Hugo Rumpuses
So you may remember the Sad Puppies, who think that science fiction is being destroyed by women and minorities. They long for the good old days when science fiction was about manly men rescuing beautiful women from bug eyed monsters, or manly men locked in manly struggle with other manly men. (Cat pauses for a moment to admire, in a purely platonic way, the bulging muscles peeping through the torn clothes of the manly men as they struggle.)
However for some reason minority characters cannot be manly men or beautiful women, and have the additional deadly characteristic of making the exact same story instantly dull (for the Sad Puppies) unless you have a good reason for them to be minority characters (like, he's going to go under cover as a slave in the next book to gather information; of course he has to be black.)
They're also very fond of explosions and guns.
They think one of the symptoms (or perhaps the cause; treating a symptom wouldn't make much sense) of this moral decay of society is that the Hugos have been going to Books They Don't Enjoy, due to a lack of explosions and guns. Or, wait--Ancillary Justice had explosions and guns. I guess they don't enjoy the books due to the presence of women and minority characters.
Their solution is to game the system. While non-Puppies spread their reading and nominations thin over all the good SFF published in 2014, the Puppies only have one place to check for suggestions--the Sad Puppy slate. So the slate skews the nominating, giving the Puppies much more nominating power than they would have had without that unifying focus.
And this year, the Puppies have been trying to own the nominations. If they can nominate all five members of a category, they can leave the Hugo Voters to choose among only Puppy alternatives.
The Hugo committee contact authors of nominated works privately before making the public announcement, to give them a chance to decline the nomination (as Neil Gaiman did last year, and as Terry Pratchett did in the past.) Some of the Puppy authors have not seen fit to keep that information private, as requested. So we know that, for example, "Wisdom from my Internets" is a Hugo nominee.
"Wisdom From My Internets" is available on Kindle, so you can get the first part as a free sample, which I did. Basically if you set Rush Limbaugh into a "Notebooks of Lazarus Long" format, removing the science fiction from both, you'd have created "Wisdom From My Internets." If the first part is typical (and not, say a bunch of chat-room messages that a werewolf PI is sorting through to figure out who stole the orbital laser plans from the robot ambassador) apparently Sad Puppies want to give this work a Hugo for, basically, repeatedly spelling the president's name with a zero. We will see whether the non-Puppy Hugo voters agree that this cleverness deserves one of science fiction's major awards.
However for some reason minority characters cannot be manly men or beautiful women, and have the additional deadly characteristic of making the exact same story instantly dull (for the Sad Puppies) unless you have a good reason for them to be minority characters (like, he's going to go under cover as a slave in the next book to gather information; of course he has to be black.)
They're also very fond of explosions and guns.
They think one of the symptoms (or perhaps the cause; treating a symptom wouldn't make much sense) of this moral decay of society is that the Hugos have been going to Books They Don't Enjoy, due to a lack of explosions and guns. Or, wait--Ancillary Justice had explosions and guns. I guess they don't enjoy the books due to the presence of women and minority characters.
Their solution is to game the system. While non-Puppies spread their reading and nominations thin over all the good SFF published in 2014, the Puppies only have one place to check for suggestions--the Sad Puppy slate. So the slate skews the nominating, giving the Puppies much more nominating power than they would have had without that unifying focus.
And this year, the Puppies have been trying to own the nominations. If they can nominate all five members of a category, they can leave the Hugo Voters to choose among only Puppy alternatives.
The Hugo committee contact authors of nominated works privately before making the public announcement, to give them a chance to decline the nomination (as Neil Gaiman did last year, and as Terry Pratchett did in the past.) Some of the Puppy authors have not seen fit to keep that information private, as requested. So we know that, for example, "Wisdom from my Internets" is a Hugo nominee.
"Wisdom From My Internets" is available on Kindle, so you can get the first part as a free sample, which I did. Basically if you set Rush Limbaugh into a "Notebooks of Lazarus Long" format, removing the science fiction from both, you'd have created "Wisdom From My Internets." If the first part is typical (and not, say a bunch of chat-room messages that a werewolf PI is sorting through to figure out who stole the orbital laser plans from the robot ambassador) apparently Sad Puppies want to give this work a Hugo for, basically, repeatedly spelling the president's name with a zero. We will see whether the non-Puppy Hugo voters agree that this cleverness deserves one of science fiction's major awards.