Sad Puppies Whine Sadly ... by Bob Nelson
In August, the Hugo Awards were voted on and distributed at the World Science Fiction Convention in Spokane, Washington. Tension was high, because the nomination process, months earlier, had been "packed" by a group of activists known as "Sad Puppies" who claimed that over the years the Hugo Awards had been coopted by "Social Justice Warriors" more interested in "message" writing than in "real science fiction". The Sad Puppies put their candidates in every category and even completely filled some of them.
As Wired put it :
Since 1953, to be nominated for a Hugo Award, among the highest honors in science fiction and fantasy writing, has been a dream come true for authors who love time travel, extraterrestrials and tales of the imagined future. Past winners of the rocket-shaped trophy—nominated and voted on by fans—include people like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, and Robert A. Heinlein. In other words: the Gods of the genre.
But in recent years, as sci-fi has expanded to include storytellers who are women, gays and lesbians, and people of color, the Hugos have changed, too. At the presentation each August, the Gods with the rockets in their hands have been joined by Goddesses and those of other ethnicities and genders and sexual orientations, many of whom want to tell stories about more than just spaceships.
Early this year, that shift sparked a backlash: a campaign, organized by three white, male authors, that resulted in a final Hugo ballot dominated by mostly white, mostly male nominees. While the leaders of this two-pronged movement—one faction calls itself the Sad Puppies and the other the Rabid Puppies—broke no rules, many sci-fi writers and fans felt they had played dirty, taking advantage of a loophole in an arcane voting process that enables a relatively few number of voters to dominate. Motivated by Puppygate, meanwhile, a record 11,300-plus people bought memberships to the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention in Spokane, Washington, where the Hugo winners were announced Saturday night.
The outcome of the vote? To quote the Wall Street Journal :
At science fiction’s annual Hugo Awards, the Puppies didn’t bark after all.
The Hugos have been enmeshed in culture-war controversy this year: Two conservative campaigns dubbed the “Sad Puppies” and “Rabid Puppies” have claimed the Hugos are biased and controlled by cliques, and they essentially took over the Hugo nominations in April, packing the ballot with dozens of their preferred choices.
But the Puppies struck out when the Hugos themselves were awarded Saturday night, as thousands of new Hugo voters lashed back against the Puppies’ tactics. In nearly a third of the categories, voters chose not to hand out an award rather than let it go to a Puppy-backed nominee. Virtually all of the other categories were won by nominees who weren’t from the Puppies’ slates.
Authors and fans who have opposed the Puppy campaigns said the results show that the science fiction fans who vote on the Hugos don’t want to see the field’s most prestigious award gamed.
“Good work was rewarded and bad action was penalized,” said novelist John Scalzi. “A small group of people tried to game the awards for their own gain, and a vastly larger group of people who valued the integrity of the awards responded by choosing ‘No Award’ over nominees they felt got on the ballot by gaming the system.”
Analysis of the voting showed that some 2500 additional people had joined the vote (membership costs $40) and bloc-voted against the Puppies. Five categories had only Puppy candidates... and in each of these cases, the result was "No Award".
The rout of the Sad Puppies was unequivocal.
In the evening, George R R Martin ( Game of Thrones , multiple Hugo winner, and voice of reason before the vote) held a huge party , to try to get past all the ill feelings. He distributed "Alfie" Awards (named for Alfred Bester, winner of the very first Hugo, seventy years ago) to people who had probably been deprived of a Hugo because of skewed voting. He wrote a blogpost to express his ambivalence about the SP disaster.
One of the louder voices against the Sad Puppies, John Scalzi, quickly wrote a blogpost entitled "Being a Jerk About the Hugos: Not as Effective a Strategy as You Might Think":
Why did the Puppies fare so poorly? There has already been much speculation and analysis on the matter, and there will continue to be for some time. But in my estimation (and leaving out issues of literary quality of the nominations, which is super-subjective), the reason for their massive and historic failure is simple:
They acted like jerks, and performed a series of jerk maneuvers.
Specifically:
- They created slates for awards that are meant to be about an individual’s personal tastes and choices. That’s a jerk maneuver.
- They gloated about the slates getting on the ballot, and the upset that this caused other people. That’s a jerk maneuver.
- They created an imaginary cabal of people and asserted without evidence that this cabal indulged in slate-making, and used this assertion to justify their own bad action. That’s a jerk maneuver.
- They spent months insulting the people they associated with their imaginary cabal. That’s a jerk maneuver.
- They spent months crapping on the writers they dragooned into their imaginary cabal, and crapping on the work those writers created. That’s a jerk maneuver.
- They spent months denigrating the award they went out of their way to build slates for. That’s a jerk maneuver.
- They spent months pissing on the people who love and care about the awards, and the convention that hosts both. That’s a jerk maneuver.
- They expected the people who they’d been treating with contempt to give them the respect they would not afford them. That’s a jerk maneuver.
- They pretended they didn’t actually care about the awards for which they put in months and sometimes years of effort to get work on the ballot. That’s a jerk maneuver.
- They had the poor grace to whine about people potentially voting “no award,” which is fully allowed by the rules, after gleefully pointing out that slating was not disallowed. That’s a jerk maneuver.
While my own personal experience with the Sad Puppies pretty much agrees with Scalzi... let's not forget that the important topic is not the SPs' behavior, but the Hugo Awards and their future. Eric Flint, one of my very, very favorite authors who happens to be both a Baen author and a self-proclaimed socialist (yay!), had been a voice of reason before the vote. Just after the vote, he wrote an excellent "plague on both your houses" blogpost :
Fact One. There is no grandiose, over-arching SJW conspiracy to deny right-thinking conservative authors their just due when it comes to awards. It does not exist. It has never existed. It is nothing but the fevered dreams which afflict some puppies in their sleep.
...
Fact Two. There is no reflexive reactionary movement to drag F&SF kicking and screaming back into the Dark Ages when all protagonists had to be white and male (and preferably either engineers or military chaps). The very same people who piss and moan about diversity-for-the-sake-of-it litter their own novels with exactly the same kind of diversity they deplore when their opponents do it.
Yeah, I know they’ll deny it. “The story always comes first!” But the fact is that there is no compelling plot function to Ringo’s inclusion of the gay couple in Under a Graveyard Sky . So why did he put them in the novel? The answer is that, like any good writer—and whatever my (many) political disagreements with John, he’s a damn good writer—he tries to embed his stories into the world he created for them. The world of Black Tide Rising is the modern world, and his novels reflect that—as they should.
...
Fact Three. Yes, there is a problem with the Hugo awards, but that problem can be depicted in purely objective terms without requiring anyone to impute any malign motives to anyone else. In a nutshell, the awards have been slowly drifting away from the opinions and tastes of the mass audience, to the point where there is today almost a complete separation between the two. This stands in sharp contrast to the situation several decades ago, when the two overlapped to a great extent. For any number of reasons, this poses problems for the awards themselves. The Hugos are becoming increasingly self-referential, by which I mean they affect and influence no one except the people who participate directly in the process.
That said, however, as I spent a lot of time in my first essay analyzing—see “Some comments on the Hugos and other SF awards”—the causes of the problem are complex and mostly objective in nature. There is no easy fix to the problem. There is certainly no quick fix. Most of all, there is no one to blame—and trying to find culprits and thwart the rascals does nothing except make the problem worse.
And then there was silence in the blogosphere... This may be partly because Brad Torgerson, the leader of the Sad Puppies, is an active member of the US Army, rotated to the Middle East just before the voting. But then, considering his recent year-end blogpost... maybe not.
It's Christmas Eve. Time for my ritual screening of my favorite adaptations of A CHRISTMAS CAROL... the Reginald Owen version, the Alastair Sim version, the George C. Scott version, and... best of all... BLACKADDER'S CHRISTMAS CAROL, with Rowan Atkinson. Time for eggnog. Time for wrapping prezzies. Time for peace on earth, and good will toward men... and women... and aliens... and elves... and even puppies. So in the spirit of the season, I am going to say something nice about the Sad Puppies.
Last year's Puppygate was an ugly affair. I am not going to rehash it here. My views are all on record, my original blog posts still up for anyone who wants to go back and read them. The last thing I want... the last thing anyone who truly loves science fiction, fantasy, and fandom would want... would be to have to go through the whole thing again in 2016. Whatever your view of how the Hugo Awards turned out at Sasquan, I think we can all agree that we would like MidAmericon II's awards to be more joyful, less rancorous, less controversial.
And maybe... just maybe... we'll get our wish. Call me naive. Call me an innocent. Call me too trusting by half, too nice a guy to see how things really are... but, really, I am starting to have some hope. All over the internet, people are already talking about the Hugo Awards, making recommendations, discussing the work... the WORK, the things we love, the stuff that unites us instead of the stuff that divides us.
... and Torgerson responded :
Many people have already seen George R. R. Martin’s optimistic (and well-intended) commentary at his LiveJournal. However, just as with George’s hood ornament Alfie awards (also well-intended) there is more than one way for a thing to be perceived. My perception — and I am not alone in this — of George’s desire for an end to the rancor, is that George still seems to think that a) the rancor was flowing almost entirely one-way, from the Puppies’ side to the Trufan side, and also b) none of the Puppies are themselves fans. Not Fans (caps f) and certainly not Trufans. No. Puppies are still an outsider bunch, who carry an outsider’s stigma.
There is also a bit too much parentalism in George’s tone: dear kids, I hope you’ve learned your lesson, now wipe those dirty looks off your faces and come give your mother a hug!
As long as that’s George’s take — and he’s certainly not alone in this — then attempts at reconciliation will be difficult at best. Because as long as Puppies are deemed to be subservient, second-class citizens within the field proper, the emotion that spawned Sad Puppies, will remain. I don’t know anybody who easily accepts being a second-class citizen in her own country. Especially not after certain people within George’s beloved community — including certain individuals at George’s own publisher — moved heaven and earth to slanderously and libelously smear all Puppies indiscriminately.
I highly recommend that anyone interested in the Sad Puppies as a "social incident" take the time to read all of Torgerson's blogpost. It fairly drips with paranoia. (At the same time, I continue to recommend Torgerson's excellent Chaplain's War , worthy of a Hugo even without packing the process...)
And in my opinion, that is the real point of interest in the Sad Puppies:
- They live in the little universe of Science Fiction edition,
- That universe is not conform to what they want,
- They know there must be a reason for that non-conformance,
- They cannot imagine themselves being that reason,
- They discuss this problem among themselves... but never with anyone else,
- They conclude that "most people" would/should agree with them,
- Since most people obviously do not agree... there must be a secret conspiracy preventing things from happening as they should!
If that sounds paranoid and delusional... that's because it is paranoid and delusional. The SPs invented an imaginary conspiracy to explain why the world is not as it should be -- that is to say, as they would have it be. They ignore massive evidence that there simply is no such conspiracy. Then they whine when outsiders refuse to take them seriously.
There's a lot of that going around these days...
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The Sad Puppies have begun a process for the Hugos in 2016... but apparently they are not looking at a "slate" as they did in 2015. Their slate proved to be toxic to their candidates, even in the cases where that candidate was objectively worthwhile.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.....