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

It really does make me wonder what “old SF” they read, because when I read Asimov’s robot stories, for example, they were usually stories about prejudice, hatred, minority struggles and love. What were the puppies reading?

And “The Gods Themselves,” which won a Hugo in 1973, had an alien race with three genders and was about the stubborn refusal of people to change.

What were these guys reading?

Jarnsaxa-

Honestly… probably nothing. A lot of these appeals to a “better time” seem to generally have nothing to do with the actual products or life during that time and tend to always be about a hazy idea of childhood or a time when you could socially be a bigot without people calling you out for it.

They don’t miss “old” sci-fi. They miss being able to harass women at sci-fi cons without being called out for it.

Cerberus, thanks for the explanation. I fear it’s still one level too meta for me. In any case, I now understand that Chuck Tingles is awesome.

It really does make me wonder what “old SF” they read, because when I read Asimov’s robot stories, for example, they were usually stories about prejudice, hatred, minority struggles and love. What were the puppies reading?

One of the Puppies seriously held up the original “Star Trek” as an example of good old-fashioned sci-fi without any left-wing political messages. I’m starting to think they’re a bunch of Fake Nerd Boys.

Again, most of the Puppy organizers are in my age bracket. They grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. The SF literature of their childhood wasn’t E.E. “Doc” Smith; it was Connie Willis and Octavia Butler and William Gibson. They didn’t grow up with the Robert Heinlein who wrote gung-ho YA space adventures; they grew up with the one who wrote polemics for his idiosyncratic blend of right-libertarianism and hippie free love.

Novels that won the Hugo when the Puppies were old enough to be paying attention include C.J. Cherryh’s Cyteen, Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan novels–all stories with action and adventure and really wild stuff, but also narrative complexity, challenging ideas, and plenty of feminism and the ol’ social justice. On the distaff side, Orson Scott Card won for Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead, socially relevant novels with a right-wing viewpoint.

When they wax nostalgic about the simple shoot-em-up sci-fi of their childhood, the Puppies aren’t talking about literature at all. They’re talking about Star Wars. But now even Star Wars has gotten mucked up with black people and icky cootie girls, so I guess they really are SOL.

I was thinking more of imitations of those things, which were still readily available through the 80s at least.* Not trying to say you’re wrong, just that it was what the Puppies descriptions made me think of.

*This was a lot of my old childhood reading material actually.

I think trashy pulp imitation was more popular in the 1980’s and 1990’s (possibly due to Star Wars), but it wasn’t the stuff that was winning awards then. Lots of people probably have nostalgic memories of reading it even though it’s never been considered good.

There’s also a lot more “literary” YA science fiction around now that’s easy to read. So there’s less of a market for pulp.

@Moggie:

Yes, but Redshirts is by Scalzi, who, for reasons I’ve never been able to discern, is supreme leader of the SJWs.

My understanding is that this comes from a few sources.

For one, the Voxman has a personal hatred for Scalzi dating back to early SFWA days. A post on the Electrolite blog (which I believe was Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s blog before he and Teresa jointly formed the Making Light blog) had a thread about a complaint against Vox being on… I believe it was a Nebula jury, with the person complaining asking how you could trust somebody like him to put aside any biases. Scalzi came in, originally arguing on the side of giving someone a chance before dismissing them. Then Vox came in and was his usual smug self all over the place, and any sympathy evaporated quickly. By the end of it when Vox got banned from the blog, Scalzi’s comment was ‘Awww, but there’s still candy in him!’

The personal hatred only got bigger after Vox got thrown out of the SFWA for his comments to N K Jemisin, which happened just after Scalzi stepped down as president of it. Vox’ attempts at becoming the next president (which happened before his formal expulsion) had failed badly.

There’s also the general sense from a lot of the Puppy types that Scalzi should be on their side. He’s white, cis, hetero, not particularly left-wing by most standards, writes books like Old Man’s War… and yet also rather loudly and mockingly rejects everything the Puppies stand for, thus casting into doubt their assumptions that they represent the true silent majority. For this betrayal, he must be punished.

And, as has been noted above, despite the fact that he does actually sometimes write the ‘rollicking space adventure’ the Puppies say they want and say is being unfairly denied a market, Scalzi is manifestly popular and a best-seller, thus calling into question the basic assumption that there is a conspiracy against them. So, obviously, he must be in on the conspiracy.

There was no period in Hugo history when most of the awards went to military space opera and “hard” SF. Good fiction in those genres has definitely won Hugos and continues do so (the Ancillary series is military SF, though the Puppies hate it), but it’s never been the dominant award-winner.

Novels that won Hugos within the first ten years include A Case of Conscience (a human missionary’s faith is shaken by the discovery of an alien culture that doesn’t need religion), A Canticle for Leibowitz (after nuclear war, the Catholic Church preserves technology through the new Dark Ages), and Stranger in a Strange Land (a human raised on Mars becomes the Jesus of hippie counterculture), all of which, were they published today, would be condemned by the Puppies as attacks on white patriarchal Christianity. The only winning novel within that period that qualifies as old-fashioned space opera is Starship Troopers, and even that’s got politics in it.

Looking over the history of the Best Novel category, there aren’t more than a handful of examples of the SF the Puppies claim to champion: action-oriented, tech- and “hard” science-heavy, psychologically simplistic, apolitical, and centered on characters assumed to be straight, white, male, and Christian. There’s Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama, maybe Ender’s Game, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books. The Hugos have always represented a wide range of SF, not just what Brad Torgersen and Larry Correia like to read.

Dammit, I could write about classic sci-fi all the day long.

He’s white, cis, hetero, not particularly left-wing by most standards, writes books like Old Man’s War… and yet also rather loudly and mockingly rejects everything the Puppies stand for, thus casting into doubt their assumptions that they represent the true silent majority.

I have absolutely nothing against Scalzi, but I’m frustrated at how he’s become the poster child of feminist sci-fi writers. It feels a little Schwyzerish, like we have to get a straight white guy as a spokesperson. (To be clear, I know Scalzi hasn’t been trying to put himself in that position, but it’s sort of how the discourse has formed around him.)

Speaking of Kim Stanley Robinson, Torgeson was actually complaining that Redshirts beat out 2312 for the 2013 Hugo, leading people to question whether he’d actually read either novel. Redshirts being a breezy adventure comedy in which the low-ranking crew on a starship realise they’re the cannon fodder in a bad SF TV series, and 2312 being a travelogue in which two people move around an anarchist, transhuman solar system, interacting with any number of variations on human body types, sexual and gender preferences (indeed both the main charaters have male and female genitals).

@ History nerd. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but, entertaining though Banks’ works are, he died back in 2013.

Ender’s Game is not particularly right wing. Maybe some of it is related to ideas in Mormonism about cosmology and salvation. Card happens to write good stuff that’s socially conscious and appeals to people with different political views.

^ Jenora got to what I slipped around.