The Golden Rule, or I'm Tired
Mar. 22nd, 2016 09:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chris_gerribSo, over at Mad Genius Club, Dave Freer had thoughts on Sad Puppies 4. Thoughts I responded to (in part) by quoting various people who asked to be pulled from their list, including Cat Valente who changed her mind and decided to stay on the list.
This prompted a lively discussion about turning down awards, of which the following is a typical sentiment: It’s about fear that their fellow tribe members will turn on them for not supporting the tribe vociferously enough. In other words, reprisals.
To which I responded:
Or we could just take people at their word. (I know, what a novel concept.)
It’s the Golden Rule, people – if you want to be taken at your word for your motivations, then you need to take others at their word for their motivations.
*** end response ***
Discussion and Amplification of Above
I'm tired - tired of being called a CHORF, a SJW, a liar, somebody being paid off by Tor (Christ, I haven't even scored a free bookmark from Tor) or a little guy that does what he's told. Respect is a two-way street. If you want my respect, show me some, or at least pretend to.
Now, I've cast my nominating votes, and I intend to evaluate whatever makes the final Hugo list on the merits regardless of how it got there, but fair warning - my patience is shot.
This prompted a lively discussion about turning down awards, of which the following is a typical sentiment: It’s about fear that their fellow tribe members will turn on them for not supporting the tribe vociferously enough. In other words, reprisals.
To which I responded:
Or we could just take people at their word. (I know, what a novel concept.)
It’s the Golden Rule, people – if you want to be taken at your word for your motivations, then you need to take others at their word for their motivations.
*** end response ***
Discussion and Amplification of Above
I'm tired - tired of being called a CHORF, a SJW, a liar, somebody being paid off by Tor (Christ, I haven't even scored a free bookmark from Tor) or a little guy that does what he's told. Respect is a two-way street. If you want my respect, show me some, or at least pretend to.
Now, I've cast my nominating votes, and I intend to evaluate whatever makes the final Hugo list on the merits regardless of how it got there, but fair warning - my patience is shot.
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“This new learning amazes me…”
Date: 2016-03-22 03:12 pm (UTC)So “Christ on a Rabbit Farm” has been repurposed, has it? Verr-rry innteresting…
Re: “This new learning amazes me…”
Date: 2016-03-22 03:21 pm (UTC)RE: Re: “This new learning amazes me…”
Date: 2016-03-22 09:30 pm (UTC)Which I thought very appropriate. "Christ on a rabbit farm! He didn't even google it first!"
That was only a day or two after he tried to repurpose it; it may not be the first result anymore.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 03:54 pm (UTC)Frankly, if it wasn't for you, Chris, I'd have never even heard of this whole “Sad Puppies” business - but having seen what they're reacting to, I'm pleased at the idea of their existence, if not by the particulars per se.
I'm not the only one to say that, it seems.
http://fuzzycurmudgeon.com/2015/08/hugo-away-now/
[Found while researching 'CHORF,' and it's very much on my wavelength. Teal Deer version: The Sad Puppies aren't perfect, but what they're fighting is simply toxic.]
Over the years, particularly after Heinlein died, but moreso after Poul
Anderson died, I sort of lost interest in “modern” science fiction, because
most of it was new-agey, touchy-feely, socially-aware, globull-
warmerongering-friendly feminist pap. And today, so much of it is post-
apocalyptic “we’re doomed anyway” downer shit…
I have sat here for many years and idly wondered from time to time just
exactly who the fuck decided that certain Hugo winners ought to have a
Hugo. Finding out that the Hugo voting has been largely taken over by the
Social Justice Warrior (SJW) crowd AKA CHORFs went a long way toward
explaining that to me.
I was not aware of Sad Puppies, by the way, until this year, which was its
third annual iteration. And I’m not going to get into the Rabid Puppies vs.
Sad Puppies distraction; I don’t know who Vox Day is, and I don’t much give
a fuck, other than that he seems to be a raging asshole…
The fact that the number of No Awards for the Hugo in its entire history
just doubled over the weekend tells me that the CHORFs are fully in charge
and have no intention of relinquishing their hold (or what they perceive as
their hold) on SF fandom…
Then there was the just-plain-nastiness of the SJW crowd, starting with
“you can cheer the no-awards, but you can’t boo them.” Fuck you, assholes.
The Hugo is finished as a serious award. It was finished anyway, years ago,
because it was only voted on by a self-selecting group that either attended
WorldCon or bought a supporting membership (after that became possible)…
And now that the proggies have full control, they’re unwilling to let go of
it, even when the awards they’re giving are going to pedestrian crap, or
aren’t going to anyone (No Award) no matter how deserving…
------------------------------------
It's all a tempest in a teapot, but the larger principle remains the same, whether it's the Soviet Writer's Union or the Oscars or the Hugos - or military medals, for that matter! * When higher priorities dictated by an insulated priesthood oligarchy become more important than the original purpose of the award, the award becomes meaningless and worthless.
* “I did not shoot, not a round, nothing. I went down praying to my knees. And that's the last I remember.”
For behavior that would have got a man court-martialed, Jessica Lynch was awarded the Bronze Star. Some are more equal than others. [To her great credit, she was thoroughly disgusted by how she was being used to advance the SJW agenda.]
no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 04:44 pm (UTC)I see that Larry Correia declined his nomination for a Hugo last year, and I agree with his reasons; he ddn't want to give ammunition to the collectivists
As long as the guy who started Sad Puppies stayed in, the more our
opposition would try to dismiss the whole campaign as being all about my
ego, or some selfish personal desire to get award recognition…
- but has anyone yet refused the actual award? You have to admit, that would certainly send a message! (I seem to recall a famously Perpetually Offended Hollyweirdo refusing an Oscar back in the Nixon era, for some trendy reason.)
In the long term I want writers to be free to write whatever they want
without fear of social justice witch hunts, I want creators to not have to
worry about silencing themselves to appease the perpetually outraged, and I
want fans to enjoy themselves without having some entitled snob lecture
them about how they are having fun wrong. I want our shrinking genre to
grow. I think if we can get back to where “award nominated” isn’t a synonym
for “preachy crap” to most fans, we’ll do it…
- L Correia
Exactly. It should not be necessary to pass a political “litmus test” to be published - as certainly was the case in the 1990s, when I threw a science fiction magazine in the trash where it belonged. [Ten years earlier I'd done the same with Kunetka and Streiber's Fifth Column effort Warday, praised by the likes of Ever-Redward Kennedy and Comrade Doctor Helen Caldicott - the first time I'd ever done that in my whole life! - but now that it has safely failed in its intended purpose, it's a somewhat interesting book.]
no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 04:47 pm (UTC)The reality is since when did anybody deserve awards? And awards are rarely and have never much been linked to commercial success.
McDonalds sells a LOT of hamburgers, I'd still rather pay $8 more and go to the place around the corner that sells a nice burger myself.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 07:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 07:35 pm (UTC)Nomination is not election - thank God… I was wondering if anyone has ever refused the actual award.
Oh, there's what I was talking about:
In 1973, the actor Marlon Brando declined the Academy Award for Best Actor
for his career-reviving performance in The Godfather. The Native American
actress Sacheen Littlefeather attended the ceremony in Brando’s place,
stating that the actor “very regretfully” could not accept the award, as he
was protesting Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans in film…
Brando was the second performer to turn down a Best Actor Oscar; the first
was George C. Scott, who politely declined to accept his award for Patton
in 1971 and reportedly said of the Academy Awards hoopla: “I don’t want any
part of it.” Scott had previously declined a Best Supporting Actor
nomination for The Hustler (1961).
Declining a nomination is one thing. Refusing the award - that's quite another!
no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 09:36 pm (UTC)I see a lot of very poor writers whining that they're not getting book contracts because they're white men. The whining contains obvious errors of fact and logic, and is frequently awkwardly written, often ungrammatical and sometimes even full of misspellings. In other words, they're not getting contacts because they can't write well.
Corriea can at least write. In his case it's more a case of McDonalds sells a ton of food but never wins Best Restaurant contests--his stuff is the burger and fries you relax with on a Saturday night and forget about by next week and that's just not the kind of thing that wins awards.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 10:49 pm (UTC)What really throws me is to see college papers that look like something out of the movie Idiocracy. This is, by definition, the best these victims of “progressive education” can do - and the results are simply gawdawful.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 04:39 pm (UTC)The thing is there are plenty of 'conservatives' who write honest to goodness rockets and ray gun adventures, some are excellent indeed, Neal Asher springs to mind. Except the Puppies didn't nominate them. They gave me 4 completely unreadable stories by John C Wright.
I wouldn't mind, but here's the thing. There is NO EVIDENCE that there was ever a plot keeping people out of the Hugos. The reality is the Hugos generally tracked the Clarkes, the Nebulas and other awards for the field.
The real problem is the Puppies represent a really small subsection of the overall fandom and like many American 'conservatives' they believe they are the majority. The results at Sasquan aside, they aren't.
This time they've tried to take hostages. That won't work for them either.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 04:50 pm (UTC)I'm sure I'd have done the same. Just because something's nominated doesn't mean it should have been. If none of the nominees deserve an award, “Sorry, Charlie…”
no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 04:54 pm (UTC)In the movie category where the options would have been the same irrespective of whether or not the system had been gamed, people voted according to quality and the feminist 'pap' CHORFs and SJWs voted for Guardians of the Galaxy which, last time I looked, was a dumb action movie.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 04:45 pm (UTC)Because that excerpt you link to is talking bull crap.
What about Asher? Reynolds? Hamilton? Banks (even). Stross?
To name a few people. Even Leckie wrote BIG space opera with spaceships, androids and AIs that had an upbeat story in the end.
What the fuck, while we're at it is 'feminist pap' - could you point some out? There's "If you were a Dinosaur my love" but that's about all I can think of and there were plenty of 'fluffy' shit novels and stories that won awards.
How about Stranger in a Strange Land? A pile of hippy fest shite if ever there was one?
The reality is that the guy who started this off was pissed because his commercially successful monsters and guns shite didn't get nominated and he wanted an award because he's got a small dick ^^^^S ego. That is ALL there is to this mess. All of it.
Then Brad Torgeson got involved because his marketing strategy seems to be him trying to be the opposite of John Scalzi. Except he's just an arse about it.
A pox on the lot of them.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 05:09 pm (UTC)Y' know, the debate over the relative merits of Stranger tends to defeat itself by the mere fact of its existence. Have you ever seen the film Casablanca? It was slapped together on the fly by a studio that put out fifty-one (51) other films that same year! [Yes, that's an average of one filmed, produced, edited, finished, and distributed movie each week. They don't call it the “film industry” idly…] Name another of those fifty-one films. Go ahead. Any one of 'em.
Just so - Stranger is this, that and t'other… and you're talking about a book published fifty-five years ago. Now name another of its contemporaries… Right. That means it's good, whatever else it is!
[It turns out there were several well-known SF novels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1961_novels) published that year. Ah, the Internet! We'd feel so stunted without it now…]
no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 05:29 pm (UTC)I can also name some amazing SF published since things apparently fell apart and got 'crap', much of which was also by straight white guys, but because it wasn't big in the US and most of the Worldcon audience is US fans, it didn't get a lot of traction.
OTOH - there are some REAL stinkers from the Golden Age, some of which won Hugo Awards, Heinlein also wrote some other stinkers (Number of the Breast anybody?).
Which brings me back to the problem I have with the Puppies, they're just the inverse of the 'right on' young book bloggers of a few years ago who were pissed to find that there was a whole fandom of weirdos who liked to meet face-to-face and who got to vote on the Hugo Awards and that they didn't feel they were included and that they were obviously representative of 'real' fans.
It's a One True Scotsman fallacy.
The thing is the Hugo Awards pretty much track the other awards which suggests to me they aren't far off what the great hordes of quiet readers are interested in and the reason Larry doesn't get nominated is the same reason that McDonalds don't get a lot of Michelin Stars.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 06:08 pm (UTC)amazing SF published since things apparently fell apart
- Yes, that's what makes the then-damn-near-absolute stranglehold of PC and militant feminism on published SF such a shame - because it wasn't absolute. An absolute boycott on my part would thus, for example, have missed J R Dunn's brilliant 1992 short story “Crux Gammata,” about an American rock band's ill-fated “goodwill tour” of Nazi Europe…
But gawd, the brain-slug-controlled bilge you had to wade through to find such things! I was astounded to find, and annoyed to then lose, the article I saw just recently that confirmed a suspicion I'd had at the time - the interviewed author admitted that he'd written stories with sane, normally-behaving characters and then used search-and-replace to switch the gender pronouns, thereby producing the Correct mockmen and eunuchs editors required to appease militant feminists. It was no surprise; I'd seen the results often enough to surmise.
As I said to Chris, I don't even bother with current SF, because what of it I've sampled is simply alien to my entire way of thinking. It did not surprise me to hear that the pool of SF readers is shrinking, people branching out to other genres like romance novels (!) which now feature science fiction and paranormal themes routinely, while avoiding the imposed requirements of gendervoid otherkin demiqueers. Not surprisingly, that market is booming, as people vote with their wallets for what they want, rather than what they're supposed to want!
In the end we beat them with Levi 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of
Communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three-ounce
Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system has been brought to its knees
because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes.
- P. J. O'Rourke
no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 06:57 pm (UTC)Eh? The What A What now?
Or to paraphrase, bullshit.
Ian McDonald, Peter Hamilton, Alistair Reynolds, Neal Asher - to name but 4 if you don't want girl cooties on your SF - but seriously, you are talking utter rubbish. Hell, even John Scalzi's Old Man's War stuff is good old fashioned Aliens and Spaceships Space Opera.
Plus swapping gender pronouns around isn't exactly new. John Brunner and Ursula Le Guin were doing it in the 70s and their work is considered good.
Robert Heinlein wrote at least two books involving a degree of gender fluidness and transposed sexuality that make most of the current stuff look frankly tame.
And weirdly, the pool of SF readers isn't actually shrinking, if anything it's getting bigger.
Separated by a Common Language
Date: 2016-03-22 07:27 pm (UTC)John Scalzi was 23 in 1992, but Old Man's War came out in 2005, long afterward.
Swapping pronouns within the context of the story is one thing; U K Le Guin played with it in “The Winter King” and The Left Hand of Darkness. I'm speaking of an author's own contrivance, which the reader is not supposed to know about. [For example, Ms Le Guin was living in Oregon, its capital Salem, when she wrote “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” i e salemO. Does this affect the story? Not at all.]
It was an annoying fad that left a permanent mark, making it science fiction indeed (http://althistory.livejournal.com/41671.html).
Re: Separated by a Common Language
Date: 2016-03-22 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 10:53 pm (UTC)You're saying a sane normally behaving character who was male would would suddenly become unbelievable if they were female? Or vice versa?
Because those would be some mighty confining gender roles. If that is what is "alien to your thinking," that's going to be an increasing problem for you in every corner of every genre as cardboard characters give way to more realistic ones.
no subject
Date: 2016-03-22 11:11 pm (UTC)“It's amazing how much 'mature wisdom' resembles being too tired.” - R Heinlein
I do apologize, but as I sit here I see absolutely nothing to gain by trying to explain myself further. That link (http://althistory.livejournal.com/41671.html) above goes into some of it; the one commenter replies, “I find the whole 'man with boobs' trope really tiresome,” and so do I.