Well, it looks like the Hugo Awards are pretty much busted this year.
So it occurred to me: there are a lot of very sharp, very well-informed SF/fantasy fans that read this blog (and at least one award-winning SF author that I know of). So why not do a little awarding of our own?
And so I would like to welcome you to the First Annual We Hunted The Mammoth Serious Kitten Awards.
Nominate your favorites in the categories below — and if there are any more categories you think I should add, suggest them. Every category with at least 5 nominees will be voted on in a future post; the rest will be dropped.
Use your best judgment when choosing the right category for your nominations. Speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror, all good. EBooks, self-published books, all fine. I’ll make other rules/clarifications/pronouncements as necessary.
The only thing that isn’t fine: No nominations for anyone or any work included in the Sad Puppies or Rabid Puppies Hugo slates, except in the “worst” categories, if you think they deserve it. The point is to highlight work that might otherwise get overlooked because of the Sad/Rabid Puppies ballot-stuffing.
The categories:
- Best Novel (published in 2014)
- Best Novella (published in 2014)
- Best Short Story (published in 2014)
- Best SF-related Nonfiction Book (published in 2014)
- Best Comic/Graphic Novel (published in 2014)
- Best Webcomic (ongoing, but has to have appeared in 2014)
- Best SF site (ongoing, but had to exist in 2014)
- Best SF blog (ongoing, but had to exist in 2014)
- Best SF movie (released or or shown on television in 2014, i.e. SyFy movies count)
- Best SF TV series (for episodes from 2014)
- Best SF podcast/Youtube channel (ongoing, had to exist in 2014)
- Best SF Twitterer (ongoing, but had to be on Twitter in2o14)
- Coolest SF person (ongoing, but had to be cool in 2014)
- Biggest SF asshole (ongoing, but had to be an asshole in 2014. Can include those associated with Sad Puppies and/or Rabid Puppies)
- Worst SF novel
- Worst SF movie
- Worst SF TV series
.NEW CATEGORY: Best SF game
Have at it! Make sure you specify what category your nomination should be in! The winners will win … something!
EDIT: Added a category.
For MRAs, only their totally imagined version of the past is real and everything else is liberal machinations.
These people are awful.
I second Ms. Marvel, which was recommended to me by somebody here and is totally awesome.
Most of the 2014 novels I’ve read so far were urban fantasy and as much as I love Séanan McGuire, I’m not sure that The winter long was really the best book of 2014.
I vote for Vox Day as biggest asshole.
Best SF TV Series: I’m going to best-mention Doctor Who and Agent Carter, and actually nominate Steven Universe.
Best Webcomic: A House Divided (warning for orphaning within first two pages).
If there’s a bigger asshole than Vox Day, I don’t want to know.
@RC: I’ve read some of Weber’s Honor Harrington books, and I found them a mixed bag. A lot better than the Midshipman’s Hope books, which lifted Hornblower and his society pretty much wholesale.
From this post, which is everything I know about what’s going on:
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016194.html
‘Butcher has not publicly commented on his nomination that I’ve seen. (I just did a quick check of livejournal, twitter, and his official web site.) If he continues to have no comment through the voting period, I will seriously question whether to buy his next book. I will forgive a lot, but not the “lie low and hope it blows over” plan.’
Alien 3 is the only Alien movie I’ve seen (I don’t like scary movies) because my former boss grew up in the place used as the location for the prison planet. Seriously. I totally thought he was shitting me, but it’s true.
Best Novel- Half the world, Joe Abercombie
Best Webcomic- Strong Female Protagonist
Best SF movie- Big Hero Six
Best SF TV series- Z Nation
Best SF podcast/Youtube channel- RocketJump
Coolest SF person – Stephen Amell
Biggest SF asshole- Theodore Beale
Worst SF movie- Sharknado 2
Worst SF TV series-Helix
And now to explain myself:
Best Novel- Say one thing about Joe Abercrombie, he’s a damn fine writer. And when GRRM says that he got snubbed this year because of the Sad Puppies, who are we to argue?
Best Webcomic- Not gonna lie, this was a hard choice between SFP, Gunnerkrigg and Unsounded. But I’m nominating Strong Female Protagonist because it’s relatively new to the game and needs recognition
Best SF movie- It was a bit of a toss-up between this and Guardians of the Galaxy, but I ultimately went with Big Hero 6 because it’s more inclusive. Not because of more protagonists of color (Though that helps) But instead I would say Guardians requires you to be an 80’s nostalgia nerd while Big Hero 6 allows nerds of every stripe to have fun
Best SF TV series- I would imagine Z Nation flew under a lot of people’s radar, and why not? It’s an Asylum made zero-budget attempt to ride The Walking Dead’s coattails. But there’s a magic to it. Namely right when you’re getting comfortable the show tosses a curveball in your direction, every character is well-acted and just the right amount of fleshed out, and it can be very entertaining if you’re into cartoonish violence
Best SF podcast/Youtube channel – A good place to go if you want to see some special-effects applied for cheap comedy. Also VGHS does a decent job showing us a world where video games aren’t being undermined by sexist jerkwads.
Coolest SF person- Stephen Amell is the nicest dude in the universe, so until someone finds his secret corpse stash under his basement and we all find out he’s actually a serial killer, I’m nominating him
Biggest SF asshole- Really, no one else is getting this award as long as he’s alive
Worst SF Movie- I feel like this needs to put “Worst” in quotes but who cares, they wanted this award and I haven’t seen any of the genuinely movies that will undoubtedly be on this list
Worst SF TV series- The triumphant return of Ronald D Moore to Syfy was heralded as an event worth celebrating. The show itself turned out to be a magnificent failure in every possible way.
Best novel: Lagoon, Nnedi Okorafor.
Though honestly, I will be very happy if The Goblin Emperor wins the Hugos, and pleased enough if Ancillary Sword does.
Best movie: can I nominate Patema Inverted? It was released in Japan in 2013, but in the UK/USA? In 2014. I think that would tie in with the rules for translations in the Hugos.
Oh shoot, can I change my short story nomination? Or add another one? I forgot about this amazing retelling of Seven Swans by Ursula Vernon: http://ursulavernon.tumblr.com/post/99871502898/swan-brothers
Even if I can’t change/add this as a nomination, everyone should go read it. It’s very short. Shorter than a lot of blog comments, even.
Aww dammit I meant to post Half a King in best scifi novel. Half the World came out in February and won’t count. Pretend I posted that instead.
Good to see a rec for that.
It popped up on my “recommended for you” on Netflix and I dismissed it out-of-hand as TWD ripoff.
@RC have you read any Tanya Huff? Her Valor series is military SF (space marines!) but without as much eye-rolling politics as David Weber (not that I didn’t read all of the Honor Harrington books back in my youth).
@ Falconer
Yeah, they can be a bit of a mixed bag, admittedly. I am much more fond of the first half of the series than the more recent half. The overall plot was a bit better paced, and the characters were right in the thick of it.
In the second half of the series, things have shifted more to wide-scale interstellar politics, and the cast has risen to such high ranks that they’re in more advisory and command roles for the most part. It is cool to see new characters get to come in and do their thing, or have young characters who have matured into full-fledged officers, but yeah. There was just about a half dozen books where things just, bogged down. Things did seem to be getting more interesting in the most recent couple books, so here’s hoping things are going back in a more positive direction.
I have to admit, I really liked the way he handled religion in his books too. It seems like a lot of sci-fi doesn’t really touch on that, and the whole arc that planet Grayson had to go through as their fundamentalist beliefs were forced to adapt to a wider, more diverse universe, that was pretty interesting stuff 🙂 I think that Weber does a generally good job showing that a person can be deeply religious *and* still be flexible enough to exist within a diverse world, and generally be a decent human being.
@kootie – Good point.
In my head, then, Butcher was just like, “A nomination for ME? Well, gosh, OK!” and didn’t know all the ends and outs until I hear otherwise.
@PI – Well, that’s the way things *have been* and *are* and *should be forever and ever*, right?
@RC – Totally. And there are conservatives of various stripes who I respect through our disagreements…Vox is not among them (though neither Rand – Ayn R. or R. Paul – are, either, though I’d count each as less noxious than VD).
People of good will can differ, sometimes loudly. It’s when their means and desired ends veer off into seemingly intentionally harmful for out-groups that I draw the line
@ Kitts
I have not, but I may have to take a look. I don’t mind a little space-politics in my sci-fi, but yeah, my hope is that the Honor Harrington series kind of eventually steers back a little bit from that. It’s fun to see the interactions and political games, but I wanna see the cast back commanding spaceships and fighting badguys too 😛 About the point where Honor and co get back from breaking out of space-jail is where the series starts to go downhill for me. I really enjoyed everything up to that.
I recently read “Unbreakable” by W.C. Bauers, and it was alright. I’m probably going to give him one more book to really hook me or not though. Fun little read, but it definitely suffered from a few common ‘first book problems.’ There were a couple too many setting exposition dumps for my liking, and one particularly egregious case of a character going “As you well know…” which is pretty much code for “I am about to dump a bunch of stuff on the reader.” Decently fun little ooh-rah space marine book though, and I am a sucker for women in powered armor.
Worst SF movie: Transcendence. Giving $100m to a first-time director is a guarantee of failure. Giving it to one with a script that could be charitably described as fucking awful is like running a Razzie campaign.
Yeah…my understanding is that Butcher only agreed to be on the slate if Vox and his ilk stayed far far away. (Hence the whole Rabid puppies mess. ’cause Vox felt Sad puppies was taken over by moderates)
I mean…some of the stuff they nominated isn’t political. See Butcher, Guardians of the Galaxy etc. It seems a bit weird to say because X nominated them–we have to cut them out entirely. Can’t we just nominate good fiction?
On Jim Butcher: I have never seen anything to indicate he’s got anything to do with MRAs etc. His Chicago geography was way off, but I’ve never had a problem with his female characters. I get the feeling he was included because he’s popular and male. To show the Sad/Rabid Puppies are not so fringe of course.
Kind of like Guardians of the Galaxy and the Lego Movie.
Kelly Sue Deconnick’s Bitch Planet has to take best comic, because otherwise what are we even doing here.
So, I have met at least one author that has been nominated from the Sad Puppies slate and am aquainted with several of the Sad Puppies through friends, friends of friends, and their Facebook presence.
I do have to argue a difference between the Sad and Rabid Puppies. Maybe not much of a difference, but at least some.
The Sad Puppies mostly come from Baen Publishing which does tend to run rather right-wing and military related in its offerings. Not totally, however. Louis Bujold has published through Baen and another core author in the Baen stock is something of an apologist for Communism. Two exceptions to the rule, yes…but they are Baen bread-and-butter. In my view, they stand out a lot more in the Baen fold than some of the more obscure authors who toe the right-wing line.
My take on the Sad Puppies is that they’re generally being hypocrites. One the one hand, many of them denigrate left-leaning politics and the “SJW” movement, as they see it. Most of what they complain about tends to come from total lack of understanding for what social justice is about, though. They take angry comment thread feminism as the totality of feminism. Similar issue for LGBT and anti-racism activism. My take is that their problem is in a lack of education on relevant feminist thinkers and a bit of an over-reliance on “hard” science. We can’t draw any conclusions from the Reddit thread about the thousands of women who were noticed, sexually, by men at age 12, because it isn’t “representative” or whatnot.
So, they spend a lot of time complaining about the Hugo, denigrating it, and now are suddenly interested in and motivated about an award that they think is over-run with the SJWs. They’ve spent a lot of time publicly insulting SJWs and are now interested in this big “SJW-award” and complaining that they can’t get the votes from the “biased” voters. Well…if you spend a lot of time telling people that they suck, it isn’t surprising that they won’t vote for you.
On the other hand, the Hugo at least pretends to be an award for the “best” SF/F out there. Full stop. Regardless of politics, some of the Baen writers can write rather well. I find that, in some cases, the politics overshadow the writing. But, others can strike a good balance.
The mistake that the Hugo makes is that it pretends to be more than a popularity contest. You get to vote for the Hugo as a WorldCon attendee, or as a non-attending voter. ($200 and $40 respectively). It is a popularity contest, not a considered review of all the SF/F published for the year. It is just a BIG and IMPORTANT one.
The mistake the Sad Puppies make is seeing any kind of malice in the Hugo voting. Some think that John Scalzi or other prominent authors have made some sort of concerted effort, beyond putting their opinions in popular blogs, to influence the voting. I seriously doubt it. At worst, Hugo award winners and prominent authors review and talk about books they like and suggest them to their fans…who then read them and vote. Scalzi, I know, has no problem reading/reviewing plenty of Baen. He takes photos of his stack of books he’s reading at the moment and there’s usually at least one Baen book.
The Rabid Puppies, however, are a much more toxic spin off. There’s some overlap between the Rabid and Sad Puppies. The nominated Baen author I’ve met is an example of that; nominally a Sad Puppy, he does have a lot of MRA sympathies and just doesn’t understand what us women are complaining about.
The Rabid Puppies, as far as I know, have already threatened that if “No Award” wins (an option for the Hugo voting) in any of the categories, they’ll come back next year and stuff the voting with “No Award” on all the slates, out of spite.
For TV show, I’d like to nominate Constantine, since I’ve been beaten to Orphan Black.
It’s a retreat of sorts. It’s conceding ground to liberals. When was the last time you actually read good conservative political sci-fi? Social conservatism is bereft of ideas of how a future society should actually look like, they don’t even have ideas how it realistically *might* look like. They have completely lost on this sector.
…so they demand that this sector should be given up.
Sour grapes, really.
But even so, the puppies show an *incredible* lack of self-awareness. They openly proclaim “Sci-fi these days thinks too much, we want our sci-fi dumped down”. I mean… don’t they see how, to be frank, stupid this makes them look?
I would like to aggressively agree that Steven Universe needs to be in there yes good thankyouverymuch.
I don’t know if this would count as a sci-fi movie (it certainly does seem to meet the basic requirements of “science” and “fiction” though), but I would throw my vote behind that one. That was a damn good movie, and I need a Baymax in my life. Baymax needs to be a real thing for a lot of good reasons.
And it’s got tons of diversity, just to stick in Voxxy’s craw. There’s only one white dude in the main cast. The lead and his brother are Asian American (I believe they’re of Japanese descent), GoGo is also Asian American (unspecified which nationality), Honey Lemon is Latina/Hispanic, and Wasabi is African American.
Other good things: GoGo is a tomboy (though she does have that “Asian girl with a colored streak of hair” thing going) who thrives on speed and making things go fast. Honey Lemon is a Latina fashionista who’s really into biochemistry, and all of the other characters are pretty well fleshed-out and have their own motivations and quirks. (But I’m mostly excited about Honey Lemon bucking female stereotypes of “smart OR pretty, not both”.)
A very good Disney movie. I liked it better than Frozen. (But not better than Maleficent.)
@PI: I haven’t seen Big Hero 6 (I really want to) but from what I can tell, the one white guy on the crew is kind of a slacker, too, which ought to cheese the Puppies off.
For best SF Blog/Website, how about AVFM? (since Elam lives in a fantasy world) *Zing!*