The Hugos

So I’ve been thinking about the whole thing for a few days, and here’s what I keep coming back to:

If a group of fans felt strongly enough about something I wrote, or me as an individual, to organize a voting block that got me nominated, I’d have zero problem with that. So I don’t see how I can, in good conscience, resent fans doing that for others, for whatever reason.

Plus Kevin Anderson is nominated, which is long overdue.

PAD

14 comments on “The Hugos

  1. Be that as it may, I hope you’ll not think me too much the sycophant if I say that your own nomination is overdue.

    1. Yeah, well I’m pretty sure it won’t happen at this point. TIGERHEART, SIR APROPOS OF NOTHING, IMZADI, my Crazy 8 books, all ignored. ARTFUL is just the latest. So I’ve pretty much given up.

      PAD

      1. I wouldn’t mind seeing annual Peter David Awards, or Paddies. (Hey, it could be fun.)

        “The award for Did-It-Before-Joss-Whedon-and-Got-Accused-of-Ripping-Him-Off goes to…”

  2. Sorry, Peter, but I have to disagree with you. Undoubtedly there’ve been movements to get individual items on the ballot. See last year’s “All 15 Volumes Of The Wheel Of Time” for Best Novel (which I voted behind no award because its eligibility as such amounted to rules lawyering looking for a loophole that I know wasn’t intended for this. If they’d just done a campaign to get the final book on, no problem. But since that wasn’t written by Robert Jordan, that apparently wasn’t good enough).

    But, for those campaigns, modulo the Scientology one for Battlefield Earth, I can at least believe that the individuals doing the nominating really do love that particular work. It’s more organization than I like, but the individuals involved do honestly think it’s worthy of a Hugo (hopefully in comparison with other things from the same year, but not a requirement).

    This wasn’t that. The Sad Puppies first asked for recommendations; I’m told for Best Novel, they got about 35…none of which were named on more than 4-5 of the recs. If they’d stopped there with “And these are novels that we think are worthy of a Hugo and of the type of work we think hasn’t been winning. We urge you to consider them when nominating”, no one would have any problem with them.

    Instead, they (probably 2 people, certainly less than 10), reduced that rec list down to a specifically titled by them “slate”, and made sure no category had more recs in it than the maximum allowed number of nominations per category.

    Now, remember when no book on their rec list got named on a significant percentage of recs? Same as the Hugos; it usually takes being on about 10% of the ballots to make it on the final ballot. For the sort of sweep to happen that did, there is no question but that an unheard of number of people turned in exactly the same ballots with respect to the Puppies. In other words, no, what they nominated wasn’t what they individually decided was really fantastic (in some cases, yeah it was. But not in these numbers, and with that much correlation) .

    So this result isn’t “I really loved “. It was “I’m bloc voting to stick it to those nasty Hugo people”. They may have liked individual works on the slate, they may even think all the slate items are good. But I guarantee there’s no way any significant number of people would, based on independent judgment without the slate, who would’ve considered exactly these 50-60 things to all be worth nominating for a Hugo.

    So, because the ballot is so tainted, I’m voting No Award in all but the Fan Artist (the only untainted category, as neither Puppy had items for it on their slates) and graphic story (only one puppy item on the ballot). I’m very sorry for the folk who honestly made the ballot, but can’t honestly be said to have won, if they do, due to not facing whatever their competition would’ve been. And for the folk who made the ballot for the Puppies, but didn’t know about them and/or weren’t asked if they wanted on the slate. But this year’s Hugos are tainted beyond repair as they stand.

    1. George RR Martin has something to say about that.

      “The hardliners propose we vote NO AWARD for everything. Every category, even the ones where the Puppies have no nominees. No Hugo Awards at Sasquan, whatsoever. We’ll show them. Rather than letting them move into our house, we will burn it to the ground. “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” It worked so well in Vietnam.

      All I’ve got to say about this idea is, are you fûçkìņg crazy?”

      1. Yeah, and I disagree with him. Which is fine. Although I think the “are you fûçkìņg crazy” was going a bit far. I think reasonable people are choosing between having the first 15 minute Hugo ceremony (after announcing Fan Artist and Graphic Story and maybe a BDP, co-host David Gerrold says “As for the rest, Noah Ward won all of them. Since that’s my officially registered with the Writers’ Guild pseudonym, I’ll be taking these 12 or so Hugos home. Good night, and enjoy the parties!” And yes, the Noah Ward bit is true per Gerrold), putting all Puppies behind NA, at least sampling everything on the ballot, but expecting to put most Puppies behind NA, ignoring it entirely and voting however things strike their particular preferences, etc.

        And with the exception of continuing a bloc vote of only Puppy items, I can see the rationale for all of them and have no problem with each person making their own decision on the matter.

      2. George RR Martin has something to say about that.

        Yep.

        “I think the Sad Puppies have broken the Hugo Awards, and I am not sure they can ever be repaired.” — George R.R. Martin

      1. The campaigns that created the slates went by the names “Sad Puppies” and “Rabid Puppies”.

  3. That is a view I hadn’t considered, PAD. I can’t say I disagree.

    But after finding links in my morning blogs, and spending too much of the morning reading other blogs, linking all the way back to themselves, and realizing I actually knew some of the people involved, I came to a literal epiphany:

    I haven’t cared what was or was not nominated for a Hugo, ever, until you mentioned you would like one. I haven’t paid attention to what won since the last time I checked out one of those great 70s SF anthologies like “SPECTRUM” from the library. So, 1982, perhaps?

    And that is all the emotional investment I left over. Sorry for all of those I know, on both sides, who are going to die again and again to keep retaking this particular hill.

  4. George R R Martin has made several posts on the subject the last couple of days on his ‘blog’:
    http://grrm.livejournal.com/

    I particularly like this quote:
    “But that’s not what they are doing here, it seems to me. Instead they seem to want to take the Hugos and turn them into their own awards. Hey, anyone is welcome to join worldcon, to become part of worldcon fandom… but judging by the comments on the Torgesen and Correia sites, a lot of the Puppies seem to actively hate worldcon and the people who attend it, and want nothing to do with us. They want to determine who gets the Ditmars, but they don’t want to be Australians.”

    The Puppies are trying to destroy the Hugos, and they dámņ well might succeed.

  5. Here’s the flaw I see in your argument PAD it’s not fans of a particular work or artist to get it nominated it’s an attempt to control to awards them selves if they had picked one work and pushed for it, that’s one thing, but to try and get every nomination, fully aware that they almost want the No Award so they can turn around and play victim.

    That’s something else entirely.

    Something else to take into account that some of them went outside of of SF Fandom and recruited Gamergaters and others who are against “Social Justice Warriors” to Vote

    http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/016194.html#016194

    This isn’t an act of Love it’s an act of Hate.

  6. Two authors have withdrawn their nominations from this year’s Hugo awards.

    “I cannot in good conscience accept an award nomination that I feel I may not have earned solely with the quality of the nominated work.” — Marko Kloos, LINES OF DEPARTURE

    “I am withdrawing because this has become about something very different than great science fiction. I find my story, and by extension myself, stuck in a game of political dodge ball, where I’m both a conscripted player and also a ball. (Wrap your head around that analogy, if you can, ha!) All joy that might have come from this nomination has been co-opted, ruined, or sapped away. This is not about celebrating good writing anymore, and I don’t want to be a part of what it has become.” — Annie Bellet, “Goodnight Stars”

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