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theweaselkingFor the second year in a row, neo-Nazis have abused a loophole to put garbage onto the Hugo ballot, displacing nominees that were actually voted for by people who genuinely thought they were good. This year, though, instead of JUST a stream of bigoted effluvia, they've also included a handful of nominees that were good and had buzz as maybe getting onto the ballot legitimately on their own.
So I'm doing something slightly different than my rules for last year - instead of No Awarding all the neo-Nazi picks, I'm comparing them to the worst of my own picks. If something dropped onto the ballot by the white supremacist vandals is good enough that I would have considered nominating it myself had I seen it during the nomination period, it goes above No Award.
Same as last year, I'm doing breakdowns with my thoughts.
Okay, let's start with some easy ones. As it turns out I basically did the whole thing in reverse order.
Best Fan Artist:
Only one legit nominee, Steve Stiles. And his works are included in the sample pack, and they are.... okay. Not actually good. Certainly not as good as many other fan artists I've seen, so NOPE.
Matthew Callahan: Nazi pick, his sample is photographs of Star Wars toys. Several are blurry and poorly framed, although a couple are decent. Still, they're clearly toys, and not great.
Ku Kuru Yo: Nazi pick, child pornographer, misogynist harasser. Art is generic anime "erotica", identical to a million other teenagers on the internet. At least he didn't include any of his kiddy porn in the voting packet, or, if he did, MidAmericon cut it out. (As will become apparent in a later category, the Sadly Rabids attempted to include child porn in other categories. They might have tried it here.)
"disse86": Nazi pick, no sample included. No award.
Christian Quinot : Nazi pick, no sample included. No award.
So, my ballot:
1) No Award
2) Steve Stiles
Campell Not A Hugo:
1) Alyssa Wong. I nominated her myself, and she's excellent.
Of the rest: All Nazi picks.
Andy Weir's The Martian was good.
I'd never heard of Sebastian De Castell - he seems a decent sort but I was bored of his book by the end of the first chapter.
Brian Niemeier included two novels in the packet - I started Nethereal and nearly tossed it across the room *in the "principal characters"* section he included before chapter 1. I got two pages in regardless before bailing - it's overwrought and full of Portentious Capitalisation.
And Pierce Brown didn't include anything in the packet, and the description of his book marks it clearly as Not My Thing.
So:
2) Andy Weir
3) No Award
Fan Writer:
1) Mike Glyer is the only legit nominee and File770 is excellent.
2) No Award
All four of the remaining picks are Sadly Rabid choices, and they're awful.
Jeffro Johnson .... ugh. We're going to see him a few more times on this ballot. Just like last year, he's not a good writer, not a strong thinker, not a very strong reader, and has a bunch of generally bigoted assumptions about the world - and he hangs out with people who encourage him to not read or think well. Again, we'll see a lot more of this in the rest of the ballot, but as much as I feel sorry for him, that doesn't make him Best Anything.
Douglas Ernst: His packet inclusions are a short and uninteresting review of Ant-Man, a fawning review of the TRAILER to Batman V Superman, a short and facile essay on how people who warn you that you're getting weird and creepy are just holding you back, a one-page review of The Force Awakens that misses everything in the movie, and half a page on how The Twilight Zone was, like, sometimes a good show or something. Want to know sad? I can't tell if he's a better or worse writer or thinker than Johnson, because there's no *there* there. There's no content to actually review.
Morgan Holmes: His Hugo Packet is nothing but *lists of things*. He reviews an anthology? He counts pages and lists the publisher. He wants to talk about Analog magazine in the 1960s? He lists a bunch of things that were published in Analog. He wants to put together a hypothetical anthology? He lists what he would include and where it was first published. This Hugo Packet makes me yearn for the halcyon days of yore, 15 minutes ago, when I was reading Jeffro Johnson and being annoyed that what he was saying was dumb - at least he was saying SOMETHING.
Shamus Young: A novel-length (literally) scene by scene description of a playthrough of Mass Effect. Where the depth of his added commentary is along the lines that he sympathises with Ashley's xenophobia because aren't the aliens just DICKS sometimes?
The problem here isn't like last year, where the Sadly Rabid neo-Nazis picked poorly-formatted screaming bigotry to feature. This year, their picks (except Johnson) avoid the problem of bad thinking by simply not containing any thinking at all.
Fancast:
Five Sadly Rabid picks, no content in the voter packet, ain't nobody got time to listen to hours and hours of A/V content on such *thrilling* topics as "what Youtube Commenters have to say about Star Wars" and "audio Let's Plays of console games", curated by the kind of people who think Ted Beale is smart.
1) NO AWARD.
Fanzine:
Four Sadly Rabid picks, and Lady Business which got in when Black Gate said fuck this shit I'm out. There's some spoilers in the mix this time. The aforementioned File770 blog, for example, has been consistently good.
The Lady Business Hugo packet starts poorly - a dry chart-filled analysis of awards by gender that's interesting but not great writing, but then it starts actual articles and it's quite good.
Tangent makes the critical mistake of including an endorsement for the Sadly Rabids in their packet, showing that either they were dumb enough to accept the lie that it wasn't going to be a "real slate" this year and that the Sadly Rabids were more than vandals, or they were in on the con and deliberately trying to spread the lie.
Subversive SF didn't include anything in the Hugo packet. Not a legit nominee + didn't try = doesn't want the award.
Finally we have the Swastika Press Blog, edited by the aforementioned "overthinking, poorly and at length" author Jeffro Johnson. They decided not to include most of the overtly racist and sexist content they're most famous for, but that stuff's there on the website if you want to find it and would be a vote-killer even if this packet was amazing. And the packet is.... not amazing. It's just some game reviews, some non-too-bright opinions on RPGs, and a WHOLE LOTTA COMMENT SECTION. Why they thought the comment section of a white supremacist vanity press was likely to impress Hugo voters, I doubt I'll ever know.
So:
1) Lady Business
2) File770
3) No Award
Semipro Zine:
Four Sadly Rabid picks, three of them legit choices and one with a bunch of really unfortunate author choices who included "in defense of genocide" in their Hugo packet.
So, since Sci Phi Journal goes below No Award, that means I need to rank the other four.
1) Uncanny takes top spot because it contains several works I either nominated myself or considered nominating, by Ursula Vernon and Amal El-Mohtar and Cat Valente, as well as several other excellent works. And, it's the only legit nominee, which settles my internal argument about whether I should put it first or second against....
2) Daily Science Fiction gets second spot because I spent a lot of time last year reading it. It published a LOT of good stuff.
3) Strange Horizons
4) Beneath Ceaseless Skies
5) No Award
Best Pro Artist:
Five Sadly Rabid picks: 4 hostages and the Swastika Press house artist.
Ranking the hostages:
1) Michal Karcz. I'm a sucker for his kind of photorealistic work.
2) Abigail Larson. Shades of Edward Gorey. Her packet inclusions are excellent.
3) Larry Elmore doesn't need a Hugo win, but he still goes above No Award. The man's a legend.
4) No Award
5) Larry Rostant - generic "person in a costume stares out of the book cover" art. Well executed but so, so, SO generic.
Editor Long:
I hate this category. I always hate this category.
Liz Gorinsky and Sheila Gilbert got onto the ballot legitimately, and Sheila Gilbert is not good at editing but she's a bad EDITOR, not a bad chooser-of-books-to-publish or a bad person.
1) Liz Gorinsky
2) No Award
3) Sheila Gilbert
Editor Short:
I also hate this category. It's easier than Long Form because the editor's choice of works is much clearer, but gets harder again because I *hate* anthologies of short fiction. I just can't stand reading them through, and that ruins a lot of the editor's EFFECT.
Four legitimate choices and Jerry Pournelle, who spent the year picking and choosing fic for Swastika Press. His Hugo packet contribution, notably, contains a short story by one of the three published Baen authors who've had drunken racist meltdowns in my comments section, so there's that.
1-4: I'm going to roll dice or flip coins between the four non-Pournelle choices.
5) No Award.
Best Dramatic Short:
Here's one of the first categories where my rules become a nasty filter: in order for an entrant to be considered above No Award, it needs to be as good as my own choices. And my own choices in this category included Rick And Morty and One Minute Time Machine.
1) Jessica Jones "AKA Smile" <- one of my own nominees!
2) No award
Doctor Who is unwatchable crap and should never be nominated for anything by anyone - and this episode in particular was touted as the best of the season, and was TERRIBLE. Grimm is usually boring and this episode was no exception. This wasn't even close to being the best Supernatural of the year, and Supernatural is no Rick And Morty. And My Little Pony is, as a kid's show, nowhere near as good as Gravity Falls or Steven Universe, and *they* aren't as good as Rick And Morty.
Best Dramatic Long:
1) Fury Road, duh. If it doesn't take an overwhelming majority in the first round, something is DEEPLY wrong with the Hugo voting crowd. I mean, like, MORE wrong than their perpetual weird obsession with shitty British skiffy.
The rest of the category suffers from this being an AMAZING year for candidates - in order for the Sadly Rabid picks of The Martian and Age Of Ultron to make it on, they'd have to be as good, in my estimation, as Jessica Jones Season 1, Rick And Morty Season 2, Inside Out, or It Follows.
And, uh, The Martian kinda was. Despite Matt Damon.
2) The Martian
3) No Award
4) Age Of Ultron
5) Ex Machina
6) Star Wars The Hot Stinky Mess Of JJ Abrams Poop
Even the three I put below No Award here weren't AWFUL, mostly. Star Wars suffered from JJ Abrams being terrible at everything having to do with making films, but Disney nearly saved it in spite of that.
Graphic Novel:
These are all pretty bad. Yes, even the Gaiman. None of them are as good as my picks.
1) No Award
Related Work:
Whoo boy. Remember that bit I said earlier about the Sadly Rabids trying to put child pornography in the Hugo packet? That's why Safe Space As Rape Room isn't included.
So let's just start this out by saying
1) No Award
and then go down the rest of the list.
Moira Greyland: Leaving aside that it's published at a proudly hypermisogynist website, this short essay comes in two parts. Part 1: "Why Moira Greyland's parents were horrible people, serial child molesters protected by fandom because, as famous/important True Fans(tm), they could do no wrong". Horrifying, very true, and a scathing indictment of the guilty parties. Except Moira Greyland doesn't appear to know who the guilty parties ARE, as we see in Part 2: "Homosexuals are responsible for all the evil in the world and my parents were child molesters because they were homosexual and thus all homosexuals should be killed."
Safe Space: Discussions of how social groups protect predators, and how someone with a big name is allowed great leeway to get away with monstrous acts? Important, and a discussion that needs to be had. However, it needs to be had with honest actors who aren't disingenuously attempting to score political points in pursuit of a bigoted agenda. Which is to say, not this work.
Appendix N: And here we get into the nuts and bolts of why I referred to Jeffro Johnson, earlier, as a weak reader, poor writer, and not very strong thinker. He's just... bland. And this is him going through a crapton of old fantasy novels, misunderstanding some of the basic details about them, and explaining how they influenced tabletop RPGs/could be expressed in RPG terms. Yes, that's his giant work.
"Between Light and Shadow - An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951-1986" - first, I give no shits about Gene Wolfe. Second, Marc Aramini himself says this work was unpublishable, it's not in a fit state for printing and no real publisher would touch it, which is why it's on Swastika Press. He also cheerfully admitted that there's no chance in HELL it would have gotten anywhere near an award without being brigaded onto the ballot by the white supremacists, misogynist, harassers, and generally garbage people that he considers his closest personal friends.
Since the author says the book is unpublishable crap that doesn't deserve a spot on the ballot, I believe him.
OK, I'm FINALLY down to the fiction noms.
Short Story:
Nasty category for the Sadly Rabids, because to get onto my ballot their work has to be as good as Naomi Kritzer's "Cat Pictures, Please" and.... oh wait, there it is, right there.
1) Cat Pictures, Please
As for the rest:
Seven Kill Tiger gets two paragraphs in before declaring that all African people are thieves, robbers, and rapists, and the entire rest of the story is about how genocide of all dark-skinned people is the only sensible reaction because they're incapable of civilisation. Published, unsurprisingly, by Swastika Press.
Space Raptor Butt Invasion: Deliberately awful gay porn, cleverly written to be funny in the note-perfect character of a terrible fanfic writer. And Chuck Tingle has been mocking the shit out of the homophobic assholes who nominated him, in hilarious fashion.... but that doesn't make this story *good*.
Asymmetrical Warfare: Loses points for the pun in the title. Telegraphs the punchline way early. Nowhere NEAR as good as Cat Pictures or Steve Rogers, PR Disaster.
If You Were An Award, My Love: yet another example of the Sadly Rabids' obsession with harassing Rachel Swirsky for having the temerity to be a woman and write a story they didn't like.
2) No Award
3) Asymmetrical Warfare
Novellette and Novella: I'm not done these yet. They're the worst combination of "not long enough to hold my attention like a novel, too long to finish quickly like a short story", which is a constant problem for me in this category regardless of the quality.
Novel:
The lack of a nomination for The Traitor Baru Cormorant is a travesty, and it's the index book I'm using for "illegitimate nominee, were you as good as this book? No? no award" in this category.
Ancillary Mercy: One of the best novels of the year. Not my first choice, but I nominated it and of my nominees that made the ballot it's my favourite.
The Fifth Season: Brought down out of first place ONLY because of how much it feels like the first part of a story (which, of course, it is) - but that feeling is so strong that it harms the book as a standalone.
The Aeronaut's Windlass: Hot stinky donkey poop, and I usually like Jim Butcher. Utter garbage, I wallbooked it several chapters in and feel no desire to ever return.
Seveneves: I described it as "perfectly entertaining if you like physics, hate all other sciences, and hate endings". I maintain that opinion. I don't regret the time I spent reading it (And what other book has a scene where Hillary Clinton kills and eats Phil Plait?) but I'd never read it again, wouldn't nominate it for a Hugo, and it's NOWHERE NEAR as good as The Traitor Baru Cormorant.
Uprooted: I noped out of this one early, for many of the same reasons that Foz Meadows did. I can see why people like it, but those people are not me.
So:
1) Ancillary Mercy
2) The Fifth Season
3) No Award
4) Seveneves
5) Uprooted
EDIT: Oh yeah, there's the retro-Hugos too.
Retro-Hugos should not be a thing. We're incapable of experiencing the available works as someone in the appropriate year would, the "dramatic" categories often contain works that CANNOT be experienced at all (let alone experienced as someone from the correct period would), and seriously, they nominated a guy who died in 1937 for the work he did AS A FAN in 1940. Notably, the only writing anyone can find with his name on it from THREE YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH is a short story, not fan writing.
My entire ballot is 1) No Award.
If you've made it all the way to here, have The Hugo Post Kitty.
So I'm doing something slightly different than my rules for last year - instead of No Awarding all the neo-Nazi picks, I'm comparing them to the worst of my own picks. If something dropped onto the ballot by the white supremacist vandals is good enough that I would have considered nominating it myself had I seen it during the nomination period, it goes above No Award.
Same as last year, I'm doing breakdowns with my thoughts.
Okay, let's start with some easy ones. As it turns out I basically did the whole thing in reverse order.
Best Fan Artist:
Only one legit nominee, Steve Stiles. And his works are included in the sample pack, and they are.... okay. Not actually good. Certainly not as good as many other fan artists I've seen, so NOPE.
Matthew Callahan: Nazi pick, his sample is photographs of Star Wars toys. Several are blurry and poorly framed, although a couple are decent. Still, they're clearly toys, and not great.
Ku Kuru Yo: Nazi pick, child pornographer, misogynist harasser. Art is generic anime "erotica", identical to a million other teenagers on the internet. At least he didn't include any of his kiddy porn in the voting packet, or, if he did, MidAmericon cut it out. (As will become apparent in a later category, the Sadly Rabids attempted to include child porn in other categories. They might have tried it here.)
"disse86": Nazi pick, no sample included. No award.
Christian Quinot : Nazi pick, no sample included. No award.
So, my ballot:
1) No Award
2) Steve Stiles
Campell Not A Hugo:
1) Alyssa Wong. I nominated her myself, and she's excellent.
Of the rest: All Nazi picks.
Andy Weir's The Martian was good.
I'd never heard of Sebastian De Castell - he seems a decent sort but I was bored of his book by the end of the first chapter.
Brian Niemeier included two novels in the packet - I started Nethereal and nearly tossed it across the room *in the "principal characters"* section he included before chapter 1. I got two pages in regardless before bailing - it's overwrought and full of Portentious Capitalisation.
And Pierce Brown didn't include anything in the packet, and the description of his book marks it clearly as Not My Thing.
So:
2) Andy Weir
3) No Award
Fan Writer:
1) Mike Glyer is the only legit nominee and File770 is excellent.
2) No Award
All four of the remaining picks are Sadly Rabid choices, and they're awful.
Jeffro Johnson .... ugh. We're going to see him a few more times on this ballot. Just like last year, he's not a good writer, not a strong thinker, not a very strong reader, and has a bunch of generally bigoted assumptions about the world - and he hangs out with people who encourage him to not read or think well. Again, we'll see a lot more of this in the rest of the ballot, but as much as I feel sorry for him, that doesn't make him Best Anything.
Douglas Ernst: His packet inclusions are a short and uninteresting review of Ant-Man, a fawning review of the TRAILER to Batman V Superman, a short and facile essay on how people who warn you that you're getting weird and creepy are just holding you back, a one-page review of The Force Awakens that misses everything in the movie, and half a page on how The Twilight Zone was, like, sometimes a good show or something. Want to know sad? I can't tell if he's a better or worse writer or thinker than Johnson, because there's no *there* there. There's no content to actually review.
Morgan Holmes: His Hugo Packet is nothing but *lists of things*. He reviews an anthology? He counts pages and lists the publisher. He wants to talk about Analog magazine in the 1960s? He lists a bunch of things that were published in Analog. He wants to put together a hypothetical anthology? He lists what he would include and where it was first published. This Hugo Packet makes me yearn for the halcyon days of yore, 15 minutes ago, when I was reading Jeffro Johnson and being annoyed that what he was saying was dumb - at least he was saying SOMETHING.
Shamus Young: A novel-length (literally) scene by scene description of a playthrough of Mass Effect. Where the depth of his added commentary is along the lines that he sympathises with Ashley's xenophobia because aren't the aliens just DICKS sometimes?
The problem here isn't like last year, where the Sadly Rabid neo-Nazis picked poorly-formatted screaming bigotry to feature. This year, their picks (except Johnson) avoid the problem of bad thinking by simply not containing any thinking at all.
Fancast:
Five Sadly Rabid picks, no content in the voter packet, ain't nobody got time to listen to hours and hours of A/V content on such *thrilling* topics as "what Youtube Commenters have to say about Star Wars" and "audio Let's Plays of console games", curated by the kind of people who think Ted Beale is smart.
1) NO AWARD.
Fanzine:
Four Sadly Rabid picks, and Lady Business which got in when Black Gate said fuck this shit I'm out. There's some spoilers in the mix this time. The aforementioned File770 blog, for example, has been consistently good.
The Lady Business Hugo packet starts poorly - a dry chart-filled analysis of awards by gender that's interesting but not great writing, but then it starts actual articles and it's quite good.
Tangent makes the critical mistake of including an endorsement for the Sadly Rabids in their packet, showing that either they were dumb enough to accept the lie that it wasn't going to be a "real slate" this year and that the Sadly Rabids were more than vandals, or they were in on the con and deliberately trying to spread the lie.
Subversive SF didn't include anything in the Hugo packet. Not a legit nominee + didn't try = doesn't want the award.
Finally we have the Swastika Press Blog, edited by the aforementioned "overthinking, poorly and at length" author Jeffro Johnson. They decided not to include most of the overtly racist and sexist content they're most famous for, but that stuff's there on the website if you want to find it and would be a vote-killer even if this packet was amazing. And the packet is.... not amazing. It's just some game reviews, some non-too-bright opinions on RPGs, and a WHOLE LOTTA COMMENT SECTION. Why they thought the comment section of a white supremacist vanity press was likely to impress Hugo voters, I doubt I'll ever know.
So:
1) Lady Business
2) File770
3) No Award
Semipro Zine:
Four Sadly Rabid picks, three of them legit choices and one with a bunch of really unfortunate author choices who included "in defense of genocide" in their Hugo packet.
So, since Sci Phi Journal goes below No Award, that means I need to rank the other four.
1) Uncanny takes top spot because it contains several works I either nominated myself or considered nominating, by Ursula Vernon and Amal El-Mohtar and Cat Valente, as well as several other excellent works. And, it's the only legit nominee, which settles my internal argument about whether I should put it first or second against....
2) Daily Science Fiction gets second spot because I spent a lot of time last year reading it. It published a LOT of good stuff.
3) Strange Horizons
4) Beneath Ceaseless Skies
5) No Award
Best Pro Artist:
Five Sadly Rabid picks: 4 hostages and the Swastika Press house artist.
Ranking the hostages:
1) Michal Karcz. I'm a sucker for his kind of photorealistic work.
2) Abigail Larson. Shades of Edward Gorey. Her packet inclusions are excellent.
3) Larry Elmore doesn't need a Hugo win, but he still goes above No Award. The man's a legend.
4) No Award
5) Larry Rostant - generic "person in a costume stares out of the book cover" art. Well executed but so, so, SO generic.
Editor Long:
I hate this category. I always hate this category.
Liz Gorinsky and Sheila Gilbert got onto the ballot legitimately, and Sheila Gilbert is not good at editing but she's a bad EDITOR, not a bad chooser-of-books-to-publish or a bad person.
1) Liz Gorinsky
2) No Award
3) Sheila Gilbert
Editor Short:
I also hate this category. It's easier than Long Form because the editor's choice of works is much clearer, but gets harder again because I *hate* anthologies of short fiction. I just can't stand reading them through, and that ruins a lot of the editor's EFFECT.
Four legitimate choices and Jerry Pournelle, who spent the year picking and choosing fic for Swastika Press. His Hugo packet contribution, notably, contains a short story by one of the three published Baen authors who've had drunken racist meltdowns in my comments section, so there's that.
1-4: I'm going to roll dice or flip coins between the four non-Pournelle choices.
5) No Award.
Best Dramatic Short:
Here's one of the first categories where my rules become a nasty filter: in order for an entrant to be considered above No Award, it needs to be as good as my own choices. And my own choices in this category included Rick And Morty and One Minute Time Machine.
1) Jessica Jones "AKA Smile" <- one of my own nominees!
2) No award
Doctor Who is unwatchable crap and should never be nominated for anything by anyone - and this episode in particular was touted as the best of the season, and was TERRIBLE. Grimm is usually boring and this episode was no exception. This wasn't even close to being the best Supernatural of the year, and Supernatural is no Rick And Morty. And My Little Pony is, as a kid's show, nowhere near as good as Gravity Falls or Steven Universe, and *they* aren't as good as Rick And Morty.
Best Dramatic Long:
1) Fury Road, duh. If it doesn't take an overwhelming majority in the first round, something is DEEPLY wrong with the Hugo voting crowd. I mean, like, MORE wrong than their perpetual weird obsession with shitty British skiffy.
The rest of the category suffers from this being an AMAZING year for candidates - in order for the Sadly Rabid picks of The Martian and Age Of Ultron to make it on, they'd have to be as good, in my estimation, as Jessica Jones Season 1, Rick And Morty Season 2, Inside Out, or It Follows.
And, uh, The Martian kinda was. Despite Matt Damon.
2) The Martian
3) No Award
4) Age Of Ultron
5) Ex Machina
6) Star Wars The Hot Stinky Mess Of JJ Abrams Poop
Even the three I put below No Award here weren't AWFUL, mostly. Star Wars suffered from JJ Abrams being terrible at everything having to do with making films, but Disney nearly saved it in spite of that.
Graphic Novel:
These are all pretty bad. Yes, even the Gaiman. None of them are as good as my picks.
1) No Award
Related Work:
Whoo boy. Remember that bit I said earlier about the Sadly Rabids trying to put child pornography in the Hugo packet? That's why Safe Space As Rape Room isn't included.
So let's just start this out by saying
1) No Award
and then go down the rest of the list.
Moira Greyland: Leaving aside that it's published at a proudly hypermisogynist website, this short essay comes in two parts. Part 1: "Why Moira Greyland's parents were horrible people, serial child molesters protected by fandom because, as famous/important True Fans(tm), they could do no wrong". Horrifying, very true, and a scathing indictment of the guilty parties. Except Moira Greyland doesn't appear to know who the guilty parties ARE, as we see in Part 2: "Homosexuals are responsible for all the evil in the world and my parents were child molesters because they were homosexual and thus all homosexuals should be killed."
Safe Space: Discussions of how social groups protect predators, and how someone with a big name is allowed great leeway to get away with monstrous acts? Important, and a discussion that needs to be had. However, it needs to be had with honest actors who aren't disingenuously attempting to score political points in pursuit of a bigoted agenda. Which is to say, not this work.
Appendix N: And here we get into the nuts and bolts of why I referred to Jeffro Johnson, earlier, as a weak reader, poor writer, and not very strong thinker. He's just... bland. And this is him going through a crapton of old fantasy novels, misunderstanding some of the basic details about them, and explaining how they influenced tabletop RPGs/could be expressed in RPG terms. Yes, that's his giant work.
"Between Light and Shadow - An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951-1986" - first, I give no shits about Gene Wolfe. Second, Marc Aramini himself says this work was unpublishable, it's not in a fit state for printing and no real publisher would touch it, which is why it's on Swastika Press. He also cheerfully admitted that there's no chance in HELL it would have gotten anywhere near an award without being brigaded onto the ballot by the white supremacists, misogynist, harassers, and generally garbage people that he considers his closest personal friends.
Since the author says the book is unpublishable crap that doesn't deserve a spot on the ballot, I believe him.
OK, I'm FINALLY down to the fiction noms.
Short Story:
Nasty category for the Sadly Rabids, because to get onto my ballot their work has to be as good as Naomi Kritzer's "Cat Pictures, Please" and.... oh wait, there it is, right there.
1) Cat Pictures, Please
As for the rest:
Seven Kill Tiger gets two paragraphs in before declaring that all African people are thieves, robbers, and rapists, and the entire rest of the story is about how genocide of all dark-skinned people is the only sensible reaction because they're incapable of civilisation. Published, unsurprisingly, by Swastika Press.
Space Raptor Butt Invasion: Deliberately awful gay porn, cleverly written to be funny in the note-perfect character of a terrible fanfic writer. And Chuck Tingle has been mocking the shit out of the homophobic assholes who nominated him, in hilarious fashion.... but that doesn't make this story *good*.
Asymmetrical Warfare: Loses points for the pun in the title. Telegraphs the punchline way early. Nowhere NEAR as good as Cat Pictures or Steve Rogers, PR Disaster.
If You Were An Award, My Love: yet another example of the Sadly Rabids' obsession with harassing Rachel Swirsky for having the temerity to be a woman and write a story they didn't like.
2) No Award
3) Asymmetrical Warfare
Novellette and Novella: I'm not done these yet. They're the worst combination of "not long enough to hold my attention like a novel, too long to finish quickly like a short story", which is a constant problem for me in this category regardless of the quality.
Novel:
The lack of a nomination for The Traitor Baru Cormorant is a travesty, and it's the index book I'm using for "illegitimate nominee, were you as good as this book? No? no award" in this category.
Ancillary Mercy: One of the best novels of the year. Not my first choice, but I nominated it and of my nominees that made the ballot it's my favourite.
The Fifth Season: Brought down out of first place ONLY because of how much it feels like the first part of a story (which, of course, it is) - but that feeling is so strong that it harms the book as a standalone.
The Aeronaut's Windlass: Hot stinky donkey poop, and I usually like Jim Butcher. Utter garbage, I wallbooked it several chapters in and feel no desire to ever return.
Seveneves: I described it as "perfectly entertaining if you like physics, hate all other sciences, and hate endings". I maintain that opinion. I don't regret the time I spent reading it (And what other book has a scene where Hillary Clinton kills and eats Phil Plait?) but I'd never read it again, wouldn't nominate it for a Hugo, and it's NOWHERE NEAR as good as The Traitor Baru Cormorant.
Uprooted: I noped out of this one early, for many of the same reasons that Foz Meadows did. I can see why people like it, but those people are not me.
So:
1) Ancillary Mercy
2) The Fifth Season
3) No Award
4) Seveneves
5) Uprooted
EDIT: Oh yeah, there's the retro-Hugos too.
Retro-Hugos should not be a thing. We're incapable of experiencing the available works as someone in the appropriate year would, the "dramatic" categories often contain works that CANNOT be experienced at all (let alone experienced as someone from the correct period would), and seriously, they nominated a guy who died in 1937 for the work he did AS A FAN in 1940. Notably, the only writing anyone can find with his name on it from THREE YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH is a short story, not fan writing.
My entire ballot is 1) No Award.
If you've made it all the way to here, have The Hugo Post Kitty.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-07-20 10:02 pm (UTC)But his ME write-up is not "aliens are bad, white dudes are good". It's a complex analysis of theme and authorial intent.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-07-20 10:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-07-20 10:34 pm (UTC)And, uh.
I was bored within the first few pages. So, having played Mass Effect, I skipped a few chapters to see what he had to say about later parts, and wasn't terribly interested either. So I skimmed a bit more, still didn't have anything catch my attention, and dropped it. I fully admit I didn't give it a thorough readthrough, because I just wasn't interested in the subject and a skim of his writing didn't make the subject interesting, and it's NOVEL-LENGTH.
Do you have a particular chapter you'd recommend? I could go and take another look if you think there's an example part that really stands out - or maybe some of his other writing that you'd recommend as a better sample for someone who bounced hard off the Mass Effect Let's Play?
[1]: Ted Beale *panned* Seveneves when it came out, calling it complete garbage. And then stuck it on his slate anyway, because it was getting a lot of buzz from people who liked it way more than I did and was considered a fair choice for Best Novel - meaning, either the voters "shoot the hostage" and No Award a deserving candidate, or the voters give a Hugo to the Sadly Rabids' pick, and either way Beale declares victory. Of course, since we all know he's going to declare that no matter what outcome happens, it was the one he really wanted all along, I feel no need to take his feelings into consideration while voting.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-07-20 10:42 pm (UTC)I haven't played the game, however, and I read the whole thing as it came out, so the length wasn't really an issue in that regard.
Of his other writing, his Good Robot series is the best: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=20638
It's a breakdown of "making a game from scratch", programming warts and all, written with non-programmers in mind. The game is out now, and they've just started a post-mortem.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-07-20 10:47 pm (UTC)I'll take a look at those and maybe revisit my vote. Having bounced hard off his Hugo packet I don't expect I'll put him above No Award, but first-below-it is still better than the rest.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-07-20 10:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-07-20 10:50 pm (UTC)The 2016 Hugos: How (some) bloggers are voting
Date: 2016-07-21 01:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-07-23 12:11 am (UTC)...
Either I remember him as a better author than he was, or he's developed some issues since I last read him.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-07-23 01:03 am (UTC)More seriously: I don't remember ever reading something by ONLY Jerry Pournelle. Maybe I did, maybe I didn't, but it was almost always "X and Jerry Pournelle". And I remember, even as a small child, noticing that the "and Pournelle" books always had more specific military details, more use of detailed technical things as solutions to problems, and way more Manly White Man Saves Stupid Counterproductive Woman (Who Tried Something White Man Said Was Wrong) From Brown-Skinned Evil Uncivilised Dark-Skinned Savage Barbaric Sub-Human Non-White Lazy Stupid Smelly Cannibal Negro.
Case in point: I really liked Lucifer's Hammer *anyway*, in large part because I missed MOST of the racist subtext and the bits I caught I mostly ignored, when I was 12. But rereading it now, while knowing what kind of real-life person Jerry Pournelle is?
(no subject)
Date: 2016-07-26 11:41 pm (UTC)The 2016 #HugoAwards: How (some more) bloggers are voting
Date: 2016-08-08 10:12 am (UTC)