Tag: Sad Puppies

A Lost World Re-Discovered

photog Science Fiction / Fantasy , , ,

Growing up back in the Stone Age, science fiction and fantasy were my favorite reading materials. I was able to fill my spare time with stories by Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke and the other “golden age” writers. Being a normal boy of the era I could enjoy both the pulpy action of E E “Doc” Smith’s Lensman yarns and the more literary stories of someone like Bradbury or Sturgeon. Likewise for fantasy, I could find pleasure along the whole axis from Tolkien to Robert E Howard. To sum up, I was able to enjoy reading a gamut of styles in these genres that differed in literary sophistication but shared the quality of excitement.

Time passed. Other activities (school, girls, work, family) began to compete with reading for my time. Also a lot of the authors I knew so well disappeared from the scene. This combination of events meant that my knowledge of and interaction with the SF&F field became more limited. Also fewer of the new authors grabbed my interest as much as the old ones. I noticed that the stories weren’t as much fun. At first I wasn’t sure why. The sf still had a colony on Ganymede or time travel. But instead of adventure and discovery we had ennui and social issues. Characters were whining about their problems and their sense of alienation. I think the most extreme example was a book called Triton by Delaney. None of the characters were admirable or likable. The story was haphazardly written and highly depressing. Now this was a Nebula nominated novel. I had always assumed that Hugos and Nebulas were given out to really good stories. But over time I found that to no longer be the case. By the mid-eighties I had given up on SF&F. I reread old books I owned and read fiction outside these genres. Whenever I still bothered to pick up a science fiction story it reinforced that the stories now produced were wholly uninteresting for me and tended to openly antagonize my sensibilities. So I stopped looking.

Time passed. I came across an article on line (I think it was on Instapundit) talking about Sad Puppies and Social Justice Warriors (SJW). I read up on it and found out about Larry Correia, Vox Day (and his dreaded Rabid Puppies) and Sarah Hoyt and the madgeniusclub.com and Baen and Tor and all the other interesting characters. In a nutshell, the claim was that science fiction had been over-run by authors and publishing houses that pushed a social message based story type at the expense of what people actually wanted, fun. And that these SJWs controlled the Hugo and Nebula awards because of the small number of voters involved.

It rang a bell.

I decided to test the premise. I tried out Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter books. I tried out Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files.

And they were fun!  If any of this story resonates with your own experiences, I recommend you try some of the Puppy recommendations and see if they work for you.

So now I’ve got a backlog of stories to read and I can also follow the soap opera that is the Sad Puppy movement. I can cheer for the Puppies and try out their books. I can boo the Puppy Kickers and mock their silly message fiction. I look forward to the day when fun science fiction is once again reliably identified by its garishly colored cover. I mean, you know you can’t go wrong when you see a scantily clad woman in the clutches of a tentacled space monster on the cover. Jack Williamson would have been proud.

Hugos and Puppies and Chorfs, Oh My!

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  • Well it’s April and that means it’s time for science fiction and character assassination.  This year will mark the fourth iteration of the greatest literary experiment since the invention of the apostrophe.  At this point the whole saga has become too long and complicated to rehash in detail but the argument in a nutshell is that the Hugo Awards had become a very in-bred mutual admiration prize that a surprisingly small number of voters controlled.  The Sad Puppies claimed that the prizes no longer reflected the kind of stories that the majority of sf buyers wanted but rather a literary style that was heavy on progressive social messaging and flavor of the day affirmative action representation.  In fact what they claimed was that a small group of like-minded authors and the publishers who printed their works (call them the Gatekeepers) basically agreed on a slate ahead of time and because of the small attendance were able to dictate the winners based on their progressive sensibilities.  For this assertion the Puppies were mocked and reviled.  So they formed a slate of their own and captured almost all of the nominations.  The panic and anger this engendered is hard to exaggerate.  Some of the publishing professionals used their media contacts to get multiple news sites to characterize the Sad Puppies as racist, sexist white supremacists.  Interestingly several of the puppies were various combinations of non-white and non-male.  But the truth is no excuse for ruining a perfectly good narrative.  By convincing the larger sf community that evil men were co-opting the venerable Hugos the Gatekeepers were able to recruit a couple of thousand new voters who used the “no-award” option to punish the puppy nominees.  And just to show how petty these gatekeepers were they handed out asterisks at the award ceremony to nominees just to show them how illegitimate their status was.
  • This year the Sad Puppies have decided to take the high road and make the program more inclusive allowing anyone regardless of sensibilities to nominate works.  This has garnered them less hate (slightly) from the Gatekeepers.  However, a very large section of the Sad Puppies has migrated to the Rabid Puppies.  These are followers of a fellow called Vox Day who so despises the Hugo Gatekeepers (or Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) as he calls them) that burning down the Hugos is actually more desirable to him than reforming them.  Now the Rabids are generally a prickly crowd and tend to bite friend or foe when the whim strikes them.  But how can you fault someone who nominates a story for a Hugo called “Space Raptor Butt Invasion.”  If the Rabids manage to capture a substantial proportion of the nominations pandemonium (and hilarity) will ensue.  The character assassination will be phenominal.  But it is instructive to see just how easily the progressives crumble when exposed to just a small fraction of the unfairness that they dish out to conservatives.  Very instructive.
  • So Bravo Puppies (Sad and Rabid).  Long may you gnaw your chew toys.

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