Hugo Awards Turn (Even More) Political

An anonymous reader writes Last year, the Hugo Awards went to mostly minorities and women. In response, a fan group decided to fight back against what they saw as a liberal attack on their medium. It appears that they have succeeded, as the 2015 nominees are predominantly chosen by a group called "Sad Puppies. Now a counter-counter group is trying to ensure that no one wins any Hugo awards in any category except Best Novel.

Comments

Yeah good luck with that...

[Mashiki]

Seems like the vocal minority is finally running up against people who've had enough...they're using their own tactics against them, and whining when people beat them at their own game. Oh and it wasn't liberals(tip it was mainly liberals that started the campaign) it was that lovely 'social justice warrior' crowd, that loves to call anyone who disagrees with them 'bigots, misogynists, racists, etc, etc, etc.'

Re:Yeah good luck with that...

[LWATCDR]

THe problem is that they really missed the target.
The goal is not to have more people of color, women, or one eye gay Episcopalian kangaroos to win awards,
The point is for everyone have an equal chance to win the awards based on the quality of their work.
AKA the issue should never have been one of inclusion. It needs to be one of ending exclusion.

Re:Yeah good luck with that...

[JaredOfEuropa]

Was that really the goal of the "SJW" group? This quote from TFA is spot-on:

Wherever they emerge, social-justice warriors claim to be champions of diversity. But they always reveal themselves to be relentlessly hostile to it: they applaud people of different genders, races, and cultures just so long as those people all think the same way. Theirs is a diversity of the trivial; a diversity of skin-deep, ephemeral affiliations.

SJW of all stripes have one thing in common: a relentless drive for conformist groupthink on the issues they fight for. Few people are as scary and dangerous as the ones who are convinced that theirs is a righteous battle, and are prepared to fight it, whether their belief flows from religion or from ideals. And what appears to make the SJW crowd more belligerent is the fact that often they are right, in that there are still plenty of inequities and social injustices. Compared to other "noisy" groups like extreme right wingers, these are the noisiest, most exclusionary, and indeed most violent. And the really scary part is that because the issues they attack are real, this mindset is percolating into the mainstream. Writers being excluded from an association or from an award because they have the wrong ideas. Or in my home country, where no one so much as blinked when a school official stated that "if you have the wrong ideas or are a member of the wrong political party, perhaps you shouldn't be a student or a teacher here". Remember Churchill: "The fascists of the future will be called anti-fascists".

Re:Yeah good luck with that...

[ageoffri]

You've got this backwards. John Scalzi has pushed his own slate in the past. It is constantly down played because he is a "right" author instead of a "wrong fan". This sort of gaming is nothing new to the Hugo's, what is new is that a conservative / middle of the road political group has published a slate and encouraged new blood to get involved with the Hugo's.

Re:Yeah good luck with that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well DUH - The SJW crowd has pushed and pushed and the group that they targeted as being "hateful and teh mean" has finally responded to their attacks IN KIND. So it's not surprising that they're "just like the SJW crowd".

Want a current example? Sabrina Erdely and the Rolling Stone magazine apologized to practically everyone involved in the rape article they wrote and published... EXCEPT the male fraternity that was accused, shutdown and subjected to harassment threats because of the now unsubstantiated rape claims in the article.

Why? Perhaps they're using the Dan Rather defense - The rape accusations are unproven but what they say is true. Because, to the SJW crowd, all rape accusations against males should be true until they're proven false. The same is not true for female on male rape, which is real, happens, but is pooh-pooh'd by even the SJW crowd because "Male privilege"

More true than you feared.

Why We Believed Jackie's Rape Story
Because it rang true for so many of us on the University of Virginia campus.

WHAT "rang true"? It was ALL fake. If it "rang true", one has to ask WHY THE HELL DID YOU WANT IT TO BE TRUE?!?!?! Why do you WANT men - especially white men - to all be seen as rapists?

So yeah, there's a problem here.

With the "SJWs" living on a planet where the sky isn't blue.

I am drained. I am confused. But I keep returning to one question. If everyone here believed Jackie’s story until yesterday — a story in which she is violently raped by seven men at a fraternity house as part of a planned initiation ritual — should we not still be concerned?

What a dumbass. If "everyone here believed Jackie's story", it never would have been repudiated. Those seven men would be in jail based on SJW "justice".

So yeah, we SHOULD be concerned, but not FOR those who scream "Rape culture!", but BECAUSE of those who do. Those who scream "RAPE CULTURE!!!!" have punished innocents in this case, and had they had their way the courts and police would have convicted them and jailed them.

And in so doing, they have cheapened the claims of every woman who was actually raped.

Way to go, assholes.

And the idiots even literally SAY they don't really care about reality:

Ultimately, though, from where I sit in Charlottesville, to let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake.

What.

A.

Moron.

Re:Yeah good luck with that...

[Livius]

SJW of all stripes have one thing in common: a relentless drive for conformist groupthink on the issues they fight for.

I would say it's not so much groupthink, rather it's that once you define yourself as a social justice warrior, your very identity is threatened unless you are crusading against a social injustice. Thus many will crusade against an imagined injustice, or a former injustice that is resolved or very nearly resolved, rather than search for less glamorous injustices or accept that they might have achieved victory.

Systemic biases do exist, of course, but more and more they are so minor that it's difficult to find a response that isn't disproportionate.

The HUGOs have always been about politics

[argStyopa]

Choosing someone for 'best author' because they're white and male is ridiculous.
What doesn't ever seem to sink into the discussion is that choosing a 'best author' because they're NOT white and male is equally ridiculous.

Then again, to accept that latter proposition would then logically bankrupt the entire concept of 'retributive' racism - ie preferentially picking brown or ovaried-people today, to correct the mistakes of previous generations - so I guess I understand that there's a whole dogma there that would have to be disassembled first.

Re:The HUGOs have always been about politics

[DerekLyons]

Choosing someone for 'best author' because they're white and male is ridiculous.
What doesn't ever seem to sink into the discussion is that choosing a 'best author' because they're NOT white and male is equally ridiculous.

True, on both counts.

What's not true is the summary, or the article linked. (It's essential the Faux News version of events.) The Sad Puppies movement isn't really about choosing authors or works based on their color, sex, or creed. The Sad Puppies movement is about two things; First, breaking the "monopoly" of a small group of tastemakers in the nomination process. Second, breaking the "monopoly" of the same small group in determining the winners of the poll. Or, to sum up both in another way, the movement is about overcoming voter apathy and broadening the base of nominated works and voters to include a larger and more representative slice of works and fandom.

Seriously, only a few thousand voters in total currently determine the nominees and the ultimate winners - out of a worldwide fanbase numbering in the millions. Those relative few that have dominated the nomination and selection process for decades (and the idiots who parrot their propaganda) are responding in the typical fashion of the "elites" - by demonizing those who would dare to challenge the self assumed predominance that is theirs by right. They, and the idiots who spout their propaganda, are the ones that invented the idea that Sad Puppies is all about skin color and the presence or absence of ovaries.

On top of that, there's the whole "Johnny come lately" attitude typical of any fandom that faces a sudden influx of "new" fans. The tastemaker elite loathes the "new fan". (Not that the issue is actually new, the roots of the issue (and "political" battles over the Hugos) stretch back to the sudden breakdown of the SF ghetto walls in the late 70's and early 80's when Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons broke out into popular culture.) But what they feel about the "new fan" is positively puppies and kittens and sunshine compared compared to the antipathy and loathing they feel towards pop culture - their slogan is (or at least should be) "Nerdom for Nerds!".

Re: Oh, Okay

[Anonymous Coward]

No irony at all - the reason for the backlash is because the books that were written by women and minorities were barely "Scifi" at all and were obviously voted in because they "said the right things" rather than be poignant and proper science fiction.

Because I'm sure you noted that the books that were voted on by "teh evil" fan group INCLUDED books by women and minorities.

So what's the argument here? That women and minorities were being shut out or that the women and minorities that are now on this years ballot "didn't say the right things?"

Re: Oh, Okay

[TWX]

They wrote something that people liked to read or watch?

Re: Oh, Okay

[_Sharp'r_]

The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies slates weren't about not having women and minorities win. Both slates included several women and minorities and even some left-wing writers who had to be publicly "horrified" the wrong people liked their work.

They're about wanting Hugo nominees/winners that reflect science fiction and what they consider the best story, rather than the last decade or so style of being nominated because the author is a leftist non-white male who includes the properly politically correct representatives in their story, even though the story itself isn't remotely the best SF story of the year. They're about wanting the winners to reflect SF fans, rather than just a small insular group of NY elites in the publishing business. Looking at you, Tor.

If you wonder why there seems to be a big gap of 12-15 years where not a lot of new good SF authors came out in book form, except from Baen, it's because the literary elite decided SF should be about identity politics instead of about science and speculation. SP/RP are about taking the field back for real SF that the fans of SF like, not the kind where it's "important" because it shows a woman musing about how the evil corporations are ruining the environment but if only her homosexual boyfriend would wake up from his coma they could live happily ever after mutually respecting each other in hipster anguish. -Gasp-

Re:So, the end result is ...

[ageoffri]

As opposed to the Tor dominated Hugo's that had a blacklist of authors. The Hugo's have been political for a long time, but it was an unopposed political bias. Now the politics have been challenged.

Have you seen the numerous reviewers and authors who have stated that they will not read any Sad Puppies related work because it is was part of the slate? They have already come to the conclusion that anything Sad Puppies related is not worthy of winning a Hugo. Some have said they will read the Sad Puppies works but regardless of merit will rank them below No Award because of politics.

What a lying, bullshit summary!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sad Puppies campaign has nothing to do with "minorities and women" winning awards, it had everything to do with Social Justice Warriors taking down and doxxing people for disagreeing with them and trying to impose censorship and speech controls on organizations like SFWA.

In fact this entire, "if you oppose the Social Justice Warrior agenda you hate women and minorities" slight of hand bullshit is one of the very things the sad puppies are fighting against. Thanks for proving the necessity of that fight yet again.

the post is a lie

[Banner]

Wow, this post contains epic amounts of FUD and just pure lying.
First of all, the Sad Puppies group started over two years ago.
Second of all, the response was due to stories being subjected to an ideological purity test before being allowed to win.
Third of all, the stories were no longer about telling a story, but were all about 'sending the right (approved) political message' which was killing the medium.
Fourth of all, several of the awards went to things that not only had nothing to do with Science Fiction or Fantasy, but they sucked ('If you were a dinosaur my love'?? Really?)

Go read all the official Sad Puppies posts, make your own decision. Also I'm pretty sure there are more women nominated this year, than there were last year, and that's from the SP Slate. Don't forget as well, that the SP project was started by a minority.

Last note: The Hugo's have been gamed for a very long time now, look at how many were won by only one publisher. The author of 'Red Shirts' heavily gamed the system the year he won, but no one said a word about that. The promotion of 'message fiction' has seriously hurt the genre, and sales have been going down for years, because most of what's been winning the Hugo's the last five or so years has been crap. Heck, Terry Pratchet couldn't even win a Hugo!!
The awards should be about GOOD stories, not about Politically Correct stories written by the 'RIGHT' person! The very fact that the person writing this story had to LIE about the reason for Sad Puppies, and is more focused on the sex and race of writers should make that pretty clear right off the top.