Tag Archives: Sad Puppies

(If you’re new here, read my earlier post on the subject for some context)

The Hugo Awards fight just gets uglier and uglier. It’s true that in the eyes of many Worldcon veterans, putting forward a slate is against the whole spirit of the rules even if it falls within the letter of them, but this level of ugliness is about far more than that.

Last year the stated goal of Larry Correia’s Sad Puppies slate was to shake things up, and he made the highly questionably decision to include a novella by the infamous Vox Day purely “to make heads explode”. It got on the ballot, but eventually came last, below “No Award”, partly because Vox Day is widely hated, and partly because the work was, to be put it diplomatically, decidedly sub-standard.

This year Brad Torgersen had a different stated agenda, which was to showcase quality work of the sort that Correia and Torgersen claimed gets overlooked. While the list predictably skewed towards rightwing authors, it also included left-leaning writers such as Annie Bellet, and wasn’t exclusively white or male.

Then Vox Day considerably muddied the waters by putting up his own Rabid Puppies slate. Most of it simply copied Brad Torgersen’s Sad Puppies slate despite some authors having agreed to take part on the condition that Vox Day had nothing to do with it. The only differences were some of the short fiction categories, where he added a number of works from his own small press, and the two editor categories, where he entered himself.

Now Vox Day is an outspoken far-right extremist who isn’t even subtle about his white-supremacist views, and his action has made it far easier to paint Brad Torgersen’s slate as part of a racist plot, despite the lack of evidence for Torgersen himself being a racist.

So it’s hardly surprising that the atmosphere has been getting increasingly ugly, up to the point where people wanted out.

Annie Bellet withdrew her short story “Goodnight Stars” from the nominations

I want to make it clear I am not doing this lightly. I am not doing it because I am ashamed. I am not doing it because I was pressured by anyone either way or on any “side”, though many friends have made cogent arguments for both keeping my nomination and sticking it out, as well as for retracting it and letting things proceed without me in the middle.

I am withdrawing because this has become about something very different than great science fiction. I find my story, and by extension myself, stuck in a game of political dodge ball, where I’m both a conscripted player and also a ball. (Wrap your head around that analogy, if you can, ha!) All joy that might have come from this nomination has been co-opted, ruined, or sapped away. This is not about celebrating good writing anymore, and I don’t want to be a part of what it has become.

And Marko Kloos withdrew his novel “Lines of Departure”, with this statement from Facebook quoted from Larry Correia’s blog.

My withdrawal has nothing to do with Larry Correia or Brad Torgersen. I don’t know Brad personally, but Larry is a long-time online acquaintance and friend. We’ve known each other since before our writing days. I have no issue with Larry or the Sad Puppies. I’m pulling out of the Hugo process solely because Vox Day also included me on his “Rabid Puppies” slate, and his RP crowd provided the necessary weight to the ballot to put me on the shortlist. I think Vox Day is a shitbag of the first order, and I don’t want any association with him, especially not a Hugo nomination made possible by his followers being the deciding factor. That stench don’t wash off.

I had previously stated on this blog that Requires Hate was orders of magnitude worse than Vox Day. I was wrong. In terms of the destruction and havoc he’s been able to wreak to the community, he’s every bit as bad. Just like Requires Hate ultimately ended up eating her own, he’s stabbed the relative moderates of his own side in the back by using his ideological opponents as a weapon, in the full knowledge that he’s considered radioactive and they’re heavily into guilt-by-association. Quite what his ultimate agenda might be is hard to guess, but his short-term goal appears to be destroy the Hugos entirely rather than win any awards. And people are playing into his hands.

At this point, the Hugo Awards of 2015 are as good as dead, and everyone is now fighting over a corpse. Whether The Hugos can be salvaged in future years is another matter, and it does need a consensus on what the awards actually represent, and who they belong to. At the moment it’s degenerated into a fight to the death which will only destroy the object being fought over. Science Fiction itself is the loser.

Maybe cooler heads will prevail in 2016. A few people have tried to build bridges and find some common ground, but they’re still being drowned out by the louder and angrier voices.

There do need to be changes, and there is still the chance that some long-term good can come out of this mess.

Slate voting has demonstrated how a tiny minority voting the same way can sweep entire categories. But it didn’t start with the Sad and Rabid Puppies. It was broken before, and it didn’t need an organised conspiracy to do it. With a small voting pool all it took was a critical mass of people with heavily-overlapping tastes to crowd everything else off the ballot. That fuelled the perceptions, true or not, that second-rate work was ending up on the ballot simply because the author was friends with the right people, and even that the whole thing was being fixed behind the scenes by an imaginary cabal.

The organisers of the Hugos need to do two things. First, they need to massively expand the pool of voters in the nomination round, and there are signs of this already happening. Second, they need to overhaul the voting system so that voting blocs, whether formal, informal or accidental, cannot dominate the nominations in the way they have been doing. If The Hugos are genuinely meant to represent the best of the year in SF&F, the finalists do need to be the choices of a representative cross section across all of fandom. At the moment, there is little evidence that they are.

I’m still glad my chosen fandom is music. I don’t remember even the Punk Wars ever getting this bad.

A couple of analogies:

Every year, around February time, the Classic Rock Society holds an awards ceremony in Wath-upon-Dearne in Yorkshire. Despite the name, the emphasis is on progressive rock, and the winners are almost entirely drawn from a relatively small and incestuous scene of grassroots bands either signed to small labels or who release independently. Bands such IQ, Magenta, Mostly Autumn and a handful of others at the same level dominate the awards. Indeed the award for Best Bass Player used to be known as the “Best John Jowitt Award” because he used to win it year after year, until finally he ruled himself out of contention so that someone else could win for a change. Nobody from major-league prog bands like Dream Theater or Rush ever win, nor prog-influenced mainstream acts like Elbow or Muse.

Were a large influx of people join the CRS specifically to vote for something like Noel Gallagher’s album about points failures at Stockport as album of the year, a lot of people would be highly unimpressed. But the CRS Awards has never held itself up as representing the best of all music, progressive or otherwise. It doesn’t have a generations-long history in which “In The Court of the Crimson King” and “Close to the Edge” were illustrious past winners.

Every year The Guardian does a readers’ poll for best album. Many years it’s dominated by the same corporate-indie mainstream as the end-of-year list complied by their own writers. But in 2012 the winner was “Invicta” by progressive rock stalwarts The Enid. A few people cried foul, claiming it was out of order that a band playing the sort of music that to them was the epitome of uncool could be allowed to gatecrash indie-rock’s party. But the consensus was “good on them”. The Enid’s fanbase broke no rules, and any other cult band with a devoted following could have done the same thing, but didn’t. Two years later the veteran punk satirists Half Man Half Biscuit repeated that success for their album “The Urge for Offal”.

If a dozen different bands with dedicated but non-overlapping fanbases were to do the same in 2015, it would make the readers’ end-of-year list an awful lot more interesting.

Not that either of these are exactly the same, but there are parallels with the hugely controversial results of the Hugo Awards nominations that are currently melting the internet.

My “fandom” is music. Being a reader of science fiction rather than a convention-goer I’m nowhere near as emotionally invested in the Hugos as many others clearly are, either as treasure to be protected or a prize to be fought over. Even so, the levels of triumphalism and of sour grapes I’m seeing from the two ‘sides’ are both predictably depressing. At the end of the day, it’s just an fan award, and the stakes are hardly a matter of life and death. But the Hugo Awards still ought to be bigger than any two warring cliques, neither of which is prepared to acknowledge that the other might have at least some valid points, however badly expressed.

The broader SF world needs to find a constructive way forward which doesn’t involve excluding significant sections of SF’s readership.

I’m leaving this post open for comments, but I’m going to be fairly strict on what I allow through. Keep it civil and be constructive if you want your words of wisdom to avoid the digital slushpile.

Yet again the Hugo Awards are causing the internets to explode. This time there are rumours that Brad Torgersen’s “Sad Puppies” slate has managed to get three out of the five nominations for Best Novel, and there are even rumours of complete sweeps of some of the short fiction categories.

The war of words is getting increasingly bitter even before the announcement of the actual nominations. The Sad Puppies face accusations of dedication to white male dominance of the genre and ruining The Hugos for everyone else, while the Sad Puppies themselves accuse their opponents of being a clique of elitist gatekeepers. Too many people are cherry-picking the worst statements by the “other side” in order to prove the righteousness of their cause. Neither side is exactly covering themselves in glory.

They certainly champion different styles of SF; socially-aware works with literary ambitions versus commercial action-adventure stories. The extremely polarised reactions to last years winner of Best Novel, Ann Leckie’s “Ancillary Justice” shows where the faultlines lie. But shouldn’t SF be a big enough tent to accommodate many different kinds of fiction?

The whole thing leaves me conflicted. I’ve never had much time for the right-libertarian world-view of much American hard-SF, and have always preferred the more socially-aware works from the likes of Charlie Stross or the late, great Iain Banks. But the left-wing sub-tribe of SF has lost a lot of moral high ground in the past twelve months, first with the Jonathan Ross fiasco, and then with ugly Requires Hate affair. There are people I once respected I now regard with suspicion.

But whatever your own position, do read Abi Sutherland’s heartfelt post on why block voting and politicisation is against the spirit of the whole thing.

Much like the similar culture wars in the computer gaming world and elsewhere, the whole thing gains its energy from the uncompromisingly tribal nature of US politics. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon. I blame Karl Rove, who for the sake of winning a couple of elections was prepared to poison the body politic for a generation. Sadly it’s polluted a lot of UK internet discourse as well. It’s difficult to imagine how any of this can make much sense to the rest of the world.

But ultimately something like the Hugo Awards should not be the exclusive property of any one narrow tribe, which is why I find some of the comments I’ve read from Teresa Nielsen-Hayden and others so disappointing.

The Hugo Awards are supposed to represent the best the the world of science fiction has to offer. If it devolves into a highly politicised contest with semi-organised block voting it risks turning into the Eurovision Song Contest, which as any music fan will tell you is an entertaining circus in its own right but has absolutely no relevance to the wider music world.

Due to the contentious nature of the issue I’m temorarily disabling comments while feelings on the subject are still running high.