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Will 2015 see the end of the Hugo Voters Packet?

Fandom, science fiction
Published on 4 Comments on Will 2015 see the end of the Hugo Voters Packet?

The Hugo Voter Packet is one of those ancient traditions surrounding the Hugo Awards that’s actually quite recent, instigated by John Scalzi a couple of years ago as a way to make it easier for voters to read as much of the shortlisted books and stories (etc) as possible. As a side effect, it also increased interest in Worldcon supporting memberships, as $40 could get you a shitload of books and the right to vote in the Hugo Awards. Last year was my first Worldcon and getting that packet was great, as it introduced me to a whole lot of authors I’d otherwise might’ve missed, like Max Gladstone, Sofia Samatar, Ramez Naan and others.

There was a bit of controversy over the Packet though, as Orbit, the publisher of three of the best novel nominees, decided not to include the books for reasons that basically boiled down to not wanting to give away several thousands copies of books. Speculation was that being an UK publisher, they of course sold fewer copies of any book in the first place than an equivalent American publisher and whereas for the latter a few thousand copies was doable, for Orbit it would mean giving away almost an entire print run…

This year we’re in a perfect storm. For the average non-Puppy voter, the Voter Packet is a lot less attractive with all that Puppy Poo on it, while publishers might be wary to put their books on it due to the rocketing number of supporting memberships bought since the shortlist announcement. Sasquan is on track to become one of the largest, perhaps the largest Worldcon ever and what’s more, most of the memberships are supporting, not attending.

So if voters are less eager for the Packet anyway and publishers less willing to include their books now the membership is getting bigger and bigger, does this mean 2015 will make the Packet obsolete?

Butcher fails where Bellet and Kloos succeeded

Fandom, fantasy, science fiction
Published on 4 Comments on Butcher fails where Bellet and Kloos succeeded

Jim Butcher is currently one of the most popular fantasy writers in the world, with several series being NYT bestsellers, as well as having a television series made out of one of them. Not quite George R. R. Martin level, but getting there. He’s nothing like Annie Bellet or Marko Kloos, two much more modestly successfull writers, except in one thing: all three got on the Hugo nominations list thanks to the efforts of the Sad Puppies.

Where they again differ is that Bellet and Kloos, after some soul searching, decided to withdraw their nominations. It’s hard to overstate how difficult that must’ve for them, seeing as how these nominations may be the only time they’ll actually get on the shortlist. Consider: in any given year there are only twenty places open for a professional writer, five each for Best nobel, novella, novelette or short story, while anywhere from 1000-1500 eligible novels are published each year and ghu knows how many eligible works in the other categories. You have to be an incredibly good or well known writer to have a shot at being nominated, let alone be nominated more than once. Yet they gave up these nominations because they knew they way they’d gotten them wasn’t fair.

Not so Butcher though, somebody who on his own merits could have a stab at the Hugos. He’s kept radio silence all this time and when asked point blank, this is what he said:

I’m not sure whether his stance is naive or calculating. His presence on the Puppies ballot from the start was clearly intended as a shield, a way to give some credence to the idea behind the slate(s), that popular works have no chance at the Hugos and really, we’re only suggesting those works we really really think are worthy of a Hugo. By neither withdrawing nor speaking out against the Puppies, Butcher gives tacit approval to their slate voting, validates their political beliefs because surely this means Jim Butcher himself thinks he can’t win a Hugo otherwise?

The same goes of course for all those other nominees used as shields: if you don’t withdraw, if you don’t speak out, I don’t care that you were put on the slate involuntarily or without your knowledge, you’ve given your retroactive consent. By your actions you help support this partisan political attack on the Hugos and I will judge you for it.

UPDATE: you know who does get it right? Black Gate.

Larry Correia: entitlement and ego

Fandom, science fiction
Published on Leave a comment on Larry Correia: entitlement and ego

Maureen O’Danu explains something I’ve been arguing from the start: that the Puppies are driven by entitlement:

Larry Correia’s public attitude makes it pretty clear that he felt that he deserved to win and that the Hugo he was nominated for was stolen from him, rather than simply won by another contender. (Larry denies this verbally, but one of the first rules of psychology is that when there is a conflict between words and actions, believe the actions.) The subjective nature of literary awards makes this a not uncommon problem. In any award where winning is at least partially a matter of opinion instead of mathematics, the language of robbery holds sway. “He was robbed” “She stole that award” “How on earth did he take that away from her.” From ice dancing to dressage to debate to writing, any ranked creative competition is going to generate these sorts of claims.

Correia took this further, speculating on the basis of negative comments he had received from either fans or writers (he has never specified) that he was specifically denied his award because of his political views. He has said that he believes has been specifically denied because he owns a gun store, is Mormon, is conservative, or all or some combination of the above.

You could see that entitlement at work even in Larry’s 2011 Worldcon report which is slightly too full of not winning the Campbell award, when he was in a field with Lauren Beukes, Saladin Ahmed and Lev Grossman, among others, not the weakest of competitions. It’s almost as if he felt he’s owned the Campbell, which of course he does. It’s not enough to just be nominated and get on the shortlist, something most new writers never manage in their two year eligibility window, he of course deserved to win.

And you do wonder if it’s his background, conservative, gun shop owner, Mormon, with ties to the Bush-era US military that’s the problem here. Not in the way Larry thinks, with all the evil leftists sneering at these things, but that all these make him susceptible to his entitlement complex. What Larry can never get his head around was that most people, like me, had never heard of him until he started making an ass out of himself last year with the Sad Puppies. I had no clue about his politics, his background or his writing, just got to know him as an obnoxious loudmouth, a crybaby that wanted to ruin the Hugos because he felt underappreciated.

But it didn’t surprise me to learn that he was a wingnut, not even if he’d reined in the evil SJW rhetoric. This sort of entitlement, by people who already are successfull by any objective standard — how many people get to be a professional writer in their chosen genre after all and a bestselling at that — but who want everybody to acknowledge that they are the greatest, especially those they see as their enemies, is pretty much a rightwing disease. And Mormonism, with its history of persecution and theological sense of entitlement, is a religion that’s pretty good at creating this type of asshole (it’s perfectly possible to be a conservative Mormon without being an asshole, of course and millions of people manage to do so.)

American conservatism is stewed in entitlement and persecution complexes and Correia and Brad Torgersen show all the hallmarks of it. For those of us who have spent the last decade and a half looking at what we used to call warbloggers, their type is depressingly familiar. They always think they’re better than they are, they always think everybody is out to get them, that there are huge conspiracies solely there to stop them from getting their due and they’re always projecting their own actions on their opponents. It was Correia and co who introduced partisan politics in the Hugo nomination process, but they had to invent a SJW conspiracy to make themselves the good guys. Perhaps they need to do this because they just cannot help but see everything in the context of partisan politics and believe everybody else does so too.

The end result though is that Correia is a massive cock wrecking things because he feels people aren’t nice enough to him.

Annie Bellet and Marko Kloos do the right thing

Fandom, Fantastika
Published on 1 Comment on Annie Bellet and Marko Kloos do the right thing

Annie Bellet has withdrawn her Puppy slated story from the Hugo ballot:

I am withdrawing because this has become about something very different than great science fiction. I find my story, and by extension myself, stuck in a game of political dodge ball, where I’m both a conscripted player and also a ball. (Wrap your head around that analogy, if you can, ha!) All joy that might have come from this nomination has been co-opted, ruined, or sapped away. This is not about celebrating good writing anymore, and I don’t want to be a part of what it has become.

So has Marko Kloos:

I also wish to disassociate myself from the originator of the “Rabid Puppies” campaign. To put it bluntly: if this nomination gives even the appearance that Vox Day or anyone else had a hand in giving it to me because of my perceived political leanings, I don’t want it. I want to be nominated for awards because of the work, not because of the “right” or “wrong” politics.

It can’t have been easy for either writer to give up an honour that few authors will get to experience even once. It’s a credit to their character that both choose the right thing to do, voluntarily withdrawing rather than profiting from an unearned nomination. Hopefully, this also means that some of the writers excluded unjustifiably from the Hugo ballot thanks to the Puppies now can be added back in.

What I found interesting in Bellet’s withdrawal is that she felt “stuck in a game of political dodge ball” thanks to her nomination. It’s clear that for those writers on the Puppy slates but not part of the hardcore loonies, there is a lot of social oprobium they have to deal with, as for some strange reason people have not greeted the slates with unadulterated joy. For the Wrights, Days and Correiras this is not a problem, they’ve burned their bridges a long time ago, but for those drafted into the slates (or gods help them, who were naive enough to volunteer), it seems there is a cost, there’s social pressure to reject the slate. If we’re lucky, now that the first two writers have done the decent thing, have gotten respect from the sane part of SF fandom for it, more will follow.

Sad Puppies: what to do?

Fandom, science fiction
Published on 2 Comments on Sad Puppies: what to do?

The more I think about the whole Puppies situation, the more I think my initial reaction during the Emergency Hugo Panel at Dysprosium this weekend is correct: the people driving the Puppy slates do not care for fandom or science fiction, even if they call themselves fans and SF writers, they’re political operators who jumped on science fiction fandom as an easy target for their kulturwars. As Nicholas Whyte succincintly said: this is a political act that needs a political response.

And the first thing to remember is that these people for all their rhetoric aren’t conservatives, but radicals. They have a vision of what they want fandom and science to be and no respect for its values or history. What the Puppies have instead are massive entitlement issues and equally massive egos. They know they’re supposed to be the popular kids, that they have a right to the Hugos, that only a conspiracies of critics and other leftists is stopping their inevitable domination of science fiction.

All of which is pure projection on their part. Because they are the sort of people who lie and manipulate to get their slate on the Hugo ballot, they naturally assume anything they don’t like is the result of similar manipulation. Their own actions therefore are done in self defence against the shadowy conspiracy of Social Justice Warriors. It’s bogstandard rightwing conspiracy thinking that’s motivating the Puppies, the same sort of logic behind the idea that Barack Obama isn’t really the president because he wasn’t born in America, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Engaging them therefore is pointless. They don’t care about anybody who isn’t like them, don’t think anybody who doesn’t share their politics is legitamite. What to do instead?

This year, all we can do is contain the damage. There are basically three short term responses to their wrecking of the Hugos: 1) business as normal, ignoring the slate and just voting on merit, as Geri Sullivan proposed at the Hugo Emergency Panel discussion and also preferred by John Scalzi, 2) No Award everybody on the slate, innocent or otherwise and vote normally otherwise, which is what I did last year with the previous slate and 3), the most radical, No Awarding everything because the intrusion of the Puppies is so massive it’s an unfair advantage for even non-puppies to get normal consideration. This is an option Erik V. Olson explained on Metafilter:

I feel that this year’s awards are fundamentally compromised, and that maybe a better solution is this.

Vote No Award on *everything*.

Why? Because if we honestly No Award every award, then, well, no awards are given in 2015. We now have a mechanism in place to fix them — the Retro Hugos. Normally, we have to wait some large number of years (50, IIRC) to do that, but the other critera is that we only do Retro Hugo’s when there were no Hugo’s awarded.

So, if we No-Award this year, and change the constitution a bit, we could run the 2015 Retro Hugos in 2017.

It’s not a perfect answer — but it could be a better answer than most. It’ll be an award for 2015. It’ll let everyone have a fair shot again. It won’t affect the next years award like an all-kill and extend eligibility would.

There’s no good answer, but maybe that’s the least bad. But I’m personally not willing to vote for the few non S/RP nominees, because they’re not running against the works they should be running against. They’re basically getting a free ride if I do that. It’s not fair to them or to the works that were shoved off by the slate.

Which I’m honestly starting to lean towards, considering how many categories have been tainted. It’s the strongest possible rejecting of slate voting and the puppies, it could provide a fresh new start, but it would depend on enough people joining in, otherwise it’s pointless.

But at the very least all puppy candidates should be No Awarded, should be taught the lesson that if you’re on the slate, you may get nominated, but never win and now your name is mud. This should be done across the board, even for things like the various movies put on the slate, even if these were only put in as a cover. The same goes for the socalled “innocent” or “pressganged” puppy nominees, be they high profile authors who could’ve arguably had a shot at a Hugo on their own like Jim Butcher, or naive fools like Kary English. They cannot win in any category, they must be rejected entirely. Fandom must show it rejects slate voting and it rejects the attempt to make the Hugos into a partisan political mud fight.

And for those who are on the Puppy slate against their will, they should do the honourable thing: withdraw themselves from consideration.