George Martin baits the hook

Anyone who read A Dance with Dragons is aware that George R.R. Martin has lost it. Hell, I wrote A Throne of Bones partly because, after finishing that tedious, pointless slog of a poorly edited doorstopper, my first thought was, “I’m no great writer, but dammit, even I can do better than that shit.”

It seems a few people agreed, as ATOB has a higher rating on Amazon than ADWD, 4.2 to 3.9.

Anyhow, it’s probably a mercy that instead of further mutilating his literary legacy, he’s decided to spend the last few days waxing ignorant with regards to #GamerGate, Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies, and the Hugo Awards. I was particularly amused by his belated Appeal to Divide and Conquer.

I do believe that there are decent, honest, well-intentioned conservatives in our field, many of whom are deeply involved in the Sad Puppies movement. Brad Torgensen and Larry Correia among them; my disagreements with them so far have been on the issues, but I don’t believe that they are racists, sexists, misogynists, bigots, or haters. But I do have a question for you:

When are you going to do something about Vox Day?

Make no mistake. Vox Day and Requires Hate are twins. Mirror images of one another. The Toad of the West, the Toad of East, each of them spewing forth the venom of hatred and violence, poisoning any attempt at honest dialogue. Requires Hate had her acolytes and enablers, and so does Vox Day, and it is from those toads that they derive their power.

Liberals and moderates and “SJWs” can denounce Day all they want, and it only serves to generate more hate, more division, more death threats. His followers will just shrug that off. But if some respected figure from the right were to speak up, well, maybe someone would listen. But do we have a conservative in the house with the courage and integrity of Laura Mixon, someone honest enough and brave enough to denounce the excesses of their “own side?”

First of all, the only Toad in science fiction is The Toad of (formerly) Tor, Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Second, neither the Ilk nor the Dread Ilk are toads. They are intelligent individuals who are entirely capable of thinking for themselves, and unlike the foolish Mr. Martin, they’re not stupid and gullible enough to swallow every false narrative put forth by SJWs in the media. Nor do they deserve to be insulted by a fat old fool who can’t be bothered to learn any of the salient facts before deciding to pontificate on the subject.

And third, it is amusing that Mr. Martin seems to seriously believe this is the first time any of us have seen this sort of Two-Minute-Hate Bait before. “Why, Mr. Decent, Honest, Well-Intentioned Conservative, if only you will join us in our ritual denouncing of today’s Emanuel Goldstein, we will be nice to you and pretend to respect you… for as long as we need you.”

Just how dumb does he think everyone on the right side of the political spectrum is anyhow?

Every member of the Evil Legion of Evil has been offered this deal if only they will abjure their Supreme Dark Lord, most of them multiple times. Every single one of them has spurned it, whether they agree with me about anything or not, because they all know exactly how forked the tongue is that speaks such deceitful promises.

Hell, I was offered the same deal myself if only I would disavow Roosh of Return of Kings and Reaxxion. To which my answer was simple and straightforward: “No, absolutely not.” This isn’t even the first time an SJW has broached the idea publicly:

  •  “There’s only one way to deal with people like Day, who see themselves as above basic human decency, and that is to cut them out of the community like a tumour. Shun them, ignore them, no-platform the hell out of them. Our conventions, our fanzines, our anthologies, our community is not open to people whose racist arguments could have come straight from the mouths of slave-owners.” (April 19, 2014)
  •  “How do you bring the weight of community disapproval on someone who isn’t part of the community?” (March 30, 2015)

Give a man a platform and he will speak his mind. Deny him a platform and he will build his own… and you will never silence him again. Rabbits always think that the only possible response to being shunned is to a) submit or b) vanish. The problem, of course, is that some of us aren’t rabbits.

And that’s why the SJWs are desperately appealing to Entertainment Weekly and George RR Martin and The Guardian and anyone and anything else that will swallow their false narrative. They are terrified because they know we are in the process of building a platform and that will mean they no longer have any influence or control over us. Over any of us.

As for Mr. Martin, it’s observably two books past time for him to hang it up and hand over A Song of Ice and Fire to Brandon Sanderson or Joe Abercrombie. Although my personal vote would be for R. Scott Bakker, just because it would be hilarious to see a horde of shape-shifting, black-seed spewing rape demons unleashed on Westeros without warning. What’s the point of featuring pointless nihilism if you don’t embrace it to the full?

An unexpected betrayal

Both Israelis and American Jews are beginning the learn the cost of being House Jews for the Democratic Party:

Sometime in the fall of 2008 I sat down at my desk and banged out an impassioned letter to my sister. She was on the fence, I knew, about the young senator from Illinois who was running for president. There was some talk in the family that perhaps, on at least one occasion, during the Bush years, she had voted Republican.

We chalked it up to her decision, made as a college freshman, to marry a skilled and caring med student, who hailed from Michigan and loved cars. He drove a Chevy, Grand Am — candy red, I think — and called the city of his birth Dee-troit.

Sure, we realized, he was a terrific father and a stand-up guy all around, but he distrusted all things organic — he was in the habit of scrubbing my sister’s farmers’ market apples with hot water and soap — and he wore jeans while skiing. He loved mayonnaise and iceberg lettuce, had a soft spot for ATVs and leaf-blowers.

In short, we didn’t ask who he voted for — there was some hope that he might be a Libertarian — but, in the fall of 2008, the facts seemed quite clear: He was going with John McCain and Sarah Palin. My sister, I feared, might follow suit.

And so I took to the computer. In an email entitled “Politics” — which I reread this week for the first time in the wake of the nuclear framework deal agreed upon in Lausanne, a deal that has left me with the clammy feeling of anticipated betrayal — I spoke about the horrors of the American prison system and the plague of racism that continue to rot America from the inside; I spoke about drugs and how only people of color are incarcerated for using and dealing them, while people like George W. Bush and every other person I knew in college was free to pull bong hits, take acid, and boil ‘shrooms to his or her heart’s content. I think I spoke about African-American role models and education and gay rights. I even told her to read Frederick Douglass.

Then I lampooned McCain for never having sent an email and mentioned his age. “McCain is 72,” I wrote. “He has had four of five bouts of melanoma. He spent five and a half years in a POW camp. He is dad’s age. Dad is in great shape for his age. He has not been to the Hanoi Hilton. Yet he falls asleep at dinner regularly. Something could happen to McCain. In walks the moose hunter.”

As for Israel, I said with all the authority I could muster, it didn’t really matter. No president has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The United States believes in a two-state solution. The occupation of the West Bank and its subsequent settlement with civilians made sense historically, emotionally, but was a horrid piece of irony: The nation that had lived under persecution for two thousand years because of its statelessness had, in a sublime moment, carved out a state in its ancient homeland and revived its wizened language only to sacrifice that historic achievement on the altar of — of all things! — territorial expansion.

A deal with the Palestinians, pushed forward by American muscle, was in Israel’s interest, I said. Without a two-state solution, guided by someone like Barack Obama, “Palestinians will outnumber us and will no longer consider 1967 a relevant date. The battle will be for all of Israel and they will win. Everyone will be yelling ‘Apartheid.’ Within two generations we’ll see the destruction of the Third Temple.”

Moreover, I noted, Bush, with his love of Zion, had been a disaster, inadvertently empowering Iran. Obama, with his cool detachment, was just what we needed.

Lastly, I encouraged her to vote Democrat, now, before her Alex P. Keaton-like eldest got the right to vote and cancelled her out. And she did (I think, maybe). She even wrote to me about the beauty of that cold January day in 2009 when he was sworn into office.

What a pity this stab-in-the-back could not possibly have been foreseen… even if I failed to note that his ritual genuflection to AIPAC was even less genuine than it appeared to be at the time.


After eight years of experiencing regular pain between the shoulder blades, conservatives can enjoy the prospect of the knife sticking out of liberal backs.

Mailvox: Objectivity

Northern Hamlet objects to my appeal to average Amazon ratings as evidence that the 2015 shortlist is objectively superior to recent previous Hugo shortlists:

By this criteria for distinctive works: Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises at 3.8 < Vox’s A Throne of Bones 4.2 Also, you’re also nearly tied there with Twilight at 4.1 for distinctive storyness.

Online ratings are no more an accurate measure of distinctive works than sales are. It’s an extension of the same argument… consider: we could predict 1 million Big Mac sales might result in a large number of people saying they sure do like Big Macs. There’s brand loyalty there among other things. While for Lima Beans, people might not report loving them as much. None of this has anything to do with healthiness in the same way that sales and ratings have nothing to do with distinctiveness.

Think of the NYC art world. When they award Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst with some award for their accomplishments in art, do you imagine that the average person would even understand anything about the pieces? You place an unneeded emphasis on reception (sales or ratings, take your pick here). Though art and literature’s quality can be determined there if we like, it’s hardly the only way (nor the common way these niche communities have developed in the past)

Now, you can go different ways with this… Shakespeare was great because of how many people have learned to appreciate him or Robbe-Grillet is great and we do need judges (gatekeepers if you will) to help refine our understanding of the art and literature experience.

Northern Hamlet’s response is neither unfair nor unexpected. It does, however, manage to completely miss the point. His error is obvious: he substitutes “distinctive works” for “objective superiority” without realizing that the former is a subset of the latter. He furthere demonstrates that he still doesn’t grasp the purpose for citing the metric when SirHamster points out his mistake:

SirHamster: He provided an objective measure for Hugo recognition, not for story distinctiveness. Whether or not Amazon average ratings provide a measure of story distinctiveness, they provide an objective measure of user-perceived quality, which may have some relation to distinctiveness.

Northern Hamlet: Yes, and superior in ratings alone, not in reception. Because, well, we need it to mean anything the SJWs didn’t mean.

No, we don’t need it to mean anything at all beyond the fact that it is an objective measure of quality. We have been repeatedly informed, by people who admit that they have not even read the works concerned, that those works are inferior to other, previous works that those same people may or may not have read.

Now, we could appeal to the same subjective standard to what they are appealing, which is to say our own opinions. We can even argue that our opinions are more informed and reliable than theirs; there are more people on this blog who have read John Scalzi’s and Charles Stross’s and George Martin’s work than there are people at Whatever and Not A Blog who have read the work of John C. Wright, Tom Kratman, and Vox Day. It should be obvious that those of us who have read multiple works by each of all six authors can much more fairly compare them than those who have not.

But we don’t need to rely upon subjective metrics. We can cite objective metrics, and, lo and behold, whether we turn to Amazon or the more left-leaning Goodreads, we observe the same thing at work: the 2015 shortlist is more highly regarded than the previous shortlists. Marc DuQuesne did the math. Can you tell which list is objectively and quantitatively superior?

A: 4.60 Amazon, 4.16 Goodreads
B: 4.64 Amazon, 4.16 Goodreads
C: 4.46 Amazon, 4.11 Goodreads
D: 3.90 Amazon, 3.91 Goodreads

Let’s look at my list of Top 10 SF and Fantasy books of all time. For science fiction, my top ten averages 4.32 on Amazon. For Fantasy, it averages 4.53, giving a net average of 4.43. This is considerably higher than the pre-Puppy 1986-2013 Hugo shortlist average of 4.00. Of course, my Top 10 list is wholly subjective, but review the list before you dismiss it; my more esoteric selections such as China Mieville’s Embassytown and Tanith Lee’s The Book of the Damned tend to bring the average down. So, I would certainly invite similar comparisons to other all-time top 10 lists.

This metric even picks up the perceived decline in the quality of Hugo nominees about which so many people have complained over the years:

1986 to 1995: 4.13
1996 to 2005: 3.93
2006 to 2013: 3.94

Now, unless Northern Hamlet wishes to entirely discount a metric which clearly shows the objective superiority of The Lord of the Rings (4.7) to The Sword of Shannara (3.7), Starship Troopers (4.4) to Redshirts (3.8), The Golden Age (4.1) to Rainbow’s End (3.6), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (4.5) to A Throne of Bones (4.2) in favor of opinions that are rooted in nothing objective and are entirely subjective, I suggest that despite the occasional flaws, average review ratings are a perfectly reasonable measure that any sensible SF/F reader can use as a basic quality heuristic given a sufficient number of reviews.

The end of shock

This is an amusingly wry commentary on Christianity and those trying to use 1980s shock-marketing tactics in a world where they are decades out of date:

 ‘Dear Charles, How are you?” says the unsolicited publicity email from someone I have never met, “I would love to share this controversial new play with you… you are welcome to talk to the writer… The play discusses Jesus’s exorcism, the atheist prostitute, Mary as a polytheist, a Greek homosexual and Jesus’s involvement in a stoning.” The play – I won’t trouble the reader with its title or venue – is “provocative and radial [sic]”, she tells me. It is “bound to shock many”, she adds hopefully.

I shan’t be taking up the kind invitation. For about 50 years now, almost the only way playwrights and television producers have felt able to treat Jesus is as something that he either probably or definitely wasn’t – a gay rights campaigner, a political revolutionary, the lover of Mary Magdalene, a rock star, a member of the Green Party etc. They have tried, with ever-decreasing success, to stir up his traditional followers into righteous anger against them in the hope that this will attract a bit of attention and so increase their ratings.

Once upon a time, such efforts, despite their crudity and bad taste, may have had some value. I am just old enough to remember the last gasps of an era when Christianity in Britain was often little more than an expression of social respectability. This was a strange way of dealing with the most explosive story in the history of the world, and it deserved to be satirised and challenged. But those days are long, long gone, as dead as men in the City of London wearing bowler hats. The playwrights who think they being are “shocking” and “subversive” are colossally out of date. The religion whose moralistic, puritanical, self-appointed spokesmen badly need challenging today is not Christianity, but Islam. You won’t see many brave new would-be avant-garde plays taking that one on, funnily enough.

I loved that “she adds hopefully”. That was what can best be described as a literary glass dagger, smooth, subtle, and sharp. Anyhow, it was, and is, a mistake for Christians to react angrily towards the blasphemers-for-profit. It can be effective to calmly ban their activities and lock them up, as was done in Christendom for centuries. It can be effective to publicly denounce them, whip them, and stone them, as is done in communities with Sharia-based legal systems. But it is not effective to get angry and attempt to change the artist’s behavior with outrage.

Christendom has already been subverted. There is no power center left untouched by the anti-Christian entryists. Those trying to cash in on being shocking and subversive are simply too late; it is now those of us who reject the shiny, post-Christian secular technotopia who are the subversives. The people of the West have made a terrible mistake in opting for an equal society rather than a free one; in EQUALITY: The Impossible Quest, Martin van Creveld convincingly demonstrates that they will enjoy neither freedom nor equality.

Christians should not be outraged when they are attacked, or when there is no sympathy for our persecuted brothers and sisters around the world. We were told this would happen. We were warned that this would be the case. And we were told that if the world did not hate us, we were doing something wrong. So, when Christianity is attacked, when our faith is belittled, when our Lord and Savior is ridiculed, and when our God is blasphemed, don’t be angry. Smile, because the very foundations of your faith are being confirmed right before your eyes.

The Almighty is perfectly capable of defending Himself. He doesn’t need us to defend Him. We need Him to defend us.

George Martin knows we’re right

He appears to be underwhelmed by the panicked SJW proposals to change the rules and destroy the Hugos because the wrong people are on the 2015 shortlists:

Over at Making Light, and on several other sites, various rules changes are being proposed to prevent this from happening ever again. There are so many different proposals they make my head spin. More nominating slots, less nominating slots, weighted voting, eliminating the supporting memberships, outlawing slates, limiting nominees to a single nomination, juried nominations… on and on and on. The worldcon business meeting is never exactly a funfest, but if the proponents of half these proposals show up at Sasquan, this year’s will be a nightmare. And will probably still be going on when MidAmericon II convenes.

I am against all these proposals. If indeed I am at Spokane, and if I can get myself up in time for the business meeting, I will vote against every one of them.

Most of them, frankly, suck. And the mere fact that so many people are discussing them makes me think that the Puppies won. They started this whole thing by saying the Hugo Awards were rigged to exclude them. That is completely untrue, as I believe I demonstrated conclusively in my last post. So what is happening now? The people on MY SIDE, the trufans and SMOFs and good guys, are having an endless circle jerk trying to come up with a foolproof way to RIG THE HUGOS AND EXCLUDE THEM. God DAMN, people. You are proving them right….

Which brings me to another proposed countermeasure: the No Award strategy.

This comes in two flavors. The hardliners propose we vote NO AWARD for everything. Every category, even the ones where the Puppies have no nominees. No Hugo Awards at Sasquan, whatsoever. We’ll show them. Rather than letting them move into our house, we will burn it to the ground. “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” It worked so well in Vietnam.

All I’ve got to say about this idea is, are you fucking crazy?

The other approach is less radical. Vote NO AWARD in all the categories that are All Puppy. In the others, chose between the nominees (there are a few) that did not appear on either the Sad Puppy or Rabid Puppy slate, and place all the rest, the SP/RP candidates, under No Award.

That’s less insane than the “No Award For Everything” idea, but only a little bit. Sorry, I will not sign on for this one either. For a whole bunch of reasons. For starts, the Puppies are already proclaiming that “No Award” equals victory for them (though sometimes it seems as though they believe anything that happens constitutes victory for them).

It’s called Xanatos Gambit, George. Look it up. Anything that happens IS a victory for us. That’s why “the trufans and SMOFs and good guys” are so upset. Deny us Hugos? Whoop-de-damn-do. We were never going to even be nominated anyhow. Change the rules? Make our point AND, as a bonus, make future Awards less legitimate. No Award everything? See: 2016 Hugos. No Award us? See: 2016 Hugos and you. Leave well enough alone and simply vote on the merits? Some of ours win a few richly deserved Hugos.

Of course, what George and HIS SIDE don’t seem to grasp, that Brad Torgersen tried to explain to them yesterday, is that not only are priorities of the Rabid Puppies not those of the “trufans and SMOFs and good guys”, they are not those of the Sad Puppies either. Brad and Larry and Sad Puppies aren’t the bad guys.

We are. We are the reavers and the renegades and the revolutionaries, and we don’t give a quantum of a damn about pieces of plastic or the insider approval they represent.

You would think it would stop being funny at some point. And you would be wrong.

Mad Mike Williamson, whose work is a 2015 Hugo nominee in the Best Related category, explains why the Old Way is no longer respected:

I attended SFWA functions at Torcon, where I tended bar, Loscon, and then Philcon.  The staff of SFWA knew who I was.  They greeted me on sight by first name. When I pulled out cover sheets of my next book (“The Hero”), one of the officers said, “Oh, a collaboration. Who’s John Ringo?”

At that point, John had about ten more books than I did, including three NYT bestsellers with David Weber.

But the in-crowd hadn’t heard of him.

And thus it often still is.  The in-crowd goes to the meetings, to the literary conventions, the writer that goes with them gets known, and then gets mentioned by friends, blogged about, and eventually, gifted with suggestions of awards.

Think about winners the last few years.  Are they good?  Generally. Popular? Within a small subsect always.  Not always among SF fans overall.  Can you think of any winners, where you’d think, “This other book that came out that year was better. Why didn’t it win?”

George RR Martin laments the “marketing” that has come to the Hugos, that the Old Way is no longer respected.

That’s because an NYT bestseller with 13 books out was unknown to the people who promote the award.

And the International Lord of Hate himself explains why it’s important to hate the player, not the team.

For those just joining us, if you are wondering where this is coming from, there are a couple of reasons many Sad Puppies supporters are leery of Tor.

There are a few Tor editors who have accused my people of some vile and outlandish things recently, but the Nielsen Haydens are only a couple of the editors there.  Sure, they’ve been insulting, but I’m not going to tar the other editors by association, especially since most of them haven’t said anything, and some have been very nice to us.

Tor.com has posted some asinine stuff on this subject, talked a lot of trash about us, and run some absurd, preachy, social engineering, wannabe literati wankery articles. However, Tor.com isn’t Tor the publisher. From what I’ve been told by some Tor employees, they are kind of their own thing.

Translation: all Torlings are SJWs who work for Tor or are otherwise associated with Tor. But not all people who work for Tor or are otherwise associated with them are Torlings. And some of the worst SJWs in science fiction have no association with Tor at all, but are merely trying to curry favor with the Nielsen Hayden clique in order to obtain an association with Tor.

So leave Tor qua Tor out of it. Tor.com is fair game; Patrick Nielsen Hayden runs it. The Toad of (formerly) Tor is fair game. Moshe whatever-his-name-is is fair game, he’s publicly taken shots at us. But as for the rest, give them the chance to be neutral or even to quietly take our side. We hardly lack for enemies as it stands.

Perspective

One thing I thought particularly worthy of note is what a small proportion of #GamerGate tweets are in response to the Hugo Awards. And notice that they didn’t move up until several days after the initial #SadPuppies spike.

That’s what I find so amusing about the SJW panic about those they call “thugs” in their midst. Not even a tenth of #GamerGate is paying any attention at all to the Hugo Awards yet, and that’s already enough to send them shrieking and running. This is still a period of calm as far as GG is concerned.

But if the SJWs want to be sure to grab #GamerGate’s attention, I suppose a coordinated media blitz full of ludicrous lies about people are an effective way to do it. It certainly isn’t anything we haven’t seen before.

I do have to give one SJW some credit, however. In addition to urging sanity on the more violence-prone SJWs, Mary Robinette Kowal also has a sense of humor. In response to Patrick Nielsen Hayden learns about the 2015 Hugo Awards, she wrote:

I never thought I’d say this, but you’ve made me laugh at something you intended to be funny. So, thanks for the chuckle. This was hilariously over the top.

The American Spectator covered the developing story:

The controversy over the Hugo Awards contains elements of a good
dystopian science fiction story. Unfortunately, the media brat-fit over
the successful effort to rescue escapist fantasy literature from its
political pursuers comes not from the pages of Brave New World but from Slate, Salon, and Entertainment Weekly.

Like
sports, video games, and cake baking, science fiction strangely finds
itself in the crosshairs of ideological killjoys. Perhaps it was only a
matter of time and space before the genre obsessed with time and space
became a culture-war battlefield.

“To many of the people involved in this industry, politics and message trump entertainment or quality,” Larry Correia, a New York Times-bestselling bard of monster stories, tells The American Spectator.
“But most people buy entertainment because they want to be entertained.
Many longtime readers fell away because they were tired of being
preached at or having their values insulted.”

It’s pretty good. It even contains a quote from yours truly. “We believe that the Best Novel award should actually go to the best
novels,” Vox Day says of his modest aim. “The best works should be
awarded, not only works by the best-connected.”

Who but a lunatic could possibly object to that? And, as I’ve noted, we can make a powerful objective case that the works awarded this year will be better, by every objective standard, than in recent years.

A doctorate in comparative gaming

2015 Hugo nominee Jeffro Johnson is better suited to make the following introduction than I am, so I will simply quote him in introducing the latest Castalia House blog star, Douglas Cole, the author of GURPS Martial Arts: Technical Grappling and a number of other combat-related RPG publications.

Game designer Douglas Cole will be joining Ken Burnside and myself at Castalia House with his new blog series called “Violent Resolution.” As you can see from his first post, this is going to be a doozy. From what I’ve seen, this will do for rpgs what Nick Schuessler did for wargames in his Space Gamer column. If you’re the type of person that’s always wanted a doctorate in comparative gaming, you will faint!

As for Violent Resolution itself, Cole himself explains what the weekly column is going to entail:

The column will focus on combat in games, mostly to the exclusion of other things. It will of course include fighting, but also how fights start and end. It will spend a great deal of time looking at game mechanics along the way, and will probably spend a lot of word count looking at what kind of storytelling environment is created by those mechanics.

Through the Lens

As the blog progresses, I’ll frequently be looking at combat with examples from different games. There will be others from time-to-time – notably when I have an anecdote from games I’ve played (or stopped playing) in the past. But by and large, I’ll explore this topic by looking at how certain games handle things.

Dungeons and Dragons, Fifth Edition

I’m going to refer to D&D5 here
frequently, because you can’t talk about RPGs – especially combat in
RPGs – without talking about the moose in the room. D&D-based games
dominate the market of tabletop RPGs that all other games combined are
pretty much an afterthought.

I’ll use D&D5 as a proxy for the kind
of resolution system that is found as variations on a theme in
Pathfinder, the D&D-derived Old School Renaissance (or Old School
Revival? Maybe both!), and other games that are recognizably the same
basic mechanic. All are recognizable as essentially the same game that I
learned to play when I was 10 years old, roleplaying for the first time
in 1981 – the Basic/Expert D&D boxed sets, followed by AD&D.
Stepping into Swords and Wizardry, Pathfinder, or D&D is usually a
matter of fine-tuning. You may need to understand the proper use of a
Feat hierarchy, or what will kill your character as opposed to knocking
him out, or get the feel for various special mechanics, such as the
Advantaged/Disadvantaged mechanic newly introduced in D&D5 . . . but by and large if you’ve ever played D&D you’ll understand what’s going on pretty fast.

As the future leading publisher of military science fiction, the martial arts from the grand strategic to the tactical is of interest to us, and while I think it is highly unlikely that we will be able to convince Dr. van Creveld, Gen. Krulak, Gen. Gray, or Mr. Lind to take up blogging  at Castalia House anytime soon, we are very pleased to have Mr. Cole intelligently addressing matters from the other end of the spectrum.

Chicken with the Dark Lord

Brad Torgersen, the leader of Sad Puppies 3, observes the obvious:

Facebook is lighting up with outrage over the fact that the notorious Vox Day is threatening to go all NO AWARD on the Hugo ballot in 2016, if NO AWARD takes the Hugo ballot in 2015. Amidst the wailing and gnashing of teeth and blaming the family dog (me) for the fact a wild wolf (Vox) is growling at the door, I have to ask everybody: what did you freaking expect when you made it plain as day the whole reason for going NO AWARD in 2015 is to keep Vox’s imprint Castalia House (and Vox himself) off the trophy table? That’s like putting a bloody leg of beef into the water while a great white shark circles nearby. You are daring The Kurgan to play chicken with you. That is The Kurgan’s most favorite game. The wild wolf lives for danger. The wild wolf wants you to nuke it all from orbit. This is Mutually Assured Destruction….

I know Vox sure as hell doesn’t give a fuck what I think. When did he
ever? He didn’t give a fuck when SFWA sent him packing. He doesn’t
give a fuck who hates him. If Sad Puppies evaporates tomorrow and
ceases to exist, Vox won’t give a shit at all. Because Vox doesn’t give
a shit what any of us think, and doesn’t care.

That pretty much sums it up nicely. What do you say, Dread Ilk? What do you say, Rabid Puppies? Are we dogs or are we wolves?

We don’t whine. We don’t cry. We don’t complain. We howl.

And the rabbits tremble.

Objectively superior

At File 770, David W. raises the point about the need for Sad Puppies to make the case that the works they have nominated are meritorious beyond the fact that many of them have sold rather well.

Hugo awards aren’t intended to recognize the skiffy equivalent of
Kraft Mac & Cheese dinners. They’re intended to recognize works
that are distinctive, not derivative, in the genre, and frankly we’re
lucky if 10% of what’s written rises above the level of mediocrity. So the SP’s need to base their claim for Hugo recognition on
something other than sales, such as, “what’s amazing and wonderful about
this story” and “what new and interesting thing has someone done with
science fiction lately”. Not “my story outsold yours, neener, neener,
neener”.

Actually, we can do considerably better than appeal to subjective superlatives too. We can objectively prove the superiority of both the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies recommendations, as well as the 2015 shortlist, to the previous five Best Novel classes.

What year looks more like one representative of a true Best Novel class to you? While the averages are set, the winner in 2015 could actually be as high as Jim Butcher’s 4.8-rated Skin Game, but the lowest ranking book nominated this year, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword, is still rated higher than any recent winner except for her own Ancillary Justice. In short fiction, consider the Amazon ratings and number of reviews for two of the Novella nominees in comparison with last year’s winners of the Novella and Novelette categories.

4.6 (63) One Bright Star to Guide Them (2015 finalist)
4.3 (121) Big Boys Don’t Cry (2015 finalist)
4.4 (48) Lady Astronaut of Mars (2014 winner)
4.3 (152) Equoid (2014 winner)

The Sad Puppy nominees are objectively superior as rated by Amazon. They are, in fact, superior across the board in comparison with recent years. We are raising the bar, not lowering it.

At the Castalia House blog, Daniel has done some more research in this regard going back to 1986.

Best Novel 2016

Ben Bernanke isn’t talking to us in the title of his new account of the 2008 financial crisisnovel, he’s talking to the gentlemen paying his speaker’s fees.

“When the economic well-being of their nation demanded a strong and creative response, my colleagues at the Federal Reserve, policymakers and staff alike, mustered the moral courage to do what was necessary, often in the face of bitter criticism and condemnation. I am grateful to all of them.”

As with all Fedspeak, you have to translate it into English. What he so bravely did was bail out the owners of the large banks at the cost of the US economy. The USA will now never exit the debt-prison into which Helicopter Ben locked it without a catastrophic meltdown.

I think we’re going to need to get a ruling from MidAmeriCon if The Courage to Act will be eligible for Best Novel next year. It certainly contains more fiction than the average fantasy novel.