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From the The Guardian.
Introducing the Sad Puppies...
"The shortlists for the long-running American genre awards, won in the past by names from Kurt Vonnegut to Ursula K Le Guin and voted for by fans, were announced this weekend to uproar in the science fiction community, after it emerged that the line-up corresponded closely with the slates of titles backed by certain conservative writers. The self-styled "Sad Puppies" campaigners had set out to combat what orchestrator and writer Brad Torgersen had criticised as the Hugos' tendency to reward "literary" and "ideological" works.
Today's Hugos, Torgersen has blogged, "have lost cachet, because at the same time SF/F has exploded popularly – with larger-than-life, exciting, entertaining franchises and products – the voting body of 'fandom' have tended to go in the opposite direction: niche, academic, overtly to the Left in ideology and flavor, and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun".
Twenty years ago, he writes, "if you saw a lovely spaceship on a book cover, with a gorgeous planet in the background, you could be pretty sure you were going to get a rousing space adventure featuring starships and distant, amazing worlds". Nowadays, he claims, the same jacket is likely to be a story "merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings".
And here we have the Rabid Puppies definitely not mentioning GamerGate:
Another group of allied rightwing campaigners, dubbing themselves the Rabid Puppies and led by Vox Day, real name Theodore Beale, have also added their voices to the block-voting campaign against what Day called "the left-wing control freaks who have subjected science fiction to ideological control for two decades and are now attempting to do the same thing in the game industry".
And finally a bit of Martin:
"Call it block voting. Call it ballot stuffing. Call it gaming the system. There's truth to all of those characterisations. You can't call it cheating, though. It was all within the rules. But many things can be legal, and still bad ... and this is one of those, from where I sit. I think the Sad Puppies have broken the Hugo awards, and I am not sure they can ever be repaired," he wrote.
"If the Sad Puppies wanted to start their own award ... for Best Conservative SF, or Best Space Opera, or Best Military SF, or Best Old-Fashioned SF the Way It Used to Be ... whatever it is they are actually looking for ... hey, I don't think anyone would have any objections to that. I certainly wouldn't. More power to them," he added. "But that's not what they are doing here, it seems to me. Instead they seem to want to take the Hugos and turn them into their own awards."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Vanderhoth on Monday April 13 2015, @04:39PM
I think the thing is there's no problem with having both. It's not like SF is just two writers and it's either column A or column B.
The issue the sad puppies are taking is the writers that are exploring other ideas, just don't appeal to the masses, who apparently like "swashbuckling". So the authors "exploring other ideas" started this whole submitting slates and politicking it up to get their stuff voted for. Which I have no issue with, if I was a writer I'd shill my work to my fans too and ask them to vote for me.
In all honesty it's a stupid system because the Hugo's have historically had such a small number fans voting. Even this year it was just over 2,000 people, which is up JUST 200 from last year and only about a 100 from the year before. At the very least the sad puppies campaign is bringing in a much larger voting base, on both sides, and they're informing people where to go to get all the authors and telling people to vote for what they like not just what's being recommended.
I say they're bringing in people on both sides, because the opposition to sad puppies is also stepping up their game. It's unfortunate that they're now calling for a nomination committee so they can choose who gets nominated to keep the wrong type of authors out and limit who can be voted on for the award.
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe