Of Hugo Awards, Sad Puppies, and notoriety

The flame wars continue on the matter of last Saturday’s Hugo Award nominations. Was this year’s voting process flawed? Was last year’s? Were the processes of many years past? For that matter, was the process ever not flawed?

In all cases: beats me.

What I do know is that a novelette I wrote made it onto this year’s Hugo Award ballot. I should be happy about that -- but I’m finding it difficult.

Why? My story appeared on a particular recommendation list. (“Slate,” the term sometimes applied to this particular list is, IMO, a loaded term. Voters were free to pick and chose -- and reject -- from among anyone’s and everyone’s sets of recommendations.) For some, an appearance on this particular list has become justification enough to make authors’ writing -- and personal worth -- suspect. I see no reason to propagate here the innuendos and slurs and guilt by association. If this controversy is new to you and you’d like to see particulars, Google “Sad Puppies.” The articles and posts are generally disheartening enough. And the comments? Well, you know the Internet.

Author Brad Torgerson and I have chatted during our occasional con encounter. That’s natural enough: we both write SF. Our stories appear often in Analog. He messaged me on FB to say he’d like to recommend a story of mine, and was that okay? I like Brad’s writing -- which is what I know about him, other than that at a con party he’s an amiable enough guy -- so I said: sure. I believe other stories got onto Brad’s list with about as much formality. Those recommendations went online, in the form of the “Sad Puppies” ballot.

Then a separate set of recommendations, from another organizer(s), appeared as the “Rabid Puppies” list. The latter recommendations somewhat overlapped the former. And somebody somewhere in the mix may or may not have had some contact or relationship with someone involved with Gamergate, a matter about which I know even less. As regards “Rabid Puppies” and Gamergate, I have had, to my knowledge, zero contact with either.

The “Sad Puppies” recommendations largely swept this year’s Hugo nominations. Some in the SF community were -- to put it mildly -- unhappy with the outcome. When critics knew and as a result thought poorly of the selected stories: fair enough. Tastes vary. But the stated reasons for this unhappiness often involved the (sometimes inferred) motivations of the recommender(s) and the (sometimes inferred) personal beliefs of both recommender(s) and authors.

“Inferred.” Why such skepticism?

I share my political and social opinions only with family and close friends. If you come here often, you know that when I post, it's almost always about science, technology, and SF. On the rare occasions I comment online about anything else, it’s about international affairs and science policy -- neither one being at issue in the Hugo/Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies/Gamergate/slate-voting imbroglio.

I write to entertain and to explore the possible implications of technologies (whether prospective or “gee whiz”), not to offer social or political commentary. As for, in particular, my nominated story: it’s a spy vs. spy vs. spy, human vs. alien adventure. I set it in 2185, on a remote moon of Uranus. If “Championship B’tok” has a message, well, that’s news to me.

Admittedly, characters sometimes have social and political opinions. My characters’ opinions aren’t always the same, and they aren’t necessarily mine. Characters who do hold opinions, hold them because those are the opinions appropriate to the story. Sometimes my characters are too concerned with staying alive to spend their or the reader’s time having opinions. Again: if “Championship B’tok” has a message, well, that’s news to me.

Bottom line: I keep my opinions and my writing separate. It’s highly unlikely that readers who nominated my story -- or those objecting to the “Sad Puppies” list -- know my stance on social or political issues. Just as I know nothing about Brad’s opinions and, I would venture to guess, he doesn’t know mine. I have no reason to believe he has the slightest interest in knowing my opinions.

Was “Championship B’tok” worthy of becoming a finalist? That’s for others to decide. Having said that, consider, strictly as numerical observations:

(a) the story appeared in Analog, the largest circulation English-language genre magazine, whose 30K or so subscribers thereby had the opportunity to read it,

(b) over a mere five days in March -- during a (non-Analog) publisher’s promotion -- roughly 500 people downloaded a copy, and

(c) for all novelettes combined, a mere 1031 Hugo nominating ballots were cast.

The fact of the matter is -- however it happened -- that “Championship B’tok” ended up on this year’s Hugo ballot. Is the story award-worthy? That’s for others to decide. I just hope that people will vote solely on the merits of the nominated works. Not on what they believe they know -- and very well may not -- about the authors. The Hugo Awards should be about the story.