Tag: Hugo Award

Not that the outcomes were ever in any doubt, but it’s always interesting to see what justifications the SJWs produce for their DISQUALIFY. Here are a few commenting at File 770:

Hampus Eckerman on May 19, 2015 at 9:04 am said:

Just finished the Related Works. Not satisfied again.

Wisdoms from my Internet was mostly a collection of tweets. Some were funny, some were well thought out, others were boring and a few were… well, lets say they catered to people with another political taste than me. Ranting about “SJWs” is not the way to get votes from me. Anyhow, who wants to read that amount of tweets? Nah, this is a no award.

Why Science is Never Settled was the standard article about the scientific methods, one of hundreds, just not as well done as many others. No award again.

Wright is as horrible as usual in his Transhuman and Subhuman:

“The female spirit is wise rather than cunning, deep in understanding rather than adroit in deductive logic, gentle and supportive rather than boastful and self-aggrandizing.”

“Contrariwise, when women in the kitchen or the nursery use the name of the Lord in vain, and the children they are nursing and teaching hear them, the vulgarity has the negative effect of deadening the emotions of the youngsters and making them vulgar and indifferent to vulgarity.”

“Also a woman who is crude inspires contempt, because she has contempt for God and man. The difference is that a woman who loses her native delicacy and modesty does not become an object of fear and respect, but an object of contempt and loathing, because the aura of sanctity women naturally inspire in men is tossed away.”
And so on. Bollocks I say.

Hot Equations might be very interesting for a weapons nerd or for someone who loves reading about exactly how weapons work. Sorry to say, I’m not that person.

Which leaves Letters from Gardner which was just damned weird. A mix of a guys memoire, writing tips and then stories. As I had never heard of him before, the memoire part was kind of boring. The writing tips weren’t anchored in anything. Stories in the mix of this just felt strange. So, nah.

And thats it. No award I guess.

clif on May 20, 2015 at 9:39 am said:

so I’ve read all I’m going to read of the short stories … preliminary voting …

1. Totaled
2. A Single Samurai
3. No Award
4. Turncoat
5. On a Spiritual Plain
6. The Parliament of Beasts and Birds

Nate Harada on May 20, 2015 at 7:27 am said:

I will confess that I No Awarded four full categories and I’m pretty >_< about it. I *wanted* to like “A Single Samurai.” I did, really! But, well, yeah. No. But it was good of Baen to include the entire anthology in which it appeared.

Katya on May 20, 2015 at 4:54 am said:

@Happy Turtle I’ve read
most of 3 categories (Short Fiction, Novel, Graphic Story). In one of
those categories, only two of the works are strong enough that I would
have finished reading them if I came across them in a magazine. While
both are OK, neither has strong enough writing or storytelling or
characterization to be ‘award’ level writing. I’ve read short stories
published this year that are much, much stronger than both of those
works. I don’t feel it is right to give a prestigious award to works
that are middle-of-the-pack. To me, it devalues the award.

nickpheas on May 20, 2015 at 1:08 am said:

OK, reads Hugo Packet. One Bright Star To Guide Me By.

Is there an in story reason why Wright seems to use Sally and Sarah to describe one of his characters, or just did he forget what he called her?

rob_matic on May 20, 2015 at 1:58 am said:

He may be using Sally as a diminutive of Sarah, although I can imagine it reading oddly if both are being used.

Peace Is My Middle Name on May 20, 2015 at 2:07 am said:
Given Wright’s stated attitudes towards women, I find it utterly unsurprising that he cannot even remember the name of his own character.

SocialInjusticeWorrier on May 20, 2015 at 4:43 am said:

I don’t
think switching between Sally and Sarah is a problem, so long as the
author has a good reason for doing it. I could see O. Henry, for
example, using the shift in names very effectively to make a point about
how different someone is/appears in a formal setting (as Sarah) as
opposed to their normal life (as Sally). What I don’t see is John C
Wright having any such purpose in his narrative, which argues for
incompetence or carelessness.

 GSLamb on May 19, 2015 at 7:18 pm said:

Had a few days convalescence (and a few more ahead), so I thought it a fine time to catch up on my Hugo reading.

Thanks
to a very good local library, I have been reading most of the Best
Novel nominees on the traditional Ent-corpse editions. “Skin Game” was
everything I thought it would be – no more, no less. “Three Body
Problem” was either over my head or not something to read on medication
(I will revisit next month). Even though I had not read the first novel,
I enjoyed “Ancillary Sword”. It wasn’t until the end when I realized
that not every “She” was female (again, medication).

With renewed access to my laptop, I started greedily digesting the Hugo packet.

Oy.

The
worst thing about the packet is that I have to wait until they release
the list of what would have made the Hugo ballot sans-slate so that I
can read those works.

Having read that one story by John C.
Wright (do not bother me with quibbles – they are all the same story*)
five times was, admittedly, rough work. Luckily I had left the Graphic
Story for afterwards. I nearly ruptured something reading “Rat Queens”.

Now, this might all sound very convincing were it not for the sort of works they were awarding in recent years. Or if you weren’t able to see for yourself what “Rat Queens” is like. No, there can be no compromise, as those who were formerly neutral are coming to understand.

Will on May 19, 2015 at 4:43 pm said:

Until now, until tonight, I thought they were full of BS. Utter BS. But you make their case better than they do. Congratulations.

Will on May 19, 2015 at 4:49 pm said:

You couldn’t be helping Vox more if he was paying you.

And where would we be without SJWs to not only explain what is good and acceptable science fiction versus what is bad and unacceptable science fiction, but also our own principles.  After all, they obviously understand us so very well.

Bruce Baugh on May 20, 2015 at 8:26 am said:

Nate’s monologue reminds me of the thing that really chafes me about a lot of noisy, disruptive modern conservatives: how much time the rest of us end up explaining their own principles to them.

Aaron on May 20, 2015 at 5:30 am said:

The Puppies have already lost. Even if one of their authors wins a Hugo, the Puppies lose, because what none of the Puppies seem to understand is the award doesn’t confer the prestige you all so clearly crave. The prestige has to come first, or the award will be seen as tainted and undeserved. Every Puppy campaign has been an admission on the part of the organizers that the works they are touting are too weak to get nominated on their own merits. Every Puppy campaign is an admission that the Puppy touted authors are simply too lousy at their profession to earn recognition for their actual work. Every Puppy campaign is itself a loss for the Puppies.

The only question is who will be king? Chris Hensley usefully summarizes the core issue underlying the conflict in science fiction at File 770:

It is helpful to understand the context in which the Puppies were started. There has been a debate going on for a number of years at this point, predating the Puppies and one which they are involved in like or not, about what, and who, we actually should accept and tolerate within the community. There has been a growing sentiment that maybe not everybody should be welcomed with open arms, maybe some people should be excluded.

I could spin it to sound more palatable, but it is a grave and terrible thing and as someone who supports sometimes excluding people for their actions it would be dishonest for me to do so. Fandom has had a tradition of not excluding anybody for any reason, including some pretty horrendous behavior up to and including sexual harassment and assault. This has finally come back to bite the community in the posterior, as well it should. A lot of this push back has been from the left-leaning end of fandom, and good for them, which has flavored both the community’s response and the reaction to that response. A lot of this is working how the details of what is, and is not, acceptable in what spaces.

One of the most heated debates, and the one the Puppies tapped into, is when speech should be excluded and when people can be excluded for their speech. The community traditionally leaned towards “never”, but the consensus has moved on that.

The moment that the SJWs in the science fiction community decided they could exclude individuals from it (and whether the SFWA expulsion was technically real or not is irrelevant in this regard), that meant the open community concept was dead. The principle was established. Now we can exclude Eskimos, people with big noses, people with little noses, people who look funny, or people who smell bad; in short, we can openly exclude anyone we have the power and the desire to exclude.

There is no longer free speech in science fiction. There is no longer freedom of expression or thought. It is now a simple ideological power game and we are ready to play that game with extreme prejudice. There is no need for discourse. There is no need for dialogue, for compromise, or negotiations. There is nothing to discuss.

They laid out the new rules. They laid out the new consensus. We not only accept them, we’re going to use make far more ruthless use of them than they ever imagined. Once we were content to let the twisted little moral freaks do and think and say what they wanted, but now they have claimed the right to tell US what to do and think and say we’re not going to tolerate them anymore. We are the sons of the Crusades and the daughters of the Inquisitions. This is a game we know how to win.

Remember, they didn’t exclude rapists. They didn’t exclude child molesters. They didn’t exclude Communists. They didn’t exclude monsters. They only excluded those with whom they ideologically disagreed. CMM observed:

I was reading the discussion from a 1960s fanzine which contained the discussion of whether Worldcon should ban the man who later became her husband (and still later died in prison after being convicted of child molestation).

In their attempts to keep up their ideal that everyone is welcome in fandom, the fans doing the discussing go to amazing lengths to deny that the guy is a problem and as they do so they reveal behavior they and people known to them have personally witnessed that made my hair stand on end, including groping the children of mutual friends in front of the friends and other guests at their house.

Remember, the science fiction community was absolutely fine with open child molesting. They still defend and honor child molesters and the sexually aberrant, even as they mock and exclude their ideological opponents. That is the sickness of the community over which the Evil Legion of Evil will methodically march. And speaking of the long march, now that the Hugo Packets are out, I should have my Totally Personal List Of Merest Voting Inclinations That Absolutely No One, Not Even The Vilest of Minions, Has To Follow To The Letter ready in about two weeks. I trust that description should suffice to keep everyone who has been whining about slates and bloc votes satisfied.

Mike Glyer adds:

It’s possible for people to exclude themselves from community with others they disapprove, but there seems to be no literal way of excluding anyone from fandom, which is why it has that misunderstood reputation for unlimited tolerance. I remember the time I passed Walter Breen in the aisle of a con huckster room, at first being astonished, then wondering “Should I tell someone?” Then, “Tell them what? They already know, he’s wearing membership badge.”

He’s absolutely right. It’s possible for a large group of people to exclude themselves from community with others they disapprove. All that we’re initially sorting out right now is who is on the Blue SF side and who is on the Pink SF side. Which, of course, is why many of those on the latter side are suddenly rushing to deny that there are two sides; they know theirs is much smaller. And they know we aim to misbehave.

UPDATE: This sums up our position nicely.

I did ask some pro-puppies that very question about how much they want. The answers I’ve gotten in emails have been very much along the lines of “Delenda Est”.

The Legion marches.

Since we’re often informed by the SJWs how vital it is that more women are given awards on the basis of inclusivity, let’s begin with putting the facts out there. We already know, per Mike Glyer, that Hugos have been awarded to 19 conservative winners since 1996. I went through the list of Hugo Awards by Year and counted the number of women awarded, then counted the total number of awards given out. When more than one individual was awarded, I added the relevant percentage of that particular award (so one women in a group of four counted as 0.25, for example), and rounded up to a single decimal at the end.

2014: 9 of 17
2013: 4.8 of 17
2012: 8.8 of 17
2011: 6 of 16
2010: 2.8 of 16
2009: 4.5 of 15
2008: 1.3 of 14
2007: 3 of 14
2006: 3 of 13
2005: 4.8 of 14
2004: 4.7 of 13
2003: 4 of 13
2002: 1.5 of 13
2001: 2 of 13
2000: 1 of 12
1999: 1 of 12
1998: 0.5 of 12
1997: 1.5 of 12
1996: 1.5 of 13

TOTAL: 65.7 women have won 24.7 percent and 19 conservatives have won 7.1 percent of the 266 Hugo Awards given out since 1996. This is despite the fact that conservatives outnumber liberals by a factor of 1.6 in the USA, which means that conservatives are underrepresented by a factor of 11.3, versus women being underrepresented by a factor of 2.

Now, if the SJWs are to be believed, sexism is a serious problem but there is absolutely no evidence of left wing ideological bias. They keep repeating this despite the fact that the anti-right wing bias in science fiction is observably 5.6 times worse than the purported sexism about which they so often complain.

Which merely points us once more towards the truth of the lesson: SJWs always lie. And if the numbers aren’t enough to convince the more rhetorically minded, there is also a considerable quantity of anecdotal evidence of bias such as this comment from Martin Wisse:

To be honest, Worldcon fandom has been caught with its pants down by the Puppies, too slow to react to the first two attempts to game the Hugos. We all thought, and I was no exception, that after the Puppy nominees were trashed in the actual voting last year, the spoiled brats behind it would get the hint and fuck off.

Well, not so much. But at least we all know how seriously to take their pose of inclusivity.

I stopped commenting at File 770 as it proved to be another exercise in demonstrating the truth of Aristotle’s dictum about those who cannot be instructed. Give them dialectic and they shamelessly attempt to pick it apart, some honestly, most dishonestly, while constantly declaring that any errors or falsehoods on their part are irrelevant. Give them rhetoric to meet them at their level and they either cry about it or concoct pseudo-dialectic to explain why it’s not valid.

Example 1
VD: SJWs always lie.
SJW: I told the truth once back in 2007. See, you’re totally wrong. Your whole argument is disproved. You are a bad person. DISQUALIFIED!

Example 2
VD: I stopped commenting at File 770.
SJW: You said you stopped commenting and then LEFT ONE MORE COMMENT THERE! See, you’re totally wrong. Your whole argument is disproved. Aristotle! You are a bad person. DISQUALIFIED!

Quod erat demonstrandum.

But the SJW theatre of the absurd aside, the continuing Hugo coverage at File 770 makes for interesting reading, particularly as the few remaining commenters possessing intellectual integrity one-by-one throw up their hands and stop trying to force the relevant facts through the SJW’s cast-iron skulls. A pair of neutrals recounted typical experiences, as one of them juxstaposed his treatment at various Puppy sites versus SF-SJW Central:

Brief Side note re: Making Light. I posted there, maybe 4 times in a discussion a month or so ago. Never a name called, never a nasty word, did not attack anyone, and was in the middle of a dialogue with another poster that came across as reasonable. My posts were disemvowelled and the board owner called me a liar. I’ve posted several times here, and at Larry’s, Brad’s, and Sarah Hoyt’s boards. At least one time I got shouted at a little, but no one edited me away to nonsense. That makes me more sympathetic with the folks not grooming their comment sections /shrug

AG on May 14, 2015 at 3:20 pm said: Regarding disemvowelling at Making Light, I took part in the initial discussion about voting rules, which as a mathematician I found very interesting. There was a contributor there (I don’t remember his name) who was an expert on voting systems and made the most valuable contributions. I certainly learned a lot from his posts. Then he made a post where he mentioned his web site (which was on topic, because it was about voting systems and potentially of interest to the people who were taking part in that discussion) and he was disemvowelled, which is something that I had never seen before and found absolutely bizarre.

Ostensibly the reason was for spamming, although as I said the poster was the one who had made the most valuable contributions to the discussion and the link was not off-topic. Talking about it, he got several more posts disemvowelled. I respect owners’ right to moderate content in their sites, but I found the practice of disemvoweling abusive and humiliating, more indicative of a petty bully in charge showing her power than of a serious moderator, and it convinced me that I did not want to have anything to do with that site.

The Making Light crew is what it is, and what it has been for the past decade. Another former neutral expressed some degree of surprise at the insistence that the Puppy tactics have been in any way worse than past tactics utilized in the SF field:

Steve Moss on May 14, 2015 at 3:20 pm said:

David W. @ 3:08 pm- So log-rolling is acceptable, with all that implies, but slates are not?

Accepting for argument’s sake the definitions of some, a slate is a list of public recommendation with a common political interest. That’s bad.

Log-rolling, quietly horse-trading votes based on self-interest (I want to win and need to be “strategic”), that’s okay.

Leaving aside the debated to death argument on slates (which I disagree is bad), it occurs to me the greatest sin the SP/RP have committed is exposing the Hugo process to the light of day. Now that more fans know: 1) that it didn’t/doesn’t take much to get a nomination; and, 2) about the behind the scenes chicanery, the Hugo loses some of its luster.

I think the position of some in fandom is laughable. What SP/RP did is the exact same thing; they just did it better and publicly. And that’s unforgivable.

It’s not surprising that the SJWs are already working very hard to change the rules because we’ve shown up and operated in an above-board manner. Instead of playing coy and disingenuous and plausibly deniable, we simply said “hey, vote for these works.” Note that it wasn’t all that long ago that SJWs in SFWA changed the Nebula rules to HIDE the evidence of all the log-rolling that was taking place there. They are always determined to hide what is actually taking place under the rocks where they dwell, which is why our straightforward tactics are so abhorrent to them.

UPDATE: While this will no doubt set the rhetoricals spinning again, it was too painful to watch people opining ineptly about whether Scalzi’s LOCK IN was a relative failure (truth) or a massive success that only proves that John Scalzi is a massive success in everything he does (SJW narrative). So, against my better judgment, I pointed out the completely obvious that had somehow managed to elude the rocket scientists commenting at File 770:

That is an apples-to-apples comparison. Hardcover to hardcover. And if that simple recitation of relevant facts isn’t sufficient to convince you, then obviously no information is sufficient to instruct you or change your mind.