[General Battuta]

And lol at this alleged Tor-Baen rivalry, the owner of Tor helped found Baen and John C Wright is published by Tor

[Luis Dias]

You're not seriously suggesting there wasn't a massive rift between the Wrights and the Haydens. You know we can google, right.

[The E]

Is he, or is he not still published by Tor?

[General Battuta]

He is - he's actually with the same editor as me right now. Tor has like a zillion editors (sixty plus? eighty?). Don't confuse Twitter and blogs for business.

[Grizzly]

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.

The Sad Puppies are not easily distinguished from the Rabid Puppies and they know it. It wouldn't have been hard for them to renounce Vox Day, who is a straight-up white supremacist. Instead they put him on the ballot twice.

This is not a case of being overwhelmed, this is a case of joining in with.

[Luis Dias]

@Batts, Fair enough.

@Joshua, I thought the point about the Sad Puppies was that politics shouldn't matter? Therefore they placed the work ahead of the author's / editor's politics?

[Luis Dias]

doublepost, for NG.

It's not just me that thinks this is a battle for the minds, you can cross every aisle and see that every camp thinks this as well. For instance, like this one:

Historically, every time there’s an advance in the rights of a disenfranchised group, whether that’s women’s lib or desegregation, there’s a corresponding pushback by the dominant group because it feels like it is losing power.

What we’re seeing with the Hugo awards is that readers & writers who have not been represented in SFF (women, PoC, LGBT) are becoming prominent because of a larger zeitgeist that is trying to redress historic imbalances. Again, we see this in other communities as well. The pushback by the various Puppy contingents matches other historical pushbacks. On their side, they think that fiction is being dominated by “checkboxes” rather than quality, which is the same reaction people had to hiring women during women’s lib or minorities during the civil rights movement.

The reason that the Hugos are more important than just a rocket ship, is that the Puppies also reflect the larger societal pushbacks that we’re seeing against women, PoC, and LGBT. So the Hugos represent a battle in a much bigger fight.

That’s why not just a rocket ship. The Hugos are a reflection of our culture. So the battle that we’re seeing isn’t about “what fiction is best” but rather “what future do we want to live in?”

What future do we want to live in.

Exactly. That is the battleground everyone here is apparently fighting for.

e: sorry, lacking link http://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/the-hugos-the-puppies-and-why-this-is-more-important-than-just-a-rocketship/

[NGTM-1R]

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.

You don't seem able to distinguish between "seeing the way the wind appears to be blowing" and "supporting the way the wind appears to be blowing". I used a pair of quotes from very different sources (Ghandi and Patrick Non-White from Popehat) to describe the situation as it would appear to most people who are currently alive. Patrick's actually a Vox Day supporter and has called the man a friend.

Is it a historical inevitability? I dunno. But even a relatively right-wing source is willing to say that the world has and is moving left, and that's the point of that statement. Aside from its excellent imagery, anyways. (I daresay from the time of its posting, Patrick was indirectly talking about this very issue.)

EDIT: You're also acting like this whole Brian/Caitlyn Jenner media thing is universally a good thing

How? I said it happened and people saw that it happened, and that it was a move left that would have been unthinkable less than a decade ago. Two of these are verifiable facts I don't think you would challenge and the third is something I'm not convinced you'll disagree with either. Six years ago the lettered crowd was deeply shaken by Prop 8 and the idea of someone coming out as trans and getting a show over it was very far from anyone's thoughts.

Now, I have, in the past, voiced support for the cause of people accepting Trans people. I still hold that belief. But it's not something expressed inside that post. You're reading things into it from your knowledge of me that aren't actually expressed inside it.

It's not just me that thinks this is a battle for the minds

But it is you, and the Puppies, that chose to express it as though people are having their voices stolen and their freedom taken. Is it a battle of the minds? Probably so, show me something that isn't. Though it's far less life and death than either you or he is trying to portray it as. As hills to die taking go, the Hugos is probably about ten feet high.

But in pretending to a grand crusade and oppression you are, at the least, engaging in willful exaggeration. As I said earlier, an award by mass vote is effectively the proverbial marketplace of ideas made as literal as it can get. That your favored is losing such a battle is distressing, but it is not an excuse to abandon reason. Battles for the mind are won by the skillful presentation of ideas.

The skillful presentation of an idea is not yelling "THEY'RE CHEATERS" as a first option. It abandons alternate explanations, only one of which you've even made the slightest effort to discredit. Your chosen battlefield could be against you; your strategies could be ineffective or even counterproductive; your numbers just too few. All three charges will fit the available evidence.

It is also not a winning strategy. The man who escalates first and furthest in the culture wars is usually the one who loses. Sulla seized power with the Optimates to save the Roman Republic by purging it of those elements he thought were destroying it. Instead he ensured its destruction. Invoking the wrath of God hasn't stopped gay rights. And moving from passively to actively political has inspired horror and intense backlash in awarding the Hugo.

[Goober5000]

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?

It was not widely known until Sad Puppies began that the Hugo awards can be voted on by anyone who is a member of Worldcon.  And anyone can become a voting member by paying the membership fee.  A lot of people thought it was some professional organization or a jury of panelists, like many other awards (including the Nebulas).

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?

You're trying to have it both ways.  This is what you said before:

Can you not see that if you have something like Sad Puppies, where a lot of books are suddenly talked about, a bunch of people will go and review those same books and therefore inflate the ratings somewhat?

Do you really expect us to believe that there was no discussion whatsoever of books under consideration for Hugo nominees until the Puppies came along?  Or that such discussion was only limited to Puppy-favored books?  If there is a bias which lifts the rankings of prospective nominees, then the bias would occur during every nomination period and for every prospective book.  All data points in the graph would be subject to the same effect.

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.

Let's do a thought experiment and toss out the entire Puppies contingent, which Vox Day estimates at 1015, comprised of 565 Rabids and 450 Sads.  Let's further assume that they all voted for Toni Weisskopf (which is highly unlikely as there were 166 votes for Vox Day in that category).  1216 minus 1015 is 201 which is still more than Patrick Nielsen Hayden got.  And yet she was still swamped by the 2496 votes for No Award.

Here is what Larry Correia had to say about it:

Now, a little background on Best Editor, and why there is a Long and Short form. It used to be just Best Editor, only it usually went to short fiction magazine editors. Until Patrick Nielsen Hayden complained one year that he’d edited most of Best Novel nominees (well, that’s a shock) and he didn’t ever get to be Best Editor, so they made a category for him to win every other year (literally).

But there are no cliques or bias!

Editor Toni Weisskopf is a professional’s professional. She has run one of the main sci-fi publishing houses for a decade. She has edited hundreds of books. She has discovered, taught, and nurtured a huge stable of authors, many of whom are extremely popular bestsellers. You will often hear authors complain about their editors and their publishers, but you’re pretty hard pressed to find anyone who has written for her who has anything but glowing praise for Toni.

Yet before Sad Puppies came along, Toni had never received a Hugo nomination. Zero. The above mentioned Patrick Nielsen Hayden has 8. Toni’s problem was that she just didn’t care and she didn’t play the WorldCon politics. Her only concern was making the fans happy. She publishes any author who can do that, regardless of their politics. She’s always felt that the real awards were in the royalty checks. Watching her get ignored was one of the things that spurred me into starting Sad Puppies. If anybody deserved the Hugo, it was her.

This year Toni got a whopping 1,216 first place votes for Best Editor. That isn’t just a record. That is FOUR TIMES higher than the previous record. Shelia Gilbert came in next with an amazing 754. I believe that Toni is such a class act that beforehand she even said she thought Shelia Gilbert deserved to win. Fans love Toni.

Logically you would think that she would be award worthy, since the only Baen books to be nominated for a Hugo prior to Sad Puppies were edited by her (Bujold) and none of those were No Awarded. Last year she had the most first place votes, and came in second only after the weird Australian Rules voting kicked in (don’t worry everybody, they just voted to make the system even more complicated), so she was apparently award worthy last year.

Toni Weisskopf has been part of organized Fandom (capital F) since she was a little kid, so all that bloviating about how Fandom is precious, and sacred, and your special home since the ‘70s which you need to keep as a safe space free of barbarians, blah, blah, blah, yeah, that applies to Toni just as much as it does to you CHORFs.  You know how you guys paid back her lifetime of involvement in Fandom?

By giving 2,496 votes to No Award.

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:

Regularly scheduled reminder?  What is this, Two-Minutes Hate?

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.

Please point to this analysis.  Because I have an even simpler one:

I just did a count and found 19 Hugos have been won by conservatives since 1996.

That's 19 out of 266, or 7.14%.  No political bias, eh?

[Grizzly]

@Joshua, I thought the point about the Sad Puppies was that politics shouldn't matter? Therefore they placed the work ahead of the author's / editor's politics?

Again, methods are important here: The puppies sought to correct a percieved bias by supporting conservative authors in running for the hugo awards. By putting Vox Day on the lists, they supported Vox Day. That they decided to ignore his politics is fair enough, but it does mean that they stood by him, regardless of the reason.

(I could also make a point about that the issue people have against Vox Day is not because of his politics. white supremacy is not a political argument, it's an excuse for bigotry)

That's 19 out of 266, or 7.14%.  No political bias, eh?

That would depend entirely on:
How you define the term conservative
How many authors have outspoken political views.
How many authors in the SFF field itself are conservative (if only 7.14% are by metric of point 1 and 2, the hugo has no bias persé).

[The E]

In further news: The Hugo nomination procedure has been amended to make slate voting less effective. The full text of the amendment is here.
It should be noted however that these rules will not go into effect until after they have been ratified by next year's WorldCon, so the 2016 Hugos will still be run under the old system.

From the FAQ:

1. Can you explain the system in plain language?
The important thing to remember is that nothing changes in how you nominate. If you think a work is Hugo-worthy, then nominate it. That’s all. There’s no need to rank your choices at the nomination stage, and there’s no reason not to nominate something you think even might be Hugo-worthy. All we are doing at this stage is throwing names into a hat. The final Hugo voting system, which actually chooses the winner, is unchanged. We could, in theory, simply put everyone’s nominations on the final ballot, but that would make for a very long ballot indeed. We therefore need to narrow the nomination list down. This system narrows down the list by eliminating the least popular works until only five (under current rules) finalists remain. Here are the basic steps to the elimination process:
a.   You have one nomination “point” for each category that will be divided equally among the works you choose to nominate in that category. So, if you nominate two works in a category, each will get half a point; if you nominate three works, each will get one-third of a point, and so on.
b.   All the points given to each work from all nomination ballots are added together. The two works that got the least number of points are eligible for elimination. One of these works is the least popular and will be eliminated. (We call this the Selection Phase.)
c.   To determine which of these two works is least popular, we compare the total number of nominations they each received (that is, the number of nomination ballots on which each work appears). The work that received the fewest total number of nominations is the least popular and now completely vanishes from the nomination process as though it never existed. (We call this the Elimination Phase.)
d.   We start over for the next round and repeat the process, however, if one of your works was eliminated, then you now have fewer works on your nomination ballot. This means that each work gets more total points, since you aren’t dividing your point among as many works. For example, if one of your five nominated works was eliminated, your remaining works now get one-fourth of a point each instead of one-fifth of a point. If four of your nominated works are eliminated, your remaining work now gets your full point.

4. How does this system eliminate slate or bloc voting?
It doesn’t, exactly, nor should a work be automatically eliminated just because it appears on a slate. On the other hand, any slate which nominates a full set of five works will find that each of its nominations only count 1/5 as much. With “non-slate” nominating, some of your works will be slowly eliminated, so your remaining works get more and more of your support. Since slate works tend to live or die together, they tend to eliminate each other until, in general, only one slate work remains. With a large enough support behind the slate (five times as much), the slate may still sweep a category; however, if that many voters support the slate, they arguably deserve to win, and no fair and unbiased system of nomination will prevent that. The answer in that case is, simply, to increase the general pool of voters. Regardless, with SDV-LPE, slates will never receive a disproportionate share of the final ballot, as occurred in the 2015 Hugos.

12. Couldn’t slates just recommend a single work for a candidate, and it will automatically appear on the final ballot?
Yes, if a slate is large enough that is certainly a viable possibility - it’s also completely fair. It does not force any other works off of the final ballot, and the final Hugo winner is determined by the same voting process we have always had. Just appearing on the final ballot isn’t a guarantee of winning a Hugo. However, if any large section of fandom strongly believes that a work deserves a Hugo nomination, then it should, in fact, be represented on the final ballot.

19. Wasn’t this system just designed by Social Justice Warriors to block the Good Stuff?
It is true that much of the discussion for this system occurred on Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s “Making Light” discussion board, and it is also true that groups such as the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies consider TNH and PNH to be The Enemy, and therefore completely biased and not to be trusted. Other than serving as occasional moderators, TNH and PNH had no real input in the discussions of the system, however. Those of us who worked on the system were very clear that our goal was not to keep the Sad/Rabid Puppies off of the Hugo ballot, and that any system which specifically targets any type of work is inherently wrong and unfair. One of the members of the group is a retired US Naval officer, a combat veteran, a certified Navy marksman, a Christian, and considers Robert Heinlein to be the greatest science fiction author who has ever lived. In short, he is exactly the Puppies’ demographic. But any slate, of any sort, be it a Sad Puppy or a Happy Kitten of Social Justice, breaks the Hugo Award because a small percentage of voters can effectively prevent any other work from appearing on the final ballot. This is a major flaw in the Hugo nomination system, and it is a flaw that must be fixed if the integrity of the award is to be maintained. Politics should play no role whatsoever in whether a work is Hugo-worthy or not.

[Grizzly]

Hugo Awards: Introducing alternative vote systems before the UK government does.

(Also, yah! That seems like a very good system).

[Luis Dias]

Saying that his politics is bigotry is not a falsification of the fact that it is still politics, I find that just too obvious to let it go.

@NGTM, look, I admit to some rethorical flamboyance, but more than half of that was not to expose my own thoughts, but theirs. I do think there's an attempt to curb the entire landscape of imagination. When I used the word censorial it was on a rethorical small jab, referring to the actual censorship that happened with all those No Awards given. But my wider thoughts don't go to the usage of mere censorship, but rather on the shift of the perceived possible imaginations by everyone, something like the Overton Window. You don't need any office for censorship to influence that.


e: @The_E

That's very interesting. I can already guess Vox Day's take on it! It's as if it's designed for a group of slates overruning a single slate with the strategy of "you scratch my back I scratch yours" winning over "so here's my big back now all you minions have to do is scratch it". I personally think it's a viable alternative system. It appears to be, but I'm sure the more mathematical inclined (and skeptically inclined) will have their own theories about it.

[Scotty]

Saying that his politics is bigotry is not a falsification of the fact that it is still politics, I find that just too obvious to let it go.

To agree that bigotry is a brand of politics is to admit it onto the stage for due consideration as a valid viewpoint.  It is not and should not be.  Bigotry, particularly of the toxic and despicable brand Vox Day so proudly trumpets, should be stamped out wherever possible, regardless of the end of the political spectrum it and the person supporting it occupy.

[Grizzly]

Saying that his politics is bigotry is not a falsification of the fact that it is still politics, I find that just too obvious to let it go.

To agree that bigotry is a brand of politics is to admit it onto the stage for due consideration as a valid viewpoint.  It is not and should not be.  Bigotry, particularly of the toxic and despicable brand Vox Day so proudly trumpets, should be stamped out wherever possible, regardless of the end of the political spectrum it and the person supporting it occupy.

This literally can not be repeated enough, but I will only quote it once for the sake of preserving the forum database.

[Luis Dias]

Where did I state that "bigotry" is a brand of politics? Bigotry is how some people brand some other people's politics. You find those politics abhorrent? Fine. I wasn't making any assessment on its merits. Also, Joshua, that line about preserving forum databases was silly to the extreme man. Come on you can do better .

[Scotty]

Theodore Beale speaks about a black SF/F author:

…it is not that I, and others, do not view [Jemisin] as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious historical reason that she is not...

...The laws are not there to let whites “just shoot people like me, without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence”, those self-defense laws have been put in place to let whites defend their lives and their property from people, like her, who are half-savages engaged in attacking them...

Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence to be found anywhere on the planet that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support from those white males.

John C Wright (nominated by Sad Puppies) reacts to the ending of Avatar: The Legend of Korra, in which two women hold hands

Mr DiMartino and Mr Konietzko: You are disgusting, limp, soulless sacks of filth. You have earned the contempt and hatred of all decent human beings forever, and we will do all we can to smash the filthy phallic idol of sodomy you bow and serve and worship. Contempt, because you struck from behind, cravenly; and hatred, because you serve a cloud of morally-retarded mental smog called Political Correctness, which is another word for hating everything good and bright and decent and sane in life.

I have no hatred in my heart for any man’s politics, policies, or faith, any more than I have hatred for termites; but once they start undermining my house where I live, it is time to exterminate them.

Yeah, clearly we have a very hard time determining whether these people are bigots.

And re-quoting for emphasis.

Yeah, clearly we have a very hard time determining whether these people are bigots.

Rejecting these authors, and anything they support in the pursuit of the views quoted above is not harmful bias (though it is bias, technically, by the definition of the word); it is stamping out bigotry.  I am making an assessment on their merits, because it is an assessment that must be made for any real discussion of the actual results to have context worth framing the discussion.

[Luis Dias]

That's all fine Scotty, but I *wasn't*. Politics includes terms like Fascism, Nazism, Communism, Feudalism, you name it. You despise his politics, that's fine. I don't think psychoanalizing the author's political ideas to get him/her placed in some toxic pathological box should have any bearing on the basic truth that these are political ideas.

[Bobboau]

wow, this topic came BACK didn't it?

[Grizzly]

That's all fine Scotty, but I *wasn't*. Politics includes terms like Fascism, Nazism, Communism, Feudalism, you name it. You despise his politics, that's fine. I don't think psychoanalizing the author's political ideas to get him/her placed in some toxic pathological box should have any bearing on the basic truth that these are political ideas.

And the point we're trying to bring across to you is that it's not Vox Day's political views are the problem, but rather what these political views are the result from.