George R. R. Martin responds

I was offline all weekend. I needed the sanity break and spent it playing the latest Call of Duty with my son.

George R.R. Martin has posted a series of blog posts about the Sad Puppies campaign. On the 9th I responded to the first 3. He posted a 4th while I was composing my response,  and a couple more since, and of course, despite Mr. Martin being pretty civil, the narrative spewing attack dogs aren’t, so when I came back this morning I found people all over the internet calling me out, saying, ooooh, he got you! Why can’t you answer him? Why are you ignoring him? Where’s the Beef? Got you, Correia, GOT YOU!!!!

Sorry, my time machine was inoperable, so I’ll lump my answers to his 4th post in with the response to today’s letter directly to me.  George R. R. Martin took the time to respond to my post from last week, and though we see things very differently, he was polite, and I would like to respond to a few things. Warning. This post is going to be HUGE. I’m responding to two great big blog posts here. If you just want to read the response to the response, skip down to that link.

 

Mr. Martin,

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my letter. I too am worn out of this whole thing. It turns out being labeled the second coming of BushSatanHitler across the internet isn’t super fun, and is actually very time consuming.

In this post, http://grrm.livejournal.com/418285.html titled Where’s the Beef, you tried to demonstrate that my side’s arguments are spurious, and that there is in fact no political bias in the awards.

I’ve read Brad Torgensen’s statements on this point, and I’ve read Correia’s MONSTER HUNTER NATION, and I’ve read hundreds of comments from their supporters. As with any large group, there is a wide range of opinion. Some of the Puppies are relatively moderate and reasonable. Others, I fear, are beyond the pale, raging and ranting about SJWs and cliques and secret conspiracies.

If I am responsible for everyone that comments on my site, then you are responsible for yours. I think we can both agree that is absurd.  I let everyone speak for themselves, debate, and I don’t remove comments just because I disagree with them. I don’t “massage” or “disemvowel”, and I hardly ever block anyone except for insane trolls and usually then only after they’ve become really repetitive and boring.

But for the rants, yes, there have been some among the 3000 comments, but I think you are being unfairly dismissive. Especially since most of those posts come from one man who has made a hobby of collecting racist quotes from Social Justice Warriors.

On SJWs, you have already told us that you don’t think SJWs don’t exist.  However, half of America thinks they do, and it is a running joke to us. Did you use the term NeoCon to describe many republicans during the Bush years? Did they disagree? Irrelevant, because the term entered common usage.

So here is a question for you.  What term would you use to describe the shared politics of the dozens of reporters, columnists, and bloggers who have run similar articles this week with obvious false accusations that Sad Puppies supporters ran an anti-diversity slate, motivated by racism, sexism, and homophobia?

Jerks? Yes, they are, but that is a bit too coordinated for mere jerkage. That was a political attempt to establish a political narrative.

So, what politics do those reporters share? The answer is glaringly obvious to most of us.   

As for “secret conspiracies” for the last few years we talked about there being campaigns, cliques, and a dominate group culture in the award process. Keep in mind it wasn’t until last week that anyone of note on your side admitted that there were actually campaigns and cliques. And you yourself talked about the prevailing culture of WorldCon and how the Hugos belong to WorldCon.  

A few weeks ago, all of that stuff would have gotten labeled secret conspiracies by people who don’t like us, so forgive some of my fans for kind of feeling like they are on a roll here.

In your Where’s the Beef post you attempted to dismiss our allegations that there is a political bias in the awards now, by going through the history of the awards and looking at the political diversity of winners from long ago. Nice, but we are talking about a relatively recent trend.

You do admit and recognize that, and then go through the last few years, trying to dismiss our complaints. You listed a bunch of names of various people and demanded to know if they should be there or not…  

Nope. Not falling for that. Even assuming your attentions are pure, I’m not walking into that.

This entire time I’ve tried hard not to name other authors or talk negatively about their books. The times that I’ve screwed up and violated that (Ancillary Justice, Redshirts, Dinosaur Revenge) I’ve come to regret it later, because now I’ve made it personal between me and another author, which isn’t what I’m trying to accomplish.

I do like how you constantly rail against McCarthyism, and then demand I name names.  You even cited some authors’ ethnicity, brought up their race specifically, and challenged us to say if we approved of their works or not (after you made it about race) so if we didn’t think the book was deserving, now it is about racism and we have no point, or to avoid that we say we do approve of the book, and now we have no point.

Since you set a trap and invited me to walk into it, I thought about how best to answer you over the weekend. Basically, there is no good way to answer. Point out specifics, be the bad guy, don’t point out specifics, still be the bad guy. That is a Kafka Trap.

The actual tastes of my people, or the idea that our supporters formed their own opinion on this, or that they could come to their own conclusions never enters into your argument, just an assumption that Brad and I were somehow able to sway all of these people without evidence… Trust me. This obstinate crowd of roughnecks and manatees made that decision themselves, and we just gave them a vehicle to get noisy about it.  

I’m going to try hard to not insult any other author’s work I haven’t already insulted, because narrative to the contrary, I actually like some of the people you listed, and I hope they go on to have long fantastic careers.

I don’t think I ever said it was all a Social Justice conspiracy, and if I did, I was probably being flippant. I said it was politically biased. SJWs are just the loudest. The bias comes in a few forms, some of which you’ve already agreed with.

  1. The author is popular with, or part of, some of the cliques.
  2. The book appeals to the cliques’ politics (which overwhelmingly skew left).
  3. The author has managed to not upset the angriest of all cliques which shall not be named.

Violate one of those rules and you are hosed.

But appeasing political bias and being a good book are not mutually exclusive. Something can satisfy A-C and still be a good book. There have been plenty of good works that still got onto the ballot. Yet you are trying to dismiss our argument that there is bias, by saying look at these good books that satisfy our bias! And meanwhile, we are all like, where are all the works that violated A, B, or C?

Let’s go to your list. Redshirts won that year, and you said:

Scalzi — look, I know Scalzi is liberal, and I know that the Puppies seem to hate him, though I can’t for the life of me understand why — but whatever you think of the writer’s politics, REDSHIRTS is a light, fun, amusing SF adventure, an affectionate riff off of STAR TREK, Ghu help us

No, I think he’s a fine of working a popularity contest. Redshirts was a light read, but I’m on record already disagreeing about amusing or fun and leave it at that. As for not understanding how my side could possibly dislike this man, here is him being gracious in victory the night last year’s final Hugo awards were announced:

John Scalzi @scalzi
I’m not going to lie. I’m going to be THRILLED to snarkread the whiny “I didn’t want it anyway” nonsense that will squirt forth tomorrow.

John Scalzi @scalzi
WE ARE GOING TO MAKE THE HUGO SLATE A REFERENDUM ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE FICTION (loses) THE HUGOS DON’T MATTER ANYWAY

John Scalzi @scalzi
SHUT UP I AM NOT CRYING IT’S THAT LITTLE FLECKS OF GUNPOWDER FELL INTO MY EYEBALLS SOMEONE GET ME A FLAMING SWORD SO I CAN FLICK THEM OUT

John Scalzi @scalzi
WHO IS CALLING ME PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE I AM ALL AGGRESSIVE DON’T YOU SEE THIS HUGE GUN I HAVE WITH ME AT ALL TIMES (breaks down, sobbing)

John Scalzi @scalzi
AND NOW I WILL IGNORE THE HUGOS AGAIN UNTIL NEXT YEAR WHEN MY FEELINGS OF PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE INADEQUACY ANGRILY WELL UP ONCE MORE

John Scalzi @scalzi
I’VE LEARNED MY LESSON AND MY LESSON IS THAT WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH PATENT RACIST SHITBAGGERY ON OUR SLATE WHAT THAT WAS GOOD WRITING MAN

John Scalzi @scalzi
ITS PROOF THAT ALL THE FEMINISTS NEED TO DO TO WIN AWARDS IS WRITE BETTER STORIES ACCORDING TO THE JUDGEMENT OF THE FANS SHEEESH

John Scalzi @scalzi
I NEVER WANTED THE AWARD THAT’S WHY I’VE WHINED LIKE A KICKED DOG ABOUT IT FOR A COUPLE YEARS RUNNING.

 

Simply can’t imagine why my side doesn’t care for him… But anyways, we’ve got plenty more examples of him being classy if you’d like them.

As for the rest, I’m not going to stick my foot in those giant steel jaws you provided and talk trash about their work. They all satisfy A-C, and they can play the game.

Come to think of it, Bujold is actually liked on my side. She is also the only Baen author to get on the ballot in… Hell… I’m not actually sure. Decades? Ever? Has another Baen book ever been nominated pre Sad Puppies?

So moving past the quality of the work, let’s talk about this “social justice conspiracy”, which I suppose is your way of dismissing the competing cliques you already admitted exist and our claim of political bias. SJWs are just the loudest, angriest, poo throwing bunch who can be counted on to run all the articles calling their opponents racist. So the best novels that year as far as I can tell the politics wing left, left, left, left, and a question mark.

Then you move down the ballot, to where the presence of Brandon Sanderson, who is a political moderate and one of the most popular authors alive, got a nomination, but to you this proves there is no bias, and not that Brandon has worked within your culture for several years in order to be accepted and considered. As you’ve said, he’s paid his dues. But we’ll run with that… and then left, left, left. Okay. I’m convinced. No bias here!  

You try to make the next category about the author’s sex, which is just being disingenuous.  And I’m not sure of everyone’s politics, because I can’t remember, but looking at those names, I’m thinking among those 5, not a lot of Romney voters if you get my drift. You next cite shorts, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t all of those authors vocally on the left side of the spectrum too?  Sorry, I didn’t check beforehand because I wasn’t aware there was going to be a quiz.

I don’t think movies and TV shows should count in this particular discussion, because they are products created by hundreds of people, but nobody has ever mistaken you or Joss Whedon for Rush Limbaugh listeners (last I checked, there are like 4 of those in Hollywood, and I’m friends with all of them). But hey, if you do want to include movies, last year’s HUGE WIN FOR DIVERSITY (92% white liberals with one Asian liberal) does get a slightly better ratio if you include Alfonso Cuaron, because in America he would check the same box on an EEOC form as I do.

You then went back to the year before, and skim through ChiCon, looking for something we never alleged to prove us wrong, but again, the same old thing. They satisfy A-C. I don’t know Corey’s politics, but other than that, where do the other 4 nominees fall on the spectrum? From communist to liberal? Wow.

Oh, I’m sure there are some broad philosophical differences in there… to you… But to my side we’re back to the fact you have a thousand words for snow, and all we see is snow.

So in all the writing categories, you’ve got a handful of nominees with unknown or moderate politics.

What could we possibly have against Charlie Jane Anders? I don’t know, why don’t you go over to the article she wrote last week on io9 about how Sad Puppies is all motivated by racism and woman hating, and take a wild guess?

Then Torgersen and Resnick… Wow. Yeah, you got me there. Out of three years you found a couple of people who could be described as conservative in the writing categories. Resnick, a living legend, managed to survive his witch burning from the SFWA bulletin, but I believe Torgersen was still in the closet then.

Again, not trying to bag on an author’s work, but if you can’t find dreary, preachy message fic in some of that stuff you listed above, it might be because you are part of their target audience. And you don’t see it as preaching, but rather you see it as obvious truth.  Meanwhile, my people look at that list, and all we can do is shake our heads, and wonder if we outsiders even speak the same language as you guys.

But if you want to make this about the Social Justice “conspiracies”, let’s run with that and talk about C for a minute. I didn’t say they controlled the awards, they’re too inept for that. In fact, many times I’ve said the haters are outnumbered by regular WorldCon voters. I said that they would actively try to destroy any author with bad politics who got in. Of those authors you listed above, how many have ever said anything in public to disagree with the SJWs?  What happened to them if they did? What percentage have agreed with them or remained silent?  

By the way, some of the authors you listed above? I happen to know for a fact that a couple keep their politics quiet out of fear, because they know they have the wrong beliefs, and they don’t want to hurt their careers. And though I know you’ll demand proof, it isn’t my place to out them. Sorry.

There were like four other posts in there too, and I don’t have time to address them. I’ve already killed one week of productive writing time going back and forth on this subject, and I can’t afford to lose another.

So, on to the response letter directly to me. http://grrm.livejournal.com/420090.html

I am just about blogged out on the whole Puppygate thing, having devoted half a dozen posts and thousands of words to it over the past few days. However, Larry Correia responded to some of those posts on his own blog, MONSTER HUNTER NATION, as several dozen of his followers immediately emailed me to point out, and I promised to reply in turn. So here it is.

Thank you, Mr. Martin.

My original posts were long, and Mr. Correia’s reply was long, and if quoted them all, and then piled more on top of it, all of Live Journal might sink beneath the weight. So I am going to cut out the stuff by me that Correia quotes, since the originals are all available upstream, and edit down his own reply to just the point I want to answer.

Going back and forth quoting each other in public gets complicated, but I’ll do my best to be clear. I will do the same, with Mr. Martin in italics and me in bold. I’m going to be cutting everything that I’m not responding to directly, so I’d encourage everyone reading this to click on that link above to read the original in context.

I would have responded earlier, but as you can see, I have been busy posting about other aspects of this thing. But I do appreciate the response, and even more so, the courtesy you have shown. It’s my hope and belief that people on different sides of an issue can disagree, even heatedly, without it turning into rancor and name calling. We are, after all, fighting about a literary award.

Agreed. We may see the world differently, but we’re both fans and professional writers (though you’ve got me beat by orders of magnitude worth of success) and we both want our genre to thrive and readers to be happy.  

Mr. Martin said some nice things about my year’s Campbell ballot and his own loss. Cutting for space and sticking to the debate, but that was nice.  

What did matter was that the Campbell launched my career, just as it launched yours.

Actually, I’m not sure if that’s the case anymore. It used to be that the awards were a huge part of launching a career, but in recent times they don’t seem to make that much of a difference anymore, economically speaking. You’d have to ask publishers, but from what I’ve heard a Hugo nomination is usually a negligible difference in sales and new fans, and a win isn’t a whole lot better, but everything I know on that topic is second hand.

You spoke about how WorldCon used to be the biggest thing in Fandom, and I think back then the Hugos really would make a profound impact, but I think we’ve lost that. Mostly because fandom has kept growing, but as you’ve said, the Hugos have stayed small.

Sure. Of course, we had no internet in 1973, no emails. I had to make do with a few passing comments in print fanzines, and the occasional encounter at a con with a fan who had actually read one of my stories. Egoboo (as we called it) was hard to come by in those days. I sold my first story in 1970, published it in 1971, went to my con that same year, lost the Campbell in 1973, lost my first Hugo and Nebula in 1974, won a Hugo in September 1975… but it was not until a couple of months later, at the 1975 Windycon, that I was finally deemed to be enough of a writer to be asked to sit on a convention panel. Paying our dues, we called it. Acclaim was hard to come by; it had to be earned, and earning it took YEARS.

I was born in 1975. Considering how much the typical WorldCon voter likes me, luckily for me I was able to go around them to get my acclaim. Sorry, I’m just being flippant again.

I don’t condone treating anyone like shit. And I have never been a Mormon or a conservative or a gun-shop owner, so I don’t know what that is like.

It is awesome.

But I do wonder… you say you were called a liar, that people were angry with you for being who you were, that they said not to read your books… well, no need to paraphrase, you just said it all. But WHO called you a liar?

Who? Jackasses I assume. 🙂 

Serious answer, it wasn’t like I wrote the names down at first. I just put my head down and plodded on, mostly trying to avoid fights that might damage my career.

As time went on, I was making more money, I became more vocal, and more people like that showed up to pick fights, we started to collect them on the blog, and I mocked them right back.  If you actually care I could probably get some of my fans to compile a list of names and links for you. This has been a spectator sport over here for the last few years.

How many people said this stuff, where, in what context?

One person, ten people, a hundred? 

Leading up to Reno specifically, hard to tell, since it isn’t like most haters on the internet use their real name and post their business cards. Back then I didn’t know who they were. There were enough to scare the new guy. And since back then I wasn’t exactly planning on kicking over the table and stealing all your chairs, I didn’t think I’d need to catalog them for future evidence.

As time has gone on, you start to recognize the recurring haters, and realize that most of the slanderers are little no name writers, who’ve never had much success, or they are has beens, or almost weres, either way, they’re hoping that if they fling enough hate at people with the wrong politics to show that they are part of the tribe, that somebody important will notice them. Not being on that side, that’s my best guess anyway.

You have lived in a house made of gold bars since this has been a thing, so you might not be aware of how the Flaming Rage Nozzles of Tolerance operate.

Their actual status in the publishing world is irrelevant, because the goal of slander is to toss out as much as possible to see what sticks. Throw out some racism there, sexism here, a little misogyny on top, complete strangers hear it, don’t think about it too hard, and then for the rest of your life your name is connected to these vile things in their minds.

If the attackers get called on it, or busted, they delete the embarrassing stuff, run away, then come back somewhere else, often under a different name, trying to stick narrative into whole new conversations. I’ve got a couple of guys who are so persistent at it, posting under dozens of pseudonyms, whenever my name shows up anywhere that I’m pretty sure they’ve got me on Google alerts.

If you are talking about more recent times, and the number of people like that, plug my name into your search engine for the last week. Now we are in the hundreds, if not thousands. Forums, blog comments, all over FB, and this time it is racist, sexist, blah blah blah… I wish they would mix the narrative up a little and accuse me of something interesting.

I don’t doubt you got some criticism, that people took shots (no pun intended) at you… but fandom is large, even worldcon fandom. There are always assholes. No doubt they were there in 1973 as well, in that first Campbell race. I mean, have there ever been two contenders as opposite as Pournelle and Effinger? That was a classic Old Wave/ New Wave showdown, with us other nominees just caught in the crossfire. However, the internet did not exist to magnify it all, and most of the sniping went on in room parties, with no permanent record of the drunken debates. I am not sure that what you suffered was any worse than what they did, way back when.

Mr. Martin, I’m afraid that you are comparing the behavior of a handful of assholes against organized slander for political ends. Your hypothetical asshole could try to defame somebody for having the wrong politics, but it took a whole lot of work to spread it to thousands of strangers unless you worked at a newspaper. Not anymore.

You keep conflating the history of WorldCon with now, before many of those involved in the current controversy were even born, but they’re not the same thing.  The world has changed. I don’t think it is meaner, but it has made meanness convenient, and the ability to defame is just a click away.

You’ve not been the target of these people, because they don’t see you as an enemy. And even if they did, you sell all the books, they’re bugs to you. Most authors on my side aren’t in the financial position to weather a slander storm.

And regardless of what happened in Reno a few years ago—if you are trying to poke holes in the veracity of my story that I never suspected I would need to document—go search the internet and see how these people reacted last year when Sad Puppies got a handful of people on the ballot. Or look at the giant flaming shit storm of last week, where blatantly stupid lies were passed around to hundreds of thousands of readers with impunity.

Also, all these things that people said about you… are those direct quotes, or are you paraphrasing?

Paraphrasing primarily, because I’d have to start huffing paint to kill enough brain cells to pass for some of these folks. I’m not that good of a writer.

 Because it seems to me that the Sad Puppies love to paraphrase, taking any challenge or criticism and tweaking it around to make it more offensive and insulting.

Okay. Then don’t accept our version. Go read reporter Damien Walter’s account in the Guardian about my sexist homophobic campaign to steal the Hugos last year. (by the way, how did he know about my nomination before it was announced?) Or go read his account in the Guardian where he libeled Toni Weisskopf. Or go read Entertainment Weekly, the Telegraph, Salon, Slate or the many other places where I’m a racist white guy from earlier this week.

Of course we tweak their words around to mock them, because bullies hate that.  You have to have fun with this stuff, or it’ll drive you nuts.

Take this “Wrongfan” moniker I now see popping up on Puppy sites. Neither I nor any of the other SMOFs or trufans or worldconners that I know have ever called you or your friends “wrongfans.” You guys made that up and applied it to yourself.

Damn right we did. I’m pretty sure I invented the word Wrongfun to describe how the perpetually outraged crowd on Twitter was perpetually offended that somebody somewhere was having fun wrong.

Let me give you an example of wrongfun. After my last letter to you went public I had three or four people concern trolling me on Twitter because I used the term “Twitter Lynch Mob” to describe a well-known type of behavior. They’re perched like falcons, waiting for somebody to transgress, so that they can swoop in and feel superior. If you use the wrong words, play the wrong games, read the wrong books, wear the wrong shirt, they’ll be there. These people are always looking for an excuse to shake their fingers at you for having fun wrong, hence the term, Wrongfun.

So when Teresa Nielsen Hayden (who somehow knew that SP3 had 3/5 of the best novel nominations before they were announced) started going off about us, and how we were outsiders, my people took Wrongfun and turned it into Wrongfan. I don’t recall who did that, but it was funny, and it made my people laugh, so it stuck.

Words are awesome like that. I do find it ironic that you don’t approve of my people making up words to describe the world as they see it, in the same sentence that you speak of SMOFs, Trufans, and Worldconners.

 I wish that would stop. People are saying enough hurtful shit in this debate already without making up new insults and suggesting that the other side was throwing them at you. 

We don’t take it as an insult. It is more of a badge. We don’t need to make up new insults. There are plenty already. Did you read the thread on Making Light? Have you been on Twitter? Have you seen the hundreds of Facebook threads? Have you seen the many blog posts and newspaper articles?

I really have no idea what you mean by a “whisper campaign.” You make it sound so sinister.

It was easier than typing out Bunch of Political Assholes Talking Shit In An Attempt To Discredit And Defame Someone They Did Not Like.

Do people talk about books and writers? Sure they do. (They used to do it more. These days, con suite debates are more likely to be about movies than novels). But nobody is whispering. Fans don’t whisper. Fans are loud-mouthed and opinionated.

Oh no, they do both. If you think they are only open and honest about their opinions, you’ve missed the backstabby, gossipy side of the equation. That’s there too, but since they don’t write it down, I can’t copy it over to my webpage to make fun of it, and when we talk about that stuff you guys just assume we are paraphrasing.

You’d win that bet. Nobody said much of anything about me before my first Worldcon, because no one had any idea who I was. I was pretty much an invisible person at that con. I had been to one earlier con, and I knew maybe half a dozen people. I spent much of that con standing quietly in corners, trying to look interesting so people would talk to me. Oh, yes, there were a few people who were terrific, friendly, welcoming — Gardner Dozois, Terry Carr, Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein –but you could count them on the fingers on one hand. Nobody rolled out the red carpet for me. Nobody gave two shits that I was a Campbell Award finalist. So we all have our traumas, Mr. Correia.

Trauma is a strong word, Mr. Martin. I save trauma for things like blunt force, or running out of Coke Zero right before a deadline with a bunch of writing still to do.

How many belligerent drunks? One? Two? Ten?

One that I can recall. Most people aren’t stupid enough to start shit with the 6’5” 300 pound guy who grew up punching cows.

I think it matters.

Having removed rowdy drunks from establishments, I’d say!

You say that you were “berated” by other panelists… but panels at SF cons do often become loud and heated, it is not at all unusual. I doubt any special malice was directed at you. WHat was the panel topic? Who was on it? Who berated you? With what words? Is it possible that you were berating the other panelists back?

Sea Lion

 

I’m supposed to remember all the details of a few panels I was on, like 200 panels ago? Well, answering your questions in order, I don’t remember. I have no flipping idea. Some jackass? I don’t remember what words. It is possible I berated them back, I do that sort of thing. Beats me. I’m going off of a memory of being pissed off and surly. Kind of wrote it off and moved on.

I am not trying to call you a liar, Mr. Correia, but…

I feel like you are, but that’s fine. I’ve already had people digging through my blog history to find my con report to say “He sounds too cheerful!” (no shit, because all this writing stuff beats milking cows). This exchange is a good example of why I refused my nomination. This shouldn’t be about just me.  Now I regret sharing my personal experience, because it just turns into another angle to dismiss the whole thing.

Tell you what, Mr. Martin, go ahead, in your mind, erase all references to my personal experiences, because yours were different and better. For this current debate, it’s as if my experiences never happened, everything was wonderful and inclusive, and joy and butterflies… Strike that personal testimony from the record and just say that I’m a malicious dick of unknown motivation who decided to prove a point for an unknown reason.  

Instead, let’s focus on the stuff we have been paying attention to, and what we have documented over the last two years when we were actively looking for this stuff.

Some people love to argue, some don’t. Some take disagreement to mean disrespect. Some are thin-skinned. I don’t know you well enough to know where you fall in respect of all that.

I spend my free time arguing politics on the internet for fun. To prove a point I picked a fight with half of publishing, and now in between reading articles about what a racist I am, I’m having a public debate with one of the most famous authors in the world with lots of angry people waiting to jump on any mistake. I must be incredibly thin skinned.

I don’t know who the Barflies are. Do you just mean you hung out in the bar? Lots of people hang out in the bar at a con, I was not aware there was a specific group. You can always find lots of writers in the bar, usually around some editor who is buying the drinks.

Barflies… Capital B, as in Baen Barflies, from Baen’s Bar, one of the oldest scifi forums dating back to the dawn of the internet. Great folks, and there is always a small contingent of them at any con. I’m kind of surprised you don’t get the reference.

Come on, Larry. The cool kids? Surely you have been around fandom long enough to realize that there are no cool kids. We’re all the fat kids, the nerds, the computer geeks, the guys who always had their nose in a book, who loved comics and played chess and couldn’t get a date for a prom. And the girls are the geek girls, our female counterparts.

Cool is relative, I’ll give you that. I meant in terms of the In Crowd.  You know, like how you established your WorldCon cred with the giant list of things you’ve been to and people you’ve known since the 70s.

Did you go to the Hugo Losers Party? That’s become an offical con thing now, and the SMOFs have taken it over and made it stuffy and semi-formal, with door dragons deciding who gets in (but as a Campbell loser, you would certainly have been on the list. Gardner Dozois and I founded that party in 1976, the night after I’d lost two Hugos. The whole point was to get drunk and bitter and bitch and tell each other we’d been robbed. We had a little contest, each of us insisting “I am a bigger loser, because… ” It was all in good fun. People who get honestly for real pissed off about losing Hugos… no, man, really, that’s no good. Fake bitter takes the sting out of losing. Real bitter poisons everything.

I did. I recall it being boring and sad, with lots of complaining and crying from people. I remember I hung out for a bit until I saw the spreadsheet printout, then I bailed. I’m an auditor, the numbers were way more interesting. Especially how this whole damned thing was determined by like .001% of fandom.

It’s history that gives the Hugos their prestige, not statistics. I believe I made that point at some length in my first post, so I won’t repeat myself.

You did. You were very clear. I was also clear that I thought they were supposed to be a prestigious big deal, and not just a popularity contest for a couple little groups of insiders.

Okay, these are some strong statements, and I have to ask once again, is it possible that some of this is wounded feelings and hyperbole?

Very possibly. Wounded feelings? I’m not a machine. I was bummed and annoyed. Hyperbole? No Portuguese person has ever been accused of subtlety. I ran a campaign with a spokesmanatee riffing off of Sarah McLachlan animal shelter videos. I wasn’t giving testimony in court. But if you think I’m exaggerating about the venom, I’d invite you to go read the internet right now. Same nonsense, only louder now.  

Were you actually called “a liar,”

Yes. Repeatedly.

or did someone just claim your statement was untrue? Big difference there.

Both.  But again, pretend that I’m just a crank with a faulty memory and look at what is going on right in front of your face from the last week. You’ve got an editor from one of the biggest publishing houses saying that Larry Correia is a lying liar who lies, and that’s not a paraphrase. That’s still getting retweeted today.  

Were you “attacked,” or did people just disagree with you?

Both. For example, right now I’d say that George R. R. Martin or Mary Robinette Kowal disagree. I’d say that Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Arthur Chu, and a bunch of reporters attacked.

Did someone actually use the words “shit writer” and “shit product?”

That is accurate. I’ve gotten that one a lot. It is a constant favorite on Facebook.

Or is this just more “wrongfan” stuff, where someone says something critical, and it gets turned all the way up to eleven on the offensiveness scale?

Nope. Wrongfan is us having fun and showing these assholes that they can’t drag us down. And shitty writer is only like a four or five on the scale. Seven or eight is the white supremacist, angry white male, racist, woman hater stuff. I don’t think these little wimps have the imagination to hit a nine or ten and the EW article attempt at the gold just made them look stupid. But just in case, I’m ready for the eleven, and I’ve warned my local sheriff’s department what’s going on. Luckily they were already familiar with the tactic of SWATing, and I live in a sensible rural area, so I’m not worried about it.

You didn’t, though. (speaking of proving my point) At least I do not believe you did.

I said that people with the wrong politics who got on the ballot would be campaigned against and actively slandered. -Check.   

I said that WorldCon was really a small group that did not represent all of fandom. -Check.

I said there was campaigning. – Check.

I am not calling you a liar, I am just saying that I believe that statement to be false. In fact, I think my own “Where’s the Beef?” blog post pretty well demolished the Sad Puppy claims.

See above.  I think demolished might be a stretch. More like there is a severe difference in perception between our respective sides.

Your supporters may not think so. Does that mean they are calling me a liar? My supporters think I was totally convincing, so…

Which is why ultimately internet debate is a spectator sport. I am under no illusion that I will sway you. I present my arguments to convince the undecided and give support to my side.

However, your posts have been absolutely wonderful for me and my people, because you’ve been honest and come out and said many things we’ve been saying too. Plus, you shot down that whole stupid narrative with people yelling at Brad Torgersen for failing to contact everybody we put on our suggested slate, by pointing out how stupid and hypocritical that is. So on the contrary, if any of my people are calling you a liar, point them out and I’ll gladly tell them to shut up.

I wish I could disagree with that, but I won’t. I am not dishonest either. You’re right, Mr. Correia. You will never win a Hugo. Whether you could have won one before the Sad Puppies, well, I don’t know,

No, trust me. I couldn’t. I’m not good enough at ass kissing to ever overcome my politics.

but now, it is true, you have pissed way too many people off. On the other hand, you know, there are many terrific writers in the history of our genre who have never won a Hugo. Your friend Brad Torgersen has his little list, and I have my own, and the names on his list and the names on mine are very different. Doesn’t mean there is a secret conspiracy. All it means is that tastes differ.

Again, not a secret conspiracy. If I said that academia or Hollywood was overwhelmingly liberal, would that be a secret conspiracy?  No, it would be pointing out that culturally they are overwhelmingly going to swing one way. Keep in mind, up until you and TNH last week, nobody important would come out and admit there was campaigning or cliques.

Has your career been sabotaged? From reading Monster Hunter Nation, it seems as if your career is going rather well.

I said they would try. I didn’t say they were good at it.

You’re on the TIMES bestseller list, are you not? I know a hundred writers in this field, damn good writers, hard-working and talented, who would love to have their careers sabotaged so that they could be on bestseller lists too.

I made the NYT list before I got my Campbell nomination (how often has that happened?)  In the last 6 years I’ve written 13 novels and 23 paying short stories. The reason these people haven’t been able to mess me up is that I work too hard, and my core fan base is made up of a bunch of normal people who don’t like being preached at and scolded either.

You said above you don’t know me well, so I’ll give you an idea. A few years ago I started taking what the perpetually offended wrote and having fun with it. I’d post up their articles in their entirety and then Fisk them, line by line. The fans loved it. So for every sale I lost because the slander stuck with some stranger and they wrote me off as a sexist homophobe, I figure I gained two who were also sick of this crap.

But most authors aren’t like me. They don’t like confrontation. Good people tend to freak out when you call them racist for no reason. And when they find themselves the victim of a Twitter Mob, they apologize, and retreat, afraid to sin again.

But apparently you’ve never seen this, and don’t think it can happen. My side lives it. They’ve watched all this unfold live for years. I don’t know if we’ll ever see eye to eye on that.

I try to assist other authors (and artists, and filmmakers, and fan writers) as well, by recommending their works on my Not A Blog. Sometimes it works. More often it does not. If you do the same thing, I doubt anyone will have a problem with it.

They sure minded when I did that last year.

The backlash you are getting now is because you went way beyond that. Yes, all completely legal… but your campaign, your slate tactics, did not just get some authors you overlooked onto the ballot, it pretty much drove everyone else off the ballot. In the three short fiction categories, there are no choices but your choices (well, yours, and Brad Torgersen’s, and Vox Day’s). You say you just wanted a seat at the table. But you kicked over the table, and took ALL the seats.

So we obeyed all the rules, but violated the secret gentleman’s agreement you guys had in place.

You know that we didn’t expect to sweep the categories. Some of the categories that were swept weren’t even because of Sad Puppies, but by Vox Day’s separate campaign that I had absolutely zero control over.

And please, please, don’t say that was what was done to your side in prior years. I think I demonstrated in “Where’s the Beef?” that that claim is simply not true. There have always been plenty of writers and stories that the Puppies should have liked on the ballot every year. If you think that’s untrue, please give me chapter and verse, with specific references to the ballots for Reno, Chicon, and LoneStarCon. Let’s at least see where we disagree.

Hey, stick your head into this hear bear trap, Correia… Nope, and I explained why above. Even if you were being completely honest there, Mr. Martin, I’m not stupid enough to give that kind of ammunition to the people who hate me by insulting other authors who aren’t currently pissed off at me. Bagging on individual author’s works accomplishes nothing for me, I regret the few times that I have. We made a case to the fans and they agreed. These fans didn’t just spring fully formed into being, just to mess with the Hugos overnight. You can use my refusal to dismiss the whole thing if you want, but again, I’m doing this for the undecided. They can look at the books and see if I have a point or not themselves.

Worldcon is a community. FIAWOL. I don’t regard that as trivial. We welcome newcomers, but yes, the hope is that they will embrace our history and traditions and culture, not just our awards. It’s a proud history and a rich culture. Some of it is silly, sure, but we even love that silliness. Some of it, like the Hugo awards, we take very seriously.

I asked you a very specific question last time on that topic, and I notice that you did not answer it in this letter. You did write a whole lot of posts last week, and I’ve been very frazzled, so I admit that I may have just missed it. So speaking of taking this stuff seriously, are the Hugos 1. an award that represents the likes of one small con, or are the Hugos 2. the award that represents all of fandom? Can’t have both. It has to be one or the other.

So far as I’m concerned, the Hugos are the Big Deal still. There’s no other award in the field with half as distinguished a list of previous winners. The Nebulas challenged for a time, but now they are a distant second.

Then if that is the case, if they are the Big Deal still, and not just coasting on history, shouldn’t everybody in fandom have a say? Or should WorldCon stay small, and have a smaller, more elite voting pool?

Perhaps. Maybe there is altogether too much “lumping together” on both sides. From over here, on the other side, it seems as though the “moderate, rational, normal” conservatives rarely seem to condemn the Vox Days and Rabid Puppies on your side, so we take your silence and lack of condemnation against the hate mongers as tacit approval.

Ah, but I have repeatedly, on Sad Puppies related posts, both last year and this year said that I don’t agree with Vox Day, I don’t condone what he says, I don’t speak for him, control him, or have any sway over him. Do you think Rapid Puppies has somehow made my life easier?

As for Rabid Puppies, there is absolutely nothing for me to condemn. They are fans too, who obeyed the rules, and bought their memberships to participate. Just because you don’t like them or what they want to vote for doesn’t make them bad people. Right now Mary Robinette Kowal is putting together “scholarships” buying memberships for people. I think they’re up to 70. I figure they’re going to disagree with me. FANTASTIC. Contrary to what you might think, I think that’s awesome. The more people voting the better.  And whether you like them or not, Rabid Puppies are fans too.  

Vox Day wasn’t on our slate. Things from his company were on our slate. But if he’d not put himself up for editor on his own slate, directly to his fans, and gotten himself nominated, I doubt anybody would have ever noticed that he published them. Now, whether you hate Vox or not, I’d still ask people to read Wright’s work and vote according to whether they think it is worthy or not.

But I see your Vox Day and match you with Requires Hate. And then I raise you a few hundred others. If you want to match unseemly quote to unseemly quote, you’ll run out of Vox’s before we get through NK Jemisen’s. Only one is the devil, and the other gets a pass. And I find that hypocritical, because both say inflammatory things, and have hurled insults at each other, but one has good politics and the other bad. Yes, I’ve seen his top five dumbest quotes and I don’t like them, but people keep posting them on my blog over and over and over again, and I keep saying the same thing. I don’t like them, don’t own them, and hey, I thought you guys were always saying to separate the art from artist… Oh, wait. That only counts for the child molesters your side showers with awards.

So, if we can bring you say, a hundred quotes from Hugo and Nebula nominated authors that are inflammatory and racist would you go through and specifically condemn each one? Would you demand a witch hunt? Try to drive them out of the industry? Publically distance yourself from them when they show up on the ballot? No? Why? They’re not your problem? Well, that’s what you guys keep asking me to do.

For this next one, I am going to leave in my original bit that you responded to, Mr. Martin, because I believe it illustrates a point.

[[CORREIA: Hypothetical question, if Robert Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers in 2014, could he get on the Hugo ballot now? Or would he be labeled a fascist with troubling ideas, and a product of the neo-colonial patriarchy? And before you dismiss that question, maybe you should read up on what the voting clique that shall not be named says about Heinlein now. Sadly, I suspect the only way Heinlein could get on the ballot today would be if my horde of uncouth barbarian outsiders got involved and put him on our suggested slate.]]

Kind of ironic that you should bring up Heinlein, since it was the Puppy slate that knocked William Patterson’s Heinlein biography off the Related Works shortlist this year. But to answer your question, I don’t think Heinlein would write STARSHIP TROOPERS in 2014. If you know Heinlein, you know that he was a man who changed with the times throughout his career. He was always trying new things, new techniques, new challenges… and his political views changed HUGELY over his lifetime. He wrote much of STARSHIP TROOPERS and STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND at the same time, yet one book is beloved of conservative military buffs while the other became a hippie bible. I have no idea what he would be writing in 2014… but if he were still at the top of his form, I would love to read it.

You didn’t actually answer the question. I didn’t say, if Heinlein evolved into something hypothetically suitable to you guys today, or if Heinlein wrote a novel today, I flat out asked, could Starship Troopers get nominated today?

And to me, I find it more ironic that the first volume of Heinlein’s biography lost to Chicks Dig Timelords.

There is no excuse for any of that. I tried to speak to some of these issues in my blog post called “Hatespeech.” Too much of this kind of shit is flying across the internet in both directions, and I don’t think any good whatsoever is served by debates about who flung the first shit, or who flung the most shit, or who flung the smelliest shit.

It doesn’t matter who did it first, or who did it more, or who did it in 20 international publications, says the person not being slandered… It is remarkable how people unbloodied can stay so above the fray and pronounce how it is all morally equivalent to them. Fantastic. Congratulations, sir, you have claimed the moral high ground. I’m going to head over to Facebook and read about how I eat babies.

(That was hyperbole… Maybe)

Look, I know I’m very testy on this subject, but when the blogs, newspapers, and authors pushing the narrative that Brad and I are white supremacists outnumber the moderate and leftwing professional authors public calls for not being lying, threatening, douchebags, then maybe I’ll be more receptive. But right now, it looks like the people calling for more honest debate and less lies are drastically outnumbered.

More and more, I grow convinced that the internet is toxic. Every controversy brings out the trolls and toads, of every political, religious, and literary persuasion, most of them anonymous, all of them venomous. You can’t control the assholes on your side and I can’t control the assholes on my side. I fear we will both just have to live with that.

Excellent. So why do you guys keep bringing up the right wing answer to Harlan Ellison to try and pin him on me? Turnabout is actually fair play, and if I have to answer for Vox’s sins, then your side should have to answer for the Flaming Rage Nozzles of Tolerance.

Nice, sure. Basic human decency, really. It is grotesque how you cannot have any sort of discussion on the internet without rape threats and death threats coming into it. Makes me despair for our civilization. Hell, I ever see these things on sports blogs.

Agreed.

(this bit is in response to the Locus list having zero Baen books on it)

Do you think that makes Baen unique?

For its size and success? Yes.

It does amuse that so many of your Sad Puppies seem to revere Baen Books and despise Tor Books, which reveals an astonishing ignorance of publishing.

Nope. https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/04/11/last-sp-post-for-the-week-to-my-people-dont-yell-tor/  When I saw that popping up in the comments, I posted this.

Both Baen and Tor were financed by the same guy, Tom Doherty. You know who the first editor was at Tor? Jim Baen.

Yep. Knew that.

Tor publishes your Puppy favorite, John C. Wright. Kevin Anderson too,

Knew that too.

I believe. And Baen published liberals… me, for instance.

Yep. I’m a fan of Misty Lackey and Eric Flint. Because just like I said in the post, Baen doesn’t care about an author’s politics as long as they can entertain their readers and sell books. I’m waiting for the astonishing ignorance part.

But hey, since you are saying this, maybe you should clarify to the haters that Baen isn’t the home of right wing misogynist sci-fi? Because apparently a whole bunch of reporters and bloggers have an astonishing ignorance of publishing.

Come on. Really? Look at the LoneStarCon ballot, the last before the Sad Puppies really began to have an impact. John Scalzi and Lois McMaster Bujold. Indistinguishable from one another? Can’t tell Brandon Sanderson from Saladin Ahmed? Jake Lake and Kim Stanley Robinson? Ken Liu and Pat Cadigan, identical snowflakes? How about the editors? Stanley Schmidt of ANALOG and Sheila Williams of ASIMOV’s, do you imagine they had the same taste, published the same stories? In long form editor, you had Toni Weisskopf, a Puppy favorite, against Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who your Puppies love to hate, with Sheila Gilbert of DAW thrown in as well, plus Lou Anders and Liza Gorinsky. All just snow? I mean, if you say so… but I see a feast there, a table laid out with all sorts of different meats and fruits and cheeses.

Went over this above, but let me point out a couple of things. Who on there went against my A-C above? I see a couple… That’s it.  

Sadly, Stanley Schmidt had to retire before he could win after two decades of losing to somebody with a bigger clique, which is bull crap. Toni Weisskopf was on the ballot that year because of Sad Puppies 1. Yep, Toni’s only nominations in her career have been from Sad Puppies, so I think it is kind of funny you are tossing that at me as evidence of how unbiased you are, since we got her there.

 When you guys ignore somebody like Toni Weisskopf for decades, and give Patrick Nielsen Hayden a dozen nominations, yeah, that’s a regular fruits and cheese tray right there.    

Diversity all over the place.

Yeah, a white liberal beats the Jewish single mom. I’m sure Kameron Hurley will call it a triumph of diversity.

That made me laugh, I admit. Very funny… but it’s all hyperbole and sweeping generalization. I don’t recognize any of those characterizations. Which book was “bigots are stupid?” Which one was “capitalists are stupid bigots?” Can you slap name tags on these straw men?

It would be faster for you to tell me which books featured capitalism as a positive thing. 🙂

I think that once again you are paraphrasing and turning the insult dial up to eleven. I will agree that there was a backlash.

It is interesting how you just dismiss lying defamation campaigns so easily.

Permit me to suggest that much of the negative press you got derived from the fact that one of the stories you placed on the ballot was that novelette by Vox Day, who was already infamous by that point because of his attack on Nora Jemison, his run for SFWA president, and his expulsion from that organization. Here we are back again to the “lumping together” we discussed earlier. Had Vox Day not been on your ticket, I suspect the backlash would not have been a tenth as vociferous as it was.

Yep, I put one story from Vox Day on the ballot for SP2. I read it earlier that year, and personally, I enjoyed it, but then again, my perceptions weren’t colored by all of you guy’s hatey-hate and judging books by their covers. I also had it on my sidebar for a month, so many of my fans read it.

When it came time to put my SP2 slate together (which was such a nefarious master plan that it consisted of me saying, hmmm… what did I like this year, and then posting it on my blog) I remembered that story. I was also trying to get people motivated to get involved in the Hugo process, and I knew he had a lot of blog traffic. Not to mention that one of my stated goals was to demonstrate that SJWs would have a massive freak out if somebody with the wrong politics got on. So on the slate it went. I nominated Vox Day because Satan didn’t have any eligible works that period.

Not to mention that in my nefarious lockstep slate voting, I think Vox had like half as many nominations as I did, because my fans are just going to do whatever the hell they feel like. Maybe if you guys hadn’t kept WorldCon so tiny, a handful of people wouldn’t be able to violate your secret gentlemen’s agreements and get bad people on the ballot.

Imagine, for example, that there had been a “SJW” slate the same year, and that they had gotten half a dozen stories on the ballot,

We don’t have to imagine.

but one of those had been by Requires Hate? (Actually, of course, Hate was nominated for the Campbell, but under a pseudonym).The lashback would have been just as nasty. In your case, it did not help that the Day story was terrible.

Really? So where was this nasty lashback when one of your cliques nominated somebody for having a racist blog? Oh, wait… There wasn’t any. Sheesh, at least Vox Day actually wrote some fiction.  

Your public platform was all about restoring “quality” to the Hugos, and yet one of your standard bearers was the worst piece of writing on the ballot. (In my opinion, of course. All of this is opinion).

So, I let something you don’t like get onto the ballot, and that destroys every other work on the ballot, and it also destroys every other work on the ballot the next year, and I’m assuming it destroys every work on the ballot forever. Those are some harsh double standards you’ve got there.

But it doesn’t really matter, because Vox is off doing his own thing. You tried to shun a man who is incapable of being shunned. He got kicked out of the market, so went and built his own market. The more you go after him, the stronger he gets. I don’t think you guys realize that most of me and Brad’s communication with Vox consists of us asking him to be nice and not burn it all down out of spite.

Got it. Politics, race, religion, and sexual orientation, OUT. Damned good stories, IN. And for this year’s Damned Good Story standard bearer, you chose… John C. Wright SIX TIMES!!! John C. Wright, a writer famed far and wide for having no opinions on politics, race, religion, or sexual orientation, and would never dream of injecting such messages into his Damned Good Stories.

No, I actually chose Jim Butcher in novel, which is the flagship big deal award. Wright is in the other categories.

Were you upset when Mira Grant got 5 nominations in one year? (only unlike Wright, she had nominations for several years before that too), and I do believe that she can be rather politically outspoken herself (but for the record, I think she’s a damned good writer).

Because, after all, the Puppies get sad when they are made to read Message Fiction.

Why, Mr. Martin, I do believe you are paraphrasing or using hyperbole! Or you’re just putting words into my mouth, couldn’t tell. Our problem isn’t that message in fiction exists. It is when message overshadows story, or in many cases in recent years, message replaces story. Or message kills the story, and sodomizes the corpse.   

Besides, Wright wasn’t on Sad Puppies ballot six times. We had him in for novella, short story, and I believe related work, all for things which frankly, we thought were excellent. That was it. The other nominations came in from Vox’s rival Rabid Puppies slate. And it probably helped that when I Book Bombed Wright’s suggested work in our Book Bombs leading up to the close of nominations, while people were on Amazon they bought his other eligible stuff too and found they liked it.

Also, the ones on our slate aren’t preachy message fiction. From your description I’m assuming that you haven’t read it yet, because I don’t think Wright’s story will bother you with his Catholic cooties. I can’t speak for the Rabid Puppies selections because I’ve not read all of them yet, but the SP ones were good.  

So Wright is in, and who is out? James S.A. Corey. Emily St. John Mandel. John Scalzi (of course). THREE BODY PROBLEM. Joe Abercrombie. Larry Niven. Greg Bear. Daniel Abraham. John Varley. William Gibson. Joe Haldeman. Greg Benford. Lev Grossman. Stephen King. No damned good stories there. I guess. No real science fiction, no exciting fantasy, nothing entertaining or commercial, just pretentious left-wing literary crap, right?

I’m not sure how Wright’s nominations in short story, novella, and related works bumped a bunch of novels out. Apparently hyperbole is only a sin when I do it.

But you would probably find it amusing to know that at least one of the people you listed quietly support Sad Puppies, but sadly, judging by their tweets, another one I’m a fan of now believes that I’m a white supremacist.

I think everybody you listed there had a novel, so Wright bumped none of them. The SP nominations for best novel were from Jim Butcher, Marko Kloos, and Kevin J. Anderson (speaking of paying his dues, this is his 125th novel). I’m curious what makes any of the novelists you listed such a profoundly better choice than the three from Sad Puppies? Couldn’t you just as easily have said Leckie is in, and who is out, and then wrote the same list?

I have already posted about my opposition to the various NO AWARD strategies.

Thank you.

I hope that NO AWARD will not sweep the board top to bottom. My best guess right now is that it won’t, but there is a good chance that NO AWARD will take all the “All Puppy” categories, the three short fiction categories and Best Related Book. No one really knows, of course. We are all in uncharted territory here.

And if they do that, it will send a very, very clear message. My people will proceed accordingly.

If I could clap my hands and make everybody play nice, I would, but I do not have that superpower.

You are one of the most famous authors in the world. I’m a pulp writing hack nobody. If I can change the entire Hugo process just by posting about it on my blog, I don’t think you give yourself enough credit.  

But it is interesting that you talk about “scaring the hell out of authors” on your side. Fear is a big part of this. People on the other side of the fence are scared as well, and when people are afraid, they lash out.

My side has had a few years head start. It has been something of a slow burn.

Both sides here feel they are being attacked, and the war of words just seems to keep escalating, and all that can come of that is mutually assured destruction.

I don’t want to see that either, but the ball is no longer in my court. Again, like I closed with last time, you guys need to decide what the Hugos really are, an award for just one small part of fandom, or an award that represents all of fandom. Can’t have both. You guys decide. If it’s just for you guys, and we’re not welcome, fine. We’ll take it from there.

Anyways, thank you for taking the time to respond to me. We see things very differently, but it is nice to be able to discuss it. I do apologize in advance if anything I said came across as cranky, because that wasn’t my intent. It has been a long week.

Honestly, I figure we’ve said about everything we can say and should move. I spent half the day writing this and need to get back to work. If I keep you from writing your next book, YOUR FANS WILL MURDER ME.

Okay, that’s hyperbole… Maybe… A little.

Thanks

-Larry Correia

Wendell's Roughnecks shirts
Last SP post for the week, to my people, don't blame Tor

638 thoughts on “George R. R. Martin responds”

  1. Actually, Brandon Sanderson is a great example of SJWs in action.

    Back in 2007, right as his career was starting to take off, Sanderson wrote a blog post about Dumbledore’s homosexuality that was insufficiently pro-gay for the SJWs. He even (gasp) noted that he agreed with the LDS position on gay marriage.

    Consequently, you’ll find him listed as a homophobe across the Internet by the rabid left. And you’ll also note that he’s made it a point to never, never comment publicly on politics since. One of the Writing Excuses podcasts, IIRC, even addressed the topic with a strong caution on writing politics (something along the lines of “You can be an activist or an author. Probably not both equally.” I’m probably misquoting, but was close to this.)

    Sanderson has since put an addendum to the original piece recanting parts of it, but that’s not enough for the radical fringe. Around the time he added that (2011), you’ll see a spate of hissy-fit articles decrying him again, even with the revision.

    The bitter left at work. And GRRM doesn’t even seem aware of the hissing and spitting against Brandon.

    1. And yet, I support marriage equality and gays in the military, but I don’t generally get called names or attacked by conservatives. We disagree sometimes vociferously, but we make our points and move on.

      TNH is apparently quote-mining my work to prove I’m a homophobe and should be shunned from SF entirely.

      I just love tolerant liberalism.

          1. Of *course* we’re lying, we’re the *Dark Side*?

            Geez, you think some people haven’t read an unsourced “tear off and print” libel campaign news story or six… 🙂

          2. It so happens that we DO have cookies. We stole them from orphans. You can look at them but if you want to eat one or more you must brave the arena. Or spring some kind of nefarious ambush. Or deceive everyone or install a new order via a coup. Or if you have a teleporter…

          3. They’re DARK CHOCOLATE cookies. The best kind!

            Or were those cooties? No matter; mix ’em into the cookie dough.

      1. It all depend on where you post your comment. Certain youtube channel is conservative but mostly youtube is pretty liberal. On the other hand, yahoo is mainly conservative. Some of the yahoo comments I have read made me felt sick to my stomach. So what. There is a lack of empathy. Everyone want to me the victim (whites, or blacks, or purples) and want to rail against the so call main stream. To the conservative, the mainstream is liberal media. And yet to the progressive, the mainstream is all bought by corporations.

    2. I remember some dark muttering from leftists during last year’s Hugo campaign, about Brandon Sanderson being Mormon and (presumably) a homophobe, including in the comments over at TorCom. Mostly it was lost in the background noise what with all the caterwauling about Sad Puppies 2 (and how gauche it was that Tor and Robert Jordan fans got the entire Wheel of Time on the ballot in the first place), but it was there.

      I expect that’s one reason Brandon mostly stays out of politics.

    3. They’ve been pushing the message that nobody would mind the SPs, etc. at all if only they weren’t “assholes.” I.e., you can be a conservative or a Christian/Mormon so long as you never, ever speak of your beliefs. But that doesn’t run both ways. I see shocking and offensive statements from authors in my Twitter feed daily that pass uncommented on, presumably because they fit with the views of the Left. Heck, Saladin Ahmed compared Israel to Al Qaeda and the US Supreme Court to the Iranian Ayatollahs. I only saw those tweets because other authors retweeted them.

  2. “I wish they would mix the narrative up a little and accuse me of something interesting.”

    Can I accuse you of murdering Mr. Boddy in the Transporter Room with the lightsaber?

      1. Larry ALSO was the guy at the Grassy Knoll. And the shadowy figure behind John Wilkes Booth.

        Also, Shakespeare got it wrong: Julius Caesar’s last words were ACTUALLY “Et tu, Larry. . . .”

      1. And here I thought there was nothing nastier than calling someone all the things he’s already been called.

        1. Larry got Lucas to have Han shoot second.

          Larry’s Wendell is the core idea for Jar-Jar Binks.

          Larry first said “Snakes on a …” no, I can’t go there.

          1. Damn you’re just taking all the skeletons out of the closet and proving how grotesquely horrible they actually are.

          1. No, no. First we shun him. After a long enough period of shunning we trick him into Candy Mountain, knock him unconscious, and steal his kidneys. Then, and only then, do we burn him.

      2. 1. Watch the time stamp on this post from Alan S.
        2. Check Making Light, et al.
        3. See how long it takes for a post to appear about Larry getting Firefly cancelled.
        4. Cackle maniacally.

    1. Oh come on people…. how has someone NOT responded to The Childlike Author? Fine… fine… I’ll bite that bullet.
      To The Childlike Author…That’s what she said!

  3. I have been following the kerfuffle to the detriment
    of my own work.

    Finding it an interesting time to be sitting on a
    completed book of SF short stories.

    Figuring out what to do with it now has become
    more complicated than I thought it would be
    when I started it as a winter project last year.
    Interesting times.

    1. You could always take a few of the short stories, try Kindle Unlimited with them, and sell the whole book separately (not under KU). From what I’ve heard, KU works with shorter fiction much better than longer. Run the numbers for yourself.

      It’s an interesting time when the gatekeepers are losing more and more of their power.

      1. Yeah, KU is great. I have a 99 cent Novelette and when someone with KU/KOLL borrows it, I get more than the cover price from the pool.

        I made a whole $14 and change last year. But when I give it away for free, MAN it moves….

          1. I’m planning to put mine up on KU when I get it finished. Don’t know how big it will be yet, depends how much the characters run off with me.

    2. Me too. I met Larry and Toni, and some of the Baen crew last year, got excited, and now I have short stories, 2/3rds of a novel, ideas galore. But there be sea monsters in the water.

      1. So how many of Bujold’s books do we take off the list because they’re from that year or before?

        I agree with you, I was just pointing out there was another one.

        1. Yep, that was the last (absent two Resnick Short stories).

          Between that, and Locus having only one Baen novel on their list for the last three years combined (again, Bujold)….

  4. Larry–you forgot that Tor has new stories published this year by Requires Hate/Binyanun Sridankew or whatever her name is.

    So no, they have not only not disavowed her, they’ve rewarded her with money.

      1. The old school publishing pipeline is at least 1 year long, sometimes much more.

        Let’s give Tor a shot to prove itself.

  5. Rants? There is no need for me to rant since everything I react to is caused by and backed up with actual documentation.

    A rant implies a certain level of mindless rage based on unreasoning fears. I have one issue and one issue alone: hate speech laughed off as not being that based on absurd double standards and stupid definitions.

    I have never used the word “cliques” nor do I care about nepotism. I have never once said or implied there are secret conspiracies. How can I know about secrets? You notice I have never commented on behind the scenes stuff. That is for the simple reason I don’t know and don’t care. Friends are going to watch each other’s backs. That’s not a KKK. What I have maintained all along is there is open collusion and racial and sexual identity bias based on racial and sexual bigotry and the naivete of diversity warriors – and there most obviously is.

    “Want non-white, non-Eurocentric, fantasy that’s really fucking good?”

    “Best of ’13 – My Favourite Books by Women”

    “Sofia Samatar ‏@SofiaSamatar 1h My list (which is already growing, & will have to be updated!) of #horror by non-western writers/writers of color ”

    “Retweeted by Foz Meadows Nnedi Okorafor, PhD ‏@Nnedi Feb 25 60 Black Women in Horror now on Smashwords (Free) …”

    “Retweeted by M J Locke A.C. Wise @ac_wise · Jul 11 My latest Women to Read post is at @sfsignal with @CarolineYoachim @erinmorgenstern @AlyxDellamonica & @mamohanraj ”

    “Dandy McFopperson @rosefox · 15h 15 hours ago @JonathanStrahan It was a really good year for queer and feminist SF/F.”

    “Rose Lemberg retweeted prezzey *Bogi Takács @bogiperson · Sep 29 just a reminder that i have a SF story with two #nonbinary #trans* protagonists 🙂 because yes.”

    “Rose Lemberg retweeted Daniel Fredriksson @thelovelymrfred · Sep 29 I’ve decided to start a book group celebrating queer, feminist and postcolonial SF/F. It shall be called @fabulations. RTs appreciated”

    That is a tiny, tiny, tiny sample. Multiply it by the hundreds. Then, realize there is not one single expression of that by the other side. NOT ONE. That is extraordinary. Then realize we are not only treated as if we do exactly that but in addition that it would also be racist, misogynistic and patriarchal for us to do so. Read Jemisin’s daffy new post to see about mindreading us and furtive conspiracies. After all, according to Jemisin elsewhere, our fiction “embraces white male power fantasies.”

    In keeping with her insane paranoia, Jemisin unbelievably says Brad “and his cronies” have somehow used the “tactics” of racial Jim Crow literary tests and the aid of the KKK, not to mention the aid of “violent bigots” like Daddy Warpig. And this is the woman SJWs swears by and to which Kowal writes in the comments “Yes, to all of this.” Really? Okay.

    1. Wait… I got called out as a “violent bigot”?

      Presumably there’s some evidence of…

      NOPE!

      My regard for the SJW clique grows daily.

      (Yes, I WILL use that word. Especially after Freer this morning.)

      1. Self-defensive words against random SJW libel is trigger-worthy violence … their headmates say so!

      2. The SJW’s apparently think that harsh words = violence, when it’s done against them; and that even violence is merely harsh words, when done against those who disagree with them.

        1. The SJW’s apparently think that harsh words = violence,

          You don’t even need that. Simple disagreement is sufficient.

          (Incidentally, my email provider was down since yesterday afternoon so I’m only getting these notifications now.)

    2. 1. your personality is set when you are nine years old.
      2. you always think other people are the same as you.

      1. Really? Because I’m not very much like I was at 9.
        I also don’t have a problem believing that other people are different from me.

        1. It’s true for SJWs, who tend to regard the world through the same lens as do 9 year olds. (Not joking. 9YOs are still young enough to believe in the “Mommy, fix it!!” theory of universal justice.)

          See also my ‘failure to mature’ theory which I posted in another thread.

      2. I can’t speak to point number one, but point number two is only true for people who have no clue and no imagination. I never assume people are the same as me unless we’re talking about very specific areas of interest and a setting which indicates a similar interest.

        For instance, anyone I see playing an RPG (or playing in an RPG I’m running — I’m talking pencil and paper here, not video games) I’m ready to assume they share my interest in RPGs. If I see them reading a science fiction book I’ll assume they share my interest in science fiction. (If I see them reading MY science fiction book, I’ll jump for joy. Hasn’t happened so far, though it’s tough to tell when the person is using an e-reader.)

        I never assume anyone shares my politics (which, like most of us here, doesn’t fit in a neatly labeled box) just because they share other interests with me.

        The problem with most liberals (modern sense of the word, not the classic definition) is that many of them automatically assume that everyone shares their same beliefs and will spout off the most amazing ideas and preconceptions based on that mistaken belief. This is because they cannot imagine anyone ever disagreeing with them unless the person in question is evil.

      3. Really? I guess that’s why SJW morons spread Southern Jim Crow over all of history. It’s actually called provincialism, or parochialism. SJWs actually think there’s such a thing as a “PoC” person in Nepal.

        1. My personal fave, from around 25 years ago, is when on the NBC Nightly News I saw Tom Brokaw refer to a black native resident of Africa as an “African American”.

      1. It’s nothing like that. It’s no different than bloggers running a “find and replace” on their own site. There is no index. These people have hive-minds which drone like insects. They are their own set of keywords, like when someone keywords a photo on a stock photo site so clients can find it.

    3. I’m thinking that on a future episode of A&E’s “Hoarders,” we’re going to see tearful friends and family members begging James May to pare down/part with his massive collection of SJW hate quotes.

      😛

      1. There’s no hoard. I data-mine my own writing. The vast majority of this so-called “hoard” is actually just sitting on the internet.

        The “hoard” is the vast collection of insane rants the internet never forgets. It’s not like it’s an act of genius to Google “mansplaining” and an influential name in SFF.

        It’s no different than anyone who wants to read about anything. Google “Mamluk Sultans” and “1001 Arabian Nights” and then start reading.

        What it’s really about is not doing what these assholes do at the Guardian and The Atlantic. I’m not going to say stuff I can’t back up with quotes. Why would I say it in the first place? We know why Damien Walters writes about this imaginary white golden age of SF where everyone made fun of blacks by thinly disguising them as aliens. But they never actually show those stories because they don’t exist. SJWs are hopeless biased and just make shit up out of their own heads and put it in scare quotes. I just don’t want to look that stupid.

        1. On the bright side, as repetitive as you get, at least you write better than Jemsin.

          I think that was the turning point for me, to un-Gafiate, when it dawned on me that the clumsy hot mess of an SF novel that everyone was talking about (and trust me when an SF novel filters down into the heart of Mundania, you know there’s an ungodly amount of “push”), the one I gave up on after half a dozen tries (and I’m a book slut) was that Jemsin? Huh.

          And half suspecting that The Middleman got cancelled because of the creator’s crypto-conservatism?

          Yeah. Past time to get involved.

  6. (dryly) I doubt if George is better at foretelling the future than those who never dreamed Sad Puppies would even exist, let alone get 1 book on the slate, a mere three years ago. Maybe you won’t ever get Hugo, because you didn’t play nice, as he says. I may also be a terrible soothsayer, although I’ve looked at enough entrails. My bet is he hasn’t thought about what that challenge will do to your fans.

    And because I am a bad man who notices details these are the people he thinks got excluded: ” and who is out? James S.A. Corey. Emily St. John Mandel. John Scalzi (of course). THREE BODY PROBLEM. Joe Abercrombie. Larry Niven. Greg Bear. Daniel Abraham. John Varley. William Gibson. Joe Haldeman. Greg Benford. Lev Grossman. Stephen King. ”

    When the actual stats come out we’ll see how many he was right on.

    In the meanwhile, Larry, thank you and much respect and appreciation for what you’ve put into our genre. Non carborundum illigitimi.

  7. “You have lived in a house made of gold bars since this has been a thing, so you might not be aware of how the Flaming Rage Nozzles of Tolerance operate.

    Their actual status in the publishing world is irrelevant, because the goal of slander is to toss out as much as possible to see what sticks. Throw out some racism there, sexism here, a little misogyny on top, complete strangers hear it, don’t think about it too hard, and then for the rest of your life your name is connected to these vile things in their minds.”

    I thought this was an interesting quote, because maybe Martin just wasn’t low enough to the ground to see when the Flaming Rage Nozzles of Tolerance targeted Game of Thrones–the TV show. Did anyone see the CHORF response to the Jaime/Cersei sex scene in front of Joffrey? The one that was thematically about Jaime & Cersei’s sick relationship, but that in the hands of the CHORFs turned into “OMG RAPE! RAPE! GAME OF THRONES SUPPORTS RAPE!” Of course, Martin and the Game of Thrones TV show are big enough that it wasn’t enough to kill the show. But the requisite apologetic explanations were dragged out, and the feminists got to count coup if not claim a scalp.

    Let’s watch what happens when Winds of Winter doesn’t follow the expected feminist tropes, and see how Martin responds to that. Because the left loves to eat its own.

  8. So, Mr. Martin has to ask who’s calling Larry a liar and so forth?

    Could he think if a more definitive way to admit that he’s spouting off without even trying to see what’s going on?

    1. “Could he think if a more definitive way to admit that he’s spouting off without even trying to see what’s going on?”

      I can think of one: using ME of all people as the example of someone who puts a lot of messages in my fiction. I have openly boasted that I put no messages in my fiction, so that no one can tell what I wrote when I was an atheist or what when I was a Christian.

      Whether I have succeed or failed at my attempt to hide my personal opinions and get out of the way of the muse is another matter: my point is that, merely by making the attempt, I am a pisspoor example to use as a message-first guy.

      1. If there’s a message in Count to a Trillion, I missed it. Guess I should look harder. Since you’re a Christian, i.e. a racist misogynist homophobe, there must be a racist misogynist homophobe message in there somewhere…

        (that was sarcasm, in case it isn’t obvious)

        1. As a lapsed Buddhist (currently unaffiliated), I’m not the least put off by the world in Count To A Trillion. Albeit, I understand that Mr. Wright have to severely curtail the Witches in the next two novels since the real life counterpart is so extreme that they’ll be unbelievable in his world.

      2. Are you asking us to believe that it’s not possible to tell that “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus” was written by a Christian??

      3. Poor fellow. He actually imagines that failing carrying water for the Concern that Deeply Concerned Goodpeople write about isn’t a message.

        Why that’s the vilest, most hateful message fic of all, and if you won’t join me in the chorus of denunciation, all the Goodpeople will make sure everyone knows you’re just as bad.

    2. Yup. Because if you really want to know who’s been calling Larry a liar, you go to a search engine, or you start looking around.

      Interestingly, it looks like a lot of older dates on archived sites aren’t showing up right now, even with benign search terms. I wonder if search engines have been changing their algorithms lately, or if some older sites have gone away.

      1. Naw, GRRM is saying, “I’m not calling you a liar, Larry, but please prove someone actually called you a liar!” How many times can GRRM cast aspersions on Larry’s credibility?

      2. Google has started down-scoring sites that aren’t mobile friendly, with an eye toward eventually de-listing them. Similar to what they did with Flash sites a few years back.

        (Hint, hint, Larry. May want to have your Correiatech guys look into a responsive [mobile-friendly] WordPress template.)

    3. I think it’s that he can’t actually see it, because this kind of hate-spewing is the everyday language of the left.

      Case in point, there’s a hatefest going on Another Forum[tm] and I called for looking fairly at both sides and that if you’re speaking in goodwill, don’t assume the other person speaks in hate. This was decried as a personal attack, while all around me were mindless repetitions of the current party line.

      I think they honestly don’t hear themselves anymore, because it’s like anything that’s become ordinary — when everyone does it, it has no impact. But when their own style gets quoted back at them by someone out-tribe, then they can suddenly hear the hate, but in their minds it becomes YOUR hate. And of course if you protest their unfairness, that’s you denigrating tribal speech.

  9. Wow. Mr. Martin spent most of that blatantly trying to gas-light Mr. Correia into thinking he imagined being called a ruinous evil backwards shitlord and trying to remove Mr. Correia’s license to use or invent clever terms to mock the tendencies and flaws of his would be tormentors. Worse Mr. Martin keeps harping on the historical glory days of the Hugo’s while ignoring that many of those old timers would be in the shitlord/pissbaby penalty box today, or that some of the more froth-mouthed SMOFs openly speak of being embarrassed by the old masters, seeking to wipe away their malevolent white patriarchal, colonialist legacy with transgressive or pseudo-subversive preachy fiction while attacking or rejecting anything that resembles the old status quo.

    Quite disappointing.

    1. Yeah, cuz I personally helped sack Tenochtitlan.

      That Cortes – what a guy. Pretty frisky with the gals if you know what I mean. His breath smelled like a goat’s.

      1. Well, to be fair, in a past life, or rather animist manifestation, I was a sentient planetoid with a quasi-phallic shape that crashed into that planet with the sessile walrus-made-of-a-cheese-like-substance creatures slumping all over it. Since I was unable to guide myself or produce any sort of thrust being only able to think and exist, I tend to blame gravity for that collision, but we all know Newton was as patriarchal as they comes so…

      2. Cortez, and a large army of natives who were sick and tired of being used as herd animals by the cannibalistic Aztecs, crushed an empire based on rounding up victims from nearby tribes, sacrificing them to the sun god, and then eating them afterwards.

        The tribes Cortez recruited were damned happy to be promoted from livestock to serfs.

  10. “If I could clap my hands and make everybody play nice, I would, but I do not have that superpower.”

    If GRRM said, “Every day that someone posts something unkind about an SF author on the internet is a day I will not work on The Winds of Winter”, I bet a lot of people would get more polite real fast.

    1. That would probably work, but since they’re already saying it’s Larry’s fault that the next book is coming out, they’d just blame us for it anyways.

      We were asking for it. Just standing there, looking all puppy-like.

  11. Paging Dr Pangloss, Paging Dr. Wormtongue, please pick up the non-white, because white is racist, courtesy phone at the front desk in the lobby.

        1. Anybody else feel like getting an Olive rotary dial phone and smashing it, just because they’re EEEEEEvil? 😀

          1. My phone is black.

            OH NOES I SAID THE BAD WORD I MUST NOW REND MY GARMENTS IN PUBLIC

            Feh.

  12. Yep. Decision time. Is the Hugo for the best of SFF, or is it for one small con. If the former I will keep paying my money in to have my voice heard. If not, my money goes elsewhere and they become irrelevant to me and many others.

    1. It is just that simple.

      They can’t continue to claim its the best of Scifi as picked by scifi fandom and yet OPERATE as a small, insular clique.

      They want the prestige without actually accepting the implications of the position.

  13. You know what part of the problem is? Liberals don’t think they have ideology. They think they’re just pragmatists.

    They’re full of shit, mind you. Everyone who has an opinion about anything that matters has an ideology. It’s nothing more than you combined values and beliefs. But the left thinks they’re above all that, that they just want to do what works.

    Their lack of self-awareness is sometimes hilarious. It makes them nearly incapable of spotting any kind of left-wing bias, because they think that their beliefs are just “common sense”.

    Mr. Martin is a fine example of this. The other issue is how detached he is from how things are in the here and now. It’s no surprise, really. My mom doesn’t use the internet, either. It’s a generational thing.

    Also, big surprise: the white guy with fame and fortune and tons of Hugo awards and nominations doesn’t see a problem with the system.

    Fucking shocking.

    CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, MR. MARTIN.

    1. If they had to think about what they “Believe” they’d discover all the contradictions and inconsistencies, and that would bother them quite a bit. Thus they don’t, and they get quite annoyed when we try to point them out for them.

    2. Please, the problem of not questioning ones assumptions and experiences and realizing that they are not shared by all people is hardly unique to liberal ideologues.

      I have experienced this first hand from Southern Baptists, Tea Partiers, CHORFs, Atheists, Liberals and Conservatives. Questioning ones assumptions is hard and constant work.

      Liberals Think…. the left thinks……

      If you don’t want to be treated as a single unified group with everyone on your end of the spectrum (like Vox Day) I suggest you try not treating everyone else on the other end of the spectrum.

      Its not hard. I don’t take issues with your observation. Everything you say is perfectly true of CHORFs. It is not universally true of the left any more than it is universally true that because some conservatives are misogynist (Vox Day) that all conservatives are misogynist.

      1. In actuality, stereotypes exist for a reason. They demonstrate the general characteristics that the stereotyped group exhibits. Do all members have all those characteristics? Of course not. Do those characteristics exist in the majority of those in the stereotyped group? Definitely.

        1. While this is true in some situations, once politics and ideology get involved, the stereotypes become more like caricatures.

          This is because so many people have an interest in painting “the other” to be horrific. They do it to build their own power. They do it because they enjoy putting others down. They do it because they can’t stand disagreement. This happens on both side.

          The net result is that the “stereotype” winds up representing not the typical but the worst ends of the spectrum.

          Your average liberal is not a self-hating bleeding heart who can’t function for all due to the pain of the opressed nor are they hate spewing political crusaders to prove the superiority of their idea.

          You average consevative is not openly hateful of differences and unable to interact with others, nor are they hate spewing political crusaders to prove the superiority of their idea.

          This doesn’t keep all four stereotypes from being common.

          In fact, it is a common stereotype that conservative movements are motivated by racism. Thats why the CHORF’s use it, the stereotype makes it an easy sell. Stereotypes also tell me that Liberals are tolerant. I personally believe that some of these CHORF’s are quietly the most racist people around that the most conservatives are not racist. Are you telling me I should believe the stereotypes instead?

          1. Oh, and by the way, your “stereotypes” that claim that conservatives are racist and liberals are tolerant aren’t true stereotypes, as they are quite at odds with reality, while most true stereotypes are descriptive of the stereotyped groups in general.

          2. No true stereotype huh….. My argument is that all stereotypes aren’t true. My argument is in fact that “stereotypes” can be at odds with reality. Your opening statement left no room for that.

            We have also descended into the logical fallacy of no true scotsman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

          3. We don’t have a problem with non-stereotypical leftists … in fact, we nominated a bunch of them.

            The stereotypical leftists are the ones whining the loudest about Sad Puppies.

        2. Gererally, there’s two problems at hand when it comes to stereotyping, though.

          The first is that groups on the same ‘side’ of the political spectrum are often conflated together. Going with AnotherTruFan’s examples, all too often I hear people attribute the most illiberal things to liberals, because they think ‘liberal’ = ‘the Left’.

          The second is whether or not it’s “the majority” in the first place. In some cases it’s really just a small band of really loud people. In other cases people make assumptions based on the people they’ve encountered online, which is often a result of non-random circumstances and thus unrepresentative. (For example, someone who writes essays on softball might only get hatred from hardcore baseball fans, and then might go on to conclude that all baseball fans are lunatics.)

          That’s why it’s important, I feel, to be precise when discussing things like this. “The constantly offended” offends no-one but the constantly offended. “These people” only offends people like the people you’re talking about. But when people say something like “those liberals”, they’ve often just antagonised liberals who are not those things who might have otherwise agreed with them, all for no reason.

          1. Precision in speech is always good.

            To be precise, the people we are pointing and laughing at are the ones who’s opinions and actions fit the CHORF-set general description.

      2. Nope. Because the left live in an echo chamber, and the right, unless they go completely off the grid (in which case how would you know anything about their assumptions?) cannot.

        The mass media: news, book, movies, radio, TV, magazines, comics… All show us over and over and over what are the beliefs, assumptions, and values of the left. Only on the Internet, can one indulge in a conservative thought bubble. And even here, at a purportedly right wing site, not so much.

        So we on the right are all truly, madly, deeply aware of how our starting premises differ from yours. We can’t avoid it, even if we wanted to. Check your privilege.

      3. I stand by what I said. Everyone does that, yes. However, not all worldviews insist that THEIR view is merely pragmatism.

        This quote is from Eric Alterman, writing in the 150th anniversary issue of “The Nation” magazine:

        “The primary difference between liberalism and conservatism, at least in theory, is that the latter is an ideology and the former isn’t. Conservatism, as Milton Friedman argued, posits that “freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself.” Liberalism, however, as Lionel Trilling observed, “is a large tendency rather than a concise body of doctrine.” And while John Kenneth Galbraith helpfully pointed out that only those programs and policies that honor “the emancipation of belief” are worthy of the term, liberalism, at bottom, is pragmatism. Conservatives desire low taxes and small government because this is how they define freedom. They like to pretend that liberals prefer the opposite in both cases, but the truth is that liberals are OK with whatever works.”

        Here’s another article to that effect, from “The New Repbulic”: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/fact-finders

        What you call a “stereotype” is accepted and espoused by leading left-wing thinkers and publications in this country. President Obama himself declared that it’s not about how big or how small government is, but that government works.

        My, how pragmatic.

        Also, I don’t know anything about Vox Day, and I’m going to say it: I DON’T FUCKING CARE ABOUT VOX DAY. Stop waving this guy’s pseudonym around like some kind of condemnation, like it’s supposed to wound me or something. I DON’T CARE. I’ve never met him, and I’ve only heard of him through Larry. Before this mess started, I’d never heard of him.

        I hope Vox Day is hiding under your bed right now, so he can pop out and EAT YOUR SOUL WHEN YOU’RE SLEEPING. BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA!

        I jest, but not really. I don’t care what he said, I don’t care who he offended, I don’t care if he’s the damned Antichrist. I’m pretty sure there’s a Hugo winner who’s an actual child molester. Not to detract from the daily Two Minutes Hate on Vox Day, but maybe there are worse people out there?

  14. Larry,

    I can lurk no more. Should you care to amend, Dave Freer presents a superb breakdown of how very badly the last 10 years or so have drifted to the left. I posted the same link over at grrm.livejournal.com, but I don’t know if it ever made it through moderation, and even if it did, it would have been deeply buried in the post, “Where’s the beef?”

    http://madgeniusclub.com/2014/08/25/a-very-surprised-looking-sperm-whale-and-a-bowl-of-petunias/

  15. Larry – that closing line? Not hyperbole.

    If you end up delaying the next book in ASoFaI, I will murder you. Well, your kneecaps. If I can jump that high. 😉

  16. I’m going to be glad to escape some of this; work is calling me to go out of state for a while, and I’ll probably be too busy to pay attention to all this for about six months, off and on.

    Larry, you have my sympathy, support (financial when cashflow allows) and respect for not going postal on some of those people. I wish you the best while I’m gone, and hope you manage to convince some fence-sitters to use their brains as well as their ears and eyes; not everyone who says they are for justice is, and sometimes they mean Just-Us.

  17. I beat this analogy to death, but it’s the best one I’ve got. Trying to explain to a liberal that there is liberal bias in a think — such as the publishing industry, or the Hugo awards in particular — is like trying to explain to a fish that the water is wet. The fish just stares at you goggle-eyed and exclaims, “But sir, that is the nature of the universe!” The great majority of America’s liberals think they truly do represent the “middle” and that conservatives are this crazy, deranged bunch of fringe-dwellers. Then they have the nerve to act surprised when they don’t get their way. Especially on anything voted. “The system is broken! We must fix the system!”

    How long before the “retro” Hugos include retro voting?

    Register all the First Fandom guys! They’re dead. They won’t mind!

    Works in Seattle and Chicago, right?

    1. What is particularly odd is that by and large it seems that political liberals enthusiastically embrace concepts such “checking your privilege”, micro aggressions, never blaming victims, and victims of abuse (psychological, economic, physical, etc) often ignoring or even hiding abusive situations because of the lack of power that such situations present. However, when these concepts bump up against a person whose testimony that they do not like they appear to completely ignore all of these previously held convictions.

      Either micro aggressions are real and problematic or they are not. Either privilege blinds you to experiences of people radically different from you or it does not. Either you should never blame someone that claims they’ve received abuse or not. I don’t know GRRM’s views on any of these matters so it is quite possible that he is completely consistent in his views, but it seems like a large contingent of people are not.

        1. With all due respect, check your meds.

          I am Tea Party member, and I know that Fox News slants Right.

          Everyone knows it, and that is why the Left hates Fox with their typical, predictable, boring yet all-consuming and mouth-frothing irrational hatred.

          I have met rightwingers who regret that Fox is not more to the right, or more solidly or more predictably, but, no, I have never once met a Tea Party member who said Fox was not on our side.

          1. Really, you are going to start a post against me with an ad hominem attack by implying that I need meds?

            I linked where I critiqued GRRM for accusing Larry in the post you responded to. I am clearly not here to tell Puppies that they are terrible. I freely agree with many of their observations. I am here to try and forge a common language between the Fans on both sides of me so that we can have an honest discussion about things without descending into insults and attacks.

            First off, I freely admitted that some tea partiers acknowledge the slant. Also, the people I was having this “discussion” with where certainly ideologues in the sense where they thought that their viewpoints were obviously correct and needed no justification. Someone with that view is not going to view Fox as slanted right but as slanted realistic and everything else slanted left.

          2. I’m sure there are some people who also believe that all Fox newswomen are naturally blonde, and that the lack of redheads and brunettes is totally a coincidence.

            These people are not considered the majority, or even the preponderance, of viewers. One does not normally mention such people as an example of normal majority opinion. .

            Most Fox viewers treat it as a running joke, or an annoying Murdochism, but not as an act of nature or a reflection of the percentage of blonde women in the US.

          3. thought that their viewpoints were obviously correct and needed no justification

            Everybody thinks their viewpoints are correct, that’s generally why they hold them.

            My only real concern is if people are capable of politely having conversation about differences of opinion or if they scream insults at you and run away lest they hear any badthink.

          4. To be fair, Fox News is the arm of the Establishment Republicans in much the same way that most of the rest of the media are the arm of the Democrats/Marxists.

            To the extent that Tea Partiers represent the third great school of thought in American politics, the classical liberal of the Thomas Jefferson mold, they don’t really have a media arm, unless you dig a bit deeper. Maybe Breitbart is at least sympathetic, if not necessarily as closely allied.

          5. The Blaze(Radio/Tv) is more tea partyish. For the Record is pretty darn great investigative journalism.

        2. Uh… I don’t know anybody on my side who doesn’t think FOX is slanted. FOX trends right. CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS trend left. MSNBC is insane. That’s not exactly a hard sell. That’s more of a duh, did you watch any of them for a few minutes?

          1. Roger Ailes have an inspired moment back in the ’90s. He realized there is a vast underserved population of viewers, roughly 1/2 of the country. And he’s been making lots of money since.

          2. I’d say NBC does more than trend Left. I find it about the same amount of unwatchable that I find Fox.

            I’d also quibble about putting CNN on the list with ABC and CBS. They seem much more center left than the other two.

            I would put to all, on both sides, that it is much easier to identify the rabid attack dogs on the other side, because they are the ones savagely beating down your door. They don’t actually participate in much conversation with their own side, except when doing “orthodoxy checks.”

          3. Judging by the subjects I do know a whole lot about, CNN sucks. That is reinforced every time I’m stuck at an airport and it is playing, because apparently that is the only place in the world where they actually watch CNN.

          4. I kind of gave up on CNN when I was trying to get coverage of a major hurricane and they kept cutting to pictures of Sarah Palin’s pregnant underaged daughter.

            Crack reporting, guys.

          5. I will agree with you on the quality of CNN. One of the reasons I don’t view CNN as particularly slanted is that they so rarely manage to say anything of substance.

            I wouldn’t call the others a whole a heck of a lot better.

          6. @aspiringtrufan I’m starting with my caveat. There are few forms of life I loath more than the news media. CNN is the forerunner in reasons why. I have lived through stories they ran where the only facts. The ONLY facts were X person was in Y place on Z day. Everything else was completely fabricated. In one case it was because the details were classified so they made things up (It’s a trend with them). They took 2-3 meters when describing the size of a room and made it 2-3 feet and tried to threaten us with the International Red Cross (which is a different beast than the local variety and much more vicious) and try to extort classified information that they could then further distort. (How do I know… I saw what information they were given and how much they distorted it when various news stories hit.) Anything that was not embarrassing to the military or the government at the time (this was under Bush) was not run. So yeah, not so much so on the ‘moderate’ and even less on the ‘honest’.

        3. Tea partier here. Also, embedded in a “purple” populist rural community where Tea Partiers both left and right (surprise! There are both. If you got you info from primary sources instead of the echo chamber, you’d know that) all consider Fox news right wing.

          Now some of the Fox crew are too lefty libertine, and some are too squishy RINO/establishment republican, and some aren’t libertarian enough.. And compared to the US as a whole they’re just barely center right. But compared to all the other TV news sites: conservative.

          I’m going to have to call BS on this claim that you have to explain to **many** tea partners that Fox is left-leaning as opposed to center right. One or two cranks, maybe, but many? Show your links.

          Mr. Wright is being too kind, and assuming you can’t help yourself. I think you’re making khreppe up.

          1. ATF:

            You’re kind of lacking in historical perspective.

            The reason why so many papers (especially the small ones on the local level) have so many political terms in their names (the occasional Republic/Republican, the MUCH more common Democrat, Progressive, etc.) was that prior to WWII, political party affiliation was the primary reason many of them existed. The false notion of “impartiality”, and the competition of radio and TV news, eventually stripped the markets down to where most locales no longer had room for competition. The only place I can think of that still has both left and right newspapers is DC (the Post & the Times), as many of the others with two paper, the situation is more Left (and MORE left) and Tabloid (Like NYC with the Times and its competition).

            On a scale of 0-10, with 5 being impartiality, low being left and high being to the right, no network is a 5. Fox is a 7 (was an 8 back in the days with Beck), Fox Business is a 6-7, ABC’s a 4 (as is CNBC), CBS, CNN & NBC are a 3 (sometimes drifting towards 2), and MSNBC is somewhere in the negatives (some would say double digit negative).
            As for news sources on the net, nearly everything falls outside 3-7.

            Once you get beyond the 3-7 range, politics tend to get a bit loony. Most of the issues I’ve seen with Fox interviewers is that the liberal panelists seem to think that the tactics used on them should only be allowed on the other networks, and targeting only conservatives. That turnabout is fair play is a concept lost on them.

        4. Trying to explain to many (but certainly not all) Tea Partiers that Fox News has a conservative slant can be a really tough sell as well.

          As various others have said, with varying degrees of civility (more on that anon), virtually nobody needs to have it ‘explained’ that Fox News has a conservative slant. I suspect where you encountered the pushback was when you tried to leap from that to ‘and therefore is a bunch of lying liars who lie.’ This ‘Faux News’ notion is an article of faith on the left. Blind, unreasoning faith — an unchallenged preconception, in fact. The thought that reality might actually ’tilt right’ never enters their minds. And anyone who tries to point that is banned, disemvoweled, disinvited, shouted down (and in some extreme cases, doxxed or swatted).

          Which brings me to civility. You seem to feel JCW was rude to you. I suggest you go to the leftist forum of your choice and try to ‘explain’ to them that CNN tilts at least as liberal as Fox News does conservative. See how civil the reaction is. For bonus fun, take a shot every time the phrase ‘Faux News’ is used with a completely straight face. Just please be sure to have a designated driver standing by.

          1. You don’t need to convince me that their are rabid leftists, rude leftists, or leftists that are so far into a different dimension that physics seems to work differently there. Unless I picked very carefully on your drinking challenge, I would not need a designated driver, I would need an ambulance.

            I can say the same thing about many on the right.

    2. This is something I’ve been running into as well, and it drives me a little crazy with how illogical the thinking is.

      We all have biases. Every one of us. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It can be–especially if a person refuses to see acknowledge their biases.

      Even bringing up objective facts (timelines, for instance) isn’t good enough. Either they ascribe motives they would have to be psychic to know or they ignore them and fall back on rhetorics. Lamenting that some are too set in their way of thinking to pay any attention to the facts. :/

      That, or they completely dismiss and ignore any comments that do bring up bias and people feeling like they’ve been treated unfairly because they have opinions that don’t fall in line with the group think. >.<

      1. “We all have biases. Every one of us.”

        It is only your bias that makes you think so.

        All men are sinners, but not all men have biases. If that were true, no reasoning could be trusted.

        1. I would say we have our biases (even if it’s something as benign as a preference for strawberry ice cream over chocolate) because we’re human. As you say, we’re all sinners, and I would add, at this point in time imperfect. (Perfection being the value for a creation that is not yet finished.)

          There exists pure truth and knowledge that is independent of human foibles and perception. Maybe my use of the term ‘bias’ was too broad. Trying to think through a headache right now, so a better term eludes me at the moment. 🙂

          Regardless, so much of this battle reminds me a bit of The Taming of the Shrew (in broad practical terms of trying to force a person to say it is night when there is, in fact, daylight streaming through the window.

        2. “not all men have biases”

          What? No. There is no human mind immune to recency bias, the availability heuristic, the curse of knowledge, and all the other cognitive biases that flesh is heir to. They are artifacts of our biological organisation, shortcuts that the mud that is Man takes out of necessity in the face of how very much more information there is in creation than he can process from moment to moment.

          Even so, we do trust reasoning, and we can. Cognitive biases are effort-saving measures, and we can consciously resist them if we so choose and have time to. (I don’t have time for someone who wants to perform a “call-out” about some “ism” against me, but I *will* listen to someone who says “I think the availability heuristic is affecting your reasoning here and here’s why.”) The laws of logic provide a framework from which to deduce conclusions from premises, and those have been tested and refined through the centuries — from the ancient Greeks all the way to Russell and Whitehead, Frege, and Martin-Lof — for consistency even in the face of human frailty. Or, should it come to it, the disappearance of mankind, should some subsequent intelligence be able to decipher whatever writings of ours survive.

          I suspect I am attacking a somewhat different construction of the term “bias” than you and your interlocutor have in mind, Mr. Wright, but that construction is also a specific case of the more general category of cognitive biases, and I reject the argument that the detection of *any* bias renders its bearer unfit to exercise reason. I do not believe that is an argument you are making — but your opponents *do* make it, every time they deem someone too biased to have a voice. Do not cede them that ground, sir! Reason won that ground in the Enlightenment, and its enemies have been wailing for it back ever since. Let them be disappointed.

      2. “We all have biases. Every one of us.”

        So what? Are you saying that nobody is able to come to conclusions based on a due consideration of the evidence? Or that if you do, it then becomes a “bias?”

        That’s a meaningless statement. Stop acceding to your opponents attempt to define terms for you.

        Conservatives in general, have been way to accommodating, and allowing liberals to always frame the discussion in the manner of their choosing, and then conservatives spend all of their efforts on meaningless defense. Don’t you get it? We’re in an existential struggle for the very soul of our civilization! To quote a great leader of the past, “In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children!” This is what we’re fighting for, and to date, we’ve barely even started to show up for the fight.

        1. No. I was acknowledging something that a lot of people (who tend to be extremely progressive) don’t see. Although, looking back with a clearer head, I recognize that bias was not quite the word I was looking for.

          Yes, I do believe people can come to conclusions based on due consideration of the evidence. (I do not consider that biased.) If everyone did that, it would be awesome. That’s not what I was talking about. I was speaking specifically about people who are so lost in their own bias that they can’t see it. (I haven’t been arguing, per se, but have been presenting facts and links to facts on a writing board for a number of days now. There have been some that do look at the evidence, and while we don’t come to all the same conclusions, they’re rational and a delight to hear from. Most of the people, though, are so sure that Larry and Brad (and especially Vox) are wrong, lying, etc. and that Gamergate is despicable and horrible, that they refuse to look at what Larry has actually said. (Occasionally there are a few clairvoyants who can discern his nefarious motives and read his mind.) They refuse to look at timelines. They refuse to see anything but their own bitterness and contempt. And refuse to accept the fact that they might be wrong, or at least honestly consider it. Those are the people I’m talking about.

          They don’t enter into the debate or conversation in good faith. Instead, discrimination people are speaking up about didn’t happen. Because they said so. Speaking up about the horribly sexist and racist comments coming from their side are completely ignored, because evidently racism and sexism only go one way. (They don’t.) These are people who cannot be reasoned with.

          I wasn’t defending or really arguing. Simply posting the facts on the writer’s board, because the OP opened with statements that were bald-faced lies, and I’m tired of good people being torn down because the people doing the mobbing are too busy starting fires and reaching for their pitchforks to do something as simple as a cursory bit of research. I wanted people who didn’t know as much about what was going on to be able to hear more than how evil Larry is, and how SP is an abomination.

          And, yes. I very much do get that we are in the middle of a war. 🙂 I’m not standing up because I care about the Hugos. I don’t. I’m standing up against the SJW mindset of mobs and bigotry, and intolerance. I’m standing up for the freedom to speak without having to be afraid of people that are so tolerant as to do everything in their power to take away people’s livelihoods because they don’t believe the proper group think. I’m standing up against the petty tyrannies that have too long gone unchallenged. I’m standing up because I value freedom, and the SJW mindset is doing all it can to take our freedoms away. The mindset of the SJWs is a toxic poison that withers away all that is good and truly just, and I refuse to sit by and watch it happen any longer.

      1. Exactly.

        What’s funny is (as others have noted), liberals *have* a mantra to describe this effect – ‘splaining. Mansplaining, whitesplaining, etc.

        I frankly hate that construction, because it gets abused as a cop out to end an argument as often as I have seen it used appropriately (that is, when actually justified) these days. However, since the purpose of language is communication, and you cannot communicate without common language (be that as crude as a point and grunt), it fits here…

        Mr. Martin, simply because you do not personally experience something that wouldn’t be directed at you anyway, and just because you don’t see it from within your bubble, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. If you only hang out with people who think Bush (either one), McCain, or Romney were conservatives (to pick an easy touchstone), you *wouldn’t* see it.

        Those of us who have been on the receiving end of it for years would like you to stop libsplaining to us. Happy to have a productive, civil, dialog with you.

        But please don’t tell us what we have experienced on a fairly regular basis for years doesn’t happen.

    3. Recently, the New York Times ran an article about a woman’s lawsuit against a Silicon Valley venture capitalist firm for sexual bias. She lost the suit.

      Yet, the Times article included numerous quotes about what this first allegedly did, etc…yet not one quote showing the other side of the coin. There had to be more, because she lost, but they only presented one side of the story.

      It was such a hack job of biased reporting that I didn’t think I’d see the like…until I saw the Entertainment Weekly story a short time later.

      Yet most liberals with argue that the Times isn’t biased. No, they’re not lying. They just don’t see it. When you’re inside the bubble, you don’t really know what it looks like from outside.

    4. They have the certainty of fanaticism and the intolerance that goes with that. They cannot be reasoned into accepting a level playing field for mutual discourse and understanding. We speak two completely different languages in a country fundamentally dedicated to having one principled language with which to sort these things out when it comes to racial and sexual groupings.

    5. Mr. Torgersen

      Thank you for that list of books you posted during all this. Because of it I have bought and read and enjoyed books by people I’d never considered before. Again thank you and Mr Correia for all these new (to me) authors and stories.

    6. I recall one conversation with a liberal friend from years ago. We were having a disagreement about something, I don’t recall what, and at one point he said (paraphrasing, obviously,) “the problem is that no matter how much evidence I show you, you could still just discount it because you don’t want to believe it because of your biases.” I responded with “I’m willing to admit that as long as you admit you’re susceptible to the exact same problem. I could show you equally convincing evidence from equally prestigious sources and you could just discount it because of your biases.” He said, “No, no, no, you don’t understand. What I said was…” and then he repeated himself. I told him, “I understand perfectly. But you need to understand that the exact same thing applies to you.” He just kept saying, “No, you don’t understand, what I’m saying is…”
      That’s when I realized that I was coming from a position of “I think I’m right, but maybe I’m wrong” but he was coming from a position of “I am correct, anyone who disagrees with me is wrong because I see the world as it is and anyone who sees it differently is biased and wrong.” You can’t have any sort of meaningful discussion with someone like that.

      1. No you can’t. Thank you for not extending this from your one liberal friend to the rest of us on the left of the spectrum.

          1. Seriously, what were you trying to do here except start a fight?

            Some people are crazy and you can’t argue with them. This is true. This is true for every permutation of every alignment of any thought ever.

          2. I’m responding quite calmly. From observation, those on the left are almost always unwilling to examine their premises, and assume their own moral and factual superiority as articles of faith.

          3. Let me ask you a question. Am I doing it now? If so how? I am honestly interested.

          4. So far as I can see, you’re not doing it at this moment. Which doesn’t change anything about the argument RKW made, of course.

        1. Let’s see if I can break this down. First of all, I’m going to have to define “bias.” You could mean by the term a worldview, a working model of how the world works, which is unexceptional. The older, more experienced, and better read you get, the better your model gets. OR you mean a type of prejudice; an unexamined belief that informs your worldview. I’m going with the latter.

          1. You claim that every one has a bias, I.e. At least one or more of this kind of prejudice.

          2. You will acknowledge that the wider one’s experience: of life events (birth, death, love, war, permaculture, puppies… You name it), of different kinds of people, of education and books read; the more opportunities there are to contrast one’s assumptions against reality.

          3. It stands to reason that while some assumptions will be proven false (no one has ever loved like me before!) some will turn out to be true (babies are a lot of work)

          4. Honest men, and men trained from an early age (“Child, your arguments are sound but your second premise is weak.”) to value reasoning, integrity and truth will be more likely to abandon false assumptions in the face of contradicting evidence.

          5. Claiming that a mature adult: one with a classical education (schooling or autodidact) in the liberal arts and sciences, widely reading in history, old enough to have married, raised children and buried loved ones, with friends and family who hold to diverse beliefs, is subject to biases is a severe criticism. You can expect to be slapped back if you try it.

          6. You are arguing that they live in an ideological echo chamber, read narrowly, are childless, and do not value reason.

          7. Conservatives can’t avoid left wing media, embrace old books, even those with wrong think, value children and reason. Liberals, well, they are what they are. Gillian wrote that the scientific method is a tool of the patriarchy, and a logical argument that reaches the wrong conclusion is hate speech. Good luck getting a reality check to overcome an initial assumption, if doing so out loud subjects you to a twitter mob accusing you of racism, sexism and wife-beating.

          So yes, your feelings are pointing you in the right direction when claims herein that “liberals have loads of biases” feel like criticism. It is. It also msy be deserved.

          Or is that an assumption that you can’t bear to have challenged?

    1. By SJW standards, he certainly is. He’s a White male telling a (forgive me, Mr. Correia) Person of Color that his experiences are illegitimate and that he didn’t really experience the discrimination he thinks he did. Flip GRRM and Correia’s politics and this is a classic case that the SJWs would jump all over. Fortunately for GRRM, we don’t play that game.

      From the perspective of “big name author picking on smaller writer,” I don’t think so. GRRMs initial post was on the Hugo controversy in general, something that he definitely has an interest in. Larry responded, then GRRM responded to Larry’s response. That seems less like “punching down” and more like “having a conversation.” I disagree with him, but I commend GRRM for making the post.

  18. “I was also clear that I thought [the Hugos] were supposed to be a prestigious big deal, and not just a popularity contest for a couple little groups of insiders. ”

    ** Wright is nominated for 6 Hugos this year. Vox Day is nominated for 2. All 8 of those nominations were the result of Vox Day openly stacking the deck, to benefit himself and/or his publishing company.

    – If you are against “popularity contests” to benefit a “little group” of people, shouldn’t Vox Day’s nominations have outraged you? Where’s your outrage?

    But no: “As for Rabid Puppies, there is absolutely nothing for me to condemn.”

    Seriously? You missed the part about Vox nominating a wirter of his 6x and himself 2x? And you’re supposedly mad at Scalzi… why? If Scalzi’s publisher (like Wright’s) stacked the deck so he was nominated 6x IN A SINGLE YEAR, would you have said “there is absolutely nothing to condemn”?

    Your own motivations are very suspect to me.

    And please don’t tell me that the selfishness of what Vox did escaped you. Or that you think Wright is good enough to deserve 6 nods in a single year.

    Where’s the outrage, Larry?

    Why do I get the feeling that instead of being outraged at Vox and Wright, you more likely *congratulted* them on their multiple nominations?

    1. Vox day is completely honest about his intentions.

      Outrage is exactly what he WANTS.

      The whole problem with the previous status quo was lack of honesty and openness.

      Either the Hugos are a silly game dominated by cliques or they actually represent the broader fandom.

      The SP position is that they are the former.

      Vox Day’s actions actually show that to be truth.

      Now if the ‘other side’ will simply acknowledge that the problem has existed for years now, there can be a conversation on what to do moving forward.

      Instead, that side is interested only in attacking with lies and hyperbole, and NOT in having a discussion.

      Why is that?

      1. This is a huge part of the deal for me. Generally speaking, I may not agree with you (general you) and I might even find some of your views deplorable, but I will have more respect for you if you’re upfront and honest about it than someone who hides or lies about their true intentions.

        There is no honor in deceit.

    2. 1) Vox is accused of gaming the Hugo’s

      2) Vox is insulted by this accusation

      3) Vox declares he’s going to game the Hugo’s

      4) Vox games the Hugo’s

      5) Most of us laugh at your consternation

      People really just DO NOT get it.

      1. If people of the right were as violent and totalitarian as the SJWs accuse us of being … well, the results would be horrific for them.

    3. I voted for Wright more than 6 times and I only voted 1/2 the puppy slate. That’s because I am a fan girl. Sad puppies had two effects. It let fen like me know we could have a voice, and it expose wright’s superb short stories (most of which are more than Hugo worthy) to a much wider audience, who agree completely with me, if the goodreads and amazon reviews are any judge.

      We wright fen are positively thrilled at his overdue and thoroughly deserved noms and I don’t understand why you insist on pissing all over my happiness.

      Do you just hate women?

      1. I think you’ve hit on something — that some of the “unlikely” nominees resulted from a sudden gush of fandom rather than some nefarious vote-mongering.

    4. Vox didn’t “nominate” anyone.

      The voters did that.

      “And you’re supposedly mad at Scalzi… why?”

      Oh, I get it. Behind-the-scenes campaigning to get more Hugo nominations in ten years than Arthur C. Clarke got in fifty is perfectly okay. It’s only when it’s done in public in a single year that it becomes bad.

      Interesting moral calculus you have there.

    5. You’re the one who has a problem with it, so why does Mr. Correia have to be the one who’s outraged?

  19. “It’s history that gives the Hugos their prestige”

    In common parlance, Mr Martin, this is called “resting on one’s laurels,” and it is the beginning of institutional rot. It’s not something that you brag about. “Oh, we gave an award to Arthur C. Clarke once” is not a reason why we should take the nomination of the next variation of “Identity group-slang really likes contemporary cultural phenomenon” seriously.

  20. BTW, if I do vote “No Award” in each and every category, you won’t have to guess at my message. I’ll tell you now. It will be because, in my opinion: (a) the nominations were corrupted this year by the open, self-interested manipulation of Vox Day, and (b) I won’t stand for corruption to win even the slightest of victories.

    My actions will have very little to do with what the Sad Puppies did or didn’t do. It will be all about Vox Day.

    As an aside, (c): I do not agree with you that in previous years, noms were also corrupted or born of “conspiracies.” If I did think that, I would have voted No Award all those other years too.

    Almost all the books I love were never nominated for Hugos (A Game of Thrones, The Name of the Wind, Perdido Street Station, etc). But I’m still not on the Puppies side because I’ve been to Worldcon 3x. I met and know the voters, and never met a single one who would vote for corrupt, selfish intentions — unlike what Vox did this year. I can live with losing fair and square. What I can’t live with is anyone, like Vox Day, stacking the deck *openly* to personally benefit himself and Wright (Yes, Mia Grant was nominated 5x. The difference being: her noms were not the result of her open manipulation, or indeed, in my mind, any manipulation. I say that though I’m not even a fan of Mia Grant).

    1. ” or indeed, in my mind, any manipulation.”
      (1) I did not observe any manipulation
      (2) Therefore, no manipulation occurred.
      (3) I need a way to dismiss John Wright’s 6x noms without diminishing Mia Grant’s 5x
      As a free bonus,
      ” I won’t stand for corruption to win even the slightest of victories.”
      (1) I politically dislike SP
      (2) I will find an excuse to NA them so that they cannot win if possible, without regard for the content of their nominee’s stories

      Great, we know where you stand. Do you need a mirror to see how biased and prejudiced you are?

    2. I personally don’t think they vote for corrupt selfish intentions but because they are an unknown combination of flat out racists and naive do-gooders. The point is that from the outside it looks the same – like one giant KKK or White Privilege Conference.

      Fuck it. Fuck the whole thing. Last year was a disgrace. The Nebulas too. Why not call it the “Anti-Male Honkies Award”? That way maybe so many people wouldn’t be duped, because that’s what it was.

    3. The nominated works made it on to the list within the rules. To vote NO AWARD without reading the works and judging them on their merits, would show a complete lack of ethics.

      1. Doing so is within the rules, and they have a right to do so.

        If they manage to No Award everything, they will have made a statement, but not the one they intended.

        And we will tailor our response to that statement. This is not a problem, but an opportunity.

    4. So, let me see if I understand your position.

      We are complaining that the Hugos have been manipulated for years by people who vote for the political correctness of the stories rather than the quality of the stories.

      We were called liars and told to field our own slate of writers, to get more voters to vote, and so on.

      We did so, and won beyond any expectation of success, so great it shocked even us.

      So to prove your point that it was wrong of us to do the exact thing we were told to do to influence the Hugo awards away from votes-for-political-correctness and toward votes-for-stories is to vote against me, without reading any of my stories or essays…

      …On the grounds that our complaint that voting for PC rather than for merit requires you to prove us wrong by voting for PC rather than for merit.

      Question: won’t that prove us right?

      1. Of course it will prove you right. But as many have said, the left is generally incapable of recognizing its blatant (to everyone else) biases.

        1. The Hugo chicanery has already started, if Vox is right:

          http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/04/john-c-wright-work-disqualified.html#comment-form

          Seems one of John C. Wright’s stories was DQ’d from the Hugo ballot on a dubious technicality – it was “illegal” because JCW posted it on his blog – but when John Scalzi actually self-published one of his stories this same technicality curiously never came into play.

          Must have been another one of those sooper-sekrit “gentlemen’s agreements,” I suppose.

          Apparently liberal trolls are also infesting Amazon’s reviews again.

    5. Actaully I always thought that Mira Grant is possibly one of the best examples of the awards being based on things other than storytelling Consider the amount and types of nominations for Mira Grant and compare them to the nominations for Seanan Mcguire.
      I maybe missing a few nomination but all of Mcguires nomination are for shorter stories or related work while Grants nominations are primarily for best novel and in one case novellette. This is odd as they are the SAME BLOODY PERSON and Mcguire has a new novel in print at least every 6 month under her own name but not a single one of them have been nominated for a Hugo. So does her style and quality vary that wider based on the name she is writing under or is it because the Grant novel are billed as zombie thriller and the Mcguire work as urban fantasy ?

      1. McGuire invented Grant so that readers in the two markets would know what to buy.

        McGuire struck gold with the Feed series, and if you haven’t tried them, they aren’t just about zombies, but also about the way their presence remade the world.

        I never tried the other McGuire until she got McGuire stories on the Hugo ballot. I didn’t find them very interesting at all.

  21. “Both sides here feel they are being attacked, and the war of words just seems to keep escalating, and all that can come of that is mutually assured destruction.”

    Why would the sad puppies side get “destroyed” when they are the side with the momentum and getting stronger every year? More and more people will be involved in Worldcon and choosing the Hugo awards, and standards will rise; isn’t that great news for the either SF/F community?

  22. “…I think my own ‘Where’s the Beef?’ blog post pretty well demolished the Sad Puppy claims.”

    This is the false-to-facts assertion which, contra Mr. Martin, demolishes his whole special pleading-fueled spiel.

    Social and artistic movements don’t happen for no reason, Mr. Martin. Try Larry’s thought experiment, and chalk his experience in Reno up to a psychotic episode.

    Now explain the 350+ people who voted for SP/RP nominees. Were they hallucinating too? Explain the backlash when SP2 only got one nominee per category. Who complained and why is a matter of public record. Blaming Vox just makes Larry’s point for him.

    Pretty remarkable how reality rearranged itself to conform with supposed hyperbole based on Larry’s allegedly faulty memory.

  23. I *still* say: “Screw the Hugos. Make way for the Wendells!” Sooner or later, it will catch on, be the mark of Allfandom Excellence, and produce a tradition that promotes inclusiveness and supports true diversity in fiction.

    1. Larry could always create the “Toru’s.” Sounds all-inclusive and pretty tolerant to me. 😉

  24. This whole fiasco has me wondering if my short stories will be rejected due to being politically-driven alternate history that’s not “Kennedy was never shot” or “MLK becomes President”, but something more hilariously complicated from that era. I know I can always fall back on indie, but what if I couldn’t? The fact that I wonder is itself refutation of the idea that there’s no SJW or more broadly liberal bias. I wouldn’t wonder if there really wasn’t.

    1. I hope not, but everything I have read and experience say that simpler you can make your pitch the better.

      Game Of Thrones -> War of the Roses with Dragons

      Star Trek -> Wagon Train to the stars

      Curse of Chalion -> Spanish Reconquest with Dragons

      1632 -> West Virginia miners meet 30 years war.

      The Guns of the South -> Terminator style meddling in the Civil War

      Princess of Wands -> True Belief gives you the power to kill demons. (Also Baen writers may summon demons)

      If your pitch involves the phrase “complicated” I am pretty sure it will get canned.

        1. Yea that was supposed to be Spanish Reconquest with Gods and Miracles. Sometimes wires get mixed between brain and keyboard.

          I assure, you I have read the book and the sequels. They are some of my favorite stories. Can’t say I care much for most of Bujold’s other fantasy. Love the Vorkosigan books though.

      1. Well, my premise is “Nixon as President in 1960 was JUST BETTER IN EVERY WAY”.

        It’s providing me a huge reservoir of creative ideas and story plots, but, well, I can’t lie and say it’s not a politically driven alternate universe.

        Based on recent Hugo news, though, I’m limiting my bloggings about the AU to plot stuff and backstory and historical discussion and no posting of drafts in progress or completed, hopefully I’ll attract some alt-history buffs eventually when I have ten or twenty posts up.

  25. I’ve been a voracious reader of SF since about 1956. I’ve read nearly all of your novels, but not one of GRRM’s. ‘Nuff said.

      1. “Sandkings” was very good. “TUF Voyaging” was pretty good. “”Nightflyers” was pretty good.

        Buy them used.

        1. I’d add “A Song for Lya” to that. The man can write when he has a story to tell and only so many pages to wrap it up.

      2. I bought GoT the week it came out. Hated it. Well written, but nihilistic and high squick factor. Subsequent books have actually gotten worse.

        (OTOH, we eventually donated that book to the library. I nearly choked when I saw what first editions are selling for now. So, GRRM gets the last laugh.)

        No question GRRM is an excellent storyteller, but Larry tells better stories.

        1. Second that.

          Song for wassname didn’t suck, but we’re in a bit of a golden age of children’s spec fic, so the bar is pretty high. Back when a kid could read ever SF&F book in a largish regional library, I might have been impressed.

    1. I thought perhaps I was the only one who was thinking “Who the heck is George R.R. Martin? I suppose I might have read something of his in the late 70’s but it obviously didn’t thrill me enough to read anything else.

      Like someone else said, I haven’t had time to plow through all the sci-fi out in the bookstores, so I’ve mainly been a Baen product purchaser (it helps that most of my favorite authors publish through Baen), so I suppose I may miss out on some really good literature. But I’m happy with my system, so please continue to write those horrid sexist, racist, etc. books, Mr. Corriea so I can revel in them.

  26. Larry, I own all your novels and some of your short works. You signed my kindle in Seattle. I disagree with you on Vox Day. Disavowing him because he’s said some things you find icky smacks of political correctness. And comparing him to Requires Hate is atrocious. Requires Hate is a buddyfucking troll who used multiple aliases to sow discord among friends. Vox Day is loyal as a dog, and he acts in the full light of day and signs his own name to his posts and comments. He’s never said a bad word about you even though you’ve been acting like he has fleas for a while now. It’s not right. Please reconsider.

    1. He didn’t equate Vox Day with Requires Hate. He admitted Vox says stuff he doesn’t like, but Requires Hate is horribly worse. His point in this was to restate AGAIN that he is NOT responsible for Vox Day’s opinions,but is being treated as though he is. VD says and does the things he says and does, because he has reasons of his own, and not because Larry is pulling his strings. And disavowing things that VD says because Larry finds them icky is not political correctness; it’s integrity. PC would be disclaiming things he secretly agrees with, to avoid being fussed at. Larry sure isn’t doing that. Look: Vox gets to be Vox. Larry is taking crap from one side; are you really wanting to give Larry a hard time for being Larry?

      1. GRRM has been claiming moral equivalency between Vox and RH, as though the left’s sins are all paid for because Vox. So when Larry said I’ll see your Vox and raise you RH, it seemed to strengthen the equivalence GRRM was drawing between the two. The reality is that they are in no way alike. That’s what led me to comment.

        1. I retract these comments. I made an emotional response when I should’ve taken more time to think things through.

          1. Whenever you find mere words making you angry, always take a break for a cortico-thalamic pause, integrate yourself, and then carefully analyze the statement that made you angry.

            You might learn something about yourself as well.

    2. While I appreciate your instinct to rise to my defense, Grendel, I don’t consider either Larry or Brad to be acting as if I have fleas. Both of them are simply pointing out the entirely obvious to people who are very, very eager to try to tar them with responsibility for me.

      I don’t speak for them. I don’t answer to them. I am not a tame wolf.

      Larry doesn’t agree with everything I write, say or think. Neither does Brad. And neither do any of the Dread Ilk. That’s just a simple fact. I don’t object in the slightest to disagreement or criticism, because all that matters is that neither Larry nor Brad has ever lied about me, unlike Teresa Nielsen Hayden, John Scalzi, NK Jemisin, and George Martin, to name a few.

      So, please don’t take any offense on my behalf in this regard. Because there is none to be taken.

      1. I’ve read several of your books, Vox, and while I have a hard time accepting an AI that believes in God, the books that I have read were good otherwise.

        And speaking as an atheist, I actually really enjoyed the book about the looming religious war with the Elves (sorry, I don’t remember the title offhand).

        I also think that a lot of what you have to say on your blog is pretty interesting.

        But honestly some of your comments about evolution get on my nerves.

        1. Some of the trains of thought I find myself riding get on my nerves too. But I just follow the logic wherever it goes. I am under absolutely no illusion that I define either the truth or reality.

          It is astonishing how many people seem to think their feelings do.

        2. and while I have a hard time accepting an AI that believes in God

          Why? A true AI would be able to believe many things, including things that are wrong. And machines are not infallible; give them the wrong input, and they will spit out junk, just like anything else. GIGO, as it were. 😉

          1. But you can be proud of the fact that you are able to own up to a mistake and change your mind.

            Way too many people can’t do that.

          1. HBO started out with microwave antennas being used to beam sports events into people’s homes during the day, and softcore porn at night.

            No one is ever going to get HBO to stop broadcasting tits.

      1. But then they doubled down with the nekkid necking dudes, so does that bring them back up to “GOT Nekkid Quota”, or are we holding out for more boobies?

        🙂

  27. I am a Sad Puppy.

    I have never been to a Con, nor do I plan to go at any time in the future. Also, my politics are mostly what you would call ‘rabid left’.

    On the other hand, I’ve set aside a room in my house to keep my sci-fi and fantasy collection which just recently passed 3000 novels and 7 shelf-yards of periodicals. I read a LOT.

    Up until about 1995 or so, I eagerly grabbed all the Hugo nominees as they hit the store shelves. These days, if I pick up a book and I don’t know the author from earlier works and it has a Hugo label on the cover, I put it back and look for something else.

    When someone comfortably in the top 1% in terms of money spent on your genre actively avoids your award, it may be time to shake things up a bit.

    So thanks, mr. Correia for doing just that, regardless of how it turns out in the end.

    Also thanks for bringing my attention to John Ringo. I read his zombie series this weekend and it’s one of the most entertaining things to hit the genre in a dogs age.

    1. It’s good to hear some support from the other side.

      When I first went to Worldcon (2 years ago) and first voted for the Hugos (last year), without being involved or really cognizant of Sad Puppies, what first struck me was how mediocre the nominees were.

      The SP should really see more support (or at least a rival, non-SJW slate) from the Left. Even if you largely agree with the politics (I don’t) and even if you like message fiction (I do), the SJWs are the death of good or interesting message fiction, because they require it fit into such a narrow, unambiguous set of views and have no interest in thinking about anything any differently.

  28. Honestly I am kind of upset both MHI:6 and Winds of Winter were postponed due to Sad Puppies.

    I mean GRRM easily wrote enough for 3 or 4 POV chapters and Mr. Correia wrote enough for about 3 epic explosions.

  29. Harlan Ellison’s protege was Octavia Butler. A writer OSC admired enough to model in his book on writing after her exposition style. “Speech Sounds” is one of the most disturbing stories I have read since “The Yellow Wallpaper”.

    I don’t understand what my community is doing right now. This type of vitriolic childishness is the reason I ran to the SFF community in the first place. I am very sad to read this post today.

    1. America is a young country and one that until relatively recently evolved quite rapidly in terms of its pop cultural expressions. Look at the difference in SF and film in the ’30s compared to the ’40s as opposed to the last 10 years and the previous 10 before that, in which there is very little stylistic shift.

      So we don’t have a lot of data to go by because America hasn’t really retreaded historic cycles. But some people have observed that revolutions tend to become the thing they revolted against. In the case of the SFF community it’s pretty clear SJWs consider themselves the logical inheritors of the ’60s cultural revolution and just as clear many key figures in that movement would’ve spit on today’s SJWs and that today’s SJWs would not and do not tolerate key artistic trends of the ’60s.

      No member of today’s gender feminist cult would do anything but react with horror to S. Clay Wilson’s Capt. Pissgums and his Pervert Pirates in the old underground comix or find R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural funny. Anita Sarkeesian and the new SFWA don’t represent people who want to dismantle the old Hays movie censorship and comics code but wish to reinstitute them.

      The wild atmosphere of old SF conventions has been replaced by people who look a lot like ’60s hippies. They wear goofy burnished leather cowboy hats, have long hair and tattoos and sharktooth necklaces. However inside they are conformist rednecks of the worst sort. Swords and boothbabes are banned and the edges have been polished off until all fun has been sucked dry. SJWs are still talking about alleged con serial harassers Rene Walling and Jim Frenkel as if they were serial killers. In the old days if there was any truth to that someone would’ve said “knock it off” or kicked them out and that would be the end of it. Claiming PTSD years afterwards from having your ass grabbed wouldn’t have entered into it. We didn’t put up with that stuff at our parties but neither would our gals have fallen apart. I once had a girlfriend turn around and punch a guy right in the mouth who touched her at a concert as we were passing through a crowd.

      I just read a Tweet about “some ugly, intensely personal shit that just happened to a close friend.” Following the link takes you here:

      http://lydy.livejournal.com/137401.html

      The comments are some of the most hysterical redneck bullshit you’ll ever want to read. What was the big drama? Some dude at a convention they all knew wanted to crash in the party room. They said no and he snuck into a closet and tried to go to sleep anyway. They caught him. A psychological forensic investigation and casting-out by what can only be described as overwrought nuns each more eager to play the victim than the last follows. It’s a must-read. Suffice it to say I’d pay money to never go to that convention.

      Years ago folks would’ve said “whatever.” Today, nothing becomes Les Miserables. These are not people I would’ve ever partied with. These are the people we kept out of our parties because they were the crew of funlessness. If it’s possible to find people more stiff and hysterically finger-wagging than Scalzi, Hines, Kowal and their crew of dipshit feminists I don’t know who they would be. These are the people who used to write songs like Okie from Muskogee and wear polyester lime-green leisure suits.

      SJWs are people who claim to be xenophiles but are in fact put off by anyone who is genuinely eccentric. They like the iconoclast on TV as long as they don’t have to actually ever be friends with someone like that. If you look at the hysterical meltdown on Twitter last year over Jonathan Ross and then at the two stiffs they wheeled on stage to emcee the awards, it’s no surprise someone wants to put marijuana in their brownies; they’re practically begging to be pranked.

      Natural eccentrics don’t like having their movements and fun constrained. Trying to do that will usually invite some caustic reaction. The cast of Animal House has exchanged sides – one looks like the other now.

      Just remember Cary Grant took LSD and Doris Day was a nympho. Appearances are often deceiving. That was one of the key points of the ’60s.

      1. Speakin’ as a flyover-country redneck myself, I beg to differ on that characterization. The key trait of rednecks is nonconformity. The redneck response to something unusual is likely to be “Well, will ya look at that! Let me try it,” and then putting their own spin on it. The reason there are so many redneck jokes is because rednecks are chaotically creative, so the crazy never ends. But conformist? Them’s fightin’ words!

        [I know you didn’t mean anything by it; just sayin’.]

        1. From Tennessee, here. What are the most common last words on redneck tombstones? “Hey y’all, look at this!”

  30. . If I said that academia or Hollywood was overwhelmingly liberal, would that be a secret conspiracy?

    Afraid of using the J-word?

    1. No, he doesn’t delete comments, unless it’s from a repeat offender who has repeatedly stalked and harrassed specific individuals. That’s not you, is it Yama?

      Anyway, no, there are plenty of conservative Jews out there. Not in Hollywood, mind you, but there’s not many conserviative [fill-in-any-ethnic-background-here] there either, and they certainly exist. Hollywood’s problem is a liberal bias, not a religious or ethnic one.

      1. So somebody whose name is a dare to see if I’ll delete stupid comments is commenting.

        No, I’ll still leave them, but I’ll insult you if they’re stupid, and once you bore me, THEN I’ll block you.

        If your grand strategy is to try to spread some narrative about anti-Semitism among my fans, my maternal grandmother’s family came over from Lithuania. Their name was Bareika. Tread carefully.

        1. Honestly, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if this one was Yama/Clamps. I have no way to know for sure, obviously, but nobody can go on a “WTF? Where the hell did THAT come from?” tangent like he can.

        2. Larry, kind of on this point, I am blocked on Twitter. Anyway I could get unblocked so I could follow your fun again? @J_C_ Elias

          Not sure how I ended up on your special list. Worst I have done is ask why the hell the high speed low drag mercs in Dead Six didn’t dummy cord their NVGs. LOL.

        3. Larry, according to Jewish law, you are a Jew! 100% Matrilineal descent!! I don’t figure you’ll start practising another religion besides the one you already have, but I will proudly claim you as a distant connection.

          1. We suspect but don’t know for sure. She never spoke about her past or her family. We didn’t even know anything about it until after she died. My wife has been doing a ton of genealogical research and is working on that line now. Fascinating stuff.

          2. ” I don’t figure you’ll start practising another religion”

            Especially with the induction ceremony. There’s a reason the early Christians stopped making people convert to Judaism first; something was cutting into their number of male converts…..;-)

    2. I doubt it, since there is nothing inherently left wing about Judaism, Nor are most leftists in academia or Hollywood Jewish.

      Can’t speak for Larry, but I know that I almost never really think about the religion of people, say in Hollywood, even when their name is fairly stereotypically associated with a Jewish background, or they are quite open about their Jewish heritage and/or faith.

      Nope, wrong strawman.

      1. If Jews really were the master-race supermen that Nazis and other leftists think they are, the world would have been a better place.

        1. In fact, that would be an entertaining alternate history series.

          I can only imagine what would have happened to Hitler in such a history.

          1. Speaking of which, why is it always “Go back in time to kill Hitler before he becomes Fuhrer”? Why not “Go back in time to give Hitler a job painting while he was still an art student”?

        2. I’ve long pointed out, that for a people supposedly secretly in charge of everything for world domination, the Jews sure seem to be lousy at this whole “Evil Secret Illuminati” schtick, given how they’ve been getting the shitty end of the stick for millennia.

          But I can’t claim credit for that observation. I swiped it almost verbatim (minus the vulgarity) from one of the nuns at school…

  31. I’ve been finding the more polite, more reasoned back-and-forth between both yourself, Larry, and GRRM to prove a pretty interesting read over the last week.

    And in light of not having much else to say on the actual topic of the current Hugo Awards themselves (what I’ve had to say I’ve said on my blogs, and done my own little battles there), I’m just going to say thanks. Because it takes someone with an entrenched base to do something like this and get it rolling. And it’s going to have good, long-term effects for Sci-fi/fantasy in general.

  32. “I don’t want to see that either, but the ball is no longer in my court. Again, like I closed with last time, you guys need to decide what the Hugos really are, an award for just one small part of fandom, or an award that represents all of fandom. Can’t have both. You guys decide. If it’s just for you guys, and we’re not welcome, fine. We’ll take it from there.”

    What response, and from who, would satisfy this?

    1. If the vote is “No Award”, then that means “This is a backwater, one-con-award for RightFans that can and should be ignored.”

      If the vote is anything else, it’s at least plausible that the award represents a wider fandom.

      The next question would be to see if the rules are changed to deprecate the “Supporting Membership” somehow.

      The line that’s amusing is “We’ll take it from there.” Because I can come up with a variety of things for both options that would… really, really irk the FRNTs.

      1. Eh, we could always decide to fix the one-con-award. Or at least push the matter until its nature becomes clear.

  33. So the short of this whole mess is: You did the maths, You saw that your tastes are in a minority and while they were proportionally represented on the slates, the majority of the electorate likes other stuff better.

    So you decided an affirmative action award for conservatives was needed and created it by bloc voting.

    How great, democratic and freedom loving of you.

    1. Not only what Jeff said, but you might want to try reading the works put forth. And if you’re that concerned about the politics involved, you might try checking them out, too, because so far you’re 0-for-2.

    2. I second Jeff Weimer’s comment. You really didn’t comprehend anything that was said, from the evidence of your post.

    3. So you decided an affirmative action award for conservatives was needed and created it by bloc voting.

      That must be why we’re the minority scrambling to buy votes.

      oh … wait …

    4. I’d be careful when talking about “tastes in the minority”. The publish numbers, to say nothing of actual sales numbers, for recent Hugo winners aren’t always “taste majority” material.

    5. Ah, the “shorter” tactic.

      Put the word “shorter” or similar at the beginning, then make something up and attribute it to the person you dislike.

      After all, it’s easier than actualy paying attention to what is being said.

      I mean, if it’s “affirmative action for conservatives” why were non-conservatives on the icky awful evil Sad Puppies slate?

      Though I must admit it can be used accurately. Here, I’ll give a an example:

      Shorter Gwen: “I decided to lie.”

    6. Having fits because someone increased the voting pool to make the electorate more what the prior electorate claimed it was — how great, democratic and freedom loving of you.

  34. For myself it is amusing that in the end everything always seem to come down to Vox. I’ve been reading Voxs blog for about 2 yrs now. It has turned into an everyday thing (along with Sarah’s and Cedar’s) and the one constant is that everyone has a voice there. Unlike every lefty blog where post after post gets lost in moderation.

    I personally will always favour the place I can go to that lets everyone speak over the ones that only the right people get to speak.

    1. “I personally will always favour the place I can go to that lets everyone speak over the ones that only the right people get to speak.”

      Amen.

    2. Whatever. It wouldn’t bother me in the least if Vox simply turned off all comments and said, “I don’t care what any of you morons has to say, so I’m not giving you a platform.”

      I’d still read his stuff. He’s a great news aggregator of stuff that I’m interested in, and he’s pretty sharp. I don’t agree with him on everything he says and I think he’s too willing to let the tail wag the dog on evidence that supports stuff he already believes anyway, but I don’t ever simply write off any of his conclusions, because they’re all well considered and well informed.

  35. Larry, Is was your fisking that led me to try your work, and this is a great example. There was however one thing you got wrong in it. It was PNH, not TNH who posted that 3/5 best novel nominees were puppies. I know because I was lurking on that thread for much of the weekend and I have posted to his comment several times. I know its a minor quibble, but t my mind the fact that it was PNH who had the the information makes it much worse, as he is still an active editor and as such makes his foreknowledge seem a lot more pernicious.

    Other than that though, Spot on brother. Looking forward to the new series BTW.

    1. Ever hear of the “one flesh” rule? 😉

      “A man shall leave his mother, and a woman shall leave her family, and the two shall become one flesh.”

      1. Wait so every time I had sex with my ex-wife I was masturbating? Actually that would explain why it was so unsatisfying, I had always just thought she was sexually repressed.

  36. My biggest takeaway is pretty much what has bugged me all along about all this. SFF writers talk endlessly about world building and speculative civilizations. But what would happen if these doubletalking arguments where essentially the same act is celebrated if the proper identity does it and reviled otherwise were used in a courtroom? Well, we’d all be walking around with machetes.

    American’s are willing to submit themselves to the court system because there is a certain level of trust they will get a fair shake. But if you threw the Day/Jemisin standard of conduct at most Americans as the norm, I doubt they would even submit to arrest any longer. Instead they would simply say “no,” I am not submitting myself to this. There is no binding principle in play, no strike zone, no fair play.

    In an SFF culture that is routinely astonishing, anyone who’s read N. K. Jemisin’s rancid anti-white post about Sad Puppies which accuses Brad of Jim Crow KKK tactics knows that woman has flipped her gourd. As usual, no matter what Jemisin writes, no matter how racist, you will inevitably find Steven Gould, or Jim Hines or Mary Kowal in the comments saying bravo or right on or yes to all that. But if any of us push back against any of this weird feminist stuff we get thrown to the wolves as transphobic racists.

    In other words we are being pushed hard on something that involves a thing we consider inalienable – our rights, and our rights to a fair trial. You’re not going to get that from this feminist cult.

    The big lie being pushed is this has happened before and is typical of fandom. That is false. Nothing like this has ever happened before. This is far worse than politics – this is hate speech. Any society which throws principle out the door will fall apart, and so look where we are. We have never seen this level of disconnect in SFF. This is a culture that has completely fallen apart into two factions based on an understanding of or rejection of the concept of principle and fair play.

    If a thing is considered inalienable, that’s the same thing as saying “we’re not asking,” and so we have SP, which is not asking, but saying we warned you, and now we’re taking action.

    So next time there is a world-building panel, just laugh at it and realize these smug great lecturing minds couldn’t build a fictional society to save their lives. Without law you can’t build or maintain jack shit. How can you write fiction if you can’t even understand short burglars get the same sentence as tall burglars? Build a society with privilege punching up theory as its base and you have a civil war from day one. In fact much of classic SFF is built on the idea of redressing such imbalance from chapter one. The difference is those writers did that on purpose, not because they were clueless dumb fucks. I am just stunned at the unawareness of these people.

    Why would adult SFF writers need to have a panel debating the merits of law or what a law might look like? It’s like we’re debating what happens to matter sucked into a black hole and into an alien dimension.

    Is this a rant, Mr. Martin?

    1. When I was younger, “racism” was saying something bad about a person just because he’s black. That’s changed now to “you CAN’T say something bad about a person just because he’s black.” (Substitute sexism or any of the other -isms as you like.)

      The problem with the former is that it meant people said untrue things about others based on an irrelevant characteristic. The latter has the same problem. You can only deny reality for so long.

      I remember thinking as a boy that “The Emperor’s New Clothes” was kind of a silly fable. I had no idea how relevant it truly was. Larry and Brad and Vox et al shouted that the emperor was naked, and the vicious response suggests that while some people didn’t like being shown as foolish, others were angry that the game was over. They liked seeing the emperor naked, after all.

      1. That’s changed now to “you CAN’T say something bad about a person just because he’s black.”

        I think it’s actually worse than that in a lot of places, i.e: “You can’t say anything about a person who is (choose any that apply: black, female, homosexual, etc.)” because if you do you are the applicable -ist, and must be condemned.

      2. Martin Luther King dreamed of a world where his children would be judged not by the colour of their skin, but on the content of their character.

        He never dreamed of a world where his children — or anyone’s — would be rendered immune from criticism of their character by equating it to mere bigotry about the colour of their skin.

    2. Probably shouldn’t look for too much reasonableness from George. I used to read “Not A Blog” pretty religiously until he posted how horrible it would be if “outspoken racist” Rush Limbaugh had been able to buy part of the Rams.

      Tuned him out after that – well, that and the last two books.

  37. Mr. Correia,
    As someone in the middle, I feel it only responsible to write to both parties. You can find my response to Mr. Martin under the same name as a comment on his response to you. I’d link it, but then this would get flagged as spam. Mr. Martin asked you to stopped using the term Social Justice Warrior and you responded that you would not. Please, find a different term. Words have power. As both a wordsmith and a leader, your words have more power than most. I am a Social Justice Warrior. The way you use the term is polarizing, and needlessly so to people who would otherwise be more sympathetic to you.

    I am not asking you not to condemn these people, or CHORFs as Mr. Torgersen has taken to calling them. They are terrible people. I condemn them. They are the reason that I annually travel from Baltimore to deep VA to attend cons but do not attend several of the cons hosted in my hometown. I have not done enough research on the making light crowd to identify which of them are the toxic ones, but they are certainly there and I condemn them. I also condemn the people who frequent those boards who do not call out their own hateful element. I condemn the people that ruined WorldCon for you, and I honestly think whoever organized the smear campaign against the Puppies deserves not only condemnation, but attention in either the Criminal or Civil justice system, possibly both.

    The problem with the phrase Social Justice Warrior is that you are turning something that is honestly important to a lot of people into a pejorative. I am going to use an analogy that isn’t so much an analogy but a parallel. Imagine a group of people who hated on “Gun Lovers”. Only “Gun Lovers” doesn’t mean people who like guns because they are instruments of self defense, mechanical works of art, or an important part of our cultural matrix, but “Gun Lovers” only refers to those people who buy guns because they are instruments of death, violence and power. These “Gun Lovers” want to feel more powerful than other people and see nothing wrong with abusing this power. Now a group that set out to affect change using this term would be offending lots of people. Their very use of the term poisons the discourse with people who are real gun lovers and might otherwise be their allies.

    I am a Social Justice Warrior. I am also Southern, Christian, White male. Like you, I have been judged by these CHORFs and found wanting. I have also judged them and found them wanting. They are not interested in social justice; they are interested only in reasons to feel superior to others. The first tool in achieving social justice should be education, and by their actions they have shown they are more interested in elitism and exclusionism than education. If I have any critique of the term CHORF, it is that CHORF does not properly capture the way that elitism permeates their very identity.

    Please, unless you actually believe that Social Justice is a cause worth mocking, please find a different term. Yes other people use the term. Other people also make death threats and coordinate smear campaigns. While this is not as bad as either of those, it is still harmful. Be the better person, find another term. I give you the same argument I give other people I respect when they use the terms conservative, Republican or Gun Nut as pejoratives. Dislike people when they demonstrate they are hateful and willfully uneducable.

    1. Unfortunately, changing the use of SJW is not within Larry’s power to do. SJW was not coined by Larry, he is simply using the term the way it has come to mean to the general population. If you fight for a cause that you believe will improve justice in society, you will probably need to refer to yourself as something other than a SJW.

      1. I know that Larry doesn’t control the wider world. He doesn’t even really “control” Sad Puppies. As a leader, the terms he uses and condones certainly do have an effect on the movement.

        1. The left has been highjacked by a bunch of nutters who called THEMSELVES Social Justice Warriors.

          We are just calling them what they call themselves. If this bothers you, talk to them about it.

    2. And you are turning something that honestly doesn’t exist into something important. There are certainly problems in America, as there are anywhere, but this hysterical screeching about an oppressive patriarchy and America being a white supremacy is fucked.

      SJWs are the one’s who’ve hijacked the term and turned it into a farce. They turned the word “diversity” into “white males suck” too.

    3. Social justice has been a pejorative for me for much longer than SP/RP has been around. I’ve been resisting that idiocy in my own church (Catholic) for many years now. I make it a point to walk out on the local parish priest’s homily whenever he begins bloviating on the subject.

      If you wish to self identify as a social justice warrior, feel free. It makes it easier to know where to direct fire – metaphorically, of course.

    4. “Social Justice” is the “justice” that society metes out because it thinks that the actual organs of justice and law are a) moving too slowly, or b) insufficiently punishing wrongdoers (of whatever stripe).

      In this country, we used to call those “lynch mobs.”

      1. I reject your definition of social justice.

        Problems of social justice are ones that deal with systematic inequality. These problems are not addressed by the criminal justice system at all because they do not fall into their domain. Governments can try, but their attempts are usually more comical or harmful than helpful. Sometimes both.

        Now, I am not saying that people don’t form Lynch Mobs in the name of “Social Justice”. These are the mirror image of the people that form lynch mobs in the name of “Ideological Purity.” Both hurt the actual causes they are involved with.

        1. I reject your definition of “social justice”.

          People with sub-normal intelligence were called “simple” (a kindly euphemism), “morons”, “imbeciles”, and “idiots” (technical medical terms), and “mentally retarded” (not as advanced as others in intellect). Each term rapidly became considered pejorative, even derogatory, not because of the word itself, but because it was used to describe an undesirable situation.

          “Social justice” has become a term for racism, sexism, and virulent insults used by racists and sexists who imagine that their positions allow them to spew virulent insults with impunity.

          When you have succeeded in salvaging “mentally retarded”, I will join you in reclaiming “social justice”.

        2. You seem to have your history confused. Until the recent pushback, 100% of internet mobbings in SFF in the last 5 years were started by these goofball intersectional feminists and their weird obsession with expressing such things in an SFF genre.

          1. I was speaking about broader society.

            I would agree with you on the SF/F front.

        3. In other circles, we differentiate between Social Justice Activist and Social Justice Warrior. Or in other words, Worker and Poser Who Won’t STFU.

          Personally, though, I see social as a modifier diminishing the key word: justice. There is just and unjust, nothing more, nothing less.

        4. They’re not the mirror image of those who form lynch mobs in the name of ideological purity. They’re actually the exact same lynch mobs. There’s no mirroring. It’s just the same people. Anti-social justice philosophy, which is what most of so-called “Red America” believes in, is live and let live. We don’t care what you believe or what you do as long as you aren’t an obnoxious control freak trying to constantly upset the apple cart and threaten everyone else’s status quo because you’re a drama queen or a totalitarian. They don’t form lynch mobs.

          That’s a feature of the left.

    5. Social Justice Warrior is not Larry’s term at all. For example it is what Arthur Chu, who has been writing libel after libel in major media regarding the people involved in this, calls himself. In this Facebook post from last year, he describes the importance of rejecting rationality and understanding of the other side in order to be a ‘Social Justice Stormtrooper.’

      Arthur Chu:

      So yes, to momentarily borrow Yudkowsky fanboy terminology, I wear black robes. I am a practitioner of the Dark Arts. I rigorously manage my own thinking and purge myself of dangerous “unthinkable” thoughts — “mindkill” myself — on a regular basis.

      This is what you have to do to be a feminist anti-racist progressive, i.e. a social justice stormtrooper, You have to recognize that there is no neutral culture, neutrality is impossible, that culture is a cutthroat war of memes and that you have to commit to picking a side and setting yourself up as a neutral arbiter of memes is impossible and is a form of surrender. You have to constantly “check your privilege” and “unpack the knapsack” and all those other buzzwords.

      You need to understand that the only way to be “rational” in this world is to be irrational, that the only way to be “fair” is to pick the right side and fight for it.

      1. I will take this moment to publicly condemn Arthur Chu, his methods, and the harm he is doing to people actually interested in solving social justice problems rather than using them as a way to wield power against others and feed his own elitism.

        1. Arthur Chu is demonstrating goodthink, and is proud of it.

          “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
          — Thomas Jefferson

          What is goodthink if not tyranny over the mind of man? “Dangerous,’unthinkable’ thoughts” only exist in someone who is afraid of debate, contradiction, criticism. I don’t hold with racists (illogical), sexists (irrational), or white supremacists (unprovable), but I may debate one, if they agree to logic and proof without demanding idological purity on MY point before we even begin. The SJW demand we accept patriarchy, privilege and intersectionalism before debate can begin, so it’s going to be short – since I don’t agree with any of those terms.

        2. Then clean your own house. The term “Social Justice Warrior” will continue to stick until you can get other folks on the left to help you condemn these insane CHORFs, and properly marginalize them in your movement.

          We can’t do that for you.

    6. The problem with the phrase Social Justice Warrior is that you are turning something that is honestly important to a lot of people into a pejorative. I am going to use an analogy that isn’t so much an analogy but a parallel. Imagine a group of people who hated on “Gun Lovers”. Only “Gun Lovers” doesn’t mean people who like guns because they are instruments of self defense, mechanical works of art, or an important part of our cultural matrix, but “Gun Lovers” only refers to those people who buy guns because they are instruments of death, violence and power. These “Gun Lovers” want to feel more powerful than other people and see nothing wrong with abusing this power. Now a group that set out to affect change using this term would be offending lots of people.

      Interesting, for a avowed liberal you must not listen to other liberals much because that is precisely how SJWs treat the term “gun lover”. It is also how SJWs treat the term “Christian” (which you claim to be).

      Please, unless you actually believe that Social Justice is a cause worth mocking, please find a different term.

      I can’t speak for Larry but mocking is the least I think the cause has earned. By their fruits you shall know them and the fruits of SJW are pretty rotten every time I’ve seen them.

      YMMV but it doesn’t invalidate mine despite SJW thinking otherwise.

      1. Actually I said…

        [i]I am going to use an analogy that isn’t so much an analogy but a parallel. [/i]

        and

        [i] I give you the same argument I give other people I respect when they use the terms conservative, Republican or Gun Nut as pejoratives. [/i]

        So I freely acknowledged that it does happen. I argue against it when it is done by people I respect or people I think are open to discussion on both sides.

        If you go look at my post on GRRM’s site, http://grrm.livejournal.com/420090.html?thread=21110010#t21110010 you will see that I am very aware that being a southern white christian is enough to mark me as badwrong to many of these people.

        1. I am very aware that being a southern white christian is enough to mark me as badwrong to many of these people.

          Yes, and to a significant percentage they are what I’ve encountered when I encounter someone who calls themselves an SJW (and they did invent the term themselves). People who claim the label and are foaming nutjobs are at least 3 standard deviations from the norm of that group.

          In terms of being judged badwrong by those people I wear it as a badge of honor. They love judging people badwrong given the number of synonyms they have for it: racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe, etc.

          I wasn’t kidding when I said upthread being blamed for getting Firefly cancelled was worse than being called racist, sexist, etc because the later just describes you as “not an SJW” while the former says you did something bad.

    7. In all honesty, if we chose some other phrase to substitute for Social Justice Warrior, that new phrase would quickly become a pejorative as well. The reason SJW became a pejorative is because of the repellent actions of those it describes, not because of any particular hurtfulness of the words themselves.

      1. Oh I am not asking you to not use a pejorative to describe these people. I’ve been calling them CHORFs which is just openly insulting. I am asking you to pick a term that doesn’t have positive value for other people that also hate these people. Your use of the term also makes it easier for people to believe the narrative people use to smear you.

        Anecdote: A relation of mine and longtime Fan found out about this whole movement slightly before the hit pieces came out because it began to be discussed on the southern fandom classic email list. All of the talk denigrating social justice here, which is important to her made it easy for her to believe the hit pieces when they were published. I am talking here about someone who attended the wedding of Toni Weisskopf and Hank Reinhardt. I am here largely because her distress caused us both to look into the issue further.

        You have to know that many people would not have gone further. Make it hard for your enemy to make you look bad. Do not make it easy. Usage of this term is bad tactics.

        1. SJW is and will remain a pejorative, and there’s little anyone can do about that. I suggest you find another self-descriptor to distinguish yourself from the SJWs, if that’s your main concern.

          1. No, my main concern is that your use of term is bad tactics. It makes it easy for the CHORF’s to convince people not fully versed in this that you are badwrong. People who might otherwise be your allies.

            I am not trying to reclaim the term SJW. It is lost. Many other movements saw to that. I am trying to convince people that I respect that using it is bad tactics because it insults almost all liberals. It makes it into a right vs left argument where it should be a right vs left wing nutjob scenario where moderates and sane left wingers can join you.

          2. Many other movements saw to that. I am trying to convince people that I respect that using it is bad tactics because it insults almost all liberals.

            Much like “SJW’s” use “racist”, “sexist”, and “privilege” to insult all conservatives?

            When you suggest that maybe Benjamin Franklin had it right when it comes to “doing good for the poor” and that maybe the Welfare State where votes are to be found in having as many people drawing government assistence as possible is counterproductive if your goal is to reduce poverty and that you cannot keep spending more and more without it dragging the economy down, well, you can only listen to people telling you to “check your privilege”, that you “hate the poor”, and are [something]-ist so many times before tempers become a little frayed.

            And if a term like “SJW” as a pejorative is going to get to you then maybe you ought to check your privilege.

          3. But it IS the left wing nutjobs that SJW applies to, and everyone recognizes that. If the rest of you on the left self-apply the term, how is that anyone else’s fault?

          4. @Doug

            I have talked to 5 Fans since this blew up in my circles last Tuesday that did not get that you were talking about the nutjobs when you said SJW. I had to sit down with them and pull up urban dictionary and walk them through some of the history of gamergate before they GOT it.

            Believe it or not…. many of us don’t give a d*(&^ about the culture war.

            The term works fine when you are talking to people who are versed in the terminology of culture war. It works against you when the average run of the mill fan runs across it, because they don’t want to be in a culture war, they want to be reading a book.

          5. I understand all that. But just because they don’t want to be in a culture war doesn’t mean they’re NOT in one. Sticking your head in the sand isn’t a useful method of understanding the culture around you.

          6. they don’t want to be in a culture war, they want to be reading a book.

            Welcome to our world.

            Except I’ll add that I want to read a book, watch a movie, watch a tv show, etc, without being banged over the head by the ‘conservatives are evil’ mantra. It’s irritating. That’s what much of this is about in the first place.

          7. @Lea
            If you hop on over to my posts at GRRM LJ (linked twice here already) you will see I spend a fair bit of time “in your world.”

            Except I get it doublefun. Trying to find thoughtful fiction that has neither librerals are dumb and illogical OR conservatives are hateful and stupid is really hard.

            I don’t think I’ve posted anywhere on here that you guys don’t have a beef. I’m talking tactics. That sort of implies I agree with your goals.

          8. “Social Justice” Bully, complete with scare quotes, is more accurate than SJW. But SJW has already entered the zeitgeist, so tough. It’s the term we’ve got, and it does the job. Pedantically nitpicking at it that you have to get the inherent mocking sarcasm or you’ll be confused is too late at this point.

        2. Usage of the term is not bad tactics on our part.

          Usage of the term embarrasses you. Take it back from them. Not our job, mister.

          1. Whether it is bad tactics or not depends on your objective.
            If your objective is preaching to the choir it’s excellent tactics.
            If your objective is convincing neutrals who attach positive connotation to the term SJW then it is horrible tactics because it’s counterproductive.

      2. The reason SJW became a pejorative is because of the repellent actions of those it describes, not because of any particular hurtfulness of the words themselves.

        Thank you. There is some segment of society that seems to believe changing a term will change the thing itself and perceptions of it. It won’t.

        I see this in all kinds of fields, names for mental health conditions, insults, politics…it seems to be utterly useless in all of them.

        1. There is some segment of society that seems to believe changing a term will change the thing itself and perceptions of it.

          Over the course of my life, the “polite” term for people with ancestry originating recently (within, say, the last 500 years or so) in sub-Saharan Africa has changed repeatedly from Negro, to Black (with a side trip to Colored), to Afro-American, back to Black, then to African-American. The expectation apparently was that simply changing the term would change things. The new term quickly gained all the connotations of the previous one.

          “Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a new label out of my hat?”
          “Again? That trick never works.”
          (Rips off sleeve) “Nothing up my sleeve.”
          (Pulls a pejorative out of the hat.)
          “Gotta get a new hat.”

    8. Their very use of the term poisons the discourse with people who are real gun lovers and might otherwise be their allies.

      People use ‘gun lovers’ as an insult all the time.

      Please, unless you actually believe that Social Justice is a cause worth mocking

      I can’t speak for Larry, but I think any kind of ‘justice’ that needs an added adjective is generally not terrible just.

      1. I think any kind of ‘justice’ that needs an added adjective is generally not terrible just.

        “Social” as an adjective, can frequently be replaced by “not” with no loss of meaning. “social science”, “social justice”, etc.

      2. Yes, and it works so well doesn’t it? Our civilization is just full of good and rational discourse on gun control.

        The above is sarcasm. Clarification added due to sarcasm on the internet problems.

        I honestly believe that one of the main problems with gun control arguments is that the gun control people are not willing to discuss the why’s of why people own guns. In their mind, guns are bad so their cannot be any “good” reasons to own a gun. This destroys the discourse and any chance of a reasoned solution.

        1. This destroys the discourse and any chance of a reasoned solution.

          When people call you racist for no reason that all destroys the discourse.

          As for your friends deep concerns about being called a ‘sjw’ she should just rest well in the knowledge that if she is not a jerk nobody is talking about her when they use that term. People who care about ‘social justice’ are different from ‘social justice warriors’.

          1. She was not called a SJW. She allowed the insulting talk here about SJW to make her believe that this movement was really racist. She has since figured it out.

          2. >>People who care about ‘social justice’ are different from ‘social justice warriors’.<<

            Depends. I used to sing in the Unitarian Universalist Church choir, because I liked to sing and they were tolerant (and needed baritones / basses). I did not always agree with their theology, which had significant amounts of Gaia-worship, liberation theology and so forth. Mostly, they were harmless; a few were rabid. The middle-of-the-roaders I could get along with, but I eventually quit because the minister was vigorously left, and kept sermonizing about how horrible various Republicans were. I went for five or six years, and cannot recall him ever complaining about a leftist politician or celebrity.
            They were high on social justice, which included things like paying a living wage, free-trade prices for third-world products, and so forth. Most of that I could agree with, and even support. But they kept pushing the idea that deporting illegals was bad, that "there is no such thing as an illegal human being"; and I lost patience with the idea that I should pay for people to come here and turn this country into the one they left, like Californians ruined Oregon and Washington State.
            I actually like some aspects of social justice, but you cannot pick and choose, you must accept all or it or be labeled a racist warmonger fascist patriarch, so I gave it up.
            I will personally help people I feel deserve it, but I do not agree that everyone deserves help automatically. Some people need to find out that reality does not care about persons, and that everyone who jumps off the cliff will find their personal reality at the bottom.

          3. They were high on social justice, which included things like paying a living wage, free-trade prices for third-world products, and so forth.

            I mark a difference between people I disagree with or think need to study economics a little more closely before they form their opinions…and people who call everyone who disagrees a racist, or sexist, or whateverist. I would say the ‘SJW’ term, as it is currently used, applies to the later, not the former.

        2. ” This destroys the discourse and any chance of a reasoned solution.”

          You do realize that that’s deliberate, right?

        3. You don’t like it when you’re judged and labeled according to a wide category, because it destroys civil relations. However, you’re pro-“social justice”.

          Okay…

    9. Unlike AspiringTruFan, I don’t consider myself in the middle; I’m proudly Libertarian and I don’t think I’ve seen a poilitical statement espoused by Larry that I’ve ever disagreed with on anything other than the most trivial, nitpicking level.

      However, I’m actually with AspiringTruFan and GRRM on this one subject. I’m really not a fan of the term SJW either.

      (Now, please bear with me as I expound upon one of those trivial nitpicking disagreements, if only because I like the cut of AspiringTruFan’s jib, and think he/she/it deserves some support here.)

      Yes, SJW an convenient term to sum a up a complicated idea. Yes, it has entered the common lexicon and there isn’t much a single person can do to stop it. However, it’s not a particularly helpful term. As you often say, online debate is a spectator sport, and there are a lot of people who might be on the fence, but who are just barely far enough into, or have enough friends on the other side that their brains turn off the second they hear it. You might argue that such people are too far gone to reach, but I don’t think that’s true. If you give up on trying to reach people, you’ve already lost.

      The social justice community has a lot of similar words which, while they might be based on a glimmer of truth, frame the concept in entirely the wrong fashion and make certain people out to be villains, and poison the entire dialogue. Privilege is a good example of this, and there are many others. It’s stupid to frame the concept in terms of the hard to see advantages some people have, rather than the hard to see disadvantages some people have, because it makes it far too easy to blame, defame, and even start discriminating against the supposedly “privileged” group when you define it that way, but that doesn’t mean some people don’t have hard to see disadvantages. (Incidentally, that’s why, in the current debate, I think it’s important to keep telling the people who think the liberal bias and cliquishness the Sad Puppies are describing is just made up that what we are feeling is the exact same phenomenon they’re talking about when they talk about Privilege, or that what they’re doing by denying it is the exact same thing they’re complaining about when they talk about “mansplaining,” but I’m kind of going off on a tangent here…) But whether it describes a real phenomenon or not, the fact of the matter is that the term isn’t helpful. All it does is give certain people in the social justice community ammunition to unfairly attack a certain group, and poisons the entire dialogue.

      SJW is in a similar boat. I know that when you use it you’re only talking about a specific subset of people, and people who aren’t in that subset shouldn’t feel offended. But a lot of them do anyway, even if they probably shouldn’t. They may lean left, but they’re nowhere near as rabid as a K. Tempest Bradford, an N. K. Jemisin, an Arthur Chu, or even a John Scalzi, and I don’t think that swaying them is out of the question.

      I honestly don’t know what term should be used to replace it. A big part of me thinks that it doesn’t really even need to BE replaced. We can describe the mindset without assigning a label to people who espouse the mindset, after all. That tends to make people look at a subject less personally. Political Correctness, for example, worked just fine in the 80s and 90s, and we managed to successfully mock it into a temporary retreat for about a decade or so back then. I don’t remember hearing too much about “PC Warriors,” though. Maybe it should make a bigger comeback? Or, if you must describe the person, just use standard English. Busybodies works. Crazy would-be Orwellian dictators works as well. Nobody who just happens to agree with a handful of the things the social justice community has to say would ever be offended by that. They aren’t crazy would-be Orwellian dictators, after all. (Admittedly, the actual crazy would-be Orwellian dictators would tend to dismiss that such a thing even exists and claim that we were strawmanning them, but, well, Jezebel literally calls their sub-blog section “groupthink,” so if the shoe fits…) But whatever we call them, I don’t think it should be a made up word that gets used as a perjorative. That’s the exact type of Orwellian language-controlling nonsense they try to participate in.

      Yes, I know you’ve complained about the “No Labels” crowd before, Larry, and I’ll admit that we make your job harder, but you’re a good enough wordsmith that I have confidence that you can handle the extra effort, and I like to think we make your work better, too.

      1. Thanks for the support. I love your paragraph about the fence sitters. It is exactly what I wanted to say but wasn’t sure if I was succeeding.

        For the record, I am actually fairly far over to the left. However I have enough problematic markers (white christian male) and wrongthoughts (guys gun control is dumb cause it won’t work) that I understand exactly where you are coming from.

        I called myself in the middle because I don’t believe the sad puppies movement as a whole is actually that far to the right. I believe that this is not a left vs right conflict, but a central – right vs leftwing nutjob conflict, where those of us who lean left are in the “middle”

        Actually, this conflict is part of a conflict between those who view themselves as the “One true guardians of Fandom” and those that they deem to be outsiders. Political idealogy is only one of the axis along which they operate. I’ve been excluded from conversations about how to bring new blood into fandom because a twenty something I could not possible appreciate the history of the situation. Turns out I had been in Fandom longer than all but three people in the room (I was 4 months old at my first convention) My screen name is an ironic jab at those people who think I can’t be a TruFan because I wasn’t alive when “real” science fiction was being published. Of course, on the internet, irony is very had to convey.

        1. I am midway through my 6th decade and I have NEVER been to a con. And so, even though I have been reading science fiction and fantasy since I was 5, I’m no true fan either.

          But no matter what group I have been in there have always those who anoint themselves arbiters of all who are worthy and true.

          Whatever makes yah happy I say, if it means that much to you, carry on.

          …..right up until they start lying. Then I kinda want to see them go down.

          I hate lying liars that lie.

        2. “because as a twenty something”

          “irony is very hard to convey”

          and probably others. Stupid iPad keyboard.

    10. Please, find a different term. Words have power.

      Indeed they do. That’s why SJWs keep trying to turn their meanings inside out (e.g. ‘racist’), or trying to replace them (e.g. ‘cis’ for ‘normal’), or clutching their pearls and shrieking about how offended they are by them (e.g. ‘SJW’ and ‘slut’). It’s unfortunate that the term has garnered such opprobrium, but it was a lie from the outset, and its practitioners have earned it all the mockery and scorn we give it, and more.

    11. Quite frankly, if you don’t like the social justice warriors but feel the need to defend them because of “words”, you need to learn to grow a thicker skin. And focus your effort on the ones who truly are making a mockery out of social justice, which is not the side the sad puppies are on.

      1. I am not defending the “social justice warriors.” The people you mean when you use that term are indefensible. I am telling you the term is bad tactics because contrary to what you seem to think, many people do not know what your mean when you say it and it offends them.

        bjlinden does a good job of explaining what I mean in his fourth paragraph.

        1. I am telling you the term is bad tactics because contrary to what you seem to think, many people do not know what your mean when you say it and it offends them.

          And I’m telling you that allowing the SJWs to arbitrarily declare words off-limits (because offense) is even worse tactics. They don’t have that authority. Not morally, not legally, not intellectually, not any-other-wayly. Ceding it to them only encourages them and enhances their status in the eyes of the low-info marks they’re conning. You want ‘social justice’ to be something other than a pathetic joke? Take it back from the people who are making it that way. We’re just the ones pointing out the emperor is stark nekkid.

    12. Interesting. I’d heard the term used contemptuously by (for example) the kind of progressive who volunteered at the AIDs clinic about the lefies who got all self-congratulatory about posting a rainbow fishy on their Facebook page. Fake, poser justice, in other words.

      It may be too late to reclaim the term. You’d need to come up with something else that was readily distinguishable from the mass of fellow travelers and lumpen-progressives on the left. CHORF might work, but only if it gets traction beyond the fandom microcosm.

      1. It is too late to reclaim the term. Don’t really care. This isn’t about reclaiming the term. If it was I would be talking to gamergaters, because on the wider social prominence scale their movement ranks at a 75/100 where the puppies are maybe at 10/100. No I am here because I care about the way puppies are perceived as a movement within Fandom. (Which you/they are part of, and the hell with anyone that says otherwise)

        You say:
        “You’d need to come up with something else that was readily distinguishable from the mass of fellow travelers and lumpen-progressives on the left.”

        My problem with the term in the first place is that it fails to do that for anyone on the left that is not already clued in to its definition. The current term fails the criteria you set for the replacement term (good criteria btw)

        I have historically called them, “The worst sort of elitist New England liberal” I can’t say that I am not guilty of stereotyping from time to time either. I am not surprised that there are some progressives that are familiar with the term used it to you.

        1. The problem with your request that we refrain from calling the SJWs what they are is that it is just another form of PC. You don’t like a particular term and want it changed to something else, which the left will also misunderstand. That’s just a waste of time. If the left refuses to make the differentiation between their nutjobs and their less-crazed members, that isn’t anyone else’s problem but theirs.

        2. So, after reading all of this, I have to ask: do you fit the description of a Social Justice Warrior?

          Yes, there is a LOT of injustice in the world. But if your reaction to it is to retweet, repost, or reblog, rather than getting involved, your efforts are the equivalent of farting on a brick wall. All you’re doing is making some noise and creating a stink, but ultimately you are having ZERO impact. Need proof? Tell me, whatever became of #Kony2012 ? I haven’t heard ANYTHING, because NOTHING happened. A bunch of SJWs pounded away at their keyboards and did absolutely NOTHING in the REAL world, where it actually matters.

          You want to be an agent of societal change? Great. Go volunteer at a homeless shelter. Donate food to your local food bank (sometime OTHER than the holidays). Server meals at a soup kitchen. THESE actions actually matter. Sharing an article on how a city in another state is passing out tickets to those who feed the homeless in the park, and commenting, “GAWD! YOU WHITE CISMALES DISGUST ME!” does nothing to address the problem of the homeless in your own city. Expressing outrage at how the Republican Party is cutting SNAP benefits doesn’t do ANYTHING to help the underfed poor in your city.

          SJW doesn’t describe those fighting for social change. It describes a group of people who solely act on the Internet, deriving some kind of moral superiority from the articles they share online. People who are quick to call others racist, misogynistic, bigots without any evidence. The only fingers these people lift to change society, is to type on their keyboards.

          1. Nono, you malign them unfairly. They also blow hot air in panels and stack panels with hostile audiences.
            :-(. If there nutjobbery were restricted to the internet they would only be bad instead of terribad.

        3. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think what you’re saying boils down to “Please stop the namecalling”.

          Which isn’t a bad sentiment by any means, but think whether the epithet fits the target. What would you call someone on a fanatical crusade to force others to change some behavior (even if the behavior doesn’t actually exist), and who attacks like it’s a battlefield rather than a society where you might have to live with your target afterward? That’s a mouthful; find a short phrase to cover it.

    13. The sort of people who actually claim to be “social justice warriors” and take that sort of thing really seriously are quite often THE WORST OF ALL OF THEM.

      Someone I know who is anti-Puppy sent me an article by someone who called himself a Social Justice Warrior in which he ACTUALLY INVOKED THE HOLOCAUST!!!

      A bunch of writers you don’t like getting nominated for the Hugos IS NOT THE HOLOCAUST!

      Why invoke the Holocaust? Because the lead-in did not include enough guilt by association:

      “Cops caught on camera murdering blacks and Latinos. Chicano Studies programs shut down. Books by Sherman Alexie, Toni Morrison and Rudy Anaya banned. Latin American immigrants scapegoated. Republicans slashing benefits of the poor and unemployed. This is your country on drugs. Drugs of hate, ignorance, racism and militaristic aggression–let’s call that HIRMA. Some think of themselves as “sad puppies” but in a different sense, they’re sadder than that. ”

      People will use SJW as a pejorative as long as people who claim to be SJWs say stuff as offensive and stupid as blaming Brad, Larry or Ted for Ferguson.

      I think your problem may be that you don’t fully understand what the title you’re claiming for yourself means. Not quite like if a guy was all “I’m white, but I’m a fan of the Supremes. Hey, everybody, I’m a White Supremacist!”, but similar.

      Maybe it’s that Social Justice doesn’t mean what you think it means? You maybe think that it means promotion of a just society when it is really shorthand for advocating punishment of the “original sin” of “privilege”. Sort of like how Democratic Republic is shorthand for dictatorship in a populist disguise, not a Republic in which representatives are democratically elected.

    14. It’s an useful word and the word itself isn’t insulting the group may have a bad rap but heck many of groups get a bad rap.

      I have heard Tea Partier used as an insult before but that is different then Tea Bagger which is a way more clear insult.

  38. You might want to consider researching the legal definitions of libel and slander. I would refer you to the excellent libertarian/free speech blog Popehat, which repeatedly discusses the issue in the context of blogging and internet arguments.

    1. Libel legally consists of writing things that are provably false in defaming someone.

      Saying that Sad Puppies consists of only white males or is an effort by [insert your evil descriptor, such as racists, sexists, homophobes, etc.] to silence women or minorities when they are plainly on the slate in considerable numbers, is manifestly false, and therefore is manifestly libel.

      1. You might find the following post educational. https://popehat* .com/2015/03/23/why-mean-blockbots-probably-arent-defamatory -with-two-caveats!* /
        (Spaces and asterisks inserted to prevent link.)

    2. Wick Deer –

      Here is the EW article from last week, before it got completely redacted and revised. Telegraph did pretty much the same thing.

      https://archive.today/0NH1i

      This would meet even Popehat’s cut off, I think.

      (There were multiple other articles of sub-par integrity, but most of them were able to claim “opinion” rather than “news”.)

        1. You’re right that most of what has been said about Sad Puppies is opinion, but prior to its redaction the EW article asserted several things that are, without question, verifiable facts and NOT opinions.

          Saying that the Sad Puppies are all racist homophobic fascists is opinion. Saying that Sad Puppies are all white and only included white men on their slate is not. I’m certain that even Ken would agree with that, and he tends to err on the side of “opinion” more than most.

          The EW article is not currently libel, because they issued the retraction. If they had not, and refused to make the change even after their mistake had been brought to their attention, it most certainly would have been.

          In short: You are wrong and you are libel!

          1. With regard to the all white men issue, that is a question of fact, but making that error wouldn’t seem to be disparaging. It would also apply only to nominees who are not white or female, not to the slate as a whole or its backers.

            Govern yourself accordingly.

          2. Exactly what Lea said. “Sad Puppies are all racist homophobic fascists” is absolutely an opinion, but is still damaging if people believe it. However, because it is an opinion, it is still protected speech.

            If someone uses obviously untrue facts, such as “they are all white and their slate only includes white men” in an attempt to prove the aforementioned damaging opinion, then it is not protected speech.

            Another example:

            “Larry Correia eats babies” is an opinion, and is not libel. However, saying “Larry Correia eats babies, and I found these tiny human bones in his trash can to prove it,” when you did not, in fact, find any tiny human bones anywhere near Yard Moose Mountain, certainly is libel.

          3. Making that ‘error’ is absolutely disparaging when it is coupled with accusations that the entire purpose was to get white men on the slate. When the facts disprove that entirely, they are kind of important.

          4. You might make it past summary judgment with that argument, but good luck getting anyone to take the case on a contingency fee.

          5. Don’t forget, my argument only holds true in a hypothetical case in which Entertainment Weekly doubled down on their claims and refused to issue a retraction when confronted with the truth. Why do you think they issued the retraction in the first place, because they were worried about their journalistic integrity? Heh.

          6. A publication can avoid liability for libel by publishing an immediate retraction, which they did.

            No trace of the original article can be found unless you use an archive service of some sort.

    3. Libel and slander, much to the dismay of many a lawyer, have common-use definitions that do not sync with legal definitions. So far as I know, Larry isn’t contemplating a lawsuit, so the legal definitions don’t enter into it.

      1. Depends. Accusing a publication of libel after they retracted could be considered damaging.

        I’d tread carefully here.

  39. Money is burning a hole in my pocket. It needs to get spent. The Winter From Hell is finally over here in New England, and we are rapidly approaching Read Novels on my Three Season Deck… season. I selfishly request that you put SP to bed and start cranking on MHI and D6!

  40. It’s astonishing to me how GRRM is famous for his intricate power machinations between various groups of people competing for the same prize, where “backstabbing” isn’t just a metaphor. Yet he can’t seem to see any political maneuvering in an organization he’s belonged to for decades.

    If GRRM wrote Westeros like he imagines the Hugos, the worst thing that would ever happen is the Starks missing out on the big tournament every year because they weren’t quite good enough to compete.

  41. In my opinion, you’re being entirely too generous of GRRM. He has conclusively demonstrated over the last few days that his intentions and methods are not trustworthy, straightforward or honest, and he deserves to be REPEATEDLY called out on it.

    The biggest mistake of the last 100 or so years will almost certainly be seen as giving SJWs and their various other x-sim allies–fascists, progressives, socialists, communists, et al.–the benefit of the doubt in order to facilitate comity.

  42. Basically he says, “I don’t believe you unless you name names and give specifics, and even then, I basically don’t believe you”. At the risk of offending some people, one wonders what the response would have been if you claimed to have been sexually assaulted.

    And besides, others have had similar testimonies. So it’s not just you having a testimony like this.

    1. No one has said one cannot relate stories of being shunned. What we say is that turning that into an institution of victimhood is stupid. As usual, a feminist retard doesn’t understand the difference between an outlier and a trend, normal proportional human behavior and serial whining. SJWs always take stabs at principle and analogies, metaphors and simple comparisons and always fail.

      1. ” As usual, a feminist retard doesn’t understand the difference between an outlier and a trend, normal proportional human behavior and serial whining.”

        Yup. No reason anyone would think the puppy crowd has a problem with women.

        Carry on with your bigotry-free conversation though 🙂

        1. Oh knock it off both of you.

          Retard is a stupid insult.

          Dismissing hundreds of people in a thread with thousands of unmoderated comments as bigots because somebody called you a name is stupid.

          1. Dismissing hundreds of people in a thread with thousands of unmoderated comments as bigots because somebody called you a name is stupid.

            Wouldn’t that fall under a combination of “skim until offended” and “disqualify that opinion” on the Checklist?

          2. No one called me a name, no worries. He was making himself look classy harshing on another feminist.

            Sad Puppies have an image problem – I think everyone agrees. James isn’t helping that.

            Feel free to delete my comment, you don’t need the bickering. I won’t raise the bigotry flag again on your blog.

          3. Sad Puppies have an image problem – I think everyone agrees.

            Yeah. Repeated libels and slanders will do that.

            In fact, that’s kind of the purpose of repeated libels and slanders.

            Your side keeps lying about them. Then complains they have an image problem which stems directly from those lies.

          4. Image problem? Hell, after a giant media campaign about how we’re white supremacists that’s not exactly a shock.

          5. I’m not a censor, or the thought police. I let people debate. I don’t prune it down into an echo chamber. That’s got some draw backs sometimes, yes, but I truly believe in free speech, warts and all.

          6. For David: “As usual, a feminist retard doesn’t understand the difference between an outlier and a trend, normal proportional human behavior and serial whining.”

            Was that James Libelling or Slandering the mentally disabled?

            I noted that someone is contributing to a perception about sad puppies. I didn’t invent his words – he did that. I pointed them out as being not helpful. It’s now a derail, I apologize.

          7. I noted that someone is contributing to a perception about sad puppies.

            And I’m sure you’ve been out berating folk like Chu and Jemison for their rather vicious attacks on Sad Puppies, right?

            James’ comments are a drop in the bucket compared to the bile spilling from their keyboards.

            So if you’re really so concerned about the perception, that would be the place to start. Or is it only our side that you feel like criticizing?

          8. “Sad Puppies have an image problem – I think everyone agrees. James isn’t helping that.”

            No, EVERYONE does not agree on that.

            However, if you want to talk about the image problem feminism has, well, there’s actual empirical evidence for that.

            Start by searching Time magazine and feminism on Google. Then dig up the Economist’s published paper on the subject.

          1. The “no wonder people think you have a problem with women” is concern trolling.

          2. It’s what I say below. Insult one crazy feminist and they come back with I’m slandering all women. Who’s dumb enough to be moved by that bullshit? I was giving my opinion in an insulting manner of one woman and not anyone else, although I do believe gender feminism is a psychotic cult.

            The idea that translates into me having it in for the mentally disabled is too stupid to entertain. Meadows is a one-woman factory of racial and sexual insults that in fact DO include ALL men and ALL whites.

            Just a Mom can take her act to someone stupid enough to fall for it. In other words I can never respond to Meadows’ group defamations. Just more convenient theory from the SJW stupid-brigade which has no standards, rules or principles whatsoever. I am more than tired of them and they will never police my language, nor will anyone.

            Underground comix were created just for people like Just a Mom. The more people got angry the more ultra-vulgar they became. S. Clay Wilson is my hero, not Just a Mom. I’ll go as far underground as I have to in order to maintain my rights.

          3. I’m a woman, and I’ve never felt the least bit unwelcome here. Then again, I don’t let intersectionalist nitwit nutjobs do my thinking for me. Find some other cornfield for your strawman.

          4. See, this is why an extensive vocabulary, and a commitment to eschew vulgar invective is your friend.

            If you’d referred to the epsilon-sub moron people’s commissar, you’d be golden.

        2. Yeah, that’s the usual patter. Crazy feminists like Meadows, Anita Sarkeesian, and Brianna Wu light me up from dusk til dawn as an inferior white man and that’s not bigotry. If I insult them back: misogyny confirmed.

          Somehow I sense if I called the KKK retards your big ears wouldn’t have come running.

          In point of fact, that’s actually what I did do. Go get a dictionary and look up “bigot.” I’m pretty sure it doesn’t say “Only others.”

        3. Since when does having a problem with feminism mean having a problem with women?

          Feminism is a specific political ideology, and while the first wave was one of the best things that ever happened to our society, and the second wave had a handfull of good ideas even though I disagree with it on a few points, the movement is currently a toxic, thoroughly misguided mess, and deserves to be questioned. Holding a particular ideology as above reproach and unquestionable is one of the most dangerous things that can happen in a society.

          I could understand if you were only complaining about the “retard” comment (though I’d still say you were making too big a deal about it) but even if you were only complaining about the “retard” comment, what on earth does it have to do with women?

          Complain about the tone all you want, but whatever problems there may be with the tone of Sad Puppies, it is not a tone that is the least bit disparaging against women.

          1. They’re always laying this stuff on us. Slang insults like “pussy” or “retard” are “gendered” and “ableist” slurs which means we hate all women and the mentally disadvantaged except when they call us “dicks.” Then it goes back to American slang. You’ll never get a fair shake out of these bums – not ever. What’s a “white dude parade”? Well, that’s just nothing. But if anyone said a “black dude parade” it’s back to bigotry, like magic. These feminauts are very easy on themselves and hard on men, to say the least.

      2. Here’s something you could think about, JM. I support wholeheartedly the work being done to break the Hugos (and fandom at large) free of all political purity tests. I also despair at much of the rhetoric coming from people discussing various social issues. But I am also a woman who has experienced sexual harassment in her working life (in more than one field of endeavour), a woman who is aware of the discrimination that can and does occur in the publishing field. I am of aware of these things because I have experienced them. I am also aware of the political discrimination that occurs in this field, because I have also experienced that. You claim to be fighting that, and wanting to make the SJW crowd aware of their blindness to it. Can you even admit the possibility that you might also have a blind spot? Or will you continue to condemn and insult and bully any woman who dares utter the dreaded ‘f’ word, because any woman who takes note of an issue that doesn’t personally affect a man must be howled into silence?

        If I hate, hate, hate, with a fiery passion, the fear I feel about speaking out against political oppression, imagine how I feel when I observe conversations here — when all reasonable commentary and debate regarding something important to women is treated the way the SPs are treated elsewhere on the internet. I feel fear, JM. Fear that my experiences, my truths, will be attacked.

        You make no secret of your contempt for feminism and feminists. You’re proud of it. And in the next breath you rail against the SJWs for speaking of you with contempt. You tar every woman who has had to fight injustice with an ugly, ugly brush. You deny their experiences, my experiences. You say I simply hate men.

        Shame on you for being as ignorant and bigoted and wilfully blind as those whom you loudly condemn on the political left.

        1. I support equal rights feminism without reservation. That includes the rights of gay couples to have inheritance rights in the event of the death of one and a say over funeral arrangements, etc. – same as for regular couples.

          I reject Third Wave Intersectional Gender Abolition Feminism as a psychotic, racist, and sexually supremacist cult.

          Align yourself accordingly.

          Adele Wilde-Blavatsky is a name you should Google. She is radically feminist enough to believe in the abolition of “Mr.” and “Mrs.” across Europe; she believes in the patriarchy. Yet even Wilde wasn’t radical enough for the likes of The Feminist Wire and got hounded out for using principle to decide her judgment of a matter rather than sex.

          Afterwards, in the continued abuse of her on Twitter (by Mikki Kendall among others) Wilde-Blavatsky wrote: “Intersectionality has been hijacked.” By that she meant racists.

          Here is the end of Foz Meadows’ post where she racially and sexually insults Malzberg and Resnick as “old white men.” Funny thing how intersectionalists NEVER in a thousand years would use “old black lesbians” as a self-explanatory pejorative.

          “This post was originally titled Old Men Yelling At Clouds: SFWA Lunacy. I then changed that last word to idiocy, as it was pointed out to me that the use of lunacy was ableist; but as idiocy is also abelist, I’ve changed it to sexism.”

          By that standard, telling me I was “stupid” for saying “retarded” is wrong. This is nuts, semantic Orwellian gibberish and it is bigotry with a double standard.

          If the fact I understand the principle behind all law is femspeak for “ignorant” then I declare myself ignorant.

          What IS the basis of all law, Miss Miller? Race, sex? What is your moral ethos based on? Mine is based on the success and failure of people as humans, not straight white men, Jews or transgender. I believe everyone has the right to live as expansive a live as possible.

        2. What do you mean, “we” white man?

          Ms miller, claiming that what matters to you is “important to all women” is sexist garbage. I am not your shield.

          I hate, hate, hate feminism and the horse it rode in on. Feminism denies every political issue I care about, from the right to bear arms, to free speech, to property rights.

          You are trying to silence me and appropriate my voice.

          1. Feminism denies every political issue I care about, from the right to bear arms, to free speech, to property rights.

            Indeed, and despite the fact that the denial of the right to bear arms disfavors women (it reduces self-defense to relative muscular force).

  43. I stopped reading about 1/3 of the way through because GRRM’s argument can be summarized as, “You are a whiny bastard that doesn’t know his place.”

    He may not think that is his argument, but it is.

  44. Oh, and, “I have never experienced negative repercussions due to my political beliefs, but then I had the good taste to have the correct ones.”

    1. Of course he can’t see the bigotry on his own side. He’s taken part in it.

      Perhaps someone needs to tell Martin to check his liberal privilege.

  45. I am fans of you both and I think this has been a really interesting discussion on both sides. I don’t agree with RR Martin’s position, but I think he just sees the world differently then we do. However, I have run out of things to read so I really need you both getting those next books out!

  46. “So anyway, you look kind of white, but Corriea sounds like an Hispanic name, so if you self-denounce, renounce your badthink views, and participate in a two minutes of hate session towards Voxday so that we can declare victory in regards to the Hugos, we might wait as long as two weeks after the awards ceremony before turning on you. But we are not making any promises.”

  47. “Paul_Cornell retweeted Alyssa Wong @crashwong · Apr 6 Those crying out against diversity in SFF are howling into the void, and ultimately, they will be soundlessly swallowed up and forgotten.”

    That’s what happens when you don’t use quotes. You get bullshit and a person too stupid to understand how much they have revealed about themselves. If you state with certainty a thing that is not actually demonstrably true, all you’ve revealed is what you want to believe. The question then becomes how does flogging this bullshit benefit Miss Wong and why is she so keen to believe it?

    Are we surprised Wong is one of the Nebula 2015 diversity-hires?

  48. Every attack on the SP has been meant to silence them.

    “Shut up, Sad Puppies, Twitter is against you!”

    “Shut up, Sad Puppies, every media outlet is against you!”

    “Shut up, Sad Puppies, George R R Martin is against you!”

    What next? Maybe the President will weigh in. I mean, he steps in to lecture the country about every other controversy, right?

    1. I can think of fewer things at this point which would galvanize puppies across the nation who didn’t even realize that they were sad before, because they didn’t even read science fiction until now.

    2. “If I wrote a Science Fiction novel, it would look like Ancillary Sword.”
      –Hypothetical Obama statement on the Hugos.

  49. I’ve already killed one week of productive writing time going back and forth on this subject, and I can’t afford to lose another.

    You don’t have to worry about pesky things like losing writing time when you take 5-10 years to finish a book!

    It used to be that the awards were a huge part of launching a career

    You know, I went back to the hugo award winners for novels to see if I happen to have read any of them and I came across a book that is on my shelf: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which if I am reading wiki correctly won in 2005. So out of curiosity I went to the authors amazon page and it doesn’t seem like she’s written anything since then.

    I’ve read others like American gods, the GRRM books, the JK books etc, but this one stood out for me because it sounded right up my alley and was prominently displayed in the bookstores and apparently won, but I found it quite mediocre. Also, I see a lot of names repeated and a lot of people I thought might have made it on not present, although that may be my personal preferences showing more than anything.

    1. Hugo winners are a joke, and have been for years. Decades really. Look at what we’ve had in short fiction recently, for example: “The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere”–gay chinese porn that has nothing to do with science fiction, and “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”–caricaturish hit piece against an imaginary Red America that has nothing to do with science fiction. Ancillary Justice? Redshirts?

      The notion that a clique of SJWs haven’t been dominating the Hugos for years is risible, and all it takes to destroy Martin’s preposterous lies is to point to those two short stories. The latter of which isn’t even a story.

      His point about destroying the Hugos is bad for the genre and for the industry is equally stupid. THEY’VE already destroyed them, made them a mockery of what they once were, made them a bad joke, perverted and corrupted them to the point where being a Hugo nominee is synonymous with being so “successful” as a writer that you are reduced to literally begging for money to pay for child care (Saladin Ahmed, one of the most obnoxiously racist writers in the genre).

      This is where I can completely sympathize with the Rabid Puppies approach. I know guys like Brad want to save the Hugos; the so-called “Dread Ilk” of Vox’s blog will, sure, let’s save the Hugos if we can, but if we can’t–at this point, who’s going to miss them anyway?

      1. Ahmed is one of the typically racist diversity-hires that filled the Arab and Muslim checkmark and SJWs waved like a flag and then threw aside. They’ll drag him out from under the bed like a prostitute whenever they want to use him. Mysteriously, the half-Irish Ahmed virtually never talks about the Irish. Hmmmm. I wonder why that is?

      2. If the Hugo’s are so bad, then why do the puppies care who gets one? Surely, if it’s a toxic award (and I can only list a few winners by name from my own memory) how many years ago did they go bad?

        And if the point is ‘they are meaningless’ is the aim to make them Really meaningless? Or is the aim “See, all the fans are speaking up who never spoke up before” – in which case, are the Hugo’s THEN valid for the first time in 20 years?

        American Gods was the last Hugo novel I read, not sure how many short story Hugo winners I’ve read over time, I read a lot of anthologies so I am sure some are in there. My question is what year was it that the puppies said, “wow, these are going downhill”. Again, there is a sea of words, I’ve been reading for 3 days and I think I’ve generally heard about “20 years”.

        1. Nice try. You seem to struggle with metaphors and comparisons, but as they say, he who has ears let him hear, etc.

          If al-Andalus was so bad, why did the Spaniards want it so bad?

          This is the Reconquista of the Hugos. If Sad Puppies 2 was Tours and Larry was Charles Martel, then this year Vox has decided to go on the offensive and become Afonso Henriques or one of the other more aggressive figures of the Reconquista that pushed the frontier southward, and I don’t think he intends to stop until the figurative Battle of Grenada has come and gone.

          1. Well …

            It’s either that or the Sack of Carthage.

            It depends on whether No Award wins.

        2. The Hugos were what introduced me to many SFF authors. I was a teenager who bought from the Book of the Month Club and the blurbs for the Hugo-winners and Hugo-nominated works were part of what got me to try out SFF in the first place. “It won a prize, must be worth looking at!”

          So getting that sense of wonder back is worth something.

      3. I’m sorry, but judging by what I’ve read at Mr. Ahmed’s Wikipedia page, I don’t see any racism at all.

  50. In your case, it did not help that the Day story was terrible.

    This is why I never read anthologies edited by authors I like. They may be able to write like fiends, but their judgement other than that tends to be crap. The only work in that category better than Day’s was MRK’s Lady Astronaut, which was excellent. The other three ran the gamut from mediocre to simply wretched.

    1. I don’t read short stories unless they are by authors I am already reading (read the dresden files fill in stories, patricia briggs, etc).

      I read the dinosaur story and thought it was stupid but it was the plot that was stupid. That other story that won didn’t even seem to have a plot…

    2. Bah. The lady astronaut story was horrific. It was about a woman who abandoned her dying husband to follow her dream…again. That’s the core, and to cover that up, the author removed all conflict from the story. No one tells her she can’t go–heck, everyone from her doctor to her boss to her husband tells her to do it. She even had the symbol of the origami bird that showed her regret for not having children and pursuing her dream, and we know that’s what it means because SHE TELLS US! Contrast that to Vox’s symbol of the illuminated Bible, and there’s no question of who’s doing it right.

      It was this nonsense that made me plunk down my cash this year to vote. Kowal’s prose is smooth enough, but it has to be to cover the structural flaws and the underlying horror of the story. The gushing over that story coupled with the vitriol towards Vox’s (usually uninformed to boot) convinced me that the voting pool needed better stock.

      1. The near-future sf manga Space Brothers covers a similar theme. But it consistently talks about all the pros and cons, and why families are generally supportive of spouses and parents going to space, and what happens when families don’t manage a good balance. There are no cheap outcomes.

        I wonder if it will ever be nominated for a Hugo.

        1. It won’t, since it’s basically about space travel, the risks thereof, is more exciting than If You Were A Dinosaur… and isn’t laden with all that the current Hugo committees love to read about (which judging by If You Were A Dinosaur… and Wakulla Springs isn’t really about space anymore, and not in the same class as The Martian.)

  51. I love the way SJWs so often go on about us making teams. Exactly who is it who put me on Team White Privilege? Myself? Is that anything like Team Greedy Jew or Team Lazy Black?

    Of course it is. That’s because Third Wave feminists are an analogue to gum-chewing Southern racist sheriffs with Ray-Bans. They’re too stupid to know that because they haven’t yet gotten to the part about “principle” in the Ascent of Mankind. I don’t know where feminists sit; before ancient Sumeria somewhere.

    1. There’s a sort of consistency there , though– the Democrats of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and modern times have all explicitly appealed to low-income voters on the basis of their race and advocated race-based policies to benefit them.

      The really weird thing is that their base has gone from burning down black Tulsa in the 1920s for being too rich, to burning down black Ferguson in 2015 because a black robber was shot by a white cop. Neither of these complaints nor the response made any sense.

        1. If you replace the word “Jew” with “White cis-Male” in almost any section of Mein Kampf, and publish it, the SJW crowd will applaud you.

  52. now, it is true, you have pissed way too many people off

    I don’t know if you deserve a hugo (full disclosure, haven’t read your stuff yet.)

    But doesn’t George think it’s a damn shame that ‘pissing people off’ is good enough to make you never win anything ever? Shouldn’t this be about quality?

    Also, George’s descriptions of all his nerdyness and sad con times are painful. It’s not the 70’s anymore, dude.

    1. How are they different than the frustrations Larry is communicating on behalf of the Sad Puppy Crew? I am reading Larry’s posts – and the comments – trying to sort out their viewpoint. It still seems like the end game: prove whether the Hugo’s are valueable – or not – doesn’t get answered by this slate – because it’s purely organizing and ‘gaming’ the noms. So, if a puppy slate wins any awards What does that prove to the puppies? That the Hugo’s are valuable – or not? I flat out apologize if someone has already answered – there’s a lot of words to read through on two different blogs and I don’t recall it being stated – what does success look like, and what does it mean?

      1. That has been answered repeatedly, so I’m not sure if you are just concern trolling me to waste my time like a dozen other people last week or not.

        We had multiple goals. I started out wanting to expose the bias, and that people with the wrong politics would be actively slandered and campaigned against. Check. Done. In SP3, Brad took over and the mission became more about getting people who would normally be shunned and ignored into the broken system.

        Beyond that, read our blogs, because I’ve written about this many times and can’t keep explaining it in the blog comments over and over again.

        1. Not trolling you – no one has that much time. As I said, I’ve been trying to understand this. I have been reading for 3 days, your blog and Brads and the message isn’t clear to me. I appreciate your response

          So, right now the aim is, ‘The Hugo system is broken, and not enough diversity is in the noms.”

          You’ve had more than enough of questions from me, I won’t task the group again. My observation on my reading so far is that you’re essentially getting people onto a slate for an award that you believe is devalued. I wish you luck with how that turns out.

          1. That’s because the more optimistic of us are hoping to re-value the awards, so they once again represent what they used to – the best, with all fans truly welcome.

          2. Short version would be: Breaking the Hugo out of its current status as a once-relevant and now insider-clique-only award by getting outsiders on the ballot leads to more attention to the Hugo, leads to more fans interested and involved in the Hugo process, leads to a broader swath of SF/F fandom getting involved, leads to the Hugo -actually- representing the best of all SF/F again.

          3. My observation on my reading so far is that you’re essentially getting people onto a slate for an award that you believe is devalued.

            We’re doing it for the same reason you take away the family’s heirloom Lalique bowl from the idiot cousin who’s been using it as a spittoon.

        2. Larry, I’m half convinced George R.R. Martin was just concern-trolling you for the past several days.

          That, or being willfully blind, as so many leftists are.

          1. That’s exactly what Martin has been doing. Very arrogant, smug, transparent concern-trolling, and attempting to get him (and Brad) to denounce Vox with the false promise that he’ll be allowed back into the SJW’s good graces if he kisses the rosaries and says a few Hail Marys. His evasive, weasel-words responses should have cleared up any doubts about the original post several days ago.

      2. There is nothing to sort out. Remove daffy gender feminists and their redefinition of words and their obsessive idea SFF is a Jim Crow and there is no Sad Puppies.

  53. “,,,the hope is that they will embrace our history and traditions and culture,….”

    And THAT’s the problem in a nutshell, GRRM – the “culture” has been expanded to a very specific political realm, and folks like you (in this entreaty) won’t abide any deviation from it, because you consider political deviation a deviation from that culture.

    It didn’t used to be that way, as you recount numerous times. Why is it so now?

        1. Here’s fun from May 1, 2013:

          “John Scalzi Verified account scalzi @saladinahmed I mean the Write Agenda (that’s false) dude. James May is just standard-issue terrified white dude. @stevengould @nkjemisin‏”

          “Steven Gould ‏@StevenGould 1 May 2013 @nkjemisin @scalzi @saladinahmed Uh, I think so. I try not to read that stuff in depth. You get stupid all over you.”

          “N. K. Jemisin ‏@nkjemisin 1 May 2013 @StevenGould @scalzi @saladinahmed Thanks. I could run a ‘find’ on the stupid, but figured since other people had already read it.”

          “Jonathon Side ‏@JaceDraccus 1 May 2013 @scalzi @saladinahmed @StevenGould @nkjemisin So that’s what paranoid white dipshittery looks like? I’d wondered.”

          I think they kinda proved my point.

          What I write is controlled by my whiteness. Nice.

          When I write about the problematic comments of Nebula nominees and I’m given that reception, don’t be surprised I insult back. Debating a definition of racial bigotry would’ve been preferable to enrolling me in the KKK. But you can’t do that at SFWA-approved banhammer sites, so, what time’s the parade start, assholes? Truthfully, the blank slate of a no-award is better than some fuck of an anti-white racist getting yet another award.

          See how that worked out for you boys? I asked, you answered, and now we’re not asking. You created us. Enjoy.

  54. I haven’t read through your whole response … yet … but from your first few paragraphs it seems a summary might go thus

    “we’re mad because you see US as all the same and you JUDGE us by the very worst of us”

    yet you then go on to describe the other side …

    “Oh, I’m sure there are some broad philosophical differences in there… to you… But to my side we’re back to the fact you have a thousand words for snow, and all we see is snow.”

    and then go on to judge all “snow” by the worst snowflakes …

    more comments as I work my through your post

    1. That’s not why they’re mad.

      The original reason for SP was a well supported perception that quality work by popular authors was being ignored in order to reward works in line with a certain political point of view.

      Each iteration of SP has moved toward introducing a wider range of works, and voters, into the Hugo process. Along the way, there have been a few “experiments”, proposed near the beginning of each SP run:

      Is Hugo voting “legit”: auditor Larry says yes
      Will people completely “loose their shit” if non-left-leaning fiction is nominated: yes
      Will there be an attempt to redefine the purpose of the Hugo (previously the “best of all SFF”): yes

      An odd fact discovered along the way is that certain people appear to have foreknowledge of the nominations and awards. This can be seen in the chronology of their statements.

      I believe this year’s experiment is:
      Would the majority of WorldCon voters rather exclude popular writers of talent than grant an award to someone endorsed by SP. (ie, is simply being endorsed by a particular (non-left-leaning) group enough to exclude one from the Hugo)

      Part of this experiment is to answer the question,”Are the Hugos the “best of all SFF” or just “the things WorldCon likes”?”

      Now, if you don’t understand why the various SP figures have grown angry with their treatment in the larger SFF community and media, well…(with apologies) your marriage is probably just a sham to cover the fact that you’re a woman hating racist.

  55. Well said, Larry. I haven’t been to a con in 30+ years (marriage, kids, work etc always seemed to get in the way) but now that I am retired this may change. I have been reading SF/F since I was 8 or 9. Like many of your readers, the explosion over Sad/Rabid puppies has pissed me off enough that I bought a supporting membership to WorldCon and I will be voting. Unlike the other side I will read the works first.

  56. Dear Larry Correia,

    The one thing in your story that just stabbed me in the heart was the story of your wife’s high school acquaintances reaching out because they were genuinely concerned for her safety.

    Mr. Martin’s comments suggest that he isn’t taking you very seriously. Perhaps if your wife wrote a short note describing her experience, Mr. Martin might find it a little harder to shrug off.

    Thank you for picking a fight with the cabals secretly running the Hugos. I hadn’t been paying attention so I didn’t realize the situation had become as bad as you revealed it to be.

    I need to buy a few more of your books. I’ll get on that.

  57. What a shock. Another white male liberal elitist nobsack.

    It’s funny I keep getting to,ld how intolerant Christians and Conservatives are and I keep seeing how hateful, petty, spiteful, and intolerant of anyone who disagrees with them “Progressives” and atheists typically are. I see very few Christians or Conservatives who act like this.

    Isn’t hypocrisy and Marxism grand?

    “Having a ruling elite is bad!”

    “But you ARE the ruling elite”

    “It’s not bad when WE do it.”

  58. But, when you boil all the arguments down, you and your suppoerters are right wing twats, rascist, mysoginistic, homophobic… Basically all that’s wrong with America. And congratulations, by the way. You have destroyed any credibility that the Hugos ever had…

        1. A maxim that the right wing of politics have taken very much to heart….

          What a remarkably recursive statement. You make the unsubstantiated assertion that the other side makes unsubstantiated assertions in the hopes that repeating the unsubstantiated assertion will make it true.

          Larry, he’s not even a good troll. Looks like a one trick pony, not even fun to pay with.

          1. You see, I wasn’t actually trolling in my first post. Just expressing my outrage at what you guys have done. Destroyed any credibility the Hugos may have had by promoting a right wing agenda.

            However, the replies I got did, indeed, cause me to troll. Best thing one can do when faced by a right winger. They ‘almost’ understand that. However, I shall watch from afar as America is taken back to the 18th century by the GOP etc…

          2. Whether lying yourself or repeating the lies of others, it’s all the same in the end.

            As for destroying the credibility of the Hugos, you folk with your political purity tests have already done that. Sad Puppies just showed people what was behind the curtain. It would have sank without a trace if Larry hadn’t been right from the start.

            As somebody tried to direct at us: you made your bed…

          3. The 18th century? You mean back when people didn’t believe men were a fake ideological construct that works much like apartheid but aimed at women?

            What time’s that train leaving, partner?

          4. I must admit that my jaded internet sensibilities are unmoved by such bland and unseasoned attempts at mockery. You have presented us with a cold casserole of leftover leftwing talking points. Yaaaawn.

            Do us a favor- go and study the works of Wilde, Parker, Mencken, and Twain, and come back when you can put together a good, cutting insult.

    1. While I am hanging around condemning unhelpful discourse can I condemn this too? Please

      doubleplusthumbsdown

    2. You’ve made a false accusation, using labels to intentionally defame a group of people you know nothing about, unsupported by any facts (real facts, not the fabricated ones). As for ruining the Hugos, if the Hugos is meant for only a small, very specific group of people, I can understand why you would say that. Otherwise, as things stand now, more people are aware of the award than ever before. Not sure why that would be a bad thing, unless the aforementioned applies.

    3. Moron. The biggest racists are and always have been on the left. They’re also stridently anti-American in everything that they say and do, as so kindly illustrated by your own post.

      The only credibility the Hugos had left was with your twisted, demented little rabbit clique. The Puppies slates are the Hugos Reconquista, and it’s the only thing that will save the Hugos, if it’s even possible to do so still.

      You, and by this I now mean YOU PERSONALLY are a fascist, would-be petty tyrant, a mewling coward, a would-be bully if you weren’t such a cowardly pantywaist, an empty-souled beast that’s inhabiting an only vaguely human-like shell.

  59. Ultimately, in 30 years, nobody is going to care what GRRM’s opinions about the issues of his day were. All they’re going to judge him on is whether or not his finished ASOIF.

    1. All they’re going to judge him on is whether or not his finished ASOIF.

      Truth.

      And I don’t care what anyones politics are unless they bleed over into their writing in such an obnoxious way that it puts me off. [See Margaret Atwood.]

      1. You don’t think that’s happened with Martin? I do. His story is unrelenting and gratuitously amoral, bleak, nihilistic, trashy, and grim, his “heroes” are largely indistinguishable from his villains (especially as it has progressed) and reading it has become a painful death march to be endured rather than an epic journey to be enjoyed.

        I completely blame his worldview as a Boomer socialist for these horrible failings.

        The sad thing is: Martin is unquestionably talented. But like the one talent guy in the parable, he’s squandered and wasted it a work that will be forgotten–and thankfully so–in a few short years. Relatively speaking.

        1. You don’t get it. What ASoIaF shows is that the world is messy, and that sometimes neither of the two grand sides in a great conflict is necessarily good. That’s worth saying.

          1. “Messy” isn’t the same as “meaningless.”

            Nihilism is cheap and easy. Meaning is tough and takes effort.

          2. I get it just fine. You’re just wrong. Martin’s Icy-Hot incest-rape fantasy does not show the world is messy. It shows the evil that resides in the hearts of boomer socialists like Martin.

          3. I disagree that ASoIoF is meaningless. It’s just that the two combatant forces are the insanely intolerant deity that Man has created, and the original inhabitants of the planet — and both sides are evil. OTOH, if the Red God wins, Humanity may be able to survive till the next climatic cycle: the Others are less merciful toward us.

          4. Jordan – Martin has demonstrated that he is simply incapable of even writing actual heroes. His characters start bad and get worse. The most moral, decent person in the entire first book is an adulterer.

            It’s not just the physical nihilism – the endless parade of deaths – but the moral nihilism that turns people away.

          5. The most moral, decent person in the entire first book is an adulterer.

            Is he?

            There’s actually quite a bit of speculation, citing textual evidence, that Jon isn’t actually Ned’s son.

            IMO, the most “moral” character in the whole thing is Danaeris Stormborn. (Her brother was a piece of work, though.) A lot of her problems arise out of real issues of trying to be “moral” in a vile world.

          6. OT, but it is obvious to me that Jon is Ned Stark’s nephew, not his son. Jon is the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark. Lyanna begs Ned for some favor, which I believe is it protect Jon by declaring Jon his bastard son.
            I also suspect that Rhaegar did not abduct and rape Lyanna, but I have less support for that.

        2. You don’t think that’s happened with Martin?

          I think his treatment of the faith is the only place where I really get that twinge of ‘great, let’s gripe about christians again’. But that may not be fair, I don’t know. They really only became a big presence in the last book.

          But no, GRRM’s not in Atwood territory. God forbid. People gripe to hell about the books, or maybe they are just talking about the tv show because lord knows how many read the books! I know GRRM saw the rape scene controversy, and to be fair it was different in the books. The show always whitewashes Cersei for some reason.

          1. Thing is, I’m actually liking the High Septon of the Seven Gods, if for no other reason than going after Cersei Lannister.

          2. Well, yes, I can’t stand Cersei either, but it’s the WAY they are going after Cersei and the reasons.

            There are many, many valid reasons to go after her that the septons care nothing about.

          3. Ah, but A. how many of those do they actually know about; and B. how many of those have the cachet of the charges they are bringing?

    2. Ironically, because ASoIaF is true to the politics and cuture of its own secondary creation, rather than to those of the SJW. The worst thing GRRM could do would be to warp ASoIaF to appease the SJW’s — if he did that, he will mar his own greatest work in its very climax. Rather as if Tolkien had made the climax of Lord of the Rings a chapter-long Tory speech by Aragorn.

  60. I’m tickled by the idea that Foz Meadows and the rest of the Usual Suspects are combing through his archives, trying to find nits to pick. I wonder if they can find all those hateful misogynistic, homophobic, racist remarks he’s alleged to have made? 😉

    1. Well, Damien’s been at it for a while now, too. Even invited people to help him crowdsource “evidence” to back up smears of Larry he published *last* year.

      Hope Fozzie packed a lunch… 🙂

  61. Honest to God, Larry, that was epic. My hat’s off to you for even having the patience and ability to respond to all of that verbiage.

  62. This thing is so much fun. While watching GoT last night, told my wife “George RR Martin is complaining about us.” Awesome.

    John C. Wright SIX TIMES!!! John C. Wright, a writer famed far and wide for having no opinions on politics, race, religion, or sexual orientation, and would never dream of injecting such messages into his Damned Good Stories.

    Six times was not enough.

    George seems like a nice guy, but you can see he has the usual LW blind spot that is the result of His Kind Of People dominating certain areas.

    At the end of the day, his claims are easy to demolish with just three simple observations.

    1. The SP slate won because more people liked those stories. That’s how voting works. No legitimate reason for anyone to be upset or claim anything was ruined.

    2. The reaction to the winning slate was around a dozen media stories calling SP racist misogynistic homophobes, many of which were forced to issue corrections.

    3. If you can’t imagine why people don’t like Scalzi, then of course you don’t understand SP. It’s hard for LW to understand when they are missing enormous amounts of relevant data simply because most everyone they read shares their opinions. It’s the Pauline Kael effect.

  63. Again, like I closed with last time, you guys need to decide what the Hugos really are, an award for just one small part of fandom, or an award that represents all of fandom. Can’t have both. You guys decide. If it’s just for you guys, and we’re not welcome, fine. We’ll take it from there.

    Been thinking about this and as a resident of Atlanta I think they answered the question years ago.

    WorldCon has does nothing to address attendance, DragonCon is running 20x times WorldCon’s attendance, DragonCon is now the “Labor Day Weekend” Con which I understand was WorldCon’s traditional date and got away with it, and no effort has been made to move the Hugos to DragonCon or a similar sized con.

    With a long history of being a smaller and smaller part of fandom WorldCon appears to have little interest in turning that around or allowing the awards to be voted on at a more representative Con (for those claiming DragonCon being in Atlanta would disenfranchise non-US voters I’ll bet there are more attendees at DragonCon not from the US than attendees told at LondonCon) they have by their actions told us what they want the Hugos to be.

    They just don’t want to admit it.

    1. So his answer is:

      1. WorldCon which is the real fans.
      2. Not something like DragonCon which isn’t real fans.
      3. And aren’t you other attendees to realfan cons which aren’t WorldCon cute.

  64. Rather than the demanded list of nominated novels shouldn’t have been, the proper metric would be to look at excellent novels that were not nominated and examine them for similarities.

  65. Kind of ironic that you should bring up Heinlein, since it was the Puppy slate that knocked William Patterson’s Heinlein biography off the Related Works shortlist this year.

    How does he know? Was there any campaigning for Volume 2 of the Heinlein biography? I mean, I put in a nomination for it, but without Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, would it have made the top 5?

    We won’t know until we see the nomination numbers, *after* Hugo results.

      1. Given their “love” of Heinlein I suspect it wouldn’t have been on regardless but they love having it as a book to beat us with.

  66. I don’t see how Redshirts won a Hugo, unless the judges only read the first half or voted based on the name on the cover.

    IMO, the author did worse then just write a bad novel. He wrote what started out as a good story (IMO), on a great subject, then let the story turn to utter shit at the end. First and last book by him I’ll ever read.

    I can’t help but wonder, was Scalzi a writer on Lost for their last season? It would explain so much.

    1. Pretty much my experience. I went into it hoping for a Pterry/Adams kind of thing- which it kind of was, at first. Then it turned into a ‘meh…’ of metafiction, worthy of being used by Philip K. Dick as something to blow his nose on.

    2. To be fair, Old Man’s War was very good. Been downhill since, though. Same thing happened to Stross around that time too. Seems like before they wrote serious stories with a little silliness, but now they’re just writing silliness.

      1. I liked Old Man’s War but after was very surprised to learn more about Scalzi. I mean, I figured he had created some of the ultimate sins against the left in it:

        1. Military personal can be reasonable and intelligent.
        2. Not only was religion still present among advanced races but the most advanced humans knew about was also the most religious and in fact driven by religion.

        My understanding is the latter books “fix” #1 but how did he survive #2?

  67. As a political movement, equal rights feminism has no history of racial incitement.

    That is what intersectional gender feminists do.

    Equal rights feminists have no history of creating demonization theories like “rape culture.”

    That is what intersectional gender feminists do.

    They are two entirely differently movements in American history.

    There are no equal rights feminists in the core SFF community we call “social justice warriors.” The theory of “white privilege” does not come from the equal rights feminist movement. That is a simple matter of reading American history.

    Intersectional gender feminists are neither “leftists” nor “liberals.” It is racial and sexual supremacist movement. At the end of the day, intersectionalists don’t care about your stand on war, gun control or socialism unless there is a racial-sexual element to it. That is also true of SFF literature.

    The reason GRRM’s comments about this affair make so little sense is because he is an actual liberal. He may toe the line here and there but his fiction is as far removed from feminist queer-racial theory as one can get. No intersectional gender feminist would ever write something like Game of Thrones. An equal rights feminist would.

    1. I appreciate the explanation. I hadn’t realized there were actually two distinct groups. I’d always wondered why women who claim to be feminists (in my mind, because I hadn’t made the distinction, the equal rights sort) seemed so focused on hating and crushing men, and so focused on racism (creating, not fighting against it).

    2. In taxonomic terms, it’s worth noting that there’s a difference between the two.

      Practically, it boils down to: “crazy people who call me a woman hating racist” and “people who call me sexist”.

      Intersectionalists may not be “leftists” (not sure I agree), but, for reasons of utility, they support those causes and those on the left provide cover and support in return. While it may only be because the left has allowed intersectionalists to drive much of their rhetoric,the distinction lacks substantial difference.

    3. You’re being too generous to “equal rights feminists.” The core of that movement going back more than a hundred years is Marxist and Rousseauian thought. Not only did the intellectual founders of the movement rely heavily on Marx, Rousseau and others, but they were immediately associated with various Marxist movements across the West. Intersectional gender feminists have certainly evolved and picked up a bunch of new, cohorts since then, but they really haven’t–philosophically–fallen far from the same tree.

      Sure, intersectional gender feminism has picked up minority causes, by and large, whereas Margaret Sanger’s Negro Project and other eugenics movements (another Marxist flirtation that ran in the same circles as incipient fascism, Bolshevism, progressivism and feminism) wanted to basically eliminate the black race from America, but really that change is much more superficial than its adherents are willing to admit.

      1. The centerpiece of Jane Eyre and and Sense and Sensibility – namely the lack of institutional protections and opportunities for non-married or widowed women – pre-date the rise of Marx. The first didn’t want to get booted out without the protection of marriage should Rochester tire of her and the second dealt with the inheritance of money.

        if a woman wants the right to open a bank account without having her brother or husband with her, I doubt she needs to go full Marx for it to occur to her that would be nice, or that it would be nice to vote. My memory tells me that even into the ’70s in Spain, a woman had to go to a bank with a man in tow.

        Intersectionalism is a racial caboose that has been tacked onto gender feminism. Gender feminism did not evolve from equal rights feminism but away from it. Radical gender feminism is lesbian-centric and has completely different goals and origins. The fact it arose at the same time as second wave ’60s feminism matters only in terms of a shared rising consciousness. They quickly learned they didn’t like each other.

        Some gender feminists certainly tried to fit their movement into a Marxist context and some few still do, but they quickly came to the conclusion it didn’t really address their needs. The centerpiece of gender feminism, which is the notion of heterosexuality and the binary masculine/feminine being “performative” fake constructs, has nothing to do with Marx. A woman like Simone de Beauvoir believed the state should take away the rights of women to raise their own children but de Beauvoir was herself cherry-picked by later gender feminists, who were more attracted to her idea “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.”

        bell hooks’ signature phrase is “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” So there is an example of the consciousness of an economic dimension, but it is not the priority. Neither is bell hooks a centerpiece of gender theory feminism. Queer gender theory is cherry-picked from thinkers such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foulcault, Jaques Lacan and Freud. It stipulates the unnatural separation from a more natural human androgyny to a fake sexual binary used to oppress and control women occurred sometime in recent pre-history.

        Wanting inheritance rights and the right to vote is really quite different from gay psycho-sexual theory dedicated to the abolition of gender which will result in the overthrow of the oppressive patriarchy.

        As goofy as that all sounds, in SFF, you’ll find the latter talked about far more than the former. Even Anita Sarkeesian says “we don’t want equality within these oppressive systems,” and by “systems” she means a patriarchy based on “socially constructed and performed gender identity.” Ancillary Justice is not rooted in economic theory and nor is Alex Dally MacFarlane’s call for an end to the binary.

        1. In that case, I guess I’m taking issue with your terms. Equal rights feminism is a specific movement, and it IS associated–intimately–with various other Marxist movements from the Progressive era and beyond.

          More generally being concerned with the legal and/or social position of women is something else. It’s superficially similar to feminism, if you read the bumper sticker versions of either, I guess, but it’s not feminism per se.

          1. Tell it to Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. You think they didn’t know exactly what they were talking about? What proof do you have feminist consciousness didn’t arise from such classic novels?

          2. Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte didn’t use the word feminism and died before the movement was labeled. They can, at best, be called proto-feminists.

            Feminism isn’t just interest in the condition of women. It’s a SPECIFIC movement with a SPECIFIC history. And as such, it was ALWAYS intimately associated with the Progressive movement in the US, and various Marxist -isms throughout the world.

          3. Because intersectionalists talk about Marxism so much. They aren’t shy about naming Peggy McIntosh, Joanna Russ, Audre Lorde and Donna Haraway. Why the ix-nay on the arxism-may?

          4. Leftists may be dumb, but they’re cunning. About once a generation the flagship -ism du jour gets completely discredited and falls out of favor: Progressivism after WW1, fascism after WW2, Communism after Joe McCarthy, socialism after Reagan and Thatcher, liberalism more recently; now it’s come full circle and is starting to call itself progressivism again.

            So what do they do? The change a few superficial details of the -ism, give it a new label, and pretend like it’s actually something completely different and hope that folks won’t notice.

            Enough people recognize the Marxist roots of all of these that Marxism remains a dirty word, though, and they prefer not to be tarred with it, no matter how justified.

  68. Huh, I feel the need to financially support a man who makes this many leftist heads explode. Off to buy some MHI schwag…

    1. “Hugo-Truthers” who asserts that Larry is Vox’s pawn

      I read that for a brief, terrifying moment as “Larry is Vox’s spawn”.

  69. This is kinda long. My apologies, Larry, feel free to delete if it’s too long. But after reading your posts with Martin, I felt compelled to type this up.

    I’m starting with a confession here. When I first read your posts referring to George R.R. Martin, I asked myself, “Who?”

    I don’t mean to be insulting to him about this, I just didn’t recognize the name.

    So I googled him, and according to his Wikipedia entry (and we all know THAT must be gospel, yes?) I find that his professional output has been:

    13 Novels
    11 short story collections
    2 YA
    1 Reference
    4 Novellas

    TV ? I could not care less. I try not to watch it.

    Editor? Okay; it can be a very demanding, creative field, but not the same as ‘writer.’ That’s why there are separate categories in the Hugos, no?

    And I discover that what I suspect his biggest claim to fame is, is that HBO picked a series of his and made it into a miniseries (Game of Thrones.)

    “Ah”, says I. That explains why I hadn’t heard of him. See earlier comment about TV. I am not an HBO subscriber, and most of the TV I watch is on the big plasmas at the local pub, with the sound turned off so it doesn’t interfere with the Jukebox or DJ.

    Another reason I didn’t recognize the name had to do, I suspect, with timing.

    From about 1968 until 1986, I averaged something like 4 books read a week. (That’s an average. Some weeks more, some weeks less, but almost always at least four. Almost always, Sci-Fi or Fantasy.)

    After that, for about twenty years, I was busy with both my personal and professional life, creating (with my wife) a family, raising two kids and working full time. There wasn’t that much time for reading; I became much more selective in what I read, because I didn’t have time to waste on things I might not like. If I was going to read, I wanted it to be something good – I didn’t want to squander the chance to enjoy it. My ‘books read’ count dropped to a personal low of maybe two books a month; one of those was often a re-read because I didn’t have time to select another good one, and I had plenty of good books I’d already read to pick from – again, didn’t want to waste the very little reading time I had on something I might not like.

    Then, an interesting thing happened. It was the late nineties, I think, and I noticed that on the last page of this paperback I’d just read (Honor of the Queen, by David Weber) there was reference to the publisher’s web page. (which was a kind of new thing at that time. Not everybody had a web page, yet.)

    Because I’d enjoyed this book, and knew it was the latest in a series, I decided that I’d check it out to try and find out if this author had any intentions of writing another. So I visited the web page, and found this thing called Baen’s Bar, being presided over by this guy named Jim. I poked around there for a little bit one evening, and found a forum there that seemed to have a bunch of discussions going on about things this author had written, and posted a message asking whether anyone knew if the author intended to write any more books in this series.

    I checked back the next day, not really expecting to see much of any response – only to find that the author himself had responded in the affirmative, and that he had more than one book he was working on in that series, and proceeded to lay out for me what his expected work schedule was going to be like for the next year or so.

    This kind of blew me away.

    From this, I started hunting around on the website, found a few other titles listed by other authors that looked interesting, and the next time I had both time and money to buy and read a book, I went looking for one of those Baen titles.

    fast-forward a year or two.

    It dawned on me at one point that I was pretty much ignoring anything published by any other house, and the reasons were pretty simple. I didn’t have the time or money to search through the dreck to find something good. In my younger days I used to spend up to four hours every week just trolling through the Sci-Fi/Fantasy sections of my local bookstores, sample reading things before making a purchase. It wasn’t unusual for me to read two chapters of a book while it was still in the store before ever buying it – and I still bought up to a half dozen books a week during that time.

    I didn’t have time for that any more – and with Baen, I could sample the books online during a break at work or in the evening after the kids were in bed, and when I got paid at the end of the month I could run over to the bookstore on my lunch hour and pick up a Baen book that I knew I’d like because I had already read a couple chapters of it.

    I realized there was probably a lot out there I was missing – but there was more than enough from Baen to keep my reading time fully occupied.

    Which brings me back to George R.R. Martin.

    Prior to my Great Change (A.K.A The Marriage, 1986) he had four Novels, 1 YA, and shorts in 5 collections, or collections of shorts (depending.) I usually don’t buy collections – I read novels. But still – I spent quite a bit of time in the bookstores then, and I quite frequently “sample-read” everything on the shelves before buying. So why don’t I remember him or his books?

    So I followed a link to the wikipedia page for his first novel. In reading through the synopsis I found: a dying world. A dying race. a dying culture. the planet was going to die… Oh lord. No wonder I didn’t buy it.

    To be fair, and not judge based on one example, I looked to his second novel. Let’s see.. planet population based on survivors of a crashed starship… population evolving into separate classes, the flyers and everyone else… the stories explore the class differences… okay, yup, another “no wonder I didn’t buy it”, this most likely wouldn’t be my cuppa tea.

    Do something often enough, and you get stereotyped. Given the amount of pre-reading I was doing, after a while I’d get to the point where I just didn’t bother checking out anything new by authors I’d flagged as being “not my cuppa.” This may have happened here.

    Or not – four books is still a small sample over the time frame we are looking at. If the book’s cover didn’t have something on it to draw me in, I might not have noticed it to start with.

    Everything else this man did happened either during “the great drought”, when I did very little reading, or happened after I had become accustomed to buying Baen books.

    So what is this “Game of Thrones” all about, then? Lessee… back to wikipedia… peruse through the synopsys… uhm. nope. Not my cuppa. Even if I was buying Sci-Fi and Fantasy books at the rate I was pre-1986, I doubt I’d be buying these. I can see why HBO would pick them up, though. Sounds like it fits in with their usual soapy, bloodthirsty approach to entertainment.

    Well, okay. I think I now know why I don’t know this author. I suspect if it wasn’t his good fortune to stumble into the HBO deal (and I have to wonder how much his working in the TV field all those years helped with that) I suspect, despite your relative newcomer status in the field, you, Larry, would be the “monster” in the field, not George.

    He may have been writing longer, but based on the number of your books I’ve bought, I think you are the better author, at least of the kind of fiction I like to read.

    So don’t depreciate yourself when trading comments with the man – I happen to think you’re the better writer.

    My money says so.

    1. Dying of the Light is a pretty cool book, but not a happy book. It has a lot in common with a Game of Thrones (flawed/weak heroes & heroines, strong villeins, lies everywhere, conflicting worldviews, great world building, bad things happening to pretty much everyone by the end). Doesn’t have a very satisfying ending to me, but it is worth a read.

      Tuf Voyaging (Which was, btw, published by Baen) is a great collection of stories which were originally published in Analog.

      I bought A Game of Thrones in soft cover. It blew me away, I bought the second book in HC. It was OK. Bought the 3rd book in Trade. Got about halfway thorough it and put it down. I think it is in the garage where I moved it while cleaning the car out a few years ago. Pretty much every character I cared about had gotten killed or was obviously doomed.

      1. yes, see, that’s where my problem is.

        I read to be entertained. If I wanted to be depressed, believe the world was going to end, feel sorrow for my fellow man, and generally just want to crawl in a corner and slit my wrists, I’d read or watch the news all the time. (well, that or watch soap operas. Same-Same.)

        Even with authors like Ringo, Weber, Correia, Drake and Flint, even after slaughtering whole armies (or populations), the story isn’t about the death and destruction, the pathos and the angst. Don’t get me wrong – that can all be in there. But that’s more the setting for the story, the reason for the book, than what the book is about.

        With the good ones, it’s about surviving, uplifting, overcoming.

        At the end of the day, I want to know – from the author – that there is another day coming for the characters I’m reading about. Maybe not ALL of them – but at least the one or ones that the story places primary focus on.

        It’s why it’s such a big deal when an author like Weber chooses to kill off a main character in one of his story lines, know what I mean?

        1. I honestly don’t find the novels depressing, despite the deaths. They are obviously leading somewhere (we’ll see if George brings it home!).

          There is more to them than that, is all I’m saying. It may not be your cup of tea and it’s really, really long (really). And the first three books are better than the most recent two.

          Of course, he hasn’t killed off my favorite characters yet so we’ll see.

          1. Lea, if he’s a couple books in and it’s still not clear where he’s going with it, I’m not sure they are leading anywhere I’d want to go.

            When I was in my mid-teens I got a hold of this fantasy that caught my attention. The book was maybe three fourths story and one third porn, if I was to be honest about it, and at that time in my life (Teenager! Male!) I was fine with that.

            I knew this wasn’t the first book in the series, so I went looking for more. There turned out to be two before it (which I found and read) and then one more after it.

            And while I was getting caught up on the earlier books in the series, another came out.

            And then I was caught up, and the books kept coming.

            The thing I found was that as the series “progressed”, the ratio of story to porn was changing. The story was becoming less, and the porn more. And this may be hard to believe of a Teenage Male, but I wound up walking away from that series, because I eventually figured out it wasn’t going anywhere. Not anymore. It may have been at one time, but not after a certain point.

            Just sayin’ that authors don’t always have a plan for where they are going beyond “I’m a gonna do another.”

            But, if you like a given author’s style and approach, it doesn’t have to matter. Stick with it if you like it, regardless of whether he is ‘going somewhere’ with it.

            Me, I have to believe that the author has an idea of where the story should be going when they are writing a series, and when they get there, stop already.

            Doesn’t mean they can’t start the train back up again in the future if they want, it’s just that for me, if I don’t think the author knows where he’s going, I don’t want to go there with him or her.

    2. “And I discover that what I suspect his biggest claim to fame is, is that HBO picked a series of his and made it into a miniseries (Game of Thrones.)”

      That may be true, but even before that, his series was about as big a hit as a fantasy novel series can get. He was as big as Robert Jordan. All you’ve done is explain why you haven’t been paying attention to stuff that was UBIQUITOUS in the world of SFF fandom. You seriously couldn’t have missed it if you were paying even marginal attention. He was already THAT big prior to HBO picking it up and making it an order of magnitude bigger yet.

      1. I had seen the covers of aSoIaF in bookstores, and was thus aware that someone was writing big fantasy bricks, but I had no idea who Martin was until HBO started promoting GoT. I don’t typically consider reading big fantasy bricks.

      2. ” All you’ve done is explain why you haven’t been paying attention to stuff that was UBIQUITOUS in the world of SFF fandom. ”

        Uh, yup. I most certainly wasn’t paying attention to the world of SFF fandom. Never claimed to.

        See, I’m a fan of the books – not of the world of fandom.

        Which is the crux of the thing with the Hugos.

      3. Furthermore, it illustrates what’s wrong with the “I ain’t gonna read that book because the author is a twat/is friends with an ass/doesn’t wear the right underwear” crowd.

        I chose not to look for books by him because what little evidence I have (supplied by either his fans, his publishers, or his publicists) indicates that his writing is not to my taste.

        NOT because he is or isn’t “UBIQUITOUS” in fandom.

        Am I missing a good read? Possibly. I KNOW I’ve missed MANY good reads over the years (for reasons I’ve explained.)

        But I didn’t do so because I think the author is a Jerk, I did so because the evidence I have indicates he doesn’t write to my taste.

        Now, put this into the context of the Hugos coming up.

        I’m going to buy a supporting membership.

        Based on what I’ve been told, that should get me a pile of ebooks to slog through. It’s going to be a challenge, because my schedule isn’t any lighter. My intent is to read everything in a category, then decide which one I’ll vote for based on what I’ve read.

        That means that if GRRM (or Vox Day, or Hitller, or the Devil Incarnate, if that’s not an oxymoron) has an entry in that category, I’ll read it.

        Then I’ll judge it, based upon how much I enjoyed what I read.

        Period.

        Does that mean I will be reading things that I may not like, which I usually try to avoid? Probably. But until I do have at those books, I won’t be qualified – in my own mind – to vote.

        Which is also why, if I run out of time, I won’t be voting in categories that I don’t have time to complete.

        See, when I’m reading for my own enjoyment – which is as much of the time as I can – I get to pass by works that do not interest me. And for whatever reason, nothing GRRM has done has caught my eye, and nothing I’ve seen on his references would cause me to WANT to read them.

        Same thing goes for Vox Day. For whatever reasons, nothing he’s written has ever caught my eye as something I’d want to read, for good or ill; I didn’t even know he existed until the current kerfluffle blew up. Same as GRRM.

        And I’ll point out to the perpetually enraged that if there is something of his in one of the categories I wind up reading to judge, it will get read. Same way I’d read GRRM’s entry if it was in the same category.

        Then I’d judge it based upon the read.

        Why am I going to do this?

        Because, for years, I believed the Hugos were SUPPOSED to be about really good books.

        And for years, I was saddened that they didn’t seem to be.

        Seems like every time I saw “Hugo Winner” on the cover of a new book, I’d get under the cover and discover, no, doesn’t appeal, and put it back without buying. (This was mostly in the late ’70s, early ’80’s. After 1986, I didn’t spend much time browsing any more.)

        And now, I realize – thanks entirely to Sad Puppies One, Two and Three – that I can make a difference in what the Hugos represent, and thanks to the trash talk slung at those who have been running these campaigns I have been motivated enough to join in and actually participate.

        And isn’t it Ironic that I’ll most likely be reading something that was put forth by that Vox Day guy, instead of GRRM?

        So if next year GRRM has something you think should get a Hugo nom, be sure and push it; do your best to get that UBIQITOUS fan base behind him – and get it on the ballot.

        ‘Cause then I’ll have to read it along with the others in its category, and we can have a civil discussion about whether I enjoyed it as much as you did.

        1. Yeah, well that’s a great ideal. Sadly, to some extent the internet has ruined that for us. You can’t just ignore the politics and opinions and personalities of creative types anymore, because it’s much harder to be unaware of them now.

          And once you’re aware of them, it’s hard to get that out of your mind, and avoid having it color the work that you’re trying to appreciate.

          It may be well and good to suggest that maybe I’d appreciate the works of Marion Zimmer Bradley or Samuel Delaney if I were to ever read them (I doubt it, but for the sake of argument, work with me here) but the fact is, if I’m reading anything by either one of them, I can’t ignore the fact that I know that they are terrible, despicable people, either guilty of or sympathetic to child molesters and child rapists.

          Also; you seem to be missing the point. I’m not a GRRM fan. I think he’s a despicable person too, and I think his works are unrelentingly bleak, soul-less, filled with gratuitous trash, and miserable.

          Just because I point out that his work is pretty ubiquitous and that if you walk into the scifi section of a bookstore or library, or look at a book catalog, or talk about fantasy books with anyone at all you can’t miss hearing about him, doesn’t mean that I’m a fan.

          Also; GRRM DID win a Hugo for the last book he wrote.

  70. Mr. Correia, i of course found you because of GRRM’s post as alot others have recently. i am not a writer at all. i hated writing in school (so please bear with this post). i do however like to read books, i just don’t have time to read as much as i want – as such i have not read any of yours. i also grew up mormon, but have since learned the truth (meaning that i am no longer a mormon). i have not gone to worldcon, but i want to. right now getting out of debt is way more important even though the next one is really close to me. i consider myself unbiased about the hugos. i don’t care who wins or not, i read a book if a friend recommends it to me. i don’t know if i will ever vote on them even if i do go to worldcon. i have read GRRM’s posts and others out there to try to understand what happened – i like to be informed. just from reading about you and what you started with the hugos i have determined a couple things:

    1. i do not have a problem with anyone wanting to recognize undeserved writers. – the problem i have is why & how (see #2). what i see wrong with your agenda is that is it based on hate. but not the hate that everyone is going on about. it seems to me it’s from the anger of not being recognized for your writing or for being bullied – which i can almost understand. i’ve been bullied (in person not on the internet) growing up and it sucks. i’ve wanted to kill myself because of it. i don’t know how i got past it. i now will stand up to anyone doing it to anyone else because i know better and know how the bullied person feels. i wish there were no bullies in the world, but there are.

    2. because there are bullies in the world and because you put yourself in the spotlight by writing, i believe that you have to be better than them. i see this is a bully tactic. by getting what you want no matter how other people feel about it or who it hurts.

    3. i don’t know if i will ever read your books. i am curious about them now that i have heard a little about them. but as i’m sure your aware this has caused negatives & positives for your writings (as far as people buying them). for the moment i’m in the negative, alot of it comes down to you – your continued opinions about this whole nonsense and everything else for that matter. and from what i’ve read, at this point i’m not so sure you care about that.

    i don’t care if you respond, i know your busy. however, i’m not going to reply to anyone but your response. i’m busy too.

    1. The only people who say that I’m super angry are those who are angry at me. The people who say I am motivated by hate are trying to dismiss me. I can see something is screwed up and get involved without hating anyone. I never said I was bullied. I was more annoyed than anything and came away from the process thinking it was bullshit.

      My people have been accused of hate so much that it has become a running joke. That’s why my title is International Lord of Hate. Saying somebody is mad doesn’t automatically refute all their points you know. But good try.

      1. “The only people who say that I’m super angry are those who are angry at me.”

        that’s the way that you are coming across to people whether you like it or not

        “The people who say I am motivated by hate are trying to dismiss me.”

        me personally? i’m don’t want to dismiss you, but the way that you are handling all of this makes other people want to.

        “I never said I was bullied.”

        i wasn’t saying you were, i was just telling you that i know what a bully is and your and your followers are bullies.

        “My people have been accused of hate so much that it has become a running joke.”

        so the best way to show people that you don’t hate others is to show hate back? bullshit, violence breads violence as hate breads hate. just take a look at what Joshua comments below. “keep your yap shut”. it’s things like that that make you look bad.

        1. If you think “keep your yap shut” makes people on this side look bad, I really hope you agree that the people on the opposing side are looking like reincarnations of Pol Pot. If not, then I think you have no claim to anything remotely approaching objectivity.

        2. Since I’m not the thought police, I don’t moderate comments. I figure you’re all grown ups.

          As for the rest, your concern is duly noted. I’ll throw it on the pile with the rest of the concerned advice.

        3. To shamelessly plaigiarize Schlock Mercenary, “If you don’t think violence will solve your problem, you’re probably just not willing to apply enough.”

          SJWs will hate and malign us regardless of anything we do EXCEPT strike back at them or toe their agenda line. They hate us for being free-market capitalists. They hate us for believing in free association. They hate us for believing that words mean things. They hate us for thinking we should have a strong defense and a small central government. They hate us for having religious beliefs that say that wrong is wrong.

          In short, they don’t hate US. They hate WHO WE ARE. They hate us because our very nature is badthink and wrongfun. They’ll never stop attacking us until we’re either converted or dead. So they can go to hell. We’re going to keep having fun. And we’re not going to die (we’re the ones with all the guns). [INSERT EVIL GRIN HERE]

        4. You see, joe, you’re making one fundamental mistake, which is assuming that we care what you think. Offer us insult or violence, such as doxxing people out of jobs, and then we’ll care until the nuisance is abated — permanently. Otherwise, we don’t care if we’re invited to your dinner parties or homes.

    2. ” i believe that you have to be better than them.”

      I can remember feeling that way. Until I’d been lied about a few times, and slimed a few more, and I realized that all that “being better than them” was getting me was pounded on more.

      Now I’m more a Tacitus fan: “Let them hate us, so long as they fear.”

      1. I can remember feeling that way. Until I’d been lied about a few times, and slimed a few more, and I realized that all that “being better than them” was getting me was pounded on more.

        I don’t think telling the truth about people is being less than them. My grandmother was the polite southern lady who could be passive aggressive when necessary and I got a lot from her. My other grandmother was blunt as hell and I got a lot from her too.

        I think you use the tactics that make sense. With people yelling at you, quite just makes them angrier. But with bullies you have to call them on it. You have to point them out. You have to stop playing their game, stop apologizing, stop hiding. I think that’s where we are, as a society. We need to stand up to the bullies. That’s what this whole thing is, to me.

    3. ” what i see wrong with your agenda is that is it based on hate. ”

      What I see wrong with your post is that it is preposterously wrong. You’re either incredibly ignorant, or willfully deceptive. Either way, it’s a much better idea to keep your yap shut until you either know enough to comment intelligently, or are willing to tell the truth.

    4. Dear dog… or puppies… or whatever.

      Talk about an exercise in blatant self-congratulations. Of course “Joe” isn’t going to respond to anyone but Larry… because it’s all about illuminating Joe.

      And it does a great job of illuminating Joe.

      Congratulations, Joe. You are illuminated.

  71. “It would be faster for you to tell me which books featured capitalism as a positive thing.”

    Irony as every book condones capitalism as a positive thing when it includes a price on top of the artwork.

    George and every one know this deep down.

    I’m no Righty, but I’m free from being a left wing fool because I finally accepting that I do look out for number one first and then number 2. Be a Naive lie of great proportions if anyone told you otherwise.

    Sadly this is what fuels the politically correct ego.

    Basically Pathological Altruism that will hurt everyone including those they condescendingly pretend to be saving.

  72. Proud SJw and Martin fan here.

    I don’t agree with much of what you say, but I’d like to tell you how sorry I am that people have threatened you over this.

    These people are democrats in name only, not understanding that human rights extend to everyone-even people we don’t agree with.

    Please accept one person’s apology for anything my so-called colleagues have done that is distasteful and repugnant.

    1. As a proud large fuzzy guy and fan of all sorts of authors, let me first acknowledge your apology for the silly behavior of others. That being said if you are out with your folks and one of them decides to have a “ego moment” of cranial rectal inversion can you put them in time out or something.

  73. Has anyone noticed the change in narrative?

    – Nominations announced: “Oh my god! SP3 cheated! They are horrible, despicable people. The Hugos have been taken over by white, supremacist, racist men! The greatest SF award has been soiled and besmirched by their actions!”

    – Not getting traction: “Well, no, you’re right, they didn’t cheat. But it’s not about the Hugos. It’s about the ethics. While what they did was legal, they shouldn’t have done it.”

    – Still not getting traction: “This is just a petty dispute by some authors who felt slighted because they’re are not been paid enough attention. It’s silly, they’re silly and childish and this is ridiculous. You don’t hijack a little thing like the Hugos over a bruised ego and thin skin.”

    Next will come the taken of the high road and “we are better than them”.

    It’s also fun that, at the very least in Charlie Jane Anders’ io9 article slamming SP, no pro-SP comment had been approved as of 4/11. Only anti-SP ones were visible since io9 hides Pending comments. Great way to have an open discussion, right?

  74. “Blue Honey ‏@devans00 · 33m33 minutes ago
    @djolder Larry Correia should feel honored @GeorgeRRMartin_ took the time to reality check him. Of course he’s too self absorbed to do so”

    You should be honored that King George condescends to speak with you, peasant!

    1. And:

      “Roz Kaveney ‏@RozKaveney · 6h6 hours ago
      Larry Correia has also threatened consequences from ‘his people’ if No Award beats his slate. Again, clear electoral malpractice.”

      Brad’s slate, you mean.

  75. I wonder how this petition would affect things?

    We the undersigned would like to make this statement:

    In light of WorldCon’s increasing atmosphere of and tolerance for institutionalized expressions of daily hate speech and serial harassment regarding men, ethnic Europeans and heterosexuals, and which include numerous dehumanization and demonization theories, we will no longer accept any nominations for the Hugo Award until this issue is addressed in an above board and conspicuously public manner.

    1. Who would this petition be addressed to? SFF authors? If so, the SJWs would both see it as an example of “hate speech” itself and decide it was everyone-who-signed-it throwing in the towel and allowing them to have the Hugos all to themselves. If it was addressed to the world of SFF readers or even to just the self-proclaimed fans, I think it would confuse people.

      1. Anyone who’s confused by that can take a course in remedial English.

        Even the stupid doublethinking of gender feminism couldn’t possibly turn that into an expression of hate speech.

        1. If the WorldCon admins would sign and enforce such a petition it would be a very good thing. So would aerial bacon.

          1. Who said anything about THEM signing it or enforcing anything? It’s for them to read and a dialogue to start.

            Otherwise bye-bye. Let feminists stare at each other all they want. It’s the WisCon Tiptree Awards for all intents and purposes now anyway. They should just merge the two and add the Nebulas and call it the “Butlerian Jihad Award” for best anti-Patriarchal SFF.

            I really don’t mind any of that. What I mind is them pretending it’s not happening. Do they really think we can’t read their 10,000 Tweets about No Mas Hombres Blancos?

          2. So you really think that will happen? Frankly, the Hugos mean pretty much nothing anymore. It’s nice that you guys are trying to resurrect them as an acknowledgement of the best in SFF each year, but I fully expect that “they” will take their ball and go home when they realize they can’t win the game by playing by the rules they’ve set.

          3. That’s the beauty of a Xanatos Gambit. Even that’s a win, because it denies them the validation that they crave, exposes them for the rabbitty, petty tyrants that they are, and clears the field for something better that recaptures the original spirit of the Hugos.

            I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; the Puppies campaigns are to the Hugos what the Reconquista was to al-Andalus. And if al-Andalus becomes Andalucia; completely different in character than what it once under Moorish rule and more akin to Vandalusia from prior to the Muslim conquest, then that’s perfectly fine.

    2. You wanna isolate and highlight these fuckers? Here’s your highlight marker. Go ahead and don’t sign this Scalzi and Hines.

      They’ll say it’s not really a problem.

      A thousand non-scare quotes follow.

      Really? Just my imagination. Nevermind.

      Have a nice life.

      Without me.

      1. Yes, of course it does. But that wasn’t in the original post I was responding to, which seems to be itself a response to someone else but which was in fact a response to a previous post of yours. That’s why I said your post didn’t make sense.

          1. Does it have to be my blood? I have a number of surrogate donors in mind… As for having my head measured, I’ve been told that its size changes with my varying levels of self-esteem, so I’m not sure just how useful that would be…

    1. It was just a coincidence that a British newspaper which has never mentioned me before, mentioned me the same day I found out I was a Hugo nominee for a British convention. That isn’t suspicious at all.

      And I don’t think I’ve ever called that a conspiracy. What is it with you guys labeling everything a conspiracy? Before last week half of my original points were called conspiracies, until people like GRRM and TNH confirmed them.

      In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever even talked about that much, except for to laugh at it on the blog a few times. I simply chalked the suspicious timing up to there being a leak somewhere. Organizations leak info all the time. Reporters love it. If there wasn’t a leak somewhere, then it was just one hell of a coincidence.

      Sure, I responded to the Ending Binary Gender nonsense before, and the Guardian wrote about me weeks later using scare quotes to accuse me of things I’ve never said and don’t believe. But I’ve also argued against many other ridiculous articles. Strange how none of those ever showed up in the Guardian until the one run the same day the Hugo nominees were informed.

      On that note, you point out that it only talked about me once in seven paragraphs, so some hit piece… Just curious, what is your acceptable threshold of being labeled a hatemonger without evidence in a major newspaper before you are allowed to be offended?

      Now, I believe that it was Dave Freer who pointed out how this is probably bullshit, not me, and also how it is funny the Nielsen Haydens knew well in advance specifically that 3/5 of the best novel nominees this year where SP. That’s a lot more specific and damning than the British newspaper leak. http://madgeniusclub.com/2015/04/13/nostradumbass-and-madame-bugblatterfatski/

      But I’m sure that was also just a really good guess.

      1. The fact that they didn’t know who three lucky puppies were suggests strongly that they just deduced it from gossip rather than learned it from insider information.

        1. How did they know there were 3?

          And those 3 didn’t gossip. So where does that leave us?

          I see two possibilities. A leak. Or this process is so stagnant and predictable that they knew who was supposed to get nominated, and when they didn’t, they knew SP had to have 3. Both indicate a problem. If you have a third possibility that doesn’t involve supernatural guess work or mind reading, I’d love to hear it.

          1. How did they know there were 3?

            And those 3 didn’t gossip. So where does that leave us?

            If there was a leak, the leaker either withheld the names of the three or PNH pretended not to know their names to cover tracks.

            I doubt it’s so straightforward as a list of 5 people who were “supposed” to win; more likely a network of the most likely candidates because he knows all of the usual suspects, or he knows the editors of the usual suspects. Do embargoed authors tell their editors?

          2. And this network of likely candidates is so small and tight that when only 2 of them are on it, then obviously the other 3 are SP? Yeah… Then that is an indicator of a really small clique of favored authors, which is pretty much what I’ve been saying for 3 years.

          3. Yes, it would be a pretty small club. But having a list of exactly 5 names / category, and having enough people voting that list to get noms, and keeping it a secret would be tricky.

      2. It was just a coincidence that a British newspaper which has never mentioned me before, mentioned me the same day I found out I was a Hugo nominee for a British convention. That isn’t suspicious at all.

        If he knew about SP2 and wanted to torpedo you should you get nominated, he might also have run that article in days prior to the announcement. That also wouldn’t be a coincidence, but wouldn’t mean that he had advance knowledge.

  76. Thanks Larry for making a big stink. Thanks because I discovered that I can vote on Hugos for a mere $40 and get copies of most of the works via a download.

    I’ve been reading SF including Heinlein etc….. for more than 40 years. I own all of the Monster Hunter & Grim Noir books (in hardback), lots of Ringo, SM Stirling. But I also read Redshirts (it was ok), Your Hatemail will be Graded (which I liked a lot) etc….

    I am joining WorldCon and will be voting. I’m going on a long vacation and will have lots of time to read in late May.

    Thanks again for letting a wider circle know that we can actually vote on Hugos. And I definitely will be reading everything I can and casting an informed vote.

    PS – My wife tells me I will be voting for the Flash TV entry.

    1. My wife tells me I will be voting for the Flash TV entry.

      *snort* Well, you’ve been informed now, right? 🙂

      (A lot of people have gotten increasingly tense over accusations of having not read the stuff and/or voting at the beck and call of others…but dude. Yeah. My advice would be to obey that particular directive.)

  77. BTW, some girl is in wired complaining about the hugos, but also that she thinks reviewers are too male. Or something. She wasn’t very clear. It’s kind of like when you read the self-submitted article in yahoo where you desperately wish they’d had an editor to tell them to write better.

    Oh, she’s also sad her debut novel didn’t get a chance to get a nomination.

    http://www.wired.com/2015/04/monica-byrne-hugos-vida/

    1. “… clear data on thorny issues, like, oh, sexism and racism in literature.”

      That’s a pip of a quote. I think Monica hasn’t figured out she did this to herself, since I am roundly sick of this race-gender bullshit and more than happy to not see it rewarded.

      “Meanwhile, the actual leaders in the field—including Nora K. Jemisin, Kameron Hurley…”

      hahaha. Unintentional irony, meet lack of self-awareness. They’re leaders, all right.

      Oh, and then she mentions “the sixth annual VIDA Count,” the one they’re desperately never applying to basketball, Vet’s Hospitals and romance fiction.

      “Bloop, bloop.” – Bloop the Alien Chimp-thing from Lost in Space.

    1. I wonder if Kloos would’ve withdrawn had N. K. Jemisin’s ringing endorsement paved the way to his nomination.

      Imagine that and then imagine Mars flying into your window.

    2. When it comes to entertainment spending, I try to buy freedom first & avoid SJW writers. Paying people to spit in my face? Thanks, but no thanks.

      Oh well. Plenty of other writers in the Amazon Swamp.

    3. Prediction: If they are replaced on the ballot, harassment of everyone else on the Puppies ballot will increase substantially, so that the “wrong” people can be replaced by the “right” people.

      1. They bent the knee, they averted their eyes in the House of Toads.

        “Croak,” went the Toad. “You are on probationary status for 5 years.”

        Prediction: In 4 years Kloos will betray the Earth to aliens.

        1. Kloos withdrew because he was on the Rabid Puppies slate.

          He simply didn’t want to be associated with Vox. He can console himself with the huge stack of cash his books will deservedly earn.

          1. I don’t doubt that’s true.

            I do doubt that he just found out about it today, though.

            It’s a lot easier to shun the heretic after several days of people screaming loudly in your ear for several days to shun the heretic.

          2. The question is would he have withdrawn had he been on an N. K. Jemisin slate? Will Alyssa Wong now refuse her AA Nebula nomination?

            The cult which repeatedly expresses its disdain for the idea of a meritocracy in quote after quote suddenly finds the faith?

          1. I won’t criticize him for withdrawing, but I doubt that the RP slate came to his attention very recently.

  78. So I saw all the outraged people crying out in anger about how Sad Puppies was ruining the Hugos. “Swept the nominations” was something I heard a lot. So I asked myself, “Self, how many Hugo nominations are there actually?”
    My self replied “I don’t know, why don’t you ask Google?”
    So I did. Turns out there are 85 nomination slots, 17 categories, 5 in each category.
    Okay, now how many slots did SP put on their slate? 61. Hmm, 72% of the possible slots. So even if every single SP suggestion was voted in, it still wouldn’t be 100% across the board denying nominations to any other “clique”.
    How many of SP suggestions got the nomination? 50. Hmm, 59% is more than half, but it seems like quite the strong reaction from certain camps for being only 59%.
    But with 82% of SP slate passing that’s still a B.
    I just have a picture in my head of a group of 6 kids playing football on a field, and another 6 kids show up and say, “Hey, we like football too, let’s get a game going!”
    1st group yells, “No! This is our ball, you can’t play with us!”
    2nd group says, “Fine, we brought our own ball, we’ll play on that half of the field, you guys got this one.”
    1st “No! this is our field! Get off! You don’t even really like football or you would have been here all along like we were!”
    2nd “Nope, rules of the park say we can play here, so we’re staying. And we like it just as much as you.”

  79. “And if they do that, it will send a very, very clear message. My people will proceed accordingly.”

    What will “your people” do? Just curious.
    Why don’t you and your people set up your own SF awards and award all the Right Wing authors you all deem acceptable?

    And what racist comments have been made by N.K. Jemisin which would justify the racist comments made by Vox Day when he called her a half savage and claimed that she (and Blacks in general) were not as human as he was?

    1. What my people do depends on what they do. Hence the word “accordingly”.

      Why would we set up our own award when there is a perfectly good one right there, that up until last week claimed to represent all of fandom?

      And a cursory glance at our suggested slate will show that it isn’t right wingers. In fact, right wingers are in the minority.

      For your last question, I’d direct you to GoH speech in Australia to start, explaining how in America it was okay for white folks to just shoot black folks who make them uncomfortable. That’s my favorite, but it is more of a blatant lie than an actual racist comment. Beyond that, I’ve got a guy on here who makes it his hobby to collect their quotes. There are so many I can’t keep track of who said what. Hint, if you don’t find them racist, substitute Jew for White Male, and if it sounds like something Heinrich Himmler might have said, it is probably racist. I’m sure he’ll be happy to supply you with a ton.

      1. Why would we set up our own award when there is a perfectly good one right there, that up until last week claimed to represent all of fandom?

        Indeed, they’re still making that claim … at the same time as they contradict themselves by implying that the votes of the Sad / Rabid Puppies are somehow illegitimate. They also imagine the movement against their domination of the Hugos to be somehow artificial and that it will go away after a year or two, which is why they think they can just vote “No Award” and have this work in the long run.

      2. I’d direct you to GoH speech in Australia to start, explaining how in America it was okay for white folks to just shoot black folks who make them uncomfortable. That’s my favorite, but it is more of a blatant lie than an actual racist comment.

        I wonder if Jemisin really believes this? One would think that if she did, she’d flee the country. But then, I remember that before the Obama Administration, a lot of radicals believed that the US government was routinely murdering dissidents — yet failed to act as if they really believed this.

    2. In referring to Brad, Jemisin writes “But hilariously, he and his cronies have resorted to a lesser version of the very same tactics that his forbears used to defend their hoarded privileges — like enlisting the aid of violent bigots, and blatantly hamstringing processes intended to be fair.”

      “same tactics” links you to Jim Crow literacy tests. “enlisting the aid of violent bigots” brings you to a Daddy Warpig Tweet at Making Light.

      1. Why is that racist? It sounds like she’s just falsely accusing someone else of being racist. Is that by itself a racist thing to do?

        1. False accusations on racial grounds are….

          I’ll let you think about that.

          OTOH, I’ll explain… if I falsely accuse the black guy of breaking into my house… can you see racism in that? If I made an accusation like that that was false then on what grounds did I make it other than my own prejudice against black men? If I explain that I see lots of news reports about black men breaking into houses, is that proof enough for my accusation?

          This *false thing* that Jemisin believes is true, she believes because she has certain attitudes about white men and applies them to all white men. It’s a racist basis for a world view… take something that is true of someone somewhere, and then apply it to everyone of that race. What do you think racism is?

    3. Well, he upgraded her to a full savage later. I’ve never read the comment in the original, but frankly “savage” does not necessarily imply anything racial.

      As for the other thing, that isn’t what he said, and that’s not what it meant. He said that modern genetic studies say that the various races don’t all have the same ancestral mix. Some “races” have Neanderthal DNA and some don’t, for example. There’s another major group mixed in as well.

      His point was that while we are all human, we aren’t all the SAME kind of human. There is more than one kind of human. But “not the same” != “lesser”. Things can be different without being better or worse, you know.

    4. http://voxday.blogspot.com/2013/06/a-black-female-fantasist.html

      Here’s the original article that Vox wrote.

      And you know what? I don’t give a damn what race Jemisin is; he’s still right.

      Anyone who can so badly – and so deliberately – misunderstand ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws is best described as a savage.

      Stand Your Ground laws, incidentally, serve as protection FOR minorities who are forced to use weapons in defense of their lives. And more minorities, including blacks, have used these laws than have whites.

      Why? Because the fact that Jemisin has to be specifically described as “savage” means that the term is not intended to be applied to her race, but merely to her. Which suggests that there are indeed civilized blacks.

      Stand Your Ground laws do one thing and one thing only: they remove the “duty to retreat” that normally applies in public arenas.

      What is ‘duty to retreat’, you ask? I’ll tell you.

      Under most circumstances, if someone assaults you on your property, and you reasonably believe that they intend to do you serious harm, you may employ lethal force in the defense of your life. This is known as Castle Doctrine, and it’s origin is the English common-law concept that a man’s home is his castle.

      Whereas in public, the ‘duty to retreat’ used to apply. What this means is that before you can employ lethal force in self-defense, you must first attempt to escape your assailant, if escape is possible.

      Stand Your Ground changes this; now you do NOT have to attempt escape before employing lethal force in self-defense. That’s what it does. That’s ALL it does.

      Incidentally, Zimmerman would have been found ‘Not Guilty’ even if Florida had been a ‘duty to retreat’ state, because escape is impossible when your assailant is on top of you.

    5. BTW… Patricia…

      Northern Europeans are the ones who are “less human”. They are most likely to have Neanderthal genes whereas Africans are 100% Homosapiens.

      Vox was deliberately punking you. It’s what he does. Because he’s an asshole. OTOH, it’s one of those situations where, when you’re punked, and you react with unthinking emotion it makes it childsplay to punk you.

      What was the quote? In the one I saw he never said which was which…. but the knowledge that Northern Europeans are inbred with “cavemen” is current, scientific, and rather well known.

      1. And every Northern European I’ve heard say a thing about it was… “Oh! Cool beans! I wanna get a DNA test to see how much Neanderthal I am!”

      2. We need to sic that caveguy from the GEICO commericals on the SJWs and make them pay for their insensitivity.

        😉

  80. The elephant in the room in the little argument about Starship Troopers is that ST is a terrible book. It doesn’t really have a plot in any way shape or form and it’s actually boring, preachy message fiction.

    Face it, the standards of writing in SF back then were piss-poor and dated by today’s standards. That goes for the Foundation trilogy, almost everything Heinlein ever wrote, and everything Clarke wrote except Childhood’s End. Almost nothing from then would or should win an award stacked up against the books being written since the 70s and 80s.

    The only authors from back then that compare well to present-day SF are Bester, Bradbury and Cordwainer Smith (only his short fiction, though, Norstrilia was awful).

        1. The answer is no it wouldn’t, neither would anything else written back then, and that’s a good thing.

          1. I actually agree with you, though, that Starship Troopers’s politics would kill it for an award today even if it were well-written. It just bugs me to see people be all like “Even Starship Troopers wouldn’t win today!” when Starship Troopers is actually no good.

          2. You know, you’re opinion is in a miniscule minority. But judging from that opinion, I suspect you wouldn’t like much of what the majority of readers do, so enjoy yourself.

          3. From Eric Flint’s post on the Hugos:

            “In fact, there is plenty of evidence that the opposite is true. In addition to being an author, I also do a lot of editing of old science fiction stories. I’ve produced by now something like three dozen anthologies of stories written mostly in the fifties, sixties and early seventies. And I can state flatly that the average level of fiction written in our field today is far higher than it was half a century ago. As fond as I am of the fiction I grew up on, the simple fact is that most of those authors couldn’t get published today.

            It’s not just a matter of prose, either. Just about everything in those days was crude, compared to the situation today.”

            Exactly.

      1. I flat out asked, could Starship Troopers get nominated today?

        Of all of the Heinlein to choose from for this discussion, Starship Trooopers doesn’t strike me as the strongest. It has a number of interesting scenes, and I think Heinlein may have invented the notion of powered armor, but an awful lot of the text consisted of a guy lecturing in a high school classroom, while nothing happened. Heinlein wrote it shortly after seeing a newspapaer add calling for the ban of nuclear testing.

        Out of all of the works of Heinlein, this one seems like the one mostly likely to sadden a puppy.

        1. I consider “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, “The Glory Road”, and “Friday” to be Heinlein’s three strongest works, and there is no way any of those would get nominated today, either.

          “Starship Troopers” is just the easiest example to cite. (Although amusingly, Heinlein wrote it when he was still a far-left, liberal socialist. Back then, liberals didn’t despise the military, though)

    1. If you’ve ever been part of a fire team receiving incoming fire, and give a crap about the world you’re leaving for your kids, Starship Troopers is a magnificent piece. But then again, you find in a book what you bring to it.

      1. Don’t know if this is still true, but wasn’t Starship Troopers the most popular book in the US Military?

        1. During the Cold War? Wouldn’t surprise me a bit. Now? Probably not. We’re too “diverse.” And not enough of us have actually taken direct fire, despite over a decade of war. Sad.

        2. I don’t know if I’d say it’s THE most poular, but it’s still very well received, at least in the Marine Corps. It’s still on the CMC’s reading list, and it’s still almost always the very first book young Lance Corporals do a report on to put in their training jackets so they can look good on boards. (Well, after Message to Garcia, at least, but they mostly only read that one because it takes all of five minutes.)

        3. Last time I checked, it was. Hell, I believe it was on the West Point *and* the Commandant’s recommended reading lists for officers and NCOs.

      2. I liked it more as an adult than as a kid, but it is message fiction. Most of what there is to like about it is in the message, and it is pretty preachy at that. A reader who doesn’t find that message appealing probably will regard it as boring message fiction.

        If the thesis of Sad Puppies is that we are continually inundated with boring message fiction, and that readers will respond well to authors with a wide array of political viewpoints if they have the storytelling chops, how is Starship Troopers an example of what the Hugos should aspire to be?

        1. The way I (and I think Larry & many others) define “message fiction” is when the message comes first in importance, before the story or the enjoyment of the readers – often *at the expense* of the story or the enjoyment of the readers. Larry has repeatedly said that it’s fine for fiction to have a message (he’s even admitted there are messages in his own fiction), but that the story & the enjoyment of the readers should first.

          I have to confess, I actually haven’t read Starship Troopers myself (yet). But judging from how many people I know who enjoyed it, I wouldn’t call it “message fiction”, because while it does have a message, it still places the story & the enjoyment of the readers above the message in importance.

          1. should _come_ first.

            Always proofread carefully to make sure you don’t a word out.

          2. I have to confess, I actually haven’t read Starship Troopers myself (yet).

            Go ahead and read it. It’s not long, and it provides food for thought. I’m not kidding about the message part though. Yes I’ve noticed message in Larry’s books, but Starship Troopers is considerably less subtle.

            The POV flashes back to when the main character was in high school and the History and Moral Philosophy teacher gives a civics lesson. He lectures, and answers questions from the class. It is difficult to be more message-oriented than that.

          3. I still doubt it crosses the line into message-fic.

            A small part of the reason I haven’t read it is because I did read, but didn’t enjoy*, Stranger in a Strange Land. Also fiction with an obvious message, which I didn’t enjoy in large part because of the message, but even though I didn’t enjoy it, I can still recognize it as a story, and that other readers enjoy it. So I don’t consider Stranger in a Strange Land to be message-fic, and I doubt Starship Troopers is either.

            *: I knew going in I was probably not going to enjoy it. I think I was planning on reading his other works, that I am quite likely to enjoy, as something of a palate cleanser. But I haven’t yet, mostly because of time & lots of other books to read, but also somewhat because of how much I didn’t enjoy SiaSL.

      3. I’d be willing to bet that most people who denigrate Starship Troopers as preachy message fic (and to be honest, Heinlein himself admitted it was message fiction… just packaged attractively enough that fans have showed their dislike of it for fifty-five years by choosing to bury the author and his estate in money) cannot identify the message (which can be given as a very short sentence). Not without research.

        ST fans – don’t five it away, either.

  81. I’m leading a boy scout troop now. Saturday we had a service project, and the guy we were helping is a Navy vet (I knew there was something off about him when I met him!). The topic inevitably turned to military stuff, and I ended up telling stories about the importance of digging the foxhole properly (heard probably fifth-hand from the Korean war era), and finished with, “…and that’s why it’s important for you to do hard things now, so that you learn to do hard things without quitting. Being too dumb to quit can save lives.”

    We’ll see how long I last at it, but the boys actually seem to like hearing this stuff.

  82. Larry, if you want to know the truth, there are a bunch of pragmatic progressives tired of the perpetually outraged
    SJW’s and how they are messing up the political process online and offline. They’re at this site: The People’s View

  83. My eyes almost bulged out of their sockets when I read this from Martin;

    “I know Scalzi is liberal, and I know that the Puppies seem to hate him, though I can’t for the life of me understand why”

    After that, it was hard to consider Martin as anything other than a disingenuous shill, and view the rest of his piece as equally dishonest.

    It would be the equivalent of Larry writing “I can’t for the life of me understand why liberals hate Vox Day!”.

  84. “if you can’t find dreary, preachy message fic in some of that stuff you listed above, it might be because you are part of their target audience.”

    And that’s all that needs to be said.

  85. I am a long time Sf&F fan, but only recently stumbled on this controversy. It is hysterical that another article on this subject actually blames Correia for George R.R. Martin being “late” on his 6th novel. Considering that we waited six years between book 4 and book 5 and now it will be 5+ years waiting for book 6, this controversy has no part in it.

    1. Yeah, that bit about me delaying GRRM is horseshit, since in the three years I was involved in Sad Puppies as the guy actually running the thing, I still managed to write like six books. He wrote some blog posts. What the hell is his excuse?

      1. Since you’re not a real author, you couldn’t have written six books during that time. Lets just call them long pamphlets.

      2. That’s because he has no excuse. As a reader I can tell you he let the story get away from him. Book 4 won all these awards and I’ve never read a 1000 page novel that did nothing to advance the story as that book did. Wandering around doing nothing was basically what it did. Then the 5th book…why add all these extra characters and side plots at this point in the story yet we still have very little white walkers and dragons? The thing has grown so far out of his control I’m not surprised he can’t finish it. Wait till we try and get the final book released. That’s going to be around 2030 at this point if ever. Heck, Sanderson might be finishing the series at the rate of Martin’s writing.

Leave a Reply to Reziac Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *