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posted by LaminatorX on Monday April 13 2015, @11:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the Livejournal-still-works dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by fadrian on Monday April 13 2015, @01:22PM

    by fadrian (3194) on Monday April 13 2015, @01:22PM (#169690) Homepage

    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.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday April 13 2015, @04:27PM

    by Jeremiah Cornelius (2785) on Monday April 13 2015, @04:27PM (#169805) Journal

    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!

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