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From the The Guardian.
Introducing the Sad Puppies...
"The shortlists for the long-running American genre awards, won in the past by names from Kurt Vonnegut to Ursula K Le Guin and voted for by fans, were announced this weekend to uproar in the science fiction community, after it emerged that the line-up corresponded closely with the slates of titles backed by certain conservative writers. The self-styled "Sad Puppies" campaigners had set out to combat what orchestrator and writer Brad Torgersen had criticised as the Hugos' tendency to reward "literary" and "ideological" works.
Today's Hugos, Torgersen has blogged, "have lost cachet, because at the same time SF/F has exploded popularly – with larger-than-life, exciting, entertaining franchises and products – the voting body of 'fandom' have tended to go in the opposite direction: niche, academic, overtly to the Left in ideology and flavor, and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun".
Twenty years ago, he writes, "if you saw a lovely spaceship on a book cover, with a gorgeous planet in the background, you could be pretty sure you were going to get a rousing space adventure featuring starships and distant, amazing worlds". Nowadays, he claims, the same jacket is likely to be a story "merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings".
And here we have the Rabid Puppies definitely not mentioning GamerGate:
Another group of allied rightwing campaigners, dubbing themselves the Rabid Puppies and led by Vox Day, real name Theodore Beale, have also added their voices to the block-voting campaign against what Day called "the left-wing control freaks who have subjected science fiction to ideological control for two decades and are now attempting to do the same thing in the game industry".
And finally a bit of Martin:
"Call it block voting. Call it ballot stuffing. Call it gaming the system. There's truth to all of those characterisations. You can't call it cheating, though. It was all within the rules. But many things can be legal, and still bad ... and this is one of those, from where I sit. I think the Sad Puppies have broken the Hugo awards, and I am not sure they can ever be repaired," he wrote.
"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," he added. "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."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 13 2015, @12:16PM
Hey look! A faux-libertarian unhappy about being marginalized by people acting in their own interests instead of his.
It's so much easier to be a libertarian when your group is on top.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Wednesday April 15 2015, @07:43AM
I'm not much of a writer but one thing I've learnt about books (or reading) is that any book etc. is written anew each time someone reads it. That's part of the magic.
The differences between the versions in each persons head might be minute and subtle or they might be enormous to the point of belonging to entirely separate universes with nothing in common and unerringly the differences in interpretation discloses information about the reader at the time they read it.
If they read it again, straight away or years later, they can end up with a completely different book (or even nothing at all). When this happens again and again and catches the reader a little off guard things get really interesting. I once had a common-law wife that possibly got that out of the Lord of the Rings trilogy of books (I don't) although I might be overestimating/misinterpreting her, maybe she just enjoyed soothing mi/e-ndless repetition, anybody can have that need. “I am not the same person I was a second ago” as the Buddhist thought goes.
When groups of people come to the same conclusions and stick with those conclusions as a group over decades (the “Heinlein is a fascist” leftist theme started right away all the way back in the seventies and eighties) it says something. Precisely what it says is up for debate in each case, from my point of view in this case it shouts “these people are acting like narrow-minded morons trapped in a deep pit of static/unchanging/dogmatic thought-suffocating ideology”, that's how I /read/ you ;) How /I/ read you. Did you get that twist/boomerang or was it lost on you? Can you comprehend the possibility of someone deliberately weakening their own argument for a purpose? Applying it to themselves? In addition to that there's the “when you're opened you're red” (paraphrased) and all that.
Now excuse me as I keep riding my high horse into our mutual doom. I only tried to give your brain a friendly kick, it would be better if you realized you need to do that yourself just as much as everyone else needs to and isn't that a lot of what (at least) science fiction is about?
P.S. do /you/ also think every crime writer is a murderer? Or that any writer with characters of both/any sexes are themselves hermaphrodites or much more but certainly not “only” male or female? Give some thought as to why the questions are relevant/how they relate to your opinion of Heinlein.
Best of luck!
P.P.S. in my case I'm not a libertarian, I'm “far far right” (or something like that, either way much further to the right than you're likely to be able to conceive or identify when I say I consider Nazis to be on the far left) and not particularly enthralled by Heinlein (except maybe Stranger in a Strange Land), I'm much more fond of Phillip K. Dick and short fiction and microfiction/flash fiction [365tomorrows.com] science fiction although I can't indulge as much in it as I'd like to (I can remember how embarrassingly and naively shocked I was once upon a time when my excellent muslim fellow teacher/co-worker complained likewise (“I can't find the time to read any more”) and now I'm pretty much in the same place).
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))