The New York Review of Science Fiction

The Puppies of Terror (Editorial, NYRSF 320)

Approximately 2.73 million words have already been written about the *Puppy attack on the Hugo nominations list; Mike Glyer’s still-indispensable online fanzine File 770 <file770.com> has daily roundups on who is saying and/or lying about to whom. I don’t know that I have anything particular to add to the specific discussion except perhaps to bemoan the near-total destruction of the short fiction categories this year.

Okay, there’s one point I feel I have to hammer on. The entire Puppy movement, rhetorically, is based on the idea that the science fiction enterprise has changed tremendously and not for the better, since the fabled Golden Age when all of the Puppies were young. The head Sad Puppy himself, Brad Torgersen, has taken to referring to his enemies as CHORFS, “Cliquish, Holier-than-thou, Obnoxious, Reactionary, Fanatics.” So, yes, the person who is bravely positioning himself as the force that will stop the people who want to change things believes that his opponents are “reactionaries.” This is, apparently, someone whose understanding of words is limited to “what sounds like an insult?”

The Puppy Fight (Editorial, NYRSF 319)

So the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts was wonderful, exactly the week of joyful conversation, food, thinky bits, and community that I needed, and then some. So of course that couldn’t last. The day we returned from Orlando I saw the first indication that the Puppies had made common cause with GamerGate.

The Sad Puppies are a group of writers and other fans dissatisfied with what they saw as a trend in the Hugo process toward overrepresentation of “liberal” works at the expense of traditional, meat-and-potatoes science fiction and fantasy. So in 2014 they gamed the Hugo nomination system to place nominees in several Hugo Award categories. What the Puppies did was very simple: They encouraged people to buy Worldcon supporting memberships and vote for the Puppy slate of nominees, and they got one or two nominees into several categories. These “Sad Puppy 2” nominees failed to land any trophies; in fact, with the exception of Toni Weisskopf in the Best Editor, Long Form, the SP2 finalists came in last in every category. And, like any well-intentioned, thoughtful group of principled actors, the Sad Puppies responded by encouraging the attention of a group of woman-hating terrorists.

NYRSF Issue 319 (March 2015): Table of Contents

• Samuel R. Delany: A, B, C, Three Early Science Fiction Novels: An Afterword
• Greg Bear & Gregory Benford: A Discussion at MIT
• The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord, reviewed by Michael Levy
• Announcing: The Winners of the 2014 James Tiptree Jr. Award
• Photos
• Editorial: The Puppy Fight

The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord, reviewed by Michael Levy

New York: Del Rey, 2015; $15.00 tpb; 336 pages

The Barbadian writer Karen Lord has one of those wonderfully diverse resumes so necessary to building a reputation as a science fiction writer, having worked as a physics teacher, a diplomat, a soldier, and an academic with a PhD in the sociology of religion. Her first novel, the fantasy Redemption in Indigo (2010), based on a Senegalese folktale, won a number of prizes and was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Her second book, the science-fiction novel The Best of All Possible Worlds (2013), with its titular reference to Candide, its picaresque plot line, and its almost Le Guinian sensibility, went in a very different direction and was quite a surprise to most readers.

Greg Bear & Gregory Benford: A Discussion at MIT

[The material below is an edited version of a discussion held at MIT on April 16, 2000.—the eds.]

The Killer B’s

Michael Burstein: Would the two of you like to talk about the Killer B’s Education Initiatives?

Greg Bear: The wrong B—David Brin started that.

Burstein: I know that David Brin isn’t here, but you are two of the three B’s

Bear: Wherever we are, David Brin is always with us.

Benford: There is something in the Bible about that isn’t there? Wherefore three or more shall gather together, someone shall ask about this library thing.

Bear: Well, you explain then, you were closer to it.

Benford: In the beginning we were trying to inspire kids to buy more of our product, buy more of the hard sf that inspires. We then broadened it. I do think the Heinlein YA novels have a style and focus that leads to ambitions and focus; it did for me!