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Sad/Rabid Puppies and the Hugos, Round Two
May. 6th, 2016 12:33 pmSome of you may recall that last year, a group of bigoted douchebags whining that they weren't winning enough awards (and that OBVIOUSLY it must be due to a conspiracy of SJWs, it couldn't possibly be a reflection on the quality of their work) set out to game the Hugo Awards (the biggest SF/F awards in the world). And, due to producing a nominations slate and getting a whole bunch of gamergaters to nominate (since anybody can do that by purchasing a $40 membership to WorldCon, the World Science Fiction Convention) they managed to get a whole lot of works nominated that otherwise would not have been on the ballot. The vast majority of which would not have been on the ballot because, quite frankly, they were not good enough. And, in response, when it came down to the final voting, there were a whole bunch of people who voted "No Award" rather than vote for a Puppy Slate nomination, and so no Puppy nomination got an award.
This year, they're at it again, and significant numbers of works are on the ballot that wouldn't be there without their slate. (File 770 has a list comparing nominees vs. the Sad and Rabid slates.) It will probably be the last time they can do this; rules on how the Hugos work require two years of approval at the annual meeting, and (if proposals made last year are ratified this year) the rules for nominating will be changed such that block-voting by slate isn't possible anymore. There are also differences between this year's Puppy Slates and last year's; this year, they put already-popular-would-have-been-nominated-no-matter-what works on their slate with the rest of the dreck, and then refused to remove them when authors asked not to be affiliated with the Puppies. My guess is, they either want to try to steal credit for how popular Neil Gaiman, Lois McMaster Bujold, and others are, or they are hoping that Hugo voters are too stupid to tell the difference between actual Puppy Slate works and things that would have been on the ballot anyway without their help, and so people will No Award Gaiman, Bujold, et al, and the Puppies (while still not achieving anything positive) would at least be preventing other people from winning.
Abigail Nussbaum has some good thoughts on the subject.
So does Alyssa Wong.
This year, they're at it again, and significant numbers of works are on the ballot that wouldn't be there without their slate. (File 770 has a list comparing nominees vs. the Sad and Rabid slates.) It will probably be the last time they can do this; rules on how the Hugos work require two years of approval at the annual meeting, and (if proposals made last year are ratified this year) the rules for nominating will be changed such that block-voting by slate isn't possible anymore. There are also differences between this year's Puppy Slates and last year's; this year, they put already-popular-would-have-been-nominated-no-matter-what works on their slate with the rest of the dreck, and then refused to remove them when authors asked not to be affiliated with the Puppies. My guess is, they either want to try to steal credit for how popular Neil Gaiman, Lois McMaster Bujold, and others are, or they are hoping that Hugo voters are too stupid to tell the difference between actual Puppy Slate works and things that would have been on the ballot anyway without their help, and so people will No Award Gaiman, Bujold, et al, and the Puppies (while still not achieving anything positive) would at least be preventing other people from winning.
Abigail Nussbaum has some good thoughts on the subject.
So does Alyssa Wong.
