Burning Down The Field in Order to Save It

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

So, I thought I didn’t care about the result of the Hugos, because in making the establishment lose their collective sh*t at the “non approved” nominations, we’d proven our point: that there is a political color bar in SF/F; that the self-proclaimed elites of sf view what fans like as problematic and therefore view the supposed “fan” award as the toy of the glitterati; and that NATIONAL PUBLICATIONS marched in lockstep with the narrative of a tiny clique over an award that in the past has sometimes been given with hundreds of votes (after which display it’s pretty hard to claim that the left doesn’t have a death lock on the media. And btw nothing was weirder than being told by the National Media we were the ones wanting to drive people off the field, while nominee after nominee was hounded off the ballot by leftist who — since WE have no political color bar — were often their co-believers.)

Turned out I did.  Yesterday was even more of a victory to the Sad Puppies than I expected.  And I wish it hadn’t been.  And I’m absolutely serious about this.

I don’t mean I wish a different set of books/stories had won.  That is only to the extent that the DELIBERATE and PARTISAN slighting of such unexceptionable luminaries as Kevin J. Anderson and Jim Butcher (Yes, yes Three Body Problem.  Well, I didn’t find it worth it, but I bet you half the people who voted for it voted either under the illusion they were favoring Chicoms OR as a slam against the puppies.But quite beyond that the block voting for the clumsy Ancillary “but pronouns” would have won first place if it weren’t Australian Rules) is a blot on the face of our genre and makes me sigh and roll my eyes.

No, I mean that the display of naked bias and, more importantly, of infantile foot-stomping and the clever-dumb insults only toddlers could think brilliant BEFORE and during the presenting of the awards makes me, today, embarrassed to call myself a science fiction and fantasy writer and, for the first time in my life, wondering if it’s time we came up with another word.

I’m just going to put it out there, without further elaboration, that adults don’t put on a panel on a subject that presents only ONE SIDE of that subject and that blatantly lies (“against diversity; mostly male” etc.) in front of a national audience.  Adults, at least ones who haven’t crossed over the line of senility, don’t create an asterisk to assign to this year’s awards.  (And for the person who played so dumb in the comments as to pretend they don’t know why an asterisk is offensive — yes, that’s why you weren’t approved — that is the mark used before/after dubious sports wins.) Adults don’t create little skits about defending the Hugos from death (particularly given what they’ve done to the Hugos’ prestige) and adults DO NOT say you shouldn’t boo no-award.

Another thing adults don’t do — or at least not adults in any definition I personally know — is slate: that is blindly vote for a list provided to them.  And that’s exactly what the Puppy Kickers did.  They voted, blindly and without reading the works (remember they bragged about that all over twitter) for the PK slate, including “no award.”  All this supposedly “opposing” a slate that we told them WASN’T a slate but a barely followed list of suggestion.  (And all you have to do is look at the vote totals to see that proven.)

Another thing (and this has me giggling this morning) adults don’t do is go to a blog that has nothing to do with Vox day and start crowing in the comments how they defeated Beale.  (No, I’m not approving you either, you clever fools.  I’m shocked you have the brainpower to push buttons on a keyboard.) You know what? I have my disagreements with Beale, as in most of the things we think are diametrical opposites and I often disagree with everything he writes, including the and a.

Until today I viewed him as a mirror of the SJW posturing.  I retract that and I give him full measure of applause.  Yes, his views are still repulsive and he still makes my skin crawl as often as the Marxists do, but you know what?  At least he has a brain and uses it.  Those of you celebrating might want to take a deep breath and wonder — for just a minute — if you did anything more than what Theodore Beale wanted.  Because from where I’m sitting, the man that set out to destroy the field and prove that everyone calling themselves its leadership were mannerless and brainless children not only won last night, he won walking away. He won without DOING anything.  He won by convincing yourselves to hit yourselves repeatedly with the obvious hammers of partisanship, lack of care for quality and INTEREST in the health of the field.  And before you died, you gloated you had won.  The mind boggles.

Well done, Vox Day.  My laughter is tinged with tears because I don’t know if the field I loved will ever recover from stupidity displayed in such an open manner. I think today I prove the Valentine Michael Smith adage that sometimes you laugh because it hurts too much to cry.

NO ONE can look at those results and think the puppies supporters vote in unison for some imagined agenda.  Not even the rabid puppies supporters. I think KJA and Butcher suffered from “most beautiful girl who doesn’t get invited to prom” syndrome (I was there, once upon a time, where guys self-shot-down because “surely she’ll laugh at me.”  Yeah, I ended up having a date, but there was a reason I thought badly of myself.) I think most people thought “Oh, they’ll sweep it in a minute.  Let me lend my support to the small but deserving Three Body Problem, so the field doesn’t look like ignorant asses. And I think that’s a shame because two men with such following would have lent their luster to the award and helped rinse it from at least a decade of mostly forgettable work that toted the right party line.

That is my only lament as far as the Hugos go.

Oh, sure, my editor, Toni Weisskopf, who has done more to keep this field alive than the rest of the field combined, deserved an award.  But I don’t think she deserved the award that was preceded by the classless and infantile display we watched last night.  Also, she knows she has not only the heart and respect of the fans, but the heart and respect of every author who’s ever worked with her.  Unlike past Hugo award winners in that category, about whom former editees trade horror stories on line and out.  So, I think in a way she already has the award of being the best-loved editor/publisher in the field. No, on consideration, I’m glad that Toni wasn’t besmirched with “the asterisk Hugo” awarded by people who if they were not too old would certainly be toddlers. (Only toddlers at least lack the experience of the world to know that with their “clever digs” they’re actually making fools of themselves.)

So while I am not upset at the results (except insofar as it proves a large number of my field is running the Marxist malware to such an extent that it will vote a slate to avoid an imaginary slate) I am upset at the display of infantility or senility or perhaps roboticity in my field yesterday (Though who would program robots that way?)  No one watching that live stream — and there was a lot of it captured and it will be replayed — can imagine that those who proclaim themselves the “intellectuals” of our field have an IQ above room temperature.  And certainly no one can imagine they have an emotional maturity above that of a toddler displaying to one and all the magnificence of the turd just deposited in the middle of the floor.

Before the pre-Hugo show was done a good number of you, by email, by PM, in private groups and on the phone were yelling that next year we No Award everything and BURN IT ALL DOWN.

The temptation is great, and I know it’s what Beale wants, and OF COURSE can manipulate the SJWs into doing.

However…  However… if we burn it all down, what we’ll be doing is destroying forever the reputation and the history of the award Heinlein (among others) won.  And while the last few years have gone a long way towards doing just that, I — like my comrade at arms and brother-of-the-heart Brad Torgersen — would prefer if we could save it.

I confess that job is going to be ten times as hard now, as people in the public at large aren’t likely to understand when leadership changes and that we aren’t the same idiots on display last night.

On the other hand, did you think it would be easy?  Did you think it was just a game? The effort to bring dignity and meritocracy to science fiction is like any other battle in the cold civil war: they will bring unreasonable force to bear on it, seeing it as part of a greater battle.  They’re not afraid of destroying that particular portion of the culture in order to “save” it.  Meanwhile we’re hampered by actually wanting to save the thing we’re fighting for.  And regardless of what else happens we can be sure that people like Beale are all for setting it on fire from the other side.

Impossible, you say?  Nah.  It’s a million to one chance.  We can’t lose.  But it might take years and years and we need to keep that in mind.  We need to commit and stay strong.  Anything worth doing is going to take years of fighting.

I’m not going to cry out for “No Award” because politics is downstream from culture, and if you guys want decent governance for your grandchildren, we need to take beachhead after beachhead and restore it to health NOT allow the other side to burn it down because if they can’t have it no one can.  I couldn’t much care about the Hugo, but I care about western civilization and it’s time we started fighting for it.

So, for next year, I give you Kate Paulk running the platform of bringing in more and more voters.  MOAR.  Sad Puppies IV the Embiggenning.  (Though none of us will do more than snicker if, since Amanda and I are helping Kate, you call it “Sad Puppies IV, the Embitchening.” We know the other side is going to call it that anyway, and we say “Yeah, and how” in advance.)  We’re here, we’re not giving up and we’re prepared to fight like girls.  May G-d have mercy on their souls.

And to every one of you, my friends, This One Is For You.

1,614 thoughts on “Burning Down The Field in Order to Save It”

  1. Panic grass and feverfew. That’s the title of the chapter in “Hiroshima Diary” about how plants started growing, and really growing, in the aftermath of the 6 August 1945 bombing, never mind the claims nothing would or could grow there again for a very long time. Sure, some fools can try to burn the Hugo down. But… panic grass and feverfew, folks. Panic grass and feverfew.

    1. I wouldn’t even call it ‘political’, sir. The behavior of the parties in question, pushing “No Award” ahead of capable, worthy candidates for each award is little more than childish and temperamental.

      Disgusting, isn’t it?

      As was said previously, they’d rather burn it all to the ground then ‘salt the earth’ so that if THEY cannot use it, no-one can. Just like a child told by an adult or teacher to ‘share’ a toy with another child who breaks/ruins the toy rather than let ANY other child have it.

      If the child doesn’t get to play with it exclusively, then nobody gets to play with it.

      Just like these folk referred to as SJWs. Someone told me that when fans started “boo”ing at the No Award ‘wins’ that one of the SJWs started telling the fans “Cheering is acceptable. Booing is not.”

      Pardon me, but this isn’t Stalinist Russia, and you’ve got NO place telling those people how to express their feelings/opinions.

      Then again, this IS a bunch of Leftists… and observation says that as far as they’re concerned, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution only applies when they want it to.

      Disgusting.

  2. I was public about how I didn’t care. Well, it turns out I do. They can write what they want to write, and read what they want to read, that’s always been the case.

    But I care that someone like Toni Weisskopf, who has the respect of everyone at Baen apparently, lost to No Award. That’s how I know it was political, not merit. Some have tried to say that everything we nominated was shite, but that’s bull. It was all about “putting us in our place”.

    This is your house, so I won’t say what I really want to say, but they’re just reminding me why they are absolute scum. Not because they like books I think suck, but because they will destroy anyone who thinks those books suck too, and that’s unconscionable.

        1. No. Nice people read this. Much nicer than myself. Though for the win yesterday night for the first time I used the F word in public, repeatedly. BEFORE the awards were announced.

          1. Hence my restraint.

            I might blog about it a little later, in which case I’ll need to give a parental warning or something, because I can’t talk about it that much without blowing my damn top.

            And since I’m doing a podcast later today to talk about the Hugos, I probably need to calm down a bit before I get on the air.

            1. Write a short screed, profanity laced and all. Then delete it, or ‘save’ it for later posting. Perhaps it will calm you down before your on the air appearance. It has worked for me.

                    3. Knit some mail instead? Generally helps me on those really thorny ones when an anvil is not at hand / need to preserve my hearing for whatever is coming up “immediately”…

                    1. It’s just time to work harder. To write more and better stories. And to prepare for next year.

                      SP3 was considerably larger than SP2. SP4 can be bigger yet. This was just a minor bump in the road. Think like Dave Freer, be a battler, a grinder. This is just the start.

                      But a key here is to not go overboard in responding to the SJB gloating. The best response is to get better, sell well, and grow our markets and fan base.

                      Let’s continue to celebrate the true diversity of SF&F. Let’s not let them win by getting bogged down again in counter-volleys. That keeps us from working and improving.

                      Just a beat up Auld Dawg’s view on this.

                    2. Since I was “challenged” to write a story based on a comment I made on Facebook, that’s where I’m focusing my attention.

                      Our side produces good stuff. Some of it is great stuff. But the more we put out, the harder it will be to ignore.

                    4. The award I want is steel engraving portraits of dead historical figures. Franklin and Jackson by preference, but I will not turn up my nose at those of Washington. (Yes, that’s an allusion.)

            1. We do have some unique words. The look on women’s faces when I tell them we have multiple words that make the c-word sound flattering (although the female president of the University of Colorado did testify under oath that the c-word could be a compliment) is priceless.

            2. I’m fluent in the dialect “snipe” and having working knowledge of the dialect “bosun’s mate”.

    2. For me, that was the straw. Admittedly long form editor is a bit inside baseball (Short form has examples in anthologies that are a bit more explicit), but after the Grauniad libel and everything I have heard about Toni it just seems nuts. And the likely recipient barring puppies is one that called us all Nazis…ya. Class act. Torrible

      1. At least one publisher contacted Brad apparently and asked that he NEVER put any of their editors on a public list of his again.

        I advised that he pass along that this individual have a Coke and a smile and shut the f*** up.

        Especially since this individual was knee deep in the puppy kicking.

          2. Sounds to me like the publisher’s name should be released with an explanation that the request needs to come from the individuals themselves.

            1. I won’t issue names, since this is second hand. If Brad stops by and wishes to fill everyone else in, he’s welcome. Or if he grants me permission to fill in the blank.

              1. If I was Brad, if that contact was in some form of text, I would have copied it, and forwarded it (by snail mail, if in actual print) to all their editors…..

          2. Don’t know. Don’t care.

            Just like I don’t give a flying fig what the hell this publisher wants from any of us. I’ll nominate anyone I damn well want to nominate, for any reason I want to nominate them, and if this publisher doesn’t like it then…well, this is a family blog, so fill in the blank according to your preferred finish that equates to “go away with extreme prejudice”.

        5. Since the mere idea that anyone has to have permission to recommend someone for an award is so obscene, I’m tempted to push for an official policy of.. “no we will not ask that you be willing, we will nominate who we prefer with no warning or request. If you are nominated and wish to refuse it, that’s on you. If your friends punish you for it, that’s on them. We WILL nominate authors and editors with politics we find horrible. Get used to the idea. “

              1. I’m sure she will.

                Brad reached out to make sure folks were OK with what was coming. He wasn’t obligated, but he’s Brad. He’s a nice guy.

                The backlash because he didn’t specifically ask each and every person if it was OK to include them on the Sad Puppies slate and a detailed discussion of what would follow the nominations disgusted me. Who he hell else gets pissed because someone nominated them?

                    1. I’ve been playing too much of an MMORPG since I found myself wondering if you needed a healer and DPS support. 😉

                2. Yep. Brad tried to contact people, missed a few, the SJWs acted like rabid hyenas towards the Puppy nominees and that’s somehow Brad’s fault?

                  1. There’s a reason I compared them to abusive spouses previously.

                    They hit and then blame someone else for their actions…just like an abusive husband does.

          2. …are they trying to use reverse psychology on you? To get you to nominate their people, I mean?

    3. I know Toni Weisskopf. Or did when I was young. She tried to give me a job on the fringe of publishing (slush pile reading) and I was too immature then to take advantage of it.

      She’s a really excellent person. And a giant of an editor.

      1. I have yet to hear an unkind thing about Toni from anyone who knows her.

        Until Toni Weisskopf is recognized with a Hugo, the award is meaningless IMHO.

            2. We need a straw puppy cosplayer at libertycon since they will likely not be murdered by congoers there

        3. Y’all just don’t understand. To tradpub and the puppy kickers Toni is pandering to the great unwashed. She produces non literary trash, military SF, garbage that no TRUFAN would ever deign to lay eyes upon. And she has committed the ultimate sin, Baen makes money hand over fist while the tradpub and their stable of correct authors are faced with shrinking sales and the inevitable cutbacks.
          Was not there myself, but I take it that Toni did one of her most excellent Baen Traveling Road Show presentations, so Toni won. She won by exposing the audience to a different choice, stuff that today’s Hugo committee simply would not consider. They by their actions driven by their progressive socialist attitudes are doing a fine job of destroying themselves so I say let’s let them do just that.

          3. “…Baen makes money hand over fist while the tradpub and their stable of correct authors are faced with shrinking sales and the inevitable cutbacks.”

            That’s why the SJW hijacking of the Hugos is largely a self-correcting problem. A clique composed of Big 5 publishing insiders used to dictate the nominees and winners. We just put a stop to that. They can still play “If the ayatollah can’t have it, no one can!”, but what happens when there ARE NO Big 5 publishers?

            1. They will always exist. Marvel comics exists as a placeholder for IP of all their characters, which Disney can mine and turn into movies. Marvel could lose $100M a year on Marvel and that’d still be a rounding error. The existing large publishers are in the same boat. They might get “marvelized” but they’d still be there, which means it is not a self-correcting problem, at least not from that angle.

              It *might* correct itself if WorldCon itself runs out of money. I don’t think Tor has the resources to keep WorldCon afloat (I could be wrong here, I don’t know their finances). The WorldCon fans are dedicated, however, so even as it grows smaller they’d probably find a way. Of course this year they are bigger than ever, so I don’t think this is a self-correcting route either.

              1. Marvel owns the IP for it’s characters. Traditional publishers do not own the IP, because tradition. I expect that some corporate idiot has, or will try to change that in new contracts. Good luck with that.

                1. Problem is that a lot of the IP in TradPub is *boring*. That which isn’t are the folks like OS Card who are tolerated (mostly) because they’re on the correct side of the line if barely.

                  1. OS Card on the “correct side”? Did you forget the broughaha from the LGBT crowd over “Ender’s Game”, simply because of Card’s less than fawning obeisance toward non-heterosexuals in some of his books and blog posts?

              2. So the long-term answer is to evolve the WorldCon supporting fanbase to be prepared to support good stories even as the SF imprints of tradpub fade into status-only loss centers for their owners.

              3. Look at the developments in NY publishing over the last few years. The Big 6 recently became the Big 5. Sales are in a nosedive. Profits are up, but that’s not due to increased readership. It’s because legacy publishers fleece their authors on eBook royalties.

                There are major differences between outfits like Marvel and Tor. I won’t even get into their IPs’ relative popularity or their parent companies’ net worth. Tor’s business model runs on razor thin margins and depends on 2 things: a lock on paper distribution and a steady influx of new writers.

                Unlike Marvel, Tor et al. rely on a single retailer for most of their sales. Barnes and Noble is in serious trouble. What happens when they fold? Not if. When.

                Tor could focus on Amazon, where indie authors already dominate the field. But that brings us to point 2. There is no reason for an author to sign an eBook only deal with a NY publisher. Amazon pays 5.6x more, lets you keep all your rights, and gives you total creative control. To survive there, the Big 5 would have to change their archaic draconian contracts, and that would only be a good thing.

          4. I was there, she gave a great road show. One of the first things she did was show a cover with a chainmail-bikini barbarian babe and told the audience, “If you are offended by this, you are probably in the wrong place.” The entire standing-room-only audience erupted with laughter.

          5. I was there at the Baen Traveling Road Show. When I made the comment that Ringo’s “Graveyard Skies” series was a coming of age saga, she gave me a free book.

            1. Oh, now I want to go leave a review calling it a “wonderful coming of age tale” 🙂

              It even has a rock star in there, and touches on social media… and drugs! And the vaccine issues!

          6. This is why I think that the Tor Clique will ultimately restrict the voting pool to keep the Hugos. They have access to less fans, and they are pissing off some of their few popular writers who actually have access to fans. They truly may not grasp that if they restrict the pool enough, the award will become obviously meaningless.

            1. It will last from inertia for a while.

              Though the best thing to do might be for Dragoncon or some such to start an award for its membership. That is, a pre-existing con.

              Though one can hardly blame them if they don’t think the grief worth it.

            2. Sadly, I think that you are correct. They will limit the voting pool, and the pool of acceptable authors will become smaller and smaller, as those writers of an independent nature and the means of going indy do so. The Hugo will mean less and less to readers who just want ripping good stories.

              1. The Hugo will mean less and less to readers who just want ripping good stories.

                Given it means about zero now how can it mean less?

    4. It’s interesting that the winner of Best Novel has, near the end, the aliens’ AI protons taking the time and effort to tell the humans “You are vermin.”

      When I’m dealing with actual vermin, I don’t bother telling them they’re vermin, I just deal with them as expeditiously as possible.

      The fact that the AI stops to hurl insults at humans tells me it doesn’t quite believe that insult.

      So….

      Maybe the Trisolarians are (unintentionally) an analogy for the Hugo elites, doing everything they can to block progress until they’re in a position to achieve victory.

      2. That’s because your vermin don’t get psychological warfare. You might if you thought it might demoralize them.

    5. Kind of impossible to claim that “everything you like sucks!” when they had sites dedicated to voting “puppy-free slates.” NoAward.com is an actual thing. SEVERAL prominent puppy kickers promoted those lists.

      Remember, these people lie. They are never not lying. They will accuse you of doing EXACTLY what they do.

      Every time.

      1. Best way to figure out what a Progressive is thinking is to look at what they accuse their opponents of thinking.

    6. I am or was a Barfly of a sort. The one trait common to all Barflies might be appreciation for Baen’s stories.

      I liked Jim’s taste in stories, and his business choices. When Toni took over, I was uncertain. Everyone agreed that she was a good choice, and Jim picked her, but I was not privy to all the inside baseball.

      Her taste in stories agrees with mine at least as much as Jim’s did. Furthermore, I think I’ve seen some pretty solid business decisions.

      It is one thing to hear that there are people who so strongly hate Jim and Toni, it is another to come across this evidence.

    7. I purchased a Hugo membership to get the reading material, as I’ve done for the past couple of years. As was true for the past couple of years, I didn’t get around to reading the vast majority of it, and I don’t watch many movies or follow any artists, so I didn’t vote.

      But – Skin Game lost to no award? One Bright Star to Guide Them lost to no award? The Parliament of Birds and Beasts lost to no award? Why Science is Never Settled lost to no award?

      I’m not even including the pieces which I think were worthy but which had aspects (e.g. traditionalist take on gender / anti-feminism in Wright’s Transhuman) which I understand could have ruined them for people who feel so strongly about issue X that it ruins a work for them when the work either assumes or argues Not X.

      Okay, clearly the awards are controlled by people who are either dishonorable or utterly lack taste.

        1. Skin Game lost to No Award. Three Body Problem won the Novels category, but No Award still beat Skin Game.

          WTF? I’m not saying that Skin Game was necessarily better than Goblin Emperor or Three Body Problem, and it had the handicap of being part of a LONG series, but in no way was it unworthy of a Hugo Award.

          Some of the works which were No Awarded stated or simply assumed viewpoints such that I can see where people who were passionately devoted to an opposing viewpoint wouldn’t enjoy them. I don’t approve – one should at least attempt to distinguish between one’s personal taste and objective quality – but I think it’s possible to, sincerely No Award such works, e.g. Wright’s Transhuman. I listed only those a handful of works which I had knew well enough to believe it was impossible to sincerely No Award them, e.g. Wright’s One Bright Star.

      3. Hmm – I hadn’t yet checked the award list (busy week & weekend). Good stuff lost to “No Award”? Most SF fans who don’t spend time worrying about inside baseball are going to be puzzled about this “No Award” story, where to get it, etc. 🙂

        I’m thinking, if it’s presented as it sounds, we should be listing “No Award(*)” and showing the 2nd place winner as the real winner of the category. I.e. just ignore the tantrums, they mean nothing so far as selecting a book to buy.

        1. Good *uncontroversial* stuff lost to No Award because of ~2500 people voting in two heavily overlapping slates: people voting No Award for everything, and people voting No Award above anything recommended by either Puppy Campaign. It’s not just that people penalized actively non-PC works, or even penalized known non-PC authors. No; they had to vote against everything the non-PC campaigns recommended as nominees.

          And, irony of ironies, they supposedly did this as a protest against slate voting, er, nominating.

          And to cap it all off, the business meeting changed the nominating process (for 2017 or later, or perhaps it will only take effect if confirmed in 2016) to make things MORE susceptible to slate voting. (Instead of five nominees, you will / would have five votes: use them on five different works, or spend them all on one work to support your friend / relative / purchaser of your supporting membership.)

    8. Same thought here. Nothing had attracted me enough in any of the short categories to care one way or the other, but when the Editor Long Form category got nuked, I knew it was spite.

      And consider the inherent contradiction of voting for anything at all in the Best Novel category, yet dumping the Best Editor category. Hello, who the hell do you think edited most of the novels being voted upon??

      If Best Novel had also been nuked from orbit, IMO that would have been the end of the Hugos. You don’t recover from sinking your own flagship.

      1. Which is one reason they pushed people to decline nominations until a couple of non-puppy works were on the ballot.

    9. And they cheered. They hooted and hollered and whooped it up as they No Awarded Ms Weisskopf. I was so disappointed in my fellow fen. Connie Willis. Connie-she-should-know-better-Willis smirking about killing rabid puppies. Bob-everyone-I-know-opposed-the-Vietnam-war-at-Berkeley ( except for my mom, the Latina cleaning your toilets) mocking the Hare Krishnas; and way to many of the fen sheep joining in to piss on someone elses’ faith.

      Faugh.

      We who are builders up need to find something to support. Like, maybe the Award for Excellence in SF & F given at one of the real popular cons (Dragon, ECC, Salt Lake City) which has a poll tax to vote (Hugos) but the money goes to the winning writers.

      We get all the SF greats prior to the Hugo name change.

      And we hold the gasoline and torches for the gents burning down the current abomination.

      I was never so ashamed of my fellow fen. Words fail me.

      1. I’m right there with you.

        I can accept they didn’t like the same books we do. I’m fine with that. But that’s not what happened. They made it clear they didn’t like PEOPLE because we liked them. They set out to snub people out of politically motivated SPITE.

      2. In re creating a new award, do it an award it retroactively to everyone who received a Hugo between 1953-1993, or 1953-2003, or 1953-2000, whatever makes sense and makes our point. We keeps our tradition and makes it new.

    11. Some have tried to say that everything we nominated was shite, but that’s bull.

      Especially since a few nominees pulled their nominations (to not be associated with Vox Day; see the Wired article) … but at least one [Annie Bellet, see same article] would have been on the ballot anyway.

      Either not everything was shite, or shite would have gotten nominated even without the Puppies.

        1. As her publicly declared honorary uncle I sometimes take unfair advantage of the relationship to tease. I intend to use the flung carp to enrich my blueberry patch.

            1. Fish meal makes a very good plant fertilizer. And though the soil does have a bit of an aroma it doesn’t seem to affect the berries themselves.

              1. I need some for my corn. This year’s didn’t fill out as well as I had hoped. I’m going to have more butternut squash than I know what to do with, though.

                    2. I hear this so much that I have firmly decided that any dogs I have will have a back yard that is NOT connected to the garden spaces.

            2. Only if you soak them in it. (We won’t mention what organically grown produce should smell like based on that theory.)

              Seriously, you can buy fish emulsion in gardening stores for use as fertilizer.

              1. As John Ringo likes to say: “Organic on the label means sh*t and a worm are involved.”

                1. Cow and horse manure make pretty good fertilizer. But the meticulously designed, carefully (with soil samples and a weather eye to what’s expected year ’round) administered, artificial stuff beats the pants off organic. By a loooong shot. Take it from this farmer’s boy.

  4. George Martin showed up at Ace’s promising a 30,000 word essay later today. Now I don’t know about anyone here, but I couldn’t write that much in one day if my life depended on it. So, yeah, just a leeetle pre-planning.

    1. You have fallen prey to AoSHQ fallacy number one: Never believe the names that people post under. One of the favorite hobbies over there is sockpuppeting. That is where you write something outrageous, and then have it posted by a name that makes it even funnier. For example, let’s say that someone were to show up here and calmly explain why the Puppies had a great idea, and then the post was signed by a noted Puppy Kicker. That is Ace’s place in action. I think the person in question was mocking the enormous amount of blathering that GRRM has wasted defending the indefensible. Anyway, it is not something you see a lot of on other sites, but it is probably the number one source of amusement there.

      It is incredibly sad how the Hugo’s turned out and we should all mourn the current status quo.

      3. That’s why you’ll see the alphanumeric string after a commenter’s name, it’s a unique hash value generated out of the poster’s IP address. It’s supposed to prevent posting under another person’s usual handle.

    2. 30,000 words is five hours of nonstop typing for a fast typist, with no breaks for thinking about what to say or anything else. So, yeah, that’s not a reaction but a preaction (totally a word).

      3. Well having read his piece, it appears to have been mostly prewritten. He just had to tweak it here and there to get it to specific reactions.

  5. To be honest, in last few years at least I hold the awards just like Oscars as signs I would dislike the piece. However even if we get slated for future, the puppy list is award and recommendation enough for me. I got enough of conceit pieces when I was in hs

    1. yes. I’ve looked on best picture as a mark that I probably won’t like a film. Once upon a time it wasn’t so bad but since the mid 90’s it has gone more and more into uninteresting films

      1. Ah, the Oscars…
        The only ones that tend to actually be accurate are the technical ones- less studio politics involved. Otherwise, you get:
        1) Pretentious, overacted, over directed and painfully slow but critically loved wannabe artfilms that nobody saw, but the hip kids said they loved to prove they are ahartist, and not the Big Hollywood whores they actually are.
        2) The “Oops” award that goes to the director who’s film should have won, but lost to #1 a year or so before. See also Scorsese, Martin.
        And, almost by accident, you get #3- a win for an movie that actually deserves it.

        1. If the Academy were interested in bolstering its,reputation, they would arrange a five year gap between elibability and voting. That would give the occasional nal i ternational embarassment like THE LAST EMPEROR (a historical film about the last Chinese Emperor done with the Communist Chinese having script approval? Why not simply give that year’s award to TRIUMPH OF THE WILL) tim eto self-destruct.

          1. I like the idea of a five-year wait before eligibility. Not only does it give fads five years to die down, it also gives an unpublicized work five years to be noticed, and it means that five years after a series starts you can nominate book one (which should decrease the difficulty of nominating books in series, though certainly it’ll remain a complication.)

            If something isn’t still memorable in five years, it probably shouldn’t get a Hugo, so the only downside I see is the difficulty in implementation.

            1. Won’t work on the Hugo until we recapture it. Could work on a new award. Kinda like the idea of a new one, but my Lady has many health problems, so it won’t be on me.

            2. Falls in between the Hugo and the Retro Hugo — though I will note that with the Retro Hugo the problem can be that later work can overshadow the question of whether Joe Author or Jack Artist really was the best of that year.

              1. That overall is an idea I have liked. Even if you just have a 6 month period so fans actually can read books. For example 3BP was published late in cycle so less read, plus the peroliod would be coolng off for hyped stuff.

                    5. Shucks, why not just use a pressure sensitive target to light concentric LED rings? Set it so the pressure determines number of rings lighting, intensity and duration of lighting.

          2. I used to occasionally use my ships to spell out “Hi”.

            I’d lose, but it was an easy way to maintain my reputation of making bad jokes.

  7. Looking at the sheer number of SJW arsonists who swept in at the last minute to burn down everything they couldn’t take with them, and compared to the nominee numbers, I’m not sure anyone can pull it off next year. I don’t think we can grow that fast. There are a LOT more barbarians inside the walls of fandom than we were counting on.

    2. The thing that will hurt is the unspoken rule regarding purchase of membership for others has been breached. Never mind GG being brought in. It may burn for time to come

        1. Pull the Gamer Gate people in. It would be a good thing if more gamers read more written science fiction, anyway. I bet you that they’d gravitate to military sf and new space opera — that’s what a heck of a lot of science fiction games are about (oddly enough, there is a paucity of games about getting beaten up by gin-soaked blue-collar Americans, go fig!).

          1. Well, look at the heavy hitter of WoW. Valid fantasy. And while it may not be the giant of literature, it is better than the midgets winning ATM. There really should be a video game story genre

            1. IMO in the longest of long runs, science fiction and fantasy (like books in general) will go interactive. There’ll be a text-only version but then there will also be versions where you get to (say) join the Galactic Patrol or be one of Honor Harrington’s bridge bunnies or defend Minas Tirith against the forces of Sauron (already half -true because of the Middle Earth online computer games) or whatever. The main reason this can’t happen yet is that the AI isn’t yet near enough sophisticated to allow full and free character interaction. Books and games will merge.

              So why not draw in the Gamer Gaters? The very fact that the Tor Clique made the accusation tells me that they are terrified at the possibility, and with good reason — if most gamers read science fiction and fantasy (and most probably already do to some extent) they would utterly swamp the Tor Clique (and all the Puppies of all persuasions, too, but then we ALREADY write stuff they’d like, so we have less to fear).

              This would leave the Tor Clique with two options: either accept defeat or turn the Hugos into the Tor Books Upturned Nose Award by changing the voting rules. Either one is a win, ultimately, because in the second case we create new awards which gain status because they’re given to genuinely good and fun books.

              And we get a leg up on the future.

              1. We’re actually already there, in small ways. There’s an app called “Zombies, Run!” which ties a tracker of your running pace to a storyline, and only lets you know what’s happening as you walk/run. (With occasional zombie attacks that you have to physically outrun, in real life. Not random, either, but tied to the storyline.)

                It was funded by kickstarter, and if it’s successful enough, I wonder what else enterprising writers and coders will come up with?

                1. There are already kinetic/visual novels. Even if a lot of them are eroges.

                2. That’s almost enough to make me want to get a smart phone. Holy crap if that had been around when I was a kid my parents would never have seen me because I’d be running through the woods all day, even more than I already was.

                3. That…almost makes me *want* to run, and my usual response to the idea is “Only if chased, and then it depends on what’s chasing me”…

                  1. I get enough exercise at work (job #1 and job #2, not so much #3). If it’s audio, I could see going about with one earbud in, listening and working…

                    Come to think of it, that might not be a bad way to pass the time. Have to slack off on it some on job #2 though, as that requires actual brainpower.

              2. Game stories and book stories are very different in many respects. In a novel “railroading” is known as good plotting. Allowing minor characters (alias NPCs) to save the day a few times can be fun, or even giving them entire scenes and plotlines where the main characters appear not at all. Not to mention that players identify with their characters much more readily than they do with a novel’s characters, which both requires more characterization in the novel and allows it to range farther.

                1. In books one goes whither the author has blazed the trail, except for those choose your own adventure books that were popular in the 1980’s.

                  In video games that’s a rail shooter, where your path is locked in. Some rail shooters allow some movement off the axis of the path, some only allow rotating around to fire at enemies that are placed in fixed positions or follow their own rails. In all variants of the type, where there are pauses in the path, you only have a fixed time to take whatever actions are available before you’re booted down the rail to the next location, or you get killed and the game ends – or you shove in more money to continue.

                  1. But if you read a novel and the character wanders around aimlessly, you would probably object that it’s pointless.

            2. “There really should be a video game story genre”

              Amen to that! The storyline for the Mass Effect trilogy was an amazing piece of milscifi/space opera, and something I consider in my top five favorite science fiction pieces, hands down…

              And many of the WoW tie-in novels are quite good fantasy novels.

              1. Especially if the award is for the story. Part of why I think it makes more sense to further split Hugo’s. Too many niches

          2. I suspect we’ll get even more GGs next year. They have really taken up the cause.

          3. Gamers are a strange lot, remember, GG is a lot like you all, a response to the massive unfairness they see in their hobby. Too many gamers out there think it ways that line up with the puppy kickers and GG is a just a small, but motivated group of individuals. They’re small, but they make a lot of noise and most of the time they’re right. Also, the gaming industry is in just as ugly a state as the publishing industry. For example after they fired Hideo Kojima someone at Konami thought it would be a good idea to remove his name from the cover of the latest installment of the Metal Gear series.

            It’s really two sides of the same coin.

            1. GG is not small, at least not in comparison to “publishing world.” Let us say “publishing world” has 5000 people in it, from all sides. I’ve seen estimates of GG at 400k+.

        2. IIRC, It was more like the Puppy-Kickers screeched at how it was all a GG plot and GG went “bwa?” and looked a bit closer at it all.

          1. That was my impression as well. The Gamersgate folks weren’t involved apart from a couple of overlapping members, but some of them noticed the yelling and screaming.

          2. Exactly. After the nominations came out, the (Former) Toad of Tor screeched on Twitter that the only reason the SP/RP nominations swept several categories was because of #GamerGate…and that attracted the attention of the last people in the world they wanted engaged with this/

            1. And was very quickly forgotten and never mentioned again. Thank goodness for stuff like this or we couldn’t write a web comic 😀

            2. Similar to Streisand Effect – a real-world phenomenon, therefore one the SJWs simply CANNOT deal with.

            3. Even got an amusing bit of fanart depicting the GG mascot looking at a puppy and wondering why everyone says it belongs to her. 🙂

      2. Gamergate was not brought in. That was one of the “big lies” that Puppy opponents were telling this time around. There were a few people who GG pays attention to that were pro-Puppies, but none that I know of made any great effort to bring in Gamergate as a movement to vote in the Hugos.

        That could change this year. I would urge that the subset of the Evil League of Evil running Sad Puppies 4 consider reaching out to Gamergate. But if you do, a few things to remember:

        1) Gamergate has no leaders. There are a core group of people that a fair percentage of GGers will listen to, but there is no organization, and no central control, and never will be. There are a few of those “most people in GG will listen to” people such as Total Biscuit who are already supporting Puppies. If the leaders of Sad Puppies 4 want to reach out to Gamergate, I will be happy to compile a list of such people (I’m not one).

        2) Gamergate is not right-wing. Gamergate is anti-authoritarian. It just so happens that the authoritarians we are dealing with (this time) come from the left. The majority of GGers are not going to be receptive to “win this slice of the culture war for the right to save America” (some will, of course). However, nearly all GGers will sympathize with a bunch of people being told they are having wrongfun.

        3) Gamergate does not care if their opponents call them: fuckwits, a hate mob, harassers, idiots, manchildren, misogynists, neckbeards, nazis, neo-nazis, pedophiles, racists, sexists, shits, sick fucks, stalkers, terrorists, bullies, perverts, abusive, assholes, asswipes, bigots, bullies, cowards, creepy, crooks, dumb, terrorists, homophobes, transphobes, rape-enablers, and “worse than ISIS”. No one in Gamergate is going to go clutching their pearls because someone at Tor accuses them of being “neo-nazis”. We have been hearing every one of these insults for nearly a year now. If you call Gamergate “neo-nazis” a more likely response is an avalanche of nazi-themed anime porn.

        4) Some of Gamergate is anonymous; some of us are out. People’s livelihoods are regularly threatened. So respect GGers who want to stay anonymous.

        5) Gamergate is ethical; but not polite. We don’t dox people or send death threats or rape threats (despite the constant stream of lies told about us). We will, however, trashtalk, shitpost, and mock our opponents mercilessly.

        6) Gamergate has no central forum. Gamergate is a twitter hashtag, it’s a subreddit (KotakuInAction), an 8chan forum, hundreds of bloggers, and about a dozen core sites. Again, if the people running Sad Puppies 4, are interested, I will be happy to provide all the information I can here.

        1. One tack to take might be to let them know this is a response to the Powers That Be telling fans “You can’t do that!”

          Seriously. When has telling fans “You can’t do that!” ever made them stop doing whatever “that” may be?

        2. “Gamergate is anti-authoritarian.”

          Did you see the title header on this blog?

          1. Yep, Sarah is only right-wing in the anti-authoritarian aspect. She is politically conservative in that she wants to go back to the Constitution as written, which is itself fairly anti-authoritarian. She is NOT socially conservative, and while some of us Huns (like myself) are, most have a very live and let live libertarian outlook, regardless of personal beliefs.

            1. I’d happily be live and let live. Each year they insist on making me care. If they won’t just let me live I will eventually return the favor.

        3. 1) Great. When fighting SJWs and their Alinsky style tactics, don’t give them targets to isolate.
          2)Yes you are. Everybody is right wing unless you are vocally and loudly following the narrative of the moment as dictated by the SJW central committee.
          3)You shouldn’t care. On the other hand, the SJWs do and that can be used against them. Look, as we’ve discovered, all that talk is projection. Make note of what they say about YOU and then look at what they say. They say you are racists, I can guarantee that race is a big part of how THEY think of people. As for cowards and bullies, have you really looked at how they behave.
          4) SJWs believe in personal destruction all the time every time. Prudence is mandated. So is courage. Sometimes you have to take the bullet for the team.
          5) Yes, yes, keep doing that. The SJWs can dish it out, but they can’t take it.
          6)When dealing with the left, you never want to concentrate. Until you attack. As it says in Sun Tsu, be formless.

        4. I meant how after noms GG was blamed. I am all for GG to join up. Wonder if a game can qual as long form.. Halo or Wow should qualify under the WoT exemption.

          I am typing from phone so Hope I am making sense and not making our evil mistress’ live more difficult than it is…

        5. Hell, I’d just be happy to get a few more readers addict- err, introduced to some great books. So the authors of said books make more money, and write faster. Because I have series I want finished. Yes, this is a totally selfish desire, but I do not care. *grin*

          From what I’ve seen and heard of GG, that’s pretty spot on. And I will add, SP this year wasn’t ideologically pure either. There were authors, I’m told, who had politics from all over the spectrum. Personally, I don’t much care when I’m reading what the author’s personal politics are any more than I care how tall they are or if they like green olives over black.

          The other side now, *they* have requirements. Can’t be nominated by the wrong folks (us), have to be vocally supportive of their side at all times, gotta preach that social justice out loud and in their stories… And must attack anyone associated with “Puppies.”

          My take is, Sad Puppies read, nominate, and vote for ass-kicking, intriguing, all-around fun stories. We vote what we like. And we’re vilified for it. If any GG folks want a little hate on their plate, come on and join the SP folks. There’s enough for all! *chuckle*

      3. I’ve never heard of any rule spoken or unspoken against buying memberships for others. Indeed in the past for conventions that relied on early subscriptions for seed money it was quite common to see Jane Doe followed by a guest of Jane Doe perhaps repeated. Sometimes these were family members or folks yet to be drafted to share a huckster’s tables and other times it was a triumph of hope over experience that by the time of the con the person paying would have a date. In all cases the con was grateful for the seed money.

        I have also seen abuses in political infighting in clubs. Very often in groups that were in transition from fan dominated with no money issue to fans who were equally part of an industry.

        When the Apppaloosa Horse Club was transitioning from fans of the horse who went on trail rides to a breeder’s association of folks who were in it for the money (though also fans or they would have been something else, AQHA perhaps but certainly something else) memberships were first bought for friends and family members with their concurrence and eventually taken out in the names of people who weren’t even told there was a membership in their name.

        The United States Chess Federation has gone through periods – to my knowledge starting with the Fischer boom but I don’t doubt going back to Marshall and New York City political factions – when the national association United States Chess Federation mirrored some of the Federation Internationale des Echeques politics (Kasperov against the world).

        When drag racing was transitioning from an amateur participant sport to a spectator sport the National Hot Rod Association expelled – more politely dropped – individual and car club members in favor of strip operators driven by a profit motive.

        The National Rifle Association had its member’s revolt at Cincinnati including folks given memberships to qualify for various things.

        Agreed that media is a large part, perhaps by dollars the dominant part (and a successful game brings in as much money as a blockbuster movie) of SF and so fandom these days – as has been noted Dragon Con a media con has a lock on Labor Day and the various Comic Cons bring a mega convention to every region of the country. Where the subject matter, and the money, overlaps so much the people will overlap.

        Given that my own politics are small l libertarian – and when they were large L registered in Colorado the wine and cheese was always in Boulder just as Yale was once and may still be a haven for their own Party of the Right – so too I see the puppy issues as political.

        The puppy supporters, Evil League et. al. are the good guys and the SJW are totalitarian. Political may be my bias but that’s how I see the leaders and so the movement.

        For those who see money at the root of everything the major actors are arguably all in publishing (promotion) to include self-publishing (promotion).

        Some of the loudest voices in the SJW side have a history of rational ignorance and following the pack when it sounds good.

        It’s going to be a struggle to move a lot of people – many of whom I think voted no award in a plague on both your houses meaning (confusing by making it possible the same vote came from different, perhaps multiple, motives) – to human wave.

        2. clark e myers wrote “…whom I think voted no award in a plague on both your houses meaning…”

          I was at Sasquan for four days and talked with upwards of 20-25 people (anecdotal, I know) and saw no evidence of this. Almost every “no awarder” I talked with was convinced all the Puppy nominations were the result of a slate and slates are the most evilist evil thing ever, and the only way to get justice was to “no award” those categories. Most didn’t even read the works. Again, totally anecdotal here, just another set of eyeballs on the ground.

          Interestingly, most did NOT get this information from any pro/anti puppy website, but from “other media”, including trade journals (stuff that the ALA puts out, for example). Asking them about Locus “recommendation lists” or pointing out that by nuking a category you nuke any non-puppies in that category produced some interesting responses, including one guy who (this is second-hand info, talking with a fellow Puppy on Sunday AM) said words to the affect that, “Gee, if someone had put it that way, I would have voted differently.”

          My personal feeling after getting off the internet and actually talking with people for four days is that you are not up against 3000+ hardened SJWs, you are up against 500 or so SJWs and a lot of “moderates” who don’t do a lot of digging for information. Did I say that diplomatically enough?

          Of course, YMMV.

          1. “a lot of “moderates” who don’t do a lot of digging for information”

            Isn’t the traditional term for that “useful idiots”

    3. Two pronged atatck; we keep trying to rescue the Hugos and we also look around for awards that are worth winning, amd publicise them.

      The Hugos haven’t been as thoroughly tainted as, say, the Nobel prizes for Peace and Literature.

      Yet.

      1. Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work. –Mark Twain

        Awards are the thunder. Lightning is the readers.

        (I think I’m ripping off Tom Simon for the applicability of Mr. Twain’s words.)

    4. There were about 2,500 true Puppy kickers. Around 500 Rabid Puppies, 1200 Sad Puppies. I was surprised the SPs outnumbered the RPs by so much.

      Note the best they could do after all that campaigning (including the publicity campaign, the slander, the libel, the buying votes for, um, “deserving but financially disadvantaged fans”) was a little over 50%, followed by burning their own award to the ground. What are they going to do for an encore? That’s their peak unless they start manufacturing votes.*

      This was round 3, part 2. The momentum is all on the Puppy side. They gave it their best shot and had to sabotage their own awards to “win” one battle.

      ==

      * This is actually a concern of mine. The WorldCon site and process is so badly outdated that the main issue to registering a number of fake profiles would be getting a few hundred unique Visa prepaid cards to pay for the membership fee. I’d guesstimate a total cost at a little over $50 per vote, less if the vote counters are utterly clueless about validation (always possible with volunteer orgs) or give a wink and a nod (sadly possible after last night’s fiasco of a presentation show). Not within the budget of most sane people, but an OCD trust funder, person sponging off wealthy friends, or game show winner with money to blow could easily shift the balance. For one year, at least.

      1. Or a publishing house. That could do it for a long while. Then again, all the publishing houses that would do such a thing are already at the bleeding edge of financial ruin, the tens of thousands needed to pull it off could push them over.

        1. Yeah, it’s not a financial win under any circumstances. You’d have to be somewhat unbalanced to attempt it. But it is easily achievable if you have the money to buy the gift cards.

          Yeah, I probably qualify as unbalanced for thinking it up in the first place. However, in my defense, (a) website security is part of what I do for a living, and (b) I’m not ubalanced enough to throw thousands (or hundreds, or dozens) of dollars down that rat hole.

          1. Of course, if a publishing house does this it is a business expense and reduces taxable income while providing a nice perq for staffers and low level employees (including interns.) Taking a week-long all expenses paid working-vacation in the Pacific NW on the company expense account isn’t the worst duty one could be assigned.

            Doing it in Kansas City in August may be less attractive.

            Whether the publishing house loses money may not even matter because it allows the corporate ownership to shield profits found elsewhere in its business model.

            1. For a publicly held company, that’s the kind of crap that will get you put in jail.

              For a privately held one, you barely have the money for toilet paper, let alone an award that doesn’t affect sales.

                1. Exactly — “Product Promotion” is a box into which an awful lot can be shoved.

                  I don’t think Alex has much experience with corporate accounting practices; attendance at industry trade shows is a legitimate corporate expense. while declining to attend would virtually constitute managerial malfeasance.

                2. Speaking as a small business owner, I have plenty of experience with gaming the expensing system. “This trip to Disney World? If I started a Disney blog, featured advertising, maybe wrote a book… Tax deduction? Hmmm.”

                  What I’m saying is that creating memberships for either not-real people or people whose personal info you’ve bought in order to game an award is not the kind of activity you are going to ever want to become public. Especially if you have an owner(s) who are unaware of what you’re doing and a scintilla of ethics.

                  1. I don’t think anyone is accusing TOR of creating memberships for either not-real people or people whose personal info they’ve bought in order to game an award; I think the claim is that TOR makes a habit of buying lots of memberships for its staffers and “reliables” (for example, by making voting memberships a premium for, oh, say, people who had been lively and welcome contributors on the TOR boards online) who could, under the prior process, go a long way to tilting the awards,

                    Given the way in which various TOR editorial staffers have slandered some of their writers and (potential) customers I doubt anybody here will argue in support of their having a scintilla of ethics, as generally understood.

                    1. *head desk*

                      Back to what I said originally that started all this… would be incredibly easy to sign up a large number of non-existent/unaware people and vote for them. No, this is not something a company would want to expense.

                      End.

        2. I seem to remember a rumor that a certain torrible house included membership for employees…

          1. As was pointed out above you could expense it.

            That being said, for a publishing house in a given genre to pay for its employees to go to the “biggest” international gathering for that genre is a legitimate business practice.

            So, I expect all Tor employees to start coming to DragonCon each year. I mean, they want the biggest gathering of potential customers, right?

            1. I can understand to a point, but for a fan award to be voted on by persons paid by publisher, especially when the publisher has been well represented by the award just seems wrong.

              May be allowed but so was every single puppy action

              1. Oh, I think if you have a book from your house up recusing yourself is a reasonable expectation.

                I also think modifying policy this year to increase memberships bought shows bad intent.

                I also think for memberships to meet the business intent they need to be attending memberships and should have expensed travel, lodging, and meals. That is, they should show all the markers of genuine business trips. If they fail that test I would expect auditors, both internal and external, to have lots of questions.

                1. Yes. I can see the business purpose and even the use of membership as fringe benefits but am hesitant about allowing voting with it. I could see a corporate membership that did not get voting pins unless individual purchased. Since we often see projection from the pk’s I was wondering since a lot of the pk’s said vd was self promoting if this was part of the previous dominance of this house, esp in categories with 40 vote margins or winners

                  1. I’m somewhat surprised there isn’t a non-voting business membership for publishers to send staff while having books up for the awards.

                    1. There is a cynical and Occam answer. After the last weekend I will break rules and say the cynical one that that would make stuffing votes by said house more difficult

                    2. Considering some of the reported vote totals from “pre-puppy” Worldcons, perhaps they figured that without allowing publisher voting they wouldn’t reach a quorum?

                      If the Hugo is to truly be a “fan” award, neither publishing house employees nor other industry professionals (e.g., writers, cover artists, etc.) should be accorded a vote. This especially applies to con guests, attending on the con dime and thus not paying for their privilege of voting in the Hugo.

                      That really ought be on the agenda for the business meeting at an upcoming Worldcon.

                      The mind giggles at the idea of mandating a “fan literacy” test as a requirement for Hugo voting. I can see a list of twenty SF MCs in Column A and the works in which they appeared for Column B with a requirement to match them. Multiple choice questions requiring identification of a writer with works written (Robert Heinlein wrote: a: Childhood’s End b: Harry Potter and the Slide-rule of Doom c: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress d: 50 Shades of Grey e: all of the above) would be easy enough to grade. I think it would be cruel to require any con committee to read through and grade short answer or essay questions, but maybe a fill in the blank section for plot summaries?

              2. “May be allowed but so was every single puppy action”

                It is a matter of great annoyance to me that I am unable to find a Youtube link for a single specific line in the movie M*A*S*H:

                Colonel Blake: [General Hammond is yelling in their direction] Radar!
                Radar: Sir?
                Colonel Blake: What’s the general trying to say?
                Radar: He’s just been informed as to the identity of our, uh, Spearchucker. His ringer spotted our ringer.
                Colonel Blake: [shouts to the general] How do ya like them apples, Charlie?

          2. That would be a few dozen. Which, in years past, would have been sufficient to logroll. Not so much any more.

            Now you’re looking at 500-1000 minimum.

            1. I know. Just cynical since so many complainers,are attached to that house, or have dozens of noms

      2. but an OCD trust funder, person sponging off wealthy friends, or game show winner with money to blow could easily shift the balance. For one year, at least.

        Or a couple of annoyed banksters.

        Ever wonder how many sci-fi fans wind up working at hedge funds. I know at least one former International Magic the Gathering Champion has: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Finkel

        It’s the kind of field run by math geeks.

        Find the right ones who remember Heinlein et al as a kid and get them on board.

        One side might have to break themselves trying to buy something as lack of financial resources is by-product of socialist thinking.

        Anyone want to take odds Vox Day knows one or more equivalents of Mr. Finkel? His is numbering his minions for a reason which he hinted at when the EHP (who uses a name that abbreviates to Evil High Priest anyway) and 4/6 came out. He’s made oblique comments about being accused of paying for memberships which the PK did.

        If the RP find the right bankster fan buying everyone at DragonCon in two weeks a WorldCon 2016 membership isn’t out of the question. I don’t think it is going on but it wouldn’t surprise me (if on a smaller scale) either.

        1. If Vox’s goal is to torpedo the awards, why would he spend his own money (especially on that scale) to do it? Seems like he did just fine getting the CHORFS to do it on their own without any investment.

          1. 1. I suspect, if he is doing it, he is spending someone else’s money.
            2. He needs to control noms tightly to get them to spend their own money.
            3. Reagan military build up…a “here bankrupt yourself before we even get started” strategy.

            Remember, I don’t know he is doing it but read my speculation. You said, “especially on that scale”.

            About 6,000 total votes were cast. That’s $300,000. I suggested he could find a hedge funder or two. For 2+ hedge funders that’s a lark.

      3. Which is why there’s a troll over at Larry’s and Brad’s who’s basically saying “Go for it next year, but in 2017 our new rules to keep wronfans out will be in place, so suck it.”

      4. “Not within the budget of most sane people, but an OCD trust funder, person sponging off wealthy friends, or game show winner with money to blow could easily shift the balance. For one year, at least.”

        We do have tweets of Arthur “Jeopardy” Chu trying to buy anti-Sad Puppy votes last year (2014).

        2. Let’s give Andrew Marston (“Yama”) the Hugos for a year! He would get some truly awful stories the award. Stuff that would make “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” look like Shakespeare by comparison! 😀

          2. “Let’s give Andrew Marston (“Yama”) the Hugos for a year! He would get some truly awful stories the award. Stuff that would make “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” look like Shakespeare by comparison! :D”

            Mother of God, now THAT would be a horror show.

    5. Enthusiasms are fickle, media are less likely to push the LIVs, truth percolates out (though slowly) so likely there’ll be fewer last-minute barbarians.

  8. Well, in accord with the soundtrack, this result has solidified my leanings toward focusing on reading primarily indie publishing. I’ll be buying only Baen and indie SFF. I’ll read Tor and the others from the library, but I won’t lose sleep over what they don’t stock.

    Three-body problem … is it just me or did anyone else read that thing solely from determined integrity? I found myself wishing both MCs would just go away and die. And the conclusion … humans will be the new cockroaches in the universe … really, they want me to PAY for that? Really?

    1. So many of the recent winners and nominees are coffee table books. You buy them and show them off so that the right people think you’re one of the right people, but nobody actually READS them.

      Consider how nearly every article that praises Ancillary Noun praises the Pronoun trick, but never talks about the story, or the abysmal writing. (Character says something telling or biting or really cool, followed by an infodump giving the background necessary for someone to realize that it was telling or biting or really cool. Mid conversation, mind you.)

      1. It seems most of these stories base around conceits and seem like they are written trying to be dull and tedious.

        No offense to any Who Fans, but that series sits right under Tor on my ‘probably a dick’ list. The idea that Letters to Gardner was worse than those books is just insane

        1. I’m pretty sure Doctor Who would like to be a dick by our lights, but the stories just won’t let them sometimes. Danny Pink’s speech in the finale, for example, plus the cameo ex machina, undercut ALL the Doctor’s snark.

      2. What’s funny is that the pronoun business is old hat in science fiction. I’ve seen it done in stories from the 1950’s and 1960’s with hermaphroditic or otherwise oddly-sexual races. Just as with religious-bigotry fueled misogyny and sterility plagues in The Handmaid’s Tale, a really old idea which the genre never dropped has been “invented” by someone out of ignorance of the field, and then trumpeted by other idiots who either want to pretend that it’s new or really are just as ignorant as the author who “invented” it.

        1. But you see, all the old masters of SF are bigoted old white men who can’t possibly have anything worthwhile to say, besides, old books are too hard to find, so the current fandom is proud of their ignorance of their past.

          1. The thing is, they don’t read with any DEPTH. They recycle stuff that’s 20 years old (ten is a bit of an exaggeration) because they don’t read anything from that far back that isn’t required reading. So they keep trotting out tripe that sank like a stone two decades ago…and for excellent reason.

            1. I’ve had several people tell me, “I only read *new* books.”

              “The mind, she boggle…”

          2. Ten years hell. They made an award winning musical out of a 98 year old opera about living the bohemian lifestyle in which the bohemian lifestyle hadn’t changed a damn bit. The only update was AIDS replacing tuberculous.

            And it was so old that it was a stereotype when Puccini wrote it.

        1. And the really sad thing? Ann Leckie was the voice of moderation on “The New Space Opera” panel.

            1. Charles Stross, Rich Horton and Jeffrey Carver. Oh and Doug Farren, who was on a couple of self-publishing panels and did alright on them, but I don’t recall him having anything to say on the Space Opera panel. But I left about 2/3 through to go to John Wright’s reading. Which they double-booked, so he ended up giving part of it in the corner of the hall.

              2. JCW reading was on the con app. (Grenadine in 303 B) I arrived early to find another group setting up and a pencilled in PC Hodgell by … Tony Daniel? Keep in mind that the con got late word that JCW would be attending so I’m of two minds what really happened. The lady volunteering at info seemed genuinely certain of the Grenadine app info, and genuinely shocked when I told her about scrounging seating to do the reading in the hall.

                I am morally certain that some of the con-runners were two-faced PKs… but not all. And no innocent persomln reacts well to false accusations of duplicity.

                That said, those claiming JCW is a subpar writer created a dog character that was spot on – and it turns out he’s never owned a dog.

          1. I’d write that crossover if not for the fact it would require me to read Ancillary Noun, which would take up time I will not be able to get refunded.

        3. I don’t know, but Ancillary Noun sounds boring and passive. Maybe Ancillary Verb has some action?

      5. Sometimes someone will tell me about this great new movie they just saw. I’ll ask them what it as about. When all they can talk about is the special effects, I know it’s not anything I’d care to sit through.

      6. That book was maddening. I could hear the screams of a good story waiting to get out if only the Author would let it. Poor little story. (Yes, I feel sorry for the story that should have been told but wasn’t. I’m Odd. The story that was told went last on my vote list.)

    2. I had pretty much the same reaction to Three Body Problem. I disliked both MCs, and the whole thing felt slow and boring to me. Some of the technical ideas were interesting. But apparently a lot of people liked it. So it’s clearly a matter of taste. Which is why having just one “best” work is kind of…not meaningful.

      1. Absolutely true. It’s also worth mentioning that TBP was (a) interesting simply insofar as there’s a novelty to ‘Hey, I wonder what Chinese SF is like?, and (b) totally unconcerned with Western culture-war issues (I’m sure it speaks to all sorts of Chinese cultural issues that may have gone right over my head). Combine that with (c) Vox Day!, and it shouldn’t be surprising that it finished first in what I consider a fairly weak pool to pick from. No, that’s not a knock on either Skin Game or Dark Between the Stars, but I think it’s genuinely quite hard to get people to vote for a book that’s a part of a series as “Best Novel” for reasons completely unconcerned with politics.

      2. I found it interesting partially because of the historical background and because there were some cool ideas in it. Makes me wonder how much of the plodding pace people are complaining about was a translation issue and how much of it is just the nature of Chinese fiction writers…also, I think people are misinterpreting the cop’s line about the cockroaches, but that could be just me.

        1. Quite possible. The Chinese tends to have a lot more in the implicit than the explicit mode and that really does not translate well (and there were some very obvious translation errors so I do wonder what was lost to translation.)

          1. Translation problems? Have you read “The Wizard-Masters of Peng-Shi Angle”? Or the Chinese title “Peng-shi Jiao di Wu Si”. Published in Pohlstars, it’s a translation back to English of the Chinese translation of Pohl’s “The Wizards of Pung’s Corners”.

            1. No, but I’ve read similar things from in the English>Russian>English set. My advantage there is I actually read Russian so can see where they might have gone wrong in the initial translation. I’ve done translations. As linguistics go, extracting essential information from a foreign language is the base ‘easy’ stage. Translating non-fiction accurately is the next step up in ‘ouch my brain’. Translating fiction is flat out hard. Translating Poetry requires you be a linguist AND a poet of close to the skill of the original.

              1. Yes. Precisely. I’ve done this work too. Remaining faithful while evoking the same thing in readers of a culture foreign to the story is art, not science.

            2. Yes, but that wouldn’t have “cultural translation” issues, would it? Which I think is what Wyrdbard means.
              As a translator and someone who grew up in another culture, I didn’t interpret her comment as an insult, simply an allusion to the difficulty in bridging cultures.
              Took me about ten years to stop writing Portuguese stories in English, by which I mean stories aimed at a Portuguese audience, no matter where set. It was hard. And Portugal is a Western tradition country AND I grew up reading British and English work.

        2. Part of the reason I enjoyed it beyond some cool ideas (and I did not find the end that nihilistic – yes, the humans were insulted as cockroaches, but plenty were NOT giving up…) was the flavor – it reminded me of the roundabout way of storytelling that was part of Cordwainer Smith’s stories

    3. I saw the results this morning and thought they probably thought they proved something. Well, as far as I can tell, all they’ve proved is that they are willing to poison the well and salt the fields. So? We knew that already.

      They have sown the wind. Let them live with the results.

      1. That was supposed to post elsewhere.

        I read and enjoyed the Three Body Problem. I had considerably more trouble with the self interpreting code than the proton supercomputer. And I liked the fact that the environmentalists were the bad guys. Mostly well meaning bad guys, but still.

        But the Goblin Emperorgot my vote.

        1. Yep, the Goblin Emperor got my vote also, I won’t say I liked the Three Body Problem, but I thought it was a decent read, better than anything else nominated, so it got 2nd on my ballot.

          1. I voted it 2nd as well. However, I knew that I wouldn’t have time to do all the reading in full because of projects at work, plus some things in the package were only excerpts, so for the novels I only read the first 50 or 60 pages and voted largely on how much I wanted to keep reading.

            I’m a Hugo voting newbie, though. I’ll try to do better next year. 🙂

        2. One amusing thought is that people were voting for it because they *thought* lao Liu was in favor of the Chinese Communists. 3BP starts with an extended condemnation of the Cultural Revolution — and would be a fine allegoies for the Hugos situation.

          1. You noticed some… similarities between the Puppy Kicker crowd and the bunch screeching at the professor in Chapter 1?

          2. I found it highly surprising that the Chinese government let that one out of the country, honestly. Perhaps, as with the “Remember June 4” thing it’s gotten to the point where they’ve so thoroughly expunged their history that they don’t recognize what they’re supposed to not be talking about anymore.

            1. they’ve so thoroughly expunged their history that they don’t recognize what they’re supposed to not be talking about anymore.

              So, they have Totalitarian Alzheimer’s?

              1. It would not surprise me. They don’t seem long on accurate predictions of what comes from the successful implementation of their programs. (Such as the shortage of wives for their men from the one child policy in a culture that wants SONS).

            2. My eldest mentioned some controversy involving a Taylor Swift t-shirt, of all things. It promotes one of her albums and reads, “TS 1989”. She’s set to play China in November. Shame it wasn’t June, but I hope the shirts sell well.

              How subversive would a simple t-shirt be? My daughter was concerned that someone would be hurt for wearing it, which means I’ve failed as a parent. She didn’t quite absorb the “Better to die on your feet than live on your knees” ethos I was going for.

              But then she thinks the Hugos turned out great and all puppies are Vox Day acolytes. Trying to explain to her that Beale won the Hugos fight seemed to confuse her. Frankly, she needs to get off the blogs and start reading actual books again. (I’d shut the wi-fi off, but when it shuts down accidentally the girls usually start a knife fight to amuse themselves.)

    4. Three Body Problem presented us with a lush and verdant world full of possibilities and put us onto a track that could only have been made by a plotasaurus. After a long, long, LONG, slog we get to the end of the trail only to find a measly plotroach. I was, needless to say, disappointed.

      However, I have heard some comments that say it was the first in a series. So maybe the trail continues?

      1. Three Body problem only won because Vox and his minions all voted for it.
        I wonder how the CHORF’s are taking that little piece of news this morning?

      2. Hard SF lover here. I really enjoyed 3BP, enough to recommend it to my husband and enough to want to read the sequels, though I don’t see myself reading it again because of the pacing (and the lack of a sympathetic character). That makes it a solid 4 stars for me, and third on my Hugo list.

        Yay, a 4-star book was my THIRD pick! In previous years, I considered myself lucky if I enjoyed ONE nominee.

    5. I read as far as I could because it had a decent beginning and several people I sort of trust said they liked it. But I’m not a hard SF fan and, frankly, it wasn’t that gripping, so I eventually gave up.

      I’m baffled that anyone could actually enjoy it, but that’s true of so many things.

        1. Asking you because you’d know better than me, is it possible some of these problems are problems of translation. As I understand the original was in Chinese.

            1. I was thinking more along the lines of “as someone who has been a translator I’ve seen this kind of issue before” without specific reference to Chinese *shrugs*

              1. I didn’t think it was unreadable. Doubt I’d have known it was a translated work just from reading it. It was just… dull.

                Goblin Emperor, Ancillary Whatever, and (sadly) KJA’s novel were in the same category for me, though, so maybe it’s just that I’m easily bored.

                1. I was highly disappointed in the Best Novel category (really I was disappointed in many of the nominations other than the Novella category, and the Campbells) I liked The Goblin Emperor, but it had a golden age, slower paced, tell rather than show, sort of style. Other than that, yeah I thought that 3BD was readable but fairly dull, Ancillary was bad but better than the other two.

                  I know a lot of people bragged up KJA, but this was my first taste of him, and frankly I despised ALL of the characters except for the one teenaged girl, and halfway through the LONG slog there was no apparent plot, yet. I was hoping the multitude of MC’s scattered across the galaxy would all gather up so the giant meteor of death could wipe them all out and the book could end. I finally gave up at about 60%. When I found myself looking forward to the need to get up and wash dishes rather than force myself to continue reading, I decided I would call it good and leave it off the ballot.

                  The less said about Skin Game, the better, all I’ll say is at least they only gave me an excerpt, so I didn’t feel bad at quitting at the end of it.

                  On the other hand, both of those authors are bestsellers, so obviously quite a few somebodies like them, unlike a lot of the PC nominations that the puppy kickers nominate most years.

                  Frankly, if I had been voting politically like I am accused of, I would have voted Kevin first and then either 3BD or Goblin Emperor (I have no idea about that authors politics, but suspect they are not totally leftist approved, simply because her work is apolitical) and No Awarded the other two.

                  1. Speaks to taste. Skin Game is, IMO, the best of the Dresden series so far and I own all of them. Plus all the short stories. Could be I self-identify with the main character being a nerd and a wiseass.

                    KJA has written good stuff (Dan Shamble stuff was fun, plus of course Star Wars), but that particular one… wasn’t his best by any stretch.

                    Ancillary Noun takes an interesting idea, neuters it, spends most of its time having characters chat over tea (slight exaggeration), and slaps it in a mil-SF shell. It could have been preaching the Gospel According to Ted Cruz and I’d still have hated it.

                    Goblin Emperor is IMO best described as pleasant, dull, preachy, and forgettable.

                2. Enjoyed Goblin Emperor – but slightly irritated that it didn’t seem to be fantasy at all, really – mentions of skin & eye color, but no cultural or psychological differences from any other pretty well written young-noble-coming-of-age tale. Just a PC throw-in to claim a category?

                  1. Well, there were the ears. I would complain a lot less about “humans with pointy ears” if writers used the ears the way she did.

        2. In the beginning it reads almost exactly like english language articles in chinese newspapers. It is clearly a style that his audience would have been familiar with. In others it is much more flowing and western.

          The biggest problem I had with it, other than almost non-existent character building, was the plot development. If you graphed it, it would be a gradually rising line as we learn more about the world, followed by a plateau, then a sharp spike up (or down) as the plot reveals a major development. Repeat that 3 or 4 times and you have the novel. At every spike (or drop, if your graph tends downward) the novel changed. Suddenly you have new information and the plot develops from there, until the next revelation. The revelation always comes from outside, with the characters just along for the ride.

          Some novel ideas, not a great story, no compelling characters, plot is revealed thru deus ex machina. Got a big fat pass because it was a translation and westerners don’t understand chinese culture and history well enough to judge it’s merits. IMO.

          nick

          1. Apparently the 1/2/3/4 plot outline is common in Chinese lit (and other Asian lits influenced by Chinese lit, such as Japanese – the Durarara anime follows that pattern).

            The idea is 1 – Establish the situation and conflict/s, 2 – Work out all the implications and plot consequences, 3 – Plot twist that changes everything, 4 – Work out the implications and plot consequences. Repeat a couple more times for maximum pleasingness of structure.

            1. Thank you…that sounds like some of the anime I’ve watched. I’ve enjoyed it but had a lot of ‘huh’ moments and then been surprised at how fast the ending was and how often it felt unresolved. I always figured there was a Japanese way of pacing that was just alien enough to me that it seemed off.

              This seems to fit my description.

            2. I may have to try that book out now. I’ve been intellectually curious about other cultures’ story structures for the last few years. Two main reasons, one being that one of my editing clients (TK Naliaka) is heavily influenced by African storytelling styles, which flow very differently than Western ones. It’s been an interesting challenge to make them accessible to American audiences without losing the character that makes them stand out. You’ll have to read the books and decide for yourselves whether we succeeded (next one should be done editing soon, I’m working on it again). The other was that a ranted some time ago at how Miyazaki’s films drove me crazy, especially Spirited Away. I loved the leisurely pace of the stories, the fascinating worldbuilding (I just roll my eyes and smile at the environmentalist tilt that slides in), but then there’s this slam bang abrupt ending. The acquaintance politely listening to my complaints explained that he was using the structure of traditional Japanese folktales. I still can’t quite enjoy that structure, but I find it fascinating how it’s effective for others.

              1. Nothing wrong with the TK Naliaka stories, IMHO. They have almost a historical/western sort of feel to me, but that may be because they remind me very heavily of an author (I don’t remember their name, but vaguely seem to think they were female, as I suspect TK is, simply by the feel) I read a number of books by quite a few years ago. And all the books that author wrote were Christian historicals based in the West.

              2. You might also try Cordwainer Smith’s stories, if you haven’t already. I’ve read that his stories use a number of Chinese literary tropes and conventions. I can’t verify that, because I’m not familiar with Chinese literature, but in his non-pen name existence he spent significant time in China, and his godfather was Sun Yat Sen.

                  1. E. Hoffman Price, little known today, lived and wrote from a similar background. Think either DAW or Del Rey published.

                2. Actually, you can probably still find it even though it’s nearly 15 years old but there is an exceptional hardback collection of Smith’s stories, at least all the Instrumentality ones (did he write any others).

            3. One I’d noted with Bleach (the 10-20 episodes in the soul society specifically) and several others is

              1) set up the situation

              2) Get all the major protagonists for this plot and tell you their backstory, with JUST enough current events to keep a sense of (some, small) progress

              3) spend 2-3 episodes looking at what happens when they all intersect.

              4) Repeat….

              2. I just considered it done when they ran out of squads for the 3rd ending animation.

                😉

            4. Thank you for that explanation. It makes a lot of sense. Perhaps more to the point, it makes Camille Paglia’s points about Western art much more pointed and accurate.

      2. Personally I bounced off the part where the “laws of nature are not invariant!” hysteria hit.

        We figured that out the first time someone realized you had to boil an egg longer in the mountains.

        1. Evidence suggests that the laws of nature are invariant — but our understanding of them is woefully inadequate. Life’s tough for a 4D entity in a 21D universe.

          1. Thus far, whenever things have been variant, we’ve been able to fit them into a metarule where they are invariant, there are just more variables.

  9. Well, I didn’t find it worth it, but I bet you half the people who voted for it voted either under the illusion they were favoring Chicoms OR as a slam against the puppies.

    It rather boggles my mind, that over 60 years after the Korean War, 50 years after the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and 35-40 years after the Cambodian genocide, you can still find adult human beings who imagine Chinese Communism to have been a good thing, and in leadership positions in anything other than organizations devoted to torturing kittens. They do not seem to grasp that, were they in the Cultural Revolution, the chances are that they would be either beaten to death or forced to work themselves to the point of collapse on collective farms. The Chinese Communists, like the Russian Bolsheviks, wound up eating their own.

    I was shocked about 10 years ago to see in a library, a children’s book with a title along the lines of He Made a Revolution: Mao Tse-Tung. The obvious intent was to present him as a role model. For some reason, there was no similar work about that other creative revolutionary, Adolf Hitler.

    Those of you celebrating might want to take a deep breath and wonder — for just a minute — if you did anything more than what Theodore Beale wanted. Because from where I’m sitting, the man that set out to destroy the field and prove that everyone calling themselves its leadership were mannerless and brainless children not only won last night, he won walking away. He won without DOING anything. He won by convincing yourselves to hit yourselves repeatedly with the obvious hammers of partisanship, lack of care for quality and INTEREST in the health of the field.

    Beale said all along that he would regard “No Award” sweeping the categories as a victory, beacause in doing so he nullified the utiltiy of the Hugos as a reward dispensible for the Tor Clique. Which is exactly what happened. They went from a condition in which they got dreck like “If You Were An Editor” nominated and semi-dreck awarded, to one where almost nothinggot awarded, and they did so at the expense of Tor publicly insulting several of its authors and tens of thousands of its readers. Which reduces Tor’s profits and hence its attractiveness as a publisher for authors.

    Hmm, who would benefit from Tor becoming less competitive? Might it be someone who owns a rival science fiction publishing house? A house like Castalia, owned by — Theodore Beale?

    Naah. Must be entirely coincidental.

    1. The Chinese don’t even think that Chinese Communism is a good thing. They just can’t figure out how to get rid of it without a huge mess and civil war.

      1. I’ve noticed that. Their economy is no longer even Communist in the important sectors — just fascist. Private enterprise produces and bribes officials not to take everything they made, and in some cases to crack down on their competitors. Utterly nasty, and ironically quite familiar to anyone who has read cyberpunk..

        1. The Chinese have merely reproduced, in Mao jackets, the traditional Chinese pattern of warlordism. Just as the Russians replaced the Tsar with the Soviet but retained the same essential structure … and just as Europe still has its Aristos demanding they run things (now from Brussels!)

          Just because they pull out the carpet and dye the drapes does not mean things have actually changed. Culture is a bitc# that way.

          2. i read something a long time ago about Chinese culture. ( I am paraphrasing ) china has been invaded many times in its long history, it just absorbs them and makes them chinese

            1. And if the invaders don’t get them, then Chinese governments typically only last for a known and tracked period of time before they’re overthrown and replaced. The Communists are approaching the start of the “overthrow and replace” period, and from what I’ve heard elsewhere they’re very worried about this.

          4. There’s a book about Tsarist Russia that I have a English, abridged version of. La Russie en 1839. My edition has a foreword by someone from the American embassy in the USSR, who said that the staff there regarded it as the best guide to the USSR.

        2. Yep – fascist. And they’ve run it further along than the Nazis or Italiand Fascisti ever did – you didn’t have the 273rd Fallschirmjager Division Ball Bearing Works And Automotive Assembly Plant, or the 133° Divisione Corazzata Littorio Steel Mill And Consumer Pottery Factory, but you very much do have the equivalent in China, with factory towns owned and run by PLA units, with the Generals in charge.

          As an incentive to preserve the status quo all the way up to the top, you really can’t beat an equity interest.

          1. You are correct as far as it goes, but you must add the Party structure to understand the stability of the regime. Mass parties like the post-Mao Chinese Communist Party are new to political history, and alter the understandings we developed from Machiavelli and even Burnham. Pareto had a glimmer, as did Ortega, but we don’t have a full understanding of how such things deteriorate.

            Possony more or less discovered the nomemklatura, an inner party structure in the USSR, but had a massive stroke before he could write much about the concept. Something of that sort seems to developing in the United States.

            1. Jerry, have you seen any good stuff on the dynamics of the Nomemkaltura. We get a LOT of Soviet empire exile engineers her in CT for some reason, so I know a fair amount about the life of an average comrade, but only have inklings of how the top works.

      2. I actually really liked 3BP, it was high on my final vote list. I thought the end was a bit contrived and the bomb scene should have been cut or edited for probability, but I LOVED the beginning. I was very interested in how the Revolution in China was perceived by a Chinese author. I thought the scene involving the scientist being censored and then publicly murdered because he had Bad-Thinks was… well let’s just say that in light of SP3, it struck a cord.

        So I had it high on my list. I won’t say how high, because I think it’s important to focus on books I love, rather than the ones I didn’t care for. So yes, I’m one of the reasons 3BP won last night. And I don’t regret it.

        Because a LOT of puppy supporters did this: voted for something or someone that wasn’t on the Puppy recommended slate. AND we encouraged everyone else to do the same.

        The No-Awards? The Puppy Kickers? They made blog posts detailing how to vote “puppy free.” They made an entire website advocating it. (NoAward.com)

        And that’s what this comes down to.

        One side wants you to read books, decide if you like them, then vote accordingly. We don’t care what your politics are, who your fans are, or who your friends are. For us, it’s all about good books. And that’s it.

        The puppy kickers care VERY much who your friends are, who your fans are, and whether or not you engage in incorrect thinking. They do not care if the books are good or if the talent is deserving. For these folks, it’s all about them.

        2. Our theme:

          Synopsis
          Resembling a music hall production more than a book musical, the allegorical plot examines the maintenance of the status quo between the upper and lower classes of British society in the 1960s. The two main characters are Sir and Cocky. Since Sir is forever changing the rules of the game of life, downtrodden young Cocky always gets the short end of the stick. … Cocky tries to beat Sir at the game, first by getting a job, and then with love, but Sir bests him both times. … By ignoring the rules, Cocky manages to win, but neither he or Sir can function without the other. The show ends with both of them frozen in a pose arguing which way to go next.
          wikipedia[DOT]org/wiki/The_Roar_of_the_Greasepaint_The_Smell_of_the_Crowd

          Now that Cocky has won the game, he tries to switch places with Sir – he wants to be the one who gets to make up the rules (which is how Sir has managed to win all the previous times – by inventing new rules every game).

          The way this number was staged live when Newley gets to the line “Your game could lead to wars”, there is a huge crash and the lights brighten then dim, as if a bomb has gone off. Newley’s finger was pointed at Sir and he gives it a look afterwards, as if to say, I didn’t know it was loaded, which got a laugh.

          From now on, we’re gonna do things my way.
          My way, or not at all.
          We’re gonna do what I wanna to when I say
          Not when you say, but when I say.

          And I say that my way is the sure way.
          My way will work out fine;
          And if you still prefer to do things your way,
          You go your way and I’ll go mine.

          From now on we’re gonna do things my way!
          No, we’re not!
          We’re gonna do things my way
          Or not at all!
          If we leave it up to you we’re gonna rue things

          We’re gonna do what I wanna do
          When I say!
          I say!
          Not when you say!
          I say!
          But when I say!
          Now let me have my say:

          I say that my way is the sure way
          We’d be better off to do things…
          My way will work out fine
          If we leave it up to you
          You’re gonna screw things

          If you’d still prefer to do things your way
          I would
          Then you go your way
          Good.
          And I’ll go mine.
          Good, and I’ll go mine.
          Good, and I’ll go mine.

          Now, let me have my say:
          From now on we’re gonna see some changes;
          Changes – that’s what we need!
          I’m gonna play what I wanna play when I say –
          Not when you say – but when I say.

          And I say that your game is a sly game.
          Your game could lead to wars;
          And if you’re not prepared to play at my game,
          Then I’ll pay my game.
          And you play yours!
          And you play yours!
          And you play yours!
          And you play yours!
          And you play yours!
          users.bestweb[DOT]net/~foosie/gpaint.htm

      1. More power to him, especially since he’s dislodging those two parasites. Who knows, maybe when the upper management finally gets sick of losing money because of them, they’ll get the heave-ho and Tor will once again become a postiive force in the field.

        I think that Vox is irrationally racialist and has crank notions of how international banking works, but that doesn’t mean he’s Pure Evil.

          1. Mind you, there are occasional situations in which international banking can work just the way he imagines (predatory lending to countries that then exhaust their economies trying to pay interest on loans on which they can never repay the principle). This usually involves corrupt Third World dictators who get kickbacks from the banks.

            What he doesn’t get is that this is impractical between First World democracies (usually because power and information are too widely distributed and the local business leaders don’t want to see their economies wrecked to benefit a politician and some foreign bankers).. Mostly because (1) he wants to see Evil Bankers everywhere (possibly as a subset or ally of Stupid Evil Jews) and (2) where it does happen in the First World is when a government realizes it can engage in deficit spending and buy votes with foreign loans (Greece, I’m looking at you), and then when the bill comes, it’s convenient to blame it on foreign bankers.

            The racialism requires a very selective reading of history — in particular, he has to avoid looking at periods (such as the Dark Ages) when his preferred superior races were doing poorly and races he doesn’t like were doing well. The truth is that pretty much every sizable racial group has had Golden Ages, and Dark Ages. We European-descended folk are both fortunate and should be proud of the fact that we carried out the Age of Exploration and the Industrial and Information Revolutions: if we just sit on our laurels and congratulate ourselves, though, we’re very likely to still be sitting when (say) the Chinese or Indians colonize the Solar System and thoroughly dominate the next millennium. People who think like Beale here are not helping matters.

              1. I don’t read VD’s blog, because most of the time there isn’t really anything on there worth reading and my time is limited. Besides, whenever something worth reading is posted there, it is invariably quoted and/or misquoted all over the internet, I can then mosey on over and read the original. I found I quite liked his fiction, however, and that of most of the authors he publishes.

                Oh, I always thought the ENTIRE POINT of his racialism was to be the mirror image of the SJWs.

            1. Darth sent flowers back to Tatooine every Mothers Day. He had standing orders for a platoon of stormtroopers to head out to the little valley where he slaughtered the Sand People that kidnapped his Mother and caused her death. There they place the flowers, replace the Sandpeople bait and re-set the stormtrooper equivalent of claymores.

          3. As far as I’ve been able to determine (and for personal reasons I have been spending considerable time on this project) VD is only “pure evil” insofar as one or two of his ideas are dead wrong.

            For the life of me I have been unable to discover the evil things he’s done.

            In this I may be more libertarian-minded than our host (or just more liberal, and i’m not using it in a complimentary sense)

            I find it hard to condemn people as evil for their ideas.

      2. According to Vox, it’s “personal” because:

        For over ten years I was repeatedly attacked, unprovoked, by various members of your weird little community. I ignored most of their repeated jabs, their libels, their false accusations, their nasty insinuations, and their insults. […] But when John Scalzi, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, N.K. Jemisin, and Steven Gould, among others, made an attempt to publicly destroy my reputation, I decided I would not ignore it any longer.

        SJWs don’t seem to be in the habit of thinking things through.

        1. IN my experience SJWs are so certain of the “rightness” of their actions that they never consider what the consequences might be.

          1. SJWs do not really believe that anyone outside their circle is really human. They think everyone else is a chess piece.

            “The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it.

            He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.” — Adam Smith

            The proof of this is no matter how often their plans end in disaster because of the eminently predictable — but unpredicted — reaction of humans to it, they never generalize; every time they think that their plans will have the effect they intend, and no other.

            2. SJWs do not really believe that anyone outside their circle is really human. They think everyone else is a chess piece.

              The very definition of the borderline or malignant narcissist.

              The other common description of those maladies is “emotionally stunted” – as in they never outgrew being children….

              1. The more I deal with SJWs, the more I’m convinced that Anonymous Conservative’s small amygdala theory has some truth to it.

        2. So . . . the CHORFs basically created Vox Day?

          Yeah, that sounds pretty much like all of the history that I’ve been reading nonstop the past couple of years now.

          1. I’d never heard of him until a few years ago when SJW’s brought him and similar blogs to my attention. Even then it took me nearly a year to get he and the author of Alpha Game were the same person.

          2. So . . . the CHORFs basically created Vox Day?

            Yeah. John Wright just learned that and goes in to more detail than I knew in this “Smeagol Nielson Hayden” essay, which starts with an incident before the awards ceremony where his wife, also a published Tor author, went to Patrick Nielsen Hayden to extend the olive branch and got viciously attacked before finishing her first sentence. Wright thinks Patrick is the most important SJW that’s brought about the current state of affairs, and then goes on to say “It seemed that the monster known as Vox Day is a creation entirely of Mr. Patrick Nielsen Hayden….” For example, sees changes in Vox Day’s prose and approach to all this which are quite understandable if one has been subject to an unprovoked campaign of vilification for a decade and counting.

          3. So . . . the CHORFs basically created Vox Day?

            Will that drive them to muttering “It was ME…” over and over again?

    4. It rather boggles my mind, that over 60 years after the Korean War, 50 years after the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and 35-40 years after the Cambodian genocide, you can still find adult human beings who imagine Chinese Communism to have been a good thing, and in leadership positions in anything other than organizations devoted to torturing kittens.

      Why not? There are still people who think communism in general is a good thing, in spite of the 20-odd million deaths directly attributable to the USSR and its leadership.

      1. … and they’ve been at it longer than the Chinese.

        (Really need to work on finishing my thoughts, or at least waiting till I’ve purged the blood from my caffeine stream. 😛 )

      2. “There are still people who think communism in general is a good thing, BECAUSE of the 20-odd million deaths directly attributable to the USSR and its leadership.”

        There, I fixed it for you.

      4. Remember the folks PJ O’Rourke took the Nation magazine cruise of Russia with. They all came to witness and testify to the superiority of the Soviet System… but they brought their own toilet paper.

        1. Given what the publisher, editors, writers and readers of the Nation are (and have always been) full of, that seems little more than a polite gesture on their part, like a dinner guest bringing wine.

      5. Hell, there were people still yearning for the return of the Stewarts IN THE BRITISH MILITARY when David Niven was serving. I’m sure that there are idiots in the Vatican who still think the Holy roman Empire should be revived.

        We lose sight of the fact that the Communism Fans aren’t anything new or modern. There are always discontented morons who imagine that some system, widely proven a failure, would grner them the recognition and power they deserve. Petty little idiots plotting away in corners and gumming up the works.

        The Liberal Intellectual Radical Progressives are dangerous now because they got a lot of social and political power in the 20th Century, and are only losing it slowly. Like the Social Darwinists, or the Plantation Aristocracy they are gong to kick and scream the whole way to the ash-heap of history. We can hope they aren’t stupid enough to play the Civil War card – they certainly aren’t suited to win one, but neither were the Confederates. At least the Comfederates understood military matter to a degree. I see to,evidence that the LIRPs do.

        1. LIRPs can always be counted on to drill holes in the bottom of the boat to make it ride lower and more stably.

    5. It rather boggles my mind, that over […] 35-40 years after the Cambodian genocide, you can still find adult human beings who imagine Chinese Communism to have been a good thing, and in leadership positions in anything other than organizations devoted to torturing kittens.

      Indeed. The eluded Korean War, and let’s not forget the Great Leap Forward, or “let a hundred flowers bloom” targeted at people like us, and most of the Cultural Revolution happened before I was alive or politically aware, but people like my family which had been cursing North Vietnam for years were all “Go, NVA!” (North Vietnamese Army) and their national guard equivalent when the former invaded Cambodia to put paid to the Khmer Rouge and the latter stomped the PRC’s punitive attack in response.

    6. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. It certainly sounds pretty, but what most naive Americans fail to realize is *who* gets to decide the ability and need. It isn’t you, it is the politburo. Progressives have already been doing this to blacks and non-elite whites in this country. They can’t be educated (ability), so ‘dumb down’ education. Start: creation of Department of Education. They ‘need’ welfare, so the Great Society. The latest, more inhumane offering is the politburo’s realization that they were breeding too much to sustain the welfare, so abortion and planned parenthood. This morphs into we have all these baby parts, can we sell them for research to let Hillary Clinton live to be 200?
      Content of their character? Too hard for the politburo to actually determine the individual ability, so lump them all together. Thus blacks especially, the ones from the rural south, where they have nuclear families and Faith can rise above the societal hardship and produce gifted children. They can, I have met some of them. Instead, the politburo lumps them in with people from single family homes in urban ghettos where neither family or Faith are present. Gangs are.
      The quote sounds humane and individually tailored, but it is too hard to establish such a system based on individual needs and skills, so they have to be lumped together into a ‘victim’ class where the same assumptions and results are applied to the group. Lowest common denominator is the result. The hopeless grey world of Socialism, where the wheels of authority grind individuality into clones. The world SJWs want to celebrate in the Hugo Awards.
      I fear for our country and our world.

      2. Thing is, centrally-planned communism requires all humans to be omnibenevolent and the central planners to be omnibenevolent and omniscient. (Saints being led by God, if you will.)

        If you assume omnibenevolent humans – and communism breaks down if you don’t, so you might as well – you can eliminate the need for omniscience by retaining the market system and simply allowing everyone to draw as much money from the central bank, or whatever, as they wish, with only their perfect self-discipline as a limiting factor.

        So I made a salary of 100,000 utility units, for which the only benefit is the warm glow of knowing my assistance last year was worth that to him. If I need 200 UUs worth of groceries, or 2000 UUs worth of medical care, I don’t to ask myself if I have the money; I just ask myself if the goods are honestly that valuable to me, because if they’re not I should leave them where they are for someone else to whom they _are_ worth that much utility to come along.

        Next year, say my boss’s business has hard times, and he has to admit that he and his dozen employees only generated 800,000 UUs last year, of which he paid half in rent and supplies — but that I was still one of his most valuable employees — he might cut my salary down to 40,000 UUs. Depending on how much I like working there and how likely I think his business is to recover, I might look for a job where I can do more good, or I might stick it out and hope he can turn things around.

        YES, this requires simply silly amounts of honesty, self-discipline, and general willingness to strive for the good of others. Does it actually require any more of any of those than centrally-planned communism and the “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” setup?

        1. “Thing is, centrally-planned communism requires all humans to be omnibenevolent and the central planners to be omnibenevolent and omniscient. (Saints being led by God, if you will.).”

          And if you read Book of Acts, 4:32 – 5:11, Ananias and Sephira, that’s exactly what the early church tried….. and still couldn’t manage to hold it together. If the 12 Apostles backed up by God couldn’t make communism work, how in the h*ll would any lesser mortals have a shot??

          1. I’ve read that passage — not only did you have Christian fanatics (they were all fanatics in those days) being led by even more fanatic Christians (the apostles) you had God enforcing the rules. Though note that Ananias and Sephira were struck down not for keeping some for themselves but for lying about it, claiming a the fullness of a virtue they only had part of. The text is fairly clear in Sephira’s case: she was asked if the money handed over was the entire sum received, and she was struck down after she said yes. It appears to have worked at the time described in the Acts; it just didn’t last, whether because they eventually went through everyone’s savings (as it said people sold land and gave money to the apostles and there’s no textual evidence of the group making similar purchases) or because eventually the apostles died or for some other reason altogether.

            If you go back to the Old Testament, the economic structure God instructs them to use could be described as capitalism with partial resets at fifty year intervals. You couldn’t buy or sell land, you leased it and it all went back to the heirs of the people given it by God every fifty years; they weren’t allowed to pledge it past then, and the “purchase” price was explicitly supposed to take that into consideration. Debts were to be forgiven at the same time, and you *weren’t* supposed to refuse to lend because you’d lose the money when your debtor didn’t pay until the year of jubilee arrived. (I’m dubious that could happen, but it makes more sense in a static economy than it would nowadays: people borrowing would have been more likely to be doing so in order to eat until the work arrives or the harvest comes in, and less likely to be doing so because they hoped to make money with the capital they’d borrowed.) Movable property and land and houses in cities, on the other hand, could be bought and sold outright.

            So the farmers – the vast majority of the population at the time – were supposed to be allowed to start over every fifty years; your father (or even grandfather) may have lost everything he had, but when the year of jubilee arrived you’d get your chance to restart. But on the flip side, even if you were a Really Good farmer there was no way to buy a farm to leave to your son; all you could do was accumulate was goods (including animals, but without land you might be hard put to feed them after the year of jubilee) and money.

            However, if you worked at some other trade – craftsman or scholar or anything which didn’t require land – this didn’t affect you. Thus, a potter or blacksmith *could* leave his shop to his son. The specialized work (I won’t say skilled work because there’s a lot of skill involved in being a good farmer) could be passed on generationally even if the line of craftsmen had started off as farmers or in some other trade.

    7. They do not seem to grasp that, were they in the Cultural Revolution, the chances are that they would be either beaten to death or forced to work themselves to the point of collapse on collective farms. The Chinese Communists, like the Russian Bolsheviks, wound up eating their own.

      As an old conservative I look forward to hearing the screams of, “but I supported the revolution” from the useful idiots being shot in the prison yard while I’m locked up. I’m 50/50 on getting shot with them or getting held until I’m too old to be trouble. Either way, I’ll get to enjoy their tears as their precious revolution consumes them.

        1. You have to remember, I’ve reached the point where I vote GOP not because they can save the country but because their “socialism tomorrow” philosophy (which is speeding up, see Walkercare) may run the clock on collapse to past my death while the Democrat’s “socialism now” philosophy insures I’ll live to see it.

          Being in spitting distance of 50 without children and a highly mixed relationship in terms of heirs with any nieces and nephews you have leave you with a very different perspective. If I didn’t have a wife several years younger and likely to outlive me by 10-20 years (my health will get me relatively young…I’m not betting on seeing 70) I wouldn’t just think maybe we should burn it down but grabbing the gasoline.

          1. Please do not misunderstand–I’m just going to do my best to hold things together for as long as possible so that the people setting up off the grid have as good a chance as possible to make it through when things crash.

        1. First order of business after winning the revolution, “Shot all the revolutionaries!”

          1. The fun part is that after every revolution, you do have to sort out the revolutionaries who resorted to violence for the sake of the revolution and those who resorted to revolution for the sake of the violence. . . .

        2. Comrade, when did you stop? All good Commies know that if the Party needs you to confess to trumped up charges for the good of the Revolution, you confess. Abjectly. With the full awareness that it will not win you clemency.

  10. I was embarrassed by the applause for No Award. I cringed when Connie Willis, someone whose writing I enjoy and own nearly every book of, used her time at the podium to gleefully trash another writer–Stephenie Meyer–who had nothing to do with the current Hugo situation. It felt very Mean Girls and classless and epitomized the evening.

    1. On the other hand, having read one of the sparkly vampire books, and looked at their sales records, comparing them to the current Hugo winners. Yep, I find some truth in her sarcastic statement, they DO deserve a Hugo more than a lot of what has been winning the last quite a few years.

      1. I’m telling you, we should make sure the 2015 Highlander novel (the time-travel romance series selling metric butt tons) is the Hugo novel next year.

        I want to see just how much the typical panty can twist.

        1. What, Gabaldon’s writing more of those?

          ‘Cause the originals were written in the 80s or 90s

          1. One in 2014 and an ongoing TV series unless I’m conflating things.

            No, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood (2014). So, the TV series for 2016 and the probable forthcoming book in 2017/2018.

    2. Yes, there is private and there is public, especially that kind of officially public that was. So Meyer’s books have their faults, and some of the fans are kinda weird, but they must have struck some chord in many people because if they hadn’t they wouldn’t have sold as much, and making fun of that in that kind of venue is not mature because it also hits all of her fans. Fans who might mature into reading other things, so potentially she also insulted people who might have become, or maybe some who already are, HER fans, and that’s just not right.

      1. I have turned Twilight bashing into an unofficial sport in my family.

        However, has any of the Twilight books won a Hugo, I’d have dealt with it a lot better than some of the crap that’s been winning. At least it has a big enough following and enough sales that winning a fan award makes sense.

        1. I am a stout believer in the idea that vampires should only sparkle when on fire but I could not fault the win. It did drive field to some extent

        2. Remember how Kate was talking about the whining over that concentration camp guard romance? Not all Nazis were cannibals. Vampires are pretty much cannibals.

          There is reason to find the vampire romance genre detestable. Especially if one thinks that sex ed these days is a combination of molesting children, and teaching them to be victims.

          Complaining that someone who sells better is unwholesome looks petty. Write what you find wholesome, and work on pulling in readers.

          2. Except that Meyer in Twilight essentially wrote that no matter how apalling the event (turned into vampire) or compelling the urge (blooooood!) People still have moral gency, and hope for the future.

            Great Scott. When I put it that way, no woder the chattering class had a hard on for trashing Twilight. I just thought being a goopy romance with an LDS author provided enough legitimacy for them to hate. And they do seem to really get off on hating en masse.

            1. I saw on the internet a then sixteen year old’s sig complaining that Meyer had destroyed an entire generation of feminists.

              Haven’t read Twilight. Heard a lot of complaints.

              Sexually creepy: So is a lot of romance.
              Strained adaptation of myth: So is a lot of PNR.
              Seems stupid if you aren’t a teenage girl: Folks in their twenties and thirties aren’t necessarily all that bright either. Lots of folks get pretty stupid when their buttons are pushed.

              I figured that it was a combination of popular, not enough rightthink, and maybe style.

              1. Two thoughts on Twilight.

                First, there was a poster going around that shows one of the old movie vampire holding the torn-off head of Twilight’s Vampire with the caption “Real Vampires Don’t Sparkle”. [Evil Grin]

                Second, one of Barbara Hambly’s Vampires is shown messing in the dreams of a minor adult female character. In her dreams, the Vampire is shown as a tragic romantic Vampire (which is very far from the truth). He’s doing so do to control the female character (although he isn’t planning to kill her). The idea here is Real Vampires aren’t Tragic Romantic Characters. [Evil Grin]

              2. I suspect one* aspect of these complaints about the success of “poorly written” books is inherent in being a popular book in these times.

                Any book that achieves a high degree of popularity (absent a TV tie-in) is very likely to have been written at a “lowest-common-denominator” level. In this era of degenerate edumacation, where an “12th-grade” reading level is actually most probably equivalent to the 8th-grade level of a half century ago, such flaws as well as stylistic and structural simplicity are simply inevitable.

                That the folks turning up their noses at such reading matter are in the main responsible for dumbing down education.

                *There are undoubtedly others, especially including insufficient rightthink.

    3. And then Mr. Gerrold instructed the crowd that while applause for no award was OK, booing was not. Translation: either approve or shut up, take what we give you and like it or go away.
      Message received loud and clear, you self important sack of shite.

      1. I don’t get why he’s so obsessed with the politics and has apparently given up writing actual science fiction. He was never great, but he used to be pretty good — his War Against the Chtorr series in particular was Heinleinesque. Is it that his desire to be politically-correct shut that series down, because that series was anything but PC? And was un-PC so deeply in its internal logic that there was no way to write a “fix?”

        If so, then he’s a sad example of why you should focus on writing what you want, and worry later about what others might think.

          1. Yeah, it was an interesting idea, and started well, but seems to have turned into a one-man “how can I trump the perversion in the last story?” contest.

            Anyone else remember the “Thieve’s World” shared universe anthologies? Great start, but some of the authors got into a race to see who could be more shocking, and the stories suffered.

            1. Yeah, I started reading that back when I was younger. But after the first couple of volumes, there wasn’t much point. Ironically, one of the best moments from a story-telling perspective, imo, was when one of the authors wrote out the invincible (Wolverine healing factor) blood knight character… and then someone else screwed things up by writing him back in.

            1. No, it was weirder than that. I soldiered on past that point which really was trying to say something but I suspect that it contributed to how easily I gave up on the series when it became clear I was more likely to get another Heinlein than book 5.

        2. Maybe because he has had writer’s block on the Chtorr books so lone (20+ years) that those of us who invested in them have given up.

          1. In retrospect it’s no wonder he got tired of writing the Chtorr books – all I had to do was read them and I gave up on them before he did.

            Gerrold’s main problem is that he doesn’t know how to write stories that go anywhere. His setups are reasonably good and his characters are well done, but given his head he just wanders aimlessly off into the weeds. And stays there.

    4. I watched the whole thing. The Connie Willis bit, my stream kind of crapped out in there, and I didn’t actually get that she was crapping on another author’s works. Twilight and the sequels were a fantastically successful franchise. I thought it was a bit teenager romance, and the sparkly vampire thing was silly, but hey, Meyer made a ton of money, so go Stephanie.

      Having said that, Twilight, sparkly vampires and all, was a superior read to the appalling crap short story that they gave a Hugo to, “The Day The World Turned Upside Down”. That was pure spite, and it is precisely what we said they would do if they could.

      I did not read Three Body Problem, but if it has the aliens behaving like humans are cockroaches then it’s 100% in line with everything I’ve come to expect from “literary” science fiction. This is their default mode, and seeing it displayed so openly for posterity is vastly satisfying.

      Also

      I look forward to the coming year, when it will be Sad Puppies: Cry havoc, and let slip the Dogs of War!

      1. Welllll… while cockroaches can be very difficult to handle, I am not sure the usual approach involves psyops to try to get them to give up.

      2. The day the world turned upside down in one sentence. “Gravity reversed, the atmosphere fell away into the universe and everyone stuck on ceilings asphyxiated like fish on a beach.”

        1. Yeah, and I really loved how all the MASONRY buildings didn’t instantly fall into the sky.

          Its stuff like not knowing that a brick wall has pretty much zero tensile strength that makes my blood boil. That and a guy who lets a wounded neighbor fall to her death because he’s rescuing a gold fish.

          I think that story getting a Hugo (or even a nomination) speaks so much louder than Noah Ward ever could. Its hateful, and like the Water that Falls stupidity of previous years, it epitomizes why I’m a Sad Puppy. Next year we make them burn it ALL down. All of it. Then they salt their own fields with their own tears, while I drink beer and cheer them on.

    5. Stephanie Meyer wrote terrible books that, if you follow the life philosophy contained within them, will at best lead you to much heartache and at worst to an early grave, then populated them with cardboard characters.
      I must confess that I do not see how this differentiates her from most of the anti-Puppies.

      1. Simple, her bad philosophy spoke to people enough to get them to actually read it. It might not be healthy but at least it did the first thing writing should, communicated, and the first thing pleasure writing should, provide entertainment.

        1. Laughing all the way to the bank comes to mind.
          I’ve never read her work; however, if people buy it and enjoy reading it, I will be the last to complain.

      2. Meyer is kind of like GRRM, I don’t care for their books (actually I liked the one Meyer’s book much better than I did the GRRM I tried, but I’m not really into anxy teen girl books) but they are coherent writers who are obviously very popular, by their sales numbers. I’m not going to complain about a “fan award” going to a huge bestseller, even if I despise the book, because obviously there are a lot of fans that liked it enough to buy it.

      3. Which philosophy is that? Straw Twilight is a real jerk, i’ll grant you, but I’m interested in the actual books. Which I’ve read. Not the popular memes parroted about them.

        1. The one where a guy says: I’m desperately trying not to kill you right now because every fiber of my being demands it, and the girl says: oh, how romantic!

        2. “I’m interested in the actual books. Which I’ve read. Not the popular memes parroted about them.”

          Is that even allowed?

          1. “Is that even allowed?”

            Certainly not among the cognoscenti. However I understand those dreadful Puppies actually -read- the books. Simply ghastly!

    6. I think a lot of that joke depended on the knowledge that Connie Willis was hospitalized recently for a bat bite. I didn’t read her so much as bashing Stephenie Meyer as *making a joke about turning into a vampire because of the bite*.

    7. I witnessed similar behavior from Ms. Willis at another convention some years back. I’m not surprised.

  11. Entrenched defenders are always difficult to dislodge, and the SJWs have their political officers behind the lines to shoot any who think of retreat. So it is going to take more than a single throw of the dice to dislodge those who have dedicated themselves to making the Hugos hostage.

    A look at the vote counts suggests they have little ability to deliver an award, merely to deny it to others. It seems unlikely they can significantly grow their bloc, so wresting the awards from their [adjective deleted] grasp is merely a matter of time.

    One more thing: in awarding future Worldcons, such twaddle as that stacked panel must be counted against any bid. The bidding parties should be held to avow representative panels for discussions of any SF/F controversies, not panel discussions so lop-sided they would embarrass MSNBC or Bill Maher.

  12. I wish I had ponied up the coin this year. I hereby resolve to find the cash, coin, whatever for a voting membership for Sad Puppies 4. If they burn it down again next year, then so be it. I guess we all must fight.

      2. And it’s in Kansas City. We should all show up, if for no other reason than to see the looks on their faces when three thousand-plus Wrongfans show up.

        1. I kind of wanted to cosplay at the next con I made it to, but now I’m torn between that and wearing t-shirts, pins, etc. identifying as an activist to cure puppy-related sadness, a wrongfan, a Hun… I shall have to ponder.

          1. The old standby of “Don’t tread on me” maybe with a bisected dachshund would work. Those from Texas could opt for “Come and take it” with a rocket in place of our beloved Gonzales cannon.

          2. Body armor, FN-FAL, kukri and a Monster Hunter International shoulder patch. It should be like a uniform.

            1. I can actually lay hold of most of that, though I’ll be slathered in peace bondings. 😀 Thanks for the suggestion!

  13. I didn’t vote or nominate at all this year, so I was just an interested viewer than in anyway a participant last night. But I remember my jaw hanging several times, and I had to keep asking myself, do they have any idea what they’re doing? Well, they’re going to find out.

  15. I’ve spoken publicly on this topic and I do congratulate the winners.

    However, I’ll say that (since I was in attendance at the ceremony) I was hugely disappointed in the lack of professionalism for an awards ceremony.

    I’ve never witnessed a ceremony which purports to be serious denigrate other members of its retinue.

    I point specifically to the quips and denigration of a hugely successful novel like Twilight. I’ll admit I personally was indifferent to it. However, the MC and others made a point to use that as a whipping post of contrast to what “good literature” was like.

    How utterly egotistical and disgraceful.

    Even if it was written inelegantly or it didn’t meet some other unwritten measure, it IS a member of the literary archive. You don’t make fun of literature at a literary awards ceremony and expect to believe people won’t find you (Fandom) as immature clods.

    The decision to vote NO AWARD on categories which had historically worthy candidates is akin to Fandom choosing to throw away the award. It’s not a good day for the Hugos. I personally find the choice of its use as a reason to mourn.

    1. I point specifically to the quips and denigration of a hugely successful novel like Twilight. I’ll admit I personally was indifferent to it. However, the MC and others made a point to use that as a whipping post of contrast to what “good literature” was like.

      Also,Twilight (like Harry Potter) has gotten new readers into urban fantasy, which leads to fantasy and science fiction in general. It’s not a good thing to mock those who are growing the field.

      Yes, I have problems with the Twilight series. But then I have problems with a lot of books and series, including many I generally like. And … I’ll say this … Twilight and its sequels gave Rosanna and I a lot of reading pleasure. It was corny and even stupid in places, but it was fun. Which is, ultimately, what fiction is for.

      1. I suspect they are less interested in including new readers than they are in excluding “wrong” readers. Small fish need small ponds in order to imagine themselves big.

    3. Reminds me. Eric Raymond has an essay on how SF is getting crappier and “not-SF” because it gets away from it’s core premises, and suffers from “Literary Status Envy”

  16. We should change the name from “Sad Puppies” to “Angry Puppies”. [Very Very Very Pissed Off]

    Unleash The Hell-Hound Bitches!!!!!

  17. I’ve said this elsewhere but it bears repeating: you don’t “win” a culture war by insulting and humiliating your opponents, because at the end of the day they are still there, only they’re angier and more determined and hate you more and more.

    This is a lesson the CHORFs still haven’t learned — but it’s one the Puppies need to keep in mind, too.

    1. It’s also a reminder what happens when people decide to walk away from something when it starts to veer in a direction they don’t like. Because isn’t that what happened with Hugos? The puppy-kickers who now have it got full control because too many others – people who think their real lives beyond fandom and other hobbies, like their jobs and their families, matter more – got tired and decided not to waste their time, and now it may be too late to get it back from them? The progressives keep at it and keep at it and keep at, take every victory, no matter how small, and always at least vote against somebody if they can’t find something they actually approve of to vote for, and so they slowly keep gaining ground.

      1. This is the tendency in any voluntary organization. Those who have the time and desire to focus on the organization eventually push out those who are marginally attached. The ones who remain are usually interested in personal power within the organization, and using it to their own ends.

        nick

        1. Exactly. it’s the Iron law of Bureaucracy as applied to volunteer organizations.

          And if you notice and say something, the inevitable response is “It’s wide open, you can change it if you don’t like it.” Except when the rot has spread far enough, you can’t, not without a full house-cleaning. And those in control, as amply just demonstrated, WILL burn down the house rather than lose any small bit of it.

          1. Oddly enough various Fans told Larry and others (me for example about 10 years ago) that if we didn’t like it we should take part more and encourage others to do likewise.

            Well we did.

            And they went full toddler and threw their toys out of the pram with extreme prejudice.

          1. That would be historian Robert Conquest, loathed by “progressives” for documenting Soviet mass murder, who passed away very recently.

          2. Mr. Pournelle,
            I frequently quote your Iron Law to the folks I work with (I’m in the Navy, in case you couldn’t guess). I agree wholeheartedly that it is an outstanding explanation for the behavior we’re seeing.
            Thank you!

      2. The puppy-kickers who now have it got full control because too many others – people who think their real lives beyond fandom and other hobbies, like their jobs and their families, matter more – got tired and decided not to waste their time, and now it may be too late to get it back from them?

        So, the Hugos are the result of those having real lives beyond fandom actually having real lives while the CHORFs have nothing to claim they’ve done but wear funny costumes and party at random hotels on the weekends.

        I’m good with that assessment and, in the future, will judge Hugos and fandom accordingly.

  18. I was pretty disgusted by the snarky jabs against the Puppies that were buried everywhere in that performance. The asterisk thing was really offensive. David Gerrold saying that it wasn’t okay to boo “No award” when it *was* okay to cheer and applaud it?? Wow.

    A big part of my reaction was sadness, that I’ve been made to feel unwelcome, disrespected, and “otherized” in the SFF “community”.

    I’m not sure what I think the best policy for next year is. Now that they’ve all slate voted “No Award”, I don’t feel much compunction any more about doing that. But like Sarah, I would prefer to actually make the Hugo meaningful. But if I can’t get that (and it certainly looks like that won’t be the case for years, if ever), I’d like to have a list of good book recommendations.

    We’re more than halfway through the year already, so I think we should be collecting lists of worthwhile books for next year, so it’s not all at the last minute. I’d like to volunteer to help with SP4, if anybody is taking names.

    Also, as a side note, I think that it would be best if we said outright that we’re *not* going to ask “permission” to put somebody on a recommendation list. That was always an incredibly stupid “rule” that was invented by the anti-puppies, and after the disgraceful performance by the anti-puppies this year, a lot of people are probably going to decline. And it would be sooo much fun to recommend some book that the anti-puppies want to recommend too.

          1. And how many times does it take finding out that turning down the nomination doesn’t save them–after all the SP liked them so they can’t be…–before they start learning that they’ve got nothing to lose by going with it?

        3. Nominate Tor books, then. They can either turn down the nomination they crave or have the the puppies “give” them the Hugo.

          1. “Nominate Tor books, then. They can either turn down the nomination they crave ”

            Like they did with Kevin J. Anderson this year? Yes, I didn’t vote for him, because I found his book so bad I couldn’t finish it, but I also didn’t vote No Award. Tor on the other hand actively campaigned to No Award one of their own authors.

            2. Would that be some sort of contract violation? Is there not some clause requiring the publisher of a book to not bad-mouth it?

              1. Apparently not.

                It is, however, not a best business practice especially in a field where there appears to be a growing alternative or two. Also, it especially isn’t when you’re shrinking (see the shutdown of Tor UK).

      2. And when someone on their side is recommended and nominated via a WrongThink source, they can remove themselves for reasons and tell us all how it’s not about the politics of othering and hatred.

    2. The asterisk thing was really offensive. David Gerrold saying that it wasn’t okay to boo “No award” when it *was* okay to cheer and applaud it?? Wow.

      Indeed, I wasn’t aware that the Chtorr ecosystem is now supposed to control fandom as well.

      Also, as a side note, I think that it would be best if we said outright that we’re *not* going to ask “permission” to put somebody on a recommendation list. That was always an incredibly stupid “rule” that was invented by the anti-puppies, and after the disgraceful performance by the anti-puppies this year, a lot of people are probably going to decline. And it would be sooo much fun to recommend some book that the anti-puppies want to recommend too.

      I totally agree with that. Why should we play by the other side’s rules? The more complex we make their voting problem, the harder it is for them to simply buy votes.

    3. I agree with that sadness and feeling of being unwelcome. I have a friend trying to get me to come to WorldCon next year. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Not when I could spend the same time and money on something like GenCon and actually have fun.

      1. No, come. We’ll be there, unless house doesn’t sell and I’m living under a bridge. And a LOT of huns will be there too. Come sit at the back and throw spitballs with us. Revolutions can be fun.

        1. I lack the money to come but if I had the money I suspect that I’d want to spend more time with the Huns (male & female) & the Bar-flies than at the World-Con events.

            1. I just went into a sincere and spontaneous evil cackle at that. Let’s do it! This is our home too.

              1. Rumor begins of a certain person living in metro KC who may be in a position to help certain, favored individuals with lodging and perhaps transportation . . .

                This person is really, truly, royally cheesed now with the “No Awards” votes and thinks 2016 might be a good time to strike a blow for the Human Wave against the Gray Goo of the CHORFs . . .

                He has a pool in his back yard, too . . .

                1. This person’s wife may be surprised and somewhat alarmed by the presence of this post on a public blog, but what can you say? For Better Or For Worse, right?

                  1. As Kipling said “The Female is the most dangerous of the species”. The individual should clear this offer with his wife. [Wink]

                    Besides, how many guests can the individual’s home house? [Grin]

                    2. At least sixteen, without putting anybody directly on a carpet with a blanket and a pillow. (Two couples will have to make do with inflatable mattresses, though.)

                      I counted it out, once. Double-occupancy on the sofa-beds, and as many as three may be accommodated on the Big-Ass Sectional, downstairs.

                      I may be opening a can of worms, here. Or, a can of carp. Not sure.

                    4. I’m going to be at the next LibertyCon. Perhaps I’ll take reservations for the Worldcon there, then. (or Then, there. It’s late. I’ve had beer. I should go to bed.)

      2. Yeah, never been to a GenCon or a WorldCon. There was a time I wanted to do both. Now, I only want to get to the former.

        1. Pretty much. Even the people that’d tempt me to a worldcon can be found at better locations.

      1. IIRC the “asterisk thing” is a sports thing to mark votes/standings where fraud is suspected.

          1. In their spoiled cruel childish minds the fact that by following their rules we managed to get some of our picks nominated is prima facia evidence that we cheated. Had they been cheating all along? Nothing to see here, move along, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
            Does their argument make sense? Oh hell no! But when did the hissy fits of a bunch of immature brats have anything to do with sense?

        3. The “asterisk thing” originated in 1962 when Roger Maris surpassed Babe Ruth’s single season home run mark but only because the season had been extended from 154 games to 162 (Maris hitting #61 in the final game.) Because of the iconic nature of Ruth’s achievement (never mind he did it in about the same number of plate appearances) there was considerable hullabaloo claiming Maris hadn’t really beat Ruth’s mark.

          Commissioner of Baseball Ford Frick tried to straddle the divide by putting an asterisk by Maris’ record, thus satisfying nobody.

          Thus the asterisk entered history as symbol of tainted achievement, emotionally invested old guards and gutless officialdom.

          So yes, it is a fine and appropriate mark for this year’s Hugos.

    5. Permission? Utter bilge! I like what I like, and that’s that. If $PERSON likes something else, that’s fine. But when it becomes a thing where I *must* like what $PERSON likes? Said $PERSON can go… engage in a procreational act in solitude.

      1. Many people fail to learn the distinction between “crap that is good” and “crap that I like.” There are several technical terms for such folk but they are not properly put up at a family friendly blog.

        This actually arose this afternoon at the grocer’s check-out when we briefly discussed reading and the constant carrying of books with the cashier. She admitted to having had only one book in her bag when her roommate had inquired what was making it so heavy. “A Stephen King novel.” “Is it any good?” “Wouldn’t I be a fool to read it if it weren’t? Life’s not long enough to read books I don’t enjoy.”

        Walking to the car I quipped to Beloved Spouse, “I’m reading 50 Shades of Grey; it isn’t any good — I’ve been bad and am punishing myself.”

  19. I have the artistic talent god gave a gnat, but I can picture an editorial cartoon: Three sad puppies on one side. On the other, a smug CHORF holding a torch. Behind them, a treehouse labelled Science Fiction (Maybe with a “No Puppies Allowed” sign in front of it) totally engulfed in flames, and the caption, the CHORF saying “We win!”

    2. Shadowdancer to the art desk, Shadowdancer to the art desk. We have a priority art request!

  22. I may ‘pony up’ for a voting membership next year, myself, though I don’t look forward to having to read ‘dreck’ (GIGO).

    And while I hope that the Hugo can be reclaimed, in the meantime, how about starting another award so that folks who want to read good books have something they trust?

    1. I share your revulsion, but how many bites does it take to determine an apple is mealy? I expect five paragraphs is (more than) sufficient to discard many nominees.

      1. Not always, I have read more than a few books I liked a lot in places but which still left me feeling as it there had been a worm in there somewhere. Or found the worm with the last bite.

        But yep, more than half of the time that should work.

        1. Jonathan Carroll is a gifted writer incapable of writing an ending for a novel. The rest is good, but the last few pages go off the rails.

      2. Well, it tells you if the writer is experienced and able to write a good hook. New writers are sometimes rather slow at getting a story moving, I’ve found – but also sometimes very enjoyable once they do. So I wouldn’t depend on that rule too much…

    2. Nothing but your own sense of honor compels you to read the nominees; if you don’t feel it’s necessary to read something to vote on it, stop. I’m debating whether this year’s No Awards relieves me of the obligation to read all nominees before voting, myself.

      That said, who needs an actual award so that folks who want to read good books have something to read? Tell Amazon what you like. It’ll be happy to recommend oodles of other stuff. You don’t have to purchase it from them if you don’t want to. Or do the same on goodreads, but since Amazon owns goodreads I assume they’ll use the same engine.

      What we really need is a list of recommendations by fan and type and commentary in a database, which can then be queried depending on what you’re in the mood for at the time. “I want milfic today. I like what Drake likes; give me his recommendations.” Or “I want something really good. Give me the top ten picks from last year from my usual weighted average of fans, with the commentary from the fan who recommended it highest.”

      That’s not really a complicated technical problem, though there’d be a lot of implementation work (starting with figuring out what the categories are; it *is* technically possible to let fans add categories, but that would probably wind up with too many overlapping categories.) You’d need a host which allows for scripting and database access. The hard problem is getting enough people to fill out the forms with enough data. Since readers choose which fan recommendations to pay attention to, it doesn’t even really matter if people try to spoof the system; you just need usage caps so they can’t take it down by overusing it too easily.

  23. I admit to mixed feelings. First, annoyance at the children who stomped their feet and brought the matches. Second, a sense of grim satisfaction that my inclination to attribute bad motives was based on solid reasoning regarding the CHORFs rather than personal animus. Sitting in on fourteen panels in two days hammered that home. What should have been lessons in craft became indoctrinations.

    Finally, sadness. This won’t be resolved in a year or two. The battle is, and will be, never-ending. Those who place politics above story understand that they must control the narrative, so they will never quit. Plan on a long, long war, one in which we must win hearts and minds while the entrenched strike matches and pine for a Pyrrhic victory to prove their worthiness to a cause.

    2. Lemme try that again: “What should have been lessons in craft became indoctrinations.”

      How so? I wasn’t there, so I’m curious about what was said.

      1. Two examples. First, at the YA Blog/Book panel, one of the panelists specifically stated at writers must include a more diverse cast of characters for the sake of diversity, not for the sake of the story. She also patronized the sole black man at the event, stating that he was the sort that wouldn’t have been invited to her D&D games when she was a teenager, so we now have to make a special effort at inclusion. I was a little astounded, since I was her age and had my black friends come over all the time when I was young. H.M Jones on that panel had some really good input and it would have been nice to hear more of what she had to say, but the other speaker rarely yielded the floor.

        Second example, Writing Characters Smarter Than You, came with explicit statements to avoid the “magic Negro” moments and to populate the story with more smart minorities and women. And, also explicitly, do not make the smart women shrill. Neither of those directives match the panel title. One of the panelists did make an attempt to address the techniques for building brilliant characters, so the session wasn’t a total waste.

        In most of the panels, I learned more at the last five-ten minutes of question/answer when the audience got involved with specifics on technique than I did during the panel discussion.

        1. Real people can be (and indeed are) diverse. Making a rainbow of characters just to check all the ticky boxes? Dull.
          Some years ago I was trying to watch an episode of NOVA about a generally unknown black scientist (finally, a black scientist who was not Carver) but the show was unwatchable. It was in February (Black History Month – fine) but it was not about the science or the scientist, but his skin color and (mis)treatment. I have no doubt he had problems – but the show failed to tell me much of anything about the *science* work he supposedly did, so…. *click*. Thus goes ticky-box TV. And so goes ticky-box literature, too.

            1. My second novel had a diverse cast of characters, but it fit the story. A Nez Perce Indian, a Kenyan, a Latina, a couple of white folks. They all ended up there because the story needed it, not because I had boxes to fill. First was white bread all the way, as fit the region the story was set in.

              Comments from readers on the second story ran along the lines of exciting, with one person going so far as to say it was like summer camp meeting the Poseidon Adventure. No one said diddly about the ‘diversity’ of the characters. If they had, I’d worry my story sucked, instead of sucking them in.

                1. “Good to see you, in yourself Orvan.”

                  Thank you. The Recent Unpleasantness pushed $HOUSEMATE over the edge of a Decision. We are now both registered for LibertyCon 2016 and have a room at the convention hotel, so people seeing an ox about the place will likely be seeing me rather than hallucinating.

              2. Not, however, the big one. Random diversity is survivable.

                It’s when you insist on diversity to the detriment of good story that we really get a problem.

                I have seen people insist that shoehorning in a scene of no relevance where a man’s mother and sister talk about embroidering just to pass the Bechdel test can not possibly be harmful to a story.

          1. Sounds like it.

            Which is par for the course on the left. They push special rules for some groups because they don’t think those groups are capable of succeeding under the same rules the rest of us follow.

            1. Their definition of racism is often as objective and compelling as me defining ‘white supremacism’ as ‘thinking thoughts other than Lincolnism-Shermanism Mitt Romney Thought’.

              These days people seem to use racism to mean entirely the opposite of ‘judging by blood’.

              1. Functionally “racism” means “I cannot find an argument, however fallacious, against your position and so I will attempt to silence you by making baseless allegations against your character.” I always shorten that to “I surrender.”

                1. Unfortunately, it does not really parse as ‘I surrender’. What it really means is, ‘The Black Knight is invincible! Come back here, I’ll bite your legs off!’

          3. She wants you to admire her for confessing her sin and repenting. That’s the kinda religious zealotry you get when you join a godless church.

        4. Was this ‘sole black man’ Steve Barnes, my partner with Niven on two best sellers and the not yet completed third book in the series? In what way was he patronized?

          2. Jerry, if Steve was there, I missed him and the “sole” part of the statement becomes inoperative (I was wrong.) This was a young man in his early- to mid-twenties. He was specifically called out, by gesture and phrasing along the lines of ‘someone that looked like that young man’, as a person who would not have been invited to the woman’s teenage D&D parties, followed immediately by a statement that we need to do a better job of inclusion. I placed her age near mine.

            My experiences growing up where pretty much the opposite of hers, maybe because I played sports. We hung out, played all sorts of games, got into reasonable amounts of trouble together. Pretty much stayed that way until, one by one, we discovered girls.

            1. “We need to do” meaning “she needed to have done”. She’s clearly not competent to generalize.

          3. Third?
            The first two are on the good “what we show to company” bookshelf with Shakespeare, Hugo, Dante, and Dostoevsky.

            I need to go lie down now.
            (Thank you)

    3. “This won’t be resolved in a year or two. The battle is, and will be, never-ending.”

      Rust never sleeps and such as these will forever be the barnacles on SF’s hull. Our opponents will raze the village rather than allow others to share in it; they are the Hamas and Hezbollah of SF.

      1. “Rust never sleeps…”
        And my first thought is, how do we make a sacrificial anode for this?

        2. Sacrificial anodes are all well and good, but they don’t beat a needle gun and a good coat of paint.

          1. Needle gun…. ZOMG that’s so much better than a stiff broom. As a penniless student 50 years ago I took a day labor gig scraping ship bottoms. Evidently it didn’t kill me.

          2. Belt and suspenders. You need the anti-fouling paint, and you need sacrificial anodes. Stiff metal brushes, replacement paint, and new anodes as required.

    4. This won’t be resolved in a year or two.

      It will never be “resolved. CHORFs gotta CHORF. It’s like I try to people in politics. There’s never a point where you’re done. The fight is forever. The instant you forget that, the SJWs/CHORFs win.

  24. I saw the results this morning and thought they probably thought they proved something. Well, as far as I can tell, all they’ve proved is that they are willing to poison the well and salt the fields. So? We knew that already.

    They have sown the wind. Let them live with the results.

      1. He is gloating big time over at his blog. If they’d been half minds they’d have made sure Wright and Butcher got Hugos to spite him.

        But they aren’t even smart enough to run and drink beer.

        1. from what I’ve seen of pictures/videos most of them couldn’t run in the first place. But running while drinking beer is tough, trust me on that. Its generally easier to drink beer before & after running

          1. The difficulty in running and drinking beer is directly proportional to the amount of shiggy involved which goes back to how nasty the hares in your kennel are.

            Now the drinking before and after, at chalk talk and circle, those are very important.

            1. Point taken. It also depends on whether you’re a racist FRB or not (I am).

              Also its good to drink beer at beer checks. My willingness to run while still drinking the beer from the beercheck is strongly negatively correlated with its quality because I don’t want to spill the good stuff.

              We should see if we can schedule a KC H3 trail during / through worldcon next year. Because hashers could really cause a lot of sensitive snowflakes to melt down.

              1. True, true…the most politically incorrect running club in the history of ever. I’d happily lead circle 🙂

                I’m Packed Full of Seamen by the way or Packy for short. My mother hash is the Happy Valley Hash in Western Mass.

                1. Dirty Dingus here. Depending how you look at it, mother hash is either Helsinki or Samurai (Tokyo) – first started running with Helsinki, but got named by Samurai almost a year later becasue H4 didn’t do names

            2. Since I was a semi-accidental SCB at the Green Flash H3 trail tonight I ran backwards donw the trail to meet the FRBs with my beer

          2. My marathon PR includes a beer stop for good measure. Portland has (had?) a beer table around mile 23 and I’d faded from Boston Qualifying pace by a couple more minutes than I could gut out, so I hit the table for a quick, quick cup of beer.

            Pretty much the best of both worlds, Never did get to Boston, but no regrets at all.

  25. one minor quibble, it looks like Vox and the Rabid Puppies actually were a block vote of ~500 people voting exactly the same.

    I think the analysis showing that the SP ‘block’ is ~400-500 is far more suspect, because its’ far less monolithic,s o I think a lot of the people being classed as ‘neutrals’ are actually SP who read everything and voted on what they liked.

    1. I don’t think anyone post here or at other SP sites that they put Ancillary #1, but I have seen a number of people that supported Goblin Emperor or 3-Body first instead of Skin Game or Dark.

      The RP votes are probably closer but I expect not as 100% as you portray.

      1. Perhaps the answer is a SP4 pre-Hugo vote. Have all the novels nominated, have all the provided reading material, have everyone vote on a SP4 site for their choices.
        Winner of the pre-vote is the one and only thing all SP4 participants vote for. I concur that Goblin Emperor, Skin Game or Dark Between the Stars would have been suitable winners. If your going to be accused of ‘slate’ voting and your opponents are ‘slug’ voting no award, it would be best to optimize the strategy to overcome their scorched earth policy.

      2. I voted for Goblin Emperor (#1) over Skin Game(#2) but it was an extremely tough decision. I admit I based it on the fact that when I started GE I couldn’t put it down until my eyes closed on their own, picked it up again as soon as I had my coffee in front of me after I woke, and didn’t put it down again until I was finished.

        However, I thought either would have been a very worthy Hugo winner. It’s hard when more than one nominee is obviously deserving of the award.

      2. 500 is about 20% over the (numbered) membership of the group that calls himself his “Vile Faceless Minions.” ie, the ones who’ve agreed to let him call the shots. The rest of them apparently voted much the way you people did. Many of them read your blog and his, both. And decide for themselves who’s full of it at any given moment…

  26. Sarah, I probably can add some non-overlapping languages to your swearing collection 😉 [Hebrew, Dutch, some Russian, a bit of Arabic]

    But seriously, to me this is just another data point: an experiment that corroborates the outcome of the previous experiment.

    I think if we again have a sweep of “Noah Ward”s next year, it is *definitely* time to roll the ending credits for the Hugo Show.

  27. Not sure how to upload an image in this system, so I put it on the FB thread. If it’s needed for a web page or something, welcome to it.

  28. I’m surprised they had 2500-3000 trufen dedicated to burning the place down. Possibly some of VD’s faceless minions helped, but even so that number was larger than I expected by a factor of 2-3. I do however doubt they can get much more than that.

    I think the answer is to go big and aim for 20,000 voters for next year. That’s a stretch goal but I think that doubling the vote is certainly possible. However we also very much need to go and nominate stuff that is worthy and this time make sure all of us nominate the maximum number in each category so that we totally overwhelm them again at the nomination stage. Next year there must be no puppy unapproved options on the ballot – in fact we need to have the top 10 slots so that even when stuff drops out we still have our stuff ont he ballot. They can noahward them if they want but they can’t get any of their poison on the ballot and that’s going to hurt them a lot.

    1. Considering we’d been accused of sockpuppeting the voting, it makes me wonder if the CHORFs didn’t do exactly that. As I noted irritably to someone last night who was taunting me about the outcome, “We didn’t buy any memberships for people. That would be YOUR crowd.”

      1. Um, no. Mary Robinette Kowal is not “our” crowd, to use that sort of terminology. She’s the one who coordinated all those … 100 or so, was it? … donated memberships.

        1. I see I wasn’t sufficiently clear. Let me rephrase: as far as I know, nobody in either group of Puppies bought memberships for anyone else, while as you point out, Kowal coordinated “scholarships” for the Puppy Kickers. How much you want to bet she was just the tip of the iceberg?

  29. The Hugos have been on life support for a good long while now. Getting the folks who put it there to admit the fact is what Sad Puppies was really all about. The system was being gamed by a tight incestuous clique who at the same time proclaimed that they represented the absolute pinnacle of the SF&F world. At the same time the readers, the true fans in the right sense of that term, were saying, “Hugos? Tried reading a few winners, but I guess I’ve just lost my taste for science fiction.”
    Last night yet again proved our point. Not only is the system corrupt, but the manipulators are spoiled and petulant children willing to destroy their toy rather than be forced to share it.
    Perhaps it’s time to issue the DNR and let the poor beast pass quietly from its current state of misery. If this is the path we choose we do need to somehow get the message out to all the fans and potential new readers that the claims of excellence made for the winners of this once prestigious award are blatant falsehood, that there is still good, exciting, entertaining SF&F out there. They just need to look in a new place to find it.
    Sarah, Amanda, Kate, if you go ahead with SP4 I will support you in any way I can, but please do not let the effort consume you. You are each and every one of you talented authors, and with indie the establishment cannot silence you, so the absolute best thing you can do is put good stuff out there for the folks to find and read. Grow new fans faithful to the spirit of the sort of stories we all grew up to love and respect. Fans who will one day say, “Hugos? Wasn’t that some award that used to matter back in the olden days?”

    1. Yes, this. Walk away, do not play their game. $40 or $50 will buy a lot of books on Amazon.

    1. Also, don’t pull anyone who’s story you liked but asked afterward not to be nominated, unless you mis-categorize that nomination or it is not qualified for rules reasons. If they ask to be pulled form your list tell then “Then write dreck and we won’t like your stories enough to read and nominate them.”

  31. First time Hugo voter. Did not nominate anyone.

    What the Hugo voting showed is that 2,500 voters out of a legion of SF readers decided to vote lockstep to no award anything nominated by people they dislike who voted in lockstep during nominations.

    The irony is hilarious! SJWs voted a slate to protest slate nominees! And then they pat themselves on the back for being “open-minded!” Awesome!

    Worldcon is a tiny, tiny con with a small number of voters. For the Hugos to regain any real meaning as a “fan award” the voting should be moved to a much bigger con – DragonCon or Comicon would do.

    I read everything. I “no awarded” several winners this year because I did not like the work. I guess that puts me ahead of the “slate voters” (both Puppies and SJWs) because I read and actually voted. The “no awards” I gave were based on my assessment of the work – not the political affiliation of the nominee.

    Goblin Emperor was my #2 vote behind the Jim Butcher work for novel.

  32. embarrassed to call myself a science fiction and fantasy writer and, for the first time in my life, wondering if it’s time we came up with another word.

    I was catching updates (but not watching) last night as I worked on writing a script to tidy up a modest data set. I was wondering something similar.

    Look, I get why we want to recover the Hugos. If we wanted to do it by mass vote buying, like they appear to have used, I could fund a fifth of what we’d need personally out of my annual bonus if I got the numbers right (yes, my annual bonus after taxes could buy over 1000 memberships…I’m a bankster FFS) buy why.

    After the ConCom I gave $40 to have them take sides and publicly piss on me why would I waster $1 on them much less the $40k to play their game their way.

    Let them keep nominating Scalzi until he has more Hugos than Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov had nominations combined. He will still be a less likable person than Asimov and a less enjoyable writer than Heinlein.

    1. Accepting that there were at minimum 500 Puppy voters (probably more, but that seems a reasonable base) we need to consider boycotting Worldcons which disrespect the voice of the puppies. Maybe they don’t want that $20K in fees, especially if putting up with the likes of us becomes the price, but it might be something to put to the test after next year’s vote.

      A little more balance on the panels, a little less disrespect from the podium seems a minor step toward making fandom more inclusive and accepting.

      1. Given some puppies were in person it was more than $20K in fees.

        But yeah, I could spend the money on GenCon or DragonCon or SWLF (which I have friends on that con committee who have been trying to get me to go for years) or Cold Wars or WinterCon or GaryCon or NTRPGCon or…

        They own WorldCon and they own the Hugo which will mean squat in 10 years when WorldCon is 500 people and shrinking.

        I’m wondering if the $20K+ we gave them did more for them than their tantrum did against them. The real home of SF/F isn’t books anymore but TV, movies, and the net. The real home of Fandom isn’t WorldCon but DragonCon or ComicCon. Maybe we’re just as overly invested in WorldCon/Hugos as them while the world has passed us all by.

        1. “They own WorldCon and they own the Hugo which will mean squat in 10 years when WorldCon” is the SF equivalent of Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips.

          1. Holy blast from the past Batman. I haven’t even heard that name in…a long time.

            Kind of like Wenchel’s Donuts or American Motors (my first car was an AMC). Things that just went away and weren’t even classic enough to be mourned.

          2. Hmmmm, the only time I vomited while pregnant was shortly after eating at Arthur Treacher’s. Just sayin’.

      2. Also, five yard penalty, assuming facts not in evidence: specifically the desire for a more inclusive fandom.

        1. Comment on Twitter earlier was all about how SF wasn’t for us, but was supposed to be “inclusive”. Um…the hypocrisy shouldn’t be that hard to see, but apparently it’s impossible for some folks.

        2. Of course they want to be inclusive and accepting. Why, they accept both kinds of people: white rich spoilt self-entitled intersectionalist loony Leftist brats who would rather spend their lives in the circle jerk of capital-F Fandom (which is not about being a fan of science fiction, but being a Fan of Fandom Itself) than have actual lives or accomplish anything, and rich spoilt self-entitled intersectionalist loony Leftist brats who would rather spend their lives in the circle-jerk of capital-F Fandom than have actual lives or accomplish anything Of Colour. (Nobody else counts as people, of course.)

          They particularly prize the latter kind, but they haven’t yet figured out the trick used by one of P. T. Barnum’s less savoury competitors, of slathering themselves in paint and passing themselves off as R.S.S-E.I.L.L.B.W.W.R.S.T.K.I.T.C-J.O.C-F.F.T.H.A.L.O.A.A.O.C.

          1. Given the revealed roots of the head of the Spokane NAACP, I wouldn’t be too sure about that.

            1. Sure, those people have figured it out. It’s the clowns at WSFS who haven’t figured it out yet. They’re so busy congratulating themselves on their superior insight into The Future!!!111eleventy™ (being Fans and all, dontchaknow), that the present has long since overtaken them and their minds are plodding along in the distant past.

  33. Science fiction won’t have to recover from the Hugo debacle. It has been going along nicely for years now with the Hugo becoming more and more irrelevant as a signator of quality and readability. Sure, Keven J. Anderson and Jim Butcher got screwed, but realistically, how many of Jim Butcher’s readers could tell you what a Hugo — or Nebula— is or meant? As a practically matter, the Hugo has as much significance as grampa’s Croix de Guerre from WWI, a meaningless token from a forgotten struggle that no one remembers anymore. It would have been nice to save it, but should we distort the rest of the world to accomodate it? The commercial houses that favor the Hugo “worthy” are suffering, but as TOR UK gets tossed in the wastebin and the rest of the “serious” SF/fantasy houses claw at each other for shrinking shelf-space in the disappearing book stores, Baen and Castalia are doing fine.

    What IS going to die, and perhaps it’s time and past time, is WorldCon and the fan base that supports it. WorldCon is fast becoming our Congress, full of graying and out of touch 60’s holdovers playing to a crowd of entitled neurotics, but fading out of touch with mainstream of public needs and interests. Perhaps it’s time to let it go. Vale WorldCon, hello LibertyCon and DragonCon.

    1. Yep, Hugos and Nebulas — and Azimov’s and Analog — stopped being relevant to my leisure reading decades ago. There isn’t much hard science fiction written these days, what’s new is mostly fantasy of one sort or another. A cheap looking rocket award is an anachronism unsuited to the much wider world out there. Bury it and get on with life.

      1. We bury it and move on, they come after us. It’s what they do. There’s nothing we can do about the Nebulas, Asimov’s, or Analog – yet – but we can do something about the Hugos, and even if that means forcing the SJW’s to burn it down around their ears in public, that’s still worthwhile. It will make it that much harder to infiltrate the next award.

          1. Heroes don’t do what they do for medals. Awards aren’t about the recipient, they’re about the community. They’re how we say “this is what we approve of, this is the best of us.” They will always be with us, and if the SJW’s keep taking them over they will always be distorted.

            1. Make up awards faster than they can screw them up. Potemkin village awards by the dozen, or better yet, a Potemkin Sad Puppies IV – all sound and fury and then no money for and no attendance at the con.

              1. You know…if we can convince the WorldCon committee to budget for all the SPIV registrations and then not show up hilarity might ensue.

                “I’m sorry, I’m a bad person because I went away like you wanted and you’re $25K short on your budget? Explain to me again why that’s my problem but first let me get more fine champagne”.

            2. In my experience, awards are about the Leftist community. They’re how Leftists say ‘this is the Official Pabulum That Is Good For You, and this is What You Are Supposed To Read (Watch, Listen to, etc.)’ It’s about giving the sheeple their marching orders so everyone will know what is the correct culture to consume.

              Basically, it’s a way to try to short-circuit the word-of-mouth process by which the real community discovers good work. And as Our Hostess has pointed out, it’s also a way of counting coup among people who are well connected and can arrange log-rolling campaigns, but haven’t got the chops to win the only award that matters – the Benjamins.

              From this point of view, the only good thing about SP and like campaigns is that it pins the enemy down and tricks them into defending a fortified position of no strategic importance or value, instead of getting out in the country and fighting a viable campaign.

              1. No, it’s that leftists co-opt awards in order to reward their loyal minions. It’s the only form of recognition they have, and it impresses the LIV’s they depend on.

                1. If you look at the actual people involved in creating the major SF awards in the first place, you’ll find a Who’s Who of the radical Left in Fandom.

                  1. Yes, but my understanding is that writers have always had more than their fair share of Leftists. Bear in mind that there are plenty of explicitly non-Left awards out there.

              2. Speaking on LIV’s, I wonder how many of the No Award slate were actual SJW’s vice those who bought the months of slander about SP.

                1. Question – what does LIV stand for?

                  To answer your question, Jeff, I spoke to more than one person who’d bought the orchestrated propaganda against Sad Puppies and when I was done they realized we are not who the rumors said we were. So I’m sure we will never know how many people bought the slander, but more and more of them may realize it was lies if we just keep on keeping on. It was really the equivalent of being told that a peanut butter sandwich was a glass of motor oil. One of the reasons we have to be there at Worldcons is to show those who’ve been lied to that we are–obviously–not what was falsely advertised.

  34. sheesh, step out the house to do some roofing and you post, and some 124+ replies later . . .
    anyhow, I was trying to think of way to say burning it down was the wrong approach (they say we want that when they made the statement they were going to do it themselves), but you, as usual nailed it.

    And before you died, you gloated you had won. The mind boggles.
    This is the same political mindset that supports unions. and the union declares “VICTORY!” when they start a labor dispute, and the company they are striking against goes out of business and closes down, then moves to another state without unions, hiring no one who walked out on their jobs. Taxes for the city, county, and state, are gone, jobs, gone, town nearly dead, but dammit we WON! They make Baghdad Bob sound sane.

    2. “then moves to another state without unions, hiring no one who walked out on their jobs”

      See, this is essentially what indie publishing is. A preferential option for the little guy.

      1. Noticed that, huh? Yep.
        By the By, the town I mentioned is still mostly dead. Though Miracle Max is having trouble getting it back. Two of my cousins live around there. One works for the state.

    3. Somewhat comparable, the unions that pushed for a $15 minimum wage in Los Angeles, won, and then lobbied for a waiver permitting union labor to make a sub-minimum wage.

      People pay dues for that, although not voluntarily.

      Speaking of L.A. & unions, look at how much film & TV production has moved out of that area to escape high union wage demands. Fewer productions, fewer employed — but damn if they don’t get union wages!

      1. Union logic:
        many moons ago, TWU was thinking of striking at Southwest Airlines. Why? “We want to get the same pay as United and American workers!”
        How much profit share do they get?
        “Um … AA and UA didn’t make a profit, and I don’t think they get it when they do?”
        So, how much more a year do the UA and AA folks get compared to what you got working for SWA and getting profit sharing?
        “Um . . . well . . .”
        It was less than their yearly wage?
        “Ah, no, it wasn’t”
        So you want to make SWA as unprofitable as AA and UA so you can make more base pay but loose your profit sharing and your stocks that SWA also gave you from time to time will be worth far less … Why?
        he had to go work a flight, and never would admit how foolish he was.
        That was the Union Rep for that location btw.
        SWA gave two wage increases during negotiations, and generally made the TWU look even more foolish than they normally do. Afterward, when negotiations were over, and TWU got their asses handed back to them, they tried to raise the dues, but that got shot down.

  35. I have 40 dollars in rolled quarters from my spare change bucket just waiting for the chance to help flesh out the embiggening. Cry Havoc and loose the bitches of war.

    2. Wrap your hand around one to punch back twice as hard, but don’t waste it buying a ticket to a rigged game.

  36. so after all the sanctimonious claims about hating slate voting the show that they really really approve of it. Or didn’t they realize that voting “No Award” in a block was slate voting?

    1. Standard SJW hypocrisy: “It’s okay if I do it. If you do it it’s badsickwrong.”

      That’s why I don’t think that SP4 being run by female writers (including our hostess) is going to cause them much cognitive dissonance any more than it did when they and their Fellow Travelers denigrated Palin, Thatcher, or any other “right wing” women. It doesn’t matter if they’re being hypocritical little [excrement]s, just that they “win”.

      Which is why I’m starting to wonder if I’m coming down with a case of hydrophobia. Vox Day’s “BURN IT DOWN” is starting to appeal now in a way that it didn’t before.

      1. It isn’t the SJW’s that need the cognitive dissonance it is the rest of fandom and the general public. It becomes so much harder to sell to the general public the image of old white guys when those running things are all women of various backgrounds. It won’t cause the SJW’s any mental conflict but others much more so.

        Tom

        1. The SJWs will try to spin it as women tokens doing the bidding of the dread Vox Day. Truth is never an issue, having spin that fits your world view is far more important.

        2. Their line is that women who don’t toe the line are somehow crypto-male. “Palin’s greatest hypocrisy is her pretense that she is a woman.”

          1. I thought invalidating someone’s identified gender was bad. Or does that not apply to known cisfemale gendernormative fascists?

            1. No they aren’t in the protected class unless they are subservient. If they are uppity they certainly are not. Why else would they have to create StrawSarah.

      3. For shame, Mr. Poore! These people don’t denigrate anyone. ‘Denigrate’ is a racist word! Go and stand in the corner and wait to be kicked.

    2. Tom, jeeze! You totally don’t understand. See, when Puppies nominate stuff, that’s Bad, ok? When a block of ~1800 people votes for Noah Ward in every category, that’s a principled stand!

  38. What _I_suspect they will realize (eventually) is how *well* they proved _our_ point. Like the rest of their Political ilk, they cannot “reason” to a logical conclusion, no matter how much evidence is there. They see/hear/read *only* what they want to see/hear/read. IOW, they are experiencing Senile Dementia.

    1. THEIR mission is accomplished. The institution is either controlled or destroyed. If they decide the latter, they will MoveOn to the next institution. Look for SJW’s to start infiltrating LibertyCon the way they’ve co-opted the “official” Libertarian Party (the way that noted progressive Pat Buchanan did before them).

      1. Looking forward to that interaction, particularly the lamentations of the SJW as they are driven before us.
        There were a few issues this past year that I won’t go into in public, but given the nature of Uncle Timmy, Brandy, and company along with LC being the de facto home con for Baen any attempts at serious infiltration should prove most entertaining.

        1. I sit semi-corrected. It was the 2000 election, and the Reform Party. Pat Buchanan declared as a 3rd party candidate. His “delegates” proceeded to literally lock the doors at the convention against Paul Hagelin’s supporters, who went across the street and staged their own nominating convention. The whole mess had to be settled in court.

          By the way, Donald Trump also ran briefly for the Reform Party’s nomination in 2000, but withdrew, he said, because of the party’s infighting.

  40. I have to say I am shocked by the results. I thought we did enough to get out the vote. And I read the works before voting DESPITE knowing from reading LAST year’s nominees, that I would find them offensive and a waste of my precious life.

    As I read this post, I was struck by it’s similarity to Sarah’s post following BHO’s re-election. I was sure we’d win. I was SURE that there weren’t enough stupid people to re-elect him. And I was SURE that people could see, as plainly as I did, the horrific damage that would result.

    I was assured by many writers that we had to ‘give it one more go’; that it wasn’t too late to work the system. But it was.

    I believe the reason the Hugo controversy spilled out into the wider world is that many saw it as a microcosm of our fight in the greater political and culture war.

    And now, we’ve had our hats handed to us. Yes, I understand that we met our goals of exposing the politics, bias, etc behind the controlling junta, because of the actions they took. WE STILL DIDN’T ACTUALLY WIN ANY HUGOS.

    Just like after the elections, we exposed the media bias, we showed the vote rigging and corruption, but we STILL ENDED UP WITH BHO AS PRESIDENT.

    I didn’t vote this time to expose the clique, Larry did that last time. I voted TO WIN SOME HUGOS for things I liked.

    Just like IRL politics, we spilt our vote, by nominating a bunch of stuff we liked, leaving them just ONE thing to vote for. And they did.

    So once again, after a defeat that makes little sense to me, and comes as a surprise, there are calls to continue working within the system. If we try harder, next time for sure.

    Well, I don’t think that is going to work. We are polite, honest, conscientious, and individualists. Our enemies are rude, vicious, liars, who will act without thinking and act en masse because it furthers their goals. We can’t win against that. We keep proving it over and over.

    As long as their progressive, marxist, collectivist, anti-human culture dominates our political and national culture, we will not win.

    Our only hope is to change the macro culture. We cannot win by adopting their tactics. We cannot win by continuing to play the game by their rules. They have taken control of the levers of power. We need a ‘Kobayashi maru’ moment. As long as they own the default position, we can’t beat them. We need our own ‘long march through the institutions’ but we need it to be SHORT!

    Short, violent (physically or psychically) revolution, or long, tedious, culture change. Cultures are changed in the long run when the barbarians are subsumed into the larger culture. WE AREN’T barbarians. We are inside the culture. I don’t think we can return to our previous culture from inside over time. I’m beginning to believe that only through a short sharp extreme event can we change the culture. We need a revolution. We need a change as profound as the changes after 9-11.

    We need a way to show clearly, that OUR WAY, although harder, is the BETTER WAY. And we need to do it soon, or there won’t be enough left to do it.

    nick

    1. No no don’t think of this as a massive loss. Instead realize that they stood up there in public and shoved their assh*les at everyone. What else was those giant asterisks but that?

      More they have publicly proclaimed that they didn’t even bother reading any works that they objected to and then turned around and voted “no award”. They spent a lot of their public capital on proclaiming that they were defending against the hoards of barbarians and then turned around and razed the awards to save them.

      This means that they are not going to be able to sell this so well for Sad Puppies 4. Worse they angered a lot of people on the sidelines who didn’t bother to register and vote this year. As Sarah has noted this isn’t a simple 1 year contest it is a fight to retake the Hugo’s from an entrenched power bloc.

    2. What happened was simple. Puppies and neutrals actually read and sweated over their choices. Puppy Kickers didn’t read anything, they just clicked “No Award” where they were supposed to and called it good. And that is far easier to coordinate and maintain discipline on. You can see where they lost support when the choice was an actual person, the ballot counts dropped by half, sometimes even more.

      Libertarians, conservatives, apolitical types, they’ll all have to decide what they want to do regarding the Hugos because I think the SJWs maxed themselves this time and aren’t likely to bring 5k in next year. They will try to bring their max of 3500 to the nomination party, definitely, though. But again, they have to select one of their own for each category and justify it as “supporting diversity”. Their own infighting on this matter will be quite amusing and may provide some opportunities for the Puppies.

    3. The best Kobayashi maru move may be to simply walk away from the Hugos. The whole system is corrupt, and without a (probably) bloody revolution it will not change. I fully expect a black swan that will make the SJWs either dead or irrelevant. The Hugos are pretty small beer compared to lots of other stuff coming our way.
      Save your $40, buy indies and let the Toristas stew in their own poison.

      1. Nah. Publicize it. Get the word out. Bring in enough people to drown the SJW votes. It’s doable.

        For starters, the moment a Worldcon location is announced, people who live in that area should start providing it lots and lots and lots of free publicity. The targets are the people who don’t have to spend a lot of money to travel and stay overnight, and thus might be more inclined to participate. Get enough involved, and the SJW bloc becomes a tiny fish in a big pond.

        2. Yeah, but having heard some of the panel titles this time around, would you want to explain to your friends why you sent them to that turdfest? They could probably buy a cheap weekend vacation in Frisco for the same money and have the same experience. They’d certainly meet the same class of people.

          1. Why would anyone waste time on panels at a Worldcon? You know they’re going to suck – why not hang out in the video/movie rooms, the dealer’s room, or find a nearby venue to patronize? It’s not like we’re actually there to socialize with the CHORFs, is it?

            1. Why would I go to the dealers’ room? To buy a bunch of old books my innalekshul betters have already declared to be racist, fascist and misogynist? To buy sexist photos of Faith Domergue? To buy videos of William Shatner demeaning the womanhood of green dancing girls and naive yeomen? Spare me from such debauchery!

    4. “WE STILL DIDN’T ACTUALLY WIN ANY HUGOS.”

      You say that like its a bad thing. Look at what did win, then get back to me why Jim Butcher would be sad this morning. I read Butcher’s book, and it was a pretty nice read. Entertaining. I read “The Day The World Turned Upside Down”, and I deeply wanted to injure the main character. Guess what I’m going to pay money to read, next time.

      We won every single No Award category, and we made them admit it before the whole world. They are walking around today with the dazed look of people who participated in a riot, and then found out they torched their own house. That was the purpose of the activity. Job done.

      Next job, do it again next year. And the year after. And so forth.

      1. Well, I take your point. But that doesn’t work in the wider world. This year the intent was to get good work nominated, and we did that. I guess I assumed that once nominated, we intended to WIN.

        If that is the explicit goal next year, I will call it ‘baby steps’ and support it, BUT if we want to rehabilitate the Huge (and lots of people do) then we have to actually win some.

        nick

        BTW, I had the exact same reaction to The World let my selfish ass live while others died. That POS was offensive. “I’ll save this fish, but let kids and mothers die.” Typical anti-human BS that we HAVE to displace.

    5. At the Battle of Midway, VT-8 was completely destroyed – only one pilot survived – without inflicting any damage on the Japanese fleet. But they pulled the Japanese air cover out of position enabling the dive bombers to inflict severe damage.

  41. For a controlling plurality of World Con membership, literary merit is a product of having the right politics, the right opinions, and the right connections. In the process of demonstrating this, they have insulted everyone with merely plebian tastes in Science Fiction. They imagine yourselves to be aristocrats, but their behavior has been crass and tasteless, and so is the kind of fiction they prefer. I’m disgusted.

      1. I hadn’t heard of it and had to look up the reference. But, going by the description only, that seems about right.

  42. I’ve seen this ending before. In one of those “literary” works they have you read in English classes, no less. You know, the one where the usurper has taken over the kingdom, and the heir to the real king comes up with a plan to unseat him, and in the end everyone is dead and Vox Day…err, Fortinbras comes in to rule over a kingdom of skulls?