26 chapters left now in One’s Own Shadow. I’ll have new covers ready pretty soon. Expect to see some previews here. Also, re-edited versions my other two books will be going up when I get done with Book Two.
So, the Sad Puppies/Hugo stuff is still going on. The newspapers of the world seem to have lost an amount of interest in covering it as voraciously as they did last year but still I see the same factual errors creeping in. Not necessarily the ones people have complained about from morning until night, but rather the sort of things that would only take a few minutes of searching to dispel. Things like the difference between Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies and the more reasonable, even last year, Sad Puppies.
The recent series of articles did manage to rankle John C. Wright, though. Curious considering the outlets that put the articles forward are pretty unabashed in their stances on the issue and something approaching a compromise or objective look at things could never be expected there. I suspect he may have just wanted to be angry for anger’s sake. He made it a point, in the post, to call out George R.R. Martin, specifically over Wright’s inclusion in an anthology in 2009. Martin replied, largely to clear the air about an unsubtle attack on his honor as an anthology editor, but a single line of Martin’s post sort of stuck out to me.
He said he gave all of the previous year’s Hugo Nominees a shot. I don’t feel that he even needed to justify himself as far as that, but he also said that if a book offends him he puts it down. That’s a curious thing to me and I wish he’d have expended on it. He may have in the comments below, but I haven’t read them yet. I can’t fault a person for putting down a book that causes them issues of any kind, but I would really like to hear what books have offended Martin so badly he needed to put them down. He is a well read man, no doubt, and intelligent to be sure. Just a list would do. Were they strong right-wing polemics? Certainly he’s written the sort of stuff that would make the squeamish back away.
Also, this post shouldn’t be read as some sort of indictment or challenge. I am genuinely just curious and that line caught my eye and completely distracted me, happily, from what was a stupid argument that really had less to do with the Hugo drama and more to do with Wright’s ego being offended.
And anyone wondering which side I’m on… neither. I am in favor of EPH or some sort of anti-slate voting process. I think Vox Day’s success this year and the Puppy sweep last year and some of the slates of years past which have seen heavy success certainly prove that the “Most votes best” system has faults when there is a dedicated voting bloc, NO MATTER THEIR GOALS. I do not think that any one group should outweigh the wider audience as it only serves to disillusion our community. No one should feel as though taking part in voting for an award for a genre they love is a worthless act. Slates make that true, honestly.
To finish things off, refusing a nomination or voting No Award also make me a bit sad. If people paid the minimum $40 to vote in the process, I would like to at least give the nameless masses the benefit of the doubt. And then the fans who weren’t part of a slate who just liked what it was that you did. They will feel sad. Nothing gets accomplished except the cheapening of the award (for however much that even matters), which everyone except the Rabid kids seem to be against. If anyone is going to pretend to give a shit about prestige and history and the glory of all things Hugo, they should accept that there are more ways to shit up the works than just voting along party lines.
This got pretty rambly. Fuck me, blogging while watching YouTube videos is a bad idea. Whatever. Doesn’t matter.