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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.
Ah, I haven’t heard any of that before. I never knew Wright ever was affiliated with Tor. It’s most amusing that this man would complain about someone acting petulantly when I’ve seen him appear in comments of articles critical of him to whine and insult the writer, like when he called Philip Sandifer’s anti-Puppies article incoherent (in the most incoherent way possible at that—he claims to be a teetotaler but it was like he was drunk when he responded) and doesn’t try to offer any counter arguments (yet in his journal claims no one tried to counter his arguments, only insult him—the mind boggles).
I have a feeling Lamplighter is exaggerating events too. It sounds more like Hayden had some harsh things to say about Wright and she was shocked hearing anything negative. It’s only a guess but the way she talks about swearing makes it sound like she’s very unused to it.
I love how they go on about “left-wing propaganda” without ever realizing the works they nominated were often propaganda too, including Wright’s own One Bright Star to Guide Them with it’s wicked magician fueling his magic with abortions. It’s like the right-wingers who call anyone to their left biased without any irony.
@pecunium
If his fiction is anything like his prose, “no award” was truly the best choice by a mile.
This could just be me, but I can’t stand shitty people using their religion as a way to be shitty.
That whole spiel by Wright talking about how this guy could go get salvation makes my skin crawl. Especially the bit where he pretty much says that PNH could not have the last twenty years of crap that got awards held against him on Judgment Day by “kneeling and asking”.
Like seriously fuck off. Just. No. People wanting SciFi to be more inclusive isn’t a mortal fucking sin. People wanting SciFi to be more inclusive and who don’t want your books aren’t “Christ Haters”.
Pull your head out of your ass you arrogant, prideful, self-serving son of a bitch, and don’t use your fucking religion as a soapbox for your shit-spewing.
Good lord. It’s like these people forget that Christ was pretty much a hippie liberal who was in love with a sex worker and had the radical leftist propaganda of “love thy neighbor”.
@pecunium
Wright’s post is… wow. Wow. I guess he actually believes he’s correctly describing things that actually happen, but wow.
I’m guessing Hayden made Vox Day by dropping Beale into a vat of toxic chemicals.
https://youtu.be/Ea1mo79ZBi4
Does Wright even realize how outlandish and pathetic this all sounds, that he’s basically claiming Beale is a convictionless troll who every behavior has been shaped by his need for revenge on an acquiring editor at Tor Books. Yes, that’s how life and people work.
Oddly, Wright’s account doesn’t quite gibe with SFWA’s Official Kicking the Mouthy Bigoted Asshat to the Curb Report, even though it does mention how Beale called Mr Hayden a “fat frog”. (That may not be the report exact title.)
http://www.voxday.net/mart/SFWA_report.pdf
It doesn’t gibe with my memory of events.
About a dozen years ago, when Beale was still writing for World Net (I think), and making a stink (I’d seen him here and there) Teresa got wind of one of his posts (he was already using VD as a nom de plume).
She savaged his logic, excoriated his prose, and generally spanked to hell and back.
He took umbrage, and attempted a reply in the comment section (I am not sure if it the combined Making Light of today, I rather think it was still Electrolite for Patrick, and ML for Teresa.
We handed him his ass.
A few months later some other topic came up, and; like a puppet on a string, he tried again. He’s never been back, in person since.
(As an aside, it is not Mr. Hayden, it’s Nielsen Hayden (no hyphen). This person telling him so is worth reading:
@pecunium
Whoops, my mistake, I hadn’t read the comments and forgot that’s how he writes his name.
Brad R. Torgersen brings the hyperbole and current bullshit arguments to Wright’s blog:
@ Shaenon
But what of the darkness, the encroaching darkness? Plus, seeing the lifeless bodies of those poor destroyed editors strewn about must have been haunting.
Only Torgersen and his pals’ nonstop right wing paranoia, ham-fisted politicking and self-serving bellyaching can save fandom, because kids love that sort of thing.
“True fans”, eh? It sure seemed like it was Torgersen and his buddies who were claiming to be the “true fans of SFF fighting to save the Hugos from inclusion over story”.
Sorry about not getting Nielsen Hayden’s name wrong. I never heard of him until now.
http://memoirsofachildhooddotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/children-who-are-wrong.jpg
Wait, JCW called Moshe Feder a “Christ hater”? Nope, no whiff of anti-semitism there…
As for this:
Just… no. If that turgid mess is representative of his writing, he’s probably not even the finest writer in his street.
@Oliver_C
One of the interesting things about authoritarian politics is that they will hastily unite in their destruction of an enemy, ignoring previous assertions that other right wing authoritarians were the enemy.
When they see an enemy they could effectively destroy, there’s no standard of ethics they actually care to live up to. Including the one that they’re justifying the current hatred on.
Everything is measured in terms of allies and enemies. Everything. And allies are merely ones of convenience for the enemy du jour.
Larry Correia’s books got fairly positive reviews, and critics mostly ignored his conservative libertarian leanings. The books just weren’t winning big name awards, and people attributed that to books getting the awards simply for having “social justice” focuses. Vox Day realized he could use the opportunity to radicalize people into far right white nationalism, so he struck an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” deal (I don’t think Correia is as much of an utterly reprehensible person as Day is).
For what it’s worth, Correia declined his 2015 Hugo nomination, which suggests he might have a modicum of integrity.
I didn’t even know who John C. Wright was before he was on the Sad/Rabid Puppies slate.
Is that what he calls that screed?
Are they really trying to make Vox Day look better by trying to explain that this whole thing was a result of his personal vendetta against Patrick Nielsen Hayden? Seriously? All this because he has held a grudge against one man for ten plus years? Yeah, that looks good.
http://31.media.tumblr.com/4ee9c1c58155b1062349eb7b322f0fe4/tumblr_mf8cor9BgE1rsm741o1_500.gif
It’s better than blaming it on Scalzi.
I mean, he already didn’t look good when the story was “They were afraid I was going to run a number on the Hugos last year, so I did it this year. That’ll show ’em.”
It’s a form of Dolchstosslegende, and they’ve chosen Patrick as the locus on which to frame the conspiracy. I don’t quite know why, save that he’s an editor and fantastic stories of his power to shape the field can be woven; which will be plausible to those ignorant of how things work.
One of the clever rhetorical tricks is the “if he still has any control over him” about Tom Doherty; implying that the Social Justice Cabal secretly runs TOR, and Patrick is the real boss.
If you have to tell people that…oh dear.
I may have found something to top Wright:
KNEEL BEFORE ZOD
Somehow, I don’t think that the loss is gonna be that great for Tor.
No, not FOR him, AT him.
There’s a vast difference between those two, and you were going to do AT, not FOR. It is easy enough to mix up those two, when you’re the one doing it.
I’ve never posted on here but I have to say that I think the approach George R R Martin advocated was better than the “nuclear” no award option.
Nuking the Hugos in a fit of pique doesn’t seem to help fix the underlying problem which is with the nomination process.
@ skiriki
I’ve always preferred ON as a way of winning debates; and sorting lunch. 😉
re:
He has an interesting definition of both “unshakeable” and “loyalty”.
Crud… I’d cut/paste and private window the VD link. I forgot it would go live, there are two links in that post, the first is to a Dreamwidth account talking about puppy issues.
@Alan:
I knew you were a reptilian under that skin! Take it off! Take it off or I will point at you and ululate the song of Feminist High Council!
@ skiriki
To quote from the best film on feminism ever:
Dr. Kurtz: This is a war! A war between men and women. Anything short of cannibalism is just beating around the bush.