Interesting analysis of the current Hugo mess.

[ffutures]

Sums it up reasonably well:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/04/the-culture-wars-come-to-sci-fi/390012/

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

The article seems very representative of one particular ideological slant on the dispute, and doesn't even acknowledge any of the positions taken by the other main ideological slant, not even to argue against them. It's a pure attack on the persons and motives of the other party. That sort of thing is natural to political disputes, but I'm not inclined to take a party to a political dispute as a source of an impartial account.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Which is arguably exactly what the Puppies have done, they've turned the Hugos forever into a mirror of the dysfunctional American political system, by casting it as Us vs Them, Conservatives vs Liberals.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Yes, and the people responding to them have gladly accepted a fight on those terms.

Worldcon has been the focus of political fights since New Fandom banned the Futurians from attending the original Worldcon. So it isn't as if politicization were new. And neither is the self-righteousness of both sides, or the conviction of each that they're an apolitical group merely responding to the political aggression of the other.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I have never seen such delusional and self-serving nonsense as is comign out the mouths of Correia and Torgerson. Everything they say, though they mean it not to, is just another utterance of 'WE DIDNT WIN ANY HUGOS! ITS NOT FAIR! IT MUST BE A MASSIVE LIBERAL CONSPIRACY!'

It's genuinely bizarre. Not once have they seemed to stop to consider the possibility that t hey're maybe just not good enough to have won.

And, for that matter, one of them has been nominated, and WON A CAMPBELL.

So their evil liebral conspiracy to freeze them out of the hugos, hasn't even frozen them out of the hugos.

Mad. Just bloody mad.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I think you have missed the point they were actually making. Though you're not by any means the only one.

One of the short stories on their slate, since withdrawn by the author, is a very good literary sf story whose protagonist, whose hero, is a Puerto Rican woman. And yet, without even reading it, some people have enthusiastically responded to the idea that they should automatically vote NO AWARD over that story...because of the people who nominated it. Because of those people's politics.

Point proved.

We have a deal of thinking to do.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Were I that author I, too, would have withdrawn as I would not want anyone to presume I was, in some way, linked to the politics of the people who had nominated me.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Nobody's politics are coming out of this looking very good, I'm afraid.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Well I think you might have missed the point too? The pressure to No Award it isn't because the people whose politics aren't liked, their politics have nothing to do with why the No Award is sought.

The No Award is being sought as a strong message to anybody in the future who seeks to influence the Hugos by using slates. The message is to say 'If you use Slates, your entire Slate will be no awarded, because the use of Slates is frowned upon.'

That has nothing to do with the politics, conservative or otherwise, of the people who nominated it, does it?

[aadler]

It struck me, personally, as firmly partisan without ever acknowledging its partisanship. This one comes across as more even-handed … though, of course, not echoing the default “OF COURSE the Sad Puppies campaign is bad-bad-bad, everybody knows that”.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Now, see, to me that one comes across as unacknowledgedly partisan the other way. It's important, I think, to realise that neither side here is in fact defending the status quo, though both might wish it to appear so. The status quo is in a state of change (as it always is and should be) and one side is covertly (if rather ham-fistedly) assisting that change while the other is overtly (and with even less subtlety) resisting their efforts. Of course that is an oversimplification, but so is just about everything else that has been said on this, with the possible exception of Matthew David Surridge's detailed explanation and Dexter Guptill's statistical analysis.

But it takes an effort to resist the temptation to reframe this factitious conflict according to one's own preferred political narrative. We do prefer simple stories with good guys and bad guys, don't we?