Tag: Puppies

Unfair and untrue

SJWs just can’t seem to fairly characterize my positions on anything:

Princess Content ‏@ContentPrincess
I just didn’t think any of them would really go.  I mean they aren’t fans.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
If they pay for a membership, then they can go. If they make trouble, they’ll get the boot. If they don’t, they can stay.

Princess Content ‏@ContentPrincess
I would not feel safe in a place where someone was openly admitting association with @voxday or his minions.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Then you’d better flee. There are more than a few there.

Princess Content ‏@ContentPrincess
i didn’t go.  You ruined it.  and you don’t even care.  You don’t care at all that you have hurt people.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
That is totally unfair and untrue. I am rather pleased at hurting the people who claim to have been hurt.

Princess Content ‏@ContentPrincess
aren’t you supposed to be a cruelty artist? Doesn’t throwing around old memes make you a cruelty hack? #notcreative

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Quoting the classics doesn’t make one a hack. Ripping them off does. Of course, no @scalzi fan would grasp the difference.

A Latino, an Indian, and a White man

Walk into a room. How does NPR describe them? As three white men. Because badthink:

The prestigious Hugo Awards, which honor science fiction and fantasy writing, will be held Saturday. Lately, they have been given to more and more women and writers of color as the world of sci-fi opens up — and that’s prompted a backlash from a group of mostly white male writers who call themselves the “Sad Puppies.”

Listen to the rest of it here if you like, I’m not going to bother. The funny thing is that if you look at the original Evil Legion of Evil, it’s not accurate to say it is a group of mostly white male writers.

Supreme Dark Lord: not white male
International Lord of Hate: not white male
Grand Strategikon: white male
King in Yellow: white male
Beautiful but Evil Space Princess: not white male
Token Liberal: white male

Of course, if NPR reported it accurately as a group that was “half white males”, they couldn’t realistically portray it as a Bad and Terrible Thing that Must Be Stopped.

Negotiation

buwaya August 15, 2015 3:31 PM  

I apologize in advance for the interjection of a marginally related matter – I have been over at File 770 bringing up the matter of a negotiated peace. It does not seem to have gone over too well for the most part, but patience is of course the key. Under the circumstances it seems to be the case that the balance of power (or risk vs return) seems to favor the puppies, so I was asking about what sort of concessions they would be willing to offer. I apologize for neglecting to check with you about the sort of concessions, in a concrete sense, this faction would be willing to accept.

The Supreme Dark Lord, Evil Legion of Evil August 15, 2015 4:16 PM

There is no need to apologize. As it happens, there are a few things we would be willing to accept in order to bring about a rapprochement in science fiction.

John Scalzi’s skull
Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s skull
The Toad of Tor’s skull
Jim C. Hines’s skull
Irene Gallo’s skull
Charles Stross’s skull
Phil Sandifer’s skull
Mary Kowal’s skull

Silvered and made into goblets, please. We may need four more, but I think eight place settings will suffice.

UPDATE: I am reliably informed that we actually have twelve SJW-bone table settings. So we will also require:

Steven Gould’s skull
Matthew Johnson’s skull
James Enge’s skull
Lee Martindale’s skull

We would also like to request a half-stanza from Byron’s “Lines Inscribed Upon A Cup Formed From A Skull” to be engraved upon each skull. As there are six stanzas, this will nicely suit the set.

Start not—nor deem my spirit fled:
   In me behold the only skull
From which, unlike a living head,
    Whatever flows is never dull. 

I lived, I loved, I quaff’d, like thee:
   I died: let earth my bones resign;
Fill up—thou canst not injure me;
   The worm hath fouler lips than thine.

Better to hold the sparkling grape,
   Than nurse the earth-worm’s slimy brood;
And circle in the goblet’s shape
   The drink of Gods, than reptiles’ food.

Where once my wit, perchance, hath shone,
   In aid of others’ let me shine;
And when, alas! our brains are gone,
   What nobler substitute than wine?

Quaff while thou canst—another race,
   When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,
   And rhyme and revel with the dead.

Why not? since through life’s little day
   Our heads such sad effects produce;
Redeem’d from worms and wasting clay,
   This chance is theirs, to be of use.

I believe it is a priori apparent that their skulls would be of far more utility to mankind if they were helping satiate the thirst of the Dark Lord and his guests than any other purpose for which they might be currently used.

Buwaya on August 15, 2015 at 1:33 pm said:

I have a response from [Day] requesting some people’s skulls, some of whom I don’t recognize. Seems unrealistic even for an opening offer, but its a start anyway

Camestros Felapton on August 16, 2015 at 1:02 am said:

New plan:
1. we get Mr Crocodile to bargain VD down to just one skull
2. we get a FAKE skull and turn it into a wine goblet & send it to VD
3. we persuade John Scalzi to run aound WorldCon with his T-shirt over his head and shouting ‘oh noes, where’s me head gone’ and wave his arms in the air like he has no head.
4. peace in our time

Felapton is the guy who did the Puppy Kerfluffle map, the latest version of which is below. I have to say, I rather like the cut of his jib.

The SJWs think they can outlast us

An SJW whose tagline is “exploiting extroverts for personal gain” is demoralized, wants to ban people obeying all the rules as “harassers”, but nevertheless insists that they’re going to outlast us:

Everyone says the Hugos will survive, and I tend to agree. I think the Puppy voters will get tired of throwing away their money in the name of making whatever statement they’re trying to make. They will also have a harder time maintaining the charade that their campaign is about anything other than self-promotion, because after this year there will be fewer neutral parties willing to appear on any slate. The nomination rules will probably be changed to make slates less effective, although I’m afraid that will make the whole process more confusing and could scare some potential nominators away. In the long run this will mostly be forgotten, but in the short term it probably means that at least two WorldCons are going to have their Hugos basically invalidated, and I don’t like that they have to make that sacrifice. In my opinion the harassment policy should be invoked against the Puppy organizers and they should be banned from the convention and disqualified from the awards on that basis. I get that the Hugo organizers won’t do this, they would argue that the integrity of the awards depends on strict adherence to the bylaws, not arbitrary decisions by administrators. I could make some counter arguments but I don’t want to go down that road right now. I will just say that when a group has a stated goal of disrupting the awards, it wouldn’t bother me at all if they were barred from participating.

I don’t think there’s any point in making predictions this year. With so many more voters than usual, anything is possible. The Puppies don’t seem to be expecting to win, but whether that means that non-Puppies win or it’s all no awards, who knows? Maybe there was a big influx of Chinese voters who wanted to support Cixin Liu and don’t know anything about Puppies. I’m not really invested in the results this year, I don’t have any favorites that I’m rooting for. I considered skipping this blog post too. But then I realized that’s what the Puppies would want. They want people, at least people who aren’t them, to lose interest. Well, voting this year was less fun and more of a chore, but I did it. Blogging about it wasn’t as much fun either, but blogging about the Hugos seems to be what I do, even if nobody ever sees it. If nothing else, it’s an affirmation that I’m still a part of the process. If I have to put up with a couple of down years before it becomes fun again, I can do that. So I’ll see you back here, same time next year.

Yeah, the game journos thought they could outgrind #GamerGate too. I always enjoy the SJW gift for self-contradiction. Even as they make fun of me for not letting go of 10 years of vicious and unprovoked personal attacks made on me by the Torlings beginning in 2005, and as they lament the terrible feelbads that TWO WHOLE YEARS of effective Puppy campaigns have dealt them, they insist that we’re going to lose interest and relax the pressure on them Real Soon Now. That’s why they want to ban us.

Are they mad, delusional, or is it just wishful thinking? Some combination of the three, I suppose. Meanwhile, Tom Knighton is beginning to sound like a Vile Faceless Minion. He just doesn’t care what the SJWs in science fiction do anymore.

 I’ve been one of those trying to argue that message fiction was a bad
idea.  I still think it is.  But now, I just don’t care what those
folks do. I believe in free markets, and I think the market will slap some of
these publishers hard.  They’ll either learn from it, or not.  Either
way, new publishers will rise.  Baen can’t publish everything, after
all.

 
So, I just don’t care.  They can write what they want to write, and
they can bitch about what they want to bitch about.  These days, most of
those who are so vocal aren’t much more to me than an ant crawling
across the ground.  A couple are significant enough writers that I’d
actually heard of them and read some of their stuff, but most of them? Nothings.  They’re the kind of thing I’d scape off of my shoe before stepping into my home, metaphorically speaking.

The Rabid Puppies are not going to stop because we’re just doing what we’ve always done. Grind until we level up, then grind some more. In the last six weeks I’ve edited two books, written a book, turned in four game designs, and none of those things were my top priority project. I don’t think I’ll have any trouble finding the time to put an annual list of Hugo recommendations together for the foreseeable future.

The SJWs don’t seem to be able to grasp that we can’t be intimidated or that every time they publish another stupid, slanderous, and inaccurate article, every time they libel us and call us names, they ensure that our morale and motivation stays at max. I don’t know about you, but at this point, I’m fired up and good for at least another decade.

The newest Puppy

The newest member of the Day household. While there can’t ever be a replacement for the Dainty Flower, I have no doubt that Spacebunny’s new Ridgeback will prove to be a fine, upstanding member of the family. Or that he’ll do an excellent job protecting the “puppies” that she loved so much.

Little skeletons in the closet

As Sasquan approaches, more of the File 770 SJWs are starting to lose it.

Patrick May: There is, however, a group within the non-Puppy set that has been making broad accusations of racism, misogyny, and homophobia against all Sad and Rabid Puppy supporters.

Matt Y: Eh, if you’re a supporter of a movement with a mission statement about how previous recent award winners only won because of affirmative action instead of quality work, without citation or evidence to back up that claim, I don’t think that’s a broad statement. There might be Puppy supporters that aren’t, but what they’re supporting certainly is.

Shao Ping: I would also add some of the works the Puppies supported add a great deal of credibility to charges of racism, misogyny, and homophobia.

That makes no sense. Whether you have supported someone who has made a broad statement or not, it is still, by definition, a broad statement to accuse you and every other supporter of racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This attempt to create a distinction about Person X’s action on the basis of Person Y’s action isn’t logically valid; Person X’s action exists in its own right. And I would also add that by Shao Ping’s standard, many of the works supported by the science fiction SJWs add a great deal of credibility to charges of child molestation, child abuse, rape, sexual deviance, and pedophilia.

For example, there is considerably more solid evidence indicating that SFWA Grand Master and NAMBLA supporter Samuel Delaney is a criminal child molester than there is to indicate that any Sad or Rabid Puppy nominee, much less supporter, is racist, misogynistic, or homophobic, much less a Fascist, a neo-Nazi or a Nazi. I have repeatedly denied all of those charges myself and no one has ever been able to prove otherwise because they are all false. Whereas, to the best of my knowledge, Mr. Delaney has never once denied having had sex with a minor as an adult… and gay sex with minors, both voluntary and involuntary, is a frequent feature of his books. Among various and sundry other unpleasantries.

We know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that many Puppy Kickers have direct personal ties to “Chip” Delaney, to convicted child molester and SFWA member Ed Kramer, and to the late child molester, Marion Zimmer Bradley, whose estate is listed in the SFWA directory. And they were not, they are not, the only child molesters in science fiction.

Listening to these criminal sex deviants and psychological train wrecks whine for months about what terrible people the Puppies are to steal their awards is surreal. It’s going to be amusing to see how they react when the media attention they have so assiduously courted starts looking in their direction and begins finding the many child-sized skeletons in their closets.

Two out of three isn’t bad

At File 770, a glimpse of the Sasquan committee’s view of the Puppies, which is surprisingly accurate:

There’s been a lively discussion on my Facebook about this all. In particular an explanation of part of the thinking of the committee –

Glenn Glazer Christopher: I put three simple facts before you:
1) The puppies have a strong tendency to _retaliatory_ action.
2) The puppies are crazy, but they are not suicide terrorist crazy.
3) Antonelli has a long history of being an online asshat, but no history of physical violence, including at Worldcon in San Antonio, which he was at.

1) This is correct. Leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone. Attack us unprovoked, and we won’t let it go until either a) you publicly and unconditionally submit to the Supreme Dark Lord or b) the Vile Faceless Minions have lapped up your blood and devoured your corpse. Your call.

2) We’re not crazy at all. We simply have different motivations and different objectives, and we operate on a longer time scale than most. If you still think the goal of Rabid Puppies is to win science fiction awards, you’re the one who is observably crazy. We care as much about them every bit as much as #GamerGate cares who wins Kotaku’s Game of the Year.

3) Now, Lou Antonelli would appear to be crazy, or at the very least, stupid. We don’t support his letter to the police, we don’t support his apology, and we don’t support his subsequent attempt to make nice with his new BFF David Gerrold. We may be, in fact, we indubitably are, Evil, but we are not stupid. In any event, we don’t care whether Sasquan bans him or not. He is not, by his own account, a Sad Puppy, a Rabid Puppy, or an SJW, and therefore we’re no more interested in him than in Black Gate, Guardians of the Galaxy, or any other non-Puppy on our lists.

As for Sasquan, we have no interest in disrupting it, but we do expect our attendees to be prepared for any SJWs inclined to violate the posted Sasquan harassment policy. That is why I encourage every VFM, Puppy, and Dread Ilk attending Sasquan to keep a recorder running at all times on your Android or iOS phone. If you’re subsequently subject to any verbal or physical harassment, you’ll have material evidence on hand to bring to the relevant authorities. More importantly, you’ll also have a strong defense to present against the inevitable SJW lies concerning your own behavior.

This map by Camestros Felapton is rather clever. I always pictured Rabidonia as being more northern, but he does a good job of placing the various relationships. Moreover, if Voxpopoli were in the upper right, it would be right where Lord Bane is in Illuria.

Those who serve and know not

To them, too, we owe our thanks. It’s tremendously amusing to listen to the science fiction SJWs projecting and declaring the Puppies to be pathetic losers while they whine and cry and gnash their yellowed, decaying teeth. A sniveling SJW named Chris M. Barkley is only the latest to strike the usual poses:

Contrast this with Mr. Beale, who, on the surface seems to have some moderate amount of talent as a writer, editor and publisher, who has gone out of his way to trumpet and advance notions of homophobia, sexism, racism with provocative slander, libelous insults and threats, wildly delivered with what I can only describe as a pseudo- intellectual flair. However, those talents, which could have been used for the betterment of literature and culture, are instead being used to soil and defame it. Beale’s latest attempt at seeking attention, a worldwide call for a boycott of all TOR authors and books, is as pathetic as it is futile.

All of the activities of the Sad and Rabid Puppies might have been easily laughed off, had they not made good on their threats and effectively gamed the Hugo Award nominations this year.

Millions of words have been spilled, pounded, spit out, spit upon, leveraged and expounded upon this subject by thousands of commentators, bloggers, pundits and literary critics since the nominations were announced.

I tell friends and acquaintances that are not familiar with sf fandom that this is not the first fannish feud to spill out into the consciousness of the public, nor will it be the last. With internet connectivity, hair trigger tempers and the willingness of people to stay up WAY PAST their bedtimes to correct stuff on the internet, it is certainly the most public display of asshattery in fandom that general public has ever seen.

I consider what Brad Torgenson, Larry Corriea and Theodore Beale have collectively done, is a direct attack on what fans, writers, editors, publishers and literature itself. And I consider this attack on fandom and the Hugos is a personal attack against me….

 I do not obsess about it but I have been wondering whether he really understands that a life is a legacy for those who follow him.

There is room in fandom for rational discussion, debate and even dissent. There is no room however, for empty rhetoric and false conjecture, death threats, bullying, hateful and blatant racism, sexism and gay baiting, which is what the Sad Puppies now stand for, forever tarred with the same brush as and the Rabid Puppy crew, whether they like or not.

Moreover, this means that while we may have to listen to the inane and idiotic diatribes of Theodore Beale/Vox Day, we do not have to endorse or accept them.

Margaret Keifer’s life is an exemplary example of what every fan’s, every person’s life should be.

What Theodore Beale and his followers have forcefully shown, is that they are incapable of empathy, kindness or human decency.

They have my pity, and little else.

So brave. Thank you for this. Of course, what they don’t recognize is that one can’t soil sewage. And one can’t defame the infamous with the truth. And I would correct him: the SJWs not only don’t have to endorse or accept anything I say, they quite clearly aren’t listening to anything I have said. I’ll try again:

I am not one of you. I do not want to be one of you. I don’t want your attention, I don’t want your awards, I don’t want your respect, I don’t want your pity, and I don’t want anything to do with you. I have never wanted anything to do with you. In my opinion you are left-wing human wreckage whose worldview is outdated, irrational, nonsensical, and ignorant.

You are neither my intellectual nor moral superior. You are not even my intellectual peer. Your morality, to the extent it can be called that, is a parasitical parody of the real thing. I do not respect you, I do not value your opinion, I reject your values, and I deny your competence to judge me in any way.

I turned my back on your freakish community and everything it stood for as soon as I had the opportunity to see it clearly for myself at Minicon in 1997. I dutifully did my panels and never went to another SF convention or attended another SF-related event ever again. I don’t associate with losers, child molesters, or creepy rape enthusiasts, and SF fandom consists of little else. I never submitted a short story to a science fiction magazine or submitted a novel to a science fiction publishing house because I didn’t have any professional respect for most of the community’s incompetent institutions.

All the SF community had to do was leave me alone and I would have left it alone. I did so, more or less, for 16 years. You didn’t. For over ten years I was repeatedly attacked, unprovoked, by various members of your weird little community. I ignored most of their repeated jabs, their libels, their false accusations, their nasty insinuations, and their insults. Out of sheer contempt, I ignored most of their attempts to obtain my attention. But when John Scalzi, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, N.K. Jemisin, and Steven Gould, among others, made an attempt to publicly destroy my reputation, I decided I would not ignore it any longer.

So, you’ve got my attention now. And you should have known better to draw the contemptuous eye of the Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil upon you. Because the Rabid Puppies, and the Dread Ilk, and the Ilk, and worst of all, my 391 397 Vile Faceless Minions, are coming for you. Not just this year, not just next year, but always and forever until you are gone. By all means, cry more about how much we hurt you; the VFM like nothing better than the taste of your tears.

The Sad Puppies want to fix what the SJWs have done to the detriment of science fiction over the last three decades. I respect that, although I think it makes more sense to demolish a building and build anew rather than attempt to shore up a termite-infested structure. But Rabid Puppies are not Sad Puppies. We want nothing more than to crush SJW bones, drink SJW blood, and leave a smoking hole where every SJW institution used to be.

We’re not incapable of empathy, kindness or human decency, we simply have no mercy for SJWs. There will be NO PLACE in science fiction for SJWs.

And that is why, on behalf of the Rabid Puppies, I wish to personally thank every SJW in science fiction who voted for No Award in any category this year and award you this badge as an expression of my personal gratitude.

 
Another File 770 SJW adds:
The puppies lack of empathy and self righteousness will ensure they are
unaware of what they have wrought or feel they are entirely justified in
doing so. Their dogmatic certainty of certain “truths” makes it
impossible to have a rational discussion with them since there isn’t a
common set of assumptions on which to base a discussion.
We know what we’ve done and as we expected, the SJW reaction has entirely justified our actions. And the next time one of them is whining about how we don’t talk to them, don’t listen to them, and don’t pay any attention to their opinions except to laugh at them, we will remind them that they themselves have declared it is “impossible to have a rational discussion” with us.

Xanatos unveiled

You know, of all the SJWs in science fiction, I would have thought that John O’Neill would have known me well enough by now to understand that I am an accomplished player of games. I mean, I contributed to Black Gate for several years and a fair number of my posts were game-related. I thought he knew me better. But, in any event, he explained his 2015 Hugo ballot at Black Gate.

I’ve explained my rationale elsewhere, and I won’t rehash all that again, but in short — regardless of how the voting goes, the Puppies have made it abundantly clear that their primary goal is to have their ballot accepted. Having the bulk of fandom acknowledge their ballot as legitimate, and having their nominees read and voted on, paves the way for future Hugo ballots to be decided the same way: through the Puppies aggressive form of slate voting, which I feel drowns out far too much worthy fiction in favor of the Puppies extremely narrow selection process (dictated almost entirely by two individuals).

Or to put it another way: Any slate in which Vox Day puts eleven works from his own tiny publishing house on the Hugo ballot — and nominates himself for two Hugos — will have a hard time convincing me that it is anything other than a naked Hugo grab, poorly masquerading as a reactionary literary movement.

Now that the voting is complete, I will simply quote Mr. Correia.

“Vox is off doing his own thing. You tried to shun a man who is
incapable of being shunned. He got kicked out of the market, so went and
built his own market. The more you go after him, the stronger he gets. I
don’t think you guys realize that most of me and Brad’s communication
with Vox consists of us asking him to be nice and not burn it all down
out of spite.”

I like Larry. I like Brad. They’re good men. I respect them both. And out of my respect for them, I agreed to play it straight this year, support Sad Puppies, and refrain from nuking the Awards. (The VFM were champing at the bit to burn SOMETHING and there was a category that eminently had it coming, so I graciously acceded to their humble requests and unleashed them.) That is why I wish I was more surprised to observe that the science fiction SJWs were dumb enough to do what the Dark Lord wanted in order to teach Brad and Larry a lesson.

See, now that’s what a fucking Xanatos Gambit looks like, bitches.

Note to Richard Brandt: I am not the habit of keeping my self-appointed enemies informed of my true intentions at all times. I said I would support Sad Puppies. I supported Sad Puppies. I kept my word. That’s what I do, even if it means running the risk of delayed gratification. Fortunately, as I anticipated, the SJWs were almost as outraged by Brad’s recommendations as they were by mine.

My intentions were always right out there in the open for anyone with the wit to see it. Based on some of his wry commentary, I suspect Mike Glyer knew. The Dread Ilk certainly understood. I even warned the SJWs that if they went No Award this year on the basis of their disapproval of our award pimpage, they’d have no grounds to complain about our utilization of their tactics in the future, only not in revenge, but because that was the goal. In addition to not voting No Award across the board, we also didn’t respond to any of their shady tactics, not Mary Kowal’s vote-buying, not the various proposed rule changes, not the spurious disqualification of John C. Wright’s sixth Hugo nomination.

The reason is that I wanted our hands to remain entirely clean this year and to gauge the true strength of the motivated opposition. Why buy 500 votes when we’ve learned that Kowal only bought 75?

Next year, we bring the noise. Sad Puppies won’t be led by the Cuddly Care Bear, but by Kate the Impaler. The VFM will grow in size and malice, and the GG-inspired counterattack will spread into new industries. Next year, Rabid Puppies will utilize every useful tactic, explore every potentially usable angle. Because we’re not here to win awards, we’re here to kick ass and chew SJWs. John O’Neill has never grasped that. For some reason, he still thinks we are craving the approval of the human wreckage that risibly deems itself a literary elite.

The last few months has been a remarkably dynamic and exciting time for fandom. The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies accomplished something absolutely incredible: joining together to make a resounding statement about the current state of science fiction awards, and forcing the entire industry to sit up and take notice. They have, without question, been the single largest story in fandom this year.

Unfortunately, the subsequent discussion has been a Public Relations disaster for the Puppies. When the eyes of the world were upon them (and while they were admittedly being unfairly criticized by people who misunderstood what they were really about), the Puppies responded by relentlessly going on the attack, hurling bombs at “SJWs,” liberals, secret cartels controlling the Hugos, and (especially, and rather senselessly) Tor, the publisher that has tirelessly promoted and sold many of the authors they championed.

In short, four months ago the Puppies grabbed the microphone and stood on stage in front of the entire industry. They seized the genre by the throat, and had a golden opportunity to make their point. And instead, they simply proved that they had nothing of any real value to say.

Today, the Sad Puppies are already seen as a spent force. Irrelevant, misguided, and not particularly very interesting. Perhaps I’ll be be proven wrong, and when the Hugo Winners are announced at Sasquan in Spokane, Washington, on August 22, the Puppies will sweep again, just as they swept the nominations.

But I don’t think so. I think the result will be quite the opposite, and the Puppies will be swept aside in a wave of NO AWARDs. When that happens, I’m sure there will be plenty of dark muttering about “next year.” But by then, the microphone will have been turned off, and the audience will be long gone. The Puppies are part of history; they just don’t know it.

Yeah, they said much the same last year too. The problem is that John still thinks we seized the genre by the throat in order to make a point. We’re not making a point, we’re strangling an evil and obnoxious ideology. And we have only begun to squeeze.

Later this month, one of two things will happen. Either one-third of the Hugo Awards will be obliterated or the twenty-year dominance of the science fiction SJWs will be publicly shattered for the world to see. The former is a win for Rabid Puppies, the latter is a win for everyone except the SJWs, but in particular for the Sad Puppies. And if the former result is not quite as dramatic as I would have liked, well, we can always seek to do better next year.

On a tangential note, I appreciated this response to one of O’Neill’s sillier statements in the comments:

“In short, the Puppy slate just doesn’t measure up.”

“Riding the Red Horse is the first great mil-sf anthology since Jerry Pournelle tapered off back in the 90′s.”

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

Rabid Puppies: don’t forget to vote

If you are, for any reason at all, interested in perusing my 2015 Hugo ballot, which I have already cast, you are certainly welcome to review it. If you are registered with Sasquan, you can vote at the link here.

As I told the lady from the publication covering the developing story to whom I spoke last night, whatever happens, we have already won. No Award was the original objective for Rabid Puppies, and with the exception of Best Novel, that is now the worst case scenario for us. The best case scenario is that we publicly break the perceived power of the science fiction SJWs and demonstrate their impotence by denying them the ability to do what we originally sought while seeing the awards go to various meritorious works and individuals.

Which, of course, was the Sad Puppies goal. It’s more than a bit ironic that the SJWs rushed to do the Rabid Puppies’ bidding in order to teach the Sad Puppies a lesson, but then, no one ever said they were smart.

The Sad Puppies’ victory condition may be unlikely, but it is still in play. We simply don’t know how all the 5,599 supporting members are going to vote and neither does anyone else. There are nearly as many new supporting members as there were total votes last year. Loncon had 10,826 members, of whom 2,882 were supporting, and 3,587 cast Hugo votes. Consider, for example, the reaction of one neutral reader to the various nominees:

I read the Best Novel nominees (and Ancillary Justice), the Best Novella nominees, the Best Novelette nominees, the Best Short Story nominees, the Best Graphic Story nominees (and Saga vols. 1 and 2), and every story by a Campbell nominee I could get a hold of (the only works I had read before the nominations were announced were Ancillary Justice, The Lives of Tao, and Rat Queens vol. 1). The oft-maligned Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies nominees held up well against the non-Puppy nominees, with the large caveat that four of the six categories were dominated by Puppy nominees and one was dominated by non-Puppy nominees.

After reading all that, what do I think? First, I was somewhat surprised to learn that, for those six categories, the average rankings I gave the books were almost identical. My average ranking for the works not on a Puppy slate was 2.8, my average ranking for the Sad Puppy works was 3.0, and my average ranking for the Rabid Puppy works was 3.2. I wasn’t blown away by the Puppy nominees, but I wasn’t blown away by the non-Puppy nominees either. I would have more sympathy for anti-puppies if better works were being nominated.

But regardless of what happens, the fact remains that the Puppies howled and the world of science fiction will never be the same again. The cultural war in science fiction isn’t over, in fact, it has barely begun in earnest. They thought they’d won, but we hadn’t even begun to take the field.

And it’s necessary. I read The Year’s Best Science Fiction #18, edited by David Hartwell and published by Tor Books. (Never fear, I respected the boycott, and believe me, with a few exceptions, this was research, not pleasure.) I’ll post my analysis here in a few days, but I can assure you, many of the “best” stories were outright Pink SF message fiction. We have accomplished far more than anyone expected already, but a long march through the SF institutions remains ahead of us.

My hope is that Tor Books will one day follow Gawker’s lead in publicly announcing that they have learned the error of their ways, and force its SJWs to abandon their objective of thought-policing science fiction and fantasy while enforcing diversity of identity and uniformity of ideology.