Finalists: 2015 Hugo Award

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by Doonge

Your position is of someone's who knows the guy, and analyzes all what he says because of past experience.
Your experience is valuable, of course, but such is not my angle.

If I met awful people in a convention, alongside wonderful ones, I think I'd be able to focus on the awesome ones and write a glee review.
But I'm ready to admit you're right about that, I think it's secondary.

I understand that what's important to you is the bad treatment Sad Puppies inflicts on this award. You call the treatment unsusbstantiated, and you call the award the most prestigious.
Here's my angle: saying that popularity awards are cliques' games doesn't need substantiation for me, it's a default assumption. Furthermore, trashing a prestigious award is not a bad thing in itself, because it will either kill the award (showing that despite being "the most prestigious", the award was weak) or strengthen it in the long run. If there is some value to the Hugo, it will be kept.

It is a possibility that this guy is just a conspirationist, as you put it. But it seems to me that, facts asides, all he wanted was that the Hugo award to be self-recognized as a regular "biased" (not a bad connotation here) award and not an all-inclusive unbiased one; and then proceeded to demonstrate it with an autistic accountant efficiency level.
It is desirable to nicely paint the Hugo award brand, but it shouldn't be a lie. If the Hugo award is valuable, then value must be there to back it up.
Another way to put it is that fighting bias is a scientific-level task. It is not easy. Does the Hugo award voting process contain inherent bias? I don't know, but by default my assumption is yes. I know how hard it is to remove bias, and I also know it's not even always desirable anyway.
To me, saying that there is probably bias in the Hugo award is totally non-controversial, and problems arise only when people want to assert it is unbiased (whether it is true or not, I do not know if the Hugos are actually good or bad, I don't care personally).

Per assumption, it seems to me that at worse, this Correia is an honest autistic guy that is trashing a weak award just to make a point. Not exactly praiseworthy, but not conspirationist either.


I've now read the whole thread, and I appreciate your contribution. Especially the straw explanation ^^

Regarding your analogy to hacking, white and black hats; consider that this Corroeia maybe couldn't take the white route. In my opinion, the worst route is doing nothing (well, it could be black hat too, it is in fact situational : it depends if your own black hat actions are the most damaging thing to do or not, because doing nothing lets another one the opportunity to do black hat things). Doing nothing is similar to letting worse people than you the opportunity to do black hat stuff themselves, in the future.

Corroeia claims to have gone the white hat route first, then opted for the black hat route after being met with incredulity of some sort.
Depending on the long term real damage done on the Hugo, going black hat might have been a good option. Because if Corroeia is right, the Hugo would have rotten into irrelevance and died without his feat. Acting forces them to react.

It's worthwhile to go read Correia's website and read his side of things. Of course the Hugo nomination and voting is biased. That was true back in the early 80's and that is true now. There is a reason that Stross and Scalzi get nominated on a regular basis. Not only are they pretty good authors, they also write the right sort of books. While Correia is popular and a very good author, he doesn't write the right sort of books.

[mgbino]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

It's worthwhile to go read Correia's website and read his side of things. Of course the Hugo nomination and voting is biased. That was true back in the early 80's and that is true now. There is a reason that Stross and Scalzi get nominated on a regular basis. Not only are they pretty good authors, they also write the right sort of books. While Correia is popular and a very good author, he doesn't write the right sort of books.

I got an ARC of Correia's newest book, which is epic fantasy, and liked it quite a bit. It's the kind of thing I could actually see getting a non-controversial Hugo nod. I don't do urban fantasy, so I doubt I'd enjoy his other stuff very much.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Well, technically, Mira Grant's Newsflesh novels are set in a post-zombie-apocalypse world. But they were pretty optimistic about that, as was the next-most-recent-dystopian one I can immediately think of, which was Cherie Priest's Boneshaker (also a post-zombie-apocalypse world) in the 2010 Hugos.

My problem with these books were that they seemed only to aim to be just entertaining. They lacked the depth I require for voting on the book as the best book that year.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I see no difference; all are examples of entirely legitimate campaigning. That's why I've said before that I have no problem with any of this. If anyone doesn't like what someone else is trying to promote, then do your own promotion for what you do like.

Not seeing any difference is absurd. But consistent with your other opinions which always are that everything were you follow the rule is good and everything were you break a small rule like copying a DVD and then selling the DVD is terrible and totally evil.

An action can be morally bad even if you follow all the rules!

[DrNefario]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

It's worthwhile to go read Correia's website and read his side of things. Of course the Hugo nomination and voting is biased. That was true back in the early 80's and that is true now. There is a reason that Stross and Scalzi get nominated on a regular basis. Not only are they pretty good authors, they also write the right sort of books. While Correia is popular and a very good author, he doesn't write the right sort of books.

I don't think Urban Fantasy is ever going to do quite as well as straight SF. Although the Hugo is open to fantasy, it still feels like an SF award, to me, and I think a fantasy will have to work harder to win it.

Unless you mean that doubletalk nonsense about snobbery and popular fiction and the conservative viewpoint.

I'm perfectly happy to say that I oppose any and all campaigning and manipulation of the nominations, no matter whose "team" (ugh) is doing it.

I'm not especially a fan of Scalzi's fiction, I have to say, and I don't really see how his kind of books differ very much from the Baen-style fare that the puppy squad want to push. Old Man's War was clearly and acknowledgedly a response to Starship Trooper, after all, and Redshirts was a bestseller.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The Hugo has always been a popularity contest; it's never been about literary merit.

And people have voted according to literary merit. But of course different people have different opinion about merit so in that sense the choice is popular. It has never been about mass popularity even if some mass popular books have won but that is the exception.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

It seems likely that Corriea is involved in all this for the reasons that he gives.

Sure. It's likely. If you believe him. Which I don't. See how that works?
I'm just not buying the whole, "I got picked on and so now I'm taking over" bit. Even if it's true, it's a childish "I'm stealing the ball and taking it home, so ... neener" response from an adult.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by mgbino

I'm still like 30% sure that "Vox Day" is performance art of some kind. I met the guy before his Vox persona caught on, and what I see from online just doesn't jive with the guy I met.

In more on topic thoughts, I'm not really sure what I'll vote for this year for best novel. I liked Ancillary Justice, but not enough to bother continuing with the series. I REFUSE to read Goblin Emperor, I still have PTSD from one of her earlier books (A Companion to Wolves). I don't really enjoy urban fantasy, so no Jim Butcher for me. That leaves me between Kloos (which I liked, but wasn't crazy about) and Anderson (which I still need to read).

I thought Ancillary Sword was actually better than Ancillary Justice but I liked both very much. A Companion of Wolves was written together with Elizabeth Bear so maybe Sarah Monette alone is better?

[Doonge]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Sure. It's likely. If you believe him. Unlikely if you don't. See how that works?
I'm just not buying the whole, "I got picked on and so now I'm taking over" bit. Even if it's true, it's a childish "I'm stealing the ball and taking it home, so ... neener" response from an adult.

It seems to me that the exchange between you two was that you first said Corroeia was likely doing it for the fame and that pwalker8 said that he was already famous so the reason you gave was unlikely.

Which is unrelated to the fact you believe Corroeia or not, so are you going on a tangent or what?

I believe that you can both be right, in the sense that it's possible that Corroreia keeps on attacking the Hugo for many reasons, one of them being the fame, but I don't believe that he initiated the whole thing for fame. In light of pwalker remark about the already existing fame of Corroeia, this is unlikely.

You say that if true, it would be childish, but that wasn't disputed and it isn't even a rebuttal?

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by tompe

My problem with these books were that the seemed only to aim to be just entertaining. They lacked the depth I require for voting on the book as the best book that year.

I personally enjoyed all the Newsflesh novels (and to be fair, there were some ambitious societal change/political elements in them even if aside from the bloggers-influentially-dominate-stuff it wasn't really explored all that thoroughly, IMHO), but ranked them pretty low in the actual voting, since I didn't think they were "best of year/best of breed" sorts of things that Hugo Award-winners personally mean to me.

I've usually put "No Award" above the stuff that I've read and might have liked, but seemed to lack the extra "oomph" required*, long before the puppies started saddening things with their previous attempts, and will continue to do so†, albeit maybe with an extra smidgen of sweet, sweet schadenfreude this year for the stories foisted upon us which seem especially sub-par (VD's story in last year's packet was umpteen minutes of my life I'll never get back, and I really did try to give it a reasonably fair chance to see if it would turn out to be unexpected genius with sufficient milliHarlanEllisons to merit its inclusion on its actual merits rather than the author's shenanigans, which it was most decidedly not).

* Including more than half of the 2011 Best Novel nominees, because much as I like and collect both Bujold and Willis' writing in multiple languages and enjoyed their series continuations, those were in no way among the better of their works and Blackout/All Clear especially was an overlong meandering mess (which I happened to otherwise like and was happy to read and find out what happened next to the characters, incidentally) and Hugos shouldn't be for "eh well, if there's nothing else better available, then this is probably good enough" IMHO, so I voted for Jemisin's novel for first place that year since I felt that one was unusually imaginative and interesting and truly excellent from an author I'd never read before.

† Though I expect to have a lot more things in the packet this year to slog through that will not pass the "is this good enough to have a reasonable expectation of belonging here" test, sigh.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Doonge

It seems to me that the exchange between you two was that you first said Corroeia was likely doing it for the fame and that pwalker8 said that he was already famous so the reason you gave was unlikely.

I don't think the word "famous" could have possibly been used to describe the Larry Correia who was "traumatized" by his first Hugo experience and decided to take action because of it. But I certainly think it can be said of him now. He's the new Don Quixote--tilting at imaginary, clandestine SJW cabals that are controlling and ruining everything.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The Hugo has always been a popularity contest; it's never been about literary merit.

I'm not a writer or WorldCon member. My only interest in the Hugo is that it indicated that a book was popular and considered to be good, so worth trying out. If we consider the polling to be an informal census, then it does provide useful information about the books if the sampling is done evenly across the distribution of members. Gaming the contest ensures that the sampling is no longer even, and that it is no longer possible to conclude that the "winner" is the book that had the most people who thought it was good compared to the others. Having people select books that they haven't even read makes it even worse. It turns the exercise into a competition rather than a census, and makes it useless as a polling and marketing tool. Perhaps you thought it was always useless for that, and feel no loss at the destruction of the census. To me, it is sad, especially because it was done for such a pathetically small power grab.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I don't think the word "famous" could have possibly been used to describe the Larry Correia who was "traumatized" by his first Hugo experience and decided to take action because of it. But I certainly think it can be said of him now. He's the new Don Quixote--tilting at imaginary, clandestine SJW cabals that are controlling and ruining everything.

Hum, how about multiple New York Times best selling author? That's a whole lot more famous than most authors.

I see that you're following the old Saul Alinsky playbook. "Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it". Stay on message and ignore any points that don't follow your narrative.

Ultimately, this is just a standard internet flame war between a number of SF authors who are well known for being active on the internet, highly opinionated and expressing their views in less than diplomatic ways. Happens all the time. Harlan Ellison was notorious for it.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by mgbino

I got an ARC of Correia's newest book, which is epic fantasy, and liked it quite a bit. It's the kind of thing I could actually see getting a non-controversial Hugo nod. I don't do urban fantasy, so I doubt I'd enjoy his other stuff very much.

Thanks for the pointer. I wasn't aware that he had a new book coming out.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Hum, how about multiple New York Times best selling author? That's a whole lot more famous than most authors.

Sorry. Not buying it. NYT Best Seller list is quite the accomplishment, no doubt about it. But it does not make one a household name (nor even guarantee you can quit your day job). How many one-time best-selling fantasy authors are languishing in obscurity right now?

That his recent activities have garnered him even more notoriety and more sales is hardly arguable. Whether or not that is the reason he's doing it is at the very least debatable. Which we're doing. Which takes us right back to; "either you believe his given reasons or you don't." And I don't. I think he's clamoring for attention.