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 sebster wrote:
I mean, flip it around, assume that the left had done this, and some categories were entirely filled with overtly progressive works, including some pretty crappy works that had no business being on any award list. How would you respond?

Wasn't that why Sad Puppies started in the first place?

also, language and Godwin warning:

 sebster wrote:
It’s true, but it’s worth pointing out that in this instance ‘political’ is not liberal/conservative, but the politics within the academic literary world. So Arundhati Roy writes about poverty and classism, but plenty of others do it more stridently without being critical darlings. She wins because she writes magical realism set in India, and every magical realist book set in India seems to win either the Booker or the Man Booker.

The Nobel Prize typically favors avant garde authors as a matter of course (also virtually shunning most speculative fiction), while the Hugo award typically goes to more traditional works (also hard scifi in literary awards) So yeah, there is an academic politics to the awards, but at the same time you don't have to look far to find patterns in winners. Liberalism is incredibly popular among Nobel winners, with some awards being even blatantly political, like Gao Xingjian in 2000 and Harold Pinter in 2005.

 VorpalBunny74 wrote:
Wasn't that why Sad Puppies started in the first place?

That’s what they claimed. And because they had a theory that there was a bias, which they believed to be political, they responded with a campaign to dominate the awards with their own political bias. It’s a bit like that guy here on dakka who was claiming because he believed there would be food shortages leading to deaths in the future, then we should cull the population right now.

Though to be fair to the Sad Puppies, their original campaign wasn’t overtly political. It was more populist, there was a lean towards their own politics but hardly anything severe. While their plan involved a plan for organised voting and that wasn’t cool, overall the books they were pushing were fine. It was only with Rabid Puppies that things went ugly, as Vox Day put up a list of books clearly valued more for their politics than their quality, and made his case almost entirely on political grounds. And then the Rabid Puppies went outside sci-fi looking for voters, especially courting gamer gate, meaning it was very likely that many of the voters weren’t even involved in sci-fi.

And of course, Sad Puppies never really had much impact on the awards, while Rabid Puppies in their first year dominated. Which is sort of a sad reflection on how the world works – a call for fans to get active and make an award more populist goes nowhere in three years. A call for disaffected oddballs to pile in on a community that they have no interest in just to strike a blow against the SJW has instant success.

 sebster wrote:

 VorpalBunny74 wrote:
Wasn't that why Sad Puppies started in the first place?

they had a theory that there was a bias, which they believed to be political

Which we're still waiting on proof for years later.

The thing about puppies (and this is hilarious) is that both groups ultimately targeted a focus on the ethnicity and sex of the winners, and then based on that and that alone accused the award of ;leftist' leanings, while if anything the Hugo award is right leaning. It honestly kind of adds a heaping helping of complete ignorance on the whole situation.

 sebster wrote:
And of course, Sad Puppies never really had much impact on the awards, while Rabid Puppies in their first year dominated. Which is sort of a sad reflection on how the world works – a call for fans to get active and make an award more populist goes nowhere in three years. A call for disaffected oddballs to pile in on a community that they have no interest in just to strike a blow against the SJW has instant success.

That could be seen more of an indicator of the extreme decline of Science Fiction literature over time, though. Possibly brought about because of ideological incestuousness

Having 'No award' as a winning for what, 5 categories, isn't going to bring in new fans though, with the implication being those categories plain old suck.

 LordofHats wrote:
The Nobel Prize typically favors avant garde authors as a matter of course (also virtually shunning most speculative fiction), while the Hugo award typically goes to more traditional works (also hard scifi in literary awards) So yeah, there is an academic politics to the awards, but at the same time you don't have to look far to find patterns in winners. Liberalism is incredibly popular among Nobel winners, with some awards being even blatantly political, like Gao Xingjian in 2000 and Harold Pinter in 2005.

Sure, there's certainly a pattern, and it's way more common for progressive books to win. Didn't mean to imply otherwise.

My point is more that while progressive books win more often, there's a lot more complexity at play. As you say, speculative fiction is also snubbed. Much of this is because people hold personal biases against certain kinds of works and certain kinds of politics, but a lot of it is actually how the various institutions work.

You could, for instance, write an excellent piece of progressive sci-fi, and you'd have zero chance of winning. Not just because it's sci-fi, but because your publisher will be a sci-fi publishing house (or at least the sci-fi wing of a larger publisher), and that means your publisher won't have the contacts among the right kind of critics and literary king makers. And when you go and give your readings and your interviews to build interest for your book, you’ll be talking almost entirely to a sci-fi crowd, and so your book will produce very little awareness among other audiences.

The political divide isn’t as stark, but it isn’t hard to see how it functions in much the same way.


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 VorpalBunny74 wrote:
That could be seen more of an indicator of the extreme decline of Science Fiction literature over time, though. Possibly brought about because of ideological incestuousness

It’s never quite clear what people mean when they talk about the decline of science fiction. It’s a notion that people just accept, but without any kind of detail as to what they actually mean.

Having 'No award' as a winning for what, 5 categories, isn't going to bring in new fans though, with the implication being those categories plain old suck.

Sure, but you have to understand the ‘no award’ response as a product of what voters were presented with. Because of the Rabid Puppy campaign in many categories every nomination were overtly political, and many were fething terrible. In those categories where the Rabid Puppies had stuffed the ballot completely, selecting no award is the best option.

The actual, real question is where to go next year. Responding to the puppy nonsense with an equally partisan left wing campaign will turn the Hugos in to a very silly skirmish in the mythical culture war. Doing nothing will mean more categories stuffed with right wing political mediocrity, and so more ‘no award’ responses.

 sebster wrote:
It’s never quite clear what people mean when they talk about the decline of science fiction. It’s a notion that people just accept, but without any kind of detail as to what they actually mean.

Mainly because there doesn't seem to be any 'greats' anymore, no Clarke or Asimov to get interested in. To paraphrase the great poet of our time (Kanye West) does anyone make real anymore?

I confess to being an outsider though, which is part of the problem - my outsider perspective is that Science Fiction has little to offer right now. Apart from love stories about dinosaurs.

 sebster wrote:
The actual, real question is where to go next year. Responding to the puppy nonsense with an equally partisan left wing campaign will turn the Hugos in to a very silly skirmish in the mythical culture war. Doing nothing will mean more categories stuffed with right wing political mediocrity, and so more ‘no award’ responses.

I agree, it doesn't look like there are any good options for this. Is it true though that this is less of a Left/Right issue and more of an old fashioned nepotism issue? I heard the name Patrick Hayden bandied around.

 VorpalBunny74 wrote:


I confess to being an outsider though, which is part of the problem - my outsider perspective is that Science Fiction has little to offer right now. Apart from love stories about dinosaurs.

I tend to think this is the real issue. It's not that there aren't any greats in the genre. It's that the genre has lost the popular imagination, and authors rarely get the mainstream recognition as authors from other genres. Sure, Scifi is still a hugely popular genre, but it's become increasingly insular over the past few decades since the end of the New Wave in the 80s. Especially when concerning hard scifi. This coincides with the large shunning of science fiction works by literary academics and awards (Scifi is the only literary genre that pretty much has to have its own award shows to get any recognition whatsoever).

This culture wars seem to be moving closer to the forefront. I first head about this argument something like 2 or three years ago. It didn't seem to be that much of a stir at the time, but now I am seeing debates like these pop up everywhere.

Do any of you really think that the people who voted 'no award' actually read any of the stuff they were voting against?

I wish there was a way to accurately gauge that data, because I'm betting no.

 VorpalBunny74 wrote:
Mainly because there doesn't seem to be any 'greats' anymore, no Clarke or Asimov to get interested in. To paraphrase the great poet of our time (Kanye West) does anyone make real anymore?

Which is a fair point. I wonder if the size of the sci-fi industry makes that hard these days, there’s so much choice out there that it’s hard for someone to dominate, and even harder to dominate with work that’s both popular and intellectually satisfying. If Asimov wrote today would he be widely read?

I agree, it doesn't look like there are any good options for this. Is it true though that this is less of a Left/Right issue and more of an old fashioned nepotism issue? I heard the name Patrick Hayden bandied around.

I think the original problem was not so much nepotism as insularity. Authors were nominated because they were the authors who were always nominated, and it was hard to break in. It isn’t politics, or even a deliberate choice, but more just the result of how critical approval works among groups – different artists just get lumped in to ‘award worthy’ or ‘not award worthy’ through an almost entirely arbitrary process. It’s why most award shows aren’t very good.

But that changed with the original Sad Puppies, which wasn’t entirely political, but certainly blurred the lines between populist stories and more conservative kinds of values. That opened the door for Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies, which led to the crazy ballot we saw.

Everyone I know who got the Hugo packet and read it agreed that the while some of the puppy works were serviceable, they were vastly inferior to what they forced off the list in the categories they stuffed the ballot box on.

I think it really says everything about the whole situation you need to know that lead puppy Brad Torgerson has gone from genially stating, 'vote the way you want, and whatever happens, it's all good,' to petulantly editing every disagreeing post on his blog to, 'You made us do this!' Yep, there's an open mind who just wants to show his true love of the genre for you.

I know that the new rules they're proposing for 2017 are going to kill slates of any sort dead. It'll be fun to see if the puppies have any life left in them and try again at that point.

 Bromsy wrote:
Do any of you really think that the people who voted 'no award' actually read any of the stuff they were voting against?

I wish there was a way to accurately gauge that data, because I'm betting no.

That's a fair question, but an even better one is, 'how many of the puppies read what they voted against? How many of them actually read what they voted _for_?'

Meanwhile they blocked the SP candidates, such as a black man, a Jew, several women and a socialist. Go diversity as long as you follow SJW group think!

Wasn't the whole point of the puppies their complaint that people weren't voting on works, but only because the author was the right color/gender?

Whoops. So much for 'group think.'

 Bromsy wrote:
Do any of you really think that the people who voted 'no award' actually read any of the stuff they were voting against?

It's a popular award. Most years the award is probably decided with most voters having read no more than one or two works in each category. Hell, the Academy Awards has that problem, and voting membership there is restricted to a supposed elite.

I still have trouble believing any of the crap nominated was better than The Martian.

That book is the gak.

 cincydooley wrote:
I still have trouble believing any of the crap nominated was better than The Martian.

That book is the gak.

The nomination data was released after the awards and it shows that had it not been for the SP slate The Martian would have been a finalist for the Campbell Award.

Also, I agree, The Martian is awesome.

 Bookwrack wrote:
Wasn't the whole point of the puppies their complaint that people weren't voting on works, but only because the author was the right color/gender?

Whoops. So much for 'group think.'

They wanted an unbiased vote but by influencing the vote massively it became biased?

I'm completely lost what this whole thing is about. How did it start?

 cincydooley wrote:
I still have trouble believing any of the crap nominated was better than The Martian.

That book is the gak.

It's the best book I've read this year. I burned through it in a few hours and most of the time I was like, Oh snap! Oh snap!. It did lose a little steam by the end but still a great book. \


Also, much like Piston Honda, I have no idea what this is about, despite reading more than one thread about it. As internet kerfluffles go this was sort of a hard one to follow.

I THINK it was basically about a bunch of people being pissed off that people were winning Hugo awards based on personal or story politics (i.e, this story won because it was written by a transmorpherized blue billy goat or this story won because it was about two gay men succeeding in american future space football) rather then the actual QUALITY of those stories.

I actively avoid anything advertised specifically towards an interest group (yay white male privilege), so I wouldn't even pick up blue billy's story if it was shopped as such.

Didn't prevent me from enjoying Dune, Dorian Grey, Fried Green Tomatoes, The Hours, any of Patricia Cornwell's novels with Kay Scarpetta, any of Bret Easton Ellis' books, any of Chuck Pahlniuk's books, any Anne Rice book, the Song of Fire and Ice series.... I could go on.

I get their point in that I'd rather see quality fiction win because it's quality fiction, and not mediocre fiction win because it has a special interest attached to it.

But the absence of The Martian makes me say, "feth all of you."

Yeah, it seems best to consider works on their merits and try to divorce them from the artist/author. Even terrible people can create pretty good art.

 Piston Honda wrote:
I'm completely lost what this whole thing is about. How did it start?

There is a yearly science fiction and fantasy award called the Hugos. In it, an award is given out to the winning new work in a number of categories.

A few years back, some right-wing SFF authors got sad that despite being nominated for Hugos, they had not actually won. They decided to start a campaign to get books they found more ideologically favorable nominated. This campaign was unsuccessful for two years, but on the third it managed to harness the disaffected right-wing rage behind stuff like gamergate and, due to the nomination process being susceptible to gaming it in this particular way, managed to nominate a large number of works. (The Hugos have a nomination process, where they produce a list of five works in each category that are seen as the finalists, and then these five works are voted on later to pick out the best one). This forced many other works that would have been nominated out of the running, often in favour of ones that were quite bad.

The question became how to respond to this. The Hugos' main voting follows a preferential system, much like you might see in an election, where the works are ordered in order of preference, with an additional "No Award" entry to indicate you do not think the works below No Award are deserving of a Hugo. Some people thought that No Award should be placed in all categories that had the gamed entries in them; others decided to place all the gamed entries below No Award, regardless of their quality; some more decided to just follow their regular voting method and if the works were of sufficient quality, vote for them. It was unclear what all this would mean for the future of the Hugos, which are quite a prestigious award. Now that one group had successfully gamed the system, would they continue to do this in future years, making counter-gaming the only effective response? Should the nominations process be changed to prevent gaming the system?

In any event, everyone was anxious to see what the results of the actual vote would be. There is a long delay between nominations and voting to allow people to become familiar with the nominated works. The actual vote just took place, and the result was that none of the gamed-in works won a Hugo. Most of them came in behind No Award in the preferences, with some managing to take second place. That said, many good works were forced out of the nominations process.

GRR Martin holds an unofficial "Hugo losers ceremony" every year for people who lose a Hugo - as you can imagine, there are many more of them than there are winners! This year he expanded it to give out some unofficial awards to people who were cheated out of nominations by the people gaming the system.

That is roughly how it all went down.

The Martian isn't really the kind of story that typically wins the Hugo Award for best novel, so I don't think it would have won even without Puppies. The Three Body Problem on the other hand, is exactly the kind of novel that typically wins.

 LordofHats wrote:
The Martian isn't really the kind of story that typically wins the Hugo Award for best novel, so I don't think it would have won even without Puppies. The Three Body Problem on the other hand, is exactly the kind of novel that typically wins.

Sure, in 2008 when it was published

 cincydooley wrote:
I THINK it was basically about a bunch of people being pissed off that people were winning Hugo awards based on personal or story politics (i.e, this story won because it was written by a transmorpherized blue billy goat or this story won because it was about two gay men succeeding in american future space football) rather then the actual QUALITY of those stories.

So, stories written by kotaku and upworthy bloggers?

There's not much too it. A few years ago, Larry Corriea lost out on the Campbell award (best first work from an author and awarded at the same annual con as the Hugo). At the time, he was gracious and said it was an honor just to be considered, and that he lost out to worthy company.

Latter on his story changed that that was just the false face he put on because people had made comments to him that he had lost not because of superior competition, but because he was white, conservative, and male and those were strikes against him. He started positing that there was a small, focused, SJW cabal exerting undue control over the direction of the genre and what books got awards (and this is the first and foremost failing of the puppies, because just looking at the easily verifiable list of books that got nominations and awards in previous years puts lie to the his claims) and organized the first Sad Puppies to try and combat them.

It was only a small thing, but this year, for Sad Puppies 2, he worked with another author of similar views, Brad Torgersen, along with a third author, Vox Day (Theodore Beale). Teddy, unfortunately, is not a very nice person. Corriea said that if he and BRad wer 'FDR and Churchill, then Teddy was Stalin." Teddy organized a second group, called 'the Rabid Puppies,' and pushed much harder to get people to vote in lockstep for a voting slate, getting people to all push the exact same choices across the entries for each category.

The Hugos are a two-step process. First you get the nominations by popular vote of the top five choices, and then you have the vote on them at the annual Worldcon. All things considered, the voting pool is/was rather small. There were a couple categories where the puppies' slate filled all the slots. That was when people sat up and took notice of what was happening, and things started exploding all over the internet.

Now we just had the actual awards themselves, and like I said before, it sums things up pretty well that before Torgersen was saying, 'vote for what you like, and we'll see how it all turns out,' and now he's throwing temper tantrums over the results.

The No Winner result makes the Hugo's look like a joke, IMO.

 cincydooley wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
The Martian isn't really the kind of story that typically wins the Hugo Award for best novel, so I don't think it would have won even without Puppies. The Three Body Problem on the other hand, is exactly the kind of novel that typically wins.

Sure, in 2008 when it was published

Well the original manuscript is in Chinese and was not submitted. Ken Liu's translation is what was submitted, and was published in 2014.

The Hugo Award for best novel tends to favor either Contemporary Fantasy or Hard Scifi (most often it favors Hard scifi). Within that trend though the award typically goes to books that look at societal changes and the effects of new technologies and advancement on a larger scale. The Martian just isn't in that mold (Hatchet meets Apollo 13), while the Three Body Problem is pretty much right up the ally. Granted, the Hugo Award has a more open voting process than most awards, so things can shift radically year to year depending on who bothered to go through the trouble of voting.


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 Piston Honda wrote:


So, stories written by kotaku and upworthy bloggers?

No. It started with some guy who didn't like the novels that were winning the award. Larry Correila started Sad Puppies in 2013 with the intention of "poking the establishment." His specific complaint was that the works winning the Hugo Awards were 'heavy handed message fic' and lacking the fun and adventure that he thought made scifi fun. Over the past two years though, the movement grew and instead became "how dare all these liberal non white people keep winning all our scifi awards!"

The movement itself seems to be completely uninformed about the Hugos though. I mean Redshirts, a scifi parody, won Best Novel in 2013, the same year Sad Puppies started and there's nothing heavy handed message about it. The Hugo award has been won by a lot of popular fiction (the Ancillary Series, Harry Potter,American Gods), and white men make up the majority of winners (2013 was an odd year with many women sweeping up). So really it's just a bunch of people screaming about a bunch of nonsense that isn't actually happening. Nominations are chosen by anyon who registers as a member of World Con, and Puppies voted in masse for works they thought deserved to win and ended up sweeping in many categories getting nothing but works they preferred on the final ballot. In response, everyone else massively voted down their nominations in retaliation going so far as to pick "no winner" in most of the categories where only Puppies nominees were present.