A small group of far, far right conservative authors got their knickers in a twist about the SJW(social justice warrior) boogeyman being the reason they don’t win awards, as opposed to generally just being awful.
So they pulled in a bunch of the usual right-wing reactionary crowd, including a lot of Gamergate supporters, and formed a voting bloc to try and rig the Hugos. They failed abysmally, and no puppies-aligned author managed to beat “No award”, barring movie and comic tie-ins that had nowt to do with them anyway.
Now they’re flip-flopping between saying their defeat proves they were right all along, and declaring victory for reasons, wondering why nobody believes them. The Hugos are putting measures in place to prevent such antics in the future.
Some racist/sexist/homophobic dudes under the banners of “Sad Puppies” and “Rabid Puppies” got mad that sci-fi keeps having all these stupid dumb social messages instead of just being about ROCKETS and LASERS and ALIENS like in the good old days, and called upon all jerks everywhere to rise up and vote for their specific slate of nominees for the Hugos. This worked even though they were a small minority of voters, because everyone else was voting across the whole spectrum of sci-fi from the last year, and the Puppies were voting in a bloc. Surprising no one but them, they were thoroughly trounced in the final votes.
It’s what Vox Day claimed he wanted. From the Wired article:
In our telephone call a few weeks back, Beale explained that his plan was a “Xanatos gambit.” “That’s where you set it up so that no matter what your enemy does, he loses and you win.”
So, yeah. Anyway, expect the awards to become less easy to game assuming the rule changes proposed this year are re-ratified next year. There’s just this one more year to worry about.
Ah, you are confused. The three magazines reviewed stuff, they serialized stuff. they received letters-- functioning much like a podcast does today-- except in print.If Analog said an author was great, they were speaking to and with a much larger fanbase than the Hugos. That’s all I meant.
Which it is. Few people who aren’t steeped like a teabag in the Subculture Wars are even aware that something like GG exists. Outside of the audience of specialized media the awareness is around zero.
I polled a couple friends, including a few who play games, and confirmed the hypothesis with a high degree of reliability.
It is just another teapot rattling with a small tempest, in the vast cupboard of internet outrages.
Why are you expecting everybody to track the same things you do?
Apparently I don’t have enough ideological purity. And not enough emotional investment in The Important Causes. And no participation in ritualistic group denunciations of The Bad Ones.
Quite a lot of postwar tech progress in the US, especially in aerospace and chemistry, has distinct German accent. You may like to give credit where it belongs.
[EDIT: not actually quoting myself above, but @EylerWerve’s response to my original post–sorry.]
A bunch of “no awards” were the second-best possible outcome for the Puppies, although they might be too dumb to realize it. And it was a terrible outcome for everyone else.
Imagine this happening at the Oscars. Let’s say a radical faction of movie-haters or culture-jammers were able to seize control of the nominating process and voting rules, and the Best Picture noms went to:
Atlas Shrugged Part III: Who Is John Galt?
Left Behind
God’s Not Dead
The Expendables 3
Transformers: Age of Extinction
Gone Girl
[no award]
Would anyone be saying that the Oscars were more trustworthy guides as to what was a good movie if nobody won? If Gone Girl won, would people be saying, “Aha! This was truly the best and most deserving movie of the year!” Or would they be openly wondering if it were merely the only pretty good movie to slip past the blockade of crap?
The point is, it’s not that the “good” Hugo voters can’t shout down, outflank, and decertify the “bad” ones–although they couldn’t this time, because this is not a victory for the anti-Puppy side. It’s just that the award is now of less value as a buying guide than reading a few blog posts about cool books someone liked. Pretty much all I learned from this year’s nominations is which Puppy-favored authors I never need to bother reading. I guess that’s not nothing, but there are easier and surer ways to pick which books are worth a shot.
Given that you basically posted the same information I did, only less helpful, more assholish, and long after the fact, you shouldn’t pat yourself on the back too hard.
Given that @scottbp made an excellent point about why simply googling wasn’t the best choice in this case, your comment wasn’t even informative. What was it you said about people being idiots or lazy…?
I have the suspicion that would have won anyway. The movie was excellent, and its gotten a lot of love from all quarters. Even if it wasn’t the best movie on the slate, its was pretty much a lock before the puppies got to it, just based on the vast level of support for the movie pretty much everywhere you look. And it doesn’t really fit in with a lot of the stuff their slate was designed to push. Marvel has been making a lot of noise about doing exactly what the puppies are up in arms about (though their clearly moving too slow, and Guardians wasn’t really a part of it). As such I’d say it makes sense to consider it as not really a part of their slate. They appear to have picked it for the same reason anyone else would. Its a hell of a lot of fun, and I’m going to have to watch it later.
This is kind of a moot point (see my edit above), but my issue wasn’t about trying to convince the zealots, it was concern for providing a talking point that might be used to add FUD when the MRAs address others who aren’t familiar with the issue.
Well, I’ll give this to Mr. Day–he may be a hateful, nihilistic trolley, but the above proves conclusively that he’s also a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool nerd.
I had to laugh. That sounds so much like my 10th grade self explaining to my friends why I lost yet another game of Axis and Allies. From here on out, every time I encounter something he’s said or written, I’m going to hear it in the voice of Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.
This is somewhat correct. For example, at its peak Escape Pod had more listeners than all of the print runs of Analog, Asimov’s, and FSF but never got the recognition it deserved but neither Eley published the same amount of original content.
The Hugos are determined by a group of people belonging to a convention with a long history. That is what it makes it interesting. More participation would be welcome, more nominations, more votes, more ideas and more bodies on site or as supporting memberships… But not as slates, not as political parties…
