It doesn’t seem to take much to make Beale look like a dick – from his own writings he seems to be pretty much an unapologetic white supremacist, homophobe, and misogynist.
The side that wanted Science Fiction to be safe for women threw two female editors under the bus by voting no award.
Way be be inclusive there.
You have proven Larry Correia’s point three years running, and this year did exactly what Vox Day wanted you too. Good job.
Next year SP4 is being run by women, that’s really going to fuck with your old white guys rhetoric.
Don’t see how. Plenty of conservatives get nominated and have won Hugos, and plenty of liberals and minorities have not had their stories nominated, much less won. I still haven’t seen any reason to believe that this is more than “you don’t like the stories that win and don’t like losing and are being a bad sport about this”, in general (or more than “let’s destroy the Hugos” in the odious Vox Day’s case).
Wow. I just scanned this entire thread and I’ve go to say this. I’m a long time reader of SF, in fact it constitutes the major bulk of my leisure reading. I had no idea that this sort of thing was going on. I don’t mind politics in my SF as long as it’s there in service to the story rather than the other way around, even when the viewpoint in question is one with which I personally disagree. I enjoy conservative writers like Heinlein and Pournelle. I enjoy liberal writers like Robinson and Haldeman.
I’m sure that all this will be ironed out in a fashion that will restore the credibility of the Hugos because if there’s one group that should be able to be counted on to deal with crazed reactionaries in a suitable fashion it would be science fiction writers.
Betcha it won’t. See, you’ve got a very reductionist understanding of what’s going on: ironically, while you are trying to critique identity politics, you’re banking on an identity politics move to outflank people who cannot possibly be fooled by something so absurd.
There are assholes who are old white guys, and there are assholes who are young Malaysian women, and assholes of every shape, size, hue, and age in between. If the Sad Puppies next year try a similar dick stunt, I betcha they’ll face the same criticism as they faced this year, even if it’s women who are organizing it.
Is that gonna blow your mind?
No I’m looking at a rose through world colored glasses.
When Sad Puppies started Larry Correia predicted the TrueFans would lose their mind. They did.
Want proof? The Anti Puppies said loud and long that the SPs are nothing but a bunch of old white guys wanting things back the way they were. This is really funny since Larry Correia isn’t white, he is Hispanic.
But wait there is more. This year the SP were headed up by Brad Torgersen* who was accused of being racist. That forced him to publish a photograph of his lovely African-American wife that he has been married to for 20 years. Epic fail SJWs.
So next year when SP4 is headed up by women the SJWs are really going to lose their shit.
What the SJWs fail to understand is that the puppies don’t give a shit about your sex, how you identify your sex, or who you sleep with. Furthermore we don’t care who you are going to vote for in the next election.
All we care about is do you tell a good story.
You won’t find any blog posts from our side saying “Pledge to not read any gay or female authors for one year.” On the AP side you will find “Pledge not to read any white cis authors for 1 year” posts.
Vox Day wanted to nuke the Hugo’s and the SJW blindly followed his lead. Funny really.
For the next year I’ll be sitting over here on my lawn chair laughing my ass off.
*Brad wrote a superb novel called The Chaplin’s War. I highly recommend it. It made me think. Not a lot of books do that.
I’m an old straight white male. My plan at the next Worldcon is to wear a t-shirt saying:
WE’RE NOT ALL LIKE THAT
Most of us aren’t.
“Rick says” is proof?
Don’t know if Brad is racist, but being married to a black woman is not proof either way.
Then why did the puppies attack so many good stories?
Seems to me that they think that stories can’t be good if they have a message, which is absurd.
And why is it bad to fight for social justice?
Wait what?
So you are saying that racists go out and marry women of the African-American persuasion because they like them?
Kind of calls in to question their racist credentials don’t ya think?
It really, really doesn’t. You now have a choice: step back and try to figure out what folks are talking about when they talk about racism, or continue in happy ignorance.
Ancillary Justice, one of the books that started all of this, was fucking awesome. NK Jemisin’s stories are fucking awesome. The idea that sad puppies just care about a good story is blatant nonsense.
I love Ancillary Justice. I love The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. I also love Leviathan Wakes and Spin and Red Shirts (okay, I was mildly amused by it, thought it was overhyped tbh) and Annihilation and all sorts of science fiction by all sorts of authors. I read 1-2 books a week, and most of them are sf/fantasy. I’m not a world-renowned expert or anything, but I’m definitely a big old dork about it.
As far as I can tell, the idiots who tried to ruin the Hugos this year did the equivalent of shitting in the punch bowl. WHen that happens, you can drink their shit, or you can throw away the punch. Hugo fans threw out the punch. That’s not following Beale’s lead.
Sure, it’s worse than having the fucking punch you wanted to have at your party, but the turd’s there. You’ve only got bad choices. The fans took the best of a set of bad choices.
Kudos to them.
Of course the Sad Puppies will try to spin this as a victory. That’s what unreasonable people do when they lose. There’s no possibility that they wouldn’t have tried to spin. Nobody except possibly them is fooled.
Beale claims Native American ancestry and he’s one of the worst bigots on earth.
Beale is not part of the sad puppies.
Secondly the day after the nominations were announced he blogged about the nuclear option to burn the awards down, and the SJW did just that.
Here’s a little light reading. You Cheered | Otherwhere Gazette
Nothing’s burned down. They threw out the punch that he shat in. The Hugos will be back next year, and if they can’t keep him from shitting in the punch next year, they’ll probably throw it out again.
It’s the saddest sort of life when one’s only victory is to make things shitty for other people. That’s what he’s cheering right now.
Slashdot, known for being hostile to, ah, SJWs, has a thread on this. I was actually surprised by the general tenor of the highest voted comments.
Next year, there will probably be another attempt to hijack the awards. It might not work as well as this year, given the vastly larger nominating pool. Or it might - the current voting system makes it hilariously easy to to do.
The year after that, though, the rules will have been changed to render slate voting ineffective. The Puppies will be neutered. And life will go on.
While not ideal, this is probably the best possible outcome for those of us who wanted the Hugo Award to continue to matter and continue to identify things that are worth reading.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Eric was my guide through the whole thing, and the above-mentioned award he got from GRR Martin was well-deserved. While he was opposed to the Puppies in general, he kept it civil and explained in detail while he held his positions and why he disagreed with others.
I look forward to his post-Hugo report (which I hope he will be doing).
You know what’s funny? I hadn’t heard about this whole brouhaha back in April. I first heard of it yesterday, when I Googled something about the Hugos completely unrelated to this controversy or to this year’s awards at all[sup]*[/sup], and saw it in the other search results.
*I happened to have some time for reading yesterday, and was working through a used book I picked up of old Nebula winners. As I was reading one of the stories, it occurred to me that I had read it before, and thought it might have been in a collection of Hugo winners, so I checked. Yes, it was, and yes, I had.