INTRODUCTION
“The Hugos are now, first and foremost, a battleground in the culture war… We have plenty of such battlegrounds, but only a few good guides to help us find good fiction. And now we have one less.”
This article explores how a prestigious Science Fiction and Fantasy (SF&F) award with a pedigree of nearly 70 years was transformed over three years into the punchline of mainstream media reports into vote rigging. Specifically, it tries to explore what claims made by both sides are universally accepted as true and which are specific to one side or the other.
Text in BLACK always denote statements which are accepted by both sides as uncontroversially true
Text in BLUE always denotes statements made by the author – analysis only
Text in GREEN always denotes statements made by the pro-Puppy disputant which are not accepted as true by the anti-Puppy disputant
Text in RED always denotes statements made by the anti-Puppy disputant which are not accepted as true by the pro-Puppy disputant
HU-GOS to HU-GONES
The Hugo Awards have been presented every year annually since 1955 at the World Science Fiction Convention (‘WorldCon’). They are a large part of the prestige and cachet of the conference. There is no dispute from either side of the argument that prior to about the 1980’s / 1990’s (depending on who you ask), winning a Hugo was a big deal both financially and professionally for a SF&F writer – it put them amongst such luminaries as Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. Even being nominated for a Hugo was thought to increase sales of a book. From a fan’s point of view, a Hugo Award (or nomination) was a reliable signal that the work was of exceptionally high quality.
Some people claim that at some point after the 1980’s / 1990’s Hugo Awards began to be given out less because they would be enjoyed by fans of the genre and more for being the ‘most deserving’ work published that year, meaning – approximately – literary works written by authors with high status in the community. There were a handful of such critics prior to 2013 (for example Harlan Ellison), but in general, prior to 2013 there was no organised movement to oppose this alleged shift.
From 2013 to 2015 a group collectively referred to as ‘The Puppies’ protested the Hugos and effectively undermined the award so successfully that both sides of the argument agree the prestige of the award has been reduced to almost zero. Puppy supporters claim that now a Hugo Award is actually detrimental to sales of a book (although concede that a lot hinges on methodology in making that claim), while opponents of the Puppies claim that while the signalling value is not quite negative – a randomly selected Hugo recipient is still probably a better read than a randomly selected book that wasn’t nominated – the award is nevertheless ruined compared to what it once was, and ruined as a good guide to good SF&F.
After 2015 the only Puppy group remaining is a particularly extreme sub-group of Puppies called the ‘Rabid Puppies’. Both sides agree that their only goal is to further attack the Hugos because of a perception that the Hugo organisers are left-wing. The more moderate group (the ‘Sad Puppies’) have largely drifted to other awards – most notably the ‘Dragons’ awarded at DragonCon – and haven’t really interacted with the Hugo awards in an organised way since then.
THE BELLIGERENTS
Part of the reason discussions of the Puppies generates so much heat and so little light is confusion between the two main groups of Puppies – Sad and Rabid. There is certainly some overlap in terms of aims and methods, and probably overlap in terms of who identifies with which group, but very little overlap in terms of stated motivations. There have been other peripheral groups using the ‘Something-Puppy’ identifier since 2013, but none have really caught on and all have been disavowed by the founder of the Sad Puppies.
The Sad Puppies are regarded by both sides as being the more moderate group in the debate. They are a loosely-defined collection of authors / fans founded by Larry Correia but not explicitly led by him any more.
They have a fairly specific stated motivation – to prove that the reason SF&F works they liked were no longer nominated for Hugos is because of in-group vote trading and ‘Culture War’-adjacent biases from the Hugo organisers, and not because these works were any less popular since the 80’s / 90’s, but as mentioned have largely given up on the Hugos since 2015 and so probably can’t fairly be said to have that motivation any more.
There is some dispute about exactly how the Sad Puppies started:
- The pro-Puppy side says that they were a long-running ‘in joke’ to get author Larry Corriea nominated for a Hugo, with the understanding that it would never actually happen because the Hugos no longer celebrated his sort of writing. Eventually some authors began to take the attempts seriously, and formalised the movement a lot more.
- The anti-Puppy side says that Larry Corriea was snubbed by a Tor editor at a SF&F event (Tor is the publishing house regarded as doing best out of the pre-Puppy Hugos), which led to Corriea issuing a ‘call to arms’ to formalise a movement to increase the status of the sort of science fiction he wrote and enjoyed reading.
Quite typically with disputes around origin stories, people have different memories of how ‘organically’ the movement came into being, and how petty its founder was being when it was founded. It seems like this dispute could be resolved in principle by someone with an awful lot of time to spare to find the original blogposts that spawned the Puppy movement on Corriea’s blog, but I looked and couldn’t find anything that proves it one way or another. Either way it seems irrelevant to subsequent claims, but is a good example of how the ephemeral nature of a lot of the supporting documentation (often blogposts, which can be deleted or edited by the author) has led to effectively intractable disputes between the two sides.
The Rabid Puppies are explicitly associated with alt-right blogger Vox Day and his fans. They have a variety of stated motivations, including personal grudges against Hugo-aligned personalities or a desire to break things in the name of being anti-‘social justice’. Their aim is agreed by both sides to be ruining the Hugo’s reputation, and to destroy the Hugos over the long-term by forcing the organisers to over-react to their campaign.
Their rhetoric can be characterised – at a minimum – as being significantly more extreme than the Sad Puppies, and both sides agree that a lot of the heat in the debate is generated when Sad Puppies are unfairly tarred with the same brush as the Rabids.
Although neither side disputes that the Rabid Puppies want to destroy the Hugos, anti-Puppies believe that the Sads also intended to destroy the Hugos. This might represent the most serious point of disagreement between the two sides, since if the anti-Puppies didn’t believe the Sads when they say they only wanted to change the sorts of works that were voted for then it is easy to see how conflict ending in the destruction of one side might be the inevitable result – both might have got the impression they were in an existential battle when the Sad Puppies say thay wasn’t the case.
The groups comprising the anti-Puppies are more overlapping. The big anti-Puppy voices are the Worldcon/Hugo organizers and a group of ‘Big Name Fans’ – authors or employees of publishers working in the SF&F industry, for example George RR Martin. These ‘Big Name Fans’ are sometimes referred to as ‘TrueFans/TrueFen’ derogatorially by Puppies, which is used as a counterpoint to the Puppies’ ironic self-description as ‘WrongFans/WrongFen’ (i.e. fans having the wrong sort of fun).
The Puppies also claim that there is a third group of anti-Puppies, who are Social Justice related, pro-Identity Politics authors and commentators.
It is possible to be a Hugo organiser, ‘Big Name Fan’ and be SJ-aligned simultaneously, so difficult to say there is one ‘anti-Puppy’ bloc.
A CODEX ON SLATES
The Puppies argument hinged on the fact a small group of people could ‘rig’ the nomination process by abusing a mechanic of the voting system, and that this rigging was commonplace. To prove this, they attempted to ‘rig’ the vote themselves. This section describes how they did it, in excruciating detail.
The Hugos used to use a very easily gameable nomination system, where a small fee could allow you to vote in any and all categories. The five works with the most votes were nominated. The Puppies abused this ‘loophole’ to vote using slates (all members of one slate voting for a specific set of winners in each category, even if they wouldn’t normally care about the outcome of that category / hadn’t read all the works). Because nobody else used slates, this would in theory allow Puppy authors to dominate the nominations.
Prior to the Puppies and ensuing rule changes, only a few dozen nominations were required to put a work on the ballot in most categories, but mass-voting by Puppies swamped both the old voting cliques and the general voting population, resulting in ballots heavily biased towards Puppy picks. As a response, mass-“No award” voting by Anti-Puppies occurred, so many categories did not receive a winner in 2015 (probably regarded as the year when the maximum amount of slate voting occured). This led to widespread and unfavourable media coverage of both the Hugos and Puppies, and is regarded by both sides as the reason the Hugos reputation ended up so badly damaged.
To prevent this happening again, the Hugo organisers implemented radical rule changes to reduce the power of voting blocs – for example a rule where multiple nominations in the same category have decreasing ‘strength’ per nomination; if you nominate one work, it gets one vote. If you nominate two, each gets less than half a vote, three each get much less than one third of a vote, and so on. This significantly hurt the Puppies’ ability to affect the outcome of the Hugos.
The pro-Puppy side also argues that these changes also centralised power back to the organisers, to allow them to pick works that they approved of even if those works were not popular – for example the change above would greatly strengthens a tactic known as logrolling (where one clique of authors would nominate another in exchange for quid pro quo nominations back), and pro-Puppies argue that such logrolling is endemic to the Hugos.
There are some additional rules changes which might be implemented for WorldCon 2017, which weaken voting blocs even further – for example the complex-sounding ‘SDV-LPE-SL’, which – according to the pro-Puppy side “further penalizes works which receive a lot of nominations by analyzing how many people nominated similar things, and discounting those votes accordingly.”. I don’t fully understand the system, but this characterisation is not disputed by the anti-Puppy side, nor especailly contradicted by any third-party information I’ve read on the topic.
The pro-Puppy side claims that these rules have been designed by anti-Puppy groups and tested against 2015 voting data, and that it is therefore reasonable to assume that the changes are mostly about breaking the power of the Puppies over the awards rather than preventing voting blocs more generally.
This voting data has not been made public so it is unclear how strong an effect the rule changes will have.
MONSTER HUNTER LEAD-IN
The first Sad Puppy slate was run in 2013, and focussed mostly on nominating Correia’s book, Monster Hunter Legion, in the category of ‘Best Novel’. The 2013 campaign was not successful in its aims and did not generate much attention outside very niche SF&F communities. The Rabid Puppies did not exist at this point.
The second Sad Puppy slate was run in 2014 and was a ‘true’ slate in the sense of nominating lots of authors for lots of categories. This year is notable for the inclusion of a nomination for Vox Day’s book ‘Opera Vita Aeterna’, which was regarded by anti-Puppies as a deliberate attempt to irritate people. Correia did not substantially refute this allegation (and lots of people were very irritated).
Seven of the twelve Puppy nominations made it to the final ballot. Perhaps more importantly, the pro-Puppy side recalls that it generated a lot of noise and reaction from the anti-Puppy side, with articles appearing in the mainstream press. This signal boosted the Puppies substantially.
The 2015 Puppy campaign was the first year the Rabid Puppies existed, and the first year Brad Torgersen took over organisation of the Sad Puppies. After the Sad Puppies announced their 2015 slate, the Rabid Puppies announced theirs a few days later (which was largely overlapping, although differed slightly in some areas). The combination of Sads and Rabids swept the nominations successfully getting 51 of 60 of the Sad slate and 58 of 67 of the Rabid slate on the ballot.
The Hugos responded by voting ‘no award’ in almost every category, meaning that only one Puppy-nominated work actually won a Hugo (the film, Guardians of the Galaxy). However since ‘no award’ won so many categories, very few awards were actually handed out at the 2015 Worldcon.
The pro-Puppy described both sides as ‘freaking out’ as the response to this. The Hugos handed out ‘asterisk awards’ to all nominees (asterisks are used in sports journalism to denote a result is unusual – for example a match called off because of extreme weather), which pro-Puppies found quite insulting.
The pro-Puppy side describes a number of other ways the Hugos reacted to the success of the 2015 campaign; “stage acts mocking the Puppies; George RR Martin’s “should have won a Hugo” award ceremony; No-Awarding a number of non-political nominees just because the Puppies liked them (particularly Baen editor Toni Weisskopf); officers of Tor Books insulting Puppy authors and supporters both online and at Worldcon”. Nobody disputes these events took place, but of course the anti-Puppies gloss them differently. It probably isn’t helpful to get into a back-and-forth about exactly how insulted various factions should be by various moves; my understanding of this is that the Hugos and Hugo-aligned supporters acting in a way that was not very conducive to settling the temperature, and Puppies simultaneously not trying very hard to calm things down on their end.
The 2016 Sad Puppy campaign was led by Kate Paulk and was substantially unsuccessful compared to the 2015 campaign, possibly as a result of rule changes instituted after 2015. Although a handful of Puppy-nominated authors won their category, these were seen by the SF&F community as being shoe-ins anyway (such as Neil Gaiman)
WHO IS RIGHT?
There is effectively no dispute that the Hugo organisers correctly claim the Rabid Puppies are attacking the Hugos for purely Culture War reasons – Vox Day’s blog proudly proclaims all the Culture War victories the Rabids have notched up (in his view). Though Vox Day himself says he is merely ‘indifferent’ to the survival of the Hugos it is not really clear that anyone (including his fans) believe him. It is a reasonable conclusion that even if the Hugos wanted to compromise with the Rabids, the Rabids are uninterested with any compromise the Hugos could offer short of total capitulation.
There is a general feeling that Vox Day has benefited substantially from the actions of the Rabid Puppies, both in raising his profile generally and in nominating books from his own publishing house. Both sides agree that Vox Day probably courted these benefits deliberately.
There are three reasons the Sads and Hugos can’t agree that are not in dispute by either side:
The first is that the Sads would only be satisfied with an admission that the Hugos have been stacked against their authors for some time. However – whether the Puppies are right or wrong about their material claims – the Hugos could not do this without significantly denting their remaining prestige, and they depend on their prestige to be taken seriously as a mark of which books to read. These are completely contradictory incentives with very little room to find a middle ground.
Another reason the two groups can’t agree is that neither believe the other side can be persuaded by evidence:
- The pro-Puppy side believes it would take a public confession from the Worldcon cliques before most anti-Puppies were persuaded (and even then they believe that most anti-Puppies would still believe the Sad Puppies were racist / sexist etc)
- The anti-Puppy side believes that the Puppies’ claims are simply not amenable to being disproved by evidence; because their characterisation of the Puppy’s claims are that the Puppies cannot believe that works they like could have lost due to anything other than a conspiracy there is no way to ‘prove’ that other works were objectively superior and hence no way to disprove a conspiracy doesn’t exist.
- The pro-Puppies don’t dispute that there isn’t a lot of evidence that could persuade them; they argue that the statistical evidence is too strong at this point for any new evidence to convince them without overturning the existing evidence
- However the anti-Puppies say that they could be persuaded they were wrong if a Puppy showed them – for example – an email chain where significant players at the Hugos agreed that a particular work was meritorious but would not be nominated because of political reasons
A final reason the two groups can’t agree is that there is a significant amount of insults and name calling happening, to the point where lawyers have been involved with libel allegations. In particular, the Hugo organisers have picked ‘isms’ to try and stick to Puppy-aligned individuals (racist / sexist etc). Both sides agree that name-calling directed at Rabid Puppies is not unreasonable given that the Rabids are deliberately trying to provoke name-calling, and both sides agree that name-calling directed at Sad Puppies by the big players in the Hugos was very unhelpful.
The Anti-Puppy side feels some sympathy for anger directed towards the Sad Puppies by ordinary Hugo fans – they argue that burning down an organisation that someone loves justifies a certain amount of animosity, and using that organisation’s own rules to do it is especially likely to be taken as an insult. The Pro-Puppy side points out a lot of the name-calling is factually inaccurate, as the Puppies are meaningfully diverse in the SJW sense (i.e. lots of genders and sexualities represented). It isn’t clear these statements are directly in contradiction, but it is an interesting highlight of which side of the issue the two disputants choose to emphasise.
The Anti-Puppy side adds that regardless of the reasons the Puppies and Hugos couldn’t agree to begin with, the issue is now completely tribal and evidence is less and less helpful.
FALLOUT
Both sides agree the Hugos were previously highly prestigious, but are now effectively worthless as a guide to selecting a good author. Both sides agree that as this was the goal of the Rabid Puppies they can be said to have ‘won’ the dispute. Any remaining actions of the Rabids are done in the service of the Culture Wars, which doesn’t seem like the kind of thing one ‘succeeds’ at. Insofar as attention was the goal of either side, the Rabids have been more reported on and are more embedded in the mind of the general SF&F public as being what the Puppies are ‘about’.
There is a little disagreement about how successful the Sads have been:
- Since the anti-Puppy side believes that the Sads eventually wanted to see the Hugos trashed rather than reformed, they also believe the Sads have been completely successful in their aims.
- The pro-Puppy side believes the Sads were partially successful – they achieved their lesser goal of proving how biased the Hugos were, but not the broader goal of reversing that bias and making the Hugos more accepting of work they liked. The Puppies are now recommending that authors of ‘Puppyish’ works use independent publishers, so no longer really hold this goal actively.
The Hugos are a small corner of the SF&F community – if an important bellweather for the health of that community – and the two sides also can’t agree if the Puppies made the broader SF&F community better or worse:
- The pro-Puppy side argues that they merely highlighted existing fissures in the SF&F community, and those whose tastes run ‘literary’ can still get work that they like, but those whose tastes run ‘populist’ are now better able to find works that they will enjoy.
- Anti-Puppies claim that the Puppies have turned SF&F into a Culture War frontier when it wasn’t before, which will have negative effects on the community. Without necessarily agreeing with this claim, the pro-Puppy side blames the Rabid Puppies for turning the Culture War ‘hot’ in the SF&F arena – the Sad Puppies would have been satisfied with more nominations for authors they liked, they claim.
It probably isn’t surprising these accounts of what impact the Puppies had on wider SF&F culture disagree – I’m more surprised by the level of agreement on how successful the Puppies were. Again, its noticeable that these claims don’t directly contradict each other; it is completely possible for the Puppies to have shone a light on existing cracks in the SF&F community which in turn made it a front of the Culture War, although I’m not expert / brave enough to claim that’s what happened by any means!
ANALYSIS
As you might gather from the rough-around-the-edges way this has been written up, this is the first time I’ve ever tried anything like this. Nonetheless I was extremely surprised by how many issues were uncontroversially accepted by both sides, or accepted by both sides after very minor revision. Part of this might be to do with the superb volunteers I got, but I suspect a lot of it is because the issue really only boils down to one or two points of contention which are then completely obfuscated by people with an incentive to fan the flames of division. As far as I can see, the outstanding issues which actually need resolution are:
- Did the Hugos give out nominations for literary merit that the Puppies did not agree with or for corrupt reasons?
- Did the Sad Puppies ever intend to destroy the Hugos?
My meaning with the second point is that maybe there is a chance of reconciliation if this is not the case, although maybe both sides are happy with the status quo with respect to the Sads doing their own thing and don’t really want a reconciliation.
Another observation is how much better off everyone would have been if the same outcomes had been achieved without the intervention of the Rabids (apart from maybe the Rabids themselves, who seem to be having a great time trashing the Hugos). This seems like a classic cautionary tale of being careful about summoning up those things which you cannot put down – by choosing to make the key lines of attack on Sads SJW-adjacent reasons (sexist / racist), it is maybe unsurprising that the Hugos drew the attention of anti-SJW machinery – especially when the Sads were deliberately pointing that machinery at the Hugos with a Vox Day nomination. This is maybe slightly unstable ground because maybe anti-Puppies really did think that the Puppies were racist / sexist, but it seems to me like the leadership on both sides could have done a lot more to cool tempers.
Overall, it seems to me like the death knell for the Hugos was failing to recognise the difference between Sad and Rabid Puppies – by associating the moderate wing of your opposition with the extreme, the Hugos left themselves no ground to reach a compromise solution. Such a solution might not even have existed in principle (and certainly the Sads weren’t exactly shy about expressing how amusing they found the Hugos falling apart), but refusing to engage with the portion of your opposition with cogent aims seems like a surefire way not to find a solution that exists.
THANKS AND CONTRIBUTIONS
A huge thank-you to the two contributors who gave up so much time
The pro-Puppy side was given by reddit user zontargs who gave the following as concluding remarks:
“Putting together an uncontested “consensus statement” between two sides using a moderator was quite easy (for me, anyway; I’m sure it kept our moderator busy). I’m both surprised and frustrated that so much of the disagreement is actually matters of degree or detail, reinforced by repetition and “sunk costs”.
A note on “slates”: the Sad Puppy slate was intended to be treated as “please read our recommended works, and vote for our picks if you agree they were the best” (though people’s responses did vary in practice), while the Rabid Puppy slate was explicitly an order to “vote for these”.”
Unfortunately the anti-Puppy commentor hasn’t got back to me with closing remarks, but I’ll update as soon as I hear from them.
