The Rabid Puppies at Ten Years
I indeed and truly thought I was never going to have anything else to say about the Hugo Awards ever again.
I mean what was there to say that hasn’t been said already?
There was a time that the Hugo Awards indicated, well I’m leery about calling it excellence because there were too many genuine classics in the field that never got an award. Classic example. The powers that be at the Hugos had been criticized for never giving J.R.R. Tolkien a Hugo. This was at a time when Tolkien was still alive, The Lord of the Rings had been widely read in the community and was being acknowledged as a great classic within the field. The SMOFs went into a huddle and came up with the explanation that Lord of the Rings was a trilogy and therefore the whole of the work needed to be judged (never mind that it was 1966 and the series was ten years old now). So they then came up with a special one-time-only award for best series of all time, specifically to award to The Lord of the Rings…
And then gave it to the Foundation Trilogy.
If you think the Foundation is better than the Lord of the Rings you haven’t read either of them. The Hugos were always about publisher politics. That was it. That was ever and only the point of it. Back when America’s institutions worked (more or less) as advertised, something with a stamp of “Hugo Award-winning Novel of the Year,” would move more copies and was likely to keep moving them down the road.
But since it was awarded at Worldcon by the Worldcon members the Hugos tended to be controlled by a clique that favored one publisher over another. When Heinlein was winning them all time his publisher was running that clique. When Del-Rey books was always scooping up awards, Judy-Lynn Del Rey was the Grand SMOF.
Here’s the thing, back then Hugo Award winners were truthfully pretty good and fairly consistently until 1977 when Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, a hyper-political book about the coming ecological apocalypse of the next ice age won for best novel of the year. I got curious and looked it up on Amazon “Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is widely regarded as a high point of both humanistic and “hard” SF”
It also has a seven-figure sales rank and a Photoshop cover.
That book was just the canary in the coal mine. The Hugos recovered for a few years but Patrica Neilson-Haydon the wife (I guess) of Patrick Neilson-Hayden the manager of Tor Books, took over as Grand SMOF. Her tastes and those of her husband dominated the awards from then on. Tastes which were that of the Modern Audiences Critical Drinker talks about.
A general resentment of this began to build until the utterly mediocre Red Shirts by John Scalzi won for Best Novel in 2013. It was such a mediocre book everyone on the right who was still capable of caring got hot under the collar and the Sad Puppies campaign began. At first, it was just a troll by Larry Correia but the second year he did it, he actually got nominated when was supposed to be shut out completely.
Talk about the shit hitting the fan. Larry had said he wanted to “make literati critics spontaneously combust”. Mission accomplished. The shrieks from World Con were deafening.
The next year the Rabid Puppies split off from the Sads. While we got a lot of stuff nominated, Worldcon opted to self-immolate rather than give one of their sacred marital aids to one of our nominees (such a pity Chuck Tingle didn’t win).
In 2016, they rewrote the rules to lock us out. The Puppies movement for what it was died out. It hardly mattered. Our point was proven. The Hugos absolutely did not represent all fans, just a clique that went to WorldCon.
They opted to destroy their award’s reputation when it could have been easy to save it. If they had voted the slate as was instead of drama queening it with their “No Awards” vote, we would have immediately gotten bored and wandered off.
In truth, we got bored and wandered off anyway but by then the Hugo’s rocket had augered in.
This was my signoff on that subject on my old blog:
The Reactionary Times and Dark Herald Blog, August 18, 2018:
“The Hugos finally died last night. The most prestigious award in Science Fiction was given to a woman who admits that she can’t really support herself with her writing…because no one wants to pay money to read her stories.
I have no trouble admitting when someone is better than me at something. I’ll never be as good a novelist as Ursula K. LeGuin. My characters won’t be as good as Bujold’s. My action scenes are not going to be as good as Larry Corriea’s. So when I say that I’m a better writer than N.K. Jemisin it’s not sour grapes, it’s an accurate assessment. I’m a medium-talent storyteller and I know I’m better than this woman, who has just been awarded the best novel Hugo for three years running.
If Jemisin had any brains at all she would have bowed out this year. The only thing she had going for herself until last night was membership in a very exclusive club. Being mentioned in the same breath as Bujold gave her a nice halo effect. But winning three in a row makes her unique.
It puts her work in the spotlight. Jemisin has to be able to stand on her own as one of the true giants in the field. More influential than Heinlein, more creative than Niven, more layered than Card, more poetic than Zelazny.
And there is no question about it all. N.K. Jemisin is none of these things. She can’t even hold a candle next to any of these spotlights. She is no giant in the field, she’s a midget on a hilltop who All the Right People are saying, is a giant. So far as that goes she couldn’t really be blamed for that.
The Torlings wanted to show He Who Must Not Be Named ‘what for.’ Sclazi would have been okay for that at one time but he’s that most horrific of things, a Cishet-White-Male. It would be an affirmation of the superiority of the Patriarchy and also, they were still pretty embarrassed about giving him the Hugo for Red Shirts.
Think about it. Three Hugos in three years should not only make her a giant but also the G.O.A.T. Up until now she has been able to get by on Hipster Literacy. Which involves hipsters (A) knowing they are supposed to know your, name if they are good hipsters. (B) Reading the plot summary on Wikipedia. (C) going to B&N and reading the first and last chapters of your book without actually buying it and (D) bragging to all their hipster friends on Facebook that they have read your book and that they should too. (E) Cycle repeats without any sales.
And if she can’t support herself writing then she obviously isn’t getting those sales. Three consecutive Hugo awards should equal one seven-figure contract and nobody is even thinking of giving Jemisin so much as a six-figure deal.
If Jemisin had had the sense that God gave a pickle she would have refused a third nomination with the old excuse of “needing to give new blood a chance”. But in accepting the nomination and then the award, the midget on the hilltop is agreeing with All the Right People, that she is indeed a giant.
And now the worst thing that can possibly happen to N.K. Jemisin is going to start happening. People will actually start reading her books and judging her works on their own merit.
Her career can’t survive that.”
I figured that would be the end and I would never write about the Hugos again.
I had noticed during the 2020 Hugo that George R.R. Martin had gotten in trouble because he “couldn’t be bothered to get the names right of such luminaries in the field as Bogi Takács, Nibedita Sen, and Devi Pillai.”
But that was definitely it, I had thought. No more reason to write about the Hugos ever again.
And I’m sticking with that, I’ll quote Fandom Pulse instead:
2023’s Hugo Awards came under fire when serial cuckold Neil Gaiman complained about his Sandman series on Netflix being disqualified under nebulous circumstances. Now, that political agenda is coming back to bite them as newly leaked emails from Chengdu Worldcon’s committee reveal the Hugo Awards team conspiring to spy on award nominees on behalf of the Chinese government to rig the awards.
….
Emails from the Chengdu Worldcon Hugo Award committee, in which it revealed several American members of the committee spying on the personal lives and online postings of several Hugo Award nominees on behalf of the Chinese communist government to censor what the Chinese considered inappropriate for their Worldcon and Hugo Awards.
The email chain has the committee checking the top 10 items in each category, with two people independently reviewing the nominees to verify they complied with Chinese censors. The committee members naturally “just followed orders,” as they cared about their clout within the science fiction community as Hugo Award gatekeepers rather than allowing votes to be processed democratically.
The emails objectively prove that the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon Hugo Awards were rigged, that votes were discounted and didn’t matter, and that it was entirely because of politics. While the people in charge are pointing to China as the problem, the Americans involved wilfully dug up dirt on several different authors on behalf of the Chinese to discredit their peers in the field.”
Tragedy plus time equals comedy. The Hugo Awards are now beyond self-parody. Everything we ever said about them has been proven correct.
And this is so much worse for that sad little clique at WorldCon. Everyone knows it by now.
