Sad Puppy

Another year, another batch of Hugo Drama

By all accounts, this year’s Sad Puppy slate is set to sweep the Hugo Nominations, with the exception of Best Novel. We’ll find out tomorrow for sure, but it seems pretty likely. (Before we get started I should note, though it’s likely obvious, that my political leanings tie in closer to the opponents of the Sad Puppy slate. I will, however, try to minimize my jingoism here, and attempt to acknowledge and point out my biases wherever possible. This is editorial content, however, not journalistic, so keep that in mind.)

How exactly did they sweep the slates? Well, it’s a little weird, thanks to the way that Hugo Nominations and Hugo voting work, but put simply, no single work tends to get many nominations, since there are so many of them, and depending on the category, it can only take a few dozen nominations to lock something in. The Sad Puppy slate is the best organized Hugo voting bloc in existence. Actually, to be honest, they are the only formal voting bloc/ political party/ whatever you want to call it in existence, despite allegations of a monolithic SJW* voting bloc. You can find detailed explanations for how the voting system works readily enough, I’m not going to go into it in too great detail.

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Hugo Controversy

The Hugo Award is undergoing an… unusual amount of controversy this year. Apart from the Wheel of Time shenanigans, which would be the center of attention, normally (people are upset about a giant fantasy series getting the nomination, blah blah blah, my fandom is better than yours, blah blah, whatever), but there is another, much bigger issue: Vox Day got nominated for Best Novelette. The Wikipedia article is pretty nice about it, but Theodore Beale/ Vox Day is a truly horrible person. He genuinely thinks that minorities and women are genetically inferior, he uses racial epithets constantly, is homophobic, is the only person ever kicked out of the SFWA, he’s anti-semitic, he’s a fundamentalist Christian (not just a biblical literalist, he’s the really hateful kind of fundamentalist), he’s a men’s rights activist, he considers feminism and women’s suffrage a disease, claims there is no such thing as marital rape… it goes on. I’m not linking to his blog or any of his posts, but I’ve read a few, and they are fucking horrifying.

The SF/Fantasy fandom world is up in arms right now.

So, how did he get on the list of Hugo finalists?

Author Larry Correia got him on the list by advocating for him, that’s how.

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