I already posted my own take on the 2016 Hugo Awards and also linked to some early reaction posts here, but now that a day has passed, we have some more reaction posts from around the web:
Michi Trota, one of the Hugo-winning co-editors of Uncanny Magazine, has put her acceptance speech online. Talking of Uncanny, they also have a guest post by Hugo winner Hao Jinfang this month, in which she talks about her writing and what is important to her.
The Book Smugglers, who just missed making the Hugo shortlist in the semi-prozine category due to puppy shenangigans, offer a brief summary of the 2016 Hugos.
At the Daily Dot, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, who coincidentally was one of my best fanwriter nominees for 2015 and 2016, offers a recap of the 2016 Hugo Awards and the puppy uproar to date. She is a bit sad that Chuck Tingle didn’t win, though.
Meanwhile, everybody’s least favourite puppy Vox Day tries to spin the resounding defeat he and his slate nominees suffered (our old friend Noah Ward has now beaten Vox Day three years in a row, which has got to sting) as having been his plan all along, since he now has the SJWs exactly where he wants them (Voting for good works instead of puppy poo?). Of course, if an asteroid had hit the convention centre during the Hugo ceremony, Vox Day would still have declared that was his plan all along.
The rest of his post is a mix of the usual confused puppy talking points. The winners in the fiction categories are all women, three are writers of colour and none of them are well known, at least according to Vox Day. And Campbell nominee Pierce Brown supposedly outsells N.K. Jemisin, hence Brown’s books are of course much better. Besides, The Fifth Season is the worst book to win the Hugo since Catherine Asaro’s (very good) novel The Quantum Rose won the Nebula in 2002, about which Vox is still pissed 14 years later. Apparently, poor Vox Day still isn’t aware that the Hugo and the Nebula are different awards. Oh yes, and Vox Day is totally responsible for Andy Weir winning the Campbell Award and The Martian the best dramatic presentation Hugo, since it isn’t as if Weir is a massively popular author and The Martian a very popular movie. He also thinks Hugo voters were embarrassed by Chuck Tingle, when pretty much everybody thinks he’s hilarious, and claims that he tricked the SJWs into voting for The Fifth Season. He also calls N.K. Jemisin “half-savage” again, though he at least has the sense to modify that with “award-winning”. Finally – and this is the best one – Vox Day has also modified his winning conditions so that if a Castalia House book placing in second place after “No Award” (which happened in Best related work, where the shortlist was four Castalia House pieces and that Moira Greyland thing) still counts as victory.
So in short, it’s the usual garble-garble from everybody’s least favourite three-times-in-a-row-no-awarded puppy.
John C. Wright also offers the usual garble-garble and complains that the 2016 Hugo winners are unworthy, just because he doesn’t happen to like them. He’s also really really pissed off that Damien Walter said mean things about his books and is back to calling people Morlocks again.
The rest of the leading puppy are conspicuous by their silence. Larry Correia doesn’t even seem to have found Damien Walter’s criticism of his novels yet. However, We Hunted the Mammoth, a site devoted to chronicling the antics of so-called men’s rights activists, pick-up artists and other unsavoury misogynists, gloats a bit about the rabid puppies’ resounding defeat and also links to some telling comments from the KotakuInAction subreddit.
Regarding the rabid puppies (since the sads were not much of a factor this year, if they ever were), Camestros Felapton attempts to estimate how many of them there are anyway. His numbers, somewhere between 150 and 190, which dovetails nicely with Chaos Horizon‘s analysis, who estimates that there were less than 200 rabid puppies voting in the final round, which required a MidAmeriCon II membership.
So in short, the rabid puppies experienced some attrition, since shelling out fifty US-dollars to vote in an award many of them probably don’t care for, only to get their Vox-mandated choices no awarded anyway, isn’t really all that much fun. Abigail Nussbaum also notes this in her post about the 2016 Hugo Awards and wonders whether the various proposed changes to the nomination system are even necessary, since the rabid puppy problem seems to have corrected itself and Hugo voters are well able to differentiate between human shields and puppy poo.
The most notable of these proposed changes is called “E Pluribus Hugo”, a system to change the way nominations are weighed to diffuse the power of slates. Jed Hartman offers an update on how “E Pluribus Hugo” affects the nominations of previous Hugo Awards, while here is an analysis of the affects on the 2016 Hugo shortlist. In short, “E Pluribus Hugo” would have knocked off some slate finalists in 2016 and 2015, but would have done nothing about the slate nominees in 2014, while knocking off some organic nominees. How will “E Pluribus Hugo” effect future Hugo shortlists? I guess we’ll see, since the amendment was ratified at the business meeting.
However, since several Hugo categories were vandalised by the rabid puppies this year, George R.R. Martin handed out his Alfie Awards once again to those kept off the ballot by Puppy shenangigans. The list of the 2016 Alfie Award winners is here and includes some very fine works.
Natalie Luhrs, who was one of my best fanwriter nominees in the past two years and was kept off the Hugo ballot by puppy interference for the second year in a row, offers her thoughts on the Hugos and the Alfies.
Finally, everybody’s favourite rabid puppy nominee and devilman troller extraordinaire Dr. Chuck Tingle has already responded to not winning the Hugo with his latest oevre, Pounded in the Butt by my Hugo Award Loss. Have no fear, Dr. Tingle, your day will come (maybe in best related work next year) and you won’t even need the devilman’s help to get there.
That’s it with Hugo reactions for today. I’ll probably write a more detailed response to accusations of “social justice affirmative action votes” from the puppy camp in the future.
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