So the Hugo awards happened. And last night was a pretty decisive defeat for the would-be awardwreckers behind the Sad and Rabid Puppies’ slates, and for Rabid Puppies ringmaster Theodore “Vox Day” Beale in particular: not only did his slate fail to crack the awards (aside from two nominees who didn’t need his help to win), but he also saw his longtime nemesisN.K. Jemisin take the top award for her novel The Fifth Season.
Human garbage pile/fantasy author Vox Day evidently thought he was being very clever when he included the gloriously weird, butt-obsessed (world’s greatest) author Chuck Tingle in his Rabid Puppy slate for the Hugo Awards, assuming that a Hugo nomination for the man behind such ridiculous and hallucinatory metafiction as Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt would make the evil Social Justice Warriors see red.
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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.
Well, it looks like the Hugo Awards are pretty much busted this year.
So it occurred to me: there are a lot of very sharp, very well-informed SF/fantasy fans that read this blog (and at least one award-winning SF author that I know of). So why not do a little awarding of our own?
And so I would like to welcome you to the First Annual We Hunted The Mammoth Serious Kitten Awards.
Over on Vox Popoli, everyone’s favorite far-right fantasy author Vox Day (Theodore Beale) is pig-biting mad that pizza parlors in Indiana won’t be allowed to refuse service to gay people. And so he’s doing his best to rally the troops for a real-world Culture War Deathmatch, urging Christians — or at least the right kind of Christians — to “stop their cowardly cowering before the world” and start acting like “the apostles and martyrs and crusaders and inquisitors who preceded them.”
Oh, and like the dudes who’ve been having a giant public temper tantrum about video games and evil SJWs with dyed hair for the past 7 months:
Strike up the band! Vox Day has been nominated for a Hugo!
So our old friend Vox Day – the proudly bigoted science fiction/fantasy writer and self-professed expert on all things “Alpha” – is in the news again. This time, it’s not for declaring most date rape imaginary or writing a racist diatribe against a fellow author. Nope! It’s because another of his literary efforts, a novelette entitled Opera Vita Aeterna, just got nominated for a Hugo award.
In other news, apparently it’s not that hard to get nominated for a Hugo if you have a coterie of hard-core fans who are perhaps still pissed that you got kicked out of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and you suggest on your blog beforehand that it would be cool if they voted to nominate you.
Anyway, there’s already plenty of discussion of the news amongst the science-fiction set, most of them understandably displeased that a racist, misogynistic, homophobic asshole got a nomination. Here’s a bit more about the racist attack on black fantasy writer NK Jemisin (and misuse of the SFWA Twitter account) that got him tossed from the organization. If you’ve never seen what he wrote about Jemisin, I’ll just quote some of the more memorable passages again here, because, wow. I’ve bolded the best — that is, worst — bits: