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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 Hairyfeet on Tuesday April 14 2015, @05:16AM

    by Hairyfeet (75) <bassbeast1968NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday April 14 2015, @05:16AM (#170226) Journal

    Actually look at their forums, the ones that vote today? Wouldn't have given Heinlein shit because he is a "fascist misogynist". That is why you really can't compare the past with the last 10 years as the SJW really didn't exist back then. If you would like to know more about the rise of the SJW please enjoy this instructional video [youtube.com] that explains 1.- What an SJW is, 2.- Where they came from, and 3.- How they act once they get into a group, complete with examples.

    --
    ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday April 14 2015, @10:50AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday April 14 2015, @10:50AM (#170319) Journal
    I enjoyed a number of Heinlein books growing up, but I wouldn't vote for him today. Not because of his politics (though the fact that he forces them down your throat and makes characters believe in totally unbelievable ways to reinforce them can be quite annoying), but because he's just not that good compared to modern SF writers. Read Heinlein in the context of his contemporaries and he's not too bad. Go back and re-read the original Foundation trilogy and you'll see how poor the competition really was.
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    sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday April 14 2015, @09:18PM

      by Hairyfeet (75) <bassbeast1968NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday April 14 2015, @09:18PM (#170553) Journal

      If you wouldn't vote for him because you think somebody else is better? THAT is a fair and honest opinion that SHOULD come into play when you are voting for an award, but look at my post again, they would insure that he would not win NOT because they thought somebody else was better but instead they would make sure nothing he wrote had a chance because he refused to parrot radical left Marxist politics and grovel and beg forgiveness for being born a white male.

      Dude I WISH I was making this up, I wish this was an exaggeration...its not, its REALLY fucking not. When Gamergate came out I first thought "Oh its one side trying to demonize the other, I bet if I actually talk to them rationally both sides have good and bad points"...nope, boy was I fucking wrong. Please do NOT take my word for it, go to some of the places that SJWs hang out like Jezebel or Twitter with gamerghazi and actually try to rationally talk to these people. If you are white? You sir are a piece of shit who should be groveling before everyone who isn't for having male privilege, if you are a man? You are a rape apologist, unless you are black in which case you rank high on the "oppression scale" and can do no wrong because no matter what you do its because of your "historic oppression" and therefor should be forgiven. They had a white male actually write a whole article (and you are about to see why we call white male SJWs "beta males" because of how pathetic they view themselves) about how the laws concerning hate crimes should be gotten rid of, sounds reasonable, right? Nope he said that "with a heavy heart I say we should get rid of hate crime laws because a black man has been charged with a hate crime and the laws as written don't even take into account historical oppression!"...I swear to God on my mother's life those were his EXACT fucking words!

      So nobody is arguing they shouldn't try to pick the one who wrote the best story....but that isn't what is happening, unless you consider "best" based on how much it pushes radical left wing feminist Marxist politics. As the one who started Sad Puppies pointed out you could place something like an Asimov or Bradbury in the Hugo Awards now and they would lose to something barely above the level of fanfic because it had a lesbian transsexual robot in it, or was filled with speeches about how whites and males were garbage. Again PLEASE don't take my word for it, I know many who have not had an actual dialog with a real SJW find this hard to believe, but go to one of their forums and talk to them directly and see how quickly you realize "these people are fucking batshit". They are racist, sexist, spew nothing but bile and hatred, narcissist as hell, you spend even a single hour talking to the SJWs and you will soon not be able to come up with a single kind word because they take even the most generic idea and radicalize the fuck out of it.

      --
      ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2015, @10:39PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2015, @10:39PM (#170603)

        parrot radical left Marxist politics

        There are Marxist parrots? And radical ones, at that? It is worse than anyone imagined. Why are the Marxist parrots picking on the Sad Puppies, and what happened to the Happy Kittens?