We just finished up a video on The Sad Puppies, The Rabid Puppies, and The Hugos. While much of it will be familiar to those who have been closely following the saga, we were hoping to make a pretty comprehensive introduction for the people new to what was going on in the world of Science Fiction and Fantasy awards over the past few years. For the people who are familiar with it, we hope that you still find it amusing!
We do have a few questions and some observations which we did not have time to include in the video.
I find it interesting that the year after Orson Scott Card wrote his piece advocating against the idea that the Mormon Church should accept homosexuals is the last year he won a Hugo award. Obviously, his writing didn’t suddenly stop being of a high quality, so I suspect that his lack of nominations after 1991 is related to Worldcon attendees discovering his column. This is despite Card spending about half the piece talking about how much love and compassion he felt for them, even though he did not approve of their actions.
Is Black Genesis by L. Ron Hubbard really that bad? Given the way that Worldcon attendees treated other books nominated by outsiders, I’m somewhat doubtful of the rumors surrounding the Mission Earth dekology. Luckily, I stumbled upon the first two volumes at a book sale some months back, so I will find out sooner or later.
I also wanted to include a brief segment about the Dragon Awards in the video, though there was not enough time to mention them. We were somewhat dismissive of the award in our last video on the topic of Sci Fi, though in hindsight, it’s obvious that the Dragon Awards are much less susceptible to ballot stuffing than the Hugos. Sure, it is possible for someone to vote multiple times for the Dragon under different names/emails, though to do so would require spending a large amount of time creating sock puppet email accounts. Whereas with the Hugos, if one had a large enough fanbase and enough money, then they could get their fans to do the work for them, in exchange for a pile of free ebooks for each of them.
Oh, and what is obviously the most important and pressing issue that will echo through the ages and change outcomes for all society, we also noticed that there is a clear trend of Furry books and authors being ignored during voting season. But, we have a few ideas for how to fix this deep and systemic issue. Stay tuned! :^)
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