Tag: Hugo Award

Chaos Horizon provides additional evidence of how the SF-SJWs guide their bloc vote:

A few weeks ago, the 2015 Tor.com Reviewers’ Choice list came out. Over the past several years, this has been an important list to track for several reasons. First, it gathers recommendations from 11 Tor.com critics, making it a collated list of its own. Second, it has been fairly well synced up to the Hugos and Nebulas, at least before the campaigning of last year. In 2013, they recommended Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice three times; it swept the Hugo and Nebula. Last year, Goblin Emperor was recommended 3 times; it scores Hugo and Nebula noms and that could very well have won the Hugo if not for the Puppies.

Tor Books has been an award-chasing publisher for decades. That fact that the Puppies have risen up to stop them from dominating the awards every year is why they changed the rules with E Pluribus Hugo. Patrick Nielsen Hayden and his little coterie calculated that as long as they can guarantee themselves a single nomination per category, they can muster enough muscle to win at the final round.

What Puppykickers quite willfully fail to understand is that in 2015, the Puppies, even the Rabid Puppies, engaged in less bloc-voting, in percentage terms, in 2015 than the SJWs did. In the past, the Tor-led SJWs didn’t need to publish public lists because it was all a whisper campaign among a few dozen people; you could see references to it in every “I haven’t read X yet, but I’m voting for it because I hear….” statement. You could also see the Nebula logrolling take place in the SFWA NAR every year, until it was hidden from the public; to Cat Rambo’s credit, she has apparently made public what, if I recall correctly, John Scalzi was responsible for hiding.

Table 1: Correlation Between Top 6 (and Ties) of the 2014 Nebula Suggested Reading List and the Eventual 2014 Nebula Nominees

Novel: 4 out of 6, 67.7%
Novella: 6 out of 6, 100%
Novelette: 5 out of 6, 83.3%
Short Story: 6 out of 7, 85.7%

Total: 21/25, 84%

The Tor.com Reviewers’ Choice has reinforced, and to a certain extent supplanted, the Tor whispering campaign; based on the way in which reviewers tend to chase the crowd, we can anticipate that the novels the SJWs will be pushing for the award season include:

Uprooted by Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
Ancillary Mercy by Anne Leckie (Orbit)
Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear (Tor)
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

It’s all women, as one would expect, but surprisingly light on Tor-published books. One would assume the fifth book would be The Dark Forest, the sequel to The Three Body Problem, but there is very, very little SJW buzz about it. Perhaps the SJWs finally figured out that Cixin Liu is a man. Or perhaps it is perceived to have been tainted by the Puppies playing kingmaker last year. Who knows? These are not rational people.

We now also know why John Scalzi very publicly counted himself out in 2015; unlike last year, he is aware that neither Tor nor the SJWs are pushing his latest mediocrity for any awards. No doubt he’s waiting for EPH, when Tor can again guarantee him a spot to make up for his declining popular support.

Now let’s go and see what the top novels are in the 2015 SFWA Suggested Reading List. And note that I did not see these until AFTER reaching my conclusions based on the Tor.com reviewers’ choices.

21     Uprooted     Novik, Naomi     Del Rey
17     The Grace of Kings     Liu, Ken     Saga Press 
16     Karen Memory     Bear, Elizabeth     Tor Books
15     Updraft     Wilde, Fran     Tor Books   
14     The Traitor Baru Cormorant   Dickinson, Seth  Tor Books
12     Ancillary Mercy     Leckie, Ann     Orbit
11     The Fifth Season     Jemisin, N. K.     Orbit   

Interesting, is it not? All four novels identified are there. After looking into the three previously unmentioned novels, I think it’s likely that Seth Dickenson’s debut novel will turn out to be the book that Tor is pushing in 2015. They badly need a new star now that Scalzi is running out of steam and they lost the HALO books; based on this review, Dickenson certainly appears to understand the Tor Game: “While I enjoyed The Traitor Baru Cormorant, and will read the second
book in the series when it arrives, I felt at times I was being giving a
sociology lecture by someone steeped in women’s and LBGT studies and
political economy.”

Seth Dickinson, we are told, “is the author of THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT and more than
a dozen short stories. During his time in the social sciences, he
worked on cocoa farming in Ghana, political rumor control, and
simulations built to study racial bias in police shootings. He wrote
much of the lore and flavor for Bungie Studios’ smash hit DESTINY. If he
were an animal, he would be a cockatoo.”

Yeah, about that… “Destiny’s initial release was met with a chorus of ‘meh’.  It
wasn’t a bad game, but it was hampered by a damp squib of a main
storyline.”

In any event, Mr. Dickenson sounds like an ideal standard bearer for Tor Books for the next few years. Regardless, I won’t be reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant, because BOYCOTT TOR BOOKS.

From File 770 comes word that two-time World Fantasy Award-winner S.T. Joshi understands that the correct way to deal with SJWs is to reject them, their ideas, and their infested organizations alike.

It has come to my attention that the World Fantasy Convention has decided to replace the bust of H. P. Lovecraft that constitutes the World Fantasy Award with some other figure. Evidently this move was meant to placate the shrill whining of a handful of social justice warriors who believe that a “vicious racist” like Lovecraft has no business being honoured by such an award. (Let it pass that analogous accusations could be made about Bram Stoker and John W. Campbell, Jr., who also have awards named after them. These figures do not seem to elicit the outrage of the SJWs.) Accordingly, I have returned my two World Fantasy Awards to the co-chairman of the WFC board, David G. Hartwell. Here is my letter to him:

Mr. David G. Hartwell
Tor Books
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

Dear Mr. Hartwell:

I was deeply disappointed with the decision of the World Fantasy Convention to discard the bust of H. P. Lovecraft as the emblem of the World Fantasy Award. The decision seems to me a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness and an explicit acceptance of the crude, ignorant, and tendentious slanders against Lovecraft propagated by a small but noisy band of agitators.

I feel I have no alternative but to return my two World Fantasy Awards, as they now strike me as irremediably tainted. Please find them enclosed. You can dispose of them as you see fit.

Please make sure that I am not nominated for any future World Fantasy Award. I will not accept the award if it is bestowed upon me.

I will never attend another World Fantasy Convention as long as I live. And I will do everything in my power to urge a boycott of the World Fantasy Convention among my many friends and colleagues.

    Yours,
    S. T. Joshi

And that is all I will have to say on this ridiculous matter. If anyone feels that Lovecraft’s perennially ascending celebrity, reputation, and influence will suffer the slightest diminution as a result of this silly kerfuffle, they are very much mistaken.

No respect. No contact. No validation. No mercy. No quarter. Those who have read SJWAL have seen that their very worst vituperation is best taken as praise, and their nominal praise is worth less than nothing. I received the following email this morning:

I just got your book in the mail today and am into the prologue and I had to put it down to email you to just plain thank you for writing it. I wish I could hear my enemies sing my praises the way your enemies sing yours.

A man is defined by his enemies as well as by his friends. S.T. Joshi, although a Man of the Left, has done very well indeed to refuse to accept the accolades of the SJWs. And note that, once more, it is TOR BOOKS that is right at the heart of the SJW infestation in science fiction and fantasy.

To be more specific, irrelevant and outdated drivel written by a coward and a liar. That’s the answer to a question I was asked by a reader concerning my response to this ridiculous guest post at Monster Hunter Nation by Charles Gannon:

My thought for the day:

Choose your battles carefully.

If you find yourself constantly in combat, you’re not being choosy enough.

Or you’ve decided that you are actually at war. Which means that you are now committed to destruction, not discourse.

No value judgments implied, but it was a call for courteous self-awareness when in discourse, and, more directly, a kind of diagram of what our discursive behavior tells us about our deepest motivations: are we talking to communicate or do battle? At no point do I imply that battle is always avoidable, or even wrong; just that it’s important to know when you’ve crossed the line, and what that really means.

This is remarkably stupid on two counts. First, you can’t always choose your battles. When it comes to war, it takes one to tangle. I didn’t choose my battles with SFWA, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, the Toad of Tor, McRapey, McRacist, George Rape Rape Martin, or Worldcon. They chose to attack me, completely unprovoked, and with the exception of Martin, I had never even heard of any of the losers prior to them attacking me. I didn’t cross any lines. They did.

What separated me from everyone else they attacked was that I was willing and able to not only fight back, but break their megaphones. Clueless and cowardly suckups like Gannon find self-defense reprehensible; he is just hoping that he’ll be eaten last. That’s why he favors unilateral disarmament with regards to rhetoric.

Second, we are in, at the very least, the fourth decade of a cultural war that has its roots in the social justice ideals of JS Mill. You could quite reasonably argue that we are actually in its second century. The time for discourse is long over. There is literally nothing to discuss. Either all individuals and institutions are wholly given over to social justice, as Mill declared, or the war continues. Would-be fence sitting moderates (who, like all moderates, only shoot at the side they supposedly, nominally, support), are totally useless, yammering about the dire need for something that is both impossible and irrelevant.

On the other hand, Trial by Fire was the only SP-recommended novel that did not make the Hugo ballot. It was also the only SP-recommended novel not included on Vox Day’s authoritarian slate. I will let you decide if there might be some relationship between those two data points…

As many know, my presence on the SP recommendation list came as a surprise; I did not learn about it until a few days (a week?) later, when someone commented on it on my FB account. Perceiving it as a list akin to dozens I’d seen floated during Hugo and Nebula seasons since I first became an SFWA member in 1990 (I think), the one concern I voiced to Brad (Torgerson) was that I was only comfortable being included if Vox Day (whose proclivities were known to me only via general third-hand report) was not on the list. Which he wasn’t. So then I went back to work (I’m fortunate to have a number of novels under contract) and pretty much stopped following the Hugo process. (I’m the parent-on-call for four kids, so I don’t browse FB feed much and sometimes wonder why I even have a Twitter account…)

When I learned about the Rabid Puppies and Vox Day’s activities (which prompted my research into the details of his prior commentaries upon race, women, and more), I contacted Brad and we agreed that everyone must follow their own conscience if push came to shove. I should add, for the record, that I not only respect fellow-novelist Marko Kloos immensely for the choice he made, but I also understand what may have been his instinct not to add to the unfortunate spectacle until and unless circumstances made it incumbent upon him to do so.

There is a relationship, without question. Had I included Gannon’s novel on the RP list, it would have been nominated, just like Kloos’s. I didn’t include it because I hadn’t read it, I’d never heard of him, and now I’m glad I didn’t because apparently Gannon is the same sort of cowardly SJW kiss-ass that Kloos is. Gannon and Kloos are like the National Review of science fiction. I was quite happy to see Kloos withdraw his nomination too; I warned Brad that it was useless trying to support moderates like him because they always run away from the heat. They come up with all sorts of noble excuses, but you can’t help but notice that the direction is always the same: away from criticism and conflict.

I can’t claim those various declined nominations were any part of my strategy, but I certainly expected to see them. Because moderates are always cowards, that’s the real reason they’re moderates.

Anyhow, Gannon is not only a liar, he’s a rather stupid one to boot. Not only am I not an authoritarian, but it would be hard to find anyone on the planet who gives less of a damn what people do so long as they don’t a) bother me or b) destroy Western civilization. And really, b) is pretty much a subset of a).

Notice that Gannon was willing to write me off entirely on the basis of “general third-hand report” while openly palling around with the likes of Scalzi. That means that his calls for civility and discourse are entirely meaningless. To claim that someone is outside the bounds of discourse means YOU have declared yourself their enemy and you do not merit any civility or respect from them in return.

Gannon poses as a moderate, but he isn’t actually one. He’s on the side of the speech police. He’s on the side of the thought police. He may not be an SJW, but he is on their side, no matter what those who believe they are his friends might think. He’ll turn on them eventually, of course. And when he calls my slate “authoritarian”, he’s doing what SJWs always do. He’s projecting.

What the likes of Gannon don’t realize is that they’re entirely behind the times. They’re still living in the 1990s. They think their pointing-and-shrieking, and false equivalences, and attempted disqualifications will somehow magically achieve disqualify “extremists” like me. But neither truth nor reality are on their side, and it’s rather remarkable that someone who is supposedly intelligent still hasn’t realized that yet.

Especially when the other side is writing delusional things like Laura Mixon:

“Bullies and abusers rely on the larger community’s desire for comity—our willingness to live and let live—to impose their will and silence dissent. In such a case, it’s incumbent on people with standing in the community to speak up against them, providing a counterweight to their destructive ideas. By speaking when she did, in my view, Irene was doing what other thought leaders in our field like N. K. Jemisin, John Scalzi, and the Nielsen Haydens have done: guarding the health and well-being of our SFF community by standing up against hate speech.”

I absolutely refuse to be a part of any community that has “thought leaders” of such an observably low quality. They are not only thought and speech police, they are proud of policing what they denounce as “hate speech”. What they call “destructive ideas” are better described as “history, science, and logic”.

And who is Sasquan protecting? Despite numerous requests, Glenn Glazer of Sasquan continues to refuse to release the anonymized NOMINATION ballots (not the final vote ballots, get it straight because you look like a complete moron when you can’t correctly distinguish between the two), because he claims, falsely, that protecting the privacy of Sasquan’s members is the paramount concern of the organization.

Glenn Glazer may well be an SJW, because SJWs always lie and he is most certainly lying.

Glazer is not lying about the ability to correctly figure out who the occasional individual is, as there are no doubt more than a few pathetic nobodies whose nominations for themselves stand out. For example, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if one could figure out which of the nominating ballots belonged to Patrick Nielsen Hayden… assuming there weren’t 40 more just like it. Of course, one can only reach a logical conclusion about a nominator’s identity, one cannot actually prove that one’s surmise is correct without Sasquan confirming it.

But Glazer is blatantly lying about the fact that Worldcon gives a damn about privacy. Consider this post from Making Light in April:

#9 ::: beth meacham ::: April 06, 2015, 12:49 PM:
Laurie Mann posted on facebook that neither John C. Wright nor Theo Beale have Sasquan memberships of any sort. I am not sure what to make of that.

Laurie Mann is the Programming division head for Sasquan. Her breach of privacy wasn’t just a one-time thing either, as there is this Facebook post from June:

David Gerrold, June 3

As long as we’re still talking about the sad puppies and the rabid puppies, there is one question that has not yet been asked.

Will Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen be attending the Hugo award ceremony? Will Vox Day and John C. Wright be attending the ceremony? What about the other nominees and the various puppy supporters?

I have been told that none of the major architects of the slates have attending memberships. So the answer is no, they will not be there.

(Some of the slated nominees will likely be there, but that’s not the question I’m asking.)

And that causes me to wonder —

Some of the puppy supporters have said this whole thing is about reclaiming “the real science fiction” from those who have hijacked it into the realm of literary merit. (Something like that.)

Okay — but if we take that at face value — then why aren’t the leaders of the movement coming to the award ceremony to cheer for their nominees? If this is really that important, why aren’t they coming to the party?

Not attending the celebration makes it look like this was never about winning the awards as much as it was about disrupting them.

In other words, Sasquan was freely divulging information – incorrectly, as it happened – about the very members whose privacy they now claim prevents them from releasing the anonymized data. It is very clear that, like Animal Farm, the privacy of some members is considerably more important than others. And their inconsistency isn’t conclusive proof of anything yet, nor do we know exactly what he is trying to hide or who he is trying to protect, it does suggest that Mr. Glazer is attempting to conceal the evidence of the Tor Books nominating bloc vote whose activities have been readily apparent since at least 2008.

Since I am informed that a number of polite requests from various Sasquan members have been stymied, I think it is now time to get a little more serious about finding out what Mr. Glazer appears to be so belatedly determined to hide from the public eye. If you were a Sad Puppy or Rabid Puppy nominator or voter who is interested in seeing Sasquan release the data, email me with your a) Loncon membership number or your b) Sasquan membership number to verify yourself and we will plan our strategy accordingly. Put SASQUAN in the subject.

And if Mr. Glazer continues to refuse to release the promised data under a false claim of privacy concerns, that will simply provide us with even more ammunition for the media, who are already interested in the increasing appearance of corruption in science fiction. I haven’t contacted them yet, but if Mr. Glazer continues to try to bury the evidence – of what, I repeat, we do not know – I will do so soon.

UPDATE: This Sasquan coverup may be considerably more serious than even the most confirmed cynic could have imagined. It appears someone may be resorting to hitherto unprecedented measures to prevent the data from being released. From File 770:

Bobbie DuFault, co-chair of Sasquan, the 2015 World Science Fiction Convention, passed away from unknown causes this morning, September 14. Glenn Glazer of the committee asks, “Please respect the families’ wishes to not be contacted at this time.”

There is that name again too. Glenn Glazer. (Raises eyebrows.) NB: If you are a science fiction SJW, please feel free to commence feigning shock and outrage now.

George Rape Rape Martin tries to put a little SJW spin on the Hugo Awards:

I had picked Mike Resnick in Short Form and Toni Weisskopf in Long Form, and indeed, each of them finished above all the other nominees in the first round of voting… but well behind No Award. This was a crushing defeat for the slates, and a big victory for the Puppy-Free ballot of Deirdre Moen. Honestly? I hated this. In my judgment the voters threw the babies out with bathwater in these two categories. Long Form had three nominees who are more than worthy of a Hugo (and one, Jim Minz, who will be in a few more years), and Short Form had some good candidates too. They were on the slates, yes, but some of them were put on there without their knowledge and consent. A victory by Resnick, Sowards, Gilbert, or Weisskopf would have done credit to the rocket, regardless of how they got on the ballot. (All four of these editors would almost certainly have been nominated anyway, even if there had been no slates).

((Some are saying that voting No Award over these editors was an insult to them. Maybe so, I can’t argue with that. But it should be added that there was a far far worse insult in putting them on the ballot with Vox Day, who was the fifth nominee in both categories. Even putting aside his bigotry and racism, Beale’s credential as an editor are laughable. Yet hundreds of Puppies chose to nominate him rather than, oh, Liz Gorinsky or Anne Lesley Groell or Beth Meacham (in Long Form) or Gardner Dozois or Ellen Datlow or John Joseph Adams (in Short Form). To pass over actual working editors of considerable accomplishment in order to nominate someone purely to ‘stick it to the SJWs’ strikes me as proof positive that the Rabid Puppies at least were more interested in saying ‘fuck you’ to fandom than in rewarding good work)).

It’s amusing how the SJWs in science fiction are claiming five awardless categories as a win while simultaneously trying to figure out how to prevent it from happening again next year. And, Martin demonstrates the truth of the observation SJWs Always Lie, as he tells a whopper about Toni Weisskopf when he claims she would “almost certainly have been nominated anyway, even if there had been no slates”.

The fact is Toni Weisskopf never even came CLOSE to being nominated prior to Sad Puppies 1. In 2012, she finished in 14th place. In 2011, 10th. In 2010, 11th. She wasn’t even trending in the right direction! Without the Puppies, she would never, ever, have received a nomination and the data shows that the 2015 Long Form nominees would have been virtually identical to the pre-Puppy years, including the aforementioned Liz Gorinsky, Beth Meacham, to say nothing of the Torlock who lobbied for the creation the award so he and his fellow Tor editors could finally win something, Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

And it’s fascinating to hear this particular fat old white man speaking about the “bigotry and racism” of this particular American Indian. A few of you will know why. In any event, my credentials as an editor – the correct word is plural, Georgie, perhaps someone can explain that to you – are observably better than Rape Rape’s editor, considering how fat with filler his recent novels have become.

But here is a free piece of editorial advice for you, Rape Rape. I know you like it an awful lot, but even so, I recommend you include a little less rape and deviant hate sex in your next book and a little more conventional human affection between men and women who actually love one another. The world you have created is not grim and realistic, it is a cartoonish and nihilistic nightmare. And worse, it’s gotten really boring.

Martin is also lying about there not being any anti-Puppy party. As Chaos Horizon has demonstrated, there were observably six different statistical factions voting in the 2015 awards.

Core Rabid Puppies: 550-525
Core Sad Puppies: 500-400
Sad Puppy leaning Neutrals: 800-400 (capable of voting a Puppy pick #1)
True Neutrals: 1000-600 (may have voted one or two Puppies; didn’t vote in all categories; No Awarded all picks, Puppy and Non-Alike)
Primarily No Awarders But Considered a Puppy Pick above No Award: 1000
Absolute No Awarders: 2500

2,500 Absolute No Awarders, up from 600 in 2013. They exist, Rape Rape. Unlike you, statistics don’t lie. We know who the SJWs are. The maximum number of principled “No Slate” voters was 285; that’s how many people voted No Award over Guardians of the Galaxy compared to the 2496 who voted No Award over Toni Weisskopf, the 2350 who voted No Award over Kirk Douponce, and the 2672 who suddenly decided that 38-time nominee and 5-time winner Mike Resnick was no longer worthy.

The post-awards spin that the 2,500 SJWs in science fiction voted No Award on the basis of unmerited nominees simply doesn’t hold up to either statistical analysis or a comparison with past Hugo winners.