The 2015 Hugos

“The important thing is that we increased participation” said the arsonist as the last volunteer fire company pulled away from the extinguished fire.

Some observations on the vote:

The Hard Rabid Puppy Vote
By this I mean the number of people who will reliably vote as Vox Day wishes. At the nomination stage it ranged from 196-100, but of course VD has boasted that he has recruited more since. During the final vote we can look at categories that VD promoted on his final ballot that were not part of the Sad Puppy slate for a maximum value: this ranged from 585 for Best Editor Short Form to 450 for Best Fan Writer on the first pass. And it only provides a maximum, not a minimum. We know that 525 people put Turncoat as their first choice, but we don’t know how many were minions and how many were Sad Puppies or swing voters that happened to vote for their own reasons. This has important consequences for how badly he can game next year’s nominations.

The Hard Sad Puppy Vote
This is harder to judge, since few of the nominees that were only on the Sad Puppy slate survived to the short list, and some of them picked up a VD endorsement after the nominations closed. At the nomination stage, nominations for the first four categories that were just on one slate were fairly similar: 172 votes average for the Sads and 165 for the Rabids. For those endorsed by both slates, they ranged from 323 votes for the novels to 220 for the short stories, averaging about 281. This is only about 83% of the sum of the two when voting for different nominees, so there is some overlap in the two pools of nominators: you can’t just add them together to get total influence.

The Hard Anti-Slate Vote
How many people voted anything on a slate below No Award regardless of merit? The Dramatic Presentations offer some guidance. The puppy nominated Guardians of the Galaxy only got 1038 No Awards, and some of them were probably a reaction to the movie itself rather than its presence on a slate.  Even a popular, Hugo-winning movie can be judged unworthy by some voters.  The previous year, the winning Gravity got 315 No Award votes: the equivalent of about 700 proportionate to the far larger 2015 total vote. In 2013, the winning avengers got 96 voters placing no award higher, proportionate to 341 in 2015. This implies a net pure and hard anti-slate vote of about 500.

In Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, the top Puppy nominee, a Game of Thrones episode, won third place against 1414 No Award votes. This compares to the second place unslated Doctor Who episode that won second place against 520 No Awards. This suggests that the net No Award penalty purely for being on a slate in that category, regardless of quality, was probably something under 900 votes. So 500-900 is reasonable estimate of the hard anti-slate vote.

The editor categories had a lot of No Awards as first choice, but much of that was probably peculiar to those categories. Judging the editors is really hard, especially long form, unless you’re one of their authors, or someone that knows their authors.

I think that some deliberately put everything on a slate below No Award in the Editor categories, but no more than in the dramatic presentations. What hurt the non-Vox editors was this:

VD made it very feasible for the ordinary fan to judge his own work at Castalia, by forcing so much of his product onto the ballot. And a lot of people voted No Award just so he could be below it. And then they abstained on some or all of the rest of the slate from lack of information, which meant that those editors weren’t above No Award either.  Or people that would have abstained from the entire category in a normal year felt that they had to vote because of VD.

I know that some people No Awarded the entire Editor Long Form category because they thought they couldn’t judge it properly, not because of the slates. 140 voters voted No Award first in the category in 2014 when there was no slate sweep, proportionate to over 440 in 2015’s larger vote.

It didn’t help Weisskopf that she had very diffuse responsibility at Baen, a house with a reputation for light editing. Or that she had called a fair chunk of the genre “fuggheads.” But I think all the editors suffered because of challenges peculiar to the editor categories.

What Scalzi said.

Slate nominations are a poisoned chalice. The only ones strong enough to survive them don’t need them. The sensible Puppy strategy next year is to come back with an actual recommendation list, with  no less than ten suggestions per category, and once again become useful members fandom.

Mallomar SF

Mallomar SF has a superficial shell of crunchy hard science, but when you bite into it’s full of fluffy, gooey magical science and bad science.

Take Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which I loved when I was twelve. Heinlein lovingly calculates the kinetic energy of the lunar bombardment, while completely omitting the amount of energy lost as the projectiles go through the atmosphere. Or the glaringly obvious heat signature of the second catapult’s radiator.

Or the economic absurdity of growing wheat in lunar caves with fossil ice for export to Earth. That’s pretty silly even before the ice starts running out.

Given the presumption of competitive fusion power, that would would be hopelessly more expensive than, for example, growing wheat underneath Antartica.

Seveneves

In Neal Stephenson’s 2015 novel, the Human Race does its best to deal with an oncoming planetary catastrophe, a 5,000 year bombardment of Earth. Most of the page count is spent on a desperate effort to preserve a fraction of humanity off the Earth’s surface in space. We are repeatedly forced to follow the Gimli Philosophy of Risk Management: "Certainty of death, small chance of success... What are we waiting for?” Because when those are the options, the answer is obvious. You play the cards you are dealt as well as you can, and if you lose you go down fighting.

Stephenson does a pretty good job of sticking to known science, with, he admits, a few places where he wrote himself into a corner. It follows that settling space with today’s technology is shown as the kind of desperate enterprise that is only attempted because an unknown Agent destroys the fricking Moon. And the settlers barely survive by the skin of their teeth, passing through the narrowest of genetic bottlenecks after terrible casualties.

Early on, the alert reader will notice Stephenson introducing Checkov’s Survival Plans B and C. 5,000 years later he takes them down off the wall. Because, even for this planetary catastrophe settling space isn’t the only option, or necessarily the best one.

It isn’t explicitly stated, but is logical to assume that there were other iterations of Plan B, and Sonar Taxlaw’s people are just the one that we meet before the end of the book.

Also, Sonar Taxlaw is the best character name since Leelo Dallas Multipass.

Heinlein’s Double Star Could Not Win a Hugo Today

Because the science is rubbish, and we know it. This is a real problem for contemporary hard SF: the universe is not nearly as hospitable to space travel as we once thought, and it’s a lot harder to write about robust human settlement beyond Earth without cheating on the science than we thought in the 1950s.

The Just City, by Jo Walton

Athena, Apollo, time travel, Socrates, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino and robot ethics.

Filking the 2015 Hugo Slates

Three pups for the Genius Club, no one knows why
Seven for John C. Wright and his Saudi prose
Nine for the Brad that calls you a CHORF
One for the Vox with a grudge he owns
In the noisy kennel where the puppies lie.
Two slates to rule them all, two slates to find them
Two slates to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the noisy kennel where the puppies lie.



At last we bared our fangs to bay
HOW I WISH I WAS IN SASQUAN NOW
Our noisy yapping made an awful din
But with one quick snark John Scalzi stove us in
God damn them all!
I was told we’d cruise the con and have rockets to hold
Be envied...by our peers
But I’m house-broken now with no Hugos to cheer
The last of Puppy Privateers

Live. Die. Repeat.: Edge of Tomorrow

She's young Victoria in powered armor. He's a smarmy rear-echelon coward. Together they fight aliens! Time traveling aliens on a Groundhog Day time loop!

Emily Blunt is Rita, worn down by multiple trips through the the temporal wringer but fighting on without sentimentality or wasted energy. Also, with the kind of honking big sword that only makes sense of you are wearing powered armor.  Tom Cruise as Bill Cage is forged in the crucible of battle into something better than he was.

A Brief Review of Puppygate

Two small groups, calling themselves Rabid Puppies and Sad Puppies, used disciplined slate voting to dominate the 2015 Hugo final ballot. After some people refused or withdrew nominations, the Puppies gained 59 out of 85 slots: 45 from both slates, 10 purely from the Rabid slate and 4 from the Sads. Black Gate, a Fanzine nominated by the Rabids, also withdrew after the ballots were finalized. Less than 14% of the ballots cast in the novella category was enough to win the last of the slots, and the most popular Puppy novella got only 32% of the ballots in that category, so small minorities willing to use slates could dominate everyone else.

Many objected that the slate tactics, although legal, were mean, unsporting, pernicious, unethical and wicked.

Particularly after the voter packets came out, many complained that poorly written slate nominees kept better choices of the ballot. I would say that the slated writing nominees ranged from competent pieces by Butcher and English that didn’t quite rise to Hugo quality, to flawed or mediocre, to actively bad, and in the case of Williamson, unrelated to SF/F. And I’m seeing a ballot that’s slants more male than the prior year or the field and readership as a whole. Even if some Puppy motives were sincere, they had bad consequences.

On May 11 Irene Gallo, Creative Director in Tor’s art department, posted a comment on her personal Facebook page that, as she later admitted, painted the beliefs of the Puppies and the quality of the slate nominees with “too broad a brush”. This received little comment until Vox Day, born Theodore Beale, leader of the Rabid Puppies, released a screencap that he had been holding for several weeks for maximum effect, on the weekend of the 2015 Nebula Awards. Tor was also closed for the weekend. Of course, someone who genuinely cared about harm to the Puppies criticized would have simply sought an immediate correction.

Although Gallo rightly apologized for her statement on June 8, and Tom Doherty of Tor issued a statement that Gallo’s views in the comment were hers alone, and was if anything diplomatically deferential to Puppy views, enraged Puppies have continued to demand that Gallo be fired, as well as any other Tor executives that have said unfavorable things about puppies. This is in spite of the fact that judging by their nominations, the Puppies weren’t big fans of Tor books to begin with.

Like nominee Jim Butcher, I think Gallo’s apology is sufficient: Tor should not sacrifice a valued and talented employee to opportunistic Puppy baying.

Nonetheless, Vox Day is trying to whip up the threat of a Tor boycott. Of course, it makes perfect sense for him, since his tiny publishing house competes with Tor. But it won't be doing Tor's authors any favors.

Next year, I would love to see the Sad Puppies express their desire for more stuff they like on the ballot with an actual recommendation list: ten works or more in each written category. And they could improve their selection process: although they solicited recommendations, the final slate seems to have been chosen by the self proclaimed Evil League of Evil, apparently consisting of Correia, Hoyt, Torgersen and Wright. Details are murky for a process that aspired to be open and democratic*. That’s a small group that seems to have had a lot of overlap in their tastes. A committee that can only come up with a single choice for Best Graphic Story, and that a poorly drawn and unfunny zombie comic by one of Torgersen's neighbors, really needs more breadth.

*I welcome correction.

Eric Flint is Cruel but Fair to Sad Puppies

What he said.

Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword

Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie, is a worthy successor to last years Hugo Awards best novel, Ancillary Justice. Breq, the protagonist, is a former starship A.I., a creation of the Radch, a sophisticated but cruel empire that doesn't use gender pronouns.

The Radch have found it expedient to use former humans as ancillaries, remote extensions of the minds that run their starships, convenient when they need to be in more than one place at a time. Did I mention the Radch were cruel?

When Justice of Toren is destroyed with malice aforethought, the person calling herself Breq of the Gerentate is all that survive's of Justice of Toren's intellect, a single ancillary pretending to be human.

Some of the kind of people that fear the feminists lurking under their bed see the Radch lack of gender pronouns as a weird culture war stunt, but as world building goes it isn't that much of a stretch. Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian all lack gender pronouns, and that's just the European languages.

Indeed, you could read the stories as a clever subversion of feminist tropes: the Radch have imperialism, oppression and sexual exploitation, but they don't even have a word for patriarchy.

It requires the usual suspension of disbelief required for interstellar empires, FTL, artificial gravity and decanting extensions of machine intellects into human bodies; in short, what is normally required for space operas.

Ancillary Justice

Ancillary Sword and another review by Lis Carey.

Night's Slow Poison is a 2012 short story set earlier in the same setting.

Introducing ScapeBook™!

Has this happened to you? You're reading a new book, and you have a sudden desire to introduce Mr. Book to Mr. Wall. At high velocity. Is it the cardboard characters? The intrusive message? The pathetic world building? The wordy but unspecific setting? Perhaps it's the plot hole big enough to sail interstellar dreadnoughts though in line abreast. Perhaps the eight deadly words "I don't care what happens to these people" have come unbidden to your lips. Maybe it's just pompous verbosity or excessive weapons porn.

Traditionally, this is followed by the consoling thump of the book hitting the wall and a moment of healthy catharsis. But what if you are using an e-reader or, worse yet, your computer?

Now, ScapeBook™ offers the answer. Handy, sacrificial ScapeBook™ sits within easy reach when you read digitally. Available in hardback, trade and mass-market paperback and Neal Stephenson doorstop, ScapeBook™ mimics the look and feel of a traditional book. Interior text is lorem ipsum filler and the back cover is equipped with the usual non-specific and deceptively edited blurbs. The generic cover can be customized with self-adhesive stickers printable on your home printer to more closely match the work you are currently reading digitally.

ScapeBook™. Your e-reader will thank you, and you'll just plain feel better.

Nutty Nuggets

"What are we looking for again?" said Liu, the technician from Mars Spacefleet.

"Ejecta from Perdita, of course.You saw the images we got from Alaunt. One of what hit Perdita shredded the cargo module and blew debris on a diverging course. The hydrogen tanks were holed too, but we're not going to waste time looking for hydrogen in space. You have the cargo manifest." Church, agent for Tranjovian and its insurance agency, was a stubby, thick-lipped, stocky man with heavy eyebrows. Perdita had gone silent on an unmanned low-energy trip to the Jovian moons and Alaunt had found what was left of her hull after a tedious search of her extrapolated course.

"Right." said Liu,  as a document came up on his screen. "Spare parts and luxury goods: fine wine, single-malt scotch, Napoleon brandy, macadamia nuts and cashews."

"The liquids will have frozen that far out, so we'll be looking for nutty nuggets. A pretty unique spectral signature beyond Ceres."

"Another 20 minutes until the next data from Baskerville. The time lag...."

"Your people willing to pay for a manned mission?"

"Hell no!"

"Mine neither. We'll live with the time lag"

"That rock pile tore up Perdita pretty bad" said Liu as they waited for the next data feed. "Tough luck!"

"Luck! You know, you ought to take a look at the statistics on loss of mission beyond LEO some time. You might learn a little something about the insurance business. We probably have ten volumes: manufacturing defect, processing error, design fault, system failure, programming error. Even inputting the wrong measurement units. You know what we don't have actuarial data for on loss of interplanetary missions?"

"Asteroid impact?"

"Bingo. Space is big."

Three weeks later, Church was back in the control room.

"Eight confirmed tracks of, uh, nutty nuggets" said Roberts

"Good. That will give us a sense of the limits of the debris field. Now we switch our search filter: aluminum, plastic, semiconductors"

"Mr. Church?"

"What's left of the bus, Liu. You don't think the Belters hit Perdita with unguided rocks do you?"

"The Belters? You think the Belters looted Perdita?"

"Hell no! You read too much classic SF. Do you have any idea how much delta-v they'd need to match courses from inside the belt and get away afterwards? How long a manned mission would take? Go ahead and look it up. God knows we've got plenty of time before we hear anything from Baskerville. But putting a few hundred kilograms of rocks on a collision course with Perdita? Piece of cake"

Several minutes later, Liu looked up from the screen. "Ok. Looting doesn't make sense. What's their game?"

"Well, you know the Belters have been trying to sell us navigation hazard warnings for the smaller asteroids, for a lot more than we think they're worth. We could read this as a bid to convince us that that threat is bigger than we think. Or just as 'Nice shipping line you got there, sure would be a pity if something were to happen to it accidental like'. But we think they were playing an even bigger game."
"
Oh?" said Liu.

"Somebody shorted Transjovian shares before Perdita was lost. To prove who was behind it we need to show the courts that it wasn't an accident. Alaunt needs to find some bit of manmade hardware in the debris cloud that isn't from Perdita. Fortunately, the debris from the places that were hit on Perdita won't look much like part of a midcourse  and terminal guidance multiple kinetic weapon bus. But now we will need some luck."

Five weeks later, they had it.

Governance in the Elflands

Original world building is one of the virtues of The Goblin Emperor. The elvish government is one facet of this. A key example is the Corazhas, which might be described as an independent privy council with teeth. Evidently, the emperor needs support from at least half of them for important actions like building a major bridge or appointing his own chancellor.

As far as I can tell it is an original invention of the author, without any actual historical prototype, but it seems workable enough.

There are seven witnesses. The parliament, magicians, clergy and universities each appoint one. One comes from the treasury, one, The Witness for the Foreigners, from what seems to be the equivalent of the State Department or Foreign Office, and one from the judiciary. Apparently, the last four aren't simply appointed by the current emperor, but chosen by senior civil servants and judges that were, in the case of a new emperor, appointed by previous administrations.

Not a democracy, but an interesting set of checks and balances. One can see how it might have evolved from a more purely advisory council.

More on The Hot Equations

Another objection to Ken Burnside's The Hot Equations is that he spends a lot of time on the performance of electric propulsion (at current performance levels) and nuclear thermal rockets (tested experimentally, but not yet ready for operational missions.) While this technology will support a great deal of interesting exploration, I don't think it will support interplanetary commerce worth fighting a space war over. That will probably require something with higher performance, like a VASIMIR engine or a fusion pulse drive.

Pastiche and Fanfic

Pastiche has been described as a work that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. It follows, then that fanfic is a subset of pastiche, mostly distinguished by the author not expecting to get paid.

Professionally written pastiche at its best includes a lot of interesting work; I would argue that almost everything in the Arthurian Mythos after Chrétien de Troyes qualifies, as well as Shoggoths in Bloom, Slaves of Silver, Stross's Laundry novels and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Scalzi's Redshirts starts out as a snarky Star Trek parody, but quickly goes metafiction as the titular redshirts figure out about the ridiculously high attrition rate among everyone on the away teams who isn't the Captain, Science Officer, Chief Engineer or Lieutenant Kerensky. They struggle to find a way to escape their fate before the narrative kills them.

Besides Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, I am reminded of Stranger Than Fiction.

About The Hot Equations

Ken Burnside makes a brave attempt to discuss the actual implications of thermodynamics in space warfare. It is on the 2015 Hugo ballot for Best Related Work. Unfortunately, he gets a lot wrong.

In space, the horizon assumption is almost always wrong. The one exception is Low Earth Orbit (LEO), where the limb of the earth can temporarily obscure something for roughly an eighth of an orbital period; this is about a 15-minute window, tops. Detection range is never limited by terrain for militarily significant increments of time. 

Not true for sufficiently distant observers. For an observer on Mars or Ceres, a ship in LEO is going to be eclipsed almost half an orbital period. In a hostile environment, this is exactly when the Earth ship would choose to make major delta-v changes.

With an emissions spectrum on your drive flare, plus distance and proper motion, they can determine the mass pushed by that drive flare. Making your spacebattleship look like a space rowboat doesn't work, and neither do decoys, which need the same drive signature, apparent motion, and mass as the ship they're duplicating. 

You can’t make a battleship look like a rowboat, but you can make a rowboat look like a battleship. A rocket engine is designed to convert as much of the energy used as possible into accelerating propellant. A mechanism designed to simply produce the same amount of heat and lighter will be lighter, simpler, cheaper and use less energy. Compare, for example a welding torch to a rocket engine with the same thermal output. Similarly, a craft with electric propulsion could route electricity directly to radiators to simulate the heat signature of a much more massive craft.

The usual counter-argument made is "I'll just drift in, with engines cold and go undetected." Your life support system and power plant will be a detectable signal once your engine turns off, and they'll know where to look. 

Again, a decoy can have a heat source to simulate a manned ship running without thrust. And unmanned ships can hibernate while not under thrust, with very low power output. We’ve already shown that unmanned craft can be lethal weapons platforms, even when operating in the unpredictable environment of an atmosphere with weather.

The ion thrusters used by NASA's probes to Pluto have ISPs of around 10,000 seconds with a thrust of around 4milligees. 

NASA’s one probe to Pluto, New Horizons, does not use ion thrusters. The author is evidently thinking of Deep Space 1 and Dawn, both asteroid missions.

The combat actions won't be naval in nature, at least in the conventional Battleof Jutland sense. They'll be closer to anti-piracy actions in the Sea of Cebu or the Gulf of Aden; a pirate will lay in wait at a point where a ship must make a course correction – and where missing that correction by a few hours can result in everyone aboard dying of starvation – and capture the ship to hold for ransom.  

This shows a profound misunderstanding of orbital mechanics. First, most cargo missions won’t need a crew and won’t have one. Second, capturing a ship at interplanetary speeds is much easier said than done.

Consider a specific scenario: the asteroid pirates in Poul Anderson’s 1966 The Moonrakers. Robot freighters travel on Hohmann Orbits between Mars and the Jovian Moons, and space pirates from the asteroids match courses and loot them as they pass through the asteroid belt. There are several problems with this concept.

Simply matching courses takes a lot of delta-v, even if the most efficient course is chosen, and the most efficient course is a very long haul for the pirate crew. Getting away with the loot requires still more delta-v, and another long haul for the pirate crew. For most goods, it’s probably cheaper to buy honestly in Mars orbit and ship to the belt on a robot freighter.

Second, if Burnside is correct that plausible space drives are visible at great distances, it will be quite difficult for the pirates to either achieve surprise or get away without being tracked and targeted. 

Third, reliably disabling enough of the freighter’s systems to make it safe to board without damaging the cargo will be tricky, even if the pirates can achieve surprise. And I can imagine a lot of ways a bloody-minded owner could booby trap a ship so that unauthorized boarding becomes too risky for any rational pirate.

The Goblin Emperor

Just finished The Goblin Emperor. The 2015 Hugo novel category is going to be just fine. There’s at least one novel with likable and sympathetic characters, good plot, and good world building. The punctilious steampunk elves with gaslight and pocket watches are definitely not Tolkein, but language notes at the back would have totally warmed the cockles of Tolkein's heart, with  a detailed discussion of elvish forms of address explicitly noting gender, marital status and social rank.

You will probably find it helpful to read that part first.

The author succeeded in making me care about the protagonist and his allies and friends. Also, elvish airships are cool. And the Elvish government is an interesting and novel piece of word building.

The Quality of Puppies

I haven't read all of them yet, but in the short fiction Hugo categories dominated by puppies, most of the nominees don't seem to be worthy of a Hugo. Why?

I think there are two main reasons. The simplest is that, for the nominations exclusive to the Rabid Puppies, Vox Day is not a good judge of writing quality, in my opinion. He can't tell when he himself is writing badly, and he is inordinately fond of works published by his own tiny Castalia House, which publishes works that are passed over by larger publishers with better distribution and marketing.

The Sad Puppies are a bit different. I believe that the were honest in their desire to pick worthy writing, but they handicapped themselves in several ways.

The first was their stated goal to support works that wouldn't get on the ballot without their boost. That means that writers who have shown the ability to get nominated without puppy support were off the table, in theory. That's a lot of good writers.

In practice, the Sad Puppies made some exceptions for editors and dramatic presentations. Because I'm pretty sure that most of them would have been on the ballot without their help.  But putting Resnick and Weiskopf on the ballot was such a wonderful opportunity to stick it to the SJWs that it couldn't be passed up.

I have no idea why they picked Sheila Gilbert. She seems like a good person. But if you are picking a slate to show you are not sexist, you must include some females.

The second is that they ruled out writers tainted as Social Justice Warriors, as defined by them. This also narrows the field. I realize that they have tried to spin this as wanting authors who put good storytelling ahead of message, but this is quite subjective. The reader's tolerance for message increases when the message is congenial.  Indeed, if the author's view of the world matches the reader's, the message may be invisible to the reader.

I found their two John C. Wright nominations to have quite a lot of message, but I'm not a conservative Catholic.  For calibration, I think the Narnia books were a bit heavy on the message, but Gene Wolfe is fine.

The third is that the Sad slate was ultimately constructed by just four authors: Correlia, Torgersen and  two anonymous authors. Their ability to capture the best of the best was limited by how widely they read. Based on the slate, it seems that they were mostly fond of MilSF, Urban Fantasy and C. S. Lewis homages.  Which doesn't seem to adequately capture the full spectrum of the SF/F genre.

Also, I don't think their subjective view of the best SF/F writing of 2014 is quite the same as the median Hugo voter. I know it isn't mine.


Correction: A previous version of this post incorrectly identified Tom Kratman as one of the group creating the Sap Puppy slate.

Consider Puppies

In his aptly titled blog post Rant: Sad Puppies vs. Anti-Puppies, as the Kilostreisands Pile Up, Jeff Duntemann argues

My conclusion is this: The opponents of Sad Puppies of Sad Puppies 3 put them on the map, and probably took them from a fluke to a viable long-term institution.

and:

I’ve seen a few comments that go something like this: “I’d never heard of the Sad Puppies before. I’ve been trying to figure out which side is right, but the sheer nastiness of the Sad Puppies’ critics makes me think they’re just sore losers. I’m more or less with the Puppies now.”

I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work, there, Jeff.  What put the Sad and Rabid Puppies on the map was their effective but unsporting gaming of the Hugo nominations that let them dominate the ballot. Before that they were getting very little attention outside the readership of their own blogs.

And someone new to the controversy would have to be pretty selectively tone deaf not to notice the sheer nastiness among the puppies themselves.

Bolos and Hugos

Back when I was in High School, in the early 1970s, I loved Keith Laumer's Bolo stories about gigantic cybertanks. I later designed a war game featuring early model Bolos (MK I-III) and I did illustrations for Steve Jackson's Ogre war games, which were basically Bolos with the serial numbers filed off.

What I learned creating the war game is that gigantic supertanks are very hard to make work at all. If anti-tank missiles become much more effective than APDS, and a supertank can carry an effective point defense system against anti-tank missiles, then maybe a supertank works. But neither has happened in our timeline. In the Laumerverse MK II Bolos were already a thing by 2015. But clearly, not in our universe.

So Laumer's Cold War Bolo era stories involved a lot of handwaving away of engineering issues. Even with exactly the right technological advances, roads, bridges and airlift remain as major roadblocks. And that doesn't begin to deal with tactical nukes being consumed like popcorn. The idea of firing a nuke beneath the Bolo and leaving it inverted at the bottom of an enormous crater was never addressed to my satisfaction.

In the wargame, it turned out that the Bolos worked best as only one part of a combined arms team, and needed to be used with great caution. Optimal tactics involved shoot and scoot plinking at long range far behind the front while the mobile infantry went in advance identifying targets, with artillery support from even further back, not gleefully surging forward to grind the enemy beneath your treads.

So the near future Bolo stories have not aged well. The interstellar Bolo stories, in addition,  required a level of handwavium technology that made interstellar wars of conquest fought on the planet surface economically rational and common.

Because you need some seriously improbable magical technology to make that work, if you think about it.

Imagine the energy required to boost the Normandy Invasion to, say, .9 c and brake at the destination. Now imagine what it would take to send it on a FTL mission.

Compare that with what it would take to send a swarm of .9 c kill vehicles sufficient to sterilize one side of a planet without braking, and another half a planetary rotation later.

Orders of magnitude less, yes?

So the interstellar Bolo stories have not aged well for me, either. Too much suspension of disbelief required.

On this year's Hugo ballot there's a novella by Tom Kratman: Big Boys Don't Cry, that is essentially a Bolo pastiche with the serial numbers filed off. There was an earlier version that was much more explicitly derivative, with Bolos and Hellbores  and Infinite Repeaters. These references have been removed in the current version, but it's still derivative, and I am still currently bouncing off the original Laumerverse, so no Hugo vote from me.

To his credit, Kratman has a few interesting things to say about the ethics of treating self-aware AI as slaves, but his meatsacks are remarkably morally obtuse about the self-aware war machines they employ. Which was a problem with Laumer as well.

However, Kratman does make his meatsack villains so thoroughly stupid, corrupt and evil that they come across as cardboard black hats, leaving the feeling that Kratman has stacked his narrative deck.

Also, if I'm reading the story correctly, the black hats have a gigantic war machine with brain damage, which they decide to provide with enough power to break a weld,  power a gauss rifle and lift its 14,000 ton hull into firing position in the course of doing system diagnostics, and they also neglect to unload all of its ammunition before dragging it away to be scrapped.

Which puts them in the Hogan's Heroes zone of villains who are simultaneously very evil and very incompetent.

Also, I don't know which is sillier: the idea of giving a gigantic cybertank orgasms while it role-plays an SS tank commander as a training exercise, or gigantic cybertanks feeling uncomfortable around one of their number because it won't assume a clear male or female gender role.

Update: A previous version described the novella as Bolo fanfic rather than pastiche.