General Ironicus

The Hugo Awards are a popular vote, made by members of Worldcon, the world's sci-fi convention. It rotates around to different local and regional cons sort of like the Olympics. Basically, this means that plopping down $40 gives you a vote. Nomination votes are generally spread out over a wide variety of works, so the shortlist is usually made of nominees that most people didn't vote for. Also voting members tend to abstain from nominating in categories they don't feel qualified to, so some categories have an even lower bar to clear. These factors make the nominations VERY GAMEABLE. From a games perspective you could say they voting system is really poorly designed: the rules incentivize unintended behaviors and results. Usually this doesn't come up much because the voting public is a bunch of self-critical writers and bloggers with a series of gentlemens' agreements. Only recently did authors start reminding people what they wrote that year without being strung up in the court of public opinion.

---

Now the Sad Puppies is a voting slate in its third year, made to take advantage of the gameability of the system and get its' creators preferred works in as a reaction to perceived SJW persecution. This is the first year it had much traction, because i's also the first year of the "rabid puppies" slate which is has a large overlap and got even more of its nominees on the shortlist. The rabid puppies slate was also pitched to gaters, which may account for getting much more votes than the last two tries. Its' compiler is the 2nd person ever kicked out of the SFWA, and is absolutely vile.

---

And they were very successful. Six categories are entirely taken from the slates, and four more had only one non-puppy nominee. By breaking the (very stuffy) unwritten rules and seeing the potential in following the real ones, a really shitty class of nominees were picked. It's the ignorance that really gets me. The sad puppy organizer has argued that books should be judged by their covers, which is bizarre. He also complains that the Hugos are too literary (how can literature awards be "too literary"?) and not for the kind of fan that enjoys The Avengers. The Avengers won the Hugo's film category before he said that. These people also are huge fans of Heinlein, and wish his recent biography was nominated for Best Related Work, but they didn't know about it, and their own slate voting kept it off. A right-wing chain email was nominated in its place. I can't see how anybody is happy with that particular result, except Patriarchy Press, the company that compiled the emails into a book.

---

The slates' supporters also claim it's an even more diverse group than previous years, but I have to wonder by what metric. When one writer gets six nominations, and one publisher gets nine, that's mathematically untrue. When that one writer is a white man that called the Korra finale "an ad for a sexual aberration" now I really have to wonder.

View more