As the Torlings double down to concede his point. Lest any of you Hugo voters feel any need to be objective, or to avoid downgrading authors for their political views or being published by Tor, consider the publicly expressed perspective of one of the larger Torlings, Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden:
Here’s the deal for me:
Why should I vote to tell the rest of the world that SF is a place where the only difference between James White and Vox Day is their commercially published texts?
The awards we give out are are a giant signal saying “This is what we love, this is what we value, this is what we think is important.”
Why the hell am I supposed to lie about what those things are?
Why have I not been flaming hairless people who refer to the bizarre text-only voting protocol they’re trying to push on me as “honest”? It’s obvious they’re suggesting that doing anything else is dishonest.
The way they want me to vote is not honest. It’s not how I think. Nor is it how I’ve ever voted. Nor is it how most of fandom has thought, or how it’s voted, year after year, for many decades.
The Toad of Tor could not have underlined Larry’s point more clearly: the Hugo awards are nothing but a giant signal. Voting based on literary merit is not only unnecessary, it is entirely irrelevant. To even suggest people should vote based on literary merit is “not honest”. She openly claims “the artist’s work can’t be divided from the artist’s politics.”
How very Marxian of her. Forget the personal. The professional is the political.
Very well. So those are the rules. Now you have to ask yourself what is important to you? A lady astronaut on Mars? The truth of feelings? Or a work of eternal life? What do you value, courage and camaraderie and the triumph of well-armed good over evil, a vast and meandering morass of moral equivalency, or parasitism? What do you love, the humble faith of a beleaguered chaplain or ersatz horses or the feminist retellings of fairy tales?
You have Tor’s blessing to send them an unmistakable signal. If Tor publishes it, it goes below No Award.