Hugo Aftermath Post

The Hugo awards were announced last night at LonCon. Congratulations to the winners.

As expected I came in last place for best novel. The surprising part was that I was originally 4th, but then Australian voting rules kicked in, the last place is removed and the votes are recalculated. It is a weird system, and basically what it does is settles on the least disliked candidate as winner. I thought for sure the outraged SJW contingent would make sure I was dead last from the start, but as I’ve seen over the last few weeks from reviewers, many honest reviewers were surprised that it was actually a really good book.  

As for the rest of the Sad Puppies slate, they did about what we expected. The shocking one was Toni Weisskopf was actually 1st for best editor, but after the Australian thing lost. Too bad, because Toni is truly an amazing editor, but I’ve heard that Buchannan is really talented, so good for her. Brad had a pretty solid showing. Most of the others came in last or close. Vox came in 6th out of 5. (we actually had a side bet about which one of us would do worse because he figured he was far more hated than I was, and he won that bet).

Now I’ve got to respond to some of the stuff I’ve seen online. I’m playing catch up because I got in from GenCon late last night (I was informed of the awards results in the Indy airport waiting to board) and I’m still exhausted and brain dead (It was a crazy busy con, but that’s a whole different blog post).

First off, some people are upset and saying there was fraud. I understand your disappointment, but I truly don’t think so. In all of my dealings with LonCon they’ve been totally professional and honest. On things like Toni’s, yes, that is confusing as hell, but that is how the Australian system works. One of the original goals of Sad Puppies was to test the Hugo nomination process just because there had been allegations of “lost” noms in prior, and as a retired auditor, I’m a sucker for statistical analysis. SP1 gathered data, and SP2 gave me comparisons. I saw zero indication of fraud. I’ve only been awake for an hour, so I’ve only skimmed the new numbers, but they appear to have shaken out about where expected. So don’t get mad at LonCon, they did their job (and as I can attest, getting accused of fraud without evidence is annoying as hell).

Next, there is a whole lot of gloating. As an example, here are some excerpts from John Scalzi’s twitter feed.

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.

Yeah… I think Scalzi still might be a touch bitter for that time I publically beat him like a rented mule.

I do enjoy the constantly moving goal posts of the perpetually outraged, like how Sad Puppies somehow turned into a crusade for racism/sexism/homophobia in their heads. I never expected to win the Hugo. My stated goals this entire time was to get some political untouchables onto their sainted slate, so that they would demonstrate that there was serious political bias in the awards.

Just like how the Guardian crowd sourced a witch hunt to comb through everything I’ve ever written to find examples of me being racist, sexist, or homophobic (and sadly turned up nothing), I’d invite my doubters to comb through anything I’ve written on this subject to find where I ever had any goals other than exposing bias in the system. Put Sad Puppies into the search engine above to see just how serious I took this.

Seriously guys, when I was a corporate accountant I got paid a lot of money to do statistical analysis of complex financial systems, so I’m fairly good at the cipherin’ and gazintas. I predicted that the SJWs would mobilize to stop the untouchable barbarians, so I got some barbarians through the gates, and the SJWs mobilized like I said they would… And I’m supposed to be sad about that for some reason, why?

I lost last night, but I won back in April the other side had a come apart and started lobbing absurd obviously false allegations about me, when editors from major publishing houses told their followers to vote based on politics rather than quality, and when the USA Today and the Washington Post picked up the story.

http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/24/an-explanation-about-the-hugo-awards-controversy/

I got to give a little victory speech every time I had an author thank me for doing this. As much as the rejoicing Twitter crowd isn’t going to want to hear this, I heard from a lot of authors, from all over the spectrum of politics, fame, and success. I put a target on my head so the world outside one narrow clique of fandom could see what awaited them if they strayed too far from the path of approved goodthink. I simply showed what some of them knew and many suspected. Shockingly enough there are plenty of authors who don’t like the idea of having angry mobs sabotaging their careers and slandering them if they exercise their free speech in an unapproved manner.

Here is a fun one from last night. One of my fans caught this one and put it on Twitter which I read when I got off the plane. Orbit Books posted congratulations to the winners, and how they’d published in one way or another 4 of the 5 nominees (you get one guess which one of us wasn’t) and they wrote this:

Our heartfelt congratulations to Ann and to all of the finalists – Mira Grant, Charles Stross, Larry Correia (for the BRILLIANT Warbound series, published by Baen Books) and Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Here is the cached version:  http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1PlJ5Jf0XigJ:www.orbitbooks.net/2014/08/17/hugo-goes/+&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

And here is the current version where that bit about Warbound being good was deleted: http://www.orbitbooks.net/2014/08/17/hugo-goes/  I just hope that poor writer didn’t get fired for accidentally admitting I don’t suck!

I didn’t watch the award ceremony, luckily for me I was at the gate reading a John C. Wright novel at the time. The most important thing is that menace Jonathan Ross was prevented from making any fat jokes! I heard it was mostly crying and social justice, but I saw on FB that one of the most telling presenter quotes of the evening was something along the line of “Many of our winners have gone on to be very successful, well… not financially… but…”.  Yeah, that sums up a lot right there.

So if it makes the SJWs feel better to imagine that I’m all broken up and sobbing because everything happened like I publically predicted it would months ago, feel free to gloat. After all, these are the same folks who have no problem imagining my sexism, racism, homophobia, bigotry, spousal abuse, vote stuffing, and rape apology, so what are a few tears?

EDIT: Just saw this, Dave Freer gets it. http://madgeniusclub.com/2014/08/18/a... 

Various people have sounded off about the Hugos – My only real comment is ‘Pyrrhus’. Look, the point being made by Larry Correia about the Hugos was the award was not for the best SF/Fantasy of the year, but for the most popular among a small left to far-left bunch of the WorldCon attendees. What he did was to make make this proposition (now established as fact) known very widely and publicly. As the reading population, logic states, is a reflection of the demographics of the total population, and maybe 10-15% of that group could count as left wing. Stretch to 25% who will put up with it… still leaves 75% who are unrepresented, for whom the Hugo Award was at best meaningless or actively signaled a book they would not want to read. Now, obviously, even if you personally are further left than Pol Pot or Kim il from-too-much-caviar or Stalin, as an author signalling that 75% do not want to read your book is not a win. By Larry making this bias obvious, by having to recruit nominations, despite being a very very popular author… The previous Hugo winners, the current nominees, the normal greying crew of voters, the WorldCon organizers and the Hugo organizers were caught in a trap. The only way to win (to establish that this was NOT true, there was no left wing bias) was to LOSE. To have a right wing, (or several of them) author (or editor) win (no matter how good the various proponents were. It was like an international road-race which somehow only Germans won… once this was publicized, even if the best runner was German – if he won, your race’s credibility was in the toilet, now and always) That would re-establish the credibility of the award as essentially picking ‘best’ rather than left wing flavor of the month lose and 75% of your sales. It was kind of a lose or lose badly equation for the left wing of sf/fantasy, lose and have a Damian in tears surrounded by exploding heads, or ‘win’ and lose badly by destroying your credibility. The best option would have been to divide and rule and get behind say Toni Weisskopf and Brad Torgersen. But that would take brains.