Voting for the 2017 Hugo Awards Has Closed, and the Sad Puppies Were Nowhere to be Seen
News is by definition the reporting of recent events, but sometimes it is equally important to note when an event does not occur.
On Sunday, the voting period for the 2017 Hugo Awards ended. According to the announcement, a total of 3,319 votes were cast (compared to 3130, 5950, 3587, and 1850 in the past four years).
You can see the list of candidates on the Hugo Award website. What you won’t find is any sign of the influence of the Sad Puppies. According to author Sarah Hoyt, the organizer of this year’s Sad Puppies, that’s because there was no slate this year.
Starting in 2013, the Sad Puppies (and its Rabid Puppies offshoot), were either a concerted attempt to introduce a right-wing slate, a regressive slate, an indie slate to the Hugo Awards, or, an attempt to wrest control of the Hugo Awards from an insider clique, prove there was a clique in control of the Hugos, or simply to sow chaos. (The descriptions varied depending on who you asked, the year, and how much they had had to drink).
This year, however, there was no coordinated Sad Puppies campaign. As Hoyt explained in June on her blog and on the Mad Genius Club blog, that was by design.
From Mad Genius Club:
If we’d planned to do something different this year, I’d have passed it on to Amanda early. But since what we’re planning has no defined deadline, as soon as we get it up (eh) in the next couple of months, we’ll be fine. And we want to make sure we do it right.
So, originally, we’d planned to do nothing, and let Sad Puppies ride into the sunset with Kate’s campaign, which did everything the left claimed to want and yet was still subjected to the same complaints as ever.
But the problem with a decentralized, almost leaderless campaign is that it’s prone to be high jacked, and we realized late last year that if someone didn’t announce then someone who was wholly (really) in the rabid camp was going to take it, and make it sound like the campaigns were always one.
Hoyt went into greater detail on her blog;
THE POINT of the fight for the Sad Puppies was never to get the Hugos, to conquer the Hugos or to hold the Hugos in perpetuity. It was simply to show that the fight was rigged and in the possession of a small clique.
THIS was amply proven by Larry and Brad, and if more was needed, Kate did a double reverse maneuver and actually proved that even if you did EVERYTHING they wanted you to do from open nomination, to more than the slots per category, to actually attending conventions and being very very nice, they would still attack you if you weren’t one of the club.
So if you were wondering about the status of the Sad Puppies, the official word is that they have accomplished their goal and retired from the field.
image by Jeff Kontur
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