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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.
Larry Correia’s books got fairly positive reviews, and critics mostly ignored his conservative libertarian leanings.
That’s what really pisses in my cornflakes: the two guys organizing the Sad Puppies, Correia and Torgersen, have enjoyed plenty of success and praise for their work. If anything, they’ve been over-lauded for the decent but unexceptional middle-of-the-road fiction they put out. Before the Puppies nonsense, Torgersen was nominated for a Hugo and they were both nominated for the Campbell (the Best New Writer award given out at the Hugos).
They just didn’t win.
Correia and Torgersen have been welcomed, praised, petted, and showered with money by the evil liberal SF community, considerably more than they deserve for their middling level of talent. But they weren’t instantly crowned the second and third coming of Robert Heinlein, with all the liberals and women and gays apologizing in tears for trying to write science fiction when such literary giants walked the earth, so they chose to throw a massive years-long tantrum.
If you want to throw up in your mouth, look up Correia’s rant about how being nominated for the Campbell in his first year as a published author, but not winning, ruined his entire first Worldcon and convinced him of the Social Justice Warrior conspiracy against him. Because there could be no other explanation for a nobody like Lev Grossman beating him. (And Torgersen lost to a woman! A woman!)
Dammit, I write awesome SF stories and I’d be bowled over to be “only” nominated for a friggin’ Hugo Award. Eff those guys.
@Shaenon:
http://perfectlycursedlife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/drops-mic-lisa-simpson.gif
Re Mic Drops
As someone who roadie’d his way through law school and used to do a lot of sound engineering, can I just point out that it’s *really* bad for the microphones. Seriously, it just buggers up the capsules and dents the screens (which can have the effect of making them more prone to feedback).
How would Lisa like it if someone threw her saxamophone on the floor?
Hey, pecunium great to see you again!
*shakes blue bag in your direction* wanna Red Vine?
Hambeast: I’m twizzlers fan myself.
I’m not a huge SF/F reader, so I don’t know what the general quality of prose in the field is like these days. But reading these quotes makes me hope that the Ancient Egyptians got it right with what happens after you’re dead, because it means that even if, for some reason, their hearts didn’t weigh so much that they’d get gobbled up immeditely, Thoth would be around.
ANUBIS: Well, looks like your heart is just balanced with the feather. That’s a draw, so I suppose we can let you through…
THOTH: Hmm, Anubis, mate. Have you seen what they did to the written language?
ANUBIS: That’s your area, not mine. I have no opinion.
THOTH: Yeah, well… *tosses the collected works of VD onto the side of the scale with his heart. The heart sinks under the weight of his prose.*
AMMIT: *Gobble gobble gobble*
Wouldn’t that poor thing get some serious indigestion out of that, Rabid Rabbit? 🙁
Consideing all the other people it’s had to swallow in its time, I’m assuming it’s got a pretty good digestive system. Also, maybe it thinks horrible people taste good.
Rabid Rabbit: Honestly there prose what really decided for me that they didn’t deserve any award. If this is how there blog posts look imagine what there books must look like.
JCW has an editor. Tor can’t be paying him enough.
You folks clearly have a good working knowledge of sci-fi so perhaps you can assist.
When I was a kid I read those old Pan Books Horror anthologies. There was a series of them.
One of the stories was about some illness that started spreading. Essentially it turned people into jelly. It really creeped me out as a kid. Does anyone have any idea of what the story/author might have been?
I’d love to track it down again.
@pecunium
The most horrifying thing about Twilight, for those of us who appreciate good writing, is that moment when you discover that there was an editor. Meyer thanks her (I think it was a her) for making her writing so much better. What got published was the best the editor could do with the original. The idea of what that must have been like is enough to give nightmares.
BTW, if you follow the link to Teddy Beale’s blog, it’s schadenfruedelishes: All the crowing about the victory to come.
@Shaenon
Yet many people who think Correia and Torgersen suffered grave injustices would be outraged to hear someone suggest that there’s a problem with too many unoriginal or good-but-not-great works getting award nominations. And it has nothing to do with authors’ political views.
Honestly, I used to think Twilight was bad, and then I heard about 50 Shades of Grey. The fact that it was (and continues to be) a bad Twilight knockoff (and very, very proud of the fact that it used to be Twilight fanfiction) boggles my mind.
At least New Moon was somewhat decent. If only for the lack of Edward whinging and being an all around piece of garbage until the very end of the book. (Yes I did read the first three books, no I’m not proud of that, and yes the movies are better, if only because they take you out of Bella’s headspace.)
If anyone wants a good Twilight substitute, I would highly reccomend The Tantalize Series by Cynthia Leitich Smith, which is a really awesome supernatural young adult romance series. The second one, Eternal, is my favorite. I cried at the end. (And there’s a really hilarious bit about angels and cherub tattoos that never fails to make me giggle like mad.)
The series is also written by a Native American woman, if you want to get off the Cishet white male author train.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but my memory’s kind of shitty, so it might not have been to you guys directly.
And if you guys would like to get good books cheap, I reccomend ThriftBooks.com. 😀 (I got all of the Tantalize books there in gently-used hardcover for like twenty bucks.)
If you’re gonna read any YA series like Twilight, read Vampire Kisses. The characters actual grow and progress and there’s costume porn.
…Also I like Jacob.
The only story I need with teen + vampire romance is Buffy.
I also enjoy Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles for some quality angsting vamps. Although I freely admit those books are flawed, they’re a million times better than Twilight I’m sure.
Actually. Scratch that. Carmilla is also good for teen and vampire romance. Funny that a conservative patriarchal type author like Stephanie Meyer got big writing vampire romance fiction when the whole sexy vampire genre began (as far as I know anyway) with a story that was very obvious with the lesbian subtext.
@WWTH
The Vampire Chronicles was good up until The Body Snatcher. So, like, only the first three, Interview With a Vampire, The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned.
Anne Rice got all religiousy later on.
I’d agree with that. The first three are the only ones I ever reread.
@WWTH
Sexy vampires technically start with Lord Ruthven, who’s the ultimate Alpha, what with being based on Lord Byron and all. There are a few other interesting ones, like Clarimonde (aka the Dead Lover) and some macho-macho-alphas, but yeah, Carmilla is pretty much the ultimate goto. LeFanu wrote great teenage girls, including in his other books. I find it fascinating how even though he’s basically on the side of Victorian patriarchs, he writes his female characters well enough from their point of view that you can see how that would be oppressive. (That’s not very well expressed, sorry.)
He did know it all along. Check the archives of his blog Vox Populi by Vox Day and see.
Now, this hit piece here is an interesting example of “clinging to the narrative”. Meta-cling!
So looking forward to the 2016 Hugo’s. Maybe this year I’ll register to vote, mwa ha-ha.
WWTH: I’d probably argue the origins of “The Sexy Vampire” in modern SFF is Saberhagen. He wrote two stories about Dracula, which then morphed into a series in the modern day (I lost the plot with the third, or fourth, of the modern set stories).
The Dracula Tapes is brilliant. It’s a fisking of Stoker (pointing out all the plot holes and inconsistencies, from Dracula’s POV). The Holmes Dracula File is a pretty good story, and also stands alone. It’ good for both Dracula, and Holmes.
The modern stories, where the magical/sexy aspect start to show up is “An Old Friend of the Family”. I recall there was at least one more before “Merlin” which is where I bounced.
That one came out ca 1984.
Surely the best story with a vampire in it is “Let the right one in”.
I don’t regard it as a vampire story though.
I really like A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. It’s a very well done movie and as a bonus, it’s misandry!
@Alan Robertshaw: