So, I figure that most people have heard of this by now, but for those who haven't, here's a short introduction. Feel free to add to this if you think I'm being unfair. Furthermore, I'll try to collect all sources in this post, and if any of the moderators are interested enough, I encourage them to do the same.
The Hugo awards are probably the most prestigious science fictions awards handed out at the moment. However, some people felt that left-wing writers with social justice leanings promoted others with the same political leanings so much and came down hard on those outside their group, that the awards were no longer for all science fiction works. To combat this, the last three years a clique of mostly libertarian/right-wing writers and fans have been pushing a list of writers which they felt deserved to be among the nominees, but were excluded by the powers that be. Although they had some minor successes previous year, this time it went exceptionally well, to the point that allmost all nominees came from their lists.
This was not received well, as you might have expected.
I was wondering what you people thought of this. I myself tend to agree with the Puppies.
I don't understand. Who decides which books are on the ballot? Who decides which books are nominees? What's the difference between being on the ballot and being a nominee?
The Hugos are voted on by the fans so are pretty much a popularity contest. The works with more fans and more dedicated fans are more likely to be nominated and maybe win.
I read Correia's books and I was generally underwhelmed by them. As such, I would personally not nominate him for an award based on the merit of his work alone.
I do tend to dislike books where the author injects too much of his/her political views and since I am generally socially liberal I will dislike books with too much or a right-leaning bias more than those with a left-leaning bias simply. It's hard for me to relate to a protagonist who espouses beliefs I find deplorable. I also find that authors with very strong political views have are likely to inject them into their stories. I read one fairly decent military scifi book where the author just could not help himself and put in a strawman gay character to prove how evil and degenerate the other side was. It was completely unnecessary from a plot point and it created very flat characters.
I generally find scifi to be a rather progressive and liberal genre so I would assume that more right-leaning writers would not be as popular.
I don't understand. Who decides which books are on the ballot? Who decides which books are nominees? What's the difference between being on the ballot and being a nominee?
Apparently, "supporting or attending members" of WorldCon (i.e., people who have bought tickets) make nominations with no limit on the number of nominations each person can make. The five most nominated works go on the ballot. Then the supporting/attending members vote on the ballot using an instant-runoff system. The Wiki article doesn't say, but from what Correia and Martin wrote, it sounds like actually only the attending members vote - I'd like some clarification on this myself.
What these Sad Puppies have been doing is campaigning hard for like-minded people to buy tickets so they can make more nominations and, potentially, votes.
I generally find scifi to be a rather progressive and liberal genre so I would assume that more right-leaning writers would not be as popular.
From what Correia said, it sounds like a lot of the Sad Puppies' sadness comes from people making that assumption, and their success this year does rather call that into question. That's just from watching the Hugo politics. Stroll down the aisle at your local Barnes & Noble, and it should be painfully obvious that military SF, alternate history, and the other "non-progressive" subgenres that the Puppies claim to be championing are all really popular.
And even there, the breakdown is a little more complicated than you might think. The two biggest names in military SF are probably David Weber and Eric Flint. Weber is far enough to the right to have a monarchy fetish, but Flint is an actual-factual card-carrying socialist. And they're good friends. They've collaborated on works in each others' universes, and - I would argue - each improved the other by rescuing some characters and factions from strawmanhood.
I suspect that sort of attitude is what this controversy is really about. Not left vs. right per se, but a different cultural divide: the easygoing, entertainment-first, popular fiction typified by writers like Weber and Flint (and their publisher Baen), versus the message-driven, socially conscious fiction that dominated the Hugos (associated with the publisher Tor, but Tor prints a lot of popular stuff too).
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I do tend to dislike books where the author injects too much of his/her political views and since I am generally socially liberal I will dislike books with too much or a right-leaning bias more than those with a left-leaning bias simply. It's hard for me to relate to a protagonist who espouses beliefs I find deplorable. I also find that authors with very strong political views have are likely to inject them into their stories. I read one fairly decent military scifi book where the author just could not help himself and put in a strawman gay character to prove how evil and degenerate the other side was. It was completely unnecessary from a plot point and it created very flat characters.
This is just not true. The issue is that biases which agree with one's own beliefs are more readily accepted and therefore do not stand out in the same way opposing beliefs do.
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We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.
The most prestigious Sci-Fi award is decided by whoever is willing to pay to vote? I don't understand why anyone would care about that award.
Does that really matter? You could say the same sort of thing about almost any award ceremony. The issue is: it is seen as one of the, if not the most prestigeous scifi/fantasy award out there.
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Does that really matter? You could say the same sort of thing about almost any award ceremony.
Can you really though? Where do I pay to get a vote on the Newbery Medal? Normally being able to buy votes would be viewed as a corruption problem.
The issue is: it is seen as one of the, if not the most prestigeous scifi/fantasy award out there.
Regardless of how it's seen, it's clearly an easily gamed system. If you make a system where every $X you give someone gives you a vote, then people are going to buy victories. What else would you expect to happen?
I'm with Tiax. To have two camps of people accusing each other of gaming the system indicates that people are overlooking the key problem: namely, the system is really easy to game, and therefore is really stupid.
And if the system for determining who wins the award is really stupid, it makes the award really stupid.
That being said, I don't get the complaints on either side. One group is complaining that the stuff they like hasn't been winning lately. They banded together to make their stuff win. Now other people are complaining they did this.
I don't really get how there's anything more to it than that, or how any of this isn't inevitable based on how the Hugo Awards actually work. According to George R. R. Martin, what these Sad Puppies have done is not against the rules. Nor does it sound all that bad. I mean, it seems like they didn't like the books that were winning, so they rallied people to vote for other books. How is this any different from a voter registration rally prior to an election?
I don't get it. On either angle. Why are the Sad Puppies apparently claiming there's some conspiracy keeping the books they want from getting as many votes as the other books when the explanation of said books just not - y'know - getting as many votes as the others is far simpler? Especially when they got the books they wanted to win to win by voting for them? Why is the other side up in arms about what the Sad Puppies did when what they did was just get people to outvote the others in a system that wins based on number of votes?
Is there a bunch of context I'm missing, or is this just really nothing more than two sides butthurt that they lost a popularity contest?
I suspect I'd disagree with a lot of the Sad Puppies on politics (and particularly the Rabid Puppies; I'm not keen on Vox Day's opinions at all, for example) - but that doesn't necessarily mean they can't write speculative fiction I'd enjoy.
I think it would be sad if the voting devolved into two opposing politics-based monoliths each year; it seems more likely to me that there would be deserving books in each. For example, I believe the latest Dresden Files book is up on the Puppies slate, and I enjoyed that. (And I will continue to enjoy it regardless of whether Puppies and their Gamergate supporters nominate it for a Hugo to get 'salt' from 'SJWs'.)
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Does that really matter? You could say the same sort of thing about almost any award ceremony.
Can you really though? Where do I pay to get a vote on the Newbery Medal? Normally being able to buy votes would be viewed as a corruption problem.
Here would probably be a good place to start, though it doesn't say if the awards shortlists are drawn up by a particular committee or if the general members get a chance to vote on them.
For your second point votes don't appear to be being sold so I have no idea where your 'corruption' argument is coming from in that sense. People are just handing over $40 to World con for the privilege of voting. No different to people paying their dues to any other organization that holds awards where voting rights are limited to eligible members.
The only difference is until now the Hugo's have been able to put forward a story that they are not decided by some small clique of people like the ALA or the Academy but are decided by the whole body politic of Sci-Foi Fandom. Something that now appears to have been proved false.
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Regardless of how it's seen, it's clearly an easily gamed system. If you make a system where every $X you give someone gives you a vote, then people are going to buy victories. What else would you expect to happen?
You get one vote. If you want another vote, you have to find someone else who agrees with you to buy a WorldCon ticket. Like Kahedron said, in principle this is just your basic "best of convention" type award, and the Sad Puppies just a "get out the vote" campaign. If you, say, dropped the ticket requirement and made the ballots free to anyone who requested them or something, they would be doing exactly the same thing. I really don't think the money is a particularly important part of the story here.
I don't really get how there's anything more to it than that, or how any of this isn't inevitable based on how the Hugo Awards actually work. According to George R. R. Martin, what these Sad Puppies have done is not against the rules. Nor does it sound all that bad. I mean, it seems like they didn't like the books that were winning, so they rallied people to vote for other books. How is this any different from a voter registration rally prior to an election?
I don't get it. On either angle. Why are the Sad Puppies apparently claiming there's some conspiracy keeping the books they want from getting as many votes as the other books when the explanation of said books just not - y'know - getting as many votes as the others is far simpler? Especially when they got the books they wanted to win to win by voting for them? Why is the other side up in arms about what the Sad Puppies did when what they did was just get people to outvote the others in a system that wins based on number of votes?
The Sad Puppies are upset because they feel the prevailing culture at WorldCon encourages voting based on the political beliefs of the author rather than the quality of the work, with unapproved authors being treated dismissively or even abusively.
The other side is upset because they feel the Sad Puppies are conservative white men who are once again trying to silence all other voices, with women and minority authors being treated dismissively or even abusively.
And as with GamerGate, the discourse is taken over by people who actually are dismissive and abusive, and none of the legitimate grievances get addressed. Here's another thing by Correia about his intentions. Here's Vox Day. You will notice a slight difference between the two. Now, here's Kameron Hurley's article in The Atlantic about the controversy, which actually links both blog posts, but then proceeds to say nothing about Correia's statements and focus on the more exciting nemesis that is Vox Day and his ilk.
And I don't entirely blame her for doing that. She's not wrong: the virulent racists and sexists are out there. And when two people disagree with you, but one of them is trying to debate you while the other takes a swing at your face, it's hard to give the debater much attention. But as we all know, on the Internet, paying attention to the trolls just gives them the power. I would much rather have seen her ignore Vox Day entirely and try to address Correia's complaints. Easy for me to say, not being the one at risk of getting harassed and doxxed, but I maintain it's the right move.
There's one other revealing thing in Hurley's article I noticed. It is this: "When I won two awards last year, it seemed like an impossible achievement for me, because I knew the history of the Hugos." She is subscribing to the narrative where people like her still have to struggle to break into this kind of recognition. And if she had won in 1994, she'd probably be right. But she won in 2014. If you know the recent history of the Hugos, Correia's competing narrative that people like him now have to struggle to break into the Hugos starts to look more plausible. Almost all of the winning works of the past decade I'm familiar with can safely be described as progressive, postmodern, or otherwise subversive. The "colonial" attitude that Hurley "explicitly challenges" is nowhere to be seen. With no disrespect intended to her work, which I've never read, she is not exactly smashing any barriers at this point, and the mantle she is taking on here seems both overly self-congratulatory and disingenuous. When I hear stories of being locked out of recognition coming from two different people, I'm naturally going to give credence to the person who didn't win a prestigious award over the person who did. So, again, it would be much better for her to address Correia's complaints rather than spend these words patting herself on the back.
But the primary people at fault for the derailment of the discourse are still the Vox Days, not the people reacting to them. I just don't write paragraphs about that because I think it's obvious enough in a sentence. The correct way to react is what requires some thought.
You get one vote. If you want another vote, you have to find someone else who agrees with you to buy a WorldCon ticket. Like Kahedron said, in principle this is just your basic "best of convention" type award, and the Sad Puppies just a "get out the vote" campaign. If you, say, dropped the ticket requirement and made the ballots free to anyone who requested them or something, they would be doing exactly the same thing. I really don't think the money is a particularly important part of the story here.
Oh, I had figured that if you bought two tickets you got two votes. I agree it's a bit different if that's not the case.
1. I don't care about Hugo, last I knew it was a car
2. The awards ceremony isn't sexy at all
With that stated, I do read a lot and if books wants to be sexy then they need a nerdfest of sorts to actually make me care about it. It's like who wins the Grammy's and the other 50,000 movie award shows to the point that everyone gets a trophy. The real question is mostly sales and the number of years that the author is known and later in public domain how many works are inspired by the very work itself.
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The only one of the R/SP-nominated stories I've read thus far is Wright's "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus", which is awful, boring, and cliche (and was subsequently disqualified from the ballot, since it was first published in 2013). I remember liking The Golden Age--what the hell happened? If this piece is indicative of the general quality of the nominations, I expect a lot of completely earned No Awards.
I don't think what the Sad Puppies did was wrong, but I think it may have permanently rendered the Hugo irrelevant, which is kind of sad. (Sure, you could say that the award was always meaningless because it was determined in such an exploitable way, but it had (to my mind) a pretty good track record.)
If this piece is indicative of the general quality of the nominations, I expect a lot of completely earned No Awards.
Yeah, Wright's stuff is awful (as is Wright). But be careful: isn't making generalizations about works without having read them sort of exactly what the Puppies are complaining about?
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Yeah, Wright's stuff is awful (as is Wright). But be careful: isn't making generalizations about works without having read them sort of exactly what the Puppies are complaining about?
Sure, and I don't mean to blindly besmirch the pieces I haven't read. I meant literally what I said. This piece does not deserve to win what is/was arguably the most prestigious SF award in the English-speaking world. If the other pieces are at this level of quality, they also do not deserve to win.
Reason 1 has to do with a couple of causes. The number of readers in the genre has skyrocketed in the past 20 years, as have the cultural differences within this group.
Have they?
As a consequence, the Hugo awards have become less representative of the genre as a whole and the diversity of themes has increased.
A bigger diversity of themes an ideals would surely be more representative?
Reason 2 is an expected thing. People are going to vote for books on subjects they like, because those are the kinds of books they read. Someone who is interested in a theme of cultural conflicts in a fantasy setting will not read (and thus not vote for) a book that is more driven by action and a good vs evil dynamic.
How does this explain the allegations of the SP group that in the last few years, the selection has become increasingly one-sided?
The sad puppies took the correct counter-strategy: get your own club out to vote. But this fundamentally changes the dynamic of the awards as well, which is what saddened GRRM. Now voting campaigns are imperative. The best campaigning team gets to win the award, so that all votes become voting blocks with no inner independence. Without knowing the background of the votes and the works before this year's ballot, it's hard to say whether Correia's assessment was right. But this seemed to me as an inevitable development either way.
I think this is a very America-centric view, based around the idea that there are only two (opposing) groups.
Reason 3 is hard to prove. Death threats, the spread of misinformation and trolling are all common issues associated with the anonymity of the internet. It is inevitable that you will be subjected to all of these as you get more famous - and this will happen faster if you are more provoking yourself, especially if you attract the attention of idealist movements with a strong militant branch such as socialists, feminists, libertarians and religious fundamentalists. This has nothing to do with the awards. People who seek controversy will always encounter negative publicity. But, as GRRM indicates, negative publicity quite often works positively on fame - something Mr. Correia cannot really complain about. The man who couldn't win a Hugo is about as good as the man who won one.
I would disagree. But then again, it doesn't sounds like a whole lot of fun to me when your wife starts getting messages from old friends asking if she's all right, since people on the internet have been saying you're a wife beater.
If I notice a book and the information I can find on the author suggests his views of the world have strong conflicts with mine, as well as some of his associates I detest from previous experiences, I will not go out and read the work unless there's a good reason otherwise.
Okay, if that's your experience, sure. However, don't extrapolate to others. I disagree strongly with Card's views, but I still read his books, same for Lovecraft.
This is why it is so important to emphasize some explanations of your views you want the readers of your work to now and to emphasize that you at the very least disagree with the people that have been associated to you against your wishes. Unless, of course, you do not have much interest in finding a large audience. Vox Day is a good example of a bad association. It's pretty easy to say that you don't agree with the man on about everything, at almost no cost. The cost to your image is much higher if you refuse to make a statement about it. The upside to this is also that, as soon as someone erroneously makes this association while you have already distanced yourself before, you can simply refer to that and make the bad-mouther look bad himself.
Please, we just need to look at the effectiveness of political smear campaigns to know it's not as simple as this.
Of course, that means it kind of goes both ways. If you want to find more books to your liking, lowering ideological standards is a good way to do it.
What do you mean by this?
Buzzwords like 'racist', 'misogynist' or 'communist' are to be ignored by default unless you can find good substantification. But authors can't expect you to go and read their books if they give you reason to have bad feelings beforehand.
The problem is in this case it's not really the authors themselves giving of bad vibes, but people creating bad vibes around those authors, as with the rumours of racism and wife beating Correia had to deal with.
The only one of the R/SP-nominated stories I've read thus far is Wright's "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus", which is awful, boring, and cliche (and was subsequently disqualified from the ballot, since it was first published in 2013). I remember liking The Golden Age--what the hell happened? If this piece is indicative of the general quality of the nominations, I expect a lot of completely earned No Awards.
Firstly, I think it's unfair to throw the Rabid and the Sad Puppies together. The Rabid Puppy list is suspect for the single reason that Baele added so many books from his own publishing house to the list.
Secondly: I'm not entire familiar with the disqualification stuff, but I'm confused by it. For example: Scalzi first self-published Old Man's War in 2002, but despite that, it was nominated in 2006 for being publish by Tor in 2005. Similar stuff is true for a host of other stories which have been nominated.
If the other pieces are at this level of quality, they also do not deserve to win.
And why would you say that unless you had reason to believe that it might be the case? I meant what I said too: be careful. You can make assumptions without even realizing you're making assumptions.
Firstly, I think it's unfair to throw the Rabid and the Sad Puppies together. The Rabid Puppy list is suspect for the single reason that Baele added so many books from his own publishing house to the list.
Secondly: I'm not entire familiar with the disqualification stuff, but I'm confused by it. For example: Scalzi first self-published Old Man's War in 2002, but despite that, it was nominated in 2006 for being publish by Tor in 2005. Similar stuff is true for a host of other stories which have been nominated.
I suspect people may be flexible on how strictly they interpret the rules depending on the politics. Happens all the time with the Oscars: an unpopular work will have a hard time surviving in the "Best Original Screenplay" or "Best Original Song" category, whereas a popular one will breeze through even when it blatantly isn't.
Me, I'm still trying to figure out the Wheel of Time thing.
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And why would you say that unless you had reason to believe that it might be the case?
Well, I'd say I do have cause to believe it might be the case: any list that included this story was obviously not chosen for merit. There might be good work on the Rabid Puppies slate, but that's incidental to its purpose. There are categories where this slate was extremely influential--every novella nominee, for example, is either a Rabid Puppies nominee, written by Wright, or both. I think worrying a little about quality is justified.
EDIT: This comes off as more negative to the other nominees than I intended. I genuinely think it's possible that there are award-quality nominees on the RP slate. I just also think it's possible there aren't, based on one of the worst stories I've ever read.
That's like a professional football player complaining because his competitive play increases the odds of a debilitating injury. Yeah, true. Now try to avoid that without changing your job or reducing your pay.
On every single issue you will find players active in the online discussions complaining about threats and online harassment. As if this is something caused by the other side, all together, in some sinister conspiracy that can easily be stopped. In reality, online harassment is a natural consequence of the way the internet works right now. It is inevitable unless we change the system, but then we should also accept the other consequences of these changes.
I don't think Correia "signed up for this" any more than Anita Sarkeesian did. At the very least, it is strong evidence for a culture that is irrationally hostile towards him as a person without regard to the merit of his work, which makes it relevant as that's precisely what he's complaining about.
You see a book with an interesting cover. It's about a subject you find intriguing as well, modern eugenics. Then you remember the author as a prominent anti-vaccer. But that's irrelevant right? After all, it's possible that he didn't allow his worldview to have considerable influences on his story.
Orson Scott Card is a bigot. Ender's Game is a call for understanding those who are very different than you.
And you fight those allegations. There's different strategies for that, some more effective than the other depending on the circumstances. They will not work perfectly, as smearing campaigns can be quite effective. But that's no excuse for inaction, nor is it that the smearers are at fault. It doesn't matter if they're at fault if what they do works and they're unlikely to get punished.
Correia appears to be trying to punish the smearers by beating them at the Hugos.
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I completely agree with GRRM on this topic. The Sad Puppies think that one thing is happening but looking at the nominated and the winners of the Hugos in the time they are complaining about, the political views and social views are varied and different and I don't see any indication of there being some sort of voting based on similar ideology going on.
People vote for who they like the best. It makes for a popularity contest, but that's the same with every awards system. It's the same with the Oscars even. The Academy votes for who they like best. The Puppies I think, don't really have a leg to stand on. And now they're sort of conspiring to vote and nominate together to give awards to the authors they like best, which while not against any rules, is really just in bad taste.
I see two really big macrotrends possible as the gay community is more mainstreamed with media:
1. More gay people can write about such issues and enter the media or are already in media will lead to characters such as Ben Grimm or Magneto, they're iconic and do well as a reflection of the genre fiction that the characters live in.
2. More people writing gay characters, with the idea of being "edgy" or "different" like during the 1990's with the whole "dark, gritty and real" anti-heroes. Some of them will survive, we might get some interesting character coming out of left field like Deadpool that's a deconstruction of some sort of developing trope. Eventually people will find their favorite character that happens to be gay, and it becomes mainstreamed along with a parody character. Yet, leaving a remark where there's a lot of mediocrity and junk trying to touch on gay issues, because now it's hip to write about. We might be a decade or two off, but it is certain possibly within specific mediums and does happen as the whole anti-heroes. At worst, we get something like Batwoman become more popular and a bunch of little to no regard characters of little merit until we reach a new equilibrium.
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The Hugo awards are probably the most prestigious science fictions awards handed out at the moment. However, some people felt that left-wing writers with social justice leanings promoted others with the same political leanings so much and came down hard on those outside their group, that the awards were no longer for all science fiction works. To combat this, the last three years a clique of mostly libertarian/right-wing writers and fans have been pushing a list of writers which they felt deserved to be among the nominees, but were excluded by the powers that be. Although they had some minor successes previous year, this time it went exceptionally well, to the point that allmost all nominees came from their lists.
This was not received well, as you might have expected.
I was wondering what you people thought of this. I myself tend to agree with the Puppies.
SOURCES:
- GRRM's view on the events (multipost, linked to only one)
- Correia's response to GRRM
- Some interesting data analysis on the subject of nominees vs winners
I read Correia's books and I was generally underwhelmed by them. As such, I would personally not nominate him for an award based on the merit of his work alone.
I do tend to dislike books where the author injects too much of his/her political views and since I am generally socially liberal I will dislike books with too much or a right-leaning bias more than those with a left-leaning bias simply. It's hard for me to relate to a protagonist who espouses beliefs I find deplorable. I also find that authors with very strong political views have are likely to inject them into their stories. I read one fairly decent military scifi book where the author just could not help himself and put in a strawman gay character to prove how evil and degenerate the other side was. It was completely unnecessary from a plot point and it created very flat characters.
I generally find scifi to be a rather progressive and liberal genre so I would assume that more right-leaning writers would not be as popular.
What these Sad Puppies have been doing is campaigning hard for like-minded people to buy tickets so they can make more nominations and, potentially, votes.
From what Correia said, it sounds like a lot of the Sad Puppies' sadness comes from people making that assumption, and their success this year does rather call that into question. That's just from watching the Hugo politics. Stroll down the aisle at your local Barnes & Noble, and it should be painfully obvious that military SF, alternate history, and the other "non-progressive" subgenres that the Puppies claim to be championing are all really popular.
And even there, the breakdown is a little more complicated than you might think. The two biggest names in military SF are probably David Weber and Eric Flint. Weber is far enough to the right to have a monarchy fetish, but Flint is an actual-factual card-carrying socialist. And they're good friends. They've collaborated on works in each others' universes, and - I would argue - each improved the other by rescuing some characters and factions from strawmanhood.
I suspect that sort of attitude is what this controversy is really about. Not left vs. right per se, but a different cultural divide: the easygoing, entertainment-first, popular fiction typified by writers like Weber and Flint (and their publisher Baen), versus the message-driven, socially conscious fiction that dominated the Hugos (associated with the publisher Tor, but Tor prints a lot of popular stuff too).
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
This is just not true. The issue is that biases which agree with one's own beliefs are more readily accepted and therefore do not stand out in the same way opposing beliefs do.
Does that really matter? You could say the same sort of thing about almost any award ceremony. The issue is: it is seen as one of the, if not the most prestigeous scifi/fantasy award out there.
Can you really though? Where do I pay to get a vote on the Newbery Medal? Normally being able to buy votes would be viewed as a corruption problem.
Regardless of how it's seen, it's clearly an easily gamed system. If you make a system where every $X you give someone gives you a vote, then people are going to buy victories. What else would you expect to happen?
And if the system for determining who wins the award is really stupid, it makes the award really stupid.
That being said, I don't get the complaints on either side. One group is complaining that the stuff they like hasn't been winning lately. They banded together to make their stuff win. Now other people are complaining they did this.
I don't really get how there's anything more to it than that, or how any of this isn't inevitable based on how the Hugo Awards actually work. According to George R. R. Martin, what these Sad Puppies have done is not against the rules. Nor does it sound all that bad. I mean, it seems like they didn't like the books that were winning, so they rallied people to vote for other books. How is this any different from a voter registration rally prior to an election?
I don't get it. On either angle. Why are the Sad Puppies apparently claiming there's some conspiracy keeping the books they want from getting as many votes as the other books when the explanation of said books just not - y'know - getting as many votes as the others is far simpler? Especially when they got the books they wanted to win to win by voting for them? Why is the other side up in arms about what the Sad Puppies did when what they did was just get people to outvote the others in a system that wins based on number of votes?
Is there a bunch of context I'm missing, or is this just really nothing more than two sides butthurt that they lost a popularity contest?
I think it would be sad if the voting devolved into two opposing politics-based monoliths each year; it seems more likely to me that there would be deserving books in each. For example, I believe the latest Dresden Files book is up on the Puppies slate, and I enjoyed that. (And I will continue to enjoy it regardless of whether Puppies and their Gamergate supporters nominate it for a Hugo to get 'salt' from 'SJWs'.)
Here would probably be a good place to start, though it doesn't say if the awards shortlists are drawn up by a particular committee or if the general members get a chance to vote on them.
For your second point votes don't appear to be being sold so I have no idea where your 'corruption' argument is coming from in that sense. People are just handing over $40 to World con for the privilege of voting. No different to people paying their dues to any other organization that holds awards where voting rights are limited to eligible members.
The only difference is until now the Hugo's have been able to put forward a story that they are not decided by some small clique of people like the ALA or the Academy but are decided by the whole body politic of Sci-Foi Fandom. Something that now appears to have been proved false.
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Votes are absolutely being sold. The convention sells you one vote for the cost of a ticket.
The Sad Puppies are upset because they feel the prevailing culture at WorldCon encourages voting based on the political beliefs of the author rather than the quality of the work, with unapproved authors being treated dismissively or even abusively.
The other side is upset because they feel the Sad Puppies are conservative white men who are once again trying to silence all other voices, with women and minority authors being treated dismissively or even abusively.
And as with GamerGate, the discourse is taken over by people who actually are dismissive and abusive, and none of the legitimate grievances get addressed. Here's another thing by Correia about his intentions. Here's Vox Day. You will notice a slight difference between the two. Now, here's Kameron Hurley's article in The Atlantic about the controversy, which actually links both blog posts, but then proceeds to say nothing about Correia's statements and focus on the more exciting nemesis that is Vox Day and his ilk.
And I don't entirely blame her for doing that. She's not wrong: the virulent racists and sexists are out there. And when two people disagree with you, but one of them is trying to debate you while the other takes a swing at your face, it's hard to give the debater much attention. But as we all know, on the Internet, paying attention to the trolls just gives them the power. I would much rather have seen her ignore Vox Day entirely and try to address Correia's complaints. Easy for me to say, not being the one at risk of getting harassed and doxxed, but I maintain it's the right move.
There's one other revealing thing in Hurley's article I noticed. It is this: "When I won two awards last year, it seemed like an impossible achievement for me, because I knew the history of the Hugos." She is subscribing to the narrative where people like her still have to struggle to break into this kind of recognition. And if she had won in 1994, she'd probably be right. But she won in 2014. If you know the recent history of the Hugos, Correia's competing narrative that people like him now have to struggle to break into the Hugos starts to look more plausible. Almost all of the winning works of the past decade I'm familiar with can safely be described as progressive, postmodern, or otherwise subversive. The "colonial" attitude that Hurley "explicitly challenges" is nowhere to be seen. With no disrespect intended to her work, which I've never read, she is not exactly smashing any barriers at this point, and the mantle she is taking on here seems both overly self-congratulatory and disingenuous. When I hear stories of being locked out of recognition coming from two different people, I'm naturally going to give credence to the person who didn't win a prestigious award over the person who did. So, again, it would be much better for her to address Correia's complaints rather than spend these words patting herself on the back.
But the primary people at fault for the derailment of the discourse are still the Vox Days, not the people reacting to them. I just don't write paragraphs about that because I think it's obvious enough in a sentence. The correct way to react is what requires some thought.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Oh, I had figured that if you bought two tickets you got two votes. I agree it's a bit different if that's not the case.
1. I don't care about Hugo, last I knew it was a car
2. The awards ceremony isn't sexy at all
With that stated, I do read a lot and if books wants to be sexy then they need a nerdfest of sorts to actually make me care about it. It's like who wins the Grammy's and the other 50,000 movie award shows to the point that everyone gets a trophy. The real question is mostly sales and the number of years that the author is known and later in public domain how many works are inspired by the very work itself.
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I don't think what the Sad Puppies did was wrong, but I think it may have permanently rendered the Hugo irrelevant, which is kind of sad. (Sure, you could say that the award was always meaningless because it was determined in such an exploitable way, but it had (to my mind) a pretty good track record.)
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Sure, and I don't mean to blindly besmirch the pieces I haven't read. I meant literally what I said. This piece does not deserve to win what is/was arguably the most prestigious SF award in the English-speaking world. If the other pieces are at this level of quality, they also do not deserve to win.
Have they?
A bigger diversity of themes an ideals would surely be more representative?
How does this explain the allegations of the SP group that in the last few years, the selection has become increasingly one-sided?
I think this is a very America-centric view, based around the idea that there are only two (opposing) groups.
I would disagree. But then again, it doesn't sounds like a whole lot of fun to me when your wife starts getting messages from old friends asking if she's all right, since people on the internet have been saying you're a wife beater.
Okay, if that's your experience, sure. However, don't extrapolate to others. I disagree strongly with Card's views, but I still read his books, same for Lovecraft.
Please, we just need to look at the effectiveness of political smear campaigns to know it's not as simple as this.
What do you mean by this?
The problem is in this case it's not really the authors themselves giving of bad vibes, but people creating bad vibes around those authors, as with the rumours of racism and wife beating Correia had to deal with.
Firstly, I think it's unfair to throw the Rabid and the Sad Puppies together. The Rabid Puppy list is suspect for the single reason that Baele added so many books from his own publishing house to the list.
Secondly: I'm not entire familiar with the disqualification stuff, but I'm confused by it. For example: Scalzi first self-published Old Man's War in 2002, but despite that, it was nominated in 2006 for being publish by Tor in 2005. Similar stuff is true for a host of other stories which have been nominated.
EDIT: Some interesting data analysis on the subject of nominees vs winners: http://linkis.com/nathanielgivens.com/GSaUy
And also for the reason that they're rabid.
I suspect people may be flexible on how strictly they interpret the rules depending on the politics. Happens all the time with the Oscars: an unpopular work will have a hard time surviving in the "Best Original Screenplay" or "Best Original Song" category, whereas a popular one will breeze through even when it blatantly isn't.
Me, I'm still trying to figure out the Wheel of Time thing.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Well, I'd say I do have cause to believe it might be the case: any list that included this story was obviously not chosen for merit. There might be good work on the Rabid Puppies slate, but that's incidental to its purpose. There are categories where this slate was extremely influential--every novella nominee, for example, is either a Rabid Puppies nominee, written by Wright, or both. I think worrying a little about quality is justified.
EDIT: This comes off as more negative to the other nominees than I intended. I genuinely think it's possible that there are award-quality nominees on the RP slate. I just also think it's possible there aren't, based on one of the worst stories I've ever read.
Orson Scott Card is a bigot. Ender's Game is a call for understanding those who are very different than you.
Correia appears to be trying to punish the smearers by beating them at the Hugos.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
People vote for who they like the best. It makes for a popularity contest, but that's the same with every awards system. It's the same with the Oscars even. The Academy votes for who they like best. The Puppies I think, don't really have a leg to stand on. And now they're sort of conspiring to vote and nominate together to give awards to the authors they like best, which while not against any rules, is really just in bad taste.
1. More gay people can write about such issues and enter the media or are already in media will lead to characters such as Ben Grimm or Magneto, they're iconic and do well as a reflection of the genre fiction that the characters live in.
2. More people writing gay characters, with the idea of being "edgy" or "different" like during the 1990's with the whole "dark, gritty and real" anti-heroes. Some of them will survive, we might get some interesting character coming out of left field like Deadpool that's a deconstruction of some sort of developing trope. Eventually people will find their favorite character that happens to be gay, and it becomes mainstreamed along with a parody character. Yet, leaving a remark where there's a lot of mediocrity and junk trying to touch on gay issues, because now it's hip to write about. We might be a decade or two off, but it is certain possibly within specific mediums and does happen as the whole anti-heroes. At worst, we get something like Batwoman become more popular and a bunch of little to no regard characters of little merit until we reach a new equilibrium.
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