Sad Puppies vs SJW's

[Combat Wombat]

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/23/set-phasers-to-kill-sjws-burn-down-the-hugo-awards-to-prove-how-tolerant-and-welcoming-they-are/

http://thefederalist.com/2015/08/24/the-hugo-awards-why-the-waronnerds-is-a-war-on-art/

 

It seems the totalitarion SJW's don't think anyone who isn't on their "ideologically approved" list should recieve a Hugo award and would rather burn the whole thing down.

[Nolder]

I think the fallout has yet to be realized.

 

The same number of No Awards in one night as the entire history of the Hugos.

John C. Wright quitting Tor, delaying publication of his book series indefinitely since he's under contract.

Jim Butcher being ranked below No Award.

Cedar Sanderson dropping out of the fight altogether in fear of her career.

Asterisk awards, diversity white as snow, etc.

[Combat Wombat]

I had started this topic in the D&D thread because it definitely about political ideologies. Why should only those approved by the far left SJWs be eligible to win professional awards?

[Nolder]

I'm sorry but I think it's been proven that the Hugo is not a professional award.

Any meaning it might have once held is long since gone.

[CUBAREY]

I'm sorry but I think it's been proven that the Hugo is not a professional award.

Any meaning it might have once held is long since gone.

True enough except that the SJW's still tout them as THE SCI-FI/Fantasy Award. It's a bit said as at one time when Sci-fi.fantasy was a minor gendre it was the Award but by the late 1960's early 1970's it became increasingly the toy of the SJW's who hand it out to each other on the bases of hw PC they can be.

[Nolder]

 

I'm sorry but I think it's been proven that the Hugo is not a professional award.

Any meaning it might have once held is long since gone.

True enough except that the SJW's still tout them as THE SCI-FI/Fantasy Award. 

And Puppies will continue to discredit that lie and call them to account.

A lot of people think it's over. It's far from over.

[Combat Wombat]

This is a real good quote about it.

 

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/212756/#respond

When I’m looking for escapism, the last thing I want is for it to preach to me.

If somebody wants to be preached at, ok. Gofer it.

For a group to dictate, as the SJW's have done, that awards given by merit must include the preaching or  that the author adhere to their political-social beliefs is beyond the pale.

[Senexx]

I can't get past the breitbart primary pop-up & this could have been interesting if  an impartial analysis was given instead of vitriol from two far right-wing rags.  I had no prior knowledge to reading this, no idea what sjw stands for etc etc

 

 

What’s the difference between ISIS and social justice warriors? Well, one recruits its members from the most pathetic, disaffected, pathological members of society, claims to stand against shadowy conspiracies and bullying by the West, and destroys revered cultural institutions in fits of fanaticism.

The others are unhinged terrorists in the Middle East?

 

Over the past year, the social justice movement, which at one point had set itself up as an insurmountable cultural juggernaut, bent on remaking every art form or subculture in its own image, has degenerated into a farce. That farce reached new heights this past Saturday night, when the voters of the prestigious Hugo Awards, in a fit of ideologically-motivated pique, refused to give any awards at all in no less than five different categories – including Best Short Story and Best Novella. As context, the Hugos had only refused to offer an award in any category five times in the award’s 60 year history.

 

The above quote is a complete turn-off and lessens the interest anyone has in the author's opinion, unless of course you already identify with the author's world view.

 

The message is lost.

[Nolder]

I can't get past the breitbart primary pop-up & this could have been interesting if  an impartial analysis was given instead of vitriol from two far right-wing rags.  I had no prior knowledge to reading this, no idea what sjw stands for etc etc

 

 

What’s the difference between ISIS and social justice warriors? Well, one recruits its members from the most pathetic, disaffected, pathological members of society, claims to stand against shadowy conspiracies and bullying by the West, and destroys revered cultural institutions in fits of fanaticism.

The others are unhinged terrorists in the Middle East?

 

Over the past year, the social justice movement, which at one point had set itself up as an insurmountable cultural juggernaut, bent on remaking every art form or subculture in its own image, has degenerated into a farce. That farce reached new heights this past Saturday night, when the voters of the prestigious Hugo Awards, in a fit of ideologically-motivated pique, refused to give any awards at all in no less than five different categories – including Best Short Story and Best Novella. As context, the Hugos had only refused to offer an award in any category five times in the award’s 60 year history.

 

The above quote is a complete turn-off and lessens the interest anyone has in the author's opinion, unless of course you already identify with the author's world view.

 

The message is lost.

Try this: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/sad-puppies

 

Know your meme is scarily neutral and well sourced considering it's just a website to track internet jokes.

[Nolder]

Combat Wombat you should join us on /r/TorInAction if you have vested interest in fighting SJWs or specifically in the Puppy campaigns.

[Werthead]

I can't get past the breitbart primary pop-up & this could have been interesting if  an impartial analysis was given instead of vitriol from two far right-wing rags.  I had no prior knowledge to reading this, no idea what sjw stands for etc etc

 

There are two viewpoints on this:

 

1. That science fiction fantasy fandom has been taken over by "social justice warriors" who value things like diversity and progressive politics over the good old-fashioned storytelling of the winners of yesteryear, which clearly never contained these things, and good books are devalued if they do not feature gay people, POC etc or are about some kind of social issue rather than say being a rollicking good adventure, or focusing more on SF ideas. This is the viewpoint taken by the "sad puppies": that message fiction is now valued more than entertainment, and that very good books with good characterisation, plot developments etc are being neglected in favour of weaker books that focus on a political viewpoint or gender/sexuality-based theme.

 

2. That science fiction and fantasy is now part of the 21st Century where we have a diverse world and books and authors which do not reflect that can come across as dated, tired and scientifically implausible (any SF writer who now writes a novel set 100 years hence in which white people are still the dominant force on Earth is completely ignoring demographics, for example, and therefore isn't being true to the spirit of the genre). It is also not true that you must have either "message fiction" or "good stories", and that the very best stories, which the Hugos honour, will have elements of both. This goes from both the left (authors like Scalzi, Gaiman, Martin etc) - and from the right (authors like Heinlein, Card and so on). This it the position taken by the "SJWs" (Social Justice Warriors) or progressive SFF fans.

 

The waters have been muddied because the Hugo Awards definitely got a bit more cliquey towards the end of the 1990s and into the early and mid 2000s. A lot of familiar names kept appearing on the lists regardless of if they'd written anything good or not (Charles Stross, Neil Gaiman, Connie Willis, David Langford, more recently John Scalzi and Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant). This wasn't because of secret cabals or bloc-voting, but because Hugo voters tended to be a fairly unimaginative bunch and used the same reading lists and forums as their peers. Things got distressingly incestuous for a while. That became more of a known issue around the turn of the decade and since then, helped especially by people like Gaiman and Martin evangelising about the awards and getting younger people on board, things have improved a little bit.

 

However, things blew up in the last couple of years. Seanan McGuire, writing as Mira Grant, got two pretty medicore novels nominated for Best Novel for two years running and John Scalzi won in 2013 for his Star Trek pastiche/tribute Redshirts. Connie Willis, a genuinely great author when she's on form (she more deservedly won in 1993 for the excellent Doomsday Book), won in 2011 for her terrible duology Blackout/All-Clear. None of these books should have been on a longlist, let alone a shortlist or winning anything, and were clearly nominated and won due to being "in the club" rather than being any good. At the same time, a whole bunch of good SF was losing out. Blackout/All-Clear beat Ian McDonald's superb The Dervish House and Scalzi beat Kim Stanley Robinson's return to widescreen, big-idea SF with 2312 (whilst David Brin's very fine Existence wasn't even nominated). Other good SF authors weren't even being nominated, like Peter F. Hamilton (a near-constant source of excellent ideas, strong characters and great action for over 20 years who's never even been longlisted) or the brilliant Alastair Reynolds.

 

Things really came to a head last year at the London Worldcon when Ancillary Justice, a space opera about a splinter society where gender is not recognised as a differential, won the Best Hugo Award. It's actually a pretty good book, but people grumbled because it beat The Wheel of Time, which was up for effectively a lifetime achievement award (never having been nominated before, the entire series was eligible for an award). There was also a feeling that Ancillary Justice was being voted for as a riposte to people complaining about the "left-wing" slant in Hugo politics.

 

The position taken by authors Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen, the effective architects of the Sad Puppies campaign this year (although others did some of the other grunt work), was to produce a slate and to get people to bloc-vote on it. Some of the people on their slate were pretty damn good, like Jim Butcher. Some were absolutely terrible, like lifelong hackjob writer Kevin J. "Destroyer of Dune" Anderson. This year the stars aligned and they managed to get some of their slate on the lists. This wasn't a huge problem in itself, as the two sides kind of disagreed with each other but at least could have civil conversations, such as those undertaken by George R.R. Martin and Correia on their respective blogs, and people like Eric Flint did a good job of taking a middle ground between the two.

 

What rolled a hand grenade into proceedings was a guy called Theodore Beale, who goes by the name "Vox Day". Beale is a self-declared trouble-maker, attention-seeker and troll, thrown out of several SF organisations after making outright racist comments about authors of colour. Beale created a second front in the campaign called "Rabid Puppies." Unlike the SPs, who (for the most part) seem to have simply wanted a different Hugo list to the "usual suspects" that reflect more popular opinion, Beale made it clear that his goal was to destroy the Hugo Awards and make them untenable by putting very right-wing and controversial authors like John C. Wright (a born-again Christian who argues against the equality of women) on the slate. The irony here of course is that John C. Wright can be a very good author, but often lets his religious and political viewpoints interfere with his storytelling and drag it down into being message fiction, which was kind of the thing that was being fought about in the first place.

 

What happened next was chaos. The more moderate SPs were apparently horrified by Beale joining the party, but they also wanted their cause to gain more traction, so sort-of reluctantly allowed Beale to take over when it became clear that Beale was able to marshal a lot of people to his cause (Beale was also involved in the Gamergate kerfuffle of last year, and mobilised a lot of people from that cause to get on board the Rabid Puppy train). That poisoned the well and turned it all into an online war. The SPs were (unfairly) all accused of being racist, sexist etc because of their association with the RPs who were openly so, and it all got quite nasty.

 

At the actual awards, the progressive SF fans curb-stormed the Rabid Puppy nominations, choosing a scorched earth policy of voting "No Award" above a lot of deserving winners simply because they'd appeared on the SP/RP slates. To be fair, a lot of the more prominent activists on the progressive side actually decried this move (most notably George R.R. Martin, who got pretty annoyed with his own supporters for doing it) as being counter-productive.

 

One irony in all of this is that the Best Novel winner, The Three-Body Problem, had actually been the preferred winner of just about everyone on all sides of the equation, since it was an old-school, old-fashioned alien invasion story but written by a Chinese author in Chinese (making it the first-ever translated novel to win the Best Hugo Novel) and riffing on Chinese history and the Cultural Revolution. So, at least in that category, everyone won.

 

The main fall-out from the award is that the way the Hugos are voted on and chosen is hideously outdated and no longer relevant in the modern world, and that must be changed so the award stays more representative and relevant without being gamed by anyone on any side. That's been a massive problem for years, so whatever side of the argument you fall on, at least that now is probably going to change.

 

The final irony is that for the general SFF fan, the Hugos are completely irrelevant, do almost nothing to help sales any more and no-one really gave a toss about them until this year when all the fuss made them headline news.

[Shad_]

I can't get past the breitbart primary pop-up & this could have been interesting if  an impartial analysis was given instead of vitriol from two far right-wing rags.  I had no prior knowledge to reading this, no idea what sjw stands for etc etc

Yeah, I was planning to read it because none of these terms mean anything to me and I'm curious, but when I was forced to select which republican I would like to see as our next president before I could continue, I took it for granted that it would be a heavily biased propaganda piece and didn't waste my time.

[Shad_]

Wow, Werthead, you should publish this stuff.    Cool, I feel informed now.  

[Nolder]

I think a lot could be said about your post in Wert (mostly in terms of needing citation for claims) but one point absolutely needs correcting I think as I have first hand knowledge. Vox had little to nothing to do with bringing in members of Gamergate to the Puppy controversy. That honor belongs to Brianna Wu.

[Nolder]

 

I can't get past the breitbart primary pop-up & this could have been interesting if  an impartial analysis was given instead of vitriol from two far right-wing rags.  I had no prior knowledge to reading this, no idea what sjw stands for etc etc

Yeah, I was planning to read it because none of these terms mean anything to me and I'm curious, but when I was forced to select which republican I would like to see as our next president before I could continue, I took it for granted that it would be a heavily biased propaganda piece and didn't waste my time.

 

Which terms do you need defined?

[Shad_]

 

 

I can't get past the breitbart primary pop-up & this could have been interesting if  an impartial analysis was given instead of vitriol from two far right-wing rags.  I had no prior knowledge to reading this, no idea what sjw stands for etc etc

Yeah, I was planning to read it because none of these terms mean anything to me and I'm curious, but when I was forced to select which republican I would like to see as our next president before I could continue, I took it for granted that it would be a heavily biased propaganda piece and didn't waste my time.

 

Which terms do you need defined?

 

 

You and Wert covered it.  SJW was throwing me off because I thought it was referring to an actual organization.

[Werthead]

Wow, Werthead, you should publish this stuff.    Cool, I feel informed now.  

 

Meh, I tend to stay out of this kind of stuff because I like writing about science fiction and fantasy, not writing about people who are writing about people who are causing drama which 99.99% of humanity has got absolutely no interest or time for, especially when it ties into the ongoing American self-identification crisis (which, as a Brit, I find interesting/bewildering to watch but less so to get involved in; we have our own equivalent going on here but at vastly reduced levels of vitriol).

 

From a sociological viewpoint, it's interesting stuff, certainly.

 

You and Wert covered it.  SJW was throwing me off because I thought it was referring to an actual organization.

 

No, it was an attempt at being derogatory, but it kind of backfired because justice, social or otherwise, is something that most people would aspire to. It's more telling about the person who uses it than the person it's being used against.

[Nolder]

we have our own equivalent going on here but at vastly reduced levels of vitriol).

EDL and UKIP say hello.

 

No, it was an attempt at being derogatory, but it kind of backfired because justice, social or otherwise, is something that most people would aspire to. It's more telling about the person who uses it than the person it's being used against.

They call themselves Social Justice Warriors long before anyone else did. We just mocked them for it after the fact.

 

Edit: to clarify, since I'm not sure Wert really comprehends what a Social Justice Warrior is and may be judging the book by it's cover, a Social Justice Warrior doesn't care about social justice. Social Justice is a smokescreen to bully anyone who says or does things a social justice warrior doesn't like. They come up with convoluted reasons why such things are harmful or racist or sexist or some other type of big bad scary ist. An example can be seen in the concept of microaggressions. A Social Justice Warrior will conduct twitter activism on the issue of microagressions in college classrooms in the United States. Meanwhile people who are actually concerned with human equality are in places like Afghanistan protecting women who choose to go to school from getting acid thrown on their faces. That's an easily identifiable difference between an SJW and everyone else. They are concerned with minute things that may or may not even be real while crimes against humanity aren't even on their radar.

[Werthead]

Like I said, it's a phrase that's more telling about those who use it than those it is used against. In general, it could be said that someone who uses the term "SJW" is generally only interested in having a strawman discussion utilising obfuscation (the primary internet debating tool of the 2010s) and ad hominem rather than any substantive debate on the actual substance of the issue. OTOH, it is a handy acronym.

 

It's a shame, as it was with GG, because their are arguments on in both cases that have merits (the Hugos have been screwed for years; gaming journalism has had massive, massive problems with conflicts of interest raging through it for almost the entire 35-odd years it's been around) but it's almost impossible to get to the core of the arguments due to the surrounding chaos.

 

I think that's as far as I want to engage in that discussion. For an alternative take to the puppy narrative, I would recommend George R.R. Martin's lengthy and numerous blog entries on the subject starting with this one. Eric Flint also has a pretty good series of articles starting here. Flint is interesting because he was held up as an example of the type of downtrodden military SF writer ignored by the Hugo clique, something which he actually didn't really care about but then got embroiled in.

[Senexx]

OK.  Both sides are in the wrong.

 

What's good is also subjective.

 

However, when one continues to stir the pot, instead of looking for solutions as Wert has said its about drama for drama's sake.  (Abbreviations are not acronyms [they form words e.g. SCUBA] but acronyms are abbreviations or more accurately both are initialisms; sorry one of my pet hates)

 

Storm in a teacup & will remain so until both sides are willing to embrace change.

PS.  I'll attempt to find a copy of Ancillary Justice and give it a read.  However as a space opera if it is anything like the Star Wars movie series (but in novel form) it will get a big thumbs down from me.

[WWWwombat]

I didn't know much about any of this, but I have found the Hugos to be increasingly irrelevant of late.  I agree with what Wert said about message and quality both being important.  Ideally, the books that should be winning awards should combine the pure enjoyment found in more pulpy SFF works with something more meaningful like the social commentary that turned SF into a serious literary genre.  Personally, I don't care about an author's politics as long as they don't infest his/her work too much and he/she knows how to write a novel.  I disagree with a lot of Orson Scott Card's political views, but love his books.  Terry Goodkind on the other hand, makes me want to vomit.

[Red2111]

for me, i read SFF for escapism, not for a message or ideology; so to me, plot & story > message or making sure you have a token gay or transgender character to stay relevant with the current social issues.

 

sometimes you get a great SFF book that also has a great message and social relevance woven in (like OSC's Empire Series or Orwell's Animal Farm) but it shouldn't be thrown in for the sake of "see i'm open minded about gay rights, theres a gay character in my series"

 

which is exactly what i feel JKR did with Dumbledore <_<

 

 

at any rate, i think an author should not be forced to incorporate a list of "relevant items" into their story.  you can tell when narrative is forced rather than natural and most times its so jarring that it distracts from a good story.  and an author should measure their success by how many books they sell, not by winning some arbitrary award.

 

edit - and actually, i think throwing in a "token social character" to showcase ones open mindedness on a social issue actually reflects worse on the author then not including one at all.