Not that long ago, if you’d spun a dystopian yarn about some future society where culture wars were so pervasive that nobody could enjoy reading a novel without first approving of the author’s politics, it would have been almost too fantastical to be believed. But within the insular world of science fiction, that future is becoming a reality.
For more than 50 years, the Hugo Awards have been handed out at the annual World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) to honor the best science fiction and fantasy writing of the previous year. But when the nominees for this year’s Hugos were announced, it touched off a firestorm unlike any in the awards’ history.
That’s because so many of this year’s nominees are perceived (not always correctly) to be conservative or libertarian. A group of right-leaning science fiction authors organized a campaign to stuff this year’s Hugo Awards ballot with writers they felt had been overlooked.
There are other science fiction awards, but the Hugos hold a special place among fans. Anyone who pays $40 to Worldcon can nominate an author. The awards thus have a special legitimacy because they are seen as being selected by the most dedicated readers.
The fact that Hugos are voted on by readers means that authors and publishers have engaged in various levels of politicking over the years to try to win. Big-name writers are not above posting lists of their favorite works on their websites or popular science fiction message boards in an attempt to whip votes.
However, among certain elements of the science fiction community, there had long been a suspicion that campaigns to gather Hugo votes were more coordinated and less reflective of the fan base than they might appear.
The schism over the Hugo Awards is aesthetic as well as political. For some time now, a handful of stars in the science fiction firmament—notably popular author John Scalzi and some polarizing editors associated with Tor, arguably the most influential publisher—have been pushing to elevate the genre by embracing certain literary and political themes. Critics contend that in practice this means an overabundance of “message fiction” where, say, encounters with an alien civilization become leaden metaphors for gay rights and other politically correct themes. The fans opposed to this want science fiction to stay focused on story-telling and adventure—and they are annoyed by the attempt to banish cherished genre conventions, such as book covers with buxom babes and musclebound heroes.
The literary crowd counters that the science fiction traditionalists are a bunch of white male retrogrades. There’s some truth to at least part of that characterization—a 2011 reader poll by the Guardian produced a list of the 500 most beloved works of science fiction. Just 18 were written by women.
There’s little doubt, however, about which faction has had more success at the Hugos in recent years. Last year, “the Hugo Awards for science fiction and fantasy were swept by a younger group of women and people of color. [I]t looked as though science fiction and fantasy were finally catching up to reality—the best stories aren’t only the ones told by straight white men,” notes the science fiction news website i09. But BookScan sales figures for some of these culturally enlightened Hugo winners show they’re not exactly embraced by the reading public, and thus suggest that perhaps more sub rosa politicking had gone on than was being admitted.
“In the last decade . . . we’ve seen the Hugo voting skew ideological, as Worldcon and fandom alike have tended to use the Hugos as an affirmative action award: giving Hugos because a writer or artist is (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) or because a given work features (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) characters,” observes science fiction writer Brad R. Torgersen.
Further, many science fiction fans have become alarmed by how a perceived lack of sensitivity to liberal social justice issues suddenly started destroying careers and reputations. Meeting the publication requirements to join the prestigious Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) had long been a goal of aspiring science fiction writers. But in 2013, a large number of SFWA members resigned in disgust over the organization’s political agenda.
The SFWA Bulletin published a longrunning back-and-forth between Mike Resnick and editor Barry Malzberg, two of science fiction’s elder statesmen. Malzberg is a liberal and Resnick is a right-leaning fellow; together they reminisced about their long careers. When they discussed a female editor they worked with in the 1950s, they praised her competence but also agreed she looked really good in a swimsuit. The same issue of the SFWA Bulletin had a sword-carrying female warrior with a metal bikini on the cover—in other words, it looked exactly like what you would expect to see on the cover of a pulp fantasy novel. For these and other transgressions, Jean Rabe, the female editor of the SFWA Bulletin, resigned under fire, and Resnick and Malzberg’s column was canceled.
A few years ago, Larry Correia, a bestselling author, also began complaining that there was a not-so-subtle campaign against one of his Hugo-nominated works among people who hadn’t even read it because of his personal politics. Correia is a firearms instructor and unabashed right-winger. He’s not the sort of person to take such an attack lying down.
Correia has a large and loyal blog audience, so he decided to mobilize it to start openly campaigning for a slate of Hugo Awards nominees. Correia called his campaign the “Sad Puppies,” because “boring message fiction is the leading cause of Puppy Related Sadness.” As his tone suggests, Correia didn’t set out to game the awards. He described what he was doing this way:
was denied.
2. So I got some right wingers on the ballot.
3. The biased voters immediately got all outraged and mobilized to do exactly what I said they’d do.
4. Point made.
After two years of organizing a Sad Puppies slate with mixed results, Correia handed the effort off to Torgersen this year. The third Sad Puppies campaign dominated the Hugo ballot, causing no end of consternation and drawing a surprising amount of media attention to the internecine battles of the science fiction world. Almost none of that coverage was fair. The headline at Entertainment Weekly was typical: “Hugo Award nominations fall victim to misogynistic, racist voting campaign.” And the correction eventually appended to the article was a doozy:
Torgersen answered critics calling him racist in part by posting a photo of himself with his black wife and mixed-race children. For that he was attacked by Salon and Daily Beast columnist Arthur Chu, who called Torgersen’s wife and kids a “shield” for his latent racism.
All along, the Sad Puppies have argued that their slate wasn’t a political statement so much as a way to gain recognition for deserving authors they felt weren’t nominated because they weren’t in favor with the politically correct clique that dominated Hugo voting.
A good example is Jim Butcher, who shares no political affinity with the right. His Dresden Files series has been a fixture on the New York Times bestsellers list and spawned a TV show on the Syfy channel. Thanks to the Sad Puppies’ efforts, Butcher was nominated for a Hugo for best novel for the first time.
Unfortunately, combating accusations of racism and sexism has been difficult because the Sad Puppies have been unfairly conflated with an unaffiliated group calling itself the “Rabid Puppies.” The Rabid Puppies are led by a polarizing writer and video game designer named Vox Day who does hold racist opinions and managed to score a few Hugo nominations for some writers who so lack merit their appearance on the ballot seems to have no other explanation than electioneering.
Even more troubling is the Rabid Puppies slate had some of the same nominees, and this association caused one writer, Marko Kloos, to withdraw his name from the ballot. “I have no issue with Larry [Correia] or the Sad Puppies. I’m pulling out of the Hugo process solely because Vox Day also included me on his ‘Rabid Puppies’ slate, and his RP crowd provided the necessary weight to the ballot to put me on the shortlist. I think Vox Day is a [expletive] of the first order, and I don’t want any association with him,” said Kloos.
A handful of other writers have withdrawn their names simply because they don’t like the fact that the awards have become so political. Where the science fiction community was once in denial about the politics behind the Hugo Awards, it’s now defined by them.
The truth is that there are both self-righteous liberal polemicists and off-putting reactionaries in the science fiction community. But the fact that the genre had previously welcomed extremes is partly what made it so wild, imaginative, and beloved. Sacrificing ideological diversity for more superficial measures of diversity isn’t a recipe for producing great writing.
“The reason that a lot of people become science fiction writers is because the field is so open to people of all kinds of different beliefs and ways of looking at the world. It was a collection of misfits for a long time,” says Tony Daniel, a writer and senior editor at science fiction publisher Baen Books. “People like Robert Heinlein were hanging out with Isaac Asimov, who couldn’t be more different politically. Heinlein was very libertarian . . . and Asimov was a complete Upper West Side liberal. And everybody got along. But slowly as the progressive types have moved in, they’ve created this dividing line.”
Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
