George R.R. Martin Wins Science Fiction's Hugo Awards for All Time...
Live from the Roasterie: Well played, GRRM, well played. I'll excuse this diversion of your time and energy from finishing Game of Thrones. This diversion, and only this once...
: Who Won Science Fiction's Hugo Awards, and Why It Matters: "Laura J. Mixon, who won for Best Fan Writer, gave by far the most stirring speech...
...Her winning blog post had meticulously described the venomous behavior of a female, left-leaning troll (an Internet troll, not a troll-troll). “There’s room for all of us here,” Mixon said. “But there’s no middle ground between ‘We belong here’ and ‘No you don’t.’ I believe we must find non-toxic ways to discuss our conflicting points of view.” In closing, Mixon, who is white, added, “I stand with people from marginalized groups who seek simply to be seen as fully human. Black lives matter.”...
Brad Torgersen, one of the Sad Puppy leaders told me, he and his compatriots “could care less about a silver rocket ship that looks like a marital aid.” (Though this begs the question: Why target them?)... Larry Correia, a 38-year-old Utah accountant and former gun store owner and NRA lobbyist turned novelist, created the Sad Puppies three years ago.... Theodore Beale--who writes fiction as a hobby while working as a game designer--openly opposes racial diversity, homosexuality, and women’s suffrage. Beale quibbles.... He says he doesn’t oppose all women’s suffrage, just women (and most men) voting in a representative democracy, like the one we have, um, in America....
When I asked him why he once called noted fantasy author NK Jemisin an “educated, but ignorant half-savage”... he said it wasn’t because she is black, then launched into an explication of what he called “new” genetic research that he says he doesn’t expect very many people to understand (but which he claims supports his use of the term “half-savage”).... He acknowledged, “I’m calling her a half-savage because I know it’s going to offend the crap out of her....
Jemisin... [who] has been nominated for a Hugo three times, including once for her debut novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms characterized her interaction with Beale like this: “He simply says, ‘This person is not human,’ and then opens his comments section and doesn’t stop anyone when they start saying, ‘We should run a train on that bitch.’ So, you know, this is the standard modus operandi for white supremacists that don’t want to go to jail.”...
It’s possible that the Sad Puppies were at best naïve when they let Beale piggyback on their idea. At worst, they have been accused of providing a politely moderate front for a shit-stirring provocateur.... “Look at it like this,” Correia blogged at one point. “I’m Churchill, Brad is FDR. We wound up on the same side as Stalin.”...
John Scalzi... said the war was over. “None of these folks”--authors who are not straight, white, and male:
are going anywhere. Nora Jemisin stands on the shoulders of every other woman and minority and gay and lesbian and trans- or bisexual folk who had to put up with shit before, a groundwork that has been laid for decades and decades. And she and lots of other people are now in a position where they can firmly plant their feet and say, ‘This is bullshit,’ and have a large number of people go, ‘You’re absolutely right.’...
To go even a little ways down this rabbit hole is to see an attempt to force out a vanguard of new creators and consumers in the nerdiverse.... When a certain subset of nerds see other people playing with their toys, it often feels to them like the toys are getting taken away....
[Annie] Bellet said she thinks Beale “rode” Correia and Torgersen “like ponies. I told Brad that. He said, ‘Just because we’re on the freeway in different cars heading the same direction doesn’t mean we’re together.’ I said, ‘Dude, you’re in the same car, and Vox Day is driving.’ He doesn’t get it. It makes me so sad”....
Late Saturday, Worldcon released data from a parallel universe... in which the Puppies hadn’t intervened. That let Martin give trophies to the people who would have been on the ballot. Sci-fi writer Eric Flint got an Alfie for his “eloquence and rationality” in blog posts about the Puppy kerfuffle. So did legendary author Robert Silverberg, who has attended every Worldcon since 1953, just for being himself. The biggest cheers, though, broke out when Martin honored two people--Annie Bellet and Marko Kloos--who’d been first-time Hugo finalists this year until they withdrew their names. The new data showed Bellet would’ve been on the ballot anyway; the Alfie clearly stunned her. “I want these awards to be about the fiction,” Bellet said, “and that was important enough to me to give one up.” The final Alfie of the night went to Kloos... for turning down his Puppy-powered nomination and making room for the winner, The Three-Body Problem. “I may get nominated again,” he said after shaking Martin’s hand. “But knowing why I got this and who gave it to me—tonight, this beats the shit out of that rocket.”
