Liu Cixin to Sci Fi: Drop Dead
Within the same fortnight that David Hartwell announced that the World Fantasy Award trophy would no longer be a bust of Lovecraft, but instead be the head of someone whose sole qualification to represent all of fantasy literature is her skin color, Liu Cixin, the first chinaman ever to win a Hugo Award has publicly spit in the face of those of us who voted for him.
He was interviewed in the Global Times. The statements are so graceless and so ungrateful, that I am studying his hands carefully to see if his fingers are crossed, a sign soldiers videoed by the enemy are supposed to make to show they are speaking under duress.
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/939761.shtml
GT: Some Chinese fans have said they want to band together to vote on the World Science Fiction website next year. What’s your opinion on this?
Liu: That’s the best way to destroy The Three-Body Trilogy. And not just this sci-fi work, but also the reputation of Chinese sci-fi fans. The entire number of voters for the Hugo Awards is only around 5,000. That means it is easily influenced by malicious voting. Organizing 2,000 people to each spend $14 is not hard, but I am strongly against such misbehavior. If that really does happen, I will follow the example of Marko Kloos, who withdrew from the shortlist after discovering the “Rabid Puppies” had asked voters to support him.
GT: Many fans believe that even if The Three-Body Problem had benefited from the “puppies,” it still was deserving of a Hugo Award. Do you agree?
Liu: Deserving is one thing, getting the award is another thing. Many votes went to The Three-Body Problem after Marko Kloos withdrew. That’s something I didn’t want to see. But The Three-Body Problem still would have had a chance to win by a slim margin of a few votes [without the “puppies”].
After the awards, some critics used this – the support right-wing organizations like the “puppies” gave The Three-Body Problem – as an excuse to criticize the win. That frustrated me. The “puppies” severely harmed the credibility of the Hugo Awards. I feel both happy and “unfortunate” to have won this year.
I don’t see any crossed fingers.
That means that this man is gullible enough to believe either what his translator, or Tor Books, or the mainstream news told him, namely, that we who voted for him were motivated by race-hatred against non-Whites. So we voted for a non-White because his book was good, not because his skin color was correct. Because we treated the award as if it were for the merit of science fiction story telling, not as if it were a political award granted to whatever most helped the far Left. We ignored race. By Morlock logic, that makes us racist.
I realize, my dear readers, that if you read THREE BODY PROBLEM, and weighed its merits, and in your honest judgment you thought it was the best SF novel of the year, that, by Morlock logic, your judgment does not matter because you are not the correct sort of people to have opinions.
Even though your opinion in this one case agreed with our Leftist insect Overlords, the mere fact that the opinion was yours disqualifies it.
You are wrongfans.
Your love of science fiction is insufficient to make you a real science fiction fan unless you also hold a wide and ever changing list of political opinions on topics unrelated to science fiction, to science, or to reality.
It seems our votes were malicious on the grounds that we are right-wing, and that when my fans ponied up forty bucks to vote for me, you were not doing this because you like my work, but only out of the terrible and dark hatred in your hearts against… well, I am not sure against whom you have so much hatred. Who is the Victim of the Week again, this week? Eastasians? Oceanians? (Someone should send Wendell the Manatee upstairs to check).
I note our malicious votes were still counted, however.
And all this time, I thought we Sad Puppies were merely sick and tired of mind-numbingly dull novels about mind-swapping genderless AI’s in space rocketing straight to the highest echelons of science fiction’s critical acclaim, and that we wanted to rescue stories that were actually worth reading and have them rise from the ashes of brain-meltingly absurd uber-leftist ideological cliques and bask in the glory of the coveted Hugo Award.
Hmmm. One would think that if this were our motive, we would have said so from the beginning. Oh, wait a minute. We did.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
