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Another Worldcon, Another Bonfire

So another Worldcon is now history, and people immediately began asking me what I thought. When Kansas City won the 2016 bid as MidAmericon II a few years ago, I’d had some hopes of attending. Then we decided to move to Phoenix, and our near-term lifestyle choices narrowed radically. Next year the con is in Finland, which would be a cool trip, but…well…no.

So all I know is what I’ve heard. And most of what I’ve heard about is, once again, focused on the Hugo Awards. Here’s the official summary. I wasn’t particularly surprised by any of it. Each of the three major factions won a little and lost a little. It’s a complicated business, and I’ve written several popular entries on the subject. If you’re coming to the Puppies Saga for the first time, you should probably read what I’ve written in the past:

The Human Wave, Sad Puppies, and SFF Monoculture, Part 1

The Human Wave, Sad Puppies, and SFF Monoculture, Part 2

The Human Wave, Sad Puppies, and SFF Monoculture, Part 3

The Human Wave, Sad Puppies, and SFF Monoculture, Part 4

The Human Wave, Sad Puppies, and SFF Monoculture, Part 5

Rant: Sad Puppies vs. Anti-Puppies, as the Kilostreisands Pile Up

Rant: You Can’t Shame a Puppy

Sad Puppies Summary and Wrapup

Rant: The Lasting Legacy of the Sad Puppies

Most of what I’ve linked to above applies to 2016, even though I wrote it all last year, and what I wrote focused on Sad Puppies 3. There was a Sad Puppies 4 campaign this year, coordinated by Kate Paulk, Sarah A. Hoyt, and Amanda S. Green. I wrote about that earlier this year, when the 2016 nominations appeared:

Sad Puppies 4 and the Doomsday Slate

As you can see from the marvelous SP4 logo from Lee “Artraccoon” Madison, the SP4 motto was “The Embiggening.” The goal was to bring still more people to Worldcon and the Hugo Awards process, as a means of fighting the worsening numeric irrelevance of the con and the awards. The other, more subtle goal of SP4 was to combat the ideological monoculture of Hugo-nominated fiction, art, and media, by nominating works and people outside the narrow boundaries of what’s acceptable to the ideological progressives in SFF.

Mike Glyer did a very good comparison of the final ballot against the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies lists back in April. Vox Day got 64 of his 81 recommendations on the final ballot, which I found nothing short of astonishing, especially considering some “poison pill” items like Chuck Tingle’s “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” and an episode of My Little Pony. Sad Puppies didn’t do quite as well, placing only 36 out of 80 recommendations on the final ballot.

A sidenote: I do not use the term “SJW” (social justice warrior) for a couple of reasons, which I’ll explain here on Contra at some point. Basically, it’s about accuracy and the objective meanings of words.

So what happened at MidAmericon II? These are the major items:

  • Sad Puppies 4 brought a significant number of new memberships to Worldcon. Attendance figures have not been released at this writing, but 4,032 valid nomination ballots were cast, and 3,130 valid voting ballots. That’s about twice last year’s numbers. Obviously, not all of those additional people were Sad Puppies supporters, but many of them were certainly APs (Anti-Puppies) who might not have joined except to counter the Puppies threat.
  • Virtually all of the winners were people and works favored by the Worldcon Elite and their loyal followers.
  • Vox Day continued his efforts to get the Worldcon community to destroy its own Hugo Awards by voting the doomsday slate of No Award over anybody recommended by either the Sad Puppies or the Rabid Puppies, or anything published by Vox Day’s publishing company, Castalia House. In the process, they gave him a fortune in absolutely free publicity, which he promptly used to build Castalia’s readership. I don’t know Vox and certainly don’t agree with all his positions, but I marvel at the hammerlock he has on his opponents’ attention. They. Just. Can’t. Get. Enough. Vox. Day.
  • MidAmericon II utterly soiled itself by expelling Tangent Online‘s Dave Truesdale from the con because he made several members of the Worldcon Elite…uncomfortable. Rob Kroese wrote up an excellent summary of that little disaster earlier today, and I won’t attempt to summarize here. Read The Whole Thing, as Glenn Reynolds says. Even Moshe Feder, definitely of SFF’s left wing, thinks that Truesdale did nothing even close to warrant expulsion from the con. As with Vox Day, Dave Truesdale got a fortune in free publicity. MidAmericon II basically lit a bonfire and threw itself into the flames.
  • The con venue made hotel room parties almost impossible, and so the much-anticipated Sad Puppies party had to be held sub rosa. I hope this isn’t a trend in con venues. Much of what we used to go for in the 70s and 80s were the room parties.

I’m not sure what more could be said, since I wasn’t there. Worldcon continued to make more enemies. John Scalzi smugly insists that the Puppies should all go home, a sentiment tweeted emphatically by the enigmatic Brianna Wu, who says that SF is her home, and not your (the Puppies) home. Howzat again? I was published and a member of SWFA before she was even born. Sheesh.

Scalzi has said more than once (and he isn’t alone) that Worldcon management should have the power to toss out any Hugo ballots that show evidence of slatework. Oh my, what could possibly go wrong? In essence, he and many others want the Hugos to become a juried award, with their people and only their people on the jury. He wants Sad Puppies supporters to leave the SFF fan community, perhaps not realizing that a great many of them already have, taking their money, their energy, and their insights with them. The great irony of the Worldcon progressive wing calling for more diversity is that diversity of worldview is quickly vanishing from Worldcon. It’s all progressive, all the time, all the way down.

To them that sounds like victory. To me and many others, it sounds like a bonfire.

6 Comments

  1. Erbo says:

    I actually signed up for the Castalia House new releases mailing list. Just for signing up, I got to download three free books, including their reissue of the Jerry Pournelle-edited There Will Be War, Vol. I. When the first new release announcement came out, I bought that book for $4.99, and, for doing so, got to download yet another free book. Say what you will about them, they sure give good value for the money. Not to mention that, in Vox’s words, they pay “such high royalties that the much larger publisher who inquired about acquiring it begged me to consider reducing them”.

    (And they’re based in Finland, a country I have come to admire for its METAL nature, and their name is a reference to Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, a book I’ve liked ever since college. Trivia, perhaps, but it’s trivia that appeals to me…)

    Some interesting rambles from Pournelle on Worldcon, which make for better reading than all the Hugo/Puppies blather: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/home-from-worldcon/

  2. TRX says:

    Years ago a friend was telling me about a type of person he found in various corporate environments. They’d get in, then hire and ally with cronies, take over the company, and then run it into the ground, all the while congratulating themselves on what a great job they were doing.

    He likened the situation to termites eating a house. Any individual termite was a tiny annoyance, but given numbers and time to work, you eventually got to the point where the only solution was to burn the house down and start over.

    I never cared for “fandom” much, and the Hugos have been an anti-quality sign for decades. I’ve moved from “let’s try to fix this” solidly into the “burn it down” camp.

    “Let’s take off and nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

  3. SteveF says:

    a great many of them already have, taking their money, their energy, and their insights with them

    Yo. I was never a member of fandom in terms of going to cons or subscribing to zines, but I spent a lot of my disposable income on fiction, almost entirely SF/F. That ended about ten years ago, when the increase in priorities other than telling a good story, and the inevitable decline in story quality, became impossible to ignore.

    I still read a lot of fiction, but now I mostly read serial novels put up on websites by wanna-be-pro authors, and my fiction budget goes to tipping those whose work I like. The big NY publishers? Yah, they can go die in a fire for all I care.

    1. They are dying in a fire. Trouble is, they lit the fire.

  4. Stickmaker says:

    Just finished posting my MidAmeriCon II photos on flickr:

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/116299515@N07/albums/72157672912728166

    Stickmaker

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