Tag: Hugo Award

The Archmorlock’s curse

John C. Wright explains why he will not write books for Tor in the future:

I am sad to report that I was mistaken. The Archmorlock himself displayed his courage against the short and girlish figure of my meek and gentle wife.

At the reception just before the Awards Ceremony itself, my lovely and talented wife, who writes for Tor books under her maiden name of L Jagi Lamplighter, and who had been consistently a voice of reason and moderation during the whole silly kerfluffle, approached Mr. Patrick Nielsen Hayden at the party to extent to him the olive branch of peace and reconciliation.

Before she could finish her sentence, however, Mr. Hayden erupted into a swearing and cursing, and he shouted and bellowed at the tiny and cheerful woman I married.

I should mention that during the last few months of the Sad Puppies kerfluffle, I once upon a time accurately described him, Mr. Moshe Feder, and Mrs Irene Gallo of Tor Books as ‘Christ Haters.’ The support of abortion, sodomy, and euthanasia rather unambiguously put a soul into the position of open rebellion against Christian teachings. In addition, any man who bears false witness against his neighbor, delights in poison-tongued gossip, and destroys writing careers of anyone who does not support his politics not only disobeys Christ, but violates the ordinary decency of ordinary men of good will of any faith.

It seems that Mr. Hayden is a Roman Catholic and was so deeply moved to offense by my words that he could not retain a levelheaded and professional demeanor while speaking with my short little wife. He shouted filthy words at her and stormed off. I do not know if there were tears in his eyes.

Before I continue, I should explain to the reader that Mr. Hayden, and no one else, was the driving force behind the corruption of the Hugo Awards in these last fifteen to twenty years.

One thing that Mr. Wright neglected to add: the only reason that the Best Hugo Editor (Long Form) category that was denied to Baen’s Toni Weisskopf even exists was so that Mr. Nielsen Hayden could finally win an award after years of whining about his inability to beat Gardner Dozois for Best Professional Editor. Chris M. Barkley claims sole responsibility for the addition of a new category, but even he admits that Patrick Nielsen Hayden was his co-conspirator, publicly campaigned for the new award, and was the chief driving force behind the creation of the new category as well as the completely coincidental first winner of it.

I sought out Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s support for the Editor’s split and brought him into the fold; I needed a prominent editor to co-sponsor the amendment or it would never have been taken seriously by the Business Meeting. He was reluctant to do so at first but eventually, he concluded that a split of the category was the best option available at the time. Until I finally shook his hand at the LACon IV Business Meeting in 2006, I think he had doubts that it would ever pass. And, the very next year, it was he who was the recipient of the very first Long Form Editor Hugo Award. Was this a coincidence? Yes; Patrick Nielsen Hayden did not conspire to win his Hugo Award, he EARNED it from the voters for his superlative work.

Seriously, the man worked to create a new Hugo award just so he could win one. Here is PNH himself in 2006 whining about how he and David Hartwell of Tor never ever get to win a Hugo:

In a post to his own weblog, Scalzi expresses regret that I personally didn’t make the “Best Professional Editor” ballot, despite the fact that I acquired three out of the five Best Novel nominees and personally shepherded two of them to publication. This is generous of John, and I wouldn’t have declined the nomination, but in fact as every book editor in our field knows, while the Best Professional Hugo is regularly awarded to high-profile magazine editors and anthologists, it only goes to book editors if we die. It’s for this reason that there’s a pending proposal to split the editorial award into “long form” and “short form” categories; whether this will be ratified by this year’s Worldcon Business Meeting is anyone’s guess. Personally, I note that David Hartwell has been a finalist for Best Professional Editor 15 times, leaving aside his 17 further nominations for the New York Review of Science Fiction, and that he’s never won a Hugo of any kind. Pretty shabby treatment for an individual who is by any measure one of the best and most influential editors in the eighty-year history of our field. Whether or not the World SF Convention decides to reform the editor award, it’s years past time one went to Hartwell.  

The Best Tor Books Editor award was duly created, and the awards went to:
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, David Hartwell, David Hartwell, and Patrick
Nielsen Hayden for the first four years before before Hartwell talked PNH into turning down their nominations so Lou Anders of Pyr could have a chance to win. Hartwell, a gentlemanly individual who is John C. Wright’s editor at Tor, continued to decline nominations, but PNH has eagerly continued throwing his hat in the ring and likely would have won the award again this year if the Puppies had not prevented him from being nominated a 16th time.

And that is why he was shouting and swearing at Tor author L. Jagi Lamplighter. Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a vain, pompous little freak who is furious that his influence over science fiction has been broken and he’s not even being nominated for his own personal award. Here is his very professional comment after the ceremony.

#18 ::: Patrick Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: August 23, 2015, 02:55 AM:
I’ll have more to say later. Right now TNH and I are at GRRM’s Hugo Loser Party and all I have to say is, my, that is some tasty, tasty schadenfreude pie. 

They proved Larry right

Milo offers a much more realistic take on the Hugo Awards:

“I said the Hugos were dominated by
cliques that cared more about an author’s identity and politics than the
quality of their work,” Sad Puppies founder Larry Correia told
Breitbart. “Tonight they proved me right.”

Vox Day, an author and publisher who
assembled the Rabid Puppies slate, agreed. “The scorched earth strategy
being pursued by the SJWs in science fiction is evidence that we hold
the initiative and we are winning,” he said. “The fact that the SJWs would rather
give out no award rather than honor an influential editor like Toni
Weisskopf of Baen Books or science fiction grandmaster John C. Wright
demonstrates the extent to which science fiction has been politicized
and degraded by their far-left politics. The SJWs will try to portray this as
a victory – they would try to portray suicide by self-cannibalism as a
victory – but anyone who knows anything about history understands the
significance of one side resorting to burning down its own houses in
order to deny it to the enemy. That is a defensive tactic borne of
desperation.”

Like the empire at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, the
forces of social justice believe they have the rebel puppy alliance on
their knees. What they don’t realize is that the puppies are already
plotting their approach to 2016, which may not include a large army of
Ewoks, but certainly will include many more pissed off fans.

Science fiction fans of all types are left, like the punters in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land,
unable to grok how their supposed fellow fans could choose to harm not
only the awards themselves but the wider industry with vindictive,
nihilistic self-immolation.

It’s fascinating to see SJWs desperately trying to cling to their Narrative on Twitter and elsewhere. They’re insisting that we’re mad, that we’re crying, that we’re upset, when the fact is that I knew this would be the result this year prior to creating Rabid Puppies.

This is the difference between game designers and normal people. We think, we HAVE to think, in terms of consequences, both obvious and non-obvious. We started last year with 1,100 reliable anti-Puppy votes and 160 reliable pro-puppy votes. That meant we were 900 in the hole before we even got started.

That’s why I was urging everyone not to adopt the tactics of the other side and mass-mobilize. Last year wasn’t a good test because I wasn’t involved in the organizing and the Dread Ilk really didn’t get involved. There was no point in throwing the full weight of our effort into this year’s awards when we had the chance to see a) what our core forces looked like and b) what their maximal forces looked like. That’s why I told everyone that this year was about the nominations and the best we could reasonably hope for was to provoke them into voting No Award… which they dutifully did.

Our execution wasn’t flawless. I made two mistakes, one which was fortuitous as it permitted Three Body Problem to make the shortlist and win, and one which was stupid as it cost us a 6th category in novelette. Our discipline could also have been better, although I don’t see that it would have made any difference at all with regards to either the nominations or the awards. But I trust the moderate approach is now sufficiently discredited in everyone’s eyes.

As for what comes next, we’re going to be discussing RP plans for 2016 at a Closed Brainstorm session later this week; only Annual Members and Monthly Members who were registered before today will be permitted to attend. Suffice it to say that there will be plenty for everyone, VFM, Rabids, Dread Ilk, and new Rabid converts alike, to do in the coming year.

Meanwhile, the Beautiful but Evil Space Princess gradually begins to grok the Evil ways of the Supreme Dark Lord:

Until today I viewed him as a mirror of the SJW posturing.  I retract that and I give him full measure of applause.  Yes, his views are still repulsive and he still makes my skin crawl as often as the Marxists do, but you know what?  At least he has a brain and uses it.  Those of you celebrating might want to take a deep breath and wonder — for just a minute — if you did anything more than what Vox wanted.  Because from where I’m sitting, the man that set out to destroy the field and prove that everyone calling themselves its leadership were mannerless and brainless children not only won last night, he won walking away. He won without DOING anything.  He won by convincing yourselves to hit yourselves repeatedly with the obvious hammers of partisanship, lack of care for quality and INTEREST in the health of the field.  And before you died, you gloated you had won.  The mind boggles.

Well done, Vox Day.  My laughter is tinged with tears because I don’t know if the field I loved will ever recover from stupidity displayed in such an open manner. I think today I prove the Valentine Michael Smith adage that sometimes you laugh because it hurts too much to cry.

I suspect last night was a lot harder for writers like Sarah and Brad, who once considered the morons blithely running around with matches their colleagues, friends, and peers, to witness their antics last night than it was for me. After my one visit to MiniCon, I never considered them anything more than psychologically damaged human wreckage, so it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that they were dumb enough to play it that way. After all, SJWs always double down.

A tale of two interviews

Once again, the Wall Street Journal did a much more equitable job of covering the Hugos than other media outlets as Michael Rapoport followed up his previous article on the nominations with one on the awards:

Authors and fans who have opposed the Puppy campaigns said the results show that the science fiction fans who vote on the Hugos don’t want to see the field’s most prestigious award gamed.

“Good work was rewarded and bad action was penalized,” said novelist John Scalzi. “A small group of people tried to game the awards for their own gain, and a vastly larger group of people who valued the integrity of the awards responded by choosing ‘No Award’ over nominees they felt got on the ballot by gaming the system.”

But Theodore Beale, aka “Vox Day,” the writer and editor who organized the Rabid Puppies slate, characterized the results as a “scorched earth strategy,” and said liberals in science fiction “would rather burn down a historically prestigious award” than let the awards go to Puppy-backed nominees. It “demonstrates the extent to which science fiction has been politicized and degraded by their far left politics,” he said….

“This was the most optimal outcome with what we had to deal with,”
said author Kameron Hurley, another critic of the Puppies. “Really proud
of the community for rewarding deserving work and passing on so many of
the stacked categories.”

But Sarah Hoyt, a Sad Puppies organizer, said the “fury” of the
reaction to the Puppies has proven their point. “That is the reaction of
a small clique that has engaged in log rolling or years to reward its
followers and those they approved of,” she said before the Hugo
ceremony.

The Hugo ceremony mostly steered clear of direct references to the
controversy, apart from loud applause for some of the announcements of
“No Award.” “Please, God, let there be winners,” co-host David Gerrold
joked at one point, clutching a bunch of awards envelopes yet to be
opened.

 This Wired article attempting to maintain the SJW Narrative concerning the Hugos is mildly amusing for the author’s complete inability to keep up and follow the plot. It’s an example of Vox’s First Law in action, sprinkled with a few factual inaccuracies that appear to result from the writer’s attempt to maintain the narrative. But give Amy Wallace credit for at least talking to us:

Based on his voluminous writings, it can be said that Theodore Beale—who writes fiction as a hobby while working as a game designer—openly opposes racial diversity, homosexuality, and women’s suffrage. Beale quibbles with those assertions, as he did with me when I reached him at his home in Northern Italy. For example, he says he doesn’t oppose all women’s suffrage, just women (and most men) voting in a representative democracy, like the one we have, um, in America. The reason: “Women are very, very highly inclined to value security over liberty” and thus are “very, very easy to manipulate.” (He favors direct democracy—and, obviously, men). At one point, he emailed that he would be “very disappointed” if I failed to quote the Wall Street Journal’s label for him: “the most despised man in science fiction.”

A conversation with Beale feels sort of like walking around a room designed by MC Escher. It turns in on itself in unexpected and at times dizzying ways. A sampling: When I asked him why he once called noted fantasy author NK Jemisin an “educated, but ignorant half-savage” on his blog, he said it wasn’t because she is black, then launched into an explication of what he called “new” genetic research that he says he doesn’t expect very many people to understand (but which he claims supports his use of the term “half-savage”).

When I said that he was intentionally baiting a person of color with a word that has racial overtones, he acknowledged, “I’m calling her a half-savage because I know it’s going to offend the crap out of her, because she’s going to run around screaming, ‘Racist! Racist!’ for the next 10 years.”

A beat, and then he added: “I don’t consider all black people to be half-savages. I mean, some people are. Here in Europe, for example, we have actual proper Africans, not African-Americans. This leads to problems, like people shitting on top of the closed toilets. They don’t know how to use indoor plumbing, okay? This is not civilized behavior.”

Torgersen told me something that helped me understand Beale, which is that he believes Vox Day is a character Beale plays—“Performance art, like Andy Kaufman,” Torgersen said. “He embraces this nemesis role that he inhabits. He’s the dark star circling around the outer rim of the solar system. He’s Darth Vader breathing heavily into your phone. He wants people to be enraged and flipping out and tearing their hair and completely losing their minds. And he gets that every single time.”

Beale acknowledged as much: “I love chaos,” he says. “I am generally pretty destructive.”

Given this kind of incendiary rhetoric, it’s possible that the Sad Puppies were at best naïve when they let Beale piggyback on their idea. At worst, they have been accused of providing a politely moderate front for a shit-stirring provocateur. Certainly, both Correia and Torgersen have worked hard to distinguish themselves from Beale.

“Look at it like this,” Correia blogged at one point. “I’m Churchill, Brad is FDR. We wound up on the same side as Stalin.” But when I asked Torgersen whether he felt the Sad Puppies had been tarnished by their association with Beale, he said no. “If he went away, I don’t think it would have changed much. People would have been just as hacked off about Sad Puppies. They just would have found some other reason.”

For his part, Beale—who runs his own small publishing company, Castalia House, which got five of its writers and editors (including Beale himself) on this year’s Hugo ballot—has been outspoken about his goals. “I wanted to leave a big smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were,” he told me before the winners were announced. “All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You—one massive gesture of contempt.” Some nerds just want to watch the world burn.

Going forward, he said, no matter how the Hugo administrators modify the nominating process to try to prevent manipulation (and there are two proposals being considered), he will still have enough supporters to control future awards. Specifically, “I have 390 sworn and numbered vile faceless minions—the hardcore shock troops—who are sworn to mindless and perfect obedience,” he said, acknowledging that his army wasn’t made up solely of sci-fi fans. On the contrary, “the people who are very anti-SJW said, ‘Okay, we want to get in on this.’” When I asked him how he might deploy those people in the future, he continued, “It’s very simple. The dark lord speaks, the minion acts.”

Corrections:

  1. I don’t favor direct democracy “and, obviously, men”, I favor direct democracy for all native-born adult citizens. Period.
  2. I did not rely upon “genetic research” to justify my use of the term “half-savage” to describe NK Jemisin, I relied upon my Hypothesis of Time to Civilization, which is a combination of history and logic that the writer somehow managed to confuse with science. 
  3. I did not acknowledge the Torgersen’s claim of “performance art” but specifically denied it. 
  4. I have 400 Vile Faceless Minions, not 390, and the number is growing daily.
  5. I am not a white male. I am a Red male. 
  6. Castalia House is not mine. I don’t own it, I’m just the lead editor. 
  7. GamerGate did not make a “political movement out of threatening with rape any woman who has the temerity to offer an opinion about a videogame.”

Notice in particular the juxtaposition between “it can be said” and “quibbles with those assertions”. Translation: she said “Isn’t it true that….” to which I responded “No.” For crying out loud, as I explained to her, ANY support for direct democracy is intrinsically far MORE democratic than playing games about the specific limits on whom is permitted to choose between the two candidates offered by the bifactional ruling party.

My favorite part of the article was this: “But even as Beale claimed victory, John Scalzi, a novelist and
three-time Hugo winner who has been among their most outspoken
opponents, said the war was over.”

SJWs always lie.

You may not like what I say one little bit, but it’s hard to argue that I don’t tell the truth. Granted, it’s only been just over two years as yet, but NK Jemisin is still running around screaming “racist, racist!” You’ll note that the writer didn’t see fit to quote Jemisin calling Robert Heinlein and “most of SF fandom” “racist as *fuck*”. And lest you think I was inventing Europe’s indoor plumbing problem, there is a reason you’ll now see these signs at the train stations when traveling through Switzerland and Germany.

恭喜！別客氣。

I had an initial look at the Hugo statistics. I’ll have more on them later, but what leaped out immediately was the fact that the Puppy vote tipped the balance in Best Novel, giving it to Cixin Liu’s very good hard SF novel instead of Katherine Addison’s SJW fantasy angst-fest.

2649 The Three Body Problem
2449 The Goblin Emperor

Considering that the Rabid Puppy vote averaged 565 across the various categories, that demonstrates that we have the ability to play kingmaker even when we’re outnumbered approximately 4.5 to one by the SJWs combined with the traditional WorldCon community.

I’m going to guess that other than Chaos Horizon, who confirmed my Best Novel analysis, we’re not going to see a lot of SJW commentary on that, as they are too busy celebrating their successful self-immolations.

Goblin Emperor lost the Best Novel to Three-Body Problem
by 200 votes. Since there seem to have been at least 500 Rabid Puppy
voters who followed VD’s suggestion to vote Liu first, this means Liu
won because of the Rabid Puppies. Take that as you will.

Based on Chaos Horizon’s numbers, it appears there are 2500 SJWs, up from 1,100 last year, plus 2,400 WorldCon voters who are naturally biased against the Puppies, mostly on the basis of our slates, but are not intrinsically opposed to us on ideological grounds. That’s pretty close to their maximum mobilization, whereas 565 RP and 450 SP is only a fraction of our own.

I also appreciated this email from a RA, a non-Puppy who is one of the many former fans unhappy with what the SJW gatekeepers have decided is sufficiently non-problematic fiction worthy of publishing:

I wanted to write to you to say thank you for your work demonstrating the toxicity of the social justice warriors that have invested science fiction.

Science fiction was the first community I ran screaming from when the SJWs appeared – the amount of anti-white racism, the group-think, and the identity politics was shocking and horrifying to me. Segregated anthologies, editors that saw no harm in ranting about how they despised an entire race of people, and reviewers who made a point of counting how many “coloureds” and “women” there were in anthologies so they could decide how good they were.

Looking back I can’t believe how bad it was, and I’m glad I no longer write or am involved in science fiction groups.

I am absolutely indebted to you for your work on the Hugo Awards which show so clearly their approach to people who do not “rightthink”. In a way it shows me that I wasn’t crazy, that they were abhorrent, and that this is a community I should never have been involved in, given the horrible things it endorses.

RA is quite welcome, of course. The current SF community is a deeply sick and twisted one, and their ridiculous preferences in literature are merely a symptom of the real issues that plague them. The five categories burned last night are only the first sparks of the cleansing conflagration that is coming.

Hugo 2015 results

We had 315 people celebrating the Rabid Puppy demolition of the 2015 Hugo Awards at the Brainstorm online party, but I have to confess, I am just a little disappointed. With the unwitting assistance of the SJWs, we managed to burn five categories, but after Chu won the Campbell, I was confident that we were going to get a historic seven. Sadly, Novelette and Graphic Novel both eluded us. It’s disappointing, because apparently only five had been awarded in the entire history of the award, and I would have liked to have exceeded that this year.

I understand that Toni Weisskopf of Baen Books walked out of the ceremony after hearing all the jokes about this being the year of the asterisk. It is just as well, because the no-awarding of her, John C. Wright, and Jim Butcher is conclusive proof that the Hugo Awards are no longer fit for purpose and need to be burned down in their entirety. That was my original position, but this year we Rabids followed the Sad Puppies lead and pursued the “fair play” approach.

Now we know the result of that. This is a cultural war, not a literary sport. They are practicing a scorched earth strategy, and we can certainly assist them in that since we do not value their territory. I still think it was worth trying to take Berlin and end the war in one fell swoop, but even though our attempt break them once and for all failed, that only means that the victory was less than complete. What the Puppies accomplished was incredible when you look at the numbers involved and clearly indicates that the Rabid strategy, not the Sad one, is the only viable strategy. There will be no reconciliation.

Some SJWs are already trying to claim that they only rejected Toni Weisskopf because she was “part of a slate”, but the fact that they had no problem voting for Guardians of the Galaxy, which was on the same slate, demonstrates very clearly that they have no such principle, it’s all about the politics for them.

No doubt George Martin, John Scalzi, David Gerrold, The Guardian, and the rest of the SJWs will try to portray this as a resounding defeat for us, but keep this in mind: the side that resorts to a scorched earth strategy is the one that is losing and in retreat. All they have accomplished is to convert many Sad Puppies into Rabid Puppies.

They have talked about sending us a message, and we have heard it. I don’t know about you, but the message I heard was “bring more Puppies.”

UPDATE: This is amusing. The SJWs are so pleased with what they are claiming was a “victory” that they have vanished the categories that were No Awarded. “Those categories in which there were Awards presented are listed below.”

UPDATE 2: The vote totals are here. With 525 Rabid Puppies, we definitely face an uphill climb, but keep in mind that this represents their fully mobilized forces, up from their anti-Puppy vote of 1,100 last year. I’ll analyze this and share some of my thoughts in a future post.

Below are the results, along with my personal vote and how I voted the winner:

Best Novel

    The Three-Body Problem (1)

 Best Novella

    No Award
    “One Bright Star to Guide Them”

Best Novelette

    “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” (5)

Best Short Story

    No Award
    “Turncoat”, Steve Rzasa (Riding the Red Horse, Castalia House)

Best Related Work

    No Award
    “The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF”

Best Graphic Story

    Ms Marvel
    No Award

 Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

    Guardians of the Galaxy (1)

 Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

    Orphan Black: “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried” (4)

 Best Editor, Short Form

    No Award
    Vox Day

Best Editor, Long Form

    No Award
    Toni Weisskopf

Best Professional Artist

    Julie Dillon (3)

Best Semiprozine

    Lightspeed Magazine (4)

Best Fanzine

    Journey Planet (4)

Best Fancast

    Galactic Suburbia Podcast (3)

Best Fan Writer

    Laura J. Mixon (5)

Best Fan Artist

    Elizabeth Leggett (1)

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

    Wesley Chu (2)

Brainstorm Hugo Party

Whether it’s a Sad Puppy sweep or we burned down the house, you are invited to celebrate the 2015 Hugo Awards online
with the Rabid Puppies, the Dread Ilk, the Vile Faceless Minions, and
two-time 2015 Hugo nominee Vox Day on August 22nd at 11 PM EST.

The Ustream video doesn’t work all that well through the webinar, so you’ll probably want to run it on your own machine. But there are 243 folks registered already, so come by and bring your own prosecco. Or champagne, if you swing that way.

The Leader of SP3 speaks

Brad Torgersen shares his “reaction” statement to the Wall Street Journal:

Because people will be gloating and/or gnashing their teeth (alternately) I’ve not been much inclined to make any after-the-fact statements. My “job” with this thing, finished the minute the door shut on the voting.

But I want to re-emphasize something I told WIRED magazine’s Amy Wallace: it doesn’t necessarily matter who wins or loses a Hugo award this year, as much as it matters that participation keeps increasing.

This year there were a record number of memberships, and a record number of ballots cast. This is very, very good. A democracy (any democracy) is only as worthwhile as those who keep their end up by actively participating. Past Hugo voting has tended to be remarkably anemic. Sad Puppies has changed this significantly — for two years running. If the participation (beyond 2015) declines, the Hugos are diminished. If participation grows, the Hugos mean more. That’s the real bottom line (in my book) and it goes way beyond which “side” can construct victory narratives.

A fine and noble sentiment. I applaud him for it. And I don’t disagree; a larger electorate means 40 Tor-affiliated SJWs can’t continue to hand Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Charles Stross and John Scalzi more Hugos to go with the 39 they’ve already collected.

Meanwhile, Mark Judge of CNS sets the historical record straight:

There is controversy surrounding this year’s Hugo Awards, the prestigious science fiction prize which will be handed out this Saturday and whose previous winners have included Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein. This year’s ballot has many names on it that liberals and the media have denounced as racist and reactionary white men.

The group in question counter that they are not reactionary, racist, or even white, and that the reporting on the entire episode has been atrocious.

The group of writers, calling themselves the “Sad Puppies” – a satire on liberalism’s penchant for appealing to emotion over logic – successfully got themselves on the Hugo ballot, and then nominated, by appealing to the fans who vote for the award. The Sad Puppies unofficial leader is Brad Torgerson, author of “The Chaplain’s War” and other works and a U.S. Army Reserve Warrant Officer. Torgerson, who has been nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula, another prestigious sci-fi prize, told one interviewer, “It became plainly obvious, especially after 2010, that a lot of the classic works of the old days – there’s no way they could possibly make it in the current climate because the current climate was all about affirmative action.”

In which tonight’s events are contemplated

Aaron sent over this cheerful meme of the Supreme Dark Lord at his ease. I just wish he’d sent it sooner, so I could have sent it in as my picture for the Awards ceremony. C’est la vie. I’m feeling more than a little optimistic today, although about what exactly I can’t say. Perhaps it is because I finished the final draft of SJWS ALWAYS LIE: Taking Down the Thought Police last night and will be able to deliver it on August 27th, the first anniversary of #GamerGate, as planned. Or perhaps because Art of Sword is coming along nicely, as we’ve finally got some of the powerups in and working. Or perhaps because we’ve got our gargantuan new project server coming on line this weekend.

I’m looking forward to tonight no matter what happens. Several media outlets have asked me for my take on the situation after the awards are announced, as there is considerably more interest in the outcome than usual, but the fact of the matter is that we achieved our objectives back in April. The Rabid Puppies outperformed my expectations, and if they do so again tonight, it won’t be for the first time. Regardless, we have broken the perceived power of the SJWs in science fiction once and for all; they are not frantically debating the best way to mitigate our growing influence in science fiction because they believe they are still in control of it.

I had to laugh when I read that some of the people at the business meeting wanted to postpone the vote on EPH until after the awards were announced because they wanted to see what the results were before taking a position on it. This indicates that they still have no idea what motivates us or what we expect to accomplish. They are too solipsistic to understand our goals even when we tell them straight out what they are. So to be clear, WorldCon, be informed that He Who Shall Only Be Named In Fearful Whispers supports E Pluribus Hugo 100 percent. As for the other anti-slate plan, X of Y, I am totally indifferent because it is structurally futile. Contra the purpose of its designers, it provides an even bigger advantage to disciplined slates than the current rules do. It’s irrelevant.

As the International Lord of Hate observed concerning EPH: “So it rewards coordination between a group that is willing to focus
votes for one item per category. Did Vox write that proposal for them?”

George Martin is already frantically pre-spinning the Narrative, declaring that no awards being given out means the truefen win and the Puppies lose, except of course when it doesn’t because he’s totally against slates except when a slate nominates something he likes. It’s the usual SJW incoherence. But we don’t care if I win Best Editor or No Award does, we don’t care if Tom Kratman wins best novella or No Award does, the objective was to ensure that none of the usual SJWs did. And in that, we have already succeeded brilliantly. Sure, it would be amusing to see Jim or John or Rolf or Eric win a plastic rocket, but only because that would, somewhat to my surprise, upset the SJWs even more than the demise of the awards.

John C. Wright is one of science fiction’s greatest authors, Jim Butcher is one of fantasy’s most popular, and I truly did not expect that the SJWs would rather burn the awards to the ground than permit one of them to be recognized for their contributions to the field. But that is certainly an acceptable outcome.

What Martin and the other SJWs are hoping is that by establishing false objectives for us (and then praying that we don’t achieve them), we will be demoralized and go away with our tails tucked between our legs, chastened by the disapproval of the empty-handed, but victorious truefen. This is amusing, because it is not us, but them, who are demoralized. Consider the despairing lament of one SJW at io9.

I’m so WEARY of these assholes. This is supposed to be FUN. It
isn’t supposed to be a long, bitter war. I hope the Puppies are
fucking trounced in disgrace at the Hugo’s. I hope “no award”
wins for most of the categories they flooded. As wonderful as that
will be it will just make them more bloodthirsty, bigoted and
pigheaded. This drama won’t end with the Hugo’s.

No, it won’t. They’re weary and in despair because they thought they’d already won the cultural war. They didn’t realize that we were still mobilizing, that we were gearing up to blow them off the battlefield with weapons and dark forces they didn’t know existed. What demoralized us was seeing SJW crap fill the bookstore shelves. What demoralized us was seeing utterly forgettable romance novels in space being declared the best that science fiction had to offer. If that mediocre SJW-infested nonsense was the best that could make it past the publishing gatekeepers, then what was the point of reading it or writing it?

Compared to nearly three decades of that, what is one more year of not winning awards? We never won any before, so what the hell do we care?

Tonight will tell us one very important thing. It will give us the opportunity to see what their true numbers are and reveal the true extent of their fully mobilized strength. Last year, the maximum No Award vote was 1,100. This year it will be more, somewhere between 1,100 and 4,000.

Being SJWs, they doubled-down as per the Second Law, giving us the chance to break them once and for all. But even if we don’t, even if we only burn Munich instead of taking Berlin, even if they are successful in “sending a message”, what we hear will not be what they wish for us to hear. Because what we will hear is this: Next year, bring more puppies.

Worldcon Minions

They’re not likely to be confused with the Vile Faceless Minions of the Evil Legion of Evil.

Too much faces. Not enough slavering jaws, black talons, or gnawed and splintered bones in the background.

In any event, this is your open WorldCon thread. Stay safe out there, Puppies, we have word of someone in a manatee t-shirt distributing unauthorized material that may be insensitive, problematic, offensive, exclusive, or otherwise dangerous. OpSec has been informed and has issued this warning:

Suspect is wearing a manatee t-shirt and has
placed a satirical flyer in the freebie area! Stay alert! If you see
something, say something!

Say what you will, but I think the Puppies have really gone too far this time! “US president Obama declares state of emergency in Washington State….”

    To: Carol Wilson Re: SFWA Membership

    Dear Carol,

    First, congratulations on your recent sales! We here at SFWA are always happy to see the professional success of authors.

    It should be noted, however, that one or more of the markets you listed are under review for desirability issues.

    However, if the sales are validated, I’d appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to answer a few questions to help us properly determine the true quality and merits of your work.

    1. What does your genitalia look like?

    2. How do you feel about what your genitalia looks like?

    3. Have you ever changed your genitalia?

    4. If you responded “No” to question 3, are you planning, or have you ever planned to change your genitalia?

    5. When you are naked in bed with another person, what does their genitalia look like?

    6. Of the major characters in your stories, how many have genitalia different than yours?

    7. Have you ever represented a character of the LGBTQQIAPHDBDSMBFDVIPRSVPRESPECTEIEIO groups as an antagonist/villain or as having any negative traits?

    Finally, please provide an evaluation of the melanin content of your skin. If you do not have a medical result available, please go to your local Sherwin-Williams store and obtain a copy of Palette Card #17 – Earth Tones and enter the color number of the swatch which most closely resembles your skin. If your skin is lighter than the faintest color swatch on Palette Card #17 – Earth Tones, please enter “Oppressor White”.

    Again, congratulations on your sales and I hope we can process your membership in time for you to participate in our annual Shunning and Denouncement Survey. It’s great fun.

    Sincerely yours,

    S. J. Woreeahr

    President, Socialist Fiction Writers of America

This is, of course, crimethink and wrongsatire, an unspeakable horror worse than the Holocaust, the Holodomor, Hiroshima, and the Great Leap Forward combined. Our thoughts and prayers go out on behalf of all the wounded victims of WorldCon.