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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: 3, Informative) by moondrake on Monday April 13 2015, @09:31PM

    by moondrake (2658) on Monday April 13 2015, @09:31PM (#170006)

    >I'm still trying to figure out how a minority secured a majority of the votes in the nominations

    Where did you read they got a majority (its not in the summary or article AFAICT)? I guess they just got the most votes compared to other candidates. That is pretty unsurprising:

    Strategic voting is a major problem for some voting systems. Including the Hugos. Suppose there are 100 votes and 58 novels. We can go in details and argue about distribution, but the gist of this story stays the same so lets assume the 3 best novels normally each get about 15 votes, the remaining votes (55) go to the 55 remaining ones (some of these people voted on a novel not because it was that good, but because they liked some aspect, perhaps because they though it had a nice political message, but since there are usually several novels for which this applies, things average out), so the remaining novels get just 1-2 votes at max.

    Now, a minority of 20 voters collude together and all vote on the pretty lackluster, but very right wing novel X. It gets 21 votes suddenly!

    Minorities get majorities all the time. Especially when the options are limited. Look at Republicans smiling when there are other moderate independent candidates (or v.v. when there are more conservative independent candidates)

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  • (Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Monday April 13 2015, @10:28PM

    by Vanderhoth (61) on Monday April 13 2015, @10:28PM (#170039)

    This is a very good point I hadn't considered. The conservative government in Canada won a majority of the government with just 30-39% of the popular vote, so the make up a majority with just a third of all the votes.

    --
    "Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe