Burning down the field in order to “save” it:
…while I am not upset at the results (except insofar as it proves a large number of my field is running the Marxist malware to such an extent that it will vote a slate to avoid an imaginary slate) I am upset at the display of infantility or senility or perhaps roboticity in my field yesterday (Though who would program robots that way?) No one watching that live stream — and there was a lot of it captured and it will be replayed — can imagine that those who proclaim themselves the “intellectuals” of our field have an IQ above room temperature. And certainly no one can imagine they have an emotional maturity above that of a toddler displaying to one and all the magnificence of the turd just deposited in the middle of the floor.
Related: And you cheered:
We saw those no-awards coming from a mile away. By voting no-award, you proved the Sad Puppies’s point. And most of you are too damn stupid to know it.
You’d rather no one win, than see someone you don’t agree with walk across that stage.We only wanted a fair ballot; real diversity among the Hugos, books by authors who don’t all think the same way. Books that tell stories rather than try to force-feed us messages. But you couldn’t have that.
It was you, not us, who brought the Hugo Awards down last night.
And you cheered while you did it.
A lot of this is why I haven’t read much science fiction in the past couple decades.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Uh oh. Hitler found out what happened [language warning, but only in subtitles]
[Update a while later]
See? I told you so.
People have asked me if I’m disappointed in the results. Yes. But maybe not in the way you might expect. I’ll talk about the slap in the face to specific nominees in a minute, but I can’t say I’m surprised by what happened, when it was just an extreme example of what I predicted would happen three years ago when I started all this.
I said the Hugos no longer represented all of Fandom, instead they only represents tiny, insular, politically motivated cliques taking turns giving their friends awards. If you wanted to be considered, you needed to belong to, or suck up to those voting cliques. I was called a liar.
I said that most of the voters cared far more about the author’s identity and politics than they did the quality of the work, and in fact, the quality of the work would be completely ignored if the creator had the wrong politics. I was called a liar.
I said that if somebody with the wrong politics got a nomination, they would be actively campaigned against, slandered, and attacked, not for the quality of their work, but because of politics. I was called a liar.
That’s how the Sad Puppies campaign started. You can see the results. They freaked out and did what I said they would do. This year others took over, in the hopes of getting worthy, quality works nominated who would normally be ignored. It got worse. They freaked out so much that even I was surprised.
Each year it got a little bigger, and the resulting backlash got a little louder and nastier, culminating in this year’s continual international media slander campaign. Most of the media latched onto a narrative about the campaign being sexist white males trying to keep women and minorities out of publishing. That narrative is so ridiculous that a few minutes of cursory research shows that if that was our secret goal, then we must be really bad at it, considering not just who we nominated, but who our organizers and supporters are, but hey… Like I said, it is all about politics, and if it isn’t, they’re going to make it that way. You repeat a lie often enough, and people will believe it.
It isn’t about truth. It is about turf.
#ProTip to journos trying to cover the Hugo story: We know from experience that the Puppy kickers will lie to you without compunction.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) August 24, 2015
[Evening update]
Why the “war on nereds” is a war on art.
One of the better Hitler mash-up’s I’ve seen. Maybe the all-time best line for the gals outside:
Don’t be triggered, Tumblr. We’re in a safe-space out here.
Big dog: It isn’t about truth. It is about turf. Out. Standing.
Based on past experiences, I think that anybody who expects anything even slightly mature from organized science fiction fandom is delusional. It’s right up there with academia in the number of petty nut jobs.
What the Puppies did was exploit a loophole in the Hugo nomination process. They gamed the system, in other words. This was widely viewed as cheating.
The normal response when people violate a social norm is to punish them, and that’s just what SF fans did. The Puppies didn’t get No Awarded because of their politics; they got slammed because they were jerks who broke the Hugo process.
Disclaimer: I plopped down $40 to vote No Award on the puppy slates, because I don’t like assholes.
I plopped down $40 to vote No Award on the puppy slates, because I don’t like assholes.
I don’t think that Scalzi has exactly covered himself in glory here.
Some loophole.
“Pay $40, vote.”
“Here’s a list of books we like, read, vote” -> “Slate voting” only if you suck down your thoughts pre-digested and can’t be bothered to research anything.
The Puppies didn’t get No Awarded because of their politics; they got slammed because they were jerks who broke the Hugo process.
The Hugos have been a badge of mediocrity in SF for years. While I’m not a great fan of anyone the Puppies nominated, their books were still better than most of those that have won the award in the last decade.
Your actions just help to cement the demise of the Hugo as anything other than a glowing indicator of books and authors to avoid.
people violate a social norm
I guess SF isn’t what I thought it was. No wonder there were No Awards.
The British thought George Washington was an asshole too but sometimes you have to speak truth to power no matter what names they call you or how hard they try to strip you of your heritage and gender to dehumanize you by stereotyping you as an angry white male.
Thus demonstrating the power of Narrative over Reality.
Slate voting, gaming for votes, all of it have been part of the Hugo process forever. The problem was that a group of outsiders said “Hey, here are some books we like! Let’s try to get some nominated! Then lets read all the nominees and vote for what we like!”
Again, the fact that Butcher and Andersen (two outstanding authors who had nothing to do with any of this) lost to No Award simply because of the taint of association speaks volumes.
So a simple question Mr. No Award voter; did you actually read any of the nominees or did you simply No Award because your betters told you it was the correct action? Bonus question; did you also scream your hatred at Emmanuel Goldstein for 5 minutes as required?
Send Admiral Honor Harrington of the Royal Manticorean Navy after them, along with her best friend, Michelle Henke, also an admiral, who just happens to be black. David Weber’s Honor Harrignton series.
And since they’re leftist puppies, and since I live in S.Korea, where people still sometimes eat dog, their corpses can be dumped into a big pot, and used as the main ingredient in Boshintang-dog soup.
I’m not sure how their voting system works, but it seems to be that it’s stacked for authors with a wide readership, since more “voters” will be familiar with the popular authors or series. The offerings are so numerous and diverse, however, that I would imagine that most books have only been read by a small minority of members (except perhaps from some shut-in book worms), and some books that few people read might be much better reads than the popular works with marketing campaigns.
If you had a large set of honest voters, you could filter through the books by finding a people who read book A and book B and see which one they thought was better, even if few people read book B. It would be similar to various suggestions on “fairer” ways to handle post-season sports tournaments, where an underdog can pull out ahead even with a small fan base.
The trouble is finding those honest voters because it would open the system up to a small cadre of SJW’s insisting that a book that only three people read was the best one ever, with no one else getting a say in the matter because they didn’t bother to read that one.
The voting isn’t slanted toward wide readership, it’s slanted towards those who go to Worldcon and are part of the convention-going sf fandom. If it was just wide readership, the novel awards would go to Star Wars books or other media tie-ins. If you look at some of the past voting data, a few dozen votes wass good enough to get nominated before this year, especially in the “down-ballot” areas like fanzine (i.e. the Hugo equivalent of the Oscar tech awards).
Given that it only takes a few dozen votes to swing a work onto the ballot, it’s possible that a publisher could assure themselves of lots of nominations by having their staff nominate the stuff they publish, especially when you consider that a couple of them are subsidiaries of major publishers, so dropping a few grand on memberships is cheap PR. And since if you buy a membership one year, you can nominate next year, it’s even cheaper. You do have to have a membership in the current year to vote, but if your goal is to dominate the nominations, it’s every other year.
It’s a popularity contest, which is fine.
The problem is that it’s a popularity contest with very few voters, so easy to game. As the SJWs have just proven.
But, hey, I’m sure that if the Puppies had nominated Tor across the board, the SJWs would have been just as eager to burn down the award because ‘violating social norms’. Not like they voted for ‘Guardians Of The Galaxy’, even though it was an Evil Slate Puppy nomination.
Rand, most journos have common cause with the Puppy kickers.
I followed both Sad and Rabid Puppies this year, and will probably join in next year. If the nominations are good, the worst I get out of it is a big pile of good fiction as e-books.
The inbred corruption in SF/F needs to be dealt with. It sounds as if the SJWs of the ruling clique bought “scholarships” for shills before the final voting. It’s a shame to see some of the junk that’s won in recent years due to the GamerGate-like behavior in SF/F. If the SJWs want to burn it down, and thereby prove the thesis that they’re corrupt, people who love good fiction owe it to the greats of the past to help it along.
IOW, we now have a group of leftists who endorse FIW. (Required reading: “And then there were none” by Eric Frank Russell) I assume this can be applied to bakeries and pharmacies.
BTW, what if David Koch bought up a bleepload of WorldCon memberships?
I don’t think I have ever seen a disagreement where positions are distorted to the absurd such as with this. I won’t pretend to know the ins and outs of this drama but nothing I have read from the puppies is remotely close to how they are characterized by those that hate them.
It looks like there is an intentional unwillingness to even attempt to comprehend or empathize with the sad puppies and just shout racist women haters at women and minorities.
As I understand it, the Rabid Puppies are an outgrowth of GamerGate, which is one of the first times the right said ‘screw you’ to the SJWs, then ‘we don’t care’, when the SJWs started complaining that GamerGate made them feelbad.
It’s one of the early battles to retake the culture from Marxism. But you can easily tell who’s on the right side. The Puppies wanted to burn the Hugos to put them out of their misery. The SJWs burned the Hugos and laughed while doing so. You don’t laugh while you ‘burn the village to save it’, it’s a difficult and grave decision, and one you take seriously.
Rabid Puppies is sort of a cousin to GamerGate, but Sad Puppies is three years old. It started long before GamerGate did.
Also, the Sad Puppies didn’t want to burn the Hugos. (Possibly they do now.) The original goal was “get some stuff we like nominated”, and that happened two years in a row, to the response of massive loss of shit. Worse this year, because some of the categories ended up with more than one or two nominations from the Sad Puppies list, but it was pretty noticeable last year as well.
Assuming the worst accusations against both packs of Puppies were in some way true, their nomination of Baen editor Toni Weisskopf [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Weisskopf ] was presented as a “token”. She was the One woman put up as the face or shield against otherwise-true accusations of sexism. (This is not true, but it’s an assumption to grant for the sake of conversation…)
Weisskopf got more nominations, via the Puppy “stuffing” process, than any other editor in Hugo history. She got more “first” rank votes than any previous nominee. But she lost the overall tallies to “No Award” — because those voting on the “anti-Puppy” slate included the token on the slate. It was more important to punish the Puppies than acknowledge the long-term contributions, talents, hard work and — by SJW narrative — glass-ceiling shattering, stereotype overcoming, Jackie Robinson style ground breaking of a woman. The narrative instructed “Destroy the inconvenient woman”.
It could be argued that Toni Weisskopf is the Judy Curry of Science Fiction fandom…
Wodun,
The Sad Puppies, personified by Larry Correia and Tom Kratman, started as a movement annoyed that only “inclusive message fiction” seemed to be getting nominated and awarded the major awards in SF/F. And they were annoyed at the push towards “inclusive message fiction” by the editors and publishers as well. As has been said by so many Sad Puppy supporters, it should be “story first, message second.” Hell, Sarah Hoyt has written a book with a with gay protagonist (“A Few Good Men”)–but the fact that he is gay is simply part of the character, it’s very different than saying, “Let me write a book about a gay character… I know! A sci-fi book!” (The ultimate “establishment” SF/F book is joked about as being gay wereseal pr0n.)
The whole point of the Sad Puppies was to try to make sure that actually GOOD SF/F was represented in the list of nominations. Books supported by the Puppies were chosen on the basis of being good books; the authors were not chosen from an “approved list,” in fact, I believe a couple of the authors the Puppies were supporting actually asked for their books to not be considered for nomination because they didn’t approve of the Puppies’ effort. There was no order to vote a certain slate in the end; the message was, “vote for the best work.” The NO AWARD votes came from the orthodoxy, to avoid having Puppy-supported works win, even though they were good works. They voted NO AWARD rather than have a GOOD book they didn’t like be awarded.
The Rabid Puppies are led by Vox Day. It is likely that Vox, who has been at war with the SF/F establishment, had the intent from day 1 of getting the SJW crowd to burn it down; but I do not claim to know the Dark Lord’s thoughts, you’d have to ask him yourself.
Either way, the awards have been exposed to be a sham by the “in-crowd” voting to exclude works by those not in the “in-crowd.”‘
For the SJW crowd to characterize the Puppies as being SWM’s out for revenge, they’re deliberately ignoring the fact that Correia is of Portuguese ancestry and Day is American Indian; and Hoyt, obviously not a male, is from Portugal. Next year, the Sad Puppies are being led by Kate “The Impaler” Paulk. (And note to the SJW crowd: with a nickname like that, I suspect Kate is looking forward to taking some prisoners.)
I have a decent understanding of what the puppies point is and I get that some of them have been not so nice. However, I notice that civility is something demanded of them and never given them.
But name calling aside, the criticism of the puppy groups has literally nothing to do with their actual positions, as far as I can tell. Maybe Paul D can chime in but it boggles my mind how criticism is so detached from any positions of the targets.
If a “tiny, insular, politically motivated” clique (after Correia, above) shows up at the balloting with ten times the votes of its rivals, I submit that it’s not tiny, but large, nor insular, but the continent itself. People called for voting no award on everything, and others called for voting no award above works you found unworthy.
I didn’t vote because I didn’t have time to read everything, but my wife did, and did. I read more than my share of military adventure-type SF and like the stuff even when it diverges from my own politics, which is frankly more often than not.
I’ve tried to understand the motivations of the various puppy factions as best I can, and the best I’ve been able to come up with is that they feel, for want of a better term, colonized. “Here’s a bunch of interlopers that have made a point of celebrating works that have nothing to do with SF the way it used to be.”
I began reading SF in the seventies (I was seven when the seventies started), and you know what? It was never just the stuff I liked. A quick scan of best novel Hugos from the decade shows almost a perfect alternation between hard-ish SF that Baen would have been happy to publish on the one hand and stuff that bounced right off of me. For the decade, the Hugo for best novel went to LeGuin, Niven, Farmer. Asimov, Clarke, LeGuin, Haledman, Kate Wilhelm, Pohl, and Vonda McIntyre. I read every one of their winning books during that decade, but wouldn’t call either LeGuin, Farmer, Wilhelm, or McIntyre’s books especially puppy-friendly.
It’s also reasonable to point out that the market has moved on to large collections of related works rather than original novels. I don’t think it’s easy to snag an award for the fourth work in a series, for example, without having a really standout piece of writing. I personally would support a “best series” award to recognize that sort of thing. On the other hand, some series authors (Lois McMaster Bujold comes to mind) have done quite well with awards, so maybe that’s not a barrier.
If a “tiny, insular, politically motivated” clique (after Correia, above) shows up at the balloting with ten times the votes of its rivals, I submit that it’s not tiny, but large, nor insular, but the continent itself.
Some people called for voting no award on everything, and others called for voting no award above works you found unworthy. Most people, I think, voted what they liked. I didn’t vote because I didn’t have time to read everything, but my wife did have time, and did vote. I read more than my share of military adventure-type SF and like the stuff even when it diverges from my own politics, which is frankly more often than not.
I’ve tried to understand the motivations of the various puppy factions as best I can, and the best I’ve been able to come up with is that they feel, for want of a better term, colonized. “Here’s a bunch of interlopers that have made a point of celebrating works that have nothing to do with SF the way it used to be.”
I began reading SF in the seventies (I was seven when the seventies started), and you know what? It was never just the stuff I liked. A quick scan of best novel Hugos from the decade shows almost a perfect alternation between hard-ish SF that Baen would have been happy to publish on the one hand and stuff that bounced right off of me. For the decade, the Hugo for best novel went to LeGuin, Niven, Farmer. Asimov, Clarke, LeGuin, Haledman, Kate Wilhelm, Pohl, and Vonda McIntyre. I read every one of their winning books during that decade, but wouldn’t call either LeGuin, Farmer, Wilhelm, or McIntyre’s books especially puppy-friendly.
It’s also reasonable to point out that the market has moved on to large collections of related works rather than original novels. I don’t think it’s easy to snag an award for the fourth work in a series, for example, without having a really standout piece of writing. I personally would support a “best series” award to recognize that sort of thing. On the other hand, some series authors (Lois McMaster Bujold comes to mind) have done quite well with awards, so maybe that’s not a barrier.
There’s always room for disagreement about who wins the Hugos. I was annoyed when Lois won for “Mirror Dance” over Barnes’ “Mother of Storms”, and then annoyed again the following year when her “Memory” was edged out by Robinson’s “Blue Mars.” Hell, Julia Ecklar won the Campbell one year off the strength of a single Star Trek tie-in novel. The whole balloting process is engineered to try and reflect as fairly as possible the preferences of anyone who wants to join the convention. I think the balloting this year reflect that, mostly, and have nothing to add to Paul D.’s disclaimer above except that I find it amusing to think of the response as a rolled up newspaper across the snout rather than getting slammed.
A quick scan of best novel Hugos from the decade shows almost a perfect alternation between hard-ish SF that Baen would have been happy to publish on the one hand and stuff that bounced right off of me.
Yes.
The difference now is that there’s almost none of the ‘hard-ish SF that Baen would have been happy to publish’. It’s almost all SJW pap, and much of it is not even SF or Fantasy.
The Hugos have been a zombie for years, thanks to SJWs. This year, they just confirmed ‘He’d dead, Jim’.
I’m curious, Edward – which Hugo-winning novels of the last, say, 15 years, that you’ve read would you characterize as “SJW pap” and which otherwise? I’m interested in how you define your categories because I’d like to understand the point of view better.
Mitchell, last years winners included these “gems” …
Nebula Award … If You Were A Dinosaur My Love I haven’t read it but I’m told that it’s not even in the genre. Dinosaur porn was one description …
Hugo – short story …
The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere A worse piece of garbage I’ve seldom read.
Last year’s Hugo novel winner was Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, which is a reasonably good book – I bought a copy – except for the awkward and really un-necessary use of gender pronouns. Here’s a critique … Ancillary Justice Review. I read the sequel Ancillary Sword too, but the gimmick gets old really fast. Don’t think I’ll bother with the third book. Not Hugo quality in my opinion.
Have a read for yourself. The entire puppy premise is really “story before message” with a side of whatever turns your crank but don’t call it SF/F when it’s not.
The atrocious behaviour of the anti-puppies makes it immediately clear to an impartial viewer which side has the moral high ground.
For a example of this year’s winners here is the Best Novelette of 2015
“The Day the World Turned Upside Down.”
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-day-the-world-turned-upside-down/
If that doesn’t may someone want to go out a build a space faring civilization I don’t know what will.
I’m curious about your opinion.
In my opinion it’s too angsty, the basic conceit of falling into the sky is simplistic and handled inconsistently. The main character not interesting and too self absorbed.
But hey, it the best darn novella/short story in science fiction and fantasy for 2015.
Second place was No Award.
Below are links to the other candidates so you can compare and judge for yourself.
http://www.analogsf.com/pdfs/Stories/Triple_Sun_RajnarVajra-HUGO.pdf
http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=issue&vol=i39&article=_005
http://www.analogsf.com/pdfs/Stories/Journeyman_Stone_House_%20MichaelFlynn-HUGO.pdf
http://www.analogsf.com/pdfs/Stories/Championship_EdLerner-HUGO.pdf
“If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” isn’t even dinosaur porn. It’s a long rambling incoherent stream-of-consciousness rant from the perspective of a smug liberal woman who is angry and offended that those horrible Red State rednecks won’t just lie down and die.
As has been noted elsewhere, the least of Larry Correia’s throwaway blog posts about Wendell the Manatee is more skiffy, more entertaining, and better written than anything Rachel Swirsky has ever written. It’s also quite a bit longer.
I haven’t spent much time thinking about the down-ballot categories, to be fair, and that’s something I should fix.
I did read “The Water that Falls on You from Nowhere” just now, and thought it was just another riff on the “what if there were an infallible lie detector” idea. Then I thought of Piper’s veridicators, Terence M. Green’s “Barking Dog,” and Halperin’s “The Truth Machine” and thought “This has been done already.” I would not have voted it very highly.
I also read a couple of chapter’s of Leckie’s book. I don’t think the book’s really about gender politics, and took the gender pronoun thing as a way to explore the idea of “What if gender really was a matter of complete indifference?” – a perfectly reasonable sci-fi premise. It was a little jarring maybe, but is it that different from the contrived dialect that Heinlein made up for “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?” This one I will probably finish.
I have to do more thinking about the editor and short fiction categories. Personally, I’d never vote on a lot of the categories like Fan Artist and Semiprozine, because I am innocent of any opinions on those subjects. But I do like short fiction and someone has to edit it, so there’s an area I can explore more.
The ‘best novel’ award doesn’t totally personify the problem. (More non-clique voters have always voted for that one – it’s the natural voting pattern of voting the big item and leaving some blank.)
The lessor awards are more egregious. “Best Editor” and one of the others I can’t recall have two people that add up to something like 50 nominations and a large number of wins as well.
Sorry about the duplicated paragraphs above. Clearly copy and paste don’t work the way I think they do.
About the only personal effect I’ve noticed from all this (which I only knew about by being a fan of Sarah Hoyt’s work and thus a reader of her blog) is that the trail of breadcrumbs led me to Larry Correia. Just finished “Monster Hunter International” and loved it.
Jeff, welcome to the MHI family. It’s a fun place.
I have MHI in hard copy and audio. I have listened to it about six times. 🙂
For me, the whole Science Fiction genre went off the rails in the 80s and 90s, when book stores decided that the category was actually “science fiction and fantasy”, and then proceeded to stock that section with nothing but fantasy novels. Where I used to be a rabid SF reader, suddenly I had racks and racks of magic and faeries with a few cyberpunk books wedged in here and there.
Now we’ve got the internet, bookstores are dying, as are the publishing houses. Good. A story like The Martian wouldn’t have been published at all 25 years ago; not enough wizards. Instead I read it online.
http://www.misterswift.com/iSTEM/The_Martian_files/The%20Martian%20-%20Andy%20Weir.pdf
Was the Martian even nominated?
It wasn’t eligible, because it was originally published on line.
And the dead tree publishers don’t like online.
It would have been eligible in its year despite being published online, I think. Problem is its first publication was in 2012.
“The Martian” was on the nomination ballot but didn’t quite make it over the line – it’s in the Hugo statistics PDF you can find online.
I loved the story, myself – but I can see how having an isolated protagonist basically just filling out a diary (with a B plot having to do with the rest of the crew, and Earth) causes dramatic problems. Swift pulled this off in Robinson Crusoe, but even he needed Friday to make the narrative work.