The Hugo Award kerfuffle
Posted: Fri Sep 11, 2015 1:16 pm
In some sense, I'm following up on G2K's post here and my comment there.
Philip Sandifer is starting a project called "Weird Kitties." This is intended as a response (or counter-slate, if you will) to Sad Puppies.
Making Light is hosted on Patrick Nielsen-Hayden's website. Patrick & Teresa Nielsen-Hayden are insiders' insiders who work at Tor Books, and Making Light has been the epicenter of anti-Puppy defense organization. Of particular note is that the Making Light commenter community put together a major nomination process reform initiative, called E Pluribus Hugo, to try and prevent the Puppies from continually locking up the nominations in the future. EPH has been approved this year, and if approved again next year, will be implemented for the 2017 Hugos.
George R. R. Martin's livejournal. In some ways, GRRM has been one of the more moderate voices speaking out in defense of the "insider" WorldCon clique. He did not endorse voting for "No Award," but he has been consistently anti-Puppy and also handed out some consolation awards, called "Alfies," to people he felt should have won the Hugos this year.
File 770. The author (Glyer) and readership of File 770 are mostly anti-Puppy, but their coverage has been fairly comprehensive. The commenter community is something to pay attention to.
Eric Flint's website. Eric Flint has spoken up only a few times, but he's been a key non-hostile neutral player. He's suggested some reforms to the Hugos, and his Hugo-related posts are well worth reading.
Mad Genius Club. A website/blog shared by a bunch of relatively like-minded authors (like-minded, at least, in terms of the Puppy controversy.) The commenter community more or less corresponds to the Sad Puppy version of the commenter community on Making Light.
Brad Torgersen's website. The titular head and organizer of Sad Puppies 3, although perhaps not the loudest voice.
Larry Correia's website. The originator of Sad Puppies. His posts are heavily commented on (again, a sort of "community of commenters" there).
Vox Day's website. The authoritative place to look to see what Rabid Puppies are about, in their own words.
Sad Puppies 4 website. Sad Puppies 4 is underway with its own dedicated website.
2046 wrote:Hugo Puppies
I heard nothing about Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies until recently, but basically some sci-fi conservatives got fed up with the lefty hipster bent to modern sci-fi and the selections of Hugo Awards in particular and organized into a nomination bloc for the Hugos. So the leftists organized and got a whole bunch of friends to sign up as final voters and then ensured that no awards were given in the final voting.
Basically, then, a maligned resistance group organized and scored a mini-coup, so the existing regime called in a proverbial board invasion to assist in shutting the whole enterprise almost completely down, giving no awards at all in most categories and ignoring native English-speaking science fiction altogether but for crap like Guardians of the Galaxy. They call this "victory" and also call the conservatives racist for those insidious racial terms like "ChiCom" (Chinese communist, a term with no racial bent I am aware of).
Don't get me wrong ... I appreciate a good strategic self-destruct. Those Klingon bastards did kill his son, after all, and Anakin did offer the Jedi Cruiser and all its embarked crew to aid Ryloth.
But in this case the irony is that the leftists have confirmed absolutely everything the maligned resistance group had been saying all along. Sure, it probably had more to do with like-mind groupthink than an organized leftist conspiracy, but now the leftist conspiracy really and truly exists, openly, and feels sufficiently good about themselves to really turn up the stupid.
So much for the Hugo Awards being a meaningful accolade. Like with the political nonsense that detracted from the work of the Trekonomics guy, they're too busy applauding needless insertions of shout-outs to modern leftism than focusing on, y'know, the sci-fi.
C'est la vie.
Edit: This is the best rundown I have seen so far, including actually explaining what the hell puppies have to do with it.
I don't actually have time at the moment to post a lot more content, but I'll give a link round-up for people less familiar with the controversy to start exploring. These links will take you directly to the source - there has been a lot of press coverage of very mixed accuracy and very little neutrality.Jedi Master Spock wrote:It's slightly more complicated than left / right. This has been brewing for several years, and I've been watching the rising tension in literary SF&F fandom for several years.
There are two dimensions: Pro- / anti- politicization of fandom and the genre; and then left / right.
The first major push was from pro-politicization left-wing forces. Right-wing fans and authors had a fairly hostile response to this (once they started to respond), whether or not they were in favor of politicizing the genre and fandom in their own direction or opposed to politicization. Left-wing anti-politicization fans and authors were left in a very awkward position, as the people in positions of power within traditional fandom tended to be left-wing pro-politicization.
See, for example, Eric Flint, who stayed mostly quiet until recently and AFAIK is still on the good side of both some of the Sad Puppies and some of the anti-Puppies ("Puppy Kickers," if you will). He's been alternating between conciliatory statements and condemnations of extremism by either side.
You've got a couple misses in the statement. Five categories were No Awarded (short story, novella, both editor categories, and related work). That left two literary fiction category awards (novel and novelette), the alternate-media fiction categories (graphic novel, "long-form drama" (movie), "short-form drama" (TV show)) and an assortment of other miscellaneous categories.
No Award WAS ranked over virtually all Sad Puppy and Rabid Puppy nominees, with the main exception being Guardians of the Galaxy. It was a fairly clear case of bloc voting against Puppy nominees.
Philip Sandifer is starting a project called "Weird Kitties." This is intended as a response (or counter-slate, if you will) to Sad Puppies.
Making Light is hosted on Patrick Nielsen-Hayden's website. Patrick & Teresa Nielsen-Hayden are insiders' insiders who work at Tor Books, and Making Light has been the epicenter of anti-Puppy defense organization. Of particular note is that the Making Light commenter community put together a major nomination process reform initiative, called E Pluribus Hugo, to try and prevent the Puppies from continually locking up the nominations in the future. EPH has been approved this year, and if approved again next year, will be implemented for the 2017 Hugos.
George R. R. Martin's livejournal. In some ways, GRRM has been one of the more moderate voices speaking out in defense of the "insider" WorldCon clique. He did not endorse voting for "No Award," but he has been consistently anti-Puppy and also handed out some consolation awards, called "Alfies," to people he felt should have won the Hugos this year.
File 770. The author (Glyer) and readership of File 770 are mostly anti-Puppy, but their coverage has been fairly comprehensive. The commenter community is something to pay attention to.
Eric Flint's website. Eric Flint has spoken up only a few times, but he's been a key non-hostile neutral player. He's suggested some reforms to the Hugos, and his Hugo-related posts are well worth reading.
Mad Genius Club. A website/blog shared by a bunch of relatively like-minded authors (like-minded, at least, in terms of the Puppy controversy.) The commenter community more or less corresponds to the Sad Puppy version of the commenter community on Making Light.
Brad Torgersen's website. The titular head and organizer of Sad Puppies 3, although perhaps not the loudest voice.
Larry Correia's website. The originator of Sad Puppies. His posts are heavily commented on (again, a sort of "community of commenters" there).
Vox Day's website. The authoritative place to look to see what Rabid Puppies are about, in their own words.
Sad Puppies 4 website. Sad Puppies 4 is underway with its own dedicated website.