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

Yesterday the following media outlets ran articles about the Sad Puppies campaign, in which they either directly said or insinuated that it was run and populated by racist straight white males with the goal of keeping scifi white and male. (not true)

The Telegraph
Entertainment Weekly
Salon
Huffington Post
Slash Dot
io9
The Guardian

It was almost like they were all reading off the same script.

Most of them said our slate was exclusively white, straight, and male (not true)

Most of them said that last year was a big win for diversity (I believe last years winners were all white and one Asian).

Most of them said our slate was exclusively right wing (not true, in fact the majority skew left, we have socialists, liberals, moderates, libertarians, conservatives, and question marks. To the best of my knowledge, I believe that last year’s “diverse” winners all espoused the same social justice politics).

But there is no bias in this perfectly functioning system. My side said that political narrative trumped reality in this business. Believe me yet?

We’ve seen this behavior before, but never at a level so blatantly false. Truth is utterly irrelevant. Actual positions don’t matter. Our actual words are replaced with fabricated new ones in “scare quotes” or bizarre out of context nonsense.

Everyone on my side is held to account for the most outlandish thing anyone tangentially related to us says, even if they’re not on our slate, but none of the untrue, vile, rude, horrible, things said about us by our opposition is ever condemned.

In the last 24 hours I’ve watched people we nominated have to go public about their sexual orientation and politics in the hopes of not becoming targets, and staving off social justice witch hunters.

We’ve been yelled at by the inquisition for failing to notify all of our nominees that we were going to endorse their work, and that makes us bad, not the inquisition.

Don’t worry, at this rate, if we keep this up the SJWs will make it so that everyone in fandom will have to wear helpful little color coded armbands that explain which group you belong to.

To the the SMOFs, moderates, new comers, and fence sitters I addressed yesterday, yes, we have disagreements with you. We’re happy to discuss them. We are not, however, happy to be libeled as the vilest forms of scum to walk the earth, and we are not happy to live in fear of career destruction.

You want my part of fandom to coexist peacefully? You want to work out our differences and keep the awards meaningful? So do we. Though we disagree on the details and the issues, we also love this stuff.

But coordinated slander campaigns, lies, character assassinations, threats, witch hunts? No… We won’t stand for that.

You want to know why we’re here now, loud, annoying you, upsetting your apple cart? Read those articles. Look at the bylines by culture warriors who all share the same set of politics. You say that you don’t like how we made the awards political. Newsflash, they have been for a long time, only you wouldn’t know it because my side didn’t bother to take the field. Now we’re here, taking ground they think they own, and those culture warriors don’t give a shit about you, the authors you love, the books you read, or the future of your culture. They think they own you like they own every other group, and they’ll lie, slander, threaten, coerce, defame, sabotage, and hate anyone who stands up to them.

No More.

EDIT: Brad Torgersen, who has the helm for SP3 chimed in too. He got libeled as a white supremacist on his birthday.

https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/fort-living-room/

Read that link. Look at the picture of Brad and his family. Explain to me how an Army Warrant Officer in a 20 year interracial marriage with biracial children is a white supremacist, because some trust fund babies with gender studies degrees declared it to be so.

EDIT: 8, I missed the A/V Club.

On Saturday they announced the finalists for the Hugo Awards. As you are aware by now, Sad Puppies suggested candidates absolutely dominated. I tried to mostly avoid the internet this weekend because it was a holiday better spent with family than hate mail.

This blog post is directed at the newcomers, the fence sitters, the undecided, and the unlucky SMOFs who’ve been caught in the crossfire. There is no need to address my detractors, because they have already repeatedly demonstrated that they’ll just ignore what I actually say and do, and fabricate their own wild and crazy narrative about what I secretly meant to say.

This is going to be get long, but there are a lot of things being tossed around that I need to respond to.

For those of you just joining us, Sad Puppies 3 was a campaign to get talented, worthy, deserving authors who would normally never have a chance nominated for the supposedly prestigious Hugo awards.

I started this campaign a few years ago because I believed that the awards were politically biased, and dominated by a few insider cliques. Authors who didn’t belong to these groups or failed to appease them politically were shunned. When I said this in public, I was called a liar, and told that the Hugos represented all of fandom and that the awards were strictly about quality. I said that if authors with “unapproved” politics were to get nominations, the quality of the work would be irrelevant, and the insider cliques would do everything in their power to sabotage that person. Again, I was called a liar, so I set out to prove my point.

This blog post has details and links to most of the background, history, and fallout from last time: https://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/24/an-explanation-about-the-hugo-awards-controversy/

Basically, I did what the other side had been doing for years, only in public and with the wrong kind of fans, and everything unfolded just like I predicted it would. Especially vehement was the contingent of fandom that I took to calling Social Justice Warriors.  This may offend the No Labels crowd, but oh well, it is what it is. The name has stuck in our culture.

Having proven my point far better than I’d ever hoped, I was going to walk away, but Brad Torgersen is a very idealistic author and fan, and he was inspired to continue the program for another year. All of his explanations are available at this link: https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/01/21/sad-puppies-3-only-a-few-days-to-register-to-vote/

Sad Puppies 1 consisted of me and a handful of blog posts. Sad Puppies 2, more people joined in, we had some fun with it (check the link, we’ve got badly drawn cartoons, videos, and a spokesmanatee), and we made a dent. A handful of nominations damned near caused the apocalypse. Then Sad Puppies 3 was wildly successful beyond all of our expectations.

Now I want to address some of the many concerns I’ve seen voiced over the last few days. I will try to be as honest and direct as possible.

-SP says that they’re fighting back against biased politics by having biased politics.

Yes and no. SP1 was very politically biased because it was just me. SP2 did have a preponderance of nominees on the right side of the political spectrum, again, because that slate was basically my suggested list of stuff that I personally enjoyed. However, ultimately that didn’t matter because the liberals we got noms for were just as attacked and vilified as the rest of us.

SP3 is actually extremely politically diverse. That’s because this time our slate of suggestions was put together by a bigger group of authors and fans, and since Brad was running the show and trying to be all about getting recognition for quality, deserving authors, their personal beliefs were of no concern. Don’t take my word for it. Go through our list of nominees for yourself. You’ll find that we have liberals, conservatives, moderates, and question marks who’ve kept their politics to themselves.

What these authors have in common is that they are good, entertaining, and wouldn’t normally have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting a nomination because they aren’t inclined to kiss the right butts. If you look at our best novel nominees, none of them are conservatives.  I was the only one on there who could possibly be described as right wing, and I refused my nomination.

For the record, Brad Torgersen is a moderate. By Utah standards he is a flaming liberal.

As you go through the other categories, you’ll find that we put up many authors and editors who are my polar political opposites, and I’d guess that a majority of them are actually moderate to left on the spectrum.

That’s because Sad Puppies suggestions was about the quality of the work. Not the author’s politics. Anybody who says the SP nominees are a bunch of right wingers is either misinformed, willfully ignorant, or a liar.

-Sad Puppies wants to destroy the Hugos

Not at all. The Hugos were already broken. My people are just the inevitable backlash that happens in any system when the pendulum swings too far in one direction.

For years people have paid lip service to bringing new people into the Hugos. Whenever people complained about the biased, cliquish state of the awards, they were dismissed and told that if they wanted to change things, they should get more people involved in the process.

Okay. Done. Next?

Note, a lot of the anger this week is about how my people are wrongfan having wrongfun, and thus are bad and should be dismissed, blocked somehow, or excluded. That kind of talk only proves my original point that started this all, and really, it is that sort of asinine, outlandish accusations that caused more of the previously apathetic fans to shell out their $40 to get involved too.

I fully admit, and am on record about starting this out of spite. However, it has grown far beyond just one man’s opinions. Brad is fighting to make the awards relevant to more of fandom.

–Okay, many of us agree the Hugos were broken, but Sad Puppies isn’t the way to fix it

That is a valid opinion, and I’ve seen it pop up a lot over the last few days. I really want to address this, because I can’t stress enough that if that’s what you believe, we’re not your enemy.

For years authors have complained about the biased state of the Hugos, the politicking, and the games you needed to play in order to be considered. Most of the grumbling was in private, behind closed doors, and there wasn’t a green room at any con in the country where you couldn’t find authors complaining about the sorry state of things.

But nobody did anything.

Then some cliques started manipulating this small, easily manipulated system. When 40 or 80 nominations was all it took to sway the most prestigious award in the industry, a few whisper campaigns and calling in favors was all it took to secure a spot. Again, many honest WorldCon fans were offended by this behavior.

But nobody did anything.

As time went on, it got increasingly absurd and political. Some once beloved and award winning authors were shunned for their politics, never to be seen at the Hugos again. Editors and companies related to those shunned authors discovered that they too were shunned by relation, regardless of their politics. Campaigns became more public, with “award pimpage” becoming the norm. And the long time SMOFs who took pride in this award were offended.

But nobody did anything.

To my half of fandom, we’d pretty much written the awards off. They’d become a joke. Award winning became a synonym for boring and preachy. The insider cliques just declared that my part of fandom was stupid and didn’t matter anyway, while those who honestly cherished the awards didn’t like seeing their Hugo lose its luster in the eyes of the masses.

But still nobody did anything, and it got worse and worse.

Then several years ago some upstart, minor jackass hack pulp writer (who’d owned a machinegun store and did gun rights lobbying for the Republican party so couldn’t exactly hide his politics) managed to squeak in a Campbell nomination. I got to see how the sausage was made up close and I was stunned by how asinine the process really was.

So I did something.

Now I’m the bad guy. I’m cool with that. Eventually somebody was going to have to do it.

Here’s the thing. This massive upheaval wouldn’t have ever happened if the moderates had done something years ago, but they didn’t. I can’t really say I blame them though. If they took a stand against the perpetually outraged crowd, they risked their career and their reputation. We’re talking about the same angry, entitled twitter mobs that ran off a famous comedian because he might tell a fat joke in the future. Those mobs are quick to outrage, slow to reason, and will turn on their allies, because attacking is what they are programmed to do. And the moderates—those who will admit it—are terrified of ending up on the wrong end of a witch hunt.

Now it is okay to rail against my people for doing what the other side has done in the past, because we’re not going to sabotage anyone’s career or slander you. We actually believe in the concept of free speech and free expression.

We’re getting condemned for bringing politics into the awards, but we all know politics have been in the awards for a long time. We just did it openly.

I never expected us to sweep the awards. Frankly, I was shocked by the results. I didn’t realize just how many regular fans had been turned off for so long.

Now the moderates are telling us we did it wrong, or telling us what we should have done better, but the thing is at least we did something. There’s not exactly an instruction manual for this sort of thing you know.

-All the Sad Puppies people are lying. It isn’t about getting good books recognized, it is about TOPIC X.

Now this is a really hard one to argue against, because X is whatever they want it to be, and it changes constantly. I’ve seen how we’re all angry white straight males (which is why we’ve got like a dozen women in there, the person taking it over is female, I don’t care about anybody’s race, and I have no idea who our nominees have sex with). Yesterday X was about how my fans are motivated by homophobia. The day before X was racism. I’m sure tomorrow we’ll hate the disabled. Who knows? I can’t keep up.

That is all nonsense, but they keep on making new crap up, and the gullible keep swallowing the narrative and regurgitating it all over the internet.

Here is an interesting one for you moderates, SMOFs, and fence sitters to ponder on. Why is it that our own words and actions aren’t to be believed, but anything the other side says about us, no matter how outlandish, is to be accepted?

Over the years I’ve done Sad Puppies, do you know how many fannish blogs, fanzines, and podcasts interviewed me, the guy who started the campaign, about the goals of Sad Puppies?

None.

I can’t think of single one. You’d think with the most controversial thing to happen to the Hugos in forever, somebody would actually want to sit down and interview us and get our side of the story, but nada, zip. Sure, lots of people wrote about it, but it was pretty obvious these fannish journalists didn’t read what I actually wrote, and instead they critiqued Straw Larry, or they quoted other bloggers quoting Straw Larry.

Finally, last month Brad and I were finally asked to do a podcast interview. They tried to be unbiased. They asked us hard questions.

It was fantastic.  http://www.adventuresinscifipublishing.com/2015/03/aisfp-289-larry-correia-brad-r-torgersen-sad-puppies/

So I’ve been a little less than patient with some fannish journalists. It has been really interesting to see a few of them who originally hated my guts, watch the foot stompy outrage crowd doing exactly what I said they would, and having those journalists realize that maybe I was telling the truth after all.

On this note, I’d like to extend an olive branch to Mike Glyer at File 770. We’ve gone around a few times, but I’ve got to hand it to him. Recently he’s been fully quoting my side and letting our arguments stand without interpretation. Well done, sir.

-Sad Puppies is mean

We’ve been getting a lot of moderates and SMOF friends reaching out, concerned, because the straw versions of us are very hateful, and it is so very sad that there are sides in fandom, and they are fighting.

That’s nice. Now let me flip this back around. Where were you guys when my people were being libeled, slandered, attacked, and insulted? Did you reach out to the perpetually outraged crowd and urge them to be nice and tell them there shouldn’t be any fighting in fandom, or do you just do that to the side you know won’t sic an angry mob on you?

Do you know the biggest single reason SP3 got more fans involved than SP2? My guess is that it was after the other side moved the goal posts, and danced in the streets about our “humiliating defeat”, and called all those outsiders first time voters stupid homophobic racist sexists and other super gracious acts, and Hugo award winning former SFWA presidents take to Twitter to have all caps rants about how my people are motivated by hate and racism, you shouldn’t be shocked when my people are increasingly motivated.

Just think, if you guys urging peace, love, and harmony now would have reigned in the attack dogs years ago, Sad Puppies would never have existed.

–Sad Puppies BLOCK VOTING is different because it was designed to lock out all other contenders

Nope. And here is a very simple way to tell that simply isn’t true.

Based upon our past performance, how in the world could we know we’d get this much more turn out?

Also, if you look at the suggested slate posts, you’ll note that in some categories we had 5, because we had 5 works that we really liked, and there are 5 slots. In other categories we had less because we didn’t think of 5 in time. We ran with what we thought of. It wasn’t exactly a nefarious master plan.

The year before we’d only gotten half of our novels on. In SP2, I put up 2 works for best novel. Mine (which made it) and Sarah Hoyt’s A Few Good Men (which sadly didn’t make it). Why wouldn’t we put up more this time?

(Funny note on A Few Good Men, as morons were saying Sad Puppies 2 was motivated by homophobia, trying to kick gays out of fiction, the protagonist and hero of that one is a gay man, but I voted for it because it was a fantastic book)

Now the moderates are telling us that if we’d suggested fewer/more works, then magically this would all be okay and they wouldn’t be so angry at us. Oh bullshit. Come on. We all know that whatever we do, whether there is one nomination or a hundred, the perpetually outraged would still be outraged.

I do love however how everybody who was completely silent while the SJW mob was running rampant and unopposed, are now full of all sorts of condemnation against my people, and full of helpful strategic advice about what we should do next time. So, when we were in a position of weakness, they maligned us. Now that we’re in a position of strength, they malign us, but your advice is to go back to a position of weakness…

Yes, that is super helpful. Thanks a lot.

Here’s the thing, this isn’t just me and a couple of my friends having fun with this anymore. It is bigger than that. There are a bunch of us involved now. For next year, we’ll take a look at how this shakes out and proceed from there. Kate Paulk is in charge next year and will be organizing what we do.

We don’t want to replace one kingmaker with another. We don’t want to replace one dominate clique with another. I don’t want the Nielsen Hayden’s throne of skulls. It doesn’t look very comfy to sit in.

Let me reiterate. We don’t want to exclude anybody. We want to include everybody.  We’ll look at what happens and adjust fire from there. We are willing to listen to suggestions, debate, and talk with you, because we truly don’t want to destroy the awards or lord over them like some petty tyrants. But getting screamed at, insulted, and lectured at is just going to annoy us, so you can skip that part.

-The Hugos belong to a select few

My, how the tune has changed in just a few years. I loved when Teresa Nielsen Hayden proclaimed that, because when I said the same thing several years ago, I was a lair.

Think about this carefully moderates and SMOFs, the Hugos are either:

1. The most prestigious award in genre fiction that represents the best of all of fandom
2. An award for the favorites for one small group of people at one small convention.

You can’t have both.

-Sad Puppies insults SMOFs

Now this gets tricky, because we get into the definitions of words that have insider meanings.

SMOF means Secret Masters of Fandom. It can be used in a few different ways. To people whose social lives revolve around conventions, it means the people who run stuff there. The word started as a joke.

To many of my people, SMOF was seen as a pejorative, used for the snooty, snobbish types who liked to tell those fans that they aren’t real fans, or that they are the wrong kinds of fans, or that they were having wrongfun.

However, many good, decent, honorable people self-identify as SMOFs. I count many of these people as friends, and many of them are cheering Sad Puppies on.

This is why Brad Torgersen, being diplomatic, made up the word CHORF to describe the snoots. https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/chorf-its-a-word-now/ which I must admit, made me laugh.

We’ve got nothing against fans. We’re fans too.

-Larry Correia is a big mean jerk

No denying that.  As Sarah Hoyt said the other day, nobody raised in a Portuguese household has ever been accused of subtlety. I’m loud, opinionated, and bombastic. Part of that is because I didn’t get to Live Life on the Easiest Difficulty Setting, and where I come from if you look like food you will be eaten.

So yes, I can be rude, impatient, and I’m quick to anger. It is a character flaw. I never claimed to be perfect, but I’m the one who showed up.

I used to be more patient. For those of you who are authors, artists, or creators, I want you to think back to the meanest, most vile, fundamentally dishonest, cruel thing anyone has ever said about you or your work. How did that make you feel? Now I want you to imagine getting that twenty times a day for your entire career. How long do you think your thin veneer of civility would last?

The SJWs are bullies. They can’t tolerate anybody being outspoken against their ideas. So when you are the nail that sticks up, they will try to hammer you down. They will spread lies about you, hoping that everyone else will shun you. This gets tiresome after a few years, especially when they start to make up “scare quotes” from you in international newspapers.

I’ve had a bunch of honestly concerned people tell me recently that they think I’m being too mean, or that I’m so used to responding to malicious attackers that I sometimes lump in innocent bystanders in with those malicious attackers (a moderate friend referred to it as my “shotgun approach” which is a good comparison).

You get attacked enough and eventually your ability to differentiate targets starts to suffer. For those caught up in that, I apologize.

To those who still willfully want to attack me, come get some. 🙂

–Vox Day! VOX DAAAAaaaay!

Vox Day wasn’t on the Sad Puppies suggest slate. Sorry. Can’t blame that one on us.

Well, I suppose you can, in that I demonstrated how small this most prestigious award actually is last year. Vox Day’s alternate Rabid Puppies slate was him going directly to his fan base. Looking at the numbers, and he on his own was about as successful as I was last year for SP2.

Now here is an interesting thought for you moderates out there who despise Vox Day. Above I talked about the angry reaction to SP2… Honestly, last year Fandom (capital F) insulted hundreds of outsider fans’ taste and intelligence, called them names, and basically treated them like trash (while the majority kept their mouths shut at best, or gave tacit approval at worst) and now you’re shocked when Vox Day has appealed directly to those people you mocked to vote in a manner that especially pisses you off?

Well, duh.

-Sad Puppies invited in Breitbart.

That’s cool. The SJWs brought in the Guardian, Io9, and Tor.com, so now we’re even.

Actually Breitbart approached me and asked for an interview. Last year the SP2 controversy got a small mention in the USA Today. The guys who talked to me from Breitbart have been doing reports on SJW crusaders across many industries, and this is news, so this isn’t exactly shocking.

–GamerGate is behind Sad Puppies!

Okay, now this one is just stupid. It comes from Teresa Nielsen Hayden, head of the SMOFfen SS.

Because many SJWs check under their bed for the Gamergate boogieman before going to sleep, obviously GamerGate is responsible for the Sad Puppies sweep. Apparently she discovered that one of my longtime fans, Daddy Warpig, is a GamerGate blogger, and has tweeted about SP3, and she exposed this shocking revelation!

Wow… Yeah, good work there, Sherlock. You could have just saved time and asked me, since I also favorited those and retweeted them. I’ve also been on his podcast. But if you want to really damn me, let me save you some detective work. I’m also friends with actor Adam Baldwin, the guy who coined the word GamerGate. I’ve also blogged about GamerGate, but more in relation to Sarkesian calling for a boycott of my home state because she didn’t understand our constitution or laws wouldn’t allow for violating our citizen’s civil rights because of fake threats against her. https://monsterhunternation.com/2014/10/21/fisking-the-deseret-news-anti-ccw-article/

But GamerGate isn’t behind Sad Puppies.

1. SP predates GG by a couple of years.
2. SP is tiny compared to GG, and the vast majority of GG paid no attention to SP,
3. Until the Breitbart article came out, but if you loot at the dates of the article https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/02/05/breitbart-reports-on-sad-puppies/ it came out too late for any new people to register in time to nominate for Sasquan.
4. We do share some common members, but enemy of my enemy is my friend, and both movements can’t stand Social Justice bullies telling people they are having wrongfun.
5. There were like 2,000 total nominations. If it had been a GamerGate plot there would have been 20,000 nominations, and they would spammed it across the internet and had a great laugh about it.

Oh, quick note moderates and SMOFs, if you don’t want GamerGate to get involved in the Hugos, don’t blame me. Tell your Social Justice idiots to shut up on Twitter!  TNH is the one invoking and provoking them, not me.

Brianna Wu—who is despised by hundreds of thousands of gamers as an opportunistic vulture—took to Twitter after the nominations were announced, blaming GamerGate for ruining the Hugos, and then she tweeted about how the awards were precious and sacred to her because her husband has 4 Hugos.  That is like waving the red cape in front of the bull.

-We’re going to vote No Award against every single thing suggested by the Sad Puppies slate!

Yes, voting based on politics with no consideration for the quality of the actual work will sure show Larry Correia what’s up.

The fact that the CHORFs were already demanding rule changes, No Awarding everybody, and blocking the wrong kind of fans before the nominations were even announced should be pretty telling. Funny. That is exactly what I said they would do years ago. The insider clique cares far more about maintaining their insular little kingdom than they do about the awards.

Here’s the thing, if you No Award everybody on the slate with no consideration to the authors or their work, you’ll just be proving me right.

And seriously, you’re telling me Jim Butcher, the god father of an entire genre, isn’t worthy? Marko Kloos indy published sci-fi book has sold literally over ten times as many copies as last year’s winner Ancillary Justice, and people love it, but it isn’t worthy? You’re telling me that Kevin J. Anderson, industry pro, 23 million books in print, three decades of working in fandom and helping other authors, isn’t worthy?

Bullshit. And none of those authors share my politics.

Toni Weisskopf has spent her entire life in fandom. She grew up at cons and lived in Rocket City. She had relatives on the Manhattan Project and ate dinner at Warner Von Braun’s house. I don’t know how many hundreds of conventions Toni has gone to, as everything from volunteer to GoH. She’s edited hundreds of authors, took over and successfully run a publishing house, and it is telling that she was ignored until Sad Puppies came along. She’s not worthy?

Edmund Schubert has been running Intergalactic Medicine Show for years, producing tons of great short fiction, and you’re telling me he’s unworthy? Why? His boss (who he disagrees with) doesn’t like gay marriage? Jim Minz started as David Hartwell’s assistant at Tor, and is beloved by everybody in publishing and has spent his whole life in fandom, and he’s unworthy?

All of these short fiction authors, some of whom have been writing for places like Analog for decades, they’re unworthy? Campbell nominees who are brand new, producing all sorts of great work, and you’ll shit all over their prospective careers and No Award their future because Brad recommend them?

They’re unworthy because of association, but you didn’t say a damned thing when the SJWs tried to give a Campbell to Requires Hate?

That is hypocrisy.

We want people to read the works and judge them for themselves. We were accused of trying to get people to nominate without reading, but we put that one to bed when we Book Bombed all the short fiction in the weeks leading up to the nomination’s, selling thousands and thousands of stories, and bumping all of our nominees up to the tops of their Amazon categories sales rankings, and making the SP nominated works the most widely read things on the ballot in years.

But yeah, No Award a bunch of obviously worthy creators over politics and brag about it on the internet in advance. If I truly wanted to destroy the Hugos credibility to all but one tiny, insular little group of fans, that’s exactly what I’d do.

Well, the whole world is watching now. What are you going to tell them the award is really about?

 

EDIT: To add, read this article for Entertainment Weekly http://www.ew.com/article/2015/04/06/hugo-award-nominations-fall-victim-misogynistic-and-racist-voting?hootPostID=221657cca998c926458486c3f53fbe17

So, SMOFs and Moderates, read that article. Hell, just read the headline… If you’ve paid any attention or have even an iota of honesty in your soul you know that article in a national publication is total bullshit.

Now do you understand why it is so very tempting for my side to just say to hell with it and hoist the black flag?

EDIT 2, they’ve already changed the article because the EW lawyers freaked out. That should tell you something. I’ve got the original cached.

Since they changed it, here is the original. See moderates? This is what happens when you cross the Social Justice crowd. The truth become irrelevant and they spread whatever they can about you to get you shunned and destroyed.

Hugo Award nominations fall victim to misogynistic, racist voting campaign
BY ISABELLA BIEDENHARN • @ISABELLA324

The Hugo Awards have fallen victim to a campaign in which misogynist groups lobbied to nominate only white males for the science fiction book awards. These groups, Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies (both of which are affiliated with last year’s GamerGate scandal), urged sci-fi fans to become members of the Hugo Awards’ voting body, World Science Fiction Convention, in order to cast votes against female writers and writers of color. Membership only costs $40, and allows members to vote for the 2016 nominations as well as the 2015 nominations, which were just released.
Sad Puppies broadcast their selection on Feb. 1, writing: “If you agree with our slate below—and we suspect you might—this is YOUR chance to make sure YOUR voice is heard.” Brad Torgerson, who runs Sad Puppies along with Larry Correia, complains that the Hugo Awards have lately skewed toward “literary” works, as opposed to “entertainment.”
Torgerson also writes that he disagrees with Hugos being awarded for affirmative action-like purposes, as many women and writers of color went home with awards in 2014: ”Likewise, we’ve seen the Hugo voting skew ideological, as Worldcon and fandom alike have tended to use the Hugos as an affirmative action award: giving Hugos because a writer or artist is (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) or because a given work features (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) characters.”
The other lobbying group, Rabid Puppies, is run by Theodore Beale (who goes by the name Vox Day). As The Telegraph reports, “Members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have called for Beale’s exclusion from the group after he has writtenagainst women’s suffrage and posted racist views towards black writer NK Jemisin.”
Fortunately, some sane voters allowed well-deserving writers to pull through. Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword and Listen was nominated for Dramatic Presentation, and Annie Bellet’s Goodnight Stars was nominated, despite having a non-white, female protagonist.
Plenty of members of the science fiction community have voiced their disgust with both sects of “Puppies.” Writer Philip Sandifer wrote on his blog Sunday, “The Hugo Awards have just been successfully hijacked by neofascists.” Sandifer’s post, which is worth reading in full, addresses what this disaster means for the sci-fi world:
To be frank, it means that traditional sci-fi/fantasy fandom does not have any legitimacy right now. Period. A community that can be this effectively controlled by someone who thinks black people are subhuman and who has called for acid attacks on feminists is not one whose awards have any sort of cultural validity. That sort of thing doesn’t happen to functional communities. And the fact that it has just happened to the oldest and most venerable award in the sci-fi/fantasy community makes it unambiguously clear that traditional sci-fi/fantasy fandom is not fit for purpose.
As writer Joe Abercrombie put it:
The Hugo Awards winners will be announced on Aug. 22 in Washington.

##
And this is how she addressed me after being called on these obvious blatant lies on Twitter.

isabella biedenharn ‏@isabella324 1h1 hour ago
@monsterhunter45 Hi Larry, we’re happy to update to include your side. Please send me your comment when you have time
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The Hugo nominees have been announced. As you’ve probably already heard Sad Puppies suggested candidates showed up everywhere. We got nominations for dozens of talented, deserving people who would normally have been ignored or shunned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the Powder Blue Care Bear of the Evil Legion of Evil has finally been pushed too far, and out comes the flame thrower.

https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/03/30/former-tor-editor-still-longs-to-gatekeep-the-field/

Good stuff. Brad explains everything really well, it his moderate, reasonable manner. Now, for my hatey hatemongers I need to clarify a few things. Some of the things Queen Teresa Neilsen Hayden is STILL saying in that thread from yesterday need to be addressed… Well, laughed at. Because they’re stupid. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016177.html

Seriously, when it comes to demonstrating what I’ve been talking about for years, that link is like the gift that keeps on giving.  Here is what Teresa Nielsen Hayden has to say:

When I say the Hugos belong to the worldcon, I’m talking about the literal legal status of the award. 

Sure you were! We all totally believe that.

I do love how when we actually quote them, that’s not what they meant, but then they fabricate bogus scare quotes for me, then that’s totally what I really meant. Man, that Straw Larry is such a jerk, I’d hate me too. 

But I also know that one of the biggest reasons the rocket is magic is because it spiritually belongs to all of us who love SF.

Just not you guys. You’re the wrong kind of fans. They’ve got 700+ posts over there now making that perfectly clear.

Here’s the thing, Teresa. You don’t speak for all of fandom. You don’t own them. You don’t even speak for all of the TrueFans or SMOF or whatever you want to call them. There are plenty of longtime SMOFs who are just as sick of your preening, entitled nonsense as my people are, and though they may find my actions upsetting or barbaric, or personally think I’m a jerk, at least everything I’ve done has been in the open… Plus, they are safe to criticize my side without fear of retribution or career sabotage. Can’t say the same thing about your side.

I’ve been thinking about the aspects of the Sad Puppy campaigns that bother me most. So far there are three.

Only three? Wow. I’d better check my privilege. I’m used to bothering these people in dozens of ways. 

Up first, the perpetual evil that is Mad Mike Williamson. 

First, there’s the Best Related Work category. That’s where the reference works wind up. Good reference books are labors of love, especially that last 10% of quality that takes 50% of the total labor. People who create reference books get one shot at the Hugo.

Oh really? Don’t worry. We’ll take a look at the history of this illustrious award in a moment.

Did you see Amazon’s sample text from Wisdom from My Internet by Michael Z. Williamson? Apparently it’s on the Hugo ballot in the Best Related Work category. Williamson didn’t know to keep his gob shut until the official announcement. @booksmugglers picked up and tweeted the story, and Kevin Maroney reported on it here.

I talked to Mike Williamson about this. It was a simple mistake. The email either wasn’t clear about keeping quiet until the 4th or he missed that part.  When Mike was informed of his error, he then deleted the posts, and apologized to the administrators, who said no harm done, and they apologized for not making the email clearer. 

Except Insider SMOF Queen knows that this is an unforgivable sin. 

That is a thoroughly bad book, including its frontmatter and interior design,

Says the editor, judging a book by its cover. 

and it’s not a related work. It’s just a nonfiction book published in the appropriate year by a Sad-Puppy-approved author, so they tossed it onto their stupid slate. I expect there are other SP titles in that category, so more than one book that would have been a nominee for Best Related Work has been displaced.

Uh huh… Let’s take a look at prior years in this illustrious, super prestigious category, that only consistently represents the best in sci-fi/fantasy, and not various insider cliques.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Related_Work  

2009’s winner was sci fi author John Scalzi’s Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, where the beloved Social Justice Warrior and SFWA president John Scalzi collected funny internet posts into a book. However, Teresa says that when evil libertarian sci fi author Mike Williamson collected funny internet posts into a book, that was SUPER BAD and SHOULD NOT COUNT. 

But wait, what other illustrious things have been on there? A cursory glance through the various nominees shows that Teresa is being disingenuous again. This isn’t just the category for scholarly reference works. Maybe it used to be, but now it is a grab bag of everything. 

In the last few years that category has had nominations for things like: 

Chicks Dig Timelords, A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It. (which won 2011, beating scholarly works about Robert Heinlein, and Resnick and Malzburg’s collection of writings on the business of sci-fi)

Chicks Dig Comics, A Celebration of Comics by the Women Who Love Them 

Chicks Unravel Time, Women Journey Through Every Season of Doctor Who. 

(That lost to Writing Excuses that year.  Good, Writing Excuses deserved it. I voted for it, plugged it, and the one year it won, was by a small margin so probably wouldn’t have made it without Sad Puppies voters. You are welcome, Mary)

Last year had Queers Dig Timelords, A Celebration of Doctor Who by the LGBTQ Fans Who Love It, but it lost to a feminist paper of dubious historical accuracy. 

But Mike Williamson’s bit of fan wankery will RUIN THE DIGNITY OF THE AWARDS FOREVER!  

Good thing the rest of our proposed slate consisted of scholarly related works. I’m sure Teresa will have no problem if any of those get on. 

Second: the nominees on the Sad Puppy slate who got onto the ballot. Indications are that a fair number of them, maybe a majority, are respectable members of the SF community who, for one reason or another, are approved of by the SPs while not being ideologically Sad Puppies themselves.

Yes, a majority of them are *respectable* members of the SF community (whatever that is supposed to mean), and they are *approved* by the Sad Puppies because they produced quality work that would normally be ignored or actively shunned or sabotaged by insider assholes. 

And to clarify, we’re not actually Sad Puppies. We’re doing this FOR the puppies, because the leading cause of Puppy Related Sadness is stupid preachy social justice message fic getting awards while good stuff is ignored. We are a coalition of fans and manatees taking a courageous stand against the scourge of PRS. 

You are welcome, America. 

The question isn’t why they are approved by us, but why they never have or never would be approved by you elitist pricks?

This means they’ve dreamed of winning the Hugo, just like all our other writers and artists and editors.

But because they failed to kiss your ring or sufficient Social Justice ass, they never had a snowball’s chance in hell until my people came along. 

They might not have had any real expectation of winding up on the ballot this year, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t wish for it with all the pure luminous desire of Ralphie wishing for a Red Ryder BB gun.

Naw… Most of them aren’t that naive. Old authors know that now they don’t have a shot unless they do something to suck up to one of the insider cliques, and new authors only have a chance if they happened to personally appeal to one of the insider cliques. 

And one of the most noxious things about this process was watching authors silence themselves or tweak their art to be more appealing to these assholes. 

They’ve been put in a horrible position. I mean, I’ve wanted a Hugo since I was in middle school, but I dreamed of being given one by SF community, not Larry Correia.

It wasn’t me that put them in this position. It was your ilk. I’m just part of the inevitable backlash that enters any system that has become stagnant and corrupted. 

I think at least two of those nominees turned down the nomination. I hope they someday get a real one.

Yep. Out of the fifty something people we put on our slate, we failed to speak with every one of them beforehand. I truly feel bad for them, because I’ve seen what happens to unsuspecting innocent authors when they end up the target of a social justice witch hunt. 

The reason we have to talk to the people we put on our slate first is because they need to be aware that SJWs are going to rip them apart, slander them, libel them, attack them, and try to damage their careers, all because they threaten the status quo. (Teresa conveniently left that part out) 

I’m actually impressed it was that few who dropped off. 

Note, she hopes they someday get a *real* nomination. Because you guys, the hundreds of you that shelled out your money to buy a membership? You don’t count. You’re not *real* fans. And your opinions are wrong and bad.  

Third: the ballot itself. This grows out of wondering why so many Sad Puppies are suddenly out and about on forums they don’t normally frequent, belatedly spreading this new and not very believable line about how the whole Sad Puppy thing is motivated by love, rather than spite and resentment. They sure haven’t felt the need to spread this line before now. Neither have they put a lot of effort into hiding the spite and resentment.

So much bullshit crammed into one paragraph. 

1. Forums we don’t normally frequent? Not really. My people show up all over. Only your kind normally just block or “disemvowel” them. 

2. Belatedly? We’ve been saying the same thing the whole time. You assholes have just chosen to ignore what we actually say and make up bullshit in “scare quotes” for us instead. 

3. Brad showed up on your blog because you had a gang of assholes lying about his character. How DARE he defend himself. How RUDE! 

4. To be clear, Brad Torgersen has always been motivated by love. I’m the one motivated by spite. Get it right. 

5. We’ve consistently spread this line the whole time. The fact you had your head shoved up your ass isn’t my fault. But I can understand the confusion. You guys lie so much that it must be hard to keep track of which narrative you’re using about us now. 

6. Again, I’m the spiteful one. I don’t like liars and career sabotaging bullies. I suppose it is because I didn’t get to Live Life On The Easiest Difficulty Setting.

So why are they doing it now?

Because we were responding to you?  So why are you doing it now? 

When you’re nominated for a Hugo, you’re contacted ahead of time by the Hugo administrators, who check to make sure you’ll accept nomination. If they’re going to have to add the next-highest nominee in a category, they want to do it before the general public sees the ballot, so that no one knows who’s the lowest-ranked nominee.

If the SPs got all or most of their slate onto the ballot, and those people had their nominations confirmed by the Hugo administrators, and they were comparing notes behind the scenes, they’d be uniquely able to reconstruct most or all of the final ballot.

Heh heh heh… 

This part is really fascinating and revealing. Let me break it down for you. 

A few years ago I told the truth in public, and said that SMOF insiders usually knew who all the award nominees were going to be for the year, based upon how popular the authors were to the tiny insular cliques, and they usually knew this before the books came out or had been read by anyone. (hell, that even wound up in our Sad Puppies video!)   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzGKlOkQsxY

I was called a liar. There is no insider info like this! The Hugos are a sainted, pure process. They’re not predictable or manipulated by politics! There are no suggested slates or campaigns behind the scenes! How DARE you?!

Uh huh… So I did in public, in the open, with a bunch of outsiders, what they’ve been doing for years with insiders. Outrage ensues. 

So here we are now, a few days away and Teresa is worried. Why? Because as an insider, the people she already knew were SUPPOSED to get Hugo nominations haven’t been contacted… 

But if there wasn’t insider info and insider cliques, and most of the noms aren’t predestined forgone conclusions, how does she even know she’s supposed to be so worried and upset?

Whoops. 
So.

I think they’ve succeeded in f*cking up the ballot beyond all expectation, and they know the SF community is going to explode when we see it.

By SF community, she means her people. By fucking it up, she means the wrong kind of fans got involved. But regardless, her people are going to explode, because that’s what they do. They’ll rant and rave, and go into hysterical fits, and they’ll libel and slander innocent people, and make up wild accusations… You know, the usual.

But here’s the thing, Teresa. Check your privilege. Your friends aren’t entitled to win everything. Fans are fans, people’s votes are equal. Sad Puppies is about being inclusive. We want more people involved. Look at your entire thread here. It is all about being exclusive, and having the most prestigious award in sci-fi just be a little club award for you and your buddies on the approved list. 

Look at Brad Torgersen’s first comment in this thread. I couldn’t figure out what he was on about when he first posted it. Now I think it’s one big steaming pile of special pleading from start to finish, all of it intended to deflect fannish wrath when the ballot’s announced.

Naw, Brad really is a nice guy who wants sci-fi to be a big tent. He truly wants the Hugos to be a shining light on a hill. I think at times he still believes that he can reach out to elitists and sway them. He’s idealistic like that.

On the other hand, I know that internet arguing is a spectator sport. I do this to give ammo to my side and convince the undecided. I know I will never sway the perpetually outraged. I don’t even want a Hugo. I’m only involved in this now because I believe the social justice stranglehold on free speech is killing our genre. 

However, neither Brad nor I are under any delusion that anything we do will “deflect fannish wrath”.  

Whether we get one nomination or a hundred, it won’t matter. These are the same people who unleash their “fannish wrath” against anybody who steps out of line, or anybody who disagrees with them, or anybody who uses forbidden words, or anybody who tells a story they don’t like, or even their own people who say that maybe they shouldn’t be so quick to outrage.

Wrath is all you people have.

Well, Teresa, no matter what we do,  no matter what the results, we know we’re going to feel your wrath. Luckily, I’ve demonstrated to the world that your wrath is impotent. For years, authors have lived in fear of angering these Social Justice mobs. They’ve moderated their speech, self censored their art, and walked on eggshells to avoid getting burned at the stake… That’s why I hate you people, and that’s why I’ve loved exposing you for the petty, petulant, and ultimately powerless little bullies that you are. 

Your angry mobs only have as much power as the person you’re attacking is willing to grant them. I stood up to you last year, and all it did was bring your antics to the attention of more, good, decent, regular fans. It isn’t your award. It is everyone who cares enough to get involved. And every time your side forms an angry Twitter mob, or runs an article in the Guardian full of easily disprovable lies, or attacks some comedian for jokes he hasn’t told yet, or lectures people that they’re having fun wrong, then more regular fans get pissed off and shell out their $40 to get involved, because they don’t like your entitled smugness either. 

I don’t like it, but it does fit all the known data. Wouldn’t it be nice if I turn out to be wrong?

You have no idea… 

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EDIT, Read this too. It is great:             http://accordingtohoyt.com/2015/03/31/the-scarlet-letters/

Sarah Hoyt addressed the bit where they’re all mad at Brad for missing a few authors and not informing them that they were going to be on our slate.

Somehow, us failing to warn these people that SJWs are going to rip them apart for the crime of bad people liking their work, is somehow a bigger crime than the SJWs ripping them apart.