Butt-centric author Chuck Tingle out-tingles Vox Day, invites Zoe Quinn to the Hugos

I think, where it all fell down, is that Correia had a bad time at Worldcon that, together with his failure to win an award, was incontrovertible proof to him of a “whisper campaign” against him.

Specifically, he was nominated for the Campbell Award, given to the best new writer of the year. His novel Monster Hunter International lost out to Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. Clearly the only possible explanation for this miscarriage of justice was a liberal conspiracy, because we know which of those works stood the test of time.

The Sad Puppies leadership includes a lot of so-so writers pissed that they have successful careers but haven’t been crowned Best Scifi Writers Ever while the ghost of Robert Heinlein gives them blowjobs and their creative rivals apologize for being feminists and sodomites. As someone who writes friggin’ awesome SF and works hard at the craft, it’s pretty obnoxious to watch these babies throw tantrums over stuff like “only” getting a Campbell nomination.

He wrote a whole rant about how, in the good old days, if you saw a book with a spaceship on the cover, you knew you were in for a “rousing space adventure featuring starships and distant, amazing worlds”. But nowadays that book with the spaceship cover may contain feels, and thus SF is ruined. It was genuinely amazing.

Back in the day, I owned this edition of Tales from the White Hart. You know how many spaceships are in that book? Zero.

http://images.paperbackswap.com/l/24/5624/9780345015624.jpg

Shaenon | May 7, 2016 at 1:58 pm
The Sad Puppies leadership includes a lot of so-so writers pissed that they have successful careers but haven’t been crowned Best Scifi Writers Ever while the ghost of Robert Heinlein gives them blowjobs and their creative rivals apologize for being feminists and sodomites. As someone who writes friggin’ awesome SF and works hard at the craft, it’s pretty obnoxious to watch these babies throw tantrums over stuff like “only” getting a Campbell nomination.

I know there are women Puppies, but I can’t help but feel like a lot of their entitlement stems from the Christian cishet white dude variety that a lot of them seem to have.

@ katz

Thanks for the link. The awful both pulls and repels.

I loved Chris Foss’s 1970s cover art, even though it usually bore little or no relation to the text. I don’t need a picture to tell me what the book is about: that’s what the blurb is for! A colourful Foss spaceship on the cover is just a bonus!

There’s a bimbo on the cover of my book!
There’s a bimbo on the cover of my book!
She is blonde and she is sexy;
She is nowhere in the text. She
Is a bimbo on the cover of my book!

There’s a castle on the cover of my book.
There’s a castle on the cover of my book.
Every knight is fit for battle,
But the action’s in Seattle.
There’s a castle on the cover of my book.

@Rachael, “If you were a dinosaur…” is an awesome story. I’m very sorry to hear about the harassment, but this is an awesome way to respond to it. I hope I’ll be able to contribute to your fundraiser.

@Katz
That guy has the perfect “Oh god, you seriously want to read this? Are you absolutely sure, I feel so sorry for you.”

Back in the day, I owned this edition of Tales from the White Hart. You know how many spaceships are in that book? Zero.

Brad Torgersen is about my age, and I remember often being confused by the inappropriate spaceship covers on SF paperbacks when I was growing up. For instance, this was my edition of Speaker for the Dead:

Imagine young Torgersen opening this book, expecting a rousing space adventure, and getting a psychological drama about the fractured relationship between a Hispanic colony on an alien planet and the friendly but inscrutable native species. It is in fact the adult Torgersen’s worst nightmare, a “story merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings.”

He must have been so triggered.

(Just kidding. I imagine the Puppies give Speaker for the Dead a pass because the author hates gayness.)

And very few covers of Ursula LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea warn sensitive young Puppies that they’ll be reading about black people.

I remember lending a friend an older edition of Iain M. Banks’ Use of Weapons. He returned it mostly unread, having decided that a book with a battleship on the cover was worthy of his attention but not a book with a chair in front of that battleship, even if there was a gun lying in front of it. I didn’t have the heart to explain how wrong he was.

http://hermiene.net/img/books/109_front.jpg

There are multiple editions of Use of Weapons, mostly in languages other than English, that actually give away the deal with the chair entirely. That totally gets me down, the reveal is so awful and so good!

Rachel S
May 6, 2016 at 4:16 pm
Unfortunately, they are not just being little shits. Although Tingle has been the most attention-grabbing nomination, they have also put things on the ballot that are intended to harass authors they don’t like, including one that has a note from the publisher on it saying I should be killed.

I am so sorry to hear that. These are just the meanest little shits and they don’t deserve any platform for their bullying. Luckily this should be the final year they can play these games of theirs with the Hugos. Best of luck to you, and I quite liked “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”.

My favorite retelling of the whole Sad/Rabid Puppies debacle has been Philip Sandifer’s Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: An Analysis of Theodore Beale and His Supporters. Recently Sandifer also will write on Vox and GamerGate in his upcoming book Neoreaction a Basilisk with a preview of it here.

I have to say, there has been one positive effect of the Sad Puppies on me: convincing me that I want to—need to—write the “message fiction” they so decry, wrapped up in the derring-do they so love. I want to write space opera where children are given time to choose their genders (or choose not to have any gender) and superhero epics that reflect on issues of sex and race. I want to be pulpy but with things to think about in there too.

YoullNeverGuess-

I’m 98% sure it’s a two-fold joke on both Voxman’s love of taking pictures of himself dressed all in black, looking moody or faux-badass, using things like sunglasses in a similar way as moody teenagers in the early 00s did after the Matrix.

That as well as Voxman’s love of red-pill philosophy and the general Man-o-sphere’s love affair with a movie trilogy they remember mostly for making trenchcoats cool rather than for being the thinly veiled allegory of someone figuring out they’re trans.

I think that whole notion of kid trying to play act cool in black leather is also the point of his series of gifs of scenes from Grandma’s Boy. Aka, it’s his way of saying Voxman is an overgrown “edgelord” teen still trying to cling to his Matrix-esque reinvention of himself as “cool” way past the point when it would at all be excusable by age.

Though this is all speculation based on the gifs used afterwards and the photos selected by Tingle.

Also, I love the idea of calling Theodore by the name of Voxman from here on out.

“Explain the Puppy/Hugo Kerfuffle in Two Paragraphs(Or Fewer)” would make a good party game if it weren’t all so relentlessly depressing. I had been entirely prepared to give the Sads a pass this year, until two of ’em decided to excoriate Steve Davidson for an intemperate comment he made about the pups on Facebook. A comment, mind you, that Davidson quickly agreed was out of line, that he offered to delete, and that he made on the day that he found out that his wife had metastatic cancer.
That sort of put me off.
Note: I am speaking of two of the actual Sad Puppy organizers for this year, in actual posts on Mad Genius Club, not random puppy commenters.