Kevin Standlee and I were exchanging comments at File 770 about Patrick Richardson’s post concerning how he was not considered a Real Fan of science fiction and fantasy:
KS: It sounds very much to me like, “Because there aren’t more people who think JUST LIKE ME!”
VD: Then why are so many of you bitching about the fact that we’re flooding
the Hugo voting with more people who do, in fact, think like us? Larry
brought in a few dozen voters last year. Now we’re bringing in a few
hundred more. You want more people? Fine. We’ll give you more people.KS: Yep, go ahead. What many of us object to is the implication that people should nominate/vote for things without reading them, because it will make the Bad People Cry. Even more annoying to me is the implication that those of us who have been voting have been doing so for Evil Political Reasons, not because we like the works involved. This strikes me very much as an argument made by people who have so little empathy that they can’t believe any rational person would like things other than what they like, and therefore the only reason things they don’t like win is because of the system being borked by Evil People.
VD: The rules were established last year when the other side declared they
did not have to read our works to vote on them…. How can you condemn us for nothing more than
following the example they set last year? We were being generous. If you actually think mediocre hackwork like
Redshirts and Ancillary Justice and “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”
represents the best of science fiction today, I feel pity for you. If
you were supporting that sort of thing for Evil Political Reasons, at
least I could understand that. If you simply like wallowing in literary
excrement, well… that is your prerogative.
It’s interesting to see how the goalposts move, is it not? But I encourage you all to note that everyone from Kevin Standlee to John Scalzi now publicly declares it’s fine, it’s great, it’s wonderful that so many Sad Puppies have gotten involved in the Hugo voting process. They never seem to mention the Rabid Puppies though. I wonder why that might be?
Meanwhile, they continue to ignore the fact that the pinkshirts are continuing to do the very thing they accuse our side of doing, which is to say, voting and nominating without reading everything and blindly rejecting the other side’s works on pure political grounds. Consider this very typical and telling comment from a Whatever rabbit:
The pinkshirts are claiming to be able to judge our quality without ever reading any of it. Meanwhile, we openly mock the quality of the crap they hold up to be science fiction’s best precisely because we HAVE read it, my love. And there isn’t a word of criticism from the nominal Hugo moderates for the likes of this pinkshirt who hasn’t read a single thing from the other side, but rejects all of it on the basis of a single quote from a single review of a book. Furthermore, having been reading the Amazon reviews, she has to be aware that it is a book with 22 ratings averaging 4.8 stars, and yet she claims that single quote somehow indicates that it is a work that has not been chosen for its quality! It’s not just the pinkshirt-nominated works that reek of bullshit.
Remember, both Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies have recommended for nomination John C. Wright’s highly regarded Transhuman and Subhuman, which was a #1 bestseller in Science Fiction History & Criticism and is still a Top 20 bestseller in Philosophy>Good & Evil, in the Best Related Work category that was won last year by an openly tendentious, ideologically-charged BLOG POST. But somehow, we’re accused of being the side that places politics over quality. The evidence strongly suggests otherwise.