Apr 052015
  April 5, 2015

The Hugo Award nominations were revealed yesterday and they brought some sadness with them as Eugie wasn’t nominated. Not all that much sadness, as I’m pretty much sad all the time, so this was a very minor prick. And not that disappointing as her chances weren’t great (she’d only been nominated once before). But this was her best chance (since her previous nomination). Her story, When It Ends, He Catches Her, was nominated for a Nebula Award, and awards can affect awards—sort of like the Golden Globes affecting the Oscars. Though the metaphor ends there as The Nebulas are more like the Oscars; The Hugos would be The People’s Choice Awards.

It’s just a bit more depressing because any chance she did have was taken away by The Sad Puppies. Now my writer friends all know about The Sad Puppies, but outside of the fantasy and SF writing community, they are not so well known, so let me give you a run down. This may take a moment.

In simplest terms, The Sad Puppies are the culture war as it has intruded into F&SF literature, but that terminology can create a mistaken impression that there were organized sides—something you need for a war. There were not. But it is about politics. It started a few years back in a atmosphere of racial tension in the writing community (community being a really vague term in this case). Following the overly dramatically named Racefail (which was really just a lot of people overreacting to posts on the Internet—you know, normal Internet usage) there was a minor argument about the cover and an essay for the professional journal of the SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America). Some claimed it was sexist. Instead of the reaction you’d expect with mature adults and a professional journal (i.e. a polite smile, and changing the document to make it a bit more professional and everyone nodding and going on), a group of right wing people screamed bloody murder and then went all ’70s hippy, claiming they must have freedom of expression, apparently mistaking a professional journal with their own novels. This was a bit like the accounting department of State Farm rising up to demand that they be able to express their artistic and political thoughts on rates spreadsheets. So, the sexist-yelling folks double-downed and the right wing hippies double-downed and everyone was unhappy.

Into this atmosphere enters Theodore Beale, who likes to go by Vox Day for reasons that are hard to fathom. OK, he’d been very much around, but he just became louder. From here on out, everything has his touch. Day is foamingly racist and sexist (supposedly also anti-Semitic, but I haven’t read his thoughts on Jews). Some of my favorite Day quotes include:

  • “it is not that I, and others, do not view [a black woman] as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized”
  • Stand your ground laws have “been put in place to let white defend themselves by shooting people, like her [a black woman], who are savages”
  • “It is absurd to imagine that there is absolutely no link between race and intelligence”
  • “a few acid-burned faces [of women] is a small price to pay for lasting marriages “
  • “raping and killing a woman is demonstrably more attractive to women than behaving like a gentleman”

So…really really racist and sexist.

Day, in some kind of fear state that the white man is being held down in genre fiction, and that there is some invisible liberal enemy organized against him and his ilk, ran for president of the SFWA. He lost, but it is scary that he got even 10% of the vote. He was soon after kicked out of the SFWA for using its official communication channels to issues some of the racist statements above.

With the defeat of Day, one right wing blogger said that they had lost the Nebulas, so on to the Hugos. This goes with the very strange belief that somehow the president of the SFWA has great power over the Nebula awards (the president can vote, but that’s about the extent of power).

So, in the wake of Day’s loss, comes The Sad Puppies—a campaign to game the Hugo awards. It (or the group behind the campaign which sometimes calls itself The Evil League of Evil—all the naming is supposed to be tongue in cheek) took on Day’s world view (that there was a secret organization of leftists that control conventions and awards). It took on his enemies as their enemies. It supported Day for awards, and Day supported the Puppies. Technically, he was not the leader. He is the godfather, the inspiration, but the leadership went to Larry Correia, an author with better sales.

I find it easiest to call the actual group that met and discussed their plans The Evil League of Evil (ELoE) and use Sad Puppies to include the larger group of supporters.

As for gaming the Hugo awards, it is surprisingly easy. Like all popularity contests, it doesn’t take much to mess it all up. It only keeps a feeling of legitimacy as long as everyone is very polite and careful, because there’s no rule that says you can’t muck it up. The Hugo nominations come from the attendees of this year’s, last year’s, and next year’s WorldCon convention. That’s not a huge group (and figure many people haven’t bought their memberships to this year’s or next year’s yet). Actual number of ballots comes out not greatly over 2000, and if no one is playing games, the nominations are spread out over a huge number of different stories, books, etc. So, if you can get 200 people to vote along a party line, you’ll win. This is even easier since you don’t have to go to the convention, just sign up for a voting membership, pay $40, and you’re good to go.

Individuals have been making suggestions for nominations for years—as individuals. A writer or editor might suggest the stories they thought were worthy of an award. Individuals would suggest what they liked. Sad Puppies, though, was a political movement. It wasn’t an individual saying what he liked, but a group, bound together, to stop things from winning that didn’t share their politics. And while following the rules, is a dick thing to do. It is like those films that won Oscars after their distributers went over the normally expected promoting, and basically bought the statue. Talk to film fanatics, and those awards will always be tainted.

ELoE doesn’t make Vox Day-type racist/sexist statements to lead their band (though looking through the general Sad Puppies comments on their posts can turn up all the racism/sexism you could desire). Correia’s motivation changes depending on how angry he’s trying to appear in a post, but I tend to believe him when he says it is to fuck with, or explode the minds of those politically left of him.

To rally their troops, they use paranoia. Over and over they talk about hidden leftist groups running things—SMOF which stands for “Secret Masters of Fandom.” A joke to others, Puppies treat it as real.  A few Correia quotes:

  • “When one of their beloved leaders “
  • “work that would normally be ignored or actively shunned or sabotaged by insider assholes”
  • “to suck up to one of the insider cliques.”

There is no leader, there are no insiders, and there are no cliques, and certainly no SMOF. There is no group shunning. Individual editors might have views, but it is individuals. Individual readers and fans may have left leaning political views, or right leaning ones, but again, it is individuals. Worldcon doesn’t even have a board. It is run by a different set of people every year who put together that year’s convention. I suppose it must come from not being able to believe that a black or Asian could win awards, or a woman, without there being a conspiracy. They add that to hearing an editor say something progressive and they invent secret insiders.

Eugie and I were acquainted with, or friends with most of the people the Puppies point out as leftist leaders. We were both directors at Dragon Con, just about the biggest genre convention around, and know the organizers of many other conventions. Eugie was a Nebula winner, female, and Asian American. Trust me Puppies, if there was an organized society or just a clique working against you, we’d have been in it.

So Sad Puppies put up their suggested slate of nominees that all right wing people should vote for. It naturally contained the works of members of ELoE, and Vox Day. How well the slate did is a matter of spin. They did get works on the ballot, but none won in the end, and Day’s work had fewer votes than “Let’s just not give an award this year.”

This is getting long, so a break, and continued in part 2