Over on Facebook, it appears that Larry is cross that I’m not writing about him or his reactions to the 2023 Hugo Awards. Sadly, even here Larry can’t get his facts right. I covered Puppy reactions to the Hugo 2023 issues way back on January 28 https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2024/01/28/ok-one-last-post-on-the-topic-for-completeness/ they just haven’t said anything interesting since then1.
But that’s not all. In fact Larry Correia is (and I genuinely mean this) a key data point in understanding the accountability elements of Hugo Award voting. In Chapter 26 of Debarkle I covered the 2014 Sad Puppies 2 campaign. In that chapter, there are numerous quotes from Larry Correia but one is particularly pertinent.
“Already there is all sorts of outragey outrage coming from the usual suspects, with allegations of, I kid you not, “ballot stuffing” For everyone who has been involved in this process, you know how especially ironic and hilarious that actually is, since behind the scenes I’ve been collecting counts of Sad Puppies nominators the whole time to see if the process was rigged because there have been some really suspicious things that have happened in the past to other author friends of mine. Can’t help myself. I’m a retired auditor. But the London committee appears to be totally honest. Great.”
https://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/20/a-blow-has-been-struck-against-puppy-related-sadness/
The “suspicious” thing that happened in the past was a claim by John Ringo that nomination votes for him in what was then the Campbell Award had been tossed out on grounds of eligibility (see https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2021/03/03/debarkle-chapter-10-2006-a-baen-sweep-of-the-hugos/ ). I’ve no idea if that was true or not2 but it is at least vaguely relevant to the current issue. Indeed, of all the things involving the Puppies, it is the only incident (as vague and unsubstantiated as it is) that resembles the current Hugo issue.
Oh, and before I forget, the “London committee” that Larry declares “appears to be totally honest”? That consisted of four people two of whom were: Dave McCarty and Ben Yalow.
More broadly, the Puppies themselves are a counter-example to the issue Larry now claims he has been warning people about. After all, if Hugo admins were routinely rigging the nomination process then the 2015 Puppy sweep of the Hugo Awards simply wouldn’t have happened (the 2105 Hugo admin team was listed as 6 people one of whom was…Dave McCarty). As Correia’s own statement above implies, even with the simpler approval voting system for the nomination process, there are ways of checking if you have a good estimate of how many people voted for you. EPH (a voting reform the Puppies opposed) provides even more detail on the nomination process and provides another obstacle for somebody attempting to rig the Hugo Awards unnoticed.
Then there is the very nature of this year’s scandal. Imagine if it was revealed that the 2023 Dragon Awards were rigged. Yeah, it wouldn’t be much of a story because how would a rigged Dragon award be different from a regular Dragon award? The Hugo Awards having an administrator making unaccountable decisions and keeping the true numbers secret from the voters so we don’t know if our votes had any genuine influence on the results is a scandal for the Hugo Awards but it is standard operating procedure for the Dragons.
The “I told you so” aspect of Larry’s current gloating is simply yet another iteration of Larry’s changing story about the Hugo Awards. Back in 2014 and 2015 (the peak of the specifically Sad Puppy campaigns), Larry’s argument was not that the Hugos were being manipulated by the people administering the Hugo Awards. He and other key Puppies did use the term “SMOF” pejoratively at various times but by April 2015 he went out of his way to clarify what he meant:
“SMOF means Secret Masters of Fandom. It can be used in a few different ways. To people whose social lives revolve around conventions, it means the people who run stuff there. The word started as a joke.
https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/04/06/a-letter-to-the-smofs-moderates-and-fence-sitters-from-the-author-who-started-sad-puppies/
To many of my people, SMOF was seen as a pejorative, used for the snooty, snobbish types who liked to tell those fans that they aren’t real fans, or that they are the wrong kinds of fans, or that they were having wrongful.
However, many good, decent, honorable people self-identify as SMOFs. I count many of these people as friends, and many of them are cheering Sad Puppies on.”
So yes, you can find Larry complaining about “SMOFs” as part of the Hugo problem but he meant people like George R.R. Martin rather than somebody like, say, Ben Yalow. Indeed we have an interesting artefact showing who Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen meant when they initially complained about “SMOFS”. Here is Brad in March 2015:
“Sad Puppies 3 terrifies CHORF queen (and former TOR editor) Teresa Nielsen-Hayden because she knows that TruFans (the dyed-in-the-wool, insular, legacy group of fans who cluster about World Science Fiction Convention) are a dying breed.”
https://bradrtorgersen.blog/2015/03/30/former-tor-editor-still-longs-to-gatekeep-the-field/
Yes, that uses Brad’s made-up acronym “CHORF” but it originally used “SMOF”. As Bard explains in an addendum to the post:
“AFTERNOON EDIT: after much cogent discussion on Facebook, and in the comments, there seems to be substantial logical evidence for changing the acronym SMOF to something else; since some people use the acronym in the positive sense, versus the negative sense. And this piece is not aimed at people who simply work hard to make conventions happen. I know many people who throw a lot of work into local cons here in Utah, and though they’ve never used SMOF (that I am aware of) I don’t want to paint with a brush that’s broader than necessary. So, I would like to birth a brand new acronym into the lexicon of the field. CHORF: Cliquish Holier-than-thou Obnoxious Reactionary Fanatic. Yes, I think that fits the bill nicely. As opposed to the SMOF, who may simply be toiling with diligence, a CHORF is somebody who’s all about fan politics, being a decider of who is and is not a fan, who gets to dominate the fan cliques, who is and is not a taste-maker, and so forth.”
ibid
From time to time key Puppy figures would dally with the idea that the way the Hugo vote was administered was rigged against them, particularly when they lost, but the repeated substance of their complaint was that the MEMBERSHIP was rigged against them, i.e. it was cliques of voters and publisher buying memberships for the vast number of employees that they imagined publishers have.
So no, Larry didn’t “warn us” nor has the 2023 Hugo scandal validated the core of his complaints about the Hugo Awards.
Camestros Felapton 
72 responses to “Larry is cross that I’m not writing about him”
My favorite aspect of the morose puppers is how transparent they are: Brad uses the code word “reactionary” – which in his hard-left fellows’ vocabulary always means “someone slightly to the right of Joe Stalin,” while Larry writes books openly celebrating the killing of capitalists (starting on page 1 of his “Capitalist-Hunter Internationalist” series). These comrades would be happier in Venezuela.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m never sure any more what anyone means by “reactionary” – I mean, the original meaning was “counter-revolutionary” in the specific sense of “right-wing with a focus on actually reversing social progress, rather than just being conservative”, but in recent years it’s been very frequently used to mean just “over-reacting to stuff” or “knee-jerk.”
I’m pretty sure that’s just one of those things that happens when a word is a little specialized or high-faluting so most people just aren’t familiar with it… and then someone on the Internet uses it in a piece that’s widely read, and they try to infer the meaning from context and they make a plausible but wrong guess, and then they all start using it because it sounded cool.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Etymonline supports your understanding of the term as pertaining to the rollback of political gains.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/reactionary
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nevertheless, I agree that the meanings of words are in constant flux. Fulsome used to signify “sickening or excessive (behavior)” and over time it’s come to mean “plentiful.”
LikeLike
In both cases I’m pretty sure the reason is just that less-widely-read people weren’t familiar with the word and saw it used and made a wrong guess that was then repeated. It’s inevitable, but it’s my least favorite way for language to evolve, since the result is that a useful and colorful word is replaced by just another synonym for an idea that there were already plenty of ways to say.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Yeah, it’s one of those words where the meaning seems obvious but that’s not the meaning. I didn’t know the actual definition until I was in my 40s.
Tangentially, I was enjoying watching a bunch of reactionary John Wayne movies recently and in one, a young feller with a stick up his butt, from Yale or Harvard, calls Wayne’s character a reactionary, and when he’s called out on it says “well, gosh, that’s just what we call people like you back East” or something similar.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Like Bugs Bunny in reverse; fulsome started as essentially a signal of “A bit too much, dude” and became nicer and less mean, while Nimrod started sincere and got turned into a new word for moron.
LikeLiked by 3 people
If you can believe it, Larry has blocked me on Facebook. I don’t know why he decided to spare me from witnessing his frequent shit hemorrhages but God bless him for it.
LikeLiked by 17 people
It’s like being forced to give up smoking.
LikeLiked by 4 people
It’s more like being forced to give up diarrhea.
LikeLiked by 9 people
That would be Paul Elam who claims that he became a Mens Rights activist after having been oppressed as a kid when his mother forced him to take medicine against his diarrhea.
LikeLiked by 4 people
So he’d rather have run around with liquid poop on his ass than take a swallow of something?
Sounds about right.
LikeLiked by 5 people
He didn’t name him but I think the Chris Chupik (sp?) guy prompted his post.
LikeLike
Well, I hope Larry’s happy now!
LikeLiked by 3 people
I hope my post gives him inner peace and an answer to his inner turmoil that he has long sought after
LikeLiked by 8 people
First off, and obviously this is not Correia’s fault… wow, FB really sucks nowadays. I’m pretty sure this particular Larry Correia is the most prominent Larry Correia on Facebook, but when I searched for his name I got some accounts with 50 friends, one that was completely private (may be his private account, based on the avatar), and then variations on the correct spelling of his name. I had to search for “Larry Correia Monster Hunter” before I finally found him.
So I read the post you referenced and then one or two other previous posts about the Hugo Awards 2023 debacle. He so misrepresents what happened and what he and other people have claimed in the past that, yeah, I don’t know why anyone familiar with the subject would be interested. His narrative is so far outside of reality that it’s basically dull fanfic – his inconsistency over the years in order is just poor writing. If you’re going to write fanfic, create your own canon and stick to it!
LikeLiked by 5 people
Oops. Ping.
LikeLike
And it is basically the same post over and over again. I thought the first reaction I saw from him awhile back on Twitter was pretty smart, a gif of Nelson from the Simpson pointing and laughing. Fair game really. The Hugos screwed up and he is entitled to some schadenfreude. The rest are just garbled misunderstandings. They really aren’t very interesting even from my very, very low standards of ongoing Sad Puppy coverage 10 years after Sad Puppies 2 🙂
LikeLiked by 7 people
Anyone else automatically think “Oh John Ringo no!” when you see his name?
LikeLiked by 12 people
Actually, I have not for a long time; I must be getting forgetful (“look, I’m sorry; I know that table isn’t getting any softer, but if you keep up the blunt force trauma, eventually brain damage will set in“) but it’s just as good if not better this time around, so thank you for the reminder.
LikeLiked by 5 people
Always
LikeLiked by 4 people
My mind got right back to the last discusion about Ringos statement about that and my conclusion that time, I don’t know if that is better or worse.
Btw. even if true (which I doubt, look at the Debarkleling) it would be a human error like the MRK-case (where it was an imho wrong judgementcall, but I have not checked the rules for that time if there was another decision posible) a more dumb one, but nothing like the case we had that year.
Of course Larry is not honorable or eager enough to get the facts right.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah and even if Ringo isn’t intentionally lying, I don’t trust his recollection. Maybe it was 2002 rather than 2001 or maybe 2003 etc, maybe people who said they voted for him didn’t, maybe the eligibility thing was said by somebody not actually official etc. Their might be a better account of it somewhere but my only source for the story is Ringo’s Facebook comment from 2013
LikeLiked by 1 person
In 2013 notable Baen author John Ringo expressed a similar sense of being locked out of Hugo consideration in the early 2000’s. However, Ringo believed there was a degree of active malice towards him.
“I had twice the votes for the John Campbell nomination in 2001 as the next highest person. Mine were ‘thrown out’ since I was ‘ineligible.’ I was told ‘But John, you’ve been writing FOREVER.’ ‘My first book came out last year. I’ve published six in this time but my first book was in 2000.’ Think that was a ‘mistake’? No. It was not a ‘mistake.’”
Facebook comment 04/09/2013
Note that the “writing FOREVER” comment came from a friend of Ringo’s who — when Ringo complained about not making the Campbell list — said they themself didn’t nominate Ringo because they knew he’d been “writing FOREVER”.
It did not come from a Hugo Admin.
This was Ringo assuming that he had that many nominations. But here’s the thing:
2001 Nominations for Campbell Award:
(201 nominating ballots, 100 nominees):
(29) Kristine Smith
(28) Jo Walton
(25) Thomas Harlan
(23) Douglas Smith
(19) James L. Cambias
— final ballot complete
(17) Tobias Buckell
(15) Daniel Abraham
(14) Saira Ramasastry
(12) Jack Cohen
(12) Mindy L. Klasky
(12) Tom Gerencer
(11) Fred Lerner
(9) Diane Turnshek
(9) Lyda Morehouse
(9) Melissa Yuan-Innes
If he’d had “twice the votes”, he’d have had 58 nominations. If that was the case, there would most certainly have been hell raised by a large group of people.
This is just Ringo being an asshole who’s butthurt that he couldn’t muster even 9 people to nominate him for a Campbell Award.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Holy cow. With 9 votes, the best he could have come in was tied for 11th, and he couldn’t even muster up that. I don’t even remember half those people, and I had nominating rights that year, so turned in a ballot.
Maybe he had 58 people who possibly wanted to nominate him but never got around to it? Or at least, hmmm, 18. Including his friend who’d told him he’d been around too long to qualify in that category.
How can you tell when a Puppy or a Baen author who’s not LMB is lying? Rhetorical question, of course.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Judgment calls should be left to the voters. The Admins need to stick to the clearcut rules. If it’s not clearly disallowed, then go with the nominators. And let the final voting sort it out. Rules can be changed later if enough people think it’s an issue. Better to allow the edge case.
LikeLiked by 2 people
This is reference to MRK’s (at that time) audio-only story.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’m too lazy to go through the Construction right now but why is an audio only work disqualified? It’s still fiction, why does the media it was done in matter? It still is a certain number of words.
LikeLike
https://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/perhaps-you-noticed-that-my-novelette-lady-astronaut-of-mars-had-enough-nominations-to-make-the-hugo-ballot/ explains the details – the Hugo admins decided it wasn’t a novelette- it was a dramatic presentation, short form.
LikeLike
huh. Sort of fair given how well she does her narratives and haven’t we been talking about if audiobooks should be a seperate Hugo? I dint think so though I think more voters should be recognising that the full cast productions are legitimately Award worthy nominees such as Gaiman’s The Sandman Audible did.
LikeLike
Yes, exactly. 2013 Hugo Admins ruled it ineligible as a novelette because it was published in an audiobook anthology in 2012. They said it would have been eligible as dp-s but did not have enough nominations for that category. It had the 3rd most nominations in novelette at 61. But the lowest nominated work on the ballot in dp-s had 89 votes. In 2014 a proposal to change the wsfs constitution to explicitly allow this was passed and then ratified in 2015.
LikeLike
The story was subsequently published by Tor.com in 2013 and won Best Novelette in 2014 — The Lady Astronaut of Mars.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Which is exactly why we shouldn’t re-run the 2023 Hugo Awards or extend the eliigibility of the wrongly-disqualified works and creators. Because that sympathy vote would result in a non-natural do-over.
We need to just declare all of the wrongly-disqualified finalists as Official Finalists in the Official Records, fix WSFS so this can’t happen again, and move on.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Stongly agree about not re-doing and not extending. If we make the wrongly DQed retroactive finalists, we would also need to include Fongong Temple Pagoda and probably The Deep. We would need to ask if they accept as well. Just as they should have been asked. I would certainly understand if they wished to decline.
LikeLiked by 2 people
There’s also the question of Chen Qiufan’s Song of Fungus. Is it a novelette as Jonathan Strahan labeled the English translation? Should the votes in short story have been combined? Both Chinese and English versions were published in 2022. The validation spreadsheet shows it as the 1st short story. So that’s a complete tangle.
Plus, we have 2 winners disavowing their Hugos because they don’t believe they were true finalists. Should that be officially acknowledged?
We’ll probably never really know who or what should have been finalists. So overall I think I’m inclined to completely leave the official record as is. Concentrating on proposals to prevent anything like it from happening again.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Thereby proving even the Hugo voters are wise and merciful.
I am now re-listening to Elizabeth Bear’s Machine as it’s been long enough that though I remember the general outlines of it, I don’t remember it in detail, and I really did forget how stellar the narrator, Adjoa Andoh, is. She captures each character just right, making them feel truly individual here.
And Bear just announced on her Patreon site which is why I’m noting this:
I’m pretty excited about this book! We have pirates, Big Smart Objects, first contact, true love, parental obligations, enemies to even-worse enemies, first contact, second contact, aaaaand a trademark Elizabeth Bear snarky alien.
We also have a publication date! May 2025, in the US and UK.
I am VERY EXCITED, y’all.
But that means I had to write an author’s note thanking everybody and apologizing for the fact that between cancer, plague, and the four fucking horsemen of the fucking apocalypse, it’ll be five years between MACHINE and FOLDED SKY. Which just made my brain go fzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt, because apparently the past few years have been a lot?
LikeLiked by 4 people
The other angle is that it should be up to admins, not nominators, to hold the rules straight. Voters should be allowed to nominate something they’re not sure is eligible, and not have that vote be interpreted as an opinion that it is eligible.
LikeLike
For example? I’m not following. Of course you can nominate any dang thing you want. And yes admins should hold the rules. But if enough people nominate it to make the ballot and it’s not *clearly* outside the rules, then it should be allowed.
LikeLike
There is only one thing in life worse than being written about by Camestros Felapton, and that is not being written about by Camestros Felapton.
LikeLiked by 17 people
Larry Correia reminds me of a large jelly donut.
LikeLiked by 3 people
He shines like a shaft of gold when all around is dark.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I wish Wilde had said that
LikeLiked by 2 people
He will, Andrew, he will.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Simple future tense? No he won’t, he’s been dead for ages. I think what you’re looking for is the future perfect:
“He will have, Andrew, he will have.”
LikeLike
2105 Hugo admin team was listed as 6 people one of whom was…Dave McCarty
I’m going to assume that’s a tyop. No way anyone’s letting Dave near Hugos again that soon.
LikeLiked by 10 people
LOL – my typoitis is getting worse. I usually get numbers in the right order
LikeLiked by 2 people
No, that’s proof that McCarty wasn’t human, something I suspect given the level of his fuckery. He must be a badly done clone.
LikeLike
“I will not be ignored!” – Larry
“LOL” – Camestros
LikeLiked by 8 people
Aww, pwoor Lawwy. Does he want a puppy treat? Will that make him happy?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Aw, poor Lar-lar. Throwing his toys out of the pram again. Hear him whine.
We know that Dave was the one who (despite his stated enthusiasm for ballot tossing) kept the Pup slate on the ballot. So of course he’s all in favor of Dave! Anyone who cheats for him is A-OK. Considering Lawwy’s politics, he probably doesn’t mind that Dave also fixed the vote against Chinese works in favor of US/UK ones either.
It’s amazing how often LC is not just wrong, but fractally wrong — here it is again. Along with his usual changing of the story to suit the day. He really can’t keep a narrative straight, which kept him off the ballot all these years because the rank and file fen didn’t find his stuff worthy. Potboiler series can be fun reading, but the Hugos are a literary award, for top-quality stuff.
Regarding stuff way back to Debarkle Chapter 10, John OH NO Ringo likely had a non-book — some short story — out before that and genuinely would have been DQ’d for the Campbell by the time of that Hugo.
You don’t have to have done novels. Connie Willis, beloved of Hugo voters, was DQ’d for having a terrible short story (either Bigfoot or aliens, I forget) in one of those tabloid “confessions” papers published years before. Similarly, if OH John Ringo NO had had something in the Baen ecosystem — which has always been big in digital — out, he’d be DQ’d. Many authors make that list on the strength of nothing but their short stories, novelettes, and novellas.
I am speaking as someone whose “con-running experience” consists of a couple instances of being a gopher, once because I was new in town and figured I’d meet more people that way, once because an acquaintance needed gofers at a small media con. That one, I mostly worked as a floating checker of badges at entrance doors to panels and the huckster’s room. Extremely not SMOF.
As far as “Baen will never win a Hugo”: if the author is good enough, it will happen. See LMB. But the problem is Baen specializes in seamless yards of extruded SF/F product, which, again, while fun to read, isn’t literary. (I personally am very fond of the Manticorean Navy group — good people.) Plus they have godawful covers, no editing, and no distribution outside North America, which hampers them at Worldcon.
And when they went full MAGA (you never go full MAGA) that put paid to it. Well-read people tend to look unfavorably upon attempted coups. They tend to support peace, rights for women, PoC, non-Christians, and LGBTQ+ people. And again, potboiler series aren’t real literary, which is why LC lost his only honest nomination for the Campbell to literary guy Lev Grossman for “The Magicians” (which then got to be a five-season TV show). Ponderous style isn’t a DQ, as we see from “Three-Body Problem” (Hugo, Chinese awards, a Chinese TV show and an American one).
Good ol’ fashioned space opera still wins, as seen by the nominations and wins for “James SA Corey” in both book (Best Series) and TV (6 seasons). That is the good stuff.
And finally, on the topic of award fails and unknown method of vote counting:
Hey, Larry! How’d inventing the Dragon Award work out for you?
LikeLiked by 5 people
The Dragon Award… Hahaha…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Re John Ringo: For the novel his first year was in 2001, we don’t have any record of him being on the longlist.
2002 John Ringo was on the longlist with 17 nominations.
His claim of the books out, would fit more for 2003 were he was no longer a candidate for the Astounding Award.
His statement does also fit more with an a fanreaction then an answer to a disqualification, of which we have no prove that it happened at all.
Sorry but this all went trough my mind when I heared the Ringoclaim.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I didn’t think to check 2002! Yes, I think he is probably misremembering a comment from 2003 and confusing that with 2001. He gets on the longlist in 2002 and hears that you get two years and so tries to get more votes in 2003 but he’s actually ineligible and the whole thing gets mangled in his head.
LikeLiked by 3 people
17 votes still wouldn’t have gotten him on the ballot for 2001, as we see by the stats above.
He had a first year of eligibility (2001) where he didn’t make the list, the second (2002) when he did, and there aren’t any more chances at the Campbell/Astounding. You can only be a New Writer for 2 years. His friend was quite right to note that nobody would bother nominating him in 2003, since he was no longer eligible.
And he NEVER had twice the votes of anyone else, except in his fuzzy head.
LikeLike
Baen’s terrible covers, distribution and editing issues are actually harming the genuinely good books they publish along with their extruded military SF product.
“Lord of the Shattered Land” by Howard Andrew Jones is genuinely good and on my Best Novel ballot for 2024, but lots of people never even checked it out because it’s Baen.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I just took it out from the library based solely on your recommendation. As I’ve said before, I check out the Baen site periodically to see what they’re offering, and I haven’t bought anything for a while. It may just be that all the boob-a-licious cover art puts me off. Well, that and all the quasi-fascist writers they seem to publish.
LikeLiked by 2 people
It is a shame he could only get published there.
They do have a few good series, as we see with Miles and the Liadens (so sad about Steve) but Baen’s the 4th publisher for Liaden, so they already had a following.
Bujold was lucky to start before the house went completely fascist so people picked it up, loved Miles (who IIRC first appeared in Asimov’s) and she was fine after that. Penric comes out in ebook from her agency first, which where everyone I know reads them. The ebooks for the Vorkosigan books now have simple graphic covers, no more embarrassments (like, ack! “Warrior’s Apprentice”) and even her later Baen books got blocky industrial non-boob ones.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Also published by Baen, but not as an original publisher (like the LIadens)? Godstalk.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I had a very long and good laugh when Scalzi won a Dragon award.
LikeLiked by 5 people
I did too. Thought briefly of making schadenfreude pie, but realized Mr. LT and I didn’t need the sugar. Our hearty laughs were treat enough.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Lol, as we’ve already noted, the mess-up vote rigging that Dave & others did at Chendgu was both contradictory & both in ways that go against what and who the Puppies claimed had taken over and rigged the Hugos voting.
Dave first knocked out authors as ineligible who were exactly the type of author the Puppies claimed were being unfairly favored in rigged voting — Gaiman, Kuang, Paul, etc. The type of authors they called evil SJW’s, unpopular, off-putting, ruining the entire SFFH field with their wokeness. Kuang in particular is a model of everything the Puppies claimed to hate.
Dave & co. then rigged the votes to throw out ballots and kick off Chinese authors — not white, men Americans, but them foreigners whose government he was at the same time supposedly trying to appease. He did so in order to favor mainly white, mainly American “western” authors on the ballots.
Dave acted, in other words, exactly like a Puppy. Which is indeed ironic, given that in 2016, Dave apparently wanted to throw the Puppy slate nominees off the Hugo ballots before being reminded that this was against the rules. And when he got in full charge of the most sensitive WorldCon Hugos they’ve ever had, he went full Puppy, getting rid of problematic (kind of) lefties the Puppies hate and Chinese foreign authors, throwing out Chinese fans’ votes, exactly how the “let’s go back to some imaginary manly white man past of the Hugos” Puppies would have applauded in 2016. He essentially sort of fulfilled their dream (though I doubt they’d have wanted Ursula to win Best Novel.)
But as I predicted, the Puppies have decided that since the Hugo votes got rigged in 2023, then it was rigged before, against conservatives, just as they claimed with no evidence they could ever logically produce. Because that’s how it works in conservative land — if someone who is among their enemies list or supposedly affiliated with their enemies list messes up, then every conspiracy theory they’ve proposed must be true. They are good, those not like them are bad.
And therefore the Puppies should be displayed prominently in this controversy, to their minds, because they said the Hugos were rotten. That the Hugos were not rotten back then and proved it in response to their Puppy campaigns is immaterial to them. In 2023, the Hugos were rotten due to the abuse of power of a few, confused, racist folk in a situation the Hugos hadn’t quite had to deal with before. And therefore the Puppy leaders are important and right, really they are, and people should pay attention to them. But really they aren’t, except that they and Dave share the same problem — the absolute certainty that certain people who are not white westerners and/or have liberal views about diversity and civil rights must be controlled and ousted because that’s what the people supposedly truly want. Which is a false notion, then and now.
LikeLiked by 8 people
It’s not just the puppies. Quite a few people on the left now alos believe that the Hugo nominations and votes have also been rigged, because that book, story or person they liked never made the ballot, which has to be a conspiracy.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Naw, just institutionalized discriminatory bias (though quite a few folk on the “Left” are also discriminatorily biased towards various marginalized groups.) It’s right to complain about Hugo nominees and those who didn’t make the list, especially in terms of dominant dominance — it’s tradition and it’s part of the usefulness of awards — they raise awareness of books through the winners, the finalists and the discussions that occur about who didn’t make the finalists but some think totally should have. (Something, as we know, the Puppies never really understood except as a market prize they thought they could use for their own individual aggrandizement.)
The Hugos’ transparency with voting data has also been useful for raising awareness of lots of books that made the long list each year but not the short one. It’s let folk know exactly what was voted for. Which is why when the stats were clearly messed up in 2023, with mysterious ineligibility expulsions to boot, folk right away knew it was wrong and questioned it.
Could someone more subtly rig the voting data of the Hugos, release that data on time and have it not raise red flags with the folk who pour over the data? Theoretically. But as we’ve had confirmed with the 2023 scandal, the folks regularly involved in administering the Hugo Awards and the data are not data wizards. Dave, whose day job is professional number cruncher, made such a hash of it, he created a giant, glaring data cliff.
So to say, well they must have been rigged in the past too — especially without taking in the particular and varied voting contingent that comes with each WorldCon’s location — is again making a claim based on emotion rather than evidence from facts like hinky numbers and email chains from times past. Hugo folk are freaking relentless about stuff like that — you know they don’t just accept what they’re told. (As the Puppies discovered.) Whereas the rigging done in 2023 was full of evidence, especially after enough questions were raised to get one of them to cough up the emails. The extent and audacity of it was shocking — because it’s stuff that hasn’t been done with the Hugos before, and would not have been possible except for the WorldCon being in China, with difficult circumstances, and for Dave being put in charge and given full reign by his fellows.
That could potentially happen again, but I doubt it could be managed till way down the road. Because all parts of the process are going to be double scrutinized in the business meetings and people running the awards committee far more challenged about what they are doing. Indeed, the Scottish WorldCon is showing exactly that, as a white hot spotlight shines down on them.
Larry got to be a hometown boy because of where that year’s WorldCon was held, which helped get him a rare and coveted Campbell nom. (Just like the Chinese authors who were nominated for Hugos at the Chinese WorldCon did before they got tossed off the ballots by Dave.) He lost to a bigger, more widely known bestseller than him at that time in his career, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a big achievement that likely brought him more readers by raising awareness of his work. But he’s someone who must always be claiming more and more dominance to fill rabid insecurity. So of course he’s going to try to insert himself in the second Hugo controversy of recent years and claim he predicted it. And of course he will always claim that he was horribly (fuzzily) wronged.
LikeLiked by 2 people
[…] 02-24-2024: Camestros Felapton notes that Larry Correia is cross that neither Cam nor anybody else is talking ab…. Of course, Larry also gets cross when people he doesn’t like do write about him, since […]
LikeLike
[…] (5) MEANWHILE, BACK AT 2014. Camestros Felapton says, “Larry is cross that I’m not writing about him”. […]
LikeLike
Correia actually had the gall to post that the reason he started Sad Puppies was to fight against the PRC, and that he predicted this from the start. Then, he threw some choice insults at GRRM- despite GRRM having treated him with nothing but respect.
The truth is a lot more brutal- and it can be confirmed from his own words.
Correia is a poor writer, and he makes it worse by having an ego the size of Texas.
He is also an angry, violent bully who enjoys treating others like crap. He genuinely thinks he is better than 99% of people, simply because he exists. He is the living, breathing embodiment of “might makes right”. And don’t even think about treating him in the same way, or he’ll attempt to paint you as a criminal.
He was like this long before the Sad Puppies. And when all those poisonous traits come together, it’s no surprise that all the people he crapped on weren’t going to vote for him. The only argument his lapdogs can come up with is, “hE oWnS a MoUnTaIn!”.
Sci-fi/fantasy is a living, breathing thing. Correia and crew are the dingleberries on the asshole hairs of it.
LikeLiked by 3 people
It’s especially hilarious when he talks trash about other more successful authors like GRRM or Steven King. Like, dude, those guys are sitting on piles of money from adaptations alone and have broken into the public conscious to the point where even non-readers will recognize them by name. Larry may have a mountain, but George and Stephen can buy dozens of mountains if they wanted to.
Dude really shouldn’t be throwing stones.
LikeLike
But the London committee appears to be totally honest. Great.
Should that be interpreted as a statement of fact/opinion, or as sarcasm? I’d need more context to make a judgement call.
LikeLike
There’s a different longer quote on Larry’s blog in which the “former auditor” totally endorses the 2014 stats. So it wasn’t sarcasm.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The SF world is poorer for having him in it, but accurate accounting and statistics are much better off.
How someone who was an accountant has so completely failed at statistics and percentages is mind-boggling. I never studied either and even I can catch his errors. He can’t even calculate percentages, which any tween with a calculator has been able to do instantly since the 70s.
And before that, sports neepery required it — how else could baseball generate all those stats that boys in my youth knew? Back when baseball was still the major sport and football was just coming on, I have a vivid memory of my math teacher actually giving a lecture and homework about percentage/stats using baseball! So we pored over the newspaper listings, esp. of our local AAA team, and everyone grasped the concept, using only paper and pencil. Batting a thousand!
So is Larry, uber-patriot, unfamiliar with America’s Pastime?!
LikeLike
Mike, I did quite like the headline you gave his story in yesterday’s Pixel Scroll.
LikeLike
[…] was right” narrative among former Puppies. It is a line that Larry Correia has been pushing himself in an attempt to make the current Hugo Awards scandal a kind of vindication of his original culture […]
LikeLike