2015 Hugo Award Nominees

Cafe Society
1

The list is out for this year’s Hugo nominees.

http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2015-hugo-awards/

This probably veers into GD territory (mods: please move if appropriate), but there’s already considerable hubbub over this year’s slate. There’s a fan group affiliated with Gamergate calling themselves “Sad Puppies” that has openly gamed the nomination system to get a bunch of their picks onto the ballot. They did a bit of this last year, but they’re doubling down this year. They believe politics have been at work to allow women and minorities to get nominations and to win these awards and also to choose more literary works vs works that appeal to a mass market.

So, they’ve stacked the deck both with stuff that appeals more directly to a mass market audience and also by nominating works from their own stable of conservative white male writers (including one nominee from “Patriarchy Press”).

As a result, there’s already a counter campaign to vote against them, as they did last year, by choosing a “No Award” vote over their candidates.

So, lots of drama in this year’s ballot. Should be fun to watch from the peanut gallery.

2

According to the writer, there’s no such thing as “Patriarchy Press”

(Note–I’ve never read anything by this guy and his jokes sound pretty damned lame.)

Note 2: Looking at Amazon, it looks like a collection of dumb jokes and puns my dad would tell, if my dad was vaguely right wing. “I learned on the internet that Pico de Gallo is not a Spanish Conquistador”. It doesn’t seem SFnal at all but it’s in a category nobody really cares about (“Related works”) so who cares?

And I don’t see any unexpected names on the list of novels (other than “Marko Kloos” who I’ve never heard of) or novellas or short-stories. Kevin Anderson and Edward Lerner might be conservative. Two out of five of the “Best Novel” writers are women. I know Jim Butcher and Kevin Anderson are white, I have no idea of the race of the others.

Frankly, I’m more concerned about the N.K. Jemisin situation: if she’s getting death threats, internet-exposed, etc (and I have no reason to assume she’s not), that’s much more troubling.

Frankly, this sounds like a controversy trying desperately to happen.

3

That seems to be where the “Sad Puppies” folks are trying to do - desperately create some kind of controversy. To the extent it’s working, it appears to be backfiring. They’ve got a lot in common with the Men’s Rights folks, with all the attendant baggage.

As for Kevin J Anderson and Jim Butcher, from what I gather, they don’t really sympathize with the cause at all and weren’t part of any of the shenanigans. They were picked to represent common man “mass market” novels.

I’m no fan of Anderson, but personally, I’d also be miffed somebody decided to pigeonhole my writing as lowest common denominator and involve me in some pet crusade without my knowledge.

Likewise, several short fiction nominees were nominated without their knowledge in the scheme, but many of them turned down the nominations, as many of them were keeping track of events more closely.

4

I’m pretty sure Butcher’s been nominated before. He certainly deserves it. Anderson, much less so.

That said, these sorts of shennanigans have gone on since like 1958+/- when a bunch of fans were “bribed” (with pizza or burgers or something) to vote for the excretible The Forever Machine, an absolutely worthless novel that is only notable for creating a fake science that’s dumber than the unholy bastard child of Christian Science and Dianetics would be. (Fake science in the sense that Asimov’s “Psychohistory” is a fake science, but a cool one.)

I’m also ok with Hugos being less “highfalutin’” and an organized movement to make them less literary and more “good reads” would be fine. If it wasn’t being done by a bunch of apparently racist, mens-rights twerps. When Hugo and Nebula winners differ, the Hugos tend to be “fun to read” while the Nebulas tend to be artsy-fartsy crap…which is why Hugos tend to hold up better overall than Nebulas (when they don’t overlap).

5

I looked at some of the stuff being said. I suppose I should be angry, but instead I’m just plain sad.

The people involved are hatemongers, with a long, long history of the ugliest online behavior. They think that calling someone a Social Justice Warrior is a slur. They want to return the world to way it was, with white patriarchy as the default setting. Seriously, not as satire. All they’re proving is that you can get a like-minded block to be cohesive, you know, like the Indiana and Arkansas legislatures.

They have no place in the modern world and they know it. So they stir as much shit in the smallest pots they can find. And when the backlash occurs they get outraged.

The backlash will occur. It’s the end of history, for them at least. Their flares will get smaller and smaller. Yet innocent people will be hurt in the process.

And that’s why I am sadder than I am angry.

6

The novel section is the only section I pay attention to. What the sad puppies may not realize is that if their campaign is successful, all it’ll do is delegitimize the Hugo Awards. Or maybe they do realize that. Jerks.

Anyway, I’ve read two of the five nominees, and the prequel to a third one. Ancillary Justice was spectacular, and I look forward to its sequel: it’s one of the most creative ideas I’ve encountered in SF in awhile. Skin Game was good, but not Butcher’s best IMO, and I’d be slightly disappointed if it won. The Goblin Emperor was very, very good, although the naming conventions drove me up the wall. I’ll need to track down Sword as well as the other two.

7

The “Best Related” category is almost always a sad case in itself. At best, there is one worthy title among 2 pieces of junk and 2 Big Names Do a Throwaway Book entries… and one of the latter wins.

8

As a clarification, I’m not aware of a documented relationship with Sad Puppies, Sick Puppies, and Gamergate. They have a lot of overlapping anti social justice believes, so it wouldn’t shock me to see significant overlap as the Puppies get press and I think they’ll keep tilting at the same windmills. The Puppies pre-date Gamergate by a few years.

I’ve never been on top of the short stories or through novellas categories, so I really can’t speak much to them. If the Puppies promoters think Ancillary Justice only won a Hugo because its politics were left leaning, please show me a better novel. I loved AJ and would gladly read anything that is better. I’ll recommend a novel to my dad or friends when we’re on the subject of sci-fi books, but AJ is one of the few I’ve gone out of my way to bring up. The previous time I went out of my way to discuss a book was Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Moon is a Harsh Mistress to ask how they had let me go so long without exposing me to them.

LHOD, I read Ancillary Sword and was a bit disappointed. It has “second novel of three” syndrome, where it seems to be more about setting up the pieces for a third part than telling its own story. To an extent, AJ left significant loose threats, but it also tied many more up. AS tied fewer and left a lot hanging. That said, the first third of AS was a bit slow as it had so much to set up for the second and third act, so I understand it’s sometime necessary to lay the groundwork.

9

Seriously. I picked it up from the library on a lark, like I do a lot of fantasy/sf/spy fiction every year. Most of what I read is dross to mediocre, but this one blew me away, and I told a lot of people about it. There’s no way it was a pity award.

I appreciate the heads-up about AS; I might wait on it after all until the third book is published.

10

Amazon claims a release date in October, so it’s probably in the middle of editing and release to the printers.

I’ll agree you should wait. Very much middle book syndrome. It seemed to just be setting things up for the third.

Functionally unimportant and quite mild spoilers:

Rather than the galaxy wide implications out of the first book, AS takes place around a single backwater planet, with a bunch of unimportant characters, and for which a major conflict is apparently defined as deciding which set of china to use - no, really, a friggin’ china set.

11

I’m following this thread with interest, because it lets me see how people outside the science fiction fan/pro world are looking at this.

First, a bit of history. This started three years ago when Theodore Beale (aka, Vox Day) started urging people to vote for a couple of his works because he was standing up to the Political Correctness Brigade. Beale was an asshole of the first degree (he is the only person to be kicked out of SFWA) and loves to piss off women with his sexist and racist rants (AFAIK, he has no connection with Gamergate, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he supported it). It got a couple of his stories onto the ballot, but they didn’t come close to winning.

Last year, a similar group did the same thing. Again, they put several works on the ballot by block voting. Again, the works didn’t win.

This year was slightly different. Though the group was somewhat to the right of center, their goals in making up the ballot was to “take back” the Hugos for Real Science Fiction™ and to honor popular works that had been overlooked.

There are many problems with this. First of all, their definition of Real Science Fiction™ is restricted to hard SF and space opera; the soft sciences are sneered upon. It’s also disturbing that The Three-Body Problem wasn’t on their list: it’s filled with the type of hard SF speculation they claim to love. The fact that it was written by a non-white author makes it look like they are what people accuse them to be.

One point of contention was a work nominated last year, “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” which won the Nebula. There is certainly room for healthy debate as to how science fictional the story is (I think of it as similar to Pamela Zoline’s classic “The Heat Death of the Universe,” which used a science metaphor to create an emotional effect), its nomination is not the death of the genre.

Also, they misunderstand the genre. Brad Torgerson, who put together the slate pointed that they wanted something like Star Trek, which inspired people to make devices like communicators and such. As David Gerrold pointed out, that was only a side point to Star Trek; its main message was social, not hard science.

The talk about popularity, of course, is nonsense, especially once you get away from novels. It’s impossible to determine how popular a story is. The nominees may have been popular, or they may have been hated. Of those on the slate ranked by Tangent Online’s Recommended Reading List, three were 0 star recommendations (which means an OK read) and one was a one-star rec (out of three). Most weren’t mentioned because they were in small press and obscure sources – which kind of makes the argument about popularity a little thin (as a comparison, the Nebula nominees had 9 stories on the Tangent list, three of them three-star stories and another three two-star stories).

And is John C. Wright really the best writer working today? I can’t think of any year where an author had five stories up for a Hugo.

The big thing about the Sad Puppies is that they can’t accept the fact the the genre is changing. More women and nonwhites are becoming involved, and the Internet means the barrier to starting a magazine is going down. SF is moving toward a more literary emphasis. I’m not entirely happy with that – I’m not a literary writer, so I constantly need to up my game – but it’s not like this is going to make any difference in the long run.

But the worse part is that they decided to game the system. There are around 1000 voters nominating for each category. There are hundreds of stories written each year. A group of 100 people voting as a block can easily get all their choices on the ballot. And this just opens the door to other blocks; maybe there will be a left-wing SF backlash. Maybe people who love fantasy will decide on a slate. Maybe someone will come up with a slate featuring only minority authors. And suddenly it’s not about what story is considered the best, it’s about which bloc can motivate the most people.

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Good point. Their talking points sound good until you look even the slightest under the surface.

This was my big sticking point. I will argue there’s never been any author who’s written 5 deserving pieces in a single year over the history of the award. And that includes some incredibly prolific writers like Asimov.

Wright would have had to experienced the single greatest writing year of the last several centuries to achieve it legitimately, and, to be honest, he did not.

13

In the SFWA thread on this, somebody called Beale literally the poster child for Gamergate.

I didn’t understand this until I read more about it, but apparently there were two independent and only slightly overlapping slates of recommendations.

Torgeson’s slate was the Sad Puppies, and deliberately sought to be more diverse. He did, in fact, include women, including a (self-proclaimed) queer woman and other non white men.

Beale’s slate was the Rabid Puppies. Most of the final nominations, including most of the Wright stories, came from that slate.

I’ve never read anything by anybody on the ballot (checking: I have read a couple of stories by Michael Flynn) so I have no idea of the quality of anything.

Just a nitpick. Asimov is legendarily famous for his nonfiction, but his entire career of short fiction from 1939 until he left fiction in 1957 would be a good year for hundreds of other writers.

14

Bwah?

You make some good points, in the stuff I’ve removed, but…it’s pretty easy to tell how popular a story is. “Nightfall” or “The Last Question” or “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” or “By His Bootstraps” (less so nowdays) have each been reprinted a ton of times in anthologies*. “Fruit of Knowledge” by C.L. Moore has been reprinted once, as far as I can tell, in a multi-author anthology. Let’s not quibble about whether “Fruit of Knowledge” is better than the other works I listed**, but it is clear that it’s less popular.

Am I misunderstanding what you meant?
*I’m not counting single author collections.

**It is, but let’s not quibble. :wink:

15

They didn’t kick out Harlan Ellison for sexually molesting Connie Willis (he did the “honka-honka” thing with her boobs on a stage because…boobs!). And…actually I wouldn’t expect them to. What did Beale do that was so bad? I’ve never heard this before. :slight_smile:

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@Fenris
Here’s a pretty good contemporary account from Jim Hines.
http://www.jimchines.com/2013/06/racist-takes-dump-in-sfwa-twitter-stream-news-at-11/

Basically, Beale wrote some fairly unpleasant and racist stuff about N.K. Jemisin, and then sent that stuff out on the SFWA Twitter feed. Here’s a sample of the piece, grabbed from Hines’ account.

If you poke around, you can find screencaps of the actual text sent.

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Harlan Ellison is an asshole, but at least he can write. Beale has no redeeming qualities whatsoever that I can see.

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Over time, yes. Stories appear in anthologies.

In the past year, no. You can track a book’s popularity by its sales, but short works appear in magazines, whose sales are determined by the package, not any one particular story (and newsstand sales – which are vanishing – only fluctuate due to the names on the cover). And for webzines it’s impossible to determine anything about how many people are reading it. Pageviews? But that includes those who look at the story and read only the first line or two. Chat on message boards? Sure, but which boards and who was talking?

On additional issue is that many of the people who voted for these slates never read the works they were voting for. How did they know they were Hugo-worthy? Because they agreed with the politics? Is every work by an author who shares your politics automatically one of the best of the year?

19

Gotcha–I thought you meant that you couldn’t tell historically what stories were popular, not which current nominations.

20

It’s even worse than that. In 2013 I remembered Beale from an earlier set of attacks on another SFWA site. He’s an Internet troll and extremely proud of it. He claims he can’t be faulted because he has Native American heritage and so he’s the insulted minority that others just talk about. If you mixed several of the worst banned posters from here and distilled them, you’d get him. Yet he has followers, rabid ones.