Sounds ominous…

Teresa Nielsen Hayden hears distant rumblings of discontent in fandom, possibly having to do with the Hugo Award nominations this year. It might just be that the Sad Puppies campaigners — happy to function as foot soldiers on another front in the right wing’s kulturkampf — has gotten its act together and managed to bulk vote its slate onto the ballots. The question is, given that this is true, is this a problem?

In the short term, yes, as it will mean other, more deserving candidates get excluded from the ballot, which in most categories is limited to five places, occassionally one or two more when multiple nominations get the same amount of votes. Slate voting like this, even if it can only get one or two candidates in each category and they have no real chance at the Hugo itself, means others will lose out on these places. And Hugo nominations can be important, especially for new writers, to establish a reputation as being worthwhile to pay attention to. Losing out on this because somebody thought making a political point is more important than actually rewarding good writers is bitter.

In the slightly longer term, if those who oppose the Sad Puppies are tempted to do the same as they, the damage may be greater. The Hugo Awards have been problematic for a long time, voted on by what you could uncharitably call a clique of ageing fans, but was starting to evolve away from this in recent years, the backlash against which erupted last year with the first Puppies slate. Remaking the Hugos into a popularity contest of warring politically motivated slates will put an end to this evolution. The same if we attempt to invent rules that makes this sort of slate pushing illegal.

Normally I’m not one to say we should just ignore the trolls, but perhaps in this instance we should. Voting in the Hugo costs money and to keep it up year after year in such a way as to be effective even more so. This campaign will run out of steam sooner or later but can do some real damage if we let them in the meantime. In this case what we need to do is to keep nominating and voting those writers and books we genuinely think are worthy of a Hugo, not engage the Puppies on their own level.