With one exception (The Poky Little Puppy), every book I have chosen for Sad Puppies Review Books is one that I have strong enough memories of that I can thresh out the basic idea for the review and then go look at some combination of Wikipedia, Amazon, and YouTube to verify the details I was hazy about. If I know a book well enough that I can call its story to mind and come up with some angle for my red-pill-popping, reactionary right-wing reviewer to take on it, I use it.

So most of the books I’ve reviewed are ones that were favorites of mine, or favorites of one or many of the children I’ve read books to over the years. The most recent one is a little different, as it was actually a favorite of my father’s. In fact, I associate the book Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel so strongly with my father that I almost dedicated the Sad Puppy review of it to him, then thought better of it on the grounds that given the subject matter, it would be easy for someone who doesn’t know him to misunderstand such a dedication.

I didn’t think about Mulligan et al when I was writing the first or second round of SPRB mainly because it wasn’t a huge part of my childhood in the same way that the books I used were, but as I had also exhausted a lot of the more obvious possibilities, last night when I saw that the GoFundMe campaign cleared $150 just before I went to bed, I wound up Googling “classic children’s books” for inspiration, and there it was in the banner of examples that popped up. I was naming the books that caught my eye to Jack, who did not have the same literary upbringing I did and who had never read or heard of many of the stories I know by heart.

He asked me to tell him the story of the titular Mike Mulligan and his equally titular steam shovel, and I did, and he remarked that it seemed to him to be about the importance of not leaving your friends behind.

I think there’s definitely something to that, although it’s such an integral theme that it’s more of an axiom. The alternative never even comes up. When the new power shovels are introduced, Mike never thinks about abandoning his trusty machine. When Mike and Mary Anne dig themselves into a hole they can’t get out of, the story treats them as a unit. Mike can leave any time he wants, but the question is how to get them out. The fact that either they both go or neither one of them does is treated utterly matter-of-factly, not as some foolish stubborn stand taken by Mike. The story’s solution does not actually require that Mike stays, but the version of it where he doesn’t is never proposed.

And so just like that, I had my hook for the review. The sort of men who fuel campaigns like the Sad Puppies and Gamergate will eat up a story like that… when it’s about a bond of friendship between two men. Mike Mulligan’s steam shovel is given a feminine name and personified as female, though, and any kind of story of sacrifice or even mutual support and respect between a man and a woman is cast down as being emasculating feminist propaganda.

When two presumptively straight guys make it clear that they will to the mat for each other every time, when they say things like, “If you want me, you’re going to have to go through him.”, when they make it clear that if it’s the two of them against the world, you should think twice before betting on the world, they… and, frequently everyone else… will eat it up with a spoon. But make one of those characters female, and suddenly she’s a gold digger, she’s an albatross, she’s using him, she’s manipulating him, etc.

Even people who get lumped into the “SJW” side of things will get in on the act under the guise of praising the woman for being “better” or “stronger” than the narrative that shows the man supporting her. Few people in the audience asked why Bucky Barnes even needed to be saved if he’s so great, or why Cap would be willing to tear the team apart to do so. But replace him with a woman… particularly, replace him with a woman of color or most particularly a Black woman… and people who celebrate the Bucky/Steve dynamic whether as an embodiment of masculine love (whether platonic or not) will excoriate the whole thing.

Men who stick by their (implicitly male) friends through thick and thin are seen as being noble. Men who fight and die in futile causes as part of a band of brothers even more so. But put a woman in the mix…

Just think about how many times on a TV show, aimed at people of any age, you’ve seen the lesson aimed at boys that they have to stand by their friends. Think about how often we see the lesson that women should stand by their men. And think about how often the lesson is, “All this, just for a woman?”

The “character” of Mary Anne the steam shovel is only incidentally female. She’s only mildly anthropomorphized in the art and narration, has no lines of dialogue and never acts on her own. She’s female because that’s the way we speak about vehicles and vessels. But for whatever reason, she is presented to the reader as female and Mike Mulligan’s bond of loyalty to her is shown as that of two old friends who rely on each other, and I think that’s important.

Of course, there are people who will look at this and say that I’m reading too much into this, that I shouldn’t be trying to politicize children’s books. But at its core, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is the story of a Depression-era laborer who is pushed out of the job market by changing technologies, and what he does to survive: first by finding a niche that the emerging big players aren’t ready to address, then by working harder and better than they will, and then finally by changing in the face of a changing world.

John Henry, the subject of a similar story, worked himself to death trying to prove that his labor was not made obsolete by a steam-powered device. Mike Mulligan pilots such a device, and its fall into obsolescence in the face of newer machines is what motivates him to work himself up into such a frenzy that he winds up trapped. Whether or not this story was meant to have political meaning, it reflects a reality that is in part political in nature.

Now, critics of this kind of discourse say things like, “But you can read any message you want into a story!” And you know what?

To a point, they’re right.

We could say that Mike Mulligan whitewashes and sanitizes the John Henry fable, by replacing the freed Black man with an Irish laborer, making his Phyrric victory non-fatal, and showing society making a place for him and his steam engine. Or we could say that they’re just different stories in the same mold, and that the author did not necessarily have John Henry in mind at all when she wrote it, that she was merely drawing from the same well.

We could argue that Mike’s final fate being far kinder than John Henry’s shows that society has progressed over the decades, or that it at the very least reflects the author’s optimism that it could do so. Or we could say that Mike’s ability to go the suburbs and win over the town and carve out a life for himself there is emblematic of the growing social capital and access to white privilege of Irish laborers in the early 20th century, something John Henry wouldn’t have had been able to do, if he had been a contemporary of Mike’s also pitting steam power against internal combustion and electric power.

If I say that these arguments all have some value, critics of such critical discourse (the critical-critical, we might call them) would no doubt seize on this as an admission that this kind of examination serves no point except to undermine the value of meaning and truth. If everything is true, then nothing is true, and anything can be true! Subjectivity run amok! Cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria!

To the critical-critical, the only point of such examination is criticism in the most negative sense, and the only point of criticism is to prove that something is bad or wrong in order to destroy it. If we talk about the socioeconomic reality behind Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, that means we are coming for it, and if we’re not stopped when we come for Mike, then who knows what we’ll come for next?

In a very real sense, I wound up choosing Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel for my next review because of two men whom I know are willing to do the hard work and stand by the women in their life with the same valor and honor that society says men should stand by each other, men for whom sacrificing for their partners is not even seen as a sacrifice or a question. When I compare them to the fearful, fretful men who inspired the content of the review… well, there’s no comparison.

Last night while I was wide awake (or rather, very early this morning), I decided to set up a GoFundMe page for getting to WorldCon.

For every $150 I get, up to the goal of $1,800, I will write a satirical piece along the lines of Sad Puppies Review Books. In fact, most if not all such pieces will be new SPRB. I’m just leaving it open-ended in case I have a really compelling idea for something better, or I run out of workable ideas for book reviews. As always, I will not just churn out something that retreads the same jokes with slightly different source material to get easy applause for preaching to the choir. I am a craftswoman, no matter how low-hanging the fruit I pick may be.

Now, even if this falls flat, I do have some new potential and actual revenue streams that might let us swing it by the hair on the skin of our teeth by the time August rolls around, but that’s a big “might” and I’m not sure it’s worth it, spending the time and money and energy from now until then making it happen, as opposed to focusing on growing my audience and business in ways that will benefit me long past then.

So, as the those dedicated free speech enthusiasts would put it, I’ve decided to let the market decide. Want to see me at WorldCon? Want to read about my adventures at WorldCon? Want to live in a world where I go to WorldCon? Put your money where your mouse is and vote with your wallet. If the dreadful elks can make sure that Vox Day owns the Hugo ballot, I have to believe the wider fandom at large can ensure that Theophilus Pratt and John Z. Upjohn, USMC (aspired) have ringside seats, if that is in fact what they want.

Now, I am sure that in some quarters this gambit will be dismissed as “e-begging” for “Social Justice dollars” or “victim bux”. If you’ve never seen someone throwing those terms around, be grateful that you haven’t done all the research I have into the alternate realities inhabited by reactionary fandom cliques. As ridiculous as the claims they make are, I confess it is tempting for me to try to temper my approach, to avoid crowdfunding or trying to do it in an apologetic and quiet way in order to try to head off such criticism, or at least make it clear that it’s not warranted.

But at the end of the day, I believe that I have contributed something of value to a wider community. I believe I can make even greater contributions in the near future with a little help. The kind of transaction I’m soliciting here is neither scam nor charity, but a simple exchange of value for value.

Not sold?

Just imagine John Z. Upjohn livetweeting the con, and then listen to your heart.

http://www.gofundme.com/ae2worldcon

Well, yesterday the Hugo nominations for this year came out. I had some positive buzz surrounding my satirical writing, but whether I had a shot was always a question of how disruptive the self-proclaimed “puppies” would be in their attempts to control the ballot. As it happens, they succeeded in disrupting the process again for a second straight year. This isn’t terribly surprising.

For those just tuning in, the puppies are two closely related group (Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies) who use the paper-thin excuse that they believe a shadowy cabal of “SJWs” have conspired to control the content of the Hugo Award ballot for years in order to give themselves paper-thin moral cover while they conspire to control the Hugo Award ballot.

The two things they have conclusively proven two years running are 1) it’s pretty easy for a small, dedicated group to overwhelm the proceedings, if everybody else is voting as an individual, and 2) everyone else has been voting as individuals. Last year when the data showed that there was no other organized effort to control the nomination process, the Sad Puppy leaders’ explanation was that the vast, all-powerful SJW conspiracy was “too incompetent to even rig the award right”.

This year there was a record number of nomination votes cast. Given the way the record number of newly registered voters voted last year to repudiate the Puppy slates, I think it’s safe to say that most of those nominations weren’t cast by puppies. But thousands of people all voting their individual tastes, wills, and consciences are apt to vote for hundreds of different things. A few hundred people who agree to vote for the same thing can easily ram a slate through in the less popular categories.

Rabid Puppy ringleader Vox Day is running his campaign for the same reason he does anything: it’s easy enough for a man of his shockingly limited abilities to do it, and it allows him to maintain his flattering illusion of himself as a tactical genius.

To put it shortly, Vox is a man who has discovered that it is easier for one who is dedicated to upend a chess board to do so than it is for anyone else to stop it from happening, and that it is easier to scatter the pieces than it is to put them back where they were. Having determined that he has the power to end the game by flipping the table, he has determined that this makes him the reigning grand master of chess.

Vox fancies himself a Christian, of what you might call the “flaming sword” variety; i.e., his pretense to religion is an extension of his desire to see himself as a victorious general riding forth. He’s one of the specimens of U.S. Christianity who believes that the first coming of Jesus Christ was essentially a feint, a sucker-punch, or a sequel hook for the second coming, when there will be fire and blood and conquest.

If Vox were Christian in the sense of being Christ-like in comportment or thought, he would understand the difference between conquest and victory. Christ’s victory over sin and death, in actual Christian theology, was not wrested from an enemy at the point of a sword, but purchased with humility and self-sacrifice.

For something like the Hugo Awards—or a society or community in general terms—to function, it requires a certain amount of decency from participants. A chess game cannot be played if both players do not agree to the rules, including the unwritten rules like “you have to actually play the game” and “you can’t flip the table if things aren’t going your way.” A player who wins following those rules has won, well and truly. A player who loses still has the dignity of a game well-played.

The player who flips the table has neither.

The player who was playing their best when the table was flipped?

This player has not lost.

Vox Day flipped the table on several of the “weaker” Hugo categories. If any of his pet projects “win” a Hugo as a result, it will be a meaningless victory.

Those of us who were shut out by his actions, though? Well, we can’t win a Hugo this year, but we can be satisfied knowing that we can’t lose, either. The game was upended before we could find out how we did. When the nomination data becomes public (which I believe is something World Con does as a matter of course, after the dust settles), we might get some notion of whether or not we would have made the final ballot.

Frankly, even with the buzz I had, I’m not convinced that I would have made the shortlist. Nor am I bothered by that possibility. While Larry Correia, the original Sad Puppy, and his flunky Brad Torgersen consider making the shortlist and then not winning to be an unforgivable slap in the face, I have the supreme advantage of recognizing that it is, in fact, an honor just to be nominated. I know of several people who stated their intention to nominate me, and I respect their opinions.

I mean, the award would be nice. It might be a nice boost to my ego and career. But in absolute terms, the award is just a ratification of a sentiment, and I don’t need a trophy to apprehend that sentiment.

I never cared much about the Hugos before, but I don’t have to care about a game to care that a group of self-entitled bigots are upending the table where other people are earnestly trying to play it.

Last year, the Sad Puppies’ racist ringleader Brad Torgersen wrote about what he called “the fracturing of a reliable field”; i.e., that science fiction and fantasy used to be homogeneous and predictable, but now it’s all over the place. He was calling this the downfall of genre fiction, but I see it as its apotheosis, its transcendent victory. He lamented the fact that we now have genre romance, genre thrillers, genre mysteries, etc.

Basically, he lamented the fact that science fiction and fantasy are for everyone now, not just him and people who share his tastes and politics.

And the fact that the genre world is so vast and so diverse now means that it’s hard to take its pulse in a meaningful way.

For years, the way the Hugo Awards would shake out is that in the big media categories, the winner would reflect widespread popular tastes and in the literary categories, the winner would reflect who and what had the most solid consensus among the portion of fandom that was most motivated to become informed about and vote on the topic. People (including the puppies and their critics) fought over whether it was a popular contest or a measurement of quality, and which it should be.

In theory, the whole thing should be both, with popular tastes being a rough yet measurable proxy for the immeasurable metric of quality.

But the “fractured field”, as Brad Torgersen calls it, is too big for any award to reliably sample from, which means that in practical terms the Hugo Awards were a popular vote among Hugo voters, roughly reflecting quality as determined by Hugo voters, modulated by caveats relating to things that Hugo voters are aware of.

One of my peculiar hobby horses regarding online discourse is the human inability to grasp the scale of… well, anything that doesn’t fit inside a room, really.

Larry Correia regards being one of five nominees for the Campbell Award in his freshman year as an unforgivable insult because he can’t conceive of how many people he beat out for that slot, much less how many people were technically eligible but never in the running because they weren’t on the radar. That’s an example of the scale problem. He feels slighted because he lost out to the four people he could see as his rivals. He can’t fathom how many people he left in the dust.

Larry Correia makes a decent living writing. To someone who doesn’t understand how many books and above all how many readers there are in the world, his lack of awards and universal acclaim might seem suspicious. This, in general, describes the mindset of these reactionary fandom groups: most everybody they hang out with feels X way about thing Y, so any indication that the world at large does not must be the result of collusion and conspiracy.

We talk about big fishes in small ponds. What we don’t realize often enough is that even a big fish in a big pond is still, perforce, only big within that single pond. Indeed, we often fail to realize that the pond we see is not the whole of the world.

Now, offhand, I can think of five people who expressed interest in nominating my satirical works for a Hugo. There might be a dozen or so who said something to me about it. There might even be dozens of people, period, who put my name forth.

And if you asked them my odds of getting onto the ballot, many of them would have said, “Of course! How could she not?” Because in the waters in which they swim, my name is known.

But that’s all a bunch of individual ponds.

To tell you the absolute truth, I’m relieved that I didn’t get one nomination that people were bruiting about: Best Related Work for John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular: How SJWs Always Lie About Our Comparative Popularity Levels, my satirical “translation” of Vox’s attempt to get Gamergate to fund his one-sided feud with a more successful author. I didn’t want to dissuade anyone from putting it forth because I didn’t want to instruct others how to spend their ballots, but if I had secured the nomination and then won, I would have had very mixed feelings about that category rewarding a negative work targeting an individual two years in a row. I mean, I would have appreciated the inevitable sales bump and heightened visibility, but I would have preferred to have been nominated as a Fan Writer, or had my more generalized, less-target-specific satire Sad Puppies Review Books nominated as Best Related Work.

And to further tell you the truth, in terms of career goals, I would much rather be where Larry Correia is than have a Hugo. I don’t mean bitter and forever tarnished by association with a failed award grab. I mean: self-sufficient, financially stable, and with a motivated fan base.

Somebody last year (Scalzi? I don’t know, possibly multiple people. It might even have been me.) said that the reward for being popular is being popular. If your work reaches enough people for you to pull down an income in the six figures, this isn’t the same as being objectively the best… but does it need to be?

From its inception in 1975 through 2015, the World Fantasy Awards have given out trophies topped with busts of H.P. Lovecraft. Following a well-organized campaign spearheaded by many respected fantasy authors and fans, it was announced that this will be the last year that these statuettes will be used. While the campaign enjoyed broad support, of course there is a small but equally dedicated cadre of naysayers deriding it as “political correctness”.

The fact of the matter, though, is that H.P. Lovecraft was never actually a good choice for something called the World Fantasy Awards. It just happened that the first World Fantasy Convention was organized around and included a large number of his friends, fans, and proteges. The inaugural event had a Lovecraft theme, and primarily because of that, it stuck.

But H.P. Lovecraft was a notorious racist, and this makes him unsuitable not just because he had “the wrong opinions”, as some would have it. His racism is not unrelated to the work for which he’s honored, and it’s not a thing apart from the man, or the message sent when he is used as an ambassador for the excellence of an entire field.

His apologists have defended him with arguments such as “Yes, but he was a product of his times,” and “Yes, but what he thought in his private, day-to-day life is completely separate from his work,” but both these arguments are fairly easy to demolish.

H.P. Lovecraft was virulently and vociferously racist even for his time, and it came out in his work. Earlier this week I saw someone claiming that his racism and generally regressive viewpoints were a result of his belief in the universe as a bleak, terrifying place in which he and the entire human race along with him were essentially meaningless. I think this is garbage and that not only is it wrong, but it is exactly wrong; i.e., completely backwards.

We don’t write about fantastic threats and then have our day-to-day fears and prejudices shaped by them. Rather, the stories we tell reflect what we are afraid of. All of the “Aliens As Communist Infiltrators” stories that came out at the height of the Cold War did not create a fear of Communist infiltrators, but were created by such a climate. All the old folk stories and fairy tales that involve dangerous encounters with strange folks in the woods did not create a fear of meeting strangers in dark places but came out of them.

And H.P. Lovecraft’s disgusting beliefs on white racial purity and the inferiority of other people did not come from his habit of writing stories where unfathomably Other beings interbred with (white) humans and created monstrosities that threatened to destroy the world as we knew it; rather, the stories he wrote were allegories of his fears and prejudices.

But even without reading into the allegories of “cosmic miscegenation” within tales like The Dunwich Horror and The Shadow over Innsmouth, his naked and unallegorical racism is still there on the page. He treats the discovery of mixed heritage among human races as being exactly as horrific and mind-shattering a revelation as interbreeding between humans and primordial beings. He refers to other races as separate species and depicts them as animalistic. At one point in the Herber West, Re-Animator cycle, he wrote the following description of a Black boxer:

a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs

The entire point of this story, not incidentally, is to establish as a scientific principle that Black people are not only a separate race but a separate species, one between “true humans” and animals. This loathsome notion is also at the center of the one of few of Lovecraft’s works that is acknowledged even by his supporters as “Okay, yeah, maybe this one is a little racist,” a disgusting bit of doggerel verse called “On The Creation of [slurs]”.

I really hate to reproduce even one word of such patently racist text, but I feel like it’s important to show that even in one of Lovecraft’s most “mainstream” works, these ideas are present. It’s a major plot point in that segment of the story. He used his Herbert West story to advance a pseudoscientific notion that upheld his racist bigotry.

But you know what? Even if we can demolish the notion that his racism was informed by his “mythos” writing rather than the other way around, it ultimately doesn’t matter which came first. The fact is that the racism is there, not just in the man, dead in his grave, but in his work, as living and vital as it was when he first put it to paper. It’s there.

And every time someone was handed a trophy bearing his form and visage as a recognition of their outstanding work in the field of fantasy, they were being asked to tacitly cosign the idea that he is some sort of exemplar for this field, that whatever they wrote is only laudable because it measured up to his example.

I have my own thoughts about H.P. Lovecraft’s skill as a writer, and I know that even a lot of people who condemn him as a bigot disagree with me on this point, so I’m going to get into this. I will say that even if he had been the greatest writer who ever lived and even if you personally could get past the racism, he was still always a terrible choice to represent something like the World Fantasy Awards.

Why on earth would you ever pick someone so provincial (to use a more polite term than is warranted, but it better illustrates this particular point) in his outlook to represent the whole World? Why would you pick someone who was scared of the world beyond his picket fence, terrified of his neighbors, repulsed by his fellow astronauts on Spaceship Earth, and utterly horrified by the grandeur of the cosmos and the possibility of worlds beyond our senses to represent the best and brightest and most imaginative authors in the field of fantasy?

H.P. Lovecraft wrote stories where books could usher in the end of the world. H.P. Lovecraft wrote stories where imagination would lead you to death and insanity. H.P. Lovecraft wrote stories where curiosity didn’t only kill the cat, but made the cat pray for death to a cold and uncaring universe. H.P. Lovecraft wrote stories where the only thing you’d find through the looking glass, at the back of the wardrobe, or out beyond the stars was madness, depravity, and despair.

These things have no existence apart from his racism. His fear of the unknown, of the different and the strange, cannot be separated out from his racism.

Even if you could ignore it—and why would you?—H.P. Lovecraft would still be the Grumpy Cat Macro of fantasy writers: “I had a flight of fancy once. It was horrible.”

And this man represents excellence in fantasy?

I don’t think so.