dead dog party

[calimac]

What must have been the first feature-length post-Hugos article - it's date-stamped 10 AM on Sunday, and I read it that afternoon - appeared on Wired. I found it rather dismaying. Though it's not superficially a polemic, and it discusses both sides, it seems to me to have a strong pro-Puppy slant. Others have noted how it begins with a portrait of a prelapsarian Puppy-ideal paradise - one in which "the Gods of the genre" who won Hugos were all male, before "recent years, as sci-fi has expanded to include storytellers who are women, gays and lesbians, and people of color."

Fortunately, Amanda Marcotte has read the article and seen through the Puppy rhetoric for the right-wing populist privilege-hogging that it is, but this is based mostly on how much it occurs to her that Brad Torgersen sounds like Donald Trump. Marcotte doesn't address what strike me as the deeper problems with the article, which allows both Torgersen and Correia to have their say at length without much rebuttal. Even Annie Bellet's corrosive analysis of the movement - she's trying to put interstellar lengths of distance between herself and Puppydom in revulsion at how close she'd allowed herself to get in the past - isn't in direct response to what they say.

Amy Wallace, the article's author, appears to have been lulled into thinking Torgersen and Correia to be reasonable guys, and only Beale is vile. Bellet's words inadvertently reinforce that. The article doesn't address the noxious behavior of these "reasonable guys." There's nothing about the huge gap between their claim of noble aspirations of good old storytelling and the hopeless crap they put in some of the ballot slots. (Only anti-Puppy fiction is allowed to be called sometimes "unreadable".) There's nothing about the Spokane PD, either. Torgersen is allowed, without challenge, a pre-emptive defense against charges of racism by once again playing his favorite tired-out and specious card that he's somehow exempt from such charges because he's white while his wife is black. That's about as logical as claiming that he can't be sexist because she's a woman. If Torgersen's claim means anything, it's that a white man who married a black woman is not the first place you'd expect to find toxic prejudice. But Torgersen himself is proof that this expectation is wrong!

I see from both here and elsewhere that the Puppy line on the No Award wins is to denounce it as a "scorched earth strategy". That's a change: pre-Worldcon, what the Puppies denounced was the "nuclear option" of No Award all across the board. I don't think they expected to get such a narrow and specific denunciation - John C. Wright is fuming about being deprived of his "rightful" awards, when he didn't even come in second in any category - but Beale is still pursuing his delusion that no matter what happens, he wins. That's true only in the sense that he already caused the damage, back in April when the nominations came out. The pending question was only how much more damage he'd be allowed to get away with. In the end he was cauterized very neatly. He "won" only in the sense that an arsonist can claim he "won" by pointing to the burned corner of the building even if the fire department showed up promptly and prevented the damage from spreading. As Mike Glyer pointed out, no, it wasn't an optimal outcome. It was, however, the least bad one in the circumstances.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I read the same Wired article, I think, and it seemed to me to be very strongly slanted against the Sad Puppies. The passages about the days when sf writers were all white men seemed not merely to be a coded way of saying "Here is the view of a bunch of racists and sexists" but to be a heavy-handed way of doing so, to the point where it didn't even occur to me that anyone could read it differently; there was a feeling of "nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more" about it. So it's informative for me to see you reading it exactly the opposite way.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The problem is that there are people who really believe that sort of thing. I see it in Puppy rhetoric all the time. You can't count on the reader to know that it's ridiculous. The rest of the article is full of Puppy mouthing off without any indication that it's flawed in this regard, particularly egregiously the quote from the unnamed rank&file Puppy who calls some non-Puppy SF "unreadable", a judgment endorsed by the author ("a certain academic torpor"), without any suggestion that there might be an argument that what the Puppies inflicted on us in its place was truly awful. I was not very inspired by the short fiction the year I last voted for the Hugos (2011), but even I thought that 11 out of 14 Puppy-sponsored short fiction nominees this year were far worse, entirely unworthy of any award. I don't believe the article refrained from expressing such an opinion merely because the author expected the readers already to know that.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Someone else who doesn't think the article was kidding.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I don't read the article the way you do. I suppose it's possible that it's because I spoke to the author a couple of times during the convention, once just before the Business Meeting, and again while I was photographing this year's Hugo trophy in the exhibits area. (The picture I took and initially posted on the Hugo site I've since replaced with a professionally-shot photo supplied by the designer.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately most of its readers will not have had the extra-textual privilege of meeting the author.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Well, I haven't met the author either. But your reading of the article struck me as astonishingly different from what I took away from it. So I don't think having met the author is required.

There seem to be two different questions here. One is, "Did the author intend to write an article that was advocating the views of the Sad Puppies group?" The other is, "Did the author write an article that could be understood as advocating those views, especially by an uninformed reader?" Your original point, "a strong pro-Puppy slant," clearly asserts the first, but this last comment, about what "most of its readers" will or won't understand, shifts the focus to the second. I don't think it makes any point about the first.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No, I made no claims as to what the author intended to do. What I assert is what she did. Possibly unintentionally, as the article was not a polemic. It was just biased. Bias is often unintentional.

You asserted that this impression was meant sarcastically. I responded by giving evidence of lack of sarcasm in giving the same impression elsewhere in the article.

Kevin asserted that this was not the author's meaning. (Possibly erroneously, though I can't say for sure, but reporters are very good at dissembling their true feelings to interviewees. See the character of Mr. Press in The Enchanted Duplicator for a situation often repeated in the early days of fandom. I can say that, as a professional concert reviewer, that if I meet a performer at the post-concert reception, I am not going to tell her about negative comments that will appear in my review.) I responded to Kevin that the author's extra-textual meaning is not available to most readers. This is true whether or not the reader reads the viewpoint as being sarcastic.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Well, to me that read as "the sarcasm represents either intentional slanting of the meaning, or the author's bias emerging unconsciously." An author doesn't have to write a total polemic to do either of those things. In fact a rhetorical attack is likely to be more effective if it's framed as not being all-out hostile—which in fact seems to be your interpretation of Correia's approach, so I don't know why you would think no one could be doing it from the other side.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

What on earth gave you the impression that I "would think no one could be doing it from the other side"? Of course someone could do it from the other side. What I don't believe is that this particular article is meant as a sarcastic attack on the Puppies. What you cited as sarcasm struck me as far too subtle and obscure to communicate such a meaning to most readers, and hence far more likely to be meant sincerely since we know people do talk sincerely that way, people whom the article elsewhere quotes without any rebuttal and even with implied endorsement.

[(Anonymous)]

I only read Wallace's article after reading your post, so I was surprised to find that it seems to be to be plainly anti-Puppy, with Bellet and Martin as the heroes of Wallace's piece, although yes, she probably works too hard to be fair to the Puppy's point of view. I see nothing in Marcotte's follow-up to indicate that she thinks otherwise of Wallace's take. And Berlatsky writes that, one errant sentence aside, Wallace's is an "otherwise excellent article". (And while this is extra-textual, I see from Wallace's website that she is re-tweeting comments from people who are tweeting anti-Puppy quotes by the subjects of her article.)

-MTD/neb

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Bellet's position is that Torgersen has been hijacked by Beale. She doesn't say anything about the fallacies in his own arguments. That's why I wrote that what she says "isn't in direct response".

Martin has posted online some entirely direct rebuttals to the Puppy arguments presented here. None of this is quoted. What he's quoted in the article as making is more general arguments which wash over the larger position without addressing the specific Puppy charges. Then it says that Martin "acknowledges that some Sad Puppy claims have merit"! Do the Sads ever admit that the anti-Puppy claims have any merit?

No, sorry, this is a pro-Puppy article.

As for Marcotte, she spends her column pointing out grotesqueries in the Puppy rhetoric that Wallace doesn't note. That's the whole point that Marcotte is making, to bring that fact into the equation, because Wallace didn't. Wallace has made an important omission that Marcotte wishes to rectify; if that's not implying that Wallace's article is deficient, I don't know what would be.