Month: April 2015

by Doctor Science

One of the things the Sad Puppies said an awful lot last year was that they just wanted the works they’d nominated for Hugos to be read and judged “on their merits”. In many ways the most surprising thing for me about last year’s Puppy nominees was that none of their horses was fit to race. None had what I think of as baseline qualifications for an award for literary (including science fictional) merit. What I still don’t understand is *why*: why a group of people who wanted me to judge works “on their merits” would nominate things without significant merit. And, especially, things that are *objectively* bad.

You may think there’s no such thing as an objective standard of literary quality, but it’s quite possible to tell the basic difference between competent writing and the stuff that isn’t.

It might be easiest to think of this in the context of Sturgeon’s Law:

90% of every human creative endeavor is crud.

With fanfic, if it’s a very large fandom and/or the fan writers are generally very young (median age 20 or younger), you’ll be lucky if the “Sturgeon factor” is only 90% — it’s often more like 95%, with barely 1 in 20 stories being not-crud.

But just because something is crud doesn’t mean I won’t read it, and even like it. It depends on what I’m in the mood for; it’s quite possible for a story to be enjoyable or just what I wanted right then, while still being objectively bad.

When I recommend stories, though, I kind of insist on not-crud, and the recs lists I trust come from people who have similar standards. But sometimes I’m just, “gimme everything you’ve got with time travel” or whatever, and I’ll at least look at them all — even though around 90% of them are going to be cruddy. There’s nothing wrong with reading and liking crud.

The problems come when writers and people who make influential recs lists don’t seem to grasp the difference between crud and non-crud. In fanfiction, I think of that line as tracing “basic competence in English prose”. Is the text laced with SPAG (spelling, punctuation, and grammar) errors? Do verb tenses and POV shift a lot? Are character names misspelled? Are names misspelled in the summary? (this is usually a sign not to read the story at all, or you’ll be s-o-r-r-y.) Are words chosen poorly or mistakenly? Are the sentences clumsily constructed?

As far as I’m concerned, the interesting part of voting for the Hugos or other awards is taking a nominations list that is all not-crud, and deciding which is best in my opinion. What shocked and even offended me last year was that the Puppy nominations didn’t pass the basic, not-crud standard.

Cut for length, including some close, editor-like reading.

Read more

by Doctor Science

Last year’s attempt by the “Sad Puppies” to take over the Hugo Awards turns out to have been the warm-up act. This year, they succeeded (at least partway). Oy.

Let me sum up:

1. Last year Larry Correia put together the “Sad Puppies 2” slate, ostensibly to broaden the field of works nominated for the Hugo to counteract leftist “groupthink” by the usual nominators. A subset of the SP2 slate made it onto the final Hugo ballot.

2. I had a Supporting Membership for the Hugos last year, and read (or tried to read) everything nominated. My conclusion:

None of the Sad Puppies’ horses is fit to race. The only ones I can call reasonably competent works of fiction are Correia’s novel and Dan Wells’ “The Butcher of Khardov”. They also read way too much like re-tellings of unfamiliar video games, and lack the most important quality Hugo voters are looking for, world-building. They are, at best, B level works, not the kind of thing I think *anyone* would want associated with “Hugo Award Winning”.

Both of Brad Torgerson’s stories are shockingly badly-edited with regard to basic grammar, punctuation, and sentence-structure. “The Chaplain’s Legacy” might have become a decent story in another couple of drafts, under the whip of a stern yet understanding editor. Vox Day’s story is also technically very poor, and then there’s the fact that a lot of Hugo voters really, honestly dislike him.

3. This year there were two, largely overlapping “conservative” slates: Sad Puppies 3, put together by Brad Torgerson, and Rabid Puppies 2015, by Vox Day. The result: the Best Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Related Work, Editor (Long Form), and Editor (Short Form) categories contain *only* Puppies nominees, all others have been shut out. Only two non-Puppies are in the Best Novel category and in the two Dramatic Presentations, and there’s only one each for Pro Artist, Fanzine, Fan Writer, and the Campbell Award.

4. BOOM. More links: FWOOOMP. I’ve been participating at Making Light, Crooked Timber, and Whatever.

5. My Opinions, Which Are Mine:

A. Elizabeth Bear, abi sutherland, many commenters at Making Light, and especially Cat (in a comment she cross-posted widely) have persuaded me that slates wreck the process of voting for awards. Slates are useful and often necessary when you’re voting for people who need to work with each other (= politics), but they’re destructive to the process of choosing excellence. Slates narrow the field radically, and let (or force) voters to make their choices other than from their own personal perspective, which is naturally idiosyncratic.

B. The people linked in A are among the many arguing that the only way to save the Hugo Awards system is to put *any* work, however worthy, that was on a slate below “No Award”. Being on a slate (of your own free will) must be an unconditional disqualification, or else we’ll end up with competing slates — which will be the very opposite of choosing works on the basis of quality. Generally speaking, I’m persuaded by this argument, and that’s what I’ll be doing. I’m really sorry, Guardians of the Galaxy.

C. What’s kind of stunning to me is how resolutely the Puppies have ignored issues of *quality* in assembling and arguing for their slate. Last year’s slate was unbelievably, insultingly weak — and I say that as someone whose fiction reading is mostly fanfic. I know a *lot* about bad writing, but I also know the difference between “bad, but I like it” and “objectively well-crafted”. Since Torgerson put together the SP3 slate, I feel safe dismissing it out of hand — he’s demonstrated that he doesn’t have the minimum level of competence at English-wrangling necessary to pick lists of “the best stories”.

I often enjoy things that aren’t even trying for excellence, but that’s not what awards are *for*. Part of what bemuses me about the Puppies is that having high standards, believing in excellence, thinking that there are objective standards of value that don’t have anything to do with popularity — these are all things I associate with traditional conservatism. And yet the Puppies seem to be doubling down on a pugnacious rejection of high literary standards — and, in their work, even such bourgeois affectations as grammar.

D. Another reason I won’t vote for anything touched by the Puppies is that two of the most prominent people involved — indeed, the two most likely to benefit from the slate — are IMHO actually evil.

As a rule, I don’t believe in calling a person “evil”. Every human is capable of evil actions as well as good ones, you can’t split people into neat “good” and “bad” piles.

However. Sometimes there are people who are pretty consistent about doing evil and seem to be proud of it, so it’s fair to just cut to the chase and say they’re evil people. If they do something nice, then you can be surprised.

Cut for some pretty disgusting, hateful language.

Read more