Slashdot Mirror
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.)
It's like Slashdot doesn't even try any more.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
The headline there is stupid. The result IS the fan's votes. In six categories "No Award" won the vote.
This sums it up pretty well: http://io9.com/how-the-hugo-aw...
"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."
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.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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?
The Hugos are a fan vote, not a judge vote. The fans voted: they rejected an attempt by two groups, one a band of right wing extremists, the other a kinda "We feel in our gut that previous winners are left wing but can't come up with a coherent reason why", to hijack the awards by gaming the nomination process.
The two groups, Vox Day's "Rabid Puppies" (the right wing extremists), and the "Sad Puppies", attempted (mostly successfully) to force fans to choose between only works they believed were ideologically sound by focusing nomination votes on two slates. With fans only able to vote for the highest supported works, there was a strong chance each ballot would only have Puppy-supported works on it. This happened in a number of ballots.
The fans said no. The choices we're stuck with suck. We'd rather not vote for anyone.
The headline is an outright unmitigated lie. The fans voted. They rejected the slates they were offered. The Hugos accepted the fan's choices here.
(And how ironic that supporters use the SJW canard when both Puppy campaigns were blatant attempts to prevent anyone voting for anything that might be ideologically unsound to the grounds involved.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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?”
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
> 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.
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.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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.
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."
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...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
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.
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.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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 feel the need to invoke "SJWs" to explain the outcome. If somebody wanted a different outcome, they should have registered and voted.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
GamerGate has nothing to do with this, apart for the same ideologues pushing their wacky postmodern agenda, If you think this is just some right wing push back, your so off it's a joke. I have voted liberal all my life, I am bisexual and I am sick of people using my sexuality as shield for their shitty behaviour. After SPJ airplay your hate mob narrative is nothing but ideological bias, keep drinking that Kool aid.
I trust him more than [xx]
Your fallacy is false dichotomy. 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."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
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. In truth to me it looks like the SJW has poisoned it to spite another diversity.
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...
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.
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).
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
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.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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 (archive version) 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."
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) affect the awards of the Hugos? This is a serious question - I really want to know what you think.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Yes, the Slashdot readership will greatly miss the five posts you have made over the last four years.
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".
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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 one of eclecticism; Starship Troopers wins Best Novel one year, Canticle for Leibowitz the next. Occasionally there's run for a couple of years for one kind of story or another.
I don't think Torgeson, Correia et al are racists, homophobes, or misogynists. Their feelings were hurt by not winning. Writers are sensitive, even writers of manly adventure stories. It's abundantly clear that they're in denial about their hurt feelings, so they're trying to advance the idea that there's some kind of conspiracy against them, but they don't really care that much.
I don't even think Vox Day is a racist or misogynist. He's a griefer out for attention. That's why he feels he's won no matter what the ballot outcome. It's not a victory that an ordinary person would recognize as such (which would involve the other guy realizing he's lost). The Sad Puppies weren't victims until they decided to play footsie with Day; it's not SJWs or CHORFs doing the victimizing, it's the Rabids.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If the shoe were on the other foot, the rally cry would be for the liberals to go establish their own award and awards process. Why can't the conservatives do the same? Yeah, we know that slashdot has catered to the right for some time (note the breitbart link in the summary as yet another of thousands of front-page examples here) but really the hypocrisy here is rather extreme.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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, and more details on the exact votes here.
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.
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 turned out to be exactly what happened?
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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", 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.
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
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.
...turns out, it isn't as easy as you thought to rig an election. it's not their authors being "conservative" that makes those books lose. incidentially they are all - sometimes entertaining - pulp novels. it's the quality, stupid.
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."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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".
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
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 to The City and the Stars is awful. Then again, MHI by Correia is miles better than Redshirts. I've never understood that particular award. Actually, *anything* by Scalzi is better than Redshirts. A miss, IMO.
But once Correia (or John Ringo, or Travis S. Taylor) create something that's really different from "upgraded western or war story" I'd be all for it. It's not that they can't write, it's just that their characters are so.. cardboard. Women are fuckable housewives, the "real" men are muscled jocks, we have the nerds, ... and let's not discuss the bad guys. If they aren't union organizers, or environmentalists, they're Democrats. If you read a lot of Ringo in one go, even the characternames start to become predictable.
Anyway, I didn't vote. But I'm curious to hear from the voters - anyone here?
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
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.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
This site, while not a smoking gun, is fairly good evidence.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
"The facts of this case are the same as in gaming and in every other industry that social justice warriors touch. They do not care about art forms. They do not care about science fiction. They do not even particularly care about talent. They care about enriching and ennobling themselves and their friends, and pushing a twisted, discredited, divisive brand of authoritarian politics."
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 stuff being published, and a relatively small body of people nominating things, it's a system where even a very small organized voting bloc can get something on the ballot. This isn't the first time this has come up, even, though it's the first time there's been a slate that I know of. There are a number of reforms to the nomination system being looked at, so things might be changing.)
Card... So, you do know that opposition to gay marriage is only one of the more recent bits there? And he takes it an awful lot further than a lot of people seem compelled to by their faiths. He was, at one time, one of my favorite authors. I attended one of his Secular Humanist Revivals way back when. He seemed to be a great guy. I mean, this was back when the net was flat, and I was a young thing, but still. ...and I guess I should be glad that the quality of his writing had been falling off by the time I heard about him writing about how there should be laws criminalizing homosexuality, which should then be selectively enforced to keep the unruly ones in their places. *boggle* The volume has increased and decreased at various times over the years, but I do think there's a difference, at least in degree between someone thinking that their own religion is a great reason some other people entirely shouldn't be able to get married, and their own religion is a great reason those people should be thrown in fail unless their keep their heads and voices down. Ew.
(Of course, as a bi woman it's perhaps not surprising that I'd take this a bit personally.)
"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.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
A while back the Hugos stopped being about the best science fiction and started being about social justice.
1970: Best Novel: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Hugos have always been about the best science fiction. Much of the best science fiction, like the 1970 best novel, is also about "social justice". But it sounds like you never read the old Hugo winners, so how would you know that?
The terribly slanted summary aside, I think ultimately this has shown that the process is borked to high heaven. Even if I give every point the No Award crowd seems to be pushing, which I certainly would not, they have shown that they will vote as an ideological block themselves to a degree that completely eclipsed the 'problem' group. All you have proven is your system is woefully broke and subject to ideological influence over all else. It is rather sad. It has proven to me that unless the Hugos completely overhaul there methodology, they are worthless, and just a matter of who can rally the biggest crowd of supporters, rather than anything to do with actual worth of the work.
And yet... David Weber has been publishing for 25 years and never even been nominated for a Hugo in all that time, but he's just one of those Baen authors, right?
The Sad Puppies point isn't that it's not ok to nominate left-wing authors, or women, or minorities, etc... they nominated some themselves, but that your publishing house or your SJW credentials shouldn't be the most important thing for the results of the vote, the story you wrote should be.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
No, it's because the overwhelming evidence was that they didn't vote for books they liked. They voted for books they were told to vote for, blindly following a slate, instead of voting for the their own preferences. I suspect that many of them never even read the works they nominated. They didn't have to—their great leader, whose ass they have their heads firmly wedged up, told them to vote for it, so they did.
What was the best reading/watching this year? The nominees, or some stuff that didn't clear the nomination cut? This whole thing seems kind of confusing.
It's always been tricky to define just what "Science Fiction" is. I can't really think of even one story that didn't play fast and loose with the laws of physics as known that I would consider science fiction, but if you are too fast and loose you don't qualify.
FWIW, Isasc Asimov had an anthology called "Earth is Room Enough" which was entirely composed of stories he'd written that has just happened to take place entirely on Earth. No rocket ships needed. There's a series called "Dance of the Gods" (don't remember the author offhand) that starts off as apparent swords and sorcery fantasy and slowly, over the course of four volumes, morphs into rather hard science fiction. (I don't really believe that physics allows what is proposed, but I'm not certain.)
And nearly anything can be done if you just invoke virtual reality nested sufficiently.
So "best Science Fiction story" is a totally ill-defined concept. You can't even exclude "Jude the Obscure" by Thomas Hardy. (I hated that in English Lit., but it attempted to be slice of life in the 1800's, or maybe 1700's.) You might, however, argue against "Finnegan's Wake" because it doesn't appear (on the surface) to have much plot.
Now when I was in my 20's I really liked "Cosmic Engineers", which is fantasy in the Science Fiction metaphor, but I also liked "Mission of Gravity" which attempted to be scientifically accurate (except for faster than light space ships). And I also liked "Sentinels from Space", which was another fantasy wrapped up to look like science fiction. The thing is, all of those were always described as just science fiction. I also liked the lensman series and the skylark series, which were politics wrapped in a science fiction metaphor. And were always described as science fiction. isn't something new.
Actually, the genesis probably goes back to the British "New Wave" science fiction of the 1960's or 70's. That was when science fiction authors started paying attention to characterization, etc. (Never mind that some authors had always done so, they'd been exceptions during the 1940's and 50's.)
If you organize slate voting, don't be surprised if some opposition arises. It will, if only as a fission within your existing slate. I rather hope that the rules amendment that has passed it's first vote passes the second vote and solves the problem. At least I hope it makes stuffing the nominations 5 times as difficult, as is its intention.
For more details about this from an author's point of view see:
Bad puppies, no awards under http://www.antipope.org/charli...
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
(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!
I know. Isn't it terrible that the commieliberals want good writing to be given a Hugo award. And if they don't get their way in having good writing in the nominations, they'll just take their award and go home.
Wait what, is there something objectionable there?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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?