What's Going on with Hugos??

[mhatchett]

Hey,
Have any of Y'all been following this insanity? I'm trying to understand, can't figure out where the thread really starts, what the agendas are, who are these people. It really give Sci-Fi/Fantasy a black-eye. I think lots of innocent by-standers are getting sucked into this. In the short term, lots of hurt feelings, in the long term, reputations are at stake. Sad that it has come to this. How much of the controversy is generated by sour grapes? Is it a generational thing? I don't see this having a very happy ending, regardless of the outcome. I'm sure there is a great book in this though.
Mike

[slayn666]

It's a big clusterfuck, basically. A group calling themselves the Sad Puppies are mad that the books and stories that win awards (not just the Hugos, but that's the only one they can game) tend to have more progressive messages and are written by liberals. On the flip side, the SP were told by this loose coalition of liberals to buy memberships to WorldCon and nominate whatever they wanted. That's exactly what they did, and now the liberal folks are crying foul because the SP gamed the system to almost completely run the board with their slate of writers (this isn't entirely accurate, but I'll circle back to that). I don't agree with slate voting, but the SP did not break any rules so the liberals have to suck it up this year and next and just hope that they can get the rules changed (it takes two consecutive votes to change the rules for the Hugos, so nothing can be done for 2016). Of course, they'll probably run their own slate next year to counter the SP.

So, Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen and some others (the Sad Puppies) come up with a slate that they feel represents a group of people that has been largely ignored by the Hugos. At the same time, frequent SP ally and well-known piece of human garbage Theodore Beale/Vox Day and his band of loonies, calling themselves the Rabid Puppies, come up with their own slate, and this is where the real problems are. While it can be reasonably argued that the Sad Puppies and their slate are apolitical, the same cannot be said about what the Rabid Puppies are doing.

And here's the thing: the racist hatemongers won. The RP slate was something like 87% successful in getting their nominees onto the ballot, while the SP slate was somewhere in the 70s. Now there was a lot of similarity between the two slates, but the key to this is looking at the differences and which slate's exclusive nominees made the cut. John C. Wright (a literal crazy person) shows up three times in the Best Novella category alone, and five times overall. Vox Day himself shows up twice, and Castalia House (a publisher owned and operated by Vox Day, and run for the express purpose of getting writers that share his views writing credits to qualify for SFWA membership) shows up eight times. It's hard to argue that the Rabid Puppies weren't more successful here.

When you strip away all the vitriol, I can see where Correia is coming from and don't necessarily disagree with him, though I think his energy would be better-served by developing his own award. But Correia and the Sad Puppies, through their own past actions, are inextricably tied up with a very hateful segment of sci-fi and fantasy fandom, and that is going to taint anything and everything they do. They need to accept that and confront it, but all I've seen so far are dodges along the lines of, "Vox Day was not on our slate."

[mhatchett]

Thanks for your insight. I've picked up on the theme, "The new stuff is too touchy feelie, we want the good old days back." But that seems too simple. I agree with you, if they don't like what's being done, they should start their own award. You would hope excellence could stand on it's own merits.
Mike

[Dave1442397]

I haven't been following it, but David Gerrold (The trouble with Tribbles) has been writing about it a lot on Facebook, for anyone who wants to take a look.

https://www.facebook.com/david.gerrold?fref=ts

[slayn666]

Damn, Connie Willis came out swinging.

[Theli]

Pretty sad to read this kind of crap is going on.

[Martin]

For those interested in this topic the radio program On The Media did a piece this week. It is available as a free pod cast also at http://www.onthemedia.org/, it is the episode with Sci-fi Culture Clash in the title. Also John Scalzi, who has said a lot about it has a blog post on the topic at http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/04/2...e-hugos-42015/.

Note: Neither of these are unbiased.