The peasant revolt will be televised

170 comments

1. I’m not sure how one goes ‘outside’ of fandom in getting new fans to attend/nominate/vote, unless he’s suggesting someone has purchased multiple memberships under assumed names. A fan is a fan, even if we don’t have the same tastes.

   I do wonder just how Mr. Davidson envisions getting new authors to submit to his publication given his comments about how said authors aren’t ‘real’. I wish him luck in his chosen career (would I be uncouth to wonder if it doesn’t involve bagging groceries?).

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3. Spotting a Hugo award on a book USED TO BE a good indicator that there was a fantastic story inside. The more obnoxious ‘those aren’t OUR kind of fans’ I see from these ill-nurtured, lily-livered, pale-hearted varlots, the less I care if I buy a TOR book ever again. I’ll be doing some research before I buy ANY ‘Hugo’ book in the future, because that kind of small-minded bullshit gets on my last nerve.

4. (BTW – Kudos to you and Larry, Brad, for bringing the BS fully into the light! A lot of the anti-SP3 stuff I see is simply ‘Ugh! These aren’t the RIGHT KIND of people to be winning OUR award!’ and that’s pretty much the saddest BS I’ve heard in a long, long time.)

5. It’s a definition that makes sense–if you believe that a person is not a true “fan” unless they go to WorldCon.

6. Huzzah! Now let’s encourage more and more fans to register and vote. I think even as few as a couple thousand would override any “No Award” bloc they put together. That would be satisfying to an extreme degree.

7. Revolts are breaking out all over against the entrenched forces of elitist presumption and privilege. Gamergate, Sad Puppies, and in visual art Remodernism/Stuckism are challenging the cultural status quo. Congratulations on striking an effective blow for freedom.

8. Mr Torgersen – speaking of the long game, do you know if/when Kate Paulk will be taking suggestions and feedback for SP4? Specifically, if a larger number of entries for each category could be highlighted, I think it would a) better highlight quality storytelling and b) cut short some of the complaints of ballot stuffing. (Some will not be pleased no matter how above board things are conducted, of course.)

9. Brad Torgersen wrote:
   > but I hope that saner, less stuck-up heads at future Worldcon concoms will conclude

   Err, I think you probably should rephrase this. It sounds as if you’ve just insulted the current WorldCon concoms, when you’ve just told people to give them money so they can vote in the Hugos (and so far as I can tell, neither WorldCon has done anything against the Sad Puppies. Quite the opposite, they’ve done their jobs and reported the results as per the rules).

   Dyrewolf wrote:

   > the less I care if I buy a TOR book ever again.

   Buy them used. Half Price Books usually gets current books at surprising speed after they’re released. And older titles are often available for pennies on Amazon. AND, none of your money goes back to Tor (of course, neither does it go back to the authors).

   Which brings me to another question I’ve been wondering about…

   Could it be that the Hayden’s opposition to SP may have more to do with the possibility that Patrick’s job may be on the line? Tor sales have plummeted, in a genre that until recently was quite profitable. That tells me that their bosses may be eyeing a shake-up of the senior staff, and if so PNH may be dislodged from his position of influence. Getting books nominated does raise sales, but more importantly, it raises Tor’s brand prestige. The SP’s have blown that up now, and therefore indirectly threaten their livelihood. Probably not enough to trigger changes at Tor soon, but the more influence the SPs gain the more Tor’s influence erodes. It may be a small erosion in the grand scheme of things, but in a situation where jobs are perceived to be on the line, even small threats can seem enormous.

10. Thank you for pointing out the irony of TNH (or was it PNH?) using the example of Cheerful Child – rapists. Perhaps all those memories of MZB just subconsciously slipped through?

11. It’s been some years now — about twenty-five, I think — since I even bothered to look at the Hugo ballot, or the Nebula nominees, or any other award bestowed upon writers of SF. (And I write SF, among other things.) Perhaps I will once again, if the energy Sad Puppies 3 has harnessed can be sustained. It would be pleasant to think of those as reliable sources of good reading once again.

12. From the talented and articulate Natalie Luhrs: “You f—–g assholes. I hope you’re happy.”

    I notice her blog has a picture of a Hugo crashed in a pile of poo. She says she doesn’t know who sent it. Curious, that.

13. “…an ethical fan with traditional fannish values has no choice but to only consider nominees _not_ backed by the slates…”

    Let’s turn this around, shall we?

    An ethical fan with traditional fannish values has no choice but to only consider boycotting a publisher whose minion suggests only voting for nominees _not_ backed by certain slates.

    Cuz TOR, you’ve just told me how to think. And I don’t appreciate that much. I disappreciate it so much that I might consider boycotting the TOR imprint.

    SP never told me how to vote. I haven’t seen so much as a suggestion that (were I a voting member) I should vote _only_ for the SP slate.

14. I’ve been thinking on this for the last few SP years.
    Complaints about slate voting meaning only works picked by a select few will get the necessary votes to be nominated can be avoided, I think.
    My suggestion is that from now on the Hugo’s put up a master list of every single eligible work.
    From there people can see what works are up for nomination and it would be easy to link to.
    Then everyone can say what they plan to nominate.
    Instead of one slate of works you would see a variety of works and you’d see where the crossover by people with similar tastes are.
    Then, if you haven’t already, you can read the ones you find interesting and vote based on that.

    Having a master list that everyone can see could expand the voters by giving every fan a chance to see if works they loved or authors they like are eligible.

    It won’t stop people talking offline and deciding to vote the same.
    But then, nothing ever will.

    Its an idea that needs refining I believe. But I think it could be a step in the right direction for both sides of the argument.

    I currently have no dog in this fight and can’t afford to be part of it. But I hope to in the next few years.

15. Incidentally the late ex-wife of the outed child-raper was scared to death of him (word around back-when was that he beat her up) and at the time of the outing, she’d had several strokes and no longer remembered longstanding acquaintances — but per a mutual friend, she could be ‘reminded’ to ‘remember’ stuff very easily. Which throws the same sort of suspicion on her final ‘testimony’ that we’ve learned to have in cases like the testimony of kids during the McMartin Preschool debacle. How much of it was real, and how much was false-memory from her being easily led??

16. For those wanting to boycott Tor, I will point out that one of the Sad Puppies novel nominees, The Dark Between the Stars, was published by Tor.

17. Which probably irks the Haydens to no end. They wanted something else in that slot.

18. You know, you almost have to feel sorry for them*. They spent years slowly driving out the unwashed masses, maneuvering and politicking the undesirable elements out of power, and setting themselves up as the arbiters of taste and talent, and in three years of not even trying that hard the Evil League of Evil has managed to completely upset everything. They have one last chance: Nuke the ground they stand on with No Awards. If that fails, they’ll just be regular fans like all of those conservatives they despise.

    * I don’t feel sorry for them. I dance with glee to the music of their lamentations and bathe in the schadenfreude and their tears. But I am not a good man.

19. The problem with these SJW SMOFs (or CHORFs) is that they are most concerned with *who* wrote what (or who likes them) than with *what* was written.

    SP3 is proof many fans are tired of outside societal politics in a realm that should be (to borrow a phrase) a “safe place” from all of that.

20. Oh, and Child-rapists ? How does that correlate with the continued support of Chip Delany, or of the late Marion Zimmer Bradley ??

21. Brad, you’re not picking soundbites very honestly. The Making Light folk were discussing the possibility that Gamergaters could have been recruited to nominate for the Hugos. But I’m not surprised. Your culture war rhetoric and the constant nonsense about somebody wanting to ignore or shut out wrong kind of fans seem to have worked just the way you planned, nevermind the fact that it’s just rhetoric.

22. I had an argument with an acquaintance recently over MZB. Basically, she refused to believe the molestation allegations, and said she thought they were made up as a way to attack a “well-known female writer”. Citing the facts wouldn’t dissuade her; it was all an attempt to malign someone who had been influential, and no amount of discussion will convince her otherwise. To her, it was all part of the vast conspiracy to “silence women’s voices”.

    When you’re that deep into the cocoon, it isn’t hard to rationalize away no matter what the evidence says.

23. Alot of the stuff on Making Light is cherry picked sound bites. I have read most of the comments over there and that is the general concensus I get. Even though I have devored sci-fi and fantasy my whole life, the commenters over at The Making Light make me feel either like an outsider or as a ignorant whom should just sit down and be quiet as his betters are talking.

    Almost every compliant of Sexism, Sexualism and racism can be thrown back at those bigots over at The Making Light and all of the SJWs. I have not seen hate from Larry and Brad’s side, but I have seen a lot of it on Teresa’s “Side”

24. So the Choom Gang gives way to the CHORF Gang…. I’m shocked. Shocked.

25. Just be aware that SJWs are extraordinarily good at stuffing ballot boxes. It’s how they roll. Which is why I just registered for MidAmericCon to help offset at least one SJW. I intend to read to nominated works and will vote for who I feel wrote the best work.

    Thanks for the link to the registration.

26. ” spacefaringkitten says:
    Brad, you’re not picking soundbites very honestly. The Making Light folk were discussing the possibility that Gamergaters could have been recruited to nominate for the Hugos. ”

    As was pointed out elsewhere, if Gamergate were actively involved, the Hugo votes would have topped 20,000 rather than 2,000. More likely the MakingLight crowd were making excuses, because there was no way “true fans” could outnumber them or their “true opinions”.

27. I would have thought after SP2, the other side would have been more organized to prevent it from happening a second time. But apparently not. They got caught with their britches down TWICE.

    No wonder they’re so angry.

28. For robspalding: up here in Canada we have the Aurora Awards, and the folks at the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association who administer the awards have done just that. There’s a master list of eligible works, compiled both by the CSFFA and volunteers, at http://www.prixaurorawards.ca/aurora-awards/eligibility-lists/. (I’m rather fond of the Auroras, having won one in 2009 for my novel Marseguro–which, by the way, was edited by Sheila Gilbert of DAW Books, who’s on the Hugo ballot this year.) There would be a LOT more work eligible for a Hugo, since the Auroras are limited to Canadian-authored-or-published work, though, so a similar Hugo eligibility list would be pretty huge.

29. Yeah, a full eligibility list, in general, wouldn’t work – too big, especially once you include small press and independent.

    However, a larger SP ‘for your consideration’ list is something I’d personally prefer (say, aiming for 10 instead of 5). Now, if all stories are equally appealing, you do dilute the vote. But you get more exposure to more authors. If people buy the stories to read them before voting (which they should be), more authors get paid. The more good authors get paid, the more good authors have incentive to write more good stories….

30. ewillet
    I know it would be a huge task to have a master list. But if it was something added to every month by the organisers it would be at least manageable, maybe.
    And with a master list all anyone ever has to do is point at it and say “Here’s what’s eligible. Please register and vote.”

    I suspect that next year will be slate vs slate.
    Maybe the year after too.
    And then either there will be a compromise solution that some will hate and some will approve or the Hugo’s will fade away.
    And I don’t think anyone wants the Hugo’s to end.

31. While the whole Hugo Award thing has been interesting and amusing, my hope for getting nominated on the SP4 slate is very simple:

    The book bombs for the nominated works are major boosts in sales. Win, don’t win, slandered…don’t care. All I want is the increased exposure during the nomination process 😀

32. My point of course was that whenever you invert SJW cant, it’s exposed as ridiculous.

    That aside, yeah, the big problem with boycotting TOR is that it would be unfair to some excellent TOR-published authors. Also, TOR’s politically-visible elements may be a poor representation of TOR as a whole (after all, TOR doesn’t seem to have a policy of rejecting politically-incorrect authors…)

    Fact is, I read a lot of stuff by people whose politics I think are nuts, so I’m already not very good at this boycott-the-evil-author thing… well, unless their fiction starts hitting me over the head with their disagreeable politics, =then= they go on my “BORING!!” list. (Actually, I’m none too fond of being whacked over the head with agreeable politics, either.)

    As to the MZB flap — my point was that while the allegations may be entirely true (or may not be — can any of us claim to know for sure?) the =evidence= is shaky because the star witness was demonstrably unreliable. Further, the common accusation that MZB was ‘complicit’ is a stretch, when she may not have had any realistic choice (getting beat up isn’t a realistic choice). This OMG-MZB-EVIL thing is, in that way, blaming the victim… something the loudest detractors also scream loudly against everywhere else.

    TL;DR: Regardless of anyone’s guilt or innocence, I found the mass rush to judgment appalling.

33. Been skimming the responses, both by the pros, and by the antis, and the responses by the antis make me queasy.

    The thing that strikes me is the subtle threat being leveled at Jim Butcher by the anti-Puppiers. They don’t believe that Jim Butcher was contacted regarding being put on the SP slate. They want to KNOW if he was… because if he was and he said he didn’t mind, then that’s who they’re going to go after, because HE LET HIMSELF BE PUT ON THE SLATE THAT SP CHOSE.

    Also the declaration to vote even Jim Butcher to No Award, just because his book is considered awesome by so many people it got nominated, and that he didn’t REFUSE THE NOMINATION because they SAID IT IS EVIL AND HE SHOULD REFUSE IT BECAUSE THEY THINK HE SHOULD.

    Uh, I think they forget that the one political thing Jim Butcher ever wrote about was in regard to the freedom of speech and expression, that it needs to be defended, even when one risks one’s life to do so.

    http://jimbutcher.livejournal.com/4837.html

    intangible ideas, thoughts, and beliefs can have tremendous power. And that’s why we should be paying close attention.

    After all, intangible fear can be mightier than the sword, too. Hell, it has been for quite a while now. Don’t believe me? Try getting on an airplane without taking your shoes off in the security line. While you’re doing that, try cracking a joke about having a knife.

    That’s the power of fear, guys.

    We. Are. In. Danger.

    The threat isn’t aimed at our government or our borders or our resources. It’s targeting something far more precious–our identity. It’s changing us, who we are, how we live, and not for the better.

    The Western world has got the biggest and sharpest sword the planet has ever known, yes. But the extremists are armed with a weapon just as powerful: Fear. And these nuts are really good at using it.

    There is /one/ way that freedom, freedom to speak, to choose, to grow, to believe, to improve, survives in the face of violent attack.

    Free men and women defend it, violently if necessary–or it dies.

    It’s that simple. It really is.

    If we forget that, if we forget that there are predators in the world who very much want to destroy those freedoms in the name of their god, their philosophy, their politics, if we forget that our freedoms /can/ and /will/ be taken away if we sit staring and do nothing, they are as good as gone.

    Freedom doesn’t defend itself.

    We have to do it.

    I read that back when the reason for that post was still fresh. The people who caused that reason are willing to kill to silence others, to silence dissent. Jim Butcher thinks that the freedoms he spoke of are worth defending. Including the freedom to choose.

    What made the anti-SP people think he was going to back out of a nomination? What makes them think he’d bow down to the petulant demands to remove himself from letting voters have the option of choosing his work just because the anti-SP scolds do not like how people chose?!

    And they want to KNOW FOR SURE he ‘agreed’, because right now, they don’t know if ‘he did’. They’re NOT sure if they should try to hold back the desire to destroy his career for mere association.

    Because, how dare we like Jim Butcher’s work without THEIR APPROVAL? How dare we like his Harry Dresden so much that we say, publicly, “We think this work is worth a Hugo, along with these other works,” put out a list of things we like and how dare other people agree with that list and go and nominate them? And how dare Jim Butcher not throw Sad Puppies under the bus because they hate Sad Puppies’s success?

    So they’ll No-Award him. Out of spite. That’s their prerogative, but…

    So much for the ‘Sci-fi is made of love’ declaration coming from this Teresa Nielsen Hayden person only very recently. I’m just glad that they’re so loud about the whole thing. Let them speak, so we may know their thoughts – and what thoughts they reveal indeed.

    The funny thing is, this is just as empty and hollow a screechy demand anyway. “Deny them, Jim Butcher, so we will love you again!” Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files is 15 books in. He has a completed fantasy series, a number of short stories, and probably more works than I am aware of. These scolds didn’t love him enough to try nominate him for even a short story or a novella in the past.

    So why the hesitation? Why the ‘need to know’ if he was contacted/made aware of his nomination by Sad Puppies to be included in the SP slate?

    Well, we know the answer. “Deny them or you’re just as evil. Dump them or you get No Award.”

    These are the threats of the abuser, to someone who isn’t their victim.

    To highlight:

    I recently spotted a comment here on Brad’s blog by a certain unwelcome stalker, who demanded that Castalia House authors leave Castalia house ‘or never get his money.’ This is fundamentally stupid because that unwelcome stalker, Clamps, doesn’t like any of the works of the authors of Castalia House even BEFORE they were publishing through Castalia House. He outright hates them, often without ever reading any of their work, for reasons that have nothing to do with their stories or writing. He wasn’t ever going to buy their writing anyway.

    TNH’s supporters threatening Butcher with No Award is about as believable as Clamps telling John C. Wright “Leave Castalia House or I will stop buying your stuff.” They’re threatening him with something they’ve been already doing: not nominating Jim Butcher for the Hugo, thus, not considering him for the award. No Award.

34. This year was slate vs. slate. It was the SP and RP slates vs. the secret slates that have dominated the Hugo’s for the last few years. All SP has done is bring slate voting out into the open. I’m sure next year the Harris’ and Scalzi will each have their own slates. The irony being that SP4 probably won’t have a slate, more a shortlist of recommended works, because Sad Puppies isn’t about getting a slate nominated or awarded (hence Larry Correia declining the nomination), it’s about getting more fans into the Hugo electorate, and slate voting only works when the voting pool is restricted.

35. Yeah, some of the comments about Butcher made my blood boil. But he’s a popular author and these attacks amount to a few drops of angry spittle in a vast ocean.

36. @robspalding: And with a master list all anyone ever has to do is point at it and say “Here’s what’s eligible. Please register and vote.”

    This is the best suggestion I’ve heard. Perhaps narrow the field with a preliminary vote as a perk of early membership, then carry on as usual.

    I should add that the one time I attended Worldcon (OMG, I might be a trufan!!), I didn’t vote because I’d never even heard of most of the nominated material.

37. Mr.A is Mr.A says:
    “As was pointed out elsewhere, if Gamergate were actively involved, the Hugo votes would have topped 20,000 rather than 2,000. More likely the MakingLight crowd were making excuses…”

    That’s not very ingenious. You only have to go to Daddy Warpig’s Twitter feed and see for yourself.

38. @Shadowdancer: thanks for the link to Butcher’s article. The man has a pair.

    Anybody: Who the heck is “Clamps” ??

39. At James Nicolls, Nick Mamatas is claiming that SP3 didn’t nominate Edge of Tomorrow because HE translated it. Others claim it’s because we’re all xenophobic Americans who don’t like stuff from Japan, or that we’re sexist and didn’t care for Emily Blunt.

    I’m not linking. Clamps is over there, spewing his usual crap.

40. spacefaringkitten says:
    “That’s not very ingenious. You only have to go to Daddy Warpig’s Twitter feed and see for yourself.”

    Right, because there’s not possible way for there to be any overlap between SP and GG without collusion. Everybody knows that no science fiction fan plays games or vice versa.

    Idiot.

41. @Rez re: “eligible works slate” – IIRC from a post last August re: John Scalzi’s “Locked In”, there were in excess of 200 SFF novels published that MONTH through various venues.(I don’t think this included the Kindle-published works, but it might have.) It’s long been true that it is not possible to read all the fiction published in the field. Some sort of gate-keeping is going to arise. We’re just arguing about the shape of the hopper and how badly things get diced going through the mill.

    Clamps is a frequent flyer troll, under a variety of names.

42. “Yama” and “Yamamanama” are among his most common aliases.

43. Right now Amazon has just under 20,000 items in Science Fiction and Fantasy that have been released in the last 90 days. A master eligible list just isn’t practical.

44. ” spacefaringkitten says:
    Mr.A is Mr.A says:
    “As was pointed out elsewhere, if Gamergate were actively involved, the Hugo votes would have topped 20,000 rather than 2,000. More likely the MakingLight crowd were making excuses…”

    That’s not very ingenious. You only have to go to Daddy Warpig’s Twitter feed and see for yourself.”

    Shallow evidence with an N of 1, and poor anaylsys on your part. What was the result of the tweet? When was the rush of resgistrations and nominations relative to that “call to arms”? Many of the main Gamergate sites only took notice of the Hugos *after* the award nominations (do a little digging for yourself). See the a snapshot of Sasquan/Worldcon’s nomination-by-year chart here: http://madgeniusclub.com/2015/04/04/2014-hugo-nominations/. If that is Gamergate involving itself, the Gaming Press and SJWs in gaming have soiled themselves over nothing.

    One could just as easily argue that PNH and TNH posting their dog-whistling about supposed Gamergate involvement on Making Light probably did more to bring the Hugo dust-up to the attention of Gamergaters than a series of tweets by a single gamer and SF/F fan.

    Do try harder.

45. “Right, because there’s not possible way for there to be any overlap between SP and GG without collusion. Everybody knows that no science fiction fan plays games or vice versa.”

    Even better, what kitten doesn’t get is just how many gamers *are* SFF book fans (i.e. of my gamer friends, a dozen or so off the top of my head). Furthermore, she doesn’t understand how many gamers AREN’T involved in #gamergate at all but are sympathetic to it. I think the most serious blunder was picking Sarkeesian, a previously established fraud and liar, as the talking head of the opposition. But that’s an argument for another day.

    The bigger issue, the one everyone keeps dancing around and pointing at, is the difference between the TruFen and us regular old fans. People like me who don’t have schedules that allow us to attend Cons but own hundreds of SFF novels and have read a thousand more. The kind of people who grew up talking about WoT and LotR and Ender’s Game and Eragon. But we’re not “involved” in the right venues, so we’re largely just ignored.

    Heck, I’m still shocked that Rick Riordan hasn’t even been *discussed* as a consideration for a Hugo. The man writes kid/teen adventure novels that are crafted better than 99% of adult fiction on the market. But he’s not even close to the “right kind” of person, apparently.

    The difference is that I can bring him up for SP consideration, say, next year – people would actually consider it. Trying that with the “other side?” Ha!

46. Nope, no collusion:

    “Vivian J. James ‏@RealVivianJames · 3h3 hours ago
    I’d like to take a second to thank Brianna Wu for bringing #SadPuppies to #GamerGate’s attention.

    I love making new allies!”

    and

    “TheRalph ‏@TheRalphRetort · 16h16 hours ago
    Seeing all this salt flow in makes me wish I did have a hand in #SadPuppies. Sorry to disappoint, SJWs, this was all sci-fi.”

47. For people who quote the Law of Unintended Consequences like it’s gospel, they really just don’t get it.

48. “One could just as easily argue that PNH and TNH posting their dog-whistling about supposed Gamergate involvement on Making Light probably did more to bring the Hugo dust-up to the attention of Gamergaters than a series of tweets by a single gamer and SF/F fan.”

    Oh, I think there’s no question that it did. They seem singularly unaware of the Streisand Effect.

49. From noted SJW Chris Kluwe in response to the Hugo nominations:

    Chris Kluwe @chriswarcraft
    The only thing that Vox Day deserves to win is a trip to a society that believes what he espouses so a random person can shoot him.

    And they complain about imaginary threats from #GamerGate.

50. I see that Brianna Wu is now weighing in on the alleged SP/RP/GamerGate conspiracy. Yeah, that’s going to end well for them.

51. Am I the only one who read the CHORF wails and thought of Eric Cartman?

    “Oh, the tears of unfathomable sadness! Let me lick them! So delicious!”

    Especially after Scalzi’s lying claptrap last year about how Larry suddenly changed his tune to claim he never wanted a Hugo when Larry actually said he never EXPECTED to get one.

    Of course these CHORFs try to rewrite their own word, in ACTIVE threads where you can scroll up and check, so what do I expect…?

52. At the very least can we PLEASE put to rest the idea that ideological tests are not a foudational part of the “traditional” publishing process where hopeful authors knew very well to hide their wrong-thoughts deep and write to please Editors like the Nielsen-Haydens even if it meant betraying their own consciences? Be careful what you say. Be careful who might hear you…

    Fans and authors with “traditional fannish values” exist alongside, and always have, the fans and authors with unacceptable fannish values. Real fans. Lifetime fans. The only difference is that one side has always felt free to express themselves and the other knew that any hope they had of a career in publishing was to please the Editors who had all the power.

    Now, actually… the result may be that the Nielsen-Haydens really thought that fandom and the pool of hopeful authors actually all agreed with their politics and priorities. But how dense does a person have to be not to realize that with great power comes great responsibility and that, statistically, it was completely impossible that there weren’t “secret” conservatives and Christians and other unwashed all around them all the time?

53. Re: Moshe Feder

    To borrow their own rhetoric, why should we pay any attention whatsoever to what a shouty old white man has to say?

    Also, I missed that Christopher M. Chupik had already brought up Brianna Wu above.

54. Wait, they’re trying to pin a rather frigid GamerGate presence in the Hugos on Daddy Warpig? When Milo Yiannopoulos has reported on both GamerGate and Sad Puppies and is not only active in GG himself but practically a darling in the movement? Wow. Research fail there, TNH.

55. Brad, they are specifically accusing that SP brought in outsiders in the form of Gamer Gate.

56. I was on my way to unsubscribe from the Tor.com mailing list (not as some sort of protest, but because I realized that I never actually read the newsletters), when a link to review of *The 100* caught my eye (if you don’t watch it, you should. It’s great). The review overall wasn’t very good, but this part caught my eye:

    “Indeed, it’s telling that the two ostensibly ‘civilized’ environments we encounter—the Ark in Season One, and the airlocked society of Mount Weather in Season Two—are both shown to be crumbling from the inside out. Though they possess the trappings of strength, like advanced weapons and creature comforts, their forced isolation from the outside world is a crippling weakness. In both cases, these static societies have achieved self-preservation at the expense of change, physically unable to develop beyond their own limits.”

    Seems like a fitting metaphor for something, doesn’t it?

57. Jeff Gauch says:
    “Right, because there’s not possible way for there to be any overlap between SP and GG without collusion. Everybody knows that no science fiction fan plays games or vice versa.”

    I think playing games and taking part in a misogynist, harrassing hate group are two quite different things, but that’s not the issue here.

    Mr.A is Mr.A says:
    “Shallow evidence with an N of 1, and poor anaylsys on your part.”

    Some active gamergaters do support Sad Puppies is all I’ve said in this thread.

    Let me re-phrase what I’ve written here: Brad cherry-picks Making Light quotes about who should be let in the fandom. Original bit was about gamergaters, but Brad made it seem like ML people were speaking negatively about any new people wanting to enter fandom. That has been his tactic for quite some time with other quotes as well, and I really dislike it.

    Truthful and open dialogue about SF/F would bring about positive change more likely than this culture war rhetoric and hate-mongering.

58. (Eyebrows shoot up to top of forehead)
    That’s rich. That’s really rich.
    Let’s unpack the last two paragraphs (I won’t say much regarding Gamergate, except for the part where the gaming journalism industry reminds me a lot of Austria-Hungary in 1914), shall we?
    As to the next-to-last, Brad Torgerson quotes a series of people who at no point talk about “Gamergate.” Instead, if one is to take them at their words, they vigorously make it clear that they don’t want outsiders coming in. Perhaps some clarification would be in order on their parts, especially seeing as they are writing, rather than speaking. People have been attacked by internet mobs for far less.
    Spacefaringkitten says he’s taking the quotes out of context. Never mind the fact that Felder and Davidson both seem to be about as precise in their targeting as a 24-pdr smoothbore cannon loaded with canister. No, they’re “out of context.” Right.
    As to the last, this fellow proceeds to accuse Torgerson of “hate-mongering” and using “culture war rhetoric.” That second accusation is utterly laughable as an accusation–not because it is inaccurate, but because Torgerson is simply acknowledging plain and simple fact. Judged by SJW rules, the anti-SP crowd wants to see us all dead. Fortunately, we play by normal people rules. The hate-mongering one is laughable for the same reasons. If Torgerson is a hate-monger, the SJWs count multiple would-be ethnic cleansers among their numbers.
    This is, of course, not the case. However, I grow weary of people complaining that actually quoting people is “hate-mongering.” It’s a hyperbolic statement that has been used for quite some time to shut down discussion, and I really dislike it.

59. Space faring kitten (i have a great user ID icon for that name) opines that truthful and open dialogue … would bring about positive change more likely than … hate-mongering.

    We agree! I’d be thrilled! Does that mean you’ll stop calling decent people like John Wright racist, sexist criminals? You’ll discourage anyone who threatens to sabotage careers, gin up social media insult-storms, and you’ll now try to put the best construction on folks’ words first, rather than just automatically assuming the worst? That would be delightful! I can’t wait.

    Seriously, that would be the best! I’d love to join you in behaving like a civilized rational adult.

    No?

60. James Nicoll again: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/5297418.html

    “Since Baen’s publisher Toni Weisskopf is part of the Puppies slate for the second year running, I will no longer accept new commissions where the only edition is from Baen and while I will finish current projects involving Baen Books, I won’t link to the Baen edition. I certainly will not be buying anything from Baen in the future.

    I urge everyone (particularly people with review sites) to do the same.

    (I’ve linked to Baen a bunch of times since I started up my site, so I should go back and remove the links)”

    I’m sure that losing the all-important James Nicoll market will definitely show Toni! 😀

61. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of James Nicoll, but he’s a freelance book reviewer, right? So reviewing books isn’t just a hobby for him, it’s a source of income. So by refusing to review Baen books because Toni Weisskopf is on the Sad Puppies slate, he’s robbing himself of both the income for those reviews, and any hits, attention, and therefore further commissions that those reviews might bring him.

    Well, I guess he showed us!

62. “Brad cherry-picks Making Light quotes about who should be let in the fandom. Original bit was about gamergaters, but Brad made it seem like ML people were speaking negatively about any new people wanting to enter fandom. That has been his tactic for quite some time with other quotes as well, and I really dislike it.”

    So.

    Quotes are quotes. Quotes from the person who runs the website and who has a position (or did) of incredible power (a career? you want a career?) are, in the end, quotes from that person about what she said and meant to say.

    Now, if you feel that Brad is Cherry Picking, Kitten… how about you quote people who have made contrary statements or who have made an argument that is reasonable in opposition to the implication that new people somehow need to be the “right” kind of people… find some that haven’t been disemvoweled. What I’ve seen every time someone says something that actually promotes inclusivity of ideology or even simple co-existence, people promoting Sad Puppies praise them for their fairness.

    (And it’s not as though anti-GGers never do any overt hate promotion, is it, or portray everyone who doesn’t make big noise about supporting the erasure of boobies in video games as somehow hating women and probably a neck-beard living in a basement and fat and stinky, too.)

63. As for James Nicoll… punishment, shunning and other In-Group control mechanisms are all they’ve got. This is why, after it doesn’t work on the Out-Group for a while, someone in the In-Group will start attacking their own. (Ie. Requires Hate) Because, in the end, Baen or Sad Puppies aren’t vulnerable… and Baen has been hated for no reason for as long it has existed… but in the end it’s James Nicoll who has to watch what he says and curry the favor of the Right People so that they won’t turn on him. It’s not a bad business decision on his part. It’s a necessary one.

64. “It’s not a bad business decision on his part. It’s a necessary one.”

    Quite possibly. However, isn’t refusing to take a commission because you have moral problems with it now supposed to be the worst possible kind of bigotry, and must be countered with government action? I demand he be forced to review Baen books against his will!

65. Speaking of a televised revolt… anyone know where I can find the recording of the Hugo announcements?

66. Nicoll says in the comments that it’s a financially bad move. It’s pure lockstep ideological reasoning, you know, what they project onto the folks who put together the various Puppies initiatives.

67. I keep running across references to the Hugo process “changing” in “two years”. Usually mentioned as a reaction to the Sad Puppy campaign. Any idea of how they’re going to “change” the Hugo process?

68. I might actually buy a book that has “Hugo Winner” on it for the first time in decades. Usually seeing that on the cover would make me consider it radioactive and carrying the z virus, to be avoided at all cost.

69. The hilarious thing about Nicoll’s announcement is that he HATES Baen. Every time I google Baen, I get his blog where he’s slagging on Baen for something or another. So this is just an excuse to do what he’s probably been planning for a while.

70. “Indications that they’ve had to go outside of fandom in order to gain recruits suggests that fandom largely rejected their actions – a message that they should have heeded early on.”

    So Brad and Larry talking to their FANS is outside Fandom? Well, it’s outside YOUR fandom. And yes, we should have heeded that message early on, before we humiliated you with this years nominations? Hmmm, maybe YOU should have done some heeding after the last two years.

    And as far as #noaward goes? I’ve seen a dozen people talking about getting a supporting membership so they can vote. Add those people to the original nominating members and I don’t believe the CHORFs have enough votes to actually get #noaward in any categories.

71. There was an amusing comment on Nicoll’s post, claiming that “It’s been a long time since Baen Books picked up anything new that didn’t fit into a very narrow comfort zone”, and that any examples to the contrary are simply “legacies”.

    Seems like pure projection to me.

72. As a SFF fan, this is the year that the Hugo Award pretty much loses all meaning to me.

    The SP and RP slate of nominees is gaming the system, and that is all it is. Whether or not any of the works on those slates could have made the Hugo shortlist on their own merits is moot. The supporters of SP and RP claim that past nominees and winners were beneficiaries of the same gaming, but this hasn’t and can’t be proved. This year, however, the gaming is obvious and provable. I feel any Hugos given out to SP or RP slate authors should have a little asterisk next to their name so that folks know that this was a year that some cheaters won.

    Curious to see if the Hugo Award can recover.

73. “but in the end it’s James Nicoll who has to watch what he says and curry the favor of the Right People so that they won’t turn on him.”

    Yes. When Stalin finishes his speech, you definitely don’t want to be the first one who stops applauding.

74. “As a SFF fan, this is the year that the Hugo Award pretty much loses all meaning to me.”

    Well, now you know how the majority of SFF fans have felt every other year.

75. “this is the year that the Hugo Award pretty much loses all meaning to me.”

    Well, we’ll all just have to live with the guilt from that, won’t we? We’ll manage.

    “I feel any Hugos given out to SP or RP slate authors should have a little asterisk next to their name”

    Your “feelings” don’t actually matter in this context. It’s always “feel” this and “feel” that with you people. How old are you, two? You (presumably) have a functioning neocortex. Try using that instead of your amygdala for once.

76. “The Making Light folk were discussing the possibility that Gamergaters could have been recruited to nominate for the Hugos”

    Yeah, you just made Brad’s point for him.

    Your justification of those comments requires and implies that 1) Gamergate people can’t possibly read and like SF/F books and have an interest in the Hugos and 2) Even if they do, they don’t count because they’re the wrong type of people who read and like SF/F books.

    Fail.

77. Reblogged this on D.E. Cantor.

78. “The day, the Hugos…..died
    They were singing bye bye to the liberal awards
    Drove my Chevy to the Worldcon
    But the Worldcon was free
    And good old SJW’s were drinking club soda and crying
    Singing this’ll be the day noawards
    Singing this’ll be the day noawards”

79. It’s the End of the Hugos As We Know it (And I Feel Fine).

80. Don’t Fear the Puppy
    The Wreck of the Nielsen Hayden
    Knockin’ on Hugo’s Door

81. There are uber-liberal Godzilla sized authors (George Martin anyone?) who could certainly motivate their fans with a little nudge, hey, you like science fiction, you loved Wild Cards, there’s a fan award called the Hugo. You should get involved. You should nominate works for the different categories. You should vote.

    The problem is… there’s no way to control how they’d vote.

    Brad and Larry didn’t have to turn down nominations because minions are good at following orders (not that anyone *gave* any orders) because that’s the problem with minions. They have minds of their own.

    Now, I think it would be a fabulous thing if uber-liberal megastars who make Correia look like a part-timer (at least for now) brought in their fan bases to have a voice in which works in any given year represent the best in the genre. Because I *know* they’d be uncontrollable.

    I’d love to know if anyone is calling for *expanding* participation in response to this, because all I’ve heard is that they’re doubling down, like Keivan up there, on attempts to keep out the riff-raff and keep control by voting no award *even if* the work merits an award if it’s got Sad Puppy cooties.

82. Don’t Fear the Puppy… oh, wow, do I want to see that as a full fledged filk.

    (My *heart* wants to filk and I haven’t done so since going to a filk session years ago only to be handed a song sheet with some gawd awful song about George Bush, and precious few that had anything to do with science fiction or fantasy… Don’t Fear the Puppy would be inappropriate *too*, but it’s at least a little on the topic of fandom.)

83. “Don’t Fear the Puppy… oh, wow, do I want to see that as a full fledged filk.”

    Working on it. 🙂

84. LawDog,

    This is the ‘out group’, we mostly don’t hear what the ‘in group’ is deciding behind closed doors.

    A couple of people have popped off with the idea of making the -ballot- shorter than the list of -nominees-. That is: You may nominate -four-, but there are going to be -five- actual nominees.

    This is, actually, -not- a counter. It presumes mindless block voting, as opposed to people reading, evaluating, and picking. But if it keeps the gerbil’s deluded into thinking that will work…. shrugs.

    Next up: voter integrity ideas like… voter ID. 😀

85. Doctor Locketopus… maybe a renovation of filk should be next on the Puppy list. I realize that my experience might be defined by who it is that volunteers to do filking at our local con, and I’m disinclined to bad mouth anyone willing to volunteer, but there is a *reason* I only went once. (I’ll continue to get along with people better if I don’t go.) The first time I went to a filk session was at Baycon a long time ago. Other than one song about a short bus that I didn’t appreciate, all the songs were cool science fiction songs or about Einstein or Admiral Naismith (to the tune of a modern major general) or some other song actually about the books. At the filk I went to here someone did a solo of their own creation (I believe) which was something about a chain mail bikini to “Highway to Heaven” which was a riot. The rest were insulting, political, and blah blah blah. PLEASE tell me that’s not the norm and that it’s usually more like the first one? 🙂

86. Kieven whined, “This year, however, the gaming is obvious and provable. ”
    Okay then, buddy boy, let’s see what you got. Show us your proof that this is “gaming” the system.
    And, Kievan? I’ve been reading SFF since the 1970s. But I’ve never been to a major Convention like WorldCon, etc. This year was the first year I realized that *I* could also vote for the Hugo awards. I had thought, in the past, that one had to be a member of a group like SFWA (for example) to vote for these awards. But no–all that I had to do was the SAME thing you and every other non-Puppy-Lover does: I paid 40 bucks, and I got to vote for fiction that I liked, fiction that I felt was closer to the original Hugo spirit (instead of stuff like the execrable “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” short story). I am a fan, and I voted. That’s not gaming the system–that’s the way the system was designed to work.

87. Julie asked, “At the filk I went to here someone did a solo of their own creation (I believe) which was something about a chain mail bikini to “Highway to Heaven” which was a riot. The rest were insulting, political, and blah blah blah.PLEASE tell me that’s not the norm and that it’s usually more like the first one?”
    What you didn’t point out is that the rest of the songs (insulting, political, etc.) were only pointed one direction: towards the right. If politifilk is made, it invariably aims its snark in that direction. So although much filk is apolitical, there are many leftists with axes to grind (and guitars to strum) who like to think they are Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and other counter-culture folk music heroes.

88. Do you guys honestly think you are making fandom or the hugos better with this shit? You are taking an all voluntary, not-for-profit institution and making it a fucking chore for the people who are trying to make fandom a functional place, especially in light of the ‘decline'(arguable) of literary fandom. Don’t get me wrong, there are issues that should be addressed, especially with some of the politicization going on, but do you honestly think this is the way to go about it? I wonder how many of you guys are actual contributors to fandom? Do you actually try to make yourself available and make reasonable suggestions to correct problems? Or do you predominantly bitch on the internet that things aren’t going your way, thinking that because you cut some veggies up in a consuite, that means you really put in the kind of effort that made that place function?

    Furthermore, have you thought for 5 fucking seconds about the likely consequences of these actions? What do you honestly think is the most likely outcome? I’d say you probably have realized the likely outcomes, and don’t give a shit, because you and your buds are probably making extra cash off the added exposure, and that’s a worthwhile venture regardless of how long it lasts. So let’s take a step back, and look again at some of the likely outcomes from this bullshit.

    First one has been mentioned and debated already: A MASTER LIST! WITH MODERATORS! BRILLIANT FUCKING PLAN! Surely if SMOFs have been replaced with SJWs, and you’re currently accusing them of fighting dirty to get their buds on the ballot, and their political enemies off, that will OBVIOUSLY end well for you. But let’s be real, that’s a shitty idea already, on so many fronts, especially considering the Hugos should be an international organization. First there’s the issue of everyone in the world who deserves to be on it, getting on the list. Then there’s the whole idea of maintaining and culling and verifying eligibility. Let me reiterate an earlier mention: all-volunteer, not-for-profit. If you want this as an option, feel free to step up and take the reins on that, if you can get off your blog for long enough to do so, of course.

    Second: By-laws are rewritten to void any votes that seem to be obvious products of collusion. How do you determine that? Ultimately it’ll probably have to boil down to one person, because too many cooks in the kitchen would make the job impossible. Gee, this sounds like an awfully similar scenario to the first one, in that the people who actually put in the time and effort to work on these staffs will be the ones essentially deciding what is eligible to win and what isn’t, again this presents a problem especially for your camp, the ones accusing SMOFs of secret vote rigging. Also let me reiterate another point, all volunteer, not-for-profit. Don’t get me wrong, there is some shit that needs to be corrected, I mean Dr. Who shouldn’t be winning all the time, it’s not that fucking good. I think there’s possible collusion going there, and should be stamped out, but this is not the way to go about it.

    Third: _Actual_(as opposed to the current imaginary) opposing blocks that essentially dictate how each category is going to go, based on the select individuals putting up the list! This sounds like a GRAND solution! Surely the Hugos will be even more relevant and reliable when everybody is simply competing to be on the current ‘Cool kids,’ voting block.

    How about that secret vote-rigging, by the way? Have you realized that your halfassed, unpopular, vote rigging has been beating the Fannish Illuminati since day 1? Your group of roughly 200 has managed to totally dominate the 1800 other colluding and conspiring Hugo nominators. Yet you keep doing it. Huh, it’s almost like you saying you are trying to prove one point, and then just say who cares about fairness at all once your friends get on the ballot. This is Motte and Bailey tactics, by the way, a popular one among SJWs, and other idiots who get more caught up in politics than practicalities.

    But lets look at the some of the potential consequences a little bit further. While I believe it’s unlikely, let’s take a look at what happened at Context 27. A bunch of people who thought they were ‘doing the right thing,’ and trying to ‘stand against injustice.’ So they turned what could have been handled privately into a public fucking fiasco, they destroyed a few reputations along the way, crushed a few spirits, and eventually ‘got their way.’ Oh. Wait a fucking minute. I forgot. There will be no Context 28. This shitty, childish, political grandstanding bullshit destroyed a convention that has been, if the number is any indication, going for 27 years. Why? Because SF literary fandom is already fragile enough as it is, without people constantly bitching about things being unfair while doing absolutely nothing to make it better.

    And worst of all is some of the basic premises you cite.
    https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/why-sad-puppies-3-is-going-to-destroy-science-fiction/

    Seriously? Your fucking argument is that fandom isn’t keeping up with pop culture? I’ve tried to avoid ad hominem here, but this is just fucking stupid and devoid of sound logic. You think catering to the unwashed masses and theater ticket sales should be greater determinants of who should win the Hugos than the core contingent of people who have been involved with them for decades? Just plain fucking dumb. Let’s look at another award ceremony that seems to grant ‘Best of’ awards to people who have the best sales and marketing campaigns. THE GRAMMY’S! A perfectly respectable and reliable institution when it comes to judging the best music from all over the world. God knows I get my music list from the Grammy’s. Ugh, fucking gag me.

    You can argue all day that SF/F has grown up and moved to Hollywood, but the Hugos haven’t. If you want to grow up and go to Hollywood, along with the ideas you idolize, then go work in Hollywood, and get a vote in the Oscars.

    Most of this was speculation, but let me leave you withe the one piece of speculation I can present that is most likely. The reason you have to organize a vote block is because your work and the work of your friends simply isn’t as good as you think it is. It doesn’t win votes because others are more deserving, and one way or another, while you may be able to abuse the system for now, you are outnumbered in fandom, and you will eventually lose. You might lose because the rules get tightened up and your work simply isn’t good enough to win, or you might lose because fandom decides to stack the deck against you out of spite. Either way, if you support these kind of obviously underhanded actions, regardless of their legality, you are clearly lacking in personal integrity, so regardless of the outcome, you are a loser.

    I invite any of you involved with this to take a step back and determine two things. First: What are you trying to accomplish here? Second: do you honestly think the tactics you are engaging will work in the long term? If your objective is to shill for your friends and get a few extra books sold regardless of merit, keep on keeping on. That ship will eventually sail, so cash in while you can. If you actually give a shit about fandom or hugo’s, and still think this is the way to go about making the situation better, well, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that one.

89. EO – Did you actually have a point to that rant other than flailing about with incessant ad hominem attacks?

90. ” The reason you have to organize a vote block is because your work and the work of your friends simply isn’t as good as you think it is.”

    But “If you were a dinosaur, my love” is that good?

    If fandom outnumbered us then why, after three years, are we stronger than ever? Sorry, I think you misunderstand who fandom outnumbers. And “underhanded?” I doubt we could have been any more up front and public without taking out ad time on SYFY. Just because you and your snobby friends ignored us until you got bit in the groin by a puppy, doesn’t mean we were hiding anything.

    And you’re right, we could have whined and complained and written letters and suggested changes. Yep, we could have done that. Instead we FOLLOWED THE RULES and actually changed things. The fact that you and your obviously completely aboveboard friends will be spending the time until the WSFS meeting coming up with rules changes designed to forever shut out anyone you CHORFs don’t approve of won’t change what was accomplished by fandom this year. And when you change the rules to completely destroy the Hugos then we will still have won. Everyone will know that it’s been reduced to a tiny, clique-granted award that means you have gotten the stamp of approval from MiniFen.

    Thank you for seasoning our midnight snacks with your bitter SJW tears. Please, try not to drown in them. They season our steaks, enrich our whiskey, and lubricate our guns. We’d hate to run out of such a useful resource.

91. I just re-read a favorite of mine this week – “A World Out Of Time” by Larry Niven. Very prescient, very timely, considering how long ago it was written. Jaybee Corbell, rebelling against the all-powerful State, fast-forwarded to a post-apocalyptic time where planets were moved in service to the ultimate War between Boys and Girls. Somewhat stunning, I must say, given the GamerGate/Hugo/SJW/RPG wars we are going through. I shrugged, nodded, and moved on….

    To the “City” cycle by Clifford Simak – with the burned out husks of human civilization, served by uncomprehending robots and disbelieving Dogs. I shuddered, sighed, and wonder where to go next.

    If you dig deep enough – but not too deep – you find that all of this has been foreseen by the true, and not-so-secret, Masters of Science Fiction.

92. Eo blasted out with ” The reason you have to organize a vote block is because your work and the work of your friends simply isn’t as good as you think it is. ”
    Yup, that’s exactly it. The reason you folks have to organize to block votes you don’t like is because your work and the work of your friends simply isn’t as good as you think it is.
    Dude, it’s not about you and your “important” fiction. It’s about continuity and quality. What I have seen happen to the Hugos is a drift away from actual quality writing towards “best SJW message.” The Hugos aren’t just yours. I, for one, am actually interested in making “fandom a functional place, especially in light of the ‘decline'(arguable) of literary fandom” (as you so aptly put it.)
    I think, however, that your definition of functional is an inward spiral, circling into a singularity of goodthink as the criteria for good writing, so that SFF becomes “literary” at last. My definition of functional means that we EXPAND the fanbase, not limit it to a small social club of TruFen ™.

93. And EO assumes that everyone involved hasn’t been “involved” in literary science fiction and hasn’t watched the periodic convulsions over the last few decades that have brought us to the point where the supposed “core” of the genre has excluded anyone not in ideological lock step. The “not a true fan” argument in yet another iteration. All the hyperventilating and flailing accomplishes what? If someone *breaks* this, it will be those defending their castle by destroying it by voting No Award on everything on the basis of who nominated it, *explicitly* calling to do so no matter the merit of the work… because burning down your own house is better than loosing control of it.

    They could, if they wanted, bring in more fans, a greater breadth of fandom, into the process of what is supposed to be a fan based award for the best in the entire genre and dilute the influence of Sad Puppies 4… but they’d loose control that way, too.

    “Science Fiction” as some nebulous entity has been working overtime to alienate and purge and purify the genre. Wanting so badly to sit at the big kid’s “literature” table in the early 1990s that “Space Opera” became a dirty word and if you used the term “sci-fi” you’d be made to regret it, to realizing in the aughts that maybe that wasn’t so smart and we ought to be proud of our pulpy roots, but that self-correction was side tracked by the literati joining forces with the SJW who have done their best to criminalize fun and ban wrong-think and turn what is supposed to be about the amazing weirdness and daring speculative fiction into a practice of social engineering and self-congratulations for voting on the basis of people’s pigment, plumping, and preferences and punishing people who use simple words like “lady” or who actually enjoy some classic fantasy artwork.

    It’s not within the power of Sad Puppies 3 to break the Hugos. They might be broken, but it won’t be by US.

94. I’ve been going to conventions since 1979; I’ve even been on the concoms of two different conventions. Do you know what I’ve been told whenever the subject of Hugo Noms has come up across that entire time? These words:

    “If you don’t like the nominations, buy a membership. Get your friends to buy them as well. Then vote on the works you want to be nominated.”

    Sad Puppies simply took fandom at its word.

    And BTW, I’ll be damned before I let anyone tell me I’m not a real fan and that my opinions don’t matter.

95. EO also assumes that no one has thought for five seconds about the likely consequences.

    EO also has no idea whatsoever about anyone’s stated goals, or what they hope to accomplish.

    EO has undoubtedly been fed a pile of manure elsewhere, got the butt-hurt version and swallowed it whole.

    EO might actually be well intentioned and willing to learn and listen and understand another point of view.

    The leading cause of Puppy Sadness is that deserving authors, top drawer outstanding professionals, examples of Greatness in this genre, for whatever reason are passed over for Hugo recognition in favor of in-group favorites. People have stopped viewing a Hugo as a place to find a rip roaring good read or to find something challenging and dangerously different. A Hugo has recently come to mean that something is approved… by a small group of people who have agendas that frankly, don’t seem to be doing much good for the genre. Too many people are starting to view the entire genre as a wasteland of gray colored drek. They remember something different. Something *expansive*… with alien cultures and chrome needle spaceships and hope and adventure and great insight into the human condition. It made you cheer or made you shiver or challenged the social order. This can be recovered without the Hugos, just let that little group have their private playground, but is that best for the genre?

    Mostly, science fiction fans don’t realize that the Hugo is supposed to be their award and that it is trivially easy to be part of the process. There should be something that a person can point to and say “That’s the best of the best,” and the only way to get that is to have more and more and more fans involved in sorting and selecting what they feel is best and then voting for it. Not just “we want to vote for our friends” which has essentially been the status quo which Sad Puppies is advocating against, but getting the input of the thousands of fans without connections to bring an unbiased view.

96. “As a SFF fan, this is the year that the Hugo Award pretty much loses all meaning to me.”

    I feel ya, dude. I was exactly the same way when “If You Were a Differently-Abled Lesbian Velociraptor, My Love” was nominated for a Hugo.

97. The first conventions I attended were in the late ’80s. I broke my SF/F chops on the likes of McCaffrey, Aspirin and Donaldson. I am DragonCon’s first Federation & Empire World Champion, from back in the ’90s (it’s a hilarious story, if you ever care to hear it).

    I am also a gamer. And I am here, now, voting in my first WorldCon, BECAUSE as a gamer I have been called out by these goombahs as “messing everything up” for them. I looked into it. I saw sneering, wild accusations, and worst of all, the stifling of creative thought and freedom.

    The Hugos are for ALL fandom. I’m proud to paint a Sad Puppy on my old SCA shield and lift it in line with the shieldwall for the advance. FORWARD!

98. @EO: “I’ve tried to avoid ad hominem here”

    That may well qualify as the single least self-aware statement ever posted on the internet.

    *golf clap*

99. “But “If you were a dinosaur, my love” is that good?”

    I figured he was talking about “Redshirts”, myself.

    “you are outnumbered in fandom”

    Amazon sales ranks indicate otherwise. Sorry about that.

100. We didn’t nominated Edge of Tomorrow because we hate the editor of the English translation? That is hilarious.

     1) I actually did nominate Edge of Tomorrow. So did my brother. It was a rather fun movie. Good solid SF concept behind it too.

     2) I hadn’t ever heard of him before last week, and I actually knew about All You Need is Kill well before the movie was made.

     3) To make the movie nominated or not about him is a bit odd. He had nothing to do with it. Even if I did hate him (which I most certainly don’t, don’t know about him enough to have an opinion at all) that wouldn’t affect the film in any way.

101. “That may well qualify as the single least self-aware statement ever posted on the internet.”

     Indeed. Shorter EO: “You are horrible, underhanded, cheating losers who like shitty books”.

102. “You think catering to the unwashed masses and theater ticket sales should be greater determinants of who should win the Hugos than the core contingent of people who have been involved with them for decades”

     You’ve *almost* got it. Let’s hear this one again, but this time wear a monocle and hold a cup of tea with your pinky finger out.

103. “Brad, you’re not picking soundbites very honestly. The Making Light folk were discussing the possibility that Gamergaters could have been recruited to nominate for the Hugos.”

     Miss, pardon me. Some of those Gamergaters buy my books, including books edited and printed by Tor. To liken my readers and patrons to child rapists is uncouth and ill advised. I depend on the goodwill of all my readers, not just the non-gamer readers, for my livelihood.

104. I didn’t nominate edge of tomorrow because I needed the slot for A Winters Tale. And I vote for what I admire and love, not for what some busybody thinks I ought to vote for, if I know what’s good for me.

     I know what side has been telling me from day one, “read it for yourself, and vote what you honestly love,” and which group tells me to ignore the work and vote to punish the bad people.

     If the angry innoramuses and offended bullies involved in bashing SP rather than cleaning house and shining a light on the SF they admire (chacon a son gout, say, I, it makes for a more interesting world) keep on in this vein, they wil in short order drive a backlash that does the same to them, and makes rabid puppies look tame. Have they no clue how their high handed, insulting intolerance energises those who would otherwise have been content to live and let live, and just ignore the Hugos as they slide gently into irrelevance?

105. Someone was talking about filk being a necessity.

     Well, my playlist is going in the background. There’s a particular theme which I keep replaying… it seems entirely too appropriate, not just because of the adaptability of lyrics, but because of the movie’s actual story.

     There’s this bunch of misfits, right? who end up being all there is to save their country from being overrun by a horde of brutish louts. Pretty stock stuff, on the face of it. And I’m sure the Neilsen crowd believes they

106. Apologies; there was a sudden screen refresh and then WordPress was posting that incomplete mess up there.

     Anyways, I’m pretty sure that lot believes they are the misfits who are going to save the nation from the “unwashed hordes” — they’ve already said as much. But what is important here is first realizing that the Fandom is far, far larger than the misfits and the hordes combined. It is when the Fandom is roused, when they take to the field, that their numbers wash the entire remainder of the conflict beneath. So when I hear one side demand exclusion of the “unwashed”, they’re not talking about invading Huns.

     They’re talking about the Fandom. They’re talking about us.

     Be a Fan.

107. I hadn’t heard of this until I caught an article critical (and clueless about sci-fi) of the “rigged” Hugo ballot. This is pretty amazing. Thank you for making it happen guys. For years the Hugo label has been useless to me as a reader for exactly the reasons you espouse. Outside of a few notable exceptions, I’ve been reading independant self-pubished authors I find on Amazon for years now. The apparently popular books just haven’t interested me.

     It’s fun watching all the people mad about this. I bet Heinlein would love it too.

108. “you’re not picking [MakingLight] soundbites very honestly.”

     Ooooooh, let’s play this game, yes, let’s do. Here’s one exact quote early on (#20, to be precise), in the currently ongoing “2015 Hugo finalists” thread:

     “Not to mention the 27 nominations for that pervert John C Wright.”

     Neither one of the Haydens saw fit to gainsay such a libelous characterization, nor even (to use their own term) “disenvowel” it… and, as Ms. Hayden later responds directly to that very same posting, it plainly is not credible that she did not see it.

     A TOR editor and a former TOR employee, in other words, both demonstrably feel that “pervert” is a perfectly fair and apt description of a TOR author, due (evidently) to his having garnered multiple award nominations within a single year. The comment, after all, remains on their site, as of this typing; other postings all around it have been remarked upon by them, and censored by them at whim.

     Just. Not. THAT. Particular. One.

     Perfectly defensible, professional adult behavior…

     … provided, of course, that one is a sow.

109. overgrownhobbit says:
     “Space faring kitten (i have a great user ID icon for that name) opines that truthful and open dialogue … would bring about positive change more likely than … hate-mongering.

     We agree! I’d be thrilled! Does that mean you’ll stop calling decent people like John Wright racist, sexist criminals?”

     I can only speak for myself, but I have never called him anything at all. I’m aware of him and his thoughts only very marginally. His opposition to gay rights and his blog posts in favor of Sad Puppies because “it’s going to make SJW heads explode” suggest he and I have very little common ground. Never read a word of his fiction, but now I probably will.

     What I mean by hate-mongering is spreading out the belief that somebody in the fandom had anything against newcomers, who treat others with respect. Tactical slate-voting in order to score political points is not very respectful, and some people seem to be quite angry about that. I’m disappointed too, but it’s not the end of the world. We’ll see how this plays out.

110. Kent18 says:
     Ooooooh, let’s play this game, yes, let’s do. Here’s one exact quote early on (#20, to be precise), in the currently ongoing “2015 Hugo finalists” thread:

     “Not to mention the 27 nominations for that pervert John C Wright.”

     Neither one of the Haydens saw fit to gainsay such a libelous characterization, nor even (to use their own term) “disenvowel” it… and, as Ms. Hayden later responds directly to that very same posting, it plainly is not credible that she did not see it.

     What’s your point? A commenter called mr. Wright a pervert. In the “Please don’t CHORF…” comment thread of this blog, feminists were compared to nazis, some specific people commenting in ML were called idiots and morons, Kameron Hurley was called an idiot, Ann Leckie was called an idiot, John Scalzi was called a moron etc.

     Bad manners everywhere.

111. You may not agree with John’s politics or his religion, but that doesn’t make him a pervert.

     Words have meanings. Or at least they used to.

112. Do you actually not see a difference between “moron” and “pervert?”

     And your definition of “hate-mongering” is spreading the quotes from the other side?

     Indeed, I think you do not have very much in common with Mr. Wright at all, as he is a highly logical individual.

113. I have to disagree with the opinion that the opposition to what the Sad Puppies has done is 100% snobbery. I have had a lot of discussions with fellow fans on Facebook recently These are friends that I’ve had for years. I’ve worked on concoms with them at both Windycon and Capricon. And many of them had no knowledge of the Sad Puppies until the recent nominations were announced. They are distressed, as am I, that a few hundred fans pretty much voted in lock-step from two lists of suggestions and got practically all of the most important nominations. And, by the way, I am totally against the No Award strategy some people are advocating. While I don’t agree with the SP tactics I will read all the nominees and vote on the content of the nominations not on their politics or on who wrote them. And I hope for the Best Novel award the Sad Puppies do the same.

114. Sorry for the very late response, Rez. Spent the day AFK doing mommy things.

     You’re welcome for the link. I love Jim Butcher’s work, and from all accounts he’s a very good person, who is happy. When I read that post of his I admire him as a person as well. I find it rather sad …and somewhat pathetic… that people out there are so full of hate that they are deciding to punish him for the slightest association to ‘conservatives’. He is one of the best writers in the fantasy / urban fantasy genre these days and quite honestly, was the writer who had me take chances on new authors once again.

     Brad, I hope you don’t mind if I take a moment to answer the question; because unfortunately the stalker has been exceedingly active and lots of new people are not aware of his history. I am sorry for the necessity.

     Clamps, aka Yamamanama, is a longtime troll who actively targets forums, blogs, writers and sites with a right-leaning bent – or hell, he just doesn’t like – and harasses people there. He has been known to go on and harass anyone who disagrees with him in discussion in those places, especially if they are female. He’s quite notorious and references to him go back as far as at least 2003 or 2005. One of his earliest mentions involves him harassing the children of a white supremacist woman.

     I happen to be one of his longtime victims – he’s been stalking and harassing me for closing in on six years now. I don’t make that statement lightly;I’ve been quietly documenting his actively following me around on the Internet, including his harassment of my husband and his repeated, declared threats on my children. He has also repeatedly gone to blogs of friends or places where I comment to harass the blog owner in the hopes of getting me banned to get him to go away. The documentation is sadly necessary; Clamps regularly tries to portray me as a homophobic, racist, misogynistic, male, (insert SJW buzzword here) in attempts to discredit me, get people to harass / dogpile me, attack or cost me livelihood on left-leaning sites, usually dragging up my name out of nowhere, or taking comments I have made completely out of context or even misrepresenting them as a whole.

     (I am Asian, female, and also small.)

     The only reason why I haven’t been able to press charges is because I live in Australia (previously, the Philippines) and he’s in the US – thus, to the police or other authorities, his threats are ‘unlikely’; and attempts towards litigation are not something I can afford.

     I am not his only target nor likely his only victim, so the documentation serves as an identifying marker for his behavior. He is strongly anti-Gamergate, hates conservatives and will most often use the DARVO tactics in attempts to gain sympathy.

     Vox is also another person who he has harassed for a very long time; and, from what I am aware, Vox actually was able to gather up evidence and contact police regarding Clamps. Since then, Clamps has been going to every. single. site where Vox has been mentioned, even in passing, to complain about Vox Day and claim that Vox was the person who stalked and harassed him – Clamp’s latest round of that got him banned yet again on Brad’s blog lately. On Vox Day’s site, Clamps tried to pass himself off as me a few times, as well as trying to pretend to be other commenters on that site.

     …I feel I must offer my apologies in advance, Brad, if this explanation results in yet another series of having to ban Clamps using new pseudonyms (or spewdonyms).

115. When Johnathan Ross came under pressure, he sarcastically offered to buy a ticket off of someone “less stupid.” This brings you to someone more stupid:

     “fabiofernandes ‏@fabiofernandes @wossy @wasteofpaint Sure. Like, say, THE ENTIRE SFF COMMUNITY”

     This is the guy in Brazil who co-edited the anti-white racial revenge anthology We See a Different Frontier whose blurb ended saying the authors would write “their fantasies of a reality in which straight, cis, able-bodied, rich, anglophone, white males don’t get to tell us how they won every war; their revenge against the alien oppressor.”

     Others also claimed ownership:

     “Seanan McGuire @seananmcguire Also, call me, I don’t know, strange, but I was told–when volunteering to host the Hugos–that the host would be from our community.”

     SJWs are unbelievably arrogant people. Those 2 fools no more represent me than the plague does. By the weird “intersectional” standards of those two, each are guilty of poaching on my territory via cultural appropriation. I can’t tell you how many Tweets I’ve read from this cult about this:

     “Retweeted by Mikki Kendall Daniel José Older @djolder · 20h People steal WOC’s work because they believe they can get away with it, because they almost always have.”

     What about MoW? So the Cult of Race and Gender is angry. Gee, what a surprise. If they were having crying jags over the U.K.’s slightly more over-the-top version of David Letterman, there must be a run on klonopin and prozac right now.

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117. @Alan Ziebarth – I’m taking the time to respond to you because you seem somewhat reasonable because you disagree with the No Award strategy.

     As someone who is voting for the first time thanks to Sad Puppies I plan to read as many of the nominees as I am able and give them an honest fair go – yes, even Leckie, whose politics I flat out dislike. Unlike those calling for a no award, I am not interested in abusing the no award out of spite.

     A long time reader of fantasy and sci-fi, I was not aware that ‘ordinary’ fans like myself could nominate or vote for the Hugos. Maybe that’s because I didn’t live in Anglophone countries most of my life, or where English books were not easy to get back then. I also was not aware that popular works like those of Jim Butcher, et al were potentially eligible, until I’d noticed that Girl Genius won a Hugo. I remember my dad saying that the Hugo and Nebula awards were supposed to be representative of the best science fiction and fantasy of that time.

     Now, my memory is admittedly hazy, as I was in and out of the hospital when this was going on, but I recall that when Brad took up the banner for Sad Puppies, he called for suggestions on works to put up on a list that for Sad Puppies 3, ‘these are works we think are worth a Hugo nomination and possibly an award.’ The way this went, the top 5 works that got suggested the most per category would be listed as suggestions by Sad Puppies – not, as is commonly misrepresented, ‘a block that Sad Puppies supporters SHOULD and MUST vote for. Just ‘If you like this and think it’s worthy of a Hugo nomination, nominate it!’

     So you think that this is ‘a few hundred fans voting in lock step’? I disagree. I think it’s more likely that these works got nominated for a change because Sad Puppies made more people aware that they could nominate and vote books they liked and enjoyed, instead of the popular misconception that the Hugos are like the Oscars.

     I’m just one of those folks, but I don’t think I’m the only one, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are others like myself who don’t feel like being vocal about this because of being tut-tutted for what they like or for participating, or being screamed at because someone thinks that an awareness campaign is like ‘following orders.’ Or for disagreeing with other people about what we think is worthy of a Hugo.

     I’m plunking down the AUD this year because there’s stuff there on the nominations I think are worthy (I didn’t nominate, didn’t have the cash then), and was reminded of the Hugo Awards thanks to Sad Puppies.

118. Christopher M. Chupik says:
     You may not agree with John’s politics or his religion, but that doesn’t make him a pervert.

     I laid out all information I have of mr. Wright, which is not much. I don’t know of him being “a criminal” or “a pervert” and I have never called him either. That said, if someone attacks the human rights of some of people close to me, it will be hard for him to get my sympathies or attention in world that is full of great fiction. I have promised to give him a go, though, when I get my Hugo packet.

119. What’s your point?

     You are either disingenuous, or else simply slow. Neither one, thankfully, is my responsibility.

     Dismissed.

120. s1al says:
     Indeed, I think you do not have very much in common with Mr. Wright at all, as he is a highly logical individual.

     Well, you got me there, son. I thought you were just complaining about how the other side is insulting you for no reason, and that is unfair.

     Shadowdancer Duskstar / Cutelildrow says:
     So you think that this is ‘a few hundred fans voting in lock step’? I disagree. I think it’s more likely that these works got nominated for a change because Sad Puppies made more people aware…

     The stats that are available at this point show that it’s a group of about 250-300 people voting in a very uniform way. There has been nothing like it before, if you compare it with previous years. People are upset because this slate voting tactic took away everyone else’s chances to get anything on the shortlist in various categories, most notably all short fiction. My opinion is that it was a quite dirty trick and not in spirit of the award, but obviously other people feel differently. If Brad wanted to do a simple recommendation list, he could have done it without the Sad Puppies nonsense.

121. I love straw men:

     “#482 ::: Steve Downey ::: (view all by) ::: April 06, 2015, 09:10 AM:
     The SP seem to be looking back to a Golden Age that really never was. I was curious, so I checked on Google, and according to them, Brad Torgersen turned 41 today, and Larry Correia is 38. Their remembrances of the Golden Campbellean Age is roughly the same as mine, then, from when I was 13 and reading everything I could get my hands on. [I turn 50 this month.] John C. Wright is a few years older than me, at 53, but still started reading well after whatever the age was they think their giants roamed the earth.”

     “#499 ::: Buddha Buck ::: (view all by) ::: April 06, 2015, 10:11 AM:
     Steve Downey @482:

     “I think I mentioned this in a previous thread, but in connection with your comment, I’m about 2 years older than Brad, and John Campbell died when I was about 2 months old.

     “There is no way I could have grown up reading new SF that was written/edited/curated by John Campbell, and the same goes for (almost) all of the players here (VD was alive, but 3 years old, when Campbell died, John C. Wright was 10, which is old enough). Sure, I read older stuff from the “Golden Age”, but that’s not the state of SF when I was growing up.

     “So this isn’t nostalgia for their youth; this is nostalgia for before their time. They may be just as well be asking for a return to family and culture like they saw on Happy Days when they were kids.”

     There you have it. Consider your mind read and the guilty verdict turned in.

     By the way I hated Happy Days.

122. If Brad wanted to do a simple recommendation list, he could have done it without the Sad Puppies nonsense.

     Why is reading comprehension so low amongst science fiction fans?

123. I came to this blog to try to understand what’s going on, and after reading the comments I’m still confused. What was the reason for the joint slate campaign? As far as I can tell, it seems to be some sort of resentment about the ‘wrong sort’ of books winning Hugos, is that right? Or a concern that works by rightwing authors, or more ‘populist’ ones, were being suppressed for politican reasons? Is there any actual evidence of that? Which great works were prevented from winning that should have done, exactly?

     I can’t help but feel that replacing an alleged secret conspiracy to control the awards with an open conspiracy to control the awards is not a step in the right direction. But then, whatever; I’ve never much cared who wins these damn awards in the first place. A lot of people on all sides seem to take them way too seriously.

     I just don’t understand what people in fandom get so angry about these days. If the ‘controversy’ over Jonathan Ross last year was bizarre and ridiculous, this one is even stranger.

124. Why is reading comprehension so low amongst science fiction fans?

     “If You Were a Mentally Challenged, Light-Making, Pan-Sexual Stegosaurus, My Love…” 😉

     If they were having crying jags over the U.K.’s slightly more over-the-top version of David Letterman, there must be a run on klonopin and prozac right now.

     They genuinely do not seem to realize — do not even seem decently capable of realizing, actually — just how graspingly self-entitled, spiteful and small all their outraged yipping and squeaking makes them seem, to any disinterested outside observer.

     “No! We won’t share our toys, damn you! We won’t we won’t we won’t we won’t we WON’T!“

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126. @Alan Ziebarth – Like @Shadowdancer, I also think you sound like a reasonable person who’s worth the time and effort to respond to. So here goes:

     I’m a first-time Hugo voter. I’ve been reading SF and Fantasy (along with tons of other stuff) since the mid-60s (although I didn’t graduate to non-children’s works ’till the late 60s). For “fannish” credentials, well… I’ve attended perhaps a half-dozen cons over the years, and volunteered at one. But other things occupied lots more of my time. Minor stuff like career, family, reading more books, other hobbies, etc.

     Last year’s SP effort got enough of my attention for me to realize that remarkably few Hugos in recent decades had gone to books and authors whose work I actually *like*. Some, yes. But remarkably few. And the SP people reminded me that, wait for it… I’m also a fan, and I can vote too! But last year, I didn’t notice ’till after the voting deadline for the Hugos. This year, I bought my supporting membership in time to nominate.

     Contrary to your assumption, I most certainly **DID** **NOT** vote in “lock-step” with the SP suggestions. In reality, roughly half of my nominations came from their slate; the other half didn’t. In **ALL** **CASES** I nominated **ONLY** where I felt that I had sufficient knowledge and context to make a considered decision, and **ONLY** works or authors or editors I felt would actually deserve a Hugo. A few examples: (a) I didn’t nominate anyone in the “best fan xxx” categories, because I lack the necessary information to have an informed opinion. (b) Three of my “best novel” nominations were not from the SP list; the others were. And it’s nobody’s business which were which. (c) I didn’t nominate anyone in the “best graphic xxx” or “best dramatic xxx” categories, because I don’t watch enough TV, or movies, or read enough graphic anything to have any basis for an opinion. (d) In the “best novel” category, I passed over an author whose politics I *like* to nominate a work by an author whose politics I *detest*, because the latter had written a better book. One of those books was on the SP list, the other wasn’t; but I guarantee you won’t do better than 50/50 odds guessing which was which. 🙂

     To sum up:
     * I read everything I nominated.
     * I made nominations *only* in categories where I have some plausible basis for an opinion.
     * Only about ½ my nominations came from the SP list; the other ½ didn’t.
     * I nominated works because *I* think they’re Hugo-worthy, not because anyone said anything about “who to vote for.”

     Finally, I strongly resent *any* suggestion that anyone is telling me how to vote. And I strongly endorse the suggestions I’ve seen from calmer heads over many years: “If you don’t like how the Hugo awards come out, buy a membership and vote. The pool of voters is small enough that your individual vote actually matters!”

127. It’s not a dirty trick that 250-300 new people nominated stuff they liked and thought was Hugo-worthy. The fact is that the Hugos usually have 500 TOTAL BALLOTS determining all the categories. Which means as few as 30 or 40 ballots have been “pushing out deserving novels” until Sad Puppies came along. And it’s worse in the other categories, as few as a dozen votes have been able to do so.

     How can anyone keep making with a straight face the argument that 12-40 people voting to represent all of SFF is “inclusive” but 200 people voting to do so isn’t?

     200 ballots is tiny, y’all, and the fact that it was able to make such a difference is a poor reflection on fandom’s self-dealing and status-seeking through obscurity.

     Previously nobody had a big voting bloc because most of the other voters were voting for themselves and maybe a couple of friends. So for being self-less and reaching out to a broad spectrum of authors across race, gender, class and political lines WHO WROTE COOL STORIES BRO, SP and RP are being maligned. How on earth is it bad to have a racially, sexually and politically diverse ballot? Isn’t that what SJWs want? Well, they haz it now. Let’s see if they’ll support minorities, women and people of faith writing SFF who aren’t them.

128. “The stats that are available at this point show that it’s a group of about 250-300 people voting in a very uniform way”

     Then how did the SP3 slate sweep virtually everything else off the table in an election which, IIRC, had in excess of 2100 votes?

     Are you saying that the race was, in reality, so very close (for these authors we keep hearing are supposedly exclusively white males with extreme right-wing politics), that less than 20% of the vote was able to create a total landslide effect?

129. The outside, non-SF world is already beginning to sit up and take notice of the sulky, selfish behavior of the CHORFs, over the past few days.

     It… isn’t going exactly as they’d doubtless hoped and planned, thus far:

     http://ace.mu.nu/archives/355974.php

     Oh, dear.

130. How can anyone keep making with a straight face the argument that 12-40 people voting to represent all of SFF is “inclusive” but 200 people voting to do so isn’t?

     *Delighted grin* I see you’ve got the Rapier of Wit, with +10 Logic for extra Awareness Density piercing! Use it well!

     (That part of your comment, I really, really love. I hope you don’t mind if I refer to it now and again.)

131. Mrs. Lastname says:
     It’s not a dirty trick that 250-300 new people nominated stuff they liked and thought was Hugo-worthy.

     The numbers suggest they voted in lock-step, which is a sure way to hijack the whole thing through tactical voting. Which is a dirty trick. Maybe you or Xenophon above voted what you had read and enjoyed, but a huge number of people voted for the slate. In the novelette category, for example, the range last year was 69-118. This year it’s 165-267. Votes are very much more centred.

     Three John C. Wright’s novellas and one by Tom Kratman, all published by an obscure small press, made it to the novella shortlist. That kind of results are impossible to achieve without very well-coordinated tactical voting.

132. No calbeck, it’s the usual claim that objective analysis and mathematics are sexist and racist.

133. calbeck says:
     “The stats that are available at this point show that it’s a group of about 250-300 people voting in a very uniform way”

     Then how did the SP3 slate sweep virtually everything else off the table in an election which, IIRC, had in excess of 2100 votes?

     For the novelette category, that I mentioned above, 1031 people nominated 314 different works, so the votes are distributed quite thin. 165 votes was needed to shortlist a work, when last year the number was 69. It’s terribly easy to sweep everything with 250-300 votes.

134. Alan S.: Don’t forget “cis-normative,” you insensitive lout! CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE!!!

135. Oh bull-ony kitten. It doesn’t take careful strategic anything to sweep the categories below novel. It just takes motivating the fan base to use all their votes. Who are your favorite authors? Do you suppose your favorite authors overlap much with mine?

136. Seems to me then the answer is still more peopke voting, ‘my’ side, ‘yours,’ and everyone else in SFF fandom.

137. Note that Sad Puppies didn’t even offer a “Full Slate” for novella, novelette, or short. (Well, there are five in ‘short’, but one was recognized as ineligible).

     I wasn’t even aware of Rabid Puppies until the last couple of days, which pretty much sums up whatever “tactics” were involved. (Actual -tactical- voting would have tried to find -someone- competent other than John C. Wright. Only the completely clueless could imagine a -plan- to triple-nominate someone. But, typical thinking.)

     I read everything I nominated. I’ve read *far* more novels and novellas – and the ones I nominated were the top. I’m not sure how many novelettes I’ve read – that category seems difficult to distinguish from a short on-the-fly. But I didn’t nominate any of those anyway. And a fair number of the items on my personal nomination list aren’t there.

     I’m just happy that there are any items on the final slate that would make it on my top ten list for the year. Those have been few and far between for a while now.

138. All I’m saying is that your Sad/Rabid Puppies slate was a success and by voting tactically you managed to sweep almost everything. Numbers show this. I’m explaining how you won, guys. Why are you fighting me? 😀

139. “The numbers suggest they voted in lock-step”

     Oooooor they suggest what they do in any other election of any kind: that X number of people liked something different than Y number of people. Your theorem requires the assumption of malice aforethought.

     The problem with that is I’ve been seeing plenty of malice going both ways. I’ve also kept my toes deep enough in the fandom to be aware of such drama as the MZB issue, so it’s not like I haven’t noticed this sort of thing percolating between the camps. It’s been hard to miss.

     But what decided me on getting involved was to hear, after the fact, that #GamerGate had supposedly shifted all those votes — and, having been IN the movement for the last seven months, I can assure you the Hugos WERE NOT EVEN ON OUR RADAR. What do you people have to do with ethics in games journalism, or journalism of any stripe for that matter?

     The invocation of us as your boogeymen made us sit up and take notice. And investigate to find out — oh, look, just like the International Games Festival, someone seems to be rigging the deal as to who gets which award. That requires the assumption of malice aforethought, of course, but here you people were, displaying that towards people you’d never met, using US as a SHIELD for abusing someone else.

     We’re kind of touchy about SJWs using people as shields. We have a sister hashtag about it, founded and frequented by all the women, PoCs, and LGBT people who were supportive of #GamerGate, but whose existence was DENIED — outright denied! — by people whose narrative was that we are an extreme-right-wing wimmin-hatin’ boys’ club out to destroy anything in the gaming sphere which isn’t white, male and straight.

     #GamerGate is #NotYourShield, lady.

     And like I said… I teethed on the likes of McCaffrey looooong before I installed my first copy of Ultima I. I’d say $40 for a run of fiction that isn’t watered-down pablum is a damn good purchase. Hell, I spend that much in a month on Steam sales, and probably get less enjoyment from it.

     This is my fandom, too.

140. spacefaringkitten: I was responding in absentia to the person who used that word to describe John, not you.

141. calbeck says:
     “The numbers suggest they voted in lock-step”

     Oooooor they suggest what they do in any other election of any kind: that X number of people liked something different than Y number of people. Your theorem requires the assumption of malice aforethought.

     Of course there was aforethought — you had your slate (even though the Rabid Puppy slate seems to have been the more successful one). The numbers show it was extremely effective and concentrated the nominations to a handful of works. That is, people voted in lock-step. Who those people actually were we can only guess.

142. Let’s just run with the 200-250 estimate right now, since no one has hard numbers.

     I have seen exactly no one say they voted the straight slate. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, merely that no one has said so.

     On the other hand I have seen at least a couple dozen people talk about how the had some from the slate they agreed with, others they did not.

     So between 10 and 25% of the SP votes are either liars or not. Now a sampling of 25% isn’t foolproof, but it is statistically significant, especially with no one saying the opposite.

     I’m willing to bet – especially with last years breakdown available – that that 25% vocal group represents SP as a whole fairly well.

143. Not MY slate. I wasn’t here for that, and I know of no GGers who were. As I said, it wasn’t even a blip on the screen to us. We’ve been too busy losing Gawker Media “seven figures in ad revenue” (their complaint, not our brag) by politely informing their advertisers what they’ve been doing and saying (bashing their audience, being pro-bullying, using a Coke twitterbot to spam Mein Kampf, you know, classy stuff like that which advertisers don’t want anything to do with).

     As your base assumptions are factually incorrect, and because you nonetheless build upon them to devise a conspiracy theory upon which your arguments for moral high ground are reliant, you simply have no leg to stand on… other than a belief system.

     Feel free to believe what you like. But correlation/causation arguments remain just as subjective as they always have been.

144. As your base assumptions are factually incorrect, and because you nonetheless build upon them to devise a conspiracy theory upon which your arguments for moral high ground are reliant, you simply have no leg to stand on… other than a belief system.

     Feel free to believe what you like. But correlation/causation arguments remain just as subjective as they always have been.

     Do you have a blog? And, if not, why not? 😉

145. I tend to be a lazy bastard.

     I DO have a Tumblr, but it’s pretty exclusively Brony/GamerGate related (askcherrypie). Oh, I also co-host on a weekly YerTerbs podcast called “Cynical Renegades Talk”. I am the “token conservative” on the panel, being centrist enough to bring some balance to what’s otherwise a fairly hard-left show.

     And by “centrist”, I mean that I think you have a right to a gun AND an abortion. -;)

146. Count me as another one who didn’t vote the straight SP slate and it never even occurred to me to do so. My nominations were about 60/40 SP, and I don’t think I nominated anything from the RP slate that wasn’t also part of SP. And I read everything I nominated. The one thing that really puzzles me about the anti-SP forces is the absolute certainty that we all voted the same. It just ain’t so.

147. “That is, people voted in lock-step.”

     That is, you are a liar. A bad one.

     People doing the same thing does not require “lock-step”.

     Trivially, we’re all breathing at this very moment without some centralized authority directing us to do so.

     That you’re incapable of imagining people doing anything without orders from a Dear Leader figure says rather more about you than it does about us.

148. James Reasoner – You’re talking to a bunch of people who crow on and on about their individualism while literally quoting false statements about the same 3-4 people across about 2 dozen blogs. Are you actually surprised about such a minor level of projection?

149. s1al — Oh, no, I’m not surprised that they do that. Just puzzled that SP has been explained to them over and over, but they keep falling back on the same false assumptions. When something was beyond my mother’s comprehension, she would say that she was “bumfuzzled”. That’s how I feel about so many of the comments from the anti-SP forces I’ve read in the past few days. I’m bumfuzzled that anybody could feel that way.

150. I’d like to go on record as being somebody else who didn’t vote in “lock step” with the “recommended slate”. My husband and I allocated $40 of our limited entertainment budget for a sustaining membership, and then armwrestled (ahem. mostly) over the noms. Not a one of our dramatic short form noms made the short list. I did borrow his kindle to read the John C. Wright selections and agreed with that part. But, in certain areas where we have no knowledge, we didn’t make any noms. And in others, (like artist), made some that again, didn’t make the list. In a few others, I’ve since been reminded of names I didn’t put on the list, that I’ll file away for next year.

     I strongly suspect that PART of the effect is that the Sad Puppies campaign caught the attention of a larger circle of disenfranchised fans this year. I realize I’m not a “true fan” by the definition of the lot that’s screaming. But, at 16 I had dreams of a career and a SFWA application squirreled away waiting for eligibility to happen – back when that required ACTUAL publication. (Said stack of paperwork has since been ritually burnt. Along with the very bad fiction that was in the same envelope. It’s been said it takes at least 1 million words to “get the suck out” and no one needed to be subjected to that sort of thing.) I’d encountered so much really BAD message fic by the time I finished college that I stopped buying SF/F at all, unless it was one of the few authors I know I like. (Bujold, P.C. Hodgell – who likes to torture her readers by sometimes going decades between books).

     I, for one, actually like Tom Kratman. John Ringo has his moments. Larry’s books I have yet to read, as I have to pry the kindle away from my husband again. But I very much resent the implication that I should NOT enjoy these authors because badThink!! And I’m enjoying very much the opportunity to stick a fork in the eye of people who say so.

     Now, I do think that it would be fab for the next SP campaign to offer more suggestions than there are spots on the ballot. In fact, a weekly book recommendation for a period of time leading up to nominations would be a really cool way to go. The same is true for short fiction. I’ve picked up some really bad anthologies over the years. And some really good ones. And some that are all over the map. I’d love to get pointed at some of the works I might miss because I only make it through the first three stories in the anthology.

     Dramatic short form, OTOH, we may just all have to go our own way. 😀 I can’t get into Grimm and am not about give up my guilty pleasure of Once Upon a Time, which I adore in all it’s campy glory.

151. That’s been our experience, too. A common concern is that a set of talking-points was established by anti-GGers (we call ’em aGGros) very early on, initially mirroring the claims put out by several women who asserted we were harassing them. We find it nigh-impossible to talk to them about journalistic ethics, because practically the first thing they put out afterward was that all such talk is a “smoke screen”, intended to provide cover for “organized harassment campaigns” intended to drive anyone not white, straight and male out of gaming.

     When members of #NotYourShield pipe up, they have been called everything from “sockpuppets” to “house niggers” (they don’t hold back on the “N” word, so neither shall I soften it by doing it for them). Women are said to have “internalized misogyny” or just to be “stupid” for belonging to “an obvious harassment campaign”.

     Those few times we have seen someone wander off the particular reservation, other aGGros SAVAGE them. Even over brief truces involving a simple cup of coffee and polite conversation. To maintain their preferred friendships and acquaintances, they double-down time and time again until they start sounding genuinely insane. It can be daunting to watch it in action; the more brilliant the person was before the conflict, the worse it can be to see… like the dying of intellect before your eyes.

     I don’t know how bad it is over here. But to my experience, “social justice” is nothing more or less than a belief system. I have, several times over the last months, seen far too many parallels to Scientology.

     That is NOT a comparison I make lightly.

152. I ‘accidentally’ visited the Baen web site’s publishing schedule and saw at least 15 books I will purchase (ebook versions) in the next six months. Good work Toni.
     Thank you Brad.

153. Well, all the talk about lock-step and slate voting is really moot until Sasquan releases the nomination statistics. If after the SP/RD winning nominations and other SP/RD suggestions there is a sharp drop to the non SP/RD suggestions then I don’t see how one can honestly say that this wasn’t mostly because of slate voting. BTW do all the SP/RD nominators read enough fanzines to make an informed nomination for Best Fanzine and Best Fan Writer? Until fanzines began to be available on-line I never bothered to even vote in these categories for the Hugos because I felt that I didn’t have enough knowledge to make an informed vote.. Do all the SP/RD nominators actually know who all the editors are in the field to make an informed nomination? I certainly don’t. And do you really expect me to believe that for the Non-related Category that most of the SP/RD nominators had any knowledge of any titles that weren’t on the slates? The second volume of the Heinlein biography and The Collectors Book of Virgil Finlay, one of the greatest illustrators of the Golden Age, just to name two, were both worse than all the winning nominees? If there are double, triple or much more than the usual nominations for these categories that would strongly imply pure slate voting not an incredible statistical coincidence. But we’ll just have to see. Time to go to the other side and say that changing the Hugo rules and voting No Award in response to the Sad Puppies strategy is also just as bad and divisive for the Hugo Awards and fandom in general.
     One more thing I also agree that the Hugos have been particularly weak for the last decade or so. I just disagree with the Sad Puppies on the reasons.But that’s another posting. And I am beginning to burn out. And to repeat myself, I will read all the nominees and make my choice as best I can on the nominations themselves. I especially hope that Michael Flynn’s story is very good. He’s a favorite author of mine.
     And the Hugos will survive. They just may be in intensive care for awhile.

154. In general, I don’t think it’s possible to be adequately informed in the fan categories. Using the fan artist category as an example, with such sites as DeviantArt, Pixiv, and Danbooru, who often host art on par with or better than the fan artists I’ve seen nominated (No slight to the fan artists nominated. There’s just a ton of really good art out there.), the sheer amount of art available is staggering. Some with blogs and forums and livestreams. So I would actually be in favor of abolishing the fan awards since I don’t think the Award is truly capable of reflecting the best out there in fan activities with fan activities as atomized and windspread as they are.

155. Has anyone considered how impossible it is that Sad Puppies brought less than 300 votes to the process? If winning nominations had that many votes it means that everyone else voted for something else. Several people have said that they only voted for half the slate. This could be by far the most common thing and if different people all preferred a different half the numbers still work. If people voted “lock step” the numbers would be truly outrageous.

156. I sincerely doubt anyone making the allegation will care what the numbers actually indicate or suggest: the objective is, of course, to de-legitimize the SP votes.

     Not to mention that the first inclination of a human psyche which is substantially emotionally invested in any given thing will be to give their own view precedence in any subjective consideration. An intelligent and reasonable person could, it is hoped, suppress this natural inclination.

     But as the rhetoric already employed against SP indicates, there’s little such interest. Of a nigh-certainty, the central opposition figures (being that much more invested in terms of personal emotion) will actively fight for the reverse: to ignore any possible HARD numbers in favor of a subjective expression which reinforces the existing view.

157. calbeck says:
     I sincerely doubt anyone making the allegation will care what the numbers actually indicate or suggest: the objective is, of course, to de-legitimize the SP votes.

     Not to mention that the first inclination of a human psyche which is substantially emotionally invested in any given thing will be to give their own view precedence in any subjective consideration.

     What the numbers suggest is that Rabid/Sad Puppies campaign was extremely effective. Saying that hardly means de-legitimizing SP votes. The Rabid Puppies campaign was actually the more successful of the two.

     I’ve blogged about the numbers in more depth in case you’re interested: http://sfkittens.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/tactical-voting-stats

     I don’t see the connection between the subjective considerations you mentioned and this numerical data.

158. Look at the low-high numbers per category. Look at the 70 to even 200 vote variance in the categories. Your math argues for turnout, while that large of a variance, especially in Novellas argues against a bloc voted slate. You’d expect to see much closer gaps between low and high. Instead, the difference between low and high in Novella, roughly 200 votes, is greater than the number cast for the lowest nominee.

159. There is absolutely no conceivable endgame, at this juncture, in which Team Toad (and its crusty camp followers) can end up with anything even remotely resembling a victory, insofar as their own oft-yammered “principles” are concerned.

     If, on the one hand, the combined SP/RP forces do end up being enough, numerically, to award Hugos to the genuinely deserving this year, then (obviously) the CHORFs will have lost wholly and outright, and the TOR thugees will have lost the one brute club of reprisal they have left to brandish ogreishly (shut up, SpellCheck!) at those who dare disagree with them and their SJW-driven inanities. Their only remaining option, at that point, will be repeated attempts at gaming future nomination/voting rules, in order to stifle further dissent anew. That… will not end well for them, ultimately.

     If, on the other hand, the CHORFs end up nuking this year’s Hugos entirely, by spiteful, self-entitled means of the “No Award” option — “No, we won’t share our toys with the unclean likes of you! We won’t we won’t we won’t we won’t we WON’T!” — they will have demonstrated, beyond any rational doubt, that every last accusation of intolerant ideological lockstep previously lobbed their way was grounded in nothing less than unalloyed and unassailable f-a-c-t FACT.

     We’ll be able to tell our grandchildren about this, someday. 😉

160. Nathan says:
     Look at the low-high numbers per category. Look at the 70 to even 200 vote variance in the categories. Your math argues for turnout, while that large of a variance, especially in Novellas argues against a bloc voted slate.

     Even the numbers at the low end are huge. Variance is to be expected, because there were not one but two voting blocs in the game, their slates overlapping. Insane concentration to certain nominees is in my mind quite strong proof of serious bloc voting, which doesn’t mean that absolutely everyone on the Rabid/Sad Puppy side voted exactly the same way. In time, numbers will tell.

161. Kent 18
     I totally agree with you about the No Award option. I hope that Fandom doesn’t go that route and I hope that the publicity on conservative sites over the loathsome EW article doesn’t start non SF readers from getting memberships just to make a political point.

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163. You want my part of fandom to coexist peacefully? You want to work out our differences and keep the awards meaningful? So do we. Though we disagree on the details and the issues, we also love this stuff.

     But coordinated slander campaigns, lies, character assassinations, threats, witch hunts? No… We won’t stand for that.

     You want to know why we’re here now, loud, annoying you, upsetting your apple cart? Read those articles. Look at the bylines by culture warriors who all share the same set of politics. You say that you don’t like how we made the awards political. Newsflash, they have been for a long time, only you wouldn’t know it because my side didn’t bother to take the field. Now we’re here, taking ground they think they own, and those culture warriors don’t give a shit about you, the authors you love, the books you read, or the future of your culture. They think they own you like they own every other group, and they’ll lie, slander, threaten, coerce, defame, sabotage, and hate anyone who stands up to them.

     No More.

     Larry Correia speaks for me.

164. Kitten, your entire point is to argue that SP/RP people are voting in “lock-step”, in furtherance of the argument that they did not consider their nominations on the merits.

     There is no function for such an argument except to discredit the value of SP/RP votes.

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168. You sad puppies are douchebags. Stay out of my universe and get out of your moms basement.

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