This has probably been coming on for a while and I’ve just not noticed, but it seems like a lot of organizations are announcing awards for SFF, or that nominations are open for their awards, etc. This is an awesome development, as it provides recognition for authors who are worthy. Some of these don’t look like mainstream awards, either, which provides a spot for people who are a little off-beat to find an audience and get a little promotion.
However. I see today that DragonCon has announced they will give out awards in 2016. This is kind of a biggie. DragonCon is a huge convention, with an annual on-site attendance of about 70,000 people. The press release says the awards will be based on nominations and votes from all fans, not just attendees or members, through an open system. They’re apparently going to run this off their Website where voters can register to vote.
Contrast this attendance figure with WorldCon that gives out the Hugo Awards. Wikipedia lists 4,644 attendees and 10,350 who bought memberships to vote the 2015 Hugo Awards, which was a record for numbers. With DragonCon moving into the awards game, I’m thinking the Hugo’s are officially undermined. The Puppy scandal has not only disrupted the voting system, but it seems to have led to an inspection of the Hugo process where works are winnowed through a narrow review and recommendation system and onto the ballot.
While most people aren’t going to swallow the Puppies’ complaints of a vast conspiracy whole, their grievances do seem to have resulted in concerns about the fairness of the process. WorldCon has scrambled to provide additional controls, but it could be that their credibility is already shot. The Dragon Awards will include a category for mil-fic, and they’re encouraging a free-for-all, i.e. campaigning.
More on this tomorrow.
Lela E. Buis 
Pixel Scroll 4/6/2016 I Saw A Scroll Drinking A Pina Colada At Trader Vic’s, His Pixel Was Perfect | File 770
Apr 06, 2016 @ 23:07:22
Apr 07, 2016 @ 01:18:56
You wrote: “…it seems to have led to an inspection of the Hugo process where works are winnowed through a narrow review and recommendation system and onto the ballot.”
What does that mean? The Hugo Awards are nominated by the thousands of members of the World Science Fiction Society. How is that a “narrow review and recommendation system?”
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Apr 07, 2016 @ 05:20:22
If I can publicly predict Ancillary Justice would be nominated for a Hugo and Nebula on the basis of no more than two reviews by a couple of daffy gender feminists the month the book came out and before I’d even read the book, that’s pretty damn narrow. When the church of feminism decides the fix is in, it’s in. Is it an absolute fix? No. But you can count on a congregation to congregate, and in this case, it has nothing to do with story-telling or artistry. By an amazing coincidence, everyone seems to know that but the feminist affirmative action movement which centers its “literature” based on nothing more than race, sex and imaginary grievances. Somehow, the fact mid-century American women bought 4.5 million issues of Ladies’ Home Journal per month as opposed to perhaps 20,000 issues of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction becomes “male elitism,” patriarchy and misogyny.
That memory-holing of history is what has produced this idiot revenge movement in SFF. Stop pretending you’re not doing what you’re doing and not supporting what you support. This entire core culture is laced with the daily group defamation of ethnic Europeans, men and heterosexuals. If I ran around saying “eff the non-gender binary with a chainsaw,” I’d be called a “homophobe.” When a “genderqueer” feminist says that about the “gender binary,” it’s called “social justice” and the reward is a Hugo nomination. What any of that has to do with SFF in the first place is precisely the point. Not exactly Moon Pools and Ringworlds, is it?
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Apr 07, 2016 @ 07:07:23
Zing!
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Apr 07, 2016 @ 08:22:32
In addition to Kevin’s excellent question, I’d wonder whether “narrow” better describes the Dragon award process which only permits 1 nomination per category, and covers significantly less of the field than the Hugos do.
There’s plenty of space for different awards, and I hope the Dragon does well for itself. It’s not a zero sum game though.
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Apr 07, 2016 @ 08:47:54
It’s not a “vast” conspiracy. The scandal is that a relatively small number of votes, on the order of 50 – 300 detemined what was nominated, and ultimately won. You can’t claim the Hugos are reflective of a wide SF/F audience when a tiny cabal can so thoroughly influence the results.
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Apr 07, 2016 @ 09:02:56
Pavetack, who exactly are you identifying as a “cabal”? The Hugo electorate, or some sub-group? If the latter, exactly who?
Where is the scandal in the way that a highly diverse set of opinions lead to a high spread of items nominated but consequently low absolute totals for the finalists? Would it be better if everyone was only working off a list of ten items or so? I see the diversity of opinions on what is “best” to be a strength.
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What a totally unexpected action | Neoreactive
Apr 07, 2016 @ 06:03:39
Apr 07, 2016 @ 09:41:26
A crown has been found unclaimed on the floor. So dragon con has decided to pick it up and claim for it self the most grandest awards in sci Fi and fantasy literature
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Apr 07, 2016 @ 10:33:53
Thanks for your comments, folks. There’s been a lot of discussion here about the Hugo process, but if you’re not a regular reader, I understand I may have lost you. Some of the comments here show the opinions about it.
What I mean by “process where works are winnowed through a narrow review and recommendation system and onto the ballot” is the undue influence that some lists of recommendation are shown to have on the Hugo results. We’ve all seen the effects of Vox Day’s recommendation list last year. If you follow Chaos Horizon, you’ll also see the unusually high predictive nature of the Nebula and Locus reading lists.
Some analyses have shown the Locus list, in particular, to feature limited sources, low diversity and a tendency for repeat appearances. Then note the small number of dedicated voters required to get on the ballot as pointed out by pavetack. This suggests a narrow process that excludes a large number of possible contenders for the award. Add the fact that the Hugo Award nominees have traditionally been chosen by the small group of people who pay the costs to attend WorldCon. I’ve not seen an analysis of who this group is, but some attendees have pointed out that it includes a large number of professionals there to market books.
What I think is undermined by this inspection is that the Hugo is an award chosen by a world-wide community of SFF fans. The Dragon Awards look to be aiming to take up this mantle.
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Apr 07, 2016 @ 10:54:23
You do not have to attend Worldcon to nominate and vote upon the Hugo Awards. I continue to hear this canard repeated. Indeed, some people seem convinced that the voting takes place _at_ the convention, which it does not.
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Apr 07, 2016 @ 11:15:29
I did note this in the blog. If you look at the figures, the greatest number of voters are traditionally attendees. Only in the last couple of years where the Puppies made a significant contribution to the ballot have the non-attendees matched the numbers of actual attendees.
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Apr 07, 2016 @ 12:56:54
Lela, you decry the “undue influence that some lists of recommendation” have and cite “the unusually high predictive nature of the Nebula and Locus reading lists.” You are claiming a chain of causation between the Nebula and Hugo Awards, both of which ask a set of people to state what the best SF works in a given year were. Two awards for similar purposes getting similar results does not imply causation.
Correlation is not causation.
The fact that asking two similar sets of people gets the same answer does not mean one set influences the other, it means that the sets were (probably) similar. If two counties in a US state poll similarly when asked about the next president that doesn’t mean the first to report influences the second, does it?
Next, we’re not actually asking people for their opinion on current affairs, we’re asking their opinion on “best”. If two groups of people are asked to taste test some pizza and get similar results, the answer may be that the winner is a very tasty pizza! In the same way, when people come to similar conclusions about a book, then maybe it’s because it’s a good book.
Further, if you look at the length of the long tail of Hugo nominations and the sheer number of works nominated (much higher than the Locus list) you’ll see that even the correlation between these sources is limited when looked at as a whole, even if the top end has correlations. Hugo voters are going far beyond earlier sources like Locus and the Nebula noms, and there’s nothing narrow about that.
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Apr 07, 2016 @ 16:34:17
So you don’t think there was any undue influence in last year’s Puppy recommendations?
You’re confounding the wording from my post above. I only said the Locus and Nebula reading lists were highly predictive of the Hugo ballot. This is an accurate thing to say about correlation.
One other note. It’s not the Nebula nominations that correlate so highly with the Hugo Award but the SFWA Nebula reading list (published for the first time this year), which has ~85% accuracy in predicting the Hugo nominees.
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Apr 07, 2016 @ 17:13:30
We’re talking about a pretty small and inbred culture that has allowed itself to be thrown over to feminist indoctrination. It is a culture which does not question itself in this regard. To quote an observer of Women’s Studies Programs from 7 years ago, “There is no internal critique, no self-reflection or examination. There are a host of theories and ideas that are simply repeated time and again without any objective analysis. Should anyone dare to question those views, they will be silenced, shamed, openly mocked (and if male, threatened and chastised)…”
We just saw that at SF Signal a few weeks ago, where a guy was shamed for having the audacity to present 20-some books without a female author. He caved, the site caved, and the former women’s studies teacher who is now the President of the SFWA – without a hint of awareness, irony or fair play – suggested he read a blog promoting an all-female segregated SF anthology as a solution. That was followed up by a blog post by a guy who backed the feminist view of events; a guy who once claimed he cried when he learned of the death of the insane Shulamith Firestone in a piece he wrote citing Firestone’s vision of a feminist utopia where adults and kids would have unrestricted sex.
That’s the nutshell of the combination of witchhunting, hypocrisy and bald-faced perversion which both WorldCon and SFWA culture has embraced. They never shut up about this stuff for one single day so I’m mystified how anyone has missed it. There is a self-evident boredom for the genre itself in favor of feminist activism and doctrine based on historic lies about our genre, anti-science and a paranoia of men.
The end result are formerly artistically neutral spaces which are carved up into racial and sexually correct affirmative action pie-charts by a culture which otherwise reserves the sole right to segregate itself into a host of Afrofuturism, gay and female-only initiatives. A couple of weeks ago, the very editor promoting the new PoC Destroy Horror anthology used vulgar insults to call for the boycott of a guy who had an anthology which was top-heavy with men, and did both on the same day! Naturally, the anti-white tone of her Twitter feed is dismal and just as naturally she is one of the darlings of this feminist culture, even while she uses terms like “PoC brethren.”
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Apr 07, 2016 @ 17:38:31
Lela, if you weren’t trying to imply something about causation between the Nebulas/Locus and the Hugos, then exactly why did you bring it up at all in a paragraph about “undue influence” in which it appeared to be the second of two examples?
Of course, if the only undue influence you’re concerned about is the puppies, then we are in agreement.
Also, how do you know that the Nebula reading list is 85% accurate if you’ve never seen it publicly before this year and haven’t even seen the Hugos it is supposedly predicting? How did it influence the Hugos if it’s never been published before? If you’re backpedalling on the Nebulas and Locus, and you’re wrong about who votes on the Hugos, then what exactly is your evidence for a “narrow” process?
More broadly, why is it surprising that a long list of “best sf works” from two sources has quite a good crossover? Even goodreads crosses over with the Hugo longlist to a fair extent.
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Apr 07, 2016 @ 17:50:16
Oh, hi there James. I would reply, but you may recall that every time I’ve fact-checked you, you’ve turned out to be wrong, so I won’t be bothering. Cheers!
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Apr 07, 2016 @ 22:35:02
Mark: “Imply” is better word to use, as I agree that mentioning the Locus and Nebula reading lists in the same paragraph suggests I think they have influence on the awards. Again, if you followed the blog, you would have a better idea where I’m coming from. I’ve discussed some of the research that leads to this liklihood over the course of the last year. One of the nice things about a SFF community is that it includes math geeks.
The SFWA published not only the 2015 data, but also that from 2014, which allowed a correlation study. See Chaos Horizon for the results. Looking at the site now, I see that I have made an error above. The SFWA list is ~85% accurate in predicting the Nebula nominees; being a previous Nebula nominee is ~73% accurate in predicting a Hugo nomination, and being a same year Nebula winner is ~88% accurate in predicting a Hugo nomination. I believe these figures are based on the Best Novel category.
Chaos Horizon has also found a bias toward previous winners in both the Nebula and Hugo Awards. See results here. Rocket Stack Rank conducted a fairly extensive study on Hugo and Nebula Award correlation with the Locus list. You can review the results here .
Of course, you’re correct that correlation does not establish causation, but as Chaos Horizon notes, there are a couple of possible reasons for such high correlation figures: 1) There is a causation relationship 2) The lists function as an accurate poll of reader tastes.
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Apr 08, 2016 @ 03:13:22
Lela, I had forgotten the 2014 data had been issued in 2015, but my point about it never previously being public and so unable to influence the wider Hugo electorate still stands. As you say, you wish to imply something about the Nebulas and the Hugos, but you haven’t demonstrated any mechanism by which this can happen. The obvious answer is that two sets of people are being asked what is “best” and returning similar answers. This is an interesting correlation but no causation, as much as you wish to “imply” otherwise.
I’m aware of the previous winners effect, but again I’m not sure what you think it means. It’s pretty obvious that a group of people who value the Hugo award enough to vote in it would have read the previous winners and gone on to read sequels or new books by the author. Does that prevent them from reading other books and “narrow” the results?
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Apr 08, 2016 @ 05:12:53
Mark: I haven’t made any statement about causality. You’re arguing about your interpretation of implications in my post instead of the data. That means I’m having problems in sorting out your argument.
Did you read the references I provided? Chaos Horizon and RSR provide data on the statistical predictability of the award nominations based on various recommendation lists. This defines the relationship between the lists and the awards nominations. There is also data that defines the relationship between Nebula nominations/winners and the Hugo results. This relationship is mathematically established. You can draw whatever conclusions you want to from the facts. However, you should take note that the correlations numbers are unusually high in these cases.
Regarding the Nebula list, it has been available for several years to the professionals who are members of the SFWA. It is accessed by professional writers, editors and industry professional as a tool for presenting their work and rating it to produce the Nebula nominees. This makes it a closed shop. Although the mechanism has not been available for the broader SFF community to watch until this year, it is always completely available to the ~2000 members of SFWA. I haven’t seen any figures on this, but many of these professionals are certainly members of WorldCon, which I gather is what you’re calling the wider Hugo electorate?
Regarding your last question, I do think that “reading previous winners” and sequels/new books by the same people will limit the diversity of books read and therefore “narrow” the results in the award nominations.
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Apr 08, 2016 @ 07:32:32
Lela, possibly we are working to differing meanings of “imply”, which is what you said you were doing. If you wish to say that you don’t believe there is a causal relationship between the Nebulas and the Hugos and your comments about “undue influence” only extended to the puppies then we will be in agreement. If you don’t wish to say that then I’d ask you to state your conclusions more clearly.
If you think that reading books is a zero-sum game and following favourite authors and recommendations precludes discovering other works then I wish you luck in your future endeavours. I’d wonder how you do think people find their next books to read though?
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Apr 08, 2016 @ 16:29:46
I’ve closed the comments because the discussion below seems to have gone off-track. Let me answer your last post by saying I have concerns that fans may be using the lists exclusively as sources for their awards nominations and/or votes. This at least reduces diversity in the results. Because there are financial benefits for publishers who appear on the lists, the possibility of manipulation enters the picture.
Again, I can’t say anything about causality, but the Puppies have demonstrated how easy it is to manipulate the awards with a recommendation list. That’s troubling, to say the least.
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Apr 07, 2016 @ 19:57:26
Mark, since you use terms like “fetishize quotes,” the concept of fact-checking is unavailable in your world. You have never once proved me wrong about anything and you can’t do so about that comment above. You can massage quotes by people with a long history of vicious and obsessive anti-whites rhetoric all you want, but the only place that finds any love is in your anything is anything echo-chambers. Why you are so wantonly self-destructive and sociopathic is probably something even you don’t know but the pattern of providing covering fire for a pack of insanely racist and man-hating feminists by altering the meaning of words is the defining characteristic of your Orwellian cult.
No one is asking you to agree about or approve anything. We are merely accurately observing the ongoing implosion of the Nebula and Hugo Awards by the daffiest pack of cultish lunatics to ever come down the pike in SFF. Go read collections like the SF Hall of Fame, Tales of Known Space or Flashing Swords if you want to see how normal and talented people once behaved. I take no satisfaction in seeing that thrown aside in favor of pie-charted versions of Scooby Doo, Where is Your Steampunk Genderblind Zombie or amateurish fiction constructed of adjectives; quite the contrary. But if I have to re-read The Ship of Ishtar from the 1920s to get a taste of fiction which is both artistic and not insane then I just will. You can have your diversity sleeping pills and take long naps.
It’s obvious your cult is angry at having 30 Third Wavers knocked out of the nominations last year. They’ll never have that year back as long as they live and there’s nothing you can do about it. I actually did take satisfaction out of seeing that. It was as much as they deserved for their man-hating racism. That was accomplished by people like me quoting them. So keep talking. I’ll keep quoting and they can keep destroying their careers. At this point, the Nebulas and Hugos are nothing more than a laughing stock, and they did that to themselves with their monotonous hate speech.
People used to love publishers like Lancer, Ace, DAW and Ballantine. Now they hate Tor, Angry Robot and Orbit, so just keep flapping your gums. You’re doing fine, you’re doing just fine.
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Apr 07, 2016 @ 22:51:26
James: You might want to review the series of blogs I’ve recently completed on author bullying. It’s not just male and/or white writers that are being targeted. A number of women and minority writers have also been bullied in very abusive ways by both men and other women. There’s a very unfortunate tendency within the SFF community just now to intolerance and terrorist tactics, which reflects trends in the larger society.
The responsible individuals need to be identified as what they are–bullies–and not SJWs. I’m personally in favor of greater unity and respect within the community.
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Apr 08, 2016 @ 03:30:28
OK James, so when you claimed Tor.com and Dribble of Ink hadn’t reviewed The Martian and I pointed out they both had, that wasn’t proving you wrong? Or when I showed you hadn’t read past the free sample of “The Traitor Baru Cormorant” and so thought a character was being presented as good when in fact they were a member of the bad evul empire wasn’t you being wrong either? And so on.
That’s why your word salads get roundly ignored – your “facts” fall at the first hurdle, and there’s little point debating with someone who thinks that being proven wrong is proof that he’s somehow even righter.
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Apr 08, 2016 @ 06:19:06
You are telling fibs. On Torgersen’s blog I mentioned “anyone who’s read the first two chapters” before you said anything, with the understanding people would get the context the novel’s first two chapters were then currently up for free. For example, Foz Meadows had already done an early review of the book based on those free chapters, and Liz Bourke without finishing the book. If you are unaware of that context, what’s that to me? Unsurprisingly, both were unhappy at how being “queer” was treated, because it’s not about that at all. Better send them some emails pointing out how wrong their first impressions were.
You then said you “guessed” I’d read only the first two chapters and I said I did. You never “showed” anything like you claimed; I did. Where’s the big reveal there?
My quotes about people like Moraine and Ahmed are never “cut up,” since that would require ignoring their scores of other racist quotes. I also never said anything about anyone being a member of Seth’s empire or not, just the description, and the larger context of how such descriptions are used by these weird people.
When have I ever claimed The Martian wasn’t reviewed at those places? In fact I didn’t know if it had or not. Turns out they only took a couple of years to get to it as opposed to glomming onto Leckie’s masterpiece from day one. Also lacking is the critical skeptical eye of Leckie’s structure or prose Weir gets from each. Meadows and Bourke didn’t review the book, they just gender-drooled.
And what about the far larger number quotes of mine you don’t mention? I presume that’s because you know they are as true as the one’s you falsely maintain are not true.
The truth remains that Dickensen’s first two chapters read like a software program which auto-generated a novel from hundreds of feminist Tweets by 50 SFWA members. The line between taking it seriously as opposed to a satire is so fine I cannot detect it.
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Apr 08, 2016 @ 07:29:22
James, the “big reveal” is that you claimed something was a positive portrayal of a PoC when in fact they were portrayed as a member of an evil empire. Whether you signalled that you hadn’t read the full book before or after I pointed out your mistake doesn’t change the fact that you were mistaken. Further, I haven’t even mentioned the part where you claimed a passage from a different story was another positive portrayal of a PoC, when in fact it was a description of a desert at night.
You claimed, at Chaos Horizon, that The Martian was “invisible” to reviewers at Dribble of Ink and Tor.com when in fact it was reviewed positively at both venues. You are now admitting that you made that statement without even knowing if it was true. I have to point out that this doesn’t help your case.
You ask why I don’t look at the far larger number of quotes of yours? As I’ve already stated, it’s simple enough: of every “quote” and “fact” of yours that I’ve sampled and checked, 100% of them have turned out to be wrong. I have no obligation to examine each and every thing you say when I’ve already established that you “tell fibs”, ignore context, and fail to even check if what you’re saying is factually correct.
In short, you are the boy who quoted wolf.
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Apr 08, 2016 @ 09:00:06
Buddy, there is something seriously wrong with you. It’s like I’m writing in some 16th century English dialect and I have to annotate and explain my every meaning to you. Did I say it was never reviewed or indicate it got no love compared to the fawning devotion A. Justice did? This is an in-group which follows SF quite closely. When did The Martian come out, who signal-boosted it and how long did it take a cult which clearly has little interest in artistically neutral SF to get to it? In other words, if an out-group of fans hadn’t promoted The Martian by word of mouth, it would’ve sat below the radar of social justice aces like Tor and Ink forever. It didn’t take them no 18 months to find A. Justice did it? They’d have found that no matter what. Not only that, they had it lined up for awards from day one.
To all intents and purposes, the work of writers like Alistair Reynolds, Peter Hamilton and Jack McDevitt are invisible to this cult. Does that mean they never get reviews or nominations? No. It means it is of little to no interest to feminists. If I went only by this socjus crowd, I’d never have known Great North Road was even written and think Rose Lemberg and Amal El-Mohtar were some of our greatest writers. I’d sure as hell know about every PoC, genderqueer and woman who’d put out a book this year, none of whom can touch Hamilton.
Why don’t you put your skills to work and tell me all the love people like Kate Elliott, Kameron Hurley, Foz Meadows, K. Tempest Bradford and all the rest have given to Jack McDevitt, one of our greatest writers. I’ll tell you: none. It’s like his name is on mute or something. Hell, I’d say they talk about the virtually unpublished Sunil Patel 50 times more. Do you know why? Patel won’t review white men and doesn’t let a week go by without talking smack about whites. Otherwise he’s nobody from nowhere who can only get published on socjus rags.
Listen, I’ve researched these people until I’m blind. Do me the credit of knowing who it is who they talk about and who they don’t. When Jack Vance died, Aliette de Bodard wrote she’d never read him and if she should. That may not be stunning to an ace like you, but it is to me. If he’d been some obscure black woman she’d have sent up rocket flares, since she never ceases recommending work by race and sex. Art for art’s sake, genre for genre is invisible to these people.
The rest of your comment is gibberish. You’re grasping at straws. Organize your thoughts and stop being such a pedantic bore. “100%” In what world is that true?
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Apr 08, 2016 @ 09:49:55
You’ve made a schoolboy error there, James. Again. Do you even google what you’re claiming before you hit send?
Your “socjus” “twf” tor.com reviewer Liz Bourke reviewed Jack McDevitt fairly recently, saying of two books “I can recommend them without hesitation.”
McDevitt has multiple Hugo and Nebula noms, including two from after your supposed 2009 date when TWF took over.
Similarly, Reynolds and Hamilton have both had good coverage on tor.com, that hive of scum and feminism. Reynolds “Slow Bullets” has had plenty of discussion on (for example) File 770 for the upcoming Hugos.
I could go on fact checking you, but there’s no need. There’s no truth to be found in what you are claiming – these authors are getting ample coverage and praise from the very people you claim think they are “invisible”.
What you think you mean by “invisible” I certainly can’t tell – it can’t mean lack of reviews, because that’s not true. It can’t mean bad reviews, because they’ve had good reviews. It can’t be lack of awards notice, because there’s awards for these people. If it means “some people don’t like these authors quite as much as I do” then I suggest you grab a dictionary and see if that’s what invisible means. (Hint: it doesn’t)
Anyway, I’m really just playing with my food at this point. Feel free to continue with the word salads, my point is made.
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Apr 08, 2016 @ 10:51:36
You still don’t get it. There is a difference between reviews and a culture which signal-boosts an author because they are the “right” author. If there had been any push from Tor or Ink of The Martian, I’d have heard about it. There wasn’t, and that’s because they were late to the party. There was no word of mouth about The Martian on socjus Twitter feeds. The Martian got 30,000 votes to Leckie’s 3,000 at the Goodreads Award. That context tells you all you need to know. Inside socjus territory it was flipped. That’s the difference between normal fans and feminists who’ve wrecked the old fandom core of SFF. Yeah, The Martian was invisible until someone shoved it in socjus faces. Its crime? It was just good solid old-school SF; an unwanted dinosaur to feminists.
In fact on socjus feeds, the authors you claim are being covered are being ignored, and that consensus is where the awards come from. I know, I’ve read the feeds; it’s obvious you haven’t. I never claimed anyone didn’t review those people or that socjus has 100% control of the Nebulas or Hugos. That’s a fantasy straw man you use and attribute to others.
And it’s amazing how you all became Reynolds fans only after he weighed in on his nomination. You even cut short his career by 10 years in order to shoehorn it into some time-scale that fit your version of Puppy claims. Suddenly you “saw” Reynolds, just not the 10 years before 2000, which is when his career actually began. 10 “invisible” years.
I’ve noticed you filers like to argue in ever descending spirals of pedantry until the larger point is lost. You’ll argue about “slates” until you’re blue in the face, hoping no one will notice why the Puppies came about in the first place. Stop with your childish gotcha games. Trying to pretend there is no massive feminist influence in SFF’s old core institutions makes you look like a child.
I’ve got a project for you that’ll keep you hopping about the internet for days. Two in fact. Tell me the connection between the phrase “before the law” and A. Justice. It’s the foundation upon which this entire socjus crusade rests, so be diligent. I’m the sole source for that on the net so make sure you quote me correctly. LOL.
Next, find me 5 white male supremacist SFF authors on the same ideological page from 1912-60 that can compare to just the 5 Third Wave Feminist parrots who won the 2013/4 Nebulas. Good luck.
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Apr 08, 2016 @ 01:02:28
I have never suggested only male or white writers are being targeted. What I have said about SFF is this: beginning in 2009, you saw the increasing defamation and harassment of ethnic Europeans, men and heterosexuals/heterosexuality as entire group and increasingly on an institutional level. They were not harassed by “SJWs” but by people who had adopted Third Wave Feminism as their ideology, and that continues to this very day. In SFF, scratch an “SJW” and you will find a TWF virtually 100% of the time.
TWF is an ideology rooted in a viciously anti-white, anti-male, anti-heterosexual radical lesbian dogma whose most important texts begin about 1970.
In the last seven years you have seen harassment on an individual level for two reasons:
A) Pushing back
B) An inadvertent violation of TWF principles.
Usually that only confirms what was already known: white supremacy, misogyny or sexism, and homophobia.
It’s true this is not exclusively done to whites, men or straights or by non-whites, women or gays. In the former that is overwhelmingly the case but the real determinant is ideology and the issue is always one of the immorality and irrational suspicion of whites, men and straights, so individual identities matter little, except as who occupies the most credible role as a type of clergy as it were. That latter is why you see a woman married and with a baby declare she is “genderqueer,” why a white guy always reminds people he is officially “PoC,” why a half-Irish guy who looks like a leprechaun always emphasizes he is “Arab” and Muslim. That is street cred they can spend like coin in this cult; it is their medium of exchange.
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2014/20140428/1editors-a.shtml
Read that Diverse Editors List at Strange Horizons. It is a howler of people all scrambling in a race to the bottom to be the most oppressed; to seem the least white, the least binary gender, the most disabled, the least “Western,” the most “underrepresented.” It is one of the most bizarre and demented things I have ever seen in a cult which almost prides itself on how bizarre and demented it is. There is no doubt this is a cult of racial and sexual supremacy nor that it is in principle not one whit different from the KKK or neo-Nazis.
In SFF, it’s true some of the most vicious anti-white racists are white. Some of the most prominent advocates stumping against the “gender binary” are heterosexuals. Some of the worst radical lesbian feminist ideologues are men.
Whether these are “bullies” or not or whether frequently anonymous commenters fit that bill is beside the point; bullying is not an ideology. This is a question of an ideology, and one which is being mainstreamed and advocated on an institutional level by publishers, editors, award-nominated writers, serial panelists, influential bloggers, conventions, writers orgs, etc. This is no mere bullying, but a sustained public collusion and act of group defamation by a comprehensive ideology with a widely-shared weird language which originates solely in intersectional radical lesbianism and no other place.
Every ill in the world is laid at the feet of “whiteness,” men, and the “oppression” of the “gender binary,” and these people do nothing to hide that fact. It is a world of irrational suspicions of every move men make and immense double standards where the only cultural expressions which need diversity are straight, white and male, and even then only the easy ones. Such things as freezer warehouses and military cemeteries need not apply.
If your point is this is some kind of equal opportunity he-said, she-said, that is false. The documentation which proves otherwise is massive. Why do you think they keep blimping up Vox Day into 1,000 people? There is no institutional other side to this – none; and there hasn’t been these last 100 years, contrary to lies about the genre’s history. That history fails only when seen through a lens of paranoid and hateful radical feminism.
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Apr 08, 2016 @ 02:15:06
One of the points I made in the series on bullying is that bullies are the tool of ideologies. Typically bullies are persons of lower status who expect their enforcement activities will increase their status within the community they affiliate with. Many are bullies first, and go in search of a convenient ideology.
Although I think you might be right that some of this activity is coming from Third Wave Feminism, some of it likely comes from the policy of multiculturalism, which has recently been declared a failure, for one thing, because of the way it tends to pit minorities against white men. Besides the persecution you’re feeling, there is a trend to fascist intolerance for different viewpoints, high sensitivity to micro-aggressions and harassment because of perceived cultural appropriation.
Have you had a look at Elizabeth Bear’s Karen Memory? This is an example of what you’re talking about, as far as I can tell–it comes across as both sexist and racist. However, I suspect Bear wrote it that way after a particularly abusive episode on her blog related to an event called RaceFail2009.
Thanks for the link. It’s interesting.
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Apr 08, 2016 @ 04:18:04
If you take all the weird terms these people use like rape culture, Bechdel Test, white and male privilege, cisheteronormative, the colonial gaze, the gender binary, misogyny, patriarchy, “my pronouns are…”, etc., as an entire group, there is only one single source for that in history, and that is intersectional lesbian feminism. They are specific terms with specific meanings from a specific source, none of them good for straight white males. It has nothing to do with generic terms like “multiculturalism,” which in any event arose from such an ideology in the first place.
Even Betty Friedan, the woman credited for kicking off the Second Wave with her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, referred to this cult in the early ’70s as “man-haters,” which is quite a term coming from a woman like Friedan. In fact Friedan felt they were so destructive to the women’s liberation movement she more than once publicly implied they they could be a CIA false-flag operation. In that 10th anniversary edition of her book, Friedan wrote she thought “the man-hating fringe will evaporate, having represented a temporary phase, or even a planned diversion.” She was wrong; it was her movement that would be infiltrated and evaporated, and you are seeing the result.
TWFs have falsely mainstreamed themselves as Friedan’s equal rights movement, not a difficult thing to do considering Friedan’s own misandry and its odd combination of a supremacist and equal rights movement. What Anita Sarkeesian said about feminism on the Stephen Colbert show was quite different from what she said at a feminist symposium in Sydney, Australia. Both are on youtube.
I think late in life Friedan became somewhat horrified at what she created, even as she took satisfaction at the legal side of it represented by things like the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the successful class action lawsuit against the American Telephone and Telegraph Co.
Don’t take my word for this. Even Daphne Patai, the feminist who took George Orwell to the cleaners as a misogynist in The Orwell Mystique, rips this cult to shreds in two books (one co-authored), Heterophobia and Professing Feminism.
There are a thousand red flags and dots to connect in SFF. Radical lesbian Adrienne Rich is most famous for her 1980 essay about “compulsory heterosexuality,” radical gay feminist Liz Bourke uses a Rich quote as the title of her TorCom column, Bourke went nuts over Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, and it wasn’t because of SF, but because of Leckie’s pandering to the “cure” for “compulsory heterosexuality” as laid out by the most famous of all lesbian feminists, Judith Butler: “genderblindness” and pronouns. Next thing you know Leckie is an historic award recipient for what most people agree is an undistinguished first novel.
Lesbian feminist Scalzi just did an entire blog post about such pronouns, as well as once alerting us to the fact that all men are sexists using the familiar feminist smearing logic “you don’t actively have to go out of your way to discriminate in order to participate in discrimination.” How exactly do I escape from that black hole? The answer is, just as in white male privilege, I am not meant to escape from these clever supremacist blood libels.
When is obvious obvious? These are very weird people. The fact this is in SFF at all should alert one to that.
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Apr 08, 2016 @ 06:07:23
Thanks for the viewpoint. I’ll plan on adding a blog about TWF to my review of social trends in SF novels. About Scalzi, I guess you can take comfort in the fact that he’s including himself in the same black hole.
I personally liked Leckie’s first novel, but the last one was definitely sexist. Not only did it attack male privilege, but it reduced her (female) protagonist to a spectator role.
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