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The Hugo Awards and the Sad Puppies

Ophiucha

Auror
Actually, Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show was on the slate, but wasn't nominated. I understand he doesn't take a very active role in it editorially, though.

True, although the lead editor for the magazine (Edmund Schubert) was nominated. That OSCIMS has published a few of these authors (including the 'Sad Puppy' leader, Torgersen) and that Schubert is friendly with Correia is a bit suspect, but I think that nomination - at least - is just them playing favourites with anyone who published them, instead of giving all of their buddies a nomination. Which I can live with, but then, I might just be saying that because I don't know my editors well enough to suggest someone better. :p
 
I'm tremendously unimpressed both by Vox Day's threats (though I'm unconvinced about his ability to see them carried through) and Brad Torgersen's suggestion that those threats mean everyone shouldn't No Award for fear of them being carried out. (It's really, really hard not to mentally label that "just let him take Poland".) Especially when his exhortation to "vote like the stories and books are just stories and books" is weighed against the uncertainty that some of these stories and books were nominated through genuine enthusiasm for their quality.

I mean, at the end of the day, I'm going to be reading as much as I can handle of everything, and then voting how I feel appropriate. But one of the measures I'm going to be using is "do I think this should have been nominated?" or alternatively "is this better than a lot of the other stuff I read last year?" and if the answer is no, I will be putting No Award above those works. And I don't care for threats and tantrums to the contrary.
 

Jabrosky

Banned
It's all well and good to ask whether award organizations like the Hugos are vulnerable to political biases among their electorate, or whether any kind of "official" award is useful for much more than boosting creators' egos or giving them spotlight attention, but I'm not a fan of any of these Puppy movements. Brad Torgensen sounds like a curmudgeon whining about how kids these days are writing stories that don't all fit his own tastes, sided with the claim that today's SF/F is somehow more preachy about politics than that back in his day. Larry Correia, the other major Sad Puppy I've heard about, might be worthy of sympathy if he really was ostracized as this horrible racist or sexist due to his own "pro-gun" libertarian politics, but that sounds less like a problem with the Hugos themselves than it is with certain critics within the SF/F fandom (and I believe the most annoying political trolls often aren't writers themselves but instead activists badgering writers to cater to their own agenda).

And then there's the one I'll simply address as the ignorant double-stuffed savage.

I wonder how any of those guys feel about the brouhaha over the Oscars earlier this year. They almost seem like a political inversion of that, except more underhanded in how they dealt with it.
 
In the time since I last posted here, Marko Kloos, Annie Bellet (original post deleted), Edmund Schubert, and the magazine Black Gate (entire official website deleted) have all withdrawn. The field is looking ever more barren.

I find it kind of amusing that in the same post, Schubert both tries to justify working with Orson Scott Card and expresses absolute contempt for Vox Day. I suppose advocating violent uprising in the event of legalized gay marriage is still less extreme than wanting to throw acid in women's faces.
 

Steerpike

Felis amatus
Moderator
I bought books by both Kloos and Bellet when they withdrew. Didn't hear about Schubert.

I don't buy OSC works because of what he does with his money, but I don't think he's nearly in the category of Vox Day. Also, I don't believe he advocated violent overthrow of the government, although that is a commonly repeated assertion. I think he basically asked whether people would at some point react violently if the judicial branch kept up a sort of unilateral, activist approach to institutionalizing gay marriage, which is a far cry from advocating violence in my view (although as a supporter of marriage equality I do not agree with his underlying premise regarding the judiciary).
 
The awards are in, and the Puppies lost across the board. Five categories got No Award. Vox Day is already claiming that he won by proving liberals control the Hugos. Yay for him, I guess.

Personally, I didn't care one way or another about Correia and Torgersen's cause. I'm just glad Vox Day's candidates didn't get anything. Folks didn't oppose him for being conservative; they opposed him because he regularly goes out of his way to provoke as many people as possible.
 

Philip Overby

Staff
Article Team
I find this post actually really interesting here:This Is What The 2015 Hugo Ballot Should Have Been

In the end, I'm happy for the people that won, but this was such a clusterf*** on multiple levels. Politics in my fantasy is like fish in my ice cream. I hope they figure out some way to fix this broken ass system. GRRM giving out awards (the Alfies) to people who were left off ballots because of whatever the hell happened, is pretty classy on his part though.
 
I found the Wired.com write-up really interesting: Who won science fiction's Hugo Awards, and why it matters

Personally, I voted on merit. But that decision led to me No-Awarding several categories, because frankly if that was the best of the year, then it was a terrible year. (I don't believe it was a terrible year, and I look forward to reading those pieces that missed out on nominations because of ballot-stacking and finding out just how not-terrible the year was.) And sometimes I No-Awarded because there was only one non-Puppy nomination, and I couldn't say whether that nomination deserved a Hugo just because.

Clearly a lot of voters had similar thoughts.

I agree with Philip that GRRM's Alfies were excellently done. I'm particularly happy that he recognised Kloos, whose withdrawal from the Hugo race was both classy and permitted Three-Body Problem onto the ballot. (I remain really sad that City of Stairs was slated off the ballot, because that book absolutely blew me away; it was far and away the best thing I read of the year.)

In any case, I hope that the increased attention and interest translates to a broader range of nominations next year - including from the Sad Puppies. As I've said throughout, I don't object to them encouraging consideration of a particular type of spec-fic, as long as that's what they're doing, not pushing a "vote for this" slate. I'd like to see long lists of suggested reading prior to nominations next year - like I see from the so-called SJW left - or I'll have to assume they're still playing silly-buggers.

I'm assuming there will never be any improvement in behaviour from Vox Day. He likes the attention too much. Though it's interesting to see the nomination data. Either he only has about 160 sworn minions (rather than the 390 he claims) or they're not as obedient as he claims.
 

kennyc

Inkling
I find this post actually really interesting here:This Is What The 2015 HugoÂ*BallotÂ*Should Have Been

In the end, I'm happy for the people that won, but this was such a clusterf*** on multiple levels. Politics in my fantasy is like fish in my ice cream. I hope they figure out some way to fix this broken ass system. GRRM giving out awards (the Alfies) to people who were left off ballots because of whatever the hell happened, is pretty classy on his part though.

This. I hope the nominating and voting process is changed (I understand there is a proposal on the table) otherwise this will be known as the year the Hugos died.
 
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