Signal boost: Vox Day and the Rabid Puppies strike back

[beatrice_otter]

The Hugo awards are the top award in Science Fiction, given out yearly, and they are nominated on and voted on by people who have memberships to the World Science Fiction Convention, wherever that may be held.  (Note: you can buy a supporting membership that does not give you the right to attend but does give you the right to nominate and vote.)

For the past several years, a slowly-getting-louder vocal minority of poo-slinger dudebros has been whining about how "biased" the Hugos are because their poorly-written white-male-power idfics don't get nominated.  Vox Day (aka Theodore Beale) is by far the loudest.  He's also stated publicly that he doesn't even really care about winning any more, he just wants to destroy the Hugos.  So last year he put together a slate of like-minded authors with Hugo-eligible works, called it the "Sad Puppy" slate, and urged his followers to nominate them.  They did, and those works got on the ballot, and none of them won for obvious reasons.  (If they'd had actual good works of SF with enough literary merit to be worthy of a Hugo, they might have had a chance.  And the Hugos have historically been very easy to game in the nominating phase and very hard to game in the voting phase, because there are a lot of people who vote every year but never nominate.)

This year, Vox Day's Sad/Rabid puppy slate managed to game the system such that there are six whole categories with NOTHING but Rabid Puppy nominations.  He did this by calling on GamerGaters to flock to his banner and buy memberships solely for the purpose of hurting "SJWs"  (Note: some of the authors whose works are on his slate were not aware of it before the nominations were done.  Some of them have already withdrawn their work from consideration because of their disagreement with Vox Day and his tactics.)

Of the various responses to this that I've seen, Abigail Nussbaum's is the best at laying things out clearly.

How am I going to respond to this?  Personally, I'm going to buy a supporting membership to Worldcon this year, and will vote for NO AWARD in the six categories they swept and instead of ranking their works in other categories.  And next year, you can bet your sweet britches I'll be nominating works that actually deserve a Hugo.

Comments

[likeadeuce]

I have to say, I bought a supporting membership after nominations came out last year last year in response to a post like this, I read a lot of stuff and voted thoughtfully, and this year I nominated thoughtfully. I think I'll save my $40 this year. . .

[laurajv]

yeah, my husband is voting No Award in those categories, too. He's ticked.

[beatrice_otter]

Yeah. The appeal to GamerGaters--and getting the same author nominated for THREE WORKS IN THE SAME CATEGORY, really there is nobody else writing that sort of work that they approve of? That kinda shoots their whole argument in the foot. (If there aren't piles of deserving works and writers being ideologically shut out, then the awards can't be biased in the way they claim. But logic is not a feature of their argument in the first place, so.)