by Vox Day
—“I read the 100 “best” fantasy and sci-fi novels—and they were shockingly offensive”, Liz Lutgendorff, New Statesman
Of course, the general science fiction public tended to disagree; according to Publishers Weekly, science fiction sales are down more than 50 percent since 2008. As the SJWs at the science fiction publishers continue to sign and publish these “better and more inclusive” books, science fiction readers tend to continue buying the older books and ignoring the new ones. But old books can't win new awards, and the awards were going to novels and shorter works that had no chance of standing the test of time. Indeed, many of them have already been forgotten less than a decade after first being published.
To prove the once-prestigious Hugo Awards were now little more than a popularity contest dominated by a small left-wing cabal, Larry Correia launched his Campaign to End Puppy-Related Sadness caused by boring SJW message fiction in 2013. More commonly known by the name Sad Puppies, the campaign was modestly successful, and although Correia himself didn't make the Hugo shortlist in the Best Novel category, he drummed up enough support among his readers to get several works by other authors nominated in some of the lesser categories. The next year, as part of his new campaign entitled Sad Puppies 2: Rainbow Puppy Lighthouse, The Huggening, he nominated my novelette “Opera Vita Aeterna”, in part because he liked it, but also, as he remarked, because the Devil didn't have anything eligible in 2014. He explained his reasoning as follows at Monster Hunter Nation, his blog named after his bestselling exurban fantasy gun porn series.
1. I said a chunk of the Hugo voters are biased toward the left, and put the author’s politics far ahead of the quality of the work. Those openly on the right are sabotaged. This was denied.
2. So I got some right wingers on the ballot.
3. The biased voters immediately got all outraged and mobilized to do exactly what I said they’d do.
4. Point made.
For the record, I’m only the second most hated man who got a nomination. The most despised is Vox Day by far, however, I’m the one who suggested him to my fans who were participating in Sad Puppies 2. So if he’s their devil, I’m the antichrist.
As anticipated, the Sad Puppies' nominees were destroyed in the shortlist voting that year. The Hugos have a peculiar and rather complicated voting system, so Larry's Warbound finished fourth in the first-preference voting, but fifth out of the five novels nominated after all was said and done. “Opera Vita Aeterna” did even worse, actually finishing sixth out of five, and behind No Award. This turned out to be useful information for us, as by comparing the results with some of the other Puppy candidates, it allowed us to distinguish between the general anti-Puppy vote, the anti-Larry vote, and the anti-Vox vote. The anti-Puppy vote, which indicated the core SJW vote, was about 600, while the anti-Larry vote was 900 and the anti-Vox vote was 1,100, thereby confirming who the SJWs in science fiction hated the most.
The SJWs celebrated, of course, and indulged in their usual Narrative-spinning, crowing about how upset the Sad Puppies were now that we had learned our bitter lesson. That might have been the end of the story, except they made one fatal mistake. Both Sad Puppies 1 and Sad Puppies 2 were Correia's campaigns. I wasn't involved in them at all, except as one of a number of authors whose works he had recommended. Incredibly, my complete lack of involvement in both campaigns somehow didn't prevent the SJWs from accusing me of gaming the award.
Now, I am a professional game designer. If I am going to game an award, it certainly isn't going to be to obtain one nomination in a minor category for myself. As it happens, I don't care about awards. I'm just not wired that way. Perhaps I'm too arrogant or too elitist to care about awards, (all right, I'm probably too arrogant and too elitist), but regardless, awards have simply never been of interest to me. I've been nominated for a few awards here and there, and my band Psykosonik even beat out Prince for Best Dance Record back in the Nineties, but I've never attended a single awards ceremony for either music or literature.
I didn't mind finishing 6th out of 5; in fact, I thought it was rather funny and proudly adopted Six of Five as my Borg name. But to be accused of gaming an award in such an inept manner was, to me, an insult not to be borne. So, rather than leaving the whole burden on Larry Correia's giant shoulders for a third year (in case you weren't aware, Larry does not look like your typical creepy SF author, but can be not unreasonably described as a six-foot-five bearded Murder Hobo), the Evil Legion of Evil, a group of loosely affiliated science fiction and fantasy writers of varying degrees of success, joined forces for the Sad Puppies 3 campaign. I believe I still have the notes of the first meeting of the Legion, which took place on January 16, 2015.
VOX DAY, SUPREME DARK LORD: Welcome, my black knights, my devious and subtle dark ladies. The circle is joined. Tell me, what evil hath thou wrought?
TOM KRATMAN: GRAND STRATEGIKON: Sir! Another 64 crossbeams, 97 posts, and 468 iron nails have been prepared and added to the warehouse, sir! Four more excruciators have been trained and are good to go, sir!
LARRY CORREIA, INTERNATIONAL LORD OF HATE: Bloody hell, Tom! How many crosses do you think we need? We haven't even crucified anyone yet!
KRATMAN: I just like to be prepaaaaared, sir!
DAY: So how many pinkshirts can we crucify? Give me a daily average.
KRATMAN: All of them!
SARAH HOYT, BEAUTIFUL BUT EVIL SPACE PRINCESS: All of them?
KRATMAN: All of them! We're cocked, locked and ready to rock!
HOYT (whispers to Correia): Kate's going to be pissed. She had her heart set on impaling McCreepy. (McCreepy is how we refer to an SJW and Torlock named Jim C. Hines. Let's just say you wouldn't allow him anywhere near your children if you saw him lurking around the playground. Kate the Impaler is Kate Paulk, the Evil Legion of Evil member who will be spearheading Sad Puppies 4.)
DAY: Stand down, Tom. Good work. Anyone else?
JOHN WRIGHT, LIVING BRAIN, KING IN YELLOW, AND SPEAKER TO MORLOCKS: I have erected, at great personal expense, a ninety-one foot tall idol of radioactive black marble to your likeness in the caves of Logan County, West Virginia, where I and a coterie of degenerate hillbillies, drug-maddened Saponi and Shawnee shamen, and blood-drinking devil dogs, together with an inhuman living fungus from Pluto, make hideous sacrifices and perform acts of unspeakable abomination to adore our idol of Vox Day, impiously dreaming of the return of the Elder Star-gods from Hyades in Taurus. For we adore Vox Day! Crowned with Five Divine Cobras of Might, His Buttocks Sit Atop the Thunder-Winged Garuda Bird!
DAY: All I asked for was the latest draft of Somewhither, John.
WRIGHT: Oh, yes. Let me see. Ah, here it is.
BRAD TORGERSEN, SOFT AND CUDDLY TOKEN LIBERAL: Hey, Larry, what's this?
CORREIA: Dammit, Brad, put down–
TORGERSEN: AH HA HA HA HA HA!
CORREIA: …the flamethrower…
The original plan was for Sarah Hoyt to take the lead on Sad Puppies 3, but when she fell ill, the Legion's token liberal, Brad Torgersen, took over for her as the standard-bearer. While Brad and I get along just fine, he's a liberal (although not an SJW), and a fair number of his friends were less than entirely comfortable finding themselves affiliated with the Lord Voldemort of science fiction. In a reflection of the divide in #GamerGate between the GGers focused solely on ethics in game journalism and those more interested in fighting SJWs, it soon became clear that we had different objectives. Larry Correia's goal was to expose the left-wing bias in the system, and he had already succeeded beautifully. Brad's admirable goal, which was considerably more ambitious, and in my opinion, highly unlikely, was to save science fiction from the SJWs who had infested it. As for me, I thought we should just blow up what had become little more than an SJW institution and public relations tool and start over. To put these goals in practical terms, Brad wanted to actually try to win awards for what he deemed to be meritorious work, whereas I thought we ought to nominate whatever would most upset the SJWs
, then turn around and join them in voting No Award for everything in order to leave a smoking hole where the 2015 Hugos had been.
Architects versus arsonists, one might say.
After discussing our differences, I stepped back from Sad Puppies and created Rabid Puppies, an allied campaign designed around the #GamerGate model. It was enthusiastically embraced by the Dread Ilk of Vox Popoli, the larger of my two blogs, and as was the case with #GamerGate, the anti-SJW people proved to be more numerous than those focused only on the industry-specific issue. However, the SJWs so hated everything Brad put forward, and reacted so negatively towards those works, that instead of needing a completely separate list of recommendations, the Rabid Puppy list turned out to be little more than the Sad Puppy list with a few tactical additions intended to further enrage the SJWs.
To describe the Sad Puppies 3 campaign as successful would be a massive understatement. The Puppies essentially swept the awards between them, and we could have easily taken every single nomination if we'd wanted to bother doing so. SJWs in science fiction, such as George R.R. Martin, the author of A Game of Thrones, were astonished to discover that their little cabal of Torlocks had been prevented from dominating the awards for the first time in two decades. Of course, this failure to collect their customary award-tribute was taken as a sign that the awards had been irretrievably broken.
“Call it block voting. Call it ballot stuffing. Call it gaming the system. There’s truth to all of those characterisations. You can’t call it cheating, though. It was all within the rules. But many things can be legal, and still bad…and this is one of those, from where I sit. I think the Sad Puppies have broken the Hugo awards, and I am not sure they can ever be repaired,” he wrote.
—Alison Flood, “George RR Martin says rightwing lobby has 'broken' Hugo awards”, The Guardian, April 9, 2015
While both Puppy campaigns were conducted completely within the rules, there was no truth to Martin's claims of bloc-voting, much less ballot-stuffing. In fact, there was considerably more statistical variance across the pro-Puppy votes than there had been across the votes from the historical Tor-led voting bloc. As the SF awards analyst, Brandon Kempner of Chaos Horizon, correctly noted, the difference between the 368 nominations for the top Editor Long Form nominee and the mere 230 for the lead Short Story candidate when both categories were Puppy-swept meant that that “not every Puppy voter was a straight slate voter.”
All we had really done was to show up and vote in unexpected numbers. As a result, between Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, we took 61 out of the original 85 shortlist nominations, including a pair for me as Best Editor, Short Form, and Best Editor, Long Form. John C. Wright received a record-setting six nominations (one of which was later disqualified for spurious reasons), LTC Tom Kratman, the former U.S. Army Ranger who is the only author more hated and feared by SJWs than I am, was nominated for Best Novella, and Larry Correia was nominated for Best Novel. Correia, whose primary goal had always been to prove his point about the awards being left-wing popularity contests, declined the nomination, prompting this hilarious exchange between him and SJW author John Scalzi, whose Tor-published novel Lock In had been widely predicted to bring him his 10th Hugo nomination in 2015.
John Scalzi @scalzi
I wish Larry Corriea had the balls to admit the reason he started the Sad Puppies campaign was that he just wanted a Hugo so fucking bad.
45 retweets 66 favorites
Larry Correia @monsterhunter45
I turned down my Hugo nomination and you still didn't make the ballot.
360 retweets 501 favorites
See: The Third Law of SJW. SJWs always project.
It was fascinating, and more than a little amusing, to witness the shock and horror of science fiction's SJWs, who simply could not believe that a group of anti-SJW revolutionaries could so effortlessly obliterate their cherished awards. They promptly resorted to the usual SJW tactic of attempting to reframe the Narrative through media spin, calling in favors and unconsciously imitating the actions of the GameJournoPros from the year before by planting identical stories, using identical terminology, not only in the usual pro-SJW publications like Gawker and The Guardian, but everywhere from National Public Radio and Popular Science to the New Zealand Herald and The Wall Street Journal. Because they found it impossible to believe that we had so much more popular support than they did, they actually blamed #GamerGate for their humiliating defeat; the truth is that there were only two GamerGaters involved in Rabid Puppies, Daddy Warpig and me, and none at all in Sad Puppies.
The Toad of Tor, aka former Tor contributing editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden, was apoplectic and even more obnoxious than usual.
"Why are people talking about what would happen if everyone who reads SF voted in the Hugos? IMO, it's not a relevant question. The Hugos don't belong to the set of all people who read the genre; they belong to the worldcon, and the people who attend and/or support it. The set of all people who read SF can start their own award…I know what they're doing. I want the Justice Department to declare [#GamerGate] a criminal organization and hit them with felony charges. It would not be an excessive response to their actions. These are the people the Sad Puppies have invited into our annual gathering.”
Needless to say, she was promptly crucified on her own words, which helped bring the anti-SJW battle in science fiction to #GamerGate's attention. If #GamerGate hadn't been sympathetic to the Sad Puppies before, they certainly were after being attacked by SJWs again for something they hadn't done. Popular #GamerGate artist Kukuruyo created an image that represented the way many GamerGaters had come to feel; #GamerGate and Sad Puppies might not be the same, but since they shared the same SJW enemy, they were destined to be friends and allies.
Another popular #GamerGate cartoon showed GG icon Vivian James petting a puppy and saying, “I don't know why everyone says you're my dog, but you sure are cute.” Even so, the Toad of Tor's hopping-mad rants calling for federal action to intervene and defend Tor's Gaia-given right to win SF awards weren't the most insane reaction. Entertainment Weekly published a hit piece that was so outrageous that the editors had to revise it twice before issuing a correction that still didn't cover all of the mischaracterizations and lies. The excised portions from the original piece are indicated by strike-through.
Hugo Award nominations fall victim to misogynistic, racist voting campaign
Correction: Hugo Awards voting campaign sparks controversy
by Isabella Biedenharn
CORRECTION: After misinterpreting reports in other news publications, EW published an unfair and inaccurate depiction of the Sad Puppies voting slate, which does, in fact, include many women and writers of color. As Sad Puppies’ Brad Torgerson explained to EW, the slate includes both women and non-caucasian writers, including Rajnar Vajra, Larry Correia, Annie Bellet, Kary English, Toni Weisskopf, Ann Sowards, Megan Gray, Sheila Gilbert, Jennifer Brozek, Cedar Sanderson, and Amanda Green.
This story has been updated to more accurately reflect this. EW regrets the error.
The Hugo Awards have fallen victim to a campaign in which misogynist groups lobbied to nominate only white males for the science fiction book awards. These groups, Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies (both of which are affiliated with last year’s GamerGate scandal), urged sci-fi fans to become members of the Hugo Awards’ voting body, World Science Fiction Convention, in order to cast votes against female writers and writers of color. Membership only costs $40, and allows members to vote for the 2016 nominations as well as the 2015 nominations, which were just released.
Many science fiction writers are up in arms with a slate of Hugo Awards nominees lobbied by two groups affiliated with last year’s GamerGate scandal, Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies.
Sad Puppies broadcast their selection on Feb. 1, writing: “If you agree with our slate below—and we suspect you might—this is YOUR chance to make sure YOUR voice is heard.” Brad Torgerson, who runs Sad Puppies along with Larry Correia, com
plains that the Hugo Awards have lately skewed toward “literary” works, as opposed to “entertainment.
Torgerson also writes that he disagrees with Hugos being awarded for affirmative action-like purposes, as many women and writers of color went home with awards in 2014: ”Likewise, we’ve seen the Hugo voting skew ideological, as Worldcon and fandom alike have tended to use the Hugos as an affirmative action award: giving Hugos because a writer or artist is (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) or because a given work features (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) characters.”
The other lobbying group, Rabid Puppies, is run by Vox Day. As The Telegraph reports, “Members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have called for Beale’s exclusion from the group after he has written against women’s suffrage and posted racist views towards black writer NK Jemisin.”
Fortunately, some sane voters allowed well-deserving writers to pull through. Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword and Listen was nominated for Dramatic Presentation, and Annie Bellet’s Goodnight Stars was nominated, despite having a non-white, female protagonist.
Plenty of members of the science fiction community have voiced their disgust with both sects of “Puppies.” Writer Philip Sandifer wrote on his blog Sunday, “The Hugo Awards have just been successfully hijacked by neofascists.” Sandifer’s post, which is worth reading in full, addresses what this disaster means for the sci-fi world: