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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: 4, Insightful) by microtodd on Monday April 13 2015, @12:42PM
I'm curious why you think Starship Troopers was bad. You don't really say. I personally enjoyed it. It was basically world-building with a specific political ideology in mind. So it was a look at a possible future (speculative fiction) if certain governmental and societal components occurred.
Was it realistic? I don't know. The psychological theories presented were interesting. To me, the two most interesting ones were a) corporal/physical punishment, often extreme, affects behavior in positive ways. The girl in Rico's H&MP class said she never got in trouble because she didn't want to get lashes. (would that happen in real life? history seems to say no...severe corporal punishment occurs in certain parts of the world and yet there are still "bad guys"). and b), that war is a form of controlled violence, of using force to achieve political objectives, up to that point *and no more*! So basically the opposite of total war.
It seems like history has said these ideas are wrong, but they were interesting to read about.
One part that was accurate, I think, was the training and military structure. "Train as you fight" is a real US Army motto, and there's the idea that if the training is really frickin' hard then the real thing will be easy. And the idea that a small, highly trained, well-equipped team is better than a large army of cannon fodder? Yeah, recent conflicts have shown that's true.
So no, I didn't think it was a bad book. Why did you? I'm honestly curious,
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday April 13 2015, @01:02PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Monday April 13 2015, @01:22PM
Sorry son, but midlife Heinlein doesn't hold up that well. The characters are cutout and, although the story is well-paced, the plot has several holes, the dialog is constrained by the subject matter and has little place to shine. They exposition itself is fairly mid-20 cen pulp language - stereotyped scenes in generic places. Just not enough life in the story to keep me engaged as a story.
Sure the political ideas might be great (to some - not so much to me), but you need a story to keep the reader engaged while the exposition goes along. Bradbury could write; Asimov could write; Ellison didn't write - he fucked life into the dead corpse of his stories by dint of pure imagination; Heinlein? He was able to make a living writing, so I guess that's something. But I'd rather read his past history stories from earlier days of pulp when expectations were lower or his later work like Job or Friday, when he finally got a bit of a handle on writing dialog, even if he was trying to fuck his own mom all the time. The years when STroop came out was a wasteland for him, as far as I'm concerned.
That is all.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday April 13 2015, @04:27PM
Ellison didn't write - he fucked life into the dead corpse of his stories by dint of pure imagination.
Great take! And delivered with perfect Ellison tone of profane aggression, mixing contempt and admiration.
And? He's not dead.
REPENT!
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Thursday April 16 2015, @04:30PM
Hey, Ticktockman, I didn't mean to imply he wasn't still doing it... Thank whatevs.
That is all.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Thursday April 16 2015, @10:02PM
I know. Internet shorthand. :-)
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 13 2015, @03:06PM
Have you read Tom Kratman? His books are available on Amazon Kindle - I don't have a Kindle, so I have them delivered to Amazon Cloud, and read them with a browser. I've liked all of his books so far, and he uses that philosophy extensively in his writings. He has done a separate little essay on that subject, and I believe it is free. Let me find the link . . .
http://www.amazon.com/Training-War-Essay-Tom-Kratman-ebook/dp/B00JQI9TH2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1428937515&sr=1-1&keywords=training+for+war+tom+kratman [amazon.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by tadas on Monday April 13 2015, @05:23PM
I'm a person on the Left of the political spectrum - literally a card-carrying member of the ACLU and NAACP (I had to ask to get a physical card). I disagree with must of Kratman's political philosophy -- and I'll automatically buy any of his novels because he's a great storyteller (I accept the politics in the story in the same way I accept the "science" - for the duration). Same goes for a lot of David Drake (don't like his Belisarius books for some reason). Same for even a flaming Libertarian like L Neil Smith.
Same goes for Heinlein - but only the "juvies" - Citizen of the Galaxy, Tunnel in the Sky and Starman Jones to name a few. TheRaven's summary of the midlife Heinlein "adult" books is pretty much right on. I think the universe gave him a giant karma payback when the hippies picked up on "grok" and Stranger in a Strange Land and spent the decade of the 60's annoying him mightily....