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Hugos Refuse To Award Anyone Rather Than Submit To Fans' Votes
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.)
...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...
(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.)
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.
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.
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?
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
So the people who voted No award are "minions" of John Scalzi. And you're suggesting that he only has to suggest it and hundreds of people with fork out $40 each so that they can do exactly what he says? Are you serious? Novels cost - what - $10? So you think people are going to spend four times the price of one of his novels just so that they can vote according to his instructions. What would they gain from that?
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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...
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 ?
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 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.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
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.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
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
Citation needed.
Fans are part of society. They have always been rather more welcoming of minorities and women than society (if tri-gendered species can be competent, then stating that women cannot be competent is odd), but as society has become more accepting of others so has fandom.
Now some puppies (who are part of fandom, but not the whole) have started saying that fandom is TOO accepting. Which confused many people. And the puppies nominated works based on the political views of the authors rather than on the qualities of the work. So when you don't select works based on quality, those works don't tend to win awards given to the best-quality works. Seems reasonable.
Note that nobody came from outside. And the people who tried to "change" fandom were the puppies, not the rest of fandom. Turns out that a majority of fans are happy with diversity; if you're not, well, that's fine, but please stop blaming "ideologues from the outside".
That "summary" is just a whiny fantrum. Pathetic.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
So wait... your way of attacking the "SJWs" would be to vote WITH them and against their homophobic, white supremacist opponents ?
Whose side are you on here ? That's like if Sauron tried to stop Frodo by destroying the ring himself !
As an aside, you guys really need to find a better insult for people like me than "social justice warrior", which as Will Wheaton so elloquently put it "is not the insult you think it is".
Seriously - you are not doing yourselves any favors by giving the people you claim to be fighting a name that sounds like a particularly awesome superhero team !
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
(and re-posted ACTUALLY logged in this time. Sigh.) Literally anyone could vote if they signed up. The Puppies lost a POPULAR democratic vote. Their original argument was that their preferences were more populist and would win the popular vote, but the nominations process was being secretly block voted by a small shadowy liberal cabal to keep populist authors off the nominees list if favor of more preachy, pro-liberal agenda authors. This was the stated reason for their publicly arranged block voting of nominees, to provide the popular vote with a choice they felt was lacking. The voting fandom responded massively against them. So now, they are arguing that the popular vote is rigged by the shadowy cabal as well, except it's now not a tiny cabal, it's the majority of fans. Which is less a sneaky cabal of so called "SJWs" and more, you know, most people. If their actions had supported their "populist" argument, they would provably have carried the day. But putting up people like Kevin J. "suncrusher-I-ruined-star-wars-long-before-jar-jar" Anderson and highly divisive figures like John C Wright and the Rabid Puppies Vox Day up on their slate as the poster boys for their "populist" argument probably didn't help, if they'd put up more genuinely popular, genuinely decent authors like Jim Butcher then their argument may have been a hell of a lot more compelling and effective. John C Wright and Vox Day were up their simply to provoke outrage at their views, not because of the quality of their writing. Which, at least in the case of Vox Day, is objectively terrible. Many of the puppies chosen authors (not all) were...not actually all that good. Not innovative, or exciting, or fun, or smart. They did not make me think, or shout with Joy, or smile (with, of course, the exception of the excellent Jim Butcher). Most of the winners did. The no awards were mostly, as far as I can tell, a reaction to the politicization of the awards. And whatever the puppies argument that the awards were always political, these campaigns are what made them so in the public consciousness. By making a political argument for the vote, the puppies forced everyone else to consider the awards in a political, rather than creative context. the trouble there was, when people did consider the issue politically, they decided they didn't agree with the puppies, as evidenced by, you know, the POPULAR VOTE!
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.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
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. . . .