t like it, but racial incitement has a way of reaching out and touching people in harmful ways just for being born. You’d think folks so on board with “anti-racism” and “social justice” would grasp that.
I honestly feel the same way clicking into TorCom as I do a white supremacist site. What would you call a site with a reviewer that wouldn’t review women and with racist articles and podcasts about white epic fantasy? Women are half of all SFF. It’s a laugh-track to claim oppression. What’s the end game if 50% isn’t enough?
What harm would it do to just ditch that stuff? It serves no purpose, solves nothing, is not SFF and creates a genre-wide divide, all in the name of a feral hatred that laughingly passes itself off as anti-bigotry. The KKK claims they’re helping America too. Should I #JustListen?
Especially since women in SFF have achieved (in some cases) greater financial success then almost any of the men writing in the field (Rowling, Collins, Meyer, Rice, Cabot). They’re all worth 50 million or more, according to celebritynetworth. According to Larry, they’re A List authors. They’ve all written financially successful SFF.
In the critical realm, Ursula Le Guin got shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize with a collection of short stories. What male SFF writer has managed that?
When they talk about other ethnicities being underrepresented in SFF, I am more inclined to agree. But as Larry has said before, the best thing we can do is just get those people reading SFF.
There is no such thing as “underrepresented” in a hobby. Saying that implies every hobby the world over has an ideal goal of a percentage of the racial/sexual population or it is broken and needs to be fixed. Only a madman would even imagine such a thing.
True enough. It merely indicates that there might be more people who would like SFF in that demographic then currently do if they were exposed to it more.
If groups are underrepresented because they’ve seen SFF and don’t feel like trying it, that’s fine. If they haven’t seen SFF stuff yet, they are a potential market for it.
Basically, if people just aren’t interested in a hobby like reading SFF, that’s cool. Their choice. But I think a lot of times that under represented groups haven’t hear about SFF (or any other hobby). Therefore, if you want to increase participation in a hobby, informing under represented groups about it seems like a good way to increase the number of people participating in a hobby.
Well, how’s this for a campaign?
“BLACK PEOPLE, YOU JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE MISSING.”
African-American fans are often reading and buying their own thing, and just don’t bother to tell the rest of us.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has a book coming out this fall, and it’s a Sherlockian pastiche about Mycroft Holmes. He’s apparently been into Holmes as long as he’s been into martial arts and Japanese flicks, or longer, but he just wasn’t showing up at Sherlockian scion club meetings in LA.
Anime and Klingon fandom actually do manage to attract a fair number of black fans, but it’s still only a tiny proportion of the African-American people who love sf/f and related hobbies but play with them in the home game. The large amount of fantasy elements in Seventies blaxploitation flicks give you a sense of this. I hear Comicon has tons of fannish attendance from everybody, too.
But honestly, I think the way you “welcome” fans is by doing cool things and writing cool things, unless you also want to run some ads on K-drama sites or maybe the African film industry sites.
@ James May
I’m pretty sure there are better possible slogans, but sure, that’s the idea. 🙂
@SuburbanBanshee
Yeah, there are a ton of people who like SFF who don’t know about the Hugos. Letting them know about it is an awesome idea.
And yeah, fans are only going to stay if you do awesome things.
Marketing to groups that haven’t been exposed to written SFF should be the publishers job, though. Maybe we’ll see Tor launch the campaign James May suggested. 🙂
If they think SFF fandom is white, they should see geocaching.
I used to make Tor.com a daily site, but I did see an agenda and the moderation tended to be heavy handed and used to further that agenda. I’m willing to believe not all writers and not all mods, but the amount of distaste I have over how I’ve seen people treated for polite disagreement makes it hard to go back, even for the snippets from authors I like. Unfortunately, it will likely take a lot to win me back.
Agreed, but there is enough caustic that it has tainted the brand to a big chunk of fandom. That’s why I said what I said, because I know there are plenty of people over there who aren’t crazy.
Speaking of: Jonathan Maberry wrote a piece about special-ops facing fantastical foes. Guess what series got a positive shout-out? 😉
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2015/04/five-books-in-which-special-ops-encounter-very-weird-things#comments
Okay….
*sigh*
*shuts off Geo-Tel*
(…and in case the above inspires someone to get all hysterical: No that was not serious.)
Take it easy later. You deserve a rest.
We got this.
I’ve got the same attitude toward TorCom as I do Vox Day’s site: There’s some good stuff over there, even if it is occasionally bad for my blood pressure.
😉
That said: The fact that we’re even having this discussion should be a clue to the Nielsen-Haydens and their allies at Tor that they’re doing immense damage to the Tor brand, especially when they go out of their way to attack Tor authors for the crime of being liked by wrongfans having wrongfun.
It’s not just the Hugos that are in danger of being burned down, at this point…and the SJWs are doing it to themselves.
This is such a funny thing because it is so simple. Now, I realize a lot of SP are angry about a range of things, but it’s my opinion the crucial element is the last 6 years of racial incitement. Take that out and there is no SP.
If I’m right, think about that: racial incitement and SFF. What the hell does the former have to do with the latter?
I’m telling you – ditch these daffy feminists and the entire divide goes away overnight.
I just read Abigail Nussbaum’s utterly racist post about the Mixon/RH thing. Multiply Nussbaum by 100 and I give you Sad Puppies. I am so sick to death of these morons and their white man bogey man I could prank anyone who gives them a voice. Like maybe WorldCon.
In my opinion what follows the pranking is the exit. Eventually a new award will be created. Imagine ALL the ticket holders eligible to vote at Salt Lake’s ComicCon. Guess who’ll try and follow and insist on “diversity” and less “misogyny” and the voices of the “marginalized”? If we leave, the Hugos goes back to the Tiptrees it was last year and we all know no one gives a shit about the Tiptrees. If goofy feminists were so happy staring at one another they’d love their WisCon and leave it at that. They’ll never do that.
Here’s the thing about a legitimate hobby or interest: it doesn’t care about the outside world. It is perfectly happy in its ghetto and seeks the approval of no one. I never tried to strong arm my SF books on my friends or cared if they laughed at those books. I was happy to read them myself. No one making model airplanes in their basement has a megaphone or is fretting about what other modelers are doing.
Hate on the other hand cannot exist without its object. No matter where we go these goofball feminists will follow. They literally do not exist without us as a foil to power their bizarre cloudy klonopin-induced behaviors. You show me someone who feels threatened by Frank Frazetta or clapping and I’ll show you a cult of insane sociopaths which pops pills to get through the day. Why am I not surprised such a cult says I feel threatened by the mere presence of non-whites or “strong” women? They’re projecting their racism and madness into my head, reading my thoughts, and then putting them in scare quotes at The Atlantic and Entertainment Weekly.
It is perfectly happy in its ghetto and seeks the approval of no one.
Some fans want there to be more fans, some fans enjoy interacting with other fans.
Just because we’re perfectly happy just to enjoy our hobby without outside approval doesn’t mean we don’t want more people involved.
Also, some hobbies do require multiple people in order to happen (chess, sports, etc.).
I don’t think I disagree with you, I just wanted to point out that many of us enjoy being fans together.
Explains why PNH is leaving most of the heavy lifting (smearing) to his wife, doesn’t it?
And why that other Tor editor (gah, can’t recall the name) piped down after a day or so of smears.
*shrug* If I see that their ideology leaks into their job at Tor and Tor is okay with that, well, there are plenty of publishers out there willing to take my money.
“And why that other Tor editor (gah, can’t recall the name) piped down after a day or so of smears.”
Moshe Feder.
yep. His FB page has been nothing but SP slander since the slate got announced. He’s debated campaigning “no award” even though his own authors were supported by SP.
So apparently agenda is more important than the well-being of his authors. That seems unfortunate, given they include Brandon Sanderson and Steven Erikson.
Damn it, Larry, get off the Internet!
You won’t see this, since you’ll be off the Internet, but I hope someone mentions to you that I was impressed with your reply to George R. R. Martin. It wasn’t funny as you are when you get on a good rant (“…ya fucking goofball…”) but it was logical and also moving. I felt your embarrassment and anger at the calls your wife was getting from people worried you’d taken to beating her. (One hopes she replied with something like “No, he’s still terrified of me–ya fucking goofball.”). You defended yourself and your cause well and honorably.
During Hugo nominations last year I real ALL the Correia books, thinking that it would be unfair to judge #3 without background. This year I will likely read ALL the nominees and judge as usual. Warning — I DO quit reading in the middle if I am bored. I do vote for only a few if that is how I judge the works.
But I think I’m fair, and I expect to be the same way no matter what the controversy.
Take a good rest and come back out full of energy.
Well, last weekend, after the Nielsen Haydens had been attacking friends of mine online and spouting ridiculous conspiracy theories, I bought Words of Radiance.
Why? Because I support Brandon Sanderson. I love his work. I won’t punish him because his editor, Moshe Feder, has been posting vicious attacks against SP on Facebook. I support the author.
The other threads are getting too big, so I’ll drop this here:
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/04/11/media-drops-the-ball-on-hugoawards-sadpuppies/
As someone who has not participated in the Sad Puppies campaign and is not really comfortable with the idea of the Hugos dominated by slates, be it one or several competing ones, but who has sympathy for your dislike about the SJW-led nastiness that has been going on in the last few years in fandom, I would like to ask you:
What is the strategy of the Sad Puppies? Will there be a new slate every year for the foreseeable future? Will it be changed for a longer list of recommendations (i.e. clearly more than 5, which is what makes it seem a electoral list rather than a list of recommendations and therefore be disliked by many people who might otherwise be more sympathetic)? Or is this supposed to be a temporary thing until some victory condition has been achieved? If so, what is that condition?
We wanted to goad SJWs into making the mistake of outright vote-buying. Now we will bring the United Arab Emirates money into it, because they hate feminists.
If the Hugos fall, all of Islam will fall.
Heh! James, you forgot to mention the financial support of the Gnomes of Zurich, and the hackers from the hidden Antarctic city of giant starfish!
When do fans have a grand strategy? As usual with fannish initiatives, everybody will mess around and do funny things. We will have to keep making our point until other people actually listen to what we are saying, and enjoy the new freedom to read cool books.
And then, it will all turn out to have been somebody else’s idea all along, and that everybody always agreed with us. 😉
Dunno if this qualifies as “outright vote-buying,” but…
“And to my readers — If you can afford it, I encourage you to buy a membership to WorldCon and become part of fandom. If you cannot afford it… I will buy a supporting membership to WorldCon for ten people who cannot afford it. I am in no way constraining how that member nominates or votes. All I ask is that you join the conversation.”
Oh, and one of the *nominees* has also anonymously given her another $400 for “scholarships.”
I am… skeptical that, after talking about Vox Day as the devil (minor imp, more like), handing out memberships to her fans isn’t buying votes on the basis of sheer self-selection. Even if she doesn’t really mean for it to be.
Of course, that opens the door for the Rabids to “sponsor” those who say they can’t afford memberships, too. And so we move to DEFCON 3…
Oh, that was Mary Robinette Kowal, BTW.
I’m pretty sure James May is joking, but I could be wrong.
A SP4 is in the works. Kate the Impaler will be running it. It is unlikely Sad Puppies will stop unless everyone gets really bored.
It is possible the slate will include more than five slots next year; the idea has been thrown around.
Other ideas that have been discussed:
Splitting into multiple slates, or reaching out to other fandoms and helping them start Wheel of Time like campaigns to get their works on the ballot. Lowering the supporting membership cost to get enough people voting to dilute the effectiveness of slates.
Ideally, Sad Puppies does want membership to increase to the point where no one group (including the Puppies) can force their choices onto the slate.
Getting more people involved is the strategy of the Sad Puppies. Whether they vote for things on the slate or not, I don’t think many of us care.
Victory has already been achieved, according to Larry. His point was to demonstrate the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the SJW crowd by getting -any- outsider nominated and simply observing SJW behavior in response.
AKA poke the ant hill and watch what happens.
SJWs have not disappointed, three years running. They’ve gone nuts every single time.
If the Hugo awards devolve into nothing more than SF/F fans kicking sand in SJW faces for five or six years, and them having an ongoing temper tantrum… I’d be open to that, personally. The idea that me just voicing my preferences in reading material will cause my political enemies to have ulcers is a sweet one.
But you have to take into account that not all of the people who are angry and want to vote “No award” are SJWs. Some are angry because they feel that you have gamed the rules by basically forming a political party to concentrate your vote. In an election where the rest of the vote is disperse because it’s a literary prize, a voting bloc gets a huge advantage. That’s something that does not break the rules but it’s against the spirit of the Hugo prize, and many WorldCon members feel very strongly about that.
And has been pointed out, multiple times, the current clique in charge has been pretty much doing that for a while. The whole thing has gone stagnant, with stories that cater to the taste of a small few.
Please tell me when they were doing this and what is the specific evidence apart from that bloody Dinosaur story, I DIDN’T LIKE IT EITHER, ok?
I didn’t vote for it.
But gods help me, I am bored of MilSF and bloody monsters, sparkly vampires, ‘realistic’ urban setting with magic in them.
Give me some original SF please!
Daveon said: “Please tell me when they were doing this and what is the specific evidence apart from that bloody Dinosaur story, blah blah blah.”
If you remember last year or the year before there was great celebration in the land because there were no “straight White males” on the ballot. That.
“But gods help me, I am bored of MilSF and bloody monsters, sparkly vampires, ‘realistic’ urban setting with magic in them.”
I’m terribly sorry that my tastes do not conform to yours… but they don’t. For my part I’m sick to death of non-binary gender intersectionalist message-fic, picking authors based on skin colour instead of the story they wrote, and dystopian post-apocalypse hell-holes where all the characters are pricks and the main character has all the moral backbone of an intestinal parasite.
Seriously, I’m fucking tired of it, and apparently so is the rest of the world given the ever-shrinking SF section. Notice how all the blockbuster movies these days a MilFic, superheros and monster hunters?
As to original SF, go read some of that John C. Wright stuff. Hermetic Millennia I guarantee has some shit it it you never thought of before.
It’s been noted multiple times that John Scalzi has racked up more Hugo nominations in ten years than Arthur C. Clarke got in fifty.
How do you suppose that happened? Was it based on Scalzi’s “literary” chops? His originality?
Or could (whisper) politics have been involved?
I think it’s very clear that Red Shirts would not have been nominated -much less won the Hugo- if it had been signed by anyone other than John Scalzi. In my opinion the reason (and the reason for his many nominations) is that he has a good number of fans and also his blog is very popular. He also has the right politics. So yes, in a way politics was involved. In particular the nomination process is very vulnerable, because the vote is so disperse.
It’s true that many unsavory things were going on at the Hugos. I think that Sad Puppies has taken it a few steps forward, though. Let’s see what happens now.
Well, he encouraged his fans to vote, too.
AG – actually that’s the other way around. The nomination process is very vulnerable, the vote is more robust as you get to rank people. But crap novels winning the Hugo isn’t exactly new. Both 1991 and 1992 were dreadful (IMO).
Even without a lot of people planning to No Award slate candidates, I think Leckie would have won again – I wouldn’t have voted for her this time, but that’s another story.
And has been pointed out several times, the proposed titles were compiled from a call for favorites among SP supporters. IE. they represent the ‘pre-voting’ if you will, of a large number of people.
Also, SP has repeatedly asked voters to READ ALL THE TITLES before voting, NOT to just vote the slate.
And finally, to vote, we had to buy memberships, so now WE ARE THE VOTERS and our votes are just as ‘legitimate’ as any other, including those who bought memberships before the campaign.
The SJWs seem to be MOST upset that more people are voting, making it harder for their TINY LITTLE CLIQUE to control the noms.
The solution is “get more people voting.” That will dilute the ability of any group to affect the noms, and has the side benefit of getting more readers to nominate a wider range of works, and therefore be MORE representative of “the best of SFF.”
zuk
And speaking of “read all the titles before voting,” I just finished Jim Butcher’s “Skin Game” this afternoon. Awesome book. The man can write.
And I can’t believe I haven’t read anything by Butcher before now. Damn, I’ve been missing out…
Also finished Jonathan Maberry’s “Predator One” this weekend as well, and it too was excellent. Let me be the first to submit Maberry’s name for consideration for SP4…
Now I just need to re-read Marko Kloos’ “Terms of Enlistment” and “Lines of Departure” before the third book in that series comes out later this month. 🙂
And I can’t believe I haven’t read anything by Butcher before now. Damn, I’ve been missing out…
You are so lucky! Now you have 13-14 novels to plow through. That is like my favorite thing in life – finding a new author who has done a series that will keep me busy for weeks.
But Lea, I can’t *afford* 13 or 14 more novels right now, even at used or Kindle pricing…
*sob*
Library. Then buy them when you can afford it and read them again. 🙂
Problem there is, you have to give library books *back.*
😛
Plus, I just moved to a relatively rural area with a crappy public library system. Although given Butcher’s popularity, they ought to have at least a few of the series…
Whatever happens, we’ve won.
-If the SJW’s have their way, and were able to kick out all the Wrongthink Wrongfans, the Hugos will collapse into utter irrelevance.
-If we have our way, the pool of voters gets way too big for any one clique to dominate.
Larry “won” the first year when some non-SJWs managed to get on the ballot and the SJWs went Epically Berserk on the interwebz.
Winning like a boss is what that was. SP2 was just rubbing salt in the wound. This year, SP3 we’re using brillo soaked in salt and vinegar.
Next year we use power equipment. We’re talking air drive, baby.
AG, every year so far it’s been completely different. Different goals. Different outlook. Different strategies.
Next year (or so I’ve heard) this goes to Kate. Kate is, more or less in her own words, a foul mouthed Australian geologist that didn’t take shit from men on-site doing manly geology things and isn’t the least bit inclined to take any shit from glittery hoo-ha obsessed Americans now that she lives here.
So, essentially… it will be Kate’s show. Now, I suggest a logo rework so that next year the Puppies on the banner are all girl puppies. Maybe Power Puff Puppies… one blond, one redhead, one brunette. But we’ll see how that goes.
The most important thing, AG, is this…
We know how the Hugos work now. We’ve got a heads up to start picking our favorite books and stories and talking about who ought to be on that slate next year. There’s too much to read for anyone. It’s easy to just suggest your friends and vote for your friends. So there’s a role for me and a role for you and a role for every Puppy and every minion in the Evil League of Evil, and that’s to start saying now… hey, I found this completely awesome self-published e-book and people should check it out because we can’t wait a year for people to find out about it and interest to grow if we want it on the ballot.
So expect to do that, AG. That’s what I expect to be doing. Any one person only reads an tiny fraction of whatever is published each year. We need crowd sourcing.
Thanks for the responses, everyone. If the slate is a longer recommendation list rather than 5 per category I could get on board with this.
Don’t just get on board. Get involved. If you happen across something this year that you think it excellent, make sure you let people know.
THIS^^^^^^^^^
The ‘Sad Puppies Slate’ is what a buncha people said “hey, dis is cool, you should read dis” about.
Not everyone agrees with everyone else on what ‘dis’ is. Hence, individual votes all over the place.
We have achieved a whole bunch of our goals. They’ve proven there is political bias, they have admitted there are cliques and campaigning, they have admitted that they don’t in fact represent all of fandom, and we’ve gotten good people on who would normally be shunned.
What’s next and what’s long term? That entirely depends on what they do now. The ball is in their court. Our strategy will depend on how they want to proceed from here.
Long term strategy is to rub the salt in their wounds with a 7″ air polisher. Random orbit, of course.
Using alcohol as the lubricating agent? After all, you don’t want any chance of infections… 😉
I am very liberal, but never restrict what I read based on an author’s politics. That would hurt me, not them. I’ve never been to any kind of con and am no insider, but always knew the Hugos were voted on by people at the Worldcon, which is small subset of SF fans.
I just learned about the suporting membership option and purchased one so I can vote. I’ve read a lot of excellent short fiction in 2014 and I’m sure some of those stories got knocked off the ballot by SP/RP. If any of the SP/RP nominees are at least as good as my favorite stories of 2014, I’ll give them a vote. If they are mediocre or worse, I’ll vote No Award. I’ll withhold judgment on your sincerity until I’ve read the stories. If they are just decent but forgettable, I’ll have to assume that part of your plan was to get a No Award victory to show that those dirty SJWs won’t give you a fair shake.
I don’t know how many Hugo voters have an attitude like mine, but I doubt I am unique.
I would encourage you to read the works. That’s all I can do.
And even if you find them wanting, that doesn’t mean that it was all some ploy, A. We didn’t know we’d sweep, so couldn’t predict the No Award temper tantrum. B. Apparently even if capital F Fandom doesn’t like them, the rest of the world likes our suggestions, For example, if you take the star ratings on Amazon, this is by far the highest average rating for the nominees ever, and the first time in decades every work is above 4 stars.
Larry, I agree. Hopefully you’re not cheating by reading this. 🙂
Overall, I find the idea of shunning particular publishers and authors because of the political shenanigans of SJWs to be idiotic. Its what SJWs do. I leave the BS to them and read whatever catches my fancy as usual.
Example, even though John Scalzi is a titanic SJW dick on the internet, I still enjoyed Old Man’s War. I bought the whole series. Its good, fun reading. I also enjoyed Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky, despite the fact that he is another titanic internet SJW dick.
Don’t care if the author is a dick. I’m reading a book, not going on a date.
That’s what libraries are for, chief. They let you enjoy the book without rewarding the titanic dick.
Abebooks can be quite useful too. I haven’t put a dime in Stross’ pockets in years, but I still get to read his books.
I sort of agree, but…It’s hard to enjoy reading a book by someone who has nothing but utter contempt for you, especially if you paid for it with your own money.
That’s one reason I quit reading Stephen King, for example. It wasn’t because King wears his lefty politics on his sleeve, but because at some point he started rubbing it into the faces of his fans and mocking anyone who doesn’t share his beliefs. (It didn’t help that King became too big to edit, and ran out of ideas about twenty years ago.)
Scalzi? Screw him. I made the mistake of discovering his blog before I discovered his published novels, which is why I can’t even stomach “Old Man’s War,” which may be the one good thing he’s written.
Ditto Charles Stross, who is a great storyteller, but I won’t buy anything of his even used at a Half-Price Books simply because of his attitude towards anyone who agrees with the Sad Puppies movement. He wants to declare everything on the SP slate to be crap, sight unseen, and boycott everything on the slate for the third year running? OK then. Boycotts work both ways. And he obviously doesn’t need my money, tainted as it might be with Sad Puppies cooties.
I don’t give a single solitary damn who the authors I like vote for, sleep with, which racial/ethnic boxes they check off on the census form or which bathroom they use. I’ll spend my money on anybody who wants to tell me a good story and doesn’t treat me like a, well, dick.
I liked Old Man’s War. Its pretty good. I also liked Agent To The Stars because its pretty silly. Of course I didn’t find out that Scalzi is a dick until later, so I didn’t have that hanging over my reading.
Charles Stross started Singularity Sky with a rain of cellphones, and how am I going to turn down a rain of freakin’ cell phones, right? Of course lately he’s been going Full Rampant Atheist in his Laundry series, which I find very message-fic-y. Also when writers deny the existence of any kind of God/Gods/whathaveyou in their stories, I find it stretches my suspension of disbelief pretty far into the “oh come on!” range and takes all the fun out of things.
Plus there is the Massive Dick issue to consider.
However, I will not stoop to scamming books. Libraries are fine, but if I want something I buy it. Should an author manage to elevate their Dickosity Factor to extreme levels, I’ll just boycott their works and send them a nassssty note.
Thank you for all your work, Mr C, and have a great rest.
But according to the Laws of Social Justice Warfare, should we not inflict suffering on the innocent as well as the guilty to prove how committed we are? I’d had to behave in a fashion they find abnormal…
James May: Well, how’s this for a campaign?
“BLACK PEOPLE, YOU JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE MISSING.”
How about:
‘THIS WORLD SUCKS? TRY ANOTHER!”
James May, I suppose, ‘IN THE UNITED FEDERATION OF PLANETS, EVERYONE HAS AN EBT CARD” is quite the direction you’re looking to take this, am I right?
“NOT” quite the direction…
I thought they eliminated money in the Federation by the 24th century 😉 (just forget DS9 and pressed latinum…)
Maa… I think the Ferengi just haven’t discovered the joys of compound interest and derivatives yet (the regressive metal-standard so-and-so’s)
“Doug Northcote, on April 11, 2015 at 4:53 am said:
World of tanks is calling you sir. Or, or, or whatever other game to relax.”
In his spare time, Larry dresses up as an Atlas in Mechwarrior Online
I meant to ask just how one joins the Evil League of Evil. After all, I’ve already paid my dues in the SJW wars…
If you haven’t already, check out #SadPuppies on Twitter. The GamerGaters (who, for the last time, were NOT involved before) have taken up the cause during the past week. LOTS of support.
We’re not alone.
One of my favorite blog comments of the week was the GamerGater in one of Larry’s previous threads, who observed that if the SJWs kept trying to drag GG into Sad Puppies, they’d “find themselves giving a Hugo to a Halo novel.”
Keep on pokin’ that bear with a stick…
😛
The Puppies have been adopted! 🙂
Hey, I actually liked some of the Halo novels!
I’m not sure if they merit a Hugo on their own, but they beat the Dinosaur short all hollow.
Greg Bear’s Primordium series was fine with me, and Karen Traviss’ stuff was fairly well done, although the Flood one needed a more attentive editor.
But mostly, if you don’t like a given series / work, leave it alone and buy another. There’s plenty of decent SF&F out there for everyone!
I would support a Hugo category for Best Tie-In. Sure, there’s crappy tie-ins, but every once in a while you get something worthwhile.
And because they are often written under constraints, I do think it can be fair to judge an author’s ability to write tie-ins against other tie-ins, instead of against people writing in their own universes.
Mary Robinette Kowal is offering to buy supporting membership to WorldCon for people who cannot afford them. She offered 10, but since then other people (Ellen Klage and several anonymous Hugo nominees, at least some of which were in the SP list) have joined the offer, so now there are 55 memberships.
Kowal has said that since those memberships will be able to nominate next year she’ll refuse any nomination she may get in 2016.
I can afford a membership, but if anyone here would like to have one but can’t for economical reasons I think that it’s only fair that some of them go to people sympathetic with SP, since some of them are paid by SP authors.
If you go there please be civil. Kowal has shown a tolerant attitude during this time of insults and lies.
http://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/talk-with-me-about-being-a-fan-of-science-fiction-and-fantasy/
“Earlier this year, I was on a panel about inclusion in fandom at a different convention. One of our panelists insisted that fandom had always been welcoming to everyone, adding that she preferred the colorblind approach, welcoming everyone as individuals. Mary Robinette Kowal beat me to the response by 0.6 seconds. Mary stood up and asked everyone in the audience who was white to raise their hands.” – gender abolitionist Jim Hines.
I would’ve straight up told anyone who talked to me like that to go fuck themselves.
Could always raise a hand with only one finger extended. Would be the polite way to handle it.
Politeness was out the door after that remark. I’ll tell you what. Go into a black bar and go ask everyone who’s black to raise their hands after you racially lecture them and see how fast you get your ass kicked.
I’d caution against using Jim Hines as a faithful transmitter of the general tenor or point someone else was trying to make. For one thing, the exchange reads as a classic opinion multiplier… so and so agrees with me, etc.
In my mind at least the exchange seems entirely non sequitor… what does one have to do with the other? Maybe it made sense in the larger context but *because* it seems so divorced from the statement it was meant to be a response to.
Now… if we want to make a point it’s not the number of white people in the *audience* that is important there, but the number of white people on the panel.
Also, it would have been more interesting had someone asked how many of the people in the audience ever felt unwelcome or uncomfortable and found out how many of those white people raised their hands. Or asked how many people had ever felt personally insulted, offended and angered by people on a panel at a con. Ask that.
I don’t think that fandom has been racist, but it can be intimidating. And a riff on evil Christians and how anti-science people of faith ruin *everything* is every bit as likely to send People of Color (both blacks and Hispanics tend to be religious) running for the door never to look back as to prick the sensibilities of white audience members.
And lets not start with publicly expressed deviances. Look, I don’t *care* what you do in your party suite, but that Black Baptist convention that arrived at the Hotel on Sunday? They were walking around the halls viewing the bondage pamphlets on the free-bee tables.
I’m sure they thought… hey, my kids like Narnia… maybe…
Raise your hands if you are white? They couldn’t just…look?
Whether she recuses herself or not, that ploy is the equivalent of buying drinks and lunch for voters in bars on election day. Saying you’re not telling them how to vote is disingenuous when they know which side is paying the tab.
This is hilarious! The SPs are accused of slate voting and all manner of underhanded skulduggery, and here’s MRK coming out and openly offering to BUY VOTES like its all kinds of ok to do that.
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve seen in this yet. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
This is a comment I made in GRRM’s latest post, and GRRM’s response.
My comment:
“I did not take part in the Sad Puppies campaign and I do not vote in the Hugos. However, I sympathize with several of the things they defend. I disagree with the precise manner in which they have conducted their Hugo campaign, although I’m starting to think they did not expect in any way to sweep the nominations like that, and that the poor voting system is more to blame for that (a voting system that gives 100% representation to about 10% or 20% of the vote). I really hope that next year their recommendations will be a longer list, so that it does not look like an electoral list and they can engage with the Hugos in a better way, without shutting anyone else out. I also have to say that I think the Hugos were a closed circle of cliques and politics. Can anyone look at me with a straight face and tell me that they believe Red Shirts would have won if it had been signed with a name different than John Scalzi?
Regarding Vox Day, I strongly dislike what he says I do not feel represented by him in any way. Anyone who has been insulted in a racist manner has my full sympathy.
As someone who sympathizes with some of what the SPs stand for, I would also like that when hate speech comes from the other side of the political divide, good people there would speak up and condemn it instead of looking the other way as usual. Just yesterday, for example, Abigail Nussbaum, nominated for the Hugo for Best Fan Writer in 2014, defended that Laura J. Mixon (the one who exposed Requires Hate) should be voted under No Award. She criticizes Mixon’s report for reasons like this:
“When the blow-up over the Requires Hate blog happened in 2012, I was sympathetic to a lot of the criticisms raised, but it also seemed clear that to stand against Requires Hate would mean standing with people I cared for even less, who would cheerfully use her behavior as a cudgel against all anti-racist, anti-sexist writing, and who would tar any angry review with the brush of “bullying.””
and:
“The report consistently treats all of Sriduangkaew’s excesses–her rage-blogging, her public bullying, and her private abuse and harassment–as if they were equally bad, whereas to my mind only the last one justifies the opprobrium that has descended upon her.”
This is the reason why many people treat the term SJW as an insult. It’s not because we are against justice, but because many of those people act like racist and sexist bullies. Yes, I say racist and sexist, because positive discrimination is something about which reasonable people may disagree about, but when it crosses the line into hate speech there is no justification.
***
GRRM’s response was:
“Abigail Nussbaum should be ashamed.”
…
So kudos for him for that. That response from someone in the left gives me some hope that people there will start realizing that the behavior of many SJWs is not OK. It’s going to be a long process, but if we are to be part of the same community we need to learn to respect each other.
Baseball players do not learn to respect each other, they learn to respect the rules so that all may benefit by those rules and learn what personal responsibility is. When a people speak a shared language with consistent definitions, they can live with each other quite happily.
Within feminist power-privilege punching up theory, it is a stacked deck against men, whites and heterosexuals. In short it is group defamation of the same sort as anti-Semitism and it is also a form of cheating. It is a constant shifting of the rules so that one team always wins. There should be no teams in the first place. Success and failure, morality and a lack of it resides on a human and individual level, not that of a race or sex.
The problem with Nussbaum’s and RH’s standards of what actually is racist and sexist is they are paper-thin, but only in one direction. An inadvertent depiction of an Asian culture is “racist,” as is “micro aggressions.” Not being on board with feminist theories of “gendered slurs” or “gender equality” is sexist.
On the other hand the most outrageously racist and sexist remarks, sick profilings and defamations from this social justice gender feminist ideology are ignored and swept aside. There are no rules all can live with and so there is no respect, only mutual suspicion and hostility. We do not speak the same language because we have no principled rules; we have Towers of Babel speaking past one another.
To me the central issue is still one of institutionalized racial (and sexual) incitement to hate. It is not a he-said, she-said but an easily documented trail of non-stop daily harassment from social justice feminists together with open collusion to discriminate.
For example, the number of documented quotes where SJWs recommend (or de-recommend) books based on nothing more than race, sexual expression and sex is a flood. There are in fact NO such recommendations by the so-called Men’s Rights Activist, conservative, white, male supremacy side – none. There are no white male segregated anthologies or “safe-spaces” and it is time to stop pretending there is or that this is an equal argument.
I agree, and part of the problem is that there is a culture that allows the SJWs’ abuse without anyone but the victims to speak up against it. Bullies on one side receive full social disapproval, but bullies on the other seem to have carte blanche. Those moderates who do not engage in that behavior routinely look the other way, I don’t know if it’s because they are oblivious or don’t care or are scared that saying the wrong thing will make them into outcasts too. I have the hope that these discussions about SP will make some decent people on the other side of the political spectrum listen to what we are saying, think about it and start seeing SJWs for what they are.
When you say “moderates” here, I silently translate as either “fellow-travelers” or “cowards.”
The hilarious thing about GRRM going after Vox Day – to the point that he’s demanding everybody on our side ritually denounce him for his badthink – is that he actually thinks Vox gives a damn about what anybody else thinks about him. Just how many times has the SJW wing of SF/F demanded Vox be shunned, now? And how did the previous attempts work out?
The other hilarious thing is that GRRM apparently thinks “our” flaming asshole – that would be Vox – is somehow the equal of the Left’s *army* of flaming assholes. I’m sure Vox thinks it’s funny, too.
And given that Vox has given as good as he’s gotten, that actually might even be a true assesement. 😉
As far as “doing something” about Vox: What, exactly, are we supposed to do about him? And what, precisely, is GRRM going to do about all the hatred and insanity coming from *his* side of the aisle, which he apparently hasn’t noticed until now that he needs to make some sort of faux-reasonable, moral-equivalence argument.
It’s sort of like… lets put out this fire by pouring gas on it.
Yeah…
That’ll work.
The only side Vox is on is his own.
The thing is, I think we need to step away – WAY AWAY – from *all* sorts of litmus tests and denunciations that we apply to fellow fans in terms of awards, etc.
SP don’t hold trufans to denounce NKJ/KTB/RH.
Trufans don’t hold SP to denounce Asimov/VD/whoever else.
We stop all this, let social groups include or exclude people as they like, and judge work based on the work. Not the gender of the author, or the religion in the work, or the skin color of the protagonist, or who else likes the work. Our own judgement of the work.
The Left is always demanding that we denounce somebody on our side, on one pretext or another (usually bogus) if we all just want to get along. But the promised comity and respect from them never materializes, does it? They just go and demand we denounce somebody else.
As Lincoln once said of Ulysses S. Grant after the latter was criticized for “excessive” battle casualties leading Union troops: “I cannot spare this man, he fights.”
That’s pretty much the way I look at Vox.
This is not a he-said, she-said. Prior to Racefail in 2009 SJWs assert that for 100 years there was a thing that acted like an ideological women-hating KKK.
That is false.
On the other hand, SJWs are in fact all on the same page with a racial and sexual feminist ideology with very specific linguistics, views and goals.
Well, while what you say it’s true, I personally do not mind saying that I don’t like VD and that he doesn’t represent me. It’s the truth after all, and if it’s going to make them feel better I don’t mind saying so.
But it’s also true that this is not the way to deal with VD. He couldn’t care less how much he is disliked or hated. By turning him into their nemesis they only make him bigger. They should just ignore him. Yes, even after he gets nominated with his Rabid Puppies. Just don’t vote for him and forget him. Feeding the troll is not the best strategy.
In fact, the SJW’s are probably going to massively increase Vox Day’s sales figures.
Yes. That. Exactly.
Yes, and he also said re: Jemisin: “I was not at Wiscon, and did not hear that speech. If your quotes are accurate, I am very disappointed. If you have read my own posts, you know I disagree with all of that.”
And regarding Arthur Chu: “I don’t know Arthur Chu. From what you say, I don’t want to.”
These are very mild semi-condemnations. They cost him nothing and will not affect any future interactions with such people. Nor will he issue a pointed or public call for such to change their behavior or be shunned, as he did with Day.
*shrug* You can’t expect people to be more than they are, or (sadly) to try to remove the beam before they start trying to pull out the other person’s mote. Sometimes it happens. Mostly, though, the best you get is a little lip service.
I’ll be happy to retract this if GRRM issues a public call for tolerance of political dissent in a panel or speech at WorldCon or similar platform.
In a way, I feel sorry (slightly) for GRRM; he apparently thinks the SJW are his friends, will make excuses for them, will try to get along with them, only mildly condemn the most egregious examples of their misbehavior ….
But there will come a day when he says something they don’t like. Then they will call for his ouster from Trufandom(c), boycott his works, call for the MinTruth to airbrush his picture out of the archives, and so forth.
They will use him as long as he is convenient, and at the first inkling of thoughtcrime turn on him.
Nah, GRRM is too high profile. Society will not condemn him on a baseless accusation by SJWs, and they know this. He is untouchable, unless he does or says something really horrible, which he is not going to do because he is a decent person..
But it’s true that he is completely blind when it comes to SJWs, like many people with his political ideas. He is so used to think that they are they good guys, the ones that fight against bigots, that he is unable to really look at them and see what they do and say. They lynch Jonathan Ross as if he were a wild animal? “Oh, well, just a bit of a misunderstanding. He did nothing to deserve it, but the Hugo Committee should have asked around whether he was acceptable.”
I’m sure Brandon Eich thought that too.
I thought of this over the weekend. If SJWs don’t exist, how would he describe the political philosophy of the multitude of reporters who wrote Puppies=Racist articles this week?
Shear Random Coincidence. Like all the warm molecules in the room suddenly rushing to one side and spontaneously combusting. 🙂
Such has already happened: http://www.ew.com/article/2015/06/03/george-rr-martin-thrones-violence-women
I think by now it’s clear that GRRM is not going to approve my last comment, probably because he does not want his site to have anything to do with criticism towards John Scalzi, so I may as well post it here:
I don’t intend to pick on just one person in the mob, but let’s try to illustrate why it’s difficult for us to take part in fandom in a normal manner, when this viciousness is so widespread, and not only from anonymous fans. It’s business as usual by now. If we go to the same convention, can we interact normally with so many people who think that saying things like these is fine? Should we hide who we are and say the right things? Or not hide and get a fun experience spoiled? After listening day after day, for years, to this kind of thing, is it so strange that we are fed up?
Foz Meadows @fozmeadows· Apr 10
Every time Correia, Torgersen and their ilk complains about the evils of diverse characterisation, they’re narrowing their audience.
Foz Meadows @fozmeadows · Apr 10
That’s the Sad Puppy complaint in a nutshell: resentment that people they dislike writing about are similarly disinterested in their books.
Foz Meadows @fozmeadows· Apr 10 #NewHugoCategories Best Use Of Elf-Orc-Human Relations As A Clumsy Metaphor For Racism In A Story With Only White Characters.”
Foz Meadows @fozmeadows· Apr 10
#NewHugoCategories Best Hiring Of A Straight White Male Writer To Fuck Up A Franchise That Was Doing Just Fine Without One.
Fortunately John Scalzi knows how tolerant fandom is and assures us that no writer is going to have their career hurt by their own personal politics:
John Scalzi @scalzi· Apr 9
It’s very difficult to hurt your career in SF/F by your own personal politics. It’s rather easier to hurt your career by being an asshole.
Thanks, Mr. Scalzi. You are too subtle for me, though, I can’t think who you might be referring to with that last part. Apparently not to truefans. As an illustration, this was John Scalzi fondly mocking Correia after the campaign to vote any Sad Puppies recommendation into the last place in the 2014 Hugos was successful:
John Scalzi @scalzi
I’m not going to lie. I’m going to be THRILLED to snarkread the whiny “I didn’t want it anyway” nonsense that will squirt forth tomorrow.
John Scalzi @scalzi
WE ARE GOING TO MAKE THE HUGO SLATE A REFERENDUM ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE FICTION (loses) THE HUGOS DON’T MATTER ANYWAY
John Scalzi @scalzi
SHUT UP I AM NOT CRYING IT’S THAT LITTLE FLECKS OF GUNPOWDER FELL INTO MY EYEBALLS SOMEONE GET ME A FLAMING SWORD SO I CAN FLICK THEM OUT
John Scalzi @scalzi
WHO IS CALLING ME PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE I AM ALL AGGRESSIVE DON’T YOU SEE THIS HUGE GUN I HAVE WITH ME AT ALL TIMES (breaks down, sobbing)
John Scalzi @scalzi
AND NOW I WILL IGNORE THE HUGOS AGAIN UNTIL NEXT YEAR WHEN MY FEELINGS OF PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE INADEQUACY ANGRILY WELL UP ONCE MORE
John Scalzi @scalzi
I’VE LEARNED MY LESSON AND MY LESSON IS THAT WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH PATENT RACIST SHITBAGGERY ON OUR SLATE WHAT THAT WAS GOOD WRITING MAN
John Scalzi @scalzi
ITS PROOF THAT ALL THE FEMINISTS NEED TO DO TO WIN AWARDS IS WRITE BETTER STORIES ACCORDING TO THE JUDGEMENT OF THE FANS SHEEESH
John Scalzi @scalzi
I NEVER WANTED THE AWARD THAT’S WHY I’VE WHINED LIKE A KICKED DOG ABOUT IT FOR A COUPLE YEARS RUNNING
The specks of gunpowder and flaming sword are references to the stories supposedly written by Baen writers, whom Scalzi frequently mocks in Twitter. Because we all know how cool it is to mock what other people read. And these are not random jerks, these are writers, one ex-president of the SFWA… Look, everyone has a bad day, but this is not a bad day, it’s a bad decade. Put yourself in my place for a moment. Would you be comfortable in a community where it is perfectly OK for highly placed people to treat you like that? You may tell yourself, “people are angry because the Sad Puppies bloc-voted”. But this comes from well before that, and we are not OK with it.
When he has had his fun, Mr. Scalzi gets back in Dr. Jekyll mode and maybe writes a reasonable blog entry about how people should give every nominee a chance. He is a moderate, you see. People wonder why we dislike him. It must be because he is tolerant and progressive, and we are a bunch of racist, misogynous rednecks who only like flaming swords. The newspapers say so, so it must be true.
One way or the other I’ll be all right. But if I can’t be treated decently you can’t ask me to accept this community as it is.
It’s very easy to hurt your career in SFF. You only have to be white, straight and a male. By virtue of that ALONE, Lightspeed and Tor writers will not review you. There will be calls to “de-white” one’s library and not read you for one year. You will be endlessly and daily demonized as a group. You cannot be on all-white, all-male discussion panels or all-white anthologies. Other authors will publicly announce they will read less of you and entire review blogs will be dedicated to diminishing your footprint in SFF. Your every move and word of fiction will be scrutinized for correctthink and privilege. You will be regularly attached to every historic crime ranging from New World genocide to managed death famines by the East India Company. You default to racist, transphobic and misogynistic until proven otherwise. Publisher’s Weekly review editors will say you should come with trigger warnings. Nebula nominees will publicly lecture you for your unconscious racism in writing the “other” and sexism in your epic fantasy. You are forbidden from using gendered slurs or enjoying Frank Frazetta. You will be relentlessly pie-charted regardless of how good your fiction is or how dismal the fiction of another. An all-male book display will be publicly swarmed on Twitter for badthink. You wlll routinely be the butt of jokes that get white males themselves publicly shunned if they do it. You will be publicly accused of “institutional racism” merely by mistaking the identity of one author for another at a convention. On Tor podcasts your fiction will be called “white guys writing white guy power fantasy.” You will be banned at any blog where you consistently question any of that. There is lots more.
The idea gender feminism is NOT a racist sexist supremacist cult is too stupid to entertain. Stop calling these people “liberals.” Ray Bradbury was a fucking liberal. Stan Lee wrote comics from a liberal viewpoint. Zap Comix was liberal. These are conservative authoritarian race-gender cultists and their wacky confused disciples. They’re lucky we still engage them on any level.
“Mary Kowal might be a good example of a liberal in action.” Mary Kowal is a “liberal” but no liberal. She hides behind a mask of even-handedness while do exactly what we are falsely accused of doing. She is buying votes in broad daylight, even being subsidized to do so, and no one is calling her out on it because “civility”?
Explain to me how what Mary is doing is in anyway different from handing out cartons of cigarettes to transients to get them into the polls on election day?
Well, let’s be frank. Does anyone expect anything different than victories for No Award, Kowal votes or no Kowal votes? That’s why I can’t get too much worked up. Also, I’m convinced she means it without any nefarious motive. If she isn’t, she’s the best actress ever… although on the other hand, she happens to be:
http://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/how-i-beat-pat-rothfuss-at-being-pat-rothfuss/
Jokes aside, I don’t believe there was any bad intention. It saw also said here and in Brad’s blog, and she said she’d be happy to give them to anyone who asked and said they couldn’t afford it, Puppies or not…
Having said all that, even if in this case I don’t think there was bad intention, I think it still is a disquieting precedent.
This is not complex. Just use Occam’s Razor and the concept of motivation. What does her ideological feminist diversity crusade get out of this? Suddenly it’s all about the literature?
This is her pinned Tweet at the top of her feed:
“It’s not about adding diversity for the sake of diversity, it’s about subtracting homogeneity for the sake of realism.”
That bit of incomprehensible semantic gibberish and illogic is her obsession, as it is for the entirety of this truly bizarre cult. You will never see that applied as a principle to any hobby or cultural interest in the world other than white and male – NEVER.
I will only note that she pointed out that others were following in her footsteps in offering free memberships, and that she encouraged those others to offer their freebies on their own sites to promote variety.
You are free to believe what you wish about her motive, but Occam’s Razor suggests that it might be possible to divine that motive from reading her words.
Taking words at face value when they conflict with all her other words is precisely where the shaving comes in.
Arthur Chu. Again. So many distortions I don’t know where to begin.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/12/right-wing-trolls-hijack-scifi-oscars.html
That has to be one of the most disgusting piles of misrepresentation and character defamation I’ve ever read. I found a quote on another site I’ll share here
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” — C.S. Lewis
I think someone should post that CS Lewis quote on the comment section of every single one of these stories.
Tried to reply to Chu but comments wouldnt’t open.
This is my shocked face.
I love Chu and Shaun Duke from Skiffy and Fanty, which is also Weimer and Cecily Kane’s playground. Reading what they said about Brad’s theoretical racism despite a black wife reinforced my idea that they are people who are almost completely devoid of human souls or human empathy. People who sign on with this gender feminist nuthatchery are truly creepy people, like Nation of Islam New Black Panther Party creepy.
My response to GRRM. Obviously this is my opinion and I do not speak for anyone else:
***
Mr. Martin, I think you talk with a lot of common sense and have strong arguments in many of the things you say.
I think that Mr. Correia and Mr. Torgerson are angry, and that anger sometimes makes them see things as worse than they are. In your “Where’s the Beef” post you made a good argument that the Hugos have not turned their back on entertaining, popular fiction, and I think you are right here and not Mr. Correia (although by spending so large a part of your article speaking about the distant past you could not do a closer analysis of the more recent years.) Anyway, except for one minor reservation I think you are right about what you say about that.
You are also right to say that for a group that calls for quality and popular entertainment the list that the Puppies have put together is deficient. I’m not saying it was necessarily bad, and I’m sure there are quite good things there (I’m talking about the Sad Puppies list here, not the Rabid ones), but as a whole the list seems something hastily put together without much analysis and overlooking many worthy candidates that completely meet the SP’s stated criteria.
I will also agree that the way this was done (with a list of exactly 5 items in many categories) makes it seem more like a slate than a recommendation list, and I understand people being upset over that. (I’ll also say however that it’s not the Puppies’ fault how deficient the voting system is, and that they were not expecting this sweep). Anyway, there’s been much politics and campaigning in the Hugos, but never to this extent. Your metaphor is good: they wanted a seat at the table but instead the kicked down the table and took all the seats. I hope that next year the Sad Puppies do things better and come up with a larger and better thought-out recommendation list, not with a slate.
The Sad Puppies are having fun and celebrating things they like, which is great, but there’s also an undercurrent of anger that makes them do things they might otherwise not do. And I believe they are right to be angry. I can only shake my head at how blind people are at bigotry and discrimination when it’s not directed at them and they have not been sensitized to it.
Tell me, if the SFWA is a professional organization, why were Mike Resnick and company morally lynched and driven away? Being feminist can not be carte blanche to bully and step on people who are doing nothing wrong, just because they do not share every single aspect of your moral doctrine. Those people were not bigots and did not deserve that treatment, Mr. Martin, their only crime was not sharing a certain ideological bent that has become very loud and vocal in the SFF world. The only people who raised their voice to defend them were those who shared their values, but it should have been all moderate members of the SFWA who defended them. When that did not happen, it was not just a slap on the face of Mike Resnick, it was a slap on the face of everyone who shares his values and considers him a good person. The same thing happens elsewhere. You do not see it, Mr. Martin, since it is not directed towards you because of your ideology, but people who have a different way of thinking feel that atmosphere very intensely, believe me. Many choose to lie low and be quiet so as not to attract attention. Others, like Mr. Correia, do not have that choice because of his past.
You ask people to condemn VD and I condemn him, because I think he incurs in hatespeech. Other people, however, are angry and say that VD is not their problem and why should they condemn anyone at the behest of those who are attacking them for their ideas or simply looking the other way when that happens. There are dozens of Vox Days on the other side of the argument, Mr. Martin, and no one is condemning them or saying that their hatespeech is not tolerable.
***
did you miss Laurajmixon.com? Seems she did a pretty good takedown on the rabid far left in question …
Did you miss Mixon’s “Patriarch’s Day Part IV”?
She IS the rabid left. Her gender feminist beliefs are identical with Requires Hate.
I guess i did … I’ll go hunt it up …
hmmm
I must be looking in the wrong place … I dashed over to t0r.c0m to try and find the hate and vileness that is causing all this angst …
checked the headlines … nope … lots of Game of Thrones stuff, Harry Potter stuff, Patrick Rothfuss stuff
checked the community link… same stuff …. to be honest I didn’t read all those threads so I suppose there might be hate directed towards Correia inc. in there, but it appears to me that you guys are simply being ignored.
that’s gotta hurt.
again maybe I’m looking in the wrong place?
Not at all. TorCom is like a site with 99 pages about peace and love and on page 100 it says “We hate N-words.” Kinda cancels the rest out, doesn’t it?
TorCom is a huge site. The ultimate objective is promoting Tor products, of course, but they try to do so by putting together an attractive site with loads of new content every day. They have a lot of money, and they pay better rates than any proffesional magazine in the genre. I like many things in it. It is not a site focused on SJW stuff. However, they do have several columnists very much along those lines. Tor is also famous for having several editors (not all by any means), who are extremely rabid SJWs. The Nielsen Haydens, for example, are attacking writers of their own editorial because of all that is going on. Since they are the strongest force in the SFF editorial world they have a lot of influence, and this perceived backing of the actions of SJWs makes many sympathizers of the SP look at them with a certain distrust.
However Tor is a very big institution, and there are all kind of people working there. They publish all kinds of genre things and all kinds of authors. Their business is selling books, not being a political party and going against part of their customers, even if a couple of individuals forget that from time to time. It does not make any sense for us to go against all Tor, we have enough enemies already to go looking for more, and it does not make any sense for Tor to go against a part of the fandom, so I expect things will calm down. Larry’s post goes in that direction, I think.
I don’t HAVE to go against TOR. I just don’t have to go TO them. When they remember that part of the seller/buyer relationship everyone will be happier.
I get that you guys are all /libertarian/conservative/gun-loving/Christians …
I’m liberal. But I also don’t really like some of the far-left stuff that goes on. I own and shoot a gun … but I’ll never join the NRA. I don’t like being made to feel guilty for loving RAH while growing up. But on the other hand when I read some of the Vox Day/John Wright stuff … I want to gag.
So help me understand … why should I support and/or sympathize with you guys? I like Larry’s books (at least the ones I’ve read) and don’t really find anything objectionable about them … but I gotta be honest … you guys often come off sounding like whack-jobs.
I’m not a Christian and find fundamental Christianity to be just as repellent as fundamental Islam. I’m for a woman’s right to choose … anti-abortion leads to situations like we currently have in Indiana. I find all the angst over homosexuals incomprehensible. WHO CARES who does what to whom? I can’t see how anyone is negatively affected by baking a cake for a gay wedding. It’s money in your pocket .. it’s not GAY money!
anyway help a potential supporter here …
WHO CARES who does what to whom?
Exactly.
Who cares if people write women as heroes in their books? Who cares if people don’t want to voice approval of things they don’t like?
Who cares if someone else’s vote is influenced by their religious beliefs? Who cares if someone else would rather lose money than be open for business on their holy day?
Who cares if the people next door to you own a weapon? Who cares if people want to refuse to pay for someone elses medical procedure? Who cares? Let people do what they want, and I’ll do what I want, and we’ll all be okay, right?
In SP, you don’t have to like anyone else. You don’t have to enjoy any books that anyone else likes. You can like what you want. You’re free to ignore the people you don’t want to listen to. You’re free to attempt to presuade people you disagree with of the error of their ways (just so long as the two of you don’t tussle loud enough to wake the baby or with enough vigor to knock over the barstools or the reading lamp.
That’s why you should come over to the dark side. Because we won’t make up your mind for you.
Plus, we have cookies. 🙂
who cares? Well I own a gun because I’m scared of the NRA whack-jobs far more than I am of the criminals. And now I’m scared of the police (which I see as an extension of said NRA whack-jobs). I’m willing to believe that most of you people are perfectly reasonable … but the loudest amongst you (i.e. Ted Nugent etc) ARE NOT.
I don’t care if you want to close on Sundays. I DO care if you want to refuse service to certain segments of society. I don’t care if you don’t want your pregnant daughter to get an abortion .. but I do care if you refuse to allow mine to get one.
See the difference? I don’t care what YOU do … but when you demand the right to care and affect what I do … I’ll balk at that.
Having said you armed yourself because you’re more scared of “NRA Whack-Jobs” far more than you are of criminals, we can now safely discount you as a serious individual. How many murders in your town committed by “NRA whack-jobs”?
Not that I suspect we’ll have to worry about you for long, because I have a feeling we’ll see you on the news one day shot by a cop you pulled a gun on at a traffic stop.
Does Ted Nugent write science fiction? Does Game of Thrones not serve gays?
Clif – I’m sorry to have to break it to you, but all groups have nutjobs, hypocrites, liars, and boors amongst them.
It is an unfortunate thing that the loudest are generally the most obnoxious.
I own a gun because I’m scared of the NRA whack-jobs far more than I am of the criminals. And now I’m scared of the police (which I see as an extension of said NRA whack-jobs).
“A person is generally not reasoned OUT OF a stance he was not reasoned INTO.” I am not going to tell you what to fear and not fear. I will tell you that a careful examination of crime stats in the USA may help you decide to re-evaluate who you want to fear most.
I DO care if you want to refuse service to certain segments of society.
It might be useful for you to compare the statement above, and this one below:
I don’t care what YOU do … but when you demand the right to care and affect what I do … I’ll balk at that.
Which brings me to:
I don’t care if you don’t want your pregnant daughter to get an abortion .. but I do care if you refuse to allow mine to get one.
If I changed it to “I don’t care if you don’t allow your son to rape your daughter, but I do care if you refuse to allow my son to rape my daughter” – would you agree with this same statement?
I don’t want to get into the pro and cons of specific stances, my point is that there are things which we allow other people to choose to do, and things which we don’t give them freedom to do.
Differences of opinion are rarely “no one can tell me what to do about ANYTHING” but far more about “no one can tell me what to do about THIS.” And there is a great deal of room to debate about each specific THIS.
Again – we care about different groups of “THIS” – but we care about a much *smaller* number of “THIS”.
And we still have cookies.
“having said you armed yourself because you’re more scared of “NRA Whack-Jobs” far more than you are of criminals, we can now safely discount you as a serious individual. How many murders in your town committed by “NRA whack-jobs”?”
perhaps I should rephrase … I’ve armed myself because I feel that I need to in a society where guns and people wielding guns is so commonplace as to be a danger to me and mine. That is true in large part because of the “NRA whack-jobs” heretofore mentioned. In my opinion. This if course has nothing to with the writing of SFF … but it has much to do with my hesitancy in embracing your position.
To be honest I’m surprised that more guns aren’t pulled on cops … and I suspect that it will become more and more common in the future.
Who cares more about the way some one voted than they do about the way they write a story?
Who cares more about someone’s ancestral origins than they do about the way they craft a paragraph?
Who cares more about punishing those who speak against the group think than they do about entertaining their readers?
Freedom – how does that work, again?
Well, you are in luck. Since Sad Puppies 3 has no political litmus test, and we put up authors based on two critera 1. Being awesome. 2. Normally being ignored, their personal politics didn’t really factor into it. So on Monday when we were being attacked in a dozen major media outlets for being white supremacists, we actually had to look harder, and it turns out that our slate includes people from every political philosophy, and if anything the average skews left.
Not that we give a shit, because Awesome and Ignored were our criteria.
Now, any other normal time I would be glad to debate specific beliefs and points, but I just don’t got the time right now.
well cool … except you guys have already admitted that 1) you HAVEN’T put authors who are awesome.
You put up guys who are indistinguishable from white supremacists. So I think you need to forgive the rest of the SFF world for being fooled.
oops sorry … I guess that wasn’t YOU … but you get tarred with the same brush to many unfortunately. I think that’s what GRRM was trying to point out …
and it’s why I’m here looking for reasons to throw in with you guys. I guess I need to be convinced you guys AREN’T white supremacists. You of course are under no obligation to try to convince me …
but it wouldn’t take much really and it seems odd that you (collective you) aren’t willing to bend a little towards the middle … because I bet there’s lots of guys like me out there.
“well cool … except you guys have already admitted that 1) you HAVEN’T put authors who are awesome.
You put up guys who are indistinguishable from white supremacists. So I think you need to forgive the rest of the SFF world for being fooled.”
Wow… from zero to ‘I Don’t Give A Damn About Your Opinion’ in about 4 seconds.
We see racial supremacy as a neutral term. So, “white supremacists”? Using what definition and compared to whom? I do not believe blacks are “diabolical” or lecture Latinos on how to write whites. There are no Men’s Rights Activists with writing workshops on writing the “other” or chastising non-whites about “cultural appropriation.”
We do not have racially segregated physical spaces or call to “de-black” our libraries. We do not routinely compile lists of white editors. We do not hold symposiums on white Eurofuturist SF. We do not recommend novels by whites cuz whiteness.
These are all things intersectional gender feminist supremacist pill-rollers do. They smoke what they roll, too.
“here are no Men’s Rights Activists with writing workshops on writing the “other” or chastising non-whites about “cultural appropriation.”
We do not have racially segregated physical spaces or call to “de-black” our libraries. We do not routinely compile lists of white editors. We do not hold symposiums on white Eurofuturist SF. We do not recommend novels by whites cuz whiteness.”
I don’t know anything about all those things … and don’t care much either. Like many blown-up issues in the world today … when I see something like that I take it with a grain of salt …the truth generally lies about halfway between the two crazy endpoints.
Were that so all courtroom trials would end in a draw.
“You put up guys who are indistinguishable from white supremacists.”
Care to back that up with some evidence?
This is simple: like the old days, we ask literary and artistic questions. Good or bad, that is what we get. Gender feminist SJWs lie and say we were asking white male hero questions. But by it’s very nature such SF defaults to an everyman, unless you like reading about Jim Crow in outer space – and SJWs do.
In their work, gender feminist SJWs ask race-gender questions and that is what they get. Since art and literature take a back seat, their work is not only routinely bad but often not even SFF.
… then there’s the hate speech.
For some bizarre reason SJWs are in a genre about myths but then expect those myths to be racially and sexually pie-charted as if they’re a documentary about the United States Census Bureau. Nothing they say makes any sense.
If you want to read bad SFF-less SFF, I give you the Tiptree winners since 1991. Enjoy walking through that sludge. Had that been old SFF you never would’ve had a Golden Age or the subsequent surge of interest in SFF. Our parents would’ve been right that SFF is moronic, juvenile and empty-headed.
but we don’t LIVE in the old days … and we never will.
I’m not a fan of much of the current sci-fi “literature” … and I detest counting how many women are in books and the unending “Bechdel Testing” of books etc.
But there are issues in today’s society that we can’t ignore. Racism is one. Gender issues are another. IMO SFF shouldn’t be the one trying to solve those issues … I don’t read SFF for that. I read The Atlantic etc if I want that.
Then we are in agreement. So what’s the beef?
“So what’s the beef?”
I don’t want guys like Ted Nugent, Vox Day, John Wright, etc … speaking for me … I guess
What is best? Conan answered that, even if he didn’t give Genghis Khan a credit! 🙂
I don’t want guys like Ted Nugent, Vox Day, John Wright, etc … speaking for me … I guess
…sorry, not following.
None of them speaks for me. Not when I vote for the Hugos, not when I write, not when I vote at the polling place. Not when I stand before God.
Can you expand on what you mean?
well thanks guys … thanks for being civil about it and trying to explain. I’m a bit confused about my own thinking … paradigm shifts ARE confusing I suppose.
I’ll continue to read stuff by authors I like … and maybe at the very least .. give you guys a little more credit. Perhaps we CAN agree to disagree on some things and agree to agree on others. A little more of that in the world today would go a long way …
They don’t speak for me, buddy.
Ahhh…. the old days are ALWAYS there. They’re patient, though, and will wait til you call them whether you know it or not.
When the F did Ted Nugent enter into this equation? Da Fuque?
Concern troll is concern trolling. Bye now!
“When the F did Ted Nugent enter into this equation? Da Fuque?
Concern troll is concern trolling. Bye now!”
I was asked!
that’s what the fuque!
I don’t really know what a concern troll is … is that epithet for a person who points out embarrassing things about your position?
““So what’s the beef?”
I don’t want guys like Ted Nugent, Vox Day, John Wright, etc … speaking for me … I guess”
Mr Clif, I would not speak for you if you paid me. I am retired from law.
Wow, Clif, concern trolling is harder than it looks, isn’t it?
wow Richard … you sounds just like some remarks I’ve one of those SJW sites you despise.
Because we don’t CARE how you believe, unlike the SJW crowd. We care that you like SFF, are passionate about it, no matter which books you like or dislike. This is so not about liking or not liking guns, or conservativism or purple polka dotted people. IT IS ABOUT THE SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY! Nothing more, nothing less.
Frankly, I don’t care if you want to have a drive-by abortion while you bake a cake for a polygamous trisexual wedding and then go out to celebrate at a gun range afterwards. I don’t care who or what you are. I care that you like reading SFF and want to have a say in it.
And anyone who says that we are all x, y or z is just erecting yet another strawman that needs to be burned. If you can’t figure that out yet, well, I don’t know what to tell you. Nuff said.
ok .. if you say so.
SF is, or should be, about the story. That’s it. That’s all. If folks are banging on about ‘diversity’ and its importance to the scene, they’re ignoring one thing.
Is the writing good? Does the description appeal enough to make me want to buy the book? That’s what matters to me.
And since I read SF, I don’t much care if the author has feathers, fins, or scales – or breathes oxygen or ammonia. It’s IDEAS that drive my interest, not ideology. If I’m buying through Amazon’s Kindle store, I don’t bother checking out whether the author’s on any sort of ‘approved’ list, and I couldn’t tell you the names of more than maybe 3 of them.
One, actually, is from China – Cixin Liu’s ‘Sun of China’. Good SF, and I’m hoping to see more from there.
But when ‘diversity’ is pushed as being much more important than the idea of ‘Is the author writing good stuff’, I start to question whether the idea is to promote good writing. Diversity by itself is meaningless when the page is in black and white.
“This is so not about liking or not liking guns, or conservativism …”
if that’s the case then why are so many (most?) of you on that side of the aisle?
where are your liberal spokesmen/women?
where are your liberal spokesmen?
Fussing at people who say “spokesmen” instead of “spokespeople” or “spokesmen/women”. Which we ignore. Which is why they either give up on it or leave.
It’s not likely they would get through, over on websites like MakingLight or io9; more likely they would get “disemvoweled” or ignored, due to their associations with SP. I’ve had posts “stay in the grey” over at io9 even without any political content at all; and most of the political ones rarely release either.
Where are the conservative spokesmen for the liberal groups? They get ignored and shouted down until they leave. Group politics are the same everywhere.
I think you’re confusing conservatism with a bunch of people who’ve been attacked for being white or male or heterosexual. That is of course going to cut across any political spectrum. If people are arrested and thrown into a cell for being black they’re not likely to all be Catholics or libertarians. They’re just going to be black.
It’s only natural that opposing gender feminism is going to be mostly done by its targets. if I throw rocks at squirrels I don’t get attacked by a swarm of owls.
“Fussing at people who say “spokesmen” instead of “spokespeople” or “spokesmen/women”. Which we ignore. Which is why they either give up on it or leave.”
ah ..my bad .. forgot where I was for a sec
“I’ve had posts “stay in the grey” over at io9 even without any political content at all”
yeah that’s weird … I have no connection at all with any groups and I have posts in the grey over there … think that’s probably just more of a case of lazy moderation than anything … but maybe not
Exactly how does one get more liberal than live and let live? From what I’ve read from people involved in SP, that’s certainly the vast majority.
We just want literature. It is not circumscribed. We like everyone and have read everyone. Christ, I’ve even read Elliott, Leckie, de Bodard, Stross, Ahmed, Scalzi, and a ton more.
Partner, you’ll never meet anyone more liberal than me. But by “liberal” what I mean is I don’t care what millions of people do and millions of people don’t care what I think.
yeah well I’m not a “liberal” in the sense of how conservatives define it … but I guess none of us fit exactly the labels we like to throw at each other.
I mostly just think that people should get as fair a shake in life as possible (given that life is never completely fair).
One of the many things I find hilarious: the accusation that this is run by a cabal of “old white men”. Leaving aside Larry’s ethnicity, he’s 38, same age I am. Brad is 41. Scalzi, on the other hand, is 46 and Martin must be in his ’60s.
It’s what they’ve feared for a long time. They aren’t the hip young counterculture anymore. We speak truth to *their* power now.
Why does anyone actually give a damn about Scalzi, his attempts at cloning Starship Troopers are pathetic, and there are dozens of other clones of varying quality.
Redshirts was average-ish humor, with dull characters, basically it was Galaxy Quest the novelization, done badly.
Then the second half of the book it turned into this massive self-aggrandizing whank fest about “creators”.
I wanted to vomit.
Seriously, Scalzi sucks.
Even funnier is Joanna Russ and Samuel R. Delany were published at 22 and 20. If the white patriarchy was strangling their careers at birth they did a poor job of it. And that’s during the dark ages – 1959 and 1962. Naturally awards would follow in order to even more severely hamstring their careers. As N. K. Jemisin puts it, white people truly are “diabolical” with their plans within plans within plans.
Why weren’t Brad and Larry published at 17? Could there be a meritocracy in play? Oh, oh.
Diabolism more likely.
Hey Clif!
shall I demand that you prove you are not an SJW? (Although, you can string three sentences together without using “privilege” or “intersection”, so there’s that going for you)
” I guess I need to be convinced you guys AREN’T white supremacists.”
how does one prove a negative proposition? Can you prove you’re not a unicorn (over the internet?)
we make no demands of you other than you read, enjoy and promote SF&F. we ask that you vote on the works you have read, according to your appreciation of the work (and not the author’s race, gender, or whatever). otherwise, it’s up to you.
so is that what you guys have all done? John Wright’s work is SO good he deserves to be on the ballot .. what … 6 times!? Is that some kind of record?
considering I had never even heard of the guy til I started following this discussion.
that comment perhaps wasn’t fair as you shouldn’t be blamed for what others do …
OK, Clif, I’ll bite.
Why are we not white supremacists? Go to Brad Torgersen’s website, on the ‘subjects’ list, click on Sad Puppies 3, scroll down until you find the post entitled “SAD PUPPIES 3: the 2015 Hugo slate” (I’d link it but don’t want to leave the comment awaiting moderation until Larry has some free time to allow it), and look at the list.
That list has women, people of various ethnicities, and people from all over the political spectrum. If Sad Puppies were a bunch of white supremacists, why would the slate have that sort of variety on it? Also, if you scroll back further on that search page, you’ll see Brad putting up a post soliciting suggestions of things that people think are awesome. If you think the things on the slate are not awesome, then when the next round happens next year, why not suggest some things you think are awesome instead?
cool .. I get that.
so why are you guys being called White Supremacists? Perhaps that was the question I should have asked in the first place?
“so why are you guys being called White Supremacists? ”
I would posit that the reason is tied to The Narrative. Those on the other side of this argument, despite the stated evidence in Brad and Larry’s posts, don’t believe them, and construct in their minds a Racist Strawman who is a white supremacist. They want to do everything they can to discredit the Sad Puppies movement, and will resort to falsehoods to do it.
It’s called guilt by association; if I can find ONE member of your group with attribute “X”, then you are all “X”-ists. See also, Alinsky, Saul: “Rules for Radicals”.
(Actually, it’s not even necessary that one of your group be an “X”; all that is necessary is that I CALL one of your group “X”, and that other people believe it, with or without research to verify it. Do you have time to research every claim you read, whether it’s “Makes your teeth brighter!” or “Eric Holder is a racist!” ? It’s HARD WORK being intellectually honest, and much easier to believe something (even if it’s slanderous, unprovable or lacks evidence) rather than track down all the source material.)
Also, see Goebbels, Joseph, The Big Lie.
Within intersectional gender feminist ideology, we’re white supremacists because we’re white. Our demography defaults to an ideology. That’s why you see so many SJWs describe old SFF as being about a “cis white hero.”
Seinfeld has a joke where, to what he calls the politically correct, 10 white men in a room is the KKK.
I’m not going to put up the quotes again, but within radical feminism, heterosexuality, the male sex drive, lesbianism, etc. are all described as purposeful political and ideological acts.
The short version is radical feminists are psychos.
Narrative is important. In order for there to be a victim, there has to be an oppressor.
In order for there to be an oppressor, there must be an oppressed class. And who better than “White Supremacists” You literally cannot escape that label, once you’re called it. And even directly refuting it –
https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/fort-living-room/
— is simply proof that you’re racist. Obviously Brad hates non-whites so much he had to enslave one.
Yeah, I don’t get it either.
Because SJW’s lie. Vox isn’t even white. Although after reading his blog for quite some time, I’d suggest that he does favor “white” civilization to that of any other, so if you’re really a pedantic SJW moron, maybe you can still make a twisted logic just-so story where he’s still a white supremacist anyway.
And that’s Vox. Anyone associated with SAD Puppies, which is not RABID puppies, as much as the haters would love to conflate them, has even bigger hurdles to overcome to be called white supremacists by anyone with any modicum of rational thought whatsoever.
I think it’s hilarious that GRRM just said, “we should debate this openly!” and then when Vox said he’d be game, any time, GRRM is now saying, “I meant Larry should debate Vox. I’ve got more important things to do. Plus, it’s actually your problem, not mine.”
What a shameless liar.
so why are you guys being called White Supremacists?
Because it’s a useful lie to use for smearing a person’s reputation. Works very well on fooling exceedingly gullible people.
Mostly people are being called White Supremacists because accusations of racism are the defacto American political method of saying “shut up.”
Beyond that, in more detail, the charges are because of this “logic” train:
I care about equality. Thus I think people need to make this particular public confession and also need to “understand” when PoC are angry *ssholes and also must always agree that they’ve done something wrong when they’re told they’ve done something wrong.
Those other people over there refuse to make the particular public confession and they seem to think that PoC don’t have an excuse for public *ssholery and when they’re told they did something wrong they don’t admit it and grovel like I do. Therefore they cannot, like me, care about equality.
One of the interesting things, really, of being a woman (I can just imagine how it would be as a PoC) on the side of… no, I will not make this public confession because I think it’s harmful to equality, I will not excuse fully functioning adult humans of “punching up” as if they’re angry children because this is profoundly harmful to equality and no I will NOT surrender my moral volition to others but will consider IF I agree I’ve done something wrong before apologizing… The interesting thing about being a woman on “this side” is how very very often I *notice* the average crusader deny that women with their own opinions are anything other than brain dead puppets. It’s like a freaking *script*.
Addendum: Note on that slate that John C Wright was only on there twice. Once under novella, and once under related work. That he has 6 nominations is not due to the Sad Puppies slate. It may have something to do with the Rabid Puppies slate (no direct affiliation, and if you want to take up the white supremacist question with Vox Day, I suggest you take it up with him on his site, and not conflate the two movements), but it also likely has something to do with a lot of people thinking John’s work is awesome (I haven’t read his work, so I can’t speak to it’s awesomeness or lack thereof).
I would also encourage you to read Brad’s and Larry’s blogs. Brad has a couple of recent posts addressing the libel against him that he’s a racist misogynist, and he can argue the point far more eloquently than I.
“It may have something to do with the Rabid Puppies slate (no direct affiliation, and if you want to take up the white supremacist question with Vox Day, I suggest you take it up with him on his site, …”
yeah … I’m probably not going to do that. 😉
Clif,
Why ask us (who are not Vox)? Go to the primary source. He knows his views, and is not shy of stating them.
Unlike certain other sites, I’m 98.5% sure you won’t get disemvowelled or banned for asking an honest question.
Otherwise, why are you asking us to interpret him?
(I know the answer in my mind, but…just in case I’m wrong, I’d like to hear if from you.)
I believe the SP list had John Wright on it twice, and the RP list added the rest. Having said that, and NOT commenting on the inherent virtues / vices of Wright’s work:
My impression is that the vast majority of publishers are liberal right now (weird, right? why not publish what sells?) and only Baen (and Tor, to some extent) of the MAJOR publishers publish ANY conservative SF&F. This may be an abstraction / inaccurate; although I’ve seen several posts from unknown authors that say things like “I’ve had to cross off 30 publishers from my potential list because their rejection letters indicated they would never publish conservative material”.
So I get the impression John Wright could not find a publisher in like, forever, then he found one and LOTS of his prior year’s work finally got published. Someone at SP found two of them worthy, and someone at RP found four more, and together he got six nominations from the combined / distributed effort. If no one had published anything by Heinlein (arbitrary comparison, pick your own author) for ten years and then suddenly everything from “Starship Troopers” to “TIme Enough for Love” got published THE SAME YEAR, might he have gained multiple noms the same year?
Something like that.
Allow me to answer a question with a question: was Seanan McGuire’s work so good that she got 5 nominations in 2013? I have not read BLACKOUT or her other works, but I am willing to believe hers might have been that good.
Also keep in mind that every story I wrote in the last twenty years, Castalia House published the best of my best all in one year, none of which had seen print before. This is because I found no other market for the work. So you are looking at ten years or more of work all coming out at once.
Charles Stross has enjoyed 15 nominations; that is as many as Jerry Pournelle (8) and Arthur C. Clarke (7) taken together. Mr Glyer, who runs he 770 website, has 50 nominations.
Somehow the 6 nominations I received for the best work I have done in a decade does not seem to my readers to have been too many.
My natural humility prompts me to argue with my readers, but they ponied up the money to put me on the ballot, so my natural meekness in obedience to my employers and patrons forbids me contradict them.
Heaven help us, Clamps is in the comments on GRRM’s site.
I thought the same thing but didn’t want to bother to take the time to register and hope my comment got approved just to call him out. I found the accusation that Vox was the one stalking him particularly humorous. He was actually commenting on the “Hatespeech” post so it would have been particularly ironic.
I was about to suggest that I totally am going to blame Tor, because after all PNH is an agent of Tor, and until Tor refutes, rebukes, or releases him, then he speaks for Tor.
Then, of course, I remembered that TNH is really the one who’s causing all of the trouble. PNH is being quite quiet. And TNH no longer works for Tor, under suspicion of having been fired, if the rumors are true.
And if so, that actually DOES speak well for Tor, come to think of it.
No, PNH has also stuck his foot in it. Go back to release day. Look up his comments on the thread @ tor.com, specifically about “taking a stand” for moral reasons.
I’ve got your moral stand right here. It’s labelled “Walter Breen”.
This fight has captured my attention. I’ve read scores of articles about this.
What I’ve decided is that for a mere $40 you can vote for a Hugo Award!!!! Awesome!!! If you pay, you also get to download most of the publications that get ranked in the top 5!! Also Awesome!!!
So for mere money I can vote for something that was won by authors who drove my interest in SF/Fantasy. I can farm out my vote in categories that I know nothing about to my family members (wife; nephew & his husband for TV shows for example)!!! I never knew that I could actually vote for something where my vote could matter that I care about – a lot in literature, movies and the like!!
Thanks Sad Puppies! I never knew how the Hugos worked. And thanks SJWs who caused such a big stink that this rose to my attention!
Amen, Avery! I got clued in to this Open Secret by Sarah Hoyt, by way of the Instapundit. Suddenly SciFi is a whole lot more fun. Be sure to get your supporting membership MidAmericaConII so you can nominate for next year.
“julie @heyjulieann · 3h3 hours ago
larry correia is the reason we’re never getting the winds of winter.”
Oh for the love of . . . !
He! He! 15 years after this, when he finally publishes The Winds of Winter, GRRM is going to include a 700-pages appendix about Sad Puppies.
Jokes aside, he has been a trooper. He loves fandom, to want to write about this and moderate so much. I like him, even if he is resolute in not seeing what he does not want to see.
Larry Correia, of the House Correia, first of his name. “The Sorrowing Pup”. Lord of the Puppies, Fisker of Fools.
Sigil: a golden manatee rampant on a field of blue.
By the way, proof that the was a manipulation of the Hugo award for political reasons going on:
nkjemisin(dot)com/2015/04/not-the-affirmative-action-you-meant-not-the-history-youre-making/
Not in the post itself, but in the comments. One of the site visitors says that people are openly talking about Affirmative Action and deliberately nominating books by POC, with the ‘by POC’ coming first before anything else, and N K Jemisin agrees that it’s true. It smells like beef to me:
—
Nicole
April 10, 2015 • 11:55 am
Thank you! I often struggle to articulate why “reverse racism/discrimination” is not a thing, and you put it very perfectly. Also, is anyone else supper amused they called themselves sad puppies?
—
Army Sergeant
April 10, 2015 • 12:58 pm
>Brad Torgersen sees Affirmative Action where only the most minimal >efforts at redressing the imbalance exist.
That may be true – but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong to see Affirmative Action, because people are openly talking about Affirmative Action, about deliberately trying to read and nominate books by POC, with the ‘by POC’ coming first before anything else. People can disagree, and obviously Torgensen and you would, about whether that ‘imbalance redressing’ is a good thing, but that doesn’t make the things that he has noticed unreal.
—
nkjemisin
April 10, 2015 • 1:23 pm
Army Sergeant, sure, it’s real. But you left off the other half of the statement that you quoted — he doesn’t see (or ignores) the favoritism shown to white male authors, and the exclusion of non-white-male authors, as also affirmative action. That’s real, too. So to complain about the handful of “read books by PoC!” initiatives out there, but not (say) the hundreds of “best SFF” lists that have come out over the years with nothing but white male authors showcased — effectively making them “read SFF by white guys!” pushes — is disingenuous at best. At worst, it reveals a whole shitpile of bigoted assumptions underlying the complaint.
“Reverse racism/discrimination” doesn’t exist in the same way that the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny don’t exist. “REVERSE” racism or discrimination begins with a fantasy that either thing ever has a *direction* like the flow of a stream.
It doesn’t.
Racism or discrimination or sexism is water… not the stream. It doesn’t stop being water if it’s in a pond or ocean or puddle or snowpack. It doesn’t stop being racism if it’s in Jemisin’s heart instead of mine.
If anyone tries to explain that racism can’t be “reversed”… AGREE WITH THEM. Hate doesn’t become something other than hate because it’s in a different vessel. Injury and Injustice doesn’t depend upon who’s behind the barrel of a gun and no one is protected just because some other person who shares their skin tone or plumbing is wearing kevlar.
Just a FYI, SPs made the discussion today at SoylentNews.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/04/13/0331215
Spent all my daily mod points. 🙂
A couple years ago I got into with James Davis Nicoll because he had went on Tor.Com and ranted about how racist the Locus Readers Poll was for Fav Novels.
I replied to him as any non thinking entity would and without curse words etc. But had my comments censored and no longer was I allowed to comment on Tor.com(It’s like Scalzi only at least Scalzi will take the time to get in a word, even if it’s a last words like “I know you are but what am I” before he bans you from being able to form words on his site about words.
Well low and behold the Locus Short Stories and Novels lists come out and it’s dominated by Ted Chiang and Kelly Link(Two writes I love)
So since I cannot reply to him and his leftest Tor.com crowd. I reply on the direct page from the Locus site.
Basically I state that this should show what a hypocritcal and Uncle Tom,James Davis Nicoll feels like now as the largely white male audience of Locus voted another race and sex at the top of their polls.
Some Commie Liberal(I just like saying that in this situation) contacts Oh James Nicoll and he gets on whining and says I shouldn’t have called him out on Locus, that I should have done so where he called Locus Fans Racist and Sexist(Tor.com)
I let him know I did but his Tor.com censored and banned me(again for my differing opinion and not profanity)
Karen Burnham(the moderator) basically called me a troll and apologized to the person who called her readers Racists and Sexists.
I am a a bit of a old SF Nerd from back in the day(80s) when Females were apparently so far up the food chain that they looked at nerds as if they were from another planet.
Course now they are saying they were not let in.
Oh Well, I guess we were also the ones that self regulated us from being in the Paranormal Romance and YA Dystopias 24/7 Business as well(Thank Gawd)
To late now. Anyway you can’t mollycoddle these venomous tolerant types. I’ve seen it go from “social issues” to multiple rules of how many women are in a story who do not talk about said(Evil White Dude) Mania.
Gaimans sucking up and agreeing with a Tard who came out and said not to read White male authors for a year(only the rich and willfully delusional can say such a thing)
Ironically, taking away someones livelihood is the essence of these Dystopias that they keep reading.
Anyway Blah Blah Blah.
P.S> Remember that is what we used to say when crap like this came up “Who gives a S**t”
But Nooooo, Nowadays it’s Insert genre etc here _______”+” Gives a S**t
Throughout all this, I have not seen one mention of DAW Books. Did they fall off the planet??
(For many years DAW publications dominated my reading habits.)
DAW is part of Penguin. Elizabeth Wollheim & Sheila Gilbert are the publishers.
Incredibly, “At this time, we do not accept electronic submissions of any kind. ”
http://www.penguin.com/meet/publishers/daw/
I have been following this controversy for awhile, and I’m actually getting interested in reading SF/F again. I’d hardly call myself a fan or suitable to evaluate novels for quality, but I’d still like to support the war on Puppy-Related Sadness.
n high school I read Starship Troopers and a few others on the SF side along with the first 3 Sword of Truth, most of the Wheel of Time series, and the main Tolkien works in fantasy. Most of my SF/F has been games & visual media since then. I like less gritty and more escapist stuff – I like to read optimistic works because real life offers plenty of arguments for depression. Definitely not into heavy sexual content.
Any recommendations or places where I can go for recommendations?
Hi, OmegaPaladin,
It depends somewhat on what sub-genre you’re interested in. Larry’s Grimnoir series is sort of dieselpunk superheroes, while his MHI books I’d categorize as action-adventure urban fantasy. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books are outstanding urban fantasy. And for freewheeling fun straight-up SF, there’s Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga. For pure fantasy (be it high or low), I’ll have to take a look at my bookshelves when I get home.
I’ve heard good things about The Dresden Files books from other people. They are definitely on the list.
I’m pretty much all over the place in visual media – cyberpunk, urban fantasy (had way too much fun in urban fantasy RPGs), standard high fantasy, steampunk, etc.
I also read the Solomon Kane stories and loved them, read some Lovecraft and hated it.
Solomon Kane! I have 3 of those from Centaur and 2 from Bantam (just to be sure I didn’t miss anything). Love them. Also not a fan of Lovecraft. I sense we’re going to be great friends. 😉
I’d rate Butcher the king of urban fantasy, but you might check out F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack series (I’d start with The Tomb). There’s also PN Elrod’s Vampire Files, about a vampire PI in the ’30s. And Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape, which is the events of Stoker’s novel recounted from Drac’s point of view.
I don’t think I’ve gone after Tor directly, except for citing to their sales catalog. I will admit to going after PNH for his “we have to take a principled stand!” thing… given the Tor -> MZB -> Walter Breen connection. I mean… if you’re going to take a principled stand, do so when it might actually have an impact on you, not when your entire point is to b****ck some people you don’t like.
Oh, and for the record, I _revile_ TNH at this point both for what she has to say and for that whole “disemvoweling” passive aggressive garbage.
Larry don’t let them get you down. Go after the ones legally that have crossed the line. What is sad is I am so far from the “normal” conservative. I am at least fiscally conservative otherwise I am politics needs to stay out of lives. So don’t fit any mold. When I read fiction I don’t want to be preached at or sold a message. The reason I love your books is because I can actually picture the story unfolding. Same reason I live Kim Harrison for her books and puns in her books make a wonderf read. and laugh all you want I have zero clue who Vox Day is. Brad is a good writer as well as is Michael and I would rather spend my money on books I will enjoy every single time.
Oh winge winge, right wingers didn’t like the current democratic process because they lost, so they formed an army and made a coup happen.
Plus one for mastering the tactical realities of winning, minus inifinity for everything that matters. Classic Tet Offensive mistake, to make a rando historical analogy.
At the very least you’ve made it very clear that you care more about politics than sci-fi.
What, you’re sending in the 4th-string trolls now? Go home, little boy. Come back when you have some game.
Larry, You may not have wanted the sad puppies to war with TOR, but TOR seems to have wanted to war with sad puppies…
The repeated comments and attacks from the Neilsen Haydens, Moshe Feder, and lately TOR’s creative Director Irene Gallo shows what they think of us…
Frankly I will no longer tolerate a company that supports its employees calling customers like myself and those like me racists, sexists, homophobes, or neo-nazis…
So from this point forward TOR/Forge as a publisher is dead to me. I will strive to support authors through other means, but no more of my hard earned money will go towards TOR/Forge.