5/12/2015

Celebrating What Is Best In Science Fiction: Foundation

Over the past month we here in the Sad Puppies Revolutionary Vanguard Party Ministry of Truth have received a number of questions about which classic works of SF do and don't exemplify the goals of the Party. While our cohort John Z. Upjohn has done a fantastic job identifying SJW-infused works, we do not wish to present ourselves as wholly negative, so today we're going to talk about one of the all time great works of SF, a classic of yesteryear which could never win a Hugo today.

Yes, Isaac Asimov's Foundation.

This is of course a story about a group of intellectually superior men -- and only men -- who set about to seize the galaxy from the effete and liberal Galactic Empire. It's a daring plan that requires subtle ground work and will take centuries to realize, not unlike our current project to wrest control of fandom from the Nielsen Hayden clique.

The parallel is made clear in the opening chapter, set on the city-planet of Trantor, capital of the empire. The Trantorians are all elitist snobs who see themselves as superior to the provincials who populate the rest of the galaxy, even though it's clear that Trantor wouldn't be able to survive without constant food shipments from agrarian worlds. It would be anachronistic to impose modern controversies on the story, but no doubt Trantorians see the rest of the galaxy as a bunch of inbred, racist hicks whose opinions should be ignored. Certainly that's the case for Hari Seldon, a brilliant scientist who has proven mathematically that the Empire has become too soft and liberal to survive -- that the vast welfare state the Imperial government has built up will soon go bankrupt, thus proving how misguided liberal policies are. The hardiest outlying regions will quickly secede and attempt to save their economies, but the suckling class the Empire has fostered with their welfare programs will put demands on the new governments which they'll be unable to meet, and things will dissolve into ten-thousand years of anarchy.

But Seldon has a plan. By placing a colony on a small, uninhabited planet way out on the edge of the galaxy (AKA, flyover country), he will plant a seed that will grow into a new and better Empire. His mathematically proven outline for this is known as the Seldon Plan, but it's clearly Manifest Destiny. The new Empire will spread forth, conquering the backwards, liberal planets that have fallen on hard times, and lift them into a new enlightenment.

Where modern SJW authors would call this "colonialism" and be appalled by the Foundation's manipulation of primitive and backwards cultures, Asimov celebrates it as the natural course of things which can never be questioned. He doesn't diddle around, lamenting how the Foundation crushes the local cultures and remakes them in a manner convenient to their expansion. No, he recognizes that the superior culture should be able to impose upon less developed ones, raising them up over many years but receiving economic benefits in the meantime. This is a fine, noble relationship of the sort Kipling celebrated in "The White Man's Burden," but which SJWs today repudiate. Instead they claim that this sort of imperialism is shameful and exploitative. They refuse to see that it's in the long-term benefit of everyone involved. They're more concerned with the primitive cultures being destroyed than the economic benefits that will eventually accrue to the people.

Reading Foundation, one cannot help but realize that if Isaac Asimov were alive today, he'd be a proud supporter of the Sad Puppies movement. He wouldn't shy away from the necessity of America helping countries like Iraq and Afghanistan escape barbarism, and he wouldn't condemn the books that acknowledge and celebrate those noble endeavors.

When SJWs turn their backs on one of the greatest SF authors to ever live, you know their vision for the genre is not one that will be embraced by the rest of fandom.

5/05/2015

Twisting Our Words

John Scalzi has found something new to be angry about. Over the weekend our Maximum Leader posted this to his Facebook page:


Scalzi predictably went off on a tirade, accusing our glorious revolutionary commander of homophobia for using the implication of homosexuality as an insult.

But read what First Citizen Torgersen wrote -- he never mentions man-on-man sex. He simply suggests that Scalzi might not like women. It is Scalzi who made the leap that our leader meant homosexuality. But there are other types of sexual deviancy out there. How can Scalzi be sure the message wasn't referring to sex with walruses? Huh? Or maybe Japanese VR sex games involving many-tentacled aliens? But no, his mind went straight to homosexuality.

And they call us the homophobes? For shame, Scalzi. For shame.

4/27/2015

Is the New York Times Bestseller List Part of the Conspiracy?

One of the key tenets of the Sad Puppy movement is that the Hugo Awards do not represent the mainstream of science fiction. Certain people out there are trying to undermine our argument by pointing out that many of the Hugo winners we consider substandard are in fact New York Times bestsellers, and therefore more representative of the mainstream than John C. Wright or Tom Kratman. Redshirts, for instance, debuted at #15, and both The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell were in the Top 10, compared to 23 and 27 for Larry Correia's best showings.

Is this proof that the Hugos are more mainstream than the Puppy movement claims? Of course not. Clearly our enemies within the Nielsen Hayden coterie have taken a lesson from Scientology. Back in the 1980s, Bridge Publications, Scientology's official publishing house, reportedly sent Church members to bookstores to purchase copies of Battlefield Earth and the Mission: Earth series, which they then gave over to Bridge so they could be shipped back to the same stores. Clearly the same thing must be happening here. It is inconceivable--utterly inconceivable--that enough people would buy a book like Redshirts to get it on a bestseller list. His work is too literary. Redshirts is practically Post Modern. Americans don't want that. We don't crave high quality prose. We don't like multidimensional characters. We want eye-popping action scenes with shallow characters, exactly like Larry, Tom and Brad give us. A bestseller list that doesn't reflect that has clearly been rigged by the elitist cabal that secretly controls publishing.

Mark my words, the actual number of people who've read John Scalzi are, at most, in the dozens, and his family accounts for most of them.

4/19/2015

The Conspiracy Goes Farther Than We Thought

Apparently --and I am only going by what an informed reader tells me since I myself cannot read the inscrutable moon runes -- the Japanese Science Fiction Convention announced the nominations for their version of the Hugos, and quite shockingly their ballot includes many of the same authors pushed by the Traditional Hugo Voting Bloc in the United States. In the best translated novel category, enemies of the genre Jo Walton, John Scalzi and Ian MacDonald received nominations, while in the short story category Mary Robinette Kowal, Pat Cadigan, Ramez Naam and Christopher Priest are up. They did include Orson Scott Card in the novel category, but need I remind readers that even our leaders, Brad Torgersen and Larry Correia, managed to get nominated before we started the Sad Puppies Campaign. Undoubtedly OSC is the token conservative author whose presence is meant to counter accusations that the nominations are ideologically motivated. And ideologically motivated they certainly are. The fact that foreign SF fans are selecting writers who are part of the Nielsen Hayden coterie shows that this conspiracy goes farther than we thought. What other explanation could there be? That these works are genuinely popular in a wide swath of fandom? The idea is utterly laughable. Obviously Tor has taken control of Japanese fandom just like it's done in the United States.

There is only one thing we can do -- we must form a Japanese branch of the Sad Puppies Revolutionary Vanguard Party! I am reliably informed that there are many works of ideologically pure Japanese SF which are routinely overlooked by the native fans, including the writings of the tax evading hero Mamare Touno, and the ultra-nationalist author Tsutomu Satou whose novels are so politically pure that the Red Chinese have banned them.

Rise up, fans of Japan. Throw off your shackles and join the international campaign against your SF overlords!

4/16/2015

All Analogies Are Approrpriate

Our Supreme Leader has a brilliant post on his blog that utterly destroys the way the reactionary Social Justice Warriors of the Nielsen Hayden coterie are attacking the Party. But, with the utter predictability of professional whiners, our enemies are trying to twist the post to suit their purposes. It's offensive, they claim, to compare the current situation to a Korean gulag. How can we compare a blog-war to people being tortured and worked to death in prison camps?

This is a typical liberal tactic. Like things are not alike unless they're exactly alike in all forms. The slightest difference in magnitude means a comparison is illegitimate. Hyperbole is disallowed.

But is it really hyperbole. Right now the argument is confined to the Internet, but what will happen at Sasquan? Remember, despite our Hugo Award insurgency, we have no control over the ConCom itself. We don't know what traps they're laying for us, and, as I pointed out two weeks ago, we have to go into the convention unarmed. We will be utterly at their mercy, and in a state controlled by socialists sympathetic to the counterrevolutionary cause. We cannot expect help from the police.

Remember your Orwell -- merely silencing their opponents isn't enough for people like this; they have to force conformity. And what better way to do it than to capture us at Sasquan?  We could disappear into the rain forest of Washington -- a place hallowed by Scalzi and his acolytes -- and they could do whatever they want to us. Then, a year from now, Brad and Larry and, yes, even Vox would emerge and denounce their past "heresies". Soon they'd start publishing new books, but these books wouldn't be science fiction classics like Monster Hunter, "The Exchange Officers" and "Opera Vita Aeterna". No, these would be stories about transgendered bisexuals in a multiracial society fighting an evil, capitalistic empire through folk song. They'd be praised throughout the liberal blogosphere for their sensitive portrayals of "the Other" and would be handed Hugo nominations for their efforts. Vox Day would declare his love for N.K. Jemisin and explain that he'd always been wrong about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. And then they would take to their old blogs and denounce all their former allies as fascists.

You think this is more hyperbole? You think it could never happen?

But it has in the past. How do you think Gene Roddenberry went from writing a show where women explicitly couldn't be captains and white men were in charge of everything, to the socialist morass of The Next Generation? How do you think Isaac Asimov transformed from a defender of manifest destiny in Foundation to the doctrinaire liberal of his later years? How do you think Arthur C. Clarke went from one of the greatest nuts-and-bolts SF authors to a gay man living in Sri Lanka? If you think this is all coincidence, you are wrong! The leftist power elites of WorldCon have long used nefarious means to control fandom.

Comparing them to the commissars who ran the gulags isn't hyperbole. It is mere fact. Anyone who disputes this is an enemy of the revolution.

4/15/2015

Where We're Going We Don't Need Roads

Today, April 15th is a day of darkness every American must weather once per year. On this day our government, betraying the ideals of our founders, forces us to file our tax returns to ensure that the money they've stolen from our paychecks over the preceding twelve months is "enough".

"Enough" for what? Well mostly to redistribute to the underclasses, but much of it also gets wasted on public infrastructure which, though it does provide some economic stimulus during construction and maintenance, sits worthlessly, not making any money once completed. Under a rational system of government, we wouldn't need the government providing infrastructure. We'd allow the market to take care of it for us, with road-building companies buying up land at fair market value instead of using eminent domain (an even more reprehensible form of government expropriation than the income tax) to steal it at pennies on the dollar. The road owners could then monetize their work through the use of tolls and roadside advertising, providing a constant flow of money that would stimulate the economy far more efficiently than the stagnant government-built highways.

Now some will object that they'd rather pay taxes to finance roads all in one go rather than paying for them piecemeal with tolls. "Oh, but when I go to get groceries, I don't want to have to stop at a toll booth every couple miles." Pah! What pusillanimity! A true man values his economic freedom over mere convenience.

Furthermore, the annoyance at having to pay tolls constantly would stimulate technological growth. If we had privately-owned toll roads everywhere in this country, auto companies would have sunk their fortunes into building flying cars so consumers could avoid the highways. Government services always strangle innovation, coddling people, making them take for granted government services that, if handled by private enterprise, would spur them to innovation. All those like John Scalzi and the Nielsen Hayden clique who enjoy paying taxes are the enemies of the future. Without them, we would have the glorious future promised by Robert Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard in the the 1940s.

Sad Puppies stands against taxes. Sad Puppies stands for privatization of government "services" and infrastructure. And on this black day, we stand with Robert Beale, one of the true heroes of our revolution who was martyred for the cause in which he believes.

Thank you Robert, and thank your son Ted for being a shining light in our movement.

Rewriting History -- Is there Anything the Enemies of the Revolution Won't Try?

The Sad Puppies Revolutionary Vanguard Party would like to state, contrary to what has been reported elsewhere, that neither Marko Kloos nor Annie Bellett were ever part of our nomination slates. Never. Anyone claiming otherwise is an agent provocateur of the Nielsen Hayden coterie attempting to undermine the revolution. You may now remember seeing them there, but memory is fickle. Once someone tells you that Kloos and Bellett were on the slate, your mind will forge your own memories to match.  And screenshots--screenshots can be forged, quite easily. Or maybe somebody hacked the blogs where the slates were posted and added the names of these genre traitors to the lists in an attempt to discredit the Puppies movement. Yes, that's it. The password was hacked. Yes. I can prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt with geometric logic. You thought you had me, didn't you, just like that time you broke into my apartment and took the strawberries from the icebox, but I'm on to your tricks. You won't fool me again. I know the strawberries are central to your plan. They're the source of all life on Earth. Why 70% of the Earth's surface is covered with strawberries. 70% of each of us is made of strawberries. Without strawberries, where would we be?  But the Nielsen Hayden coterie wants to rob us of that, they want to take away our strawberries for their nefarious communist purposes. We cannot allow that. We must remain vigilant. Yes, vigilant. Heh heh heh. We can't go sleeping on duty. No, that would never do. When you go to sleep, that's when John Scalzi sneaks into your room and steals the ideas out of your head and sells them to his liberal friends who twist them and pervert them to suit their leftwing agenda and then publish them and reap the rewards, and you can't do anything about it because Scalzi buys off the police and they won't listen to your evidence. Well I'm not going to let it happen again. Scalzi, you aren't stealing my thoughts any more! I'm going to saw off the top of my skull, remove my brains and place them somewhere safe that you can never reach, you hear that, Scalzi? Your days of idea stealing are over. Heh heh heh. Yes, soon even your Hugo Awards will be no more. Heh heh heh.

4/14/2015

Enemies of the Revolution Resort to Underhanded Tactics

Some may believe that with the nominations announced, the hardest part of our campaign has already been accomplished and all that remains is to coast to victory, but recent events prove the need for continuing vigilance. The eligibility committee at Sasquan has today disqualified two of our works from the final ballot based upon minor technicalities! They did this even though last year they permitted the entirety of the Wheel of Time, the first volume of which was published when the Soviet Union was still a going concern, to be nominated, with free copies of the entire series distributed to voters. In so doing they severely undermined Larry Correia's Warbound by admitting an entire series that attracted votes away from the Sad Puppies base of adventure-loving readers.

Now we see the indisputable truth -- the forces of the reactionary Nielsen Hayden clique will stop at nothing to undermine us. The Central Committee for the Sad Puppies Revolutionary Vanguard Party has already demanded that Sasquan allow observers to be present during the vote counting, but we suspect they'll reject us. Who knows what sort of shenanigans they'll get up to without outsiders present? Will there be Black Panthers counting the ballots? Will they permit Ruth Bader Ginsberg to determine whether a chad is hanging? Would we find Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke voting from beyond the grave? The mind quavers at the possibilities!

Puppies, the time may come when swift action is necessary to seize the ballots to ensure a fair and accurate vote count. Be ready, the revolution is about to get a lot more interesting.

4/13/2015

Free Mamare Touno!

Despite our inclusion of token minorities on our slate, many critics of the Sad Puppies movement continue to claim that we are motivated by race. To prove this is not so, the Central Committee has voted unanimously to show our support for the imprisoned Chinese dissident author Mamare Touno. Touno has been charged the violation of that most barbaric of all laws, the income tax.

The right of individuals to possess money and property without interference by the government is the most fundamental of all, above even the rights to speech and religion. The government's expropriation of our possessions is a vile atrocity (one that, sadly, the United States commits all too frequently). We applaud Touno for his brave stand against despotism. We call upon our brothers around the world to show solidarity by withholding their own incomes from their government. We call upon our readers to show support for Touno by buying his novel Log Horizon when it's released in English next week. And we call upon Barack Obama to grant Touno political asylum -- the government should provide him with a free plane ticket to the US and a place to stay once he gets here, with free English lessons to help him get on his feet. And most of all, we call upon everyone, friend and enemy alike, to pray unto Our Lord Heinlein for Touno's protection in this time of hardship.

4/11/2015

Terms of Surrender

It has been one week since the Sad Puppies won their overwhelming victory in the Hugo Awards Nomination Battle. With the reactionary forces of the Traditional Hugo Voting Bloc and the Nielsen Hayden coterie on the retreat in all spheres of combat, the Central Committee for the Sad Puppies Vanguard Party has met and considered terms of surrender for all enemies of Fandom.

These are our terms:

  1. Immediate termination of Tor Books as a science fiction publisher, with the rights to their catalogue to be turned over to Castalia House, which will vet all titles for ideological soundness. Those deemed fit and proper works of SF will be republished; those which do not meet our standards will be edited to bring them into compliance, or, if they are judged too heterodox, they will be removed from publication and their authors added to the Index of Suspect Persons. The Nielsen Hayden's must agree to resign from the genre altogether, though we are magnanimous enough to allow them to continue in the publishing industry in a genre more suited for their mistaken beliefs about quality literature, perhaps in ChickLit or mysteries.
  2. The withdrawal of all YA publishers from the field. For too long we have stood by as Young Adult authors have acted as a fifth column within the genre, subverting the youth and poisoning them to the glories of traditional science fiction. Henceforth YA lit shall once again be known as "Juveniles," and only those works embodying the highest principles of Robert A. Heinlein shall be permitted. Girls who read Twilight and books like it shall be expelled from the genre. We will recognize The Hunger Games as a proper SF novel, but the sequels are right out.
  3. Ann Leckie, G. Willow Wilson, Kameron Hurley, John Scalzi, Charles Stross, and Charlie-Jane Anders must sign letters repudiating their previous Hugo winning works and acknowledging their ideological unsoundness.
  4. WorldCon must permit the Central Committee of the Sad Puppies Vanguard Party to revise the list of previous Hugo winners, removing all works deemed ideologically suspect.
  5. WorldCon must ban all discussion of Chinese cartoons and cosplay involving said cartoons. Attendees must be required to sign affidavits affirming that they are not subscribers to Crunchyroll, Funimation or any other website which streams Chinese cartoons.
  6. There is no number six.
  7. All female attendees at WorldCon must wear original series Star Trek uniforms.
  8. The Hugo Awards must be renamed the Heinies in honor of SF master Robert A. Heinlein.
Failure to conform to these demands will be met by further action by the Sad Puppies Vanguard Party, to include but not be limited to the overthrow of the WorldCon apparat, an uprising by our supporters within the SFWA, and a large scale boycott of Tor Books.

You have been warned. You have six days to conform to our demands.

THIS STATEMENT HAS BEEN APPROVED FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE BY THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE SAD PUPPIES VANGUARD PARTY