Slashdot Mirror
2016 Hugo Awards Shortlist Dominated By Rightwing Campaign (theguardian.com)
Dave Knott quotes a report from The Guardian: The annual Hugo awards for the best science fiction of the year have once again been riven by controversy, as a concerted campaign by a conservative lobby has dominated the ballot. The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies movements, which both separately campaign against a perceived bias towards liberal and leftwing science-fiction and fantasy authors, have managed to get the majority of their preferred nominations on to the final ballot, announced today. Since 2013, the Puppies factions have posted recommendations of works to combat the Hugo tendency to reward works that leaders of the movement deem "niche, academic, overtly to the left in ideology and flavor, and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun." The Rabid Puppies has been successful in getting its nominations on the shortlist again this year; out of 80 recommendations, 62 have received sufficient votes to make the ballot. At MidAmeriCon II this year, it was announced that more than 4,000 nominating ballots were cast for the 2016 Hugo awards, almost double the previous record of 2,122 ballots. This news was initially greeted with cautious optimism, but the shortlist shows that the Puppies and their supporters have redoubled their efforts to "game" the awards. The shortlist will be voted upon and the winners revealed at the forthcoming Worldcon in Kansas in August.
Not right wing, rather, opposed to social justice snowflakes, whiners and crybullies.
you have never been controlled by a conservative, libertarian or constitutionalist. Conservatives and their fellows work towards smaller, less intrusive government (we don't force you to purchase healthcare you do not need, for instance). Small governments don't have the time or the resources to waste on individuals unless they are law breakers.
You're (and you not alone judging by the thoughtless comments above and below) are just repeating what someone else has told you. Given the Progressive Establishment has controlled education in the West since before WWII, I can guess where your misinformation began.
Maybe it shows that the people who have BEEN gaming the awards for the last couple of decades are finally being outnumbered by people who actually vote for good writing, instead of politically-acceptable dross. Up until a year or so ago, there was a huge amount of campaigning for Hugo awards. Now, the same people who used to get nominated regularly by doing so are whining because someone else is also campaigning - and getting nominated instead of one of their friends.
The people running the Hugos whine about ""Republicans" - but go and actually LOOK at the nominees from the Sad Puppies. There's actual political diversity there, not the progressive sameness of a typical Hugo ballot.
The claim that people want "right-wing" books to win rather than just good books is basically being made up. It's not symmetrical.
I'm OK with the Hugos being about "swashbuckling fun". They've always been a fan's choice award anyway, for the lowest common denominator. There are other awards for serious science fiction. The Hugos are for people who think Star Wars is science fiction.
Let's see how much attention the Hugos get once they start giving awards to talentless self-publishers like Vox Day.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I've never been into reading science fiction, but I've watched plenty of it on TV. I'll take Star Trek for example, which had a clear left wing bias to it. When it's done right, the end result can be very entertaining. When the message is too overt, it takes away from the story. Balance of Terror was one of the great TOS episodes. Racism was a major theme of that episode, but it was also one of the great TOS episodes because of how it makes its point and the overall quality of the story. Birth control was the major theme of The Mark of Gideon, which began as a rather creepy and interesting episode, but generated into a very overt point about birth control. Kirk's speech about birth control before the leaders of Gideon and the conclusion of the episode really took away from things. TNG didn't feel as political, but it had its moments. When done right, in stories like The Drumhead, it was also really good.
DS9 was all about politics and war, but it was, IMO, the best of the Star Trek series. The writing and acting were excellent, and it certainly wasn't a soap opera in the Delta Quadrant. They didn't portray it as a battle of good (the Federation) and evil (the Dominion), but characters that were all somewhere in between. The Ferengi were certainly representative of modern capitalists, but they were interesting, entertaining, likeable characters who weren't portrayed as buffoons like in TNG. The views on war weren't overt but rather shown through their effects on characters you cared about. It was absolutely left wing, but it was also really good.
It's not Star Trek, but I really didn't care for Torchwood. Doctor Who certainly touched on politics in plenty of episodes. Terry Nation created the Daleks as an allegory for the Nazis, which was really developed in later episodes from the classic series. Genesis of the Daleks was an outstanding story, which certainly had a political theme to it. Torchwood just seemed way too much in your face to be likeable.
I think a lot of good science fiction has a left wing bias to it, based on what I've seen. I'm okay with that. I'm sure it can be done well with a conservative bias, though it seems to be less frequent. I think left wing politics in science fiction are fine, but it can take away from the story when it's too overt.
...that's wrong.
While some of the folks behind the Sad Puppies movement are definitely right-wing, or Libertarian, or something similar, their nominations are all over the map, because they didn't run their nominations through a political filter before putting them up.
On the other hand, the left-wing types who have been running the Hugos process for a long time have been... less honest about it. They whine about the Puppies "promoting" books for the award, while people like John Scalzi have been doing it for years. For that matter, touting books for the Hugo has been a part of the process as far back as I can remember (and I've been in and around fandom most of my life).
It's not republicans, it's not conservatives, there's nothing right-wing about the Sad Puppies. I can't blame the submitter for the terrible summary, because it's just copied from the article, but maybe I can blame the submitter for linking to a terrible article? The Sad Puppies are just a group who felt that sci-fi was getting too preachy and wanted to promote some lighter fare. That's it. the website. I had a ridiculous time finding that, since the top search page is just full of articles talking about how awful these people are. It's appalling how one-sided the reporting on this is.
The Rabid Puppies are something else. They seized on this idea and decided to make it more political - I'm not sure that calling them right-wing is accurate, more like anti left-wing, but these are separate groups with separate goals.
The Hugos have always had how to vote cards. It's just now it's common knowledge.
Translation; I'm going to force you to have an unwanted baby, but I bear no responsibility for the end result of the force.
Good old reactionary conservatives. Quick to tell people waht to do, but greedy sociopaths in every other way.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Speaking of dishonest, I present you with a quote from the biggest liar of the day (so far):
For the last few decades, a small cabal has run the Hugos as their own personal award mill, and they ensured that nearly nothing could win if it didn't fit their ideology.
And guess what, sales figures show pretty damn clearly that people do NOT enjoy reading that crap. Go check the long tail sales figures on some winners and nominees. It isn't hard to find single books by pre-SJW writers selling more copies per year than a decade's worth of Hugo winners.
And the claim that Day is pushing for ideological purity is totally fucking insane and can be trivially disproved by reading nothing more than one-paragraph summaries of the nominated works. There is no common ideology in the puppy lists.
You are a lost cause, but I urge anyone else reading this to go see for themselves.
See that "Preview" button?
I think the "left-wing" label mostly only exists in the minds of these activists - it's a catch-all for "any work that discusses topics or espouses positions that we are uncomfortable with".
The typical Sad Puppies member is not so much decrying "left-wing" as decrying SJW-ish works. Have you read "If You Were a Dinosaur My Love"? I refuse to believe that it was the best short fiction in its year, but it got nominated for the Hugo. Was it because it checked the right boxes... SJW themes, written by a woman?
http://www.apex-magazine.com/if-you-were-a-dinosaur-my-love/
http://difficultrun.nathanielgivens.com/2015/02/10/the-hugo-awards-dinosaurs-and-me/
I would absolutely classify most of John Scalzi's books as "swashbuckling fun", but they hate Scalzi.
I think it's not so much that they hate his books, and more that they hate Scalzi the man, and that pretty much because he hated them first.
My respect for Scalzi plummeted when I read him taunting Larry Correia on Twitter. I've met 5-year-old children with more good manners and dignity.
Larry Correia collected the juvenile taunts in this blog posting: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/6846396-hugo-aftermath-post
The other part of it is that they hate Scalzi because they believe he is connected with the behind-the-scenes clique or cliques that used to decide who got the Hugo. I've never met anyone who genuinely believed that Redshirts was the best novel of its year, deserving of Hugo status; I've heard it is a light and fun read ("swashbuckling" maybe?) but it can't have been the best novel published that year. Somewhat more egregiously, Scalzi published a book of stuff from his blog and that won a Hugo also, and then as part of the Sad Puppies firestorm the cliquish types claimed that some of the Sad Puppies nominations were not sufficiently scholarly and were an insult to the Hugo. I don't know about you, but I hate double standards, and here a double standard was applied to the benefit of Scalzi.
http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/03/31/sad-puppies-update-the-melt-down-continues/
I suspect they don't like Lois McMaster Bujold very much either, since she frequently explores gender issues - but most of her books are also pure space opera.
Oh no, not at all. The Sad Puppies are not a homogeneous bunch, but on the whole they love Lois McMaster Bujold. If you know only one thing about a book, that it was published by Baen, you know that the Sad Puppies probably like that book. Not a slam dunk, but that's the way to bet.
Lois McMaster Bujold writes entertaining books. The Sad Puppies like entertaining books. Her books aren't loaded down with SJW freight; it's interesting to see how a strong and independent woman from Beta Colony reacts to the strangely backward society of Barrayar.
Remember how the Sad Puppies nominated Toni Weisskopf? She's the senior editor at Baen. She edited Lois McMaster Bujold's books. The Sad Puppies nominated her for a Hugo for editing.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
This is correct.
Posting anonymously, as I work at a university and do not want to be seen defending conservatives.
The Sad and Angry Puppies started as a measure to counteract SJWs stuffing the ballot box and preventing good sci-fi from winning Hugo awards. If you look at the history of what left-wing activists have done to this award, you'll see that they were rigged to promote books that were not popular and that did not sell well, but which featured characters or causes that the left found important.
Last year, "No Award" was the most common award, as in, in many categories, no award was given. This was because activists would have preferred for nothing to be awarded over the books that had been nominated which did not promote their value system. Many participants voting were simply voting on a slate of left-wing literature that they were told to vote for, and voting "No Award" was intended as a dig to censor not only literature whose views they disagreed with, but literature that did not promote their point of view.
This post is a gross distortion of what happened, and Slashdot should be ashamed that it made it through the filter. Do not left SJW activists further pollute our community. The result will not be a kinder, gentler, more understanding world. It will be censorship and oppression. We know, because these are the tactics that they use now.
Likewise, I'm a Sad Puppy. And am amused, that, IMMEDIATELY, the narrative came out again about this being a right-wing effort. if you go back to the start, Larry Correia started the Campaign to Stop Puppy-Related Sadness as a tongue-in-cheek parody of a relatively standard campaign for the social cause du jour, which always seems to be "for the children"
The point was, boring fiction used as a vehicle for social messaging and virtue signaling had been increasingly dominating the Hugo Awards, and he, and those of us that joined him, wanted the Hugo to be about the BEST Science Fiction of the year. Since then, it's become a source of repeated One Minute Hates from "trufandom".
As I've said elsewhere in the topic today, the Hugo and the WorldCon and "Trufandom" are of increasingly less significance every year. SF and Fantasy Fandom are no longer tiny, cloistered groups, and the rise of Indie Publishing is slowly killing off the gatekeepers of "TradPub". i.e. "traditional" publishing.
Me, I really don't care about the Hugos, but AM highly amused that, amongst the nominees, is "Space Raptor Butt Invasion". Never read the book, don't plan too, but am laughing at the reaction. . .
Looking at the shortlist it looks like I'll be voting "none of the above" in most categories. Right wing takeover? I don't see it and haven't since Heinlein died in 1988. I do see a lot of right wing and left wing stuff on the list.
I don't want either right or left wing politics in my science fiction.
That said, I did write one story with a hint of politics and religion, basically with the message "you can't eat gold." Left or right? I don't know but I doubt it's right wing.
I nominated my own Mars, Ho! but it didn't make the shortlist. I nominated C.C. Finlay, Editor in Chief of F&SF as best editor. He's not on the list, either but damn it, he should be. His magazine has the best SF IMO and he even occasionally sends personalized rejection letters. No other magazine does that, at least that I've seen (granted, there are quite a few I don't submit to).
Oddly, four of five in the "semipro" list are counted as professional markets by the SFWA (the folks behind the Nebulas).
The Guardien calls the Hugos "biggest prize in science fiction and fantasy", but I disagree. Fans vote for the Hugos, science fiction and fantasy professional writers ("professional" being defined as selling three 1000 word or longer stories for a nickle a word or more, or a novel (at least 40k words) that earns $3000 from self-publishing profits, an advance, or royalties) vote for the Nebulas. If they were movie awards, the Hugos would be the Sundance Film Festival's Audience Award and the Nebula would be the Oscar.
Free Martian Whores!
I love it how you don't let facts penetrate your arguments.
aen has long published some of the most libertarian 'right-wing' authors, but in those books they've had the strongest female characters along with the widest variety of ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations I've come across. The problem
What problem? For all of your complaining about "cliquish pseudo-academic types", McMaster (published by Baen) is in fact tied in first place with Heinlein for largest number of Hugo wins ever.
So, the Hugos have in fact been recognising stuff published by Baen, and that was before the puppies of any sort got involved.
SJW n. One who posts facts.