The Hugo Nominations for 2016 were announced on Tuesday, April 26, sometime around noon CST… and I am at a loss for words:
It looks like the Rabid Puppies have managed to make a mockery out of fantasy/science fiction’s most well-known award.
AGAIN.
Okay, but to recap for those of you just joining this sideshow, the Rabid Puppies are a group of science fiction fans/Gamergaters/anti-”Social Justice Warrior” types who, apparently, follow lockstep to orders issued by grand-master Vox Day/Theodore Beale. A lot has been said already about Mr. Beale and, currently, all I can add to that is incoherent rage, so… suffice to say his political views are, in my personal opinion (which he would discount because I am not only female but queer af), odious.
I was really hoping that after last year’s resounding vote of “No Award” that we were done with this malarkey.
This time, apparently, in keeping with the naughty puppy theme, the Rabid Puppies clearly decided to especially rub our noses in it. On their slate this year was none-other-than Chuck Tingle’s “Space Raptor Butt Invasion.” Chuck Tingle, if you don’t know (and you really should, since we use to live-blog his erotica regularly here) is the guy who writes and self-publishes tongue-in-cheek (pardon the pun) stories like “Pounded In The Butt By My Book “Pounded In The Butt By My Own Butt.” So, hilarious, maybe, certainly entertaining on some level… but Hugo worthy? I wouldn’t have necessarily said so, but, thanks to a little thing called bloc voting….
“Space Raptor Butt Invasion” made the ballot.
I can’t even. I may, in point of fact, be officially out of evens.
Especially since one of the loudest arguments from the “Sad Puppies” (which are a tangentially related group to the Rabid Puppies) claims that one of the reasons they wanted to push their agenda was to keep politics out of awards and, instead, vote for fun, upbeat, old-fashioned science fiction. You could make a case that Tingle’s work falls under the category of “fun,” but there’s no way “SJWs Always Lie” is “apolitical.”
The thing that frustrates me about this is something that frustrates me in general about my fellow liberals. Because we legit value democracy and freedom of expression, we’re impossible to organize in this same, singularly-focused way. Despite Beale’s constant cries that there’s some kind of SMOF (secret masters of fandom) conspiracy against him, there is no “SJW” science fiction fan/pro that I know of who is willing to say (much less actively promote) a voting bloc. It’s against our nature. We’re all out there being decent, and making “suggestions” for the stories we love, but no one is willing to say: don’t let the b*st*rds win, vote this way or not at all.
So now we have to deal with this all again.
At least until this year’s WorldCon where, with luck, the people who actually show up to the convention can change the rules so that this kind of thing is no longer possible.
Because if we have to go through this again, next year… I might have to turn in my “Proud to be an SJW” t-shirt and hunt someone down to kick them in the gonads. Or at least kick my chair.
A lot.