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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2015, @03:16AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2015, @03:16AM (#170180)

    The proof is here (for context, N K Jemisin is a fantasy writer known for her incendiary speeches against white people, don't take my word for it if you don't believe it, read her Wiscon 38 Guest of Honor Speech. But anyway, here's the proof you were asking for):

    nkjemisin.com/2015/04/not-the-affirmative-action-you-meant-not-the-history-youre-making/
    Not in the post itself, but in the comments. One of the site visitors says that people are openly talking about Affirmative Action and deliberately nominating books by people of color, with the ‘by POC’ coming first before any other consideration, and N K Jemisin agrees that it’s true.

    This is not what really bothers me, though. Positive discrimination, is not something really awful like normal discrimination, although I still don’t think it should take place in a literary award. But what bothers me is the exclusion, the violent rhetoric and the cultural war against a certain part of the population. Look, I don’t care if you get together with your online friends to vote only for writers with a certain skin color. Whatever floats your boat. I just want to be treated decently, and not like a rabid dog.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2015, @06:39AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2015, @06:39AM (#170244)

    incendiary speeches against white people

    OMG! Lookit dat! Incinderary speeches! Why, that is almost as bad as having a cross burning on you lawn 'cause you got uppity! Mercy on these white people! They must be so afraid! I hope no one lynches them for being such racist assholes!