Puppygate

Puppygate is a block-voting controversy concerning the Hugo Awards, science fiction's oldest and most prestigious honor. Politically conservative science fiction writers started campaigns to overturn what they believed was an injustice: that Social Justice Warriors had kept SF fandom hostage to their political agendas for years and that a secret liberal cabal who did not represent SF fandom at large was ultimately responsible for works with progressive themes and/or by non-white, LGBT and female authors winning Hugos in the 2010s. As a result of their campaigns, 2015 and 2016 Hugo Award nominations were skewed, many fans were angered, and members of Worldcon voted to change the Hugo nomination process.
In 2015, the Sad Puppies group, led by professional authors Brad Torgersen and Larry Correia and the Rabid Puppies group, led by professional author and game designer Theodore Beale, known as Vox Day, swept the Hugo nominations by proposing slates and exhorting their followers to vote for them. Although the puppy campaigns successfully overran the nomination process, their efforts ultimately resulted in only one win, Guardians of the Galaxy, for the category of Best Dramatic Presentation/Long Form, and a record-breaking number of No AwardsIn five categories: Best Novella, Short Story, Related Work, Editor Short Form, and Editor Long Form. This was equal to the number of previous No Awards for the entire history of the Hugos. 2015 Hugo Award Winners Announced Posted on August 22, 2015 by Kevin at thehugoawards.org.
Day found allies in GamerGate participants, and in the backlash after the nominees were announced, both Torgersen and Correia tried to distance themselves from Day's rhetoric and methods.
As a result of all the conflict, the supporting memberships for Sasquan, the 2015 Worldcon (where the Hugo winners are announced), went through the roof. (A supporting membership allows one to vote on the Hugo awards, and to nominate for them next year.) Many people advocated voting "No Award" in several or all categories. George R. R. Martin has spoken extensively about it in the Hugo Award tag at his Livejournal."We're SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY FANS, we love to read about aliens and vampires, and elves. Are we really going to freak about Asians and Native Americans?" Where's The Beef?, entry dated April 9, 2015.
SF fans were talking about puppygate for months; the nominations were announced in April, and the winners were announced in August. There is no known linkspam/roundup location collecting all the relevant posts; the discussion happened in several places at Livejournal, individual author blogs, fansites, and Facebook.Considering Martin's involvement, there is a notable lack of related Game of Thrones gifsets (screenshots captioned with jokes or slogans) bouncing around the social network tumblr where many of today's fans -- and SJWs -- tend to congregate. Some 2015 roundup and summary posts: 
* Overview: How conservatives took over sci-fi's most prestigious award by Todd VanDerWerff, updated April 26, 2015
* Simon McNeil's Hugo Roundup
* File 770's April 1 Puppy Roundup
See #Further Reading for more.
==Background: The Hugo Award and its Discontents==
The Hugo Awards are a set of awards given annually to science fiction and fantasy authors, artists, and actifans at Worldcon. Anyone who buys a membership for Worldcon can nominate works for the award, but as noted by many, the number of fans who actually participate in the nomination process is a small subset of even Worldcon attendees, who in turn represent a small subset of the SF readership. Theoretically, everyone who nominates does so independently and purely based on merit. However, there will always be people, especially those overlooked for nominations or who didn't enjoy the winners, who may wonder if the vote is rigged in some way. 
Presumably, suspicions about the Hugo voting process date back to the first year the award was given, though the only confirmed case(?) of block voting before the puppies occurred when Scientologists got The Invaders Plan, a 1986 novel by their founder L. Ron Hubbard, onto the Hugo ballot.See Mission Earth sales controversy at Wikipedia. This apparently happened twice. Hubbard's 1954 novel To the Stars was nominated for a retro award for Best Novella in 2001. A humorous talk given by Dave Langford at the 1987 Worldcon references this event: "SF fandom was plunged as usual into controversy when the Pope published a science fiction novel called Immaculate Genesis: there were worries about massive Hugo block-voting by members of the little-known 'Catholic' cult which has been openly condemned by several British governments since the reign of Henry VIII...."From "The Ansible Year in Review", later printed in Pulp #6.
Worldcon itself is no stranger to wank: see Worldcon#Controversies. For example, the Futurians were banned from the first con. At the time, there was a fierce debate in fandom with different factions arguing about what science fiction was and who should control it.Amy Wallace, Sci-Fi’s Hugo Awards and the Battle for Pop Culture’s Soul: Equality in the digital age. Wired, 2015-10-30. These factions were intensely political. Nothing has changed.
==How Puppygate Started==
 “I wanted to leave a big smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were. All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You -- one massive gesture of contempt." - Theodore Beale (Vox Day), quoted in the Guardian for 2015-08-23.
In 2013 conservative SF writer Larry Correia started a "Sad Puppy" campaign to get a more "diverse" set of authors nominated for the Hugo Awards; his view was that women and minorities were getting nominated and winning Hugos based on liberal politics and not on literary merit. In a 2015 podcast he said,
Correia also had been nominated for, but did not receive, the Campbell award in 2011.See Wikipedia:John_W._Campbell_Award_for_Best_New_Writer. He said that when he was nominated people had freaked out because he was "openly conservative"; he attributed his subsequent loss to liberal bias.Starting at 11:45 in , posted 8 March 2015. He also mentions "a big clique of people talking about how we're never going to read him, he's evil, he's bad, he's a horrible person." 
The campaign got its name from a series of SPCA promos featuring sad-looking animals rescued from abuse. A joke by Correia had related the leading cause of puppy sadness to "boring message-fic winning awards". Additionally, Correia created a cartoon mascot "spokesman" in the form of a talking manatee. 
2014 saw Sad Puppies 2. Correia proposed a slate for people to nominate in a block vote, thus insuring that every (?) item on the slate made it onto the Hugo ballots. None of them won a Hugo. In 2015, when Brad Torgersen took over the Sad Puppy campaign ("Sad Puppies 3"), the slate included almost enough names to crowd out any non-slate nominees. Meanwhile, Vox Day, generally considered to be a radical right extremist neo-Nazi bigotSome sources: article in The New Republic 17 April 2015; Anti-Defamation League; failfandomanonwiki's entry; Rational Wiki's entry; Fundies Say the Darndest Things search results; Solving My Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit Problem, a 2 February 2013 blog post by John Scalzi; Vox Day: The Mixoning (archived), a 15 April 2015 Tumblr post; We Hunted The Mammoth, 23 May 2017 blog post. and only the second person to be kicked out of the SFWA, proposed an alternate slate, "Rabid Puppies", that overlapped considerably with the Sad Puppies slate.
Torgersen provided a second rationale for the Sad Puppy slate: SF had become too "literary," and the Hugo winners no longer represented what the average fan actually enjoyed. On his blog he complained of the inability to judge Science Fiction books by their covers these days: 
The nominations were announced April 4, 2015, and lo and behold the majority of nominees in most categories were from one of the two slates: the rest of SF fandom was outraged. Initial analysis from SF bloggers concluded that Vox Day's slate was more successful than the official Sad Puppy slate.Jason Sanford. , 6 April 2015.File 770. , 4 April 2015. Someone in connection with Rabid Puppies put out a call on Twitter to Gamergaters in order to increase the number of votes in the block.In a discussion at Making Light, April 4, 2015, a poster screencapped a tweet by @Daddy_Warpig: Yo, #GamerGate! There's a chance to humble SJW in Sci-Fi, too! Jim Hines noted other connections between both puppy slates and Gamergate in the comments to his blog post. Correia and Torgersen have publicly distanced themselves from Day., Monster Hunter Nation, APRIL 16, 2015, April 16, 2015. Reportedly, sad puppies have also attempted to scrub the internet of their Gamergate sympathies/connections. News media conflated Sad Puppies with Rabid Puppies and reported that GamerGate was responsible for everything. Several of the nominees declined their nominations, two of them after the announcement, which was a Hugo first; sad puppies claimed that the authors were bullied into declining, but other fans have argued that authors didn't want to be associated with the sad puppies and/or didn't want an award that everyone now knew was meaningless.Two Finalists Withdraw from 2015 Hugo Awards, website announcement posted April 16, 2015.
==2015 Withdrawals==
Several nominees withdrew their names from consideration; one of these was after the nominees were locked in and the ballots could not be changed. In addition, former Hugo winner Connie Willis withdrew from presenting.
Matthew David Surridge posted a long (~10k words) explanation of his understanding of the politics involved, along with his explanation for withdrawing from consideration as Best Fan Writer, on April 4th: A Detailed Explanation "I think it’s clear how extensively I disagree with the Puppy campaigns, and why I don’t want an award nomination that primarily comes from being placed on their slates. I should have investigated the situation more thoroughly in February when I found out that I was on those slates, and I should have asked to be removed then. Again, I extend my apologies to everyone for not doing so at that time."
Connie Willis turned down the opportunity to present the Campbell Award, saying she cannot allow herself to support bullying as a campaign tactic:
:In my own particular case, I feel I’ve also been ordered to go along with them and act as if this were an ordinary Hugo Awards ceremony. I’ve essentially been told to engage in some light-hearted banter with the nominees, give one of them the award, and by my presence–and my silence–lend cover and credibility to winners who got the award through bullying and extortion.
:Well, I won’t do it. I can’t do it. If I did, I’d be collaborating with them in their scheme. Why I Won't Be a Presenter at the Hugo Awards This Year, Apr 14, 2015
Mark Kloos, whose novel Lines of Departure was nominated, posted a public withdrawal on his blog: "if this nomination gives even the appearance that Vox Day or anyone else had a hand in giving it to me because of my perceived political leanings, I don’t want it. I want to be nominated for awards because of the work, not because of the “right” or “wrong” politics."A Statement on My Hugo Nomination, April 15, 2015
Annie Bellet withdrew her story "Goodnight Stars" from consideration, in a blog post that has since been removed.Hugo Story Withdrawn Apr 15 - Google cache version "I am not your ball. My fiction is my message, not someone else’s, and I refuse to participate in a war I didn’t start. It has become clear to me that the only way to stay out of this is to pick up my ball and go home." Bellet had been a longtime friend of Correia, and expressed a belief that he and Torgersen had been manipulated by Beale.
Black Gate was nominated for Best Fanzine, and withdrew on April 18: "The strongest argument I can muster is that I believe that Black Gate is a superb website, the product of thousands of hours of dedicated effort from dozens of the top writers in the field every single month, and if there’s even the slightest chance that giving it a Hugo would in any way diminish the reputation of the Awards, we, as an organization and as a team, categorically reject any involvement in that effort."Black Gate Withdraws From Hugo Consideration (Wayback machine link)
Edmund Schubert, the editor of webzine Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, wished to withdraw his name from consideration as Best Editor (short form). posted an open letter which was reposted with permission at John Scalzi's blog. However, he posted it after the deadline for withdrawals. He says:
:While I personally find it challenging that some people won’t read IGMS because they disagree with the publisher’s perceived politics (which have nothing whatsoever to do with what goes into the magazine), I can’t in good conscience complain about the deck being stacked against me, and then feel good about being nominated for an award when the deck gets stacked in my favor. That would make me a hypocrite. I can’t be part of that and still maintain my integrity.In Which Edmund Schubert Withdraws From the Hugos, Whatever, Apr 27, 2015
In addition to nominees who withdrew, Juliette Wade was informed of the nominations beforehand, and asked for her novelette, "Mind Locker," to be removed from the slate when she realized it was something other than a standard rec list:
:You did not say you were going to be calling it the Sad Puppies list. I feel like you were misrepresenting it. I’m happy to be one of your Hugo recommendations. This is different.An Account of Juliette Wade’s Withdrawal from Sad Puppies 3, posted at File770 on May 2, 2015
==2015 Award Results==
The 2015 Hugo Awards were presented on August 22, 2015.
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, a 2008 Chinese-language novel translated into English in 2014, won best novel. Laura J. Mixon won best fan writer for her expose on Winterfox. See the complete list of wins and nominations here.
The Hugo Awards website reported that 5950 votes were counted and that No Award won in five categories.2015 Hugo Award Winners Announced Posted on August 22, 2015 by Kevin at thehugoawards.org Detailed vote counts here.
The Wall Street Journal reported on the results, noting that the only apparent win for the Puppies, Guardians of the Galaxy, had wide support beyond the puppies.Michael Rapoport. No ‘Puppy’ Love at Science Fiction’s Hugo Awards, Wall Street Journal, 23 August 2015. Commenters at the Fail-fandomanon dreamwidth community agreed. One anon noted that "it definitively proves that it's not just people voting against Puppies on purpose. They just think that most of the Puppies' choices are well and truly shit. When they think one of the nominated works is good, like this one, people still voted for it."
For the most part, puppy nominations finished behind No Award.
==2016==
The process repeated itself in 2016, but this time sf fandom was not surprised and there was not as much discussion or outrage. Media reports following the winner announcements had titles like "Right-Wing Activists Fail to Ruin the Hugo Awards; Fiction Categories Swept by Women." The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin won best novel, and No Award ended up winning in two categories. (Accessed 21 August 2016.)
During the 2015 Worldcon, members voted to change the Hugo nomination process to prevent block-voting strategies like the sad puppies from succeeding in future years. This change was dubbed "E Pluribus Hugo" aka EPH. However, for rule changes to take effect, the vote must pass at two Worldcons. Members voted to ratify EPH at the 2016 Worldcon, but the new rule could not be implemented until 2017. As a result, the 2016 Hugo nominations were also affected by slate voting.David Barnett, Hugo awards shortlist dominated by rightwing campaign. Guardian, 26 April 2016.
Sad Puppies 4 was a "recommendation list" rather than a strict slate, so their effect on the nominations was minimal, but the Rabid Puppies ran another slate. Of note, the 2016 Rabid Puppy slate contained several popular or progressive entries. Some people expressed the opinion that these might have made it onto the ballot anyway and that the Rabid Puppies would try to take credit if these nominees won; alternatively, it was suggested that the Rabid Puppies were hoping that the anti-Puppy nominees would voluntarily withdraw or that anti-Puppy voters would rate them below No Award on general principle. In particular, the fact that the Rabid Puppies had nominated gay dinosaur porn by the pseudonymous self-published author Chuck Tingle was a source of much merriment in fandom. As one FFA nonnie put it,
Another anon commented:
Chuck Tingle countered by arranging for Zoe Quinn, enemy #1 of GamerGate, to accept the award for him, but did not ultimately win the award. Tingle did win fandom's admiration for his humorous trolling of Vox Day and the Puppies. After the awards, he tweeted, "time of devilmen hasselin hugos this year wont be remembered with sadness and dispair but with laughter joy and love. that is winning"Tweet by ChuckTingle, 7:29 PM - 21 Aug 2016.
The Rabid Puppies had also put onto its slate "The Story of Moira Greyland," a controversial 2015 essay by the daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley, describing child sexual abuse by both her parents and asserting that pedophilia and homosexuality were inextricably linked. It along with Daniel Eness' "Safe Space As Rape Room", also about pedophilia in science fiction fandom, and two other essays were nominated for Best Related Work. The Hugo voters elected to give "No Award" for these items also. Russell Newquist's blog posts describing what happened bordered on conspiracy theory, as he and other Puppies believed (or said they believed) science fiction fandom was riddled with "perverted SJWs", pedophiles and gays who just wanted to keep the cover-up going.Doris V. Sutherland, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Child Abuse: Cover-Up or Exploitation? On her blog Attack of the 6-Foot Tranny, March 2, 2017.Russell Newquist, "WorldCon SJWs Continue to Defend Child Rape. August 24, 2016 archived from russellnewquist.com.
==Puppygate Transformative Works==
* John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular (2015)
* "Slammed in the Butt by My Hugo Award Nomination" by Chuck Tingle (2016)
* "Pounded In The Butt By My Hugo Award Loss" by Chuck Tingle (2016)
==Further Reading==
===Spring 2015===
General:
* Yes, the Sad Puppies campaign swept the Hugo Awards, Jason Sandford (March 30, 2015)
* Entering the Lists (April 4, 2015) 
* The 2015 Hugo Awards: Thoughts on the Nominees, Abigail Nussbaum (April 5, 2015) 
* The Puppy Hugos, Niall Harrison (April 6, 2015) 
*http://www.journalfen.net/community/unfunny_fandom/25251.html (link wonky?)
* On Laura Mixon-Gould’s Hugo Nomination for Best Fanwriter, RCRuiz (April 8, 2015) 
* , Peter David (April 9, 2015) 
* The 2015 Hugo Awards: Why I Am Voting No Award in the Best Fan Writer Category, Abigail Nussbaum (April 10, 2015) 
* More on the Sad Puppies Hugo Nominations, Deidre Saoirse Moen (April 10, 2015) 
* Why Brad Torgersen is the saddest puppy., Alexandra Erin (April 11, 2015, dead link sometime before August 29, 2020) 
* Right-Wing Trolls Hijack SciFi Oscars, Arthur Chu (April 12, 2015) 
* Freeping the Hugo Awards, Susan Grigsby (April 12, 2015) 
* since some puppies are deleting things (April 13, 2015) 
* Vox Day’s involvement in the Sad Puppies slate, Naomi Kritzer (April 13, 2015) 
* untitled post by David Gerrold (April 14, 2015). This contains an excellent overview of the Hugos and their history and why this controversy is so important.
* WHY I WON’T BE A PRESENTER AT THE HUGO AWARDS THIS YEAR, Connie Willis (April 14, 2015) 
* Hugo Story Withdrawn, Annie Bellet (April 15, 2015) 
* a statement on my hugo nomination., Marko Kloos (April 15, 2015) 
* Some comments on the Hugos and other SF awards, Eric Flint (April 16, 2015) 
* , Elizabeth Minkel (April 16, 2015)
* Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: An Analysis of Theodore Beale and his Supporters, Philip Sandifer (April 21, 2015) 
* Puppies in Their Own Words, Jim Hines (June 7, 2015)
Fail_Fandomanon:
Several discussions were hosted on Fail_Fandomanon (where nonnies had apparently tried to nominate the meme for a Hugo?)
*the Sad Puppies campaign swept the Hugo Awards, thread started March 31, 2015
*Sad Puppygate continues, thread started April 1, 2015
*Hugopocalypse Now, thread started April 4, 2015
*Hugopocalypse 2: FULL OF BEES Edition, thread started April 6, 2015
*Hugocalypse III, thread started April 7, 2015 (yes, misspelled)
*Hugopocalypse IV: The Wrath of GRRM, thread started April 10, 2015
*Hugopocalypse Ongoing, thread started April 15, 2015
*Hugopocalypse: They Shoot Hugos, Don't They?, thread started April 17, 2015
*Hugopocalypse: Over 9000 Puppies, thread started April 25, 2015
Black Gate:
* A Detailed Explanation (April 4, 2015) 
* Black Gate Nominated for a Hugo Award in a Terrible Ballot (April 5, 2015) 
* Sad Puppies and Super Puppies: The 2015 Hugo Train Wreck (April 7, 2015) 
* Black Gate Withdraws From Hugo Consideration, John ONeill (April 19, 2015) 
George RR Martin:
*Puppygate (April 8, 2015) 
*Me and the Hugos (April 8, 2015) 
*Blogging for Rockets (April 9, 2015) 
*Where's the Beef? (April 9, 2015) 
*What Now? (April 9, 2015) 
*A Reply to Larry Correia (April 13, 2015) 
*Larry Correia, Once Again (April 15, 2015) 
*On the Darkling Plain (April 15, 2015) 
*Once More, Into the Kennels (April 17, 2015) 
*Black Gate Withdraws (April 19, 2015) 
dreamingaboutotherworlds:
* Biased Opinion - Inventing a Science Fiction Past to Complain About the Science Fiction Present (February 26, 2015) 
* Biased Opinion - Gender and the Hugo Awards (February 10, 2015) 
* Biased Opinion - Sad Puppy Falsehoods, Tantrums, and Failures (April 7, 2015) 
John Scalzi:
* Thoughts On the Hugo Awards, 2014 (August 17, 2014)
*A Note About the Hugo Nominations This Year (April 4, 2015) 
*Human Shields, Cabals and Poster Boys (April 7, 2015) 
* The Latest Hugo Conspiracy Nonsense Involving Me, John Scalzi (April 15, 2015) 
Hugo history:
*Science Fiction's White Boys' Club Strikes Back, New Republic (April 17, 2015)
===Post 2015 Hugos===
*The Final Lessons From This Year's Hugo Awards Clusterfrak at io9 (September 1, 2015)
* , by Amy Wallace at Wired.com (August 23, 2015)
Fail_fandomanon:
*Hugopocalypse: Award 451º (2015-08-22)
*Hugopocalypse: The Breakdown (2015-08-23)
*Hugopocalypse: Old Yeller (2015-08-25)
*Hugopocalypse: All over but the barking (2015-08-25)
*Puppywatch (2015-08-27)
*Puppywatch: When Canines Go Bad (2015-08-28)
*Puppywatch: Whine on, you crazy diamond (2015-08-30)
*Scalzi post-Hugo discussion (2015-09-04)
*The Compleat Litter of Puppy Roundup Titles File 770 (2015) - compilation of all the round up articles posted about Puppygate.
===2016===
* Puppies All the Way Down at metafilter
* Measuring The Rabid Puppies Slate’s Impact on the Final Hugo Ballot at File770 (April 26, 2016)
* Hugopocalypse 2: Ballot Roundup at FFA
* Gum on the Shoe of History, or, Why the Hugos Are Still Not Destroyed by John Scalzi (August 22, 2016)
* Amanda Marcotte, The alt-right attacks sci-fi: How the Hugo Awards got hijacked by Trumpian-style culture warriors. Salon, August 23, 2016.
===2021===
* "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter", aka "Helicopter Story", a short story by Isabel Fall, has been nominated for a Hugo. It can be read at archive.is. It originally appeared in Clarkesworld for January 2020. Ms. Fall, a transgender woman, took an internet phrase meant to satirize and condemn transgender people, and worked it into a classic what-if about the U.S. military actually reassigning troops' genders and sexual identifications to their tasks and the machines they operate. There was little or no information about Ms. Fall under that name online or anywhere else, as she was maintaining strict anonymity during her transition. Because the "attack helicopter" phrase is traditionally used by misogynistic trolls and 4chan/Something Awful goons, many readers feared that Ms. Fall was a transphobic "straight white dude", a Sad Puppies troll or even a neo-Nazi. Clarkesworld editors confirmed that Ms. Fall was sincere and genuine, but the story was withdrawn, then retitled. Ms. Fall considered suicide, and has since decided not to proceed with her transition and resume her male identity. Emily VanDerWerff, "How Twitter can ruin a life". Vox, June 20, 2021.Princess Weekes, "Devastating Report on the Backlash to a Trans Writer’s Story Shows That Mob Rule Has Consequences." The Mary Sue, July 2, 2021.
==Other Resources==
* Sad Puppies at Wikipedia
==References==
Category:Science Fiction Fandom
Category:2015 Events
Category:2016 Events
Category:Fandom Wars
Category:2018 Featured Articles
Category:Science Fiction Fandom Occurrences