If you are planning on burning down the house, it behooves you not to stay inside or it defeats the purpose.
Saturday night, I was working on my book when I decided to take a break and remembered that the Hugo Awards were on and probably the results in. I got in Facebook and Twitter to check and found out that the ceremony had not begun yet as they were in the Pacific time zone. I decided to follow the Twitter Feed and commenting over in Facebook with others doing the same.
This might be my third post about the Hugos and the Sad Puppies controversy. I am not a fan of SciFi but I have sided with the SP project because I am a fan of Larry Correia and I wanted to see if the Social Justice Warriors in power would follow the standard script that the extreme Left applies to other aspects of life.
I am sad to report that was the case.
The awards ceremony became a Kick The Puppies fest. Insults veiled and not so veiled being told by the presenters were being reproduced via Twitter with a syrupy glee. And then the asterisk made its presence:
I have no idea how big that thing is, but two things were understated by those “in the know”: 1) It was the unofficial award to be given to the Puppies and 2) It is a representation of the anal orifice.
And then it went into stupid high drive. Five major categories went No Award. Not because the field had no nominees or the works sucked but because they were somehow associated with the Puppies even if they were not part of the nominations as it happened to Baen editor Toni Weisskopf. Let me put it in perspective for those who are not hip in the Hugos: In the sixty plus years of the award, only five times before a category went No Award. That doubled in one swoop on Saturday night.
It gets worse: People in the audience cheered at every No Award that blocked a Puppy.
It hit bottom when the presenters ordered the few who booed the No Awards not to do so and only cheering was allowed. Yes, that petty.
My take: The winner of the 2015 Hugo Awards is (drum roll): Baen Books and any Non-Tor publishing company.
Are you going “huh?” Allow me to explain. The Sad Puppies’ original and still running statement was that SciFi was dominated by a clique of people who were not accepting works others than those that fit a certain stance. That was a charge that was denied by the SJW/Chorfs (Social Justice Warriors/Cliquish, Holier-than-thou, Obnoxious, Reactionary, Fanatics.) Sad Puppies went on to prove it by getting people to nominate what they liked and not what was recommended by the SJW/Chorfs as accepted works of Sci/Fi and managed to capture several important slots pissing the bejesus out of the Establishment.
Some in the SJW/Chorfs Upper Management decided to ask their fans to vote No Award without even bothering to read the books. Those who had at least half an ounce of brain on their side, thought it was the wrong move. But the issue with those in power is to know when to exercise it and specially to win long-term and not to become abusive with it because people will be repelled by it. But when the SJW/Chorfs yelled “WE ARE ALL INCLUSIVE!” and at the same time excising works because they were on a list of unerwünscht authors, they proved the Puppies point and they underlined it with their behavior at the awards.
In the short-term future, the SJW/Chorfs will be celebrating and collecting a short-lived payday. But will happen (mark my words) is that authors who get their manuscripts rejected will no longer think “Crap, I guess I have to do better” but “Maybe is it my work or maybe is it my beliefs that these people don’t like.” And if a SJW/Chorfs-rejected author gets picked and published by other companies, the word will spread like fire that no matter how great a writer you could be, you need a level of political purity to even pass the Silver gates of the SJW/Chorf Kingdom much less get published by them.
One last piece of advice to the SJW/Chorfs: You confused politeness with weakness and being an asshole as the equivalent of strength.
Learn from your mistake as fast as you can and apply it in real life.
Now I’m more motivated than ever to try and write the book I want to write just to piss off the SJWs.
I described it to my wife and she said that I round be best to publish under a nom de plum and brace for liberal rage.
Agreed, they don’t know what they’ve started… Nor how many ‘wrongfans’ they’ve ticked off with their antics. J- I’d be happy to alpha or beta read your book! 🙂
If Miguel approves, I might post snippets of my idea serialized to get feedback.
The two problems that I am running into are 1) new job – hectic schedule (hence my comments and posts are down) and 2) as an Engineer, I have been trained to write in passive voice, which makes writing dialog difficult.
My wife was an English major and she HATES proofing my technical papers because they are all in passive voice. I jokingly wrote up a version of a fairy tale in all passive for her to review. It went something like:
“The domicile resided in by three members of the Ursus family was entered by the subject. Three beds were observed in the main room of the domicile. Each bed was tested in order, for rigidity by the subject by resting on the bed in a supine manner. The first bed was observed to be excessively inflexible. The second bed was observed to lack sufficient orthopedic support for the subject. The third bed was determined to be adequate for the physical needs of the subject, at which point the subject entered a state of rest.”
Go for it
Honestly the Hugo’s have been irrelevant among the majority sci-fi community for ages.
The organizers have burned their bridges and salted the earth around them. When even less people pay attention to them, it will all be blamed on the ‘white male SP contingent w/ no cognizance of their own actions. That’s how they will ‘apply’ it.
Best 40 bucks I ever spent.
Next year will be a hoot.
The authors who have been trying to get published, but haven’t, will notice this AND that Andy Weir had a movie deal almost before he had a publisher, and decide that Amazon direct publishing may be the way to go.
And if they’re good, they will find the success that was denied to them, with better terms and more control over their destiny.
Welp, next year is gonna be fun.
Even the show I’m blogging, written by a nationalistic Japanese author and somehow turning into an manga then anime series that kinda makes regular Japanese people go ‘wait a damn second’ is more SciFi than whatever dreck is pushed by Tor nowadays.