Tag: Hugo Award

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.

George Martin admits Hugo campaigns

He is to be commended for not following the SJW lead in attempting to deny the undeniable, which is to say the long and easily verified history of organized Hugo campaigning:

 In the ongoing discussion of Puppygate, numerous people have cited one instance, wherein a stack of identical nominating ballots arrived with the same postmark, paid for by consecutive money orders. Those were disallowed. In 1987, members of the Church of Scientology campaigned successfully to place L. Ron Hubbard’s BLACK GENESIS on the Best Novel ballot. That was not disallowed — the Scientologists had done nothing illegal, after all, all they’d done is buy supporting memberships to a convention that they had no intention of attending, for the sole purpose of nominating LRH for a Hugo (hmmm, why does that tactic sound familiar?) — but their campaign created a huge backlash. Hubbard’s name was booed lustily at the Hugo ceremony in Brighton, and his book finished last in the final balloting, behind No Award. (The winner that year was Orson Scott Card, with SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD, for those who are counting).

Of course, there were also recommended reading lists. That wasn’t campaigning, not strictly, but certain lists could have huge influence on the final ballot. The annual LOCUS Recommended Reading List, compiled by Charles Brown and his staff and reviewers, was the most influential. If your book or story made that list… well, it did not guarantee you a place on the ballot, but it sure improved your chances. NESFA (the New England fan club) had an annual list as well, and LASFS might have done the same, not sure. And of course the Nebulas, which came before the Hugos, carried a lot of weight too. Win a Nebula, and the chances were good that you’d be a Hugo nominee as well. Again, no guarantee, some years the shortlists diverged sharply… but more often than not, there was a lot of overlap.

So there were always these factors in play. Cliques, I can hear the Sad Puppies saying. Yeah, maybe. Thing is, they were COMPETING cliques. The NESFA list and the Nebula list were not the same, and the LOCUS list… the LOCUS list was always very long. Five spots on the Hugo ballot, and LOCUS would recommend twenty books, or thirty… sometimes more, when they started putting SF and fantasy in separate categories.

Bottom line, lots of people influenced the Hugos (or tried to), but no one ever successfully controlled the Hugos.

That became even more true when we entered the age of the internet. Suddenly blogs and bulletin boards and listservs were everywhere, and there were DOZENS of people drawing up recommended reading lists and suggesting books and writers and stories. Sweet chaos. It was glorious. So many people talking about books, arguing about books, reading books.

That was also when the practice of writers blogging about their own eligible books and stories took root. “Say, the Hugo nominations are coming up, and I had a few things out last year. Hey, check them out.” Some people were deeply offended by this practice. (Some still are. Check out the blogs of Peter Watts and Adam Roberts on the subject, for instance). Others, especially newer writers and those hungry for attention, seized on it at once as a way of getting their name out there. Publishers and editors began to encourage it. Publicity and advertising budgets being what they were (non-existent in many cases), new writers and midlist writers soon realized that if they did not publicize their books, no one would.

And once it really got rolling, there was no stopping it. “Everyone else is doing it,” you heard writers say. “I have to do it, in self-defense.” They were not wrong. Sometimes the difference between making the Hugo ballot and falling short is a single vote. The writer who refused to self-promote and then fell a few votes short… ouch.

[And yes, I have done all this myself. Mentioned my own work, drawn up recommended reading lists, blogged passionately about people I thought deserved a nomination. I am not condemning the practice, just reporting on it. It always made me feel awkward, but like many of my friends, I knew that if I refrained and then missed the ballot by a few votes, I would be kicking myself. I’d sooner see the practice die out. But until it does, you have to play the game.]

Of course, not everyone was equally good at self-promotion. Certain subfandoms were better organized than others (the DOCTOR WHO fans, for instance). Certain writers were more skilled at social media than others, and built up huge personal followings on Twitter and Facebook, or through their blogs… numbers that soon translated to multiple Hugo nominations.

And that was pretty much where we stood, until the Sad Puppies came along…. The Sad Puppies did not invent Hugo campaigning, by any means. But they escalated it, just as that magazine/publisher partnership did way back when. They turned it up to eleven. Their slate was more effective that anyone could ever have dreamed, so effective that they drowned out pretty much all the other voices. They ran the best organized, most focused, and most effective awards campaign in the history of our genre, and showed everyone else how it’s done.

It’s fascinating to see SJWs like John Scalzi twittering that Sad Puppies are on the wrong side of Mr. Martin when he just cut the legs out from under most of the opposition’s arguments. Observe what Mr. Martin has admitted, contra the SJWs, and particularly the Making Light clique.

  1.  Whisper campaigns and bloc votes are real and have existed for decades. I’ve talked to a number of old school authors and the story is the same in every case. People have bought multiple memberships for their families, for their extended families, and voted them as a bloc. Publishers used to send free copies of the books they were specifically pushing for Best Novel to all the convention voters. Authors agreed to trade votes with each other in an arrangement known as “logrolling”.
  2. We did not invent Hugo campaigning. Neither did John Scalzi. But just as he created Award Pimpage and used his blog to get him a Fan Writer Hugo, then, in a tactic imitated by Jim Hines and Kameron Hurley, used it as a pivot for his successful Best Novel campaign. Now he has 9 Hugo nominations and 3 Hugo Awards, which means that he has more nominations than Jerry Pournelle and Arthur C. Clarke, and 3 more Hugo Awards than Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Vogt, Lester del Rey; Gregory Benford, Norman Spinrad, Terry Pratchett and Iain M. Banks combined. The difference is that Scalzi’s Award Pimpage campaigns benefited only himself. Sad Puppies has helped bring attention to the work of a broad spectrum of hitherto unrecognized, but meritorious authors.
  3. Teresa Nielsen Hayden and everyone else who has claimed that there were no previous campaigns is lying.
  4. Mr. Martin correctly decries the No Award tactic as the nuclear option, because “too many innocents would be hurt, and the Hugos would be destroyed”. He is correct. Those who are advocating it as a way to teach Sad Puppies a lesson are completely failing to understand the situation.
  5. There are those who think No Award will send a message that this kind of campaigning is not wanted at the Hugos. Sure, it will send a very clear message to Sad Puppies. And that message will be: unleash the Rabid Puppies. 
  6. We don’t feel we’re victims. We’re not complaining that we’ve been overlooked for decades. We’re not whining or crying about anything. But we were told by a certain clique that we had to kowtow to them because failing to do so would be “a career-limiting move.” Now we are making sure that no one will ever have to kowtow to them, or cower before them, again.
  7. I published science fiction books for years without ever campaigning for them, listing their eligibility, or pimping them for awards, despite having the public platforms of a nationally syndicated column and a popular blog. And I’m not inclined to listen to criticism from anyone who ever did. 
  8. The two Puppies campaigns have resulted in the highest average Amazon rating in the Best Novel category going back to 1986. In 2015, the average is 4.46 stars. The 2010-2014 pre-Puppy average is 3.9 stars. Sad Puppies is objectively improving the quality of the nominated works and expanding the overall nominee pool.

UPDATE: Mr. Martin added this:

That business about one clique (those dreaded SJWs, I am sure) dominating the nominations for the last ten years strikes me as pure Puppy poop. Where’s the evidence of that?

Someone needs to send him this quote from Charles “Three more Hugo nominations than Asimov or Heinlein” Stross at Making Light back in 2005:

For the purposes of assessing the impact
of your words, it doesn’t matter whether they’re supported by the
evidence or not — we’re talking perceptions here.

The people who live and work and pitch their tents in this
field have long memories. You’ll have to share the same field with them
for a long time — decades, maybe — if you want to be in it at all. And
you’ve just offended 75% of them? This is Not Clever.

You may not need them now, but you have no idea
what your circumstances will look like in ten years’ time. Twenty years.
Thirty. Five minutes hence. (Etcetera.) Pissing people off for no good reason is counter-productive. In a corporate environment it’s sometimes termed a career-limiting move. I think you just made a career-limiting move.

Keep in mind this was in response to a nationally syndicated op/ed column I had written for Universal Press Syndicate. And I was supposed to be concerned that I had limited my career by offending the Nielsen Hayden clique even though I didn’t know who they were.

    Brad Torgersen confronts the beast

    It’s a little ironic that Brad Torgersen is being accused of racism, which you’ll understand if you click on the link:

    What disturbs me more is that the field of SF/F is stooping this low.
    That some of my colleagues — and no, contrary to my impression of the
    field 20 years ago, not everyone likes or gets along with each other —
    have decided to make the nerd argument over the Hugos into a decidedly
    personal grudge match. Where the objective is to not just win the
    argument, but to destroy the arguer. Professionally. In the
    marketplace. On the big stage of public opinion. This is the kind of
    stuff you ordinarily find in cut-throat national political elections,
    but then it’s been clear for years that cut-throat politics have drifted
    down into nerd circles of all kinds: comic book circles, movie and
    television circles, video game circles, etc. There’s simply no escaping
    it. And there are people for whom winning is more important than
    ethics, more important than integrity, and more important than the
    truth.

    And the truth is, I’m not the dastardly guy Biedenharn’s piece makes me out to be. And neither is Larry Correia.

    Am I concerned with the infestation of political correctness which
    has invaded SF/F over the last 15 years? You bet. Today’s ride on the
    media dunking machine was just another iteration in the near-endless
    attempts by the politically correct to enforce their views, with slander
    and falsehoods when it comes down to it. Our field is diseased. It
    has been struck by the same mental virus that has been permeating other
    sectors of our culture. As one astute and recovered victim put it, the
    new zealots are a cult who dwell in depression and anger, seeking the slightest excuses to lash out and make other people suffer:

    There is something dark and vaguely cultish about this
    particular brand of politics. I’ve thought a lot about what exactly that
    is. I’ve pinned down four core features that make it so disturbing:
    dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti-intellectualism.

    Today, the crusader mentality decided to defame and slander Brad R.
    Torgersen the evil demonic racist and hateful sick bigoted misognynist. As my friend Larry often quips, if I was half the bastard some of these crusaders say I am, I’d probably hate me too….

    But really, when SF/F sinks to this depth, you know we’ve jumped a
    certain kind of unfortunate shark. Political correctness has gone to a
    place of destructive take-no-prisoners soul tyranny that could very well
    and permanently wreck this field; unless good men and women of
    conscience decide to stand up. I made the decision a long time ago that
    I wasn’t going to be one of those professionals who diplomatically
    skulks around the field, obsequiously trying to avoid controversy and
    not upset the bigger fish. Again, I’ve seen too much of the elephant.
    My career isn’t so important to me that I am willing to become an
    ideological chameleon, or cipher. Perhaps this has angered some people
    to the point they believe it’s time to “end” Torgersen once and for all?
    If so, I think that’s a very sad statement — about the vindictiveness
    that has overtaken the genre, among men and women who should probably be
    working hard to be friends.

    Folks, until or unless political correctness is given the boot, this kind of stuff isn’t going to stop.

    It won’t be just me getting the torch. It will be you too. You
    other authors, and you other fans. Political correctness has a
    bottomless stomach, and is red in tooth and claw. Even if you try to
    appease the beast, it will eat you eventually anyway.

    Needless to say, I’m a little less surprised. I was openly warned about my sinful nature in the eyes of science fiction’s thought police more than 10 years ago, and attacked by a few of those self-appointed thought police for my thought crimes. They know perfectly well that I don’t care what they call me, so they’re going in search of what they think is easier prey, of people more inclined to give in.

    Aren’t they in for a surprise!

    Entertainment Weekly libels Sad Puppies

    I suspect Isbella Biedenharn is going to be hearing from her superiors shortly:

    Hugo Award nominations fall victim to misogynistic, racist voting campaign
    by Isabella Biedenharn

    The Hugo Awards have fallen victim to a campaign in which misogynist groups lobbied to nominate only white males for the science fiction book awards. These groups, Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies (both of which are affiliated with last year’s GamerGate scandal), urged sci-fi fans to become members of the Hugo Awards’ voting body, World Science Fiction Convention, in order to cast votes against female writers and writers of color. Membership only costs $40, and allows members to vote for the 2016 nominations as well as the 2015 nominations, which were just released.

    Sad Puppies broadcast their selection on Feb. 1, writing: “If you agree with our slate below—and we suspect you might—this is YOUR chance to make sure YOUR voice is heard.” Brad Torgerson, who runs Sad Puppies along with Larry Correia, complains that the Hugo Awards have lately skewed toward “literary” works, as opposed to “entertainment.”

    Torgerson also writes that he disagrees with Hugos being awarded for affirmative action-like purposes, as many women and writers of color went home with awards in 2014: ”Likewise, we’ve seen the Hugo voting skew ideological, as Worldcon and fandom alike have tended to use the Hugos as an affirmative action award: giving Hugos because a writer or artist is (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) or because a given work features (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) characters.”

    The other lobbying group, Rabid Puppies, is run by Theodore Beale (who goes by the name Vox Day). As The Telegraph reports, “Members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have called for Beale’s exclusion from the group after he has written against women’s suffrage and posted racist views towards black writer NK Jemisin.”

    Fortunately, some sane voters allowed well-deserving writers to pull through. Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword and Listen was nominated for Dramatic Presentation, and Annie Bellet’s Goodnight Stars was nominated, despite having a non-white, female protagonist.

    Plenty of members of the science fiction community have voiced their disgust with both sects of “Puppies.” Writer Philip Sandifer wrote on his blog Sunday, “The Hugo Awards have just been successfully hijacked by neofascists.” Sandifer’s post, which is worth reading in full, addresses what this disaster means for the sci-fi world:

        To be frank, it means that traditional sci-fi/fantasy fandom does not have any legitimacy right now. Period. A community that can be this effectively controlled by someone who thinks black people are subhuman and who has called for acid attacks on feminists is not one whose awards have any sort of cultural validity. That sort of thing doesn’t happen to functional communities. And the fact that it has just happened to the oldest and most venerable award in the sci-fi/fantasy community makes it unambiguously clear that traditional sci-fi/fantasy fandom is not fit for purpose.

    As writer Joe Abercrombie put it:

        The Hugo Awards have never looked less like the future of anything.

        — Joe Abercrombie (@LordGrimdark) April 4, 2015

    It should be amusing to see the back-pedaling from this malicious hit piece. It’s like they have one tactic: call the media and lie. How fortunate that #GamerGate has demonstrated the complete impotence of the tactic.

    UPDATE: They’re scrubbing the article and title, but Daddy Warpig provides the archived original.

    CORRECTION: After misinterpreting reports in other news
    publications, EW published an unfair and inaccurate depiction of the Sad
    Puppies voting slate, which does, in fact, include many women and
    writers of color. As Sad Puppies’ Brad Torgerson explained to EW, the
    slate includes both women and non-caucasian writers, including Rajnar
    Vajra, Larry Correia, Annie Bellet, Kary English, Toni Weisskopf, Ann
    Sowards, Megan Gray, Sheila Gilbert, Jennifer Brozek, Cedar Sanderson,
    and Amanda Green.
    This story has been updated to more accurately reflect this. EW regrets the error.

    They left out the only Native American. WHY DO THEY HATE INDIANS?

    On bloc voting

    First, I was pleased to see that Black Gate accepted their well-deserved and long-overdue Hugo nomination. John O’Neill, who is one of the fairest and most decent individuals on either side of the ideological aisle, explained why:

    “Since the Black Gate nomination was for the
    entire site (which is run by a group of nearly 40 volunteers, many of
    whom are thrilled by the nomination), we did not decline. That’s a
    choice that will doubtless expose us to some (perhaps deserved)
    criticism.”

    John believes SP/RP was “a Spectacularly Bad Idea” and that “There will be a response, and it won’t be pretty.” Of course, we’re already seeing how unpretty that response can be.

    “I consider Vox Day one step, either direction, from certifiable.” – Mike Resnick

    “Fuck John C. Wright, that cretinous neckbeard, and fuck Vox Day, that pathetic human garbage bin.” – a commenter at Charles Stross’s site

    “I cannot abide Vox Day, and I’d drop a planet on his house if I
    could. Man’s a misogynistic pig, and that’s an insult to swine.”     – Michael Harper

    And the latter comment is coming from someone who has REJECTED the Mutually Assured Destruction option being recommended by many, including John O’Neill himself. However much I like John and respect his opinion, I would be remiss if I did not point out there are two serious problems with it:

    1. It is logically incoherent to assert that we are wreckers and indifferent to the long-term fate of the Hugo Awards and to simultaneously threaten MAD. If anyone believes that it is our goal to destroy the awards, they should be begging Sad Puppies to not vote No Award for everything and promising to cast their own votes for everything on the merits. In 2008, there were 483 valid nominating ballots. In 2015, when SP/RP dominated, there were 2,122. It should be readily apparent that anything they can do, we can do bigger, better, and longer. Yes, the other side can bring more in the future. So can we. If they want a showdown, we’ll be there.
    2. Contra John’s belief, I’m not crazy, he is completely wrong, and there IS a bloc operating in secret. Several blocs, as a matter of fact, and a fair number of people have known about them for a long time.

    You might be surprised how long small block voting has been going
    on in Hugo nominations. In fact, I was having a conversation with a
    former Hugo administrator about it last night. The thing is, it’s usually only in a category or two, and usually
    either not enough to add a single nominated work, or just enough to add a
    single nominated work.
    – Deidre Saoirse Moen, April 5, 2015

    I do not believe that there was ever a deliberate conspiracy to fill all
    the slots in every category with a dedicated “slate” of works. There
    clearly have been campaigns to get individual works on the ballot, some of them going beyond the technically legal.
    – Kevin Standlee, April 2, 2015

    Here is one apparent example. Consider the following vote totals in Best Editor from 2007 to 2013:

    2007
    88 David G. Hartwell (Tor)
    80 Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor)

    The next three nominees received between 43 and 28 votes.

    2008
    70 Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor)
    67 David G. Hartwell (Tor)

    The next three nominees received between 18 to 51 votes.

    2009
    87 David G. Hartwell (Tor)
    76 Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor)

    The other three nominees received 92, 34, and 34 votes.

    2010
    54 Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor)
    47 David G. Hartwell (Tor)

    The other three nominees received 99, 61, and 42 votes. Strikethrough indicates that the nomination was declined. As you can see, not everyone gets the message right away.

    2011
    44  David G. Hartwell (Tor)
    31 Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor)

    The other three nominees received 96, 54, and 23 votes 

    Either PNH or Hartwell won the Best Editor Long award every year from 2007 through 2010, with two apiece. Lou Anders of Pyr finished second on the shortlist every year from 2007 through 2013, except for the year he won, in 2011. Now, what is interesting to observe is that in 2007-2008, Anders only had 43 and 51 votes. Anders responded with an effective nomination campaign and came back the next three years with a bloc vote ranging from 92 to 96 votes, finally culminating in a shortlist win in 2011, the year that PNH followed Hartwell’s lead in declining the nomination.

    PNH was back in the game the next year, although it looks like he threw his support to Betsy Wolheim of DAW who received 67 nominating votes and won the Best Editor Long award despite never receiving a single nominating vote in 30 previous years and promptly falling off the shortlist the following year, when PNH won again. Two years after winning, Wolheim was back to receiving no nominating votes at all. Sheer coincidence, no doubt. Note that Wolheim is Patrick Rothfuss’s editor, and Rothfuss is an ally of the Scalzi/Stross bloc vote.

    And what ho? That year that Wolheim inexplicably received Tor-level nominating votes and won, what do we see in Best Novel, but:

    49 The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
    48 Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi

    Pure coincidence and fanly enthusiasm again, right? Unless you have a two-digit IQ, what you can see here is not only bloc votes of the sort that Standlee and Moen are describing, but competing bloc votes. Anders was able to build a bigger supporting bloc vote at the nominating stage, but he was always beaten out by Tor’s larger non-bloc shortlist voters until the Tor crew eased up and let him win one by stepping aside. Then they threw a bone to Wolheim before resuming business as usual.

    And then Sad Puppies entered the picture….

    Anyhow, as I told everyone at Black Gate, there is one, and only one, reason that I recommended their nomination. I recommended a Hugo nomination for Black Gate and for Matthew David
    Surridge for one very simple reason; they are both among the best in
    their categories in the SF/F field. No more, no less. And both deserved Hugos
    years ago.

    “The key to strategy… is not to choose a path to victory, but to choose so that all paths lead to a victory.”
        —The Vor Game

    Their greatest threat

    The Hugo announcements appear to have driven a few SJWs well around the bend:

    This is a man who goes beyond bigot, whose longterm planning looks more and more like creating a Christian version of ISIS. I don’t care about Godwin’s Law, he has written his own Mein Kampf. Forget the “War Against Terrorism”; Vox Day’s Culture War is the greatest threat to us all.
    posted by oneswellfoop at 12:38 PM on April 5 [5 favorites]

    My old Uncle Charlie – he once invited me to call him that – appears to be deeply, deeply disappointed with his black sheep of an adopted nephew:

    The screaming question I feel the need to ask, is: why Finland? Could there be a connection between the white supremacist Perussuomalaiset (Finns Party), the overtly racist Sweden Democrats, the Dark Enlightenment/neoreactionary movement, and Vox Day’s peculiarly toxic sect of Christian Dominionist theology?

    Over a period of years, he’s built an international coalition, finding
    common cause with the European neo-nazi fringe. Now they’ve attempted to
    turn the Hugo Awards into a battlefield
    in their (American) culture wars. But this clearly isn’t the end game
    they have in mind: it’s only a beginning. (The Hugos, by their very
    nature, are an award anyone can vote in for a small fee: it is
    interesting to speculate on how deep Vox Day’s pockets are.) But the real burning question is, “what will he attack next?”

    And now we know how the imagination that once produced Accelerando now exercises itself. Great stuff! My question is if it is “the screaming question” or “the real burning question” that takes priority? Remember, this is one of the very people who informs us that John C. Wright isn’t a Hugo-quality writer, like them. Cuz they be writing real gooder! But at least we now have a proper name for the auxiliary forces of the Evil Legion of Evil, which is the International Coalition of the Willingly Evil.

    But I do owe the man for honestly warning me about how speaking my mind freely would pose a serious risk to my career in SF/F. Is Scalzi around? Does that merit a hand job or will a mere “thanks, mate” suffice?

    McRapey’s friend Sparklepunter was content to settle for a death wish:

    Chris Warcraft@chriswarcraft
    The only thing that Vox Day deserves to win is a trip to a society that believes what he espouses so a random person can shoot him.

    And another of Scalzi’s little friends, @SFReviews, managed to get his account suspended.

    Account suspended
    The profile you are trying to view has been suspended.

    These people really have their identity tied up as the One True Science Fiction Fans. The mere threat of not collecting their annual rocket tribute has them reacting like Gollum to someone trying to steal his Precious. For who would contemplate something so purely evil, but Evil Nazi Finnsssssss?

    If this keeps up, it will provide Anonymous Conservative with enough material for tome on Rabbitology fatter than A Throne of Bones. And you know, for all that they enjoy citing the fact that my father has been imprisoned for years and babbling about how dangerous I am, it’s interesting that they never manage to put the two together. I mean, in the movies, anyhow, people are usually very concerned about those who have direct contacts in the Federal prison system.

    UPDATE: James Nicoll digs a deeper hole and swears off Baen Books:

    Since Baen’s publisher Toni Weisskopf is part of the Puppies slate for the second year running, I will no longer accept new commissions where the only edition is from Baen and while I will finish current projects involving Baen Books, I won’t link to the Baen edition. I certainly will not be buying anything from Baen in the future. I urge everyone (particularly people with review sites) to do the same.

    Not exactly a problem for Castalia House. None of them were ever going to review our books anyhow. What was that a very smart and astonishingly handsome man once said about denying a man a platform?

    A cunning plan

    Watch out! The bitter SJWs and Torlings have come up with a clever two-part plan to take back the Hugo Awards!

    1. Sign up Castalia House for UK mailing lists. Muawahahahahaha.
    2. Blow up the Hugo Awards by voting No Award.

    I don’t know about you, but I suddenly find myself questioning if I can find the strength to carry on in light of such effective actions and threats, especially such totally unforeseeable ones such as the latter.

    Dear Mr VoxDay AndOtherRacistHomophobes

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    They’re totally not irrational and flailing wildly about at all. Even other Tor editors besides the NHs are now doubling-down:

    I’m asking people to vote for No Award (not a person named “Noah Ward,” please note), which is the escape clause the rules give us to signal that the process is broken. I don’t expect you to understand how it’s broken. Clearly the principles you’re basing your argument are radically different from mine. In these late days of traditional fandom, as sad as that is, it’s not surprising.
    – Moshe Feder, Consulting Senior Editor for Tor Books

     I’m going to assume everyone here understands the concept of statistical variance. Here are the variances compared for the SP2 nominees, the top vote getter in the eight major categories in 2014, and the suspicious Tor darlings from 2008 to 2013. Can you spot the bloc votes?

        Variance: 3773.9 (SP 2014)    Variance:  1493.8 (SP 2013)    Variance: 1.6 (Tor 2008)    Variance: 98.6 (Tor 2009)    Variance: 119.1 (Tor 2010)    Variance: 4.7 (Tor 2012)    Variance: 14.9 (Tor 2013)

    Note that 2008 is when Scalzi posted his most blatant “Award Pimpage Post” and he and Stross finished within 3 votes of each other for Best Novel (41), Best Novel (40) and Best Fan Writer. (43). That same year, Tor editors PNH (70) and David Hartwell (67) were within 3 votes of each other as well. Its pretty obvious that there was an additional “suck up to the big dogs at Tor vote of 30 votes over the Scalzi/Stross alliance.

    By contrast, this year, the leading vote-getter in Best Novel, presumably Correia, received 387 votes, which was similar to the 384 votes in Best Editor Long, presumably Weisskopf. Bloc vote, right? Well, no, that doesn’t hold up because it is far more than the 230 that Wright presumably got in Short Story or the 201 that Johnson presumably got in Best Fan Writer. It’s too soon to tell, but there may be more variance among the people who voted for John Wright in Best Novella alone than between the 2008 Stross/Scalzi vote.

    To claim that TWO 3-vote variances in a single year are LESS suspicious than an open slate that differed by at least 186 votes is either dishonest or insane. Especially when both Scalzi and Stross are self-admitted Hugo campaigners.