Brad Johnson/Contributor
That’s it, I am officially scared for the future of science fiction. While watching the Hugo Awards last night, I realized something: that organized fandom doesn’t really care about the genre. Sure you claim to, but when it comes down to it, you only care about the “right” writers, not the genre as a whole. That’s the only explanation I can think of for what happened.
“What happened?” you may be asking. Well I’ll tell you, and I’ll use small words so that you’ll get it.
You Cheered.
When Scalzi delivered a blatantly false and one-sided “explanation” of the Sad Puppies, you cheered
When they introduced the “asterisk” award, which we all know was a left-handed way of calling the SP vote invalid, you cheered.
Four times No- Award was announced and four times, you cheered. Not because the nominees were bad, but because you were angry that they had even made the ballot.
You probably think four no-awards is some kind of victory for your side. That you some how stuck it to us last night. You only stuck it to yourselves, then you broke it off and smiled when you did it.
We saw those no-awards coming from a mile away. By voting no-award, you proved the Sad Puppies’s point. And most of you are too damn stupid to know it.
You’d rather no one win, than see someone you don’t agree with walk across that stage.
We only wanted a fair ballot; real diversity among the Hugos, books by authors who don’t all think the same way. Books that tell stories rather than try to force-feed us messages. But you couldn’t have that.
It was you, not us, who brought the Hugo Awards down last night.
And you cheered while you did it.
Otherwhere Gazette 
If I may pick a nit: Five No-Awards.
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FIVE No Awards, and the schtick with the Dalek showed Gerrold had every intention of making the awards political. He’s a lying sack of bovine excrement. That woman who finished her acceptance speech with “black lives matter” was also showing their true colors.
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I was waiting for mixon to thank Requires Hate in her award speech.
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What gets me about the whole debacle is that, stripped of the polemic, what happened was a that a multi-million dollar corporation managed to hold on to its nigh-monopoly on the awards by slandering a group of authors working on their own initiative, simply by word of mouth. And the folks who gleefully helped this happen probably believe themselves to be fighting on the side of the little guy against the establishment.
Can we just call them the Tor awards? They’ve been buying them for years, I think they have the right to put their name on them.
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I recall a cartoon done where the Hugo rocket was replaced with the TOR red rocket. with the comment, “Might as well, they get it all the time anyway” (or words to similar effect).
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I think we should name them the “Yugo Awards.” Not worth a damn,
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Next time, try writing stuff that isn’t backward drek and porno for ammosexuals.
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Cute, insult writers who seem to be doing better than most of the award winners and calling people with a hobby names. You must really be proud of yourself bubba. Your ignorance is showing.
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So what you’re saying you bright red asshole is that you didn’t read any of it. Fine, we fight until your side stops writing dino porn with just-so Marxism. We’ll see who outlasts whom. Hint, our crowd can give your crowd between twenty and thirty years. We’ll be around to piss on the grave of the last senile CHORF. And we will.
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Ironically, I think most hoplophiles will find the tag “ammosexual” amusing as opposed to insulting. Sadly, I doubt LOL could have realized that without it being pointed out to him/her.
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I think it’s hilarious – and honestly I wish Larry would stop writing quite so much detail about the guns in his MHI books.
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So why the No Award for either editor category? Probably because you were told to by the slate you were following like a good little sheep.
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Oh look! A bigoted Hoplophobic twerp outs itself!
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It’s Astounding just how much you guys Don’t Get It.
You are the Tea Party of Science Fiction, having co-opted both their misogynistic politics and their tactic of projecting their motives into their opponents.
You stack the nominations with gag-worthy rather than award-worthy work in the name of making your political statement, all the while accusing the “SJWs” of themselves acting solely on political grounds.
Well, let me tell you: 5500 Fans stood up to you. They decided that, rather than give their honor to anything that was not up to the standard of quality they expect (without regard to the politics of the author or editor), they would, solely on the basis of lack-of-merit, No Award the categories you hijacked.
5500 Fans is about half the total membership of the Worldcon. That is no clique. That is the COMMUNITY telling you that you are full of it and kicking your sad/rabid little asses to the curb.
On the other hand, you did get many many more fans engaged in the process. Thank you for that.
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hmm, we nominated a number of women and minorities, and you twits managed to make sure a single Jewish mother was no awarded, and WE’RE the misogynists. Hmmm, yeah, you’re full of shit brah.
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Word, PR. They may as well say “why did you make me have to do that to you, baby?”
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I must’ve missed the misogyny in all of Larry Correia’s posts on the issue, and the way they nominated all those … women.
(And “not award worthy”? Annie Bellet’s short would have made it in even without the Puppies vote, according to the Wired article on this fiasco – she dropped her nomination to not be associated with Vox Day, and who can really blame her?
But plainly it must be “award worthy” by your own standards, if it had enough votes anyway.)
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Not George, I see you are also not logical. 5500 was the total votes cast from the approximately 11,000 eligible. Apparently over half of the fans didn’t care either way. Of that number apparently about 2500 block voted “no award”. Because of the OUTRAGEOUS block voting that the puppies were supposed to be doing. Try to think about that whilst considering that the puppies were all over the place because we voted what we liked. What we READ. Unlike you and yours ,who wore your ignorance with pride that you’re voting no award because. ..well since I can’t fathom the mindset of a drone. I would have to ask you how you reconcile your hypocrisy in disdaining works you haven’t read, smearing people you don’t know , and applauding the lynching of choice and creativity. Hopefully you’ll start thinking for yourself someday.
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I’m a little befuddled by these numbers… 5500 voting in a bloc; 11000 total… out of, what, 500,000,000 English speaking SF fans?
Methinks we need to increase the voting quantity here, by at least a factor of 10, if not 100.
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You gotta be a Worldcon member to get a Hugo vote.
Me, I’m not blowing money on a con membership to vote in a popularity contest I don’t care about; let the Hugo die its natural death, finally.
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More ignorance. This time of the Hugo voting process and results. Minor nit on the preceeding comment, though, the no award block was 4500
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Who guess what, true fandom has shit all over. We are getting tired with all this self entitled crap you people keep spewing. “It was all about principles,” and “against slates.” All the while it’s been obvious that the ONLY criteria you puppy kickers had was the approval of the kickers and yes, you people were slating all over the place, but somehow our votes don’t matter because we were somehow not trufans and our nominations were, somehow not worthy. This from the people who nominated that unreadable POS “The World Turned Upside Down.” And even when you win, you have to continue to be jerks. Well good for you. Well wake up and smell the coffee, because SFF is dying and you people are the ones responsible.
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Naw, SFF isnt’ dying, we won the culture war, geek culture and SFF are mainstream. It’s fat dinosaurs like the Neilsen Hayden and bum lickers like not George here who don’t get it.
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5500 stood up to us? oh horse shit. math must never have been your strong suit
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Math is the nemesis of SJWs. Oh, math, chronology and history. Oh, and literacy. But other than that they’re the future. Or at least progressives told them so.
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Math and honesty aren’t your strong suits, are they?
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The ‘Tea Party’ of SF. That is a label I would be proud of. The Tea Party, quiet peaceful assembly, Nancy Pelozi trying for a racial slur and can’t get it, protest parks left cleaner than when they arrived.
Fans like you. Occupy Wall Street? Defecating on Police Cars? Raping women in tents? Perhaps screaming “Black Lives Matter” to interrupt a political speech? You wouldn’t know ‘diversity’ if it smacked you in the face.
(P.S. I tried to ‘like’ Misha’s post, but apparently logging in by facebook not wordpress it apparently considers my vote ‘worthless’)
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Let me guess, you didn’t read any of the nominated works in the categories you voted no award for… Which means this wasn’t “solely on the basis of lack-of-merit” but on your prejudices and biases. If it was about lack of merit, you would actually have to read the nominees to know.
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Who wants to read books where their way of life is routinely castigated? Note print journalism’s death… People read Sci-Fi to escape.. not read someone else’s insane moral judgments. The only people who can stand a SJW is another SJW. Pay heed to gamergate.. pay heed.
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“You are the Tea Party of Science Fiction, having co-opted both their misogynistic politics and their tactic of projecting their motives into their opponents.”
Think you got the Tea Party confused with your progressive democrat party. The Tea Party has been motivated by one issue- demanding fiscal responsibility from our elected officials. To that end, the Tea Party people have endorsed a range of candidates including women, blacks, Hispanics and gays. On the other side of the ledger, the democrat party has offered the oft-indicted terminally deceitful liar Hillary Clinton and her disgusting husband, socialist jerk-off Bernie Sanders, and now they’re trying to activate septuagenarian establishment kapos, Biden, Warren and Brown. All old white anti-American fossils of the sick sixties. As far as projection goes, when you hear a democrat complain about a dirty trick, a lie or a deception, you can follow the trail back to the slime-pit of the DNC.
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The tea party of sf. Using the same misogynistic tactics. You are showing ignorance of both the tea party and the sad puppies at the same time. Plus bigotry, but that usually comes as a ride-along with ignorance.
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I won’t claim to understand the vote counting, but I’m not seeing where you get 5500. It looks more like 3500 to me.
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Leftist math, they don’t do any of that patriarchal adding and subtracting, it’s racist.
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Summer of Recovery, man. Same math.
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In regard to some of the claims made, I’d just like to note that someone of no small perspicacity said, “SJWs always lie.”
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The Sad Puppies “crime” had been that they brought attention to and made the Hugo Award more relevant than it has been in decades. They brought in new members, increasing the voting population on both sides of the spectrum, which means more paying membership and more Con attendance, a positive for most organizations. However, the Hugo “purists” who feel this is their private preserve, view this increase as an intrusion by the peasantry who read books without the appropriate packet of litmus tests, since the start the “purists” have said the new members were not “true fans” of Sci-Fi or that they are “the wrong sort of members”.
Consider for a second if the Sad Puppies used that type of language, the outrage Tsunami that developed would be monumental yet when the Hugo “purists” make the comment their friends in the media just nod in approval.
The supremely ironic part of this, is that the Hugo “purists” have in their outrage over the increased membership brought in by the Sad Puppies rendered themselves a crude facsimile of an old boy clubs in the post-Jim Crow era who would rather let themselves go out of business than accept a new member whose particulars were not to their liking.
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From http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/
As Brad Torgersen, one of the Sad Puppy leaders told me, he and his compatriots “could care less about a silver rocket ship that looks like a marital aid.”
and Ted Beale is quoted as saying
“I have 390 sworn and numbered vile faceless minions—the hardcore shock troops—who are sworn to mindless and perfect obedience,” he said, acknowledging that his army wasn’t made up solely of sci-fi fans. On the contrary, “the people who are very anti-SJW said, ‘Okay, we want to get in on this.’” When I asked him how he might deploy those people in the future, he continued, “It’s very simple. The dark lord speaks, the minion acts.”
Seems a lot of fuss being made by people who say they don’t care.
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I can’t help but read that entire Beale quote (“mindless and perfect obedience”, “the dark lord speaks”) as taking the piss on the entire situation.
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Rather than “No Award”, which lacks a cool SF name, how about the “Not of the Body” award?
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Strange marketplace you have here, strange marketplace. I’ve been reading and buying SF & F books since I was 14 years old, one of those crazy fans who had over 1,000 SF/F books on my shelves by age 20. (I know, books and shelves are passe’, but hopefully you get the idea.)
I’ve seen the change in the product, and you the providers have suffered as I stopped buying…from 10 books a month to 5 to 1 to a few a year. So as your customer, one of those key consumers who makes the difference in whether you make a profit or not (you know the kind that recommend a great read to 20 friends, and goes through enough books to find those great reads), let me ask an important question: are you writing to be read and make money or not?
I am not interested in your stories for their sex scenes, whether the sentients have one set of genitals, multiple sets, the same sets or different sets. If I want to read romance, I’ll pick a book from that category. And if I wanted to read soft porn, I wouldn’t be coming to SF/F authors.
While I like good character development, again I’m won’t be coming to SF/F to delve into serious relationship angst, gender identity angst, and genitalia confusion.
When I was a teen, scifi opened up a vision of the skies and the future. It created excitement about science, and yes delved into possibilities of where science could take us.
Much of today’s scifi should have an R rating and seems focused on opening doors to things best kept private in the bedroom. And I certainly won’t let my teenagers read it! And if they did, they won’t be getting inspired about the future, will they?
Once again, how are those profits going? Enjoy your awards, or avoiding giving them or whatever. There was a day when I would pay attention to such, but that was 30 years ago.
Provide inspiration, science possibilities, and the future, and I will be your customer and advertise you everywhere.
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The Hugos are just the latest visible institution to be afflicted by Robert Conquest’s Second Law. The dynamic is both easy to understand and absolutely unstoppable:
1. Leftists have no moral constraints and love power above all things.
2. The amoral power-seeker has a huge advantage over others in the acquisition of power.
3. Any organization that has any sort of rules of membership or operation is a power-concentrating entity.
4. Thus, Leftists will seek to dominate any and every organization, no matter how small, if only to keep anyone else from doing so…and their natural advantage will guarantee them eventual success.
The only thing one can do to oppose it is to “pre-politicize” your institution against it, which is a form of self-defeat.
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I’ll simply ready what I like without regard to Hugo, or Tor. Most of what I like is more often found on Baen anyway.
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[…] Related: And you cheered: […]
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Ammosexuals will beat metrosexuals every time.
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If nothing else, we will out-survive them.
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