2016 Hugo Awards Shortlist Dominated By Rightwing Campaign (theguardian.com)

Dave Knott quotes a report from The Guardian: The annual Hugo awards for the best science fiction of the year have once again been riven by controversy, as a concerted campaign by a conservative lobby has dominated the ballot. The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies movements, which both separately campaign against a perceived bias towards liberal and leftwing science-fiction and fantasy authors, have managed to get the majority of their preferred nominations on to the final ballot, announced today. Since 2013, the Puppies factions have posted recommendations of works to combat the Hugo tendency to reward works that leaders of the movement deem "niche, academic, overtly to the left in ideology and flavor, and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun." The Rabid Puppies has been successful in getting its nominations on the shortlist again this year; out of 80 recommendations, 62 have received sufficient votes to make the ballot. At MidAmeriCon II this year, it was announced that more than 4,000 nominating ballots were cast for the 2016 Hugo awards, almost double the previous record of 2,122 ballots. This news was initially greeted with cautious optimism, but the shortlist shows that the Puppies and their supporters have redoubled their efforts to "game" the awards. The shortlist will be voted upon and the winners revealed at the forthcoming Worldcon in Kansas in August.

Comments

Why does it need to be political at all?

[BitterOak]

Why does it have to be either "left wing" or "right wing" books that win? Why not just choose good books, regardless of politics? I think a feature of some of the best books written is the politics is left up to the reader. Is the Lord of the Rings left-wing or right-wing? I've seen commentaries taking both positions.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the "left-wing" label mostly only exists in the minds of these activists - it's a catch-all for "any work that discusses topics or espouses positions that we are uncomfortable with". For instance, I would absolutely classify most of John Scalzi's books as "swashbuckling fun", but they hate Scalzi. I suspect they don't like Lois McMaster Bujold very much either, since she frequently explores gender issues - but most of her books are also pure space opera.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[ultranova]

Why does it have to be either "left wing" or "right wing" books that win?

Science fiction is a vision of how the world could be. Or visions, which is a huge problem if you happen to be an authoritarian with political agenda.

Is the Lord of the Rings left-wing or right-wing?

Idealized feudal past and its Divine Right of Kings vs. vilified Industrial Revolution and its robber barons. Or, if you prefer, how right wing wants to see themselves vs. how they actually are.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[steveha]

I think the "left-wing" label mostly only exists in the minds of these activists - it's a catch-all for "any work that discusses topics or espouses positions that we are uncomfortable with".

The typical Sad Puppies member is not so much decrying "left-wing" as decrying SJW-ish works. Have you read "If You Were a Dinosaur My Love"? I refuse to believe that it was the best short fiction in its year, but it got nominated for the Hugo. Was it because it checked the right boxes... SJW themes, written by a woman?

http://www.apex-magazine.com/if-you-were-a-dinosaur-my-love/

http://difficultrun.nathanielgivens.com/2015/02/10/the-hugo-awards-dinosaurs-and-me/

I would absolutely classify most of John Scalzi's books as "swashbuckling fun", but they hate Scalzi.

I think it's not so much that they hate his books, and more that they hate Scalzi the man, and that pretty much because he hated them first.

My respect for Scalzi plummeted when I read him taunting Larry Correia on Twitter. I've met 5-year-old children with more good manners and dignity.

Larry Correia collected the juvenile taunts in this blog posting: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/6846396-hugo-aftermath-post

The other part of it is that they hate Scalzi because they believe he is connected with the behind-the-scenes clique or cliques that used to decide who got the Hugo. I've never met anyone who genuinely believed that Redshirts was the best novel of its year, deserving of Hugo status; I've heard it is a light and fun read ("swashbuckling" maybe?) but it can't have been the best novel published that year. Somewhat more egregiously, Scalzi published a book of stuff from his blog and that won a Hugo also, and then as part of the Sad Puppies firestorm the cliquish types claimed that some of the Sad Puppies nominations were not sufficiently scholarly and were an insult to the Hugo. I don't know about you, but I hate double standards, and here a double standard was applied to the benefit of Scalzi.

http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/03/31/sad-puppies-update-the-melt-down-continues/

I suspect they don't like Lois McMaster Bujold very much either, since she frequently explores gender issues - but most of her books are also pure space opera.

Oh no, not at all. The Sad Puppies are not a homogeneous bunch, but on the whole they love Lois McMaster Bujold. If you know only one thing about a book, that it was published by Baen, you know that the Sad Puppies probably like that book. Not a slam dunk, but that's the way to bet.

Lois McMaster Bujold writes entertaining books. The Sad Puppies like entertaining books. Her books aren't loaded down with SJW freight; it's interesting to see how a strong and independent woman from Beta Colony reacts to the strangely backward society of Barrayar.

Remember how the Sad Puppies nominated Toni Weisskopf? She's the senior editor at Baen. She edited Lois McMaster Bujold's books. The Sad Puppies nominated her for a Hugo for editing.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[serviscope_minor]

It would be more accurate to say that the Hugo Awards have been trying to move away from just rewarding

I don't think that would be more accurate: the Hugo awards don't as such do anything at all.

Nominations come from the membership only and then votes come from the membership only. The latter happens at the convention and gets moderate participation, the former, especially for anything other than the popular "best dramatic presentation long form (i.e. film)" , short form (i.e. tv) and novel is extremely low, because frankly, very few people care enough.

The only people who care enough are/were in fact those with some particular interest, and it just so happened that those people who still cared enough to vote had a personal liking for non white, LGBT stuff etc.

HOWEVER! And there's a big however. And this is also of course why the puppies were so effective. Flat-out lies are usually not as effective as lies with a kernel of truth, because people will latch on to the kernel of truth, especially if it's one that resonates.

What those people nominated (and what won!) in previous years was in many cases was the most atrocious drek. I mean just bloody awful. Weak stories, very poor on the speculative element, bad characters and in many cases flat out boring. For instance the risible "The water that falls on you from nowhere[*] won in 2013 and pretty much the only thing that distinguished it from the average scrapings from bottom of the barrel is that it didn't have the usual straight white man protagonist. Likewise "if you were a dinosaur my love". And others too. Were any authors pandering to that, knowing that that sort of thing gets nominated? Probably? It's a big world after all, but either way it doesn't matter because it was that sort of thing getting nominated anyway, and enough authors seemed to want to write it.

Having something other than the usual and rather heavily over-done perspectives is great, but it's not an excuse for poor writing. It seems however that the small community who gave a crap enough to vote didn't feel the same as me, or have different standards for "good writing". They're wrong of course because they disagree with my opinion. But I can't complain too much (define: too much) since I never voted but anyway.

So here's the silly thing. So OK, some small community were the only people voting (and there's no evidence of collusion), and the puppies (in many cases rightly) thought what they were voting for was bad. Heck, many people who weren't puppies agreed that really awful stuff was winning. But that's about as far as it got before it descended into farce. So they stacked the slate, and they had a golden opportunity to see all these marbellous speculative or space opera or mil SF (pew pew!) pieces that we'd been missing out on because no one bothered to vote and... well all they chose was yet more drek! About as bad as whatever had been winning before, arguable worse! And a good bit of it wasn't mainstream stuff, it was Jesus fan-fic (see John C. Wright's entries). What a wasted opportunity.

That also proves that the puppies are in fact a right bunch of nitwits and don't apparently actually care about good writing.

[*] John Chu. I've not read a single thing of his I like or even find passable.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[serviscope_minor]

I love it how you don't let facts penetrate your arguments.

aen has long published some of the most libertarian 'right-wing' authors, but in those books they've had the strongest female characters along with the widest variety of ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations I've come across. The problem

What problem? For all of your complaining about "cliquish pseudo-academic types", McMaster (published by Baen) is in fact tied in first place with Heinlein for largest number of Hugo wins ever.

So, the Hugos have in fact been recognising stuff published by Baen, and that was before the puppies of any sort got involved.

Re:Why does it need to be political at all?

[mcgrew]

The government healthcare bureaucracy has drastically impeded the research necessary for prolonging life and restoring youthful characteristics and will most certainly spike any such treatment, at least until most of us boomers are safely killed off.

In 1900 you were lucky to reach 50, my dad died at age 84 and my mom still goes bowling twice a week at age 88. Her brother is in his late nineties. That was almost unheard of a century ago.

When you're faced with limited remaining life in a fragile body on miniscule after-ripoffs savings, with a healthcare system that looks to be dedicated to killing you while retaining plausible deniability

Funny, my mom says Medicare is the best health insurance she's ever had. I'm looking forward to being eligible next year because my insurance REALLY sucks.

You're crazy, Louie. See a doctor about that early onset Alzheimer's.

Re:Idiocracy was prophetic

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like a great sf plot. right wing nutjobs take over the planet, forcing the barrel chested, stentorian liberal science hero Evian Muskmelon to create an interstellar colonizing flotilla. he also creates an armada of quick attack ships, the I-regulars, to defend the flotilla, against the poorly designed conservative ships, the Reagan Reserves, who are trying to stop the spread of liberal values throughout the universe. Emperor Trump III fails in his effort to stop the flotilla. It returns a century later, with the support of the alien version of the Algonquin Round Table, which promptly retakes Earth, names it New Atwood, and places the conservatives in Coventry, until they choose psycho-rehabilitation.

Starship Troopers

[jfdavis668]

Anything by Heinlein or Jerry Pournelle would fall into the right wing Scifi genre.

Re:Starship Troopers

[lgw]

Starship Troopers (the novel): right wing.

Only if you believe the character's voice is the author's voice, which is frankly a childish view. Do you imagine Heinlein was endorsing the fascist society in Starship Troopers merely because the characters inhabiting the world accepted it? Was he then also endorsing the libertarian society in Moon is a Harsh Mistress? And where does Stranger in a Strange Land fit in?

Man, I'm tired of people trying to convince me Heinlein was fascist libertarian hippie. He wrote about the good and bad aspects of a society taken to the extreme in some direction. Sorry, no child-safe black-and-white there, just an attempt at an honest examination of how these societies would look from the inside, leaving up to you how to view them from the outside.

Key points to understand

[steveha]

The "Rabid Puppies" and "Sad Puppies" have about as much to do with each other as "JavaScript" and "Java". That is, nothing but a confusing similarity of name.

Charges that Sad Puppies needs to control Vox Day are simply unfair. How are they supposed to do that exactly? Vox Day is an independent adult and there is no reason why the Sad Puppies would have the ability to control him. See above point.

Last year, the Sad Puppies pleaded with Vox Day not to burn the Hugo Awards to the ground. Then the science fiction fandom got really organized and burned the Hugo Awards to the ground. Vox Day got everything he wanted and they did the work for him.

The Sad Puppies have always been about recommending the SF works that you enjoyed the most. Sad Puppies 4 continues this tradition.

Rabid Puppies, on the other hand, seems to be a trolling campaign by Vox Day. (Vox Day seems to have a knack for saying things that are so beyond the pale that they literally enrage people. I suspect he's trolling because his statements are so perfectly calculated to enrage. And now "Space Raptor Butt Invasion"?)

One final point, submitted for your consideration: The novel Three Body Problem won a Hugo. It was Vox Day's favorite novel of the year, and had he read it a little sooner, he would have nominated it for a Hugo. It would then have lost the Hugo to "No Award" as the organized fandom was voting an "anti-Puppy" slate.

The organized fandom and their organized "No Award" campaign claimed that they had to award an unprecedented number of "No Awards" to protect the Hugo, but how would denying the Hugo to Three Body Problem have protected anything? What was protected when Toni Weisskopf was denied her Hugo? And here we are, with the Rabid Puppies causing worse trouble than ever, and some fraction of fandom repelled by the No Award and wooden asterisk plaque antics, and walking away from the whole thing.

Re:I'm Supposed To Read A Sci-fi Book Every Year??

[AJWM]

Fans read an SF (not skiffy) book a week, or at least I did when I had the time. The "job" is volunteer, and you get to vote by buying a membership in the con.

The Hugo Awards have always been a popularity contest, since they're nominated and voted on by the fans (or, anyone else willing to pony up the money for a membership, although there are a couple of rules to discourage organized (vs disorganized, like the Puppies) bloc voting.

For that matter, the Nebula Awards, which are nominated and voted on by SF/F writing professionals (ie, SFWA members) are also something of a popularity contest, it's just a different crowd.

I suppose it's inevitable that any kind of award for the "best" in a subjective field like the arts (whether writing, filmmaking, whatever) ultimately devolves to a popularity contest of some kind.

In some objective sense the only contest that counts is who has more readers. As Jerry Pournelle put it when one of his books was nominated but didn't win, "New York Times best sellers [which his was] will get you through times of no Hugos better than Hugos will get you through times of no best sellers."

And while I'd love to have one of those little silver spaceships sitting on my mantle, Jerry has a point. A Hugo by itself isn't going to let me quit my day job and spend more time writing.

That is what it is now

[SuperKendall]

Why not just choose good books, regardless of politics?

That is what has happened, if you actually READ the list of recommended books from the Sad Puppies list for example, it's not really a set of "right wing" books at all. It's simply good books.

The issue is that for many years beforehand it HAD been a politically chosen set by a tiny minority with no diversity of thought, and so the "normal" became a set of overwrought heavily left-wing oriented books. Now that it's reverting to center it's being portrayed as political, when what is occurring is the opposite of a political movement. It is a QUALITY movement.

Informed opinions

[Livius]

I think it's sickening to have these puppy factions undermining the awards process.

Which books are the kittens recommending?

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[lgw]

By design the Hugos are a popularity contest. The Nebulas are chosen by critics, the Hugos by fans. There's no "stacking the vote" in any way, just voting (it's not like this is an internet poll or something silly like that).

While the only important popularity contest is book sales, the Hugos do sometimes help less-known authors get discovered. Even then it's about the books you like, not the books you're supposed to like - the latter was always the Nebulas.

Re:This is sad seeing republicans...

[guises]

It's not republicans, it's not conservatives, there's nothing right-wing about the Sad Puppies. I can't blame the submitter for the terrible summary, because it's just copied from the article, but maybe I can blame the submitter for linking to a terrible article? The Sad Puppies are just a group who felt that sci-fi was getting too preachy and wanted to promote some lighter fare. That's it. the website. I had a ridiculous time finding that, since the top search page is just full of articles talking about how awful these people are. It's appalling how one-sided the reporting on this is.

The Rabid Puppies are something else. They seized on this idea and decided to make it more political - I'm not sure that calling them right-wing is accurate, more like anti left-wing, but these are separate groups with separate goals.

Re: This is sad seeing republicans...

[Anonymous Coward]

A baby's freedom to live certainly supersedes the mother's freedom to kill him or her.

Very true. The problem comes from people who use the term 'baby' to describe a zygote or fetus.

Re:booky mcBookyFace

[Oligonicella]

The Hugos have always had how to vote cards. It's just now it's common knowledge.

Re: Holy Shit! this is opposite world!

[thesupraman]

You havn't studied much history have you..

Or perhaps you think the Chinese cultural revolution and Stalinist Russia were right wing?

The reason you are dead wrong of course is the neither left not right is the enemy. Totalitarianism is.. And that can be either..

And the world is rushing to become more totalitarian year by year at present.. In the name of making us safe from ourselves.

The opposite of totalitarian is freedom.. Just remember that.

Re: Holy Shit! this is opposite world!

[Salgak1]

I'm a Sad Puppy too, and have been since it all started. What's amusing, is that, last year, Vox Day and his alt-right people decided to leverage the "Sad Puppies" with their own "Rabid Puppies" slate. And, of course, both have been conflated, despite the fact that they come from VERY different places.

Besides, the Hugo Awards, and Worldcon, have been dying for years. The announcement of the Dragon Award by DragonCon in Atlanta is just another nail in the coffin. When the "WorldCon" got 5,171 attendees last year, while DragonCon got over 70K attendees. . . the argument than the WorldCon is representative of Fandom tends to fail. . . similar attendance is seen consistently at the San Diego Comic Con, the Salt Lake City Comic Con, and the New York ComicCon.

That would suggest that perhaps the Hugos and the WorldCon are NOT representative of SF and Fantasy fandom. . .

Re:Idiocracy was prophetic

[mcgrew]

Looking at the shortlist it looks like I'll be voting "none of the above" in most categories. Right wing takeover? I don't see it and haven't since Heinlein died in 1988. I do see a lot of right wing and left wing stuff on the list.

I don't want either right or left wing politics in my science fiction.

That said, I did write one story with a hint of politics and religion, basically with the message "you can't eat gold." Left or right? I don't know but I doubt it's right wing.

I nominated my own Mars, Ho! but it didn't make the shortlist. I nominated C.C. Finlay, Editor in Chief of F&SF as best editor. He's not on the list, either but damn it, he should be. His magazine has the best SF IMO and he even occasionally sends personalized rejection letters. No other magazine does that, at least that I've seen (granted, there are quite a few I don't submit to).

Oddly, four of five in the "semipro" list are counted as professional markets by the SFWA (the folks behind the Nebulas).

The Guardien calls the Hugos "biggest prize in science fiction and fantasy", but I disagree. Fans vote for the Hugos, science fiction and fantasy professional writers ("professional" being defined as selling three 1000 word or longer stories for a nickle a word or more, or a novel (at least 40k words) that earns $3000 from self-publishing profits, an advance, or royalties) vote for the Nebulas. If they were movie awards, the Hugos would be the Sundance Film Festival's Audience Award and the Nebula would be the Oscar.