Rabid Puppies 2016: Best Related Work

The preliminary recommendations for the Best Related Work category:

• Appendix N by Jeffro Johnson. Begun in 2014, Jeffro finished his massive 43-post exploration of Gary Gygax's famous appendix of science fiction and fantasy works that inspired the creation of Dungeons & Dragons in 2015.
• Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986 by Marc Aramini. An incredibly in-depth, 826-page literary analysis of every piece of fiction published by Gene Wolf during the 35 years specified.
• The Story of Moira Greyland by Moira Greyland. The daughter of Walter Breen and Marion Zimmer Bradley speaks for herself about the dark side of science fiction fandom.
• Safe Space as Rape Room by Daniel Eness. A five-part series on the disturbing and recurring problem that science fiction fandom has been attempting to hide from the outside world for more than fifty years.
• SJWs Always Lie by Vox Day. The bestselling work of political philosophy; it happens to contain the most accurate account of both GamerGate and the 2015 Hugo Awards controversy available today.

Other 2016 Hugo categories

• Best Graphic Story
• Best Editor (long-form)
• Best Semiprozine
• Best Fanzine
• Best Fancast
• Best Fan Writer
• Best Fan Artist
• Best New Writer

On a not entirely unrelated note, one of my recommendations for Best Fan Writer, Dave Freer, explains how the advocates of the rule change to the Hugo Awards known as EPH are not only biased, but are behaving unethically by violating their non-disclosure agreement and reporting on the "results" they claim to have found.

Fast forward to this year. To File 770. Where Jameson Quinn – one of the Making Light cabal plotting to institute EPH announces that he and Bruce Schneier have been given the anonymized data, and tested it. Incidentally (because he’s not too bright, it seems) he announces that there is a weak correlation between the non-puppy nominations and what was nominated, but that this was much stronger in the puppies and what they nominated. Now, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that, without knowing the ‘secret slates’ Quinn and Schneier could not separate voters for those cabals from other voters. So: if a ‘weak’ correlation shows up with ALL of the data, there is a high probability that indeed, there was secret concert voting by some. After all, the pattern of ‘you nominate mine, I’ll nominate yours’ is well known and documented from the Nebula Awards, before they anonymized that nomination process. It may well still go on, but it is harder to see. Many of the same authors come up in Hugo nominations, which should be unlikely. The one is supposed to be a peer award, the other a fan award.

Which leads us to: how did Quinn and Schneier get data which was not available to everyone because giving it to anyone breached voter confidentiality and privacy rules? I don’t know either from Adam  — but Quinn & Schneier came from a group which has a questionable reputation, has a financial interest in the outcome of the Hugos. Unless they are babes-in-wood those who provided the data to Quinn and Schneier knew that they were not people who could be considered neutral by a substantial number of the people whose data they were handing over. The two ‘researchers’ also knew full well they were not considered neutral or trusted: Quinn posts on File 770, another well-known anti-puppy site.

“As previously announced, it was determined that the data was unable to be sufficiently anonymized for a general release, so the researchers were provided data under a non-disclosure agreement.”

I see. A non-disclosure agreement… with a pair of ‘researchers’ from a partisan group with a questionable reputation and a financial interest. In secret.

My, that looks REALLY ethical. And no one spoke up. Not one of the Hugo Admins involved went public. Even those who objected… thought if they kept quiet, they’d get away with it. I see. Rather like: “I complained to him when he was molesting the little girl, I tried to get him to stop, but he did it anyway, and I didn’t go to the cops, because he was one of us.” My word! We can TRUST you after that. You would never permit anyone to diddle the system for their favorites.

And Jameson Quinn promptly breached their non-disclosure agreement. Well, what did you expect? Rules are for little people.

There is no reason to believe anything that Quinn and Schneier claim; they are observably untrustworthy on the basis of their affiliations, declarations, and NDA-violating actions.