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

[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.