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 MWHistorian wrote:
They're saying that message shouldn't override story.

So which of the recent winners have been such a horrible case of the message overriding the story? Even if they're honest about their motivations it's still a solution in need of a problem.

 Peregrine wrote:
So which of the recent winners have been such a horrible case of the message overriding the story?

That's a very good question but I don't think it is the right one. It has less to do with the winner being bad than good books not being considered, if I understand Sad Puppies correctly.

 Manchu wrote:
That's a very good question but I don't think it is the right one. It has less to do with the winner being bad than good books not being considered, if I understand Sad Puppies correctly.

No, it's definitely a claim that the winners didn't deserve it. Let's look at the SP3 organizer's own words:

No longer interested in adventure, argue the Puppies, the Hugos have grown elitist, academic, and overly ideological—irrelevant to the average fan.

And if the winners weren't bad then what's the point of the SP argument? If the winner deserved the award just as much as the books that didn't get it then the claims of bias disappear and we're left with nothing more than a few fans who are annoyed that their favorite thing isn't everyone else's favorite thing. I suppose rabid fans will have that argument all the time, but it certainly doesn't have any value to anyone outside their specific fandom. So if you want to reduce SP3 to nothing more than the average superman vs. batman argument then that's your right, but I don't think you really want to go down that path.

But sure, let's consider the other question too. Which deserving authors were excluded for political reasons? When you answer this question please remember three things:

1) The Hugo awards can only be given for a work published that year. There is no "lifetime achievement" award, and being a popular author with great stuff in the past isn't supposed to get you an award this year. Nor is writing the next book in a popular series, unless that book stands on its own merits without considering the previous books.

2) Not all authors received immediate popularity. For example, Terry Pratchett wasn't very well known outside the UK until the Discworld series was well established. So all of the earlier "wow that was awesome" books were no longer eligible by the time enough voters had heard of them. Same thing with Ian M. Banks (an openly far-left author who the "SJWs" should embrace), whose best work was virtually unknown in the US because the publisher didn't bother getting it into US stores. And I can imagine a similar thing happening with Jim Butcher and the Dresden Files series before 2015, his series has certainly been popular but the last few books have kind of suffered from a lack of editing (common with a successful author).

3) Not all authors are popular enough with the voting community to get a nomination. You can be the best author ever in a specific niche of science fiction and fantasy, but if you don't have broad appeal with the voting community then you aren't going to win. I think this is an issue with some of the right-leaning military science fiction authors, they're really popular with their fans, but those fans are kind of a separate niche. That isn't political bias excluding deserving authors from the process, it's just the inevitable result of a niche market being a niche market.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Manchu wrote:
That's a very good question but I don't think it is the right one. It has less to do with the winner being bad than good books not being considered, if I understand Sad Puppies correctly.

No, it's definitely a claim that the winners didn't deserve it. Let's look at the SP3 organizer's own words:

No longer interested in adventure, argue the Puppies, the Hugos have grown elitist, academic, and overly ideological—irrelevant to the average fan.

And if the winners weren't bad then what's the point of the SP argument? If the winner deserved the award just as much as the books that didn't get it then the claims of bias disappear and we're left with nothing more than a few fans who are annoyed that their favorite thing isn't everyone else's favorite thing. I suppose rabid fans will have that argument all the time, but it certainly doesn't have any value to anyone outside their specific fandom. So if you want to reduce SP3 to nothing more than the average superman vs. batman argument then that's your right, but I don't think you really want to go down that path.

But sure, let's consider the other question too. Which deserving authors were excluded for political reasons? When you answer this question please remember three things:

1) The Hugo awards can only be given for a work published that year. There is no "lifetime achievement" award, and being a popular author with great stuff in the past isn't supposed to get you an award this year. Nor is writing the next book in a popular series, unless that book stands on its own merits without considering the previous books.

2) Not all authors received immediate popularity. For example, Terry Pratchett wasn't very well known outside the UK until the Discworld series was well established. So all of the earlier "wow that was awesome" books were no longer eligible by the time enough voters had heard of them. Same thing with Ian M. Banks (an openly far-left author who the "SJWs" should embrace), whose best work was virtually unknown in the US because the publisher didn't bother getting it into US stores. And I can imagine a similar thing happening with Jim Butcher and the Dresden Files series before 2015, his series has certainly been popular but the last few books have kind of suffered from a lack of editing (common with a successful author).

3) Not all authors are popular enough with the voting community to get a nomination. You can be the best author ever in a specific niche of science fiction and fantasy, but if you don't have broad appeal with the voting community then you aren't going to win. I think this is an issue with some of the right-leaning military science fiction authors, they're really popular with their fans, but those fans are kind of a separate niche. That isn't political bias excluding deserving authors from the process, it's just the inevitable result of a niche market being a niche market.

You're inventing strawmen with your points. The people voting for stories that are for some reason objectionable to a certain vocal subset of Hugo voters and/or SciFi fans are simply voting for Hugo eligible stories that they enjoyed reading. The only quasi political point of Sad Puppies was to explain that the reason popular well written SciFi wasn't winning awards is because not enough fans of those stories were voting and if more fans voted those books would win. Hugo's were being awarded to books that were relatively unknown and generates low sales. Popular authors of Hugo eligible stories encouraged their fans to vote for the Hugo's so they did. There's no reason to be upset over that because that how the Hugo's have been awarded nothing changed except more fans participated who had previously abstained.

Your third point is arguable at best. Regardless of the niche of an author's arbitrarily classified genre if nobody wants to read hi/her stories then its difficult to see how an unpopular author could be construed as good or successful. If you write stories that nobody wants to read what are you acxomplishing that is noteworthy or laudable?

@Peregrine

I don't think Torgeson is referring to either the Hugo award or some recipient work as irrelevant -- rather I think he is complaining about how left-wing ideological standards allegedly shackle how works are considered. It seems to me that Torgeson is arguing that racial prejudice and exploitation, sexism and the oppression of women, and gay and transgender issues (all his words) are irrelevant to average sci fi fans. Meanwhile Correia is saying, the point is actually to get meritorious works nominated regardless of the authors' political ideology. And that just doesn't fit with the Torgeson soundbyte. In selecting a politically diverse slate of nominees, it seems Correia is not making a judgment one way or the other about what kinds of ideological standards are relevant to sci fi fans.

 MWHistorian wrote:
They're not misogynists. Many of the authors on the ballet are women.
They're not racists. Some of the authors are minorities. Brad has been married to a black woman for twenty years.
They're not all conservatives. Some are libertarians and some are even (gasp) liberals.

Women can be misogynists. Minorities can be racists.

Whether or not that's pertinent here, I don't know. I can't claim to have met anyone who identifies as a SP member.

I'm simply pointing out that having diversity in a movement is not an iron-clad shield against either being present. There are plenty of examples of terrible movements/groups with maligned individuals among them. Often they're "one of the good ones".

 Manchu wrote:

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:
But I am not going to assume conspiracy by default.

No one, not even Sad Puppies, has asked you to do so.

Why are you constantly posting about how I should totally consider this possibility and certainly not assume the opposite, then?

Put simply, I have not.

George RR Martin: "The rightwing lobby has broken the Hugos."

“Call it block voting. Call it ballot stuffing. Call it gaming the system. There’s truth to all of those characterisations. You can’t call it cheating, though. It was all within the rules. But many things can be legal, and still bad … and this is one of those, from where I sit. I think the Sad Puppies have broken the Hugo awards, and I am not sure they can ever be repaired,” he wrote.


“If the Sad Puppies wanted to start their own award … for Best Conservative SF, or Best Space Opera, or Best Military SF, or Best Old-Fashioned SF the Way It Used to Be … whatever it is they are actually looking for … hey, I don’t think anyone would have any objections to that. I certainly wouldn’t. More power to them,” he added. “But that’s not what they are doing here, it seems to me. Instead they seem to want to take the Hugos and turn them into their own awards.”

Suggested alternate headline: "Racist white male authors right to remain relevant in a world which has left them behind".

 Peregrine wrote:
No longer interested in adventure, argue the Puppies, the Hugos have grown elitist, academic, and overly ideological—irrelevant to the average fan.

All I can say to Mr. Puppies is Welcome to the Hugo Awards (or any Literary award for that matter). I still remember all the BS that was floating around when The Sandman won the Short Fiction award, which granted I agree that comics dont belong in the category, but that's beside all the snobby stuff people were saying ("lel comics are fer kids grow up" kind of nonsense). The Hugos didn't even recognize comics as a genre until 2009 and only because a circle of fans "conspired" to constantly submit comic books for the awards to the point WSFS finally caved and added a comic category. And that award was promptly taken over and dominated by the indy crowd.

To understand GRRM's point there you have to also understand that in order to make it he needed to revise his opinion on "who owns" the Hugo awards. He admitted that he has for years told scifi fans that they own the award because they get to vote for which works receive it. But for the purposes of this argument about Sad Puppies, GRRM has changed his view and says WorldCon owns the award.

This is an interesting point because GRRM has shifted from making a point about what the award means (i.e., that it is an opportunity for scifi fans to celebrate what they think is good scifi) to a point about ownership. Now, that's not just legal ownership, although of course WorldCon is the legal owner of the Hugo awards. But his new point is also about who gets to vote, i.e., WorldCon members. So right there, we see GRRM distinguishing between scifi fans, as per his older views, and WorldCon members.

So it seems to me that what GRRM is actually saying is, these Sad Puppies people are just invading WorldCon for the sake of the Hugos. They don't care about the long and storied history of WorldCon of scifi fandom generally. They want the prestige of the award.

My trouble with GRRM's point is that the Hugo awards are no longer just the WorldCon membership's stamp of approval. Whatever they started as, Hugos are now prestigious (because, as GRRM himself admits, they have been handed out to so many famous authors over the decades) and therefore people who are not WorldCon members or don't even know about WorldCon know about and respect the award and even might be more willing to buy a book that has won the award.

In short, the Hugo awards have probably outgrown WorldCon.

Prestor Jon wrote:
There's no reason to be upset over that because that how the Hugo's have been awarded nothing changed except more fans participated who had previously abstained.

Sigh. I guess you're going to keep ignoring the fact that something did change: a group of people started agreeing to all vote for chosen works from a specific category to amplify their voting power. There's a difference between "hey, fans of {genre}, you should vote" and "hey, fans of {genre}, let's all vote as a unified group so that someone from our genre wins the award".

Your third point is arguable at best. Regardless of the niche of an author's arbitrarily classified genre if nobody wants to read hi/her stories then its difficult to see how an unpopular author could be construed as good or successful. If you write stories that nobody wants to read what are you acxomplishing that is noteworthy or laudable?

You're missing the point here, so I'll attempt to explain it again: an author can be popular and financially successful in a niche market, but fail to win awards if they don't have mass popularity outside of that niche. Let's say dedicated fans of right-leaning military science fiction are 10% of science fiction fandom as a whole (a completely imaginary number). That's a substantial number of people and enough of a market to have popular and successful authors, but even the most popular books in the niche aren't going to win a general-fandom award unless they manage to become successful in the other 90%. That doesn't mean there's some kind of conspiracy to keep them off the ballot, it's just a natural consequence of not having enough fans in the voting community. You know, kind of like how the absence of erotic (40k) space marine fanfiction on the nomination list isn't proof that its authors are being unfairly excluded.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Manchu wrote:
I don't think Torgeson is referring to either the Hugo award or some recipient work as irrelevant -- rather I think he is complaining about how left-wing ideological standards allegedly shackle how works are considered.

No, that's exactly what he said:

No longer interested in adventure, argue the Puppies, the Hugos have grown elitist, academic, and overly ideological—irrelevant to the average fan.

Meanwhile Correia is saying, the point is actually to get meritorious works nominated regardless of the authors' political ideology.

Ok, then I'll repeat my question: which meritorious works and/or authors are being left off the ballot for ideological reasons and need support from SP3?

In selecting a politically diverse slate of nominees, it seems Correia is not making a judgment one way or the other about what kinds of ideological standards are relevant to sci fi fans.

Note that Correia didn't run SP3. He did the first two, which were open attempts to get more right-wing authors and stories onto the ballot, but handed it over to Torgesson for this year.

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:

 Haemonculus wrote:
Regarding the OP, that's just one article you've decided to agree with. Even the Telegraph amended the errors that the quoted article made in the OP.

Did I give my opinion anywhere in the OP? I merely presented an article I found and asked members of Dakka for their opinion. Please do not attribute commentary to me that I did not make.

My sincere apologies. I was not attacking you by pointing out that the article was factually incorrect. But I appreciate you raising the SP issue here.

 Peregrine wrote:
No, that's exactly what he said

Yeah I read that. But the interpretation you are suggesting, which I agree lines up with the syntax, makes no sense. It seems pretty clear that Sad Puppies is not trying to rescue the Hugos from irrelevance. If anything, their actions suggest the award itself is relevant to them and to a wider audience than existing WorldCon members.

 Peregrine wrote:
Ok, then I'll repeat my question: which meritorious works and/or authors are being left off the ballot for ideological reasons and need support from SP3?

It's hard to take this question at face value because you're a smart guy and I know you can use the internet to find the Sad Puppies slate of nominees all by yourself. So I am thinking this is another try at the old burden shifting.

 Manchu wrote:
Yeah I read that. But the interpretation you are suggesting, which I agree lines up with the syntax, makes no sense. It seems pretty clear that Sad Puppies is not trying to rescue the Hugos from irrelevance. If anything, their actions suggest the award itself is relevant to them and to a wider audience than existing WorldCon members.

You're right, it doesn't make much sense. Very little about the SP3 campaign makes sense. It assumes that there is a left-wing group controlling the nomination process and keeping out authors that don't agree with left-wing politics, but also a bunch of left-wing authors that have been unfairly neglected. It assumes that science fiction has abandoned the good old days when it was all about the story instead of the political message, and then cites the good old days of Heinlein and Star Trek. I think this is the result of having it start as a "SJW TUMBLR FEMINAZIS RUIN EVERYTHING" rant and the authors later realizing that they need to repackage the message a bit to attract people who aren't rabid right-wing lunatics like Vox Day.

It's hard to take this question at face value because you're a smart guy and I know you can use the internet to find the Sad Puppies slate of nominees all by yourself. So I am thinking this is another try at the old burden shifting.

I'm not asking which authors SP3 included, I'm asking which authors YOU feel are being overlooked for political reasons. If that's the SP3 list then you can just say "the authors on SP3". If you have your own list in mind then let's see it.

 Peregrine wrote:
I'm not asking which authors SP3 included, I'm asking which authors YOU feel are being overlooked for political reasons.

Well, he will just tell you that he does not think any author have been overlooked for political reasons but it is your burden of proof to show no author has been overlooked for political reasons even though he does not say any of them has been. Because, uh, reasons! The important thing being only that the burden of proof is on you.

http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/04/09/a-response-to-george-r-r-martin-from-the-author-who-started-sad-puppies/

in case it hasnt been posted a reply to G.Martin from one of the authors in sadpuppies

 Peregrine wrote:
It assumes that there is a left-wing group controlling the nomination process and keeping out authors that don't agree with left-wing politics, but also a bunch of left-wing authors that have been unfairly neglected.

From what I can tell, their actual premise is WorldCon membership has become significantly biased against right-wing politics. Sad Puppies, as Correia articulates it, is exploiting WorldCon rules to nominate works of merit without regard to the authors' politics.

 Peregrine wrote:
the authors later realizing that they need to repackage the message a bit to attract people who aren't rabid right-wing lunatics like Vox Day

Or maybe to prevent that nutjob from hijacking their initiative/prevent disinformation tarring the Sad Puppies by association (see e.g., Entertainment Weekly's retraction/apology).

 Peregrine wrote:
I'm asking which authors YOU feel are being overlooked for political reasons.

Nah, this isn't about me as I am not a part of the Sad Puppies movement or their ally.

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:
it is your burden of proof to show no author has been overlooked for political reasons

If someone claims no author has been overlooked for political reasons then it is on them to back that up. I'm perplexed that you don't understand this.

 Manchu wrote:
Nah, this isn't about me as I am not a part of the Sad Puppies movement or their ally.

See? No burden on proof on him. He can and will contradict you at every turn, but he need not back this up with anything.

I don't need to back it up because it is not a fact claim. Again -- why are you having trouble with such basic points?

At the end of the day, the votes are legit and the system works as it was written. Whether it works as it was intended is another issue but considering many of these issues were apparently highlighted to the committee and ignored, then I'd say the committee had their chance to fix them (2 years chance in fact).

Honestly, this is like people claiming 'haha, you'll never win enough votes to be elected' and then when someone goes out to campaign (and in a very OPEN manner to boot, with public declarations on the internet), and somehow wins, somehow it's suddenly wrong. GRR Martins fable about sourgrapes really should be applied to some people, but I don't think it's Sad Puppies in this case

 Manchu wrote:
From what I can tell, their actual premise is WorldCon membership has become significantly biased against right-wing politics. Sad Puppies, as Correia articulates it, is exploiting WorldCon rules to nominate works of merit without regard to the authors' politics.

And the point is that the two aren't really consistent. If there is really a significant left-wing bias in the nomination process then we shouldn't expect to see deserving left-wing authors being excluded, and the Sad Puppies organizers should have a hard time finding any left-wing authors to nominate. Once you start talking about deserving left-wing authors who have been excluded unfairly then it's a concession that the nominating process isn't split along left vs. right lines.

Or maybe to prevent that nutjob from hijacking their initiative/prevent disinformation tarring the Sad Puppies by association (see e.g., Entertainment Weekly's retraction/apology).

It's not just Vox Day. Correia's own original Sad Puppies campaign was a lot heavier on the "SJW TUMLR FEMINAZIS RUIN EVERYTHING" ranting, and the current one seems like little more than a weak attempt to repackage the concept after realizing that right-wing fans alone aren't enough to win nominations.

Nah, this isn't about me as I am not a part of the Sad Puppies movement or their ally.

No, but you sure seem to be doing a lot of arguing for their case in this thread. If you don't agree with them then why are you defending them?

If someone claims no author has been overlooked for political reasons then it is on them to back that up. I'm perplexed that you don't understand this.

And once again you don't have any clue how proof works. It is impossible to prove that no author has been overlooked for political reasons because even if everyone who has ever voted for a Hugo nomination stated their reasoning for every vote or non-vote you could still claim that the voters are lying, or that there's some other author who was neglected that nobody mentioned, etc. There is nothing I could possibly say in response to your demand for proof that would satisfy you. So your demand for "proof" of the absence of bias does nothing more than direct attention away from the fact that the Sad Puppies campaign has made a lot of claims about political bias in the nomination process but provided very little evidence to support those claims.

 Peregrine wrote:
Once you start talking about deserving left-wing authors who have been excluded unfairly then it's a concession that the nominating process isn't split along left vs. right lines.

Not really. It could be, and I think this makes much more sense, that "left" is only a loose relational adjective describing the alleged political ideology of some significant part of WorldCon membership rather than a precise and exhaustive term.

 Peregrine wrote:
the current one seems like little more than a weak attempt to repackage the concept after realizing that right-wing fans alone aren't enough to win nominations

Sure -- or Correia's explanation could be sincere and/or accurate.

 Peregrine wrote:
If you don't agree with them then why are you defending them?

Because it irritates me when posters treat assumptions as facts.

 Peregrine wrote:
It is impossible to prove that no author has been overlooked for political reasons

If you claim something is a fact but cannot support it then you are really just declaring an opinion. I think you have explained this a number of times on this very forum.

 Peregrine wrote:
[...] nothing more than direct attention away from the fact that the Sad Puppies campaign has made a lot of claims about political bias in the nomination process but provided very little evidence to support those claims.

I don't think you have been paying attention. Or maybe you just don't read what doesn't fit how you would like the conversation to go? I have been very consistent in treating the Sad Puppies rhetoric as a narrative rather than a set of facts. Instead of trying to hide this, I explicitly laid it out.

 Manchu wrote:
I don't need to back it up because it is not a fact claim.

So, what is it, again?

It's my opinion. My opinion is, I don't really agree with the Sad Puppies movement and its allies about WorldCon overlooking authors on the basis of political ideology. I mean, I get that it is unpopular to like firearms in some circles, for example. It is harder for me to believe that someone might be passed over for Hugo nomination on that basis.

EDIT -- But OTOH I am not a right-wing scifi writer. I have never been in the position to experience the kind of garbage Correia describes facing. I am not saying that kind of thing does not happen as I would not know. It certainly sounds plausible. We have already seen just in the lifespan of this thread EW publish some pretty serious disinformation about Sad Puppies.

This whole thing reminds me of Happy Gilmore. Where Gilmore attracts the wrong type of fans to golfing tournaments and some of the old crowd are less than pleased with him

Yeah I think that, beyond the attempt to explain this in GamerGate terminology, the deeper issue is that the WorldCon model of fandom that produced the Hugo award is no longer really relevant to the prestige and marketability of the award today.

 Manchu wrote:
Not really. It could be, and I think this makes much more sense, that "left" is only a loose relational adjective describing the alleged political ideology of some significant part of WorldCon membership rather than a precise and exhaustive term.

Then what exactly is the supposed ideology, if "left-wing" isn't accurate?

Sure -- or Correia's explanation could be sincere and/or accurate.

I see very little reason to believe that it's a sincere explanation. It contrasts very obviously with his other statements, and the evidence supporting it is weak at best. The "repackaging after the failure of SP and SP2" explanation, on the other hand, fits very consistently with what we see from the SP3 campaign.

As for the rest, let's review the conversation:

SP3: THERE IS LIBERAL BIAS AND DESERVING AUTHORS ARE UNFAIRLY EXCLUDED!!!!!!!!
Me: there's no evidence for that.
You: PROVE THAT THERE IS NO EVIDENCE!!!!!!!!

Your demand for proof that there's no credible evidence for the SP3 accusations is simply ridiculous. You wouldn't say the same thing if I said "there's no proof of mind control messages in the chemtrails", so why is it any different here? SP3 have made a claim without supporting it, so if you want to disagree with me about there being no evidence for their claims then you need to provide some evidence instead of just nitpicking about who has the burden of proof.

 Peregrine wrote:
Then what exactly is the supposed ideology, if "left-wing" isn't accurate?

It can be accurate without being exhaustive. Left-wing ideology isn't monolithic/"left" is a broad term.

 Peregrine wrote:

Sure -- or Correia's explanation could be sincere and/or accurate.

I see very little reason to believe that it's a sincere explanation.

I dunno, I thought this provided at least some reasons:

Prestor Jon wrote:
Larry has personally made the effort to push the books he felt were worthy of nomination and get more people to buy them. This was demonstrably proven by his book bombs for nominees increasing their sales and sales rank on amazon. The stories he pushed people to buy and read were written by various authors whose personal politics were across the spectrum, both men and women were included along with various races. The stories that he encouraged his fans to read were not some unified block of stories written by authors with the same political views or from within the same demographic they were just good stories that Larry thought his fans would also like and potentially want to vote for.

http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/03/04/sad-puppies-book-bomb-best-related-work-and-campbell-award-for-best-new-writer/
http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/03/03/sad-puppies-short-story-update-free-championship-btok-and-tuesdays-with-molakesh-eligibility/
http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/02/26/book-bomb-results-more-free-stories-and-sad-puppies-slate-update/
http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/02/25/book-bomb-short-stories-from-the-sad-puppies-slate/
http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/02/19/book-bomb-success-behold-the-power-of-sad-puppies/
http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/02/18/book-bomb-novellas-from-the-sad-puppies-slate/

There you go, proof that Sad Puppies wasn't about politics. It was about getting talented authors more publicity, help them sell more books and introduce Larry's fans to stories they might like and if they did like them that they would be willing to vote for them for Hugos.

 Peregrine wrote:
As for the rest, let's review the conversation:

Yes, let's:

Peregrine: LEFT-LEANING AUTHORS DID NOT LOBBY FOR VOTES!!!
Manchu: Can you back that up?
Peregrine: IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PROVE AND YOU ARE CLUELESS!!! YOU HAVE TO PROVE THAT THE OPPOSITE IS TRUE!!! FOR REASONS!!! CLUELESS!!!
Manchu: I see ...

 Peregrine wrote:
so if you want to disagree with me about there being no evidence for their claims then you need to provide some evidence instead of just nitpicking about who has the burden of proof.

Nice try at moving the goal posts old chap. Here's your actual argument:

 Manchu wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
Left-leaning authors made no effort to hide their politics in either their writing or their personal lives, but they didn't go beyond "this book is awesome" in trying to lobby for votes.

Do you have a source for that?

Just fyi, Correia has an open blog that you can go and demand proof from him for.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I'll even link it for you

http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/04/09/a-response-to-george-r-r-martin-from-the-author-who-started-sad-puppies/