The Hugo Awards 2016 and beyond

tapeslinger

So, the Hugo awards season is upon us. What are the Hugos and why do you care about them?
(Probably because George RR Martin does, a lot: http://grrm.livejournal.com/tag/hugo awards)

The Hugo awards are a speculative fiction award given at the annual Worldcon:
http://www.thehugoawards.org/

These awards are decided by an involved balloting process which is conceived to be by the fans, for the fans. A fact not necessarily widely known is that the awards process is open to anyone willing to shell out for a Supporting membership to the current Worldcon (in 2016, this is MidAmericon II in KC: http://midamericon2.org/ ) and fill out the ballot. Ballots go out twice-- in January, for nominees; in April, the nominees are narrowed down to the 5 or so* candidates which received the most votes in each category, and these are ranked in order by balloters and winners are determined by an exacting mathematical process. (No Award is considered an eligible contender in every category.)

A related award which is pertinent to the discussion is the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, often casually called the "Not A Hugo." Because it isn't.
http://www.thehugoawards.org/campbell-history/
This award is for authors new to pro publishing; authors are eligible for this award for their first 2 years of professional experience. Voting for this award occurs alongside the Hugos and the award, presented by Dell Magazines, is also awarded at Worldcon each year.

In recent years, the nomination ballots process for these awards has been indisputably gamed** by a very loosely organized bloc vote which is purported to represent what these individuals feel is an under-represented minority: (mostly) white, (mostly) male authors writing "ripping good yarns free of politics" etc etc. These individuals are bent on 'taking back' something they genuinely believe has been taken from or denied to them: a shiny, incredibly phallic trophy time-honored as an emblem of, I dunno, manly man dude writing. The most notable of these blocs is referred to, by its own voting bloc, as Sad Puppies.

2013-2014: some stuff happened before and during Sad Puppies 2: Sad Harder which is really hard to ignore in context.

A gentleman named Theodore Beale, who calls himself the voice of G*d ("Vox Day") and writes about elves finding Jesus with inaccurate Latin grammar, ran for the presidency of SFWA. Astute observers discovered that his blog is A Thing***. After several smaller incidents, in 2013, SFWA members call for him to be removed from the org after writing that another human being is a "half-savage" because apparently when you think the voice of G*d is a normal thing to call yourself you start thinking other equally unquantifiable, unprovable things. In fairness, his expulsion from SFWA wasn't, in fact, for believing his own rhetoric, but for using SFWA resources to broadcast it widely to the public under the SFWA banner, which is pretty gross. (http://www.locusmag.com/News/2013/08/beale-expelled-from-sfwa/)

Sad Puppies 2 (2014) happened right on the heels of the SFWA kerfuffle and, depending on your interpretation of sources was either confusing and sad, or wildly successful. Around one nominee from each category on the Sad Puppy slate landed on the finalist ballot; all but one of these finished last in their categories, and one even landed below No Award.
http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2014-hugo-awards/

2015! Lots of things happened.
http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2015-hugo-awards/
Sad Puppies 3 was joined by a new slate, the self-dubbed Rabid Puppies. These are considered by their originators to be separate efforts which are in the same spirit of taking "back" the Hugo. There's a lot of overlap between the two groups, and the names are similar, which necessarily causes confusion. The easiest way to disambiguate: Sad Puppies 3 is claimed by Brad Torgersen, Larry Correia, and a handful of others; Rabid Puppies is the effort of Mr. Beale.

The results of this combined effort have been surprising to all sides. A statistically significant segment of the ballot was dominated by SP and RP picks, with some categories unrepresented by the wider public at all. One nominee, Mr. John C. Wright, constituted 3/5 of the Best Novella category, for example. Only the Best Fan Artist category carried no Puppy picks.

There's been a lot of heated talk on both sides, and it's hard not to get a little mad. A number of nominated authors withdrew their works in order to disassociate themselves from the bloc-balloting groups, regardless of their own politics.

Whether it's morally right or against the spirit of the awards, the awards process has been gamed by a bloc-voting effort which is completely fair according to the given rules of the host organization based on the existing circumstances. There are lots of calls for change, but the road forward is going to be a long one. E Pluribus Hugo looks like the likely candidate to get 'er done at the business meeting, but it won't be ratified until MidAmericon II, meaning either another year of fuckery and No Awards and heartache, and Alfies, or...

2016:
Sad Puppies 4 exists; Rabid Puppies 2 exists. Will they have an effect on the ballot at the end of April? It's tough to say; there is considerably less buzz, and considerably more social media fatigue. At the moment it's anyone's shortlist.

ANNND we're off to the races! Another banner year of Rabid picks domineering the ballots; will they finally get their way and ruin SFF forever?! Or will this just accelerate the likelihood of ratifying E Pluribus Hugo at the business meeting at MidAmericon II? My guess is more No Awards, more infighting, and the perceived moral victory regardless of outcome for Mr. Beale. Mostly because he's crafted a Wile E. Coyote Acme trap for us all! (No, not really, but you can't tell him that.)


*******

This is a thread curated with moderator permission specifically for discussion of the Hugos, with special attention to the issues surrounding the 2015 awards. Which are now the issues surrounding the 2016 awards.

It is not a thread about:
the politics of any specific authors in a general or unrelated way;
GRRM being distracted from finishing Winds of Winter instead of dealing with this shit;
rabies, which is a bad disease to get, especially if you are a puppy

Information on membership to Sasquan: https://sasquan.swoc.us/sasquan/reg.php

@Shadowhope has a tremendous list of related links here: http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/32351997/#Comment_32351997, which I am hoping they'll repost here as well, it's very thorough. I am trying not to editorialize too hard in the OP but I am sure some of my biases inevitably creep through. Sorry.

---

*sometimes 4, sometimes 6, sometimes 7; depends on ties and min/max percentages

**even the individuals in question freely admit that this has happened, so this is a fact, not a speculation; their reasoning behind it varies widely between the axes of "ripping good yarns free of politics" and "BURN IT ALL DOWN"

***this is not a thread about how [adverb adjective] Mr. Beale's blog is.

Librarian

This is the latest opinion by an author on the subject I came across. I have to admit that I have never heard of Eric Flint before, but he makes some excellent points:

Click

This is just the part where he is arguing against the puppies claim, he has more to say about the flaws of the Hugos and other awards in general:

Then, there’s the argument advanced recently by the people around Sad Puppies is that the Hugos (and presumably the other awards) have been warped by politics. Specifically, by a bias against conservative authors like Larry Correia and John Ringo.

My response to this can be either short or very long—very, very, very long—and I’m opting for short. In a nutshell:

Any author—or publisher, or editor—who gets widely associated with a political viewpoint that generates a lot of passion will inevitably suffer a loss of attractiveness when it comes to getting nominated for awards—or just reader reviews. Somebody is bound to get angry at you and denigrate your work, and often enough urge others to do the same.
Does it happen to people who are strongly associated with the right? Yes, it does. But it also happens to people who are strongly associated in the public mind with the left. If you don’t believe me, all you have to do is read through Amazon reader reviews of my work and see how many “reviews” are obviously triggered off by someone’s outrage/indignation/umbrage at what they perceive as my political viewpoint and have little if anything to do with the book which is theoretically being “reviewed.”

Nor does it matter very much whether the assessment people have is accurate or not. To give an example which is germane to this issue, there is a wide perception among many people in fandom—the average reader-on-the-street could care less—that Baen Books is a slavering rightwing publisher. And never mind the inconvenient fact that the author who has had more books published through Baen Books than any other over the past twenty years is…

(roll of drums)

Me.

Who is today and has been throughout his adult life an avowed socialist (as well as an atheist), and hasn’t changed his basic opinions one whit. A fact which is well-known to Baen Books and has been well-known ever since my first conversation with Jim Baen almost twenty years ago, which was a two-hour discussion of politics. (The next day we talked about my novel which he was considering buying—and did buy, saying: “Well, I guess if John Campbell could get along with Mack Reynolds, I can get along with you.”)
So why does Baen keep publishing me? For the same reason any sensible commercial publisher keeps publishing a given author. I sell well.

Duh.

This whole argument is just silly, and reflects the habit too many people have of seeing nefarious conspiracies everywhere they look, all of them aimed against them.
Yes, it’s true that Larry Correia and John Ringo are pretty far to the right on the political spectrum and they don’t get nominated for major awards despite being very popular.
You know what else is true?

I’m very popular and further to the left on the political spectrum than they are to the right—and I never get nominated either. Mercedes Lackey isn’t as far left as I am, but she’s pretty damn far to the left and even more popular than I am—or Larry Correia, or John Ringo—and she doesn’t get nominated either.

The popular fantasy author Steven Brust, like me, is what most people call a “Trotskyist.” In a career that has now lasted thirty years, he’s picked up one Nebula nomination. On the other hand, China Miéville—another so-called Trotskyist—has gotten around a dozen nominations and won both a Hugo and a World Fantasy Award.

On the other side of the political spectrum, Mike Resnick has gotten more Hugo nominations than just about any author in the history of science fiction—he’s won five times, too—and he’s a Republican. A sometimes loud and vociferous Republican, as I can attest because he’s a friend of mine and we’ve been known to argue about politics. Loudly and vociferously.

The fact is, there is no correlation I can see between an author’s political views and the frequency (or complete lack thereof) with which he or she gets nominated for SF literary awards. The claim of the Sad Puppies faction that so-called “social justice warriors” are systematically discriminating against them is specious. It can only be advanced by cherry-picking examples and studiously ignoring all the ones that contradict the thesis, of which there are a multitude.

DevoutlyApathetic

So on a happy note, this whole kerfuffle has raised a bunch of author names I really should check out.

nexuscrawler

Outrage seems to be a poor way to sell books or garner award's votes

Unknown

This content has been removed.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

Librarian

Are those 1632 books by Flint any good? The premise is ridiculous enough to appeal to my 80s kid love for cheesy time travel stories.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

nexuscrawler

That seems like it's be the worst feeling in the world to get nominated for a top award in your field only to find out it was by people who made assumptions about your politics.

Caedwyr

They are almost all co-written with other authors, so the quality varies. There's nothing incredible about them, but the few I read were fairly fun tales. They don't really aspire to be anything more than entertaining.

SummaryJudgment

Librarian wrote: »

Are those 1632 books by Flint any good? The premise is ridiculous enough to appeal to my 80s kid love for cheesy time travel stories.

They are...

Well, I was incredibly surprised to read Flint's statement (and interested enough to read the full thing at this blog) that he's been a socialist for 20 years. I imagined the guy as a dyed-in-the-Wool conservative sci-fi author, considering the first of the 1632 books is like...West Virginia coal mining town / high school / A&M college get sent back in time and provide 'Murican values to their local allies, who then kick the shit out of everyone, and then the nerd marries a hot local, and female biathlonist kills a hundred guys in the school stairwell.

It's fun, but it's a little problematic, if that's something you're concerned about.

I guess my reaction about Flint is the same reaction that a lot of folks had, including myself, when I read Old Man's War and it turned out later that Scalzi has the political affiliation he does.

Then again, Scalzi's a shrewd guy, and he's admitted to writing what he knows will sell (not a bad thing, he's an author). Piggybacking off of Starship Troopers for your first printed published work isn't a bad way to go, apparently. Not a lot of Scalzi's political beliefs come through in OMW, and I'm sure a lot of folks - myself included - just subbed in Heinlein's narration when, looking back, it really wasn't there.

Librarian

Knuckle Dragger wrote: »

Librarian wrote: »

Are those 1632 books by Flint any good? The premise is ridiculous enough to appeal to my 80s kid love for cheesy time travel stories.

i wouldn't call them fine literature, but they are quite entertaining. Good enough that I've read 7 or 8 of the series.

It is available as a free ebook from Baen. Awesome! So at least something good has come of this so far.

I would say that Mr. Flint makes a very good point, in that awards can never recognize everyone deserving of one and that is true for all fields of entertainment.
Hitchcock never got an Academy Award as best director, neither did Kubrick.
On the other hand, there are countless books and movies that won awards at one time and are now almost completely forgotten.

I would also point out, that with the continuing success of YA literature over the last decade a lot more female fans and authors have found into the SF/F readership. And with the huge global success of some of these books of course also a lot of "minorities".

To not see this and to instead make this about a secret conspiracy of SJWs to change the world is what really makes me wonder about the puppies sanity.
They constantly use terms taken from 1984 when talking about their "enemies", like doublethink and their new favorite word wrongfan.
This way of believing to be the keepers of some secret or hidden truth fighting against a world full of enemies is an underlying mindset that they and by extension the gamergaters share with both neonazis and islamist fundamentalists.

tapeslinger

good insight from Deirdre Saoirse Moen: http://deirdre.net/hugo-awards-eric-flint-speaks-and-final-nomination-changes/
about this post from Eric Flint:
http://www.ericflint.net/index.php/2015/04/16/some-comments-on-the-hugos-and-other-sf-awards/
on the history that surrounds the Hugos and some of the issues currently surrounding things like categories and so on.

I like her suggestions, if only because there is sort of a dearth of a specific type of workshop in the present environment.

CaptainNemo

Jim C. Hines wrote a solid post on the matter.

http://www.jimchines.com/2015/04/10-hugo-thoughts/

These puppy guys sound like real assholes.

DevoutlyApathetic

CaptainNemo wrote: »

Jim C. Hines wrote a solid post on the matter.

http://www.jimchines.com/2015/04/10-hugo-thoughts/

These puppy guys sound like real assholes.

It's dead Jim.

Google has a cached copy up here.

Kipling217

I have read GRRM take on this cluster fuck on his blog and I found him to be very evenhanded.

I have also read Larry Correia take on why he supported the Sad Puppies(never the Rabid Puppies, heavens forfend) at his blog and I have never seen anybody come off as more self-pitying, self-justifying and whiny little shit in my life. People didn't like you because you where a conservative gun-store owner? Because you where a Mormon? That the Hugo's had been taken over by the "Cool kids" leaving poor Correia to drown his sorrows at the bar with Baen Barflies? Gimme a break.

As for Vox Day, any guy that thinks its acceptable to call a woman of color a "half Savage" and who gives himself the internet moniker translating to "the voice of God" is not worth listening to in the first place.

CaptainNemo

I can't see the word Vox without thinking of the Vox Populi from Bioshock Infinite, which makes Vox Day's entire personality funny as hell to me.

Bogart

It'd be a shame if this meant the Hugo nomination system changed purely to stop assholes from fucking it up, but if the alternative is going through this shit every year or just not having them I'll take a reorganisation on every time. I guess nothing will be decided about the awards until after they've happened and the results are known.

Ideally, all the SP nominees finish last and the Sad Puppies go home and cry themselves to sleep before vowing to become better people. But that's unlikely. At least the last part.

tapeslinger

WSFS will doubtless make some changes, but changes will take 2 years to be part of the rules, so there is still at least one more year of canine antics.

japan

Holy wall of text, batman

http://www.blackgate.com/2015/04/04/a-detailed-explanation/

(linked from that Jim C Hines piece)

There's a lot of interesting stuff here. In particular it exhaustively details a number of suspicions I had about the motivations of the people putting together the puppies nominations (namely that a lot of it is motivated by a conflation of quality and commercial success; a perception that the Hugos exist for the purpose, essentially, of advertising; and that it involves a particular parochial US-centric view of what science fiction is).

Really what I find most annoying about this is that now when I see "Hugo award winner" it'll prompt me to wonder if it's a real Hugo or a puppies Hugo, whether they end up getting any of their nominations awarded.

CaptainNemo

That reminds me, I really need to get back to reading that Ancillary book. Really dug the premise a lot, confusing as it was.

tapeslinger

@japan presently there are zero pup winners in Hugo history, so "winner" is still pretty sure bet.
"nominee" is specious even pre-puppies, so

nexuscrawler

Bogart wrote: »

It'd be a shame if this meant the Hugo nomination system changed purely to stop assholes from fucking it up, but if the alternative is going through this shit every year or just not having them I'll take a reorganisation on every time. I guess nothing will be decided about the awards until after they've happened and the results are known.

Ideally, all the SP nominees finish last and the Sad Puppies go home and cry themselves to sleep before vowing to become better people. But that's unlikely. At least the last part.

I just don't see anyway they could do it without changing what the Hugos are on a basic level. For better or worse its one of the few awards ordinary people can vote on. And if it's easy for people to vote it's going to be easy to have people try to manipulate the vote. It's hardly new back in the day the Scientologists for Hubbard nominated for a bunch of things by buying up votes in bulk.

Preacher

Well the accusation by the puppies people is this is brushback for the social justice crowd ruining scifi, which seems like bullshit, but you know the persecuted right wing complex on the internet, when they don't get their way their rights are being impacted.

CaptainNemo

To be fair, these fucking socialist lefitist pinko commiefeminazis have been ruining Science Fiction since 1895.

Preacher

That is one of the dumber complaints from the puppies that Scifi now is dealing with parallels to current political events when it totes never did that before... ignoring the history of scifi entirely. Like they point out the whiz bang of star trek and forget Uhurra, the first interracial kiss on television and the black white people.

CaptainNemo

Like.

The first alien invasion story is a metaphor for how fucked up British imperialism and racial theory is. Science fiction has always reflected social issues.

nexuscrawler

Preacher wrote: »

That is one of the dumber complaints from the puppies that Scifi now is dealing with parallels to current political events when it totes never did that before... ignoring the history of scifi entirely. Like they point out the whiz bang of star trek and forget Uhurra, the first interracial kiss on television and the black white people.

Right and none of the military sci-fi of the 60s-80s(the golden age of sci-fi to the puppies folks) had ANYTHING to do with the Cold War in the least

A Dabble Of Thelonius

All I know is that Correia has never written anything hugo worthy. I've read most of his stuff because it's ideal time filler at work, no thought required, and maaann you wanna talk about wish fulfillment author inserts? Let me show you the perfect man's man that is his monster hunter international protagonist.

Schrodinger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA4IkGUcxe8

And somehow, we're still dealing with today.

Fun fact: Apparently this episode was based on the Comic Code Authority.

Do you know why EC Comics eventually shut down? Was it because of all the violence? The covers featuring a guy putting a syringe to some lady's eye?

Nope. It was because of this:



http://www.buzzfeed.com/saladinahmed/how-the-comics-code-killed-the-golden-age-of-comics

Bogart

nexuscrawler wrote: »

Bogart wrote: »

It'd be a shame if this meant the Hugo nomination system changed purely to stop assholes from fucking it up, but if the alternative is going through this shit every year or just not having them I'll take a reorganisation on every time. I guess nothing will be decided about the awards until after they've happened and the results are known.

Ideally, all the SP nominees finish last and the Sad Puppies go home and cry themselves to sleep before vowing to become better people. But that's unlikely. At least the last part.

I just don't see anyway they could do it without changing what the Hugos are on a basic level. For better or worse its one of the few awards ordinary people can vote on. And if it's easy for people to vote it's going to be easy to have people try to manipulate the vote. It's hardly new back in the day the Scientologists for Hubbard nominated for a bunch of things by buying up votes in bulk.

True. Hopefully they just ride it out.

A Dabble Of Thelonius

Like, this whole kerfluffle equates to Mark Sanchez calling for reform to the NFL mvp system because Brady Quinn never won it.


This joke was basically for @Preacher

Preacher

A Dabble Of Thelonius wrote: »

Like, this whole kerfluffle equates to Mark Sanchez calling for reform to the NFL mvp system because Brady Quinn never won it.


This joke was basically for @Preacher

And I appreciate it. THE SANCHIZE!!!

I do like how sad puppies wants to avoid being confused with Vox Day because even they recognize he's poison to their cause.

nexuscrawler

I don't think any of them will actually win. They can scrape together enough votes to get on the finals list but the backlash will make them hated by everyone else. But as you said the whole debacle robs the awards of their prestige.

It feels more like an effort to destroy the Hugos than to "take them back":

Preacher

It's actually about ethics in voting procedures. I mean Scalzi would always link on his site what he thinks should be nominated, totes the same thing.

And destroying something because they don't like how it goes is totes in line with this groups usual mindsets. A group of taking my ball and going home fuck whits.

Librarian

I think at least Vox Day is totally fine with just destroying the Hugos. He has stated several times by now that he has no claim in the SF/F community.
And Torgersen and Correia distance themselves by saying "we are not Vox Day, but freedom of speech arrglllbarrgll" which is not a very convincing way to go about it.

Schrodinger

So can "None of the Above" win an award?

Because that's the only way I can see a good ending coming from this.

Librarian

This is a comment Torgersen made a couple of minutes ago:

A physician may apologize to the patient for causing pain, while performing a necessary — if uncomfortable — procedure. I knew SP3 was going to cause certain individuals to become upset. I didn’t anticipate that some of them would use the larger media to launch some slander attacks, and for those specific people, I am not apologizing to them. They are worse than anything SP3 has done, because they have made it about the politics of personal destruction, and personal destruction was never an objective of Sad Puppies 3.

But I do apologize to the people who aren’t necessarily partisan, but who have been upset by this anyway. Certainly Connie Willis’s comments make it clear (to me) that Connie doesn’t necessarily understand what’s going on, has had the “facts” communicated to her by people who are partisan, and who are also happily using Connie as an emotional chess piece in the partisan conflict. I don’t blame Connie. I feel bad that she’s unhappy. But I don’t blame her. And it sucks that we’ve reached this point.

But like I told George R. R. Martin, despite the fact Sad Puppies blew the lid off the rotten contents of the dutch oven, we (Sad Puppies) did not create it. The dutch oven has been stewing for decades. The green rooms and private author-editor parties have been stewing with it. Everyone agreed that the awards had “problems” and almost everyone agreed that there didn’t seem to be any way of addressing these problems which weren’t also problematic.

Larry and I simply concluded that complaining about a problem — while doing nothing — wasn’t a principled position. Having identified the thing, we determined to do something about the thing.

Which, again, takes me back to the analogy of the physician and the patient. We want to heal the Hugos. It hurts right now. For some people, unbearably so. Hopefully all the attention and controversy and conversation will get people involved, the democracy will become “awake” and alive, the quiet exclusion — from Fandom toward fans — will end, and this award will mean something again.

Poor Connie is too stupid to see what is really happening! SP3 just wants to heal the Hugos and make it all better!

Preacher

Noah Ward is always on the ballot.

tapeslinger

Schrodinger wrote: »

So can "None of the Above" win an award?

Because that's the only way I can see a good ending coming from this.

Yes, no award can place

I believe it's Kevin Standlee or someone similar who holds the trademark on "Noah Ward," the synonymous author pseudonym

Librarian

No award can take place, but Vox Day has already threatened to do his spiel every year from now on when that happens.