Hugos Refuse To Award Anyone Rather Than Submit To Fans' Votes 1044
An anonymous reader writes: You may remember way back in April there was a bit of a kerfuffle over the nominees for the Hugo Awards being "too conservative" based on a voting campaign organized by a group of science fiction fans who wanted to promote hard science fiction over more recent nominees. This was spun as conservatives "ruining" a "progressive" award. The question was left: would the final voters of the Hugo awards accept these nominees, or just take their ball home and refuse to give out anyway awards at all? The votes are in and we know the answer now: they'd rather just not give out any awards. (Wired has a slightly different slant on the process as well as the outcome of this year's awards.)
Lovely summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like Slashdot doesn't even try any more.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And sourcing from Breitbart of all places. :| Disgusting.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And not just Breitbart - Milo-freakin'-Yiannopolous. That dipshit is as dishonest as the day is long, even Andrew Breitbart die-hards despise the guy.
Don't trust [Re:Lovely summary.] (Score:4, Informative)
I trust him more than [xx]
Your fallacy is false dichotomy [logicallyfallacious.com]. Just because [xx] is a bad or unreliable commentator, doesn't mean that Breitbart is a good or reliable commentator
In fact, Breitbard is not a reliable source.
rather than actually pointing out anything untrue or misleading about what he wrote. If you see something he wrote that is untrue or misleading, spit it out. Otherwise, piss off.
Many people did so. His headline is backwards from the truth. The fans vote was for "no award."
Majority [Re:Don't trust [Re:Lovely summary.]] (Score:5, Informative)
The no awards didn't receive a majority, but rather a narrow plurality.
So if you're going to complain about slanted news it behooves you not to engage in the practice.
Nope.
In every single one of the categories in which NO AWARD won, it won on the first ballot with a majority.
The closest was in editor, long form, where the results were:
No Award 2496
Toni Weisskopf 1216
Sheila Gilbert 754
Anne Sowards 217
Vox Day 166
Jim Minz 58
Total votes 4907
But 50.9% is a majority. (The other categories were not nearly as close.)
I'm rather sorry for Toni, who I rather like, and who might well have won in the absence of the puppy-only ballot. If she had won, I would have said "well deserved."
Re:Don't trust [Re:Lovely summary.] (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, the Hugos STARTED going downhill, as a general measure, from the late 1990s, and the trend has accellerated to the point that it was pretty obvious 4-5 years ago.
I've voted in Hugos for 20-odd years, and while there HAVE been lovely works (Lois McMaster Bujold comes immediately to mind), the ideological slant has trended left since the I've been voting them.
I'll also note the emergence of the "Social Justice Warrior" has been a relatively recent thing, I never even HEARD the phrase until late 2012-early 2013 or so, so putting the bounds of your list 25 years before that is moving the goalposts.
The REAL issue of the Puppies, is that we believe that the STORY is the most important aspect of a work: is it engrossing, well-written, solid plot and characters. Any Social or Political message, if included, should be part of the story, not the story as a convenient vehicle to preach a particular message.
Instead, we saw more and more messages, wrapped in a story, and generally dystopic in nature. We thought that we'd like to see some nominees with good STORIES. And so Larry Correia kicked off Sad Puppies 1. And the opposition went berserk. No nominations. So Larry came back in 2014: we got no nominations. Got told that if we wanted Hugos, we had to up our game.
At this point, Larry stepped down, and Brad Torgersen stepped up. We had a list of recommendations for most of the categories. And then Vox Day/Ted Beale popped up with his alternate "Rabid Puppies" list, even bootstrapping our logo with a variant, and a full slate for ALL the categories. And we did get a larger number of people to register and nominate. So, from the numbers, did Vox and his Rabids.
The result was unexpected. A Puppy sweep of the nominations, duplicating almost precisely the Rabid Puppy Slate. And the progressive wing of fandom collectively lost their minds. In the following days, we saw widespread media stories condemning us for "stuffing the ballot box". All of which quoted progressive sources, often identically, and yet NEVER contacted anyone on our side. We were accused of standing for white male supremacy and worse, despite a broad range of nominees across ethnic, gender, and political spectrums. Our female nominees were often amused at seeing in print that they were white Mormon males.
We were repeatedly accused of being racist, sexist, homophobic, even neo-Nazis. And every time we proved otherwise, the cry of "VOX DAY!" went up. People seem to think that, somehow, if several groups of people are working towards similar ends, we MUST be coordinating action.
To which I reply: have you ever tried coordinating people who trend conservative-to-libertarian ? It makes herding CATS look easy. I don't speak for Vox. I've occasionally interacted with him over the years, and I've read his nominated works. But Vox and his "dread ilk" are independent players, and they can speak for themselves. I know Larry, Brad, and next year's trio, Kate, Sarah, and Amanda. They're good people, interested in good stories.
And none of us care bit one about the politics, ethnicity, sex, or who and how they prefer to sleep with. That's irrelevant, all we care about is a good story.
Anyway, that's my significantly-more-than-2-cents on the subject. . . .
Re: Lovely summary. (Score:3, Informative)
The Rabid and Sad puppies are mostly allies; the Sad Puppies are less viciously reactionary than the Rabid Puppies, but still more "anti-SJW" than not.
Re: Lovely summary. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sad Puppies believes that the Hugo's can be reformed. Rabid Puppies believes the entire thing should be burned and started oer from scratch. In the end, they were proven right that the Hugo's are being vote blocked and that it needs to be fixed.
Re: Lovely summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. The puppies (sad and angry) are both pissy that their favourite stuff isn't getting awards. They claim that their stuff is getting pushed out in place of crap that they hate. Of course there's a kernel of truth: some utter drek has been given awards (the utter shit by RH, for example and bad stories that have a gay person in it, such as the appalingly bad http://www.tor.com/2013/02/20/... [tor.com]).
The trouble is it's only a kernel of truth. The stuff being awarded may have been bad but theirs is, by any reasonable standard just as bad, if not worse.
This is not an attempt to reform or destroy stuff, it's just a massive attempt at shameless self promotion and getting their stuff awarded. Any claims to the contrary are simlpy them making stuff up to rewrite history in otder to make themselves look better, something Vox Dei does a lot.
Anyway as a result, the Hugos are part way to adopting a new voting system which penalises identical voters in order to make it harder to utterly stack the votes.
Re: Lovely summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not an attempt to reform or destroy stuff, it's just a massive attempt at shameless self promotion and getting their stuff awarded. Any claims to the contrary are simlpy them making stuff up to rewrite history in otder to make themselves look better, something Vox Dei does a lot.
If that was true, then the SF clique wouldn't have voted no award in only specific categories. That rather disproves your point, Hoyt [accordingtohoyt.com] figured it out. Steven King figured it out, GRR Martin figured it out.
Anyway as a result, the Hugos are part way to adopting a new voting system which penalises identical voters in order to make it harder to utterly stack the votes.
And thus both sad and rabid puppies proved their point that a clique was there, and forming voting blocks for the stuff they wanted to win awards. Which detracts from the actual point of having awards for good writing.
Re: Lovely summary. (Score:4, Insightful)
And thus both sad and rabid puppies proved their point that a clique was there, and forming voting blocks for the stuff they wanted to win awards. Which detracts from the actual point of having awards for good writing.
Which is also funny, because that will not work. The diversity in the non-NA votes proves there was no "block." The only block that existed was the NA block, because there's no way to argue that was not political.
Hoyt gets it exactly. The puppies will win, it is inevitable, because their method requires no coordination, and no foaming at the mouth. Just publish the slate, and let the SJWs work themselves into tizzy opposing it. And there's basically nothing easier than getting SJWs to work themselves into a tizzy.
Re:Lovely summary. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The SJW clique was very willing to destroy the award rather than see it go to people they didn't want it to. Not to Godwin but the implication is there.
How voting doesn't work [Re:Lovely summary.] (Score:5, Insightful)
"Puppies supporters say that slew of "eno award" wins this year can at least partially be attributed to the fact that SJW votes were concentrated on that choice, while Puppies votes were distributed between as many as four deserving authors.
First, all of the "no award" wins won by a majority on the first ballot. Even if all of the puppy voters had agreed on a single candidate-- they still wouldn't comprise a majority. That argument is false.
Second, that argument is by somebody who doesn't understand how the ballot functions. It works for the nominations, but not for the actual votes, which use a "single transferable ballot" (aka, "australian ballot"). When your first choice is eliminated, your vote goes to your second choice. So, if the puppy vote was distributed between four authors-- so what? As each candidate is eliminated, that vote doesn't go away.
Re:How voting doesn't work [Re:Lovely summary.] (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think I understand your point. Are you saying that the "SJW" faction didn't decide to take their ball and go home by voting for "No Award"? Or are you saying that there were no works worthy of awards this year and that's how the voting went?
By voting "No Award" it sure seems like there was some organized group bent on preventing the interlopers from getting their way - even if it meant that nobody got an award this year.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Fans' Vote Was No Award (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, the headline is false- in fact, it is backwards.
The fans voted for no award.
No award wasn't instead of the fans' votes: it was the fans' vote.
(not in all categories, though.)
-- this is an artifact of the fact that it only takes a plurality to get on the ballot, but it takes a majority to win (with single transferable vote). So a small groups can get works on the ballot, if the rest of the nominators are split, but if the majority doesn't like those works, a small group can't make those works win.
Re:Fans' Vote Was No Award (Score:5, Interesting)
Meh, digging into the numbers a bit, it seems 5950 people voted. For contrast 8363 people voted on the last slashdot poll, so we aren't talking about a whole lot of fans, making it an easy balance to swing either way with relatively small numbers of voters. There's more detail on the breakdown of the voting here [wordpress.com].
Re:Fans' Vote Was No Award (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody had to pay $40 to vote in the Slashdot poll. They had to pay at least $40 to vote in the Hugos. This is also, apparently, a huge increase over the last number of people who voted in the Hugos (65% more than last time?) suggesting a significant groundwell.
Re:Fans' Vote Was No Award (Score:5, Insightful)
This is also, apparently, a huge increase over the last number of people who voted in the Hugos (65% more than last time?) suggesting a significant groundwell.
...or a significant mustering of the troops. If you look at the breakdown of the numbers there an interesting picture emerges. I've also linked to Scalzi telling his minions to vote No Award after their preferences elsewhere on this page, it wouldn't be difficult to organise a couple of thousand people at all.
Re:Fans' Vote Was No Award (Score:5, Insightful)
If Sarkeesian can get almost seven thousand people [kickstarter.com] to donate almost $160,000 to help her create a series of videos I'm not even sure she finished, then yes it's definetely within the realms of possibility.
Re:Fans' Vote Was No Award (Score:5, Interesting)
Politics not a huge deal in SF ? Politics has been the foundation of great SF for more than a century.
It is politics that lie at the heart of "20-thousand leagues under the sea" - a famous work by perhaps the first true SF writer. Politics gave us Star Trek - and everything Philip K. Dick wrote. Heinlein's works are filled with political messages.
In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a single good SF novel that isn't political. They are from all sides of the political spectrum and quite frequently the same novels are read as defending entirely opposing political messages. Many libertarians despise Star Trek as "statist and socialist" but Ayn Rand was a huge fan of it and considered Roddenberry a personal hero. Snowcrash by Neil Stephenson is set in a libertarian "paradise" but is he celebrating it as a dream come true or calling it a dystopian nightmare ? Which way you read it depends more on you than on what he intended. Now think about Diamond Age?
Why is it that those who have the loudest opinions so rarely know what they are talking about ?
On the contrary, the reason SF is so much more worthy of literary attention than it normally receives is actually BECAUSE of it's power for political messaging. SF is the ultimate exploration of "what if" - it allows authors to explore the outcomes of ideas, and political ideas are as important a part of that as technology. Every good SF author has realized that a world is more than the machines it contains - it's the people using them, and the society in which they live - that shapes them, without comment on that society, you would have no story to tell at all.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The AC who submitted this is of obviously from the "Sick Puppies" camp. Anyone who has a clue to how the Hugo system works could have predicted, and many did, that this would be a sweep for "no award" in the categories that were influenced by the actions of the "Sick Puppies".
And really, it was all about numbers. The Puppies are a small minority and were thus clobbered by the greater SF Community. To them, it's a well known "fact" that a Hugo win can boost the sales of books and collections, and that is wh
Re:Lovely summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
They want "no awards" they can have no awards. Forever.
Yeah, when my step-son was 6 years old he felt the same way. "If I can't win the game, then nobody can win!" just before he turned the board over and stormed out of the room.
Fortunately, he's matured.
FYI, "no award" meant that a majority of fans thought that none of the works rose to the level of an award. This only happened in categories which only had puppy works. Since the puppies picked their works based on political views of the authors rather than quality, this seems like a valid result.
Re:Lovely summary. (Score:4, Informative)
If you had been following this you would have noticed that the assertion was made by "the puppies" themselves on the initial website instead of being some shameful secret. It's grubby student political shit that has escaped the playpen and for some reason they are proud of it.
Re:Lovely summary. (Score:4, Informative)
And yeah, I hate politically correct bullshit too. I hate it whichever side it comes from. "Oh no, the Hugo voters picked something that offends me--they must be controlled by an evil liberal cabal! We must destroy them!" That's politically correct bullshit, and I despise it.
Actually, that's a slightly different form, called "conservative correctness" [rationalwiki.org].
Re:Lovely summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but it makes your argument untrue. Whatever's being argued for (or against) may in fact be true, but not for the reasoning you presented.
Regularly, we see story submissions from rags like huffingtonpost, so why not breitbart? The issues can then be debated here openly..well at least as openly as the moderation system permits. From this perspective, it almost doesn't matter what sources the submitter used, though it would be nice if multiple sources were cited.
The only conclusion I can draw from all of this is that, like so many other 'prestigious' awards, the Hugo is now essentially worthless: Just a prop to push circular legitimacy for certain political viewpoints. That's unfortunate, but good to know.
Re:Lovely summary. (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not Breitbart ?
Well I would venture that the people complaining are opposed to what they perceive as Breitbart's political leaning but are perfectly willing to accept bad reporting from sources that advance their agenda
Ex
https://twitter.com/KatyTurNBC... [twitter.com]
For or against Trump he drew 20,000 + people to that rally. You have to ask is NBC reporting the news here or trying to control it ?
Re:Lovely summary. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's too bad today's news pushes such obvious political agendas. They should be focused on telling the truth as objectively as possible.
Re: (Score:3)
opposed to what they perceive as Breitbart's political leaning
I don't think Breitbart (either the person or the group he formed) ever made any secret of their political leanings. What you perceive is what you get. Breitbart's reporting has always been in service of that agenda, and I'm not sure how you can pretend otherwise. Sure, others also do that, but that doesn't change the fact that Breitbart does it.
Fallacy fallacy [Re: Lovely summary.' (Score:5, Insightful)
Please explain how a fallacy could be true.
It's literally defined as being a false belief or a failure in reasoning.
It's the "fallacy fallacy. [fallacyfiles.org]"
If you conclude that because a line of reasoning contains a fallacy, the statement reasoned about is false, you just fell into the fallacy fallacy..
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c... [yourlogicalfallacyis.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Not quite.
Many arguments cited as fallacies are actually heuristics: They are arguments that are usually valid, but not universally.
If an event A is always followed by event B, it is a fallacy to say from this that A causes B. But pointing this out as a fallacy does not mean A does not cause B. The 'fallacious' argument is flawed only in claiming to be an absolute proof: It is still very strong evidence, and should be taken as such in the absence of any evidence to the contrary or alternative explanation.
Or
Re: (Score:3)
So, so sad...
Here we go:
All Presidents wore black pants :. Bill Clinton was President
Bill Clinton wore black pants
Both premises are true and the conclusion is true. The argument itself, however, is not valid.
This is basic logic, folks. It's not complicated.
Re: Lovely summary. (Score:4, Funny)
WTB purple cat PST
Re:Lovely summary. (Score:5, Interesting)
MRAs literally had absolutely nothing to do with this, it was a reaction to the hugos becoming a cliquish groupthink approved voting slate that rewarded toxic bigots like Requires Hate [laurajmixon.com] while ostracizing people like Toni Weisskopf for their crimethink... or even purely because crimethinkers liked them.
Congratulations AniMojo, once again you've proven unequivocably that you don't give a flying fuck about women or equality and only use that line as a cover for siding with toxic bigots who disproportionately target women and minorities.
Re: (Score:3)
Summary trolls have been around since the early days of Slashdot.
Well seeing as your a major summary troll, you should know.
Re:Lovely summary. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Lovely summary. (Score:4, Insightful)
It may also not be fair, but it's lasted longer than the Hugos with fewer complete meltdowns of this nature.
Re:Lovely summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
Arguably though the Academy Awards also suffer from what the Puppies accuse the Hugos of being: rewarding unenjoyable pandering (just of a different variety). I'm a huge film nerd who will enjoy watching abstract art films and I can barely stand sitting through a lot of the Academy Award nominations. There's no good solution. If you hand over awards to critics you often end up with dry "important" works of art. If you hand it over to the consumers you get McDonalds works of art. If you hand it over to the creators you get a lot of self indulgent crap. And without fail the winners are pretty arbitrary especially since it's on an annual basis. If you happen to have a lot of crap in one year, above average crap will win. If you have a year of amazing groundbreaking work then every nomination could be better than the last decade of winners.
It's tough to find any one process which nominates work that is: Important, Innovative and Entertaining.
Re: (Score:3)
Sourcing an "unreliable source" comment from... Newsmax.com. Sweet self-undermine.
Re: (Score:3)
Apologetics is a type of writing in defense of something. Early Christian apologists are Paul of Tarsus and later, St Augustine.
There are libraries full of apologetics, and one who practices apologetics is called an apologist.
In regard to the last assertion needing more citations, I think you could find more than you need by reading subject's own public statements. Try for yourself. Start by going back to last year's Hugo Awards for copious self-incrimination.
Re:Lovely summary. (Score:5, Informative)
Christian apologist is just someone who explains Christianity and why it's right and good. The term has a long history and is not usually considered derogatory. C. S. Lewis was a Christian apologist.
MRA means Men's Rights Activist. There is a wide range of MRA folks. Some fight for equality in child custody cases or domestic violence cases (there are a lot of men who get beat up by women). Some are just misguided weirdos who think women should hold the door open for men or something, and there's a bunch of horrible misogynists.
Headline is Bad (Score:5, Insightful)
The headline there is stupid. The result IS the fan's votes. In six categories "No Award" won the vote.
Re:Headline is Bad (Score:5, Interesting)
...and most of the folks I know did indeed sit down and slog through most every story, and only voted "No Award" if they really felt nothing was up to Hugo quality. (Personally, I'm perfectly happy to stop reading about the point that stabbing pencils into my eyes sounds like more fun than continuing reading, but then I'm not a purist.)
The saddest story is the alternate universe where there wasn't an attempt to organize a voting bloc: http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2... [tobiasbuckell.com]
(As an aside, I think there's at lot to be said to building bridges with sad puppies, though it has to be a mutual effort. Rabid puppies? Not so much.)
Actually, the truth is somewhat different. (Score:5, Informative)
This sums it up pretty well: http://io9.com/how-the-hugo-aw... [io9.com]
"This actually sounds like a compelling argument at first â" but the saboteurs themselves have already disproved it. Their own success shows that their conspiracy theory is absolutely false. If there had been a left-wing conspiracy to stuff the ballot, it would have largely counteracted the efforts of Beale and his friends. The Beale strategem only succeeds if all the other nominations are scattered and disorganized. And that kind of disorganization is exactly what we saw in most nominations. It appears that everybody except Bealeâ(TM)s crew simply nominated whatever stories they happened to enjoy in 2014. Had there been a secret left-wing bloc nominating its own stories in lockstep, then Bealeâ(TM)s strategy would have failed."
Re:Actually, the truth is somewhat different. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Actually, the truth is somewhat different. (Score:4, Insightful)
You're not getting it. The argument by people in favor of the puppy stuffing is that the nominations were already being stuffed by SJWs. But if SJWs were stuffing the nominations, then someone else trying to stuff the nominations would fail. They wouldn't be able to get basically all the nominations they were looking for, because someone else's stuffing would make sure that some other nominations succeeded. Since they did succeed, we know that there was no SJW-led stuffing worth mentioning, and that the entire puppy argument is a lot of dogshit.
Re:Actually, the truth is somewhat different. (Score:5, Interesting)
Except it's completely the opposite. The puppies scattered their votes between who they thought most deserved an award. The SJWs concentrated their votes on "No Award" to landslide out anyone, especially women or non-whites, who was tainted by crimethink.
Re:Actually, the truth is somewhat different. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand the mindset that can't accept the fact that science fiction encompasses more people, more ideas and a wider audience than first presumed. It's antithetical to the precepts of the genre.
As an old white guy who grew up on Heinlein and Silverberg and Asimov and Niven and Pohl, it's been proved for decades that non-Anglo and female and gay authors offer something valuable and aren't just a side show. I don't know why anyone who calls themselves a science fiction fan would not want to celebrate that.
Re:Actually, the truth is somewhat different. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's almost as if that's not the issue at all, and female/LGBT/non-white authors are in fact regularly celebrated and embraced... when they're not being terrorized by SJW trolls [laurajmixon.com]. It's almost as if all that talk of "equality" and "diversity" from SJWs is provably just a smokescreen for toxic bigotry and a violent hatred of dissent.
How on earth did this summary get published? (Score:5, Informative)
This is the most ignorant story summary I can ever remember reading on Slashdot.
I don't believe that it is worth engaging with it, but readers should understand that there has always been a "No award" option. Furthermore, anyone can join up and vote in the Hugos. There is no "cabal" of "SJWs" who are taking over anything. Anybody can sign up to vote in the Hugos. If the majority voted "No award" in some categories, that reflects a democratic view of those people who bothered to register to vote.
Flamebait on the front page? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to wonder why Slashdot ran that submission from an anonymous coward (sorry, reader). The Wired article Timothy mentioned in passing looks like it has a stronger grasp on reality but that submission is what people will actually read. Do we need to start moderating the editors or as the GG/Puppies contingent gotten so strong here that it's a lost cause?
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
I'm genuinely curious: how many awards this year went to white men (or if we throw out this year, let's take the last 5 instead)? Was it approximately proportional to their demographic representation in the field? Too high? Too low?
Both sides are so busy screaming at each other, I've never seen actual data. To determine whether I feel that the 'puppies' groups were reactionary wreckers (the popular narrative) or whether they identified a actual "politically correct" slant toward a nomination process tha
Re:Worst. Summary. Ever. And a lie to boot. (Score:5, Informative)
You should probably read the Wired reporting on the story rather than perpetuating ignorance. They interviewed Annie Bellet. She was not pressured by anyone. She personally rejected Sad Puppies' using her as a politically pawn. She personally thinks their approach is antithetical to inherent inclusiveness of nerd culture. But yeah, keep regurgitating the WML-fabricated narrative. I'm sure it goes over well on blogs like Breitbart.
does anti-sjw = deranged violent prick? (Score:4, Informative)
> This was spun as conservatives "ruining" a "progressive" award.
Umm, according the blithest troll behind the group that's exactly what it is:
"For his part, Beale—who runs his own small publishing company, Castalia House, which got five of its writers and editors (including Beale himself) on this year’s Hugo ballot—has been outspoken about his goals. “I wanted to leave a big smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were,” he told me before the winners were announced. “All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You—one massive gesture of contempt.” Some nerds just want to watch the world burn."
[..]
“I have 390 sworn and numbered vile faceless minions—the hardcore shock troops—who are sworn to mindless and perfect obedience,” he said, acknowledging that his army wasn’t made up solely of sci-fi fans. On the contrary, “the people who are very anti-SJW said, ‘Okay, we want to get in on this.’”
-- source: http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/
They are the typical scummy trolls, just like any other juvenile middle school troll. It's rather sad to see *adults* behaving that fashion. WTF is wrong with some people, really. And that's who you have writing your summary, great job there Slashdot. Breitbart, *really*?! Pretty low.
And the winner is... Vox Day (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, the social justice clique burned the awards to the ground to stop any Puppy-nominated candidate from winning. But all Vox Day (the Rabid Puppy leader) wanted was to take the award away from that clique, and he was openly willing to burn it down. They did it for him. Bravo.
The Sad Puppies this year were run by Brad R. Torgersen. He's the most moderate of the puppy group. He explicitly wanted the Sad Puppy slate to be apolitical, the best works around. So on the slate were works by people in the Social Justice clique, and works by those who were neither puppy nor SJ. All the clique had to do to save the award for themselves is vote for those works. But instead they hounded some of their own people into withdrawing their nomination, and refused to vote for those neutrals (e.g. Jim Butcher) who remained. Once again, bravo, SJW/CHORFs; in stomping on as decent a person as Torgersen you gave victory to Vox Day.
Re: (Score:3)
No he didn't, because he (and presumably you) seem to think that the voters are a closed group. In fact, anyone may register to vote. You don't have to attend Worldcon to vote. So there is no "clique" to sway the vote. There are just fans of scifi who are committed enough to stump up the $40 (or however much) to register to vote.
There can't be a clique. Anybody can register to vote. Presumably the people who register are the ones who are interested enough in scifi to be bothered. But anybody at all is allow
Re: (Score:3)
The OP's contention is that: Yes, the social justice clique burned the awards to the ground to stop any Puppy-nominated candidate from winning. This presumes to know the reason that none of Vox Day's nominations won an award. The possibility that the OP thinks is most likely is that there is a "clique" (or some other term) of "SJ" people who all voted together. This fails Occam's Razor test - it's not the simplest explanation. A far simpler explanation is that the works that were nominated by Vox Day were n
I have a better political mission for the genre (Score:5, Insightful)
Science fiction authors always had political differences, which fans were in many cases aware of. In the days of the Big Three, we had, let's see...a New Deal Democrat, a military/libertarian Republican, a gay Eurosocialist. The worlds they built reflected their sociopolitical values, and guess what - nobody worried about it! It just caused them to offer different styles of future, which fans debated as alternative scenarios, which is the whole idea. The field as a whole had no net political coloration.
What Beale and his minions (there might be henchmen in next year's budget, but they'll never be able to afford cronies) are mainly concerned about seems to be identity politics, especially when combined with the current softening of the science being presented in an effort to broaden readership. I think they have a point on the retreat from science into what Beale calls "angsty fantasy," but do fans really care deeply about the gender ratios in their stories? Beale is attacking from a fundie Christian perspective that has zero following in the genre.
If SF needs a political mission, I would like to see it address a real present danger, which is the general culture's mounting disrespect for science itself. Tis showed up first as a generalized fear of every application of science, but it has mushroomed into deep-seated evil like this:
http://dgrnewsservice.org/2015... [dgrnewsservice.org]
If these people gain political traction, everything we value here is in deep trouble. If the genre wants to charge into a political battle, this is the one it needs to join.
Bad voting method, abused by Shmucks (Score:5, Insightful)
But if you compare the results of this year's vote, to votes of previous years, you can easily see that this year is the only year where there was an organized attempt to get certain people elected. Categories that they did not care about were ignored, there was no disagreement at all among the conspirators, while their was no unified pattern of votes in previous years. In previous years there was real competition - rather than an agreement for all of one category of voters to focus on a single, predetermined winner.
So the analysis of their attempt to game the system proves that they were in fact WRONG, and previous awards were fair voting, rather than a conspiracy as they paranoidly claimed.
But it's not entirely fair to blame the conspirators. They simply abused a system that was not designed to handle intentional abuse.
Frankly, the main problem is that people simply don't care enough about the Hugo's to cheat - until now. So now we have to upgrade the voting system to account for a-holes trying to game the system.
Re:Bad voting method, abused by Shmucks (Score:4, Informative)
No upgrade is needed. The voting system to get things nominated is different to the one to make the awards. So it's possible for a small group to create a voting "bloc" to get works nominated, but they are then not able to force those works to win awards.
are the nominees any good? (Score:3, Insightful)
I haven't heard anyone ask this: were the nominated works any good? If you don't like the nominees, is it because of their politics or because the works sucked?
I just want to read a good yarn. I have never researched the political views of any author, and I'm not about to start now.
They Brought It On Themselves (Score:3)
The WSFS brought this upon themselves by intentionally being vague and nebulous about what they're giving awards for.
The popular belief is that Hugo awards are for science fiction and possibly fantasy, but the truth is you can nominate any form of fiction.
Quote the FAQ:
The charter explicitly makes fantasy as well as SF eligible for our awards. Works of fantasy have often won Hugos, and, in fact, Hugos have been won by works that some people consider horror or even mainstream. There will never be universal agreement about the precise distinctions between genres and sub-genres, so WSFSâ(TM)s position is that eligibility is determined by the voters. To paraphrase the great SF editor and writer Damon Knight, a Hugo winner is what the Hugo voters point to when they award a Hugo.
The idea of voting for a work based on the gender, race, skin color, sexual identity, etc. of either the author or characters is stupid. How about basing it off the plot, character development and writing quality?
For example, Citizen Kane was a great movie and that isn't impacted by the fact the main characters are all heterosexual and white. It wouldn't be improved -- nor detracted from -- if the characters were of a different race or sexual orientation. The story stands alone.
Conversely, Gigli was a steaming pile of fecal matter. Replacing everyone in it with a wide variety of LGBTQ people of a random variety of races, skin colors and genders wouldn't help. It would still be shit all on the merits (or lack there of) of plot, writing and character development.
The Sad Puppies won. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Sad Puppies won. Yes, they didn't win a single award -- in fact, some really good works lost to No Award, seemingly just to spite them.
But that was the point.
Their stated goal was to prove that there was a group of people out there voting for political reasons and fixing the Hugos. To fight this, they did the unforgivable sin of nominating some good works (such as one of the Dresden Files novels) for a Hugo.
The CHORF / SJWs fell for it en mass, just as George R R Martin begged them not to [livejournal.com] (archive version [archive.is]) back in April. They proved the Sad Puppies point -- that the Hugos are fixed by a group of gatekeepers.
The Hugos have been fixed for years, to the point that Steven King outright refused to participate due to how bad it became. The CHORFs proved the Sad Puppies' point more than anything else could. The Hugos have been forever tarnished by this -- not by the Sad Puppies voting in the "wrong way" for the "wrong type of fans", but by the CHORFs decreeing that you have to have the right politics, the right thoughts, the right opinions, to be a "real fan" or a "real hugo winner."
Re:The Sad Puppies won. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Hugos have been forever tarnished by this
Probably not. Eventually ideological people get bored. They're in it for the emotional high, and as soon as things get tough, they leave.
Re:The Sad Puppies won. (Score:4, Insightful)
But the S.F. readers get bored of it much faster... Only the people who think they have a religious duty to "correct" reality have the patience, energy and engagement to stick around when everything goes eye-rollingly consternating.
I had not heard of this whole mess before today, and I find it already tedious just searching for basic factual information about WTF happened and who has been an arsehole and who stuffed whose ballots. I was just hoping to learn of exciting new authors, and now it feels like I'm somehow reading a Twitter argument between some random MRA and my transgender SJW sister.
Re: (Score:3)
[The Sad Puppies'] stated goal was to prove that there was a group of people out there voting for political reasons and fixing the Hugos.
And in retrospect, they succeeded in proving there was one such group indeed: the Sad Puppies.
Take your Whine and start a new award (Score:4, Insightful)
poor puppies... (Score:3)
Uh, no, that is an outright lie. (Score:4, Informative)
The Hugos did not "choose not to award anyone rather than submit to fan's votes". They submitted to the votes of the fans, as always. The fans voted for "No Award".
This has to be the best quote .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:SJW prove the SP's point (Score:4, Insightful)
Re. the "popular books should always win" concept, I think Martin said it best:
“The reward for popularity is popularity! It’s truckloads of money! Do you need the trophy, too?”
Re: (Score:3)
This makes NO sense whatever. It's a free vote. And anybody is free to sign up for it (try searching google to confirm this). You don't have to go to WorldCon to vote. If the majority of people voted against the Puppies' nominations, that's because the majority of people who took the trouble to register voted against them. I have no idea why this is so hard to understand or why so many people fe
Re: (Score:3)
I have no idea why this is so hard to understand or why so many people feel the need to invoke "SJWs" to explain the outcome.
Maybe because what Scalzi was trying to get organised [scalzi.com] turned out to be exactly what happened?
Re:SJW prove the SP's point (Score:4, Interesting)
You've linked to that article but you clearly haven't read it! Scalzi simply explains the rules and how he interprets them. His article was in response to a lot of hand-wringing about the puppies' attempt to vote for a slate. Lots and lots of people were forseeing doom and gloom for the Hugos, Scalzi's article was simply to explain that while it's possible to get nominations on the ballot paper by colluding, it's a very different thing to getting Hugos awarded. You should read the article - it's pretty interesting.
Re: (Score:3)
His instructions were pretty clear, and I quote:
"HUGO FOR BEST USE OF YOGURT
1. Deserving nominee #1
2. Deserving nominee #2
3. NO AWARD"
And that's exactly what happened. Coincidence? You decide.
Re: (Score:3)
1. I understood what you were saying;
2. I don't understand what "the Academy" has to do with it;
3. I don't understand the point you are making about feminists and homophobia;
4. I don't understand what Obamacare has to do with it;
5. I agree with you on the point about the use of "SJW". See also "PC".
Re: (Score:3)
WHAT are you talking about? The voters ARE the supporters! There are no judges. The voters are ordinary sci-fi fans. In fact, if you had wanted to vote, you should have just registered to do so. Anybody can and you don't have to go to WorldCon. Of course, if you'd rather just complain and blather on about SJWs, you clearly are not interested enough in sci-fi to take part.
Re: (Score:3)
Its funny. How do you think you take part. I've always taken part by reading. Lately when I look at a list of top scifi its all low rent soap opera in some vague dimensionless settings. In other words weather our new interlopers who confuse dragons and fairy's for scifi realize it. They have made the hugos irrelevant. Its amazing you think the main part of 'taking part' is worrying about some decrepit award. I've felt ignored for years by the awards. The crap that got voted in has mostly been crap.
Re: (Score:3)
What you have written here makes no sense at all. Here are some facts for you.
1. Anyone may register (I think it costs $40);
2. Anyone who registers can nominate any work they like;
3. Anyone who registers can vote for any work(s) they like in each of several categories;
4. If someone thinks that nothing in a particular category deserves an award, there is a "No award" option;
5. The voting system for nomination is different from the voting system for the awards;
So how can "SJWs" (or anyone else for that matter
Re:There's truth on both sides here (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, some basic factual errors. First off, the Hugos are a fan award, not a writer award - that's the Nebulas. They're both important, they aren't the same.
Second, the people who refused to grant awards were *the very people who paid $40 [or much more if they attended] to vote*. This wasn't some arbitrary decision, or a decision by some committee, there has always been an option of voting that it was better to not award an award in that category than to award it to the option on the ballot because they were so universally sub-par. This wasn't done by some committee, this was the voice of the voters.
Seriously - the summary was godawful and misleading, but the information is widely available.
Re: (Score:3)
If Orson Scott Card got his act together and wrote something on the order of Speaker for the Dead, or Ender's Game, again, I'm pretty sure he'd claim both the Hugo and Nebula. Unfortunately, the main reason he didn't get more awards was because most of what he wrote later was rather crappy. Xenocide, anyone?
Correia - I enjoy his books a lot, but they aren't in the same league as Stross or Scalzi. Correia takes the old fantasy plot of monster hunters and upgrades it rather well, but still... no. Comparing it
Re: (Score:3)
I think it's pretty valid to make a distinction between authors saying "Hey, BTW, my book is eligible to be nominated!" which a ton of people from all kinds of backgrounds do, and for that matter "Hey, this is a bunch of cool stuff I've read that you might want to check out that's also been eligible," to putting together a slate. There's an argument to be made as to where the sad puppies fell. There really isn't one with the rabid puppies.
(And really, as many people have pointed out, when you have so much s
Re:There's truth on both sides here (Score:5, Insightful)
People paid 40 dollars a pop to vote for no award, I think that not giving an award is the right thing to do in that case.
Re: (Score:3)
I remember watching the New England Patriots play the Chicago Bears in SuperBowl XX (1986). This was in the pre-Belichick/Brady era, and the Patriots got clobbered 46-10. Here's the thing: there were points scored on both sides, but that doesn't add up to some kind of moral victory for the Patriots.
The Sad Puppy case always struck me as weak; if you look back over the entire history of the awards what you see there was never much of a preference for the kind of stories they write. The overall pattern is o
Re: (Score:3)
SJWs say that these books shouldn't exist.
Examples please. And show me how these particular people are managing to steer the course of fandom.
Re:WIRED has it right (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
This whole movement came out of the same place as GamerGate.
Untrue. The Sad Puppies movement was started in 2013 by writer Larry Correia who, as far as I know, does not have any direct ties with GamerGate. You can make an transitive link between the two through Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day, however Vox Day didn't become associated with Sad Puppies until 2014. This year Vox Day splintered and started the Rabid Puppies movement, which is centered on getting right-leaning fiction onto the Hugo Ballot.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Please give me a year in which you feel like science fiction did NOT address social inequality. What were the good old days for you? I'm genuinely curious.
Re:WIRED has it right (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. This was a free vote of everyone who wanted to register to vote. You don't have to go to WorldCon to vote. Anybody who wants to register gets a vote. So there is no question of "SJWs" getting butthurt. There were a series of votes on the various works that were nominated. In the categories where serious nominations were made, Hugos were awarded. In the categories that only had non-serious nominations, no awards were made. If the puppies had wanted to win the votes, they should have recruited more people to vote for their nominations. They didn't (or couldn't), so their nominations did not win.
Re:WIRED has it right (Score:4, Informative)
As I posted above, only 5950 people voted. For contrast 8363 people voted on the last slashdot poll, so we aren't talking about a whole lot of fans, making it an easy balance to swing either way with relatively small numbers of voters. Meanwhile here's Scalzi telling his fellow travellers how to vote [scalzi.com], and more details on the exact votes here [wordpress.com].
Re:WIRED has it right (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think you get what I'm saying - it's a lot easier to rig a small vote than a large one, purely because you don't need to get as many people on board. Look here's a noted and very vocal SJW Charles Stross crowing about the "victory" [twimg.com], although himself and Scalzi fail to realise they're just making the point for the Sad Puppies. When he speaks of "fans" here he's talking about his own clique who did exactly as instructed, as demonstrated above.
Re:WIRED has it right (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong! The condition for nominating are EXACTLY the same as the condition for winning the Hugo. Anyone who registers can nominate any work they like (it has to have been published in the relevant year of course).
So the Sad Puppies didn't prove anything, except that they could get works nominated but could not get those works to win Hugos. The reason for this is the different voting system used in both cases. None of this has changed in any significant way.
To put it another way, the changing nature of the types of work that win Hugos reflects the changing nature of the types of people who read sci-fi (or to be more specific, the changing nature of the types of people who register to vote in the Hugos).
Re: WIRED has it right (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay, but I think you're missing the component here that espousing that point of view fails to account for: that diversity for its own sake is not necessarily beneficial.
Not that I agree with the Sad or Rabid Puppies here, or that I have any problem with what you're saying on the surface, but that's the problem with ideology. There's been a lot of "taking a good idea to absurd levels" going on in geek arenas, and that's where the charges of "racism" and "misogyny" come from.
Minorities and women are sure welcome, but ideologues from the outside marched in and started telling everyone on the outside that they don't seem to be welcome enough, by some vague standard of "enough" that can't be satisfied because there are no existing qualifications to satisfy it. So, of course the media jumped on a juicy story that can get people worked up.
What, really, does "diverse enough" mean, that make fields like science fiction really guilty of not being diverse enough by some standards, and where such guilt is quantified by things other than stereotypes and strawmen?
Re: (Score:3)
The voters for the Hugos are sci-fi fans. There is no "SJW" group that votes. EVERYONE who registers can vote. There are no restrictions on who can register (another poster says that it costs $40). You don't have to attend Worldcon to register. Presumably, those people who register are the ones who are most interested in scifi. But there's no group of "SJWs" (or anybody else for that matter) who can affect the outcome. Everyone who registers can vote.
Re: (Score:3)
Summary aside, if there really is an objection to the range of science fiction stories that the Hugos are currently addressing these days, then I can see two reasonable solutions, either or both of which may already exist:
1) hugos specific to the category being awarded: e.g. "hard science fiction"
2) another award entirely -- which means publicity, fan gathering, etc. Lots of work.
It seems like a tempest in a teakettle to me.
Re:Last Post (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, the Slashdot readership will greatly miss the five posts you have made over the last four years.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Breitbart? Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
Really? Those being called out as SJWs are the ones I see marginalizing other's viewpoints. The whole thing about GG and anti-GG was the anti-GG people trying to shut down the other group rather than even discussing what they were saying. In this thing, you have the same thing, those who have subverted the voting system in order to shut down another person's viewpoint. These are the SJWs, the ones preferring to vote no award because they don't like the politics of those that were nominated. Hell, many of them didn't even read the entries and were bragging about it. How can you vote in a best of award without even reading the material?
http://whatever.scalzi.com/201... [scalzi.com]