Sad Puppies Aren’t Much Fun

[swan_tower]

Quick synopsis, for those not already aware: this year, Brad Torgersen organized the third iteration of the “Sad Puppy+” slate for the Hugo Awards, which, at least on the surface, was about campaigning to get conservative SF/F authors on the ballot (giving them the place they have been denied by their political opponents). Unabashed racist/sexist/homophobic bigot Theodore Beale/VD++ apparently also decided to organize a “Rabid Puppy” slate, on similar principles, only more so.

Between them, these two initiatives managed to have a huge influence on this year’s Hugo nominations, dominating the short lists for many categories. (Here’s a rundown on what they achieved.) This was met with a great deal of dismay in many corners of fandom.

We all caught up?

+No, I don’t know how that term came to be attached to this. If you know, please enlighten me in the comments.

++I find his chosen moniker sufficiently arrogant that I decline to oblige him by using it.

***

I’ve felt for years now that the Hugos are a thing I should maybe be more involved in. Two things have stopped me: first, you have to pay for a Worldcon membership in order to nominate or vote, and even a supporting membership is a non-trivial expense, at $40. Second, my reading is very disorganized; much of what I read in any given year was actually published long before, meaning I’m not very au courant with the stuff that’s eligible for awards. This latter point makes nominations in particular quite daunting, because there’s a whole swath of stuff to choose from, and I haven’t read most of it.

This year, for the first time, I’ve bought a supporting membership so I can vote on the Hugo Awards. I’d like to talk about why, and what exactly I intend to do with my vote.

***

There are several things to consider regarding the works or individuals that were on the Sad Puppy/Rabid Puppy slates.

1) I agree with Abi Sutherland that slates are antithetical to what the Hugos are meant to represent. In theory, nominating a work for the award means you think it’s one of the best things you’ve read all year. A slate, on the other hand, is somebody else giving you your marching orders. It doesn’t really matter to me what the motivation was of the person assembling the slate: whether they’re trying to make a political point (as seems to be the case with the Sad Puppies), trying to trash the process (as seems to be the case with the Rabid Puppies), or whatever, the fact remains that you, the voter, have laid aside your own opinions in obedience to someone else’s, so that “your side” can win. I don’t like this.

2) The Sad Puppy candidates apparently don’t have a very broad base of actual support. According to this comment, Torgersen gathered suggestions from his followers as to what should be nominated. For Best Novel — always the category with the most participation — there were apparently thirty-five suggestions from forty-one people, and none of them got more than three backers. It was Torgersen who decided what should get nominated, and then everybody else followed in step. Which means there were a lot of people nominating a book they didn’t actually think was the best thing published that year. They didn’t care: they were more interested in “taking back the Hugos” or sticking it to the enemy (which is liberals/social justice activists/etc).

3) Some people are arguing that, however the works got on there, the only fair thing to do is to read them all and give them an equal chance. I haven’t decided yet how many works I will extend that consideration to, but I’ll tell you right now, it isn’t all of them, and it may be none. Because there are many factors that go into the equation of “what do I think is the best?,” and outside considerations are on that list. Theodore Beale/VD, for example, is a sufficiently repellent excuse for a human being that I feel neither the desire nor the obligation to grant his fiction real estate in my brain. I read a small amount of John C. Wright’s stuff before I learned more about him as a person; I wasn’t terribly impressed with it at the time, and therefore am not inclined to give him yet another chance. On a non-ideological front, I read the first four or five Dresden Files books and got bored; I find it unlikely that the fifteenth book in the series will mean enough to me to make up for my previous opinion. (Especially when even fans of the series are saying, “yeah, it’s far from the best.”)

Regardless of what you personally chose to do: you are under no compulsion to read them all. As someone said elsewhere, you don’t always have to taste the milk to know it’s bad; sometimes a sniff is enough. And as another person said, insisting that you have to try has creepy overtones; it’s like a guy in a bar saying “c’mon, it’s not fair to just blow me off. You have to sleep with me, and then decide if you maybe like me after all.”

4) If you’re wondering what the heck “Castalia House” is and how they got so many works on the ballot, it’s a publisher run out of Finland by Beale/VD, dedicated to publishing his work and that of like-minded people. Which is to say, bigots.

5) There was at least some amount of effort to recruit #GamerGate backers to support the Puppy slates, explicitly as a way of “hurting social justice” and “fighting the infection.” That says quite a lot about the dynamic here. (It’s about ethics in Hugo voting! No, really!)

***

As always, the question is: what now?

There are a lot of proposals to change the Hugo rules in ways that will prevent, or at least discourage, this sort of behavior in the future. Going that route will be hard, though, for two reasons: first, it’s a minimum of two years to introduce any changes to the Hugo procedures (because of Worldcon’s bylaws), and second, many of the proposed changes would disenfranchise a lot of voters who have been participating in good faith. (A fact which, fortunately, I have seen many people point out. The problem is known, and I devoutly hope it won’t be accepted as the price of doing business.)

In the short term, and quite possibly the long one, the better answer is social rather than legislative.

As I said, I’ve bought a supporting membership; if you have $40 to spare and the inclination to officially register your displeasure with this situation, you can do the same. (This also, by the way, gives you the right to nominate candidates for next year’s Hugos — and, as a special bonus, the right to vote on the upcoming Worldcon bids! Look for another post later about the Helsinki bid and why I think people should support it; that’s enough of a digression I don’t want to go into it here.)

What’s the best way to use your vote? Well, the Hugos use an interesting system: instant runoff voting. This is a system built to discourage the triumph of small but dedicated voting blocs over the general sentiment of the electorate as a whole; it means the winner is likely to be a candidate most people thought was pretty good, rather than one a few people adored and a bunch of other people hated.

The Hugos also have “No Award” in every category. When you rank this on your ballot, you are saying that you would rather see no award given in that category at all, if the alternative is to see it go to one of the works you have ranked lower (or left off your ballot entirely: for a cogent explanation of the different effects between those two, see here.) This has happened before, though not recently; the last time No Award won, it was 1977.

I stand with those who say, the problem here is the entire “slate” approach: even if the slate consisted of works I like, I have a profound objection to the entire notion of organized campaigns of followers nominating and voting for the candidates their leaders have selected. That isn’t what the Hugos are for, and if five years down the road we have the Sad Puppy Slate competing against the Social Justice Slate competing against the Can’t We All Just Have Fun Slate, I will consider that a disaster for the Hugos, no matter what I think of the works on the slates themselves.

One way to speak out against the slate approach is to use IRV and the No Award option to register your disapproval. There is a Puppy-free list of candidates here (and if you needed a visual demonstration of how thoroughly they dominated certain categories, there you go). Rank non-Puppy candidates as you feel they deserve; when you’ve run out of candidates you think might be worthy of the rocket, rank No Award. Then rank everything else — Puppy candidates, and anything non-Puppy you thought really was just utter crap — below No Award, or leave it off your ballot entirely.

In other words: say you would rather see no prize given than these tactics rewarded.

This may mean voting against some works you’d ordinarily support. In the case of Dramatic Presentation (Long), for example, maybe you really enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy or The LEGO Movie. But voting for them says, “well, I don’t like slates, but I guess they’re okay so long as they pick things I agree with.” That encourages us to form competing slates in future years, which is precisely what many of us are trying to prevent. If you think it would be wrong to give the rocket to Edge of Tomorrow or The Winter Soldier, then rank No Award first — that’s your decision. But please, don’t support the slate.

Because fundamentally, the slate approach is fundamentally not about fannishness or enjoyment of books. It’s about making sure your side wins. And in this case, it’s also about hurting people who have until now been nominating and voting for works they love, and stroking the egos of a few individuals who have felt disenfranchised by the fact that the Hugo electorate doesn’t like their stuff. (It is not even about supporting the kind of SF they claim to like: both Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem and the second volume of Patterson’s Heinlein biography are right up their alley, and several SP/RP types, including both Larry Correia and Beale/VD, have commented that they probably would have supported those. So even their side gets hurt by this, as the decisions of the ringleaders locked out things their followers genuinely enjoyed and might have wanted to vote for.) It is about championing bigots like Beale/VD and John C. Wright. This is, in short, a move undertaken explicitly to upset and drive away people like me and many of my friends.

I will not be driven away. And I will not reward their efforts.

Is it idealistic to believe the Hugos should be about nominating books you, personally, enjoyed? Maybe. But I will do what I can to support that ideal.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[toft]

Thanks for writing this up. Such a shame that the Hugos process has been abused in this way.

[swan_tower]

It's all within the rules. Then again, as Patrick Nielsen Hayden was saying over on Making Light, "As anyone over the age of ten knows, it’s generally possible to do things that are dubious, or scummy, or even downright evil, without violating any laws or rules."

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

The Sad Puppies name appears to originate from Larry Correia launching his first campaign to get himself nominated for a Hugo with a parody of a charity infomercial featuring sick and injured animals. Linked with "donotlink" so as not to provide google juice:
http://www.donotlink.com/monsterhunternation.com/2013/01/16/how-to-get-correia-nominated-for-a-hugo-part-2-a-very-special-message/

I have a long and consistent history of being against people campaigning for Hugos on any basis other than "it's the best work of its kind in its category this year." (Even if it's just the much more common, "X writer deserves to be acknowledged because they're important and they've never won a Hugo yet." We have other awards for that.) Needless to say I'm not at all eager to see the awards turn into a battleground for competing slates.

A few years ago I was using a special tag on Goodreads to track everything I read that was eligible for the award in that year so I could make it easier for myself to nominate and vote appropriately. And then I got lazy and quit doing it. Time to go set up a tag for next year, I think.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Tagging like that is a good idea. I saw someone arguing that "here's what I published last year" is distasteful because if the reader can't remember it, then clearly it isn't worthy of an award . . . but seriously, that vastly overrates people's ability to keep the interiors of their brains well-organized. We need some kind of auxiliary mechanism to assist.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I have never voted on the Hugos but I wish I had known about this before I voted for The LEGO Movie in the Nebulas. I didn't know there were slates this year until after the Hugo results came out. Ironically, this was the first time in years I bothered voting.

(In my case, avoiding discussion of awards is due to anxiety disorder issues every time they come up--I would prefer not to be involved at all--but if it's going to be all over my reading pages anyway, I might as well be informed.)

Thanks for your writeup.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

If it helps, I don't *think* the Sad Puppies had any influence on the Nebulas. And The LEGO Movie is something I would absolutely vote for, myself, under normal circumstances.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I almost didn't vote on the Nebulas except I finally caved and clicked the link because they kept emailing me! (I usually glance over SFWA emails and then delete them.) Because I wanted to support Ancillary Justice, which I genuinely liked, and my entire family loved The LEGO Movie for popcorn viewing. :/

I do usually try to vote in elections, but otherwise I...don't really feel I have much to contribute. I will have to pay more attention in case more stuff like this starts going down.

[beccastareyes]

And I might remember that Jane Doe did a kickass short work that year, but she's more likely to know which of the Short Fiction categories it should be nominated in. That's my main argument for HWIPLY posts: tell me word counts.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Mine, too. Was that a long short story or a short novelette? I need somebody to tell me.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Okay, you convinced me to buy a supporting membership to vote. That will teach me to splurge on anime artbooks before sf/f awards season. *wry look*

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I genuinely do believe the best solution to this problem is more participation.

[beccastareyes]

I think it's harder to game, because it is a professional award -- you can't join for $40 dues, but you actually have to join SFWA. You can't just rally your blog audience, you have to approach other authors.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Yeah--as I said, I hate awards season and would still prefer to avoid it for mental health reasons (it interacts badly with my anxiety disorder), but it won't kill me to send in a vote. (Uh, the voting thingy isn't up yet, right? I've checked the site and I don't see it there. Having spent my $40, I don't want to screw this up.)

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I mean, not that it stops authors from trying to promote the hell out of their works. I have been a member of SFWA since college and personally, I have often contemplated putting any author who spams me with their stuff unasked-for (which has happened) onto a "never vote for this person ever again" list, except it's meaningless when I never vote anyway. Until this year, apparently.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

No voting yet, no. I'm not sure when that happens, but at the very least we'll get the packet before it does.

[alessandriana.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link and a writeup. Bought a membership to counteract some of the crap (and also because I desperately want The Goblin Emperor to win Best Novel...)

[beccastareyes]

I've seen it suggested that, especially for the Fan categories, one can read the authors and decide 'Is this an author I would like to read more of, and might consider future work for nomination' while following the 'no slate' voting rule. Of course:

1. Several of the authors' views against people like me are terrible enough that I refuse to read their work. Life is short, and there's too many good stories in the universe that I can winnow by whatever rules I like and not run out of good things to read.

2. Last year, I read all of the fiction except for a handful (Correria, Day, and some of the short fiction gave my eReader word salad, including Swirsky's piece). Generally the SP2 picks were far from my favorites. Even if the SP folks go back to 'vote what you like' patterns and get some stuff on the ballot, I'm probably not going to rank it high because we seem to like different things.

On the other hand, the fellow who was on the SP slate for Fan Writer but withdrew his nomination after he found out that it was an organized attempt to flood the ballot seemed like an interesting and thoughtful guy, so I might add him to my blog roll. Once I look up his name again.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Charlie Stross' theory is that Beale/VD has started up Castalia House as a way of generating the short story sales necessary for his followers to join SFWA. (Given that Beale's father is in federal prison for large-scale tax evasion, Beale might actually have the cash to keep that up, at least for a while.) I'll grant that the guy has a grudge against SFWA the size of the Atlantic, but if that's his game plan, I think he'll bankrupt himself or his followers will flame out: it isn't just the cost of those three pro sales, but the recurrent dues that follow. Doing that on a scale large enough to influence the Nebs is unlikely.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

When you say "spams me with their stuff unasked-for," do you mean they're emailing you copies of their stories?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Agreed absolutely. I don't usually know my own word counts/categories unless I put them somewhere to look up, why would the reader know?

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

It hasn't happened in the last various years--either they figured out that I don't vote (which I've said in public), or everything went to the thing where people upload attachments to the forums? I'm not 100% clear on how that works because I've been in the SFWA forums like once or twice ever. But yes, back when I was an undergrad, I got emailed (or even mailed) copies of stories or books several times asking for awards consideration. It got old. That, or I'm a misanthrope.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I heard that theory. If he actually pulls it off I may fall down laughing at the hilarity of the universe, which is probably not the response, but I'm at a loss for what else I can do at that point.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I believe Surridge is the guy you're thinking of.

One of the responses to "you should read it and see if you like it!" has been from people who did read it last year, and found nothing to like. As they've been saying, why exactly should they give the SPs' tastes another shot?

On the other hand, I've heard people praising Annie Bellet's story. I won't vote for it, because I'm not going to support the slate -- but I will probably read her piece, and if I like it, I can always keep reading her stuff and vote for her in future awards. Ditto anybody else about whom I hear genuinely good buzz: I won't blacklist Butcher just because the SPs decided to promote him, for example. There are basically three tiers for me:

1) I already knew about this person/work before the slate, and their presence on the slate won't change my opinion of them. (Note this opinion could be either good or bad.)

2) I didn't know about this person, but from what I hear of them and their work, I'm willing to at least look at their stuff, if not vote for it.

3) I never heard of this person or their work, but the associated info I have (e.g. "they're published by Castalia House") means I will not bother looking at it.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

People post on the SFWA forums, yeah. I'm 100% fine with that, and have done it myself: it amounts to making the piece available to people who are interested. Not interested? Go on your merry way, then.

Emailing to people out of the blue . . . not so much. We are not the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.