At this point, I imagine nearly every Hugo nominee has something to say about the awards. By my not very scientific calculations, I’m pretty sure that far more people have rejected a Hugo nomination than is the norm. Many of the nominees were completely unaware of the Sad Puppy nomination, and are moving to distance themselves from it. Following are a selection of various statements regarding the nominations, including some from some of the lesser known categories. (Best Semiprozine and best Fanzine).
As far as the Best Novel nominees go, they’re generally avoiding the controversy-
-Jim Butcher, unsurprisingly, chose to avoid the controversy, merely posting a basic announcement. Can’t say I blame him in the slightest.
-Marko Kloos still hasn’t done much commenting beyond a retweet of a John Scalzi blog post. That being said, he does seem to have just had a family pet die, so we should probably be respectful and leave him out of our internet flame war for a bit.
-Kevin J. Anderson hasn’t commented beyond a simple tweet about the nomination.
-Katherine Addison/ Sarah Monette merely noted her nomination and her excitement about it. (Her Goblin Emperor was my personal favorite this year, though I still need to read the Marko Kloos and the Kevin J. Anderson.)
Earlier today, Sue Bursztynski, an editor of Andromeda Spaceways In-Flight Magazine (awesome name for a magazine, though I’d never heard of it before today- the name alone has earned my interest, however) commented on my post regarding the Hugo nominee announcement. She, and the magazine at large, being from Australia, had never even heard of Sad Puppies until after they got their nomination.
-The official statement from Andromeda Spaceways In-Flight Magazine. (I’m not going to get tired of that name any time soon.)
Black Gate, nominated for best Fanzine, was not contacted by the Sad Puppies slate prior to the awards committee contacting them.
-Editor John O’Neill’s official statement on the topic.
Semiprozine nominee Abyss and Apex is rather happier with their nomination.
File 770 assembles a few quotes from various involved figures. (I should note that some of the formatting on the quotes is a bit confusing- in the case of Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a comment by someone else she was responding to is included that addresses John C. Wright as a pervert, which was not her statement.) Apparently one of the estimates going around for the size of the Sad Puppy additional vote is around 200- out of a total membership of thousands. It is unknown how many pre-existing Sad Puppy voters there are, but based on last year’s vote, it doesn’t seem too high. File 770 does seem to be endeavoring to take a more neutral role in this debate. In addition, they assembled an exact scorecard for how well the Sad Puppy and Rabid Puppy slates did.
And, of course, the movement to vote no award above the SP/RP slates has already begun, as I predicted, which to be fair, wasn’t even remotely difficult to predict. I wouldn’t take my lottery number suggestions just yet.
I should note before I go that whatever Vox Day/Theodore Beale, Castalia House (Vox Day’s publishing house) and John C. Wright (the single most Rabid Puppy nominated author, who happens to largely be published through Castalia house) say, the fact that the Rabid Puppy list (published by Vox Day) is so heavily weighted towards Castalia House and John C. Wright make it pretty apparent that the Rabid Puppy list is a very obvious awards grab for themselves. (The official Castalia House awards announcement completely fails to mention why exactly so many of their works were nominated.) Sad Puppy looks a little better by comparison- The Sad Puppy slate curator, Brad Torgersen had the good grace to not include himself in the list. The Sad Puppy creator, Larry Correia, had the class (or political savvy, for those more cynical about his motives) to decline his nomination, even though he was on the slate
Mountain Was Here 