9 years ago
22
Sad Puppies, Rabid Chauvinists: Will Raging White Guys Succeed in Hijacking Sci-Fi’s Biggest Awards?
More and more women have been nominated for Hugo Awards in recent years—until this year. Here’s what’s at stake.
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I'm a white, male, aspiring SF writer, and all I see in the Sad Puppies is the death throes of an outdated culture. I'll be happy when this bunch of assholes is gone from the scene.
SF changes, and that's a great thing. I LOVE classic SF, read a lot of it, but there's no denying that socially it tends to be utterly backward. There are some fantastic exceptions (Ursula Le Guin and Gene Wolfe, for instance) but on the whole you can feel it in the SF that these white men were writing for other white men.
Today, the field is teeming with alternate points of view. I participate in workshops and frankly, the majority of rising SF writers are women. It's great, because these are women who approached SF from a deep love for the genre and are bringing their own experience to the field.
And the thing is, SF to me has always been about alternate points of view. I read SF since I'm a kid because I love seeing strange worlds through strange eyes. So why be close-minded about who brings in these points of view? It doesn't make sense.
It always blows my mind that a writer who purports to imagine impossible worlds has a hangup about putting a strong woman or a different culture in it.
I love Sci-fi that tackles social questions. My favourite sci-fi book is Down and out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. It changes very few elements of our society comparatively to other sci-fi authors but they have extremely large ramifications.
They still have computers but they are a chip in your head. Memories can be backuped and restored and making a full grown clone at any age is trivial. And the world is now post-scarcity and working in a reputation economy (you basically upvote people in your mind).
And this changes everything. Imagine that you can mentally IM with people (telepathy!), mentally Google anything, and mentally take notes of things you don't want to forget in a word processor.
Imagine that you lived something terrible and had the option to restore from backup before it happened. Imagine your relationship to danger if you can be brought back to life no matter what.
And imagine if the issues of karma systems like reddit's permeated all of society.
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The bullshit that just assaulted my eyeballs:
He continues:
I hope Sad Puppies kick your asses (because the idea of the status quo being changed shouldn't be taken as "hacking", but as a sign of your awards reflecting the culture).
I don't understand what you mean. You're hoping the Sad Puppies succeed in overtaking the Hugos because you would see this as a reflection of the culture?
I'm seeing a bunch of conservative old men who are resisting change because it takes them out of the top spot. I would call it "hacking" specifically because it's changing the awards to reflect a minority position, not the general culture.
Yep. Campaigning and networking to get your side picked is as old as dirt. It's not like anyone calls the presidential campaigns cheating. With some new players on the field, it's about time that the people in the top spot have to fight to keep their position.
That's voting culture for just about anything people care about. It's time it came to the Hugo awards.
A minority position in what? People who vote for the Hugo awards or people who like science fiction? I don't think the Hugo awards are actually indicative of what the SF fans across the board enjoys and any upcoming "minority" position is only a minority in sway and power, not actual numbers.
If you can rally and network and actually win, then I see it as SF fans realizing they have voices in their community that matter.
I'd agree with you, except the Sad Puppies thing is a clear attempt at manipulating the vote in an effort to conduct what I'd consider a culture war. You might say it's just gaming the system and thus acceptable, but I find the goal to be despicable. Partly because it's an attempt at stifling diversity, and partly because people doing it are voting in terms of furthering an agenda instead of recognizing absolute quality.
To be clear, I don't really care for Sad Puppies. Their very name says they want to flaunt themselves as the pitiful underdogs to gather votes, and I don't really buy into that.
But I cannot refute the need to fight against the complacency around the voting for one of the biggest SF awards. It'll be hard to make this some sort of two-party system like US politics, but once it's shown that the award winners aren't all old white men conservatives, it will open up the awards to any writer with a large enough and dedicated fan base.
Sometimes a ~war~ is what's needed to overthrow an ~outdated tyrant~.
I think the idea that an award being currupt because the wrong sort of people win is stupid. I don't care if you're a giant sandworm if your stuff is great you deserve to win.
Who said anything about wrong sort? I'm just tired of the same sort. If the same old people win, then it's not about deserving, it's homogenous culture voting for the same type of stuff.
It depends, are the same people winning because of collusion or because they turn out good scifi. I think there's a bias in the other argument as well, the bias that assumes that because white males win the awards, that it's collusion.
It's the target audience for the genre, just like romance is consumed by women or poetry is consumed by hipsters. Hit your target and your one of the top writers for the genre. I don't see it as a problem that a genre loved by white male twenty something's is rewarding the writing that appeals to white male twenty something's.
But it's not the Same Old People. Ann Leckie won for her debut novel last year, and the Puppies HATE her. "The Wind-up Girl" won in 2009, and "Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell" in 2009. Both Brad and Larry were Campbell Nominees.
Man, when the writer starts getting this aggressive about their point, it becomes incredibly difficult for me to side with them. They take it way too far and make it sound like men can't write anything with significance, resonance, or dignity, and that anyone that has won the award in the past got it by whining. It really just detracts form everything else they've written up to that point.
Actually, I've never bought a book based on any awards! I'd have to believe there is publishing money behind this too.
"Raging White Guys" That's the point where I turn off. I'm sorry, but don't you think making an assumption that a group of people are all of a certain gender is not the best way to go around making an argument? I don't like Sad Puppies all too much, but come on! If someone wants to make an argument, direct your criticisms and anger at the group who are doing it...
I can't read this anymore. Can someone explain to me how they manipulated the vote?
The Hugos have open nominations. So long as you're a member of the World Fantasy Con, You can nominate up to five entries in each category. The Hugo Committee then picks the 5 entries with the most nominations, IF each has at least 5% of the nominations. With only 1K or so Nominators, and thousands of works possible to be nominated, a work can make the ballot with only a few votes. And it does happen. If there is so much of a spread than a top 5 gets less than 5%, it doesn't get listed (2013 had only three nominees in SS as 4 and 5 had too few nominations)
So it' very easy for a concerned bloc to skew the vote. With about 15% of the nominations, the Rabid Puppy slate swept everything. Note they really didn't break the rules: This was a known bug, and there was a gentleman's agreement kinda in place that kept the community from exploiting it. The Puppies have said they feel there was a backroom conspiracy to promote a certain type of literary fiction over their own works, but by sweeping th categories, they themselves pretty much disproved it. THey proved the system wasn't being gamed precisely because it was so easy to be gamed, anybody could have done it at any time.
So they exploited an issue with the voting system, so where does the sexism come into this? Because it doesn't sound like anyone "broke" anything, it sounds like someone gamed a broken system.
There's a lot about the puppies where they say one thing and do another. It's been written about pretty extensively. Check out Jim C. Hines post for a comprehensive and fair article with lots of sources: http://www.jimchines.com/2015/06/puppies-in-their-own-words/ I agree with Jim that there is nothing explicitly Sexist about the puppies, but the fact is their slate was less diverse ( And has much weaker works) than most recent ballots.
Personally, I think they only glommed onto the politics to get useful fools on board. This was always about sour grapes and self promotion.
I mean I'm well traversed in Gamergate, and I saw a clear attempt to connect the two for a time, but I just ignored it and it seemed to pass. Seems a bit silly to me. I think they are probably feeding off of these articles. They'll fall into obscurity if people just ignore them, it seems.
I weep for the future of fiction.
I actually have to give George Lucas credit for writing THX 1138 now.
I thought it was liberal rubbish taking the piss out of moral conservative reaganites.
I see it now as warning against leftists utilizing social media (the most low and base arm of the technocracy) to police fiction as fascists.