[Polpolion]

What the Puppies are saying is that the Hugo awards, currently, do not reflect the entirety of SFF fandom and therefore the Puppies votes are needed.  (Implying that more Puppies will join and vote next year.)

I'm a bit late to this whole thing, but did the members of the puppies just not vote before or something? Or do they make up such a small minority of the SFF community that they just can't get nominations without conspiring?

[SpardaSon21]

From where I sit, the overall point Goober and Luis Dias are making is that the puppies were being deliberately excluded from the Hugos based on their political views.  From what I see of the huge amount of "No Awards" being handed out, as opposed to something, anything from a competing author, that really tells me the voters would much rather have no award period than one going to a deserving author despite his political views, which is just reinforced by the huge break from the last No Award in 1977.  NGTM-1R's statements about the political inevitability of left-leaning policies are also just confirming a lot of my own suspicions, namely that there is indeed a strong cultural movement by left-leaning members of society to frame the cultural struggles we have now as hopeless and futile, and their opponents just should give up before history leaves them behind.  Language shapes perception after all, and if you control the language of a debate, you control people's perceptions of it.

[NGTM-1R]

NGTM-1R's statements about the political inevitability of left-leaning policies

Hey so maybe you should go back and read them again because that's sure as hell not what happened.

It's not about them being inevitable; it's about trying to project the future based on what's going on right now. Right now, the world's getting more left and doesn't seem likely to slow down. We went all Gay Marriage and I'm Cait and if I'd told you that was gonna happen in six years in 2008 you'd think I was crazy and start waving Proposition 8 at me. It's observable. Therefore, people who predict the future is more left are presented with a lesser burden to prove they are right.

Will the world be more left? **** if I know. I do know that anyone who's out to write a story is going to have an easier time convincing people it will be, and an easier time writing that story.

[Luis Dias]

You're talking nonsense and trying to cloak yourself in some holy crusade against censorship that didn't happen, and you need to stop and take a good look at yourself in the mirror.

Will you stop attacking strawmans? I never once stated this was the world war of literature, gimme a ****ing break. It's just that as small as the kerfuffle might even be (I don't think the Hugos are "little", but HEY if that rocks your boat, it's fine), the reasons behind it are not, especially for those who are fighting it. And thus, all I did up there was trying to bring forth the more .... political notions that reside under this kerfuffle.

[NGTM-1R]

Will you stop attacking strawmans?

I'm literally quoting you. You can't turn Karaj's arguments around on me when instead of making **** up it's a literal quotation. Here, have some.

... but I REALLY don't want to be left in a world where the only allowed imaginations are those who are pre-described ideologically, who all point to the same direction (OR ELSE), where all must abide to the new social justice checklists of approved talking points, tokens and thematics. I don't welcome a world where not only Ctuhluh rides Left, but we can't even imagine it going anywhere else.

My pessimism is way less censorial in its imagination than any social justice inclined voter at the Hugos was.

These are the words you have spoken, and you are on record as speaking them. If you wish to say they were straw men, to where have your goalposts moved now?

[Luis Dias]

I stand by them, what the hell NG are you telling me there's not a culture war happening in sci fi right now, regardless of who shot first?

You seem to have a problem connecting the concept of a localized kerfuffle and the concept of its ideological significance, as if they are in contradiction, but they are not, especially in a world so deeply connected in social media we have today.

[SpardaSon21]

NGTM-1R's statements about the political inevitability of left-leaning policies

Hey so maybe you should go back and read them again because that's sure as hell not what happened.

It's not about them being inevitable; it's about trying to project the future based on what's going on right now. Right now, the world's getting more left and doesn't seem likely to slow down. We went all Gay Marriage and I'm Cait and if I'd told you that was gonna happen in six years in 2008 you'd think I was crazy and start waving Proposition 8 at me. It's observable. Therefore, people who predict the future is more left are presented with a lesser burden to prove they are right.

Will the world be more left? **** if I know. I do know that anyone who's out to write a story is going to have an easier time convincing people it will be, and an easier time writing that story.

It doesn't really matter whether the Hugos were biased or not (in my personal opinion they probably are, but such a bias is inherent to their genre nature: forward-looking science fiction and the fact that Cthulhu only swims left/moral arc of history); the response of Vox Day et. al. is itself significantly biased not only in terms of political leaning but also towards a specific organization and author.

(Emphasis Mine)
Please tell me how that statement is not a declaration that your political views are a historical inevitability, and therefore culture must adapt to propagate them.

EDIT: You're also acting like this whole Brian/Caitlyn Jenner media thing is universally a good thing, when I can speak from some pretty painful personal experience that these actions can have consequences on those around the one transitioning, and asking family members to just accept it won't always end well.

[Mongoose]

From where I sit, the overall point Goober and Luis Dias are making is that the puppies were being deliberately excluded from the Hugos based on their political views.  From what I see of the huge amount of "No Awards" being handed out, as opposed to something, anything from a competing author, that really tells me the voters would much rather have no award period than one going to a deserving author despite his political views, which is just reinforced by the huge break from the last No Award in 1977.

But did the voters reject the given choices because of the authors' political views, or because said choices were generated by a targeted--and decidedly political--orchestrated campaign?  And if you can't answer that question definitively either way, why jump straight to assuming the worst?

[karajorma]

It's like you thought I wouldn't have anticipated that contingency.  The nominations were announced April 5th.  The analysis was posted April 7th.  The Amazon ratings at the time of the analysis predate all of the post-nomination publicity.

:facepalm: This is getting silly. Do I really need to explain how the day the nominations were announced wasn't the start of this nonsense?

So, there exist editors who were not on the nomination list that are better than those nominated, and better to such an extent that No Award was preferable to honoring any of the nominees?

I'll quote Brad Torgersen here:

Toni Weisskopf got 1,216 first-line #1 votes. Arguably the most of any editor in the history of the Hugo awards.

Sheila Gilbert got 754 first-line #1 votes. Again, second only to Toni, arguably the most of any editor in the history of the Hugo awards.

By contrast, Patrick-Nielsen Hayden won a Best Editor Hugo in 2010, with just 140 first-line #1 votes.

Is it really so hard to understand why the numbers could be misleading? Notice how both numbers are so high? Do you honestly think that Brad Torgersen is such a good editor that this fact alone is responsible for him getting 10 times more votes than Patrick-Nielsen Hayden? Are you saying he's a 10 times better editor than Patrick-Nielsen Hayden? Or is it more likely that the entire hoopla surrounding the nominations resulted in more votes on both sides.

That really tells me the voters would much rather have no award period than one going to a deserving author despite his political views, which is just reinforced by the huge break from the last No Award in 1977.

As I pointed out, it's probable that most of the people involved don't think they were a deserving author though. Your logic seems to simply be that they were on the slate and therefore that automatically makes them deserving. But the fact that the slate was deliberately rigged to push out other more deserving awards could also explain that.

Look at it from this perspective. 20 years from now, all this nonsense will be nothing more than a footnote on the Hugo Awards Wikipedia page. But books that win the title will still have "Hugo Award Winner!" stamped all over them. Some people feel that wouldn't be fair when there were better books around which didn't get the chance cause of politics.

[Grizzly]

From where I sit, the overall point Goober and Luis Dias are making is that the puppies were being deliberately excluded from the Hugos based on their political views.  From what I see of the huge amount of "No Awards" being handed out, as opposed to something, anything from a competing author, that really tells me the voters would much rather have no award period than one going to a deserving author despite his political views.

The thing is, the puppies were not excluded from the hugo awards because of their political views. They were excluded because they were puppies. When you look at the statements of the authors endorsed by the rabid puppies who have withdrawn, you can see that it's not the political views of the puppies that is being rejected here (esp. since, as GB mentioned, Brad Torgerson would have been nominated fair and square if not for the puppies). It's the methods they tried to use in order to win the awards.

[666maslo666]

I changed my mind a bit, if the "no award" votes were just protest votes against slate voting regardless of politics then it is justifiable. I dont like the puppies methods either. Still, I am not sure fighting vote manipulation with more vote manipulation is ethical or good for the awards in the long run. Many of those nominated authors still deserved the Hugos on merit, IMHO.

[karajorma]

I suspect that the reason for the large number of No Award votes is a mixture of both kinds of protest vote. Both the protest against a rigged slate but also the more simple "The best novellas weren't even on the list, so I'm going to vote No Award". It's worth remembering that the latter of the two is going to happen regardless of who buggers up the nominations. So even if an anti-sad puppy movement springs up, it's probably not going to have much luck.

What you and karajorma are saying is that the Hugo awards "deserve" and "merit" consideration based on a subset of the votes that excludes the Puppies.  Which effectively means that a subset of SFF fandom should be excluded.

I'm not saying anything of the sort.

The Sad Puppies claim that the Hugo voting system means that certain books never win or even get nominated because of the politics of the story or the author. Battatua has already pointed out that one of their candidates would have been nominated anyway, so that is already proven to be at least partially incorrect.

So if a fair vote is taken and that particular candidate wins, then the Sad Puppies might be able to argue that they have a point. If on the other hand their candidate loses, it kinda shows that they're simply sore losers. Which is why I asked if their choice won in a fair vote.

[General Battuta]

Your regularly scheduled reminder that the Puppies movement is a catspaw of Vox Day, who also started his own publishing house to create SFWA- qualifying authors who could then slate vote for the Nebulas, all as revenge on SFWA for kicking him out for being a white supremacist :frogout:

GRRM's analysis was solid evidence that there hasn't been a political bias in the Hugos over recent years. This is about Vox Day's ideology.

[General Battuta]

The Sad Puppies have been around for several years, to no effect. This year Vox Day got on board.

[Luis Dias]

You contradict yourself there, Batts. First you say the Puppies are Vox's "catspaws", then next you say the sad puppies were "to no effect", but now Vox Day got on board and it blew everything away. You also point to an analysis as being evidence. But we can look at the data, and I'm really highly skeptical that a very few amount of people could hoard so many awards without either being geniuses or ... something being afoot. You can also look at the data, and while I'll readily agree that seeing Castallia with so many nominations is indeed a farce, it is a farce that followed the silent tragedy of watching so many Tor books year after year after year. Perhaps they're basically the only publishing house doing quality work in the world. Or perhaps something else.

e: If we are bringing GRRM to the table though, we should also remember that he warned everyone to *not* do what they ended up doing.

[The E]

Luis, the biggest publisher of SF/F getting more nominations than smaller houses is perhaps not the statistical anomaly you think it is.

[Luis Dias]

Didn't I acknowledge that caveat in my statement?

[The E]

You contradict yourself there, Batts. First you say the Puppies are Vox's "catspaws", then next you say the sad puppies were "to no effect", but now Vox Day got on board and it blew everything away.

The Puppies are Vox's catspaws. They may not have started that way, but now they are.

[Luis Dias]

I don't think they are. I just think that all the moderate voices in any of this were just completely overwhelmed by the loud angry polarizing voices. I also think (and said) this is part of a wider problem of increased polarization everywhere.

[General Battuta]

No contradiction. The Rabid Puppies were the successful slate. You'll note that where Sad and Rabid differed, Rabid came out ahead.

Vox Day is a reprehensible person whose values are anathema to any humane creed, liberal or conservative. It's not 'immoderate' to oppose him.