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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: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 14 2015, @07:48AM
Larry Correia, who was an auditor/accountant in his first life, has twice said he believes the Hugo's internal vote-counting process is NOT tainted.
An observation which is completely irrelevant. I'm sure, if you put him to the question, he'd have to admit that probably not a lot of babies were eaten in the process of voting for a Hugo either.
Tainting the internal vote-counting process is a rather extreme and possibly illegal (due to the potential for being considered fraud) way to game the system. Why speak of that instead of speaking about the obvious, demonstrated example of getting a bunch of your friends on board and voting as a bloc? Sad Puppies showed that latter approach is quite effective and easy to implement. That implies that they might not be the first to do so, just the first to publicly demonstrate that it can be done.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday April 14 2015, @03:04PM
Well, he said this because he was accused of believing that the Hugo administrators had screwed with the previous votes, and he was pointing out that wasn't what he'd said at all; rather, as you say, that previously various people had done exactly what he did, they just weren't so public about it.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.