My first (seven) reactions to the surprise announcement of Sad Puppies 4

4 reasons to pet the Puppies:

1. Tone

The Puppy organizers Kate Paulk, Sarah A. Hoyt and Amanda S. Green have written things that I consider stupid, hateful and obnoxious, but the Sad Puppies 4 announcement was phrased very un-obnoxiously. Civility is a nice thing.

2. It’s not a slate, really

Listing more works than one can nominate for the Hugos and stating up front that one should read the stuff before suggesting it are good and play down the slate aspect.

3. No more shady correct taste comissars

With Sad Puppies 3, Brad Torgersen had a somewhat similar nominee suggestion phase (that had humorously few participants). After that, though, he ditched most of the stuff people had suggested and went on with the things that were written by his chums. There will be no more of that, it seems.

4. Focus on MOAR

The Puppy trio has promised to focus on participation instead of ideological screeds. It remains to be seen if that is a promise they are able to keep.

3 reasons to prefer kittens:

1. Hijacking Sad Puppies 4 is child’s play

Hugogeddon2015 made it very clear that there are a lot of people who just love to troll and cause damage in SFF fandon. About 500 Rabid Puppies were ready to pay the membership fee in order to get to vote the way their leader told them. Messing up Sad Puppies 4 is a lot easier, plus it’s free.

2. Why does this have to be about the Hugos at all?

Compiling this (possibly huge) recommended reading list would be an interesting experiment in and of itself. I don’t see any reason why it has to be connected with the Hugos. I mean, the Locus Recommended Reading list is a little bit similar mega list, but that is not constructed as a catalogue of great stuff you can nominate for the Hugos — it’s a catalogue of great stuff you can read and enjoy. Why not do something similar here?

3. Why would Hugos need primaries?

Sad Puppies 4 is — if it works the way that the organizers say it should — a sort of preliminary election about what works are popular enough to be on anybody’s Hugo nomination ballot. I’m not convinced that something like that would increase the voter participation in any way.

Wisdom from the Hugo Results

Here are seven (nutty) nuggets of information that we can get out of the Hugo results and statistics:

1. The science fiction and fantasy fandom won’t take any bullshit from conservative culture warriors who want to use Hugo awards to make a political point

Not counting the movie and TV show categories, every single nominee on the two slates finished below No Award, by a significant margin. That was a surprise to me. I expected that the results would be a mixed bag, but the fandom was out in force and up in arms.

2. I’m not a puppy-kicker after all

I tried to give every nominee a chance (even though many weren’t worth it) and ended up putting few puppy picks above No Award. As I was doing it, I still considered myself some kind of an Anti-Puppy hardliner, because I’m sure my dislike for the Puppy movement and their absurd arguments does show and some pro-puppy commenters made it clear that they think I’m a nasty, wretched SJW troll. But what do you know — turns out that the majority of fans was less forgiving and I ended up being the mellow moderate.

3. We need EPH

The Hugogeddon 2015 has proven, though, that the nomination phase is easy to game. The system breaks down when there’s tactical voting, and it should be changed so that we can be sure that the results reflect the opinions of 100% of the nominating fans, not 20%. E Pluribus Hugo rule change proposal is the logical step to the right direction. The long list of great works that Brad R. Torgersen and Vox Day managed to force out makes a very good case for EPH.

4. Puppies might bite our ankles until the end of time

In the tradition of all true supervillains, Vox Day vowed to be back for blood next year. I very much doubt that he has the minionpower to do much damage without a sizeable useful idiot contingent that will be hard to put together after everybody saw how miserably Sad Puppies failed. In the age of Internet, however, trolls are a resource that will never be exhausted.

5. Puppies often lie…

It will be interesting to see how the Puppy ringleaders plan to coin the campaign next year. First, it was about the swashbuckling fun that feminists take away from wrongfans. Then, when very little fun was to be found on the slated works, the goalposts switched place and it was about getting more people to realize that they could vote. At some point, it was also about countering the evil, liberal mass media that lies about the Puppies, or evil, liberal creative directors who lie about the Puppies, or evil, liberal publishing houses that publish Puppies AND lie about them.

None of these goals requires throwing smear around like Brad Torgersen did right from the start in his screed posts, though, so the logical conclusion is that sticking it to the SJWs was mainly the point all along. I guess most Hugo voters realized this.

6. …but some Puppies are honest

Despite what many people may think, all Puppy voters didn’t follow the party line.

Take Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson, for example. It’s very hard to come across any praise for the book by somebody who isn’t a devout puppy, I think. It was severely bashed in almost all non-Puppy reviews I read. However, the stats show that out of the 251 voters who thought that DBtS is the best book of the year, only 130 chose Jim Butcher’s Skin Game (that’s the other Puppy nominee) as their second choice. Nearly as many of them (93, to be exact) thought that Three-Body Problem, Goblin Emperor or Ancillary Sword is the second best novel of the year. I guess they voted what they felt is the right choice. Especially Goblin Emperor and Ancillary Sword were severely bashed by Puppies, in turn, but over fifty voters went that way.

Another example: in the fan writer category, fans of the staunch anti-SJW evangelist Amanda S. Green were more likely to have the staunch social justice advocate Laura J. Mixon as their second choice than fellow-Puppies Dave Freer or Jeffro Johnson. Actually, even if you combine the Green-Freer and Green-Johnson voters, they’ll still lose to the Green-Mixon crowd. Judging by the internet rhetoric, that was unexpected. And that’s a nice setup for my last point.

7. Other fans like the weirdest things

If two fans can’t get a fight started about the merits of some book or writer, they aren’t real fans at all. You can’t herd cats and you can’t herd fans.

Yes, I mostly agree with the non-Puppy voters on the Puppy nominees’ merits. The non-Puppy nominees’ merits are a different matter entirely. Three-Body Problem is good, Ms. Marvel is great and there’s a nice raccoon in Guardians of the Galaxy, sure. However, nobody in the world can convince me that they’re better than Ancillary Sword, Sex Criminals and Lego Movie. No one.

Congratulations for all the Hugo winners and losers, and condolences for everybody who just learned that they would’ve been on the ballot if the Puppies hadn’t messed it up!

Hugogeddon 2015 Debriefing

WordPress is generous with all kinds of interesting figures, and I guess there’s something interesting there to look at now that the Hugo voting has ended and everybody is in waiting mode.

I started blogging here when I began looking for things to nominate for the Hugos five months ago. During this Hugo season, the WordPress stats tell me, I’ve written 52 blog posts that have been viewed a little over 18,000 times. I have no idea how good or measly figure that is for a project like this, but I’m of course grateful for every reader and visitor.

In addition, I guess there were plenty of people who only read the bits that were quoted in File770 Puppygate roundups. In his web fanzine, Mike Glyer followed the Hugo mess and quoted extensively from all sides of the discussion. Many of my posts were featured there, and it seems that I even got my own tag on File770 (how great is that). According to the WP stats, File 770 is the place which sent most traffic in my blog, and as a matter of fact, the ten next largest traffic sources combined generated less traffic than Mike Glyer alone. In case you happen to read this, Mike, my hat’s eternally off.

This being the internet, the most read posts seem to be those in which I was being snarky and judgmental. The more enthusiastic ramblings didn’t draw people’s attention the same way which is something one would expect, I guess. In contrast, one thing I wasn’t expecting was that the most clicked links were those leading to Jeffro Johnson’s blog. Who would have thought?

One consequence of being occasionally snarky and judgmental is that some people get angry with you. This is what author Brad R. Torgersen, the Chief Sad Puppyteer of this year’s Hugo mess, opined about me:

I suspect the furball has no solutions, merely complaints. If we actually do get back to the moon before the middle of the century, spacefaringkitten is the kind of sad-sack who will find an excuse to whine about it.

It sounds so cool that I had to integrate it into the blog’s subtitle.

Another disgruntled customer was writer R.K. Modena who — I realized only yesterday — was asking around in Twitter if anybody involved with #GamerGate would recognize my writing style and tell her who I was. What she would have done with the information, I have no idea. Sent me a head of a horse, perhaps?

Question to #GamerGate -Does Spacefaringkitten sound familiar-name/writestyle? See pics. #SadPuppies pic.twitter.com/r5YwFRBAXP

— R.K. Modena 🇦🇺🇵🇭 (@rkmodena) June 17, 2015

Evils Under Dr. Who’s Bed & Wrapping Up the Dramatic Presentation: Short Form Category

Category: Dramatic Presentation / Short Form
Slates: None

The Dr. Who episode “Listen” is a third finalist that I rather like in this category. Well, there’s always a Dr. Who episode that people rather like in this category, if you check the history.

Doctor and Clara time travel between Clara’s messed up date, the end of the universe (where a future descendant of the guy she is dating has stranded) and various locations where there is something frightening hiding under the bed.

It’s a lovely mixture of a TV show for all ages and horror elements that are enough to frighten a fair deal of adults that I know (and to whom I’d like to show this episode to see if it works). Peter Capaldi’s grumpy Scottish Doctor is more to my liking than Matt Smith’s, David Tennant’s and Christopher Eccleston’s takes on the character. Especially Smith and Tennant who have doctored the show for the last ten years were so nice guys that it’s easy to get something interesting and different going on when you focus on the edge that the current Doctor brings to the show.

As a series of one-shots, it’s quite impossible to honestly compare Dr. Who with Orphan Black and Game of Thrones that are a huge, sprawling tales lasting season after season. I liked them all more or less equally, but now that I have to make a decision about the final vote, let’s say Dr. Who takes the second place after Orphan Black.

Score: 8/10

There, that’s a wrap-up of the category:

1. Orphan Black: “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried” 8/10
2. Dr. Who: “Listen” 8/10
3. Game of Thrones: “The Mountain and the Viper” 8/10
4. Grimm: “Once We Were Gods” 6/10
5. The Flash: “Pilot” 5/10

Once More With Feeling and Gore — Game of Thrones: “The Mountain and the Viper”

Category: Dramatic Presentation / Short Form
Slates: Rabid Puppies

I watched the Hugo-nominated Game of Thrones episode last year, so my memories of it are a little sketchy.

Game of Thrones is one of those things that makes you incredibly immersed in the storyworld when you are watching it, but afterwards it’s hard to say was it really that important or relevant.* It’s hard to even remember what is it that exactly happened in the series.

Off the top of my head, I can only remember one single event of the last season: the duel between Oberyn Martell and Gregor Clegane which takes place in this episode. It’s a cataclysmic event in the story and I remember how out-of-breath I was afterwards. For me, it worked maybe even better that the Red Wedding of the third season, perhaps because the duel was coming for a long time and the people doing the show know how to build up suspense.

On the other hand, killing off characters is quickly devalued as as means of generating drama in Game of Thrones, because there’s so damn much of it. I just finished the fifth season and watched a mind-numbing atrocity after a mind-numbing atrocity, but none of what happened there really rose to the same level of significance than this and last year’s Hugo-finalist episodes. There’s nothing there that I believe I’m voting for next year, even though I’m sure something will be nominated.

But this one last time I will let myself be excited enough to like Game of Thrones, because it’s a good and ambitious show that is making history, regardless of its shortcomings, and it’s based on a book series that was and is a game changer in heroic fantasy literature. With most fantasy series, I’ve always had the feeling that a healthy dose of gritty realism would make the world more credible, but maybe Song of Ice and Fire and the Game of Thrones TV show are there to prove that there’s such a thing as an overdose.

Score: 8/10

* I think I’m paraphrasing somebody in this sentence. Not sure who.

Nations of Zombies and TV-Heads — Wrapping Up the Graphic Story Category

Two more comics left to review. Let’s start with Zombie Nation.

Category: Graphic Story
Slates: Rabid Puppies & Sad Puppies

Zombie Nation by Carter Reid is a horror-themed gag strip webcomic. The information about what strips are actually included in the Hugo-nominated collection Reduce Reuse Reanimate is nowhere to be found, so I took a look at some random strips that were published last year.

Judging by the reactions I have seen elseweb, many Hugo-voters — especially those unhappy with the Puppies — are giving Zombie Nation the cold shoulder. And now that I checked, Vox Day himself is doing the same thing: he tells on his site that he is going for No Award in the Graphic Story category and has placed Carter Reid last in the Professional Artist category, below the only artist not on his preliminary slate.

Reid is truly out of supporters, it seems, so let me say a few kind words for Zombie Nation. It’s actually not that awful.

Zombie Nation is a gag strip, so you can’t expect an elegant storyline or the sort of a satisfying dramatic arc that’s possible in long form comics. There has to be one joke per strip and you have to deliver it in three or four panels. Gag strips are a hard to do, and amusing gag strips are infinitely harder.

Some jokes make me smile, most did nothing and only few are embarrassingly bad (many are just weird, which is better than bad). Technically, most punchlines are delivered decently, and the rhythm and timing usually work. That is all that I can realistically hope for when reading a gag strip. Zombie Nation is no match for the other comics on the ballot and it shouldn’t be there in the first place, but it is not a bad comic of its kind.

Score: 4/10

Next: Saga Volume 3

Category: Graphic Story
Slates: None

The first volume of the science fantasy series Saga won a Hugo award two years back, and the second volume nearly managed to do the same thing last year. Now we have here the third collection and the third Hugo nomination.

During the summer, I reread the whole series after getting my hands on the nice hardcover omnibus that collects volumes 1-3, and I ended up liking the series even more than I used to. It’s an extraordinarily good comic full of engaging characters, lying cats and weird worlds. Occasionally, the action takes some melodramatic turns, but I can’t help loving it.

It’s hard to put my finger on the reason I like Saga most for, but it may have something to do with the subversive feel or quirky tone of the storytelling. The TV heads and various things that slip on their screens, the virtual reality slash interactive theatre form of entertainment, the protagonists’ baby as an extra narrator and countless other delightful details add to the impression that Saga is saying lots of complex and interesting things in imaginative ways. Even though it’s a war story of sorts and terrible things do happen, the comic manages to stay cheerful and fun. What mad scripting skills Brian K. Vaughan has.

The third volume ties up neatly all the story threads of the first two volumes, and I guess that the series is going to take a new direction now that the protagonists have dealt with all the immediate threats. I’m pretty certain I’ll stay reading.

Score: 9/10

That wraps up the graphic story category:

1. Sex Criminals Volume 1: One Weird Trick 9/10
2. Saga Volume 3 9/10
3. Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal 8/10
4. Rat Queens Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery 5/10
5. No Award
6. The Zombie Nation Book #2: Reduce Reuse Reanimate 4/10

Rabid & Sad Factoids — Wrapping Up the Related Work Category

It’s a mystery to me why the Puppy crowd chose to nominate two short pieces of nonfiction, “Why Science is Never Settled” by Tedd Roberts and “Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF” by Ken Burnside.

Category: Related Work
Published in (Roberts): Baen website [part1] [part2]
Published in (Burnside): essay and short story collection Riding the Red Horse, edited by Vox Day and Tom Kratman
Slates: Rabid & Sad Puppies

Why pick a somewhat dry exploration into the scientific method and a physics-heavy account of thermodynamics and military science fiction? They seem to be fine as far as dry explorations and physics-heavy accounts go, but it feels quite weird that suddenly a legion of Hugo nominators pretend that they are enthusiastic about these tedious things.

Here’s an exemplary paragraph by Burnside:

The Space Shuttle Main Engine had an ISp of 470, and was a Rube Goldberg contraption pumping cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen past the engine to regeneratively cool it, running a little bit past the rated design spec. The cheaper to operate, but less efficient Falcon 9 has an estimated ISp of about 290 seconds. NERVA open core nuclear rockets using hydrogen as propellant had ISps of 1200 seconds with a thrust of around 400 milligees. The ion thrusters used by NASA’s probes to Pluto have ISPs of around 10,000 seconds with a thrust of around 4 milligees.

Roberts’s text isn’t even related to SFF, but let’s have a soundbite from that as well for fairness’s sake:

Accidents occur, and scientists are not immune from them. Hopefully, errors are caught in the review process; it has certainly happened to me, and I’ve caught many errors as a reviewer. Too much pressure to publish too often (or simply rushing the process), can lead errors that must later be corrected, either through published retraction, or simply by other lab(s) finding and reporting to differing results. No scientist truly wants to get a result published, and then find out later that the results were not valid due to a decimal point error…

What fun. What rip-roaring, swashbuckling fun.

Score for both: 1.5/10

This wraps up the very disappointing Related Work category that is going to look like this in my final voting ballot:

1. No Award
2. Letters from Gardner: A Writer’s Odyssey by Lou Antonelli 2/10
3. “The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF”, Ken Burnside 1.5/10
4. “Why Science is Never Settled” by Tedd Roberts 1.5/10
5. Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth by John C. Wright 0/10
6. Wisdom from My Internet by Michael Z. Williamson 0/10

Laura J. Mixon & Wrapping Up the Fan Writer Category

Category: Best Fan Writer
Blogs on: Laura J. Mixon
Slates: None

It took me a while to decide whether I would vote for Laura J. Mixon in the Fan Writer category.

It’s clear that her Requires Hate / Benjanun Sriduangkaew report is an enormous service to the fan community and required a fair deal of hard work. On the other hand, people like Abigail Nussbaum and Kate Nepveau have made a case for voting for No Award and I find some of their reasoning convincing as well (not all of it, though, maybe not even most of it).

On the third hand, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (a post here + comments here), among others, has disagreed with Nussbaum with pretty convincing reasons of her own. Mixon has also written a series of followup posts. On yet another hand, awarding the report with a rocket for Best Related Work would have made more sense than awarding Laura J. Mixon with a rocket for being the Best SFF Fan Writer in 2014 which I don’t necessarily think she is, even though the report itself is valuable.

So, what should someone like me — who is most definitely not member of the underprivileged ethnic/cultural/whatever communities that are most affected by the things the report details — do? Not voting at all and letting others decide would maybe work on another year, but that’s another bad choice now that there are Vox Day’s troll hordes pushing for anti-feminist rant bloggers in this category and I have to register my wish to not give them an award in any case.

After some thought, my ballot looks like this:

1. Laura J. Mixon
2. Jeffro Johnson (6/10)
3. No Award
4. Cedar Sanderson (3/10)
5. Dave Freer (1.5/10)
6. Amanda S. Green (1/10)

Sure enough, Jeffro Johnson seems to be an uncritical sidekick of Vox Day, but I think his work that was included in the Hugo voter packet was reasonably good. That makes him stand apart from all other (save one) Puppy nominees in writing categories, who are going below No Award.

Edit 29/7/2015: Added some links to Mixon’s blog posts that should have been there.

Tired Superhero Shtick — The Flash

Category: Dramatic Presentation / Short Form
Slates: Rabid Puppies & Sad Puppies

Judging by the pilot episode, there’s pretty much nothing noteworthy about The Flash. The TV adaptation of the DC superhero is uninspiring and manages to cram so many tired clichés in the 45 minutes that it’s a feat in and of itself. There were no characters or plot points that I’m interested in enough to watch the second episode.

For some reason, it’s supposedly a well-received and popular series but I really can’t see the charm. For me, it’s the weakest finalist in this category.

Score: 5/10.

A TV Show I Would Love to Love — Orphan Black

Category: Dramatic Presentation / Short Form
Slates: None

It’s hard to make up my mind about Orphan Black. I think there are two very good reasons for loving the show and — sadly — one that reduces my enthusiasm quite a bit. Here they are:

Why it’s good #1: Technically, it’s a work of art. The concept is great and having the same actor play so many different characters (who are clones) makes terribly clever use of the possibilities of the medium. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Tatiana Maslany is tremendously good with all the roles.

Why it’s good #2: Space is given for different levels of moral ambiguity — especially with female characters. Some people central to the story played by Maslany include, for example, a substance abusing and murderous housewife, a brainwashed lunatic assassin and a lowlife hustler teen mother, who are all presented more or less positively. Something like that is so rare in TV entertainment (even though it shouldn’t be) that it’s almost enough to make any series great.

Why it’s not so good: While watching Orphan Black, I’m annoyed by the same thing that made it hard to really like Heroes. Each episode is meant to reveal something new and complicate things further, but after a certain point it all just becomes a complicated mess. Fanatic murderers turn sympathetic characters in the next episode, and sympathetic characters are revealed to be sinister some way or the other, the monitors of the clones seem to be swithing allegiance every week, and so on. Tables keep on turning (and reversing the last turn) and that gets tiring after some time. Orphan Black lacks some consistency and I’m not sure if the scriptwriters (different in every episode) are really taking the show in the same direction.

Furthermore, when you begin to think about certain plot twists, they start to make less and less sense. For example, in this Hugo-nominated episode (“By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried”) there’s an elaborate plot to get the captured Sarah Manning a gun (with which she then kills Rachel Duncan) and a drawing by her kid (that explains how she is supposed to use the DIY device). However, all that seems completely unnecessary, because the protagonists had already struck a deal with the female Dyad executive a ladder up who seems to have access to everywhere and who probably would have been able to save them in the first place. Or at the very least that is how I interpreted what was going on. Rather than revealing what different characters have the power to do in the world of the show and sticking to that, the people putting Orphan Black together rely on keeping the audience somewhat in the dark, so it’s hard to say for certain how things really are.

So, making sure the story logic holds water would improve this TV series that is, in my opinion, already very good.

Score: 8/10