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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.
@Hipsterminator
Why do you guess they’re MRAs, exactly?
Yeah, can’t we wait for more details about the Pokemon guys before labeling them? Not everything is about MRAs.
Translated from the blowhardese: “We might not have won, but at least we ruined it for everybody!” Nope, not immature trolls at all.
Yes, of course Vox Day would claim victory. That’s his standard strategy. No matter what happens, he won. He will go on about this “victory” for the next month, and refer to it and what he supposes to be the chagrin of his “enemies” every few weeks or so for the next year. He will interpret every thing said about the Hugos by John Scalzi, George R R Martin, and co as chagrin, of course.
Here’s something interesting, btw, Day refers to John Wright as a Grand Master on at least two occasions. So far as I know, he is no such thing. Does Mr Day believe he can make this fact by assuming fait accompli? People don’t believe his “victories”; why does he think he’ll do any better at making Wright a Grand Master?
Day brought in Gamer Gaters to vote the Rabid Puppy slate, which is how he managed to flood the nominations with his slate.
I was working the dc 17 bid and got to see the ceremony at the convention, it was pretty amazing how unified the fans are on this.
Hipsterminator: I didn’t see anything in the article that specifically mentioned them being MRAs or any other political position. There’s obviously a ton of entitlement there, especially if they were planning on shooting up the place if they lost (which I think may have been the plot). And it tends to be straight white men who have that sort of entitlement in our society. But leapiing from that to “They were MRAs” is a bit quick off the draw. Naturally, if social media posts or the like are found indicating they were actively anti-feminists, then I’ll withdraw my objection.
I’ve got one for Vox Day: a fictive victory is a fictory. I donate that one to him free of charge; he can use it from now on.
It’s sort of moot to try to figure out the first sci-fi story by the presence of sci-fi elements; Does Talos the bronze guardian of Crete count as a robot, for instance? How about Jewish golems?
If you count the beginnings of sci-fi by themes or by the beginning of the contiguous present-day movement, Frankenstein is a pretty good choice.
Along with ‘Halo Jones’, another great female-centred SF comicbook is Elaine Lee and Michael Kaluta’s ‘Starstruck’: a space opera so sprawling (and with such a convoluted publishing history) it took them a quarter-century to finish.
Certainly one could argue that the Odyssey is the first fantasy. (I used to be a Classics major, sorry.)
Bonelady: I think you mean the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The people who make up wild conspiracy theories about wicked SJW cabals plotting the downfall of civilization sure love accusing others of having “narratives”.
@bonelady
Well John C. Wright, Vox’s pretentious blowhard hanger on, is a chip off the old block, what with his claims about normal men’s natural inclination to gay bash (a), and his own desire to punch the 63 year old Terry Pratchett in the face for spouting “pure evil” (b).
(a) http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2015/04/john-c-wright-tries-to-cover-up-that-hes-a-wannabe-gay-basher.html
(b)http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/5306366.html?thread=99789054#t99789054
He also thinks he’s being quite witty and clever when he gets those screeds really rolling.
http://www.thebacklot.com/orson-scott-card-isnt-the-only-homophobic-wackjob-sci-fi-writer-out-there/08/2009/
http://johncwright.livejournal.com/333124.html (Note: That gem’s from one of his many comments on his own blog, he loves to go on and on.)
The following block of text is pure grade John C.Wright: it’s painful to slog through and awkwardly combines two of his favorite topics, “race realism” and global warming denial, into one frothy mess.
http://johncwright.livejournal.com/326302.html (The blog post is an epic hissy fit of interminable length.)
TL:DR Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen can belatedly pretend to distance their Sad Puppies clique from the Rabid ones, but they created the original SP slate with their good pals Vox Day and John C Wright. John C Wright is a pompous bigot who abuses both people and the English language, he’s definitely a Vox Day-level asshole of the highest order. Fuck these guys.
https://naomikritzer.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/vox-days-involvement-in-the-sad-puppies-slate/
John C. Wright’s flounce from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America was a grand thing.
http://www.scifiwright.com/2014/04/an-open-letter-to-the-science-fiction-writers-of-america/
http://cdn.meme.am/instances/250×250/59461882.jpg
John C. Wright later added the followup statement “Waaaah!”
Well I am liking this John C. Wright fella more and more.
[barf emoji]
Has Theodore Beale bothered to notice that, unlike him, “Grand Master” John C. Wright *supports* female suffrage, however reluctantly? I sense an ideological split coming on…
I’m curious as to what these mildly intolerable drawbacks to women’s suffrage are. Based on his writings, I suppose I could guess.
It could be that women are too liberal and are less likely to vote for libertarian conservatives. Because we’re too emotional to get the manly wisdom of being a right wing asshole.
It could also be that voting rights made us too uppity. We got the wacky notion that we’re people with the right to consent or not consent to sex, the right to pursue a career, the right to make our own reproductive choices and other assorted horrors.
I wonder which tack he was taking there.
Vox Day is pure ass. Fuck that piece of shit.
A lot of you guys sure are reblogging and liking that Tumblr post. lol P:
@weirwoodtreehugger
I often get the impression that these people find the fact the universe does not revolve around them to be a grave injustice.
I’ve said it elsewhere and I’ll say it here: every word these guys say is a load of horseshit, with one exception: I think it was Brad Torgersen who said to – was it NPR – that he was tired of the fact that he and his friends were not winning Hugo awards.
This wasn’t some great ideological movement. It was an effort to game the system for these dudes and their friends.
The attempt to frame the overwhelming repudiation of their tactics as a liberal conspiracy is also horseshit. SF fandom is not an ideological monolith, especially as far as what they choose to read. I am politically liberal, yet I buy, read and enjoy some of the same authors they claim as forefathers, and current authors of adventure and military SF. It’s all about enjoying a fun read for me. I also read some of the “literary” books they claim to hate. I think the overwhelming majority of Hugo voters that rejected the Puppies did so not based on their ideology, but because they wanted to punish them for screwing with the fair voting process of an award they respect. No, technically they didn’t violate the letter of any rules, but they sure as hell violated the spirit of the whole event. And they didn’t nominate the “best” work of conservative authors – they nominated, as Torgersen admitted, themselves and their friends, and much of it was pretty lackluster stuff.
The results spoke loud and clear: not “go away conservative authors,” but DON’T FUCK WITH THE AWARDS, ASSHOLES.
Ftfy 😀
I’m pretty sure that Vox isn’t going to suddenly have the hots for you no matter how much you post about him, David. He’s straight.