"So what SF and fantasy has this argumentative bastard read, anyway?"

I'm sure you didn't ask, either. Too late.

Mark Adlard: Interface
 
Brian W. Aldiss: Barefoot in the Head; The Long Afternoon of Earth; Cryptozoic!; Earthworks

Isaac Asimov: Foundation
 
J.G. Ballard: The Terminal Beach; High Rise
 
William Barton: When Heaven Fell

William Barton and Michael Capobianco: Iris; Fellow Traveller
 
Alfred Bester: The Demolished Man

John Brunner: Stand On Zanzibar; The Jagged Orbit; The Sheep Look Up: The Shockwave Rider; The Traveler in Black

Algis Budrys: Who?
 
Terry Carr (editor): Universe 1 
 
Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle; Ubik; Martian Time Slip; Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; We Can Build You; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Now Wait For Last Year; A Scanner Darkly ; Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After The Bomb; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch     
 
Paul DiFillippo: Ribofunk
 
Harlan Ellison: The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World; Approaching Oblivion; Deathbird Stories; Strange Wine; Shatterday; Dangerous Visions (editor)
 
William Gibson: Neuromancer; Count Zero; Mona Lisa Overdrive; Burning Chrome; Virtual Light; Idoru
 
William Gibson with Bruce Sterling: The Difference Engine
 
Mira Grant: Deadline

Joe Haldeman: All My Sins Remembered; The Forever War
 
Harry Harrison: The Stainless Steel Rat; The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge; The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World; The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted: Deathworld; Deathworld 2
 
K.W. Jeter: Dr. Adder; The Glass Hammer; Farewell Horizontal
 
Stephen King: Night Shift
 
Kathe Koja: The Cypher; Bad Brains
 
Fritz  Leiber: Swords and Deviltry; Swords Against Death; Swords in the Mist; The Big Time
 
Frank Belknap Long: Mars Is My Destination

Ken MacLeod: The Cassini Division
 
China Mieville: Embassytown
 
Michael Moorcock: Elric: Elric of Melnibone; The Sailor on the Seas of Fate; The Weird of the White Wolf; The Vanishing Tower; The Bane of the Black Sword; Stormbringer; The Fortress of the Pearl; Corum: The Knight of the Swords; The Queen of the Swords; The King of the Swords; The Bull and the Spear; The Oak and the Ram; The Sword and the Stallion; Dorian Hawkmoon: The Jewel in the Skull; The Mad God's Amulet; The Sword of the Dawn; The Runestaff; Count Brass; The Champion of Garathorm; The Quest for Tanelorn; Jerry Cornelius: The Final Programme; A Cure for Cancer; The Condition of Muzak;  Oswald Bastable: The Warlord of the Air; The Land Leviathan; The Steel Tsar; Other: The Eternal Champion; The Silver Warriors (AKA Phoenix in Obsidian); Breakfast in the Ruins; Best SF Stories from New Worlds 2 (editor)
 
Frederik Pohl: The Merchants' War; The Cool War; Gateway; Beyond the Blue Event Horizon; The Siege of Eternity; The Far Shore of Time; The Best of Frederik Pohl; The Age of the Pussyfoot; Drunkard's Walk
 
Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth: The Space Merchants
 
Robert Sheckley: Immortality, Inc.
 
Robert Silverberg: Hawksbill Station; The Second Trip; The World Inside; Born with the Dead; Nightwings; Dying Inside
 
John Shirley: Eclipse; Eclipse Penumbra; Eclipse Corona; Wetbones; Heatseeker; (most of) New Noir
 
Dan Simmons: Hyperion; The Fall of Hyperion
 
Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash; The Diamond Age; Cryptonomicon
 
John Sladek: The Muller-Fokker Effect
 
Bruce Sterling: Crystal Express; A Good Old Fashioned Future; Islands in the Net; Heavy Weather; Mirrorshades (editor); Holy Fire
 
Michael Swanwick: Vacuum Flowers

Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-five
 
David Wingrove: Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom
 
Gene Wolfe: Endangered Species

Roger Zelazny: Nine Princes in Amber; The Guns of Avalon
 
Doctor Who novelizations: (Please keep in mind that these some 81 [!] books are the ones I actually remember reading and may not be a complete accounting of the ones I've actually read. Editions with an asterisk were published by Pinnacle in the US instead of Target UK.)

First Doctor: The Daleks; The Crusaders The Zarbi; The Tenth Planet; The Dalek Invasion of Earth; The Keys of Marinus; An Unearthly Child; The Aztecs; Marco Polo  Second Doctor: The Abominable Snowmen; The Cybermen; The Ice Warriors; The Web of Fear; The Tomb of the Cybermen; The War Games; The Enemy of the World; The Dominators; The Mind Robber; The Wheel in Space  Third Doctor: The Auton Invasion; The Cave Monsters; Day of the Daleks*; The Doomsday Weapon*; The Daemons; The Sea Devils; The Curse of Peladon; Terror of the Autons; The Green Death; Planet of the Spiders; The Three Doctors; The Invasion of the Dinosaurs; The Space War; Planet of the Daleks; The Carnival of Monsters; The Claws of Axos; The Mutants; The Time Warrior; Death to the Daleks; The Monster of Peladon  Fourth Doctor: The Giant Robot; The Loch Ness Monster*; Revenge of the Cybermen*; Genesis of the Daleks*; The Pyramids of Mars; The Seeds of Doom; The Ark in Space; The Brain of Morbius; The Planet of Evil; The Deadly Assassin; The Talons of Weng-Chiang; The Masque of Mandragora; The Face of Evil; The Horror of Fang Rock; The Android Invasion; The Sontaran Experiment; The Hand of Fear; The Invisible Enemy; The Robots of Death; Image of the Fendahl; The Invasion of Time; The Armageddon Factor; The Nightmare of Eden; The Creature from the Pit; The State of Decay; The Keeper of Traken; The Leisure Hive; Logopolis; The Sunmakers  Fifth Doctor:The Visitation; Time Flight; Castrovalva; Four to Doomsday; Earthshock; Terminus; Arc of Infinity; The Five Doctors; Mawdryn Undead; Kinda; Snakedance; Enlightenment; Warriors of the Deep

Yet Another Polemic about The Hugos - collect them all! (updated)

So. A bunch of guys got together, voted as a bloc and...

Ah, skip the intro, already. This has been detailed by so many people in the fannish community in so many different ways that it's not funny, but then again, it really shouldn't be. Why? Mainly due to two reasons which I'll go into in detail:

1) Like most people who happen to read these odd, antiquated things called "books" as a form of entertainment I have a finite amount of both time and money to spend on those books. That means that I pretty much read what I want to. Quite a bit of it would be termed "literary science fiction", for want of a more accurate description. That being said, the one thing that will not convince me to read a book is having someone engage in the online equivalent of screaming at the top of their lungs with a bullhorn outside my window at 3 in the morning about how "YOU'RE BEING A LITERARY ELITIST/SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR/CRAPTACULAR JUDGE OF SCIENCE FICTION FOR NOT READING MY BOOK INSTEAD THE ONE YOU'RE CURRENTLY ENJOYING, DAMNIT!!!"

That's pretty much what the entire Sad (and even worse, Rabid) Puppies crowd did with the 2015 Hugos. A number of more deserving nominees probably got knocked off the ballot as a result of all this, which directly leads to this observation:

2) All of this wouldn't be as grating on my nerves except for the following: although there was nothing particularly illegal in terms of  Hugo nomination rules as laid down by the WSFS in what the Sad/Rabid Puppies did, they chose to ignore the following truism: just because you can doesn't mean that you should. The Sads, in my opinion, were looking to continue a strategy of self-promotion that goes back to the first two Sad Puppy campaigns that Larry Correia organized in 2013 and 2014. Unfortunately, the current Sad Puppy front man is Brad R. Torgersen, who seems even more naïve than Correia about the company he keeps. Tactics like theirs would have pissed me off regardless of who engages in them, but the fact that the organizers of the Sad and Rabid campaigns are all to the right of my own political views (in the case of the Rabids very far to the right, since they make the likes of Bill O'Reilly seem like Bernie Sanders in comparison), have a very narrow definition of what constitutes proper SF and also undertook this as a politically motivated attack on certain corners of SF fandom is just icing on an already huge cake. I have a saying that if you scratch an Objectivist you'll find a Stalinist underneath. I think it's been more than adequately proven here.

Also, consider their online belligerence: if they hadn't ratcheted up the "you better listen to us because we're really angry and we'll call you names if you don't" element of their campaign, I wouldn't have cared all that much about this mess. Since they did, my response is this: if the Puppies' only way to present an argument is to engage in personal attacks against other pros in the field (such as here, here and here), they've pretty much lost my interest in reading anything they publish or even in taking them all that seriously as polemicists in the first place. Not only is it a complete non-starter in term of debating tactics, but it makes them look like a pack of emotionally stunted escapees from the Asshole Factory. That's not a particularly pleasant turn of phase, mind you, but I calls 'em as I sees 'em and what I see from them is behavior indicative of a bunch of supposedly grown men who are acting like anything but. 

So if the SRPs were looking to win any points with a run-of-the-mill, not particularly SMOFish Joe Fan like me by doing this, they didn't. Quite the opposite, in fact. As to whether they realize that there's an actual lesson in that fact...

Now reading

The Malacia Tapestry by Brian W. Aldiss.