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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.
@katz
I remember reading somewhere (sorry, can’t remember the source right now), that if you total up all the distances travelled in the journey of Gilgamesh and Enkidu to the cedar wood forest of the giant Humbaba, they’d have ended up in the middle of Siberia. That is, if they were travelling to the north-east in a straight line the whole time.
@OP
I think that the claiming of victories from actual defeats is about the oldest tactic of the insecure man. I mean, it has been used by kings all through human history, after crushing defeats handed to them by rivals. *shakes his head*
Also, I’d like to join the crowd looking forward to the Hugo Awards being handed out in Helsinki in 2017. 2017 is in fact looking to be a good year for Finland in general, since we’ll also be getting gender-neutral marriage laws then. 🙂
The perfect exmaple of how a great author can integrate poltics, sociology, gender and sexual diversity seamlessly into a story then you cannot go past the late and great Iain M Banks, who had more writing talent in his little finger than these clowns have in their whole bodies..
In his ‘Culture’ series there is incredible diversity.
In the Culture, an incredibly advanced society that makes its own orbitals in space… Any person can change their sex just by willinging it. Male, female, neuter at their desire.
Thse are not just backdrops in his books, while the white heterosexual males do all the action, they are often at the core of the stories.
Take Excession, high SF but at the core a tragic love story. Many Culture people when they want to have children will organise to have two of them at the same time, because it is romantic. The couple will select one being a male the other a female. The female will get pregnant, then freeze in stasis the fetus. She will then change to male and her partner to female, then they get pregnant and time it to deliver their children together.
Excession tells of one such story where emotions and jealousy got in the way.
Another core character is in Surface Detail (which I love because of the psycopathic Culture war ship…lol) is a neuter by choice, though later in life they change backwards and forwards from male to female to neuter……
A lot of action in the Culture boks is on more primitive socioties, where comparing them to the Culture, is wonderful social commentary. He has a lot of fun showing how bad these primitive standard male dominated, partricial, hierarchial, capitalist (as wll as racist) are.
Get them and read the lot.
There have been lots of highly influential left wing SF authors over the past 150 or so years, like H. G. Wells, Gene Roddenberry, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, etc. There’s also been no short supply of “literary SF” alongside more pulpy stuff, but there’s no reason you can’t like both the literary stuff and mindless action.
When a conservative author gets well received in SF circles, it usually has nothing to do with their political views. For example, Orson Scott Card’s book Ender’s Game is strongly literary and (spoiler alert) has an anti-war message that seems like a 1960’s counterculture critique of Starship Troopers. Everyone was ignoring Card’s statements about gay people until he forced the SF community to deal with them by refusing to moderate or qualify them. Similarly, John Scalzi even wrote favorable reviews of some of Larry Correia’s books, but Correia wouldn’t shut up about how Scalzi was part of a leftist conspiracy to destroy SF.
Incidentally, does anyone know anything about Orson Scott Card’s views on women?
@loganbacon
Vox is a clownish troll, so there’s no need to take anything he says seriously. The ugly part for me is how Brad Torgersen and Larry Correia are in constant spin mode because they can’t admit their slate shenanigans have blown up in their faces, unless their greatest goal in life is to do aggressive PR work for Beale and Wright. Correia had no answers when GRRM and others point out that their mean girl theory of recent Hugo winners is fantasy and there’s never been a nomination slates until these knuckleheads made one.
They’re now acting like having well respected editors lose to No Award is a SJW war crime when they themselves turned the whole thing into a mockery by (accidently?) helping Vox Day getting himself nominated in both editor categories and turning short fiction into a Charles Wright cottage industry.
Brad has been reduced to linking to a heart wrenching Facebook post in which two kids at the Award ceremony were made super sad by the No Award wins being applauded.
When all you have left is a soppy “think of the children!” anecdote from a random person on Facebook, you’ve officially got nothing.
https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/08/23/nothing-more-need-be-said/
Brad has no one but himself to blame for those kids’ disappointment. @katz and @history nerd, while I am boycotting OSC’s books yes, because of his politics, especially his role in NOM, he declined his nomination – which I respect. One author I like a whole lot, Jim Butcher, did not – and while I DO like his work a lot, his books (especially the one nominated via the puppies) are not good enough for a Hugo. Some of the older ones, maybe. This one, heck no!
@ Lisa
Some of the closest that I’ve found myself to agreeing, on accident, with a stand-in for a racist character in a novel is Horza in Banks’ Consider Phlebas. I hate to admit, I went pretty far down the rabbit hole of buying the argument that, yeah, mechanical sentience is sentience, but a different kind of sentience from organic sentience, and the second part is what really matters, before I figured out what Banks was trying to teach me there. It was a good moment for me as a person, overall.
*John C Wright
Charles Wright was recently named Poet Laureate of the US and is no way affiliated with the Puppies crew. Whoops.
@Ayyy Lmao
http://33.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lw757gCu5b1r317bvo1_500.gif
1/10 stars, would not be trolled again.
Isn’t the default state for everything, ever “winning” as far as Sad/Rabid Puppies, Gamergaters et al are concerned?
LMAO
http://33.media.tumblr.com/27dc1cea9ce27dd1f09db298911b93a4/tumblr_nn6ptkc2BF1r6er14o1_r3_400.gif
@katz
I’ve never heard any direct comments from OSC on women, but his later books are strongly in favor of them becoming stay-at-home baby-making machines. Like when he turns Petra from Ender’s Game into a weepy mother whose man goes out to save the world and won’t let her join in because it’s his job, not hers, and anyway she’s pregnant so she doesn’t get a choice in the matter.
Of course Vox is straight, he’s banging his bible too hard to even consider being one of “the gays” like some of us. (And frankly, none of us want him in our spaces anyways. Ick.)
And David hasn’t posted about Vox since June 5th. That was two months ago.
You’re coming off as desperate, stop with your thirst. We get it, you want David to notice you.
@Ayyy Lmao sick burn
Is Ayyy troll named after the Ayyy team, the gamergate faction that made fake looting tweets during the Fergusson protests in hope to trick police into more violence? I would personally want to avoid associating with this lot!
On topic: I’m sure many who supported the Puppies are genuinely unaffected by their failure: a couple months passed between the effort they put into it and the outcome, that’s longer than their attention span, I’d be surprised if none of them had simply lost interest.
The good people have had a couple of satisfying victories last couple of weeks.
46,000+ signed a petition to keep Roosh out of Canada, 37 signed a petition to let him in. The attention meant that Roosh couldn’t assault anyone in Canada; that his victories were losing money to talk to two small groups and getting a beer dumped on him.
Now the puppies are soundly defeated-0 for 5, with 100’s of voters voting against them.
Somehow never occurs to Roosh or Vox that the majority of people, even older white cishet males, are good decent people that find their ideas abhorrent.
This not meant to minimize the damage they do or to negate anyone else’s life experience dealing with toxic masculinity, but to remind us [me] that there are good decent people out there.
@loganbacon
I am a huge fan of the Dresden Files, and Butcher’s silence regarding being involved in the slate nominations was both deafening and depressing.
@Zyvlyn, sad to say I heard that when pressed, he said (paraphrasing here) “whatever gets him on the ballot.” Those are not his words, that is the essence of what I read he said. I wish I could remember where.
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.
I’ve been discussing that (with some heat) elseweb. I feel for Toni Weisskopf, who not only had that to deal with, but was a woman; “backed” by hateful misogynists (who didn’t get her consent), and has working relationships with some of them.
I don’t know that, were I her, I’d have dared to say, “I decline the nomination”; even without the issue of her work being above reproach, and Hugo noms not easy to come by.
This wasn’t some great ideological movement. It was an effort to game the system for these dudes and their friends.
This was embarrassingly obvious when the nominees became available for voters to read. Very few of the Puppy nominees fit the Puppies’ description of what they want from SF: fun, action-oriented space opera and hard sci-fi. Instead, the two ballots look very much like some guys made a list of stuff by their friends plus a handful of other stories they happened to read, then called it a day.
More than anything, I was insulted as a reader. I love science fiction and I love literature, and the lack of effort on the Puppies’ part showed a disdain for both. They put infinitely more effort into yelling at people online and making up insulting acronyms than reading, writing, or thinking about the fiction they supposedly care so much about.
Anyway, Worldcon was a great time. It’s a very friendly, inclusive, laid-back convention. And the Puppies can brag all they want about successfully “burning down” the Hugos, because somehow they’re still happening and everyone at the con was excited for Helsinki.
Wright has flounced from his publisher (using his wife as a shield). Moreover, in an attempt to make him look better, his wife gave the lie to his version of events.
On top of that in the course of his exposition he actually espoused heresy (and a heresy which seems to be at least a new variation, if not a new one altogether).
Pretty good stuff.
Torgersen is blacking out those who disagree with him about the reasons they No Awarded the Puppies; without blacking out those who respond (before he can black them out) which gives the lie to his claim he is merely taking bloviation and reducing it to it’s essence.
My popcorn supply is running low.
Shaennon: Sad I wasn’t there. Probably not going to MidAmeriCon, so Helsinki is the next chance I’m likely to get to meet you (unless you’re doing Arisia).
Wait, what is happening here?
The interesting part about the Puppies slates is that it is imbuing in me a desire to read anything that *isn’t* Puppies-pushed. Ordinarily I don’t care about the Hugos. Now? I want to BUY ALL THE BOOKS. Good job, Puppies!
Here is Wright’s post on the events:
http://www.donotlink.com/gfq4
The highlights:
At the reception just before the Awards Ceremony itself, my lovely and talented wife, who writes for Tor books under her maiden name of L Jagi Lamplighter, and who had been consistently a voice of reason and moderation during the whole silly kerfluffle, approached Mr. Patrick Nielsen Hayden at the party to extent to him the olive branch of peace and reconciliation.
Before she could finish her sentence, however, Mr. Hayden erupted into a swearing and cursing, and he shouted and bellowed at the tiny and cheerful woman I married.
I should mention that during the last few months of the Sad Puppies kerfluffle, I once upon a time accurately described him, Mr. Moshe Feder, and Mrs Irene Gallo of Tor Books as ‘Christ Haters.’ The support of abortion, sodomy, and euthanasia rather unambiguously put a soul into the position of open rebellion against Christian teachings. In addition, any man who bears false witness against his neighbor, delights in poison-tongued gossip, and destroys writing careers of anyone who does not support his politics not only disobeys Christ, but violates the ordinary decency of ordinary men of good will of any faith.
The Heresy:
Of all the things said or written since first Larry Correia announced that the craptastification of the Hugo Awards created Sad Puppy syndrome and was the leading cause of puppy sadness, this comment alone, my observation that Mr Hayden and his cronies are Christ Haters, is the one that provoked him to this undignified and petulant display.
I was unaware that he was a Roman Catholic. This is cause for immense hope. He could go tomorrow, nay, today, to a confessional booth, receive the sacrament, and save his darkened soul from damnation.
He could take the host tomorrow, nay, today, and the evil spirit of malice, greed, stupidity and sloth which had been darkening his intellect and casting such a shadow of malodorous corruption across our whole genre could be fumigated, or, to use a more accurate word, exorcised.
It could happen in a moment, in a miracle. All of the last twenty years of crap that has been given awards, and all of the careers stifled or ruined by this man, all the promising books that never saw the light of day because they were shouldered aside by poorly-written uber-Leftist propaganda penned by freaks who hate our genre and despise our founding members — all that could be forgiven by heaven and not held against Mr. Hayden’s account on Judgement Day.
Two decades and more of lies, lies, lies could be sponged away in once second of absolution in the sacrament of reconciliation. All he has to do is kneel and ask.
The unwarranted Pride, married to the flounce:
I am, in all modesty, a skilled author, one of the finest writing today. I intend to write no more books for Tor, until, at the very least, I am ameliorated for the unprofessional behavior shown in public toward that other loyal Tor author, L Jagi Lamplighter, my wife.
Tor, thanks once more to Mr. Hayden, has lost the otherwise unshakeable love and loyalty of one of their more skilled writers, namely, yours truly. (I say one because my wife is an unnaturally forgiving and kindhearted woman, and I cannot guess her mind in this matter.)
There is a lot more: here is his wife giving him the lie:
First, I think John has made it sound a bit worse than it was…but this is not his fault. I did not repeat to him all of what PNH said because I did not him to get upset during the reception. (I was afraid he would be very angry if he knew someone had sworn at his wife.)
Mr, Nielsen Hayden did shout, swear, and stomp off…but he was shouting and swearing at/about John, not at me personally and, actually, as far as swearing, he just used the phrase “tell him to shovel it up his…” You can figure out the rest.
This may not seem like swearing to many of you…many folks speak that way normally. But I do not. Nor do people normally speak that way to me.
My first thought after he stormed off was; isn’t it interesting that he yelled at the one person in the room whose only reaction is going to be to pray for him.
I was not the least upset…