Tag: Puppies

John Scalzi looks back over the last ten years of his literary career and devotes nearly one-third of the article – 31.6 percent – to his critics:

Any discussion of my career over the last decade needs to include the antipathy of me by a certain cadre of right-wing SF writers and fans, a group which overlaps (considerably) with the “Sad/Rabid Puppies” who publicly shat themselves so dramatically during the middle bit of the decade with regard to the Hugo Awards and other aspects of the business and community of SF/F literature. I noticed the first real push of the antipathy after Redshirts won the Hugo, and certain dudes suggested that Redshirts won because I had sucked up to the Social Justice Warriors sufficiently, rather than because, say, it was a popular book riffing off a beloved science fiction franchise in a clever and affectionate way, written by a writer who’d been nominated for Best Novel a few times before.

In the full bloom of the Puppy beclownery there was more of the same, a fair amount of snide discussion of my sexuality and gender, and general allegations that my sales numbers were inflated and/or propped up by bulk purchases by my publisher, which, by the way, was doing terribly and would soon be out of business. My personal favorite bit of this was when there was a long discussion about how my 2014 novel Lock In had been a massive sales failure and that Tor was about to drop me as an author; this discussion was happening simultaneously with me negotiating with Tor for my multi-book, multi-year, multimillion-dollar contract (which included not one but two sequels to Lock In). When the contract was announced, the narrative shifted to how much more I would have made self-publishing, and then later how I’d never really make as much money as the public figure of the contract. Which, well, okay, dudes. In time most of them have left off this nonsense, but there are a few of them still out there on this bullshit — why, I was chucklingly misgendered just this week!

What is it about me that bugged and in some cases still bugs these dudes? If you ask them they will give you all sorts of reasons, but having dealt with this nonsense for a better part of a decade I’ll tell you it’s mostly envy, and frustration about the state of their own careers, which they feel should be better because they write the sort of science fiction they’ve always loved and assume others still love as well. And which I also do, so why the hell do I get the big contracts and they’re (mostly) left to scrape by? There has to be something else involved — thus the secret cabal of SJWs, bulk purchases, also I’m gay and/or trans and thus not a man at all, hur hur hur. Add to this the fact that at least a couple of these dudes legit dislike me for other reasons (most of which boil down to the fact they can’t argue their way out of a paper bag and at one point or another I pointed that out to them in public), and some of them just happen to be bigoted as fuck, and you’ve got a fairly toxic mix of resentment and complete bullshit.

This hasn’t affected my career in any meaningful way — see the summary earlier in the piece — but on a personal level it could be tiresome. I’m guilty of taunting some of these dickheads on occasion, because they deserve the taunting and because I know my successes irritate the shit out of them. But mostly I’m glad it’s largely done and over with, save a few stragglers. I think after a certain point it just became difficult to argue that I was a failure, and that their doing so just accentuated their own relative positions, which they preferred not to do. And also, after a certain point you do just have to get on with your life and write your things. To the extent that some of them are doing that, good for them. Those that aren’t, well. Bless your hearts, dudes.

As always, Ol’ Johnny is lying and attempting to retroactively spin the narrative when he thinks no one is going to call him on it. No one was ever saying that he was a failure – quite to the contrary, he is almost certainly science fiction’s most financially successful grifter of the last fifty years.

What we said, and still say to this day, and what we can prove, is that he is a serial liar, a fraud, and a literary mediocrity. That’s all there ever was to it. And the reason no one even bothers to criticize him any more is because it is obvious to everyone that he is over and done. He can relax now. The hounds, like everyone else, have lost interest in him.

And start using Infogalactic:

Last year, Larry Correia fisked a condescending piece of… writing vomited by some screeching social justice simian who got offended because someone shared a meme on the Internet advising poor people to cook at home and instead of buying fast food. Two days later, someone edited Larry’s Wikipedia page so that the very first thing it said was that he was a White Supremacist Author. The page was also edited to say that Larry wanted his “worthless and self published fantasy dreck” nominated for a Hugo Award. “The funny thing was,” Larry told me when I spoke to him about the incident, “I was the one defending the intelligence and dignity of poor people of any ethnic background, and the rich white liberal was trying to say they were too dumb to boil water.”

Baen authors Tom Kratman, Sarah Hoyt, and John Ringo have also been targeted (the flaccid attempts against Ringo will go over about as well as the pantshittingly inept ones against Larry – that is to say they will be a fail), ostensibly for their refusal to act in accordance with the screeching social justice simian diktats and soothe their chafed labia by acknowledging that mayonnaise is a gender.

Reasons for the deletion range from petty to outright unhinged, claiming primary sources are insufficient and even questioning the military service of Mike Williamson and Tom Kratman! Apparently, even an article in Stars and Stripes about veterans forging successful careers in science fiction is insufficient evidence that an author is significant enough to warrant a Wikipedia page and Baen publishing – a giant in science fiction and fantasy that’s been in existence more than three decades – is apparently a “vanity press with little editorial/production standards that can’t even keep straight what year they awarded one of their fake awards.”

But really – like everything else they do – their efforts to destroy the reputations of their political enemies stem from their feelings of inadequacy compared with creators who not only produce literature people want to buy and read, but are infinitely more successful at their chosen art than these squealing mediocrities are at whatever it is that they choose as their so-called “professions” (often involving begging for money on Patreon and serving overpriced beverages at whatever hipster coffee house allows them to wear torn Che t-shirts and neckbeards as a uniform).

“To an extent, it’s like erasing historical figures,” Sarah Hoyt told me. “They try to erase us because our accomplishments make them feel theirs are tiny. It’s stompy-foot, fuck fuck games of people too stupid to excel at their supposed profession,” she added.

The conservatives, the Williamsons, Hoyts, and Ringos of the world, are endlessly surprised to discover that their enemies actually hate them, aren’t going to play fair, and aren’t going to heed dire warning #863,527 that someday, someone who almost certainly isn’t them, is going to do something about it.

There will come a time when normal people will have had enough. 

I’ve been hearing those dire warnings to the Left from conservatives since the 1980s. I’ve learned not to pay any attention to them, and I’m pretty sure the Left has concluded that they have nothing to worry about on that score.

Sarah Hoyt adds: “IT’S HAPPENING MUCH FASTER THAN I EXPECTED.”

But it was always happening all along, she just didn’t want to have to actually do anything substantive about it. One commenter points out the obvious: There’s one guy actually doing something about it, and a bunch of the people named in the article have disavowed him, because he didn’t wait until now to fight back. 

Exactly. So FFS, stop whining, stop crying, stop issuing dire warnings, and just use Infogalactic instead. If you’re a public figure, get your Verified page and use it to set the record straight. And relax, it’s not about me, I’m only one of literally hundreds of people who helped make it happen and help keep it going.

UPDATE: The gammas all butthurt about the fact that I don’t let them snark away snarkily about me on my personal blog, on my personal YouTube channel, or in my house are too self-centered and stupid to observe the obvious fact that the rules are very different for my personal sites than for the games, technologies, and public sites I design. If I don’t like you, that’s a perfectly legitimate reason to never permit you on my site or in my house. But my personal preferences are not a legitimate reason to deny anyone access to a site that purports to be for everyone.

And rightly so. A fanzine author realizes who was always to blame for the destruction of the Hugo.

So fuck John Scalzi anyway.

Fuck his sense of entitlement. Fuck his arrogant, unilateral “fix” of things he didn’t understand, which weren’t actually broken to begin with. Fuck his self-promoting crusade to prove that a merely world-famous, best-selling professional author with an international following of devoted groupies, whose “fan writing” blog is devoted to the ideas and concerns of professional SF authors qua pro authors, and whose grasp of what a fan writer is came by way of the modern equivalent of reading it off a cereal box, can still drum up enough ignorant first-time voters to win himself a Best Fan Writer Hugo because gosh darn it, people like him. And the rules didn’t explicitly say he couldn’t. And because he tapes bacon to cats, I guess. Woo….

So as far as I can see, John Scalzi created the blueprint: providing both proof of concept and implicit permission for the Sad and Rabid Puppy ballot stuffing campaigns. The fact that they didn’t also win the rockets suggests to me that they weren’t as good at marketing (and were aiming at some rather tougher nuts to crack, in voting number terms – Scalzi was sharp enough to notice that the fan categories had long been low hanging fruit for wrangling a short list nomination), but what they did wasn’t materially or morally different from what John Scalzi did. Neither one violated the letter of the law, and both dismissed or ignored the spirit. If the actions of the Puppies were blameworthy, so were those of John Scalzi.

If what he did was okay within the rules and therefore okay, then so were the Puppy campaigns. The fact that John Scalzi is a funny, likable guy who tapes bacon to cats doesn’t change the moral quality of his actions, it just distracted a bunch of people from noticing it. Think of him as the Daenerys Targaryen of burning the Hugos to the ground, if you like – the Mother of Dingbats.

She’s correct. John Scalzi was absolutely the inspiration for the Sad Puppies, although he wasn’t the only one. It was the entire Tor Cabal, scheming and plotting to win as many awards as possible, then waving them in the face of better, better-selling authors like Larry Correia, that made it clear that the awards were no longer anything but a popularity contest.

Larry proved his case with the first Sad Puppies campaign; all the subsequent Puppies campaigns were intended to do was to underline for the entire world his original point that the awards no longer had anything to do with literary quality in the science fiction genre. And the Rapid Puppies in particular succeeded in doing that to perfection; literally no one takes the Hugo seriously as a statement on literature anymore now that Space Raptor Butt Invasion, Stix Hiscock, and N.K. Jemisin have permanently stained what was once a substantive award.

I’ve been too busy to pay too much attention to the SF world in the last year. Share your thoughts concerning the 2019 Dragon Awards, particularly as they relate to Best Comic and Best Graphic Novel.

I personally think that the Best Graphic Novel we’ve published is either Rebel Dead Revenge or Right Ho, Jeeves. As for Best Comic, I’m inclined towards Alt-Hero #4: The War in Paris.

This is an interesting article on science fiction history that even references Castalia House:

Alec Nevala-Lee, an Asian-American science fiction writer,[2] has here written something remarkable: an intentionally PC multi-biography that nevertheless manages to be well-informed and informative, well-written and compulsively readable.

It’s the first substantive biography of John W. Campbell, Jr., the man – or, as we’ll see, some would insist on “the white male” – who basically invented modern science fiction; and that last point means that to do so properly, we have to take into account the three men – yes, again, white males – whose writing careers he promoted in order to do it.

It’s an index of Campbell’s importance that, although I am not really a science fiction fan – certainly not to the level of the fanatical creeps[3] that slip in and out of these pages – I could recognize almost every work referred to, and had indeed read most of them; and I bet you have, too.

Campbell started off with a bang, writing “Who Goes There?” in the August 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, later filmed as The Thing (1982), The Thing from Another World (1951), and again, not so well, as The Thing (2011).[4] Next, almost by accident, he became the editor of Astounding, and in the decades to come he would find young authors, eager to break into the big time, and feed them his ideas for stories. Even as his career wound down, and the magazine slipped from its dominant position, he was still able to snap up Frank Herbert’s serial “Dune World.”

It’s an interesting read that demonstrates the genre has long been populated by the brilliant, the bizarre, and the fundamentally broken.

And speaking of the Puppies, this is what a desert called victory looks like. Notice that no one, anywhere, pays attention to the Hugo Awards anymore. A glance at the Best Novel nominees will suffice to explain why.

• The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
• Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton / Harper Voyager)
• Revenant Gun, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)
• Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente (Saga)
• Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey / Macmillan)
• Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga)

Total nonentities. All six of these novels together won’t sell as many copies as a single Galaxy’s Edge novel. Novik would have been considered a C-level talent at best in the 1980s. And people could be forgiven for thinking that the Rabid Puppies were still dictating the nominees with titles such as “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington” on the short list.

It was funny to read this in my inbox, as it was the first time I’ve had any reason to give a thought to SFWA in a long, long time. Possibly the most amusing thing about this latest SFWA kerfluffle is that it is a direct consequence of SFWA adopting my original campaign proposal to admit independent authors to the membership. Sad Puppy leader Brad Torgersen observes, with no little irony, the 2019 version of Sad Puppies:

This past week, some indie authors got on the Nebula ballot, and the taste-makers—many of whom are ardently “woke” political activists—began braying about how a “slate” had ramrodded these indie authors onto the sacred SFWA ballot, and how it was high treason against all things Good and Clean in the genre for *any* “slate” to influence the Nebula final selections.

Nevermind that magazines such as Locus have spent decades publishing “recommended” lists designed and published explicitly for the purpose of influencing both Nebula selection, and Hugo award selection, among others. Such “recommended” lists have been with the genre for a long time, and only now—mysteriously!—has it been deemed evil for such lists to exist. Provided those lists don’t originate from Correct™ sources, with Correct™ credentials, Correct™ political affiliation, and so forth.

Well, predictably, the indie authors came in for a caustic drubbing, and many of them—some being overseas, and not at all familiar with the internecine rhetorical warfare of American literary SF/F—were both angered and confused. And I can’t blame them. It’s difficult to properly unearth the many decades of political and elitist cultural battles which have saturated SF/F in America, and the larger Anglosphere SF/F lit scene, since at least the 1920s.

Suffice to say the whole thing is perhaps best explained through the lens of George Orwell’s landmark 1984. Where you have Inner Party, and Outer Party, and Proles.

Inner Party being comprised of long-time Super Fans (aka: “true fans”) and some venerable editors and authors who’ve labored carefully for years to take up positions of influence and prestige within SFWA, and the broader literary SF/F “establishment” as a whole. They are concerned almost
entirely with their own power and influence.

Outer Party being the newcomer political activist writers from the universities who see all of literary science fiction—and the Hugos and Nebulas, as well as other awards—as a tool for “woke” political activism. All of them aspire to Inner Party status, and are just waiting for the extant Inner Party to literally die off, so that the Outer Party members can graduate to places of Inner Party power and prestige.

And finally the rest of us inhabit the land of the Proles. Fans and authors who were never part of the establishment, and do not attend the so-called “World Science Fiction Convention” (which never was ‘world’ much, even when it went overseas) nor are we active SFWA members. Many of us are indie authors, or hybrids, who often make far more money and have far more readers than any three dozen SFWA trad pub members put together. But we still bear the stigma of self-publishing which is beyond the borders of establishment propriety in the eyes of the Inner Party.

So, when a “slate” created for and by Proles manages to get some Prole selections onto the ballot—which rightfully belongs to both the Inner and the Outer Party!—the Inner and Outer Party take it as an act of ART WAR! And as you know, Bob, nothing is more vicious than ART WAR!

And this meant it was time to launch the social media mobs, Twitter snipers, “woke” punditry, etc. In an effort to get the Proles kicked out of the process, or at least make the world aware of how horrible and evil it is that Proles stood up to be counted. Which Proles are never, EVER supposed to do. Ever. Proles are meant to mind their places in the hierarchy and not cause a fuss. We are to accept what the deciders of “worthy science fiction and fantasy” have declared for us this season, and learn to love Big Brother.

THAT is the state of American literary SF/F, in a nutshell. That is SFWA.

Which doesn’t make it any easier for indie authors or fans, much less indie authors or fans who don’t originate from U.S. soil. The whole thing can seem both ridiculous and conflicted. Which it is. Because any sane outsider looks at it all and does a W-T-F.

Try as they will to style themselves international, the Inner and Outer Party members of American literary SF/F are hopelessly provincial, sharing a painful overlap in ideology, as well as a kind of homogeneous, mushy globalist-liberal outlook. Which, being “woke”, puts a premium on demographics over individualism. Fetishizing ethnicities and sexualities. While remaining borderline-militant about a single-track monochrome political platform.

So, certain Inner and Outer Party folks proceeded to step all over their own unmentionables in an effort to “call out” the “slate” of the indie Proles from the dirty ghettos of indie publishing. And now the Inner and Outer Parties are in damage control mode (yet again!) trying to re-write events, submerge evidence, gaslight the actual victims of the literary pogrom, blame all evils on Emmanuel Goldstein (cough, Sad Puppies, cough) and crown themselves the Good People once more. Who would never, of course, do anything pernicious, because how could they? They are Good! They tell themselves they are Good all the time! They go out of their way to virtue-signal this Goodness on social media! It cannot be possible that they have done anything wrong!

Well, if you’ve seen the ugly carnival long enough, it’s easy to peer through the smog. And I am sorry for all of the Nebula nominees who—being rightfully excited to learn of their nominations—watched that excitement crumble beneath a digital tsunami of accusations and character assassination. I’ve been there. I remember the lies and slander. I know how it happens, and why.

Just shrug it off, and walk away. Neither SFWA, nor Worldcon, nor the Outer nor Inner Parties, have anything for you. They are not the audience, and never were. And the harder they try to enforce their own relevance, the more plain it becomes that this relevance has fatally degraded in the new century.

Meanwhile, no one seems to have noticed that both Tor and Baen are rapidly sliding towards nonexistence. I’ve heard that Macmillan is looking to get rid of Tor from several sources over the last three months. The changes you’ve seen in Castalia’s practices of late are the direct result of Amazon destroying the ebook publishing market, and those changes are hurting the traditional publishers a lot more than a company like Castalia that doesn’t rely as heavily upon the various channels.

The acid test is going to be in April. It’s going to be fascinating to see how well a book that is in very high demand does through the channel versus direct.

Bounding Into Comics urges everyone to stop the madness:

With coordinated attacks coming from all sides, it’s more critical than ever that #Comicsgate members keep their eye on the prize and don’t turn into #dramaqueens who favor sniping and infighting over solidarity. Sadly, for those supporting this consumer revolt in the name of good comic books, and for the high profile figures within it, recent history may not be on our side.

On September 3rd, 2018, Alt-Hero publisher Vox Day announced his prospective Comicsgate imprint right here on Bounding Into Comics, and it would be an insult to diarrhea to say that the Comicsgate community understandably lost their crap in response. Whether Vox Day was trying to do something he deemed to be positive for the movement, or he was just trying to co-opt it a la Sad Puppies…or both, is mostly irrelevant; the fallout from his move was quite real, particularly when it came to author and occasional BIC contributor Jon Del Arroz…. Guilt by association? Juvenile stunts? Sounds a little SJW, doesn’t it? That’s because these are the brushes that crowd loves to paint with, and this is the same crowd who is smiling with glee at seeing Comicsgate infighting because they equate it with weakness.

With someone like Vox Day, it’s easy to understand this reaction. He has a history of co-opting movements, and he’s far more apt just to burn down the house rather than try to treat the infestation, which is what many longtime comic book fans don’t want to see. However, in this case Vox didn’t do that. He gave up on the Comics Gate imprint and is sticking to publishing popular stories through Arkhaven Comics and Dark Legion Comics.

I tend to agree that it’s important to stay focused on the business rather than the tempests and teapots, but I also have to admit that I’m really not concerned about this one way or another. Things will probably play out as they usually do, those who talk will talk and those who act will act. This ComicsGate nonsense hasn’t slowed down our release schedule in the slightest or interfered with the Alt-Hero:Q campaign. The only real ComicsGate-related problem for us has been the latest SJW attack at Amazon; the four digital editions of Gun Ghoul there are still blocked for absolutely no legitimate reason.

As I pointed out to a very irate Will Caligan last night, this isn’t a showstopper and the print edition of Gun Ghoul is available at Arkhaven Direct, at Barnes & Noble, Book Depository, and even on Amazon itself. You’ll get the best price at Arkhaven. But it is the sort of ridiculous thing that has inspired the President of the United States to consider lowering the antitrust boom on the social media giants.

I would, however, like to correct one common misapprehension: I never co-opted Sad Puppies. To the contrary, I was the architect of the Sad Puppies most notorious success and at no point in time was there ever any conflict between the Sad Puppies and me. If you look more closely, you’ll notice that none of the four leaders of the Sad Puppies, from Larry to Kate, have ever made a single accusation on that score. I don’t intend to say any more than that, except to reiterate an absolute fact: I did not co-opt Sad Puppies and anyone who claims I did in any way, shape, or form is wrong.

They are, however, correct to observe that I believe the optimal response to a converged organization is to burn it down. Because that’s what is going to happen anyhow, one is merely helping to speed the inevitable process along.

Congratulations, Rabid Puppies! Thou hast conquered.

Last night’s Hugo Awards ceremony featured a significant first: Nora Jemisin became the first novelist in science fiction history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugos, once for each volume in her Broken Earth trilogy (the concluding volume, The Stone Sky, won last night’s prize); in addition to the unprecedented honor, Jemisin had another first, with her acceptance speech, which may just be the best such speech in the field’s history.

Other works and creators honored last night include:

Best novella: All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)

Best novelette: “The Secret Life of Bots,” by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld, September 2017)

Best short story: “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™,” by Rebecca Roanhorse (Apex, August 2017)

Best related work: No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Best Graphic Story: Monstress, Volume 2: The Blood, written by Marjorie M. Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda (Image Comics)

Best Editor – Short Form: Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas

Best Editor – Long Form: Sheila E. Gilbert

Let’s consider the best speech in the science fiction field’s history by the greatest science fiction writer of all time.

oh um okay so I I had started developing this whole superstition where I only went Awards if I don’t show up and my friends are texting me so I can’t read my speech stop okay all right so let me get to the speech this has been a hard year hasn’t it a hard few years a hard century for some of us things have always been hard and I wrote the broken earth trilogy to speak to that struggle and what it takes to live let alone thrive in a world that seems determined to break you a world of people who constantly question your competence your relevance your very existence I get a lot of questions about where the themes of the broken earth trilogy come from I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m drawing on the human history of structural oppression as well as my feelings about this moment in American history what may be less obvious though is how much of the story derives from my feelings about science fiction and fantasy then again science fiction and fantasy are microcosms of the wider world in no way rarified from the world’s pettiness or prejudice but another thing that I tried to touch on with the broken earth trilogy is that life in a hard world is never just the struggle life is family blood and found life is those allies who prove themselves worthy by actions and not just talk life means celebrating every victory no matter how small so if I stand here before you beneath these lights I want you to remember that 2018 is also a good year this is a year in which records have been set a year in which even the most privileged blinder of us have been forced to acknowledge that the world is broken and needs fixing and that is a good thing stop texting me and that is because acknowledging the problem is the first step towards fixing it I looked at science fiction and fantasy as the aspirational Drive of the zeitgeist we creators are the engineers of possibility and as this genre finally however grudgingly acknowledges that the dreams of the marginalized matter and that all of us have a future so will go the world soon I hope fairies and yes there will be naysayers I know that I am here on this stage accepting this award for pretty much the same reason as every previous best novel winner because I work my ass off I have poured my pain onto paper when I could not afford therapy I have studied works of literature that range widely and dig deeply to learn when I could and refine my voice I have written a million words of crap and probably a million more of me and beyond that I have smiled and nodded while well-meaning magazine editors advised me to tone down my allegories and my anger I didn’t I have gritted my teeth while an established professional writer went on a 10-minute tirade at me and basically as a proxy for all black people for mentioning under-representation in the sciences I’ve kept writing even though my first novel The Killing Moon was initially rejected on the assumption that only black people would ever possibly want to read the work of a black writer I have raised my voice to talkback over fellow panelists who tried to talk over me about my own damn life I have fought myself in the little voice inside me that constantly still whispers that I should just keep my head down and shut up and let the real writers talk but this is the year in which I get to smile at all of those naysayers every single mediocre insecure wannabe who fixes their mouth to suggest that I do not belong on this stage but people like me cannot possibly have earned such an honor and that when they win its meritocracy but when we win its identity politics I get to smile at this people and lift a massive shining rocket-shaped finger in their direction I’m understand so how many of you all saw like Panther okay probably my favorite part of it is actually Kendrick Lamar theme song all the stars the chorus of it is this maybe the night that my dreams might let me know all the stars are closer let 2018 be the year that the stars came closer for all of us the stars are ours thank you

Moving. Deeply moving. (wipes a solitary tear away) You lift that massive shining rocket-shaped finger to the sky, you inspiring token for the savagely untalented! No one can ever take away those unprecedented three consecutive Best Novel Awards from you, although they’re desperately going to want to do so once they realize just how completely they have destroyed the credibility of their own awards.

You see, my dear SF-SJWs, this is what a smoking hole looks like.

A legitimate award-winning science fiction writer, Robert Silverberg, begins to grok.

I have not read the Jemison books.  Perhaps they are wonderful works of science fiction deserving of Hugos every year from now on. But in her graceless and vulgar acceptance speech last night, she insisted that she had not won because of ‘identity politics,’ and proceeded to disprove her own point by rehearsing the grievances of her people and describing her latest Hugo as a middle finger aimed at all those who had created those grievances.

But that’s what the Hugo Award is now. And that is all it is. Which is exactly what I told the Rabid Puppies would happen. Our actions could never have sufficed, but their reactions did.

Basically, what we succeeded in doing is turning Worldcon into WisCon. Now, here’s an interesting observation: isn’t that what is happening to the DNC? Absolutely it is, and who caused that? Donald Trump is doing the same thing on a larger scale in the political world, what Rabid Puppies did to the
science-fiction world. It’s the same thing. If you apply sufficient force, if you apply a sufficiently strong action and provoke a strong enough reaction, then you can withdraw and allow the SJWs that have been stirred up to devour everything else that’s still there.

Think about this way. Imagine that SJWs are like piranhas, and so you’ve got these piranhas in a fish tank, and there’s the SJWs and then there’s the regular lefty fish. They’re all the enemy, but some of them are a little bit worse than others. So what you do, you know, is you stick your hand in there and then shake your hand around right? Now, the key is got to pull your hand out! Yeah, so you stick your hand in, you stir them all up, you pull your hand out, and then the piranhas are going to attack everything that’s in there. They don’t realize that the other fish in there aren’t your hand, they’re not discerning, they have their agenda and these other people stand in the way of that agenda just like you do, and so, you know, by going in and stirring things up, and then withdrawing, then the whole thing ends up a massive mutually destructive activity.

Here are my recommendations for the 2018 Dragon Awards. In the comic book category, note that they want the series name first, then the issue and publisher. And while it might seem a bit much to put John C. Wright’s novels forward in both categories, frankly, I defy you to find a better science fiction novel published in the last year than Superluminary: The Lords of Creation or a better fantasy novel than Tithe to Tartarus. The man is simply the greatest science fiction author alive, and I say that despite being a hard-core fan of both Neal Stephenson and China Mieville.

The rules follow. Be sure to get your nominations in before the deadline. I’ll post a reminder as we get closer to it.

Once you have submitted a nomination for a category you cannot change it. If you are not sure about a category, then leave it blank. You can come back at a later date and add nominations for any category you leave blank using this same form. Make sure your name (First and Last), and the email address match your original submission. No need to fill in your original nominations, the form will append the new nominations to your prior list. Do not nominate a book for more than one category. If the same book is added more than once, all your nominations will be null.

Nomination Deadline: July 20, 2018. We encourage you to get your nominations in early.

Best Science Fiction Novel
Superluminary: The Lords of Creation
John C. Wright

Best Fantasy Novel (Including Paranormal)
Tithe to Tartarus
John C. Wright

Best Young Adult/Middle Grade Novel
Young Man’s War
Rod Walker

Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel
Wardogs Inc. #1 Battlesuit Bastards
G.D. Stark

Best Alternate History Novel
Hammer of the Witches
Kai Wai Cheah

Best Media Tie-In Novel   
Before the Storm (World of Warcraft)
Christie Golden

Best Horror Novel    
The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack
Nate Crowley

Best Comic Book
Alt-Hero
Alt-Hero #2 Rebel’s Cell, Arkhaven Comics

Best Graphic Novel
Rebel Dead Revenge
Gary Kwapisz, Dark Legion Comics

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series, TV or Internet
Stranger Things
Netflix

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie
Incredibles 2
Brad Bird

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy PC / Console Game
Kingdom Come: Deliverance
Warhorse Studios

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Mobile Game
Hearthstone
Blizzard

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Board Game
The 7th Continent
Serious Poulp

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Miniatures / Collectible Card / Role-Playing Game
Starship Samurai
Plaid Hat Games