Search Results for: puppies

Back in August, in response to Vox Day crowing about how his Xanatos gambit had come off so perfectly or something equally stupid, I made a stab at predicting how he’d play things in 2016:

I think we can safely assume that the Rabid Puppy slate in 2016 is going to consist of five nominees in every category, to try to maximize the number of categories with no non-Puppy nominees. I suspect he’s also going to pointedly include nominees that exist to dare the left to vote against them.

Vox is, of course, nothing if not banally and irritatingly predictable, having just released the first chunk of his Rabid Puppies slate for the year, his picks for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. And sure enough, his five picks include not only a writer whose sole publications have been through Castalia House but Andy Weir, author of The Martian, who would have been on the ballot last year were it not for the Puppies, and who I’ve had penciled in on my balloting spreadsheet since November.

First of all, then, my sincere sympathies to Andy Weir, who I’m sure had absolutely zero desire to be put on the Rabid Puppies slate, who self-evidently doesn’t and didn’t need Vox Day’s help and who really should have been allowed to enjoy his Oscar season in peace and without any of this nonsense. Now an award that he would have been up for anyway (if not ineligible on the basis of having won it last year) is fundamentally tainted. This should serve first and foremost as a reminder that Vox Day is a complete and utter dick, and that the only reason anyone would support him is that they are too.

Second of all, then, my initial thoughts on how to reply to the tactic. For one thing, I’m still going to nominate Weir. He deserves it. Frankly, his breakout success is literally the exact sort of thing the Campbell Award exists to honor. He stormed on the scene and got a Ridley Scott movie for his trouble. I’m going to carry on with my ballot in all other categories, and if Vox turns out to make some of the same picks as me, so be it. I’m perfectly at peace with that.

Because, you see, when it comes to voting?

I have a plan.…

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As the science fiction community mutters “I thought MidAmericon said nominations would open in early January” with baited breath, I note that certain fascist pricks have begun to ramp up their performative chortling. So I figured “why not write a mildly trolling open letter to someone else entirely?”

Ms. Paulk et al:

I note with some bemusement your efforts to reform the Sad Puppies movement from its oft-criticized 2015 form, stripping away its overtly conservative trappings, widening it to a ten-item recommendation list, et cetera. By and large, I have to admit, these seem like, if not strictly speaking good things, at least less bad things. So thank you for your efforts to be less odious than your predecessors. It’s genuinely appreciated. That said, there’s one rather large issue that you don’t seem to have addressed, and that I’d like to raise.

Simply put, why are you doing this?

I mean, I see your nominal explanation on the site – to increase Hugo participation. And while I think your assessment of the field is rubbish (science fiction, at least as a literary genre, that being the primary focus of the Hugos, is in no way “a field loved by millions,” and five thousand voters is absolutely massive given the current state of the publishing industry – and not just SF/F publishing), sure, I guess that’s a reasonable motivation. What’s rather less clear to me is why on Earth you’re adopting a brand that’s primarily known for its previous decision to actively ally with a fascist bully to do so.

Yes, I’m talking about Vox Day, who you so eloquently dismiss as “not our circus, not our monkey” and suggest that people “talk to him about whatever problem you have with him.” But, well, I have talked to him about many of the problems I have with him, and anyway, my problem here isn’t with him, it’s with the Sad Puppies movement that you’re actively positioning yourself as the direct successor to and that movement’s past relationship with an abusive, bullying troll motivated primarily by his passionate vanity and even more passionate hatred for women, ethnic minorities, and LGBT people.

Because let’s be very clear here: in both 2014 and 2015, your predecessors in running Sad Puppies made an active and conscious decision to ally with Vox Day. Indeed, that’s pretty much what your movement is best known for at this point – getting spectacularly hijacked by him last year such that you didn’t actually have a meaningful impact on the vote because his sidecar movement outperformed yours such that anyone who hadn’t looked closely at the precise nature of the fan politics mistook your movement ofr his. That’s your best-known accomplishment: allying with a sadistic troll who proved better at your own game than you were.

Now, of course, you’re not wrong in your basic sense that the sadistic troll’s moment has passed. Vox’s main talent in life is that he can marshall around five hundred people. Of course, given that Vox is steeped in GamerGate tactics, this means five hundred accounts, not five hundred actual flesh and blood people who might plausibly show up at MidAmericon II and affect any business that actually takes place at the con.…

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If you enjoy this and haven’t already, please consider buying the book version of The Last War in Albion Volume 1, which collects the pre-Watchmen history of the War. Your support keeps this project going.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Actually, this is basically a great jumping on point for new readers, though it helps to know that the previous chapter left off with the line “We do it because we are compelled.”

The line, of course, belongs to Rorschach, the glamorous poison at the heart of Watchmen’s appeal. Moore is self-effacing about the character these days, joking that his popularity is down to the fact that Moore “had forgotten that actually to a lot of comic fans that smelling, not having a girlfriend – these are actually kind of heroic.” But unlike a lot of Moore’s self-deprecation, there’s an edge to this quip. He’s emphasizing his failure to anticipate the reaction to Rorschach, but only as a means to insult Rorschach’s fans even more spectacularly. There are obviously a lot of things about Watchmen that have gone sour for Moore, but at times it seems that there is nothing he resents quite as deeply as the reception of Rorschach.

Figure 977: The Zodiac Killer, a Californian serial killer named for his literally cryptic letters, has nothing to do with either Watchmen or From Hell.

In some ways it’s no wonder. It’s not just the throngs of fans eager to tell Moore how much they admired Rorschach, a phenomenon that is surely associated with the sudden spike in Moore’s popularity that turned comics conventions into deeply unpleasant experiences where he felt crushed and mobbed (the usual anecdote is the time a fan followed Moore into the bathroom to get his autograph, but his recurring nightmare of hands grabbing at him perhaps more accurately captures the sense of horror Moore felt at this). It’s also the sorts of people who identify with Rorschach, a list whose most eye-popping member is perhaps 2016 US Presidential Candidate Ted Cruz, who included him along with Spider-Man, Wolverine, Batman, and Iron Man on a list of his favorite superheroes. Given that Ted Cruz is a warmongering homophobe opposed to any form of social welfare, this is, to say the least, not the sort of endorsement Moore was seeking. And while Cruz is just one (deeply idiosyncratic) datapoint, the truth is that it’s not hard to see why a lunatic right-winger famous for alienating virtually everybody he’s ever worked with might view Rorschach as an aspirational figure.

The fundamental problem at the heart of this is simply that Rorschach is an unsettlingly fascinating character. Even Moore, for all the reservations he would come to have about him, freely admits that “Rorschach was one of the characters I enjoyed writing most.” And no wonder – think of a classic line in Watchmen and the odds are overwhelming that you’re thinking of a Rorschach line, probably either a bit of his opening monologue or “none of you understand.…

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A guest post by David Gerard.

Every field has its standard ways to fuck up. Experienced artists never do these in public, but you’ll see the lesser lights fall for them if you go looking. Someone gets a rush of blood and is struck by aninspiration to do something different, something the big guys aren’t doing, for a new take on things! Not realising that the experienced artists don’t do these things because they don’t work.

Like writing a novel about the pop industry. No, better: a political allegory in the form of a novel about the pop industry. No, better still: a right-wing fever dream political allegory in the form of a novel about the pop industry. Yep, that’ll show ’em all!

Phil Sandifer tweeted a “hey, look what I just stepped in”:

As a connoiseur of the worst of popular culture — and novels about the music industry are definitely the worst of popular culture — I foolishly looked. (Doing a great swan dive naked into the abyss and wallowing while sending back reports probably involves staring at some point.)

The least-unreadable examples of this species of folly, that don’t make you shout “WRONG! WRONG! BULLSHIT!” twice a page, tend to be thin fictionalisations of real events; plenty of fucked-up shit happens in the music industry that makes people go “someone should write a book about this.” Platinum Logic by Tony Parsons fails as an even slightly coherent novel, but every lurid and tawdry incident in that book is a version of something that happened, and spotting the players is the fun part.

There are genuinely good novels that have the music industry as a theme — Pratchett’s Soul Music, Banks’ Espedair Street — but these tend not to be about the music or the industry as such, and avoid going into too much detail even as they slip in the in-jokes. Even The Commitments, which is literally about a band. They resist the urge to be didactic. It’s a trepidatious endeavour, though: get the details even slightly wrong and you look like a fool.

Fenris Wulf gets the details mostly right. The problem is everything else. 

“Hi, I’m Fenris. I’ve considered myself to be a LaVeyan Satanist for about 10 years, and I also embrace a Lokian version of Asatru, as my name indicates.”

Loki’s Child is published by Castalia House, i.e. Vox Day, the abovementioned human dumpster fire, who is now most famous for doing his damnedest to fuck up the Hugo Awards with the Rabid Puppies.

I thought Day was the author of this thing — “Fenris Wolf” was the name of his 1990s video game studio, and he was once in a band with minor hit records so he’s brushed up against the business. But Vox is not known for either patience or attention to detail, and this is a work the author’s been polishing and polishing for years — he put the first version up as Record Producer from Dimension X in 2005, then publicised the rewrite as Loki’s Child in this 2011 post to a fan board for Ayn Rand’s right-wing political philosophy Objectivism:

The novel gets progressively more ingenious, and it exposes the disgusting evil of the nihilist Left in a way that hasn’t been done before.

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Since this seems like the sort of post that might get a bit of attention, I figure I should toss a link to my Kickstarter at the top, and politely ask you to at least click through and look at it to see if it’s something you’re interested in backing.

I’ve mostly stayed out of Hugos stuff for the last couple weeks, having a book to promote and all. And because it didn’t seem necessary. The situation was straightforward and as expected last year – one more year of Puppies and then normal business would be restored. Except that over the last couple of weeks several analyses have thrown some cold water on the hope that the E Pluribus Hugo nomination reform expected to pass at MidAmericon II this year will be quite the fix that many of us hoped for, with reports suggesting that it will at best allow the overwhelming majority of fans to have 1-2 slots per category that are not dictated by a tiny minority of racist dunderheads. A considerable number of new proposals to deal with this have thus been circulated, most of them preposterously baroque, clearly ineffectual, or both. This is strange, as the problem is not actually particularly hard to solve if you want to. Just ban slates.

After all, the Hugo Ballot is fifteen categories long. Each category has five nominating slots (possibly four after this year). That’s seventy-five slots on a ballot, all of which can be filled with any novel, short story, podcast, fan writer, or whatever that you want. The odds that two ballots are going to be identical through means other than active coordination are already vanishingly small. The odds that dozens or hundreds are is simply non-existent. If you want to get rid of the disruptive voting practices by which a vindictive psychopath is ruining the Hugo Awards, just get rid of them directly. I mean, the Hugo FAQ already pretty much declares them against the rules by saying “don’t nominate or vote for something you have not read or seen, and don’t vote based on reputation — the Hugos are meant to honor your choices and judgments.” It’s just that there’s not a single mechanism to actually enforce that.

There are, of course, other proposals out there – Kevin Standlee has put three up on File 770. But these all involve significant revamping of the system, introducing things like a third stage of voting (with seemingly no thought as to how this would fit into the timetable) or arbitrarily allowing categories to be extended. These might work. They might also be gamed, however, much like E Pluribus Hugo looks to be gameable. What isn’t gameable – what is indeed inherently ungameable – is simply banning organized campaigns to do anything other than have fans nominate works they read and enjoyed. (And notably, if in fact there have been seekrit leftist attempts to manipulate the Hugos for years, an allegation that literally not a shred of evidence has ever been presented for, this would have the effect of shutting them down too.)…

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