I was offline all weekend. I needed the sanity break and spent it playing the latest Call of Duty with my son.

George R.R. Martin has posted a series of blog posts about the Sad Puppies campaign. On the 9^th I responded to the first 3. He posted a 4^th while I was composing my response,  and a couple more since, and of course, despite Mr. Martin being pretty civil, the narrative spewing attack dogs aren’t, so when I came back this morning I found people all over the internet calling me out, saying, ooooh, he got you! Why can’t you answer him? Why are you ignoring him? Where’s the Beef? Got you, Correia, GOT YOU!!!!

Sorry, my time machine was inoperable, so I’ll lump my answers to his 4^th post in with the response to today’s letter directly to me.  George R. R. Martin took the time to respond to my post from last week, and though we see things very differently, he was polite, and I would like to respond to a few things. Warning. This post is going to be HUGE. I’m responding to two great big blog posts here. If you just want to read the response to the response, skip down to that link.

 

Mr. Martin,

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my letter. I too am worn out of this whole thing. It turns out being labeled the second coming of BushSatanHitler across the internet isn’t super fun, and is actually very time consuming.

In this post, http://grrm.livejournal.com/418285.html titled Where’s the Beef, you tried to demonstrate that my side’s arguments are spurious, and that there is in fact no political bias in the awards.

I’ve read Brad Torgensen’s statements on this point, and I’ve read Correia’s MONSTER HUNTER NATION, and I’ve read hundreds of comments from their supporters. As with any large group, there is a wide range of opinion. Some of the Puppies are relatively moderate and reasonable. Others, I fear, are beyond the pale, raging and ranting about SJWs and cliques and secret conspiracies.

If I am responsible for everyone that comments on my site, then you are responsible for yours. I think we can both agree that is absurd.  I let everyone speak for themselves, debate, and I don’t remove comments just because I disagree with them. I don’t “massage” or “disemvowel”, and I hardly ever block anyone except for insane trolls and usually then only after they’ve become really repetitive and boring.

But for the rants, yes, there have been some among the 3000 comments, but I think you are being unfairly dismissive. Especially since most of those posts come from one man who has made a hobby of collecting racist quotes from Social Justice Warriors.

On SJWs, you have already told us that you don’t think SJWs don’t exist.  However, half of America thinks they do, and it is a running joke to us. Did you use the term NeoCon to describe many republicans during the Bush years? Did they disagree? Irrelevant, because the term entered common usage.

So here is a question for you.  What term would you use to describe the shared politics of the dozens of reporters, columnists, and bloggers who have run similar articles this week with obvious false accusations that Sad Puppies supporters ran an anti-diversity slate, motivated by racism, sexism, and homophobia?

Jerks? Yes, they are, but that is a bit too coordinated for mere jerkage. That was a political attempt to establish a political narrative.

So, what politics do those reporters share? The answer is glaringly obvious to most of us.   

As for “secret conspiracies” for the last few years we talked about there being campaigns, cliques, and a dominate group culture in the award process. Keep in mind it wasn’t until last week that anyone of note on your side admitted that there were actually campaigns and cliques. And you yourself talked about the prevailing culture of WorldCon and how the Hugos belong to WorldCon.  

A few weeks ago, all of that stuff would have gotten labeled secret conspiracies by people who don’t like us, so forgive some of my fans for kind of feeling like they are on a roll here.

In your Where’s the Beef post you attempted to dismiss our allegations that there is a political bias in the awards now, by going through the history of the awards and looking at the political diversity of winners from long ago. Nice, but we are talking about a relatively recent trend.

You do admit and recognize that, and then go through the last few years, trying to dismiss our complaints. You listed a bunch of names of various people and demanded to know if they should be there or not…  

Nope. Not falling for that. Even assuming your attentions are pure, I’m not walking into that.

This entire time I’ve tried hard not to name other authors or talk negatively about their books. The times that I’ve screwed up and violated that (Ancillary Justice, Redshirts, Dinosaur Revenge) I’ve come to regret it later, because now I’ve made it personal between me and another author, which isn’t what I’m trying to accomplish.

I do like how you constantly rail against McCarthyism, and then demand I name names.  You even cited some authors’ ethnicity, brought up their race specifically, and challenged us to say if we approved of their works or not (after you made it about race) so if we didn’t think the book was deserving, now it is about racism and we have no point, or to avoid that we say we do approve of the book, and now we have no point.

Since you set a trap and invited me to walk into it, I thought about how best to answer you over the weekend. Basically, there is no good way to answer. Point out specifics, be the bad guy, don’t point out specifics, still be the bad guy. That is a Kafka Trap.

The actual tastes of my people, or the idea that our supporters formed their own opinion on this, or that they could come to their own conclusions never enters into your argument, just an assumption that Brad and I were somehow able to sway all of these people without evidence… Trust me. This obstinate crowd of roughnecks and manatees made that decision themselves, and we just gave them a vehicle to get noisy about it.  

I’m going to try hard to not insult any other author’s work I haven’t already insulted, because narrative to the contrary, I actually like some of the people you listed, and I hope they go on to have long fantastic careers.

I don’t think I ever said it was all a Social Justice conspiracy, and if I did, I was probably being flippant. I said it was politically biased. SJWs are just the loudest. The bias comes in a few forms, some of which you’ve already agreed with.

1. The author is popular with, or part of, some of the cliques.
2. The book appeals to the cliques’ politics (which overwhelmingly skew left).
3. The author has managed to not upset the angriest of all cliques which shall not be named.

Violate one of those rules and you are hosed.

But appeasing political bias and being a good book are not mutually exclusive. Something can satisfy A-C and still be a good book. There have been plenty of good works that still got onto the ballot. Yet you are trying to dismiss our argument that there is bias, by saying look at these good books that satisfy our bias! And meanwhile, we are all like, where are all the works that violated A, B, or C?

Let’s go to your list. Redshirts won that year, and you said:

Scalzi — look, I know Scalzi is liberal, and I know that the Puppies seem to hate him, though I can’t for the life of me understand why — but whatever you think of the writer’s politics, REDSHIRTS is a light, fun, amusing SF adventure, an affectionate riff off of STAR TREK, Ghu help us

No, I think he’s a fine of working a popularity contest. Redshirts was a light read, but I’m on record already disagreeing about amusing or fun and leave it at that. As for not understanding how my side could possibly dislike this man, here is him being gracious in victory the night last year’s final Hugo awards were announced:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Simply can’t imagine why my side doesn’t care for him… But anyways, we’ve got plenty more examples of him being classy if you’d like them.

As for the rest, I’m not going to stick my foot in those giant steel jaws you provided and talk trash about their work. They all satisfy A-C, and they can play the game.

Come to think of it, Bujold is actually liked on my side. She is also the only Baen author to get on the ballot in… Hell… I’m not actually sure. Decades? Ever? Has another Baen book ever been nominated pre Sad Puppies?

So moving past the quality of the work, let’s talk about this “social justice conspiracy”, which I suppose is your way of dismissing the competing cliques you already admitted exist and our claim of political bias. SJWs are just the loudest, angriest, poo throwing bunch who can be counted on to run all the articles calling their opponents racist. So the best novels that year as far as I can tell the politics wing left, left, left, left, and a question mark.

Then you move down the ballot, to where the presence of Brandon Sanderson, who is a political moderate and one of the most popular authors alive, got a nomination, but to you this proves there is no bias, and not that Brandon has worked within your culture for several years in order to be accepted and considered. As you’ve said, he’s paid his dues. But we’ll run with that… and then left, left, left. Okay. I’m convinced. No bias here!  

You try to make the next category about the author’s sex, which is just being disingenuous.  And I’m not sure of everyone’s politics, because I can’t remember, but looking at those names, I’m thinking among those 5, not a lot of Romney voters if you get my drift. You next cite shorts, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t all of those authors vocally on the left side of the spectrum too?  Sorry, I didn’t check beforehand because I wasn’t aware there was going to be a quiz.

I don’t think movies and TV shows should count in this particular discussion, because they are products created by hundreds of people, but nobody has ever mistaken you or Joss Whedon for Rush Limbaugh listeners (last I checked, there are like 4 of those in Hollywood, and I’m friends with all of them). But hey, if you do want to include movies, last year’s HUGE WIN FOR DIVERSITY (92% white liberals with one Asian liberal) does get a slightly better ratio if you include Alfonso Cuaron, because in America he would check the same box on an EEOC form as I do.

You then went back to the year before, and skim through ChiCon, looking for something we never alleged to prove us wrong, but again, the same old thing. They satisfy A-C. I don’t know Corey’s politics, but other than that, where do the other 4 nominees fall on the spectrum? From communist to liberal? Wow.

Oh, I’m sure there are some broad philosophical differences in there… to you… But to my side we’re back to the fact you have a thousand words for snow, and all we see is snow.

So in all the writing categories, you’ve got a handful of nominees with unknown or moderate politics.

What could we possibly have against Charlie Jane Anders? I don’t know, why don’t you go over to the article she wrote last week on io9 about how Sad Puppies is all motivated by racism and woman hating, and take a wild guess?

Then Torgersen and Resnick… Wow. Yeah, you got me there. Out of three years you found a couple of people who could be described as conservative in the writing categories. Resnick, a living legend, managed to survive his witch burning from the SFWA bulletin, but I believe Torgersen was still in the closet then.

Again, not trying to bag on an author’s work, but if you can’t find dreary, preachy message fic in some of that stuff you listed above, it might be because you are part of their target audience. And you don’t see it as preaching, but rather you see it as obvious truth.  Meanwhile, my people look at that list, and all we can do is shake our heads, and wonder if we outsiders even speak the same language as you guys.

But if you want to make this about the Social Justice “conspiracies”, let’s run with that and talk about C for a minute. I didn’t say they controlled the awards, they’re too inept for that. In fact, many times I’ve said the haters are outnumbered by regular WorldCon voters. I said that they would actively try to destroy any author with bad politics who got in. Of those authors you listed above, how many have ever said anything in public to disagree with the SJWs?  What happened to them if they did? What percentage have agreed with them or remained silent?  

By the way, some of the authors you listed above? I happen to know for a fact that a couple keep their politics quiet out of fear, because they know they have the wrong beliefs, and they don’t want to hurt their careers. And though I know you’ll demand proof, it isn’t my place to out them. Sorry.

There were like four other posts in there too, and I don’t have time to address them. I’ve already killed one week of productive writing time going back and forth on this subject, and I can’t afford to lose another.

So, on to the response letter directly to me. http://grrm.livejournal.com/420090.html

I am just about blogged out on the whole Puppygate thing, having devoted half a dozen posts and thousands of words to it over the past few days. However, Larry Correia responded to some of those posts on his own blog, MONSTER HUNTER NATION, as several dozen of his followers immediately emailed me to point out, and I promised to reply in turn. So here it is.

Thank you, Mr. Martin.

My original posts were long, and Mr. Correia’s reply was long, and if quoted them all, and then piled more on top of it, all of Live Journal might sink beneath the weight. So I am going to cut out the stuff by me that Correia quotes, since the originals are all available upstream, and edit down his own reply to just the point I want to answer.

Going back and forth quoting each other in public gets complicated, but I’ll do my best to be clear. I will do the same, with Mr. Martin in italics and me in bold. I’m going to be cutting everything that I’m not responding to directly, so I’d encourage everyone reading this to click on that link above to read the original in context.

I would have responded earlier, but as you can see, I have been busy posting about other aspects of this thing. But I do appreciate the response, and even more so, the courtesy you have shown. It’s my hope and belief that people on different sides of an issue can disagree, even heatedly, without it turning into rancor and name calling. We are, after all, fighting about a literary award.

Agreed. We may see the world differently, but we’re both fans and professional writers (though you’ve got me beat by orders of magnitude worth of success) and we both want our genre to thrive and readers to be happy.  

Mr. Martin said some nice things about my year’s Campbell ballot and his own loss. Cutting for space and sticking to the debate, but that was nice.  

What did matter was that the Campbell launched my career, just as it launched yours.

Actually, I’m not sure if that’s the case anymore. It used to be that the awards were a huge part of launching a career, but in recent times they don’t seem to make that much of a difference anymore, economically speaking. You’d have to ask publishers, but from what I’ve heard a Hugo nomination is usually a negligible difference in sales and new fans, and a win isn’t a whole lot better, but everything I know on that topic is second hand.

You spoke about how WorldCon used to be the biggest thing in Fandom, and I think back then the Hugos really would make a profound impact, but I think we’ve lost that. Mostly because fandom has kept growing, but as you’ve said, the Hugos have stayed small.

Sure. Of course, we had no internet in 1973, no emails. I had to make do with a few passing comments in print fanzines, and the occasional encounter at a con with a fan who had actually read one of my stories. Egoboo (as we called it) was hard to come by in those days. I sold my first story in 1970, published it in 1971, went to my con that same year, lost the Campbell in 1973, lost my first Hugo and Nebula in 1974, won a Hugo in September 1975… but it was not until a couple of months later, at the 1975 Windycon, that I was finally deemed to be enough of a writer to be asked to sit on a convention panel. Paying our dues, we called it. Acclaim was hard to come by; it had to be earned, and earning it took YEARS.

I was born in 1975. Considering how much the typical WorldCon voter likes me, luckily for me I was able to go around them to get my acclaim. Sorry, I’m just being flippant again.

I don’t condone treating anyone like shit. And I have never been a Mormon or a conservative or a gun-shop owner, so I don’t know what that is like.

It is awesome.

But I do wonder… you say you were called a liar, that people were angry with you for being who you were, that they said not to read your books… well, no need to paraphrase, you just said it all. But WHO called you a liar?

Who? Jackasses I assume. 🙂 

Serious answer, it wasn’t like I wrote the names down at first. I just put my head down and plodded on, mostly trying to avoid fights that might damage my career.

As time went on, I was making more money, I became more vocal, and more people like that showed up to pick fights, we started to collect them on the blog, and I mocked them right back.  If you actually care I could probably get some of my fans to compile a list of names and links for you. This has been a spectator sport over here for the last few years.

How many people said this stuff, where, in what context?

One person, ten people, a hundred? 

Leading up to Reno specifically, hard to tell, since it isn’t like most haters on the internet use their real name and post their business cards. Back then I didn’t know who they were. There were enough to scare the new guy. And since back then I wasn’t exactly planning on kicking over the table and stealing all your chairs, I didn’t think I’d need to catalog them for future evidence.

As time has gone on, you start to recognize the recurring haters, and realize that most of the slanderers are little no name writers, who’ve never had much success, or they are has beens, or almost weres, either way, they’re hoping that if they fling enough hate at people with the wrong politics to show that they are part of the tribe, that somebody important will notice them. Not being on that side, that’s my best guess anyway.

You have lived in a house made of gold bars since this has been a thing, so you might not be aware of how the Flaming Rage Nozzles of Tolerance operate.

Their actual status in the publishing world is irrelevant, because the goal of slander is to toss out as much as possible to see what sticks. Throw out some racism there, sexism here, a little misogyny on top, complete strangers hear it, don’t think about it too hard, and then for the rest of your life your name is connected to these vile things in their minds.

If the attackers get called on it, or busted, they delete the embarrassing stuff, run away, then come back somewhere else, often under a different name, trying to stick narrative into whole new conversations. I’ve got a couple of guys who are so persistent at it, posting under dozens of pseudonyms, whenever my name shows up anywhere that I’m pretty sure they’ve got me on Google alerts.

If you are talking about more recent times, and the number of people like that, plug my name into your search engine for the last week. Now we are in the hundreds, if not thousands. Forums, blog comments, all over FB, and this time it is racist, sexist, blah blah blah… I wish they would mix the narrative up a little and accuse me of something interesting.

I don’t doubt you got some criticism, that people took shots (no pun intended) at you… but fandom is large, even worldcon fandom. There are always assholes. No doubt they were there in 1973 as well, in that first Campbell race. I mean, have there ever been two contenders as opposite as Pournelle and Effinger? That was a classic Old Wave/ New Wave showdown, with us other nominees just caught in the crossfire. However, the internet did not exist to magnify it all, and most of the sniping went on in room parties, with no permanent record of the drunken debates. I am not sure that what you suffered was any worse than what they did, way back when.

Mr. Martin, I’m afraid that you are comparing the behavior of a handful of assholes against organized slander for political ends. Your hypothetical asshole could try to defame somebody for having the wrong politics, but it took a whole lot of work to spread it to thousands of strangers unless you worked at a newspaper. Not anymore.

You keep conflating the history of WorldCon with now, before many of those involved in the current controversy were even born, but they’re not the same thing.  The world has changed. I don’t think it is meaner, but it has made meanness convenient, and the ability to defame is just a click away.

You’ve not been the target of these people, because they don’t see you as an enemy. And even if they did, you sell all the books, they’re bugs to you. Most authors on my side aren’t in the financial position to weather a slander storm.

And regardless of what happened in Reno a few years ago—if you are trying to poke holes in the veracity of my story that I never suspected I would need to document—go search the internet and see how these people reacted last year when Sad Puppies got a handful of people on the ballot. Or look at the giant flaming shit storm of last week, where blatantly stupid lies were passed around to hundreds of thousands of readers with impunity.

Also, all these things that people said about you… are those direct quotes, or are you paraphrasing?

Paraphrasing primarily, because I’d have to start huffing paint to kill enough brain cells to pass for some of these folks. I’m not that good of a writer.

 Because it seems to me that the Sad Puppies love to paraphrase, taking any challenge or criticism and tweaking it around to make it more offensive and insulting.

Okay. Then don’t accept our version. Go read reporter Damien Walter’s account in the Guardian about my sexist homophobic campaign to steal the Hugos last year. (by the way, how did he know about my nomination before it was announced?) Or go read his account in the Guardian where he libeled Toni Weisskopf. Or go read Entertainment Weekly, the Telegraph, Salon, Slate or the many other places where I’m a racist white guy from earlier this week.

Of course we tweak their words around to mock them, because bullies hate that.  You have to have fun with this stuff, or it’ll drive you nuts.

Take this “Wrongfan” moniker I now see popping up on Puppy sites. Neither I nor any of the other SMOFs or trufans or worldconners that I know have ever called you or your friends “wrongfans.” You guys made that up and applied it to yourself.

Damn right we did. I’m pretty sure I invented the word Wrongfun to describe how the perpetually outraged crowd on Twitter was perpetually offended that somebody somewhere was having fun wrong.

Let me give you an example of wrongfun. After my last letter to you went public I had three or four people concern trolling me on Twitter because I used the term “Twitter Lynch Mob” to describe a well-known type of behavior. They’re perched like falcons, waiting for somebody to transgress, so that they can swoop in and feel superior. If you use the wrong words, play the wrong games, read the wrong books, wear the wrong shirt, they’ll be there. These people are always looking for an excuse to shake their fingers at you for having fun wrong, hence the term, Wrongfun.

So when Teresa Nielsen Hayden (who somehow knew that SP3 had 3/5 of the best novel nominations before they were announced) started going off about us, and how we were outsiders, my people took Wrongfun and turned it into Wrongfan. I don’t recall who did that, but it was funny, and it made my people laugh, so it stuck.

Words are awesome like that. I do find it ironic that you don’t approve of my people making up words to describe the world as they see it, in the same sentence that you speak of SMOFs, Trufans, and Worldconners.

 I wish that would stop. People are saying enough hurtful shit in this debate already without making up new insults and suggesting that the other side was throwing them at you. 

We don’t take it as an insult. It is more of a badge. We don’t need to make up new insults. There are plenty already. Did you read the thread on Making Light? Have you been on Twitter? Have you seen the hundreds of Facebook threads? Have you seen the many blog posts and newspaper articles?

I really have no idea what you mean by a “whisper campaign.” You make it sound so sinister.

It was easier than typing out Bunch of Political Assholes Talking Shit In An Attempt To Discredit And Defame Someone They Did Not Like.

Do people talk about books and writers? Sure they do. (They used to do it more. These days, con suite debates are more likely to be about movies than novels). But nobody is whispering. Fans don’t whisper. Fans are loud-mouthed and opinionated.

Oh no, they do both. If you think they are only open and honest about their opinions, you’ve missed the backstabby, gossipy side of the equation. That’s there too, but since they don’t write it down, I can’t copy it over to my webpage to make fun of it, and when we talk about that stuff you guys just assume we are paraphrasing.

You’d win that bet. Nobody said much of anything about me before my first Worldcon, because no one had any idea who I was. I was pretty much an invisible person at that con. I had been to one earlier con, and I knew maybe half a dozen people. I spent much of that con standing quietly in corners, trying to look interesting so people would talk to me. Oh, yes, there were a few people who were terrific, friendly, welcoming — Gardner Dozois, Terry Carr, Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein –but you could count them on the fingers on one hand. Nobody rolled out the red carpet for me. Nobody gave two shits that I was a Campbell Award finalist. So we all have our traumas, Mr. Correia.

Trauma is a strong word, Mr. Martin. I save trauma for things like blunt force, or running out of Coke Zero right before a deadline with a bunch of writing still to do.

How many belligerent drunks? One? Two? Ten?

One that I can recall. Most people aren’t stupid enough to start shit with the 6’5” 300 pound guy who grew up punching cows.

I think it matters.

Having removed rowdy drunks from establishments, I’d say!

You say that you were “berated” by other panelists… but panels at SF cons do often become loud and heated, it is not at all unusual. I doubt any special malice was directed at you. WHat was the panel topic? Who was on it? Who berated you? With what words? Is it possible that you were berating the other panelists back?

 

I’m supposed to remember all the details of a few panels I was on, like 200 panels ago? Well, answering your questions in order, I don’t remember. I have no flipping idea. Some jackass? I don’t remember what words. It is possible I berated them back, I do that sort of thing. Beats me. I’m going off of a memory of being pissed off and surly. Kind of wrote it off and moved on.

I am not trying to call you a liar, Mr. Correia, but…

I feel like you are, but that’s fine. I’ve already had people digging through my blog history to find my con report to say “He sounds too cheerful!” (no shit, because all this writing stuff beats milking cows). This exchange is a good example of why I refused my nomination. This shouldn’t be about just me.  Now I regret sharing my personal experience, because it just turns into another angle to dismiss the whole thing.

Tell you what, Mr. Martin, go ahead, in your mind, erase all references to my personal experiences, because yours were different and better. For this current debate, it’s as if my experiences never happened, everything was wonderful and inclusive, and joy and butterflies… Strike that personal testimony from the record and just say that I’m a malicious dick of unknown motivation who decided to prove a point for an unknown reason.  

Instead, let’s focus on the stuff we have been paying attention to, and what we have documented over the last two years when we were actively looking for this stuff.

Some people love to argue, some don’t. Some take disagreement to mean disrespect. Some are thin-skinned. I don’t know you well enough to know where you fall in respect of all that.

I spend my free time arguing politics on the internet for fun. To prove a point I picked a fight with half of publishing, and now in between reading articles about what a racist I am, I’m having a public debate with one of the most famous authors in the world with lots of angry people waiting to jump on any mistake. I must be incredibly thin skinned.

I don’t know who the Barflies are. Do you just mean you hung out in the bar? Lots of people hang out in the bar at a con, I was not aware there was a specific group. You can always find lots of writers in the bar, usually around some editor who is buying the drinks.

Barflies… Capital B, as in Baen Barflies, from Baen’s Bar, one of the oldest scifi forums dating back to the dawn of the internet. Great folks, and there is always a small contingent of them at any con. I’m kind of surprised you don’t get the reference.

Come on, Larry. The cool kids? Surely you have been around fandom long enough to realize that there are no cool kids. We’re all the fat kids, the nerds, the computer geeks, the guys who always had their nose in a book, who loved comics and played chess and couldn’t get a date for a prom. And the girls are the geek girls, our female counterparts.

Cool is relative, I’ll give you that. I meant in terms of the In Crowd.  You know, like how you established your WorldCon cred with the giant list of things you’ve been to and people you’ve known since the 70s.

Did you go to the Hugo Losers Party? That’s become an offical con thing now, and the SMOFs have taken it over and made it stuffy and semi-formal, with door dragons deciding who gets in (but as a Campbell loser, you would certainly have been on the list. Gardner Dozois and I founded that party in 1976, the night after I’d lost two Hugos. The whole point was to get drunk and bitter and bitch and tell each other we’d been robbed. We had a little contest, each of us insisting “I am a bigger loser, because… ” It was all in good fun. People who get honestly for real pissed off about losing Hugos… no, man, really, that’s no good. Fake bitter takes the sting out of losing. Real bitter poisons everything.

I did. I recall it being boring and sad, with lots of complaining and crying from people. I remember I hung out for a bit until I saw the spreadsheet printout, then I bailed. I’m an auditor, the numbers were way more interesting. Especially how this whole damned thing was determined by like .001% of fandom.

It’s history that gives the Hugos their prestige, not statistics. I believe I made that point at some length in my first post, so I won’t repeat myself.

You did. You were very clear. I was also clear that I thought they were supposed to be a prestigious big deal, and not just a popularity contest for a couple little groups of insiders.

Okay, these are some strong statements, and I have to ask once again, is it possible that some of this is wounded feelings and hyperbole?

Very possibly. Wounded feelings? I’m not a machine. I was bummed and annoyed. Hyperbole? No Portuguese person has ever been accused of subtlety. I ran a campaign with a spokesmanatee riffing off of Sarah McLachlan animal shelter videos. I wasn’t giving testimony in court. But if you think I’m exaggerating about the venom, I’d invite you to go read the internet right now. Same nonsense, only louder now.  

Were you actually called “a liar,”

Yes. Repeatedly.

or did someone just claim your statement was untrue? Big difference there.

Both.  But again, pretend that I’m just a crank with a faulty memory and look at what is going on right in front of your face from the last week. You’ve got an editor from one of the biggest publishing houses saying that Larry Correia is a lying liar who lies, and that’s not a paraphrase. That’s still getting retweeted today.  

Were you “attacked,” or did people just disagree with you?

Both. For example, right now I’d say that George R. R. Martin or Mary Robinette Kowal disagree. I’d say that Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Arthur Chu, and a bunch of reporters attacked.

Did someone actually use the words “shit writer” and “shit product?”

That is accurate. I’ve gotten that one a lot. It is a constant favorite on Facebook.

Or is this just more “wrongfan” stuff, where someone says something critical, and it gets turned all the way up to eleven on the offensiveness scale?

Nope. Wrongfan is us having fun and showing these assholes that they can’t drag us down. And shitty writer is only like a four or five on the scale. Seven or eight is the white supremacist, angry white male, racist, woman hater stuff. I don’t think these little wimps have the imagination to hit a nine or ten and the EW article attempt at the gold just made them look stupid. But just in case, I’m ready for the eleven, and I’ve warned my local sheriff’s department what’s going on. Luckily they were already familiar with the tactic of SWATing, and I live in a sensible rural area, so I’m not worried about it.

You didn’t, though. (speaking of proving my point) At least I do not believe you did.

I said that people with the wrong politics who got on the ballot would be campaigned against and actively slandered. -Check.   

I said that WorldCon was really a small group that did not represent all of fandom. -Check.

I said there was campaigning. – Check.

I am not calling you a liar, I am just saying that I believe that statement to be false. In fact, I think my own “Where’s the Beef?” blog post pretty well demolished the Sad Puppy claims.

See above.  I think demolished might be a stretch. More like there is a severe difference in perception between our respective sides.

Your supporters may not think so. Does that mean they are calling me a liar? My supporters think I was totally convincing, so…

Which is why ultimately internet debate is a spectator sport. I am under no illusion that I will sway you. I present my arguments to convince the undecided and give support to my side.

However, your posts have been absolutely wonderful for me and my people, because you’ve been honest and come out and said many things we’ve been saying too. Plus, you shot down that whole stupid narrative with people yelling at Brad Torgersen for failing to contact everybody we put on our suggested slate, by pointing out how stupid and hypocritical that is. So on the contrary, if any of my people are calling you a liar, point them out and I’ll gladly tell them to shut up.

I wish I could disagree with that, but I won’t. I am not dishonest either. You’re right, Mr. Correia. You will never win a Hugo. Whether you could have won one before the Sad Puppies, well, I don’t know,

No, trust me. I couldn’t. I’m not good enough at ass kissing to ever overcome my politics.

but now, it is true, you have pissed way too many people off. On the other hand, you know, there are many terrific writers in the history of our genre who have never won a Hugo. Your friend Brad Torgersen has his little list, and I have my own, and the names on his list and the names on mine are very different. Doesn’t mean there is a secret conspiracy. All it means is that tastes differ.

Again, not a secret conspiracy. If I said that academia or Hollywood was overwhelmingly liberal, would that be a secret conspiracy?  No, it would be pointing out that culturally they are overwhelmingly going to swing one way. Keep in mind, up until you and TNH last week, nobody important would come out and admit there was campaigning or cliques.

Has your career been sabotaged? From reading Monster Hunter Nation, it seems as if your career is going rather well.

I said they would try. I didn’t say they were good at it.

You’re on the TIMES bestseller list, are you not? I know a hundred writers in this field, damn good writers, hard-working and talented, who would love to have their careers sabotaged so that they could be on bestseller lists too.

I made the NYT list before I got my Campbell nomination (how often has that happened?)  In the last 6 years I’ve written 13 novels and 23 paying short stories. The reason these people haven’t been able to mess me up is that I work too hard, and my core fan base is made up of a bunch of normal people who don’t like being preached at and scolded either.

You said above you don’t know me well, so I’ll give you an idea. A few years ago I started taking what the perpetually offended wrote and having fun with it. I’d post up their articles in their entirety and then Fisk them, line by line. The fans loved it. So for every sale I lost because the slander stuck with some stranger and they wrote me off as a sexist homophobe, I figure I gained two who were also sick of this crap.

But most authors aren’t like me. They don’t like confrontation. Good people tend to freak out when you call them racist for no reason. And when they find themselves the victim of a Twitter Mob, they apologize, and retreat, afraid to sin again.

But apparently you’ve never seen this, and don’t think it can happen. My side lives it. They’ve watched all this unfold live for years. I don’t know if we’ll ever see eye to eye on that.

I try to assist other authors (and artists, and filmmakers, and fan writers) as well, by recommending their works on my Not A Blog. Sometimes it works. More often it does not. If you do the same thing, I doubt anyone will have a problem with it.

They sure minded when I did that last year.

The backlash you are getting now is because you went way beyond that. Yes, all completely legal… but your campaign, your slate tactics, did not just get some authors you overlooked onto the ballot, it pretty much drove everyone else off the ballot. In the three short fiction categories, there are no choices but your choices (well, yours, and Brad Torgersen’s, and Vox Day’s). You say you just wanted a seat at the table. But you kicked over the table, and took ALL the seats.

So we obeyed all the rules, but violated the secret gentleman’s agreement you guys had in place.

You know that we didn’t expect to sweep the categories. Some of the categories that were swept weren’t even because of Sad Puppies, but by Vox Day’s separate campaign that I had absolutely zero control over.

And please, please, don’t say that was what was done to your side in prior years. I think I demonstrated in “Where’s the Beef?” that that claim is simply not true. There have always been plenty of writers and stories that the Puppies should have liked on the ballot every year. If you think that’s untrue, please give me chapter and verse, with specific references to the ballots for Reno, Chicon, and LoneStarCon. Let’s at least see where we disagree.

Hey, stick your head into this hear bear trap, Correia… Nope, and I explained why above. Even if you were being completely honest there, Mr. Martin, I’m not stupid enough to give that kind of ammunition to the people who hate me by insulting other authors who aren’t currently pissed off at me. Bagging on individual author’s works accomplishes nothing for me, I regret the few times that I have. We made a case to the fans and they agreed. These fans didn’t just spring fully formed into being, just to mess with the Hugos overnight. You can use my refusal to dismiss the whole thing if you want, but again, I’m doing this for the undecided. They can look at the books and see if I have a point or not themselves.

Worldcon is a community. FIAWOL. I don’t regard that as trivial. We welcome newcomers, but yes, the hope is that they will embrace our history and traditions and culture, not just our awards. It’s a proud history and a rich culture. Some of it is silly, sure, but we even love that silliness. Some of it, like the Hugo awards, we take very seriously.

I asked you a very specific question last time on that topic, and I notice that you did not answer it in this letter. You did write a whole lot of posts last week, and I’ve been very frazzled, so I admit that I may have just missed it. So speaking of taking this stuff seriously, are the Hugos 1. an award that represents the likes of one small con, or are the Hugos 2. the award that represents all of fandom? Can’t have both. It has to be one or the other.

So far as I’m concerned, the Hugos are the Big Deal still. There’s no other award in the field with half as distinguished a list of previous winners. The Nebulas challenged for a time, but now they are a distant second.

Then if that is the case, if they are the Big Deal still, and not just coasting on history, shouldn’t everybody in fandom have a say? Or should WorldCon stay small, and have a smaller, more elite voting pool?

Perhaps. Maybe there is altogether too much “lumping together” on both sides. From over here, on the other side, it seems as though the “moderate, rational, normal” conservatives rarely seem to condemn the Vox Days and Rabid Puppies on your side, so we take your silence and lack of condemnation against the hate mongers as tacit approval.

Ah, but I have repeatedly, on Sad Puppies related posts, both last year and this year said that I don’t agree with Vox Day, I don’t condone what he says, I don’t speak for him, control him, or have any sway over him. Do you think Rapid Puppies has somehow made my life easier?

As for Rabid Puppies, there is absolutely nothing for me to condemn. They are fans too, who obeyed the rules, and bought their memberships to participate. Just because you don’t like them or what they want to vote for doesn’t make them bad people. Right now Mary Robinette Kowal is putting together “scholarships” buying memberships for people. I think they’re up to 70. I figure they’re going to disagree with me. FANTASTIC. Contrary to what you might think, I think that’s awesome. The more people voting the better.  And whether you like them or not, Rabid Puppies are fans too.  

Vox Day wasn’t on our slate. Things from his company were on our slate. But if he’d not put himself up for editor on his own slate, directly to his fans, and gotten himself nominated, I doubt anybody would have ever noticed that he published them. Now, whether you hate Vox or not, I’d still ask people to read Wright’s work and vote according to whether they think it is worthy or not.

But I see your Vox Day and match you with Requires Hate. And then I raise you a few hundred others. If you want to match unseemly quote to unseemly quote, you’ll run out of Vox’s before we get through NK Jemisen’s. Only one is the devil, and the other gets a pass. And I find that hypocritical, because both say inflammatory things, and have hurled insults at each other, but one has good politics and the other bad. Yes, I’ve seen his top five dumbest quotes and I don’t like them, but people keep posting them on my blog over and over and over again, and I keep saying the same thing. I don’t like them, don’t own them, and hey, I thought you guys were always saying to separate the art from artist… Oh, wait. That only counts for the child molesters your side showers with awards.

So, if we can bring you say, a hundred quotes from Hugo and Nebula nominated authors that are inflammatory and racist would you go through and specifically condemn each one? Would you demand a witch hunt? Try to drive them out of the industry? Publically distance yourself from them when they show up on the ballot? No? Why? They’re not your problem? Well, that’s what you guys keep asking me to do.

For this next one, I am going to leave in my original bit that you responded to, Mr. Martin, because I believe it illustrates a point.

[[CORREIA: Hypothetical question, if Robert Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers in 2014, could he get on the Hugo ballot now? Or would he be labeled a fascist with troubling ideas, and a product of the neo-colonial patriarchy? And before you dismiss that question, maybe you should read up on what the voting clique that shall not be named says about Heinlein now. Sadly, I suspect the only way Heinlein could get on the ballot today would be if my horde of uncouth barbarian outsiders got involved and put him on our suggested slate.]]

Kind of ironic that you should bring up Heinlein, since it was the Puppy slate that knocked William Patterson’s Heinlein biography off the Related Works shortlist this year. But to answer your question, I don’t think Heinlein would write STARSHIP TROOPERS in 2014. If you know Heinlein, you know that he was a man who changed with the times throughout his career. He was always trying new things, new techniques, new challenges… and his political views changed HUGELY over his lifetime. He wrote much of STARSHIP TROOPERS and STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND at the same time, yet one book is beloved of conservative military buffs while the other became a hippie bible. I have no idea what he would be writing in 2014… but if he were still at the top of his form, I would love to read it.

You didn’t actually answer the question. I didn’t say, if Heinlein evolved into something hypothetically suitable to you guys today, or if Heinlein wrote a novel today, I flat out asked, could Starship Troopers get nominated today?

And to me, I find it more ironic that the first volume of Heinlein’s biography lost to Chicks Dig Timelords.

There is no excuse for any of that. I tried to speak to some of these issues in my blog post called “Hatespeech.” Too much of this kind of shit is flying across the internet in both directions, and I don’t think any good whatsoever is served by debates about who flung the first shit, or who flung the most shit, or who flung the smelliest shit.

It doesn’t matter who did it first, or who did it more, or who did it in 20 international publications, says the person not being slandered… It is remarkable how people unbloodied can stay so above the fray and pronounce how it is all morally equivalent to them. Fantastic. Congratulations, sir, you have claimed the moral high ground. I’m going to head over to Facebook and read about how I eat babies.

(That was hyperbole… Maybe)

Look, I know I’m very testy on this subject, but when the blogs, newspapers, and authors pushing the narrative that Brad and I are white supremacists outnumber the moderate and leftwing professional authors public calls for not being lying, threatening, douchebags, then maybe I’ll be more receptive. But right now, it looks like the people calling for more honest debate and less lies are drastically outnumbered.

More and more, I grow convinced that the internet is toxic. Every controversy brings out the trolls and toads, of every political, religious, and literary persuasion, most of them anonymous, all of them venomous. You can’t control the assholes on your side and I can’t control the assholes on my side. I fear we will both just have to live with that.

Excellent. So why do you guys keep bringing up the right wing answer to Harlan Ellison to try and pin him on me? Turnabout is actually fair play, and if I have to answer for Vox’s sins, then your side should have to answer for the Flaming Rage Nozzles of Tolerance.

Nice, sure. Basic human decency, really. It is grotesque how you cannot have any sort of discussion on the internet without rape threats and death threats coming into it. Makes me despair for our civilization. Hell, I ever see these things on sports blogs.

Agreed.

(this bit is in response to the Locus list having zero Baen books on it)

Do you think that makes Baen unique?

For its size and success? Yes.

It does amuse that so many of your Sad Puppies seem to revere Baen Books and despise Tor Books, which reveals an astonishing ignorance of publishing.

Nope. https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/04/11/last-sp-post-for-the-week-to-my-people-dont-yell-tor/  When I saw that popping up in the comments, I posted this.

Both Baen and Tor were financed by the same guy, Tom Doherty. You know who the first editor was at Tor? Jim Baen.

Yep. Knew that.

Tor publishes your Puppy favorite, John C. Wright. Kevin Anderson too,

Knew that too.

I believe. And Baen published liberals… me, for instance.

Yep. I’m a fan of Misty Lackey and Eric Flint. Because just like I said in the post, Baen doesn’t care about an author’s politics as long as they can entertain their readers and sell books. I’m waiting for the astonishing ignorance part.

But hey, since you are saying this, maybe you should clarify to the haters that Baen isn’t the home of right wing misogynist sci-fi? Because apparently a whole bunch of reporters and bloggers have an astonishing ignorance of publishing.

Come on. Really? Look at the LoneStarCon ballot, the last before the Sad Puppies really began to have an impact. John Scalzi and Lois McMaster Bujold. Indistinguishable from one another? Can’t tell Brandon Sanderson from Saladin Ahmed? Jake Lake and Kim Stanley Robinson? Ken Liu and Pat Cadigan, identical snowflakes? How about the editors? Stanley Schmidt of ANALOG and Sheila Williams of ASIMOV’s, do you imagine they had the same taste, published the same stories? In long form editor, you had Toni Weisskopf, a Puppy favorite, against Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who your Puppies love to hate, with Sheila Gilbert of DAW thrown in as well, plus Lou Anders and Liza Gorinsky. All just snow? I mean, if you say so… but I see a feast there, a table laid out with all sorts of different meats and fruits and cheeses.

Went over this above, but let me point out a couple of things. Who on there went against my A-C above? I see a couple… That’s it.  

Sadly, Stanley Schmidt had to retire before he could win after two decades of losing to somebody with a bigger clique, which is bull crap. Toni Weisskopf was on the ballot that year because of Sad Puppies 1. Yep, Toni’s only nominations in her career have been from Sad Puppies, so I think it is kind of funny you are tossing that at me as evidence of how unbiased you are, since we got her there.

 When you guys ignore somebody like Toni Weisskopf for decades, and give Patrick Nielsen Hayden a dozen nominations, yeah, that’s a regular fruits and cheese tray right there.    

Diversity all over the place.

Yeah, a white liberal beats the Jewish single mom. I’m sure Kameron Hurley will call it a triumph of diversity.

That made me laugh, I admit. Very funny… but it’s all hyperbole and sweeping generalization. I don’t recognize any of those characterizations. Which book was “bigots are stupid?” Which one was “capitalists are stupid bigots?” Can you slap name tags on these straw men?

It would be faster for you to tell me which books featured capitalism as a positive thing. 🙂

I think that once again you are paraphrasing and turning the insult dial up to eleven. I will agree that there was a backlash.

It is interesting how you just dismiss lying defamation campaigns so easily.

Permit me to suggest that much of the negative press you got derived from the fact that one of the stories you placed on the ballot was that novelette by Vox Day, who was already infamous by that point because of his attack on Nora Jemison, his run for SFWA president, and his expulsion from that organization. Here we are back again to the “lumping together” we discussed earlier. Had Vox Day not been on your ticket, I suspect the backlash would not have been a tenth as vociferous as it was.

Yep, I put one story from Vox Day on the ballot for SP2. I read it earlier that year, and personally, I enjoyed it, but then again, my perceptions weren’t colored by all of you guy’s hatey-hate and judging books by their covers. I also had it on my sidebar for a month, so many of my fans read it.

When it came time to put my SP2 slate together (which was such a nefarious master plan that it consisted of me saying, hmmm… what did I like this year, and then posting it on my blog) I remembered that story. I was also trying to get people motivated to get involved in the Hugo process, and I knew he had a lot of blog traffic. Not to mention that one of my stated goals was to demonstrate that SJWs would have a massive freak out if somebody with the wrong politics got on. So on the slate it went. I nominated Vox Day because Satan didn’t have any eligible works that period.

Not to mention that in my nefarious lockstep slate voting, I think Vox had like half as many nominations as I did, because my fans are just going to do whatever the hell they feel like. Maybe if you guys hadn’t kept WorldCon so tiny, a handful of people wouldn’t be able to violate your secret gentlemen’s agreements and get bad people on the ballot.

Imagine, for example, that there had been a “SJW” slate the same year, and that they had gotten half a dozen stories on the ballot,

We don’t have to imagine.

but one of those had been by Requires Hate? (Actually, of course, Hate was nominated for the Campbell, but under a pseudonym).The lashback would have been just as nasty. In your case, it did not help that the Day story was terrible.

Really? So where was this nasty lashback when one of your cliques nominated somebody for having a racist blog? Oh, wait… There wasn’t any. Sheesh, at least Vox Day actually wrote some fiction.  

Your public platform was all about restoring “quality” to the Hugos, and yet one of your standard bearers was the worst piece of writing on the ballot. (In my opinion, of course. All of this is opinion).

So, I let something you don’t like get onto the ballot, and that destroys every other work on the ballot, and it also destroys every other work on the ballot the next year, and I’m assuming it destroys every work on the ballot forever. Those are some harsh double standards you’ve got there.

But it doesn’t really matter, because Vox is off doing his own thing. You tried to shun a man who is incapable of being shunned. He got kicked out of the market, so went and built his own market. The more you go after him, the stronger he gets. I don’t think you guys realize that most of me and Brad’s communication with Vox consists of us asking him to be nice and not burn it all down out of spite.

Got it. Politics, race, religion, and sexual orientation, OUT. Damned good stories, IN. And for this year’s Damned Good Story standard bearer, you chose… John C. Wright SIX TIMES!!! John C. Wright, a writer famed far and wide for having no opinions on politics, race, religion, or sexual orientation, and would never dream of injecting such messages into his Damned Good Stories.

No, I actually chose Jim Butcher in novel, which is the flagship big deal award. Wright is in the other categories.

Were you upset when Mira Grant got 5 nominations in one year? (only unlike Wright, she had nominations for several years before that too), and I do believe that she can be rather politically outspoken herself (but for the record, I think she’s a damned good writer).

Because, after all, the Puppies get sad when they are made to read Message Fiction.

Why, Mr. Martin, I do believe you are paraphrasing or using hyperbole! Or you’re just putting words into my mouth, couldn’t tell. Our problem isn’t that message in fiction exists. It is when message overshadows story, or in many cases in recent years, message replaces story. Or message kills the story, and sodomizes the corpse.   

Besides, Wright wasn’t on Sad Puppies ballot six times. We had him in for novella, short story, and I believe related work, all for things which frankly, we thought were excellent. That was it. The other nominations came in from Vox’s rival Rabid Puppies slate. And it probably helped that when I Book Bombed Wright’s suggested work in our Book Bombs leading up to the close of nominations, while people were on Amazon they bought his other eligible stuff too and found they liked it.

Also, the ones on our slate aren’t preachy message fiction. From your description I’m assuming that you haven’t read it yet, because I don’t think Wright’s story will bother you with his Catholic cooties. I can’t speak for the Rabid Puppies selections because I’ve not read all of them yet, but the SP ones were good.  

So Wright is in, and who is out? James S.A. Corey. Emily St. John Mandel. John Scalzi (of course). THREE BODY PROBLEM. Joe Abercrombie. Larry Niven. Greg Bear. Daniel Abraham. John Varley. William Gibson. Joe Haldeman. Greg Benford. Lev Grossman. Stephen King. No damned good stories there. I guess. No real science fiction, no exciting fantasy, nothing entertaining or commercial, just pretentious left-wing literary crap, right?

I’m not sure how Wright’s nominations in short story, novella, and related works bumped a bunch of novels out. Apparently hyperbole is only a sin when I do it.

But you would probably find it amusing to know that at least one of the people you listed quietly support Sad Puppies, but sadly, judging by their tweets, another one I’m a fan of now believes that I’m a white supremacist.

I think everybody you listed there had a novel, so Wright bumped none of them. The SP nominations for best novel were from Jim Butcher, Marko Kloos, and Kevin J. Anderson (speaking of paying his dues, this is his 125^th novel). I’m curious what makes any of the novelists you listed such a profoundly better choice than the three from Sad Puppies? Couldn’t you just as easily have said Leckie is in, and who is out, and then wrote the same list?

I have already posted about my opposition to the various NO AWARD strategies.

Thank you.

I hope that NO AWARD will not sweep the board top to bottom. My best guess right now is that it won’t, but there is a good chance that NO AWARD will take all the “All Puppy” categories, the three short fiction categories and Best Related Book. No one really knows, of course. We are all in uncharted territory here.

And if they do that, it will send a very, very clear message. My people will proceed accordingly.

If I could clap my hands and make everybody play nice, I would, but I do not have that superpower.

You are one of the most famous authors in the world. I’m a pulp writing hack nobody. If I can change the entire Hugo process just by posting about it on my blog, I don’t think you give yourself enough credit.  

But it is interesting that you talk about “scaring the hell out of authors” on your side. Fear is a big part of this. People on the other side of the fence are scared as well, and when people are afraid, they lash out.

My side has had a few years head start. It has been something of a slow burn.

Both sides here feel they are being attacked, and the war of words just seems to keep escalating, and all that can come of that is mutually assured destruction.

I don’t want to see that either, but the ball is no longer in my court. Again, like I closed with last time, you guys need to decide what the Hugos really are, an award for just one small part of fandom, or an award that represents all of fandom. Can’t have both. You guys decide. If it’s just for you guys, and we’re not welcome, fine. We’ll take it from there.

Anyways, thank you for taking the time to respond to me. We see things very differently, but it is nice to be able to discuss it. I do apologize in advance if anything I said came across as cranky, because that wasn’t my intent. It has been a long week.

Honestly, I figure we’ve said about everything we can say and should move. I spent half the day writing this and need to get back to work. If I keep you from writing your next book, YOUR FANS WILL MURDER ME.

Okay, that’s hyperbole… Maybe… A little.

Thanks

-Larry Correia

I’ll be offline for the next 48 hours. If you see me on the internet, yell at me to get off. This week has been nuts. I’ve written over 30,000 words of posts, comments, and emails responding to the controversy. I’ve read over 2000 blog comments here, I don’t know how many thousand tweets and FB posts, a slew of emails, and done some interviews. Talking to people–on all sides of the issue–about this is all that I’ve done, all day, every day, this week, from about six in the morning to midnight, and frankly I have argument fatigue and am in danger of severe grumpiness.

So one last quick note, because I saw this coming up in my comments from some of my regulars earlier.

The Sad Puppies campaign isn’t mad at Tor the publishing house. We have nothing against Tor.

In fact, one of our suggestions for novel is by Kevin J. Anderson, and is published by Tor.  One of our nominees is John C. Wright, and he is published by Tor. There are other Tor authors who are secret members of the Evil Legion of Evil. And there are some Tor authors and editors who have reached out to us this week, and who have told the angry mobs to calm the hell down and knock off the asinine defamation, both in public and in private.

Don’t threaten to boycott anybody because of their business associations, because that’s exactly the kind of boorish behavior that’s been done to us.

Don’t post links to a torrent site and suggest that people pirate stuff instead of giving a publishing house money. Do you have any idea how offensive it is to do that on a professional author’s feed?

For those just joining us, if you are wondering where this is coming from, there are a couple of reasons many Sad Puppies supporters are leery of Tor.

There are a few Tor editors who have accused my people of some vile and outlandish things recently, but the Nielsen Haydens are only a couple of the editors there.  Sure, they’ve been insulting, but I’m not going to tar the other editors by association, especially since most of them haven’t said anything, and some have been very nice to us.

Tor.com has posted some asinine stuff on this subject, talked a lot of trash about us, and run some absurd, preachy, social engineering, wannabe literati wankery articles.

However, Tor.com isn’t Tor the publisher. From what I’ve been told by some Tor employees, they are kind of their own thing. Most people don’t know that though. On that note, I don’t know who the marketing person is over there, but seriously, some of the stuff posted on Tor.com is ridiculous and has left a lot of people on this side of fandom with a bad taste in their mouth.

So, to the Sad Puppies supporters, be cool. There are a bunch of good folks over there, good authors and good editors, making good books, and some of them even agree with us.

Now, I’m going to bed until Sunday.

When one of the most successful authors on the planet takes the time to talk about something you did, I figure that deserves an in depth response. I’ve got no direct line to Mr. Martin, but I am hoping that this will get back to him.

I am going to respond to some of the things Mr. Martin said to try and explain my reasoning. His words will be in italics, mine will be in bold. The link to his original articles is provided. Since I’ve read like 4,000 posts on this topic this week and written a novel worth of responses, I’ll not be going through everything he said and just be responding to things that I think need clarification or direct response. I will provide links to each of his posts so that you may read them in their entirety.

http://grrm.livejournal.com/417521.html

Let me begin with the basics:

Who owns the Hugo Awards?

You know, looking back, I am probably partly to blame for some of the misconceptions that seem to exist on this point. For years now I have been urging people to nominate for the Hugo Awards, and saying things like “this is your award” and “this award belongs to the fans, the readers.” I felt, and still feel, that wider participation would be a good thing. Thousands of fans vote for the Hugos most years, but until recently only hundreds ever bothered to nominate.

Still my “it is your award” urgings were not entirely accurate.

Truth is, the Hugo Awards belong to worldcon. The World Science Fiction Convention.

Mr. Martin, that is exactly one of the reasons I started this campaign.

When I started this the Hugo Awards were not portrayed as the awards that belonged to WorldCon. They were portrayed as the awards that represented the best of all of fandom. After my first experience seeing how the sausage was made, I publically said the same thing you said there, that the Hugo Awards don’t represent all of fandom, they represent one tiny part of fandom.

I was called a liar.

I too was nominated for the Campbell for Best New Writer. As a young, new writer, who had grown up reading the great ones, I was super excited by this incredible honor. See, I was born around when you got your Campbell nomination. I was one of those fans who grew up believing it when great authors said things like “this is your award” and “this award belongs to the fans, the readers”.

Because I was naïve.

I was overjoyed when I found out I’d been nominated. I was even dumb enough to think that I might have a chance. I had already read works from two of the other nominees and I knew that they were remarkable story tellers. I had read Wells and Beukes and knew the quality of their work was excellent. In any fair wordsmithing contest either could kick my ass, and I hadn’t even read Ahmed or Grossman yet, but if they were as good as the other two, then there would be a lot of quality works to choose from.

But that’s the kicker… I hadn’t realized yet that for many voters it wasn’t about the quality of the work. 

Within a few days of the nominations being announced I not only knew that I was going to lose, I knew that I was going to be last place. Only it had absolutely nothing to do with my writing, but rather, who I was, and what I was. 

I know you remember when you were starting out, Mr. Martin, because you talk about it in this very post, that scrimping, saving, and sleeping on couches phase of your career, where you are desperate to get your work out there in front of people, to get any exposure at all, and I’m betting that you were always really excited to hear what readers had to say about your creations. Right?

I know I was. So I went out on the internet and started searching my name, trying to find out what the buzz was for the Campbell nominees. I started calling friends who belonged to various writer forums and organizations that I didn’t belong to, asking about what people thought of my books in there.

You know what I found? WorldCon voters angry that a right-wing Republican (actually I’m a libertarian) who owned a gun store (gasp) was nominated for the prestigious Campbell. This is terrible. Did you know he did lobbying for gun rights! It’s right there on his hateful blog of hatey hate hate! He’s awful. He’s a bad person. He’s a Mormon! What! Another damned Mormon! Oh no, there are two Mormons up for the Campbell? I bet Larry Correia hates women and gays. He’s probably a racist too. Did you know he’s part of the evil military industrial complex? What a jerk.

Meanwhile, I’m like, but did they like my books?

No. Hardly any of them had actually read my books yet. Many were proud to brag about how they wouldn’t read my books, because badthink, and you shouldn’t have to read books that you know are going to make you angry. A handful of people claimed to have my read my books, but they assured the others that they were safe to put me last, because as expected for a shit person, my words were shit, and so they were good people to treat me like shit.

At first I was shocked, then I got angry. What the hell? This is supposed to be the most prestigious awards in scifi and fantasy?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not lumping all of the WorldCon voters in with that perpetually outraged, politically motivated clique. I know plenty of voters read my books and just didn’t think they were as good as the people I was up against. Awesome. I salute you for you being an honest person with an honest opinion, and let’s face it, people have different tastes.

But don’t tell me now that the Hugos don’t have whisper campaigns…

Though I knew I still had fans voting, and I figured there were a lot of honest people who would give my works a fair shake regardless of my politics, I also spent most of my adult life as an auditor who did statistical analysis for a living. I understood how Australian Rules voting worked, and the rankings are not most popular to least popular, but rather least disliked to most disliked, and 72 hours after the nominations came out it was pretty obvious I was going to be most disliked.

Then I went to my very first WorldCon.

Mr. Martin, you talked about your positive, joyous experiences at WorldCon. How you were welcomed as a peer, about how you had all these great, wonderful, memorable experiences.

But I’m betting before your first WorldCon a whole bunch of malignant lying bastards didn’t spread the word to thousands of complete strangers that you were a racist, sexist, homophobic warmonger who deserved to be shunned. 

Side note, I’m not racist, sexist, or homophobic, but if that crowd (I’ll talk about the derogatory label my side uses that you don’t like in a minute) decides you are the enemy, they will smear you with those labels, regardless of the evidence. If you don’t believe me, read the many, many news articles about Sad Puppies that came out a few days ago working off that same script.

I met many wonderful people at that WorldCon. I also had many people treat me like garbage. I was berated by other panelists. I had people get up and leave the room when I entered. I had belligerent drunks challenging me at room parties because “Oh, it’s that fucker”. 

A lot of people will tell you now that I bring this upon myself, because I am rude and abrasive on the internet now. Yes. Now. But back then I was still trying to play it cool, and didn’t think I could have a successful career if I made the wrong people angry. It wasn’t until after that WorldCon that I said screw it, they’re going to hate me anyway, might as well state my honest opinions.   

So I mostly hung out with the Barflies, because they were cool. But I can hang out with Barflies at fifty other cons where I’m not assumed to be the second coming of Hitler because the internet said so. And while I hung out with them, I got to hear how many of them were shunned for various reasons too. 

Then I went to the award ceremony, and the parties, and the various schmoozefests, and I discovered that the Hugo Awards were like one great big In Joke. And the cool kids told their cool stories to the other cool kids, and lorded it over those who weren’t part of the In Joke. Honestly, it reminded me of high school, and I was the poor fat kid who had inadvertently pissed off the mean girls.

Then I got to meet and hang out with a whole bunch of authors, artists, and creators who spent most of the con bitching about how broken and biased the Hugos were. Some of these were old school, and got the In Jokes. Some were so talented, so famous, so successful, that it blew my mind that here they were at dinner, pissed off and angry that they knew they would never get any sort of consideration.

After the awards were over and all the cool kids patted each other on the back about how brilliant they were, and everything shook out pretty much exactly how everybody predicted it would anyway, they released the actual numbers for nominations and votes, and I discovered just how freaking tiny the number of people involved in this supposedly most prestigious award in the world was.

The winners were those who played the game, and as I sat there with the losers, I watched the game already being played for next year. As an author, I was sad. As a fan, I was disgusted. But as an auditor, I marveled at how something so statistically insignificant could be taken so seriously.

That was my first exposure to how the process really worked.

So I went home, dejected. And when I openly spoke about my experience, and I said pretty much exactly what you just said there, Mr. Martin, that the awards don’t represent all of fandom, and that they just represent one tiny, insular, clique of fandom… I was called a liar.

I was attacked all over again. I was told it was just sour grapes from a loser, but what could you expect from a shit writer, making shit product? The Hugos represent greatness, worthiness, and all of fandom. WorldCon is inclusive. How dare you question it?

So I said I would prove it, and I did. 

Here we are, a few years later, and oh how the narrative has changed. Now we are being told that the idea that the Hugos represented all of fandom and not just the tastes of one small convention were misconceptions. Now the most successful author in the world and editors for the biggest scifi publishing house are telling us that it belonged to just WorldCon all along.

Too late.  When people like me kept getting told that it represented all of fandom, we believed you. When you told us that if we wanted the stuff we liked represented better we should get more people involved in the process, we believed you.

And we did. Now we’re the bad guys.

((Never believe anyone who states loudly and repeatedly that they don’t care about awards, especially if they don’t care about one award in particular. Aesop saw through that okey-doke centuries ago. Boy, them grapes are sour. If you don’t care about something, you don’t think about it, or talk about it, or try to change the rules so you get one. The people who keep shouting that they don’t care if they ever win a Hugo are the ones who want one the most, take that to the bank)).

 

I am many terrible things, but dishonest is not one of them.

Let me clarify something, because I have been personally attacked for this for three years now. Yes, like most authors I dreamed of winning a Hugo, because I was very naïve. In the past I did very much want to win a Hugo. Just like I was dumb enough for a couple days to think that I might actually have a shot at winning a Campbell.

However, I know that I will not ever win a Hugo. I’m way too good at statistical analysis. I had a snowball’s chance in hell before I upset the apple cart and made myself radioactive to the typical WorldCon voter.

I launched the Sad Puppies campaign with the idea that if I could get authors with the wrong politics onto the Hugo ballot, I could prove to the world that the Hugos were in fact what you are all now admitting that they are. (Mission accomplished) Plus I wanted to expose that the perpetually outraged crowd would react with vehemence, vitriol, lies, and career sabotage, so that the world could see that our genre is overrun with bitter culture warriors who have politicized everything, and that if you had the wrong politics they would do everything in their power to destroy you (mission accomplished beyond my wildest dreams).

Not only did I know going into this that I would never win a Hugo, I also knew that I was going to make myself a target, and that I would be slandered, threatened, and have my career sabotaged.

But I still did it anyway.  

The thing I’m shouting about is bigger than just the Hugos. It is about freedom of expression, and the ability of authors to say what they want to say without fear. It is about exposing the malignant, destructive bullies who live to persecute others for crossing their invisible lines.

I got a nomination for my novel Warbound last year. The people I’m trying to expose rose to the occasion, formed lynch mobs and started attacking. I got a nomination again this year, for my novel Monster Hunter Nemesis, but I refused the nomination, specifically to prove that this isn’t about me wanting a Hugo. Apparently that still isn’t enough.

Allow me to demonstrate my conviction, and state for the record that I will never accept a Hugo award nomination for myself. However, I will continue to assist other authors who I believe have been unfairly blacklisted and shunned get theirs.

You will all have noted, no doubt, a common thread here: worldcon.

The Hugos belong to worldcon.

I am glad we are on the same page now.

If important people like you had said this to the people feeling disenfranchised before, then you wouldn’t be seeing this backlash now.

But instead of telling us the truth, that we were right and the Hugos belong to just WorldCon and didn’t represent all of fandom, my people were insulted, and told we were stupid, and that we liked stupid unworthy things. When an outsider dared to complain in public about how they would never get considered, they were told it wasn’t because WorldCon was biased, it was because they just weren’t good enough.

Worldcon continued… but the steady growth that had characterized worldcon through the 60s and 70s stopped. That 1984 worldcon in LA remained the largest one in history until last year at London. Meanwhile San Diego Comicon and Gencon and Dragoncon grew bigger than worldcon… twice the size, ten times the size, twenty times the size… Dragoncon even went so far as to break with a half-century old fannish tradition by moving to Labor Day, worldcon’s traditional date, a date that had up to then been inviolate. And why not? Dragoncon’s attendees were fans, sure, they were comics fans and Star Wars fans and cosplay fans, and some were even book fans… but they were not “trufans,” as that term was commonly used, and they didn’t care when worldcon was.

 

While WorldCon complains of the shrinking and greying of fandom, Salt Lake City ComicCon has been around for 2 years and has 150,000 attendees. For some people, books might not be their primary fannish outlet, but they still read books. Just because somebody plays Dragon Age or the Witcher doesn’t mean they don’t read fantasy novels too. Heck, I believe Halo tie in novels are some of the bestselling books in scifi.

If somebody was introduced to fantasy by watching Game of Thrones on HBO, and then they bought and read all your books, discovered they liked fantasy and read other books, and they thought some are awesome and deserving of an award, are they somehow lesser fans on the scales of fandom because they don’t know WorldCon trivia?

So do you not want those fans to vote in the Hugos because they don’t share the proud traditions of WorldCon, or not? Because I do.

(The term “trufans” is an unfortunate one in this argument, since some of the Sad Puppies and their supporters take it amiss, and understandly, when told they don’t qualify. The term is a very old one, however, probably dates back to THE ENCHANTED DUPLICATOR, a parody of PILGRIM’S PROGRESS about the search for “true fandom.” Like “SMOF,” it is at least partially a joke. And if any of this paragraph makes any sense to you, you are undoubtedly a trufan… but don’t worry, you don’t need to know what a mimeograph machine is to be a real fan, I swear).

 

Yes, part of the issue of why my side is very loud right now is that people like Teresa Nielsen Hayden have been very explicit that they aren’t welcome, and that they are the wrong kind of fans.

But now that we are talking terminology, let me explain why exactly the term SJW has come into common usage. Much the same way SMOF and trufan have taken on meanings representing groups with a shared mindset to your community, SJW has taken on a meaning representing a group with a shared mindset to my community.

The term SJW is way bigger than Sad Puppies, and predates Sad Puppies, and has entered the general lexicon of easily half our nation, but probably mostly the red state tired of getting yelled at half. We use the term SJW because it is far easier than typing out Perpetually Outraged, Searching For Offense, Quick to Accuse Racism/Sexism/Homophobia/Privilege/Patriarchy, Holier Than Thou, Politics Before Fun, Unholy Cross Between Communists and Puritans, Twitter Lynch Mob Forming, Career Sabotaging, Social Justice Crusaders.

The term has stuck, and shows up everywhere in America. Comet Guy with his “offensive” shirt did more to popularize the term SJW than anything my people ever did. It is here to stay.

And to contrast SMOFs, who are mostly normal, sane, good people, Brad came up with the term CHORFs for the really snobbish elitists, because unlike SJWs, we have a sense of humor

Other conventions have other awards. Wiscon has the Tiptrees. The World Fantasy Con presents the World Fantasy Awards, or Howards. The Bram Stokers are given by the HWA, the Nebulas by SFWA. Libertarians have the Prometheus Awards, though I don’t know where they give them out. I just came back from Norwescon, where they handed out the Philip K. Dick Award. We used to have Balrogs and the Gandalfs, but they went away. The Japanese have the Seiun awards, the Spanish have the Gigameshs, the Czechs the Newts. Australians have Ditmars, Canadians Auroras. Gamers have Origins Awards, comic fans have Inkpots and Eisners.

I don’t denigrate any of these awards. I’ve won an Inkpot, I’ve handed out an Eisner. I won a Balrog too, but it was smashed before it reached me. I have a Newt and a bunch of Gigameshs and even a Seiun. Awards are cool. Awards are fun. Or should be. I don’t expect I will ever win a Tiptree or a Prometheus or a Dick, but that’s fine, I applaud them all the same. Writing is a hard gig, man. Any recognition is a plus. Big or small, any award is a pat on the back, a way of saying, “hey, you did good,” and we all need that from time to time.

The difference is that none of those awards claimed to speak for the entirety of fandom.

The barbaric outsiders shelling out their $40 to get involved now grew up being told that the Hugos were it, the Big Deal, the best of the best, and like me, they were naïve enough to believe it for a long time.

Yet, as the Hugos became increasingly politically skewed in one direction, people can now admit that is because they reflected WorldCon, not all of Fandom, only for all these years Fandom were the ones being told that they were dumb for liking the wrong things. They were wrongfan having wrongfun.

If the Sad Puppies wanted to start their own award… for Best Conservative SF, or Best Space Opera, or Best Military SF, or Best Old-Fashioned SF the Way It Used to Be… whatever it is they are actually looking for… hey, I don’t think anyone would have any objections to that. I certainly wouldn’t. More power to them.

Mr. Martin, up until a week ago, nobody in the upper echelons of fandom or publishing would say that the Hugos belongs to just one tiny convention. They kept claiming to represent the best, most worthy things in our whole genre. And we had stuff that we thought was great and worthy too, but it was ignored or shunned, so why would we go start another award when there was a perfectly good award right there already claiming to represent us too?

We started doing this 3 years ago. Maybe, if 3 years ago some VIPs had come out and said what you’re saying today, we would have done that instead. “Okay, Sad Puppies 2013 or 2014, you are right, you really are outsiders, and we’re insiders and we want to keep this our thing, so go do your own thing” would have avoided a lot of trouble.  But you guys didn’t say that then, so you can’t get mad at us for taking you at your word that you represent everyone, and then get mad at us for not knowing the insider information that you guys claimed didn’t exist until last week!

But that’s not what they are doing here, it seems to me. Instead they seem to want to take the Hugos and turn them into their own awards. Hey, anyone is welcome to join worldcon, to become part of worldcon fandom… but judging by the comments on the Torgesen and Correia sites, a lot of the Puppies seem to actively hate worldcon and the people who attend it, and want nothing to do with us. They want to determine who gets the Ditmars, but they don’t want to be Australians.

 

I told my WorldCon experience above. I know Brad had a similar experience when he first got involved with WorldCon too.

Why do the many people involved in the Sad Puppies campaign seem to hate WorldCon? Because the SJW crowd (I know you don’t like that term, but it is the appropriate one to use here) hates my kind of fan, actively and routinely attacks my kind of fan, and calls them racist, sexist, homophobes without evidence, all day, every day.

I know the SJWs are only one small clique at WorldCon, however they are the loudest and the meanest. And sadly, the moderate, rational, normal WorldCon folks rarely seem to condemn them for their antics. So from over here on the Sad Puppies side, they take your silence and lack of condemnation against the hate mongers as tacit approval, and then they tend to lump you together.    

So why then would they want to attend when they are told their kind is unwanted?

Why would they stick up for WorldCon, when in their minds they think the silent majority of WorldCon attendees are the same as the vocal minority of crusading social justice crowd who actively and openly despises them?

WorldCon claims to be inclusive, but scroll through the various comments threads on the various fan blogs on my side of the fence and get their perspective sometime. SFWA also claims to be welcoming, inclusive, and apolitical, but again, read how they are really perceived by many. Snobbish, snooty, bossy, self-righteous, etc. Don’t take my word for it—you know I’m terribly biased—but ask them yourself.

 

The prestige of the Hugo derives from its history. The worth of any award is determined in large part by the people who have won it. Would I love to win the Hugo for Best Novel some day? You’re damned right I would. But not because I need another rocket to gather dust on my mantle, as handsome as the Hugo trophies are. I want one because Robert A. Heinlein won four, because Roger Zelazny and Alfred Bester and Ursula K. Le Guin and Fritz Leiber and Walter M. Miller Jr and Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl and so many other giants have won the same award. That’s a club that any science fiction and fantasy writer should be thrilled to join.

Yet honestly, with the current state of the Hugos, how many of those greats that you list would win today? Sadly, I think we both know the answer depends on how well they could play the game.

My personal favorite on there is Robert Heinlein. Hypothetical question, if Robert Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers in 2014, could he get on the Hugo ballot now? Or would he be labeled a fascist with troubling ideas, and a product of the neo-colonial patriarchy?

And before you dismiss that question, maybe you should read up on what the voting clique that shall not be named says about Heinlein now.

Sadly, I suspect the only way Heinlein could get on the ballot today would be if my horde of uncouth barbarian outsiders got involved and put him on our suggested slate.

[[Once again, comments and dissent are welcome, but I expect courtesy from all parties. And yes, that means those of you who are on “my side” as well. Let’s not throw around insults, or charges of misogyny and racism, please. And Puppies, sad or happy, if any of you feel inclined to reply, please avoid the term “Social Justice Warriors” or SJWs. I am happy to call you Sad Puppies since you named yourself that, but I know of no one, be they writer or fan, who calls themselves a social justice warrior. Offending or insulting posts will be deleted. We can disagree here, but let’s try for respectfuldisagreement.]]

We do not mind being called Puppies, but for the record we are doing this on behalf of Sad Puppies, because good books being excluded over political message dreck is the leading cause of Puppy Related Sadness.

We do not however like being called racists, sexists, misogynists, homophobes, fascists, hate mongers, the KKK, or wife beaters. Especially in major media outlets like Entertainment Weekly, Salon, Slate, the Telegraph, and io9. If you would like to compare the amount and level of vitriolic lies spread in this contentious debate, it is pretty obvious which way those scales are going to go.

As for the term SJW, as I said above, that isn’t going to happen at this point. It is entrenched. You might as well tell people not to say conservative or liberal, because though often inaccurate when applied to every single individual in a movement, they are useful, handy descriptors that get the point across quickly.

http://grrm.livejournal.com/417600.html

I find the above link to be an excellent article about the tone.

Yes, I do get angry, and yes, I have said some very mean things as part of that.

I know you’re not looking for excuses, Mr. Martin, but I’m a little nobody, no name, hack author, who sells a tiny fraction as many books as you do, who had the bright idea to expose the bias in a biased system. As a result I’ve had people who know better spread the vilest lies about me you can imagine, and even when they know it is a lie, they have continued.

For five years, nobody on your side said a damned thing about tone when I was the one being labeled a hatemonger, or a “rape apologist” by disingenuous SFWA presidents, or they were using fabricated “scare quotes” to show I was a homophobic woman hater in the Guardian.  

So, yeah, I’m angry. When people who haven’t talked to my wife since high school reach out to her, worried for her safety, because they read about how her husband is a wife beater, I get angry. Right now in about 50 blogs going out to I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of people, the narrative is that I’m an angry white man, trying to keep scifi straight and white and male.

And the fans who got involved with Sad Puppies? It turns out that one of their primary motivators to finally get involved was that they watched all this happen live. And as more of them voiced their opinions, more of them were publically attacked too, which motivated more to jump in, etc. etc.  

But once we finally succeeded in making a big splash, and everybody started paying attention, and tons of people on my side are speaking up now too, and media outlets from the both sides of the political spectrum are reporting on it, and the insults are flying back and forth…

Now we get warnings about tone.

You know the most heartening things I’ve seen this week are? Writers who are my polar political opposites finally standing up and saying things like yes, Larry Coreia is an asshole, but he’s not any of these horrible things you are accusing him of, or yes, Larry Correia is an asshole, but please quit threatening to kill him and his entire family.

That’s been nice.

But yeah, I’ve said some pretty mean things during this debate, so you’ll have to forgive me if after the 1000^th post calling me a bunch of things I’m not, I come off a little testy. When you have professional culture warriors like Brianna Wu and Arthur Chu, who make their livings off of generating political controversy, saying that Brad Torgersen’s two decades of interracial marriage is just a shield to hide his true secret racism, then yes, there is a serious tone problem.

People like us have been dealing with people like that for our entire careers. One of my goals was to get your people to notice it.

So thank you for calling for civility.

Personally, I will try to remain civil to anybody who disagrees and wants to debate, but I’m way past the point where I have any mercy left for people who just want to scream in my face, or the mind readers who ignore what I actually say and do to tell everyone what I really meant, and I will treat them accordingly. 

http://grrm.livejournal.com/417812.html

Mr. Martin, on this last post of yours, there is actually very little that I disagree with, and it is actually extremely nice to see a writer of your caliber and level coming out and saying this stuff. For that, I am truly appreciative, and I’m not just blowing smoke. I’ll explain why below.

The Sad Puppies and their supporters have argued that they are not the first to campaign for awards in our (not so) little genre.

They’re right about that, of course.

I’ve been around a long time. So has campaigning, by one means or another.

(I left out several paragraphs here about campaigning for the Nebulas, just because of space, because this blog post is already huge, but I would really recommend that everyone go and read the whole thing. The Nebulas aren’t the Hugos, but the communities are intertwined)

And what about the Hugos, you ask?

Yeah, there too. In the ongoing discussion of Puppygate, numerous people have cited one instance, wherein a stack of identical nominating ballots arrived with the same postmark, paid for by consecutive money orders. Those were disallowed. In 1987, members of the Church of Scientology campaigned successfully to place L. Ron Hubbard’s BLACK GENESIS on the Best Novel ballot. That was not disallowed — the Scientologists had done nothing illegal, after all, all they’d done is buy supporting memberships to a convention that they had no intention of attending, for the sole purpose of nominating LRH for a Hugo (hmmm, why does that tactic sound familiar?) — but their campaign created a huge backlash. Hubbard’s name was booed lustily at the Hugo ceremony in Brighton, and his book finished last in the final balloting, behind No Award. (The winner that year was Orson Scott Card, with SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD, for those who are counting).

Of course, there were also recommended reading lists. That wasn’t campaigning, not strictly, but certain lists could have huge influence on the final ballot. The annual LOCUS Recommended Reading List, compiled by Charles Brown and his staff and reviewers, was the most influential. If your book or story made that list… well, it did not guarantee you a place on the ballot, but it sure improved your chances. NESFA (the New England fan club) had an annual list as well, and LASFS might have done the same, not sure. And of course the Nebulas, which came before the Hugos, carried a lot of weight too. Win a Nebula, and the chances were good that you’d be a Hugo nominee as well. Again, no guarantee, some years the shortlists diverged sharply… but more often than not, there was a lot of overlap.

One quick note, after SP2 made a little bit of a dent and I had said a bunch of things in public about the bias in the awards against people with the wrong politics, various incredulous fan bloggers started looking at it. These were people who don’t like me (which I am totally cool with) but they were honest, and figured my claims of political bias in this process would be easily disproven.

Except they ended up finding various things that indicated maybe all of us “right wingers” weren’t such liars after all. That prestigious influential LOCUS Recommended Reading List you mentioned? I think it has like 40 or 50 books but ZERO from Baen (a publishing house that gets a bad rap because it is willing to publish any author regardless of their politics, from capital L Libertarians to card carrying Communists as long as they can tell a good story).  Most of the other various lists from various pro places? The politics of the recommend authors are either unknown or overwhelmingly fell in one direction. You can guess which direction that is. 

Chaos Horizon picked two Hugo contenders to compare for 2015, one “right wing” (me, because of my showing during SP2) and one “left wing” (because this overtly political and opinionated author is a perpetual Hugo favorite) and they compared the buzz and reviews. What they found was so lopsided it surprised even me. Our books sold about the same, came out within a month of each other, and I had higher reviews on Amazon, except the left wing author had been plugged on ALL the recommendation places they checked. The right wing author was on ZERO.

So there were always these factors in play. Cliques, I can hear the Sad Puppies saying. Yeah, maybe. Thing is, they were COMPETING cliques. The NESFA list and the Nebula list were not the same, and the LOCUS list… the LOCUS list was always very long. Five spots on the Hugo ballot, and LOCUS would recommend twenty books, or thirty… sometimes more, when they started putting SF and fantasy in separate categories.

 

Yes, there were competing cliques, but the only cliques who mattered all looked virtually identical to us outsiders looking in. And hardly anything they ever nominated represented anything we liked. To most of us barbarian wrongfans, the competing cliques were indistinguishable from one another.

For example, correct me if I’m wrong but I believe with last year’s winners, every single one shared similar political viewpoints. And all but one of them was white, yet that year was hailed as a huge win for diversity.

You need to see this from Wrongfan’s perspective. You guys had competing cliques, but to us it was like an Eskimo having a thousand different words for snow, and you can tell us about your many diverse and wonderful types of snow, but all we saw was snow.

And in recent years when we looked at the ballots it was like, awesome, let’s choose between these five items of approved socially conscious message fiction. Yay! We’ve got selections from: religious people are stupid bigots, capitalists are raping the earth, capitalists are stupid bigots, bigots are stupid, and I’m not quite sure what the hell this last thing is about and I’m not even sure if it qualifies as fantasy or scifi but it has bigots in it… Oh man, tough call.

Again, now we can openly say that this all makes sense because my kind of people aren’t WorldCon regulars, and this award belongs only to WorldCon, so the stuff making the ballot wasn’t aimed at us… but sadly that wasn’t what you guys were telling us when we started this. This stuff was supposed to be the best stuff in the whole world.

So we formed our own competing clique and actually bothered to show up.

Bottom line, lots of people influenced the Hugos (or tried to), but no one ever successfully controlled the Hugos.

 

And I truly don’t want to either. I don’t want to be Hugo Pope.

That became even more true when we entered the age of the internet. Suddenly blogs and bulletin boards and listservs were everywhere, and there were DOZENS of people drawing up recommended reading lists and suggesting books and writers and stories. Sweet chaos. It was glorious. So many people talking about books, arguing about books, reading books.

That was also when the practice of writers blogging about their own eligible books and stories took root. “Say, the Hugo nominations are coming up, and I had a few things out last year. Hey, check them out.” Some people were deeply offended by this practice. (Some still are. Check out the blogs of Peter Watts and Adam Roberts on the subject, for instance). Others, especially newer writers and those hungry for attention, seized on it at once as a way of getting their name out there. Publishers and editors began to encourage it. Publicity and advertising budgets being what they were (non-existent in many cases), new writers and midlist writers soon realized that if they did not publicize their books, no one would.

And once it really got rolling, there was no stopping it. “Everyone else is doing it,” you heard writers say. “I have to do it, in self-defense.” They were not wrong. Sometimes the difference between making the Hugo ballot and falling short is a single vote. The writer who refused to self-promote and then fell a few votes short… ouch.

[And yes, I have done all this myself. Mentioned my own work, drawn up recommended reading lists, blogged passionately about people I thought deserved a nomination. I am not condemning the practice, just reporting on it. It always made me feel awkward, but like many of my friends, I knew that if I refrained and then missed the ballot by a few votes, I would be kicking myself. I’d sooner see the practice die out. But until it does, you have to play the game.]

Of course, not everyone was equally good at self-promotion. Certain subfandoms were better organized than others (the DOCTOR WHO fans, for instance). Certain writers were more skilled at social media than others, and built up huge personal followings on Twitter and Facebook, or through their blogs… numbers that soon translated to multiple Hugo nominations.

 

You have no idea how incredibly glad I am that you wrote all of that, Mr. Martin. After the week I’ve had… Holy moly.

And that was pretty much where we stood, until the Sad Puppies came along.

Last year I didn’t do anything different than what was listed above. I talked about it on my blog. I tried to motivate and rally people to get involved. I plugged stuff I liked. And all of a sudden there was a little clique of Wrongfan nominating for LonCon, just big enough to get one item into every category. We were no different than the other above mentioned subfandoms.

Yet, somehow, when I did that, I was a filthy villain, breaking all the rules, with no respect for tradition. Just as I predicted, there was a wrathful terrible public backlash from the clique which shall not be named, and even though I went into it knowing that none of us would actually win, once the final results came in, the leaders of the clique which shall not be named out of respect for Mr. Martin, moved the goal posts, and danced in our blood. Articles were written about how these horrible racist hate mongers were soundly driven from the sainted halls of WorldCon. Back beneath your rock, foul barbarians! And anyone who supported Sad Puppies was motivated by racism! Booooooo!

That reaction did more to cause the avalanche that was Sad Puppies 3 than anything I could have ever done. It proved exactly what I’d been saying all along. I was joined by a whole bunch of other people, authors, creators, artist, and fans, who said enough of the lies and BS and slander, now we’re in this too. We’re tired of the Hugo awards being a circle jerk of like-minded people telling each other how brilliant they are.

To be perfectly frank, some things changed between LonCon and SasQuan. I’d proved my point about the bias and attacks, and was ready to hang it up. They poked the bear, the bear mauled them, and now the bear just wanted to go back to his cave and be left alone. But Brad Torgersen is an idealist, Mr. Martin, I can’t accentuate this enough. He would be dead in Westeros in fifteen minutes. Brad is TruFan. That man waves his nerd flag high. He looks at the Hugo with adoration like it is some sort of religious icon with a halo around it. He prays to his altar of Saint Heinlein 3 times a day and lights candles for Frank Herbert.

If I was naïve at first, Brad makes me look… hell… I don’t even have a good comparison. So when he grew up hearing that the Hugos represented the Best of the Best, bright shining light on the hill, he incorporated that into the very fiber of his being.

And Brad figured that with my insane stunt of SP2 actually working, let’s make the Hugos represent more of fandom, fans like him and his friends. So instead of a thousand words for snow, we might actually  have some dirt, or grass, maybe even some trees, and no doubt some bullshit will show up once in a while, but damn it, our side is sick of freaking snow!

At that point Sad Puppies was no longer just about proving a point. It was about giving a voice to a whole mess of fans who didn’t think they would ever have one again. The mission changed, and it became about getting deserving worthy creators who would normally be shunned or ignored some freaking recognition for once in their lives.  It was time to stand up to the clique that shall not be named and their lectures about how we were having wrongfun.

Unlike the existing cliques, Sad Puppies 3 didn’t give a damn about politics, race, religion, or orientation. All we cared about was could they tell us a damned good story. The big game you describe, the campaigning, the favors, all that, our suggested slate was made up of the people who didn’t, wouldn’t, or couldn’t play that game. 

I have very mixed feelings about campaigning for awards. Part of me agrees with my friend Lisa Tuttle. Wouldn’t it be great if each reader could make his own nominations, without being influenced by slates or lists or mass mailings? It would also be great if all the children of the world could get together and sing in perfect harmony, but that’s not going to happen either. Like it or not, campaigning is here to stay.

I can see where this is going. I am a Worldcon member and a SFWA member, but I am also a member of the Writer’s Guild of America and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which means I vote on the WGA awards and the Emmys… and so the flood comes in, DVDs and Blu-Rays and screeners and links to lockboxes, all full of TV shows and movies “for my consideration.” Way too many to watch. Way too many to count. Are there studios and directors and networks that don’t play the game, that don’t send out screeners and run ads in VARIETY and THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER. Sure there are. They are easy to recognize. They’re the studios and directors and networks who don’t win any awards.

Once you let the genie out of the bottle, he doesn’t go back in.

The Sad Puppies did not invent Hugo campaigning, by any means. But they escalated it, just as that magazine/publisher partnership did way back when. They turned it up to eleven.

If the people attacking us don’t chill out, more of my people are going to get pissed off, and it might hit a 12 or 13 next year. 🙂

 

Their slate was more effective that anyone could ever have dreamed, so effective that they drowned out pretty much all the other voices. They ran the best organized, most focused, and most effective awards campaign in the history of our genre, and showed everyone else how it’s done.

I used to be an accountant. We are monotonously efficient.

Truthfully, we never dreamed that we would block out whole categories with our suggestions. I underestimated how motivated my people became after seeing the childish, petulant, entitled reaction from the clique that shall not be named last year.

I’ve had a bunch of well-meaning SMOFs telling me that they nobody would be upset if we’d only gotten one or two things into each category, but that’s exactly what we accomplished last year, and they still freaked out at us.

The lesson will be learned. The Sad Puppies have already announced that they intend to do it again next year. Which means that other factions in fandom will have to do it as well. Just as happened with the “let me tell you about my eligible works,” the rest of the field is going to need to field slates of their own in self-defense.

 

Mr. Martin, we didn’t start this. We are the inevitable backlash that occurs when the pendulum swings too far in one direction.

I don’t look forward to that. It cheapens the Hugos. Will future winners actually be the best books or stories? Or only the books and stories that ran the best campaigns?

As far as we could tell, it was already like that.

Can all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put the Hugos back together again?

I don’t see how. And that makes me sadder than all those puppies put together.

My honest opinion is that to a gigantic chunk of disenfranchised fandom, we felt like Humpty Dumpty fell off that wall a long time ago.

If you want to talk about going forward, from here, I don’t know what to tell you about your campaigning cliques. They were already there long before we showed up.

But you really want to “fix it” and make sure my people don’t screw it up anymore, and keep the Hugos sacred? Well, right now the ball is in your court.

You’ve got people out there who supposedly love the award so much that they are organizing block votes for No Award against absurdly deserving yet consistently overlooked people like Jim Butcher, Toni Weisskopf, and Kevin J. Anderson, all to burn the whole thing down, just because my people violated your secret gentleman’s agreement and plugged them on a slate. As Brad Torgersen pointed out already, that sounds suspiciously like the story with Solomon offering to cut the baby in half.  And one mother saying, screw it, I’d rather the baby die than that bitch get him. (paraphrasing, obviously).

No matter how you change the rules, Sad Puppies will still obey the rules.  

First and foremost, you guys need to decide, once and for all, what the Hugo Awards really are. There are two choices.

1. It is the most prestigious award which represents the best works in all of fandom.
2. It is a little award, for one little group of people, at one convention.

You can’t have both. Pick one, stake your flag on it, and we will proceed from there.

If it is just WorldCon’s little clubhouse award, and some of us aren’t welcome in the clubhouse, then fine. Duly noted, and Sad Puppies next move will be predicated upon that.

But if it is the most prestigious award that represents the best of all of fandom, then that means that all of fandom, including us, gets to participate.

You can’t have both.

I think you will find that the people who are involved with Sad Puppies are willing to talk about the future, but we are very tired of being yelled at and lied about.

No matter what happens, whether you like the term for them or not, you guys need to calm your SJWs down, and tell them to quit forming angry twitter mobs, and scaring the hell out of authors who cross their invisible lines. Most of us aren’t big and successful enough to be immune to their inquisition. I’m fine. You’re doing, holy crap, like mega bucks piles of gold bars fine. But many regular authors are being intimidated by these bullies, having their careers damaged, and it isn’t right.

Anyways, I hope you actually read this, and if so, I appreciate you taking the time.

Sincerely,

-Larry Correia