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So, last night the SJW types over at the Hugo awards decided they'd rather burn the whole thing to the ground than give out an award based on what the readers like instead of social justice reasons:
The members of the World Science Fiction Society rejected the slate of finalists in five categories, giving No Award in Best Novella, Short Story, Related Work, Editor Short Form, and Editor Long Form. This equals the total number of times that WSFS members have presented No Award in the entire history of the Hugo Awards, most recently in 1977.
Here are a few of the people on the #SadPuppies slate that should be quite surprised to learn that they were denied a chance at an award for being white males when they wake up this morning: Rajnar Vajra, Larry Correia, Annie Bellet, Kary English, Toni Weisskopf, Ann Sowards, Megan Gray, Sheila Gilbert, Jennifer Brozek, Cedar Sanderson, and Amanda Green.
takyon: Here are in-depth explanations of the Hugo Awards controversy.
Previously: "Rightwing lobby has 'broken' Hugo awards" Says George R.R. Martin (240 comments)
(Score: 4, Funny) by aristarchus on Monday August 24 2015, @04:06AM
Some interesting commentary! A choice tidbit:
I've been seeing a lot of disbelief and anger among the puppies (and gamergaters—there seems to be about a 90% overlap) on twitter in the past 12 hours. They didn't seem to realize that "No Award" was always an option on the Hugos.
"They didn't seem to realize", that covers an awful lot of territory, including Oklahoma. Right-wingers have to come to the realization that they are not a majority, they are not even a large enough of a minority to primary a beauty contest, as Charlie says. So it has to be faced, "No Award" is more popular, better looking, and more skilled at writing science fiction than a Sad Puppy.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday August 24 2015, @04:22AM
You think #SadPuppies was right wing? Get off the crack, ar. It was a group that wanted awards to be based on the merit of the book rather than which fulfilled the most social justice checkboxes. Fuck's sake, even Stephen King has been ignoring the Hugos for years for that very reason.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Monday August 24 2015, @04:37AM
Definitely right-wing. Almost fascist. Certainly misogynist. Quite possibly deranged. So what is your point? (Sorry for the territory reference, if that is what drew you in.) The Sad Puppies wanted the awards to be based on their idea of merit, which was right-wing. The point is that they are incapable of seeing how ideologically blindfolded they are. This is what happens to art when it is bound by ideology. And it does not really matter whether the ideology is right or left. Take a look at a lot of Soviet or Chinese or Mormon art; it just sucks in a way that the authors of the suckiness cannot see at all. It used to be said that no one knows why the Puppies are Sad. But now we all do. But they still do not. Poor Puppies.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 24 2015, @05:00AM
That all sounds remarkably like George Bush's "If you're not with us you're against us".
It is the SJW's who have an ideology, one which the Puppies refused to kneel to.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by aristarchus on Monday August 24 2015, @05:38AM
Ah, Runaway! If only you understood how much we are sympatico! You are like my brother, only my brother who was a trucker and listened just a little too much to Fox News. The Sad Puppies are not with us, they are not with anyone but theirselves. That is kind of the point of all this. It is not Social Justice Warriors that are flooding into the Hugo Awards to dis these right-wing ideologues, it is science fiction fans who are making the call. Now the Puppies may have "refused to kneel" to the judgement of their readers that they suck, but such a refusal is far from noble, in fact it is just the sort of asinine behaviour that got them into this situation in the first place. So there is no black and white, not SJW versus Sad Puppies where we have to be "Faire and Balanced". The Sad Puppies just suck, by any measure of literary quality or competence. So, come back, Runaway. Your fellow Soylentils need you.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday August 24 2015, @11:53AM
What a goddamn idiot. They specifically plotted to load the nominations with reactionary crap written by shitheads, and then they throw a whinefest the moment the majority of actual voters who aren't trying to game the system say "No thanks" to their bullshit.
There is no world in which what you're saying even approaches a fair assessment of the situation. Sorry people who aren't shitheads massively outnumber your actual conspiratorial movement, and you need to brand them as a conspiracy of "SJWs" rather than what it actually is: a majority people who don't want what you're selling(i.e. reactionary identity politics).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday August 24 2015, @12:07PM
what it actually is: a majority people
Just a friendly factual reminder that we're not talking about more than 3.7 billion out of 7.4 billion of the world population, we're talking about a couple thousand extremists on both sides, who paid a modest sum of money for a ballot, both the noms and the election.
Also looking at the voter stats, a huge fraction of the voters are recent political operators. Something I wonder about is it would make a hilarious conspiracy theory story if decades later it came out that the org just wanted to sell more memberships so they intentionally politicized it not expecting 60% of the votes to come from recent joiners with a political axe to grind.
In the grand scheme of things, both sides of the hugo political action are greatly outnumbered by JFK conspiracy theorists, flat earth believers, creationists, klansmen, cult members in general, and all of those are greatly outnumbered by anything even remotely as big as "a majority".
Lets just say I live in a tiny little city in the middle of nowhere that no one has ever heard of, and more people voted for my municipal dogcatcher (city animal control health inspection officer, whatever he's called) than were involved in the hugo election on both sides put together.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday August 24 2015, @12:27PM
I love it, the contortions you go through to pretend "the other side"(i.e. most Hugo voters) are vote brigading, and the people who specifically set out to do that aren't. Buncha Ur Fascist [www.pegc.us] reasoning there. "Destroy our enemies who are secretly weak but using underhanded tacticts to destroy us, which is why underhanded tactics are totally valid in all cases."
Grow up.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by VLM on Monday August 24 2015, @01:00PM
I saw it as more of a performance art piece. Its pretty entertaining and interesting from that point of view.
So there's this popularity contest a specific type of art where the performers used to be (and still mostly are) ridiculously non-diverse, so there being no demographic -isms reasons to vote for anyone over anyone else, the winrar of the popularity contest historically was always the artist who made the best art. Now there's enough diversity for massive brigading based solely on artist demographics, which has made the popularity contest pretty much suck for everyone who relied on its secondary almost accidental function of identifying great art, because all its good at is identifying politically correct authors. Its like asking who won a nobel prize and instead being told who passed their FBI clearance. So to do a performance art protest, the noms were stuffed by political operatives to call attention to how crappy the nom process is at selecting good writing and how good it is at selecting "good" left wing demographic members, and the lefties rallied to do their own stuffing, and it ended up being a big joke.
I'm quite sure the nomination rules will be changed so that next year categorically and explicitly straight white males will be forbidden and only black lesbian trans women will be accepted for the 2016 noms and all the SJWs can calm down and relax about the whole thing and the hugos can go back to being a laughingstock.
All this "destroy" and "underhanded" talk sounds like neocons having a freakout over someone burning a flag. The action was just sending a message, a piece of performance art. There is no "totally valid" on any side by any one in a popularity contest now or in the past.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24 2015, @07:26PM
> I saw it as more of a performance art piece. Its pretty entertaining and interesting from that point of view.
Are you now referring to your own whackedelic posts as "performance art?"
That's got to be one of the smoothest ego saves ever done on soylent.
Wait, does that make you an ego save artist?
(Score: 2, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 24 2015, @12:30PM
Well, you've got to admit - the dogcatcher is far more important than a bunch of stuffed shirts sitting around masturbating each other. I don't follow the Hugos, any more than I watch the various Hollyweird things, with all the "stars" stroking each other's things. Or the music awards, for that matter. The only reason to watch any awards ceremony, is the opportunity to see some cleavage, and that isn't even very exciting when the broads are mostly grandmother age.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24 2015, @05:58AM
You have the Sad Puppies confused with the Rabid Puppies. The Rabid Puppies are openly conservative and reactionary. The Sad Puppies are a slate of diverse authors who are upset about Tor owning the SFWA and demanding that everybody agree with every little thing John Scalzi says to have a chance at winning the Hugo, which should be based on the merit of the work and not whose ass the author kisses. Art suffers under a dictatorship.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ticho on Monday August 24 2015, @06:26AM
Sad puppies, rabid puppies... Anyone else here confused and sadly wondering what happened to science fiction that they loved since childhood?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24 2015, @08:39AM
That is likely the only overlap between this fiasco and gamergate. Gamers never cared about gender or racial politics. They were in it for the medium itself. Don't worry, this will pass as those that are not doing it for love of the medium will burn out and move on to battle in other political arenas soon enough.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mcgrew on Monday August 24 2015, @05:25PM
Anyone else here confused and sadly wondering what happened to science fiction that they loved since childhood?
In my case, the authors are all dead. I'm the only one I know of who writes like that any more (although my stories may be a tad bit more insane). Personally, I'm sick of dreary stories of dystopian futures. It seems that all of today's authors want to be George Orwell, writing 1984s and Animal Farms.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday August 24 2015, @06:26PM
SF needs new blood. It's not so much that new ideas are needed as that authors should drop wrong ideas. The embarrassing part is that some of these ideas have been kicking around for decades.
Among the worst are ideas on copyright and intellectual property. Unlike a lot of other ideas, that one arouses personal feelings and fears in authors. "How will I earn a living without copyright?" they wail. And so most can't write rationally about that subject. The futures many envision still have ridiculously strong copyright protection. Books are on the way to becoming a quaint relic of the past, entirely supplanted by digital copies, yet in a lot of SF, the paperless office has yet to entirely arrive.
Then there's Faster Than Light travel. The reality we live in is that FTL travel probably is impossible. Every way we've thought up to do it takes absurd amounts of power, or exotic matter, or something else that is utterly impractical or flat impossible. Do the plots really need FTL tech? Mostly, no. Things would take longer, a whole lot longer, and of course some things wouldn't be possible or worth doing. Yet most SF has it. Why? Are they bowing to impatient audiences? Is it so we can act like visiting planets by spaceship is about the same as visiting cities by train? It may be that no FTL travel has kept us safely isolated from hostile aliens, and rather than pining for it, we should be glad it's impossible.
Worse yet is traveling back in time. Forward is fine, nothing wrong with that, we all experience it always. If anything really ruins a story, it's unlimited ability to travel back in time. Any time anyone makes a mistake, just hop back in time and fix it. I suspect that not only is traveling back in time impossible, but that the very thought is a misunderstanding of reality, and we wouldn't even be talking about it if we had a better understanding. Typical time traveling stories restrict the time travel in essentially arbitrary ways, to keep it from being so powerful. Of course in many stories, time travel is the central mechanism that everything revolves around, and the story is an exploration of the ramifications, That's okay, but we have enough of those. It becomes as tiresome as yet another story of what it would be like if the world is flat and you could sail off the edge.
Then there's overbearing space opera, the sort of drama which pushes perfectly valid and often blindingly obvious ideas aside for the sake of making things more dramatic. For instance, in Star Trek, why do they always, always send out an Away Team? Don't they have drones? Remotely operated robots? Probes?
This touches on another problem, which is the desire of people to be the center of action. The amount of personal action needed to accomplish anything is just silly.
(Score: 3, Funny) by cafebabe on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:54AM
I thought that the Sad Puppies was a series of young-adult science-fiction books. Or maybe a graphic novel. I'm vaguely disappointed that it isn't.
1702845791×2
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24 2015, @09:55AM
> You have the Sad Puppies confused with the Rabid Puppies.
The rabid puppies got all of their nomination choices accepted, the sad puppies were not so successful. When there was a choice between sad noms and rabid noms, the rabids won and the sads lost.
I can see how if you consider yourself just a sad puppy you want to distinguish yourself from the rabids, but there is tons of overlap between the two groups and the rabids got more votes over all, they are clearly leading the movement.
(Score: 1, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday August 24 2015, @10:15AM
Sad suggested blocks of authors and said pick your favorites to vote for. Rabid laid out fixed blocks and said vote exactly like this. And when it came time to vote? Sad and Rabid both voted for the books they thought best while the SJWs took their flamethrowers to the categories.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24 2015, @10:18AM
Another non-sequitur response. Nothing you wrote contradicts the point that rabids were more succesful at getting their noms than sads were and thus are leading the movement.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24 2015, @11:45AM
The idea of a meritocratic social order is neither left nor right. Both sides can and often do adopt it, and both sides can reject it. Even if we go with the presumption that there is something inherently "right" in it, it still doesn't mean that leftists cannot support it in some or all circumstances, because most people aren't extreme ideologues.
It's funny that you mentioned Fascism because that's a hard-right ideology which strongly favors order over merit, and in fact it rose to prominence as an ideological opposition to 20th century center-left liberalism.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday August 24 2015, @01:39PM
That's rather strange, because the books and authors that the Sad Puppies claim have so much merit as to deserve Hugos have attracted neither critical acclaim, nor a strong readership (if their sales numbers are anything to go by), nor lots of compliments by fellow authors, all of which would seem to me to be pretty good indications of merit or lack thereof. And instead of reacting to that with "Maybe the books just aren't that good", they instead went with "There's a conspiracy of Social Justice Warriors to keep these books from winning, even though they are the best books ever!"
The most ridiculous complaint I saw coming from Sad Puppies was that the Hugos were showing a strong preference for books that were seen as more "literary". Well, it's a literary award, what did you think they were supposed to prefer?
It's not like Hugos have never been given to right-wing authors or authors tackling things from a right-wing viewpoint, either.
From the point of view of someone who's generally outside of the whole thing and doesn't really care who wins Hugos, it looks a lot less like conservatives are being persecuted, and a lot more like a very small number of people are claiming conservatives are being persecuted for the purposes of selling bad books.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24 2015, @05:07PM
Merit of the works? Haahahahahahahh! Pull the other one, it's got bells on!
The Sad Puppies nominated mostly shit that got voted down not just because it was hateful, racist, and misogynistic, but because it was BADLY WRITTEN.
The Sad Puppies claim to love David Weber, but didn't get around to nominating any of his bestsellers. Idk if that was because he has female and trans main characters, or because nominating him wouldn't get their tiny little obscure publishing house any free press. Maybe it was a bit of both.
Sad Puppies are interested in the "merits of the book" about as much as #gamergate is interested in "ethics in video game journalism". Thanks for the laughs!
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by jmorris on Monday August 24 2015, @09:51AM
Yes, many of the Sad Puppies wanted to reform the Hugos by making a point; they thought the other side could then be reasoned with. The Rabids knew better. After voting closed Vox Day was openly stating that it had been his intention from the beginning to goad the SJWs themselves into nuking the Hugos by No Awarding since he knew he didn't have the numbers to outright do it himself. Looks like he played them effortlessly. And has no plans to stop hurting them, over and over, year after year, until they get the hint. He has already been wargaming their probable next move of changing the voting rules and how to troll them into further damaging themselves when they do it.
Vox says "SJWs always lie." but I would add that they also aren't too bright either. Of course they make up for it with massive numerical superiority as Progressivism is a creed for losers and there is never a shortage of those.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24 2015, @09:58AM
> Looks like he played them effortlessly.
Seems to me Vox Day is a "heads I win, tails you lose" kinda guy and super bright guys like yourself totally agree.
> He has already been wargaming their probable next move
Snort!
(Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Monday August 24 2015, @11:56AM
The NRx interpretation of the collection of facts does seem to correlate better than most interpretations.
What I find interesting is the NRx blogs/podcasts I follow don't have much mention of the hugo situation. It can be recognized as an example of their worldview, but they aren't acknowledging it. Or I'm failing to read it, or in the grand scheme of things its not a big enough deal to get much mention.
An additional NRx interpretation of the facts that you missed yet fits right in, is the old classic that "all organizations that aren't explicitly right wing eventually turn left wing", which certainly fits the hugos. Decades ago, hugo awards really meant something as a mark of quality, its only recently that it converted to a marker of left wing racism and sexism. Now a hugo means the book is at best run of the mill and sometimes mere crap, its like getting a stamp of approval from a Soviet censor. In the old days a hugo meant it was a good story, now it means the author is a member of the correct leftie demographic group and the story is no longer considered.