Camestros Felapton

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Dragon Award 2023 Season Opens with a Puzzle

You may ask how do people know when Dragon Award season begins? Foolish people think it begins in the October/November of the previous year when nominations open. That is a mere technical start and it may or may not happen anyway and even if it does it might not be announced. No, the true method involves a groundhog, a hotdog and a piece of twine. When the groundhog sees its own Goodreads reviews, then Dragon Award season begins. If the groundhog’s sun sign is in Aquarius then it will be a year when the former Puppies marshal their forces in the hope of claiming the awards in the name of all that is true, proper and heavily armed.

“Hey guys, public service announcement time.
Nominations for the Dragon Awards are now open.
Anybody can nominate books. It doesn’t cost anything. It’s fine for authors to campaign to get their fans to vote.
Please don’t vote for me. I’ve won before. I’ve got plenty. Spread the love.
For best sci-fi I’m voting for Dabare Snake Launcher by Joelle Presby, because it’s good hopeful sci-fi, and it got snubbed by the snoots at a different award that shall not be named. You guys should check it out.
If anybody has books they want to suggest in the other categories, go for it in the comments.
If you’ve been grumpy in previous years because somebody you think sucks got nominated for a Dragon, it’s because they motivated their fans. Great. Don’t cry about it. Rally behind something good, tell your friends, and throw some love at something good and worthy. It’s free and only takes a minute to do.”

https://www.facebook.com/larry.correia/posts/pfbid02yENayxxUorMeXgQBPopdNXpq28MZCU6RWMCipK4u3ytUrx9Rnb8ChoTKYogd3h95l

Nominations are now open. See, whatever magic happened between that twine, the groundhog and the hotdog has led to the Dragon Awards Nominations not just being technically open but also spiritually open.

Sharp eyed readers will note this bit:

“For best sci-fi I’m voting for Dabare Snake Launcher by Joelle Presby, because it’s good hopeful sci-fi, and it got snubbed by the snoots at a different award that shall not be named.”

Snubbed at a different award! That’s terrible! I wonder what award and what was the nature of the snubbing? Luckily File 770 already covered that story:

“Sean CW Korsgaard, Assistant Editor & Media Relations for Baen Books, recently cast suspicion on SFWA’s 58th Nebula Awards finalists after zero works published by Baen Books made the ballot, offering as support what he claimed was a near-deadline screencap of the Nebula nomination voting tally for Novel showing a Baen author out in front.”

https://file770.com/baen-nebula-kerfuffle-resolved/

Well there you go. For those of us wondering what all that weird bit of theatre was about, now you know. It was a manufactured grievance to create an impression that a Baen published book had been treated badly by the “snoots”.

One of the weirder aspects of that little incident was that it was low-scale. The claim was that a book that received the most nominating votes in a ballot did not make it onto the finalist list. The initial claim appeared in only two places, a comment on M.A.Rothman’s Facebook page and a post on an anti-SFWA thread on Kiwi Farms[1]. If the people running the Nebula Awards at the SFWA were really manipulating the votes that would be a huge scandal regardless of the publisher. BUT…it couldn’t actually be a huge scandal because the explanation for the supposed screenshot was very simple.

“The numbers you are seeing on the ‘Total’ column only reflect the number of SFWA members who had recommended (not officially nominated) a work to their fellow members at the given time this internal screenshot was taken. The reading list and the nomination and final ballots are completely different systems.”

https://file770.com/baen-nebula-kerfuffle-resolved/

Anybody familiar with the relevant pages on the site (including whoever took the screenshot) would have known exactly what the screenshot was. People not familiar with the pages (including myself for example) wouldn’t be aware.

The motive for this pseudo-scandal felt odd to me at the time. What was the point of it? The audience in the Post-Puppy Sphere don’t care about the Nebulas and think the SFWA is a den of evil doers regardless. The claim itself had to be done in a low-key way otherwise the very obvious scam (it’s a screenshot of a recommendation page not a tally of the actual votes) is quickly exposed.

It makes a lot more sense when you factor in the Dragon Award. Baen presence and more generally Post-Puppy presence on the Dragon Awards has declined in recent years and the removal of the Military SF category for this year would exacerbate that decline. The broader Post-Puppy sphere has the numbers (probably, I’m guessing) to get stuff nominated but only if there is enthusiasm and a degree of coordination. Larry Corriea can get on the ballot (an may yet, despite asking people not to) but others in the Post Puppy Sphere struggle.

Where the PostPuppy Sphere will act in a more coordinated way is when there is a perceived slight. Note, I don’t think this is anything to do with Dabare Snake Launcher or Joelle Presby, they are just the book/author that people connected with Baen are promoting.

[1] Link to an archive of the relevant Kiwi Farm’s page https://archive.is/txyJ3 you need to scroll down to find the post

camestrosfelapton

27 responses to “Dragon Award 2023 Season Opens with a Puzzle”

  1. Act immediately! Act without thinking! Act without reading the book!

    Because when people read the books they start feeling entitled to form their own opinion about what to vote for. And we know that’s one thing Larry won’t stand for!

    Liked by 4 people

  3. I haven’t read Joelle Presby’s novel and never will, because at this point, I only buy Baen books if the author is someone I’ve read and liked before. However, it might well be a good book.

    That said, it seems to me as if Baen is specifically pushing Joelle Presby in an attempt to expand beyond their usual reader base into the wider SFF community again. And someone at Baen clearly saw that science fiction set in Africa was successful and so Baen launched a science fiction novel set in Africa. However, they completely failed to notice that people are interested in science fiction novels set in Africa written by Africans and not written by a white American woman.

    Liked by 2 people

    • According to her LinkedIn profile:
      Joelle Presby is an American writer who spent twelve years of her childhood in West Africa living in N’Gaoundere, Tchamba, Poli, Garoua-Mboulai, and Meiganga. Small town life in Cameroon gave her a fear of venomous snakes, a wary respect for folklore, and a fascination with the way people can make things work without actually having all the expected parts.

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    • Mmmm, she seems rather sane by Baen Author standards. Also involved in the Multiverse series with Weber. So, *maybe* worth a read. Also I believe we have a common acquaintance from her Navy days. I

      Then again she does have a blue tick…..

      Liked by 1 person

  4. The Dragon Awards remain a fascinating psychology study.

    I think the post-pups very much do care about the Nebulas. It was the Nebulas that most of them were upset about, but they couldn’t game those, so they went for the Hugos. And the SFWA has established professional authors as members, so they can fill in as any kind of snobs and radicals the pups want them to be. Thus the SFWA will always be an organization cast as a bastion of corrupt elitism against real and true righteous chosen.

    The thing with Presby is that even when you know the debunking, it can still be used for a claim of snobbery by pups. Author members were recommending the book! And yet other members didn’t take it up and then nominate the book! Clearly they are left wing snobs who hate Baen Books, etc. But even if Presby shares their politics — and there’s no clear signal yet that she does — it’s unlikely they’ll be able to manage a cohesive campaign to get her nominated enough for the Dragons that the Dragon awards administrator can decide to toss her the nod. (Though not impossible.) There’s a lot of in-fighting, there are the complications of the 20to50 crowd, etc. And Presby is fairly new.

    The Dragons are officially a popular vote award. Once more people were aware that they existed and more authors were more accepting of the award because it became established, most of the pups were going to have a hard time. They tried to shift it for awhile by picking established name authors whose politics they decided were acceptable enough to nominate and claim but that doesn’t really help them out in the long run. And it certainly doesn’t make them look like kingmakers who can declare the Dragon Awards “their” award. The Dragons are not fully legitimate yet, and still ramshackle, but they are closer to it. Last year, the only category where pups had any real influence was in Military SFF, a category which is now gone.

    So yes, the junior editor at Baen Books who was completely unprofessional and lied his ass off to get weird publicity for Presby’s book around the Nebulas might have also been thinking, let’s try to game the Dragons for Baen by making a pretend scandal. Or Larry might have decided to use it. But it’s very much of a long shot.

    Because again, most readers don’t care about fiction authors — they care about stories. And they are marketing resistant. They don’t like it when fiction authors are whining about buying their books or giving them award nominations (something the Puppies also didn’t get.) It’s not necessarily going to do Presby favors with the bulk of possible voters (whom the award admin we know listens to at least partly.) And the post-Gamergate folks are rather busy these days with other, higher profile culture wars. The demographics of the Dragon Convention itself don’t favor them. So they would have to really hustle to get the ideologically faithful to turn out in the name of a woman author they barely know to spite an authors organization whose existence continues to confuse them. And they don’t have the best track record on hustle.

    Plus the Dragon Con runners are probably not going to be thrilled if Baen/Puppies try to work up shenanigans in enough numbers around a pretend SFWA scandal, dumped onto the Dragons. They want the Dragons separate from the Nebulas. And we’ve already seen from the nom and winner patterns that the admin got a lot more respectable on the final choices, which comes from pressure from people voicing concerns (Red Pandas) and from convention admins saying, clean it up and make it popular. There’re still the sweepstakes rules that need to go, but in the meantime, those can be used to punish Baen just as easily by the awards admin as they were initially used to buoy them and Puppies. They are playing with dragonfire if they really try it.

    Liked by 2 people

    • Absolutely nobody said anything when Brad R. Torgersen’s book won a Dragon. A lot of writers are out there campaigning 365 days a year for any award they can get nominated for — they want to put that on their social media and book covers. There’s not the slightest interest in the award itself has any merit. Even Baen authors who are gifted with the fake Helicon Award give public thanks on Twitter. If Timothy the Talking Cat gave them an award they’d do the same.

      Liked by 1 person

      • Well yeah, but the first couple of years of the Dragons had the Puppies crowing it was their award in the wake of the Hugos and many authors who were aware of the Dragons did not initially want to be associated with the Dragons or were leery about it because of that. They didn’t want to be involved in any further voting slate controversies. In the second year, three authors wanted to withdraw their nominations — Jemisin because of the Puppies. She did not want to be associated with the Dragons. Scalzi got the awards to let her and the other author go in return for him accepting his nomination instead of turning it down. So it wasn’t a matter of whether the Dragons were meritorious or not as an award but how controlled by and associated with the Puppies they were.

        By the third year, authors who were concerned initially weren’t concerned anymore and authors who hadn’t been aware of the Dragons became more aware they existed. DragonCon started giving the awards a bit more publicity attention. I can remember Delilah Dawson announcing that she had found herself being nominated for something called a Dragon and she didn’t know what it was but she was thrilled (in 2018 year 3 for the new tie-in novel award for her Star Wars book.) So by year three, the Puppies had little influence but they did keep lobbying. And then the pandemic happened, etc.

        So they don’t have a lot of leverage and I seriously doubt that calling the troops to rally against the SFWA by getting a Baen author a Dragon nomination in year 8 is going to work much. I don’t know if it functions as a real conspiracy as Camestros has speculated.

        Liked by 1 person

      • I was nominated for a joke award. Which everyone knew was a joke, like the Hogus but even smaller. I put that on the indicia page of the next work, in very small type. I didn’t know about smileys then or I’d have added 😉

        Liked by 1 person

      • I wonder if they’ll ever give up on the Dragons? We’ve seen they can’t run their own award, and if their admin man ever leaves, or they get rid of the sweepstakes/thumb on the scale rules, they’ll have even less chance.

        Liked by 1 person

    • Joelle Presby’s book also got very little buzz. I hadn’t of the book at all, when the Nebula not-a-scandal broke out, though I recalled seeing one interview with the author. I noticed it, because that site normally doesn’t cover Baen books, so I was surprised they were interviewing a Baen author .

      Still, Presby’s book is very little known for a popular vote award like the Dragons, unless she has a highly dedicated fanbase.

      Liked by 2 people

      • Joelle Presby might get some votes from the David Weber fanbase as she co-authored The Road to Hell with him and contributed to Honorverse story collections, so there could be some name recognition there.

        I haven’t picked her new book up yet but do mean to – her husband was one of my roommates in college. 🙂 I’ve seen him a few times since he and Joelle married but haven’t met her as yet. Based on knowing him, I have significant trouble believing she’d be all-in with the Puppies crowd, though some level of overlap is certainly possible.

        Liked by 2 people

  5. So has anyone here have any idea at all just how large the Puppy following is? Seriously, is it a roomful of drunken uncles pissing up the wall*, or a houseful of defrocked priests?** (Yes, I really, really don’t like them.)

    *Oysterband lyric
    **Also an Oyster band reference

    I don’t think the number of folks actually voting for them was ever that large, and that they won early on solely because no else was voting for the Dragons. Once they went mainstream, the Puppies got castrated***.

    Not an Oysterband reference. I think.

    Liked by 1 person

    • Hard to say. Correia himself has a decent following. The Monster Hunter International book page on Facebook has 2.5K followers – a chunk of which will be bots but it still gives a sense of magnitude of the fanbase. The ‘official’ private fan group has 3.3K members on Facebook. Then you have that oribit of ex-Superversive and Pulp Rev people, Declan Finn, Brian Niemeier, trad-cath SF, and other smaller networks of right wing writers

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      • So do we know how many voted in the Dragons? I’m assuming given it’s an Internet poll that it easily could be tens of thousands.

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    • At the time, with the Hugos, the estimates were that it was maybe 400 of them paying for votes, but some of those were Gamergaters whose vote opportunity was paid for. Not really SFF fans who were part of the Puppies, but alt righters willing to vote the slate to own the libs and break things. But the Dragons don’t require money to enter and you can vote multiple times with different emails, so probably they had maybe a couple of thousand in the beginning of the awards? But probably less in later years.

      In 2018, for instance, they claimed 11,000 total voters cast ballots for the Dragons. In 2022, though, they announced more than 7,000 total voters for the Dragons. Of course, everybody had drops due to the pandemic years and we don’t know if the numbers are real, but it is online voting. So Camestros’ speculation — that maybe they cranked up the SFWA fake scandal to encourage more of their past followers to vote for a Baen Book for the Dragons — isn’t entirely impossible if they wanted to get the band back together. Or maybe just a few of them saw an opportunity after the kerfluffle occured. But it seems unlikely they’ll really organize it effectively.

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    • Hey now, I have an uncle who’s a ‘defrocked’ (laicised) priest. Not that much of a drinker though…..

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  6. That “tens of thousands” is completely unrealistic. They don’t even get a hundred people in the room for the award ceremony at a convention that actually does draw tens of thousands.

    Liked by 1 person

    • And the people who vote when they hear about it through the local libraries (like last year) aren’t tens of thousands, and maybe don’t even go to the con.

      If Pups hadn’t had a buddy on the staff, it never would have been started. Dragon Con is excellent, a good time for all, but it’s never been heavy on the literary.

      Liked by 1 person

  7. I’m really disappointed that the snoots have taken over the Dragon awards. What about us non-snoots, huh? For years, no, decades, we’ve been reading books and hoping they’d win the various SFF awards only to have our votes invalidated by the snoots. Oh, sure, the snoots would tell us that our votes would count just as much as theirs, but that’s not true, is it? No, those cosmopolitan snoots with their expensive clothing and their nose-in-the-air attitude would allegedly out-vote us, EVEN THOUGH we know that there are fewer snoots than normal god-fearing Mil SF fans like us. It’s more than just a crime, it’s a crime against (non-snoot) humanity. It’s just like the Holocaust, except for the very few ways in which it isn’t.

    My message? Snoots are immoral interlopers with no real rights. Baen is the equivalent of Western democracy. The Dragon Awards are somehow like Munich, but not the Munich Olympics, the Neville Chamberlain Munich. And Larry Correia is Winston Churchill, but with less brandy and more guns.

    Liked by 3 people

  8. ‘… And you may ask yourself, “How do I nominate this?”
    And you may ask yourself, “Where is that Dragon Award nominations page?”
    And you may tell yourself, “This is not a book from this century”
    And you may tell yourself, “This is not an alternate history”‘

    Liked by 4 people

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