I feel sorry for WorldCon; so many people bought memberships just for the satisfaction of stomping down some really good authors. As much as people complain that the ‘Sad Puppy’ slate that many used for the nomination round, the reality is that the entire point of the Sad Puppy slate was justified in not just the ‘No Award’ category winners, but also in those which did win awards - driven almost entirely by political viewpoints without regard to quality.
I’ve been running into these types for years in bookstores.
Now I know why its been so hard finding good science fiction for a long time.
What would John W. Campbell say to all this?
For those that don’t know what has been going on this started a few years ago when some outspoken conservative authors started making noise about how the Hugo award, supposedly given to the best of Sci-Fi, was heavily slanted toward leftist ideological winners. The leftist side of Sci-Fi fandom swore up and down that it was not biased. So The right wingers organized. They roped in lots of people, not just on the right, that were tired of seeing the award go to poorly written works just because the author was a transsexual minority midget or some such ‘oppressed class’. This group called itself the Sad Puppies and they campaigned to get more ideologically diverse things into the Hugo nominations. This year things came to a head. The Puppyss had garnered so much support that there were entire categories where all the nominees had been put forth by the Puppys’. The hardcore left raised a stink, rallied support and, rather than let the awards go to anything promoted by the Right they voted to not give the award to a record number of categories. The crowd even cheered and clapped when the judges announced the ‘no awards’. It was a disgraceful and disrespectful spectacle.
One thing the leftist fans claim about that Sad puppies is that they are anti-women. (the usual accusation of the left toward the right) This year on the ballot were two extremely successful women editors and the leftists chose to give no award in that area rather than let one of them have it. All this while screaming and moaning that the Puppy’s were the ones that were bigots.
They refused to give out awards rather than let it go to authors, SOLOLY because right-wingers promoted them. Many of the authors weren’t even remotely right wing themselves. The Puppy’s promoted a very diverse slate of works. All this has served to definitively prove the Puppys’ point that the proceedings were ideologically biased.
There is a lot more to all this. It has been a massive internet war and it is far far from over.
The gist of the article is that a clique of Liberals who have been running the esteemed Hugo Awards have been excluding authors, or voting “No Award” for their works, whose political views do not line up with accepted neo-Marxist and Socialist dogma. Two groups of more traditional science fiction / fantasy fans calling themselves Sad Puppies and a more “militant” group called Rabid Puppies (I know which group I’d have joined if I was still into sci-fi) have been causing a stir about this ans so this year nobody received a Hugo. George RR Martin, author of the Game of Thrones and an ultra-liberal, proposed the groups start their own Hugo Awards. Well, F him and the back busted dragon he rode in on.