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No Award at the Hugos
Well, if you’ve been following the Sad Puppies story, the votes are in. Rather than swallowing their pride and liking something on the merits, the Social Justice Warriors out of spite voted for no awards to be given in several categories.
Before the Hugos were a proxy for politics, they were about good science fiction. I’ve got a book on my shelf, or in a box, or maybe my brother has it, that is a compilation of Hugo winning stories from the ’50s and ’60s. Some of the stories are fantastic, amongst the greatest things I’ve ever read. Some aren’t all that great in my estimation, but they got the award because other people disagreed with me. It’s about the science fiction, not about the politics, right?
Even if it isn’t about the politics on the surface, it usually is in the end. It seems a group of people realized that A) it’s a major career boost to have that “Hugo Award Winning” on your dust jacket, and B) A relatively small group of people could swing the voting one way or another. And so the Hugos in recent years have gone to a small, poorly written, and overwhelmingly leftist set of stories.
The Sad Puppies slate, more than anything else, was about putting the science fiction back into the awards. Not every story can be “Flowers for Algernon,” but we can do better. The Rabid Puppies, on the other hand, were about extracting revenge. They’re looking to push right-leaning authors, and rub the whiny leftists’ faces in it. As a fan of the genre, I don’t think obsessive right-wing literature will be much better than obsessive leftist trash, but as a culture warrior I appreciate the fight-to-the-last-breath mentality.
Which brings us back to “No Award.” The triumphant Breitbart article I linked up top is calling this a win. Quoting from Vox Day (who, if you haven’t been following along, leads the Rabid Puppies):
The SJWs will try to portray this as a victory – they would try to portray suicide by self-cannibalism as a victory – but anyone who knows anything about history understands the significance of one side resorting to burning down its own houses in order to deny it to the enemy. That is a defensive tactic borne of desperation.
Maybe, but the first historical example I think of is Napoleon’s army reaching the ashes of Moscow. Tactics born of desperation can be pretty dangerous. As the saying goes “If you’re not willing to shell your own position, you’re not willing to win.” It may be that the future of science fiction will be this sort of proxy political knife fight.
If you want to see the future of science fiction in person, you can get your front-row seats at next summer’s WorldCon in Kansas City. If you’re joining the metaphorical knife fight, remember the first rule: Bring a metaphorical gun. And the second rule: bring lots of friends with metaphorical guns. What better friends to back you up in a sci-fi gunfight than other Ricochetti? Join us for the Ricochet WorldCon Meetup while you cast your vote for next year’s Hugos. Or just attend the meetup. Because frankly, Ricochet Meetups by themselves are pretty awesome.
Published in Literature
Yeah, what is Qadgop’s view on Vogon poetry? Could he still slurp neutronium armor after hearing a few lines?
From the first link in the OP, the best one-sentence summary of today’s Left I’ve ever read:
Daft as a brush but very very Ravenous.
By the way. Schlock Mercenary is awesome. Howard Tayler is a machine.
“How far do you think you can throw an antimatter hand grenade anyway?”
“Well, if you attach a gravity nullifier to it…”
I disagree with the OP on one point. Obsessive right-wing literature is much better than obsessive leftist trash.
But politics is best left out of awards like the Hugo, as much as humanly possible. The Left Hand of Darkness is an excellent and provocative book, even if it does tilt to the left.
I’m glad to see so many Ringo fans here at Ricochet. I really liked the Troy Rising series and the first couple of books of the Aldenata series.
I’ve never been able to get into Weber, except the Starfire series that he wrote with Tim White (Insurrection, Crusade, In Death Ground, and The Shiva Option).
My older son (the Marine) loves Ringo and read (or listened to) everything he could find. Just last week, I directed him to the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, which he is greatly enjoying (as I knew he would). The Vorkosigan books are good scifi and excellent humor.
Larry Correia: “Sad Puppies 3: Looking at the Results“
After reading this and getting depressed about what it says about mankind, I’ll throw this out there:
So the hard-core Leftist sci-fi fans are strategic idiots, apparently, doing their most-hated enemy’s work for him.
I remember when I was a kid and I thought sci-fi showed us the way forward. Now I’m an adult, and instead of living in Star Trek it’s a combination of Animal Farm and Brave New World.
Or Idiocracy.
BTW, you may have to reload a couple of times to get past the database connection error…
He might barf it back up. Talk about a mess to clean up.
So basically you’re saying that the Hugos have joined the Nobel in being something that Leftists give to each other for the sheer sake of going “Nyah Nyah, you guys can’t have one!”.
I’ve been trying to understand this controversy for some time. I’ve read Sarah Hoyt’s columns on it, and some of the lefty side writings, and I still don’t understand the underlying issue very well. There’s so much heat on both sides, so many claims and counter-claims that it’s hard to figure out what’s going on.
So my take is that one of two things has happened to science fiction:
1. The readership of science fiction has slowly shifted to the left, and as a result the readers tend to not like books that are right-wing or have conservative values. That means the Hugos are dominated by left-wing books and right-wing books are excluded even if the people on the right think they had more artistic merit.
or,
2. There is a small cabal of left-wing activists who have ‘hijacked’ the Hugos and are using them as just another front in the dreary advance of the Social Justice Warriors’ attack on institutions. There’s a conspiracy afoot, and it’s up to the Sad Puppies to fight fire with fire and create a slate of works that are not biased by politics.
If 1) is what’s happening, then I think my answer would be, “oh well… people have a right to vote for the books they enjoy.” It seems to me that science fiction started to shift to the left a long time ago. Early science fiction was dominated by engineers and hard scientists, and the readers were largely male. In the 1960’s that started to shift with the ‘new wave’ that came out of the counter-culture, and science fiction attracted a lot of new female readers. It seems to me that the trend has continued to this day, and science fiction is now largely dominated by lefties who write about right-wing dystopias and use science fiction to illuminate and champion left-wing ideas.
But if it can be shown that there is an Alinsky-ite movement afoot to subvert science fiction, and it’s not just a natural evolution of the field, I can support the Sad Puppies doing something about it. Otherwise… not so much. It is what it is. If SF has organically shifted to the left, the proper answer is to educate people and to write better right-wing fiction that can’t be ignored.
If the Hugos are contaminated because all the voters are intolerant lefties, then support another award – say, the Prometheus awards. Promote the hell out of them. If a Prometheus becomes more valuable for selling books than a Hugo, then the market will punish the lefties for destroying their award system.
John C. Wright appears to believe the conspiracy is named Hayden. But it’s all anonymous sourcing. Hayden is also apparently responsible for Vox Day, Flame Warrior.
There’s a scene in James Michener’s Texas. Sam Houston has come to visit Stephen Austin, who has been released from prison to recover from an illness contracted as a guest of Santa Ana. Houston has previously pledged not to support war so long as Austin is opposed. He begins to comfort Stephen, and talk about their next letter to Santa Ana. Stephan cuts him off.
“No, Sam. War is all that is left. War is our only option. War to the end.” (I paraphrase.)
Having heard the description of the events, I don’t care what the fandom thinks or desires. Burn it down. War to the End.
That’s the way most awards are. O’Sullivan’s Law and all that. The Left is always the instigator in the culture wars, which is why you have to burn things down after they stop being impartial and start over. Best idea for the puppies is to create an alternative sci-fi award, which can establish itself as the serious alternative.
Yeah, I’d love to meet her. As far as Darkship Thieves goes, I wrote about it way back on Ricochet 1.0.
Ringo is very fun to read, but David Weber does battles better. You can see the comparison fairly easily between the third book in the Council Wars series (Against the Tide?) and Weber’s Off Armageddon Reef. Both describe large scale wooden navy battles across an ocean like the Atlantic. But when Weber did it, you knew why the commanders were making their moves. You knew what they knew of the other guy, what secrets they were holding back, and what they were afraid the other guy knew or would find out. I found it a much more satisfying battle. Weber does take his time getting you to the battle though.
The Troy Rising series is my favorite thing I’ve read from John Ringo so far.
A fair point. I’m reading the Wired Article on the awards right now. It takes the anti puppies view. They spend a paragraph discussing this in the broader context of the culture wars. Sample quote:
Funny, I remember that event, but that’s not how I remember it going down. Nor gamergate, in the same paragraph. The article itself is broadly self-contradictory. They talk about how the sad puppies crowd are trying to bring back the proverbial old days when it was engineers in space all the time. Later they talk with an author who declined her nomination because she didn’t want to be anyone’s political football. (Which is fair enough.) The interviewed author is a woman from Portland OR, with everything that implies. She’s a liberal, her adoptive mother was a lesbian, she had a black and a Vietnamese sister, and she recalls getting into fights with people using racist slurs on her sisters. (That Portland must be some kind of bigoted hellhole.) Only if the sad puppies are trying to turn science fiction into 50’s space operas, why did they nominate her in the first place?
But to go to your broader point, it’s possible that Science Fiction has broadly shifted ever to the left. I don’t think so. I think the publishing houses have broadly shifted ever to the left, but that doesn’t mean the fan base has done so. The publishing houses have largely been losing money, and blaming it on the internet, and “people just don’t read anymore.” Except for Baen, who publish pulp military fiction, often with strong right wing themes. They seem to be doing all right.
In the end, we’ve got an institution full of people who publish self indulgent drivel and blame everyone else when they don’t make any money. Sounds like an institution that’s systematically packed itself with leftists to me.
Yeah, that sounds very plausible. O’Sullivan’s law (mentioned by Guy Incognito already) could easily apply here. After all, people that come into science fiction from lit in college are probably 95% liberal in the first place. And they are more likely to be in charge of these publishing houses.
But shouldn’t the market take care of that? As you say, Baen seems to be doing fine, while the ‘lefty’ publishers are going down? If it’s true that there’s a very large conservative audience, then whichever publishing house captures that market should crush the others.
If there’s room in the market place for multiple ideologies, then maybe the answer is to create a new awards system, or endorse one that already exists, like the Prometheus.
And if the Prometheus is worth a lot of money to publishing houses because it attracts a larger audience of viewers, the stature of the Prometheus would rise and more publishing houses would target their authors in that direction.
On the other hand, I certainly appreciate the frustration of having your own treasured institutions captured by people who despise you and are trying to exclude you. I can understand the desire to reclaim it rather than to go away and start over.
Unfortunately, you have to have a strategy for doing that. It looks to me like the Hugos are going to be re-engineered to prevent these kinds of lists and cliques in the future. How do you plan to end the pernicious influence of the left? It seems like a tough chore.
@Dan Hanson
Its a small exclusionary monoculture which behaves for all intents and purposes like a conspiracy without any actual collusion. The reason most organizations try to create some planned diversity within the organization and leadership is to try and eliminate some of the blind spots. The problem is that liberals think they are diverse and really aren’t have nothing but blind spots.
The left has also colonized the middle ware of society. They sit in the communication systems that connect people and present the worlds information with a fun house mirror of crazy.
Larry started the Sad Puppies a few years ago pointing out that the hugos and writers organizations were a small exclusionary monoculture. He nominated works pointing out the left would lose their minds and they did.
So now they have burnt their village down because the wrong types of people moved in.
I would encourage everybody to pay your money and do what your conscience dictates.
Indeed:
Since the Prometheus Awards have been mentioned a couple times I want to put in a link to the list of Prometheus Award winners. The don’t have a bunch of categories like the Hugos, but you can see the Best Novel winners. They are given out by the Libertarian Futurist Society.
Yay but Weber can’t write non-cheesy dialog if his life deepened on it. All his best works are co-writes. He is a great story teller that has some major issues when it comes to writing. His characters are pretty flat to if you have read most of his stuff. That is he does not really have a wide variety of character templates in novels he only writes. However the Starfire series is by far his best.
Weber’s also miserable at writing a romance, but I can forgive it all for his battles.
A friend of mine from college was nominated in one of the “no award” categories and was at the ceremonies (such as they were) on Saturday. It’s infuriating to me to see what should have been a truly great situation for him ruined. [CoC] leftists.