Castalia House is the indie publisher that Vox Day owns. So there's that mystery solved :P

And of course, sci fi was never political before the evil liberals got to it.

That's true. I would point out, though, that for me and many others, books that feature casts actually representative of the real world, and that don't treat women as sex objects, tend to be better. This isn't a political agenda anymore than it's a political agenda for people to prefer books that feature young male…

Both Brad Torgersen (the current person running the Puppies slate) and Larry Correia (the inventor of it) have explicitly said that they think too many diverse characters in a book makes it inherently political. Their calls for sci-fi to go back to the "good old days" is problematic when you consider who, exactly, was…

But...it's not actually true that the Puppy nominees are more popular. (see analysis here: http://www.jasonsanford.com/blog/2015/4/ye…) There are a few outliers there, namely the Dresden Files outselling basically everything, but in past years GRRM has won a Hugo, as has the bestseller Jonathan Strange and Mr.…

Really?

Oh, I see! I thought you were disagreeing with the premise of the article, not the Sad Puppies themselves.

Do you think fans aren't capable of thinking about qualities beyond just entertainment? Are judges more than professional fans? I know that I look for more than just pure entertainment when reading books; I'm sure many others do also. Sure, sometimes I'm a fan of something because of completely subjective and personal…

I don't believe that anyone should be disqualified because of their political views, but I do have a hard time believing that someone who has odious views of quite a few sections of the human population is capable of writing six great pieces of fiction. After all, isn't fiction about empathy and imagination?

I get that he, like Larry Correia, probably puts on a lot of this blowhard-ness for show, but at the same time when you start using that sort of language I feel you've crossed a line. Even if he is speaking about ideals (which, dude, get an editor and make your point clear), the idea he's talking about exterminating…

Source:

Thanks for the clarification! That's too bad. It sounds like some parties involved with the SP slate put out that they contacted all their nominees when that was far from true.

I guess I just don't see anyone making the point you're debating against? Except the Sad Puppies themselves, who seem to believe that there's some sort of battle between popcorn fiction and literary fiction going on, and that the people nominating literary fiction hate popcorn fiction and won't allow it on the ballot.…

You think 6 nominations for the same dude* is okay? I'd give significant side-eye to ANYONE who had that many nominations, especially in so few categories (Seanen McGuire only managed to get 5 because she also writes very different works under a pseudonym, and that was an extraordinary circumstance). It's not about…

Last year, women and POC had a really good showing in the actual awards (not rigged—the Sad Puppy White Men rigged some nominations and failed to get any actual wins). This year, the Sad Puppy White Men tried harder to rig it and were more successful, completely overrunning most of the short fiction nominations.

I gotta wonder about Torgersen. I've interacted with the guy a couple of different times, and he always seemed pretty level-headed if a bit stuck in a fantasy version of the past. But the people he chooses to run with are nuts.

It's the same group of people both years, this year they just gamed the system slightly more effectively.

It's true that people can be interested in multiple things! That doesn't mean that everything is equally worthy of an award meant to celebrate literary merit (I love popcorn books as much as the next person, but I don't think that they're what these awards are intended to celebrate).

Fun fact: He apparently wrote a screed about how he wanted to "exterminate" the creators of the Legend of Korra because of the bisexual ending.

That's true. But I would argue that most people who are seriously interested in the Hugos generally believe that "best work" goes beyond "most entertaining work" and includes some sort of meaningfulness in either the philosophical or literary sense. There always will be some people who find it silly that awards don't…