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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.
Didn't read TFS nor TFA but...
>This is sad seeing republicans... distort literature like this. ...
Yeah, the left wing just bans literature they don't like.
>They already control nearly every moment of our lives.
I don't know in Amerika, but in the rest of the world the LEFT is the one trying to control everything you do, lest you say something somebody wouldn't like
>And the media.
Wrong. Everything you see and hear in the media is anti-right-wing propaganda.
Music, movies, news, series, etc
Anything by Heinlein or Jerry Pournelle would fall into the right wing Scifi genre.
There are actually some really good books in the lists that are now "tainted" by these shenanigans. Hell, I like Jim Butcher and I know he's got some right-of-center politics, but best novel? No way. And Seveneves? Good book for about 3/4, then falls a bit, also not a good pick for any cause.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
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". For instance, I would absolutely classify most of John Scalzi's books as "swashbuckling fun", but they hate Scalzi. 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.
I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice I cared so little about!
#DeleteChrome
Fans read an SF (not skiffy) book a week, or at least I did when I had the time. The "job" is volunteer, and you get to vote by buying a membership in the con.
The Hugo Awards have always been a popularity contest, since they're nominated and voted on by the fans (or, anyone else willing to pony up the money for a membership, although there are a couple of rules to discourage organized (vs disorganized, like the Puppies) bloc voting.
For that matter, the Nebula Awards, which are nominated and voted on by SF/F writing professionals (ie, SFWA members) are also something of a popularity contest, it's just a different crowd.
I suppose it's inevitable that any kind of award for the "best" in a subjective field like the arts (whether writing, filmmaking, whatever) ultimately devolves to a popularity contest of some kind.
In some objective sense the only contest that counts is who has more readers. As Jerry Pournelle put it when one of his books was nominated but didn't win, "New York Times best sellers [which his was] will get you through times of no Hugos better than Hugos will get you through times of no best sellers."
And while I'd love to have one of those little silver spaceships sitting on my mantle, Jerry has a point. A Hugo by itself isn't going to let me quit my day job and spend more time writing.
-- Alastair
Why not just choose good books, regardless of politics?
That is what has happened, if you actually READ the list of recommended books from the Sad Puppies list for example, it's not really a set of "right wing" books at all. It's simply good books.
The issue is that for many years beforehand it HAD been a politically chosen set by a tiny minority with no diversity of thought, and so the "normal" became a set of overwrought heavily left-wing oriented books. Now that it's reverting to center it's being portrayed as political, when what is occurring is the opposite of a political movement. It is a QUALITY movement.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Republicans haven't meaningfully stood for small government... ever. It's a trope passed out to the Libertarian wing of the party, but it's just a load of shit. As to freedom, well, so long as it isn't women looking to control their own bodies, or cis individuals picking the bathroom of the gender they identify with, oh no, not then.
Anything beyond the centrist moderate wing of the Republican party is a pack of frothing-at-the-mouth reactionaries that hate just about everything about the modern world.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's certainly true there are a lot of Republicans that would like to see a smaller government. There just aren't enough to control the party. There are, however, far more small-government Republicans than there are small-government Democrats.
Yeah, this is a load of horse shit. A baby's freedom to live certainly supersedes the mother's freedom to kill him or her. As to the bathroom thing, again, there are two freedoms at odds. I don't have any interest in sharing a public restroom with women regardless of how they view themselves.
You have a child's view of freedom.
By design the Hugos are a popularity contest. The Nebulas are chosen by critics, the Hugos by fans. There's no "stacking the vote" in any way, just voting (it's not like this is an internet poll or something silly like that).
While the only important popularity contest is book sales, the Hugos do sometimes help less-known authors get discovered. Even then it's about the books you like, not the books you're supposed to like - the latter was always the Nebulas.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Science fiction is a vision of how the world could be. Or visions, which is a huge problem if you happen to be an authoritarian with political agenda.
Idealized feudal past and its Divine Right of Kings vs. vilified Industrial Revolution and its robber barons. Or, if you prefer, how right wing wants to see themselves vs. how they actually are.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Perceived?! When they vote "No Award" so to not give an award to someone based on their views, that is text book bias.
The hugos have been a mix of political correctness in the 5+ years. Why the fuck has a left wing political view have need to be pushed in an awards meant for best scifi/fantasy... Why do they have to censor what we read to not offend someone. This PC crap has been getting out of hand since they gave a Nobel peace prize to someone because of his lefty party affiliation and not his works.
Many of those "Small government Republicans" are deluded Tea Party members. They don't realize that the whole "small government" meme is driven by the super-wealthy and aimed at gutting the good things that government does. Like protecting the environment, collecting taxes from those who have the means to hide their income, etc..
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Translation: Women are breeding machines. Oh, and because it's all so very Libertarian, pregnant women shouldn't get any publicly-funded health care either.
Fucking Jesus, who died and made you God, that you can impose your will on the decision a woman and her doctor makes? What makes you so fucking special? Considering the numbers of actual babies who die or suffer every year, even in the US, due to poverty and a lack of decent health care, why not show some fucking compassion for them, rather than fetuses.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"There has been a long identified syndrome that seems to infect SF writers as they get older; they tend to become more Libertarian, more reactionary, more socially conservative. "
This is true for humans in general.
A baby's freedom to live certainly supersedes the mother's freedom to kill him or her.
Very true. The problem comes from people who use the term 'baby' to describe a zygote or fetus.
Until now where a bunch have turned up with what is effectively "how to vote cards" - which is why people are pissed off about that bunch.
Basically what is indistinguishable from grubby and petty student politics has hit the Hugos. Left wing and right wing are not the issue, a bunch of low rent political hacks manipulating things is the issue no matter what breed of politics they screech.
Ignoring any bias in the demographic itself, it seems to me that it's just harder to write right-wing sci-fi.
It's easy to write about an enemy that has all of the money, power, and control, providing a convenient struggle for the protagonist. It's much more difficult to write (and thus, more rare to find) a good story where the enemy is given the same circumstances as the protagonist, and both are given the same life choices. Sure, you can say that the antagonist was given too much freedom... but then you have to establish why he chose that way, and if you try to use any variation on "because he's evil", your story goes from being a thought-provoking philosophical adventure to being a heavy-handed morality essay.
You could more generally make a strong leftist state be the enemy. That's the dystopian road blazed by sci-fi in the 1960s, and several movies since the 1970s, notably Logan's Run and Soylent Green. It's a time-honored genre, but that's also the problem. It's old. Dystopian fiction dates back a few centuries, and combining it with science is hardly groundbreaking.
For a while, a popular trend was to base such stories on real people and events, who could be suitably framed for conflict while keeping their political slant. Of course, the reading audience quickly grew tired of every Nazi and Soviet alternate-history piece, and those have waned in recent years.
To more directly address your point, consider the alternative: Writing left-wing sci-fi is easy.
The plot is simple: An underdog wants freedom for himself against the oppressive regime of the evil overlord, who had freedom and used it to oppress others. What makes the underdog different is that he will stand for justice for everyone, show kindness to everyone the audience could identify with, and never miss a chance to help others. Relying on teamwork and everyone's unique (identifiable and presence-justifying) abilities, the protagonist establishes a utopian foothold, where all of the characters that the audience identifies with are loved and cared for.
In fiction, that plot is sufficient for a story. In reality, things are much more complicated. What happens if one of the protagonist's allies was really only following because his girlfriend was? What if the rules of the protagonist's new state really screw some of the wealthier folks? What if the protagonist himself is genuinely a right-wing capitalist who just wants to make money and retire in obscurity?
You're right - Political strife isn't where really good fiction comes from. The best sci-fi works are ones where every character has their own motivations, and they don't boil down to "be good" or "be evil". Rather, they reduce to things like "sleep safely", "get back to stability" or "avoid the consequences of a mistake". One particularly good sci-fi space opera work, itself nominated a few times for Hugo awards, has spent nearly two decades dealing with the indirect results of a mistake. Characters have come and gone through the series, and politics has been an issue, but by that time every character had their own long-established reasons to hold their preferences. At no point was the story ever purely about morality, even when the "definitely evil" characters were introduced - they eventually got their own motivations.
Those deep-rooted, long stories that take the time to establish characters and motivation are great sci-fi, and can avoid bias toward either political slant.
That's hard, though.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Except when women exchange the terms as a matter of convenience. Assault? Baby. Abortion? Fetus. Pregnant Women Assistance programs? Baby
If women can't even make up their own minds about the status, you can hardly blame anyone else for being confused.
A government powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have.
Your reaction is a common "poison pill" fallacy committed by government agencies ordered to cut their bloated budgets. They immediately cut the things that will hurt while keeping the fat safe. Small government conservatives don't want to get rid of the fire departments or the police departments (but a lot of leftists want this one) nor the environmental departments (admittedly this one has become a nest of far-left hate). They want an out-of-control federal government to be reined in, and the best way to do that is the same way you get rid of a cancer, i.e. stop its blood flow.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
A government powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have.
In a vacuum, yes this is true, a powerful government can take everything from you. Keep in mind, though, that the alternative is to allow powerful individuals to control everything instead; in that case, a state which humanity has languished in for thousands of years, those powerful individuals will take everything from you.
The large middle class that we've seen rise in America and other modern countries has only come into existence thanks to the tireless work of powerful governments holding back the power of the very wealthy. It's no surprise that, now that those very wealthy have managed to subvert the government, we are seeing the middle class shrink, battered by high costs imposed by the rent-seeking rich.
I don't see any conflict. It's the old Voltaire position on free speech: I may not agree with your decision, but I believe it must be your decision to make.
I find it very frustrating that the pro-life side generally opposes contraception and sex education, even though these are the best mean we have to reduce the need for and number of abortions. I think it's because they have such a strong religious element - almost all of the major pro-life organisations and leaders are explicitly Christian and devoutly so, which means they must regard their mission as not only to eliminate abortion, but to eliminate the evil of non-marital sex too.
It would be more accurate to say that the Hugo Awards have been trying to move away from just rewarding
I don't think that would be more accurate: the Hugo awards don't as such do anything at all.
Nominations come from the membership only and then votes come from the membership only. The latter happens at the convention and gets moderate participation, the former, especially for anything other than the popular "best dramatic presentation long form (i.e. film)" , short form (i.e. tv) and novel is extremely low, because frankly, very few people care enough.
The only people who care enough are/were in fact those with some particular interest, and it just so happened that those people who still cared enough to vote had a personal liking for non white, LGBT stuff etc.
HOWEVER! And there's a big however. And this is also of course why the puppies were so effective. Flat-out lies are usually not as effective as lies with a kernel of truth, because people will latch on to the kernel of truth, especially if it's one that resonates.
What those people nominated (and what won!) in previous years was in many cases was the most atrocious drek. I mean just bloody awful. Weak stories, very poor on the speculative element, bad characters and in many cases flat out boring. For instance the risible "The water that falls on you from nowhere[*] won in 2013 and pretty much the only thing that distinguished it from the average scrapings from bottom of the barrel is that it didn't have the usual straight white man protagonist. Likewise "if you were a dinosaur my love". And others too. Were any authors pandering to that, knowing that that sort of thing gets nominated? Probably? It's a big world after all, but either way it doesn't matter because it was that sort of thing getting nominated anyway, and enough authors seemed to want to write it.
Having something other than the usual and rather heavily over-done perspectives is great, but it's not an excuse for poor writing. It seems however that the small community who gave a crap enough to vote didn't feel the same as me, or have different standards for "good writing". They're wrong of course because they disagree with my opinion. But I can't complain too much (define: too much) since I never voted but anyway.
So here's the silly thing. So OK, some small community were the only people voting (and there's no evidence of collusion), and the puppies (in many cases rightly) thought what they were voting for was bad. Heck, many people who weren't puppies agreed that really awful stuff was winning. But that's about as far as it got before it descended into farce. So they stacked the slate, and they had a golden opportunity to see all these marbellous speculative or space opera or mil SF (pew pew!) pieces that we'd been missing out on because no one bothered to vote and... well all they chose was yet more drek! About as bad as whatever had been winning before, arguable worse! And a good bit of it wasn't mainstream stuff, it was Jesus fan-fic (see John C. Wright's entries). What a wasted opportunity.
That also proves that the puppies are in fact a right bunch of nitwits and don't apparently actually care about good writing.
[*] John Chu. I've not read a single thing of his I like or even find passable.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
This is a fantastic writeup of examples by steveha that demonstrates the very problem - the cliquish pseudo-academic types have been screaming their bloody heads off, acting like American millenials. They're hypocritical and mindless, and if they don't get their way they resort to name-calling and claiming that the other side gamed the system.
steveha used Baen as an example, and it serves perfectly. Baen 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 is that they're set in worlds in which hard work, rugged individualism, independence, logic, - all those 'right-wing' and/or 'conservative' values - rule the day.
I see a parallel with "faith-based" movies. If you've ever seen one, you know what I'm talking about. Movies that sacrifice story-telling in order to be faith affirming. They are super popular among mormons and evangelicals because "god comes first." But anybody else who is not part of the cult finds them tedious as fuck because preaching to the choir is no fun if you aren't in the choir.
The puppies see the world through a reductive lens that assumes people are all in factions. I think part of it is that they are so thin-skinned, so sensitive to anything that challenges their world-view that they can't help but see those challenges as a grand conspiracy. So it is only 'logical' that the proper way to counter teh SJW conspiracy is to promote stories that affirm the puppy belief system. It is a fundamental misread of reality to believe in the conspiracy but if you are convinced there is a conspiracy then everything else makes sense.
Notice how all the alt-right movements like the puppies and gamergate have SJW conspiracies as a central of their grievances. Its because the internet lets them congregate in their own little worlds and they soon start to believe that their little worlds are reflective of the world at large. It's kind of like that old Colbert joke where he was parodying a Bill O'Rielly rant: "I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias."
Logic and the right wing have long since parted ways.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
The government healthcare bureaucracy has drastically impeded the research necessary for prolonging life and restoring youthful characteristics and will most certainly spike any such treatment, at least until most of us boomers are safely killed off.
In 1900 you were lucky to reach 50, my dad died at age 84 and my mom still goes bowling twice a week at age 88. Her brother is in his late nineties. That was almost unheard of a century ago.
When you're faced with limited remaining life in a fragile body on miniscule after-ripoffs savings, with a healthcare system that looks to be dedicated to killing you while retaining plausible deniability
Funny, my mom says Medicare is the best health insurance she's ever had. I'm looking forward to being eligible next year because my insurance REALLY sucks.
You're crazy, Louie. See a doctor about that early onset Alzheimer's.
Free Martian Whores!
"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?"
I didn't personally think those were the best works those years either, but do people really need to get so riled up about it? The things i really like rarely make the semifinals and even more rarely win, but i don't feel compelled to invent some "SJW" conspiracy to explain it. (The fact that people _still_ insist on using that term to create a singular enemy out of nothing is just mind boggling.) A bunch of LGBT people and their friends got on a celebratory high because of the social progress their cause has been seeing lately. Because they're a relatively small part of the overall voting base they had a disproportionate effect on the awards for the shorter works, which usually get less attention. (For the exact same reason those are the categories that the Puppies have had the most success in.) Did they go a little overboard in their enthusiasm in this case? Maybe. But it is far from the first time the Hugos (or any other awards) has gone through some kind of phase, nor will it be the last i expect. It would have blown over soon enough, but the Puppies made things infinitely worse by deciding to stage their campaign and have only prolonged the problem.
"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."
Many of the people who ended up founding the Puppies had a hate on for Scalzi years before the Hugo kerfuffle. I don't know what started in back in the day, but it's certainly been long standing and mutual. A lot of the stuff i've seen from the anti-Scalzi side has been filled with bile and hate, while i rarely see that from the pro-Scalzi side. But like everyone else i do have a biased viewpoint.
I've got to say though the goodreads link you shared doesn't really make a good case for what you're claiming. Scalzi's tweets, are certainly silly and juvenile (and really, you don't expect people to be silly and juvenile on twitter from time to time?) but they don't actually seem to be directed at Correia, just the Puppies in general. And Correia himself isn't coming off sounding very well in his response to it.
" 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."
See, this is conflating two different issues, and is probably a fundamental part of the whole problem to begin with. There is a group of LGBT people amongst the Hugo voters (not an organized groups trying to control the vote in some sinister manner, just a Venn diagram type group of people who happen to have similar viewpoints) but there is a far larger, far older overlapping group, the "fen". These are the people who have been going to conventions forever, who _run_ the conventions and who hobnob with the authors and each other at those conventions, and write the fanzines and do the podcasts and all that other stuff. They participate heavily in WorldCon and the running of the Hugos and so of course the results of those awards tend to reflect their tastes.
And i can tell you that for any self-selecting fan group that runs their own awards if you create something that panders to that group it has much higher odds of winning. The degree and style of pandering varies between contests, but it's always there. Tha
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