Don’t Be Fooled – Kate Paulk’s Kinder, Gentler Sad Puppy Slate Is Still A Slate.

puppies

The Hugo Awards – are we all sick to death of my posting about the Hugo Awards? Hell yes, you say? Well, can we can stand one more post on the subject? Okay, then! – are voted on in two stages. From the Hugo Award FAQ:

How are the results decided?

Voting for the Hugos is a two-stage process. In the first stage voters may nominate up to five entries in each category. All nominations carry equal weight. The five entries that get the most nominations in each category go forward to the final ballot. […]

Why do you have a two-stage system?

Hundreds and hundreds of science fiction and fantasy works are published each year. No one, not even the top reviewers in the field, can possibly read/see all of them. Other awards limit the field by restricting themselves to works of certain types (e.g. only fantasy), or by type of work (e.g. only books), or by where they are published, or by the nationality of the author. The Hugos attempt to cover the whole field. The voting system explicitly accepts that no one can have seen/read everything. It relies on the fact that many people participate to find the five works that are most popular (that is have been seen/read and enjoyed by most people), and then there is a run-off between them in the final ballot.

So the first stage of Hugo Award voting is a form of crowdsourcing, whittling down those “hundreds and hundreds” of stories to just five in each category.

For instance, in 2012 (before the puppies), 611 Hugo voters turned in ballots for short stories. The most popular short story, E. Lily Yu’s amazing The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees, was listed on only 72 of those 611 ballots (about 12%). At least 60% of those 611 ballots didn’t vote for any of the top five nominated stories.

Nippon_hugo_archive1And that’s fine. That’s how the Hugo nominations are designed to work. 611 Hugo voters, acting as individuals, each nominate whatever short stories they think are award-worthy. From that list of hundreds of short stories, the five most-nominated make it to the final ballot.

Unfortunately, it’s an easy system to game, as the Puppies have proven. If you can form a voting bloc of just 100 people who will nominate an agreed-upon list, instead of voting as individuals, that’s enough to completely overwhelm the much larger number of Hugo voters who are voting as individuals. 100 people voting for just 5 works will beat out 500 people voting from among hundreds of works.

In the case of the Sad Puppies, Brad Torgersen solicited suggestions on his blog, and then – either working by himself, or (as Larry Correia claimed) in consultation with Larry Correia, John Wright, Sarah Hoyt, and V*x D*y – chose five nominees.1

Next year’s Sad Puppies slate – although they’re not calling it a slate – will be run by Kate Paulk. On a podcast, she outlined some plans:

For starters the word slate is not going to appear anywhere. For second [Cross talk] I am not doing a slate, I am doing a list of the most popular works in all of the various categories as submitted by people who read on any of the various blogs that will have me. And I’m going to post ultimately the top ten of each, with links to the full list of everything that everybody wanted to see nominated, and I’m going to be saying “hey if you really want to see your favorite authors nominated your best bet is to pick something of theirs from the most popular in the list as opposed to the least popular.” That is going to be what it is. I don’t care who ends up on that list. I don’t care if David Gerrold ends up being the top of the list somewhere. That’s not the point, the point is that I want to see the voting numbers both for nomination and for actual voting go up above 5,000 up above 10,000, because the more people who are involved and who are voting the harder it is for any faction including puppies to manipulate the results.

Except this is manipulating the results. Because she’s telling the Puppies to vote strategically from a common list (“your best bet is to pick something of theirs from the most popular in the list”) instead of doing what they should, which is voting as individuals for whatever works they’ve personally read and consider the best.

This isn’t as blatant a slate as Torgersen’s was – but it’s still an attempt to consolidate the votes of the Sad Puppies, from hundreds of possible stories to just a handful of choices. By the time of the final Hugo vote, there appeared to be 400-500 Sad Puppies, about 100 of whom voted strict party line. If even half of those Sad Puppies strategically choose their votes from Paulk’s “top ten” list, while the thousands of non-Puppy voters, voting as individuals, split their votes among hundreds of stories, then bloc voters will once again be able to lock out the rest of us.

If Paulk sincerely wants to participate fairly, rather than running a slate, she should ask her readers to post their recommendations (like Scalzi and others do). And then – that’s it. Don’t consolidate, don’t list in order of popularity, don’t encourage strategic voting – just crowdsource a list of reader’s favorite choices, and tell readers to vote as individuals.

* * *

three-body-problemMany puppies are crowing that this year’s “Best Novel” winner – the excellent, if flawed, Three Body Problem – would not have won without a few hundred puppy voters joining with the majority of voters to beat out The Goblin Emperor (also excellent, also flawed).

That’s true, but it’s also true that Three Body Problem, which was not on either Puppy slate, would not have been nominated if Marko Kloos hadn’t honorably declined his slated nomination. In other words, it’s only because the Puppies screwed up that TBP was nominated at all.

Various leading Puppies have said that they would have nominated TBP if they had read it on time – but, as it happened, none of the handful of people (2? 5? Whatever) who made the decision had read TBP.

And that illustrates exactly what’s wrong with allowing slates to choose the Hugo nominees, rather than Hugo voters nominating as individuals. A crowd of hundreds of Hugo voters, voting as individuals, wouldn’t have left Three Body Problem off the list – but the Puppy slates did.

(Actually, Kloss wasn’t the only novelist to decline a Hugo nomination this year – Larry Correia, who founded the Puppies, made a big show of allowing himself to be nominated, and then declining the nomination. Ironically, if neither Kloss and Correia had declined their nominations, then this year’s Hugo best novel would have been Ancillary Sword, a novel the Puppies loathe.)

* * *

One more point. I’ve seen several Puppies argue that the “no award” vote was gaming the awards, equivalent to how Puppies gamed the nominations.

That’s nonsense.

“No Award” didn’t beat the Puppy nominees because a minority gamed the system and locked out the majority. It beat the Puppy nominees because that’s how the majority of Hugo voters voted. When the majority votes for an outcome, and that outcome wins, that’s not “gaming the system.” That is the system.

  1. It appears that Torgersen et al pretty much ignored the reader selections they solicited: “of the 16 written fiction nominees on Torgerson’s slate, 11 – more than two-thirds – had not actually been nominated by anyone in the crowd-sourced discussion.” []
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39 Responses to Don’t Be Fooled – Kate Paulk’s Kinder, Gentler Sad Puppy Slate Is Still A Slate.

  1. 1
    Jameson Quinn says:

    This is why we should lift the restriction on voting for only 5. I didn’t push too hard to get that into EPH, because EPH works with the limit; but EPH would work even better with it.

    What do I mean? I mean that asking Paulk not to do the work of collating and sorting her recommendation list so that it won’t be a slate is security through obscurity. Yes, if puppies make sure to include at least one nomination from the top few works they like, they will avoid any of their ballots being wasted, and gain some extra power from slating; while if non-puppies continue to disperse their votes such that 60% don’t vote for any winners, they will lose that voting power. But you can’t stop that by trying to censor anybody who collates and sorts any recommendation list. If you want honest votes, the only way for the non-puppies to fight back would be to vote for more things, until the number who haven’t voted for anything viable drops below about 20%. And the puppies, in turn, could in principle be using their collated list honestly, by making sure to vote for something near the top of it and everything they honestly preferred, even if for some of them that meant voting for more than 5 works and/or some works that other puppies hate.

    In other words: the only honest way to solve the problem of 60% of the voters you like wasting their vote is to let them vote for more things, not to try to make sure that the voters you don’t like waste their vote in the same proportion.

    I think that next year, there should be a proposal to lift the 5-work-per-ballot-per-category limit. Again, the BM ran long enough this year without debating that, and it’s not as urgent as EPH was, but it would help.

    (Note: since Mike Glyer got on my case for being impolitic, I’m trying to avoid expressing my opinions, and to just talk about the voting theory. That means that I’m writing in a way that will probably be read by both sides as using the other side’s rhetoric. Sorry about that.)

  2. 2
    Ampersand says:

    Hi, Jameson! Thanks for dropping by. I’m a big fan of the work you did with E Pluribus Hugo.

    In other words: the only honest way to solve the problem of 60% of the voters you like wasting their vote is to let them vote for more things, not to try to make sure that the voters you don’t like waste their vote in the same proportion.

    I really don’t think of things in these terms.

    1) I don’t think of the 60% (or more) of voters whose votes don’t lead to nominations as having “wasted” their votes. Voting isn’t just about winning; it’s about participating in a process. Insofar as the Hugos have any legitimacy, that legitimacy comes from having a wide variety of Hugo voters participate in the process. All the voters count for that, not just the ones who vote for the most popular works.

    (It may be less than 60%, btw. 60% was looking at just a single category; since there are a bunch of categories, many of those >60% whose short story nominations don’t make it into the top five, might see one of their nominations make it in another category.)

    2) It’s not a matter of “voters I like” and “voters I don’t like.” (Is this what you mean by using “the other side’s rhetoric”?) I don’t have anything against particular voters, even if I do disagree with some of them politically. I’d be angrily opposed to any proposal to stop them from voting. I just object to the use of slates to game the system.

    3) “And the puppies, in turn, could in principle be using their collated list honestly, by making sure to vote for something near the top of it and everything they honestly preferred….”

    I don’t agree that would be an honest vote. If they’re voting for something near the top (i.e., a strategic vote), AND also the works they honestly preferred, then the vote for “something near the top” isn’t an honest vote. Everyone should just vote for the works they honestly prefer. Period.

    4) But I hope, if and when EPH comes into effect, this will all be moot. If the system is set up to prevent a minority from using slates to sweep the nominations, then that will remove my objections to slate voting. Slate voting, for me, is only objectionable if the voting system allows slate voters to have power over the nominations disproportionate to their numbers.

    5) If EPH works as we hope it will, then the unlimited-number-of-nominations proposal will no longer be needed to dilute the power of slates. I’m not against it, but I don’t understand what problem unlimited nominations would be solving.

    6) “But you can’t stop that by trying to censor anybody who collates and sorts any recommendation list.” I’m not calling for censorship, in any way at all. And I only object to bloc voting, not to recommendation lists in general.

  3. 3
    Nancy Lebovitz says:

    Minor point: it’s Marko Kloos, not Martin Kloss.

    [Thanks for catching this. Fixed! –Amp]

  4. 4
    Jameson Quinn says:

    I’m trying to walk a tightrope here, between mathematical accuracy, comprehensibility, reasonable brevity, and nonpartisanship; so I apologize if my arguments aren’t always well-put.

    My basic point was: even with EPH, slate/strategic voting can still be a problem (although less of one) if 60% of the non-slate voters are not voting for anything that has a chance to win. Basically, the effective size of the slate is multiplied by up to 100/(100-60)=2.5. And what Paulk is doing could still work as a slate in that sense. And the only honest way to fight back against that would be to allow people who thought there were more than 5 awardworthy works in a year to nominate all of them.

    To put some reasonable numbers on things: If half of the 60% took the hint of the unlimited nominations and added extra awardworthy ones, and 1/3 of those extra nominations turned out to be for stuff that a lot of other people had considered awardworthy, that would drop the non-winning ballots from 60% to 50%, and thus the extra power of a (perfectly-executed) Paulk-type slate from a factor of 2.5 to one of 2. This is far less of a difference than EPH makes in the first place, which is why I didn’t fight too hard for this idea. But if Paulk-type puppy slates, or any other similar slate from any side, continue to exist, I think this extra boost to EPH’s power to help honest voters against slate voters (of any stripe) is worth it.

  5. 5
    Jameson Quinn says:

    Note that in 2015, if the combined puppies had been punching at 2.5 times their weight, that would have meant they got 2 or in rare cases 3 nominations per category with EPH. If they were reduced to just 2 times their weight, that would have meant 2 or in rare cases 1 per category. So the difference is meaningful, but the difference EPH makes is much bigger.

  6. 6
    Susan says:

    I’m only a spectator on this one, but I have family members who are deeply involved and very interested. (!!)

    Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves here? The 2016 Hugo will be awarded for works published in 2015, and it’s only September 3. We don’t even know what all will be published in 2015. Maybe on November 6 some Marvelous Blockbuster Work will be published which immediately unites all parties and everyone nominates it and votes for it and that’s the answer. For that category anyway.

  7. 7
    Ampersand says:

    Jameson –

    Okay, that’s a good case for expanding the number of slots. Thanks.

    But I wonder if Worldcon business meeting voters will be up for supporting another change, before the already-voted-for changes (EPH, 4/6, AND eliminating the 5% rule) are implemented? (Assuming that those changes are ratified by the next Worldcon business meeting). It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of people want to wait a couple of years and see the changes already voted for in action before making any further changes.

  8. 8
    Mark says:

    Jameson, what you say about the “wasted” votes giving extra power to slates is interesting, mainly because I was making the same point on F770 earlier and I’m glad I wasn’t talking nonsense!

    Ampersand, one minor correction? You give the source for Katie Paulk’s podcast as Chris Meadows, but the original from which Chris Meadows took it was http://file770.com/?p=24650

  9. 9
    Jameson Quinn says:

    Note that next year, there will be the chance to turn 4/6 into 5/6 and still pass it for Helsinki. That would be an improvement that meshed well with EPH, IMO. And by next year, I think we’ll have an idea how much that kind of thing is needed.

  10. 10
    Charlie Martin says:

    And Scalzi’s recommendations, and “No Award” and so on are not a slate.

  11. 11
    Pete Patriot says:

    For instance, in 2012 (before the puppies), 611 Hugo voters turned in ballots for short stories. The most popular short story, E. Lily Yu’s amazing The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees, was listed on only 72 of those 611 ballots (about 12%).

    This year the least popular nomination got 13% of the votes on 1174 ballots. And got 151 votes, more than double the pre puppy number. It is much much more well supported than the 2012 winner.

    At least 60% of those 611 ballots didn’t vote for any of the top five nominated stories.

    Why is it a good thing that most voters weren’t represented on nomination? Surely you should want people to vote, open the nominations and see stuff they voted for?

    And that’s fine. That’s how the Hugo nominations are designed to work… From that list of hundreds of short stories, the five most-nominated make it to the final ballot.

    Complete falsehood. There’s a 5% threshold built in to ensure consensus. The nominations are designed so people need to agree.

    Unfortunately, it’s an easy system to game, as the Puppies have proven. If you can form a voting bloc of…

    There is absolutely zero evidence this happened. You are making it up. You have no idea what the % of ballots that made it on to the nominations in different years are and which more broadly represents the fan base. This is completely fabricated allegation with no actual facts behind it. (The fact the data that could support it has not been released is a very telling indication that it doesn’t aid the establishment).

    The possible ranges are 2012: 12%-42%. 2015: 20%-82%. It’s entirely likely the puppies achieved a far broader representation of ballots on nominations than the cabal ever did. In fact the minimax choice given the only data available is obviously the puppies, so you are presumptively wrong.

  12. 12
    Mandolin says:

    There was a big rule change in SFWA right before I started participating in the Nebula process. But wasn’t an unlimited nomination stage a step 1 they used to have before going down to the short list? I had the impression this was where the logrolling used to occur. (Again, this was before I started participating.)

    I think this is much less likely to be a problem with the Hugos since:

    1) Not everyone involved is a creator, reducing the impact of quid pro quo

    2) the EPH itself should mitigate the effects of anyone that is quid pro quoing

  13. 13
    Pete Patriot says:

    Voting isn’t just about winning; it’s about participating in a process. Insofar as the Hugos have any legitimacy, that legitimacy comes from having a wide variety of Hugo voters participate in the process.

    If you believed this you would think the 2012 to 2015 increase from 611 to 1174 ballots, with the puppies expanding the voting numbers, made the Hugos more legitimate. You obviously don’t think this.

  14. 14
    Ampersand says:

    And Scalzi’s recommendations, and “No Award” and so on are not a slate.

    They are not, for several reasons, some of which are discussed in the original post.

    (BTW, welcome to “Alas.” If you continue posting here, please be sure to read the comments policy.)

  15. 15
    Ampersand says:

    Pete Patriot:

    You’re right that I forgot to mention the 5% threshold, and technically I should have. (This year’s business meeting voted to do away with the 5% rule, and it seems likely that next year’s business meeting will do the same, so happily this won’t be a factor for much longer.)

    The idea that there’s no evidence of bloc voting this year is too reality-denying to be worth commenting on. It’s like arguing about if global warming is real or not. (Albeit with much, much, much lower stakes.)

    If you believed this you would think the 2012 to 2015 increase from 611 to 1174 ballots, with the puppies expanding the voting numbers, made the Hugos more legitimate. You obviously don’t think this.

    LINUS: I want baseball games to be exciting.
    SNOOPY: But it was really exciting when Charlie Brown threw spitballs and Lucy used a corked bat! And you were against that! So obviously you don’t REALLY believe that games should be exciting!

    More voters are nice. But they don’t make up for gaming the nominations.

  16. 16
    Pete Patriot says:

    The idea that there’s no evidence of bloc voting this year is too reality-denying to be worth commenting on. It’s like arguing about if global warming is real or not. (Albeit with much, much, much lower stakes.)

    So, basically, a bunch of stuff you didn’t like got nominated. So you have all convinced yourselves that this was actually due to a small percent of the electorate capturing the nominations as a defence mechanism. But when challenged, there is no actual evidence you can point to to prove this is the case.

    It’s in fact very easy to see that “bloc” voting can expand representation. If A and B gets noms from 2 different voters each in a 10 voter electorate, then 40% voters are represented as nominations. If 10 evil new voters turn up next year (who – the horror – like different things!) and vote 10 C and 10 D who win the noms, then 50% voters are now represented as nominations.

    You simply have no evidence the puppies have reduced the % of voters who capture nominations, and have invented an obviously false just-so-story to convince yourself bloc voting can only push this % downwards.

    In fact the actual data indicates the presumption is the puppies have made a more representative nomination set, see above where the lowest number that could have been represented in 2012 was 12% and in 2015 20%. Go puppies.

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  18. 17
    airboy says:

    You said:
    “One more point. I’ve seen several Puppies argue that the “no award” vote was gaming the awards, equivalent to how Puppies gamed the nominations.
    That’s nonsense.
    “No Award” didn’t beat the Puppy nominees because a minority gamed the system and locked out the majority. It beat the Puppy nominees because that’s how the majority of Hugo voters voted. When the majority votes for an outcome, and that outcome wins, that’s not “gaming the system.” That is the system.”

    OK – if you believe this then a majority of Hugo nominees voting on a nomination is “how the majority of Hugo nominee voters voted.” Nothing more, nothing less.

    Unless you are a hypocrite.

    The whining we saw in 2015 was supposedly about “quality” or “categories getting locked out.” If you boil your post down to a simple statement it would be: “I don’t like the wrong fans nominating for a Hugo.”

  19. 18
    Jake Squid says:

    If you boil your post down to a simple statement it would be: “I don’t like the wrong fans nominating for a Hugo.”

    While I can’t speak for Amp, I’m nearly certain that this is wrong. Amp has been consistent about saying that what he dislikes is slate voting. So, had the categories looked exactly like they do without an organized campaign to nominate the 5 works in each of those categories, Amp would’ve have disagreed with the nominations without being upset by the vote being gamed.

  20. 19
    Mandolin says:

    Wtf is this wrong fan shit anyway? Projection. I’ve been told I’m the wrong kind of writer, that I like the wrong things, and that my readers like the wrong things (and are lying for unfathomable reasons that they do like them.)

    You want to change the awards? Do it. Campaign, bring attention to works, play by the rules.

    You want to fuck up the rules as activism? Fine, but activists get shit. They don’t deny they did activism, and they take the consequences, and they don’t whine that it was totally unexpected that people would be angry.

    You aren’t a wrong fan having wrong fun, but for fucks sake, the entire puppy premise is that *I am* and that is such bullshit.

  21. 20
    Ampersand says:

    OK – if you believe this then a majority of Hugo nominees voting on a nomination is “how the majority of Hugo nominee voters voted.” Nothing more, nothing less.

    Yes, but the puppies are NOT a majority. They are a minority. At the time of the nominations, they appeared to be about 15% of Hugo voters who turned in nomination ballots. And they did, in fact, game the system to lock the other fans out of entire categories.

    Do you not know what the word “majority” means? Do you think 15% is a “majority”? You can’t possibly be that stupid. So why are you claiming that the Puppies were a majority, when it’s the majority of the Hugo voters have unambiguously rejected the Puppy slate?

    If you boil your post down to a simple statement it would be: “I don’t like the wrong fans nominating for a Hugo.”

    As Mandolin said, the projection you’re engaging in is impressive. At no point have non-puppies done a thing to lock puppies out of nominating works. That has never happened. But the puppies did lock all the other fans from being able to nominate in a bunch of categories (and came close to doing the same in a bunch more).

    The only people here with a record of locking other fans out is the Puppies. That’s the simple fact.

    Here’s another one: The puppies aren’t ordinary SF fans standing up against elitists. You guys are the elitists, trying to use gaming the vote to force the rest of us Wrongfans having Wrongfun to give awards to Puppy work instead of the work that’s actually popular with Worldcon members.

    You’re like someone who burns their neighbor’s house down and then screams “why won’t you let me live in your neighborhood?”

    If you guys would just be willing to nominate without gaming the vote, I wouldn’t have any problem with you. With only a couple of exceptions, the Puppies consist of people who I’ve never heard of and have nothing against. It’s entirely possible that Puppies would nominate something I’d vote for.

    But I’m not going to vote in a way that enables people who game the nominations with bloc voting. And, apparently, most Worldcon voters agree with me.

    [Edited out some needless snark. Apologies to Airboy for that.]

  22. 21
    Pete Patriot says:

    Yes, but the puppies are NOT a majority. They are a minority. At the time of the nominations, they appeared to be about 15% of Hugo voters who turned in nomination ballots… So why are you claiming that the Puppies were a majority, when it’s the majority of the Hugo voters have unambiguously rejected the Puppy slate?

    What evidence do you have supporters of puppy candidates were a minority? Oh, that’s it none. This is just made up. I’ve said this before, and it’s going to be ignored again in favour of paranoid conspiracy theories, but look at the short story vote: it is 100% certain the 2012 nominees were controlled by a minority of voters, it is absolutely possible a majority of voters saw their nominees on the 2015 ballot. This is elementary maths.

    There is no evidence puppies had minority support, it is 100% certain a small cabal was running the show previously.

    The only people here with a record of locking other fans out is the Puppies. That’s the simple fact.

    So the campaigning for ineligibility rulings and nominee withdrawals didn’t happen?

    And no one was kept off by the 5% threshold?

  23. 22
    Harlequin says:

    There is no evidence puppies had minority support, it is 100% certain a small cabal was running the show previously.

    In order for a “small cabal” to have been running the show previously, you would have to demonstrate that the same minority of voters controlled every every category. There is no evidence of this, and you won’t find any, because it didn’t happen.

    Meanwhile, it’s pretty easy to demonstrate collusion from the Puppies, what with them doing it out in public and all.

  24. 23
    Myca says:

    it is 100% certain a small cabal was running the show previously.

    This is a claim that there is simply no evidence for, unless you perform some seriously unethical definitional contortions.

    —Myca

  25. 24
    Ampersand says:

    unless you perform some seriously unethical definitional contortions.

    REPORTER: Has this administration tortured definitions?
    CHENEY: Of course not! At most, we’ve subjected definitions to enhanced definitions.

  26. Pingback: Puppying Down | The Open Window

  27. I don’t understand the vitriol being flung about the whole “slate” business. People can always get together to agree that they will vote a particular way with regard to the Hugos (or anything else, for that matter), whether or not a “slate” mechanism is used. Short of limiting what voting choices are legal (which I think is even more abhorrent than “slates”), I do not see how anyone can stop that.

  28. 26
    Ampersand says:

    Hi, Catherine. Welcome to Alas. :-)

    I think people got upset about the slate voting, to a great degree, because it subverted the purpose of the Hugo Awards. The Hugos are meant to be a contest determining which are the works that the largest number of Worldcon voters think are award-worthy. This only works, however, if people vote as individuals.

    When someone injects a slate into that, that changes things. The winner of a contest between 90 people voting as individuals and 10 people voting as a slate will be… the slate. If nothing is done about it, the Hugos would cease being a contest about which works are most loved by Worldcon voters, and instead become a contest about which slate does best at organizing its supporters.

    I do not see how anyone can stop that.

    No one can stop people from voting (nor is that what I’d want). However, Worldcon can – and more than likely will – alter the rules of how votes are counted, so that slate votes are still counted, but slate voters no longer have a crushing strategic advantage over folks who vote as individuals. The specific proposal is called “E Pluribus Hugo” – it’s in somewhat technical language, but if you scroll down past that part, there’s a plain-language FAQ.

  29. 27
    Susan says:

    As an interested outsider, Catherine, I will also point out that according to what I understand (and you can see this in some of the comments) the fight was not entirely about literature or literary merit or even what books you enjoy. It became a fight over politics, with a “right” wing (the Puppies) opposing what they called SJW (Social Justice Warriors). These latter inclined to works of fiction which questioned gender roles and boundaries and other far-out stuff.

    Of course good SciFi can be written about white male engineers in spaceships subduing the universe under the American flag, and good SciFi can be written about aliens who don’t exactly have gender, and both have been done, and done well. If you are at all familiar with the genre you can instantly name examples of both.

    As a reader I am not included to “take sides” on this question. I am looking for enjoyable fiction which maybe stretches my mind a bit, and there are lots of ways to do that. In fact I am not comfortable with putting fiction through an ideological test at all, at least not in advance of reading it. For this reason among many the Puppies make me uneasy. Fiction, especially SciFi, is art. Insisting that it also serve a social agenda, any social agenda, is a lot like making the same demand of sculpture. Such a demand can produce good sculpture, but too often it produces hack stuff like Giant Soviet Socialist Realism. (Or on the other side, drippy sentimental Madonnas.)

    A social or political agenda stands outside art, and tends to corrupt it. My opinion at least.

  30. 28
    Mandolin says:

    A social or political agenda stands outside art, and tends to corrupt it.

    Can you name examples of work that displays none?

  31. 29
    Susan says:

    None what?

    All art incorporates politics I suppose, just because all things human partake of politics. But good art does not tend to have politics as its main force. There are exceptions of course. And some people actually like Giant Soviet Socialist Realism.

  32. 30
    Susan says:

    Actually there’s quite a lot of non-political art.

    Starry Night. Ars Poetica. Trinity (Andrei Rublev).

  33. 32
    Ampersand says:

    I really wouldn’t say that politics are the main force of Fun Home.

    There are implicit politics there – Fun Home assumes without bothering to argue that LGB rights are good and unequal treatment is bad. But the politics aren’t the main force of the narrative, the way it is in, say, a political cartoon. (Or for that matter, in some of Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For strips.)

    I agree with you that there’s no reason a great work of art can’t have politics as a main force. But I also partly agree with Susan; it’s possible, but it’s sure a lot harder for a work to be both great and didactic. Sort of like playing a video game on a harder difficulty level.

  34. 33
    Mandolin says:

    Ah. Main force. That gets complicated, of course. Representing queer disabled women is political; does it become the main force? Puppies seem to have said the answer is it does.

    Van Gogh is a post-impressionist, I think, and I’m not as up on that. But changing modes of visual representation around that time were absolutely political.

  35. 34
    Mandolin says:

    Anyway, if it’s a main force were talking about and not any politics at all (which I maintain is impossible) then yeah, I’m with Barry.

  36. 35
    Susan says:

    I agree with you that there’s no reason a great work of art can’t have politics as a main force. But I also partly agree with Susan; it’s possible, but it’s sure a lot harder for a work to be both great and didactic. Sort of like playing a video game on a harder difficulty level.

    Amen. It’s been done of course, and done well. But it doesn’t happen very often. This is exactly what I was trying to say. “Didactic” sums it up perfectly.

    My prejudices are showing. I like fiction, sculpture, music, painting, theater, for themselves, not for any political “message” that may come with any of them. 1984, for example, is a terrible book. I agree with the message, but the characterization and the “plot” leave a lot to be desired. Great fiction this is not. Animal Farm was better on all counts. My opinion. De gustibus non est disputandum.

    I don’t understand the Puppies very well, probably because I haven’t tried very hard. I read a little Vox Day, a little on the other side. Only a little. But the way I read the controversy, what some of the Puppies at least were saying was not, “Hey! Here are these Great Works of SciFi Art, great art! which is being ignored for the Hugo because solely it doesn’t have main characters which used to be space ships and now have no gender!” That would be a legitimate complaint if it could be documented.

    The way I read them was, “We want more books about white male engineers in space ships conquering the galaxy even if no one likes those books particularly, even if they have no plot and no characters, because we prefer that model for political reasons, and we’re going to game the nomination process to advance our agenda.” To me, that is advancing a “political” agenda ahead of artistic value, and even ahead of reader pleasure, because, if everyone loved that book it would win the Hugo without tilting the table at the nomination stage.

    I read science fiction, but as I said I am not a part of the SciFi community particularly, so maybe I don’t have the right to speak up. (There’s a reason I’m commenting here, and not at Making Light!) But the Hugo is supposed to be awarded by the fan community as a whole. That’s the way it was set up. I think that community has the right to a fair list of nominees, based on popularity, and a fair list of winners, based on popularity widely over the community. They think so too, and are in the process of correcting their procedures for nomination and voting to get closer to that ideal.

    If the majority of WorldCon wants to give the award to didactic, political Science Fiction, even if it’s artistically horrible, that’s great. More power to them. But they also have the right to defend themselves against the narrow political agenda of a very few of their number.

  37. Pingback: Episode 3 | The #WrongFun Podcast

  38. 36
    Ampersand says:

    Rather disappointingly, the folks at the @WrongFun Podcast didn’t actually address any of my arguments; if they read anything beyond the title, it doesn’t show in what they or their guest (Kate Paulk) said. Also, their interview couldn’t possibly have been more softball; it was like listening to Winnie the Pooh perform an interview. I don’t know if they’re ever going to have any anti-slate guests, but if they do, I hope they’ll maintain that level of friendliness towards the guest (although hopefully they’ll start asking somewhat more challenging questions of any guest they bring to discuss a controversy, from either side).

    But in episode one, they did a interview with Ken Burnside which was worth listening to. I sure didn’t agree with everything Burnside said, and months ago I think he was running around being mean and trying to pour fuel on the fire. But more recently he does seem to be genuinely trying to deescalate things (including in this interview), and I admire that he’s trying.