SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday April 15 2015, @06:21AM
OMG. Let's do the math. You are a Nazi. Now, you may not buy into that whole "superior Race" thing, but you are loyal to your nation that seems to have bought into it. And rounding up Communists, Socialists (other than the Nationalist kind, of course), Homosexuals, Jews, Gypsies, and actual Catholics, you did not agree with any of that, even though you participated in it. And the whole work/death camp thing of the "final solution", yes you acceded to it but it always seemed a bit extreme to you. Couldn't we just send these aberrant writers of science fiction to another country instead of killing them all? Of course, as a "good" Nazi, you would never dare say such a thing, and so by silent tacit consent, you are responsible for the entire Nazi program. That is what it means to say there are no good Nazis, if they were good, they would be in the camps as a political prisoner. not still wearing the uniform and bearing arms. So what of the Sad Puppies? Good Nazis, or Bad Nazis? Not so bad right wing fanatics and Mormons, or just Science fictions writers who want to be able to have a hard-on and conquer evil lesser races, like Slavs? Let's not go all Godwin at once, since I really think it is possible to get there by slow steps. "Service guarantees Citizenship! Want to know more?" Fascism, pure and simple, only redeeming quality is that it is fiction, after all.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday April 15 2015, @09:10AM
What do you mean by 'You are a nazi'?
You are a woman. Now you may not have a vagina, or you might even like girls... ugh.. the brain is already hurting by imitating your strenuous reply. Just. Keep it simple stupid.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday April 16 2015, @09:05AM
Evidently I did not keep it simple enough for you. I would give you a "whoosh", but I am afraid that would go right over your head as well. Stay cool, bro, don't ever change!
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Saturday April 18 2015, @11:56AM
You can't make so many assumptions and keep it is generalized. I don't know what your personal experiences are but most things don't happen with so much planning or are how things run. At some time you need to stop looking at rest of the humanity under discovery channel - as if there are certain 'type' of people and this or that is their behavior.