You might think handing out awards for the best science fiction writing of the year would not be, ahem, rocket science. But you’d be wrong.
The Hugo awards are the Oscars of the science fiction and fantasy genres, and the 2016 shortlist is announced on Wednesday. The winners will be revealed at the annual World Science Fiction convention (Worldcon), this year in Kansas City in August. It should be a grand day for the nominees – and for most of them it will be. But a shadow looms over the Hugo awards, one that howls like a pack of puppies.
The troubles began in 2013, when author Larry Correia launched a campaign against what he perceived as the liberal, lefty bias in science fiction and fantasy publishing. He came up with a plan to “game” the Hugos and get his own novel Monster Hunter Legion on the list. Correia named his campaign Sad Puppies, because the omission of his work from the “snooty and pretentious” awards “made puppies sad”.
Correia failed to get his book on the ballot – but only just. It garnered 101 nominations, just 17 short of making the grade. From this relative success the Sad Puppies movement grew. Each year, they released a new “slate” of recommended books that would fill the Hugo ballot with more conservative and traditional titles.
And then the Rabid Puppies crashed the party, coming close to hijacking the Hugos in 2015. Everyone in science fiction and fantasy writing was involved: it even dragged George RR Martin away from finishing the long-awaited sixth book in his Game of Thrones series and in to the furious fight online, as the tussle over the different ideologies grew ever more ferocious.
George RR Martin: “When the Hugo ballot came out last year it was not just a rightwing ballot, it was a bad ballot”
“The prestige of the Hugos derives from its history. Robert A Heinlein won four times, Ursula K Le Guin won, Harlan Ellison won. That’s a club any aspiring writer wants to be a member of,” George RR Martin says. “When the Hugo ballot came out last year it was not just a right-wing ballot, it was a bad ballot. It was the weakest we’d seen for years.”
The Hugos are not a “first past the post” race where the book with the most votes wins. Instead, they use a system known in politics as “instant run-off voting”, or, in the UK, as the “alternative vote”: rather than putting an X in the box of the favoured candidate, nominations are ranked in order. If there is no clear winner, the bottom-placed candidate’s votes are transferred to the next preference on the ballot papers. (You can explore the whole Hugo voting system here).
So far, so complicated, but not a completely unknown system – and, according to Hugo organisers, a fairer one: “In ordinary governmental elections it is possible for the winner to be someone that 40% of the people like and 60% of the people hate, because that 60% could not agree among themselves on a candidate. The Hugo voting system is designed to avoid results like that.”
However, the Hugos’ problems aren’t to do with voting so much as nominating. Each member of Worldcon gets to nominate up to five entries in each of the awards categories. The five most popular choices in each category go on the ballot – a simple system that had worked since the inception of the Hugos in 1953 until the Sad Puppies, and then the Rabid ones, began to interfere with the nominations.
“When I saw [the 2015] ballot I felt I had to say something and refute the Puppies’ claims that there was discrimination against conservative fiction,” Martin says. “There have been plenty of conservative writers in SF. I think SF has always had both liberal and conservative writers, but there probably have been more liberals.
“This is a genre about the future, it’s about looking at different ways of living, of governing, of sexuality, all those things. It’s always been forward thinking. As the great writer Theodore Sturgeon said, SF is about asking the next question.”
This year, following the controversy of 2015, the Sad Puppies have published recommendations, rather than a “slate” for supporters to submit. “This works much better; anyone can publish lists of recommendations for books they want to win,” Martin says. He pauses. “The Rabid Puppies, on the other hand, that’s another matter. Their intention is to burn down the Hugos, to destroy everything. That’s pretty toxic.”
The man behind the Rabid Puppies: “The campaigns have exposed the ideological bias in science fiction and fantasy publishing”
The Rabid Puppies emerged in 2015, as both a running mate to the Sad Puppies and a reaction to it. Brad Torgerson, an author in the Sad Puppies movement, was quick to distance his group from the newcomers: “We’re driving on the same freeway, but our destinations appear to be drastically different. Different cars. Different driving styles. We don’t want to be pulled over because the guy in the other car is doing 110mph. We can’t control the other driver(s) on the freeway.”
At the wheel of the Rabid Puppies bandwagon is author and blogger Vox Day, real name Theodore Beale, whom The Wall Street Journal once described as “the most despised man in science fiction”. He has a history of sharing his opinions on everything from marital rape (an oxymoron, he says, because “marriage grants consent on an ongoing basis”) to women’s suffrage (“the women of America would do well to consider whether their much-cherished gains of the right to vote, work, murder and freely fornicate are worth destroying marriage, children, civilised western society and little girls”).
In 2015, Beale published a slate of 67 nominations and asked his followers to nominate them. Fifty-eight made it in, including two of his own works. But why? “For over 20 years, the mainstream science-fiction publishers have been trying to pass off romance in space and leftwing diversity lectures as science fiction,” Beale tells me. “The Puppies are a popular reaction to mediocrities and absurdities being presented as the very best that the field has to offer.”
Are people buying memberships to a convention they have no intention of attending, purely to vote on the Puppies’s slates? “I believe so,” says Beale. “The unprecedented numbers make it clear that people on both sides were buying supporting memberships in order to vote for and against the Puppy recommendations.” Doesn’t that make a mockery of the whole Hugo system and ethos, though? “No more than it has always been,” Beale says. “I think they [the Puppies campaigns] have successfully exposed the extent of the ideological bias in science fiction and fantasy publishing, and in the media. The media coverage last year was so insane and so over the top that it significantly boosted support for the Rabid Puppies.”
I ask Beale how he feels about the regular accusations of racism, homophobia and sexism levelled at him. “It is said that the more flak you receive, the more certain you are of being over the target,” he says. “I would not have site traffic of 2.2m Google page-views per month if there were not tens of thousands of readers who are at least somewhat sympathetic to my perspective.”
Alastair Reynolds: “I do not want their endorsement; I do not want even the suggestion of their endorsement”
Not all the authors on the Puppies’ lists want to be there. This year, British author Alastair Reynolds found his novella Slow Bullets on both the Sad Puppies’ and the Rabid Puppies’ slates. This did not make him happy; after the 2015 vote, Reynolds says, he made his feelings on their campaigns “very plain”.
“This is an attempt by various elements of the American right to regain the centre ground of SF from some perceived shift to the liberal left,” he says. “It’s predicated on a falsehood … as any analysis of recent Hugo nominations and winners will show: there is no demonstrable bias from within the field against writers of faith, or those who have right-leaning politics. And yet, the Puppies keep recounting the same doctrinal narrative, with a seemingly endless appetite for name-calling.”
Reynolds asked for Slow Bullets to be removed from both the Puppies’ lists, to no avail. “I do not want their endorsement; I do not want even the suggestion of their endorsement, and for that reason I requested that my story be removed from both lists,” he says.
There is a get-out clause: members can vote “no award” above the Puppies’ nominees, effectively forcing them out by rewarding no one. This was what happened in 2015, when an unprecedented five categories were not honoured. Only one nominee selected by the Puppies won: the film Guardians of the Galaxy took best dramatic presentation. But rather than feeling like anyone won the war, it all seemed rather unfair, especially for books and authors that were nominated but passed on for the “no award” votes.
Do the Hugos need a complete overhaul?
Can the Hugos be fixed?
E Pluribus Hugo is a bid to get the awards administrators to consider a new voting system, known as ‘single divisible vote with the least popular eliminated”. It would work like this:
- Each member has just one nomination in each category.
- If a member awards their single nomination point to a single work, it gets the full point. If they nominate two works, they get half a point each. Three works, and the point is divided by three, and so on.
- At the end of the nominations period, each point and fraction of a point is added up and the most popular works make the ballot.
E Pluribus Hugo needs to be approved at this year’s Worldcon to get passed. If it does, a change to the World Science Fiction Society constitution can go ahead – and this time next year the Hugos nominations process could look very different. But overhauling the nomination system wouldn’t close out the Puppies - I’m told it’s about not allowing any one party to shut everyone else out. Even if it makes for a fairer, less easy-to-game system, has the reputation of the Hugo awards already been broken?
“Well, badly, I suspect,” says Alastair Reynolds. “Last year was a catastrophe and this year may not be much better.”
George RR Martin says: “It’s the attack element of the Puppies that’s poisoned things. There have always been disagreements in science fiction and fantasy, but they used to be confined to a debate in a room at a convention – now the internet has a way of throwing gasoline on to a fire, allowing people to jump in, fights to escalate.
“Throughout the history of SF there has always been a dialogue that’s been expressed through stories. If you take Robert Heinlein’s book Starship Troopers, that’s a very conservative novel. Harry Harrison wrote Bill the Galactic Hero as a direct response to Heinlein’s views. And later, Joe Haldeman wrote his own response in The Forever War … but Heinlein loved it. That’s how the science fiction community should tackle its differences, not through name-calling and personal attacks – through writing.”
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion