Hugo Drama 2015

[Squab]

Nope. If you're going to claim there's ever been a non-Puppy slate that had any meaningful effect on the Hugos, what was on that slate and where was it promoted?

Ahhhh, yep. Also, it was a question rather than a claim. Others first asserted it, i only really had to google it.

Scientologists. I think GRRM spoke about it at notablog.

Frank Wu posted some stuff about reading lists you might find interesting too. It is a decade old i think.

[mushroomshirt]

GRRM just posted an update on the whole controversy on his Not a Blog. I wish he had just posted this from the beginning.

I was pretty stunned to read all this behind the scenes drama. As a "casual" fan of SFF, I never imagined that there would be this much drama. Although if I thought about it for a second I probably would have imagined it. After all when you have more than 2 people you have politics.

Personally, I think where the SPs went wrong was to try to frame this thing as a "vast left-wing conspiracy". If they had just said, "hey, here are some books we like, let's get together and nominate them for a Hugo" I think it would have been a whole different thing. GRRM would probably have still been upset, because it would be a break from the past culture of Worldcon, but I think a lot of air would have gone out of the balloon. As other posters have said, that's democracy.

GRRM I think is a bit like George Washington who never wanted political parties in the US. I agree with him (GRRM and Washington) but I think factionalism is just part of human nature.

[Darth Richard II]

Yeah, the Hugo's constant snubbing of Terry Brooks is one of humanity's greatest crimes! :P

[Shryke]

GRRM just posted an update on the whole controversy on his Not a Blog. I wish he had just posted this from the beginning.

I was pretty stunned to read all this behind the scenes drama. As a "casual" fan of SFF, I never imagined that there would be this much drama. Although if I thought about it for a second I probably would have imagined it. After all when you have more than 2 people you have politics.

Personally, I think where the SPs went wrong was to try to frame this thing as a "vast left-wing conspiracy". If they had just said, "hey, here are some books we like, let's get together and nominate them for a Hugo" I think it would have been a whole different thing. GRRM would probably have still been upset, because it would be a break from the past culture of Worldcon, but I think a lot of air would have gone out of the balloon. As other posters have said, that's democracy.

GRRM I think is a bit like George Washington who never wanted political parties in the US. I agree with him (GRRM and Washington) but I think factionalism is just part of human nature.

Tons of awards go along fine without this kind of shit.

[mushroomshirt]

Tons of awards go along fine without this kind of shit.

I wonder... maybe all the fighting is just going on behind closed doors.

[Seli]

It seems that after the withdrawal of Kloos, the Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu has now been moved up to nomination status. Which seems to be good news.

....

Personally, I think where the SPs went wrong was to try to frame this thing as a "vast left-wing conspiracy". If they had just said, "hey, here are some books we like, let's get together and nominate them for a Hugo" I think it would have been a whole different thing. GRRM would probably have still been upset, because it would be a break from the past culture of Worldcon, but I think a lot of air would have gone out of the balloon. As other posters have said, that's democracy.

...

That would still have gotten a negative reaction, the whole idea of nominating and voting for a specific list of works (one might or might not have read) as part of a campaign seems to go against the spirit of the award. Which seems to be more about convincing people that a certain work should be nominated/win.

[felice]

Scientologists. I think GRRM spoke about it at notablog.

Frank Wu posted some stuff about reading lists you might find interesting too. It is a decade old i think.

The Scientologists campaigned for a single book; not exactly comparable to a slate that takes over entire categories. Dodgy behaviour, but it didn't really cause a problem, it's not at all typical, and it certainly wasn't supported by the regular WorldCon membership.

The reading lists in question also included far more works that didn't get nominated. There's a massive difference between "vote for these five works" and "here are a couple of dozen books published last year which we think are worth considering", and correlation is not causation - that the list-makers liked the works isn't proof that many voters were swayed by the lists, just that they had similar tastes; there aren't that many widely acclaimed SF novels published each year. There's significant overlap between the Hugos and other awards such as the Locus and Nebula awards - are they controlled by Hugo recommendation lists too?

[Lily Valley]

Oryx and Crake 2004. If somebody should have a big whiny tantrum corner it's the author of that book. Some Canadian Lady, I hear.

I'm really sickened. While the Hugos have never made me think they were the best books of the year, y'all made me read books by authors I hadn't read. And I loved them. They were GOOD books. This is the saddest part of this whole sad mess.

[Darth Richard II]

Don't be silly, Atwood doesn't write scifi, that's like dumb spaceships and shit.

[Bjornbert]

Don't be silly, Atwood doesn't write scifi, that's like dumb spaceships and shit.

I'd be really curious to see what she wrote if she wanted scifi

[Lyanna Stark]

I was aware of the Hugo award for a long time but never really looked too closely into it so I might be missing something. Why are so many classics never even nominated? Feist, Eddings, Tolkein, Jordan (although it looks as if he got a posthumous nomination only because nothing else in the series was ever nominated), Wurts, Weis and Hickman, Douglas Adams, Terry Brooks, Hobb, Douglass, Stephen King even. Seemingly all inclusive club indeed.

Why on God's green planet would these ever be nominated? I have to echo Darth Richard here, and not because I generally agree with him 90% of the time anyway, but a lot of the ones you've listed are somewhere between mediocre to painful. Or at least in the case of Wurst and Weis & Hickman extremely uneven. King too has a lot of ups and downs. Feist was probably ok around 1995, as was Jordan, Eddings "Belgariad" is just about as reductive as you can get without being Terry Brooks. (I say that as someone who owns large parts of the Shannara series. In hardback. Yeppers.)

Regarding the withdrawn nominations, I was sad to see Annie Bellet withdraw. I've only read one of her stories which was a fairly ok-ish UF detective story, featuring, I believe, a gay couple a secondary characters, so I have no idea why she was Sadpuppied. It was pretty clear from that novel though that she was a huge geek (as there are lots of in-story references to geekery) and that she had what I guessed a deep love for geeks and for geek fandom in general. Apart from that I don't know anything about her. Haven't read Kloos as I tend to not read a lot of military SciFi.

[David Selig]

Actually and literally quote from a Hugo nominated work

And that's not even in the top 10 of the dumbest quotes in that book.

[Nearly Headless Ned]

Interesting take on all the rumpus from Eric Flint.

http://www.ericflint.net/index.php/2015/04/16/some-comments-on-the-hugos-and-other-sf-awards/

[David Selig]

Interesting take on all the rumpus from Eric Flint.

http://www.ericflint.net/index.php/2015/04/16/some-comments-on-the-hugos-and-other-sf-awards/

Great read. Everyone involved in this mess should read it carefully.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

SCO, farseer,

There is good science done at Christian Universities.

My wife (long before we married) worked on the Human Gemone project at a lab at Georgetown supervised by a Jesuit priest. This is, of course, not to say Christian scientists and labs are the only ones doing good work. I'm simply saying it's not absurd to see good science from labs at Christian institutions.

[farseer2]

SCO, farseer,

There is good science done at Christian Universities.

I am not denying this. I laughed because the quote said that "secularization of the scientific community has arguably decreased the rate of the advance of science. Universities founded by or run by the Church study real knowledge and produce real science, because they believe God is Truth", and that seemed ridiculous to me.

I'm not laughing at anyone's faith or saying that scientists at Christian Universities do not do their job well. It's just that God is God and science is science. Any good science done at Christian Universities is not done because they believe in God. It's done simply because they are good scientists.

Having said that, I have nothing against Wright. He has every right to his beliefs and he actually seems to me a nice guy, unlike VD. He is just extremely religious. I respect that, but I do not have to agree with his opinions.

[mushroomshirt]

That would still have gotten a negative reaction, the whole idea of nominating and voting for a specific list of works (one might or might not have read) as part of a campaign seems to go against the spirit of the award. Which seems to be more about convincing people that a certain work should be nominated/win.

I totally agree. It still would have gotten a negative reaction, but not AS negative (IMO).

Over the last few years, I seem to recall George mentioning an informal "voting block" (he probably didn't use that term) for Dr. Who that kept GOT TV show from winning some particular Hugos. He seemed only a little upset by this because presumably the Dr. Who folks weren't so overtly campaigning and presumably thought Dr. Who was the most deserving based on the quality of the work nominated and their own tastes. They were acting more within the spirit of the awards. They weren't calling names or labeling other people. The weren't voting based on an author's political persuasion.

What if the SPs had done things like Dr. Who fans, slowly and within the system, taking the high road and without the name calling? I suspect an entirely different outcome.

[farseer2]

What if the SPs had done things like Dr. Who fans, slowly and within the system, taking the high road and without the name calling? I suspect an entirely different outcome.

Then they wouldn't have got any results. After a few years of trying they would have tired of wasting their money for no results. The cost of voting is 40$, or 50$ if you are not from the US. Let's say your theory is that the award is dominated by insider cliques out of touch with the rest of fandom and you want to challenge that by mobilizing a very large crowd of uncoordinated voters. You would need to find a few thousand people willing to cough up the money (perhaps more, if there's a reaction from insider fandom). So far they have only mobilized a few hundreds. Even if you managed to grow that large, then you would still be accused of bringing outsiders who do not care about the WorldCon to hijack the WorldCon prize. There would still be calls to increase the prize or to disallow voting from supporting members.

I can't say whether I think their strategy is sound or not because I do not truly understand their objectives. Why do they care about the Hugos so much? What are their long-term objectives? Stay like that year after year paying their supporting membership and involved in a fandom war? Prove that the voting process is very vulnerable to politicization?

[mormont]

I can't say whether I think their strategy is sound or not because I do not truly understand their objectives.

I don't think the Puppies do either, to be fair.

They're entirely muddled up about what their problem with the Hugos even is, let alone what they're trying to do. Is it that the awards don't recognise commercially successful authors? That they're 'too literary' (whatever that means, it's not at all the same thing)? Is it that they exclude right-wing authors (certainly not related to either of the first two things)? Too ready to nominate minority authors at the expense of older straight white males?

Let's set aside whether any of these things are even true (they're largely not) - which of them is the cause, here? They're not the same thing, in fact they're quite different. And even if we accept that the cause is 'all these things', the slates that the Puppies have put forward address them rather haphazardly. They complain about tokenism, then make sure to include (and point out the inclusion of) female and bisexual writers. They complain about the lack of recognition for best-selling authors, and then nominate stuff published by obscure publishers that would be totally unfamiliar to most fans. They include a bunch of Dramatic Presentation nominees, despite the fact that (as far as I can see) few or none of the complaints they're making apply to those categories.

Day, at least, knows and is open about his intentions. It's just a shame that those intentions are no more noble than to piss on everyone else's fun unless and until he gets to say who wins. Torgersen, Correia and the rest, though, just seem to have some rather formless sense that Things Ain't Right, and that Something Must Be Done.

[Darth Richard II]

I'd be really curious to see what she wrote if she wanted scifi

OH I'm paraphrasing something she said a looong time ago. She's been much nicer to the genre since, also considering when she said it(early 80s i think) you can kind of see where she was coming from. Just on some days the whole speculative fiction isn't SFF can set me off randomly. :P