As you all know by now, the Hugo Awards were presented Saturday, and No Award dominated most of the categories. Rather than let any outsiders win, they burned their village in order to “save it”. And they did so while cheering, gloating, and generally being snide exclusive assholes about it. This year’s awards have an asterisk next to them. It was all about politics rather than the quality of the work. Even the pre-award show was a totally biased joke. In addition they changed the voting rules to make their archaic rules system even more convoluted in order to keep out future barbarian hordes. They gave as many No Awards this time as in the entire history of the awards.
So like I said yesterday… See? I told you so.
People have asked me if I’m disappointed in the results. Yes. But maybe not in the way you might expect. I’ll talk about the slap in the face to specific nominees in a minute, but I can’t say I’m surprised by what happened, when it was just an extreme example of what I predicted would happen three years ago when I started all this.
I said the Hugos no longer represented all of Fandom, instead they only represents tiny, insular, politically motivated cliques taking turns giving their friends awards. If you wanted to be considered, you needed to belong to, or suck up to those voting cliques. I was called a liar.
I said that most of the voters cared far more about the author’s identity and politics than they did the quality of the work, and in fact, the quality of the work would be completely ignored if the creator had the wrong politics. I was called a liar.
I said that if somebody with the wrong politics got a nomination, they would be actively campaigned against, slandered, and attacked, not for the quality of their work, but because of politics. I was called a liar.
That’s how the Sad Puppies campaign started. You can see the results. They freaked out and did what I said they would do. This year others took over, in the hopes of getting worthy, quality works nominated who would normally be ignored. It got worse. They freaked out so much that even I was surprised.
Each year it got a little bigger, and the resulting backlash got a little louder and nastier, culminating in this year’s continual international media slander campaign. Most of the media latched onto a narrative about the campaign being sexist white males trying to keep women and minorities out of publishing. That narrative is so ridiculous that a few minutes of cursory research shows that if that was our secret goal, then we must be really bad at it, considering not just who we nominated, but who our organizers and supporters are, but hey… Like I said, it is all about politics, and if it isn’t, they’re going to make it that way. You repeat a lie often enough, and people will believe it.
It isn’t about truth. It is about turf.
We saw all sorts of arguments this year. They’d nitpick everything they could to make us the evil outsiders. When it was just me, they made it all about me. When it was bigger than just me, they spread the love (though I still got labeled as a sexist, racist, homophobic, woman hating, wife beater with zero evidence which is always a treat) and went after our supporters. People who agreed with us were misogynists and our female supporters became tokens.
There was lots of virtue signaling. They represented purity and tradition, basically all goodness, and since they used up all the goodness, ergo we could only be motivated by greed, spite, and hate. Since most of us never said anything outlandish or offensive, they picked the most controversial figure they could from an allied movement, and ascribed everything they’ve ever said about him to all of us, and if we failed to denounce sufficiently, said we must be the same. Meanwhile, they don’t have to denounce their assholes, and instead continue to shower praise and awards on literal NAMBLA supporters.
I’ll skip over the boorish behavior from Saturday night, the SJW panic attacks from being triggered at the freebie table, and an editor cursing at probably the meekest, politest author I know, and talk about the actual categories. I’ve only had time to give the numbers a cursory glance, but it looks like you’ve got five to six hundred Sad Puppies, five to six hundred Rabid Puppies, and about 3,000 CHORFs and allied useful idiots, with the remainder being normal fans. This year there was about 1 of us to every 3 of them.
Right off the bat you can look through our nomination numbers from all of the categories and see that the crying about our super evil slate voting was nonsense. The actual numbers between the various Puppy nominees varied wildly, with some Puppy favorites falling just outside of the short list where we can see the same thing. Yeah, I figured that. All of those charges about voting in lockstep? Nope. The only real lockstep slate vote went to No Award.
No Award is for nominees who are not award worthy. Notice that on these nominees they railed against their identities, the philosophies of who liked them, and the politics of how they were nominated, but we seldom if ever heard anything about the quality of their work. Quality of the work had nothing to do with it. The NA crowd can cache it however they want, they’re defending tradition, this is their thing, it is special to them, they’re TRUEFAN, they’ve been attending since the ‘70s, we’re outsiders, we upset them, how dare we! So on and so forth, but ultimately all those NA categories came down to politics over quality.
Let’s look at a few of our record five No Award categories. This is where we get to the part where I’m actually disappointed. I knew there were a lot of biased assholes in fandom, but I was surprised at the depths they’d sink.
Kary English is a damned fine writer. I don’t even know what her politics are. We picked her as one of our nominees because she wrote a really solid story. She got 874 votes for best short story. I believe that is one of the highest number of votes for a short story in Hugo history. No Award got 3,000.
That’s asinine. Honestly compare Totaled to some of the short stories that they had no problem with before… That vote had nothing to do with quality, and everything to do with turf. You assholes are celebrating punishing her, and you justify it because you don’t like people like me.
But that’s not the category that is really absurd. Let’s look at Best Editor, Long Form.
Now, a little background on Best Editor, and why there is a Long and Short form. It used to be just Best Editor, only it usually went to short fiction magazine editors. Until Patrick Nielsen Hayden complained one year that he’d edited most of Best Novel nominees (well, that’s a shock) and he didn’t ever get to be Best Editor, so they made a category for him to win every other year (literally).
But there are no cliques or bias!
Editor Toni Weisskopf is a professional’s professional. She has run one of the main sci-fi publishing houses for a decade. She has edited hundreds of books. She has discovered, taught, and nurtured a huge stable of authors, many of whom are extremely popular bestsellers. You will often hear authors complain about their editors and their publishers, but you’re pretty hard pressed to find anyone who has written for her who has anything but glowing praise for Toni.
Yet before Sad Puppies came along, Toni had never received a Hugo nomination. Zero. The above mentioned Patrick Nielsen Hayden has 8. Toni’s problem was that she just didn’t care and she didn’t play the WorldCon politics. Her only concern was making the fans happy. She publishes any author who can do that, regardless of their politics. She’s always felt that the real awards were in the royalty checks. Watching her get ignored was one of the things that spurred me into starting Sad Puppies. If anybody deserved the Hugo, it was her.
This year Toni got a whopping 1,216 first place votes for Best Editor. That isn’t just a record. That is FOUR TIMES higher than the previous record. Shelia Gilbert came in next with an amazing 754. I believe that Toni is such a class act that beforehand she even said she thought Shelia Gilbert deserved to win. Fans love Toni.
Logically you would think that she would be award worthy, since the only Baen books to be nominated for a Hugo prior to Sad Puppies were edited by her (Bujold) and none of those were No Awarded. Last year she had the most first place votes, and came in second only after the weird Australian Rules voting kicked in (don’t worry everybody, they just voted to make the system even more complicated), so she was apparently award worthy last year.
Toni Weisskopf has been part of organized Fandom (capital F) since she was a little kid, so all that bloviating about how Fandom is precious, and sacred, and your special home since the ‘70s which you need to keep as a safe space free of barbarians, blah, blah, blah, yeah, that applies to Toni just as much as it does to you CHORFs. You know how you guys paid back her lifetime of involvement in Fandom?
By giving 2,496 votes to No Award.
So what changed, WorldCon? We both know the answer. It was more important that you send a message to the outsiders than it was to honor someone who was truly deserving, and that message was This is ours, keep out. That’s why I’m disappointed. I wanted the mask to come off and for the world to see how the sausage was really made, but even I was a little surprised by just how vile you are.
Same thing with Editor, short form. Mike Resnick has the wrong politics, but he makes up for it by being a living legend, and a major part of fandom for decades. He’s super involved and has helped launch more careers than anyone can count. When they went through and broke down Hugo winners by politics over the last couple of decades, he was one of the few who was good enough and famous to still win. He should’ve won this year, big time. But nope. Brad Torgersen endorsed him. Send the message. Same category, Jennifer Brozek, have zero idea what she believes about anything, despite working on stuff that was worthy before, No Award, because Larry Correia endorsed due to her quality work on Shattered Shields. Send the message.
Resnick and Weisskopf losing is particularly galling. CHORFs don’t care about tradition. You have no honor. You only care about protecting your turf. You’re inclusive and welcoming, provided the newcomers kiss your ass and don’t get uppity. And old timers? Heaven forbid somebody with badthink endorses them, because then they either have to debase themselves and beg for mercy, or you’ll burn them too. I talked about how this poisonous culture scares many writers into self-censoring before, and you gave them a great example too. Stay in the lines or else.
Oh, and all that bullshit you spew about fighting for diversity? Everyone knows that is a smokescreen. You talk about diversity, but simultaneously had no problem putting No Award over award nominated females because they were nominated by fans you declared to be sexist. Wait… So let me see if I’ve got this straight, you denied deserving women like Toni, Cedar, Kary, Jennifer, Shelia, and Amanda, just to send a message, but we’re the bad guys? I don’t think so. Or as one of our female nominees said, this Puppy has been muzzled. http://cedarwrites.com/this-puppy-has-been-muzzled/
So who really won the Hugos this year? It was 3 to 1 in votes against the two Puppy factions, so they beat us in numbers big time. I’m not going to try to spin that (hell, after the media blitz about how you noble Fans were bravely holding off an invasion of hateful white males hatemongers of hate, I’m surprised that’s all you got) they own Worldcon. At least now they finally admit that. For the Sad Puppies, I don’t know what they’re planning to do next. I’m not in charge. Kate Paulk is. Sarah was supposed to be in charge this year but she fell ill. I wanted to wash my hands of this thing last year and Brad asked me to come back. Over three years the Puppy numbers went from a handful, to hundreds, to over a thousand. The question now is do we want to keep throwing money at a bunch of ungrateful bastards who keep changing the rules to forbid us, or change tactics. Either way, not my call, not my problem. I’m sick of this crap.
No Award is the big winner. Only time will tell, but for FANDOM and the CHORFs I think you’ve got yourself a pyrrhic victory. So many of you don’t seem to realize that this isn’t just about the awards, and culture wars are a spectator sport. WorldCon was shrinking and greying, and now you can rejoice as it goes back to the comfy way you like it. You want to know why? Read this.
“Attending the Hugo Awards from the perspective of a 12 and 14 year old.”
I took my kids to WorldCon to expose them to Fandom and I’ve consciously shielded them from any of the politics of the kerfuffle associated with the literary “sides” that were in play.
When we attended, we had good seats and they were excited to see if some of their choices would make it.
Let’s just say that my boys ended up being exposed to some of their categories being utterly eradicated from eligibility due to this thing that I’d shielded them from.
They couldn’t understand why their short story choice evaporated into something called “NO AWARD.”
As I briefly explained, the audience was cheering because of that decision and the MC made a point of saying that cheering was appropriate and boos were not.
My kids were shocked.
Shocked not by not winning but by having an entire category’s rug being pulled out from under it and then having all the adults (many of which were old enough to be their grandparents) cheering for something my kids looked at as an unfair tragedy.
I’ll admit to having feared this outcome – yet this was my children’s introduction to Fandom.
We are driving home and they are of the opinion that they aren’t particularly interested in this “Fandom” thing.
I find that a great shame – and I blame not the people who established the ballots to vote for (for my kids enjoyed a great deal of what they read on the ballots), but as my kids noted – they blame the ones who made them feel “like the rug was pulled out from under me.”
I’d offered Fandom my boys – my boys now reject them.
And yes, the picture below is just before us walking to the Hugo ceremonies. They’re excited about it all. I just find it a pity that they didn’t feel anything other than bewilderment and bitterness toward the people in the auditorium after the ceremonies.
That’s the future you elitist exclusive snobs want. Sasquan talked about their record numbers, and record attendance, record supporting memberships, record votes (not to mention record money), but then to commemorate it, you gave them an asterisk for violating your secret gentlemen’s agreements, and told them their kind isn’t welcome in Trufandom. Thinking about the asterisk though, didn’t any of you special snowflakes watch Community? None of my people got any awards, so it isn’t our flag that’s an anus. But fly your anus high, WorldCon, because those two kids will probably be published authors themselves, having fun with other Wrongfans at other cons by the time Gerrold finishes the next Chtorr book.
The real winner this year was Vox Day and the Rabid Puppies. Yep. You CHORFing idiots don’t seem to realize that Brad, Sarah, and I were the reasonable ones who spent most of the summer talking Vox out of having his people No Award the whole thing to burn it down, but then you did it for him. He got the best of both worlds. Oh, but now you’re going to say that Three Body Problem won, and that’s a victory for diversity! You poor deluded fools… That was Vox’s pick for best novel. That’s the one most of the Rabid Puppies voted for too.
Here’s something for you crowing imbeciles to think through, the only reason Vox didn’t have Three Body Problem on his nomination slate was that he read it a month too late. If he’d read it sooner, it would have been an RP nomination… AND THEN YOU WOULD HAVE NO AWARDED IT.
And if that doesn’t prove my original point about this fucked up system being more about politics than the quality of the work, I don’t know what will. One of the only two fiction works that actually received an award this year would have been a Rabid Puppy nominee except for timing, and you would’ve No Awarded the winner just to send your little message.
The outrage this summer is all about politics and protecting turf. Look at the nomination numbers. There is a significant correlation between amount of butt hurt and who was supposed to have made it.
http://www.thehugoawards.org/content/pdf/2015HugoStatistics.pdf
Other than the Puppy noms, look through all the supporting categories and look how tiny their numbers are. Yeah, the Puppies crushed them and locked them out, but not through malicious slate voting. It doesn’t take a lockstep slate to beat a system that is so pathetic a couple dozen friends can swing it.
The cliques are small and inbred. Don’t believe me, think about who our biggest haters are, and then scroll through the list and see who didn’t get Hugo nominations because my side showed up for once. Check out Fan Writer. Look at the list of who would’ve made it if it hadn’t been for us. Funny. Most of those names look familiar, usually because they’re ranting about sexist/racist hate boogeymen.
Same thing with Best Related Work and the other little categories. No wonder Hines has been on the warpath. We interrupted his destiny. As GRRM said, he’s served his time, damn it! Hell, if we’d not shown up culture warrior Anita Sarkeesian would have been a nominee, and you say that we’re the ones who involved GamerGate? And for all of Empress Theresa’s bloviating about us keeping off the 2nd volume of the Heinlein dialogs, that’s a smoke screen because it wouldn’t have made it anyway. Oh, and there’s Glyer 45 Hugos. No wonder he’s pissed. If it hadn’t been for Puppies his title would be Glyer 46 Hugos. Sheesh. Scroll down that list. Lots of familiar names with pathetically small vote counts that would’ve otherwise made it, but there are no entrenched cliques. Uh huh.
Anyways, I’m glad it’s over. I can’t wait to see what new exciting ways they come up with to slander anyone who disagrees with them next year.
everyone who voted this year has the right to nominate next year at no additional cost.
so nominate away and if you are worried about giving them your money, hold off until after the nominations to decide if you want to pay to vote.
the business meeting that voted on the rule changes had <250 people voting on the EPH proposal and <170 stayed for the next vote on the 6/4 proposal.
I hope that next year in Kansas City there are far more than 250 puppy supporters (or just sane fans) there who can walk into that meeting and vote the proposals down
EPH gets ratified at KC. 70 additional people showed up Sunday for the EPH vote they hadn’t gone to any of the other meetings. It still would have passed without them .
Forcing WorldCon to overhaul their archaic voting system is a victory of a sort for the puppies.
On the current numbers the Puppies will get at least one, and more likely two or three of their nominations in each category under EPH. And because they can’t accuse the Puppies of unfairly crowding everything else off the ballot, the Hugo in-crowd can’t No Award puppy nominations without making their agenda so obvious even Arthur Chu would notice.
Well – probably one. And that’s correct. You get someone on the ballot. That’s a good thing.
It’s not the voting system where changes were proposed, the voting system would stay exactly the same. It’s the *nomination* system that they want to change.
Good point David.
I am not walking away. I am more committed to destroying the SJW factions than ever before. They marshaled their forces and only came up with about 3,000 or so. Hell, give us 2 or 3 more years and I think we can double that number, if not triple it. This isn’t a one year battle. This is a war, and it will takes years. No surrender, no retreat and NO PRISONERS.
See you guys in the foxhole.
What you have to remember, though, is that all the SJWs vote for No Award, whereas the Puppies split their vote among however many nominees. So you could still lose even if you outnumber them by 2 or 3 times.
Not under Instant Run-Off voting. If all the Puppies rank Puppy nominations above No Award, and all the SJWs put No Award over all Puppy nominations, then it’s a straight fight over which side has the greater numbers.
I’m so glad that Sad Puppies are fighting hard for everyone to vote independently and individually based on their own personal beliefs of merit rather than for some sort of tribal political goal. /sarcasm
So you ignore everything the SPs said and did, and just go with what you’ve been told by the CHORFs, eh? Gotcha.
Thinking outside the hive mind is haaaard, Doug. 😉
I read a lot but I’ve almost no clue what the Hugos are. Similarly the whole Sad Puppies v Chorf thing really isn’t on my radar. Burning the award ceremony out of spite seems counterproductive to me – shouldn’t it be a case of may the best book etc win? If it turns political then either the Hugos die or it becomes a war and folk have to join a side. I think I’d be more puppy than chorf but I’d much rather work it out myself.
Well, you’ve got a whole year to figure it out. And I don’t think you are a CHORF or you would already be aware of that.
“I can’t wait to see what new exciting ways they come up with to slander anyone who disagrees with them next year”
They won’t. We’re talking about people who haven’t had a new idea since 1960, after all.
SPOILER ALERT: We’ll be called racist, homophobic, misogynists who want to keep minorities out of Science Fiction!
Who “crowded the ballots” with “right-wingers” and so on.
(Or some fool on Twitter claimed. RT’d it, and he kind of handwaved by pointing and shrieking at John C Wright as “proof”.)
Vox should change his name to “No Award” and then when the SJWs do it again, he can go striding down the aisle and collect all his Rockets!
No, no. He should change it to Noah Ward, just to add confusion.
David Gerrold has registered Noah Ward already in some official way.
So… now we know who the real winner was.
Strong work, Trufen. *headshake*
Great point about Three Body Problem. I voted for it, along with much of the the SP slate, and I bet a lot of SP did. Also for GOTG, which was great fun.
So… reactionary much, CHORFs? Lawl.
And even if it may not be obvious for a few decades that The Golden Age series is the preeminent literary work of our time, Wright being deliberately frozen out of the Hugos just further undercuts the awards’ sagging credibility. “One Bright Star to Guide Them” won that category and we all know it… and we can even say it’s “the story receiving the most 1st place Hugo votes in 2015” and the CHORFs can’t stop us 🙂
I’m actually going to go a step further. Rather than to consider it “the story receiving the most 1st place Hugo votes in 2015″, I’m just going to call it “the story that won the Hugo award in 2015”. Because the “No Award” vote, being based on nothing but politics rather than story vote, was illegitimate and should be disregarded. The Hugo committee might disagree with me (they won’t actually give Wright the rocket ship he earned), but they’ve forfeited the right to award the Hugo anyway by accepting this illegitimate result.
So the real Hugo winners of 2015 were:
Best Novel: The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
Best Novella: “Flow”, by Arlan Andrews, Sr.
Best Novelette: “The Day the World Turned Upside Down”, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Best Short Story: “Totaled”, by Kary English
Best Related Work: “The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF”, by Ken Burnside
Best Graphic Story: Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal, written by G. Willow Wilson, illustrated by Adrian Alphona and Jake Wyatt
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Guardians of the Galaxy, written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman, directed by James Gunn
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Orphan Black: “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried”, ” written by Graham Manson, directed by John Fawcett
Best Editor, Short Form: Mike Resnick
Best Editor, Long Form: Toni Weisskopf
Best Professional Artist: Julie Dillon
Best Semiprozine: Lightspeed Magazine, edited by John Joseph Adams, Stefan Rudnicki, Rich Horton, Wendy N. Wagner, and Christie Yant
Best Fanzine: Journey Planet, edited by James Bacon, Christopher J Garcia, Colin Harris, Alissa McKersie, and Helen J. Montgomery
Best Fancast: Galactic Suburbia Podcast, Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce, Tansy Rayner Roberts (Presenters) and Andrew Finch (Producer)
Best Fan Writer: Laura J. Mixon
Best Fan Artist: Elizabeth Leggett
The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: Wesley Chu
Congratulations to Arlan Andrews, Sr., Kary English, Ken Burnside, Mike Resnick, and Toni Weisskopf on winning a Hugo Award!
Well, I’m sure you would have agreed with anyone claiming that all the Sad Puppy nominations should have been ruled ineligible because of the nominators’ politics.
Richard,
What part of what I wrote makes you say that? I said that the votes based purely on politics rather on story quality were illegitimate, and therefore should be thrown out. Anyone claiming that “all the Sad Puppy nominations should have been ruled ineligible because of the nominators’ politics” would be basing their claim on politics rather than story quality, so their claim is also illegitimate.
Nicely done.
One quibble though — I think “One Bright Star To Guide Them” actually wins over “Flow” because first-place votes is the only criteria evaluated in the first round (if I am understanding the system correctly).
TallDave – You are not. All rounds play out to the end (Round 1, passes 1 through 3 last year, Toni was first, but lost in round 4 and eventually slid to I think 4th place.
And based on that, I have to retract one thing I said. I said earlier that Wright had earned a Hugo, but based on the official results, “Flow” took second place and “One Bright Star” took third. So based on the real results (throwing out the illegitimate “No Award” results), I had “Flow” rather than “One Bright Star” winning, and I can’t actually say that Wright earned a Hugo award this year.
Now, I haven’t actually taken the raw ballot data and re-run the math based on throwing out all the “No Award” votes. It’s possible that throwing them out at the beginning rather than at the end would have put “One Bright Star” above “Flow”, but I haven’t done the math. My list above was based on taking the officially-announced results, and giving the Hugo to the official “second place” winner in any category where “No Award” took first. An overly-simplistic method, I know, but I thought it would come out to the same results as doing the math.
If someone does the math and “One Bright Star” really does win out over “Flow” if you discard the “No Award” votes, please let me know and I’ll post a corrected list.
BTW, when I say “discard the “No Award” votes”, I mean that the following ballot:
1) No Award
2) Story A
3) Story B
4) Story C
5) Story D
6) Story E
Would instead be counted as:
1) Story A
2) Story B
3) Story C
4) Story D
5) Story E
I don’t mean that the ballot would not be counted entirely. The only ballots that would not be counted at all would be any ballots with “No Award” votes as #1 and no second (or third, etc) choices listed at all. (And even then, they would only fail to count in that one category.)
it’s hard to tell for sure without the algorithm itself, and it depends what question you’re trying to answer, but if you throw out NO AWARD, “One Bright Star” wins the first round and the Hugo.
Remember, the SJWs wanted to be absolutely sure Wright did not win. So some voted NO AWARD and nothing else, others voted NO AWARD first and then other things, but not things by Wright.
But remember, the point of the exercise is to ask who would have won the first round if NO AWARD had not won the first round. And the answer seems obviously to be “One Bright Star.”
Craig — I’m not sure you followed. Round 1 ends with the first count.
TallDave. Not under the rules as written; check Best Editor, 2014.
Then why is only one pass listed for the first round?
Actually I think I can see their logic now (overanalysis is what happens when you’re a programmer) — they appear to end a round when (logically enough) an entry has more than half the preference votes, So “One Bright Star” wins the first pass for Position 1… but then it’s hard to say what happens because we don’t know what else the NO AWARD #1 ballots we threw out had. If you keep those ballots but just toss out NO AWARD then it looks like “Flow” wins.
While I don’t like what many of the fans did when they voted No Award, what they did was *within the rules*. In fact, voting No Award is *provided for* in the rules, and it is required to be on the ballot for each category.
Hell, there were people calling for disregarding the nominations as done, because they “violated the spirit of the rules” and were “not ethical” or “morally illegal”. Nope, can’t do that either. The nominations were done within the rules.
In addition, there is absolutely no way to tell if people actually read the stories and just didn’t like them, or if they voted that way to make a political statement.
If you *really* want to change things, propose a change that the provisions that require No Award be listed for each category be removed from the WSFS Constitution.
“In addition, there is absolutely no way to tell if people actually read the stories and just didn’t like them, or if they voted that way to make a political statement.”
Actually, there kind of is. Through the magic of data analysis you can arrive at a pretty good approximation of the number of No Award slate voters.
Given some of the ridiculously godawful dreck that’s won Hugo awards in the past, and applying Occam’s Razor, we can conclude that anybody claiming to have voted a No Award slate because nothing on the ballot was Hugo-worthy is simply lying out their ass.
That rather boldly assumes in past years the voters have intentionally voted for works that they knew were dreck. However, there seems to be a fundamental difference in taste. There is, at the core, a disagreement about what makes a good sci fi book. Once you add that in, then a very simple explanation follows for a lot of votes. Past wins appealed to their taste, and did not to Puppies (Things like AofJustice, Redshirts, Among Others, Graveyard Book?) Whereas the slate may have appealed to the Puppies, but not to the rest.
It actually is impossible to guess intentions even with statistical analysis. It could be due to believing the nominees lacked quality, or a repudiation of slate tactics, or even for this culture war reason, all of the above or a mix of some and not the others, or for reasons entirely separate. Unless you ask people the ‘why’, you are more or less engaging in speculative fiction when you assign
“That rather boldly assumes in past years the voters have intentionally voted for works that they knew were dreck.”
No such assumption is necessary. For example, as James May points out downthread, the usual suspects are currently making a great deal of noise about how the No Awards are an important victory, not for merit or for art, but for diversity. That’s a fairly unambiguous admission that quality is, at best, a second-order consideration for these people.
If:
(1) You all but admit that your principal voting criterion is something other than whether nominated work is actually any good (e.g., whether the work strokes your social-justice erogenous zones); and,
(2) The historical voting results bear this out (e.g., a decade or more of forgettable message-fic taking home Hugos); and,
(3) In the one year that a significant number of nominees fail to meet your principal voting criterion, you turn around and try to claim you No Awarded them because they just weren’t good enough…
Well, sorry, but I didn’t just fall off the back of the turnip truck. You are of course free to believe what you like, and if you’d prefer to think that this is merely a disagreement over taste, that’s your business. I will maintain, though, that the most straightforward and plausible explanation (again, Occam’s Razor) is exactly what I said before: people who voted a No Award slate and are now trying to claim that nothing on the ballot was of Hugo quality are simply lying out their asses, in much the same way that they lie about nearly everything else (e.g., our host being a racist misogynist shitlord wife-beater or whatever; I’ve been to busy to keep up with the Slander Of The Week lately).
You are wrong, Falling. There is a massive culture-wide proof and in quotes books are being recommended based on nothing more than race and sex. Secondly, look at what wins in the non-fiction and magazine categories. The more you engage in incitement against men and whites and promote diversity, the better you do. This is a gender feminist third wave cult endemically hostile to straight white men, not a culture of fans devoted to artistry. Are most WorldCon voters naive flak catchers who mean well? Probably. That doesn’t magically change hate speech to love.
Sorry for the double post, but I guess you can’t edit in an additional thought.
For instance, regarding Toni for the editor category, I have seen multiple complaints that Toni did not provide very much material for them to judge. If it was supposed to be a life time award, that would be no problem. But as it is supposed to be for that calendar year, that provides a bit of bind for those voters, and the ones I have seen talking about it, felt like they had insufficient evidence and suggested that Baen provide a better packet in the future.
You CAN edit- for 5minutes after posting- but you have to hit refresh…
Stacey — sure, absolutely no way, except for all the people who said publicly they weren’t going to read the stories, and urged other people not to read the stories, and said were going to vote NO AWARD because the nominees were horrible people, and urged other people to vote NO AWARD because the nominees were horrible people. and cheered loudly when NO AWARD won, and yelled at the nominee’s wives, and called the nominees a bunch of horrible things in the MSM, which had to issue retractions.
Sure, it was in the rules. Just like slating has been done (yet they’ve screamed like harridans about it). Voting in block for No Award and buying memberships might be stretching the rules a bit.
Cheering when No Award wins, being told only cheering was acceptable is the lowest they could reach.
There is a way to tell, because many of them have proudly declared they didn’t read them. Jim Butcher, under no award? Just from a general survey, at least 3/4th of readers enjoy him. This is a fan award, after all.
I hope I can actually comment.
If nothing else, Sad Puppies informed me that I can actually vote on the Hugos. Maybe next year, we can be even more influential, and bury the nonsense about “rightfans having rightfun” versus “Wrongfans having Wrongfun.”
It was great to read the Hugo nominees and actually enjoy them. “Three Body Problem” was a terrific book, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, I’m glad it won, though I voted for something else.
In addition, I had a tee-shirt made up by Cafepress, reading, “I am a Wrong Fan having Wrong Fun.” I will wear it proudly.
The Hugo (No) Awards were the biggest public temper tantrum I’ve ever seen.
The CHORFs were spiteful, vulgar, and utterly without class.
And they were also super predictable.
Hey,
You know what’s spiteful, vulgar, and utterly without class? Still insisting on calling them CHORFs.
No, it’s ACCURATE. If they don’t want the label, they’re free to stop acting like that at any time.
Hey, if the foo shits, wear it.
Please provide a list of acceptable terms. Spite-less, high-minded, classy ones. Start with “racist neo-Nazi” perhaps.
I’d say “Butt-Sniffing Pugs”, but 1) the pugs shouldn’t be tarred with that brush, and 2) there’s already a game by that name. (Still in development, IIRC.)
I agree. Mentally crippled flak catchers for radical feminists is more accurate.
No matter how well-meaning, exactly how does one insult a thing which operates like a supremacist racial cult?
And the Hugo Award for Racial Incitement goes to…
… the Hugo Awards.
Congratulations you flak catching pricks.
I plan to schedule my work next summer so that I am in KC for the next WorldCon.
For what It’s worth. Aimee, I appreciate what you said over at the Great Bearded One’s blog. His response was utterly out of line, but when I tried to call him on it I got banned.
Gerrold telling people it was inappropriate to boo no award but appropriate to cheer it is another example of “wrong fans having wrong fun.” I was a little annoyed that some of the people who were in the room actually listened to him and quit booing. Something tells me that if Vox Day had won editor long form Gerrold wouldn’t have made an announcement about it being inappropriate to boo him.
You have to project from the diaphragm. I run one of the events at a well-known national pistol match, and when my check-in guy has a no-show, he hands me the competitor number. I called a competitor down from the competitor parking lot last year, and one from the vendor’s area this year. And there are three other match events being run on the ranges next to mine.
Tell me not to boo? Heh heh heh. I’ll have to bring earplugs for those around me if I make it to KC…
Yes, I remember when media claimed it was all about “Right-Wing Trolls Hijack SciFi Oscars”. Because they hated that the Award had moved forward and more inclusive to diversity.
Even after the Hugos are over, media still continue to spread the same messages:
http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/
“Early this year, that shift sparked a backlash: a campaign, organized by three white, male authors, that resulted in a final Hugo ballot dominated by mostly white, mostly male nominees.
After the Puppies released their slates in February, recommending finalists in 15 of the Hugos’ 16 categories (plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer), the balloting had become a referendum on the future of the genre. Would sci-fi focus, as it has for much of its history, largely on brave white male engineers with ray guns fighting either a) hideous aliens or b) hideous governments who don’t want them to mine asteroids in space? Or would it continue its embrace of a broader sci-fi: stories about non-traditionally gendered explorers and post-singularity, post-ethnic characters who are sometimes not men and often even have feelings?”
I must say the media has shown some extreme racial fixation these months, repeating the words “white males” over and over.
One has to wonder how Hayden and others have gotten such influence the last couple of decades. It can probably be explained as power abuse, conscious or not. There has been and are a lot of people in the business with a lot of power and influence, but they don’t abuse it. It takes a certain kind of personality to use their influence in ways their predecessors would condemn. If the mayor in a small town becomes the richest guy in town because he puts some of the tax money in his own pockets, unlike those who have been mayors before him, his wealth can be explained by him being immoral and not following the rules, written and unwritten. What has happened the recent years can probably be explained as the “wrong people” being at the wrong place, seeing the genre as a way to spread propaganda instead of nurturing it and let it spread in new directions.
“Would sci-fi focus, as it has for much of its history, largely on brave white male engineers with ray guns fighting either a) hideous aliens or b) hideous governments who don’t want them to mine asteroids in space?”
Ah, Straw Sci-Fi history. I hear that Straw Larry has been writing that stuff since the 50s (the 1750s that is). Because clearly the only choice is that or alleged “stories” about “non-traditionally gendered explorers and post-singularity, post-ethnic characters” (what the heck is a “post-singularity” character anyway?) talking about their feelings.
I can’t find it at the moment, but I recall a post from someone (John C. Wright, maybe?) on how the old sci-fi covers were nothing but helpless damsels being menaced by evil monsters while waiting for the men to save them. The post got funnier and funnier as he searched for a cover where the damsel didn’t have a gun…or a sword….or a flamethrower…hey, ray guns still count as guns…
I really hate the way the article turns the whole thing is turned into the opposite of what it is really about. It make it sound like the puppies want to restrict the genre and only considers a very tiny handful of topics worthy to write about, while the other side wish to expand it to write about other topics as well. That is of course a big lie.
Today’s science fiction and fantasy has become more limited because it has been more and more restricted to just a handful of real world topics, disguised as speculative fiction, dealing with the same social messages over and over again. The campaign was about rewarding actual merit, but also about cutting the chains that has made the genre more boring and less interesting, and allowing other kinds of stories and ideas to flourish the way they used to do.
When speaking about diversity, what the SJWs really mean is more writers “of color”, as they put it, more females writers, more non-western writers, more gay and lesbian writers. Not more diversity in the genre itself. On the contrary, when rewarding the same kind of politically correct stories repeatedly, what we see is less and less diversity. Not to mention that it feels boring when the messages are too obvious. Even as a kid reading comics for children I instinctly disliked such stories.
I don’t expect Wired to write competently about technology.
I certainly wouldn’t expect them to get SF fandom politics correct, even if they tried, which I’m not sure they did.
No, Wired didn’t try. I was a Rabid Puppy nominee for Campbell. I talked to Wallace for a while at Sasquan, explained the puppy’s side of it, talked about my book and how I got into it all, etc. She used absolutely none of it. Not a quote, not a reference, not a word. Indeed, many of the things she said flatly contradicted what she heard from me. Perhaps the fact that I had my own recorder going as well so she couldn’t out-of-context sound-bite me to push her own agenda had something to do with it. Or maybe it didn’t. Shrug. It’s the media. They get the facts wrong even when they are NOT trying to.
Oh Rolf, do you really think that what passes for the journalistic media today EVER try to get the facts right? Sorry; the “narrative” is all. As the New York Times motto goes: “All the news that fits [our biases], we print.”
We’re against this affirmative action movement, not only because of it’s continually defamatory commentary about whites and men, but because it pushes unworthy work and poisons the well about whether the work is unworthy in the first place.
Take the Nebula winning “Jackalope Wives” by Ursula Vernon. I like that sort of story… when Walter Miller did “You Trifilin’ Skunk” 60 years ago. The social justice crusaders went all nuts over it though it was common urban fantasy in Unknown and other places in the ’40s an ’50s. Did the fem crusaders like it because Vernon’s a woman? Not her fault. Did they like it because someone did women wrong? Miller did that too. Did Vernon intend that? The truth is we don’t know. We can make shrewd guesses as to affirmative action darlings simply by the feminist flood of recommendations by skin and sex, but we can’t know for sure. The well’s been poisoned by these harpies and everything’s suspect now, even stories which may not deserve it. There’s certainly nothing innovative about “Jackalope Wives.” It’s also typical Bloch and Lieber territory from long ago.
None of that’s my fault. I’m just reading this feminist commitment to diversity, which is without a doubt an interchangeable term for affirmative action. There’s no way anyone deserves to be called “anti-diversity,” a “racist” or “misogynist” for reading clear as day comments from these morons or their conformist and sometimes shitty stories.
What I meant was you often can’t tell a feminist agenda just from the story (sometimes it’s obvious). For example, Alyssa Wong’s Nebula nominated “The Fisher Queen” is classic “rape culture” 101; she says so on her site, along with the usual colonialist bullshit. Also, since that story was plucked from a writing workshop, it’s pretty clear being gay, Asian and a woman is frosting on the cake.
So I just checked Vernon’s Twitter feed. Unfortunately she’s banging away with ever super-crusader we know. Nebula win confirmed.
And since it for some reason seems impossible to edit my latest post even before five minutes have passed:
“What the heck is a “post-singularity” character anyway?”
If I should guess, I would say it is a character living in a future where all the gender and racial barriers (and all other barriers) have finally been tore down. Possibly a racial mixed androgynous hermaphrodite missing secondary sex characteristics and from a classless society or something.
But that universe already exists. It’s called Warhammer 40,000. Men and women fight on equal terms and get killed by orks, heretics, daemons, tau, eldar, dark eldar, necrons, tyranids and the inquisition on equal terms.
But 40k is probably sexist, too, because women can’t be Space Marines and the screaming lunatics in the SWJ camp would quickly go nuts and completely ignore awesome, strong female characters like Patience Kys, Amberley Vail and Regina Kasteen.
While the Sisters of Battle get consistently jobbed by GW in the game mechanics, the novels invariably depict them as a powerful, dangerous force against the enemies of the Imperium.
Sandy Mitchel (Ciaphas Cain, Hero of the Imperium!) apparently has a novel coming out with Baen next year under his real name of Alex Stewart.
I also had the NightLords Omnibus as one of my nominees for best novel this spring.
That’s fantastic news! I generally don’t want to give Games Workshop a dime of my money given how abysmally they’ve treated their fans in the past, but I make an exception for the Caiaphas Cain novels. They’re so fantastic that getting the author his royalties is worth whatever share of the cash gets into GW’s pockets from my purchase. (Or future purchase, I should say: my book budget is so tight that my Caiaphas Cain reading so far as been from books borrowed from friends. But Alex Stewart is going to get some cash from me at some point in the future. And if he’s got a novel coming out from Baen, well, he’s probably going to get even more cash from me, because I might just buy his new novel sight unseen.)
I assume they mean “singularity” in the Stross sense, of “after everything is so different none of the assumptions we have are valid”, not especially post-gender.
(See Accelerando for his prototypical use; note that the post-singularity characters still have gender, at least the ones that are human enough to be presented as comprehensible and relevant.
I suspect one might apply the term to a Banksian post-scarcity economy, too.
Now, I don’t know what “post-singularity” is singled out as especially relevant or interesting…)
> “non-traditionally gendered explorers and post-singularity, post-ethnic characters” (what the heck is a “post-singularity” character anyway?)
Normally in a SF context “singularity” refers to a hypothetical future where humans merge with machines, in which case the most recent “post-singularity, post-ethnic character” I remember reading would be TX45D62a0-9555-11e3-bfa7-0002a5d5c51b from Steve Rzasa’s Turncoat. He/it is even “non-traditionally gendered”.
“what the heck is a “post-singularity” character anyway?”
A character after he’s fallen into a black hole.
Indeed, science fiction — going all the way back to Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1912 — was notable for its tendency to have heroines who didn’t just sit around waiting to be rescued, but actively fought the bad guys themselves. They MIGHT need rescue at some point, but they were neither passive, cowardly nor weak.
The CHORF’s are entirely ignorant of the history of their own claimed field. It would be like me claiming to understand US political history and being unaware that the Democrats had been pro-slavery.
Good lord that article was terrible.
Given this kind of incendiary rhetoric, it’s possible that the Sad Puppies were at best naïve when they let Beale piggyback on their idea. At worst, they have been accused of providing a politely moderate front for a shit-stirring provocateur. Certainly, both Correia and Torgersen have worked hard to distinguish themselves from Beale.
What on earth is it that the author thinks they could have done?
“Hey, Beale! We INTERNET FORBID YOU from using a campaign name with the word ‘puppy’ in it!”
I’m sure that would have worked well…
Trademarks are good things. We need them next time.
Exactly when did anyone have the power to “let” Beale do anything?!
Okay, maybe his Mom did when he was a boy, but still….
Beale turned into Vox Day after he was attacked for bad think by this very crowd. No wonder he is so caustic.
So it’s like a supervillain origin story? 😉
It may be terrible, but it is articles like that, which the media keeps pouring out, who in a large degree are responsible for the actions from all the useful idiots interfering.
The articles reach out to millions, and just a very, very few of these readers care about doing some research themselves. Instead they think that somebody should learn these hateful white male extremists who tries to tear down an award celebrating diversity and progress a lesson.
If only a few of them decide to vote for themselves to support a good cause and fight against trolls and white saboteurs, despite not having read any of the works, that’s enough to give a whole category a No Award, or make sure inferior works win in competition with better works.
Without media’s generous assistance, who was quick to choose sides and spread disinformation, it is possible we would have seen a totally different outcome.
I thought the article as a whole was very good. Note that she does say “accused of” there, which isn’t exactly an endorsement of the charge.
I’m looking forward to next year. Wordlcon memberships last for three years, right? So at the very least, for those three years, you guys need to keep gumming up the works.
Forcing them to all hivemind together and No Award deserving, talented authors, erasing entire categories, and spitting on fans and writers who don’t toe the party line.
This one year might have done some real damage, but if you can force them to change the rules, or break half their awards for a few years, the Hugo’s will go up in flames. They’ll burn it all down over and over again, until people just stop coming back.
Hell, a year from now I’ll likely still be in GamerGate. Ha ha.
You Puppies have been at this way longer than us Gators. You have to put on a good show. Teach us young’uns how it’s done. Between the Sad Puppies and GamerGate, nerd culture is finally starting to push back against politically driven invaders.
Now this may just be me, but I’d hope you guys will stick around. See this through till the very end.
Just two years, but I intend to use that membership to the fullest.
Technically, it is 3 years for nominations, but it’s not current + 2 future; it’s previous + current + next.
So if you purchase a membership for Worldcon 2017 in Helsinki, you will also be eligible to nominate for the Hugos in 2016 & 2018. But only nominate, not vote on the final ballot – to vote on the final ballot you need a membership at that year’s Worldcon.
From http://www.thehugoawards.org/i-want-to-vote/
I thought it might be amusing to see what they do if the “Puppy Slate” next year was, like, Scalzi’s suggestions. Would they No Award all of those, too, just because we’d suggested them? Would all of the people who got the nominations refuse them?
I’d say it would be hilarious to force cognitive dissonance… but that presumes the existence of cognition to start with… *sigh*
that gives me a terrible yet awesome idea. what if we put their favorites on the suggestion list, I mean “slate” lets nominate Scalzi, Jemisin etc – and see them trying to figure out if they should vote for their favorite, or vote no award form them because puppies suggested their work. now THAT would be hilarious 😀
Would, say, a D&D manual or a Magic the Gathering expansion count as a related work? I think this is possible to do while still nominating cool stuff that wouldn’t ordinarily get a Hugo because the award is stuck in the 60s.
I see no reason why a D&D manual couldn’t be a related work. A filk album was a couple years ago. Actually, the committee doesn’t get a say; the voters do. If you get enough people to nominate it, the committee only cares when it was published in English and a few other fiddly details.
The link to the Cedar Sanderson site is the first time I’ve actually seen a close-up of the asterisk. Watching the Livestream, it seemed like a silly joke: “Look! If you put a bunch of exclamation points together, they look like an asterisk!” with an obvious double meaning about this being an odd year (to put it mildly). I chalked it up as a joke that missed the mark. It wasn’t the only joke that missed the mark, but there were a lot of genuinely funny jokes, too, so I thought it was just the typical win-some-lose-some nature of an awards show.
Seeing one up close, it strikes me as yet another slap in the face to the people who were No Awarded. It probably wasn’t intended that way–I’m guessing nobody thought this through and considered what it would feel like to get No Awarded and then walk away with this as your booby prize–but think about how it looks: You come to an awards ceremony where something you created has been nominated for a major award. Not only do you lose, but lose with the insult (regardless of its merit) that your work was unworthy of the award in the first place. While you’re dealing with that gut-punch, you get hit with the fact that a lot of people are actually applauding what just happened to you. And then just to round it all off, you get this Official Worldcon 2015 Asterisk, 2015 Hugo Award Nominee medallion.
I think that reasonable people can disagree about nomination slates or the use of No Award. I fail to see how anyone can think it’s okay to applaud–again and again–when a whole group of people get kicked in the teeth. It was probably too late to decide not to hand out the medallions at that point, but boy does it look horrible.
Larry, you’re just trying to spin the fact that you did this whole thing because you’re mad that you never won a Hugo.
Just kidding! Just kidding! Please put the testubou away.
David
“…an editor cursing at probably the meekest, politest author I know…”
I think this really needs to be called out by name. I’m assuming the editor is Patrick Nielsen Hayden from Tor, and the author is L Jagi Lamplighter, who is a Tor writer and John C Wright’s wife. Here is her description of the exchange, per her post on John C Wright’s blog:
BEGIN QUOTE
First, I think John has made it sound a bit worse than it was…but this is not his fault. I did not repeat to him all of what PNH said because I did not him to get upset during the reception. (I was afraid he would be very angry if he knew someone had sworn at his wife.)
Mr, Nielsen Hayden did shout, swear, and stomp off…but he was shouting and swearing at/about John, not at me personally and, actually, as far as swearing, he just used the phrase “tell him to shovel it up his…” You can figure out the rest.
This may not seem like swearing to many of you…many folks speak that way normally. But I do not. Nor do people normally speak that way to me.
END QUOTE
I really don’t know what to make of this. Nielsen Hayden and Lamplighter presumably have an established professional relationship, but he’s still trash-talking her husband, which is obviously outside the bounds of their professional relationship. Again, this is tasteless behavior at best.
Tasteless and unprofessional behavior? At Tor? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you!
Don’t worry, Jim Hines and the other feminists are calling for his firing just like they did with Tor editior Jim Frenkel over a similar incident at WisCon; because they’re not at all lying hypocrites.
Oh, man. That was funny. 😀
Tell another one!
The anti-puppies could have taken the high road. They had the media on their side. Instead, they behaved like classless a-holes and pushed many moderates into the “rabid” camp.
honestly? it was suggested before and you know what? I think its a good idea. we need our own awards. with none of the hugo politics, none of the bullshit. just fandom awards for books that majority of the fandom loved. let those insular cliques stay insular. its not like anyone outside of those cliques and long time librarians care about hugo’s much anymore anyways.
and I agree to you about Kari English, Totaled was amazing. it was one of those stories that make me sit back once I’m finished and just mule over it for a while, AND it was very well written. she and Annie Bellet are the best things I’m getting out of this whole mess, personally. (incidentally, it amuses me that they claim that Annie would have been on the nominations lists without the puppies. if not for the puppies, that crowd wouldn’t have even known about her)
Yes, it would be nice. And easy. However I do not thing we should settle for “separate, but equal”.
Then don’t settle for “separate, but equal”. Call the awards the “Science Fiction Achievement Awards”. It’s what the Hugo Awards were officially called before 1992, and calling the awards that would highlight that it’s a return to when the Award meant something.
You would be taking the award back to it’s roots, not creating a separate award. It’s also completely legal as the WFSF never gained protection for the name.
Ooh. I like this idea and would actively support it :).
That is the only proposition for a new award that I could get behind. I kind of like the idea of taking the original name.
They are still referred to as that in the WSFS Constitution, so they could very well try to defend the mark, even though the application for the mark was abandoned as of 1985.
I’m no expert on the Hugo’s (like most people I’ve largely ignored them for decades as haven’t seen them as a sign of good sci-fi) but it seems that they didn’t just abandon the application for the mark; the application failed and it was deemed ‘merely descriptive’. Here’s the text from Item F.3 (Calling the Hugo Award the Hugo Award) of the 1991 minutes of the WSFS:
“3.Brief Explanation
This motion would replace the remainder of the usage of “Science Fiction Achievement Award” in the WSFS Constitution with “Hugo Award”. WSFS’s awards are known universally by the name Hugo awards except in about half of the WSFS Constitution where the term “Science Fiction Achievement Award” is used. (The rest of the WSFS Constitution also calls them simply the “Hugo Awards”.) The term “Science Fiction Achievement Award” has neither current nor historical significance, nor have we been able to gain service mark protection for the term, as it is deemed to be merely descriptive.
4.Close Debate (by popular demand)
5.Vote on Main Motion: Many hands in favor (passes)”
There’s little value in the fact that they (accidently?) left in a single reference (in brackets) to the now unofficial name of the award that, in their own words, never had any significance to the WSFS.
Ultimately the aim of these awards would be twofold.
1. To reward quality Sci-Fi irrespective of the political view of the author.
And 2. To bring attention to the fact that the Worldcon version is based on politics and insider cliques.
Marketing it as a “back to its roots”, “genuine” and “original” version of the Hugo’s will do this. A failure by Worldcon to defend the original name of the award will simply reinforce this.
Great idea, Adiabat. But insurgencies don’t fight full-scale battles until the existing order is damaged and weakened enough, by which time the insurgents have also grown in numbers and experience.
Not there yet.
Our own awards? Separate but equal, huh? I’ve read their blogs: it’s just what they want.
Only as a very last resort, I think.
Go for it. The convention would be tiny but nothing wrong with that.
Anybody know what the attendance was at LibertyCon this year?
Want to reconsider that almost-thought?
LibertyCon was a lot of fun, but it’s a small, local con. The ChooChoo, let alone the entire city of Chattanooga couldn’t possibly handle a con big enough for that kind of award. Maybe Nashville….
(Seriously, the transportation infrastructure alone would be crushed by a con the size of WorldCon.)
There has been some talk of seeing if Liberty Con would host a juried (if that’s the right term) award for Human Wave. Which is a different sort of thing and while not political is certainly ideological. (By host I mean let us have the announcement there.)
It’s truly stupid though to recreate a popular fan award for every category when an award exists that supposedly represents the body of fandom.
3400 this year (granted, that was the smallest WorldCon since 2007, looks like). Chattanooga could handle that. Chattanooga Convention Center could put that in one corner with room for 3-4 more events of the same size.
Nashville hosts conferences in the tens of thousands of people. You can fit a small city in the Opryland Hotel alone.
The key factor in addition to a large enough convention center is enough hotel rooms in the immediate vicinity of same.
It’s a good bit off-topic, but the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop symposium for 2016 is going to be in Chattanooga at the Choo Choo Feb. 28 – Mar. 2. It looks like it could be really interesting (it is decidedly not a fannish event).
In the 70s comics had circulations in the hundreds of thousands even for mid level comics, now the best have circulations of maybe 50-80k. The industry is on life support and yet ComicCon has crowds of 250K and the attention of Hollywood and the media despite being in its near death circulation rate. Worldcon by comparison brags about 6K people voting for a Hugo. That is pathetic. Dota 2 is not the most popular game but its world championship held over 250K stream video viewers and was open in over 400 theaters. Worldcon had maybe 3K during its peak. Worldcon is a joke. I’ve seen high school graduations from small town Nowhere Special have better scripting and showmanship than the Hugos. I think a few brain dead morons could out do Worldcon.
Duck Dynasty on a duck hunt has more fashion sense than David Gerrold. I bet we could get Jason though and he would be actually funny and not snarky and mean spirited. Hell yeah we could put on a show! The trouble with Worldcon is it is a boring nerd fest. I think they channeled Lenin’s corpse when they came up with Worldcon. I’ve seen mime slap fights and chess play by play action with more entertainment quality than what I saw last Saturday at Worldcon.
we need our own awards. with none of the hugo politics, none of the bullshit. just fandom awards for books that majority of the fandom loved.
No good, for one simple reason: if such an award is successful, they’ll come after it as well. Maybe not the first year or the second, but we’ll lose that one too eventually. If they would leave it alone, it would be a solution. But they won’t leave it alone – not unless it’s so small it’s under the radar, and stays that small indefinitely. Tolerance is not in their world view and everything with any prestige must be absorbed.
As bad as the attacks have been on a relatively small and powerless group like the Puppies, the instant a formal organization springs up with identifiable names and persons in charge, the storm will really break. The CHORFs and SJWs will immediately organize like never before and start pushing publishers and authors to boycot the “bigot’s award”.
I am already boycotting Tor and their parent company, Macmillan. It’s easy enough to do, they haven’t been publishing very much worth buying for years.
Awareness growns their masks keep falling and we push back the narratives. We should never give up or give in. Their arrogance will be their fall. #GamerGate
So almost 30 bigots who should be under scrutiny by the Southern Poverty Law Center had to sit this one out on the sidelines. Hate speech is against the law outside the U.S., so keep flapping your gums.
What are you babbling about?
Racist feminist authors whose shit stories were sidelined forever.
Racist feminists…?
Oh, dear. Jim HInes is suffering from puppy related sadness because as an adult he still hasn’t figured out nobility or lack of it resides equally in all human beings, not just those he segregates by race and sex and then draws fake Jim Crow lines around based on data he made up out of his head.
You do realize I’m talking about the social justice crusaders, don’t you? Or are Glyer’s Liars on the prowl?
I’m not one of the downvotes, but on first reading, I thought that your post was: 1) about the Sad Puppies (and undercounting them by a lot), and 2) not by you but by someone sock-puppeting your name.
Poe’s Law in action. Have a remedial upding.
Because we all know how accurate SPLC is. And unbiased, too!
This is a serious Socially Transmitted reality resistant Disease problem rooted in a highly floating bubble so separated from reality it’s ready to explode and as with all STD’s the issue won’t be resolved till the viral media has run its course.
While waiting for sufficient numbers of the inculcated aging demented hosts and those that enable then feed from them to die off as their resources are diminished the only course of treatment will be to continue to address the symptoms.
The voting process in every election from local dog catcher to best author is going to have to be shoved down their pie holes until dried out throats can no longer elicit cheers of derision past the spittle flecked flaccid furred faces of male/female/ tri-gender pyro fox/others celebrating whatever injustice to only certain lives that matter and “No Award” announcements.
The only saving grace to the crucible of hard times ahead is the certain reality that the lotus eaters are facing a starvation diet.
That they take so many others with them that shouldn’t go while leaving a reduced legion of the infected is the unfortunate nature of the human beast.
Meanwhile I’ll probably skip the Hugo again and vote for Y’all with my wallet.
Cheers
It really sucks when you burn the house down to save it… And the truly sad part is you were EXACTLY correct Larry. The BS games have gone to a whole new level with not only the voting but the cheap shots with the asterisk and Hayden’s outburst at L Jagi Lamplighter. Hayden didn’t even have the balls to say it to John C. Wright’s face, he had to dump on his wife. Somebody should have bitch slapped him into the next county for that.
You were right, Larry. It doesn’t get more conclusive than this.
I remember GRRM’s attempts to gaslight you with reasonable-sounding kafkatraps. I wouldn’t trust the man now if he said the sun rises in the east.
I also won’t be buying any more of his books, since SFF is about lying in service of the truth, and I have no desire to just be lied to.
Think I’ll have to allocate that portion of my book budget to you.
So what exactly are the new rules for the hugos gonna look like? A quickie google search doesn’t seem to turn up anything about them.
The 4/6 rule means that you can only submit 4 nominees, and the ballot will have 6. EPH is difficult to explain, but basically, the more things you nominate, the less your vote counts. Both sets of rules passed, but they have to pass again next year in order to go into effect.
We may have a little something to say about that.
Easy to explain. You have one vote and one point. Split it up or bullet vote. But if you split it up and what you voted for loses, you don’t lose that partial point. It gets re-allocated to the rest of your ballot.
Good luck and enjoy your nominating.
Did they ever make it clear is it 1 vote/point PER CATEGORY or 1 vote/point PERIOD?
The gist of EPH is that you have one “point” in each category. The more works you nominate, the smaller fraction of your point each work gets. They add up all the points from all the nominating ballots and then drop the lowest scoring work (ties on scores are decided by number of ballots – if the lowest score is 1 point and one work has 2 1/2 points it will be dropped in favor of a work with 3 1/3 points). Anyone who nominated that work gets their point re-distributed over the remaining works they nominated. That process repeats until they have the finalist list.
I guess the idea is to prevent a slate from having all of its works nominated, leaving room for Tor to put their chosen one on the list so that all the SJW’s have something to put over No Award.
How else would you prevent slates, Tor’s or Torgersen’s, Beale’s or Stalin’s, from dominating the Hugos? Do you genuinely believe that the vast majority of Hugo voters who no awarded the slated nominees (I am not one of them, though I did put no award first in a couple categories) are CHORFy SJWs? They re not. They are grumpy nerds who hate being manipulated.
Do you genuinely believe that the vast majority of Hugo voters who no awarded the slated nominees … are CHORFy SJWs? They re not. They are grumpy nerds who hate being manipulated.
If so, they may be pretty angry soon when they realize how they were manipulated into devaluing the Hugo, by people who lied to them about the Sad Puppies and their motivation.
But I’m not confident that you’re correct. Rather, I think the vast majority who block-voted No Award were not manipulated into doing so, but were genuinely in lockstep with the CHORF agenda.
Time will tell, I suppose.
If they read the works and honestly believed non deserved the honor, then I have no problem with their voting “no award”. If, however, they did NOT read the works, and were voting “no award” in some misguided effort to “save the hugos” then they _were_ manipulated.
They are “fans” who refused to read a work and judge it for itself. In short, they are grumpy, easily manipulated nerds, who hate voting for books some else likes.
Hipsterism comes to SF/Fantasy…let the world tremble!
So EPH does basically the same as the existing voting rules, except it uses fractions of a point instead of preferential votes.
Not quite. From what it sounds like the existing transferrable vote rules apply to the final voting only. This EPH scheme apply to the nominations.
In context, EPH means that if you have competing slates, each slate will probably get something in. For the nomination rules as they currently exist, if you pit slates against each other, the larger slate takes all the spots and leaves the little slate sad.
It has some weird curlicues, but basically, it will pit the works on a slate against each other for elimination. If you have nice round numbers, you can get some very simple cases to work out. For example, if you have three voting blocs, sizes:
A: 300
B: 400
C: 500
With some random tiebreak voters thrown in proportionately, then the elimination sequence goes something like this:
2 A nominees (3 As left, 100 pts each)
1 B nominee (4 Bs left, 100 pts each)
*1 A nominee (2 As left, 150 pts each) *
1 B nominee (3 Bs left, 133 pts each)
2 C nominees (3 Cs left, 167 pts each)
1 B nominee (2 Bs left, 200 pts each)
1 A nominee (1 A left, 300 pts)
1 C nominee (2 Cs left, 250 pts each)
The elimination round marked with an asterisk is the only round in which nominees from two DIFFERENT slates compete with each other. By the EPH rules, the smaller slate will lose in this contest. That example gives 2 finalists each from B and C, and one from A. If we took this down to 4 finalists, the A candidate would be eliminated
Under EPH, you still should nominate as many works as possible, for two reasons. First, if you only nominate one, and that nominee is eliminated early on, your point for the category gets thrown away. Second, the number of ballots a nominee is used on decides which of two “competing” nominees is eliminated – so while you might only be giving each nominee one fifth of a point in determining which one goes up for elimination, you’re giving each one a full vote towards victory in the elimination contest.
The entire issue is:
This only works as described against -actual- lockstep slate-voting for nominations.
A recommended reading list of 8 works is … a recommended reading list. No one can vote for all 8 works. Everyone -independently- picks their own ranking 1-8. (Or, at least, 1). I’d personally just pick the one book I considered Hugo-worthy from my own knowledge (list-or-not) and give it the full vote.
For the actual award voting, the puppies were flat out-voted. But for the -nominations-, … There only seems to be evidence of a relatively tiny “Slate Voting” block. But a hefty chunk of people who acted like sane adults with a reading list and then voted their own darn way – that was vaguely puppy-like.
So EPH seems like unnecessary, distracting, feel-good fluff, but whatever.
And in the meantime, it will probably put Toni on the ballot permanently. Because (A) every interaction puppies have had with Tor editors would make a good horror movie, and (B) puppies like her books.
I actually made a point to sit down with the man who came up with E Pluribus Hugo. As I understand it, EPH would even get rid of block voting if it was for No Award.
I don’t think this is correct. EPH applies only to the initial nominations process. It doesn’t apply to the final vote on the ballot, which is where No Award comes in.
Absolutely incorrect. EPH is being considered for the nomination part, not voting for nominees.
Here’s the thing. I used to spend hundreds of dollars a year on SF books, back when good books were all over the place. Now, I hardly buy any new books, because most of them are just plain boring.
The Windup Girl – boring.
River of Gods – boring.
But I’m nobody, just a guy that used to buy a lot of SF books.
Regards,
Try Baen, they’re rarely boring. Also, there’s a lot of good indie fiction at places like Amazon. There are still lots of good SF books, they’re just not getting put out by the big houses.
There are a lot of people out there who think this SJW swill is the only material available. That’s why so few people read anymore.
But there’s a lot of good stuff out there. Larry here is a good start if you’re unfamiliar with what’s out there beyond the garbage dump of SJW-land.
I don’t know anyone that thinks SJW swil is only available. I don’t know anyone who thinks in terms of SJW swill.
Most people I know think the field is expanding rapidly and there are lots of exciting things out there.
Maybe you should find a different circle of readers?
Your hivelike monoculture is hardly something to brag about. Emphasis on the “cult”.
You probably don’t know anyone who voted for Nixon, either.
I do find lots of interesting, exciting books. It’s just that when I try to get interesting ones awards, I get told by you that the only possible reason I could nominate that work was to spite Scalzi.
Apparently, spiting Scalzi is what made Jim Butcher a good author.
Look around there are a lot of good books out there some even still published by the big 6. More of them are being published by independents. Check out review sights and authors you likes sights to see what they talk about and recommend. Also if you have a kindle read the amazon reviews and download book samples of things that sound interesting.
Lots and lots of good books are still out there.
At this point, I think the Hugos are as good as dead.
Time to create a new award, where ANYONE regardless of social category can be honored for excellent work.
I don’t know if you drink, Larry, but I seriously owe you one. I’ll probably just dismantle my Gjallarhorn in your honor instead. 😀
We do that and we just end up having to do this same fight over in 20 years when the Hugos die and the SJW’s come over to the new award.
You think it’ll take 20 years? After Saturday night’s Wellstone Funeral for the Hugos, *all* the rockets might as well come with an asterisk stamped on ’em from now on.
K Tempest Bradford retweeted
Asymptotic Binary @asymbina Aug 22
In awarding Laura J. Mixon Best Fan Writer, the Hugo voters have made it abundantly clear that white supremacy is alive and well in fandom.
KKK vs. KKK. Which side will emerge victorious? How would you even know who won?
Larry said:
“That’s how the Sad Puppies campaign started. You can see the results.”
Yes I do. You are still a liar. You have one more year to piss in the punch. After that, I am afraid the puppy party is over. And that’s no lie.
Oh please. We’ve already established that every word you say is a lie, including “a” and “the”. You know we just keep you around for comic relief, right?
One more year for what? Who’s going to make them stop? You do realize this isn’t ending, right? You’re going to have to do this again next year.
Oh what, didn’t think that far ahead? Yeah, you progs never do.
I like this tweet on the #HugoAwards #Sadpuppies hashes:
https://twitter.com/Warlord_Ralts/status/635975499475382272
@EscapeVelo @TorgoForever They think more convoluted Hugo voting rules are going to stop us? Bitch, we played 1E AD&D and *LIKED* it.
1E AD&D? hell with that, I played Rolemaster.
SJW75126 trips over an imaginary dead tortoise and is stunned for three rounds.
They’re playing Pokemon: Collect the Whole Set of Grievances. The Puppies are playing Diplomacy.
I thought it was an SJW version of Bingo. Fill all the appropriate “diversity” squares and they’ll win a toaster.
What, we only have one more year? Pray tell, Numbers, what’s going to change? Both Puppy camps are growing. And the resentment from the travesty of a ceremony is only going to get stronger.
Shh… he’s monologuing.
But isn’t he supposed to have a cat in his lap to pet instead of… ew.
I don’t think it’ll play out that way. Kate Paulk is the point person on SP4, so everyone will wait to see what she does. Everyone who voted No Award this year is obviously acutely aware of the fact that the nominations process can be, for lack of a better word, “gamed”. I see it going one of two ways. Either Kate Paulk gets inundated with suggestions from the No Awards folks, which would basically neutralize SP4, or there will be one or more counter-slates that get organized, and the numbers are there to override SP4 by a large margin. I can also seeing it playing out either nasty (with the two groups screaming at each other on social media) or nice (with an honest dialogue of what works from the past year were really worth reading). I suspect it’ll go on the nasty road. The only way I see it going on the nice road is if Kate Paulk and someone like George R R Martin are able to broker some sort of peace agreement.
Martin is the one who gave out the “let’s pretend the Puppies don’t exist” awards. Yeah, I can’t see that happening.
Like I said, I expect it to go on the nasty road. But Martin has a lot of influence, and he still hasn’t posted his reactions to the awards. I’m hoping that he was, at a minimum, appalled by the raucous applause that greeted each No Award and is thus willing to make or take a peace offering. We’ll see.
“Apalled”? Martin not only sanctioned Mixon’s racial incitements he actively promoted that woman.
Georgie-Porgie doesn’t seem particularly interested in ‘peace’….
I floated the counter slate idea at “Making LIght” and it is getting no respect. I thought, why not just slate stuff that has won awards. You don’t have to get that many real fans to support. As a starting point and example , here are the nomination for last years Nebula (with no John Wright):
Novel
The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Tor)
Trial by Fire, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu (Tor)
Coming Home, Jack McDevitt (Ace)
Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer (FSG Originals; Fourth Estate; HarperCollins Canada)
Novella
We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory (Tachyon)
Yesterday’s Kin, Nancy Kress (Tachyon)
“The Regular,” Ken Liu (Upgraded)
“The Mothers of Voorhisville,” Mary Rickert (Tor.com 4/30/14)
Calendrical Regression, Lawrence Schoen (NobleFusion)
“Grand Jeté (The Great Leap),” Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Summer ’14)
Novelette
“Sleep Walking Now and Then,” Richard Bowes (Tor.com 7/9/14)
“The Magician and Laplace’s Demon,” Tom Crosshill (Clarkesworld 12/14)
“A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,” Alaya Dawn Johnson (F&SF 7-8/14)
“The Husband Stitch,” Carmen Maria Machado (Granta #129)
“We Are the Cloud,” Sam J. Miller (Lightspeed 9/14)
“The Devil in America,” Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com 4/2/14)
Short Story
“The Breath of War,” Aliette de Bodard (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 3/6/14)
“When It Ends, He Catches Her,” Eugie Foster (Daily Science Fiction 9/26/14)
“The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye,” Matthew Kressel (Clarkesworld 5/14)
“The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family,” Usman T. Malik (Qualia Nous)
“A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide,” Sarah Pinsker (F&SF 3-4/14)
“Jackalope Wives,” Ursula Vernon (Apex 1/7/14)
“The Fisher Queen,” Alyssa Wong (F&SF 5/14)
Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), Written by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr. & Armando Bo (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
Edge of Tomorrow, Screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth (Warner Bros. Pictures)
Guardians of the Galaxy, Written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
Interstellar, Written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan (Paramount Pictures)
The Lego Movie, Screenplay by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller (Warner Bros. Pictures)
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy
Unmade, Sarah Rees Brennan (Random House)
Salvage, Alexandra Duncan (Greenwillow)
Love Is the Drug, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Levine)
Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future, A.S. King (Little, Brown)
Dirty Wings, Sarah McCarry (St. Martin’s Griffin)
Greenglass House, Kate Milford (Clarion)
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, Leslye Walton (Candlewick)
Thing is… They didn’t listen to GRRM when he said no award was a bad idea. They figure this was a victory. So why be civilized?
First he says that it’s a “bad idea”, then when it works he praises it as the wisdom of the “fans”.
Martin is a lying hypocrite.
“Either Kate Paulk gets inundated with suggestions from the No Awards folks, which would basically neutralize SP4, or there will be one or more counter-slates that get organized, and the numbers are there to override SP4 by a large margin.”
Pretend Kate made a recommended reading list for prospective nominators. (Exactly like this year.) Make it … eight books. Make four of the books by Martin, Scalzi, Hines, and that Hate person. Puppies reading all eight books will … most likely not vote for four of those books.
When you mix chocolate chips and rabbit pellets, stir gently, and then suggest “Eat what you like”, well, some pretty careful sorting will go on. And people will -individually- vote their own way.
Yeah.
I was intellectually on the Puppies side before I read about the ceremony and the results, but didn’t care in any real sense.
Now I’m actually annoyed at the other side.
“Applaud but don’t you dare boo”?
Who died and made you my boss?
(I mean, hey, booing is rude. I probably wouldn’t boo Hitler if he won an award for Mein Kampf*.
But telling me I can’t, pre-emptively?
Oh, it’s on.
* Though I’d No-Award it; it’s a terrible piece of writing. And I’d boo Hitler in any other context, because, y’know. Hitler.)
Meh. Booing an award is rude because it’s rude to the person who just won the award. Cheering is fine because it’s supporting the person who just won the award.
Booing “No Award” is expressing disapproval, but not targeting any particular person. Cheering “No Award” is rude because it’s celebrating the humiliation of five writers who have just been told that their work is so bad, it would be better to not give a Hugo at all.
Not hard to figure out, unless you’re David Gerrold.
Not sure if you’ve seen this Hitler ranting about 2015 hugos:
https://youtu.be/qZOWipBL0gM
Do you ever dream of escaping, like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?
So the poor winner comes around. Here is the thing you do not seem to understand. This year, Larry said the Sad Puppies campaign was not about winning him a Hugo, but instead showing how the awards no longer represent all sci-fi fans. I think anyone objective can look at what has happened and see that is the case. Congrats, you have saved your precious awards. Enjoy how they continue their spiral into obscurity and irrelevance. You and the rest of the “Truefans” “won”
You do realize that outside the English speaking extremely obsessed fanbois, fangirls and similar nutjobs with a pseudo-social agenda nobody cares about the Hugo, right?
I haven’t seen even one mention in the big newspapers in my country, not a word on TV or the radio. Heck, I’ve been reading scifi since the 80s and I haven’t known about the Hugo Awards until a few years ago, because, guess what, it’s irrelevant in my language area. We acknowledge the giants of the past, like Asimov and Clarke, of course. But the Hugo hype? Nobody cares.
Also, there’s a deadline? Maybe, because in a year the Hugo will be even more irrelevant than today. I had a look at some of the stuff that won in recent years. Wow, talk about trash. It shows again that quality doesn’t matter, skill doesn’t matter, talent doesn’t matter. Just push the buttons of the fringe minority of self-righteous tryhard crusaders that have hijacked “fandom” and you, too, can win!
Personally, I don’t do fandom, it’s boring, it’s full of people with obsession issues on a clinical level and that makes me uncomfortable. I don’t do conventions because I have better things to do with my time and money. I can re-read Gaunt’s Ghosts in the time I waste on a con.
I agree with what you say. However the rise of a hate speech movement that is actually celebrated with awards should give any American pause. Keep in mind 3 of the worst have Sci-Fi TV and movie tie-in novels this very minute. That allows their reach to go much further and cements the idea their crazy fears of whites and men is plausible. How do you think the racist fraud Black Lives Matter got traction? On nothing Twitter feeds by nobodies.
Rule 1 : SJWs always lie.
I’m afraid that Mr. SJW-alternate-reality may be right. It may be that our chance to turn the Hugos into something that all fans care about and listen to is ending. Not because of the new voting rules, they don’t look like a bug deal at first glance, but because how many of us who aren’t the valiant 3000 really care enough to try to resuscitate someone who doesn’t want it?
I’ll stick around, though, and maybe we can still create some awards that reflect what all the fans think is the best book.
What? How is that even tangentially a reply to the previous comment?
Pass the popcorn. This has the potential to be a better narrative than anything they’ve written in years.
Why is it I always hear about this “white supremacy” and other things from folks like Tempest and not when I go here or to other blogs supporting Sad Puppies?
Oh wait, I know: They’re lying. Mystery solved.
G’night.
When Bradford (A Requires Hate supporter) says “White Supremacy” she means “Any white people who disagree with K Tempest Bradford” rather than Nazis/Skinheads/KKK
I ‘m pretty sure Asymptotic Binary is another of RH’s acolytes.
She is. That whole little crew are mentally ill. Day after day, week after week for months on end it’s whites, men, whites, men, whites men. The idea RH – living in Thailand – is obsessed with white supremacy shows how ill she is. However what’s worse is we should all know who these people are and have flooded 770, and Martin and Flint’s blogs with quotes by these insane people when they chimed in about the Hugos. Failure to do that is where we lost, right there. All three were able to get away with their bullshit narratives and that alone may have turned the tide.
There are enough easily available quotes out there to sink this feminist cult in SFF ten times over. Instead we crabbed about slates and basically let us behave as if we invaded Okinawa and Pearl Harbor never occurred. Of course when you do that the U.S. military looks like racist warmongers, and so did we.
Knowing how things come in 3’s, I have a feeling not-so-tiny Tempest is in the same category as a certain Spokane NAACP activist and another certain Black Lives Matter activist.
(Tried to reply to this once before and got a “0” error message balloon.)
That was amazing.
The takeaway I got from those twitter threads was “PoC should never be criticized.”
I think you might be downplaying the number of social justice freaks not really interested (more than superficially at least) in science fiction at all that came in just to vote No Award. (The possible exception being Three Body Problem.)
The number of good people I know that were lured into thinking the slate was perpetrated by racist monsters before someone else set them straight is also surprisingly high, and might be another reason this problem exists.
Sheeple never believe they’re sheeple.
The Soviet Union didn’t fall right away, but fall it did. Stay the course.
David Gerrods the Master of Ceremonies for the Hugo Awards has a hilarious essay published just prior to the Hugo Ceremony at:
http://www.zauberspiegel-online.de/index.php/facts2/26790-david-gerrolds-guest-of-honur-speech-the-hugo-issue-addional-material
What is really funny is David Gerrolds lengthy discussion of why “empathy” is so important to WorldCon and SF in general.
Then he went and as Master of Ceremonies did nothing to limit, stop or hinder the public humiliation and shaming of nominees. Get this – he mentions Mike Resnik by name yet still did his MC thing with “empathy.”
Read it. If Mr. Gerrolds understood irony his head would spin in circles.
“Empathy” is like “diversity” and “welcoming”; it’s social justice jargon which has a meaning quite far from its actual dictionary meaning. In SJ terms, “empathy” means listening and believing anything a “marginalized” person says, and accepting it as a call to action to Do Something about it by punishing white males (“taking away some small amount of privilege”).
You don’t feel “empathy” for “privileged” persons; that’s a contradiction in terms.
I keep hearing that Toni Weisskopf would have gotten on the ballot without Sad Puppies. So why didn’t she get on the ballot without Sad Puppies? She’s been around a while, so why wasn’t she nominated before? Why did it take Sad Puppies for this to happen?
Because she doesn’t enforce SJW purity either in content or in her “stable” of writers.
Also because she is the editor at BAEN that evil evil publisher and they would never ever in a million years nominate her. Though the Sad puppies nominated her. And note she got 1216 votes before the NO AWARD swept things.
They say she would have been on the ballot without SP because Lying Liars Gonna Lie.
With her rank in nominations, and other notes that struck me.
2006 (Professional editor) – did not rank , so <12 noms
2007 (start of long form) – tied for 17th, 7 noms
2008 – tied for 8th, 16 noms
2009 – 7th, 27 noms
2010 – 11th, 18 noms
2011 – 10th, 19 noms
2012 – 14th, 18 noms
2013 (SP1) – 5th ; 50 noms (made ballot by 6 votes ; finished second behind PNH)
2014 (SP2) – 1st, 169 noms (51 more than Ginjer Buchanon; PNH finished 6th, off the ballot). Despite having the most first place votes, finished 4th.
2015 (SP3) – 1st, 368 noms (76 more than Sheila Gilbert) ; PNH finishes 8th.)
“instead continue to shower praise and awards on literal NAMBLA supporters”
Seriously, Larry? And you want to be perceived as the side that ISN’T throwing stones?
I wasn’t involved in any of this on either side until the whole thing blew up this summer. I have neither belonged to nor sucked up to any cliques in any part of this genre, and I’ve never been to Worldcon nor had a Worldcon membership, but I got interested enough after reading a lot of blogs and articles on all sides of the issue that now I’m a paid and voting member, and I intend to continue voting every year from now on. So your efforts have led to at least one constructive result — increased voter participation.
But if you seriously want to be perceived as materially different from mad dogs, you might think about acting a bit more civil yourself.
He’s not making that up.
So you didn’t know that Samuel Delany is a literal NAMBLA supporter? It’s not really a secret; you have to not be paying attention at all to not know this.
See, this is what happens when the word “literal” is now defined as meaning “figuratively”. It loses all meaning when used properly.
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/22/according_to_the_dictionary_literally_now_also_means_figuratively_newscred/
It’s also worth looking into what has been known about Marion Zimmer Bradley – and the people who were still praising her after all that came out.
You are not aware then that Samuel Delany is very public in his support of NAMBLA?
He means a literal supporter of NAMBLA.
Not “literal” as in “not literal”, but as in “really, for real, honest”.
It’s not being a mad dog to mention that as contrast to claims of evil against “your side”, if it’s demonstrably true.
(See here for an interview with links to primary sources.
Now, seeing as how the context seems to be more like “I wish it’d been around when I was a young adult so I coulda gotten laid” than anything else, one can certainly say it’s not thoroughly wicked; hell, I can’t tell him with a straight face that he’s a bad person for that.
But it is so that the person in question is a literal supporter of that organization.)
Samuel Delany did, literally, support NAMBLA. And rape little boys.
I read the Wired article on the Hugos. From it I learned that Larry Correia was a former NRA lobbyist and that he has published seven books in the Monster Hunters series. Assuming Wired is correct, let me congratulate you on your work for the NRA, and politely inquire where I can purchase the two Monster Hunter novels I’m missing.
Less facetiously, is monsterhunternation.com dealing with a DOS attack? I keep getting an “Error establishing a database connection” message when I try to connect to the site.
No attack, just the usual legion of fans trying to get their Correia fix between novels. The server was overloaded. As a result, his chief marketing minion will be ‘disciplined’ by Wendell and his replacement will be moving MHN on Wednesday.
So it’s sort of a friendly DOS attack? 😉
(I linked this article and another one on this site on Twitter in response to the Wired crap, it’s possible someone decided to take a look.)
MHN isn’t under attack, but I’m told there’s problems with John C Wright’s blog today.
You can buy the Monster Hunter books (in ebook form) at baenebooks.com. I don’t know if Amazon still has the dead tree versions or not.
http://www.baenebooks.com/s-176-larry-correia.aspx
For those interested, EPH explained here:
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016262.html
While I have a couple problems with it, I think it’s fine. I would have supported it. And 4-6, too.
Anonymized full nominating ballots are supposed to be available from Sasquan sometime.
Suckers. Just before the awards were announced, I legally changed my name.
Greatest. Hugo. Haul. EVER.
Congrats, Vox.
First, let me congratulate this blog as being the only place I can think of that still shows the results of “downthumbing” other than Yahoo articles comment sections.
A question: the story about the parent and two kids, is that a hypothetical that Larry wrote or is it someone’s legitimate review of the con? I couldn’t find it referenced anywhere else.
That is originally from here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10204934540299315
Thanks! Gonna spread that one around a bit.
Back from Sasquan. I have to say your analysis conforms to my observations: I wasn’t surprised. My personal expectations were no “Puppy” wins, and a few No Awards (mainly in the spite JCW categories). As a 30-year+ fen (I’m one of the folks who stood up when Gerrold called for us to do so at the awards) the shameless jeers and cheers, the tokenism, and nastiness made me so sad. I’m embarrassed for my tribe.
But I’m not posting this to join in the misery party. I spend time volunteering for the con Sunday (because that’s what fen do) and the support staff were good folks doing their best with the usual chaos (“Normally I have dozens of volunteers. Today, 3. Arrrrhhhh! They screwed the estimates in an entirely predictable way”) . Most of the people I talked to (my protective coloration is suberb) were either useful idiots or uninvolved in the controversy. They were just trying to get the organized crazy that is a con to go off without falling off the rails. There really is a core of decency there. The rot really does start from the top in this instance.
I just want to let you know that without the campaign to end Puppy-related sadness, I would never have discovered your books (which I really like) and I wouldn’t have dropped loads of cash-y money on a whole slew of Puppy-related authors, or been motivated to get the “How to get your stuff onto Overdrive so Libraries can buy your e-books” out to a bunch of Indy authors. Which means I can connect more readers to more good books, if they take me up on it.
We don’t always see the good we do. But my grandma, a pastor’s wife who helped out at many a funeral told me: “You be sure to send your rose to the living, not lilies to the dead.”
Mr. Correaia: you Done Good. Thanks.
Came across this:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CNE4zp-UEAAw4n7.jpg
Does anybody know if it’s legit?
I believe it’s legit, but it’s a different author with the same name.
THE Stephen King is a SJW. Probably wrote the best SF of the decade. But I doubt the Hugos are on his radar.
If you think Stephen King wrote the best SF of the decade, your definition of “best” is FAR outside that of us normal folks. But that wasn’t really in doubt, now that I think about it…
That’s because you think every one else are wrong fans having wrong fun reading the wrong thing. But yes, best SF I have read in a long time is “11-22-63”. And there are a lot of wrong fans having wrong fun that agree with me – well at least enough to vote for it. (Goodreads Choice for Best Science Fiction (2011). And yet… an SJW. Go figure.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Goodreads blah, blah, blah. No one cares.
Even better. King didn’t win a Hugo but just last week President Obama presented him with the National Medal of Arts. I missed it but King was on the Tonight Show with Stephen Colbert.
Read that and “Under the Dome”. His older stuff, “It” and “The Stand” for example, are much better.
So I have to agree with Larry here. King has a problem ending books. I really liked 11-22-63 and no problem ending that one. But to your point, “The Stand” was great but I have to say the ending really sucked.
Some Fans say that about the Dark Tower Series, but I actually liked that ending.
I agree with you about “It”. Nice book. Not crazy about that ending either.
I’m sincerely curious, Larry: Does LTUE ever get awkward with you and Mary Kowal so close together?
Would have happily been there, however the membership that a mate of mine and I had was not collected as we were busy oppressing a fire near Colville. I say oppressing as it seems that anything we do around here is oppression. Wanted to grab some of the wrong fan ribbons darn it
Looks like the guy with the Facebook post has already had to change his permissions because he was getting attacked by too many people for saying what he did. I tried to put up a link to it on another blog and it refused to post the link.
One quite telling figure – Best Fan Writer, won by Laura Mixon for her exposure of Requires Hate.
Over a thousand first preference votes for No Award. Does that indicate the level of Requires Hate’s continued support? If so, the numbers are as big as the Sad and Rabid puppies combined.
I saw Requires Hate on Twitter bitterly complaining about being exposed. It was hilarious.
And writing Requires Hate/Vox Day slashfic was equivalent to rape.
There was a nasty pile-on attack by her acolytes on a writer who was alleged (wrongly as it turned out) to have joked about that at a panel at Eastercon.
Rabid Puppies always planned on No Awarding everything, didn’t they? Except perhaps Vox Day’s stuff…
Rabid Puppies considered it. Brad and Larry argued Vox out of it, at least for this year, and Vox did not recommend No Awarding to his vast armies of minions – he says out of respect for Larry and Brad rather than because he didn’t want to.
Next year may be a different story.
Some more media disinformation:
“The Puppies organized themselves to vote as a bloc in the nominating process in order to put more white, male candidates on the ballot. As the voting turnout for the nomination process is typically low, the strategy worked.”
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/23/no-award-hugo-awards-following-controversy
Isn’t it possible to demand a public excuse for such lies?
And an article from Damien Walter:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/aug/24/diversity-wins-as-the-sad-puppies-lose-at-the-hugo-awards
“Diversity wins as the Sad Puppies lose at the Hugo awards
The Puppies have riven the SF community this year by organising a reactionary vote in protest against the increasing number of women and writers and colour who have been winning the awards.
It was the worst result possible for the Sad Puppy voters, and a personal humiliation for their leaders.
Far from infecting sci-fi with with their right-wing rhetoric, the Sad Puppies have only succeeded in inoculating the field against it.”
Then he continues:
“Science fiction’s problems with diversity have been, and continue to be, very real. For most of sci-fi’s history women writers have faced steep barriers, and writers of colour have had to overcome systematic exclusion. High-profile names like Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler are often used by sci-fi’s apologists to say diversity has never been a problem. But all too often, these or a few others are the only “diverse” writers they can name.”
Don’t know what his sources of information are, but if he wants to sound like a sci-fi historian, he should be able to back up his claims with something.
Have Delany and Butler ever been used as an argument for diversity amongst “apologists “? And how many science fiction writers “of colour” other than those mentioned, can Damien Walter himself name? When it comes to prolific and familiar names and faces, it is a fact that most through history have been white. But he make it sound like a crime, as if the only explanation is because others have been held back. Again without any evidence at all. It does not seem to occur to him that maybe it is because it were always way more white readers and writers, and this is reflected in the history of science fiction and therefore amongst the biggest names on the list.
And: “Worse, it (the publishing business) still seems to believe, despite much evidence to the contrary, that stories for a narrow, white male demographic are the way to make money.”
What “much evidence to the contrary”? Even George RR Martin says that the publishers in general sell what the readers buy, and the selection in the bookstores reflects this.
But if the rumors about Damien Walter working on his own sci-fi stories are correct, then maybe he can personally demonstrate how it is supposed to be done.
Walter is a congenital idiot who knows nothing about the history of SFF. Get this guy into a debate and ask him who Thomas Metcalf and Bob Davis were or the Stratemeyer Syndicate and his eyes would glaze over. His crap about women facing an uphill battle is a straight up falsehood. I’ve said this before: why would a Patriarchy allow Ruth Fielding novels 1913-34 and Nancy Drew 1930-2003 and forbid that in SFF? The easy answer is they wouldn’t. It was no more menacing than simple marketing. Walter is a passive aggressive sociopath incapable of telling the truth. His patter follows the same patter of racial incitement and incitement to hate men his feminists creed dictates and is their default mode of thought.
Frankly I doubt if walter knows who Mary Shelley is.
Er, Damien does know that a massive “No Award” was Vox Day’s original idea, right? Funny how a “the worst result possible for the Sad Puppy voters, and a personal humiliation for their leaders” is exactly the same as the result that Alpha Dog of the Rabid pack wanted.
Oh, wait, I just mentioned Damien Walter and the idea of knowing something in the same sentence. Silly me, my bad.
“Diversity wins”, by punishing those who don’t tow the line.
“Isn’t it possible to demand a public excuse for such lies?”
Write to the ombudsman.
But as it’s the Guardian you might as well hold your breath on that.
Holy Moley! That is wrong in so many ways I don’t know where to start…
Just read one of the short stories the church of feminism is publicly mourning missing out on a Hugo nod – “The Truth About Owls” by Amal El-Mohtar, a perfect affirmative action darling. The story is terrible and do you even have to ask me if it has any SFF? If that’s the future of SFF these feminists are asking us to accustom ourselves to, then imagine this happening in the Munsey magazines in 1907. Then imagine no SFF ever having emerged in America.
That story won the Locus Award, btw. I read it and I had to scratch my head. Does owl mean something that I don’t know?
It’s free here: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2015/20150126/1owls-f.shtml
I just read it for the first time, and I actually really like it. It’s definitely an urban fantasy story (that is, the main character has magic powers she doesn’t fully understand, and is dealing with that and more ordinary concerns) rather than science fiction, but it’s well written, the main character is someone I really like and am rooting for, the main story arc is satisfying, and the side characters are interesting.
I consider this story to be better than about 90% of the non-Puppy nominated Hugo candidates I’ve read in the past few years. Given that it’s got more interesting characters than Redshirts (where the main group of characters all spoke alike, had minimal physical character description, and had identical senses of humor), and a far more satisfying plot arc than any of “The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere”, “The World Turned Upside Down,” “If You Were a Weird Hallucination My Love” (just off the top of my head), I can’t blame them for being sad that a piece so much better than previous years’ “Hugo-worthies” didn’t make it.
That story makes this puppy sad. I am not surprised people who enjoy sf/f nominated other work than this snippet of PC frippery.
Here’s someone who tries to be reasonable, but misses the point entirely. Guess he should have been paying attention these last three years.
So, is it time for Mr. Hugo Noah Ward to replace the unfortunate Joe Buckley going forward?
I’m officially claiming Noah Ward as my redshirt in the next story I write.
One minor clarification: You seem to be saying that the only Baen books nominated for Hugos prior to Sad Puppies were Bujold’s, which would be overlooking Elizabeth Moon’s REMNANT POPULATION. (Also, Bob Shaw’s THE RAGGED ASTRONAUTS, at least its American edition.)
So he needed to add the clarification “Since 1997”?
Bujold’s Cryoburn was nominated in 2011. It’s a Baen book.
Actually it looks like with the exception of Correia and Moon, all nominated Baen novels are by Bujold. Wikipedia lists Golanz for The Ragged Astronauts, so I’m not sure how you count that. There could be others liked that one.
Off topic: Why is it necessary with numerous attempts to enter this website, and then more attempts to enter one of the blog posts. It is also difficult to post a new comment. Problems with the server or something?
Yes. We are switching to a new dedicated server on Wednesday.
A telling quote from Puppy-kicker Phil Sandifer:
“Also, @femfreq would have gotten on the ballot if not for the Puppies.— Phil Sandifer (@PhilSandifer) August 23, 2015 ”
Apart from being a strident feminist scold who hates GamerGate, what has Anita Sarkeesian contributed to SF fandom in the past year?
Wait, never mind, answered my own question.
I’m curious too. Not that being a feminist scold isn’t it’s own qualification, but usually you at least have to write something that they can nominally give the award to. What did Ms. Sarkeesian write?
At the risk of being called a conspiracy theorist I am guessing Phil Sandifer and other’s in his clique were the ones pushing this work. I would not be surprised if this same clique were the ones who inserted the GG is SP3 narrative into the media.
On the other hand, good job keeping Andy Weir off the ballot this year!
Good job providing covering fire for a hate movement. How much of a sucker do you have to be to be outsmarted by rats who moan about male privilege and the Bechdel Test?
We were told he wasn’t eligible, otherwise he would have been on the list.
The Martian wasn’t eligible. Andy Weir himself was eligible for a Campbell (Not a Hugo) Award.
Either way, Dick’s comment is just a small jar of Schmucker’s Sour Grape Jam.
True, I forgot about the Campbell. I did nominate Weir for the Campbell.
LOL @ Peter. That’s just funny.
Why?
Look at the “slate” post. Larry mentioned it.
I’ve been reading Andy Weir’s stuff since the Casey and Andy Comic.
Weir wasn’t eligible, because the Martian was first released in 2012.
Oddly, it didn’t receive any votes for that years Hugo’s.
Why?
It wasn’t well known then.
Weir wasn’t eligible and Brad mentioned that online. I think it likely that the Sad Puppies would have included The Martian on the ballot.
If that’s the case then we should be thankful for the Puppies.
Well, Black Gate Magazine is certainly making it easier for me to stop reading it:
https://www.blackgate.com/2015/08/24/dear-puppy-nominees-grow-up/
Here’s John ONeill who wrote the article from the comments:
“The cheering that accompanied NO AWARD was from those Hugo voters who banded together to to protect the award. Their intentions were entirely honorable, and I salute the success of their endeavor. With applause.”
Shame. BG used to be a favorite blog. No more.
However, BG did publish this post:
https://www.blackgate.com/2015/08/23/dear-conservatives-dont-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out/#more-112558
by someone who probably won’t be a reader for much longer either. I’m genuinely surprised ONeill ran this, considering how rude and hostile he’s been in recent months.
O’Neil’s a fembot up and down the line and has been a long time. Forget about him.
“The cheering that accompanied NO AWARD was from those Hugo voters who banded together to to protect the award. Their intentions were entirely honorable, and I salute the success of their endeavor. With applause.”
So, he’s saying that the ends justify the means, and any sort of behavior – no matter how crass, boorish, and uncivil – that happens along the way to those ends. Duly noted. It’s important to understand the rules, moving forwards.
Such a shame. I have a shelf with maybe 12 Black Gate magazines. Never frequented the web site though.
The blog was pretty solid up until a year or two ago, but it’s been in decline as most of the interesting writers (including Vox Day, heh) have either left or post so infrequently they might as well have left. Nowadays it mostly pimps new or upcoming books that look really boring but check off all the proper “diversity” boxes.
The Hugos/Puppies controversy, though, has caused BG to leap right off a cliff and dash its remaining brains out on a rock. I guess O’Neill is milking it for hits, though, as he puts on a pose of being fair-minded and above the fray only to turn around declare the Puppies as “loathsome” and “despicable” and warning that Larry and other supporters are endangering their careers with their antics (BWAHAHA!).
That is funny! I’m sure all of us waiting eagerly for any scrap from Larry will help him keep food on the table for many years to come.
Larry might be in danger of suffocating under large stacks of money, but that’s about it.
I was randomly thinking it would be funny if Larry decided to buy BG. With cash. Just to screw with people 🙂
So what you’re saying is that you’ll stop reading quality because you don’t like the message…
No, I’m saying i have a bunch of the print copies of Black Gate Magazine for years ago. And I’m saying its a shame that they are against the Puppies and for the Chorfs. Because they didn’t appear to be that way in the past. Or at least, I didn’t notice it. I don’t recall it being flush with lefty politics in the past.
Speaking of Mike Glyer and File 770:
“tnielsenhayden @tnielsenhayden · Aug 23
My earliest nominations for 2016: Mike Glyer for Best Fanwriter, File 770 for Best Fanzine.”
Don’t worry, you might just get that coveted 46th nomination yet, Mike! Don’t stop believing!
We should put Mike on the counter slate – but he wouldn’t like it.
What, the NO AWARD counter slate?
I think the Fans should do a counter slate. However, the Fans disagree. Heck, it’s just one more year when slates will have much impact.
So your saying the Sad Puppies were not fans. Got you.
What fans? No matter their political stripes, fans support SFF as a literary genre. That does not include geriatric flak catchers muttering bullshit about intersectionalism and black lives matter and shoving that into every crevice which used to be SFF. The fans are gone. They migrated to Hunger Games, Harry and Twilight a long time ago. Nobody there hates them, though a few are trying. Some dipshit feminist recently added up all the minutes PoC spoke in the Harry Potter movies and then went on a crying jag. That’s what I expect from Stormfront, not “fans.” For some reason your “fans” see that overt narcissistic racism as social justice and give out award nominations for it. Have you ever even read Renay or The Book Smugglers, who are sad obsessed man-hating feminists who would’ve been on the Hugo ballots were it not for SP and RP? Your entire cult is a disgrace to fandom, not “fans.”
Blah blah blah. FANS James – not political hacks. I know – to you they are “Wrong Fans” having “Wrong fun”. But that’s just you.
I like what GRRM said. The vote showed there was no SJWs. Just puppies and everyone else. That everyone else are the Fans.
BS! If “everyone else” were just “Fans” who voted the work and not the politics, then Toni Weisskopf would have won for Editor, as she almost did last year.
Stop lying to us. Have the courage to admit your crowd put ideological purity and “stop the Puppies” over the quality of the works and creators/editors nominated.
Oh wait, that would require you to have courage to begin with, wouldn’t it…
“SJW” and “Fan” aren’t synonymous, you clown.
If a so-called “fan” votes No Award rather than for or against the merits of the nominee just to “stop the Puppies” (as many have plainly stated they did), then they are SJWs, not fans.
And your Dear Leader, GRRM, admitted that was what you were doing:
” This was a clear defeat for the Pups, and another victory for Moen’s Puppy-Free ballot.”
Here’s what I love about you and your whole crew and why you’re Orwell’s bitch: you guys go nuts over “ethics” and “fair play” when it comes to something like slates. THAT gets you emotional, up in arms and organized. But 3 years of bald-faced hate speech which in principle is no different in any respect than anti-Semitism or “homophobia”? Oh, shit – crickets. You and every shit that supports that ratty garbage can of gender feminism can go take a flying leap. I almost laughed out loud when one of you beer-garden rats Tweeted “Love wins” after the No Award. Is that anything like “work makes you free”? You and I agree about one thing: this is not about politics. This is about a biological feral hatred of skin and sex which has been sold to morons like you and WorldCon as “social justice.” You are suckers who’ve been chumped. I’m not surprised you see normal people who see through that con game as “reactionaries” and “racists.”
3000 or so is far from everyone else., Worldcon may indeed represent (F)andom, but probably no longer represents the Science Fiction reading community
And now we see it. You are attempting to equate “fans” (notice the non-fannish plural there) with “SJWs.” You’re not fooling anyone.
So one is a fan os SF/Fantasy only so long as one speaks the “holy words”?
Try harder…you make this too easy.
Nighthawk,
I proposed a counter slate for 2016. Slates will be useless in2017 so what the heck? The Fans are not going for it however.
Eh, I bet the SJWs will come around if you keep trying. Really, I hope you get a slate going. Would be fun to watch you eat your own over who got left off.
I doubt it Arksine. But we don’t need many. A small percentage of the Fans is roughly equal to a large percentage of the pups. So in theory only a few of the Fans could offset the puppies and everyone else could just vote what they like.
Watch this, folks. The SJWs are now going to claim that to be a TruFan you MUST be an SJW and agree with them on all points. This clown is just demonstrating the new talking point.
SJW-alternate-reality has been claiming that for ages.
How does another slate offset the puppies. It doesn’t work that way. It might put items from that other slate on the ballot, but it wouldn’t somehow cancel Puppy nominating votes.
The part that’s most amusing about the incessant “Slates will be useless” troll is: A recommended reading list isn’t a slate. Repeating it incessantly doesn’t make it so, defending against it is just hilarious.
Me too. where I come from, slate is just a type of rock.
Why not? I don’t see anything wrong with it. Except for you calling it a counter slate. Counter to what? Why not put one together with things you guys actually like.
Larry.
Mr Correia.
I am not by any stretch of the imagination a true puppy. I am at best a puppy cheerleader. I have blogged in support of SP3, (the biggest platform I ever had was when you graciously linked to my fisking of Sandifier and I wasted the exposure you gave me) and I did what I could with my limited platform to rally other potential puppies. So feel free to take this with a grain of salt, but I beg you not to walk away. I don’t say this because I lack faith in Mrs Hoyt, or Mrs Paulk. I have no doubts that they will be terrible and horrifying opponents. I say this because (and please excuse the reference) when the 800 pound gorilla in the room leaves, it always favors his opposition. We still need you Sir. When we have won, when the Hugo’s have once again become a mark of excellence, then you can ride off into the sunset. But until then, we simple townsfolk still need the great gunslinger to back us up.
For some reason I cant log into your site on WordPress to comment. probably due to how crappy my internet is here in “more fun” land. but if anyone wants to remind themselves of who I am you can go to https://marsascendant.wordpress.com/
BG’s posts on the matter were abhorrent. All this has proved is that Hugos are worthless.
I was a regular on BG. I tweeted and promoted them never knowing that they were actually the CHORFs enemy. I thought John O’Neill was somewhat sympathetic and not someone who thought that the abuses heaped on the Sad Puppies and our leaders were justified or good. Those media character assassinations never registered or delivered any sympathy or capital. Instead, he minimized the action and later condoned the abuse.
All the while I distanced myself from Vox Day but now I think Vox was right about a few things. These guys will never and have never seen the Hugo as something belonging to all of fandom. They see it as their own private club. The Hugo Award has been a sham since they overtook it. Now the power they hold has a fortress like strength. Vox said that SJWs always lie. He was right. When in the wrong Vox said that SJWs always double down. He was right. Larry, Vox, and Torgersen all said that SJWs project. They are fucking bastards every one.
John O’Neill is an enemy. He said in his last two posts that the nominees deserved everything that was given them. To think that my $40 went to support that abuse weighs on me. I feel that I ended up supporting the people that abused Toni Weisskopf and others. O’Neill also delivered nothing but scorn for the Sad Puppies after the event but was the voice of concern, moderation, and a least a modem of sympathy when the outcome was in doubt. Now he has been unmasked for the coward and traitorous liar that he is.
As for Vox day and the Rabids, I once looked upon them like bullies who were thumping on fandom. Now I see them differently. I don’t like Vox’s stances on many issues but on how to treat SJWs and how to rip the CHORFs apart I approve.
Gaul Brennus defeated the Romans and was ready to sack and raze Rome when they all came out and begged him not to raze Rome. Brennus agreed and put out a big scale with a huge stone. He said that he would not raze Rome if they put enough gold and riches onto the scale to tip it. One Roman whined about the weight of the stone and sought to get pity from Brennus. Brennus drew his sword and added it to the weight of the stone and said, “Woe to the conquered”.
Right now that is exactly what we have done with the CHORFs. We appealed to them and instead they only grew worse.
One hundred years later the Gauls were being crushed by Julius Caesar and they were all swept away. Brennus thought that they would be on top forever but the winds of war change as they always do. There will be a day when the SJWs and CHORFs are where we are now and begging for our mercy. I will never show them any. I will treat them as they have treated us and wipe them clean. Let them have their Pyhrric victory. They looked and acted like assholes. Even their little asterisk stunt was meant to be a slap in the face.
For me, I don’t give a damn about the Hugo anymore. It hurt to see the people I supported get abused. The Hugo is nothing but a badge of SJW approval that is worthless. It is a masquerade of fandom even with the record setting 6K who voted for it. That is a pathetic joke. I will stay on as long as Larry does and if he walks away from the Hugo fight, I will too. Restoring the Hugo is a good cause but it isn’t necessarily a prize worth winning unless it means something to us to turn it around. Make no mistake though. The way they acted here is the way their entire philosophy is—-rotten to the core. There might be a person or two worth saving among them but the most of them are not. There are other battles of weight where the lib-reptiles need to be crushed. The Hugo is just one small front of the culture war. I don’t mean to put that weight on Larry but Vox is not a leader I’m willing to go to the mat for. No offense to Vox. I would rather throw my energy into something else if Larry isn’t around. Larry spoke up first and gave the vision that inspired me to join up, not Vox. To all of you who stayed to fight. I salute you. It was an honor to be with you all.
Wild Ape said: “To think that my $40 went to support that abuse weighs on me. I feel that I ended up supporting the people that abused Toni Weisskopf and others.”
Well I don’t see any abuse and I do think pups were treated fairly but you did support the Fans. Any number of post said the parties were better this year (meet and greats) and that had to do with the increased membership. And you were part of that. And the fans thanked you for it.
But you got your stuff, got your voice and got your vote. I wouldn’t spend $40 for that but if you want to, you got what you paid for, yes?
Well I don’t see any abuse…
An angry voting block votes “No Award” in preference over giving the Best Editor, Long Form award to a woman who everyone says is one of the best editors they’ve ever worked with. But you don’t see any abuse. An editor swears at the wife of the person he’s angry with, instead of bringing his concerns to the person himself. But you don’t see any abuse. Some 12 and 14 year old kids end up feeling “like the rug was pulled out from under me” because they got to see politics trumping voting for good stories. But you don’t see any abuse.
The $40 didn’t pay for any of those things. It did pay for those asterixes to be given to the nominees. That strikes as somewhat abusive.
You don’t see any abuse because you support a culture which values a racist segregationist shit-rag like Lightspeed which prioritizes paranoid bigoted intersectional gay feminism over art as opposed to a publishing house which is all about the SF.
Of course you didn’t see any abuse. “It’s OK when WE do it!” has long been a guiding axiom of the SJW movement.
We got 30 privilege monkeys knocked off the ballot. I consider not having to look at the stupid expressions on their faces at the podium to be a win. Some of them were only a handful of votes away. Too bad, so sad. Good luck next year fighters against cisnormativity and rape culture. You didn’t burn the patriarchy down this year but you did succeed in burning down your own awards with a if-I-can’t-have-you-no-one-will-darling attitude. Now go eat a rock.
What the fuck does CHORF mean again?
Cliquish, Holier-than-thou, Obnoxious, Reactionary, Fanatics.
Coined by Brad.
Church of Radical Feminism.
Regarding the link to the votes, I don’t understand their current odd voting process. I’ll have to check the rules.
But it seems odd on the first page how Jim Butcher gets totally buried in the last couple of rounds by No Award.
What a strange data set.
I’m telling you, Larry, you need to start the Wendell Fan Choice Awards–and just leave the fan votes as they are.
Lessons learned:
1. Stay on point. If you’re not quoting and fisking the opposition you aren’t accomplishing much.
2. Highlight their hypocrisies. For example, feminists routinely use terms like “old white men” and “toxic masculinity” as self-explanatory slurs in a way they never would “young black lesbians” or “toxic homosexuality.” The reason they don’t is obvious: they would consider it racist and genderphobic, ergo feminists are racist and genderphobic, not us, since we don’t use such terms. Ask these fucks why they would never use the phrase “the unconscious bias of black men” with as much facility as the Hugo-winning Mixon and others use the phrase “the unconscious bias of white men.”
3. Stay out of useless circular arguments that have nothing to do with what motivated you in the first place, e. g. Glyer’s arrogant pack of know-it-all imbeciles.
4. If you’re intent on using terms like “socialists,” “leftists,” “liberals” and “Marxist,” then you are fighting non-existent opponents with no names. You are against a group of actual people with real names, not Chairman Mao or Stalin. Mao and Stalin didn’t give a shit about the Bechdel Test or “compulsory heterosexuality” or giving women “agency” in epic fantasy.
5. Monitor their Twitter feeds and blogs. Save their insane quotes. They are like ammo in a clip. There is no reason to imagine what the opposition is doing when you can show it. Every Twitter feed has a “You may also like.” That will invariably lead you to five more man-hating anti-white racists.
6. Go after their unsourced lies on blogs and journalistic ethical lapses in the press. The most famous is SFF has always been cissexist, white and male. So the fuck what? Is that like Jewish banking? Explain that smear or shut the fuck up and admit you’re no better than a neo-Nazi.
7. Understand you are up against anti-white racial incitement and incitement to hate men and not one other single thing. The fact Scalzi and Hines may be opportunistic or naive means nothing; hate speech is hate speech.
8. Realize the almost 30 names kept off the ballot are so much on the same page when it comes to gay third wave feminism it’s frightening. There is no need of a cabal in a church. They are a congregation who openly collude to affirmative action art, not a secret conspiracy.
9. Realize everything about this sick ideology is a lie and a fraud from A to Z. There is a reason Glyer forbade quotes by Sarkeesian, Jemisin, and Hurley and allowed a mountain of them if you were a Puppy, even outright unsourced lies. There is a reason for disemvoweling and banhammers and Tor’s fuck of a deletion and banning policy. They operate on faith and the goodness of their crusade, not facts and logic.
10. Remind these fuckers morning, noon and night why they never call for diversity in nursing, teaching, romance fiction, boxing, rap or the NBA. Easy answer there: they’re not white and or male.
11. Constantly remind these asshats there is only one side which has formal racial and sexually segregated anthologies, reviews policies and physical spaces. Only one side calls for boycotts based on race and sex. Every time someone asks you about a slate ask them about their support for racial and sexual segregation.
This is a great guideline. These assholes remind me of the Star Bellied Sneetches.
#2 won’t help. Basically, “Never mud wrestle with a pig”.
You just get sweaty and muddy and the pig enjoys it
Larry mentioned me!
In passing, as an aside and without naming me, but still…
I’m the “freebies table” guy.
And am I a bad person for already planning next year’s ribbons?
No way man, Monster Hunters always plan ahead.
Dude seriously, get permission and open a etsy site or something. One of the aww damn it things that I regret for being otherwise occupied 150 miles north was missing out on the cool swag like what yall put out
Seconded.
Of course not. You are cool.
Dude, you rock.
No. My only question is,how can I get the ribbons early?
I’m planning to nominate you for Best Related Work, actually.
Yes.
Please flagellate yourself for making the SJBs* feel unsafe. Then burn yourself with cigarettes for being a White male. If you aren’t actually a White male, burn yourself with cigarettes anyway for acting in a way that made people think you might be a White male. Finally, cut off your finger in punishment for lighting up a cigarette, thereby supporting the evil tobacco companies and exposing those around you to second-hand smoke. The fact that you only lit up the cigarette because we told you to is no excuse.
* = using “Social Justice Bullies” here on the grounds that anyone who feels unsafe because of a ribbon cannot be referred to as a warrior even in jest.
Then perhaps “SJW” should be redefined to represent “Social Justice Whiners.” That’s more apt, really…
Social Justice Wankers.
Stole that from some Brit supporters of GamerGate. Didn’t know jack about them til the SJWs started referring to Sad Puppies as “GG”. Gods, SJWs have their slimy, vampuric tentacles into EVERYTHING. Like a bevy of black holes, not one particle of Fun will escape their grasp. Not enough matter in the universe to fill those gaping pits.
Requesting a “Wendell’s Roughnecks – HOOOOOON!” ribbon.
“Are you now or have you ever been a member of wrongfandom?”
Guilty.
Welcome to the exact same treatment that gamergate received. Whilst I’m a liberal myself, you have to know before you challenge the far-left that they have a massively over-representative say in the media. If you’re going to challenge them, you need to have the right-wing media on your side before you do so or they’ll just trash you and they’ll do without giving a damn about the damage they cause.
Been proudly not giving a damn for 3 years now.
GRRM answers back:
Martin has his post up at “Not a Blog”. Ever the gentleman, it is a good read. Parts…
“The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer was first up. It went to Wesley Chu, as I’d hoped, and as I predicted that was a harbinger for the rest of the night. Chu defeated four Puppy nominees, and his win was the start of a landslide. The Puppies lost and lost big; not just defeated, but routed, finishing behind No Award in almost all cases.”
…”I had picked Mike Resnick in Short Form and Toni Weisskopf in Long Form, and indeed, each of them finished above all the other nominees in the first round of voting… but well behind No Award. This was a crushing defeat for the slates, and a big victory for the Puppy-Free ballot of Deirdre Moen. Honestly? I hated this….
…((Some are saying that voting No Award over these editors was an insult to them. Maybe so, I can’t argue with that. But it should be added that there was a far far worse insult in putting them on the ballot with Vox Day, who was the fifth nominee in both categories. Even putting aside his bigotry and racism, Beale’s credential as an editor are laughable. Yet hundreds of Puppies chose to nominate him rather than, oh, Liz Gorinsky or Anne Lesley Groell or Beth Meacham (in Long Form) or Gardner Dozois or Ellen Datlow or John Joseph Adams (in Short Form). To pass over actual working editors of considerable accomplishment in order to nominate someone purely to ‘stick it to the SJWs’ strikes me as proof positive that the Rabid Puppies at least were more interested in saying ‘fuck you’ to fandom than in rewarding good work))….”
…”Which brought us to my own category: Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. I was the designated acceptor for GAME OF THRONES., … but I didn’t think I would get to use them, and I didn’t. ….It is telling that the three shows that were on the slates — us, THE FLASH, and GRIMM — finished at the bottom, below the two the Puppies ignored. This was a clear defeat for the Pups, and another victory for Moen’s Puppy-Free ballot. …By slating us, the Pups effectively destroyed our chances. I don’t mind… much. ORPHAN BLACK is a worthy win, an excellent show long overdue for some recognition, and GOT had won three years in a row. Even so, there’s a part of me that would have liked to have seen how GAME OF THRONES did against ORPHAN BLACK on a level playing field. Even chances we might have won a fourth, I say. But we’ll never know. The Pups poisoned the well….”
“…The vote totals, when we saw them, were overwhelming. Conclusive proof that Puppygate was never a war between the Puppies and the “SJWs,” as their narratives would have it. There were no SJWs, then or now. There were only the Puppies… and the rest of us, who weren’t Puppies, and did not like having their choices imposed on us….”
“Bigotry and racism”? Compared to what – to who? That is the question you can ask these people until you’re blue in the face and never get an answer. Well, that’s not precisely true. They keep giving nominations to the most vicious racists and man-hating clowns in the history of the genre.
Maybe Patrick Neilson Hayden shouldn’t have crated Vox Day in the first place. If he hadn’t attacked him and attempted to punish him for mind crimes then Vox Day wouldn’t exist today.
“This was a crushing defeat for the slates, and a big victory for the Puppy-Free ballot of Deirdre Moen. Honestly? I hated this….”
Deirdre Moen is an acolyte of Requires Hate.
That explains the No Awards given to Laura Mixon.
DSM was pushing No Award for Mixon, but I assumed at least some of those NAs came from here. Remember:
https://monsterhunternation.com/2014/11/10/sjw-cannibal-feeding-frenzy/
“There were no SJWs, then or now.” Just another SJW lie. You know, Vox is right. SJWs always lie.
So George tacitly admits there was a “Not the puppies” block vote. Even Weisskopf’s record setting vote tally fell to the co-orinated “no puppies” party line.
Hell, George flat out NAMES the “antiPuppy” slate:
” This was a clear defeat for the Pups, and another victory for Moen’s Puppy-Free ballot.”
If you read the full GRR Martin blog post he discusses that:
1] He thought the two editor picks that got the most votes were highly worthy and he voted for multiple people in both categories.
2] He and the people he was sitting with were not happy with the applause, cheers, catcalls for the “no awards.”
SJW’s post above cuts off where Martin heavily criticizes the behavior of truefans during the awards ceremony.
An unfortunate side effect of Larry’s pointing out the problems with the Hugos, Hugo Nominations, and Hugo Voting is the SJWs and the Puppies sometimes talk past each other without reading what the other actually said.
I wish Mr. Martin had stood up and asked people to not make themselves public jerks at the awards ceremony. But I do believe that he did not personally participate and thought the behavior was in very poor taste.
That would have required SJW75126 to be intellectually honest and cite the entire article. Figure the odds of that shit slinger doing that, here.
GRRM was proven to be irrelevant. His own do not respect him. When he is no longer useful he will be chewed up and spat out by the SJWs too. Why don’t you go to Scalzi’s or somewhere else SJW1138 and talk him up?
As will Scalzi in time.
Stalinist always eat their own.
GRRM will be eaten by his erstwhile allies, because he has talent and good ideas, and they resent him for that. Also, he’s guilty of failing to make his world conform to SJW norms. Before he found this fight, he was being savaged by the SJW for the misogyny of his world — which is quite authentic for a medieval culture torn by a chaotic multi-lateral civil war.
Bah, whatever Grape Ape. All I hear is If the Puppies will go away, then everything will be just fine.
Just checked Patrick Nielsen Hayden own website.
It says: “Work like you were living in the early days of a better nation.”
I’m sure he is pretty convinced himself that he is doing an important job to improve the world. But that sentence seems like he really is using science fiction and fantasy as a tool for social engineering, spreading messages he thinks will improve society. But is that the kind of speculative fiction fans want to read?
And: “We’re positively interested in work from writers of any race, gender, species, sexual orientation, class, nationality, religion, political tendency, or physical/neurological status.”
Even political tendency of any kind? Then he has a chance to prove for next year’s Tor Awards.
But sci-fi and fantasy have always played with message fiction; are you saying that “social engineering” is new to sci-fi/fantasy? I disagree. It seems that some people just don’t like the message (which has always been true as well). Others do.
But is can not be defined as message fiction, and is not “what it’s really about”. Some writers use the opportunity to include a few of their own opinions, other build their whole story around the core of their message. Too much of this will make the genre boring, and true diversity is the only way to prevent that from happening. Diversity as in story variations.
What’s new to SF/F is that the “social engineering” clique is actively trying to prevent anything other than their particular brand of message from being seen/heard/read.
There’s always been affirmative action and racial incitement in SFF? Ummm… I don’t think so, buddy.
Harlan Ellison has written, way back in the 70s and 80s, that before a story can educate, it first must entertain. This is the same message as Sad Puppies and it’s a lesson that the genre repeatedly has needed to learn.
“I’m sure he is pretty convinced himself that he is doing an important job to improve the world.”
As were Robespierre, Trotsky, and Ernst Röhm,
The problem is that if he is using a the genre as a tool to do that, it will suffer.
Add these illustrious man-loving anti-racist names to the list of near-misses that would’ve been nominated for a Hugo without the Puppies :
Abigail Nussbaum
Liz Bourke
Natalie Luhrs
Mark Oshiro
Lynn Thomas
Shaun Duke
Paul Weimer
Rachel Acks.
Renay
Jodie
Aiden Moher
Anna Grilo
Thea James
Neil Clarke
Beth Meacham
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Oh, well, what’s another year of racial incitement and dogging all men on Earth.
Does it do any good to “beard the bear” in his lair about his two-faced hypocrisy? Coward has his commenting rules set so only posts HE approves get seen.
The only good it really does is that he sees it. I doubt he reads any further than to see of you agree or not, but there is that. It’s typical of the differing ideologies- their side screams for us to shut up, our side begs them to keep talking…
I can’t even do that now…the Great Bearded One in his infinite “tolerance” banned me from even posting.
It seems to me that the point has been proven the Hugo Awards are a clique. The Awards are, perhaps unfortunately, essentially meaningless. This is particularly true when considering that what really matters –what will we readers pay for when it comes time to spend our hard earned currency? To that end (and I hope this does not break any commentary rules — advanced apologies if so) I decided the best response I could give would be head on over the Baen site and look for something to buy. My original thought was that this would be a wonderful way for me to give an “award” to Ms. Weisskopf. Wonderfully, the November Bundle is available and includes works by many of those within or associated with the Sad Puppy campaign. It also includes many fantastic authors from across the political spectrum who write well and have provided me at least with many hours of entertainment. Win-Win. I get more entertainment, the authors I like get more currency (and thus hopefully write more!). To be clear, I have zero association with Baen, nor am I an author looking to get published. Just a long time reader and fan (Baen introduced me to e-books and for that I am eternally grateful). If you are interested here is a link:
http://www.baenebooks.com/p-2846-w201511-november-2015-monthly-baen-bundle-last-date-to-buy-october-15-2015.aspx
Lol on breaking commentary “rules”. The only rules here are:
a) don’t be spam and b) don’t bore Larry. You can irritate, insult, and annoy him but boring him is crossing the line… 😉
Good point on voting with you wallet, btw…
I think c) Don’t be Clamps is next…
“It seems to me that the point has been proven the Hugo Awards are a clique.”
Well certainly they are a clique. Many have been going to this thing for 40 years. Now a much bigger clique than the tiny Puppy clique. But still a clique. They are the Fans of Worldcon.
It also helps that there taste in Fiction seems to be a bit better than the Pups. But that’s OK. You pups read what you want and nominate how you like.
They are the greying left-overs of a once-marginally-thriving subculture that had much more esteem for themselves than anyone outside that subculture did for them. As for taste in fiction, it’s pretty well established that you have none.
Since their taste is based on race and sex I’d say it was light years better. If I never left their Twitter feeds I’d think 80% of all humans were queer. It’s a bizarre obsession with them.
I was disappointed with the quality of several Puppy items, but found that they were more than competitive with much of what has been on the ballot in recent years.
I don’t think the nominees for the awards down ballot have been getting picked by a single clique, or a “secret slate” so much as they have been the product of their authors campaigning to get a few dozen votes to put them on the ballot. On the other hand, if they did come from a secret slate, EPH will affect them just as well as an identified slate.
I read more than a few blog posts by anti-Puppy campaigners who nevertheless felt the need to admit that “The World Turned Upside Down” was pretty poor, and yet it was the number one non-Puppy vote getter. How did that happen if there was no secret campaigning and the Worldcon voter’s taste is so great?
All I can say is that this article summed up the confusion around this whole event for me:
https://fozmeadows.wordpress.com/2015/08/24/hugos-puppies-peeling-the-onion/
As I said before, I actually voted slate-blind and came up with some No Award votes because I just didn’t like any of the stories on offer. I also voted for people in some of the categories that went to No Award. But I think blaming everything that happened this year, and in particular all of the changes to Hugo over the past few years, on politics and collusion isn’t fair. Tastes differ. I like a good tale written in an arresting fashion and if it also has a strong, well-written woman or PoC or gay character then that is great because I like seeing someone new represented on the page. It shakes things up.
Oh, and I wish The Goblin Emperor had won because I loved that book with all of my heart. Oh, well.
Empress Teresa decides to play the Zombie Heinlein Card with Jim Baen:
“tnielsenhayden @tnielsenhayden · 18h18 hours ago
Jim Baen had a deep understanding of fandom. I cannot imagine him thinking it would be a good idea to mess with the Hugo Awards.”
That would be the same Jim Baen who they never once gave a Hugo, correct?
Yeah, that Baen.
I expect he would have walked out, same as Toni and Tony did.
Look, I don’t know a CHORF from a dwarf. I don’t go to Worldcons, or any cons for that matter. And I don’t care about the politics around the Hugos, or any other awards. But I think this whole damn thing — puppies, SJWs, and what have you — is just bloody ridiculous.
I don’t read science fiction and fantasy for the Hugos, or the Nebulas, or anything else. I read these genres because I sometimes want to read a good story, I sometimes want something that challenges my assumptions and my beliefs, and sometimes I just want a space cowboy to walk into the space saloon, shoot the bad guys, and ride off into the sunset on a cybernetic horse.
In my not so humble opinion, this back and forth about the Hugos, and whether this is fair, or that’s fair, or conservatives or liberals or whoever is well represented, doesn’t do much to help anybody. The Hugos and the cons are sandboxes, and authors that I admire (or formerly admired) are fighting over the damn things like third-graders. To those of us outside the bubble (i.e., casual fans), the whole damn thing looks ridiculous and diminishes, rather than ennobles, its participants.
Is it too late to just get back to writing stories, and let the damn stories speak for themselves?
The problem, sir. Is that those who control the Hugos also exert enormous control over the world of publishing outside of Baen and Indie works. If they are not opposed in one arena how can they be opposed in another? I had stopped reading science fiction and fantasy almost entirely except for a few authors I trusted not to sermonize at me. Then I stumbled across this blog, and read MHI. It was good. Then came Sad Puppies 2 and I went ‘huh’ and read some of the books they recommended and some I liked and some I didn’t, but got another author into my far too dry well. I watched the fits thrown by the establishment. I watched the libel, and I filed it away for future reference. I cross correlated it with attitudes I was seeing from prospective writers on a large writing group of which I am a part (20,000 members so a fair sample, though a self-selected one.) And noticed ideological threads: there was very little discussion anywhere about craftsmanship. There were HUGE discussions everywhere about whether X Y or Z was ‘acceptable’ or diverse enough and even ‘pure’ fantasy/sci-fi folk tended to think of box checking first and story second. I’ve read some of the snippets and their work suffers for it badly. These are the people many of the publishing houses are encouraging. There is some sanity out there, but it’s under assault. Being a conservative author could end a career, and very much does threaten standing in a publishing house. Indie is a viable option, but it’s not one a lot of authors are ready for. For a few first hand accounts of the very real career-hurting bias try these:
http://accordingtohoyt.com/2012/09/06/does-everybody-know-it/
http://accordingtohoyt.com/2015/03/31/the-scarlet-letters/
She’s got more, but my search-fu on her site is currently failing.
This is why it’s worth fighting the fight, at least from the puppy side. The Hugos are one battlefield. It’s the future of Science Fiction we’re fighting for. The insanity this year inspired me into paying my $40, reading, and voting. (I was too late in the game to nominate.)
With respect … I will say that as a casual SF/F fan, I find myself turned off by the rhetoric. If I encounter a Puppy partisan (of the sad or rabid variety) fulminating about CHORFs and SJWs, objecting to liberals, and hurling invective like so much irradiated monkey poo, I’m not going to say, “Gee, I should read this guy’s books because they might be interesting.” I’m going to think, “Oh, hell this guy’s rude.” I’m also going to think, “I hate it when people mix their politics with their art. I’m steering clear of this one.”
And I’m likely to think the same of the other side … I mean, if somebody’s first criticism of a book is to run down a ratio of male to female characters or something along those lines, I’m going to think, “Oh, hell, not again” and move on from the person’s work.
Quick sideline. In the last fifteen years or so, I’ve tried out a couple fantasy series with overtly political or potentially sexist tones. Each one turned me off for a different reason. One, a fantasy series about Objectivism, felt like Gandalf was continually whacking me upside the head with a hardback copy of THE FOUNTAINHEAD. I don’t object to objectivism in my books, per se. I just don’t like the didactism.
Another fantasy series, with a nicely engaging plot about a young woman from the slums becoming a mage, turned me off because it was mixed in with an unnecessary plot about an ancillary character discovering he’s gay. Again, I don’t have a problem with that kind of plot. But if it’s not an integral part of the story, then it’s just an author filibuster.
When I compare these to Lev Grossman’s THE MAGICIANS (of which I’ve read only the first book), these series suffer in comparison. Grossman had some interesting messages about modernity, wish fulfillment, maturity, and maturity. But he managed to wrap it up in a story that was pretty damn engaging, and in which the message (such as it was) tied directly to the characters’ growth.
This is what I mean about the stories standing on their own. As a casual fan, I don’t need to see the community of authors and publishers air its dirty laundry. I don’t need to watch them fight publicly about the minutiae of Worldcon politics. I can distinguish for myself, thank you very much, an authors’ politics, and whether that authors’ politics have influenced his work for the positive, or for the negative.
If the bulk of the publishing houses and many of the individuals in the establishment weren’t threatening people’s livelihoods for the ‘sin’ of being conservative (read the links I’ve linked, and putter around her site. She’s got several more about her experiences that I didn’t find immediately.) I’d agree with you.
I’ve been looking into publishing houses over the past several years and the picture I have managed to find is rather disturbing. Try your luck with a small press that may not be able to give you much, hope Baen picks you out of the slush pile, or publish indie unless you want to include bits about ‘social issues’ in your stories. I reached this conclusion independently of the Puppies campaign.
Something has to give and this was where it gave. No one in the puppies expected to sweep any of the categories. No one expected the media reach to go much farther than the usual suspects such as The Guardian.
This is a bit better than even the ones above:
http://accordingtohoyt.com/2011/08/31/he-beats-me-but-he%E2%80%99s-my-publisher/
Larry has a post here as to why he publishes with Baen (Entitled “Why I love my publisher”) I would link it but two links sends the post into moderation and I would prefer to avoid that.
Jerry Pournelle has commented a few times on the environment surrounding the Hugos, though I’ve seen less commentary on the industry in general (what I saw was in the comments section of Sarah Hoyt’s blog). It was a game he didn’t want to play.
The people we’re arguing with would love to require that every story get sidelined by the issue of the day which, as you, yourself have noted causes the writing to suffer.
By the way, I hope you are being genuine. But you seem to be treading the line of what we call, here, the ‘concern troll’. Roughly summarized, a concern troll comes in and expresses that a person or group should change some behavior or position lest it negatively impact them in an arena. Often it is couched in ‘I’m a really big fan but concerns me if you continue to speak on it people may not buy your stuff!.’ With, of course, the goal being to prevent the action or speech of the person in question rather than try and bring about a better result for them. I will not toe that line myself, simply say if you see people reacting with suspicion, we get a lot of that kind of argument here so it may be a case of missidentification and behavior edging into alarm-bell territories.
OK, political othodoxy hitting your livelihood. That, I get. And it’s pretty nasty if the gatekeepers won’t let you get a word in edgewise. That sometimes gets lost in the Hugo discussions.
And by the way, thanks for forcing me to re-evaluate my perspective here. I don’t know from “troll,” but I think I’ve figured out why I’m being crotchety on this one.
Politics poisons damn near everything. In a given day, I’ll disagree with a conservative friend about Issue X, and a friend of that conservative friend friend thinks I’m some Satanist monster who’s going to turn their children into dope-smoking hippies. Then I turn around and disagree with a liberal friend about Issue Y (or sometimes the same Issue X), and a friend of that friend thinks I’m going to turn his kids into flag-waving Christian robots. It’s really annoying.
So … I’ve got my refuge. Not just activities, but discussion of the activities with others. The video games and gaming thing worked for a while, but then the Gamergate controversy blew up, and everybody lined up on the liberal side or the conservative side. Boom. Refuge gone. Then it’s sf/f literary fandom … and then the Sad Puppies movement came along. Folks are supposed to line up on the conservative or liberal side, and, boom, refuge gone.
It may be unfair of me to come here and heap scorn on you guys about it. But, well, Larry Correia’s blog was the first place discussing it where I didn’t have to run through the Livejournal login process, so I’m kind of venting here.
Look, if it’s any consolation, I’ll go home tonight and purchase a Monster Hunter book and see how I like it. Would that be a suitable peace offering?
Monster Hunter International is free on Kindle. No need to make a “guilt purchase” to try it.
Frankly, no. A suitable peace offering would be to not post snarky comments about things you clearly don’t understand.
Frankly if you walk away and actually think about it that’s peace offering enough, though I’m sure Larry will appreciate the buy. Just one more bit of thought. I know little enough of Gamer Gate, but I do know with Sad Puppies, the political side of things has been there for years, threatening people’s livelihoods and decreasing the good output for people who just want to read. This is not new. It goes back to at least the 90s. If you run somewhere else to escape politics, you’re going to wind up doing nothing but running. Puppies is what happened when people got tired of running and hiding. Some day you may have to take a stand, if only because there’s no where left to hide. I wish you luck.
This is an honest question … Have the Sad Puppies supporters thought about establishing their own awards?
It is being debated, back and forth.
No, we intend mass convert to queer privilege theory and write books about rape culture galaxies, white holes and noble space operas about fighting aliens who use compulsory heterosexuality.
As long as there’s a bit with a dog, a kangaroo, and a chicken, it’s all good.
Concern Troll?
It’s not just in SF/Fantasy, it’s EVERYwhere. And it comes from both sides. I’m a Christian Progressive and I get to enjoy the paranoia from BOTH sides. I don’t check off enough boxes on the Kook Left list so I get called a “racist, sexist, etc” and I don’t check off enough boxes on the TEAOP Right so I get called a “socialist, taker, etc”. Depending on where I am and who I’m then with, I ALWAYS have to watch what I say face to face.
I probably should watch what I say online more than I do. In the city I live in, being known as a Progressive can get you fired or keep you from getting hired. I’m not so much worried about my socially more conservative views locally, but I do worry about pissing the wrong online bunch off to the point they might try to “dox” me in order to leave me vulnerable to some nut job or another on the fringe Left.
An excellent point. It’s time to write until the International Lord of Hate calls for Sad Puppies 4: The Re-Reckoning Raggy!
After this last dust-up, I went back to look at my shelves and my list on Goodreads. I think the last Hugo winner I read was 1993 – The Doomsday Book.
Unfortunately, it may well be too late. SF/Fantasy fandom has joined the rest of society in rushing for the extremes politically.
is it too late to just get back to writing stories,
That is pretty much what happens anyway. The Hugos don’t have any affect on sales these days and seem pretty much irrelevant to the reading public. Amazon reviews, ratings, price, and book suggestions play a big role in what I buy. I cannot recall the last time I bought a book because it was awarded a Hugo or Nebula,
Do you think that’s because of the Hugos in particular or is it that awards in general are losing their PR power?
For example, I know in ’13 the Teen Choice Awards turned out to be rigged. Do incidents like this and the Hugos make people lose their faith in awards in general?
I don’t know. Another possibility is the sheer number of books available. A brick and mortar bookstore might have had a short aisle of SF, on Amazon there are tens of thousands of books any of which is easily available with a click. There is no way that an award can really be representative of thousands of books catering to a wide variety of tastes. It isn’t that useful.
May as well forget about it. After a zillion words we’ve come full circle and accomplished very little. Even the Stormfront social justice troopers crowded off the ballot by VD’s prank actually advertising their own names has had no effect, as you can see from Flint’s latest fogbank of a post. That list, which I’ve left around here in two parts, should be like a flare going off which illuminates how much the Hugos have been taken over by a hate group. That alone is a win, but you have to know what the fight was in the first place and therefore what winning looks like.
It’s pretty obvious neither Flint nor GRRM know who Renay and Book Smugglers are or how Natalie Luhrs and Jim Hines have been spending the last 3 years, or know anything about the rest of them and their daily racial incitement. Of course you’re going to laugh at the idea if you haven’t read that racial incitement. I call it not doing one’s homework yet turning your project in. It doesn’t help when you take certain quotes at face value cuz you like them and say others are something or other because you don’t.
Flint, GRRM and Glyer’s romper room of child-like adults all get a fail. Had Flint and GRRM alone done their homework and taken a stand, this would’ve ended. Of course this would all end tomorrow merely by agreeing on what an English dictionary is, a thing beyond the ability of core fandom to do. The net effect is an anti-white, anti-male ideology has successfully sold a bullshit story about SFF’s “racism” and “sexism” when it fact it’s literary legacy is precisely the opposite. No one should be surprised a KKK or neo-Nazis would make up myths about black Americans or Jews and no one should be surprised where “white privilege,” “rape culture,” “misogyny” and “patriarchy” come from. For some oddball reason I can’t figure out, social justice crusaders have it fixed in their minds only straight white men hate or that other sexual and racial identities would ever organize themselves around such hatred. Only children think like that and it’s particularly galling to see that in a genre with Orwell warning us of that exact thing; that organized hatred will look the complete opposite of what you expect – look like a friendly face.
In effect Flint’s post once again swallows the “F” word and tries to tell a Pacific War story while not knowing Pearl Harbor happened. “Hey, Empire of Japan and U. S. Navy! Knock it off!” May as well tell the KKK and black Americans to knock it off. Flint’s comment defending Hurley’s Hugo-winning post is so ignorant I don’t even know how to characterize it.
The upshot is we are seeing a typical thing in fandom: a passion for arguing things we don’t know jack shit about and a cult of social justice freaks impervious to logic and facts… when they have them – which is not often. Others, like The Guardian’s meat puppet, are simply straight up fabricators and propagandists.
The best prank left to us next year is to nominate Aliette de Bodard, Saladin Ahmed, Luhrs, Buhlert, Book Smugglers, Tobias Buckell, Jim Hines, Beth Meacham, Renay, Requires Hate, Laura Mixon, Kai Ashante Wilson, Alyssa Wong, Kameron Hurley, Cecily Kane, Skiffy and Fanty, Rachel Acks, Foz Meadows, Lightspeed, Uncanny, Amal El-Mohtar, Damien Walter, and the rest of that crew out of sheer disdain and contempt, and then No Award the whole fucking thing.
I have come to the same conclusion.
Mr. May, please, please, please establish your own blog. Speaking as a nonbinary genderfluid wereseal-kin, you could disemvowel me any time.
The first part is within reach, or at least Vox’s reach. The later isn’t.
Unfortunately, and I mean no offense, it is unwise to open your remarks by admitting you do not know the issues, and then to utter a statement showing you are entirely in sympathy with one side of the issue with no sympathy for the other, WHILE at the same time dismissing the issue as insignificant.
The Sad Puppies are sad for one and one reason only: that a certain large, loud and vocal faction of fandom has decreed that getting back to writing stories and letting the stories speak for themselves is racist, sexist, homophobic, displays a hatred of women and minorities, a crass inability to appreciate highbrow literature, and shows that there is no place for you in society, at all, period, full stop.
You see, my most ignorant yet loudmouthed young friend, the reason, the sole reason, and the only reason seven international wire services carried to countless strangers who, like you, do not know a CHORF from a dwarf the news that I was a racist bigoted hatred-filled antisemite who feeds blind nuns into woodchippers and laughs as they scream is not because any of these allegations are true, but only because a sustained program of utter insane and over-the-top accusations, shrieked at high enough volume over long enough time paralyzes all attempts at reasoning. And my self appointed enemies merely decided that when I asked for us all to get back to writing and let the stories speak for themselves, they could not answer me with reason. And so I had to be destroyed.
For you to cluck your tongue at me, as if I had contributed or participated in starting this war, when you believe the EXACT same thing I believe, and you are just as guilty as I am of all the things of which I am accused (which is to say, not at all) is an irony beyond grotesque.
You should be one hundred percent on our side, if story for the sake of story is your motto. If you motto is social justice above story, message above story, race above story, sex above story, division, confusion, hatred and propaganda above story, you are with them.
There is no middle ground., This weekend’s Hugo’s proved that. Make your choice and take your stand.
Allow me to offer an analogy. When I was in college, I was involved in student government. One year, we had a royal scrum over some issue — what it was, I cannot recall at a moment. But we fought each other like, well, like cats and dogs, over issues and positions of authority in student government that seemed quite important at the time. It was STUDENT GOVERNMENT!!! It was SERIOUS BUSINESS!! And we fought so, so hard. Friendships were destroyed, and resentments were stoked.
Two decades later, I look back on that little scrum, and I can’t imagine what we were so exercised over. Issues that at the time seemed so huge are, today, piffles, little things that ultimately mean nothing. We were small, small, small men and women, fighting in a small, small, small place, over small, small, small things.
We did not have a perspective on it, you see — a perspective that came only once we left that small, small, small place and put vast distances between us and it.
John Reilly, my condescending, but much word-gifted friend, you mistake my intention. I do not choose a middle ground in this melee, and I do not seek one. Rather, I see you and your sworn enemies are fighting over a rather small sandbox. I’m standing over by the swings, watching this little melee. As nearly as I can see, all of you, whether puppy or kitty, are covered in mud, and you have made a royal mess of the sandbox.
So, yes, I shall cluck my tongue at you, and yes, I, not a CHORF or a dwarf, shall try to enlighten you: You have a choice. You can fight with the self-proclaimed kings of the sandbox, or you can declare (for all the world) that their sandbox is a small, small, small thing, and you can leave them to their childish games, and let their actions, like their stories, speak for themselves.
Wright. Wright. Not Reilly. Sona frazzin’ razzin’ ..
If you aren’t interested in the issue being contested, why are you bothering to post at all? Please look up the definition of “concern troll.”
You are confused if you think the institutionalization of hate speech against men, whites and heterosexuals is a sandbox.
Look, if you don’t care about the issues, then WTF are you doing posting here?
The good Reverend Wright said:
“There is no middle ground., This weekend’s Hugo’s proved that. Make your choice and take your stand.”
OK – read what you want. Vote what you want. Don’t try to game the system. Respect the voice of the Fans. That’s my stand. Sticking to it.
“You should be one hundred percent on our side, if story for the sake of story is your motto. If you motto is social justice above story, message above story, race above story, sex above story, division, confusion, hatred and propaganda above story, you are with them.”
On no Reverend. That’s just another edition of “wrong fan” having “wrong fun” reading “wrong message”. That’s the problem with you pups. You have no respect for the Fans.
And again, you try to equate “fans” with “SJWs.” No one’s buying your drek.
SJNumbers,
When Worldcom stops openly selling memberships and restricts to a handpicked elect, only then can you honestly make that distinction.
Well, it looks like all my comments on GRRMs journal got summarily nerfed and I’ve been banned. Maybe It had something to do with me calling him a “two-faced hypocrite lying out of both sides of both mouths”? 😉
But the Bearded One did respond to two people making much the same points I’d also made, and this is what THAT looked like:
http://grrm.livejournal.com/439207.html?thread=22378151#t22378151
“No war, no politics
Nope. No war. No SJWs. No politics. Just a whole bunch of works and people who were ignored and/or slighted because the wrong people supported them.
Don’t pretend it didn’t happen. You admit that works were downvoted because Puppies supported them. You admit that you would have liked to see how the competition would have gone had certain works not been supported by the wrong people (heck – you might even have gotten another award!) But it was all the Puppies’ fault. Had they not had the temerity to get involved in the Hugos, none of this would have happened. Had they not had the impertinence to suggest works for nomination, this kerfuffle would have been avoided. Had they not had the unmitigated GALL to suggest that Toni Weisskopf might be worthy of a Hugo, she might have actually won.
Yeah, right. Pull the other one – it has bells on it.
The Sad Puppies said “here’s a bunch of good stuff that’s Hugo eligible this year. Read it, and if you agree you can nominate it for a measly $40”. And peoples’ heads started to explode. Oh My GOD!!!!!!!!! It’s a bunch of conservative hateful white Mormon men trying to eliminate diversity in SciFi!!!!! Except, it wasn’t, and the Sad Puppy list of suggest works had men and women, gay and straight, of various skin tones, and assorted politics ranging from libertarian to unknown (but probably more progressive than I).
Don’t worry though. The TruFen wanted to send a message, and they did. Even without the Asterisk awards, we got the message.
And the message was “Needs more Puppies.” ”
And George’s response was:
http://grrm.livejournal.com/439207.html?thread=22389159#t22389159
“Aha, one of Teddy Beale’s rabid fools shows up to spout the party line. Nice pile of Puppy poop you shat there.
Take it back to the kennel, please.”
Now that the con is over, and the Puppies crushed, and the rules rigged to keep them from ever “threatening” the stranglehold over the Hugo by the Insiders, Mr “Voice of Reason” has gone back to his roots.
You should have told him, “A day will come when you think you are safe and happy, and your joy will turn to ashes in your mouth. And you will know the debt is paid.”
The Honey Badgers Brigade weighs in:
http://honeybadgerbrigade.com/radio/nerdrevolt-27-sad-puppies-proven-right-remain-sad/
Puppies and badgers and manatees, oh my!
I always have a good time talking to the Honey Badgers. They are good people. And our conversations always go way, way over time — that’s a good sign you’re really rolling with an interesting conversation. And their artist guy does great work too!
I know one of them personally. Glad to see her fighting for what she believes in.
Has there been any news about their dispute over getting kicked out of that convention? There was talk of legal action at one point.
” You know how you guys paid back her lifetime of involvement in Fandom?
By giving 2,496 votes to No Award.”
The Hugo Award for Best Editor isn’t a reward for years of loyalty and involvement.
This is why you fail
“You talk about diversity, but simultaneously had no problem putting No Award over award nominated females because they were nominated by fans you declared to be sexist.”
Because the nominators were sexist? No.
Fans who voted No Award on principle did so overwhelmingly to communicate that bloc voting to sweep the nominations is a dick move, and won’t be tolerated. It’s not complicated, really. The silent majority you crowed about and lauded for so long rose up and spoke. That you choose not to listen because you either don’t like or, more likely, don’t understand their message is your failure, not theirs.
The Hugo Award for Best Editor isn’t a reward for years of loyalty and involvement.
yep, its suppose to be a reward for Tor.
So, why was there a No Award campaign last year when Sad Puppies only had one or two nominees per category?
And since when has 3 or 4, or even 1, nomination per category equaled five?
Since they discovered Wormwood was the good guy in Lord of the Rings.
The most common phrase I’m seeing from the social justice crusaders about the No Award is “diversity wins” rather than “art wins,” or “literature wins.” Thanks for admitting you’re an affirmative action movement. Now all you have to do is admit you power that with ginned up racism and sexism against whites and men using demonization lies about “privilege,” “patriarchy,” “misogyny,” and the “marginalized” and your skills will be complete. Saying there are people “underrepresented” in SFF is as moronic as saying whites are “underrepresented” in basketball, and only a racist would spotlight one and go silent on the other. An idea is an idea.
What’s really disturbing is that they’re perceiving it as a significant victory and “empowering” moment. The tone has gotten nastier since Saturday and the “moderates” like Martin during the debate are dropping their masks all over the place.
“Diversity Uber Alles!” As long as that diversity does not stray from the approved Party line mein comrades.
Diversity wins… which is why there are blizzards less white than the award recipients several years running.
The diversity of the Zero.
Reason #85 why social justice crusaders are chumps. According to Amanda Taub at Vox, the term “rape culture” first appeared in a 1974 book titled Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women. It was published by a lesbian feminist collective. What a kick in the pants; who saw that one coming?
If you are interested in an objective statistical analysis of the voting results – I suggest:
https://chaoshorizon.wordpress.com/
I’ve reviewed everything and I cannot quibble with the math. Interpreting the data is open to opinion since the data is behavior, and not the underlying beliefs that explain why the behavior occurred. I have lots of statistics graduate work in addition to lots of practical application of those skills over the last 30 years.
Given the scatter in the nominations, I expect he’s underestimating the actual number of Sad Puppy votes by as much as 50%.
My picks, for example, would have me as a “Neutral – Voted Some Puppies.”
Well, since the SJW’s seem determined to run us off the planet, I guess the only thing to logically do is bring my books back into print. Can anyone here recommend a decent piece of OCR software, free or commercial?
You might try Tesseract, an open source OCR engine developed by HP Labs. Depending on your OS there are different front ends for it.
thanks
Oh, here’s the web page for those various front ends:
https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki/3rdParty#gui
I’ve noticed over the past 15-16 years that memories seem to be getting increasingly selective. As in, almost every time someone who identifies themselves as “tolerant” or “inclusive” does something rotten, spiteful, and filled with hate, people can’t run in fast enough to say “Oh no! This is the first time someone who preaches those things has ever fallen short! And who can blame them, considering how EVIL their opponents are?”
Over and over again for over a decade and a half. Each time the ugliness, pettiness, and sheer lunatic meanness is put on display, it’s always “the first time” and always “something they were forced into by the EVILNESS of the other side.”
….it’s very draining, realizing it’s not so much as the other side feels no guilt for doing wrong, as far as they’re concerned they are INCAPABLE of ever being wrong. :/
Read up on the various theories about how radicalism (of ALL types) works. For radicals, ideology is beyond good, beyond evil, beyond right and beyond wrong. Truth is the first thing to go, usually. It has to, really. because it is the ultimate limited on ideology.
From Tor.com:
http://www.tor.com/2015/08/26/why-were-creating-more-uncanny-still-a-real-magazine-now-with-a-fake-future-history/#more-187552
“The Curator sighs. “Ah. The final battle of the Great War of the Miserable Malcontents of Sirius, 1000 years after the last entry. Thank goodness the Space Unicorn Ranger Corps was there to help restore peace, art, beauty, and kindness to the universe. Please skip ahead.”
Considering Sirius is the Dog Star, I think this is a veiled jab at Sad Puppies. But don’t bother posting at Tor, they’ll just delete your comment.
Doesn’t have any comments yet…we’ll see if mine posts…
Looks like “no”. Doesn’t even register.
Ok, now it’s up. Let’s see if it stays.
I’m afraid you misspelled “clever” and “pyrrhic”.
I’m tired and hopped up on cold meds right now…you’ll just have to read past a typo or two.
That reads like the Legion of Super-Heroes rip-off I wrote in junior high.
They erased the “Miserable Malcontents of Sirius” remark.
At Tor.com the future is certain, it’s the past that keeps changing.
Unbelievable…Let me guess: hide the evidence but leave the comment up so they can go “What are you talking about?” and make the commenter look foolish?
For me, the article currently says it has a comment, but no comment is displayed…Is it erased, or just problems displaying for me?
Also, tell me you got a screen shot or archive of the original.
I can’t either, but I don’t know it if’s something Tor did or just more internet/browser trouble. I’m having similar problems on a lot of sites.
And no, damnit…I wish I had now…
Hey Pups,
Hope all the Puppy Sadness has dissipated. If not, there is the power of prayer. In the spirit and because you have an interest in the Fans Convention here is the link to the Hugos. And you can watch all the fun and camaraderie.
But… to cure sadness go right to the Hugo Blessing. It is Video 2, at about 1:50. Bod Silverberb offers the blessing.
http://livestream.com/worldcon/2015HugoAwards
Say it with him. It will make you feel calmer.
Silly little twit…
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
I really need to roll up a Sith Inquisitor on SWTOR. But no, I decided to go with an Imperial Agent….
As a Mage, Inquisitor won’t walk through first instance without Healer. As a Healer, it extremely boring to play through locations. As combination of both it really lacks DPS and HPS to do instances without good team. So, may be you not very wrong to play another class. I endured my Inquisitor up to third location, about 28 in level and dropped it (and erased this game out of my hard drive, but that’s another story).
Inquisitors are fun, especially if you play one as a pacifist. Enslaved -> forced to become powerful or die -> keeps getting attacked by Jedi -> somehow ends up in a position of ultimate power despite just wanting to get along with everyone.
Playing light-side Empire characters is the most fun.
Apparently, you can make an NPC’s brain fault by having your character keep their word. A trustworthy Sith?!
😀
Exactly, Patrick, exactly. 😀
it’s fun but is out of RP. and you get -probably – a bad slide of your tank that way.
I prefer the Old Code Jedi, but AFAIK SWTOR doesn’t use them anyways…
Why would we settle for calm when we are experiencing the joy of watching you and your fellow travelers twist yourselves into such a knot that not even groupspeak can save you anymore?
You do realize the Aristocrats is a joke and not an instruction manual, right?
I’m not sure of your position; are you ignorant of 3 years of daily race-baiting and hate speech against men, or do you actively support it?
Hate speech against men? Do tell.
Wilfully blind, eh?
More like willfully stupid…
Something I don’t get is why in the world there even exists such a thing as a no award vote option, the only purpose I can see it serving is what happened here, to cut out those they don’t like, because they are a bunch of hateful sore losers. If they were a real award without bias, that option should not exist, because those that get the most votes should win. If you want to avoid someone winning all the time, there should be a limit, like if you win you can’t get an award for the next five years.
Seriously if I had the money and the opportunity, I am pretty sure I could design a better system than the one currently being used for the Hugo awards.
If I remember correctly, Guitar Player & Bass Player magazines had a system where, after 3 or so wins in the reader’s poll, the player would be moved to the “Gallery of the Greats”, and would be ineligible for future voting.
Otherwise it would pretty much be just “Geddy Lee” as best Bass Player, year after year.
Really? that’s the *only* reason you can see?
“You should vote for No Award as your first choice if you believe that none of the nominees are worthy of the Award”
http://www.thehugoawards.org/the-voting-system/
That ought to be a really, really high bar, especially when the finalists got there with record high numbers of nominations.
As I’ve participated in the Hugo Awards for the last few years, there have been several finalists on past ballots that didn’t really suit my taste, and I would have preferred seeing a different set of finalists. But that was no where near enough for me to put them under “No Award”. The least I could do was show the other nominators, who obviously had disagreed with me, a very basic level of respect, and evaluate the finalists in relation to each other. Turns out, when the final ballot is more to my taste, 2~3 thousand CHORFs will show up to *loudly* refuse to give me & hundreds of other nominators (record high numbers) that minimal level of courtesy. Not to mention the finalists themselves.
For the months after the final ballot was announced & before the results were released, I was believing (or at least hoping) that the “No Award” screechers were just a very loud vocal minority, and most Hugo voters would be more like George R. R. Martin, and not use “No Award” as a massive bludgeon, even if they disagreed w/ Sad Puppies. These results have not been good for my faith in humanity. It helps to tell myself that 2~3 thousand people is still just a small fraction, even just of SciFi/Fantasy fandom (little f).
I’m looking forwards to Sad Puppies 4: The Embiggening.
Exactly Beolach that whole respect for those you disagree with thing is exactly why I think there should not be a “No Award” option. So someone you don’t think was all that great got the most votes, quit being a baby and suck it up, get more people to vote for the people you do like next time then. All the no award option does is show that there are those who are seriously sore losers. As it stands, all the no award does is snubs those who got more votes, we still know they won anyway.
Now that I have a chance to actually read and listen to the after action reports as well as listen to the awards ceremony of the Hugo awards instead of a quick glance and reply on the phone as I bounce around in the back of a rig outside of Colville in Washington state I have a few thoughts. They are not as polished or nuanced as some of the fine folks at 770, Guardian, SJW7526 et all but do forgive me as I am on mandatory stand down, and so exhausted I cant sleep
GO F*C# YOURSELF.
To the taint that was bragging on the youtwitface about buying memberships to stop the evil patriarchies take over of sci fi how about you use that money and energy to come out to the fire line. If you cant due to physicality issues we have a crying need to help run logistics and resupply for the lads and lasses who are on the line rightgoddamnnow in harms way. Or the hundreds if not more we have had to evac.
To the shit stain that was going off about the fact that there was little to no puppy supporters there. I have to give you a “I am right point” There were at least 5 of us that if i have the timing right were trying to figure out a way to safely get a animal rescue in the area out of harms way and fed in there temporary relocation area. You pride your self on being smart and clever, come help coordinate the safe movement and feeding of the animals and supply for 5 days (BTW you have 15 minutes before the area in question was burned over due to wind shift. We did it so probably never made the news)
To the future statistic that posted the thing about using a base ball bat on us (bar tender in Seattle ), and the jaggoff publisher from tor who verbally attacked Mrs lamplighter in a post award party, first be glad that me and mine were otherwise getting in the real and dirty and therefor didn’t have time to be there. As in this state if you declare hostile intent on myself or another and I can prove reasonable fear of mine or antohers safety I will put you down HARD. Did it professionally for 16 years. The hilarious thing on that is the two ladys who I most frequently go to these things with (who also did the night club and fugitive recovery thing for years as well would have made sure to break bones on yall as well. I am a big believer in low paperwork, mercy solutions. They believe in a good maim at least will warn the other dbags ). You want to prove you are hard come play with us and face a real scary foe. Fire so big that it puts smoke a state away
Last but not the least Mrs “worst thing evah” I have a special hatred for you you current and future drain on emergency services. You feel that a piece of paper is “the scary ting that is so horrible and o noes the ribbons and ideas that i heard were going to oppress us and beat up tha gays and PoC o noes” May you find out what scary is so you have a real thing to be afraid of as this “rough man that stands ready to do violence” is done with you and yours. scary is loosing comms with the demo team that went up the ridge line to clear a exfil out for your location. Horrible is the dead eyes of a working family that just lost everything , and there kids asking when they can go home. Or the old couple that had to be intabated as they are trying to unload supply for the brush cutter teams.
and to all you squirrel sodomizing fuctards out there who are blaming the conservatives and the christian or the patriarchy, and by now have discounted anything i say, Be advised assclowns, I and mine are Norse by faith or temperament. the skin tone (when not in the fields of hell range all over the board as we dont care and gender preference is something between whoever is involved at the time so long as they are of age and consenting. You all are used to doxing and threatening folks who are culturally and religiously programmed to forgive and be kind and charitable . We are not. Violence is a sacrament to us. We believe the best way to cross the bridge between worlds is with a weapon in hand and the blood of our foe on our lips. Offer a quantifiable threat of harm in real space versus the youtwitface place and you shall know what “A furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine’ is
Final thought. upon further consideration stay the hell out of the way as you clowns burned your own awards
Never type angry, Elements Rook. Never type angry. And never hit “submit” after you do.
Full disclosure: based solely on this post (I am not aware of you have ever posted anything else) I rather suspect you’re trolling us on behalf of Arthur Chu or whoever, that’s how over-the-top your post is.
Just sayin’.
I thought it was rather good (assuming it isn’t a plant). Sometimes you just have to give the idiots the “full Kinnison” treatment.
Haven’t seen a true Wall O’ Text in a while.
Sorry for the wall o text folks. Now that I have had 12 hours of sleep and a couple of showers as well as food that dose not taste of smoke I feel more cognizant. Not a attempt as a excuse, but rather a explanation
To address a few questions raised I had to actually google Chu to see who the hell the rules manipulating twerp was. I have read MHI for a few years and rarely comment as yall generally cover my thoughts on a lot of things so, why be redundant?
To clarify on the “we are not with whom to screw with” bit, I was referring to a few of us in the great pathetic northwet who happen to occasionally do events and conventions. I personally stopped as I got tired of being called out to fix stupid things, only to be bitched at for following state and or federal law. Went back to making money on the weekends working for some of the largest night clubs on the I5 corridor verses dropping a couple of grand and getting to work on top of the whining from the pachuli wearing hyku writing mother truckers
Same for the wife. Same for the rest of the lads and lasses that I worked with
I get to be home for another 12 hours and then I get to go back out into eastern Washington and see what logistics screw-up I get to creatively fix
Keep up the fight folks, I am just done with answering assistance calls from those who will call me and mine racist, sexist, homophobic neo nazi bastards and when the bad thing happens, call me and mine to rescue them
(best cred thing i can say of the most recent thing is that I just got back from ace hardware where the wife and I live and got her a KSG for a “Hi dear, Im home prezzie”)
Grinz
If we all ignored his stupid posts he would leave.
well, “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity” still holds, I see
Well big fella, hate to say it but – you never had a chance. You still don’t. Next year? Pbfbfbffffft.
I say this as an old fart that walked away from SF back in the mid-90’s. (I got fed up with wading through 20 expensive books filled with SJW lectures to find one that actually had a story).
Look at the SJW crowd. The homosexuals. The fat, angry womyn with their hair dyed in all the frooty colours of the rainbow. The sullen elderly hippies. The neck-beardos with bigger boobs than the girls have. A few are apparently closet pedos.
You younger folks have been INDOCTRINATED to look past all that, and find something, ANYTHING good – and focus exclusively on that and none of their obvious personal failings. An old fart like me would look at that collection of sexually disturbed finks, flinks, freaks and ufo’s…and wouldn’t waste the time of day with them. They’ve made a home in the SF community and I suppose that’s good because nobody else can really put up with them – as our gamer friends will tell us. Those are not nice people, they are deeply unhappy with themselves and everyone else and that is why they treated you the way they did. If you won that fight Larry, I suspect you wouldn’t be happy with it because at the end of the day you are fighting with retards and marginal people. There is no pride to be taken in pounding a retard; because that is exactly what those people are. If you take this away from them it is probably going to hurt them and they wouldn’t learn anything from it anyways. The Hugos have been meaningless for a long, long time. The SJW is going to lose in this conflict, they always do.
You need your own awards, your own voice, and your own publishers. Vox Day has already started and is doing well with it – and he is a weapons grade asshole. A guy like you with business sense could virtually tap and develop a marketplace on the verge of exploding. SF need not be a ‘gay bath house’ for degenerates and marginal; there are plenty of normal people that just want a good story. If the old guard doesn’t want to address it – you should. I hope you do and I hope you make a million. $$$$.
And when they come to the new award? It always happens. Fall back start over yet again? No. Enough is enough.
“They invade our space, and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!”
I don’t think they’ll follow you, Frank. It may not seem like it, but Larry and the boys hung a lickin’ on those turd brains they will never forget. To me it is all about markets; they have theirs and we have ours. Why are we piddling about with their publishers, their authors and their opinions?
There are only two ways forward: either you get along and play in the same sand box with people that have no maturity, no ethics and no morals – or you play in your own and you do what they do: establish gate keepers to keep the trouble makers out.
Seeing as how you guys want to open things up, bring in more writers, readers and fans – and they are dead set against it… to me there is really only one way forward.
They will follow. They do every single time. EVERY time. They’re already trying for other cons. They’re already invading other spaces. What major publisher can you go to that isn’t left? Baen. That’s it. Indie, though if they get their way with Amazon that’ll be hurt pretty badly. Where SHOULD we draw the line Glenfilthie? Enough is enough. As far as I can tell the ‘you have your stuff and we have ours’ is what folk have been trying for around 20-30 years now and it’s why the genre’s been so badly stomped on. Sooner or later there won’t be any space left to run.
I’m with you. There should be no more running.
There is a 3rd way. Wreck their sandbox.
Glenfilthie said:
“Look at the SJW crowd. The homosexuals. The fat, angry womyn with their hair dyed in all the frooty colours of the rainbow. The sullen elderly hippies. The neck-beardos with bigger boobs than the girls have. A few are apparently closet pedos.
You younger folks have been INDOCTRINATED to look past all that, and find something, ANYTHING good – and focus exclusively on that and none of their obvious personal failings. An old fart like me would look at that collection of sexually disturbed finks, flinks, freaks and ufo’s…and wouldn’t waste the time of day with them….
…You need your own awards, your own voice, and your own publishers. ”
That’s the spirit.
What do you expect homosexuals to do – live in a cave?
Lets just say it was never a good idea to let the inmates run the asylum.
Fat, angry womyn with frooty colored hair here. Young, too. And a gamer.
Still a puppy since I found out about SP3.
Judging books by their covers (or the appearance of their authors) goes both ways.
The SJW will do everything in their power to stop this. Because if they can’t have it, no one can. The SJWs are the ones who make people like me uncomfortable to stand up and be who we really are and say what we really want because we don’t fit their pre-determined categories. But I will hazard a guess a lot more of us are going to stand now. As WyrdBard said, enough is enough.
Welcome, Taysha. We’ve always been about welcoming everyone into the fold. Hold your own beliefs, we don’t care how they differ from ours, so long as you don’t try to insist that yours are the only ones that can be allowed to be heard. Demand good quality in SF/F, and don’t settle for anything less just because the promulgators may share some of your beliefs. That’s pretty much all the Puppies have ever asked.
That and the occasional “HEY! you’ve got to read this book it’s AWESOME” style recommendations.
Thank you. I like knowing there is a place where achievements will be judged on their own and not by the ideas of the authors (because they’d fail hardcore on the latter with some of the people I know).
And I can tell you a lot of the silent ones are starting to talk.
Wyrdbard – regretfully, the last recommendation I gave was for Steven Brust because the bastard made me cry with Issola.
are you saying your not their shield 😛
I’m saying I’m myself, and they seem to dislike that.
Sorry, my comment was a passing reference to Gamergate. There were a group of people there who I believe shared your same philosophy and they used the hashtag #notyourshield in response to those attempting to lump them into the SJW camp by default of their personal identities.
A few telling notes on this fiasco (which I have posted elsewhere).
1) A very liberal friend of mine (who attended Sasquan) while no friend of the SP movement, has repeatedly said that the Hugos were broken and in dire need of reform and rescue from the SMOF crowd.
2) I was having a chat the Friday before the vote with several friends (all male) when the talk, as its wont, turned risque. We were razzing on each other with naughty jokes. One of my friends declared that this conversation would not be allowed at Arisia. (For those not in the know Arisia is a Boston con- and a good one). Now he volunteers at Arisia so he can attend without buying a membership now because of the PC crap, he is considering not bothering in the future. (FWIW, this person is South Asian).
3) That led me to describe what happened when the PC crowd took over Readercon, a literary con in the Boston area. One of the first things they did was to eliminate the Kirk Poland Bad Prose competition, usually the highlight of the con. The numbers have plummeted subsequently.
4) Back when Boston was to host Worldcon, I was a regular at NESFA (New England Science Fiction Association). I suggested to the membership that NESFA get a table at Anime Boston to hand out literature for the Worldcon. Those were the days of inevitable ‘greying of fandom panels.’ But at AB the crowd was big, young and enthusiastic. They were the potential future of fandom.
At NESFA, there was hemming and hawing and other reactionary noises. I volunteered to man the table. They said ‘No.’ Finally I just grabbed fliers and left them around AB. This was when AB was still small enough to be held at the Park Plaza (though there was a portion held offsite).
That was 2004, the last time Anime Boston had a smaller attendance than Worldcon. In 2014, AB had over ten times the attendance of Worldcon.
And Pax East blows them both out of the water.
Can we just stop awarding . . . period?
Is there any award that isn’t currently the equivalent of a “My Child Is An ‘A’ Student At Margaret Sanger Elementary” bumper sticker?
I don’t even think it’s possible to create a new, non-sales-based award that isn’t automatically devalued at its outset simply because it exists in our current “Everyone Shall Feel Good and Valued” era.
Let’s just knock it off. No more Awards. For anything. Ever again.
If you want to honor your favorite editor or other behind-the-scenes associate, send her some flowers and an awesome gift card, but for Pete’s sake don’t waste her time with a devalued industry insider circle jerk commemorative statuette.
It may yet come to that.
BTW, the more I look at all this shuffling, the less I understand why it called WorldCon. Bet, outside English-speaking countries this local anthill is mostly unheard of. And that’s a lot of World, shurely.
Back when fandom was teensy tiny WorldCon was a big thing. Now it’s a provincial backwater town ruled by the kind of people who routinely attend book club meetings at your local Barnes & Noble every week in order to recite their 5-page free verse odes to the glorious revolutions of the 60’s.
I worked at Barnes & Noble for years and years. I know these guys like I know what Patchouli smells like – some stinks one can never forget.
I find burning sage makes that go away.
So here’s a thought. Maybe next year the SPs shouldn’t have a slate. Maybe either spread a wide net and suggest 20 or so works in each category that are suggested reading (and leaving blank those categories where they can’t come up with at least 7 – 10 suggestions) or don’t name any specific works and just encourage people to get out there and nominate whatever works they think are awesome.
Personally, I joined and nominated/voted this year because of the SP campaign, but I nominated based on my own preferences, and only 3 of the things I nominated got on the ballot (Skin Game, GotG, and Winter Soldier). It was very disappointing to me to see that the SP and RP slates swept the ballot because it meant that nothing I nominated that wasn’t on those slates mattered. Likewise, it was very disappointing to me to see everything from those slates get pushed under No Award because, again, my actual voting didn’t matter. It sucked both ways.
So maybe next year the SPs shouldn’t fight fire with fire, so to speak, in pitting one slate against the agreed-upon works that the SJWs nominate, but rather just get out there and encourage everyone to nominate whatever they want to (with, like I said, possibly a very wide selection of suggested reading which is too big to constitute a slate).
That might work if 50,000 people were involved.
They proved the Hugo is a useless award. If they don’t like something, it won’t get nominated in the first place. If it does get nominated, they’ll nuke the entire category to stop it from getting a Hugo.
Yeah, this is pretty much where I’m at right now. A Hugo is worth about as much as a people’s choice award given by your average high school, for all that it truly represents the opinion of fandom. (And I mean fandom in the actual sense, not in the sense that these Worldcon people decide to use it, as if they somehow own fandom. Honestly, the arrogance of that.)
Not sure that is true. The Fans of Worldcon are the fans of Worldcon. They are fairly small in number and they have an open system which allowed you to play rat bastard to their process.
But I think the Goodreads is more prestigious. The Fan Base is much larger and the number of votes much greater. Now you guys wouldn’t count for much because you are a tiny group – but it is a better award.
The Hugos only represent the wisdom of the Worldcon Fans.
“which allowed you to play rat bastard to their process”
Was that directed at me? I believe it was, and yet I think I made it pretty clear that I did not vote in lock-step with the slate as it sounds like you’re implying, nor did I set out did destroy your awards. I heard that they were fan awards that anyone could pay a membership fee to participate in, that sounded like fun, and I did so, nominating and voting purely based on my own opinions and tastes. And yet you just called me a rat bastard. Not that it should surprise me that you wouldn’t bother reading and responding to people as individuals. Not surprising at all.
Dear Shawna –
I only disagreed that it was worth as much as a people’s choice award. I was saying it is worth less than that.
I meant puppies in total playing rat bastard to the process. If you are not a pup, good for you.
Sorry, I used an unclear analogy and then was unable to edit it. What I meant by people’s choice is if you took any random high school of decent sized and had its students vote on which book they like best. Given the size and insular nature of Worldcon compared with all fans of sci-fi/fantasy over the world, that’s about the actual representation of the fanbase that you get.
You could have seen that I wasn’t one of the people that you call the puppies (though I was brought into it because of the SP campaign and therefore could be called one on that basis, though I did not vote for many/most of the things on the SP slate) if you’d paid more attention in reading my post and responding to me based on what I said rather than assuming that everyone on here is saying the exact same thing. It’s like when so-called “feminists” (who are so extreme that they’re actually female supremacists) say that because I’m a woman I should think/act/vote a certain way or else I’m not a “real” woman. People respond a lot better when you treat them as individuals and respond to them based on what they actually said.
And again, these are all lies.
Shawna, if you read through the comments here you’ll see that our SJWnumbers is an arrogant, smug hater of anything differing from his dogmatic beliefs. Don’t pay much attention to him; we only do so to keep newcomers from believing he might possibly have any valid points.
And he has a huge boner over Goodreads.
@Shawna
SJW#s has trouble with basic message board grammar and hasn’t mastered the whole “@whoever” thing yet or figured out metaphor or alot of other things. BTW when you got your Worldcon membership did you send in a soul sample with your payment so SJW#’s and his ilk could determine or not they consider you a True Fan or wrongfan?
lol
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=most+prestigious+science+fiction+award
Try it w/ any search engine of your choice. Let me know when you find Goodreads coming up over Hugos.
No one cares about Goodreads. And your incessant crowing about it isn’t winning it any new adherents.
I think it’s far too soon to write off the Goodreads Choice Awards. I think they’re just too new to really guess at what their long-term impact is going to be. A Goodreads win in 2015 might not be as prestigious as a Hugo, but I don’t think Goodreads is going anywhere. The only downside to the Goodreads awards is that they go to books that have already made the bestseller lists, so you’re unlikely to find something “new” or “overlooked” there.
Nighthawk said:
“If they don’t like something, it won’t get nominated in the first place. If it does get nominated, they’ll nuke the entire category to stop it from getting a Hugo.”
“They” being Fans rather than pups. Yes I think the jest is that this is a fan based award and if someone freeps to put crap on the ballot, the fans might just nuke the goofy pups that did. Seems right to me.
Fans voted. Pups don’t like what the Fans like. It makes the Sad. So sad. Too bad.
Yep, that’s the arrogance I’m talking about. Stop saying “Fans” like you guys own the word. There are millions of people in the world who consider themselves fans of one thing or another (including sci-fi/fantasy) who’ve never even heard of Worldcon. I know I’ve considered myself a fan of fantasy and sci-fi my whole life and didn’t hear about your little con until Larry Correia brought it up.
.”Stop saying “Fans” like you guys own the word. There are millions of people in the world who consider themselves fans of one thing or another…”
But here we are talking about Worldcon Fans – as opposed to pups.
Your “fans” gave a fuck-rag like Lightspeed a Hugo. Go beg Sunil Patel there if he’ll forego his white male reviews boycott and give your work a shot. Or maybe you’re lucky and one of the right race. Then beg Lightspeed if they’ll give you a slot in one of their Women, Queers and PoC… Destroy SFF segregated anthologies. Or maybe you’re lucky and hit the jackpot of being queer, female and PoC all at once. Maybe at some point they’ll mention writing and art.
So “Fans” only includes Worldcon attendees who agree with you, eh? You can keep pushing this redefinition all you want, you’ll never sell it.
Silly boy! If Worldcom meant to restrict membership to an elite few, one would not be able to purchase voting memberships.
Instead membership would be by invitation only, with classic “blackball” rules and the rest.
SJW, dove, by your own definition YOU are NOT a Fan.
You’re just a little boy trying to lick the boots of The Worldcon Fans(TM) so they won’t kick you too hard.
We call those people “hangers”. You’re not worth their time. But go on putting all this effort into people who will turn on you when the wind changes.
The very definition of an “omega”.
So,the people who bought the ticket to participate are not fans. Only the certain ones who voted the way you approve of are fans. In other words, your logic is fairly pure horse shit.
3,000 No Awards? Really, I know of spontaneous livestream on YouTube that get a bigger audience than that. God help them if someone nominates PewDePie or Epic Rap Battles of History next year…
Epic Rap Battles of History is awesome. Hmm, what category would it be nominated for. And double hmm, I’ll need to look into how works are considered eligable for nomination because there’s a little webcomic that I absolutely love and I’d love to suggest to fellow fans that they try and get it nominated.
Thanks for handling my light work Shawna 😛
Of course it seems right to you. You’re nuts.
‘Personally, I joined and nominated/voted this year because of the SP campaign, but I nominated based on my own preferences’
What you did Shawna is exactly what the Sad Puppy campaigns are about. Why should a successful tactic be changed?
I suppose I’m just trying to think of a way to render their “It’s because we hate slates!” argument less valid. And because I really was annoyed with the way my vote never really counted. We all know that if/when the SP slate goes up next year and, because of the change in nominating system, only one or two from that slate are in each category, the SJWs will still put those nominees below ‘no award’. Naturally, that’ll just show their true colors even more than this year did, but…
I guess I’m just trying to think of a way that this whole ‘make the Hugos relevant again’ thing isn’t a totally hopeless cause. Seems like either the SPs nominate a slate and get voted down as a vicious backlash or we don’t nominate a slate and none of our individual nominations get enough votes to be on the ballot. There’s no real way to beat the SJWs at their own game here, so I guess I think we should try a different tactic.
You can’t win a fight on the internet because the opponent will never concede defeat, even when that defeat has been thoroughly proven. Same principle here. What’s the point, especially when the media is on their side?
For nominations, the accusation was that it was ballot stuffing led me to look at the RP numbers.
The loest RP nominee would seem to be the high watermark for ‘just copied Vox’ ballot.’ Looks like that mark is 29 votes, which would change…. 3 categories?
Well, not all of the media is on their side. I’ve read a lot stories that would certainly be voted ‘no award’ by the CHORFs.
When the voting rules for next year are published and set in carbonite then the slate voting may indeed be overridden by something else. It should just be as successful and thought-provoking as the slates.
Here’s another weak point in their armor. If enough people cared enough to show up and shoot down the proposed changes next year, that might be worth aiming for.
If these are science fiction and fantasy fan awards, why are massive swathes of fandom absent? Where’s the manga nominations for graphic novel? Where’s the video games, both console and PC? Where’s the pen and paper RPGs? The miniature gamers? Where’s the YouTubers? Where’s the machinima groups? The Cosplayers? The anime fans? Magic: the Gathering players? The media tie-ins? There are more lore fans for World of Warcraft that read Blizzard’s monthly short stories than Worldcon members. There are more people on John Q. Random YouTuber’s livestream announced on Twitter than nominating voters for the Hugos.
Get those groups involved and any Worldcon slate gets washed away. The Hugo voters in this record year only come to less than 0.1% of Blizzard’s active playerbase in World of Warcraft. The problem is, no one is nominating things the greater science fiction fandom cares about.
Brad made a good case that we’re a backwater of the greater SFF fandom this year, but we selected works that only appealed to the backwater. We need to do better.
And I’d love to see if we get a repeat of this year’s Hugo ceremony if companies like Wizards of the Coast and Blizzard send representatives.
> why are massive swathes of fandom absent?
They were wrongfans, run out of True Fandom to press their noses against the window of Worldcon, eventually to set up their own pathetic loser “cons” like Comic Con.
Sure, they may get over 100,000 attendees, but they’re not trufans and can never be…
All those missing fandoms are at Dragon*con, not world con.
“All those missing fandoms are at Dragon*con, not world con.”
…and PAX, and RTX, and Blizzcon, and Anime Expo, and Comiket…
…all of which turn away crowds larger than WorldCon.
Let’s bring fandom back to the Hugo awards.
Because if gamers got involved in numbers the whole face of the con would change. When they have cons they’re fun and inviting for everyone and they tend to be big and diverse. When you have a very large group of very diverse people it’s hard to create and control a narrative. Also, gamers tend not to enjoy being told what they think and how to think it and when they get mad they do things. The last thing Worldcon wants is to risk drawing in gamers because then they’ll bring in Gamer Gate as well and that’s the sort of attention no one wants. GG pays attention, takes notes and records events as they happen, making it impossible for the people they catch in lies to backtrack or effectively change the narrative. It would be a nightmare for those who favor the status quo.
Shawna, you have a realistic evaluation of the situation. But the point is, it’s fun. And even if they no award everything, we still learned of a lot of great stuff to read by going through this process.
That would be essentially a Sad Puppies version of the Locus Recommended Reading list. It sounds good in theory, but a list of 10-20 recommended novels is a lot to digest in practice. It can also be expensive to try to track down all of the works on the list, particularly the short fiction works. I “undernominate” because I usually haven’t read five novels that I think deserve an award. This year, I had The Bone Clocks and The Martian (which was ruled ineligible). I didn’t nominate anything in the other fiction categories. I don’t think I even filled the Long Form Dramatic Presentation category, and I’m a big movie watcher.
That being said, I don’t really know what SP4 is going to look like. Kate Paulk may decide to go in the direction that you’re suggesting, or she may end up only suggesting 2 or 3 works per category.
RP2, on the other hand, is probably going to be a slate full of things that Vox Day thinks that the so-called SJWs are going to want to nominate, thus “tainting” them with their presence on his slate. If that happens, I expect a lot of people to decline their nominations, and maybe a slew of No Awards again next year. And if/when that happens, then everyone comes back the next day and votes in EPH and 4/6 for the nominations process, and this whole thing ends there.
I could totally see Vox nominating things just to trick the SJWs into boycotting them. And that would be pretty hilarious if it worked.
I kind of think having only 2 or 3 recommended nominees would be nice. If nothing else, it’ll be easier for voters to work through. (Though, as this year’s Best Novel category proved, the SJW crowd will definitely boycott anything on the SP list, no matter how few there are.)
At this point, I feel like I’ll probably keep an eye on things next year, but this year’s whole Hugo thing just makes me feel tired and apathetic. I mean really, I think all the SJWs proved is that the Hugo is a completely archaic award that isn’t worth paying attention to. When a group, as a whole, will vote No Award over a storytelling genius like Jim Butcher, they have lost any respect or consideration I had for them. (And that’s not even counting the fact that I absolutely hated Three Body Problem and can’t fathom how anyone considers that quality writing.)
And for extra points Vox could point his Minions to a different slate just before the nominations, causing even more angst and confusion…
If you feel tired and apathetic, I suggest take a break, and read all the Monster Hunter novels. You’ll at least get some energy from them 🙂
EPH takes us back to Sad Puppies 2 where there were one or two Puppy items per category, and a counter slate wouldn’t dislodge them, nor would Vox playing whatever game he thinks is most amusing next.
Hey Larry,
Just came over here after reading some of Charles Stross’s triumphalism on his blog. Someone posted this photo (from twitter):
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CNEcxJ-UwAAJG3C.jpg
with the comment (from the twitter post) “Hugo winners that aren’t sad puppies. Boy, look at all that diversity!”
Thought you might get a laugh out of it.
That photo is a few years old, but the newer ones aren’t better.
Don’t worry, technically they’re all transblack and transgay. They feel the oppression of others by proxy for them, kinda like a rent-an-oppression.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the transblack thing LOL
Does the term “projection” mean anything to you, Mr. Correia? Your Sad Puppies *are* a “tiny, insular, politically motivated clique” who “care far more about the author’s identity and politics than the quality of the work.”
I believe this is where we point at you and make duck noises. An accusation of projecting that projects your own biases on the other guy that you accuse of projecting them on you. Rich.
Please Cal, go on. We’re all ears.
That must be why the Sad Puppies nominated Annie Bellet, and Marko Kloos, and Black Gate. And that’s just the ones you people ran off.
Do you know Jim Butcher’s politics? Because I don’t. Steve Diamond’s? Rajnar Vajra’s? Sheila Gilbert’s? Jason Cordova’s?
One of the most amazing takeaways from all this is how much the anti-Puppies declare they’ve read all of VD’s and John Wright’s posts yet show not the slightest sign of having done the same with the interviews, blog posts and Twitter feeds of Tobias Buckell, Jim Hines, Kate Elliott, Kameron Hurley, Renay, Requires Hate, Aliette de Bodard, Saladin Ahmed, Ann Leckie, Book Smugglers, Daniel Jose Older, Rose Fox, N. K. Jemisin, Tananarive Due, Cecily Kane, Shaun Duke, Alyssa Wong, Charles Stross, Nicola Griffith, Justine Larbalestier, Amal El-Mohtar, Djibril Al-Ayad, S. L. Huang, Liz Bourke, Seanan McGuire, Farah Mendelsohn, Abigail Nussbaum, Brianna Wu, Anita Sarkeesian, Randi Harper, Arthur Chu, John Scalzi, Monica Byrne, Damien Walter, Natalie Luhrs, and too many others to name.
In other words people have been arguing about a play with the entire first act thrown into a memory-hole. A simple analysis of that data reveals one simple fact: a three year long irrational rhetoric about ethnic European heterosexual men that often verges on hysterical if not outright hate speech. I’ve looked at that data and I’m telling you – there’s not anything else there; not a single goddam thing. It’s one of those all roads lead to Rome things wrapped in clever rhetoric. That clever rhetoric always ends up in the same place. Nothing like it has ever existed in the century of American SFF, unless you count Jack Vance and James Schmitz being stupid enough to submit work while being men and not people of color, because that’s just like a tacit cabal – an ideological patriarchy of white male supremacy of sexism and misogyny, isn’t it? There is not the slightest sign of a moral ethos or principles in that data. There is only a good race and sex and a bad one. That’s what social justice crusaders consider data and research. Where there’s smoke there’s fire.
The KKK makes up shitty myths about black people. Neo-Nazis make up shitty myths about Jews. Lesbian Third Wave Feminism makes up shitty myths about straight white men. It’s just as simple as that.
In case anyone has forgotten, Arthur Chu remains deeply, deeply stupid:
“Arthur Chu @arthur_affect · 10h10 hours ago
Ha ha Sarah Hoyt made up a slur (“Chicom”, “Chinese communist”) to smear Cixin Liu with, you can’t make this up”
So much fail.
And this guy won a quiz show? Holy crap.
I have to think Jeopardy started giving out participation awards in his case.
I’m sure his parents are right proud of their “My Son Won Jeopardy” bumper sticker.
Regurgitating memorized trivia is not the same as knowledge.
Says Chu, an anti-white racial supremacist who hides behind “social justice.”
You mean the rape apologist that hides behind social justice and a Twitter keyboard?
Whenever a self-appointed expert on group defamation doesn’t even know what hell it is, you know you’re being sold a con game. That would include every moron knocked out of the nominations by RP and SP.
“Duh, I coulda bin a contendah!!”
Looks like the Usual Suspects are gearing up for a full-scale swarming on Sarah. Twitter-google her name if you want to engage them or screenshot them. I guess they’re tired of attacking Larry and Brad.
Engage, or run for the nearest fallout shelter before Sarah starts engaging them?
Kowal has already run for the hills after getting heavily smacked down.
Unfortunately, Scott Lynch got involved. Given how badly his last book sucked, he might want to spend more time writing good fiction for a novel instead of bad fiction on the Internet.
Here is another great disappointment for me. I really loved the first two Locke Lamora books. But following him on Twitter … I Can’t Even…