Tag: Puppies

This is what victory looks like

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.

Darkstream: destroying a converged institution

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

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.

Dragon Awards 2018

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

SJWs in SF: Sad Puppy version

Sarah Hoyt laments the ejecting of John Ringo from something called ConCarolinas:

It’s been known for years – as long as I’ve been published in SF/F – that conservatives get invited to be guests of honor at conventions far less often than leftists in SF/F and infinitely less than red-diaper-babies in SF/F, but ConCarolinas seemed like a weird place for a conflagration of snowflakism.

I went over to John Ringo’s page and read about it.  As far as I could tell, a bunch of people on Twitter had been badgering both the con-committee and the other (very leftist) guest about inviting someone who was… what the heck was he?  I don’t know.

In the beginning, the accusation against him was that he was “Puppy Adjacent.”

For those of you wanting to follow this at home, the score card is this: Five years ago, my friend Larry Correia started a movement called Sad Puppies, which was a half joking attempt to get books not of solid leftist bent (not even right wing, just not preachy left) nominated for the Hugo, which used to be one of the most prestigious fan awards in science fiction.

When Larry tired of the game after two years, my friend Brad Torgersen took it over…

It was supposed to be me, but a cancer diagnosis and emergency surgery stopped it.

Brad ran it creditably, suggesting fan-favorites who had never got nominated (over the last decade, the Hugos have become a log-rolling club of leftists.) He got people who’d never before nominated to nominate, increasing the number of people involved by three fold.  And we got practically everyone on our suggestions list on the ballot.  (Ours because I was involved both in planning and defending the guys, as was my friend Kate Paulk and my friend Amanda S. Green.)

Imagine our surprise when we found out that:

  1. We’d promulgated an immutable slate, that had to be voted for in order. We must have managed that by cleverly telling people to read and vote for those they liked, or add others, or whatever, just get involved.
  2. We were against the participation of women, people of color, and people of different gender identification and orientation in science fiction and fantasy. (How we were supposed to divine all that except perhaps women, is beyond me.  And even there, there are gender neutral names.)  The fact that three of us, in the “inner council” were women made no difference.  Since we’re not leftists, we’re obviously not “real women.” Oh, by the way, we also nominated women, people of color, and I think at least one gay person for the Hugo.  That most of those recused themselves had nothing to do with us, and was a function of the attacks by the left, who threatened to destroy careers of those who stayed on the ballot, or promised them they would get nominated by them next.  (On the eve of never, I’ll wager.)
  3. We’d done this to oppress people by being gatekeepers. Note our coalition was one best selling author (Larry Correia), a promising beginner (Brad Torgersen), a midlist author (me), and two indie authors (Kate Paulk and Amanda S. Green).  None of us had or had ever had gatekeeping powers.  In fact, the people who called calumnies against us to Entertainment Weekly (who later retracted) and other national publications were gatekeepers, since everything points to their working for TOR.

Anyway, that was the conflagration called Sad Puppies.  After our nominees were treated horribly at the 2015 Hugos, after leftists bought memberships by the dozen for the express purpose of voting “no award” over people they proudly admitted they’d never read, we thought there was no point.  My friend Kate Paulk, probably the most conciliatory woman in the world, ran it the next year and did everything the left said they wanted done.  They still attacked her.  I and Amanda claimed the right of succession, but never took it, because it was obvious the Hugos were dead, their reputation destroyed and only academics seeking tenure could be interested in them.  The only reason we claimed them was to prevent a few deluded people from trying to ride a movement they had nothing to do with to fame.

So.  This is now three years later.  There have been no Sad Puppies for two years.  And by the way, John Ringo’s extent of involvement in this was to be our friend and to joke about giving Larry and Brad the Don Quixote award.

But he was “puppy adjacent” and the deranged game of post office on the left adduced to him all the things they said we were.  You know the drill: racisss sexisss homophobic.  (They really need to come up with a more sibilant word for that.)

I find this rather fascinating for what it omits. The Baen cum Sad Puppies crowd is in an uncomfortable position not terribly different from that of Never Trump and the cuckservatives. They are accustomed to being the sole opposition to the SJWs in science fiction, and viewing themselves as the proper and respectable opposition, so they really don’t know what to do about the Rabid Puppies or the considerably less accommodating opposition that is now represented by Castalia House, Arkhaven, and Dark Legion. Nor do they understand how various trends favor the growth of our influence, in part at their expense.

So, they push a narrative to the public in which we don’t exist, even though without us, Sad Puppies would have remained what it was prior to our involvement, a minor bump in the road that didn’t even require any suppression outside of the usual routine. This is not to say that what they did was not admirable, and indeed, their construction of the Dragon Awards will likely prove to be more significant in the long run than our demolition of the Hugo Awards. I merely observe that their efforts would have been insufficient in our absence.

But unlike the SJW narrative, the Sad Puppy narrative does not harm us at all. I am content to let them push it in peace; after all, they are not the enemy. Right now, we are marshaling our forces and preparing to engage in offensives on multiple fronts, some of which are known and others which will prove to be unexpected.

Understand that many people are going to become exhausted. Others are going to fall away for one reason or another. Friends will become allies, and allies will become neutrals. All of that is fine. None of that gives us any cause for concern nor should any such transitions be discouraged or criticized. The core remains stronger than ever, and our focus and our efforts remains relentlessly targeted at the enemy.

Let the others trail in our wake at their own pace. As long as they refrain from either attacking us or getting in our way, they are not part of the problem. They are trying to be part of the solution, even if they go about it in different and suboptimal ways.

Speaking of the SJW narrative, the crazy never ends.

I liked The Hobbit. A lot. But while Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books are influential as exercises in world building, as novels they are barely readable. It never seemed to me that Tolkien cared about his story as much as he cared about rendering, in minute detail, the world he built. Why not instead read Ursula K. Le Guin’s magnificent (and as beautifully rendered) stories and novels surrounding Earthsea? Le Guin captures the world of Earthsea through a powerful, dark, gorgeous kind of storytelling that is irresistible. Perhaps Le Guin’s work—along with an entire universe of fantasy fiction—wouldn’t have been possible without Tolkien’s influence behind it, but in its time, Le Guin’s books are more influential and make for better reading.
—”21 Books You Don’t Have to Read”, GQ

Only on Planet SJW are Ursula Le Guin’s tedious and tedentious books deemed more influential and better reading than Tolkien’s.

Supreme and superior

I wonder to whomever they might be referring?

The “User Reviews” sections of Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic and The Internet Movie Database – all of which let users leave scored reviews regardless of credentials or official status on the web – are uniformly on the more mixed side as the film enters its second day of release, marking the widest disparity between critic and “audience” scores for a Star Wars movie in Tomatoes’ history in particular. Granted, the film has proven more divisive among many fans than the previous installment, with unexpected character turns and further cementing of the push for a younger, more diverse cast of new generation heroes – but this level of disparity has raised eyebrows.

Accusations of such activity are currently being leveled on social media by culture-commentators like activist Peter Coffin, who compared the proliferation of anonymous reviews name-checking the same set of points repeatedly (references to “forced diversity” and “SJWs” abound) to more explicitly politically-motivated “brigading” attacks from earlier in the year related to elections and social movements. The deeper recesses of Reddit and 4chan are indeed littered with threads in which enraged “ex”-fans organize campaigns in an attempt to control the narrative and create a situation wherein the idea of the new Star Wars Trilogy as “poorly received” can overtake the reality of its reception in the public discourse.

The term “Sad Puppies” has been raised, a reference to a collective of right-wing fiction writers who gained fame by manipulating the Hugo Awards several years back, along with the GamerGate and ComicsGate social-media movements. Some point to the aforementioned politically-tinged reviews as evidence of motive, while others allege that some of the brigading has been conducted by fans of Justice League seeking revenge on the critical press for its negative reviews. Also posited is that this comes from anti-corporate activists who see the recent acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Disney as the rise of a dangerous monopoly.

Let’s see: Sad Puppies. GamerGate. ComicsGate. Now, who do we know was involved in all of those things…. The sad thing is that I now officially make for a better Dark Lord than anything in the current Disney SJWStar Wars mythos.

Man, they are NOT going to know what hit them when Alt★Hero comes out.

SJWs always project

Shocking racism from the self-confessed rapist. If misgendering a tranny is a crime, how much worse is it to intentionally misrace someone?

John Scalzi‏Verified account @scalzi
Note to the authors who tried to win an award by positing it as a culture war with me on the other side: You sure wasted your time, dudes.
3:28 PM – 3 Sep 2017

Cheryl Morgan‏ @CherylMorgan
You SJWs ruin everything!

John Scalzi‏Verified account @scalzi
I AM THE WORST

John Scalzi‏Verified account @scalzi
Ironically all the wannabe contenders are middle-aged white dudes, so there’s that.

Jon Del Arroz ??✝️‏ @jondelarroz
I’m Hispanic. What the hell.

Benjamin Cheah‏ @thebencheah
I’m Chinese. Scalzi is a liar.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
I’m American Indian.

No word yet from Larry Correia or L. Lamplighter Wright, who am happy to say is not in a same-sex marriage with Mr. John Wright.

Silly Scalzi. Didn’t he realize that it’s SJWs Always Double Down that’s on preorder today, not SJWs Always Project? I haven’t even started writing that yet. But at least we have yet another illuminating example of the phenomenon at work.

Dragon Awards 2017

Congratulations to Larry Correia and John Ringo for winning Best Fantasy Novel for Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge. And to Richard Fox, who won Best Military Science Fiction Novel for Iron Dragoons.

The rest of the winners are here. I’m not disappointed about A Sea of Skulls losing out to Larry and John, but I really would have liked to see John C. Wright win in Best YA. But as good as his Moth & Cobweb books are, it was always going to be tough to beat the YA juggernaut that is Rick Riordan.

Dragon Award: Del Arroz’s recs

Jon Del Arroz has some recommendations for the Dragon Award:

Ran a poll yesterday on which blog my readers would like to see next, and the winner by no uncertain terms was my recommendation for Dragon Award nominations. If you haven’t seen the Dragon Awards before, they are the premier award for Science Fiction and Fantasy, given at Dragon*Con, arguably the best convention that exists. Please, readers, do take the time to vote as this is really your award choice and your voice matters.


Best Science Fiction Escaping Infinity by Richard Paolinelli

Richard really has created a great science fiction, and I mean that in the classic sense. It’s on the short side, but it’s packed with a lot of ideas and it’s definitely the best sci-fi of the year.

Best Fantasy  A Sea of Skulls by Vox Day

Vox Day is the most underrated fantasy author in fiction. His Arts of Dark and Light series is frankly better fantasy than Brandon Sanderson (of whom I’m a big fan), Terry Goodkind, Terry Brooks or George R.R. Martin. The characters are fantastic, the world is a very cool Roman-esque fantasy world, it’s tense all the way through, and it’s got very cool magic and magical beings.

You can vote here. My own recommendations are here. If you’re interested in reading an excerpt from A Sea of Skulls, you can find one here.

Mike Glyer doesn’t like Larry Correia

He really, really doesn’t like him:

Ultimately Correia remains enraged at me today because four years ago, I was one of the people (as were some of you) who said no to him when he wanted to help himself to the Best Novel Hugo. Not that I could actually stop that from happening, but when I started covering as news what Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies, and everyone else had to say about the controversy (in their own words, with links to the rest of their posts), I had an impact by facilitating the growth of a new community of people who wanted to talk about these issues — most of them opposing the vandalism of an institution they had spent years building up.

In 2013, Correia had decided that someone with his sales figures and blog readership, who had twice had a book on the New York Times bestseller list (for a single week) deserved a Hugo, and started organizing his readers to make it happen. He didn’t think of the members of fandom as his neighbors or colleagues; he approached it like the raid culture of ancient times where you go and steal somebody’s cattle if you think you can get away with it. Despite all of the agitation he stirred up among his followers, he got only 101 nominations and failed to make the ballot.

Larry knew that since the previous summer’s raid hadn’t worked out as well as he’d hoped, to sack Troy, he would need more boats and warriors in 2014. He wrapped his nomination campaign in the flag of the culture wars. Literary awards don’t fire people up, but political motivations do. He called on readers to nominate himself plus selected friends and editors as a way to ”stick it to those SJWs”. His book made the final ballot with the third-highest number of nominating votes (184) and lost to Ancillary Justice. Two hundred votes is enough to do any amount of damage to the Hugo nominating ballot — but after two years of effort by a bestselling author, it doesn’t seem like much of a number.

In 2015 Correia gave the project to Brad Torgersen, his Patroclus, who couldn’t wait to don Larry’s armor and lead the Sad Puppies 3 campaign. Torgersen put together a slate composed of both willing and unwilling writers (with some demanding to be removed), and spearheaded his campaign with a series of abusive political tirades against the Worldcon voters. However, his band of award pirates soon discovered that the Agamemnon of their scenario was really Vox Day. His Rabid Puppies slate blanketed nearly all the Hugo categories, and his followers dictated the 2015 ballot. Larry Correia’s latest novel was one of the things on their slate, but despite three years spent jacking up his readers and colleagues to get him this award, at this point he refused his nomination, went back to his tent, and let everyone else go forward without him.

File 770 covered that story and became a place people gathered to discuss it, and correspondingly became a lightning rod for Larry Correia’s wrath. In the past two years, whenever my name or this site’s name is mentioned in comments on his blog he can always be counted on to erupt in a spew of obscenities about me — in fact, one of his followers regularly injects my name into the conversation just to see him go off. And that same spirit controlled what Correia said on Facebook, and wrote in his post. Likewise the blizzard of comments from Correia’s followers, filled with playground taunts and references to Japanese pornography and prison sex. And these things can be expected to continue because of his example and that they’re encouraged in his comment community.

Then again, Larry Correia really, really doesn’t like China Mike either:

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the seedy underbelly of fandom, File 770 is a garbage gossip column website run by a scumbag named Mike Glyer. His whole shtick is to be a news aggregator for the sci-fi/fantasy business and collect links from people who actually create things for a living. He play acts at being an impartial journalist, but in reality everything he does is slanted to screw over anybody he doesn’t like.

He chums the water for his horde of psychos so they can go about forming internet lynch mobs, boycotts, and black ballings. But then he pretends to be all impartial and above the fray. If you ever want to lose all faith in humanity, read the comments there. His regulars range between basement dwelling goons, creepy weirdo stalkers, and angry rainbow haired social justice warriors.

If you are in any writer’s groups with conservative or libertarian authors in them, then you’ve inevitably heard about this shithole website. We mostly call it Vile 770 or File 666. At one point or another that page has tried to start shit with every author who gets on Glyer’s bad side. Because when you are ever the nail that sticks up, the File 770 crew are the hammer that wants to knock you back down. Luckily, they’re about as effective as a Fisher Price squeaky hammer. So mostly we just mock them.

No matter how big or small you are, if you write something that draws their ire, Glyer will link to you, write some passive aggressive misleading bullshit, and then his little minions will go out of their way to slander you. You are evil and their side is all goodness and light. Usually the slander is about how insignificant and unimportant their foes are, and how they totally don’t even know who you are, which is ironic coming from comments that are bizarrely fixated with your personal details. Across the board they are jealous, spiteful, and really kind of pathetic.

I drew his ire several years ago with my campaign to show that the Hugos were biased. Since Glyer has like 40 something Hugo nominations he took that personal. Go figure. (Sadly, I wish I was exaggerating that number).  He’s been linking back to me constantly ever since, always muck raking and shit stirring. He’ll usually post some passive aggressive thing about look how evil I am, his flying monkeys get riled up, and then he acts all innocent and says he was just reporting the news.

Since I’ve got nothing but contempt for the two faced bastard, I just delete his track backs and move on. I still come up a lot over there . My guess is he really hates me because unlike most authors I don’t dance around with fake politeness. They love fake politeness. They screw you over with impunity, and when you fight back, then they are all about “tone”.

The thing is, for all their mutual dislike, there is an amount of nuance here that may escape your attention. Larry correctly identifies the real problem at File 770 being the commenters, who are as nasty as they are mid-witted. I’ve never been able to discern if Mike Glyer truly shares many of their opinions – unlike them, he seems to grasp that I don’t care about awards and I’m actually pretty good at what I do – or if he’s simply stuck riding the tiger of his readership.

Regardless, the point is that there is more to this than mere personal dislike. The Pink/Blue divide in SF is substantive, ideological, and real, and it is a reflection of the primary divide in the USA that is cultural, ideological, and identity-based.

As for me, I stand by Larry, because he does not throw people under the bus to spare himself. He had every opportunity to do so, indeed, he was actively lobbied to do so by more than a few well-known people, and yet he refused. That is what men of character and integrity do. But I do think there is hope for Mike, if he can ever find the courage to reject the dishonesty and partisanship of his commenters and embrace the objective position that befits the true historian. The ironic thing is that he’d probably a) gain readership and b) never win another SF award if he did so.

Speaking of Puppies, don’t forget to get your Dragon Award votes in. My recommendations are here.

The Dragon and the dying industry

Russell Newquist announces his Dragon Award recommendations:

The nomination period for the 2017 Dragon Awards closes very soon. I waited until almost the last minute this year, but I do have a handful of recommendations.

  • Best Science Fiction Novel – I’m going to have to go with The Secret Kings by Brian Niemeier. Its predecessor proved worthy of last year’s Dragon Award, and the third book in the series only ratchets everything up further. Solid book. Read my review of it here.
  • Best Fantasy Novel – Hands down, A Sea of Skulls by Vox Day. I’ll have a review of this one up soonish, but this series continues to beat the pants off of A Song of Ice and Fire.
  • Best Young Adult Novel – Rachel and the Many Splendored Dreamland by L. Jagi Lamplighter. This book actually turned a 13 year old girl (horrible creatures!) into a lovable character, and deserves the award for that alone. But it’s a fantastic book on top of that. See my review for more details.
  • Best Military SF or Fantasy Novel – I’ve been too busy and haven’t read any this year. ?

Read the rest of them there. I am pleased, however, to see that readers continue to think highly of the Arts of Dark and Light series, and in particular, A Sea of Skulls. It’s interesting to see how there is still absolutely no notice taken of it at all, or of massively successful authors such as Richard Fox, BV Larson, David VanDyke, Nick Cole, Vaughn Heppner, Christopher Nuttall, in the mainstream SF/F publishing world.

Which, of course, is one reason why the mainstream SF/F publishing world is dying. File 770 chronicles the shrinkage of BookExpo:

Having attended from the mid 1970s to now, I’ve seen the convention grow enormously, with extravagant parties and promotional events — parties on paddle wheelers in New Orleans, at Hugh Hefner’s mansion in LA, at Radio City Music Hall in NYC, and the party in DC for The Name of the Rose, held at the Italian Embassy’s estate — among memorable soirees, and then shrink from more than 40,000 attendees to the current ensmalled convention, with exhibits taking a fraction of the space they used to.

There were wide empty places on the exhibit floor that in years past would have had booths shoe-horned in everywhere; empty spaces behind black curtains where nothing was happening; meeting rooms that in previous years would have been on other floors.

Many of the older exhibitors I talked to commented on this shrinking convention, and wondered what the future would bring. The convention has already become a 2-and-a-half day event from 4-5 days previously. It’s rattling around in the Javits Center now, and I wonder whether it could go back to being held in a few large hotels instead. Or back to DC’s Shoreham Hotel, where it was held for decades, with the publishers displaying their wares on card tables in the hotel’s garage.

But the shrinking trade shows and aging fan conventions aren’t the only sign. I have been increasingly hearing about cuts at Tor, Baen, Orbit, and other publishing houses, cuts that include names most SF readers would recognize. Most of this information isn’t public yet, but don’t be surprised when you start seeing familiar names gravitating to independent publishing houses or suddenly deciding to “dip a toe” into the wild West of self-publishing.

The product is the problem. But it certainly doesn’t help that mainstream SF/F is increasingly a pure SJW freakshow, written by, published by, and read by socially hapless freaks whose only appeal is to their fellow social justice warriors. The photo, taken at BookExpo, is a graphic illustration of the decline and fall of science fiction in a snapshot.