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So the Hugo Awards were last night, and, as many of you no doubt already know, the Puppies went down in defeat.
For those who haven’t been following the ongoing culture war in the world of science fiction, a group of cultural reactionaries decided to try to strike a blow against what they see as the Social Justice Warriorization of the SF world by essentially stuffing the ballot boxes for the Hugo Award nominations with two slates of their own candidates, dubbed the Sad and the Rabid Puppies. They succeeded in this ignoble task, with many of the categories in the final ballot filled entirely with writers put forward by one or the other of the Puppy slates.
But there’s one peculiar thing about the Hugo ballots: if you don’t like any of the nominees, you can vote for “no award” instead.
And last night, that’s what everyone fed up with the Puppies did. In the five categories where all the nominees were Puppy-nominated, voters picked “no award” over all of them. The only Puppy-endorsed winner? Guardians of the Galaxy, which was such a charmingly entertaining popcorn flick that it transcended Puppy politics altogether
Naturally, the Puppies and their supporters claimed … victory? Well some of them did, anyway.
Doesn't the super-villain always set off the self-destruct when his underground lair is overrun by heroes? Just a thought. #HugoAwards
— Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) August 23, 2015
Meanwhle, Vox Day — the famously reactionary, racist, woman-hating fantasy author who headed up the Rabid Puppies — tried to spin the giant loss as a sort of nihilistic victory for the forces of reactionary chaos.
In his first blog post about the results of the Hugo votes, Day managed to sort of admit that the Puppies had, yes, failed. Of those voting for “no award,” Day wrote,
They are practicing a scorched earth strategy, and we can certainly assist them in that since we do not value their territory. I still think it was worth trying to take Berlin and end the war in one fell swoop, but even though our attempt break them once and for all failed, that only means that the victory was less than complete.
But in later posts he banished the f-word and tried to convince the world, like Pee Wee Herman after his famous bicycle spill in Pee Wee’s Great Adventure, that he’d “meant to do that.”
In his second post on the Hugo results, Day declared
The five categories burned last night are only the first sparks of the cleansing conflagration that is coming.
In a later post, he wrote
It’s fascinating to see SJWs desperately trying to cling to their Narrative on Twitter and elsewhere. They’re insisting that we’re mad, that we’re crying, that we’re upset, when the fact is that I knew this would be the result this year prior to creating Rabid Puppies.
He knew it all along!
Pee Wee, take it away:
For more details on the Hugos, and more of Vox’s spinning, check out the accounts on Wired and the Wall Street Journal.
I hate to be the one to break it to these poor puppies but the Titantic is going down. They need to get their asses off the ship or be happy at the cesspool that history will remember them as.
I didn’t see anyone else bring it up, so I’m going to: Please read our comments policy before conflating assholes and their asshole behavior to mental illness.
Those of us with mental illnesses don’t like being thrown under the bus by having our mental illnesses conflated with shitty behavior, thanks.
But, how will they pretend to be the good guys if they aren’t painting us as the villains?! We’re just out to destroy all that’s good (white, cis, het, male) in the world!
Actually, it’s about ethics in sci-fi awarding.
I’m not a big SF geek (fantasy is more my cup of tea), but I do enjoy an occasional novel examining social issues set in a speculative, futuristic setting. You know, like a fuckton of SF stories. This whole “SF being overrun with SJWs” is kinda silly in light of that.
Well, in light of anything connected to reality, really.
@skiriki
No way. It’s coming to Helsinki in 2017? Guess I’ll have to start catching up to modern stuff instead of re-reading the Lord of the Rings for the seventy-eighth time.
@Sarity
Those puppies are adorable. As opposed to the jerkheads in the article, I just want to cuddle them after their fails.
You know how conspiracy theorists like to justify their wrong predictions by saying “well, obviously since we found out about their plans, they had to abort”?
Yeah, this is basically that. Except it actually had a negative effect on something.
Plus the whole “I’m not racist ’cause I know a black person” as a defense.
It’s why I’m less concerned with tone these days – if you’re saying racist or sexist or transphobic things in a “nice” way, that doesn’t make it less racist or sexist or transphobic. The idea that makes the opinion “more valid” is something people need to stop doing.
@Nop
I admit I’m a bit leery of defining SJWing by the attributes of the winning writers as opposed to what their writings were about. I’m aware the opposite viewpoint is at least as valid as mine, and probably more, but felt the need to point that out.
This has nothing to do with the Hugo Awards, but is about finding out that Vox is dodging taxes in Italy: MRAs, when 90% of your big-namers are hiding from law enforcement or dodging taxes outside of America and 5% of the remainder aren’t allowed outside of America… There may just be reasons for that other than “Nebulous SJW/Jewish/Obama/alien/lizard people/Jewish SJW aliens working for Lizard Obama conspiracy.” If you need a hint, it rhymes with “Door blah great stoop wool gov liminals.”
I’m confused… how did sad or rabid puppies ‘nominate’ each candidate?
*Change “America” to “Their home country.” A couple are Canadian and one’s Australian.
Moocow: The nominations are open to anyone who 1: was a member of the previous years Worldcon or 2: paid for a supporting membership in this year’s Worldcon.
The puppies put up slates, and told their fans, followers, and fellows to nominate those works.
Which had (relatively speaking) huge numbers of nominations; some of which were works out by one very small publishing house.
They were also… by and large, awful.
@ peculum
The dominant opinion that I’ve seen from rank-and-file Puppies has focused on the so-called “lockstep” that characterized the voting in Puppy-heavy categories. It’s the most classic example of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose rhetoric that I’ve seen in a while: nominate a bunch of unreadable crap with some reactionary cred, presumably in the hopes that at least one piece of it will stick to an award, and then denounce SJW groupthink when people sensibly flock to “no award” rather than see something like “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” win a rocket.
The fact that most of the stuff they nominated was terrible and that none of it would deserve a Hugo, under any circumstances whatsoever, doesn’t seem to enter the conversation, ever.
Anarchonist — yes! Worldcon is in Helsinki in 2017! Isn’t it awesome!?
One of my friends was so aghast when he found out he was being backed by these guys that he withdrew his nomination entirely. I’m a scifi writer myself, and I don’t know if I would have the strength to give up a shot at the Hugo Awards.
“Either of you read Halo Jones?”
Speaking as someone who considers Alan Moore’s ‘major’ works (‘Watchmen’, etc) to all have significant flaws, I regard ‘Halo Jones’ as one of his greatest graphic novels, even in its unfortunately unfinished state. One of the few Moore comics not to throw in sexual violence as a plot point, too.
Definitely the oldest science fiction story was Cyrano de Bergerac’s story of a traveler to the Moon who smeared cow’s marrow on himself and was drawn up to the Moon, which had a unique society of people living on it.
How about The Great Moon Hoax of 1835?
Oliver_C:
It’s been many many years since I read Halo Jones (I guess I bought the three volumes back in ’86 or ’86, after they were recommended by my feminist friend Katie), but (avoiding spoilers) I seem to remember some fridging.
(Hot digital dog, that’s longer ago than I care to think of. How did I get so old?)
The story is that his father had a lot of assets that were never accounted for, and that someone *cough* helped him hide those assets.
@ Oliver and Moggie
How do you think I feel; I read them in the comic!!!!
pecunium:
One could say that the whole rabid puppies thing was our fault. See, if we’d just given VD the recognition which he knows is his by right, if we’d just knelt before his brilliance, he wouldn’t have had to do this. As it is, everything creative he’s done has failed to set the world alight, while he has had to watch as the wrong sort of people (some of them barely even people, really) have won the accolades which should have been his. So of course he has been forced to go the supervillain route, destroying what we care about. Really, we should be ashamed. Look what we made him do!
Alan, I wouldn’t want to challenge your position as resident geezer!
The funny thing is that the best military sci-fi of the last few years (a genre that I’d guess those people would categorize as appropriate sci-fi) was Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.
SPOILERS – SPOILERS – SPOILERS – SPOILERS – SPOILERS – SPOILERS – SPOILERS –
It has AIs, starships, an empire, big weapons and all the gritty details which make hard sci-fi and space operas so much fun.
It also has the female pronoun as the default and the society in it knows no gender. Its main character is also deeply humane and a bleading heart liberal.
The book is really really great.
/fanboy off
@ Moggie
Hey, it’s just that I started reading comics when I was very very young 😉
[Also, time machine]
http://www.rt.com/usa/313187-pokemon-boston-threat-police/
So a pair of (I’m guessing) MRAs wanted to massacre the Pokemon championship. Of course they got caught by posting it on Facebook.
Stay Tuned.
Only six weeks until Ancillary Mercy!
*Obsessively hits refresh on Amazon*