Rant: The Lasting Legacy of the Sad Puppies
After the appalling 2015 Hugo Awards ceremony (google "Hugo Awards asterisks"; I can't bring myself to write about it) there arose a litany:
The Sad Puppies Lost!
The Sad Puppies Lost!
The Sad Puppies Lost!
(Repeat until purple.)
Except...they didn't. The losers were the poor writers who would likely have won the award if the Worldcon Insider Alphas hadn't decided to burn the award down rather than let people they disapproved of win it. The even bigger losers were the Hugos themselves, which are now proven to be political proxies for a bogglingly stupid culture war that most of us would prefer not to fight.
The biggest losers of all were the hate-filled tribalists themselves, Alphas down to their shitflinging Omega footsoldiers, who got their asses handed to them in a big way and threw the only tantrum that they could. Now, I don't know precisely what to make of it, beyond my longstanding contention that tribalism will be the end of us all if we're not careful. What I can say with fair confidence is that it isn't over. (More on this later.) What I can say with complete confidence is that the Sad Puppies won big on several fronts:
- They brought the cobwebbed machinery behind the Hugo Awards out into the open where everybody could look at it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
- They made everyone aware of the curiously obscure fact that you don't have to go to Worldcon to vote for the Hugos. All you need is $40 (soon to be $50, I think) and an Internet connection.
- They exposed corruption that's been going on for quite a number of years, and I'm not talking about inclusiveness, or diversity, or clever (if silly) experiments with pronouns here. (That's a separate issue.) I'm talking about the fact that a derivative and mostly boring novel like Redshirts can only win a Hugo via corruption.
- They alerted everyone to the fact that Worldcon and traditional SF fandom are rounding errors compared to the number of people who buy and enjoy SF and fantasy. Too few people nominate and vote for the awards to make corruption impossible and the awards themselves meaningful.
That's a lot, right there. That would be enough, in fact, to persuade me that the Puppies won. But the Sad Puppies did something else: They created the nucleus around which a whole new fandom is crystallizing. People who took that lonely walk away from SFF suddenly realized that lots of other people were taking the same walk, and for the same reasons: Modern print SF is for the most part dull, dudgeon-rich message pie, and fandom is ideologically exclusionary and mostly under the control of a handful of high-volume haters. (I and many others have been called fascists one too many times.) If you have the unmitigated gall to have libertarian or (gasp!) conservative leanings, there is no place for you at that table.
Well, alluvasudden there's a brand-new table.
In part (like most of everything else these days) it came from Amazon. The NY imprints have a powerful bias against fiction with libertarian or conservative themes. While they were the gatekeepers, there was little to be done. Now, with indie-published ebooks generating close to half of all ebook sales, authors can make fair money (or even a good living!) without bending the knee to Manhattan culture. They don't even need ISBNs. They do have to rise above a pretty high noise level, but that's a technical challenge: If you write well and understand the nature of the game, you will be noticed. The more you write, the more you'll be noticed, and the easier it becomes.
What didn't come from Amazon came from Google. The commotion generated by the Sad Puppies' sweep of the Hugo nominations got a lot of attention. Commotion does that; it's almost a physical law. People who hadn't followed the SF scene for many years (if ever) discovered Web forums and new authors whose vision of SFF was far closer to their own.
Ironically, most of that commotion came from the Sad Puppies' opponents, who could have strangled the Puppies in their sleep simply by keeping their mouths shut. But no: They had to vent their tribal butthurt, and in doing so recruited thousands of brand-new Puppies to the cause.
This new fandom centers around a crew of writers who (I suspect) give the New York imprints nightmares: Larry Correia, Sarah Hoyt, Brad Torgersen, John C. Wright, Peter Grant, Cedar Sanderson, Brian Niemeier, Amanda Green, Kate Paulk, Tom Knighton, R. K. Modena, Dave Freer, and many others whose work I'm only beginning to sample. Some have books from the tradpub imprints (Baen especially) but all are indies as well. I'm linking to their Web forums here so you can discover them too. Additional sites of interest include collaborative webzines like The Mad Genius Club, The Otherwhere Gazette, and Superversive SF. (Several of the above authors contribute to all three sites.)
At least one SF convention leans libertarian: Libertycon, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. There may be more than that, especially among the smaller gatherings. I don't know, but I'm always looking. I think there's a lot of upside in smaller, in-person meetups held in local pubs and other gathering places, and if I can't find one in Phoenix I may well start one. I'm intrigued by reports from the major Puppy authors who have attended various media cons around the country. Sarah Hoyt's is instructive. The boggling crowds at events like ComiCon are more diverse by far than attendees at traditional literary cons, and much, much younger. There is way more interest in textual SFF at the media cons than I expected. It's not all movies and comic books. Now, I'm not sure how much I'll be attending media cons; Worldcon-level crowds make me a little crawly, and the media cons draw eight to ten times more people. What stood out in those reports for me was the fact that people at the media cons were actually having lots of pure freeform fun, not searching desperately for something to be offended about.
The bottom line is that a vast and mostly invisible network of new friendships happened as a result of the Sad Puppies phenomenon. I'm reading more SFF now than I have in a decade. The Paperwhite helps, of course, as does the "toss-it-in-the-cart" pricing that predominates in the Kindle store. I'm corresponding with other writers whom I'd not met before. I've learned that indie publishing can work, and work well. (Thanks, Sarah!) I'm hearing others saying more or less the same thing about the Sad Puppies universe: "It was like coming home."
And it's not over.
No sirree. Sad Puppies 4: The Embiggenning is well underway, run by Kate Paulk, Sarah Hoyt, and Amanda Green. These are formidable women; I pity the poor tribal troll who tries to call them "female impersonators." The logo once again is from Lee "ArtRaccoon" Madison. Sad puppies Frank, Isaac, and Ray from last year's logo have returned, this time bringing their new robot friend Robert with them. Robert isn't the least bit sad. He has no reason to be.
His side is winning.
(More thoughts on this issue of a new SFF fandom as time/energy allow.)