This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Oh man, you guys, I can’t believe no one has written up the Sad Puppies yet! This is a tale of literary drama that went very nearly mainstream, tangentially involving a few people you’ve probably heard of, and it’s just packed with comically obvious villains and delicious schadenfreude. I sincerely hope that in a decade or two someone makes it into a heartwarmingly overwrought Oscar-bait docudrama. In the meantime, here’s what happened.

Tl;dr: science fiction had its own, somehow even dumber Gamergate.

This got so, so long, I’m sorry. You guys seemed to enjoy the extended Snapewives etc writeups so I kinda just went for it.

Diversity: The Final Frontier

Science fiction is, historically, a white guy-heavy club. There are notable exceptions, but for the most part when you say ‘sci fi’ people are going to think of classic 1950s-1970s genre giants like Heinlein and Asimov. Early editors and publishers deliberately cultivated a white male only scene. And, relevantly to the entire huge-ass essay I’m about to write, it’s stubbornly white and male. Although the field started opening up in the 80s with authors like Octavia Butler and Lois McMaster Bujold making inroads, and nominations for the Hugos (the genre’s highest awards, ie the Nerd Oscars) were actually about 50% given to female authors in 1992-93, backlash hit hard. From 1998-2009, no more than 25% of Hugo nominees were women, and some years as low as 5%. I can’t find hard numbers for racial diversity but it wasn’t any less bleak.

At a time when wider society was increasingly talking about maybe not gatekeeping literature quite so much, the science fiction fandom had spoken: stories of utopian societies and incomprehensibly advanced alien technology are relatable, but black people? This is not the way.

What changed in 2009 was Racefail. I’m not going to try and even summarize it, because it was an extremely complicated, contentious movement featuring about eight million people who won’t be relevant to the rest of this post. The extremely short version is that Racefail was an approximately year-long series of conversations, essays, responses, and counter-responses about racism and sexism in the speculative fiction community and the ways that non-white-guy people get shut out of the traditional publishing process. This was years before Gamergate, but it was an earlier example of the way online fan communities were starting to exert their authority.

In the wake of Racefail, a new generation of female and POC authors came out of the woodwork to participate more actively in the speculative fiction community, especially by finding easy-to-reach internet-based fans not locked behind magazines or publishers. Almost overnight the Hugo nominations looked a lot more balanced (40% female/60% male authors in 2010, 50/50 in 2011). A lot of really good contemporary talent blossomed, and we got some awesome novels that might never have seen the light of day. Problem solved!

The Hugos

That was just the exposition, sorry. The actual drama is going to center around the Hugo Awards. Like the Grammys and Golden Globes, the Hugos are the industry awards of the ‘Speculative Fiction’ (science fiction and fantasy) world, given out every year for accomplishments in a number of categories.

(It’s sci fi and fantasy, but this post is mostly going to be about the sci fi side, for reasons that mostly come down to science fiction being preferred literature of Logical and Euphoric Enlightened Gentlemen. Fantasy is for girls. Apparently.)

Unlike the Grammys etc, the format of Hugo nominations is somewhat unusual. Anyone who buys a ticket to the World Science Fiction Convention (aka Worldcon) can make nominations; the top five nominees are put through a ranked-choice vote by the same community. Every category also has a No Award option, intended to be used if voters think any or all of the nominees don’t deserve to be considered.

The decentralized nature of the award elections means the process can be fairly easily taken over by even a relatively small coordinated bloc. No one had ever really worried about this before, because no single author could ensure themselves an award and who else would bother gaming the Hugos?

Well, these guys would, as it turns out.

The Sad Puppies are born

History? In my spaceships?

The Sad Puppies movement was born in 2013, in the comment section of the blog of a science fiction author named Larry Correia. Correia lamented his lack of industry recognition, describing his work as ‘unabashedly pulp,’ and therefore discriminated against. In other words, modern fans cared more about books with literary and cultural merit than his good ol’ action stories about square-jawed spacemen punching bad guys and hooking up with sexy aliens. And that’s not fair. :c

Correia’s anger reflected a trend in reactionary science fiction blogging, which is a sentence that I did not expect to type when I woke up this morning. You see, the Puppies had their own explanation for the post-Racefail diversity burst: obviously it’s impossible that anyone actually likes books by or about women and/or nonwhite folks, so the increasing success of those authors was just pity awards and book sales, driven by liberal guilt and the desire to look Hashtag Woke. Conservative white male authors were convinced that they were, actually, the ones being discriminated against - some said the industry was anti-Christian, some yelled about the dreaded SJWs. Regardless of the cause, they weren’t winning everything anymore, which couldn’t possibly be the result of a fair process, so something had to change.

(The name ‘Sad Puppies’ is a reference to those emotionally manipulative Sarah McLachlin animal cruelty ads that had everyone crying themselves to sleep back in the day. Correia edited together a humorous video featuring himself as one of the pitiful little doggos who would die of Neglectitis without your donation vote!)

Let’s game the Hugos!

So Correia and friends dubbed themselves a movement and decided they’d raise support to get his latest book the Best Novel award at the 2013 Hugos…

…and failed. Completely. His book didn’t even make it to the election. Clearly Team Sad Puppies had to step up their game, so they advertised more and put together a whole slate of nominations in anticipation of the 2014 Hugos, intending to collectively win multiple categories.

…and failed, again. Of the seven Puppy nominees that reached the ballot in 2014, only one did better than ‘dead last’ and one actually lost to No Award, ie worse than last. “This was really a year that underscored that a younger generation of diverse writers are becoming central to the genre and helping to redefine and expand it,” noted nerd culture news repository Gizmodo, serenely unaware that there had even been a right-wing protest vote bloc.

Under Correia, the Sad Puppies had been pretty much entirely useless at achieving their actual goals. But interest in their club had spread through the rightwing geek internet, and a monster was waking…

Enter Players 1 and 2

deep breath

Time to introduce arguably the two central figures of Puppygate, ie the people I’m most focused on fantasy casting for my imaginary melodramatic reenactment film: NK Jemisin and Theodore Beale.

NK Jemisin is a sci fi/fantasy author and also black woman who incorporates themes of colonialism, oppression, and cultural conflict into her work; she was actually one of the pro-diversity voices of Racefail from way back at the top of this page. She’s also a really good writer. Her work burst onto the scene in 2010 to huge success and near universal critical acclaim and she’s since won approximately every fantasy literature award on the planet, refusing to back down from her political stances along the way.

Theodore Beale is better known as alt right culture war polemic Vox Day, who you might be familiar with if you were unfortunate enough to pay attention to Gamergate. He’s also an author, having created his own publishing house to distribute his Christian-themed fantasy books and “a guide to understanding, anticipating, and surviving SJW attacks.” He has been described as a “graspingly untalented bigot” (by John Scalzi) and “holy shit, that guy is a straight up literal Nazi” and once attempted to create a conservative alternative to Wikipedia.

The two are not friends.

In 2013, Vox Day ran for president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). He lost, but NK Jemisin used her keynote speech as guest of honor at a large convention to publicly express her alarm that 10% of the SFWA membership had voted for a man who once referred to women’s suffrage as a “complete and unmitigated disaster” and had a lot of thoughts about something called ‘white tribalism’. In response, Vox Day used the official SFWA Twitter to link to a post on his blog in which he said that “genetic science presently suggests that we [ie white and black people] are not equally homo sapiens sapiens,” referred to Jemisin as a “half-savage,” and called her editor a “fat frog,” among a whole lot of other stuff. After a bunch of dumb waffling about civility and drama the SFWA kicked him out.

The incident apparently focused Vox Day on the dreadful oppression faced by rightwing white guys who write books about dragons. This all went down in 2013; now we’re jumping back to…

2015: Shit Gets Real

Puppies everywhere

In preparation for the 2015 Hugos, OG Sad Puppy Wrangler Larry Correia (remember him? No one else does) was succeeded by an author named Brad Torgerson, a guy who had been nominated for a couple industry awards but never found enough success to quit his day job.

About five minutes later, Vox Day popped up to announce his own splinter movement, the more extreme Rabid Puppies. While the Sads’ voting slate was officially a ‘suggestion,’ the Rabs were clear that they meant to be a unified bloc. Finally, someone was taking a stand against identity politics and affirmative action, by… only voting for books written by politically acceptable white guys.

Anyway.

War of the Puppies

2015 was inarguably the Year of the Puppies. Newly organized and energized and taking notes from the still-raging Gamergate movement, the Puppy candidates dominated the Hugo ballots - the Sad Puppies got 51 finalists, while the Rabid Puppies achieved 58. They swept several categories, meaning all five candidates were Puppy-approved. It escaped no one’s notice that Vox Day, Torgerson, Torgerson’s inner circle, and Vox Day’s publishing house were healthily represented, as well as a bunch of other authors who clearly were not on the ballot on the strength of their writing.

The whole thing took the rest of Worldcon by surprise - no one had ever tried to game the results at anything close to this scale before. The speculative fiction community was in an uproar. The Puppies were widely criticized for both their ideology (the Sad Puppies made a half-hearted attempt to pretend to disapprove of the Rabid Puppies and their openly white supremacist leader, convincing approximately nobody) and for their blatant abuse of the process. Much more successful and popular white guys like George R. R. Martin and sci fi writer Alastair Reynolds disowned them. Reasonably famous internet writer guy and former president of the SFWA John Scalzi started an all-out war against the movement, becoming their #2 nemesis - second only to Jemisin, who had become a symbol of everything the Puppies wanted banished from science fiction.

(Funnily enough, Scalzi won the 2013 Best Novel Hugo that Correia started the Sad Puppy movement to get.)

And the winner is…

When the panic died down, calls went out among the Worldcon community to No Award the Puppy candidates. The way this works is that in every category, No Award is essentially a sixth nominee. As the vote is ranked choice, a voter who feels that a given book or author is undeserving of the nomination can rank that book/person below No Award. Anyone who scores below No Award doesn’t place at all (so if NA gets third, the fourth, fifth, and sixth-place books get no recognition). If No Award wins the vote, no Hugo is awarded in that category at all. Prior to 2015 this was a rare occurrence.

The result: No Awards to every one of the categories with only Puppy candidates. No Award beat every Puppy-approved candidate in all of the other categories, with the sole exception of Guardian of the Galaxy winning Best Dramatic Presentation in the Long Form. No wins for Brad Torgerson or Vox Day.

Oops.

2016: Pounded In The Butt By My Reactionary Politics

Okay, So That Didn’t Work

By 2016 the Sad Puppies had completely lost control of Vox Day. They retreated to focus on gaming the votes at the brand new Dragon Awards of DragonCon, which at least kept them quiet. Newly crowned Supreme Puppy Emperor Vox Day vowed to DESTROY THE HUGOS AND LEAVE NOTHING BUT A SMOKING PIT and so forth.

The problem was that no one wanted to run on the Rabid Puppy ticket. Previous years had made it clear that associating yourself with the Puppies was a good way to win absolutely nothing at all, since even people who didn’t care about the ideological fight going on would vote against Puppy candidates in distaste for their gaming of the process. In fact, the only work or author to finish in anything other than last place after receiving a Puppy endorsement was Guardians of the Galaxy, which… probably didn’t need their help.

Guardian’s victory became the movement’s new strategy. Instead of nominating themselves, the Puppies would claim whichever independently successful authors weren’t entirely politically unacceptable. Then, when ‘their’ candidates won, so would the Puppies! It was foolproof.

The authors themselves (at least the ones who knew they’d been chosen by the Puppies; some had no idea) were… displeased. They demanded to be taken off the slate, to no avail. Neil Gaiman called the Puppies ‘sad losers.’ A few near-certain winners dropped out of the race to spite Vox Day. There was disagreement about whether authors who were essentially human shields should be No Awarded. In the end, the Puppies finally picked up a few ‘wins,’ but only with authors who weren’t associated with the movement.

And there was one victory they couldn’t celebrate at all: NK Jemisin became the first African American author to win the coveted Best Novel award for her book The Fifth Season.

THE BAD DOGS BLUES

There were a few Puppy-driven nominees on the ballot in 2016: joke nominees. The Puppies decided that if they couldn’t steal awards from minority authors, they’d delegitimize them. One of their most absurd picks was an obscure anonymous author who apparently wrote nothing but bizarre supernatural gay erotica.

That’s right: the Sad Puppies gave us Chuck Tingle.

Tingle accepted the nomination and used it to troll the hell out of his benefactors. Apparently no one had remembered to register RabidPuppies Dot Com, so Tingle bought it and redirected it to an LGBT charity and NK Jemisin’s marketing page. He arranged for feminist game developer and noted target of shrieking, incoherent Gamergate rage Zoë Quinn to give his acceptance speech. Lastly, he published the classic Slammed in the Butt by my Hugo Award Nomination, which I confess I have not read.

The End of the Puppies

Changes to the Hugo award process in 2017 reduced the effectiveness of bloc voting, but by that point it didn’t really matter. Gamergate had run out of momentum and the world had moved on. The Sad Puppies quietly disbanded; Vox Day and the Rabid Puppies struggled on for another year, but managed only 12 nominations and no wins. NK Jemisin took Best Novel again for the sequel to last year’s winning book.

Finally, in the scene that will almost certainly form the last triumphant shot of the melodramatic dramatization of this saga, in 2018 female authors won all the major Hugo categories, and NK Jemisin became the first person to win three consecutive Best Novel awards, one for every book in her Broken Earth trilogy.

In conclusion, I am going to go look at pictures of real, adorable, non-bigoted puppies. Thanks for reading!

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here