Oh No, the Puppies Are Back for the 2016 Hugo Awards—and As Angry As Ever
The puppies have returned. How could that sentence portend anything foul or wicked? And yet it does—science-fiction writer and publisher Vox Day’s followers are the least cute puppies that ever puppied. You may remember them from 2015, when they hijacked the nominations for that year’s Hugo Awards, the closest thing the sci-fi and fantasy community has to the Oscars. Convinced that the genre had eschewed swashbuckling space opera in favor of politically correct, scoldy garbage, these “activists” proposed a slate of “corrective” titles and whipped up enough support among a conservative niche of Hugo voters to get them on the ballot (pushing more “literary” and more “progressive” nominees off).
Campaigns for individual books or authors at the Hugos are nothing new. Yet the puppies’ ideologically driven movement, which drew on the tactics and talking points of Gamergaters, struck a lot of people as unprecedented. When the pups positioned their nominees as a rebuke to the women, people of color, and LBGTQ folks seeking a place in the science-fiction/fantasy world, that coalition struck back. Voters opted to give “no award” in the five categories wholly overtaken by puppy nominees.
Unlike men, not all puppies are created equal. The especially virulent Rabid Puppies, led by unsavory bigot Vox Day, who is extremely paranoid about Aztecs, have made it their mission to boot SJWs (“social justice warriors”) out of science fiction and fantasy….
So now it is 2016, and the saga continues. This time, in an effort to distance themselves from last year’s bad press, the Sad Puppies have published a list of “recommendations” rather than flogging their own ballot. But the Rabid Puppies are madder than ever. Their campaign has resulted in 64 out of the 81 titles they put forward being shortlisted. One of these books is called “Space Raptor Butt Invasion,” by erotica scribe Chuck Tingle, author of such science fiction pearls as “Taken by the Gay Unicorn Biker” and, most recently, “Slammed in the Butt by My Hugo Award Nomination.” (Audible narration is available for all three. For the more politically-minded, Tingle also offers “Feeling the Bern in My Butt.”) Writes Day on his blog: “Let’s face it, there are just three words to describe the only event that might happen in 2016 that I can imagine would be more spectacularly awesome than ‘Space Raptor Butt Invasion’ winning a Hugo Award this year, and those three words are ‘President-elect Donald Trump.’”
As Michael Schaub observes in the Los Angeles Times, the Puppies’ self-mythology here as Hugo provocateurs doesn’t totally hold up. “Tingle is a popular figure among a wide range of readers,” he notes, “not just Puppy-affiliated ones.” A fair number of science fiction and fantasy folks seem delighted, not offended, by the Butt bard’s success.
Awesome. Let’s see them prove it by voting “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” Best Story. But I suspect this is just hapless SJWs attempting to get on top of the Narrative with their conventional “the joke is really on you” tactic. Key word: “seem”. If they were genuinely delighted, NK Jemisin wouldn’t be making a complete ass of herself by trying to get Chuck Tingle to withdraw his nomination.
From Tingle’s reaction, she’d have better luck convincing me to withdraw. It cracks me up that more articles about the 2016 Hugos point out that Jemisin is an ignorant half-savage than mention her own nomination for Best Novel. I’d almost feel bad for her, if she wasn’t such a horrendously unpleasant affirmative-action monster. But SJWs will sacrifice anyone to maintain the Narrative, even their own pets.
It’s more than a little amusing that Slate claims I am paranoid about Aztecs, when I am part-Aztec myself. But you can always count on an SJW to stick with the Narrative, no matter how observably stupid it is.
It’s also interesting that referring to an idiot black woman as “an ignorant half-savage” three years ago is presently deemed more newsworthy than writing the best-selling political philosophy work of 2015, or than publishing four different #1 bestsellers in the Politics, Atheism, Philosophy, and Economic Theory categories in nine months.
No wonder the media is dying. Being converged, they’re much more interested in playing speech police than in simply doing their one job.