Well, the awards came in.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/08/23/434013387/amid-a-hubbub-at-the-hugos-puppies-see-little-success?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150823

Votes were up 65% on their previous record, so lots of people came in to counter the puppy thing. Whether they can be assumed to be genuine fans wanting to retake control of sci-fi, or SJW who are just as partisan as the puppies is up for everyone to decide (guess) for themselves.

In the end, the only Puppy entry that won was Guardians of the Galaxy which doesn't count for fairly obvious reasons. Five sections ended up with 'no winner' - I think these were the categories where all entries were from the sad/rabid puppies.



Here's a link to the previous thread where lots of people, myself included, took this a lot more seriously than we probably should have;
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/643769.page

"No winner", short-hand for throwing one's toys from the pram when everyone doesn't fall in line with the groupthink.

Heh, the thing you’re complaining about is probably the only thing in this whole mess with a simple and easy answer – when all five entries on a ballot are works you don’t like, then you vote ‘no winner’. Which is fairly obviously going to happen when a fringe movement mobilises to get all five nominations from their preferred list. Even if you take politics out of the equation that’s how it is supposed to work.

I mean, there’s lots of debateable, subjective stuff this whole incident, about whether there was a real issue for the puppies to protest, whether their method of protest was right even if it was, whether similar methods were justified by left wing groups in response, whether any left wing groups made any such methods and so on. But the thing you’re complaining about is probably one of the only obvious non-issues in the whole thing.

Yet if you look at the response from Day and the like, they are claiming a victory because of the "no winner" votes. At the same time they are clamiring on about the other side "moving goalposts" when they evidently haven't picked up a mirror in quite some time.

 sebster wrote:

I mean, there’s lots of debateable, subjective stuff this whole incident, about whether there was a real issue for the puppies to protest, whether their method of protest was right even if it was, whether similar methods were justified by left wing groups in response, whether any left wing groups made any such methods and so on. But the thing you’re complaining about is probably one of the only obvious non-issues in the whole thing.

So I'll be honest in that I really haven't followed this, but I read a bit about it last night....

Does giving no award out for the categories really make it a "win" for the SJW-y side? This "no win" nonsense feels like just that. A load of nonsense to me. Does the nominations process need to be revamped that much?

Was The Martian not eligible?

I don't know what to think about this whole Hugo awards thing at this point. I generally agree with Eric Flint on this issue. That the puppies crowd is more stupid than anything else. But also the Hugo awards have issues and the crowd that votes there every year doesn't really represent the average reader of sci-fi anymore.

That said the "SJW" crowd refusing to give awards and just voting for "no award" is also stupid. Your are accused by your critics of voting for things based on your politics, and then you decide to vote on your politics to screw over your "opponents". All you end up doing is the same thing you were accused of in the first place.

It actually is a good result. It shows that instead of being interested in the awards and using it to promote good authors, the SJW just want to push their agenda. In the end, they achieved turning the Hugos into a laughing stock. Great job.

 Blood Hawk wrote:
But also the Hugo awards have issues and the crowd that votes there every year doesn't really represent the average reader of sci-fi anymore.

That's pretty much every award for everything. Guardians of the Galaxy was by far one of the best films of 2014 and it wasn't even nominated at the Academy Awards (while 4 films that were basically unknown were). The Nobel Prize in Literature is notorious for picking winners based on politics (even picking winners no one has heard of outside of specific colleges/universities where the author works).

Welcome to awards, where a small group of people decides what they like best and makes sure everyone else knows it.

That said the "SJW" crowd refusing to give awards and just voting for "no award" is also stupid. Your are accused by your critics of voting for things based on your politics, and then you decide to vote on your politics to screw over your "opponents". All you end up doing is the same thing you were accused of in the first place.

This assumes that people who voted "no winner" voted solely because they disagreed with Puppy politics, rather than the actions of the group. Had I voted, I'd have voted 'no winner' simply because the entire thing was slowed and couldn't possible have produced a worthwhile result (and I most certainly agree with Puppy in that the Hugo awards do resoundingly favor conservative leaning works)..

 LordofHats wrote:

 Blood Hawk wrote:
But also the Hugo awards have issues and the crowd that votes there every year doesn't really represent the average reader of sci-fi anymore.

That's pretty much every award for everything. Guardians of the Galaxy was by far one of the best films of 2014 and it wasn't even nominated at the Academy Awards (while 4 films that were basically unknown were). The Nobel Prize in Literature is notorious for picking winners based on politics (even picking winners no one has heard of outside of specific colleges/universities where the author works).

Welcome to awards, where a small group of people decides what they like best and makes sure everyone else knows it.

Exactly. You can't create an award show where people politics don't play any part of what they pick. Also Hugos don't represent the average reader anymore either. Eric Flint puts it this way:

“What’s involved here is essentially a literary analog to genetic drift. Biologists have long known that the role played by pure chance in evolution is greater in a small population than a larger one. The same thing happens in the arts, especially those arts which have a huge mass audience. The attitudes of the much smaller group or groups of in-crowds who hand out awards or do critical reviews are mostly influenced by other members of their in-crowd, not by the tastes of the mass audience. Over time, just by happenstance if nothing else, their views start drifting apart from those of the mass audience.”

 LordofHats wrote:

 Blood Hawk wrote:
That said the "SJW" crowd refusing to give awards and just voting for "no award" is also stupid. Your are accused by your critics of voting for things based on your politics, and then you decide to vote on your politics to screw over your "opponents". All you end up doing is the same thing you were accused of in the first place.

This assumes that people who voted "no winner" voted solely because they disagreed with Puppy politics, rather than the actions of the group. Had I voted, I'd have voted 'no winner' simply because the entire thing was slowed and couldn't possible have produced a worthwhile result (and I most certainly agree with Puppy in that the Hugo awards do resoundingly favor conservative leaning works)..

I am pretty positive that a lot of people that voted for no winner were doing it because they don't like the puppies politics (and their tactics). You do see that a group that is somewhat conspiratorial is going to take that vote as proof that you are conspiring against them right?

I think it is jumping the gun to say that people are protesting the politics rather than protesting the behavior. There's no way to really know what caused people to vote the way they did. Such speculation serves no purpose but to push the very kind of political agenda people are complaining about.

If it's not Ben Bova, it's CRRRRAP!



Avatar, 20 years before Avatar. Only with Apes and 6-legged Lions instead of sexually assaulting animals to gain mind control of them...

fething weirdo.

 LordofHats wrote:
I think it is jumping the gun to say that people are protesting the politics rather than protesting the behavior. There's no way to really know what caused people to vote the way they did. Such speculation serves no purpose but to push the very kind of political agenda people are complaining about.

Yes we can't read people minds, but this is the internet people are going to speculate. But what is the no vote really going to accomplish? Other than breathing more life into the controversy and turning the award show into a joke?

You're meant to vote No Award above all the entries you don't think deserve the award. It's exactly what they should have done if they didn't think the work was Hugo-quality.

I thought the counter-Puppy plan was to vote No Award in every category stacked by the Puppies, without regard to the merits of the works in question; i.e., as a protest against the Puppies.

I think the biggest thing we learned, both good and bad, is that it's very difficult to raise the specter of "political correctness" or "social justice" in an otherwise mostly subjective process without looking at self interested, and at worst bigoted.

As others have pointed out, it's an easily gamed, small sample size vote, which makes any result political by definition. Complaining about that, whether in general or in the specific, is pretty much always considered gauche. It's like pointing out that the emperor is naked. To paraphrase Neil Gaimen: It has always been the province of children and fools to point out that the emperor wears no clothes. But the emperor remains and emperor, and the fool remains a fool.

There might be some valid points to be made about prior Hugo voting blocs. Throwing a temper tantrum about it just makes you look petty (at best), and some of the allies to this movement were unsavory folk.

So, little is actually done. People took sides, some are going to get (fairly or not) tagged with the implication of bigotry, and maybe, best case scenario, the system is fixed to prevent this sort of nonsense.

 Blood Hawk wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I think it is jumping the gun to say that people are protesting the politics rather than protesting the behavior. There's no way to really know what caused people to vote the way they did. Such speculation serves no purpose but to push the very kind of political agenda people are complaining about.

Yes we can't read people minds, but this is the internet people are going to speculate. But what is the no vote really going to accomplish? Other than breathing more life into the controversy and turning the award show into a joke?

I'd argue the award is already a joke, and has been for quite some time.

I mean, Orson Scott Card is basically the darling of the Hugo Awards, and the guy is pretty scary. Virtually every book he writes contains ridiculous undertones of homophobia, fascism, racism and a fascination with prepubescent girls. Not that I don't enjoy his books mind you. Just saying, read them and some disturbing trends pop up

 LordofHats wrote:

 Blood Hawk wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I think it is jumping the gun to say that people are protesting the politics rather than protesting the behavior. There's no way to really know what caused people to vote the way they did. Such speculation serves no purpose but to push the very kind of political agenda people are complaining about.

Yes we can't read people minds, but this is the internet people are going to speculate. But what is the no vote really going to accomplish? Other than breathing more life into the controversy and turning the award show into a joke?

I'd argue the award is already a joke, and has been for quite some time.

I mean, Orson Scott Card is basically the darling of the Hugo Awards, and the guy is pretty scary. Virtually every book he writes contains ridiculous undertones of homophobia, fascism, racism and a fascination with prepubescent girls. Not that I don't enjoy his books mind you. Just saying, read them and some disturbing trends pop up

Fair enough.

 LordofHats wrote:
ridiculous undertones of homophobia, fascism, racism and a fascination with prepubescent girls

 LordofHats wrote:
Not that I don't enjoy his books mind you.

More revealing than you intended?

 Manchu wrote:
I thought the counter-Puppy plan was to vote No Award in every category stacked by the Puppies, without regard to the merits of the works in question; i.e., as a protest against the Puppies.

I think what most people did in the end was just vote for what they thought deserved it. It seems like the categories that got No Award were the ones filled with puppies - even categories with 4/5 puppy entries gave an award. Some of the puppy entries did actually beat No Award, just none of them came in first (other than Guardians of the Galaxy, which, well...)

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
It seems like the categories that got No Award were the ones filled with puppies

This seems to support the Puppy protest strategy explanation more than the merits of the work explanation.

 LordofHats wrote:
while 4 films that were basically unknown were.

Oh really? Which were those?

I'm looking at that list and can't see any "unknowns' on there...

People are protesting puppies? Sweeps terminate them!

Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is the issue here? Hugo handing out rewards to who, and the Puppies protesting what by how?

 cincydooley wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
while 4 films that were basically unknown were.

Oh really? Which were those?

I'm looking at that list and can't see any "unknowns' on there...

Boyhood? The film was virtually unheard of until it was nominated. Whiplash. Selma. EDIT: Even after these films are little known of, unless you pay attention to the awards.


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 Manchu wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
ridiculous undertones of homophobia, fascism, racism and a fascination with prepubescent girls

 LordofHats wrote:
Not that I don't enjoy his books mind you.

More revealing than you intended?

*gasp* They're onto me!

 cincydooley wrote:

Does giving no award out for the categories really make it a "win" for the SJW-y side?....

Was The Martian not eligible?

The awards were the best result of a bad situation. Of the myriad of reasons Torgersen, Correa and Day gave for what they did 'speaking out for the true sf fans' was front and centre, and the awards proved them wrong. If those were their true reasons we could congratulate the winners and move on. But this was always about them, not SF as a whole, so we can expect the whole show again next year. Although, I suspect, to a lesser degree.

For a start the wave of gamer gate-ness the RP supporter rode on has petered out, also authors will be aware if one of the SP organisers approaches them to be a slate. Plus SF fans have been mobilsed, and will hopefully be as active as they were this year.

Perhaps the nomination rules will change, we'll see, but the organisers of woldcon are very aware that what makes the Hugos is how open they are, so don't expect a closed nomination process.

And to answer your question, yes the Martian was eligible for a Campbell award for best new writer, but the nomination votes released since show that they SP snomination slate voted it down to get their own noms on the list, so you can thank them for that.

Also, if anyone was in any confusion as to the type of people who organised the SP / RP slates, here's a lovely article outlining the kind of person Day is, and Torgersen is busy editing non SP comments on his blog to make him look like the victim.

 LordofHats wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
while 4 films that were basically unknown were.

Oh really? Which were those?

I'm looking at that list and can't see any "unknowns' on there...

Boyhood? The film was virtually unheard of until it was nominated. Whiplash. Selma. EDIT: Even after these films are little known of, unless you pay attention to the awards.

Boyhood is a linklater film. If you're into movies at all you know him and his work.

Selma was the Oprah movie. Hardly obscure.

I guess I'll give you whiplash, but buzz started for that early. And was sustained.

And it was better than Guardians.

 cincydooley wrote:


Boyhood is a linklater film. If you're into movies at all you know him and his work.

That's kind of my point. If you're into movies. Most people aren't into movies. They just watch them.

That isn't a crack against the quality of the films nominated, but a completely valid point that this is how awards are. If you were to have the average film goer vote on the nominees for the Academy Awards, you probably wouldn't have seen any movie but American Sniper nominated, and maybe Grand Budapest Hotel. Instead of Whiplash, Selma, or Boyhood we'd have Guardians of the Galaxy, Hunger Games, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and The Hobbit. Because the Academy Award isn't looking at average movie goers when it considers films for awards (and I'm not saying they should).

It's the same thing with the Hugos more or less, except everyone's whining and complaining every which way and appealing to 'true fans' (whatever that means).

 LordofHats wrote:
'true fans' (whatever that means).

The beauty of it is that it means whatever you want it to, or need it to.

I don't like ambiguity!

 cincydooley wrote:
So I'll be honest in that I really haven't followed this, but I read a bit about it last night....

Does giving no award out for the categories really make it a "win" for the SJW-y side? This "no win" nonsense feels like just that. A load of nonsense to me. Does the nominations process need to be revamped that much?

The short answer is that it isn’t a win, because the only way you ‘win’ at an awards ceremony is when a work you really like win.

However, this is a very unusual set of circumstances. The Puppies, especially the rabid puppies, had come in really hard in the nomination process, and in some categories they’d managed get every single nomination. It isn’t acceptable to let some ideological group stuff the ballot with their own favourite politics, especially when a lot of the eventual nominees were really minor works.

I mean, flip it around, assume that the left had done this, and some categories were entirely filled with overtly progressive works, including some pretty crappy works that had no business being on any award list. How would you respond? And if you managed to avoid any of those stuffed ballots claiming a win, wouldn’t you be pleased given the circumstances you faced?

The real question is what happens next year? Ideally everyone will realise how silly this is and stop organising political factions to vote in some sci-fi awards. But that’s not going to happen. So when the Puppies, and especially the Rabid Puppies put out their list of politically approved nominations, how will the left respond? By putting out there own list of politically approved nominations? That’s a question with no good answer.


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 Sigvatr wrote:
It actually is a good result. It shows that instead of being interested in the awards and using it to promote good authors, the SJW just want to push their agenda. In the end, they achieved turning the Hugos into a laughing stock. Great job.

So to make this fit your own little worldview of ‘boo left, yay right’, you’ve just built a fiction where you pretend that all the political stuff done by the puppies was actually done by the left.

Score one for ideology led delusion.


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 LordofHats wrote:
That's pretty much every award for everything. Guardians of the Galaxy was by far one of the best films of 2014 and it wasn't even nominated at the Academy Awards (while 4 films that were basically unknown were). The Nobel Prize in Literature is notorious for picking winners based on politics (even picking winners no one has heard of outside of specific colleges/universities where the author works).

It’s true, but it’s worth pointing out that in this instance ‘political’ is not liberal/conservative, but the politics within the academic literary world. So Arundhati Roy writes about poverty and classism, but plenty of others do it more stridently without being critical darlings. She wins because she writes magical realism set in India, and every magical realist book set in India seems to win either the Booker or the Man Booker.

This assumes that people who voted "no winner" voted solely because they disagreed with Puppy politics, rather than the actions of the group. Had I voted, I'd have voted 'no winner' simply because the entire thing was slowed and couldn't possible have produced a worthwhile result (and I most certainly agree with Puppy in that the Hugo awards do resoundingly favor conservative leaning works)..

It’s worth pointing out that it’s only in the categories where every entry was a Puppy entry that resulted in ‘no award’. Where non-puppy entries were on the nomination, they won. And where there was a Puppy entry that everyone loved, Guardians of the Galaxy, it won.


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 Manchu wrote:
I thought the counter-Puppy plan was to vote No Award in every category stacked by the Puppies, without regard to the merits of the works in question; i.e., as a protest against the Puppies.

That was a proposed plan by some people, when the response to the Puppy tactics were still being decided. Given that ‘no winner’ only got up in the categories dominated by the Puppies, it’s doesn’t appear to the strategy most voters took.

There was another strategy suggested – if there’s a work there that you love, vote for it, and if there isn’t vote no winner. Seeing how the awards played out, it looks like that strategy was the one more often employed.

 sebster wrote:
I mean, flip it around, assume that the left had done this, and some categories were entirely filled with overtly progressive works, including some pretty crappy works that had no business being on any award list. How would you respond?

Wasn't that why Sad Puppies started in the first place?

also, language and Godwin warning:

 sebster wrote:
It’s true, but it’s worth pointing out that in this instance ‘political’ is not liberal/conservative, but the politics within the academic literary world. So Arundhati Roy writes about poverty and classism, but plenty of others do it more stridently without being critical darlings. She wins because she writes magical realism set in India, and every magical realist book set in India seems to win either the Booker or the Man Booker.

The Nobel Prize typically favors avant garde authors as a matter of course (also virtually shunning most speculative fiction), while the Hugo award typically goes to more traditional works (also hard scifi in literary awards) So yeah, there is an academic politics to the awards, but at the same time you don't have to look far to find patterns in winners. Liberalism is incredibly popular among Nobel winners, with some awards being even blatantly political, like Gao Xingjian in 2000 and Harold Pinter in 2005.

 VorpalBunny74 wrote:
Wasn't that why Sad Puppies started in the first place?

That’s what they claimed. And because they had a theory that there was a bias, which they believed to be political, they responded with a campaign to dominate the awards with their own political bias. It’s a bit like that guy here on dakka who was claiming because he believed there would be food shortages leading to deaths in the future, then we should cull the population right now.

Though to be fair to the Sad Puppies, their original campaign wasn’t overtly political. It was more populist, there was a lean towards their own politics but hardly anything severe. While their plan involved a plan for organised voting and that wasn’t cool, overall the books they were pushing were fine. It was only with Rabid Puppies that things went ugly, as Vox Day put up a list of books clearly valued more for their politics than their quality, and made his case almost entirely on political grounds. And then the Rabid Puppies went outside sci-fi looking for voters, especially courting gamer gate, meaning it was very likely that many of the voters weren’t even involved in sci-fi.

And of course, Sad Puppies never really had much impact on the awards, while Rabid Puppies in their first year dominated. Which is sort of a sad reflection on how the world works – a call for fans to get active and make an award more populist goes nowhere in three years. A call for disaffected oddballs to pile in on a community that they have no interest in just to strike a blow against the SJW has instant success.

 sebster wrote:

 VorpalBunny74 wrote:
Wasn't that why Sad Puppies started in the first place?

they had a theory that there was a bias, which they believed to be political

Which we're still waiting on proof for years later.

The thing about puppies (and this is hilarious) is that both groups ultimately targeted a focus on the ethnicity and sex of the winners, and then based on that and that alone accused the award of ;leftist' leanings, while if anything the Hugo award is right leaning. It honestly kind of adds a heaping helping of complete ignorance on the whole situation.

 sebster wrote:
And of course, Sad Puppies never really had much impact on the awards, while Rabid Puppies in their first year dominated. Which is sort of a sad reflection on how the world works – a call for fans to get active and make an award more populist goes nowhere in three years. A call for disaffected oddballs to pile in on a community that they have no interest in just to strike a blow against the SJW has instant success.

That could be seen more of an indicator of the extreme decline of Science Fiction literature over time, though. Possibly brought about because of ideological incestuousness

Having 'No award' as a winning for what, 5 categories, isn't going to bring in new fans though, with the implication being those categories plain old suck.

 LordofHats wrote:
The Nobel Prize typically favors avant garde authors as a matter of course (also virtually shunning most speculative fiction), while the Hugo award typically goes to more traditional works (also hard scifi in literary awards) So yeah, there is an academic politics to the awards, but at the same time you don't have to look far to find patterns in winners. Liberalism is incredibly popular among Nobel winners, with some awards being even blatantly political, like Gao Xingjian in 2000 and Harold Pinter in 2005.

Sure, there's certainly a pattern, and it's way more common for progressive books to win. Didn't mean to imply otherwise.

My point is more that while progressive books win more often, there's a lot more complexity at play. As you say, speculative fiction is also snubbed. Much of this is because people hold personal biases against certain kinds of works and certain kinds of politics, but a lot of it is actually how the various institutions work.

You could, for instance, write an excellent piece of progressive sci-fi, and you'd have zero chance of winning. Not just because it's sci-fi, but because your publisher will be a sci-fi publishing house (or at least the sci-fi wing of a larger publisher), and that means your publisher won't have the contacts among the right kind of critics and literary king makers. And when you go and give your readings and your interviews to build interest for your book, you’ll be talking almost entirely to a sci-fi crowd, and so your book will produce very little awareness among other audiences.

The political divide isn’t as stark, but it isn’t hard to see how it functions in much the same way.


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 VorpalBunny74 wrote:
That could be seen more of an indicator of the extreme decline of Science Fiction literature over time, though. Possibly brought about because of ideological incestuousness

It’s never quite clear what people mean when they talk about the decline of science fiction. It’s a notion that people just accept, but without any kind of detail as to what they actually mean.

Having 'No award' as a winning for what, 5 categories, isn't going to bring in new fans though, with the implication being those categories plain old suck.

Sure, but you have to understand the ‘no award’ response as a product of what voters were presented with. Because of the Rabid Puppy campaign in many categories every nomination were overtly political, and many were fething terrible. In those categories where the Rabid Puppies had stuffed the ballot completely, selecting no award is the best option.

The actual, real question is where to go next year. Responding to the puppy nonsense with an equally partisan left wing campaign will turn the Hugos in to a very silly skirmish in the mythical culture war. Doing nothing will mean more categories stuffed with right wing political mediocrity, and so more ‘no award’ responses.

 sebster wrote:
It’s never quite clear what people mean when they talk about the decline of science fiction. It’s a notion that people just accept, but without any kind of detail as to what they actually mean.

Mainly because there doesn't seem to be any 'greats' anymore, no Clarke or Asimov to get interested in. To paraphrase the great poet of our time (Kanye West) does anyone make real anymore?

I confess to being an outsider though, which is part of the problem - my outsider perspective is that Science Fiction has little to offer right now. Apart from love stories about dinosaurs.

 sebster wrote:
The actual, real question is where to go next year. Responding to the puppy nonsense with an equally partisan left wing campaign will turn the Hugos in to a very silly skirmish in the mythical culture war. Doing nothing will mean more categories stuffed with right wing political mediocrity, and so more ‘no award’ responses.

I agree, it doesn't look like there are any good options for this. Is it true though that this is less of a Left/Right issue and more of an old fashioned nepotism issue? I heard the name Patrick Hayden bandied around.

 VorpalBunny74 wrote:


I confess to being an outsider though, which is part of the problem - my outsider perspective is that Science Fiction has little to offer right now. Apart from love stories about dinosaurs.

I tend to think this is the real issue. It's not that there aren't any greats in the genre. It's that the genre has lost the popular imagination, and authors rarely get the mainstream recognition as authors from other genres. Sure, Scifi is still a hugely popular genre, but it's become increasingly insular over the past few decades since the end of the New Wave in the 80s. Especially when concerning hard scifi. This coincides with the large shunning of science fiction works by literary academics and awards (Scifi is the only literary genre that pretty much has to have its own award shows to get any recognition whatsoever).

This culture wars seem to be moving closer to the forefront. I first head about this argument something like 2 or three years ago. It didn't seem to be that much of a stir at the time, but now I am seeing debates like these pop up everywhere.

Do any of you really think that the people who voted 'no award' actually read any of the stuff they were voting against?

I wish there was a way to accurately gauge that data, because I'm betting no.

 VorpalBunny74 wrote:
Mainly because there doesn't seem to be any 'greats' anymore, no Clarke or Asimov to get interested in. To paraphrase the great poet of our time (Kanye West) does anyone make real anymore?

Which is a fair point. I wonder if the size of the sci-fi industry makes that hard these days, there’s so much choice out there that it’s hard for someone to dominate, and even harder to dominate with work that’s both popular and intellectually satisfying. If Asimov wrote today would he be widely read?

I agree, it doesn't look like there are any good options for this. Is it true though that this is less of a Left/Right issue and more of an old fashioned nepotism issue? I heard the name Patrick Hayden bandied around.

I think the original problem was not so much nepotism as insularity. Authors were nominated because they were the authors who were always nominated, and it was hard to break in. It isn’t politics, or even a deliberate choice, but more just the result of how critical approval works among groups – different artists just get lumped in to ‘award worthy’ or ‘not award worthy’ through an almost entirely arbitrary process. It’s why most award shows aren’t very good.

But that changed with the original Sad Puppies, which wasn’t entirely political, but certainly blurred the lines between populist stories and more conservative kinds of values. That opened the door for Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies, which led to the crazy ballot we saw.

Everyone I know who got the Hugo packet and read it agreed that the while some of the puppy works were serviceable, they were vastly inferior to what they forced off the list in the categories they stuffed the ballot box on.

I think it really says everything about the whole situation you need to know that lead puppy Brad Torgerson has gone from genially stating, 'vote the way you want, and whatever happens, it's all good,' to petulantly editing every disagreeing post on his blog to, 'You made us do this!' Yep, there's an open mind who just wants to show his true love of the genre for you.

I know that the new rules they're proposing for 2017 are going to kill slates of any sort dead. It'll be fun to see if the puppies have any life left in them and try again at that point.

 Bromsy wrote:
Do any of you really think that the people who voted 'no award' actually read any of the stuff they were voting against?

I wish there was a way to accurately gauge that data, because I'm betting no.

That's a fair question, but an even better one is, 'how many of the puppies read what they voted against? How many of them actually read what they voted _for_?'

Meanwhile they blocked the SP candidates, such as a black man, a Jew, several women and a socialist. Go diversity as long as you follow SJW group think!

Wasn't the whole point of the puppies their complaint that people weren't voting on works, but only because the author was the right color/gender?

Whoops. So much for 'group think.'

 Bromsy wrote:
Do any of you really think that the people who voted 'no award' actually read any of the stuff they were voting against?

It's a popular award. Most years the award is probably decided with most voters having read no more than one or two works in each category. Hell, the Academy Awards has that problem, and voting membership there is restricted to a supposed elite.

I still have trouble believing any of the crap nominated was better than The Martian.

That book is the gak.

 cincydooley wrote:
I still have trouble believing any of the crap nominated was better than The Martian.

That book is the gak.

The nomination data was released after the awards and it shows that had it not been for the SP slate The Martian would have been a finalist for the Campbell Award.

Also, I agree, The Martian is awesome.

 Bookwrack wrote:
Wasn't the whole point of the puppies their complaint that people weren't voting on works, but only because the author was the right color/gender?

Whoops. So much for 'group think.'

They wanted an unbiased vote but by influencing the vote massively it became biased?

I'm completely lost what this whole thing is about. How did it start?

 cincydooley wrote:
I still have trouble believing any of the crap nominated was better than The Martian.

That book is the gak.

It's the best book I've read this year. I burned through it in a few hours and most of the time I was like, Oh snap! Oh snap!. It did lose a little steam by the end but still a great book. \


Also, much like Piston Honda, I have no idea what this is about, despite reading more than one thread about it. As internet kerfluffles go this was sort of a hard one to follow.

I THINK it was basically about a bunch of people being pissed off that people were winning Hugo awards based on personal or story politics (i.e, this story won because it was written by a transmorpherized blue billy goat or this story won because it was about two gay men succeeding in american future space football) rather then the actual QUALITY of those stories.

I actively avoid anything advertised specifically towards an interest group (yay white male privilege), so I wouldn't even pick up blue billy's story if it was shopped as such.

Didn't prevent me from enjoying Dune, Dorian Grey, Fried Green Tomatoes, The Hours, any of Patricia Cornwell's novels with Kay Scarpetta, any of Bret Easton Ellis' books, any of Chuck Pahlniuk's books, any Anne Rice book, the Song of Fire and Ice series.... I could go on.

I get their point in that I'd rather see quality fiction win because it's quality fiction, and not mediocre fiction win because it has a special interest attached to it.

But the absence of The Martian makes me say, "feth all of you."

Yeah, it seems best to consider works on their merits and try to divorce them from the artist/author. Even terrible people can create pretty good art.

 Piston Honda wrote:
I'm completely lost what this whole thing is about. How did it start?

There is a yearly science fiction and fantasy award called the Hugos. In it, an award is given out to the winning new work in a number of categories.

A few years back, some right-wing SFF authors got sad that despite being nominated for Hugos, they had not actually won. They decided to start a campaign to get books they found more ideologically favorable nominated. This campaign was unsuccessful for two years, but on the third it managed to harness the disaffected right-wing rage behind stuff like gamergate and, due to the nomination process being susceptible to gaming it in this particular way, managed to nominate a large number of works. (The Hugos have a nomination process, where they produce a list of five works in each category that are seen as the finalists, and then these five works are voted on later to pick out the best one). This forced many other works that would have been nominated out of the running, often in favour of ones that were quite bad.

The question became how to respond to this. The Hugos' main voting follows a preferential system, much like you might see in an election, where the works are ordered in order of preference, with an additional "No Award" entry to indicate you do not think the works below No Award are deserving of a Hugo. Some people thought that No Award should be placed in all categories that had the gamed entries in them; others decided to place all the gamed entries below No Award, regardless of their quality; some more decided to just follow their regular voting method and if the works were of sufficient quality, vote for them. It was unclear what all this would mean for the future of the Hugos, which are quite a prestigious award. Now that one group had successfully gamed the system, would they continue to do this in future years, making counter-gaming the only effective response? Should the nominations process be changed to prevent gaming the system?

In any event, everyone was anxious to see what the results of the actual vote would be. There is a long delay between nominations and voting to allow people to become familiar with the nominated works. The actual vote just took place, and the result was that none of the gamed-in works won a Hugo. Most of them came in behind No Award in the preferences, with some managing to take second place. That said, many good works were forced out of the nominations process.

GRR Martin holds an unofficial "Hugo losers ceremony" every year for people who lose a Hugo - as you can imagine, there are many more of them than there are winners! This year he expanded it to give out some unofficial awards to people who were cheated out of nominations by the people gaming the system.

That is roughly how it all went down.

The Martian isn't really the kind of story that typically wins the Hugo Award for best novel, so I don't think it would have won even without Puppies. The Three Body Problem on the other hand, is exactly the kind of novel that typically wins.

 LordofHats wrote:
The Martian isn't really the kind of story that typically wins the Hugo Award for best novel, so I don't think it would have won even without Puppies. The Three Body Problem on the other hand, is exactly the kind of novel that typically wins.

Sure, in 2008 when it was published

 cincydooley wrote:
I THINK it was basically about a bunch of people being pissed off that people were winning Hugo awards based on personal or story politics (i.e, this story won because it was written by a transmorpherized blue billy goat or this story won because it was about two gay men succeeding in american future space football) rather then the actual QUALITY of those stories.

So, stories written by kotaku and upworthy bloggers?

There's not much too it. A few years ago, Larry Corriea lost out on the Campbell award (best first work from an author and awarded at the same annual con as the Hugo). At the time, he was gracious and said it was an honor just to be considered, and that he lost out to worthy company.

Latter on his story changed that that was just the false face he put on because people had made comments to him that he had lost not because of superior competition, but because he was white, conservative, and male and those were strikes against him. He started positing that there was a small, focused, SJW cabal exerting undue control over the direction of the genre and what books got awards (and this is the first and foremost failing of the puppies, because just looking at the easily verifiable list of books that got nominations and awards in previous years puts lie to the his claims) and organized the first Sad Puppies to try and combat them.

It was only a small thing, but this year, for Sad Puppies 2, he worked with another author of similar views, Brad Torgersen, along with a third author, Vox Day (Theodore Beale). Teddy, unfortunately, is not a very nice person. Corriea said that if he and BRad wer 'FDR and Churchill, then Teddy was Stalin." Teddy organized a second group, called 'the Rabid Puppies,' and pushed much harder to get people to vote in lockstep for a voting slate, getting people to all push the exact same choices across the entries for each category.

The Hugos are a two-step process. First you get the nominations by popular vote of the top five choices, and then you have the vote on them at the annual Worldcon. All things considered, the voting pool is/was rather small. There were a couple categories where the puppies' slate filled all the slots. That was when people sat up and took notice of what was happening, and things started exploding all over the internet.

Now we just had the actual awards themselves, and like I said before, it sums things up pretty well that before Torgersen was saying, 'vote for what you like, and we'll see how it all turns out,' and now he's throwing temper tantrums over the results.

The No Winner result makes the Hugo's look like a joke, IMO.

 cincydooley wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
The Martian isn't really the kind of story that typically wins the Hugo Award for best novel, so I don't think it would have won even without Puppies. The Three Body Problem on the other hand, is exactly the kind of novel that typically wins.

Sure, in 2008 when it was published

Well the original manuscript is in Chinese and was not submitted. Ken Liu's translation is what was submitted, and was published in 2014.

The Hugo Award for best novel tends to favor either Contemporary Fantasy or Hard Scifi (most often it favors Hard scifi). Within that trend though the award typically goes to books that look at societal changes and the effects of new technologies and advancement on a larger scale. The Martian just isn't in that mold (Hatchet meets Apollo 13), while the Three Body Problem is pretty much right up the ally. Granted, the Hugo Award has a more open voting process than most awards, so things can shift radically year to year depending on who bothered to go through the trouble of voting.


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 Piston Honda wrote:


So, stories written by kotaku and upworthy bloggers?

No. It started with some guy who didn't like the novels that were winning the award. Larry Correila started Sad Puppies in 2013 with the intention of "poking the establishment." His specific complaint was that the works winning the Hugo Awards were 'heavy handed message fic' and lacking the fun and adventure that he thought made scifi fun. Over the past two years though, the movement grew and instead became "how dare all these liberal non white people keep winning all our scifi awards!"

The movement itself seems to be completely uninformed about the Hugos though. I mean Redshirts, a scifi parody, won Best Novel in 2013, the same year Sad Puppies started and there's nothing heavy handed message about it. The Hugo award has been won by a lot of popular fiction (the Ancillary Series, Harry Potter,American Gods), and white men make up the majority of winners (2013 was an odd year with many women sweeping up). So really it's just a bunch of people screaming about a bunch of nonsense that isn't actually happening. Nominations are chosen by anyon who registers as a member of World Con, and Puppies voted in masse for works they thought deserved to win and ended up sweeping in many categories getting nothing but works they preferred on the final ballot. In response, everyone else massively voted down their nominations in retaliation going so far as to pick "no winner" in most of the categories where only Puppies nominees were present.

 Bookwrack wrote:
There's not much too it. A few years ago, Larry Corriea lost out on the Campbell award (best first work from an author and awarded at the same annual con as the Hugo). At the time, he was gracious and said it was an honor just to be considered, and that he lost out to worthy company.

Latter on his story changed that that was just the false face he put on because people had made comments to him that he had lost not because of superior competition, but because he was white, conservative, and male and those were strikes against him. He started positing that there was a small, focused, SJW cabal exerting undue control over the direction of the genre and what books got awards (and this is the first and foremost failing of the puppies, because just looking at the easily verifiable list of books that got nominations and awards in previous years puts lie to the his claims) and organized the first Sad Puppies to try and combat them.

It was only a small thing, but this year, for Sad Puppies 2, he worked with another author of similar views, Brad Torgersen, along with a third author, Vox Day (Theodore Beale). Teddy, unfortunately, is not a very nice person. Corriea said that if he and BRad wer 'FDR and Churchill, then Teddy was Stalin." Teddy organized a second group, called 'the Rabid Puppies,' and pushed much harder to get people to vote in lockstep for a voting slate, getting people to all push the exact same choices across the entries for each category.

The Hugos are a two-step process. First you get the nominations by popular vote of the top five choices, and then you have the vote on them at the annual Worldcon. All things considered, the voting pool is/was rather small. There were a couple categories where the puppies' slate filled all the slots. That was when people sat up and took notice of what was happening, and things started exploding all over the internet.

Now we just had the actual awards themselves, and like I said before, it sums things up pretty well that before Torgersen was saying, 'vote for what you like, and we'll see how it all turns out,' and now he's throwing temper tantrums over the results.

That was a very ignorant summary.

It was a very accurate summary.

 .Mikes. wrote:
It was a very accurate summary.

I personally know Larry and Brad and you're way off the mark with their motivations and behavior.

 .Mikes. wrote:
It was a very accurate summary.

No brah you don't get it. The SJWs have taken over our Scifi awards! it is our responsibility as "true fans" to tell them that we won't tolerate their opinions! We like our trashy low brow science fiction, and we ain't gonna let de womeniz and the Chinese take over!

If you personally know Larry and Brad could you please urge them to recognise the 'popular vote' they claimed to stand for just slapped them down hard and if they had any integrity they'd lay off trying to pull this kind of stunt again?


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 LordofHats wrote:
we ain't gonna let de womeniz and the Chinese take over!

This is auto-correcting for me to 'dark eldar womeniz'. Damn, I didn't realise it had gotten that bad.

 LordofHats wrote:
We like our trashy low brow science fiction, and we ain't gonna let de womeniz and the Chinese take over!

Wasn't Toni Weisskopf denied an award because of the anti-puppy vote?

 VorpalBunny74 wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
We like our trashy low brow science fiction, and we ain't gonna let de womeniz and the Chinese take over!

Wasn't Toni Weisskopf denied an award because of the anti-puppy vote?

Shelia Gilbert and Anne Sowards as well (all in the same category). And John C Wright was nominated 3 times in the same category? Crazy stuff right?

It's almost like the whole thing is a giant mess and I'm being facetious EDIT: Granted, my crack was directed at the crowd behind Sad Puppies, not the people who actually organize the slate (Torgersen), who I think is at best described as being somewhat misguided.

 MWHistorian wrote:

 .Mikes. wrote:
It was a very accurate summary.

I personally know Larry and Brad and you're way off the mark with their motivations and behavior.

Whatever you say, man. The truth hurts, don't it? I mean, we can go right over to Brad's blog right now and see where along with his well reasoned summation of the Hugo results, you had a streak where every comment that disagreed with him had him re-write your comment to say, "You made us do it!"

That's the saddest thing about the puppies is EVERYTHING they've done is preserved in the public record for anyone to read and confirm. Like Correia and Martin's exchanges.

*edit*
I'm going to have to look for the link because I don't remember the name, but you had Brad working up outrage about one of the writer's who declined their nomination being 'bullied and harassed' until she withdrew, only to have her immediately tell him not to speak for her, and no, she hadn't been.

*edit 2*
-cooled it on some of the hyperbole-

http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/blog/2015/05/sad-puppy-brad-torgensen-lies-like-crazy-and-juliette-wade-calls-him-on-it/

I believe you're referring to Juliet Wade, whom Torgersen started making up stories about after she asked to have her name removed from the slate.

The only way to see who's "winning"/has "won" is to look at sales numbers, I think. Are the "genderfluid socialists fighting oppressive reactionaries with empathy guns as they forge communist utopias" novels selling more than the "grizzled white men playing into stereotypical Western male power fantasies in spaaaaaace" ones?

 LordofHats wrote:
It's almost like the whole thing is a giant mess and I'm being facetious

No problem - I just don't know who's ribbing who now. It's a mystery wrapped in an enema

Well I think that's a bit unavoidable. Sad Puppies really is a lot like Gamer Gate in that is sucked in a very large number of people trying to achieve different things.

About the only thing that can probably be definitively taken away is that Sad Puppies failed to achieve its goals. Despite getting much of its slate on the final ballot, for whatever reasons the rest of World Con was so upset with them that they outright refused to give awards out when their only choices were those pushed by Puppies. If that isn't a statement ultimately condemning Puppies by the majority in rather harsh terms, I'm not really sure what else it can be taken as.

Seaward wrote:
The only way to see who's "winning"/has "won" is to look at sales numbers, I think. Are the "genderfluid socialists fighting oppressive reactionaries with empathy guns as they forge communist utopias" novels selling more than the "grizzled white men playing into stereotypical Western male power fantasies in spaaaaaace" ones?

I'm not one of those people who claim a winner is someone who sells more books, but in this case, yes you're correct. Also, when an SP tried to organise a boycott of Tor-published books, Tor books actually increased.

The whole editor section is a mess and the part I really don't understand.

 Bookwrack wrote:
Everyone I know who got the Hugo packet and read it agreed that the while some of the puppy works were serviceable, they were vastly inferior to what they forced off the list in the categories they stuffed the ballot box on.

I think it really says everything about the whole situation you need to know that lead puppy Brad Torgerson has gone from genially stating, 'vote the way you want, and whatever happens, it's all good,' to petulantly editing every disagreeing post on his blog to, 'You made us do this!' Yep, there's an open mind who just wants to show his true love of the genre for you.

I know that the new rules they're proposing for 2017 are going to kill slates of any sort dead. It'll be fun to see if the puppies have any life left in them and try again at that point.

 Bromsy wrote:
Do any of you really think that the people who voted 'no award' actually read any of the stuff they were voting against?

I wish there was a way to accurately gauge that data, because I'm betting no.

That's a fair question, but an even better one is, 'how many of the puppies read what they voted against? How many of them actually read what they voted _for_?'

That actually isn't a better question. At best it would be equivalent, but I am still fairly certain that since in many cases the 'no award' received multiple times what the next entry got in terms of votes you are looking at a situation where the 'puppies' received a whole lot of nominations and they all voted for the ones they liked best, and other people came along and voted no award as a matter of course - otherwise you would not be seeing results where the second place got more votes than the winner in previous years and yet still lost by an order of magnitude to no award.

The nomination and awards processes are distinct - to nominate you do not have to vote 'against' anything. If you are questioning whether people read the things they voted for in the actual awards, I would posit that since basically the puppies spread their votes for all of the nominees in quite a few categories and lost to no award, the puppies were far more inclined to vote for those out of the five that they had read and liked, whereas everyone opposed to the puppies were motivated to vote no award regardless of the quality of the entries that the puppies were far more likely to have actually read the nominees.

Do the results give us the spread of votes?

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Do the results give us the spread of votes?

http://www.thehugoawards.org/content/pdf/2015HugoStatistics.pdf

I'd posit that in most of the categories, the people voting probably have read the pieces or are aware of the persons. Very few places publish Novelettes or Short Stories, and most of the categories that are not 'Best novel' are the kind of mediums where the people bothering to vote in them at all, are probably fairly aware of what is in the field. So for most of the categories, if a voter is aware of any piece that might qualify they're probably familiar with most of the others due to limited venues/time investment.

The only area where I'd feel confident saying people probably vote without having read all the nominees is Novels and Long Form.

 LordofHats wrote:
I'd posit that in most of the categories, the people voting probably have read the pieces or are aware of the persons. Very few places publish Novelettes or Short Stories, and most of the categories that are not 'Best novel' are the kind of mediums where the people bothering to vote in them at all, are probably fairly aware of what is in the field. So for most of the categories, if a voter is aware of any piece that might qualify they're probably familiar with most of the others due to limited venues/time investment.

The only area where I'd feel confident saying people probably vote without having read all the nominees is Novels and Long Form.

So you're saying best Novelette isn't treated in the Hugo's the way I treat best sound editing or best foreign language short film on my Oscar ballots?

Pretty much. It's just not a widely published medium. On top of that, most of those works are short enough that you'd be able to read the entire thing in an afternoon (not to mention, there aren't many authors writing in those genre's either).

 Bromsy wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Do the results give us the spread of votes?

http://www.thehugoawards.org/content/pdf/2015HugoStatistics.pdf

Thanks.

Judging by that , the No Award votes ranged widely from the lowest to the highest single vote in different categories.

I've been seeing this story everywhere and man it's dense and confusing. Even after reading this whole thread I'm still not sure I understand exactly what's going on with it. Is this understanding roughly accurate?


-Big awards ceremony for nerd books.
-Tastes of nerd book crowd begin to shift a bit, at start picking a lot of books with gay/minority/whatever characters in them.
-Some authors & fans take offense that their tastes aren't in the majority anymore, and start getting angry and blaming "SJWs" for ruining everything.
-Said angry people form groups to stack the popularity stage of the nominations by pulling in lots of votes from outside the usual community.
-In protest judges enter null votes in any category where it seems as though the votes were manipulated by the angry crowd, meaning few awards actually given out.

Mostly accurate, but the 'judges' here are anyone who bought a voting membership of world con. There's no select cabal of judges who make their decisions behind closed doors.

I like Flint's view on it. Granted I like Flint's books for the most part so I'm probably biased. Plus it alludes to what might be the next Heir to Alexandria series book

Just treat the Hugo's like any other award and forget about it.

 Chongara wrote:
-In protest judges enter null votes in any category where it seems as though the votes were manipulated by the angry crowd, meaning few awards actually given out.

There actually are no judges. It's all driven by fan voting. You just have to spend the $40 to purchase a World Science Fiction Society membership to be able to vote, and the rules for what's eligible are pretty broad. To qualify, your book has to be published in the previous year. There are no guidelines for what determines if something is sci-fi or fantasy and the five title nomination list come straight from the voting. It also gets you a copy of the Hugo nominated works to review. When Robert Jordan's 'Wheel of Time' series was completed it got nominated for a Hugo, and the nomination packet contained the whole series. Pretty good deal for $40!

It's probably no big surprise that the membership and voting pool tended to be fairly small, and this is how the puppies had their early success. For each category, you could pick 1-5 titles to nominate. Some voters were dedicated and made sure to fill each slot on their ballots. Others just voted for the best novel and ignored the rest. Against that, just getting a small group of people to vote the same five entries allowed the puppies to steamroll some of the initial nominations, and those were the ones that got hit with the No Award choice.

Which when it came to the final voting, was not some omg you can't do that! thing. If you thought that Dance with Dragons was the best god damned book of 2012, and everything else was garbage, making that your top pic and No Award your #2 entry was just fine. If a lot of other people agreed with you, aDwD would come in #1, and No Award would be somewhere below it. It'd all come down to the fan votes cast at World Con.

Which also might answer the above questions about how many people read the works they voted no award for. Because if you cast a vote, you got the packet and had the chance to read the works.

 Piston Honda wrote:
So, stories written by kotaku and upworthy bloggers?

See how a few different people gave you summaries, and you picked out the one that sounded like it most closely suited your own culture war beliefs, and then exaggerated it even further? That's what this is about. People with pre-loaded political ideas charging in with absolutely no fething interest in the reality on the ground, all primed to fight another round in the insufferably stupid culture war.


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 MWHistorian wrote:

 .Mikes. wrote:
It was a very accurate summary.

I personally know Larry and Brad and you're way off the mark with their motivations and behavior.

You may possibly know every single person on Earth. I am impressed.

That one mentioned where a chinese man comes out to his traditional parents sounds so stupid. There is no reason that has to be a science fiction where wat.er falls on your head if you lie

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
That one mentioned where a chinese man comes out to his traditional parents sounds so stupid. There is no reason that has to be a science fiction where wat.er falls on your head if you lie

According to their website:

While the World Science Fiction Society sponsors the Hugos, they are not limited to sf. Works of fantasy or horror are eligible if the members of the Worldcon think they are eligible.

I haven't read that water falling story though, so there could be a shocking Science Fiction twist at the end

The Hugo Award is better described as a Speculative Fiction award, rather than a science fiction award (despite Science Fiction being what the award is best known for). Lots of Fantasy works have won it over the years (Sandman, American Gods, Harry Potter).

I like how none of the novels recommended by Atomic Rockets site ever got a Hugo award, especially a gem like Human Reach series.

Or the Atomic Rockets site itself.

I guess science in science fiction no longer counts.

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:
I like how none of the novels recommended by Atomic Rockets site ever got a Hugo award, especially a gem like Human Reach series.

Or the Atomic Rockets site itself.

I feel bad for Ken Burnside, actually. Even if "the cold equations" doesn't hold much literary value in itself, it is a must read for anyone interested in writing a realistic depiction of space warfare. Sadly, he messed up big time with a couple of untimely comments at Nielsen-Hayden's blog and got immediately lumped with the puppy hardliners.

Heck, for the sake of sci-fi, I wish he'd kept his head down. He was probably the only Puppy nominee who deserved a win IMHO.

 Agent_Tremolo wrote:

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:
I like how none of the novels recommended by Atomic Rockets site ever got a Hugo award, especially a gem like Human Reach series.

Or the Atomic Rockets site itself.

I feel bad for Ken Burnside, actually. Even if "the cold equations" doesn't hold much literary value in itself, it is a must read for anyone interested in writing a realistic depiction of space warfare. Sadly, he messed up big time with a couple of untimely comments at Nielsen-Hayden's blog and got immediately lumped with the puppy hardliners.

Heck, for the sake of sci-fi, I wish he'd kept his head down. He was probably the only Puppy nominee who deserved a win IMHO.

How is that Burnside's fault? His work speaks for itself. The problem is with other people who have decided that an author's political beliefs, B they real or perceived, matter more than the quality of their writing.

The whole trfan vs wrongfan fight is pathetic and disgraceful. WorldCon chose to let people buy memberships and vote for Hugos. Then when popular authors get more fan than ever to buy memberships, giving WorldCon more money and more members than ever the aging old guard of WorldCon voters decides that they don't like their own system after all because they want to continue to be the small insular group that can control the awards. They can't just let any sci Fi fan with $40 cast a vote because then those horrible people who are fans of the genre and willing to pay WorldCon for a membership might vote for books that the insular old guard doesn't like. Even worse than that blatant hypocrisy of condemning fans for participating in fan voting, you have WorldCon trufans that decide that the personal politics of authors is what's really important regardless of their ability to write good scifi that sells lots of books, helps keep the genre healthy and the fan base growing.

I have no idea what Marko Kloos' personal politics are. A friend of mine recommended his first book to me so I bought it, read it, liked it, bought more of his stories. Judging by his book sales and amazon reviews I am far from the only person who's a fan of his. Yet WorldCon trufans can't stand the idea that Kloos' fans might choose to participate in Hugo voting because in the giant Venn digram of scifi fans Kloos' fans overlap with fans of sad puppy authors and anyone who could be even tangentially connected to anyone with wrong politics who writes wrong stories or gets wrong enjoyment from reading wrong stories because the stories aren't the right stories that the small insular group of WorldCon trufans choose to laud as award worthy must be shunned as strongly as possible.

If the wrong fans like your stories then you have to be shunned from the Hugos forever because only a small select few people are worthy of telling the world what "good" scifi looks like.

WorldCon just told huge fan bases of popular authors to feth off and stop giving them money and participating in fan voting because they're wrong fans because reasons.

Now everybody knows that what used to be the most prestigious award for scifi literature is only concerned with the opinions of a select few members of a dwindling Con that chooses self congratulating insularity rather than inclusiveness to support a genre that has always had a rich history of inclusivity .

 cincydooley wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
while 4 films that were basically unknown were.

Oh really? Which were those?

I'm looking at that list and can't see any "unknowns' on there...

Boyhood? The film was virtually unheard of until it was nominated. Whiplash. Selma. EDIT: Even after these films are little known of, unless you pay attention to the awards.

Boyhood is a linklater film. If you're into movies at all you know him and his work.

Selma was the Oprah movie. Hardly obscure.

I guess I'll give you whiplash, but buzz started for that early. And was sustained.

And it was better than Guardians.

I'd heard of Whiplash. But then again I play the drums so it's the kind of thing I would've noticed


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 VorpalBunny74 wrote:

 sebster wrote:
It’s never quite clear what people mean when they talk about the decline of science fiction. It’s a notion that people just accept, but without any kind of detail as to what they actually mean.

Mainly because there doesn't seem to be any 'greats' anymore, no Clarke or Asimov to get interested in. To paraphrase the great poet of our time (Kanye West) does anyone make real anymore?

I confess to being an outsider though, which is part of the problem - my outsider perspective is that Science Fiction has little to offer right now. Apart from love stories about dinosaurs.

The Long Earth series. You're welcome.

Prestor Jon wrote:
How is that Burnside's fault? His work speaks for itself. The problem is with other people who have decided that an author's political beliefs, B they real or perceived, matter more than the quality of their writing.

Maybe if he had used his brief moments of exposure to defend the merits of his work instead of flinging poop against Rachel Swirsky...

Burnside wouldn't have won. Feel free to look through the Hugo winners over the years. Burnside writes scifi as hard as hard scifi can get, but those kinds of works haven't found much success at the Hugo Awards since the late 70's (and even before that, scifi like Burnside writes wasn't the most successful).

Now everybody knows that what used to be the most prestigious award for scifi literature is only concerned with the opinions of a select few members of a dwindling Con that chooses self congratulating insularity rather than inclusiveness to support a genre that has always had a rich history of inclusivity .

Explain this to me. WorldCon is basically a popular contest, right? I mean the only requirement is that you pay a $40 fee and you can vote for whatever. You can even vote for nominees. So, if these 'popular' authors that the mean 'elitist World Con Minority' are being shut out... Wait that makes no sense! The fact that they got voted down so hard, would seem to suggest that these 'popular' authors are not as popular as some people seem to think they are, and that the the 'elitist minority' is actually the majority.

It's the second irony behind Sad Puppies (after that they're basically talking nonsense). Sad Puppies are the real elitist minority. WorldCon is just a bunch of people voting in a scifi popularity contest. There are some obvious political trends in the winners sure, but the award has always been that way. Any given group will have bias'. It's unavoidable, why do you expect WorldCon members to be any different? Go find me an award that isn't. Further, who cares? At least the winners of Hugo Awards tend to be good enough that I can nod and say "well it was pretty good." That's already a full leg up on a half dozen other prestigious awards

All Sad Puppies really amounts to is a bunch of pretentious fans throwing a raging temper tantrum because another group of pretentious fans has different bias' than they do.

 LordofHats wrote:
Burnside wouldn't have won. Feel free to look through the Hugo winners over the years. Burnside writes scifi as hard as hard scifi can get, but those kinds of works haven't found much success at the Hugo Awards since the late 70's (and even before that, scifi like Burnside writes wasn't the most successful).

Started reading it. Looks like mostly the same stuff that Atomic Rockets was talking about for over a decade. Though he was a source of some of the stuff at Atomic Rockets.

The thing is that it's old news. There's already a series of novels who follows the rules - reaction mass, no stealth, necessity of cooling, huge ranges etc. - the only concession to fantasy is that it has wormholes for interstellar travel.

The Human Reach

Check out the author credentials.

The combination of an experienced journalist author and a the author of the Atomic Rocket as a consultant means that it avoids most of pitfalls of "Sci-fi" - avoids being dry and technology obsessed while avoiding being fantasy in space. AFAIK it's the most realistic military sci-fi out there.

To be honest, I have no idea how it's possible that it's not showered with awards and widely published.

 LordofHats wrote:
WorldCon is just a bunch of people voting in a scifi popularity contest. There are some obvious political trends in the winners sure, but the award has always been that way. Any given group will have bias'. It's unavoidable, why do you expect WorldCon members to be any different? Go find me an award that isn't. Further, who cares? At least the winners of Hugo Awards tend to be good enough that I can nod and say "well it was pretty good." That's already a full leg up on a half dozen other prestigious awards

What's the point of having awards when it's just a mob vote?

It's like the peoples choice awards in movies. Not to be taken seriously, though you might find out the best kiss scene.

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:

What's the point of having awards when it's just a mob vote?

The point of any award is so far as people care who gets it. The Hugo award is one of the few to actually have an impact on sales (Hugo Award winners have tangible sales boosts attributable to winning the Hugo). So that's the point and is why publishers care, and people care because people like scifi sometimes and they get together to talk about their favorites (one could say it's a lot like an internet forums )

Beyond that... so what? The award is what the award is. All awards are basically popularity contests. It's just a question of how many people's opinions get counted and what it is that group is looking for in a piece.

Prestor Jon wrote:

 Agent_Tremolo wrote:

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:
I like how none of the novels recommended by Atomic Rockets site ever got a Hugo award, especially a gem like Human Reach series.

Or the Atomic Rockets site itself.

I feel bad for Ken Burnside, actually. Even if "the cold equations" doesn't hold much literary value in itself, it is a must read for anyone interested in writing a realistic depiction of space warfare. Sadly, he messed up big time with a couple of untimely comments at Nielsen-Hayden's blog and got immediately lumped with the puppy hardliners.

Heck, for the sake of sci-fi, I wish he'd kept his head down. He was probably the only Puppy nominee who deserved a win IMHO.

How is that Burnside's fault? His work speaks for itself. The problem is with other people who have decided that an author's political beliefs, B they real or perceived, matter more than the quality of their writing.

The whole trfan vs wrongfan fight is pathetic and disgraceful. WorldCon chose to let people buy memberships and vote for Hugos. Then when popular authors get more fan than ever to buy memberships, giving WorldCon more money and more members than ever the aging old guard of WorldCon voters decides that they don't like their own system after all because they want to continue to be the small insular group that can control the awards. They can't just let any sci Fi fan with $40 cast a vote because then those horrible people who are fans of the genre and willing to pay WorldCon for a membership might vote for books that the insular old guard doesn't like. Even worse than that blatant hypocrisy of condemning fans for participating in fan voting, you have WorldCon trufans that decide that the personal politics of authors is what's really important regardless of their ability to write good scifi that sells lots of books, helps keep the genre healthy and the fan base growing.

I have no idea what Marko Kloos' personal politics are. A friend of mine recommended his first book to me so I bought it, read it, liked it, bought more of his stories. Judging by his book sales and amazon reviews I am far from the only person who's a fan of his. Yet WorldCon trufans can't stand the idea that Kloos' fans might choose to participate in Hugo voting because in the giant Venn digram of scifi fans Kloos' fans overlap with fans of sad puppy authors and anyone who could be even tangentially connected to anyone with wrong politics who writes wrong stories or gets wrong enjoyment from reading wrong stories because the stories aren't the right stories that the small insular group of WorldCon trufans choose to laud as award worthy must be shunned as strongly as possible.

If the wrong fans like your stories then you have to be shunned from the Hugos forever because only a small select few people are worthy of telling the world what "good" scifi looks like.

WorldCon just told huge fan bases of popular authors to feth off and stop giving them money and participating in fan voting because they're wrong fans because reasons.

Now everybody knows that what used to be the most prestigious award for scifi literature is only concerned with the opinions of a select few members of a dwindling Con that chooses self congratulating insularity rather than inclusiveness to support a genre that has always had a rich history of inclusivity .

Exalted for truth.
Apparently I'm the wrong type of fan for the Hugos because I would rather have an interesting story than a sermon.

 MWHistorian wrote:

Exalted for truth.
Apparently I'm the wrong type of fan for the Hugos because I would rather have an interesting story than a sermon.

And the first irony of Puppies. That claim has never been true. The same year the guy who started Puppies made that complaint about the Hugos, Best Novel went to Redshirts. Seriously, if books like Harry Potter, American Gods, Neuromancer, and Ender's Game are what you'd call 'heavy handed message fic' then I'd question if your issue is with sermons rather than any book/story written with an inkling of intelligent thought and writing talent.

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:

...
...
...
What's the point of having awards when it's just a mob vote?

Sad Puppies obviously think there is a point in the award or they would not have tried to influence it.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:

What's the point of having awards when it's just a mob vote?

The point of any award is so far as people care who gets it. The Hugo award is one of the few to actually have an impact on sales (Hugo Award winners have tangible sales boosts attributable to winning the Hugo). So that's the point and is why publishers care, and people care because people like scifi sometimes and they get together to talk about their favorites (one could say it's a lot like an internet forums )

It seems that it's solely for people who were already chosen by the mob, though. It doesn't serve to enlighten the mob but to merely confirm its choices.


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By the way, here's the first chapter of Through Struggle, the Stars.
http://www.thehumanreach.net/Through%20Struggle%20the%20Stars%20-%20promo.pdf
It has a single starship battle starting after page 30.

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:

It seems that it's solely for people who were already chosen by the mob, though. It doesn't serve to enlighten the mob but to merely confirm its choices.

Welcome to every award ever.

Well, "the mob" implies people potentially rioting in the streets to get their nominations on the ticket.

What actually happens is that anyone who cares to, can buy a $40 membership and vote as they like in complete anonymity and safety from coercion.

There is no mob, in other words.

 LordofHats wrote:

 MWHistorian wrote:

Exalted for truth.
Apparently I'm the wrong type of fan for the Hugos because I would rather have an interesting story than a sermon.

And the first irony of Puppies. That claim has never been true. The same year the guy who started Puppies made that complaint about the Hugos, Best Novel went to Redshirts. Seriously, if books like Harry Potter, American Gods, Neuromancer, and Ender's Game are what you'd call 'heavy handed message fic' then I'd question if your issue is with sermons rather than any book/story written with an inkling of intelligent thought and writing talent.

Funny you mention Red Shirts by Scalzi. He's the one that campaigned for his fans to get him nominated. It was his example that the Sad Puppies were using. But when they did it, they were wrong. Scalzi also fits in with the political ideals of the Hugo board.
Also, Nueromancer and Ender's Game were back when the Hugos still mattered.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
The Long Earth series. You're welcome.

My thanks for that, I'll look into it

 MWHistorian wrote:

Funny you mention Red Shirts by Scalzi. He's the one that campaigned for his fans to get him nominated. It was his example that the Sad Puppies were using. But when they did it, they were wrong. Scalzi also fits in with the political ideals of the Hugo board.
Also, Nueromancer and Ender's Game were back when the Hugos still mattered.

Authors have always campaigned to get their works nominated for a Hugo, as has been pointed out numerous times. Lots of rewards actually involve a little campaigning. You can even hire PR and marketing firms to do it for you if you want, because awards are part of PR and marketing (who knew). Further, Redshirts actually deserved to win. It's one of the best scifi novels put out in ages. If you haven't read it yet you totally should because it's hilarious EDIT: Ender's Game was also "campaigned" for.

But never before has anyone or any group campaigned to have an entire slate nominated, let alone an entire slate nominated for absurd claims of "political ideals" (vague and unclear "political ideas" at that) and accusations of fixing that run completely counter to the nature how the Hugo award works.

Good job moving the goal posts though. Now I have a third irony, because if anything actually sabotages the relevance of the Hugo Award, it'll be groups like Sad Puppies trying to fix the entire ballot and overtly politicizing the award, not single authors every now and then asking fans to support them at World Con.

 LordofHats wrote:

 MWHistorian wrote:

Funny you mention Red Shirts by Scalzi. He's the one that campaigned for his fans to get him nominated. It was his example that the Sad Puppies were using. But when they did it, they were wrong. Scalzi also fits in with the political ideals of the Hugo board.
Also, Nueromancer and Ender's Game were back when the Hugos still mattered.

Authors have always campaigned to get their works nominated for a Hugo, as has been pointed out numerous times. Lots of rewards actually involve a little campaigning. You can even hire PR and marketing firms to do it for you if you want, because awards are part of PR and marketing (who knew). Further, Redshirts actually deserved to win. It's one of the best scifi novels put out in ages. If you haven't read it yet you totally should because it's hilarious

But never before has anyone or any group campaigned to have an entire slate nominated, let alone an entire slate nominated for absurd claims of "political ideals" (vague and unclear "political ideas" at that) and accusations of fixing that run completely counter to the nature how the Hugo award works.

Good job moving the goal posts though.

They're not vague or absurd. Well, they are if you only read what their detractors say and ignore completely what Sad Puppies actually say. (I detest the Rabid Puppies though.)
Goal posts moving? No, my stance hasn't changed.
I've read Scalzi's other books and was highly unimpressed. Old Man's War was the least accurate depiction of a military since the original Star Trek show.

 MWHistorian wrote:

They're not vague or absurd.

Then you might want to try identifying them, because Sad Puppies has said a million things, lots of them contradictory, which is vague and I've made several posts throughout these threads pointing out how many of the claims are absurd.

Goal posts moving? No, my stance hasn't changed.

Well first your issue was "sermons" now your issue is "political ideals" and this mysterious 'board.'

I've read Scalzi's other books and was highly unimpressed..

And I find Orson Scott Card's books incredibly disturbing and most of Neil Gaiman's works annoyingly pretentious in their assumptions about people, but you know, sometimes credit goes where credit goes, because American Gods (and Sandman) and Ender's Game (and Speaker for the Dead) were pretty damn good

 LordofHats wrote:

 MWHistorian wrote:

They're not vague or absurd.

Then you might want to try identifying them, because Sad Puppies has said a million things, lots of them contradictory, which is vague and I've made several posts throughout these threads pointing out how many of the claims are absurd.

Goal posts moving? No, my stance hasn't changed.

Well first your issue was "sermons" now your issue is "political ideals" and this mysterious 'board.'

I've read Scalzi's other books and was highly unimpressed..

And I find Orson Scott Card's books incredibly disturbing and most of Neil Gaiman's works annoyingly pretentious in their assumptions about people, but you know, sometimes credit goes where credit goes, because American Gods (and Sandman) and Ender's Game (and Speaker for the Dead) were pretty damn good

I love all of those books. But I don't like Scalzi's writing. Heck, Card was the one that first taught me how to write.
'Sermons' was referencing the books that worried more about preaching a cause than telling a good story.
'political ideals' was referencing the political ideals of the authors. As in, if you don't have the correct political persuasion, don't bother trying for a Hugo.
And as for vagueness. They've made their stance pretty clear to me. I'm not going to rehash everything all over again.

 VorpalBunny74 wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
The Long Earth series. You're welcome.

My thanks for that, I'll look into it

I've been reading that myself lately (two books in) and I'm really enjoying it. You can take that with a grain of salt though; I'm a pretty big Pratchett fan after all.

 MWHistorian wrote:

'political ideals' was referencing the political ideals of the authors. As in, if you don't have the correct political persuasion, don't bother trying for a Hugo.

And I'm curious what those are, because Hugo Award winners have a pretty diverse range of politics over the decades. Even in the last few years there's been a range. China Mieville is a pretty active guy in liberal politics and is an outspoken Socialist (his book The City & the City was nominated and won in 2010) but Connie Willis (won in 2011 for Blackout/All Clear) has made frequent attacks against the very idea of political correctness (Blackout/All Clear is topical right now, as the series was about letting ideology override common sense). Annie Leckie has said little if anything about politics from what I can tell, and writes good old fashion space opera. Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl won in 2010 and his works are all about Bioengineering (read GMO) will be just as destructive is not more so than fossil fuels. Aside from writing a lot about the impacts of AI, Vernor Vinge's (Rainbow's End, 2007) works are chalk full of how awesome Laissez Faire Capitalism is. And that's just four writers who've won in the last couple years that I can think of/find who have overt political messages in their works. If Ann Leckie has a political message beyond "tyranny bad" I can't find it, which is usually a good sign that the author understand subtlety

^And that's just winners. I haven't even bothered to do a summary check on nominees.

And what books are "preaching a cause?" This claim keeps getting made but no one ever identifies why they mean by it, and more than that why it should even matter. People seek to derive meaning from narrative. Even if an author completely tried to avoid leaving a message they'd fail. Even today typical readers can't grasp Tolkein's rather simple position of 'allegory' and 'applicability' because fact of the matter is the human brain isn't wired to function that way. There will always be a message (i.e. a cause) so there's little choice but to assume that "preaching a cause and not telling a good story" is just code for "I don't like what this story is about." So we just come full circle to the reality of what sad puppies is; it has nothing to do with 'causes' or 'sermons' but the plain matter that Sad Puppies has a set of bias' different' from those of World Con as a whole and is whining like a 2 year old on a 16 hour plane trip that their bias' are not being reflected by the winners. And how is it any different from the books that have always won the Hugo?

Have your read Ender's Game, Stranger in a Strange Land, Foundations Edge, or Dune? Because they all have a message (and pretty strong ones). Fahrenheit 451 was retroactively awarded a Hugo in 2004 and the whole book was a scathing assault of conservative politics of the 50's! I mean Jesus The Forever War and Starship Troopers are Hugo Winners and both of those books are little more than the political thoughts and ramblings of their authors with a facade of narrative wrapped around them so that their genre is science fiction instead of Philosophy 101 Text Books. Stranger in a Strange Land, is arguably the most hippie book ever written by anyone.

In which case, so what? Go make your own award if you want your chosen winners to win. Otherwise you're stuck accepting that other people exist and their opinions might differ from yours (well you'd ideally accept that anyway, but I know how some groups like to exist in a bubble and pretend their the 'real fans' or w/e they call themselves)

*I keep referencing Best Novel because it's the easiest most straight forward award to talk about

And as for vagueness. They've made their stance pretty clear to me.

Maybe to you. To me the few things that have been clear have been on their face fallacious, and everything else is a jumble of opinions ranging in intensity from "liberal bias in the media" to "get back in the kitchen."

"A couple of decades ago" has nothing to do with the current situation.
One of the authors being a socialist isn't exactly a point in their favor when Sad puppies accuse the Hugos of having a strong liberal bias.
I loved Windup girl. One of my favorite books of that year. But yes, it was actually a very liberal book in terms of philosophy and politics.

 MWHistorian wrote:
"A couple of decades ago" has nothing to do with the current situation.

And how is the current situation any different from the past situation?

 LordofHats wrote:

 MWHistorian wrote:
"A couple of decades ago" has nothing to do with the current situation.

And how is the current situation any different from the past situation?

Because the Hugos have changed. They used to be good. Now they're fossils stuck in a cliquish mindset. I thought you understood what the Sad Puppies were arguing against?

 MWHistorian wrote:

Because the Hugos have changed.

How? I keep asking for clarifications of Sad puppies complaints and all I get is vague answers.

You claim that the Hugo Awards have been focusing on books that push agenda more than story, but I just listed Stranger in a Strange Land, The Forever War, Starship Troopers, and Foundation, two of which were practically pure agenda. So is the issue that there's an agenda present, or is the issue that you disagree with it? I find either position kind of childish in regards to the subject, but it might help if puppies could actually get it's head out of it's butt long enough to actually notice that the Hugos have always been that way. Every award is that way. If Sad Puppies went and made its own award, their award would be that way.

They used to be good.

I'd argue that so long as joint Hugo/Nebula Award winners keep popping up, they're still pretty good I consider it a sign that World Con actually has taste that there are so many joint winners (even more so because both awards tend to end up choosing between the same nominees).

Now they're fossils stuck in a cliquish mindset.

How does that even make sense with your earlier claim of liberal bias? Liberals tend to be pretty 'progressively' minded. I mean, among the winners of the Hugo Award in recent years have been Gay-Right proponents, pro-Choice advocates, minorities, and women. Seems like the Hugo's have been keeping up with the general trends of politics to me so how exactly does that make them fossils? And yet at the same time winners include Capitalists, homophobes, and anti-PC.

Sad Puppies argues that the Hugo favors literary works over 'fun' but again, not sure how that's any different from how it's always been or even what they expect to happen to fix this 'problem.' Sad Puppies seems to have taken for granted that Hugo Award winners have always been on the lower rungs of 'literary' because when we're talking about literature awards, being an author of books that don't push new ground or shoot for some kind of novelty usually means your just another face in the crowd. You actually have to do something to stand out, which entails being at least a little bit literary.

And Hugo Winners have reflected this since the 50's when the Award started because other literature awards wouldn't give Sci-Fi or Fantasy the time of day, let alone a seat at the table. They seemed to have it their head that sci-fi and fantasy couldn't possibly be the works of intelligent people.* Very few non-literary works have ever won it the Hugo. People today might lose track of that, because what might have been 'literary' 50 years ago has become typical now (Dune, Neuomancer, and Foundation were all literary works. Most Hugo winners have been. I'd actually argue more Hugo winners have been chosen for literary value than political value).

*EDIT: I'd also really like to hammer this because it's kind of funny now that I think about it.

I thought you understood what the Sad Puppies were arguing against?

I do understand it insofar as I can be sane and make a semblance sense of the madness. I think Sad Puppies fails to realize it's own rank hypocrisy, or that the bulk of their complaints make no sense. I think the reason I always get vague answers for Saddies (puppiers? w/e) is because they haven't even thought through their own position, which explains why it makes so little sense. I think that's because Sad Puppies is a juvenile group with childish complaints, because like a book I don't just stop thinking the moment the words go past my eyes, like most people

You're going off the assumption that Sad Puppies are insane and irrational. You can't have an actual conversation when you assign insanity to their motivations. When you can discuss this rationally, I'll be glad to continue.

And yes, cliquishness can be done by liberals. Wow.

 MWHistorian wrote:
You're going off the assumption that Sad Puppies are insane and irrational.

It's not an assumption I've even made. There's a rationality behind Sad Puppies, I just don't like it and I think it's anti-intellectual, ideologically motivated, and built on a number of false premises. If you think that's insane, well that's your description not mine. I'd call it 'juvenile.'

And yes, cliquishness can be done by liberals. Wow.

I never said they couldn't (I didn't even really debate that point because I think the Hugo Award is Cliquish). To discuss that point, let me ask why is it a problem and how what would you prefer? What do you even mean by cliquishness (because I would consider every award I've ever seen, and Sad Puppies itself, at least a little bit cliquish because fandom itself is cliquish).

And, you seem to be going off the assumption there is a discussion. You're posts constitute a long series of vague non-answers to any of the question's I've posed. In fact, the only definite responses you've given have been cherry picked and completely miss the point of what is being discussed. Talking to a mime who just shakes his head at everything I say and occasionally shouts 'nuh-huh' at random isn't really a discussion if you want to heighten the level of discussion, you might try looking in your own corner and elevating your responses, cause I'm not getting much to work with

It's not an assumption I've even made. There's a rationality behind Sad Puppies, I just don't like it and I think it's anti-intellectual, ideologically motivated, and built on a number of false premises. If you think that's insane, well that's your description not mine. I'd call it 'juvenile.'

 LordofHats wrote:


I do understand it insofar as I can be sane and make a semblance sense of the madness. I think that's because Sad Puppies is a juvenile group with childish complaints, because like a book I don't just stop thinking the moment the words go past my eyes, like most people

You seem to be contradicting yourself there.

 MWHistorian wrote:

It's not an assumption I've even made. There's a rationality behind Sad Puppies, I just don't like it and I think it's anti-intellectual, ideologically motivated, and built on a number of false premises. If you think that's insane, well that's your description not mine. I'd call it 'juvenile.'

 LordofHats wrote:


I do understand it insofar as I can be sane and make a semblance sense of the madness. I think that's because Sad Puppies is a juvenile group with childish complaints, because like a book I don't just stop thinking the moment the words go past my eyes, like most people

You seem to be contradicting yourself there.

In case you've not even been reading my posts and just cherry picking the bits you can sit there and self-righteously indignify yourself with; I've complained that Sad Puppies is a large group with different members making vague and seemingly contradictory claims and I've asked numerous times for clarification on what it means to you so that it can be talked about in a precise manner. If you want to exploit the 'madness' and the opinion of Sad Puppies I've cobbled together from trying to understand it to avoid actually having to discuss anything of merit, I suppose you can do that but it's kind of hypocritical for you to complain about the discussion while continually dragging it down the basest level.

 MWHistorian wrote:

One of the authors being a socialist isn't exactly a point in their favor when Sad puppies accuse the Hugos of having a strong liberal bias.

No. Stop. Just no. Words have meaning, and "liberal" and "socialist" are two different things.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:

 MWHistorian wrote:

One of the authors being a socialist isn't exactly a point in their favor when Sad puppies accuse the Hugos of having a strong liberal bias.

No. Stop. Just no. Words have meaning, and "liberal" and "socialist" are two different things.

Well this is America, and over here we tend to use those words to mean the same thing (yes it's stupid), though there is a certain silliness that the author being discussed is I believe from the UK were liberal does mean liberal and is something completely different from socialist

 MWHistorian wrote:
Because the Hugos have changed. They used to be good. Now they're fossils stuck in a cliquish mindset. I thought you understood what the Sad Puppies were arguing against?

You were asked to remove the vagueness from the complaint, and you respond with something about fossils stuck in a cliquish mindset. I think you really need to understand how hopelessly vague that complaint is.

And that's the issue with the Puppies. They complain that all the awards were given to heavy handed message books that are strongly left wing, but when you look at past winners there's a mix of serious and lighter stuff, with a mix of political messages. The complaint doesn't actually match with the reality.


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 LordofHats wrote:
Well this is America, and over here we tend to use those words to mean the same thing (yes it's stupid), though there is a certain silliness that the author being discussed is I believe from the UK were liberal does mean liberal and is something completely different from socialist

Sure, there's two uses of the word liberal, one in the US and one everywhere else. I don't think that's the issue (especially when liberal isn't much used outside of the US anymore).

It's more that the US meaning doesn't mean the same as socialist, it's more moderate, closer to 'progressive'. Socialist is used to describe someone who advocates strong levels of state control, up to and generally including nationalisation of some industry. But more often its used to make people think a liberal is much more fanatical than he really is.

 LordofHats wrote:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:

 MWHistorian wrote:

One of the authors being a socialist isn't exactly a point in their favor when Sad puppies accuse the Hugos of having a strong liberal bias.

No. Stop. Just no. Words have meaning, and "liberal" and "socialist" are two different things.

Well this is America, and over here we tend to use those words to mean the same thing (yes it's stupid), though there is a certain silliness that the author being discussed is I believe from the UK were liberal does mean liberal and is something completely different from socialist

The thing is that American liberals aren't socialists. They are one of the factions on the economic right. Socialists are one of the factions on the economic left. American political scene doesn't even have significant social-democrats, not to mention socialists.

Oh I know. The biggest irony is that our Republicans are the closest thing we have in the US to actual liberals (as in classical liberalism), but they throw the word around like it's cancer. Setting that aside, pretty much the entire spectrum of American mainstream politics is firmly in the realm of some kind of Liberalism (Social, Modern, Classical, Neo etc). But that's the sad state of American political discourse, and I can't really hold it against people when every media source we have over here treats 'liberal' and 'socialist' like they're the same thing, or at least fails to identify how they are different.


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 sebster wrote:
'progressive'..

Well the Republicans can't call their opponents that. Progress is a good thing!

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Well, "the mob" implies people potentially rioting in the streets to get their nominations on the ticket.

What actually happens is that anyone who cares to, can buy a $40 membership and vote as they like in complete anonymity and safety from coercion.

There is no mob, in other words.

I mean mob as in a mass of people whose power is derived from their number.

 LordofHats wrote:
I mean Jesus The Forever War and Starship Troopers are Hugo Winners and both of those books are little more than the political thoughts and ramblings of their authors with a facade of narrative wrapped around them so that their genre is science fiction instead of Philosophy 101 Text Books.

You conveniently forget that they also have some interesting ideas on future warfare.


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 LordofHats wrote:

 sebster wrote:
'progressive'..

Well the Republicans can't call their opponents that. Progress is a good thing!

Progress isn't an inherently good thing. And I'd argue that it's neocons who are progressing with their goals (destruction of middle class and the poor and enriching the richest) while democrats are feebly trying to stop them which makes them reactionaries, not progressives.

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:
The thing is that American liberals aren't socialists. They are one of the factions on the economic right. Socialists are one of the factions on the economic left. American political scene doesn't even have significant social-democrats, not to mention socialists.

Poor Bernie...




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 LordofHats wrote:
Well the Republicans can't call their opponents that. Progress is a good thing!

When the term liberal got sufficiently poisoned, more or less about the time Bush won his second term, there was an actual effort by liberals to start rebranding themselves and their movement as 'progressive'. I think it tested well somewhere, or something.

Identity politics is weird.

The whole discussion is weird, though, right? Your political beliefs are based on how you think the world works, how you think people work. If you think people work a particular way and I disagree then your story may come across as weird and unnatural, whereas if we have similar political ideas then it'll seem to make a lot of sense and be really true to life.

To give an example, I found the Maelstrom's Edge novels jarring because one of the authors' views is that human culture doesn't change significantly over time. If you agree with that then maybe you will find them to be a rollicking space adventure with plenty of shooting and explosions that is "free of politics". Personally, I found it made the setting unbelievable. And that's not a value judgment - if I'd written that story and its author had been reading it, maybe they would have found it unbelievable because my humans had too different a culture.

That's not to say you can't enjoy a story by someone who has different political views - I enjoyed the Maelstrom's Edge books - but it doesn't make sense to say that they "should be irrelevant," because they are at the heart of what makes your world believable to a reader.

I mean mob as in a mass of people whose power is derived from their number.

I would say that yeah, that's the silly thing about a people's/fan's choice awards. But at the same time, that's kind of why the Hugo is worthwhile. The only barrier to participation is membership in World Con, so in theory, basically anyone can participate. I don't really think that's an issue unless you're someone(s) trying to pretend the award carries more weight than what it is. It's a bunch of people who got together in some way and voted on what they thought were the best works of the year, no more no less.

Beyond that, we might as well ask what's the point in any award?

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:

You conveniently forget that they also have some interesting ideas on future warfare.

Most good books work on multiple levels. It's what makes them good

Though to be specific of these two novel's I'd argue that Starship Troopers, despite it's reputation, offers very little commentary on warfare beyond it's first few chapters and some bits in the middle. Ultimately the serial's main focus was a discussion of civics and the relationship between individuals, the state, and liberty. An intrepid reader might themselves find in Starship Troopers, a book that arguably borders of advocating Facism, the early seeds of how Heinlein would go on to later write Stranger in a Strange Land, a book operating on a completely different mindset

The Forever War of course, has long been seen as the antithesis to Starship Troopers and actually spent more time of warfare, but even then the bulk of the book was again about social issues more than it was about science. However to Handleman's credit, I'd argue that Heinlein's Starship Troopers was a philosophy text with a thin narrative, while the Forever War was a true novel but that's probably attributable to the nature of publication (Starship Troopers was first published as a serial series in a pulp magazine and then compiled into a book, while The Forever War was published as a full novel).


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I think you've hit the problem on the head HiveFleetPacific. When something has a message we agree with, it doesn't challenge our preconceptions and we might not notice it at all because we take our preconceptions for granted. Then when we read something that does challenge our preconceptions, or approach humanity and the world from a completely different view than we are accustomed, it's stands out because it's alien to us (alien, get it I'm horrible...). Indeed, maybe the reality is that 'fun' works don't belong at the Hugo Award. Something that's just fun and nothing else doesn't challenge us. It doesn't push new ground. It doesn't seek to be more than just a story. And if it's 'just a story' then why should we care enough to give it special recognition? However much we might enjoy it, being 'just a story' isn't much of an achievement, not when there are hundreds of them floating around.

So maybe we could view Sad Puppies as a reactionary movement. The politics of culture are shifting. Not just that, the dynamics of fandom is changing, and what is the Hugo Award but one of the longest standing institutions of organized fandom?

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
The whole discussion is weird, though, right? Your political beliefs are based on how you think the world works, how you think people work. If you think people work a particular way and I disagree then your story may come across as weird and unnatural, whereas if we have similar political ideas then it'll seem to make a lot of sense and be really true to life.

To give an example, I found the Maelstrom's Edge novels jarring because one of the authors' views is that human culture doesn't change significantly over time. If you agree with that then maybe you will find them to be a rollicking space adventure with plenty of shooting and explosions that is "free of politics". Personally, I found it made the setting unbelievable. And that's not a value judgment - if I'd written that story and its author had been reading it, maybe they would have found it unbelievable because my humans had too different a culture.

That's not to say you can't enjoy a story by someone who has different political views - I enjoyed the Maelstrom's Edge books - but it doesn't make sense to say that they "should be irrelevant," because they are at the heart of what makes your world believable to a reader.

Yeah, well said. And I think it shows there's a bit of complexity to how we see political beliefs in any kind of text. On the one hand, we should be welcome to reading other ideas, and for the most part I think most of us are as long as it isn't too strident or dogmatic. The issue, I think, is that when the writer's beliefs are significantly different from our own we're likely to be more critical, if we welcome the idea we're more likely to see it as being explored, if we don't like it we're more likely to see it as unexplored or manipulative.

And the better the work, the harder that subjective assessment likely is.


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 LordofHats wrote:
I think you've hit the problem on the head HiveFleetPacific. When something has a message we agree with, it doesn't challenge our preconceptions and we might not notice it at all because we take our preconceptions for granted. Then when we read something that does challenge our preconceptions, or approach humanity and the world from a completely different view than we are accustomed, it's stands out because it's alien to us (alien, get it I'm horrible...). Indeed, maybe the reality is that 'fun' works don't belong at the Hugo Award. Something that's just fun and nothing else doesn't challenge us. It doesn't push new ground. It doesn't seek to be more than just a story. And if it's 'just a story' then why should we care enough to give it special recognition? However much we might enjoy it, being 'just a story' isn't much of an achievement, not when there are hundreds of them floating around.

If it is the book most people enjoyed the most it should win. And even if it doesn't heavily delve in to anything deep, that doesn't mean it isn't about anything or can't make us think. The Hitchhiker's Guide isn't directly exploring anything deep, but the imagination and creativity in the book has allowed us to apply it's odd situations to all kinds of real world issues. I think one of the most interesting thing about great books is how they open us op to lessons the author didn't intend or couldn't even have conceived of.

So maybe we could view Sad Puppies as a reactionary movement. The politics of culture are shifting. Not just that, the dynamics of fandom is changing, and what is the Hugo Award but one of the longest standing institutions of organized fandom?

They're certainly a reactionary movement. Whether they're reacting to a real movement among the sci-fi base, or just their own perception of that base is the bigger question.

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Well, "the mob" implies people potentially rioting in the streets to get their nominations on the ticket.

What actually happens is that anyone who cares to, can buy a $40 membership and vote as they like in complete anonymity and safety from coercion.

There is no mob, in other words.

I mean mob as in a mass of people whose power is derived from their number.

...

Then democracy is mob rule.

Sad Puppies tried to revolutionise their supporters to flood the awards with votes for their preferred books. Happy Kittens voted against this in larger numbers than the Sad Puppies could muster, and Sad Puppies essentially lost.

This simply shows that the Sad Puppies agenda does not have popular support.

 sebster wrote:
They're certainly a reactionary movement. Whether they're reacting to a real movement among the sci-fi base, or just their own perception of that base is the bigger question.

I've argue there has been a movement, but it's not the one Sad Puppies claims. Science Fiction has changed since the 80's and 70's (which as far as I can tell is the 'golden age' to Sad Puppies), but that change is stylistic more than political. S

Science Fiction has become less far future and more contemporary in setting, with less focus of 'space ships and space lasers' and a closer focus on 'close to contemporary' kind of stories. Maybe in the past, people could write off themes or messages they didn't like as 'they're aliens and they're different from us' it's a lot harder to dismiss those things as 'just part of the story' when the story is set in some otherworldly version of NYC or the world but a few years from now kinds of settings.

A lot of those kinds of books have been getting the Hugo Award in the past decade or so. We see much fewer books like Foundation or Dune make it to the top rungs of the award anymore. Ancillary Justice is the last novel of that style to really win in the past few years and that was in 2014. Among Others is set on Wales in modern times. The Three Body Problem takes place in just after tomorrow China. Blackout/All Clear not only takes place in the near future, but involves traveling back in time to WWII. Neil Gaiman has won the award several times and most of his works are contemporary in setting.

Is that politics? Or is it that the genre has stylistically altered and the stories that the Sad Puppies seem to consider 'fun' are simply not 'in' anymore? It's not like nobody writes those kinds of stories. They get written all the time, but they're certainly less common since the end of the New Wave in the 80's. I guess I'd call this new generation of writers and their works the second new wave, or post new wave (w/e) but there is a distinctive stylistic change in the kinds of stories their writing, and my thought would be that Sad Puppies is reacting to that but what their attributing the change not to a changing face in the genre itself but rather to politics simply because when we're looking at contemporary settings it's a lot harder to write off any theme or message a reader finds personal disagreement with.

If any of that made sense

 sebster wrote:
I think one of the most interesting thing about great books is how they open us op to lessons the author didn't intend or couldn't even have conceived of.

I was reading a book a while ago with some kids in it, two of the male characters seemed really close, and homosexual in that ancient Greek sort of sense, and I got a real 'and if that's what they want then its fine' sort of thing.

It was Alai and Ender from Ender's Game. Needless to say, when I learned more about OSC and his views on the subject I figured out that probably wasn't the intention ha. But it has always stuck with me that I really thought that was the intent, and honestly thought it was a really interesting approach to take.

 sebster wrote:
If it is the book most people enjoyed the most it should win. And even if it doesn't heavily delve in to anything deep, that doesn't mean it isn't about anything or can't make us think. The Hitchhiker's Guide isn't directly exploring anything deep, but the imagination and creativity in the book has allowed us to apply it's odd situations to all kinds of real world issues. I think one of the most interesting thing about great books is how they open us op to lessons the author didn't intend or couldn't even have conceived of.

I'm not necessarily advocating that a good story is deep, but a good story isn't 'just a story" nor am I strictly saying that message is the sole thing that helps a piece stand out. I'm saying that, if it doesn't stand out, why should it be worthy of any sort of special recogition when surrounded by so many others?

As to what makes a story stand out, there's lots of things. I'd argue the Hugo Award doesn't go to anyone for political reasons. Rather the award tends to go to works that are stylistically novel or unique. Not so novel/unique as to be avant garde, but not just your general James Patterson run of the mill either. It's something virtually all Hugo Award winners have in common. The works themselves take a novel approach to something. American Gods is what you get when you build a novel off a mountain of allusions. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell has a unique prose style written purposely to emulate Victorian literature. Redshirts is an affectionate parody/surreal analysis of science fiction itself (arguably it was destined to win. It's just too much of a 'by a fan for fans' kind of book).

These books all stand out, not necessarily for any political message they or their authors might hold, but because they're not just typical sci-fi novels. And I don't really see what's wrong with that. To a degree, Sad Puppies seems to be arguing that we should be giving the award to lowest common denominator fiction and they certainly put more than a few works on their slate that I'd consider trash fiction. I mean seriously, The Maze Runner and the Lego Movie? Anything written by John C. Wright? The guy is the M. Night Shamalama of science fiction. I hear complaints about 'heavy handed message fic' and I can't help but feel like it's at least in part an argument that science fiction should never challenge anything or be intellectual in nature, which runs completely counter to how and why the Hugo Award came about in the first place.

Rewards by fans, not by people who live for finding and reading as much good fantasy/sci-fi as possible are redundant and uninformed.

 sebster wrote:

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:
The thing is that American liberals aren't socialists. They are one of the factions on the economic right. Socialists are one of the factions on the economic left. American political scene doesn't even have significant social-democrats, not to mention socialists.

Poor Bernie...

He's a centrist centrist.

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:
Rewards by fans, not by people who live for finding and reading as much good fantasy/sci-fi as possible are redundant and uninformed.

I'd posit someone who spends $40 on a World Con membership (the value of which is pretty much limited to voting in the Hugo award) is someone sufficiently invested in reading fantasy and sci-fi that their opinion can be considered useful and informed. One does not need to be a professional at something to literate in it's subject matter.

Further, I'd argue the value of the Hugo and the quality of it's choices can be verified by cross referencing with the Nebula Award. The Nebula Award is given out by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and to be a member you must be a published artist (professional). The Nebula Award nominees are voted on in house with a second round ballot determining the final winner.

As an example, the Nominees for Best Novel (Hugo Award) 2015;

Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem (Winner)
Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor
Kevin J. Anderson, The Dark Between the Stars < Sad Puppies Hugo 2015 Slate Nominee
Jim Butcher, Skin Game < Sad Puppies Hugo 2015 Slate Nominee
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword

*Trial By Fire by Charles Gannon would likely have been nominated if not for Sad Puppies

Nominees for Best Novel (Nebula Award) 2015;

Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation (WInner)
Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor
Charles E. Gannon, Trial by Fire < Sad Puppies Hugo 2015 Slate Nominee
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword
Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem
Jack McDevitt, Coming Home

As you can see, both awards nominated several books in common (Ancillary Sword, The Three-Body Problem, and the Goblin Emperor). In fact there is a very large number of joint winners of the Nebula and Hugo Awards, the most recent being in 20014 when both awards for best novel went to Annie Leckie's Ancillary Justice. Among Others took both awards in 2012. Blackout/All Clear in 2011. The Windup Girl in 2011 (the 2011 Hugo for best novel was a tie between The Windup Girl and The City & the City which was also nominated by the Nebula Award).

In fact both awards have consistently joint recognized many of the greats of Science Fiction; Dune. American Gods. Ring World. The Forever War. Neuromancer. Ender's Game (again, I list novels because I've read most of them ).

It would seem to suggest that your premise is false, as being a fan choice award doesn't automatically mean the fans would come to wildly different conclusions than the Professionals or that fans are somehow less capable than Professionals of recognizing a good book when they read it (it would even suggest Sad Puppies isn't completely without taste)

If you want a non-fan choice voted award there is the Times Best Seller list.

 LordofHats wrote:
I've argue there has been a movement, but it's not the one Sad Puppies claims. Science Fiction has changed since the 80's and 70's (which as far as I can tell is the 'golden age' to Sad Puppies), but that change is stylistic more than political. S

(snip)

If any of that made sense

It made good sense and seemed to me a good argument. I hadn't thought of it that way, thanks.


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 motyak wrote:
I was reading a book a while ago with some kids in it, two of the male characters seemed really close, and homosexual in that ancient Greek sort of sense, and I got a real 'and if that's what they want then its fine' sort of thing.

It was Alai and Ender from Ender's Game. Needless to say, when I learned more about OSC and his views on the subject I figured out that probably wasn't the intention ha. But it has always stuck with me that I really thought that was the intent, and honestly thought it was a really interesting approach to take.

Yup. Reading Ender's Game, and then reading OSC's later political views is kind of amazing. I wonder what is really going on in that head...

Surely it is a key skill of an author to be able to create fiction about things you would never personally do or condone in others in real life.

Back on topic, it is clear that there has been massive social change since the 80s, with wide acceptance of homosexuality, a much greater acceptance of female equality, reduction of racism and so on.

These social shifts have been reflected in politics by laws have been passed to help enforce them. Probably the laws and the social change have gone hand in hand, because laws influence behaviour and social change influences law making.

Ironically, a lot of real "Golden Age" SF featured strong female characters, such as Podkayne of Mars and Starship Troopers. It's not impossible to understand, SF being a forward looking genre.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
It's not impossible to understand, SF being a forward looking genre.

Agree. It's why I find claims of 'liberal bias' a little odd. Conservatism is about the status quo, fundamentally, being functional and mostly alright. Maybe it can be improved, but conservatism rejects the notion of sweeping change being necessary (except in the context of reversing some change that has already occurred to restore the original status quo). That entire concept is antithetical to science fiction, which from it's very beginning has been a genre prominently about "what would happen if _________". It's all about sweeping change and how that change might happen, effect our lives, or reflect our contemporary experiences.

Science fiction is 'liberal' by it's very nature. At least a little bit anyway.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
If you want a non-fan choice voted award there is the Times Best Seller list.

No, that's as fan-voted choice as it gets.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:
Rewards by fans, not by people who live for finding and reading as much good fantasy/sci-fi as possible are redundant and uninformed.

I'd posit someone who spends $40 on a World Con membership (the value of which is pretty much limited to voting in the Hugo award) is someone sufficiently invested in reading fantasy and sci-fi that their opinion can be considered useful and informed. One does not need to be a professional at something to literate in it's subject matter.

Further, I'd argue the value of the Hugo and the quality of it's choices can be verified by cross referencing with the Nebula Award. The Nebula Award is given out by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and to be a member you must be a published artist (professional). The Nebula Award nominees are voted on in house with a second round ballot determining the final winner.

As an example, the Nominees for Best Novel (Hugo Award) 2015;

Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem (Winner)
Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor
Kevin J. Anderson, The Dark Between the Stars < Sad Puppies Hugo 2015 Slate Nominee
Jim Butcher, Skin Game < Sad Puppies Hugo 2015 Slate Nominee
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword

*Trial By Fire by Charles Gannon would likely have been nominated if not for Sad Puppies

Nominees for Best Novel (Nebula Award) 2015;

Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation (WInner)
Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor
Charles E. Gannon, Trial by Fire < Sad Puppies Hugo 2015 Slate Nominee
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword
Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem
Jack McDevitt, Coming Home

As you can see, both awards nominated several books in common (Ancillary Sword, The Three-Body Problem, and the Goblin Emperor). In fact there is a very large number of joint winners of the Nebula and Hugo Awards, the most recent being in 20014 when both awards for best novel went to Annie Leckie's Ancillary Justice. Among Others took both awards in 2012. Blackout/All Clear in 2011. The Windup Girl in 2011 (the 2011 Hugo for best novel was a tie between The Windup Girl and The City & the City which was also nominated by the Nebula Award).

In fact both awards have consistently joint recognized many of the greats of Science Fiction; Dune. American Gods. Ring World. The Forever War. Neuromancer. Ender's Game (again, I list novels because I've read most of them ).

It would seem to suggest that your premise is false, as being a fan choice award doesn't automatically mean the fans would come to wildly different conclusions than the Professionals or that fans are somehow less capable than Professionals of recognizing a good book when they read it (it would even suggest Sad Puppies isn't completely without taste)

 LordofHats wrote:
The Windup Girl

 LordofHats wrote:
The Windup Girl

 LordofHats wrote:
The Windup Girl

Hmm...
https://archive.is/jEI2z
https://archive.is/T1oDd

So, okay, stuff like that gets Hugo but a series of novels exploring realistic space combat (something that almost never happens in Sci-Fi!), limited interstellar warfare, role of agents in wars, with well written characters done by a war/political journalist doesn't get one?
Is it because he forgot to insert a pornographic rape scene?

A website dedicated to educating people (especially writers) about realism in space travel and space warfare also not worth rewarding?

 LordofHats wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
It's not impossible to understand, SF being a forward looking genre.

Agree. It's why I find claims of 'liberal bias' a little odd. Conservatism is about the status quo, fundamentally, being functional and mostly alright. Maybe it can be improved, but conservatism rejects the notion of sweeping change being necessary (except in the context of reversing some change that has already occurred to restore the original status quo). That entire concept is antithetical to science fiction, which from it's very beginning has been a genre prominently about "what would happen if _________". It's all about sweeping change and how that change might happen, effect our lives, or reflect our contemporary experiences.

Science fiction is 'liberal' by it's very nature. At least a little bit anyway.

I don't really see that. SF asks "what if?", but in a lot of SF works, the answer to that question is "curiosity, meddling or unchecked progress have bad consequences", which seems conservative in the sense of warning about the unintended consequences of those things, and disputing that they'll make the future better than the present.

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
If you want a non-fan choice voted award there is the Times Best Seller list.

No, that's as fan-voted choice as it gets.

...
...

No, it's just purchases. If a Russian oligarch wanted something to win top SF novel he could just buy 100,000 copies a week and bingo.

And for every sci-fi tale that claims that, there are several who instead say: "if this would change, things would be better" or "change is inevitable, and if you're not prepared, you'll be left behind", and so on and so forth.

 Aszubaruzah Surn wrote:

So, okay, stuff like that gets Hugo but a series of novels exploring realistic space combat (something that almost never happens in Sci-Fi!), limited interstellar warfare, role of agents in wars, with well written characters done by a war/political journalist doesn't get one?
Is it because he forgot to insert a pornographic rape scene?

Which just goes back to the question I keep asking; Is your issue that the people giving out the award have bias', or is your issue that their bias' are different from your bias'?

I've posted several times on the sort of unspoken 'criteria' that Hugo winners tend to share; A degree of stylistic novelty. A preference for works dealing with social issues/ramifications rather than hard science. Obviously books with large fan bases are prone to end up with more support at such award (though I'd posit you ca't get a large fan base if you aren't doing something right most of the time).

That isn't to say only works like that are good or worth reading, but they are the works that tend to be recognized at the Hugo Award (the Nebula is similar but tends to favor more, advanced works, the kind that often struggle to get mainstream attention). And it's a long trend going back all the way to the award's founding in the 50's, when it was founded specifically because Science Fiction and Fantasy works were snubbed by other literary awards and academics who all just assumed science fiction and fantasy couldn't possibly have intellectual merit. Normally, people with a strong interest in educating themselves about science will go and read a science book. Hard scifi has always been a much narrower market than soft scifi, so no one should really be surprised it doesn't get as much recognition.

A website dedicated to educating people (especially writers) about realism in space travel and space warfare also not worth rewarding?

I don't think anyone anywhere has ever suggested that.

I don't really see that. SF asks "what if?", but in a lot of SF works, the answer to that question is "curiosity, meddling or unchecked progress have bad consequences", which seems conservative in the sense of warning about the unintended consequences of those things, and disputing that they'll make the future better than the present.

I'm not saying there's no such thing as conservative scifi (okay I suppose I kind of did so I'll take that back, maybe got a bit carried away ). Frankenstein is often cited as the very first Science Fiction novel, and arguably the main them of the book is "science gone mad."

But I think there is a point that at least to a degree, there's an identifiable preference in the genre to lean towards things we would consider to be liberal here in the US. Most post-apocalyptic tales involve the world/humanity on the brink of ruin because of nuclear power back during the Cold War. Now those same kinds of stories have shifted to climate change. Since Neuromancer, mega corporations as shadow villains in secret conspiracies are so common to be cliche. Lovable rogues who abscond social norms and expectations are archetypal science fiction heroes (Star Lord anyone?). Being critical of religion tends to be a trend in every genre of fiction, science fiction and fantasy included, where evil churchs/cults are often villains (Just look at Maelstrom's Edge ).

I guess what I'm really trying to get at is that, you don't have to look very far in science fiction to find things that some people who just want to be angry about stuff, will decry as 'liberal bias.' Except I would consider that to be inherent, to a degree, to the nature of asking the question "what if ______." You're either concerned the world is going to be destroyed, or curious how it can get better. Both mindsets I'd posit have a tendency to send one down certain roads that most often fall on the liberal side of things.

Right - I've done some data analysis, quick and dirty because I'm not being paid for it.

My assumption, taken from John C. Wright, is that "the Hugo Award became the Tor Award"

To test this, I got all of the nominees and winners from 1985 to today from the Hugo website, and filtered them into categories by publisher (if the category had a publisher, so not Best Web site for example)

I limited to the following awards: Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Related Work, Best Short Story, and Best Editor (all forms)

Going by five year blocks, the nomination results are as follows:
1985-1989: 9 Tor nominations
1990-1994: 17 Tor nominations
1995-1999: 15 Tor nominations
2000-2004: 19 Tor nominations
2005-2009: 24 Tor nominations
2010-2014: 33 Tor nominations

The winning results are:
1985-1989: 2 Tor wins
1990-1994: 1 Tor win
1995-1999: 0 Tor wins
2000-2004: 4 Tor wins
2005-2009: 8 Tor wins
2010-2014: 11 Tor wins

While this indicates that Tor have been getting more nominations and wins in general over the last decade, the data does not and cannot say why. Could be because of slate voting, could be because of merit, who knows? I just thought it'd be interesting to crunch the numbers.

The obvious question is how many other publishers are there, how many works doe they publish per year, and how many of them have been nominated and won?

Just for a start without knowing the size and growth of the markets covered by the awards, it's impossible even to say if Tor nominations actually have increased in a meaningful sense.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The obvious question is how many other publishers are there, how many works doe they publish per year, and how many of them have been nominated and won?

243 publishers for the categories I limited to. I can compare them to Analog, Asimov's and F&SF as the other 'bulk' award winners if you want. Any further than that and I'd need you to pay me

Just for a start without knowing the size and growth of the markets covered by the awards, it's impossible even to say if Tor nominations actually have increased in a meaningful sense.

I. . . just proved that Tor nominations have increased? Not sure why the size and growth of the market should matter, and considering this these are awards this is a zero sum game - any nomination Tor gets is one someone else doesn't get.

As per above - results for Analog, Asimov's and F&SF

 VorpalBunny74 wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The obvious question is how many other publishers are there, how many works doe they publish per year, and how many of them have been nominated and won?

243 publishers for the categories I limited to. I can compare them to Analog, Asimov's and F&SF as the other 'bulk' award winners if you want. Any further than that and I'd need you to pay me

Just for a start without knowing the size and growth of the markets covered by the awards, it's impossible even to say if Tor nominations actually have increased in a meaningful sense.

I. . . just proved that Tor nominations have increased? Not sure why the size and growth of the market should matter, and considering this these are awards this is a zero sum game - any nomination Tor gets is one someone else doesn't get.

As per above - results for Analog, Asimov's and F&SF

Spoiler:

The nomination results:
1985-1989: 18 Analog nominations
1990-1994: 12 Analog nominations
1995-1999: 15 Analog nominations
2000-2004: 21 Analog nominations
2005-2009: 11 Analog nominations
2010-2014: 9 Analog nominations

1985-1989: 40 Asimov's nominations
1990-1994: 49 Asimov's nominations
1995-1999: 54 Asimov's nominations
2000-2004: 45 Asimov's nominations
2005-2009: 35 Asimov's nominations
2010-2014: 19 Asimov's nominations

1985-1989: 19 F&SF nominations
1990-1994: 11 F&SF nominations
1995-1999: 12 F&SF nominations
2000-2004: 15 F&SF nominations
2005-2009: 15 F&SF nominations
2010-2014: 5 F&SF nominations

The winning results:
1985-1989: 1 Analog win
1990-1994: 4 Analog wins
1995-1999: 0 Analog wins
2000-2004: 4 Analog wins
2005-2009: 0 Analog wins
2010-2014: 1 Analog wins

1985-1989: 10 Asimov's wins
1990-1994: 13 Asimov's wins
1995-1999: 16 Asimov's wins
2000-2004: 10 Asimov's wins
2005-2009: 9 Asimov's wins
2010-2014: 6 Asimov's wins

1985-1989: 2 F&SF wins
1990-1994: 0 F&SF wins
1995-1999: 3 F&SF wins
2000-2004: 1 F&SF wins
2005-2009: 3 F&SF wins
2010-2014: 1 F&SF wins

What I mean is that if 30 years ago there were 10 awards and now there are 20 (for example, due to animation being added, or blogs, or whatever), then clearly Tor's number of awards could go up by 50% while actually losing some of their dominant position.

This is without mentioning that if Tor is a huge publisher that puts out 90% of the SF stuff in the USA, you would expect them to win a substantial proportion of awards, because they would have such a stable of authors. Also consider that publishing actually involves selection, editing and talent management, meaning that Tor may be just plain better than tiny rivals at publishing stuff that is going to do well. On the reverse angle, Tor may put out 2,000 books a year and only get 20 awards, while some smaller rivals might 20 books a year and get 2 awards.

Conversely, perhaps Tor uses their size to buy memberships for all their employees and make them vote for Tor books.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
This is without mentioning that if Tor is a huge publisher that puts out 90% of the SF stuff in the USA,

While I do not know if the number is accurate, it is true that Tor is far and away the largest publisher of Science Fiction and Fantasy works in North America (the scifi isle at your local bookstore might as well be the Tor isle for how many works Tor puts out each year). A quick google search had this website though I am honestly too lazy to verify it's accuracy. Assuming it's accurate, Tor is far ahead of other publishers in number of authors and books nominated for/winning awards (the website covers 10 awards including the Nebula and Hugo Awards). Of those listed, Del Ray, Tor, and Ace are the publisher's I'm most familiar with as far as books I've read are concerned.

Conversely, perhaps Tor uses their size to buy memberships for all their employees and make them vote for Tor books.

While I find that unlikely, Tor probably does organize campaigns each year to try and lobby their published works for numerous awards (including the Hugo) but that's a pretty standard practice in numerous mediums including film and music. It is entirely possible Tor dedicates more resources to marketing and campaigning to get their books noticed, and that this is reflected come award season with a much wider audience having read them as well as even knowing they exist.

EDIT: Oh, here's why; Tor is a subsidiary of MacMillan, aka one of the Big Five publishing houses. Ace and Del Ray I think are the only other science fiction publishers associated with one of the Big Five (Penguin Random House), and Penguin has been treading water the last decade, around the same time Tor really started sweeping the nominations. My theory; Tor has been putting more money into marketing their authors and books, while other publishers in the genre have either been unable to match their marketing, or forced to cut back because their parent is struggling. Not to mention just having more money and access to authors in general.

 LordofHats wrote:


I'm not saying there's no such thing as conservative scifi (okay I suppose I kind of did so I'll take that back, maybe got a bit carried away ). Frankenstein is often cited as the very first Science Fiction novel, and arguably the main them of the book is "science gone mad."

I'd argue that the main theme of Frankenstein is that humanity creates its own monsters. The Monster was driven to its crimes by the hostility it encountered from those it met, even from its own creator. The Monster was not inherently evil, it was effectively abused from the very moment of its creation and so had no chance to learn to be "good".

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:


I'm not saying there's no such thing as conservative scifi (okay I suppose I kind of did so I'll take that back, maybe got a bit carried away ). Frankenstein is often cited as the very first Science Fiction novel, and arguably the main them of the book is "science gone mad."

I'd argue that the main theme of Frankenstein is that humanity creates its own monsters. The Monster was driven to its crimes by the hostility it encountered from those it met, even from its own creator. The Monster was not inherently evil, it was effectively abused from the very moment of its creation and so had no chance to learn to be "good".

Totally (good books work on multiple levels and can be about multiple things )

 Kilkrazy wrote:
What I mean is that if 30 years ago there were 10 awards and now there are 20 (for example, due to animation being added, or blogs, or whatever), then clearly Tor's number of awards could go up by 50% while actually losing some of their dominant position.

Ah, I get you - in that case, yes there have been definite changes to the Hugo categories, but limiting to the categories I did the differences are:

1985-1998 5 awards
1999-2006 6 awards (Best Related Work introduced)
2007-present 7 awards (split of Best Editor to Long and Short Form)

I didn't include stuff like Best Web Site or Best Fan Artist. As per above, I limited to Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Related Work, Best Short Story, and Best Editor (which changed in 2007 from 1 to 2 awards)

This is without mentioning that if Tor is a huge publisher that puts out 90% of the SF stuff in the USA, you would expect them to win a substantial proportion of awards, because they would have such a stable of authors. Also consider that publishing actually involves selection, editing and talent management, meaning that Tor may be just plain better than tiny rivals at publishing stuff that is going to do well. On the reverse angle, Tor may put out 2,000 books a year and only get 20 awards, while some smaller rivals might 20 books a year and get 2 awards.

Conversely, perhaps Tor uses their size to buy memberships for all their employees and make them vote for Tor books.

I agree, there could be any number of causes for the increases in nominations and wins. I'm making no judgements, just pointing out an increase is present.

 LordofHats wrote:
While I find that unlikely, Tor probably does organize campaigns each year to try and lobby their published works for numerous awards (including the Hugo) but that's a pretty standard practice in numerous mediums including film and music. It is entirely possible Tor dedicates more resources to marketing and campaigning to get their books noticed, and that this is reflected come award season with a much wider audience having read them as well as even knowing they exist.

Yeah, I think this is most obvious and most likely cause. Success at the Hugos and other sci-fi awards is part of the Tor business model, and they put resources in to it that other publishers can't or choose not to match. Given Tor's market share, it's hard to claim it isn't working.

Beale's at it again... well, he's trying, and got taken down by a single Goodreads user:

http://file770.com/?p=26905

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/9683209-you-all-owe-me

You know, for a group of people who claim to act on the behalf of all SF authors and readers they do spend an awful lot of time in the kind of attempted clandestine bullying of people they don't like with the level of professionalism which would do the Keystone Cops proud.

I remember this, I remember talking to a few gamergaters about it and asked why they were doing it, some were there to get back at "SJWS".

And then a few were actually like "Well I like sci-fi Didn't know about the hugo awards until then."

Two sides to every single part of a story.

Oh well. I do think it is interesting that this happened. I don't support any of the actions comitted at all. By GG or by any idiot. Because I have always voted in the Hugo Awards, because I am a fething sci fi nerd

 .Mikes. wrote:
Beale's at it again... well, he's trying, and got taken down by a single Goodreads user:

http://file770.com/?p=26905

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/9683209-you-all-owe-me

Well, he's certainly good at the whole martyrdom act. Too bad he can't figure out that even people on the conservative end of the political scale can look at a proud sexist and white supremacist with a history of disruptive behavior and say "nope, I think our community is better off without him".