by Vox Day
Perhaps the most amusing thing about that is that the two categories only exist because Tor Books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden, possibly the most influential SJW in science fiction, publicly cried about always losing out to the popular Asimov’s editor, Gardiner Dozois, who won the Best Editor Hugo 15 times from 1988 to 2004. A new Best Editor Long Form award was established and duly gifted to Nielsen Hayden in 2007. SJWs care desperately about credentials and awards because they are such tone-deaf mediocrities that they have no idea what is good and what is not. Nielsen Hayden’s skill as an editor is perhaps best observed by the fact that despite being Tor Books being the biggest publishing house in science fiction, under his leadership, Tor Books has missed out on publishing almost every single major new science fiction and fantasy writer since Orson Scott Card burst upon the scene in 1983. With the exception of Brandon Sanderson, they have somehow managed to reject or otherwise fail to sign every bestselling science fiction or fantasy author from Joe Abercrombie, Larry Correia, and George R.R. Martin to Stephanie Meyer, Suzanne Collins and J.K. Rowling. It’s a rather remarkable achievement, when you think about it.
Our second goal was to illustrate the increasingly ludicrous nature of the awards. I searched Amazon for the most ridiculous science fiction-related title I could find, inspired by a dim recollection of having once seen the covers of bizarre, self-published dinosaur erotica with names like Taken by the T-Rex and Ravished by the Triceratops. They weren’t eligible, of course, but I did find “Space Raptor Butt Invasion”, an erotic tale of a lonely gay astronaut stationed on the planet Zorbus with no one but a male space velociraptor for company. Written by Chuck Tingle, a prolific author who is also known for classics such as “Slammed In The Butt By The Prehistoric Megalodon Shark Amid Accusations Of Jumping Over Him” and “Open Wide For The Handsome Sabertooth Dentist Who Is Also A Ghost”, “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” was more than worthy of representing the best of the SJW-converged diversity fiction now infests the field.
Our third goal, of course, was to demoralize the SJWs. They were already exhausted and emotionally spent from the unexpected need to rally the troops to prevent the Puppies from winning all the awards, and the fact that the very popular Dragoncon convention had introduced its own Dragon Awards only added to their growing sense of dismay. However, this exhaustion was balanced by their certainty that they were going to give the Puppies the boot again when the next nomination period
This misplaced confidence only added to their shock when, in April 2016, the Hugo Awards committee announced that the Rabid Puppies had claimed 70 of the 80 possible nominations, up from the 58 of 67 that the joint campaign had claimed the year before. In the end, the number was reduced to 62 by a series of dubious disqualifications by the committee combined with withdrawals by a few weaklings who still hoped to curry favor with the SJWs, but that was not much consolation at the time, although it did cut down on the number of categories no-awarded. The Guardian’s tone, so celebratory the previous August, effectively reflected the widespread demoralization that was a consequence of the Rabid Puppies’ 2016 blitz.
The annual Hugo awards for the best science fiction of the year have once again been riven by controversy, as a concerted campaign by a conservative lobby has dominated the ballot.
The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies movements, which both separately campaign against a perceived bias towards liberal and leftwing science-fiction and fantasy authors, have managed to get the majority of their preferred nominations on to the final ballot, announced today. This means that voters on the prestigious awards will now be choosing from a shortlist which includes SJWs Always Lie, an essay about “social justice warriors” by Rabid Puppies campaign leader Vox Day; a self-published parody of erotic dinosaur fiction called Space Raptor Butt Invasion, by Chuck Tingle; and My Little Pony cartoon The Cutie Map…
A breakaway, more political faction called the Rabid Puppies was formed in 2015, the year the prize was most rocked by the twin campaigns. After the shortlist was dominated by nominations from the Sad and Rabid Puppies’ lists, Game of Thrones author George RR Martin said the Hugos were “broken”, while previous Hugo winner Connie Willis pulled out of presenting a prize, saying her presence would “lend cover and credibility to winners who got the award through bullying and extortion”. In the end, members of the World Science Fiction Society rejected finalists in an unprecedented five categories, voting for “No Award” rather than any of the nominees backed by the campaigns.
Led by Beale – who writes under the name Vox Day and was once dubbed “the most despised man in science fiction” by the Wall Street Journal – the Rabid Puppies has been successful in getting its nominations on the shortlist again this year; out of 80 recommendations posted by Beale on his blog, 62 have received sufficient votes to make the ballot…. The Hugo awards, once the watchword of quality in the SFF world, appear to have been utterly derailed for the second year running.
—“Hugo awards shortlist dominated by rightwing campaign”, The Guardian, 26 April 2016
The finalist votes went very much according to form, as after only two years, we already had science fiction’s SJWs voting almost entirely in reaction to us, changing and complicating their rules, and going out of their way to awarding SJW-approved affirmative action works and writers instead of merit in most categories. While were only able to burn two categories in 2016, but we were successful in reducing their choices to X or No Award in 5 other categories. This was, in part, the result of poor choices on my part, as centrist writers unable to stand the heat from the Left chose to withdraw their nominations, thereby opening a spot for the eventual winner.
Perhaps the most important achievement, however, was the way in which the 2016 campaign forced the SJWs to show the public their true colors by demonstrating that what the Hugo Award primarily means is public adherence to the SJW Narrative. Among the finalists who were “No Awarded” in 2016 were: Jerry Pournelle, Larry Elmore, Toni Weisskopf, Moira Greyland, David Vandyke, Pierce Brown, and RazörFist. In most cases, the awards in the categories for which they were finalists were given to people whose work was of observably lower quality. For example, the bestselling Pierce Brown, whose novel was not even nominated for Best Novel despite my recommendation, wrote what was almost certainly, by any reasonable standard, the best science fiction novel published this year. The fact that he was deemed to be unworthy of mere consideration for Best New Author conclusively proved how irrelevant the Hugo Awards have become to successful writers and science fiction readers alike.
For example, the Hugo voters no-awarded a serious literary work about Gene Wolfe, the very same people who had previously claimed, just the year before, that a simple blog post was “the Best Related Work” in science fiction that year. The contrast is informative, although it must be admitted that they did have the sense to avoid no-awarding Jim Butcher for a second straight year. Apparently Mr. Butcher’s writing improved considerably from 2015 to 2016.
Sadly, for all of their totally unconvincing pretenses of delight with it, the nomination of “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” embarrassed both the Worldcon and the Hugo voters to no end. Chuck Tingle’s erotic masterpiece was no-awarded, exactly as I predicted it would be. What was much more surprising was that there was little celebrating the fact that in 2016, more of the awards went to women this year than ever before, including all of the fiction categories. I wondered if perhaps some SJWs were beginning to catch on to my objectives, as it was becoming obvious that all four fiction categories were increasingly becoming No White Male territory. The 2016 winners were in the Novel, Novella, Novelette, and Short Story categories were: black woman, black woman, Asian woman, and white woman, none of whom are bestselling or even very well-known authors.
I noted at the time that this development was reliably indicative of the awards increasing irrelevance, and that it wouldn’t be long before simply being a minority won’t be enough and authors will have to be gay, blind, and crippled just to be nominated. As
Martin van Creveld, the Israeli military historian has noted, the more women enter any professional field, the more men leave it. And as the men depart, so to do the prestige and the economic rewards provided by the field. This creates a vicious cycle that both expels existing men from the field while repelling new men from entering it.
My success in helping the science fiction SJWs establish this vicious cycle can be seen in the winners of the 2017 awards. Although the new rules that went into effect after 2016 prevented the Rabid Puppies from sweeping the nominations again, we did manage to secure ten nominations in ten different categories, including “Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By the T-Rex” in the Best Novelette category. I also secured my seventh Hugo Award nomination for Best Editor Long Form, which theoretically secures my status as a science fiction great with more Hugo nominations than Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Vogt, Lester del Rey; Gregory Benford, Norman Spinrad, Neal Stephenson, David Weber, Terry Pratchett and Iain M. Banks.
This is, of course, utterly ridiculous, and tends to prove my point about the total absurdity of the idea that the awards might signify anything but popularity within a very small and increasingly female clique.
As it happens, the 2017 Hugo Awards, given out in Helsinki, Finland, were very nearly an all-female affair. Sixteen of the 18 winners were women, as only two categories, both TV/movie categories, went to male winners. Best of all, professional grievance artist N.K. Jemisin, the very SJW pet whose attack on me played a such an important role in my awakening to SJW convergence in science fiction, won the Best Novel award for the second straight year. If we can safely count on one more round of the science fiction SJWs doubling down, she’ll win in 2018 too, for the third book in her trilogy called The Broken Earth, which neither you nor most science fiction readers have ever read or even heard of.
And if that happens, I think I will be able to safely conclude that the walls have been torn down, the fields have been salted, and the work of the Rabid Puppies is complete.
COMICSGATE
If you don’t follow comics, you are almost certainly unaware of how SJW-converged they have become. Apparently the needs of social justice demand that all white superheroes be replaced by black, Hispanic, or Asian successors, all male superheroes be replaced by female successors, or at least turn gay even though they were quite literally conceived as being straight, and all attractive female superheroes must be replaced with unattractive variants that border on transgenderism.
And it is worse than you would expect. To be blunt, it is worse than you are able to conceive, because you are a normal, sane individual whose imagination simply does not work in the same way as an SJW. As one critic described Marvel’s current business plan, they are selling comics books written by people who hate superheroes to an audience that doesn’t like superheroes or read comic books. The changes that the SJW writers have made are as radical as they are unappealing to traditional fans.
Jane Foster (female) is now Thor. Miles Morales (Hispanic) is now Spider-Man. Sam Wilson (black) is now Captain America. Riri Williams (black, female) is now Iron Man. Kate Bishop (female) is now Hawkeye. Kamala Khan (female, Muslim) is now Ms Marvel. She-Hulk (female) is now Hulk. Amadeus Cho (Asian) is also Hulk. X-23 is now Wolverine. Despite having been straight since 1963, Iceman is now gay.
Science fiction grandmaster John C. Wright, a longtime enthusiast of pulp fiction and comics who I suspect will strap a nuclear device around his body and blow up the offices of DC Comics if they ever mess with Catwoman, proposes an experiment. “To those who cannot tell the difference between this heavy handed blotting out and an organic change to the character, I propose a general challenge: Find one single example of a straight white male character taking up the name and identity of a minority superhero or superheroine, or tell the reason why you cannot.”
It’s one thing to hear about this convergence, or to read about it, but it is truly something else to see it with your own eyes. Once you do, there is simply no escaping the conclusion that the comics in general, and Marvel in particular, has devolved from what was once described as an original American art form into an utterly reprehensible and relentlessly stupid mound of SJW cultural defecation. Consider the excruciatingly bad dialogue, the terrible characterizations, the breaking of the fourth wall, and the near-complete absence of both action and drama from this “fight-scene” that appears in Thor (vol. 4) #5.
CRUSHER CREEL: THOR? Are you kidding me? I’m supposed to call you Thor? Damn FEMINISTS are ruining everything!
CRUSHER CREEL: You wanna be a chick super hero? Fine, who the hell cares? But get your OWN identity. Thor’s a DUDE. One of the LAST manly dudes still left. What’d you do, send him to sensitivity training so he’d stop calling Earth girls “wenches”?
SHE THOR: I care not what you call me, ABSORBING MAN. Just be certain to inform your new cellmates that ’twas a WOMAN who returned you to prison.
CRUSHER CREEL: What the?! What’s gotten into this crazy thing? This ain’t how it’s supposed to work! What the hell kind of Thor ARE you?
SHE THOR: The kind who just broke your jaw! THAT’S for saying “feminist” like it’s a four-letter word, creep. And also… you know… for the robbing?
TITANIA: What the hell’s going on out here? Let ME handle this, baby.
THUNG!
TITANIA: I ain’t fighting no WOMAN THOR and neither is HE. Not today at least. I’m STANDING DOWN out of respect for what you’re doing. Can’t have been easy for you. Hasn’t been easy for me either.
SHE THOR: Do not think this means I will allow you to flee.
TITANIA: I’m not asking you to. A little prison time will actually be good for me and Crusher. When we’ve been out too long, he starts to get a WANDERING EYE.
TITANIA: But just so you know, this is a one-time GIRL-POWER pass.
This is just one of literally hundreds of equally ridiculous examples. I could have as easily cited the panels where the Muslim Ms Marvel, previously so enthusiastic about leading people to the polls, is overcome with despair after Donald Trump wins the presidential election. Or when Wonder Woman complains that while her lasso compels the truth, it can’t prevent “mansplaining”. Or when the survivors of the Walking Dead celebrate the fact that so many of them are hyphenated-Americans rather than white people. The nadir, one would have thought, was when MacArthur Genius Grant-recipient Ta-Nehisi Coates was hired to write the Black Panther comic and decided that would be an ideal vehicle with which to complain about the gentrification of Harlem. Why the population demographics of a single U.S. neighborhood would be an issue of primary concern to the king and protector of the African nation of Wakanda remains a mystery, since Black Panther: World of Wakanda was canceled after its sales dropped 75 percent in the five months after its initial release.
The essential problem faced by the SJWs in comics is no different than the one it faces in science fiction and every other form of entertainment. The specific reason that SJW convergence inevitably has a destructive effect on all storytelling forms, including comics, novels, films, and poems, is that social justice intrinsically requires that certain identities be portrayed in a positive manner that is always beyond reproach.
That is why Titania and She Thor couldn’t get in an actual fight, because it would involve one woman being violently beaten by another. Sure, She Thor hit Titania in the end, but only with her express permission. Moreover, Titania and She Thor could not actually be on different sides, despite the former being a criminal and the latter being a crime-fighting superhero, because they both belonged to the same SJW-approved identity group.
This is why there is a surfeit of Code Girls and Magic Negros and Saint Gays on television, to say nothing of criminal businessmen, sinful Christians, evil Republicans, and white gangbangers. In the SJW entertainment world, National Socialists are the greatest danger to world peace despite the fact that the German National Socialist Worker’s Party has been defunct since 1945, gays are the most monogamous people on the planet, blacks are
a wise and peaceful people, women are more technologically inclined than men, and the criminal gangs of the United States are predominantly populated with clean-cut white men without tattoos who last shaved three days ago.
The difficulty of providing modern entertainment under the handicap of SJW interference can be compared to monochrome photography, in which the photo taken possesses only a single hue rather than recording all the various colors of the scene being captured. Information about the other hues simply are not there. For example, if you see a monochrome photo of a dilapidated house out in the country, it is seldom possible to determine the actual color of the house from the image. Is it brown, is it white, or is it that faded blue-grey that you often see in abandoned rural areas? Not only is it impossible to say what color the house actually is, but even making a reasonable guess requires the viewer to draw upon his own experiences that are external to the photograph if he is to begin formulating an opinion. And it is not a value judgment, but a straightforward statement of fact, to observe that color information is absent from the image, and it is logic that dictates the ability of the viewer to formulate an opinion on the color of the object is severely handicapped.