Fake sci-fi boys cry salty tears over Puppies defeat at the Hugo Awards

@Alan

Apparently some Trump supporters might be interested, according to that other thread. Unless it’s not fresh enough for them ?

@EJ

When I was 16, an old friend and I created a little something we called [Sans-Titre] (“Untitled”). The aim was to gather and publish stuff from various authors, really anyone who’d give us something to publish. It would be really anything, short stories, poems, excerpts from novels, the occasional political pamphlet – the only requirement was that we liked it. That actually had a lot of success considering the extremely limited means we had. We sold the thing on a PWYW basis, and ran something like 20 issues, each printed in numbers between 100 and 200. We had regular contributors from all over the freaking country, people we’d actually met through [Sans-Titre], who remain my friends to this day.

It’s one of those things I’m insanely proud of. I can still remember Mr. Chief-Redactor-Dude walking up to me in high school while I was hiding and smoking a joint, and saying “Hey, let’s start a paper.” to which I replied “Fuck yeah.”

It featured a lot of my short stories, and excerpts from this same novel I’ve been restarting over and over again, in it’s 2008-2010 state. One thing that version had in common with the current one was the character of a lady knight named Hylda, and the chapters centered around her were the ones most published – and people seemed to love her. Incidentally, she went on and became the main character in the current iteration (or “reboot”, heh).

I don’t know about you but I get a huge kick out of people reading my stuff, even if they go on to tell me how much it sucks.

Well fair criticism is the best way to improve innit ? Since [Sans-Titre] is pretty much over now, I’m always looking all over the place for readers since the only way I can assert what my stuff is worth is by listening to what people have to say about it. Admittedly, it’s pretty hard to find people now – most of those who used to do this for me are way too busy with their work and studies now, and there aren’t a lot of readers in my most immediate circles. I’m hoping that will change with the move in September.

@Alan again

Pseudonyms. Always use pseudonyms.
Incidentally, Sinkable John is an anagram of my real name.

These people are not ready to know about Afrofuturisim, Margret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Marxist science fiction, or queer spec fic.

They don’t understand how important speculative fiction is to marginalized people. It always has been about everything from class struggle to sexisim. We need to imagine our future to make it happen, or express our feelings of oppression. We need to tell others how to end it, and science fiction can show people how.

Or we need to see ourselves as great heroes in fantasy and imagine worlds that don’t judge us. Fantasy is uplifting and escapeisim while science fiction offers solutions.

I think that’s part of the reason why they’re afraid of progressive speculative fiction. We can use it as a tool against them and the system, or use it to heal ourselves.

They also see us as an intruder into “thier” genra.

@John
Fuck you. Now I hafta figure out what your name is. Couldn’t just let me believe it was John, could ya? 🙂

@Alan

Sod pseudonyms.

Look at some of those though.

“Narwhal Boaster”. “Aberrant Ash Owl”.

Granted, most of them don’t make any sense. Some might even be downright vexing (that happened for me), I haven’t read them all so I can’t be sure.

@authorialAlchemy

It’s almost as if they have strictly no idea what the whole point of writing is. Oh wait…

ETA : @Axe

Good luck, heh. Both my first and last names are spelt in a way that looks like a typo, so it’s making any reverse-anagram-engineering (which is a totally legit concept and not one I just made up) pretty much impossible.
Hint though : John is indeed my name, or more accurately its english equivalent.

Jadehawk
August 21, 2016 at 8:06 pm
“…and despite it being SJW messagefic about murdering all men…”

given the main character’s culture’s inability to tell genders apart to save their lives, this could be a difficult mission to accomplish ? ?

No, but you see the subtext of the book is kill all men, or something.

Seriously, I’ve seen the most amazing criticisms of the Imperial Radtch trilogy, including it being man-hating, that you can’t tell if it’s science fiction or fantasy (and that came from a professional writer!), that it undermines military SF as a genre because a soldier cries, and they talk about drinking tea.

Boiling vessels sounds like something the French would make up as a parody. And then you realize that it’s real.

I think there’s a law that states that parody can’t actually beat reality, but I can’t remember how it’s called.

I think there’s a law that states that parody can’t actually beat reality, but I can’t remember how it’s called.

Poe’s Law. One part of Poe’s Law, anyway.

Speaking of Peter F Hamilton, he published the outstanding Greg Mandel trilogy in the 1990s – all about a climate change! I’ve not seen anyone complaining about it yet.

@ rugbyyogi

Me too!

Unfortunately it actually looks a bit like the tank is gunning for the badger; which wasn’t really the ethos we were aiming for.

ETA: There’s also a Eurofigher Typhoon so at least it looks like the badger has managed to call in air support.

Metal Shoggoth
August 21, 2016 at 11:26 pm
Isn’t this the third straight loss for the Puppies? You’d think they’d find something better to do with their free time by now.

Aw hell, who am I kidding? They’d probably spend that free time on r/RedPill.

This is the 4th straight loss for a group identifying as Sad Puppies, and the second for Voxman’s Rabid Puppies.

In 2013, it was just Larry Correia trying to get his book onto the Hugo shortlist, which failed.

In 2014, Correia tried again, this time with a handful of nominees per category, a couple of which made it to the shortlist. Nothing on his list won. This year he included Voxman as a short story author (to ‘blow liberal minds’, to paraphrasew Correia), who finished behind No Award. This iteration of the Sad Puppies campaign caused a lot of consternation and debate in the SF community, as while it was generally acceptable (if a little distasteful amongst older fans) to list your own stuff that was in the running for awards that year, putting forward a recommended list that was designed to fit entirely within the shortlist was pretty shitty.

In 2015, Correia handed over reins of Sad Puppies to Brad R. Torgersen, who was a nominee for the John W. Campbell award for best new writer in 2012.

The Campbell is not a Hugo, but is administered by the Hugo administrators and given out in the same ceremony. One of the Campbell traditions is that the winner wears a tiara for the night, and Torgersen attended the Hugo ceremony that year in full military dress uniform (as is his right as a member of the US Army), with the justification that if he won, he could decline to wear the tiara as it would besmirch his uniform or something.

He came last in the voting for the award.

Torgersen took the campaign a step further, moving from a small number of items per category to a full 5 – telling people exactly how to vote. Voxman decided to run his Rabid Puppies slate alongside Torgersen’s one, and thanks to tje Hugo shortlist being First Past the Post voting, they dominated the list, but thanks to the Hugos themselves being determined by Single Transferrable Vote and the No Award option, they were soundly defeated in the award finals.

It’s worth noting that Sad Puppies basically acted as a signal booster and stalking horse for Rabid Puppies, and most of the Sad Puppies’ success was where their lists coincided with Voxman’s

This year, Sad Puppies was run by Kate Paulk, Sarah A Hoyt, and Amanda Green. They decided to do a recommendation list, allowed anyone to submit entries to it, and then listed them in order of popularity. Which isn’t great, but a hell of a lot better than the prior two years. They got very little traction, and the Hugo stats show very few people used them as a guideline.

Voxman, meanwhile ran Rabid Puppies again, and didn’t get anywhere near as much control as he did last year, but he was able to dominate Best Related Work (including some seriously awful, insulting pieces) and Best Fancast. He also included some popular and well-regarded works (such as Seveneves by Neal Stephenson in Best Novel) in his list in an attempt to confound voters and so he could claim victory one way or another – indeed, he’s claiming he won because The Martian got best Dramatic Picture – Long Form and Andy Weir got the Campbell (even though Weir was kept off the Campbell shortlist last year by the Puppy campaigns).

I’d be willing to bet that this is the last year that Voxman will try and vandalise the Hugos, for a couple of reasons.

1: You need to pay $50 (or thereabouts, it changes from year to year) for a supporting membership, which is the minimum Worldcon membership level necessary to vote in the Hugos. This membership level allows you to vote in the current year’s Hugos, but to nominate in the current year, and the following one. So the people who signed up for Sad/Rabid Puppies last year got to nominate this year for no extra effort.

An analysis of the Hugo stats for this year shows that Voxman likely had 400-500 people nominating his slate, but only 150 voted for him as best editor, suggesting that relatively few people forked out for membership this year.

2: Two anti-slate mechanisms were added to the Hugos at Worldcon this year, to go into effect next year – the shortlist will be expanded to 6 entries, but people still nominate 5; and the counting of the votes will be done in a more complicated way, where each person effectively has one vote that’s split between the works they nominate.

An additional two anti-slate measures were approved this year to be ratified next year, one being an expansion to the new vote counting, the other a second voting stage where people can attempt to downvote works from the shortlist.

If anyone wants to read them, the Hugo stats are available here: http://www.thehugoawards.org/content/pdf/2016HugoStatistics.pdf

@jefrir

Alright, that is definitely something I absolutely needed to know. I’ll take that into account, thanks a lot. As a rule I avoid translated books (really translated anything) now, unless the original language isn’t english, and even then I’ll go for the english translation. French translators (and in the case of movies and games, French voice-actors) are incredibly bad at their job, and it’s something that’s extremely painful to witness for me since I’ve done a few unreported translation jobs and worked my ass off on them, for about 5% of what those clowns make…

It’s a problem I’ve had with PS3 games (either language-locked french physical copies, or more infuriatingly paid-for downloads) , so I definitely ain’t making the same mistake a second time. I’ll look into it some more.

Re: Hamilton

I remember The Night’s Dawn went on extensively about the use of particularly destructive weaponry, with sometimes pretty long descriptions on the effects of such devices on immediate surroundings. I read that ten years ago so I can’t be sure anymore, but I seem to remember there was a certain dedication to describing the disruptions caused even by a single shot. The example that comes to mind most readily is those Gauss rifles that lift extremely large dusts of cloud that are eventually blown away to reveal craters.

Given that the whole trilogy features an enemy that is by definition impervious to violence, a lot goes on about the absurdity of using increasingly terrifying devices for next to no result except enormous collateral damage. That’s how I remember it though, I could be dead wrong about the meaning, again it was ten years ago.

Fascinating, are they.

Did someone point them at NK Jemisin’s patreon and the fact that – thanks to it – she can now concentrate on writing full-time?