![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So where is this going?
Apr. 25th, 2015 08:07 amSo where is the whole Sad/Rabid Puppy thing going?
The talk is unlikely to die down in nine, or even ninety-nine days (which would still not quite get us quite to Worldcon), although I suspect that there will be no tales of Mad Puppy vanishing in a puff of petulance and returning with a bag of slates of candidates to hand out to grateful children.
That being said, will this end up being more than a tempest in a teapot?
Some commenters, like GRRM, are not very sanguine.
My own view is that the Hugos as an institution will survive quite well. The surge in supporting memberships reflects a ton of anecdata regarding people only tenuously connected to Worldcon fandom enlisting to respond to the threat to voting norms represented by the Puppies. (I'm sure there are new Puppy memberships as well, but there are certainly many anti-puppy new members.) Whether they take the full-bodied nuclear option and vote No Award to everything, or vote No Award above only slate candidates[1], or vote No Award on merit after reading extensively - and my judgement so far is that the quality of most slate candidates is below Hugo level - the outcome is not likely to be friendly to the slate model. Note that new Puppy members' votes will be spread across the spectrum compared to No Award voters - an inverse of the situation with the nominations. (This argument does make the assumption, justified in my experience of reading slate-nominated stories, that voting on merit and voting in principle against this slate will come to much the same thing, given the quality of this slate.)
And those new members will be far more likely to nominate next year than the normal crop.
The awards may take a hit for a year or two, but not a permanent one. One or another voting scheme may pass two Business Meetings which will make it harder for slates to prosper: I know that a 4/6 model has been submitted, and there's a more comprehensive proposal coming from a discussion with Bruce Schneier at Making Light. (Single Divisible Vote, Least Popular Elimination)
I also see signs of a move to provide better ongoing feedback to alert people to good shorter fiction works. If anything, there will be several such initiatives, representing different viewpoints. If there's anything fandom is good at, it's representing different viewpoints.
The candidates who were put forward and then withdrew seem, if anything, to be in a good position: many fen are buying their works in support. If they write well, they will have a set of new readers.
If any genuinely good authors have had their profiles raised by the Puppy slates - Kloos seems like a possibility - they may get Hugo recognition in future years.
The core Puppies' nominees, the ones who have not withdrawn - Wright, especially, who really does seem to appeal to a subset of conservative fans - are unlikely to suffer: the people who will reject or dislike their work were not part of their likely market in any case, and they will increase sales to their partisans.
I also see signs that there will be at least one (depending on how well people can coordinate) unofficial award contest for the would-have-been nominees once the full information is released in August. I suspect they will also turn out, in the end, to have lost little in publicity or sales, though the chance of an actual Hugo will have been foregone.
There are deep divisions emerging between the leaders of the Sad Puppies and their partisans, on one side, and much of fandom on the other. Those divisions will not easily be healed, and fen have long memories, but I don't know how much communication there was in the first place: this hasn't so much cut apart groups as made existing divisions deeper.
Finally, as far as sales go, most SF readers are not fen, and I would expect the main net impact on sales to be a wash, except for time lost to authors writing philippics instead of fiction.
Personally, I am not a member of convention fandom; my idea of a nice convention is an academic conference. My involvement in fandom has been principally online, dating back to Usenet /rasfw and mailing lists in the 1990s. But I, like others, have been motivated to buy a Supporting Membership to Sasquan to cast a vote in defence of the Hugos (not for the package: I could buy the works I want to read for less than the membership cost, having read relatively widely last year).
[1]My personal inclination, except in the one case (Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form) where I can be morally sure that several works would have been on the ballot in any case. I'm not sure I've seen anyone else point out strongly that voting most slate candidates below No Award does them an injury only if it's likely that they would have been on the ballot in any case.
The talk is unlikely to die down in nine, or even ninety-nine days (which would still not quite get us quite to Worldcon), although I suspect that there will be no tales of Mad Puppy vanishing in a puff of petulance and returning with a bag of slates of candidates to hand out to grateful children.
That being said, will this end up being more than a tempest in a teapot?
Some commenters, like GRRM, are not very sanguine.
My own view is that the Hugos as an institution will survive quite well. The surge in supporting memberships reflects a ton of anecdata regarding people only tenuously connected to Worldcon fandom enlisting to respond to the threat to voting norms represented by the Puppies. (I'm sure there are new Puppy memberships as well, but there are certainly many anti-puppy new members.) Whether they take the full-bodied nuclear option and vote No Award to everything, or vote No Award above only slate candidates[1], or vote No Award on merit after reading extensively - and my judgement so far is that the quality of most slate candidates is below Hugo level - the outcome is not likely to be friendly to the slate model. Note that new Puppy members' votes will be spread across the spectrum compared to No Award voters - an inverse of the situation with the nominations. (This argument does make the assumption, justified in my experience of reading slate-nominated stories, that voting on merit and voting in principle against this slate will come to much the same thing, given the quality of this slate.)
And those new members will be far more likely to nominate next year than the normal crop.
The awards may take a hit for a year or two, but not a permanent one. One or another voting scheme may pass two Business Meetings which will make it harder for slates to prosper: I know that a 4/6 model has been submitted, and there's a more comprehensive proposal coming from a discussion with Bruce Schneier at Making Light. (Single Divisible Vote, Least Popular Elimination)
I also see signs of a move to provide better ongoing feedback to alert people to good shorter fiction works. If anything, there will be several such initiatives, representing different viewpoints. If there's anything fandom is good at, it's representing different viewpoints.
The candidates who were put forward and then withdrew seem, if anything, to be in a good position: many fen are buying their works in support. If they write well, they will have a set of new readers.
If any genuinely good authors have had their profiles raised by the Puppy slates - Kloos seems like a possibility - they may get Hugo recognition in future years.
The core Puppies' nominees, the ones who have not withdrawn - Wright, especially, who really does seem to appeal to a subset of conservative fans - are unlikely to suffer: the people who will reject or dislike their work were not part of their likely market in any case, and they will increase sales to their partisans.
I also see signs that there will be at least one (depending on how well people can coordinate) unofficial award contest for the would-have-been nominees once the full information is released in August. I suspect they will also turn out, in the end, to have lost little in publicity or sales, though the chance of an actual Hugo will have been foregone.
There are deep divisions emerging between the leaders of the Sad Puppies and their partisans, on one side, and much of fandom on the other. Those divisions will not easily be healed, and fen have long memories, but I don't know how much communication there was in the first place: this hasn't so much cut apart groups as made existing divisions deeper.
Finally, as far as sales go, most SF readers are not fen, and I would expect the main net impact on sales to be a wash, except for time lost to authors writing philippics instead of fiction.
Personally, I am not a member of convention fandom; my idea of a nice convention is an academic conference. My involvement in fandom has been principally online, dating back to Usenet /rasfw and mailing lists in the 1990s. But I, like others, have been motivated to buy a Supporting Membership to Sasquan to cast a vote in defence of the Hugos (not for the package: I could buy the works I want to read for less than the membership cost, having read relatively widely last year).
[1]My personal inclination, except in the one case (Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form) where I can be morally sure that several works would have been on the ballot in any case. I'm not sure I've seen anyone else point out strongly that voting most slate candidates below No Award does them an injury only if it's likely that they would have been on the ballot in any case.
