How's that Puppy thing working out for you?

Today Annie Bellet withdrew her short story “Goodnight Stars” from the Hugo Award ballot and Marko Kloos did the same thing with his novel Lines of Departure. 

While Bellet and Kloos were on the slate of stories put forward by the Sad and Rabid Puppies campaigns, both decided that didn't want to be anyone's political ball.

I can totally understand that. Few people like being used by others to score political points.

And this news comes only two days after the novelette “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus” by John C. Wright was pulled from the ballot for being previously published (and replaced with the novelette “The Day The World Turned Upside Down” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt).

On top of all that, the organizers of Sad Puppies are scrambling (and failing) to disassociate themselves from a certain person who ran the Rabid Puppies campaign.

I will still be reading all the Hugo Award nominees. But if this keeps going I may not have much reading to do.

So Puppies, how's that campaign of yours working out?

A diverse genre contains countless worlds and viewpoints, and I will consider them all

I came to the science fiction and fantasy genre by way of pain and abuse. When I was young and thought the pain would never end, science fiction and fantasy stories kept me going. These stories offered me an escape. They offered me hope. They offered me a glimpse of a world expansive enough to hold a universe of beliefs and outlooks and backgrounds.

I still believe this. Which is why it pains me to see the community which saved my life inflicting such pain on each other.

I'm not naive. There's always going to be pain in the world. But I see no reason why I have to inflict pain on the world in return. And that's why I'm not going to simply dismiss any of the people and works up for this year's Hugo Award, no matter which group helped them make the ballot.

Anyone who follows science fiction and fantasy fandom has likely heard how two similar but separate organized voting campaigns (the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies) worked to overwhelmed the Hugo Award nomination process. Yes, I'm irritated by how these people gamed the Hugo Awards and used the awards to push a political agenda. Despite the protests of the Puppies, this has never before been done on such an organized scale. (For more on all this, I urge people to read Matthew David Surridge's excellent and detailed explanation on why he turned down a nomination for Best Fan Writer. )

Perhaps the best summary on this comes from George R.R. Martin, who points out that there has always been campaigning for the Hugo Awards. But until now, no one group controlled the award.

Now the Puppies do.

But despite my irritation at that, I also realize that if the Hugo Awards weren't broken in the first place none of this would have happened. So some of my irritation is aimed at the people who run the Hugo Awards for not fixing this problem despite many others, including myself, pointing out the flaws in the nomination process.

In truth, I'm no longer angry at Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen for running and promoting this campaign. They played by the Hugo Award nominating rules. They raised a few legitimate issues about the awards (mixed in with a massive amount of simply wrongheaded notions about our genre and the world). 

But I'm not writing about that. I'm writing because people are being hurt by all this.

As a result of the campaigning which placed many of the Hugo finalists on the ballot, some people in the genre are attacking every finalist. Some people are also considering voting — without reading the nominated works — a straight No Award across the ballot or in certain categories. Doing so is seen as a way to both protest this political gaming and the motivations behind the campaign.

I understand why people feel this way and would vote No Award without even considering the finalists. But I won't do this. There are many people on the Hugo Award ballot who have not been involved in the Puppy campaign. And whether or not a finalist supported the campaign, not considering their nomination because of politics simply plays into the hands of those who see the Hugos as nothing more than a political weapon.

For example, the story “Goodnight Stars” by Annie Bellet was on the Puppy slate and made the final ballot. Annie has written a moving essay describing her pain at this nomination, even though she did nothing wrong (and her politics definitely don't match up with those of the Puppy campaign originators). I haven't read Annie's story, but I plan to do so.

And I know Annie isn't the only one caught up in this through no fault of their own. Jim Butcher is on the final ballot for Best Novel. For the last week I've heard variations of "Did Butcher know about the Puppy campaign or didn't he?" Well, I for one don't care. I'll read Butcher's novel and judge it on it's own merits. I will not engage in a political litmus test to determine someone's literary worth. I refuse to join the Puppies in in turning the Hugos into nothing more than a political football.

And there are others on the award who should also be considered, such as Best Editor (Short Form) nominee Edmund R. Schubert.

As editor of Intergalactic Medicine Show, Edmund has been extremely supportive of new writers no matter their politics or backgrounds or beliefs. The list of writers who've earned one of their early publishing credits through Edmund reads like a "who's who" of the new generation of SF/F authors, and includes Tony Pi, Saladin Ahmed, Aliette de Bodard, Nancy Fulda, Eric James Stone, Eugie Foster, and many more.

And yes, I'm biased about Edmund because he accepted my first-ever professionally published story. He also published my first short story collection Never Never Stories while working as the editor of Spotlight Publishing. And he commissioned this amazing artwork from fellow Hugo finalist Julie Dillon for my story "The Never Never Wizard of Apalachicola."

But despite IGMS being one of our genre's few professional-level magazines, Edmund has never appeared on the Hugo Award Best Editor ballot. Again, I'm not naive — I know it's because of two reasons. First, Edmund has never been among the trendy insiders in our genre. And it's also likely some people never considered him for the award because the full title of his magazine is Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. That OSC name trips up people and they hold it against Edmund.

Which is a true shame. After all, OSC doesn't run the editorial side of the magazine. He merely supports the magazine. I am able to separate OSC's political views, which I disagree with, from his support of new writers. This is similar to how most people in our genre support the Writers of the Future contests and programs even though they were founded by L. Ron Hubbard and receive funding from Scientology-related ventures.

Edmund has posted a detailed comment about his nomination on his Facebook page and I urge people to read it. While it shouldn't be a concern with regard to his Hugo nomination, the post may surprise a few people because it reveals that Edmund's politics don't match those of his employer.

As if anyone's politics ever matches anyone else's.

I hope people will join me in saying congratulations to Edmund for becoming a Hugo finalist. He's earned the honor.

I'm also pleased about other nominees on this year's ballot, including Jennifer Brozek, who is a great person and a hard-working editor who has published 14 anthologies over the last five years. I'm also excited that Ms Marvel Volume 1: No Normal by G Willow Wilson made the ballot for Best Graphic Story. Likewise for Wesley Chu, who is up for the Campbell Award. And how can anyone be mad that Guardians of the Galaxy made the ballot because of the Puppies?

I could go on with the name of finalists. But I hope people get my point. 

So yes, I intend to consider all of the finalists I've mentioned and more. But I'm also going to consider the people and works I don't already know or don't know well enough. I'll even consider those finalists who supported the Puppy campaign.

Make no mistake: If I judge something or someone to not be worthy of winning the Hugo, I won't vote for them. And if no finalists in a category merit the Hugo Award, I will vote No Award. Because that's what voters do with the Hugo Awards. They judge and vote based on their reactions to the ballot.

As I've said, I'm disgusted by how the Puppy campaign gamed the Hugo Award nomination process. I'm disgusted by the actions and attacks from people who saw the Puppy campaign as an avenue to spread their hate. No, Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen and most of the people who publicly supported or ran the Sad Puppy campaign didn't do it out of hate. They did it because they truly believe the genre is going down the wrong path and they wanted to change it back to some imagined perfection of yesterday.

But that doesn't change the fact that their campaign has hurt a lot of people. And also enabled others to use their campaign for their own purposes.

Based on how Edmund Schubert's editing has been overlooked by the genre, a few of the arguments put forward by Brad and Larry have some merit. I believe Edmund and some of the others on the ballot were never previously nominated both because of politics and because they weren't among the genre insiders and decision makers.  

That doesn't mean there was some competing cabal of liberals who made a voting slate and checked their political list and decided who was worthy of making the Hugos and who wasn't. Again, George R. R. Martin describes pretty much what went on before.

But just because I don't agree with the methods or views of Larry and Brad doesn't mean the Hugos didn't need to be shaken up. 

Their larger complaints that authors are receiving the Hugos simply because of their race or ethnicity or gender or a straight political litmus test is simply wrong. And their dream of returning the genre to some idealized past which never actually existed is not going to happen. No genre or artform or any human creation survives by going backwards. And even if this was possible, the SF/F genre is growing more diverse and far-reaching by the day.

I want to thank Larry and Brad for demonstrating how screwed up the Hugos are. Perhaps the awards will now finally be fixed. I have a proposal to do just that, as do others.  But even if the Hugos aren't fixed our genre will go on. Great stories will still be told. Other awards will honor these stories.

But the genre will not go on if we go around hurting each other. Which is why I hope people will not use this controversy to inflict pain on even more people.

The SF/F genre is beginning to embrace all the worlds and people it should have always been open to. Our genre is now creating new stories and dreams that no one could have imagined even a decade ago. No campaign or voting slate or anything else is going to change that.

I came to our genre because of pain, but I stay because of love. I will state my opinions on what I see around me. I will stand up for what it right. I will try to improve the genre and the world. But I will not use our genre to hurt other people or cause pain simply to further a political goal.

I urge others to do the same.

A modest Hugo Award proposal

I received the following proposal from a long-time genre fan who wishes to stay anonymous. This person cares deeply about the Hugo Awards and, like many people in the science fiction and fantasy field, wants a solution to the current controversy which is threatening to destroy the Hugos once and for all.

After considering all of the alternatives, I think a proposal like this is a solution which could end this destructive fight. Yes, some people involved in Worldcon are already working on rule changes to make it harder to game the Hugo nomination system through block voting. However, it is unlikely anything would be approved until next year's Worldcon because it takes two Worldcon cycles for members to vote and approve significant change to the Hugo nomination process.  This means we could easily experience dueling nomination campaigns next year. And the rule changes being considering are, while needed and long overdue, also unlikely to prevent anything like this from happening again. (For a description of the rule changes being considered, see the proposal below.)

But instead of simply tweaking the Hugo rules, perhaps a better solution is to find common ground and agree to fix the Hugo Awards once and for all.

The proposal below seems like something all of fandom could agree to. And even if this proposal doesn't agree with people, perhaps a different form of proportional nominating would work.

I look forward to hearing people's thoughts. And many thanks to the person who sent this proposal to me.
 

The Proposal

I don't know why I'm writing to you about this, other than that I've seen you post about Hugo nomination rules and potential rumors of changes thereto on Twitter. What I've heard about is a possibility of the "4/6" process, where voters may select 4 titles to nominate, and the nominees list will be at least 6 titles. I actually think this is a step in the wrong direction. (It may — may — help mitigate "sweeps" but an organized campaign can overcome that by simply having 2 (or actually 1.5) "slates" and enough of a push behind them both. But that's not why I don't particularly like it.

Where smaller categories get bogged down and overwhelmed by manipulation — short fiction, related work, etc. — is that there are many dozens of "very good" stories and (since long blog posts are related works now, though another topic would be creating a "short related work" category for that so that book-length related works can have their say, but boy is that a digression) related works, and (with the rise of so many anthologies and small press e-zines that do good work) so many short form editors, etc. That a hundred people like stories ABCDE, and another hundred like AFGHI, and another... so when an aggressive slate pushes VWXYZ everything (except perhaps the "A" that is a majority choice from the get-go) is pushed off. The long tail of good stories is its own defeat.

But! We can solve this with better democracy, in a way that (I hope) even the Sad Puppies would like. The approach is to allow *more* instead of *fewer* nominations per voter, ranked, and counted by a special Condorcet method which preserves proportional representation.

Proportional representation means basically that if 60% of ballots are A-B-C-D-E and 40% of ballots are F-G-H-I-J that the 5 nominees are A-B-C-F-G. This is what I actually favor: minority representation is important no matter which "side" one might be on. It makes for an environment where if 600 people really dig literary spectrum stories, and 400 people really dig pulp adventure, that each can put forth some nominees, instead of the 600 always having their sway. (Or the 400 turning rabid and ramming a wedged slate down everyone else's throat.)

Further, by allowing 10 short fiction nominations, for example, we can avoid the problem of so many people (who like the same 20 stories) splitting their own voice and picking non-intersecting groups of 5 stories, only to be overwhelmed by a dedicated group that won't split its vote.

http://civs.cs.cornell.edu/proportional.html

At that link is a short article about the Condorcet "proportional representation" method, attached to the Cornell server which you can play around with, submitting sample ballot files, etc. (I encourage trying the 60% ABCDE and 40% FGHIJ ballot, because I think it's *awesome* that it comes up with ABCFG.)

Even without the (radical, I admit) step of expanding the nominations to 10 per category per voter, using proportional representation would also prevent a 'sweep' by a true minority bloc. I should note, though, that not expanding to 10 nominations per vote would not allow people to express their preference for more of the long tail of truly fantastic fiction that you and your fellow writers publish each year.

Sad little corrupt puppies

The true winner on this year's Hugo Award final ballot isn't the Sad Puppies campaign of Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen but Vox Day and his more extreme Rabid Puppies. As Mike Glyer demonstrates over on File 770, the Rabid Puppies slate actually placed more items on the ballot than the related Sad Puppies campaign slate. This indicates to me that Theodore Beale (aka Vox Day) has more power and ability to get people to game the Hugo Award nomination process than either Larry or Brad.

Of course, Larry and Brad have gone to great lengths to distance their campaign from Vox Day's. No doubt this is because of VD's well-documented attacks on others, such as how he used SFWA's Twitter feed to link to comments he made calling N. K. Jemisin a “half-savage,” for which he was eventually expelled from the organization. When you state you want to make the genre inclusive for everyone, as Larry and Brad say, then Vox Day is a very inconvenient finger in everyone's eye.

No, Larry and Brad don't want to be associated with VD. But they also must not mind benefiting from his campaign. I say this because it's the only reason I can think of for why they're not calling Vox Day out for the obvious conflict of interest of his Rabid Puppies campaign turning out the block vote for both himself and his own publishing house.

As Charles Stross points out, a Finish publishing house founded last year by Vox Day landed a nine nominated works on the ballot because of the Rabid Puppies campaign. And this isn't taking into account the two nominations for long and short editor Vox Day also scored.

Larry and Brad made a big point about how their campaign aims to fight against a corrupted Hugo Award nominating process. That they want to return the power in the genre to those who are supposedly being overlooked.

So I ask: How is the Rabid Puppies campaign, which benefited the very person running it, not simply a continuation of the corruption Larry and Brad are supposedly fighting against? I'd also love to hear if Larry and Brad support Vox Day receiving dual Best Editor nominations, especially when VD was the one who urged people to vote for himself in those categories.

Am I the only one who is amused that the Puppy's big step in supposedly cleaning up the genre turns out to include cranking the dial on genre corruption to 11?

Yes, people do read the non-Puppy novels up for the Hugo and Nebula Awards

So the Hugo Awards final ballot has been released and it matched up pretty much as I predicted earlier this week. Essentially every fiction and editing category outside of Best Novel is all Sad Puppies all the time (or from the related Rabid Puppies campaign). In addition, three of the five finalists in the novel category are also from these slates.

I've already said plenty about this year's Hugos, including how the Puppies campaign is merely the dysfunctional US political system expanding its reach into the SF/F genre. There are many others commenting on the issue right now, so I won't rehash my earlier points.

But I do want to address a different issue raised by the Sad Puppies campaign, which is that they represent the "true" version of science fiction and fantasy fandom. In this view, few people read the works that have been nominated for the Hugo Awards in previous years and the Puppies campaign are merely nominating the stories actually read by genre fans.

In some Hugo Award categories, such as with short fiction, its impossible to test this theory. While there are some general numbers on magazine circulations and anthology sales — the main place short fiction is published — these numbers don't tell how many people read an individual story in a magazine or anthology. So you can't draw any definite conclusions on readership patterns from the short fiction categories. 

But there is one category where we do have solid readership numbers — Best Novel. And thanks to Nielsen BookScan, a book industry sales-tracking data system, it's not hard to compare the sales numbers of the different Hugo Award finalists and see how they stack up with readers.

Important Note: These are only sales tracked by BookScan, which does not report e-book sales or some print copy sales or how many books are checked out of libraries. (Update: Per the comment from Colleen Lindsay below, Bookscan represents about 60% of actual physical book sales.) But that said, this does allow for general comparisons of how many people are reading specific novels.

Here are this year's Hugo Award Best Novel finalists and how their BookScan reported sales compare as of earlier this week:

• The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (Tor), 1,800 copies.
• The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson (Tor), 1,900 copies.
• Skin Game by Jim Butcher (Roc), 94,000 copies.
• Lines of Departure by Marko Kloos (Amazon's 47North imprint), 2,360 copies.
• Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie,  (Orbit US; Orbit UK), 8,000 copies.

As you can see, the sales of the two non-Puppy novels (The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison and Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie) are either in line with the other novels picked by the Sad Puppies or extremely ahead of them, in the case of Ann's novel. In fact, Ann's novel is second in sales behind only Skin Game by Jim Butcher, which sold 94,000 copies in hardcover and is the 15th novel in a very popular series.

It's worth noting that Monster Hunter Nemesis by Larry Correia (Baen) evidently made the final ballot but Larry declined the nomination. So to be fair we should note that his novel has sold 6,100 copies. This is the fifth book in Larry's bestselling Monster Hunter Incorporated series. According to BookScan, the first book in his series has sold 54,000 paperback copies since being released by Baen in 2009.

If you wish, you can compare this with Ann Leckie's first novel, which is the Hugo and Nebula Award winning Ancillary Justice. Ann's novel on this year's final ballot is the sequel to Ancillary Justice, which according to BookScan has sold 26,000 copies in trade paperback since it was released. Of course, a direct comparison between these novels is a little tricky because Larry's novels are released in a paperback edition, while Ann's are higher-priced trade paperbacks and Jim Butcher is originally published in the most expensive format of all, hardcover. 

But this comparison still shows all of these top authors are reaching plenty of readers. If these sales represent what genre fans are supposedly reading, then there is no way to say that genre fans are not reading books like those by Ann Leckie.

Again, these are only BookScan numbers and don't include some print sales and all e-book sales. I keep inserting this disclaimer because I don't want any anyone to think I'm under-reporting any author's sales.

Of course, only two non-Puppy novels are on the Hugo final ballot this year, which limits the comparisons we can make. But how about if we also bring in this year's Nebula Award final ballot. After all, the same complaints the Puppies made about the previous Hugo Awards not representing what fans truly read have also been made against the Nebulas.

Here's are the BookScan sales figures for this year's Nebula finalists:

• Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (FS&G), 33,836 copies. (Note: I want to remind everyone yet again that BookScan doesn't report all sales, and doesn't include any reports on ebook sales. As proof of this, note that Jeff's Southern Reach series has sold more than 150,000 copies to date. That's significantly more than BookScan is reporting.)
• The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Tor), 1,800 copies.
• Trial by Fire by Charles E. Gannon (Baen), 1,373 copies.
• Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie,  (Orbit US; Orbit UK), 8,000 copies.
• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu (Tor), 7,669 copies.
• Coming Home by Jack McDevitt (Ace), 3,311.

The BookScan numbers for the novels on the Nebula final ballot actually exceed the sales on the Hugo ballot with the exception of the novel by Jim Butcher. And both Butcher and Jeff VanderMeer blew everyone else on both ballots out of the water. The Three-Body Problem also had excellent sales, especially when you consider the book was (like Butcher's novel) released as an expensive hardcover edition.

The take-away: All of these numbers indicate that people are reading the novels on the Sad Puppies slate AND the novels their campaign implies no one reads. In fact, if you take VanderMeer's novel into consideration, then far more people read the first novel in his Southern Reach series than all the other Hugo and Nebula shortlisted novels combined with the exception of Skin Game by Jim Butcher.

What these numbers tell me is there's no reason to say that the Sad Puppies campaign represents the true genre fandom any more than people should say the novels which made the Nebula Awards are the true fandom. People in the science fiction and fantasy genre are reading all of these works.

So the next time someone tells you their view of SF/F represents the genre's true fans, don't believe them. Because the numbers say otherwise.