Black Gate

If you’re feeling a certain degree of Hugo controversy exhaustion, no one could blame you. The past few days have seen an explosion of debate and analysis, here and elsewhere, since the winners of the 2015 Hugo Awards were announced late Saturday night.

If you’re a little late to the party, or just not following events all that closely this year, the high volume of virtual high-fives and angry rebukes ricocheting around every corner of the genre is probably pretty confusing. Figuring it all out at this late date probably seems a little daunting. I would have agreed, until I stumbled across this summary of the entire affair by Camestros Felapton, “The True History of the Great Puppy Kerfuffle of 2015,” a marvel of compact narrative. I do believe it has captured virtually every event of importance in the whole affair, with the sole exception of Amal El-Mohtar’s June 2013 call to expel Theodore Beale from SFWA, which arguably triggered Vox Day’s two year scheme for revenge against the entire industry. Here’s Felapton’s intro:

This is literally a narrative as it is a story shown over time with a plot and complications but it is also a subjective mapping of headspace. It looks more serious than my map but the same caveats apply – it is how I perceive the kerfuffle and while it is made out of truthful bricks (I believe) the structure itself is a fabricated thing. Same warnings about false balance apply and also the timeline has the issue of stirring up old arguments.

Suggestions and corrections are welcome within the limit of not wanting to re-kerfuff old kerfuffles and certainly not wanting to re-open old wounds.

Major sources: Mike Glyer’s puppy round ups, Jim C Hines’s article “Puppies in Their Own Words”, The Hugo Awards blog, and the blogs of Larry Correia, Vox Day, Brad Torgersen and John C Wright.

See the thing in its mind-boggling entirety here.

As I predicted in my last post, there’s been no shortage of discussion regarding the Hugo Award ceremony Saturday night. From the non-Puppy contingent there’s been plenty of smug satisfaction and schadenfreude, and from from the Puppies there’s been the expected complaining about intolerance from the evil left, and dark threats about next year.

Sadly, I haven’t seen a lot of calls to come together now that the fireworks are (largely) over. Perhaps the most insightful comment I read (and I read a lot) came from author James Enge, who wrote:

Let me say this about the puppies — rabid, sad, or otherwise: they were right to act, to participate in something that mattered to them. Fandom was caught napping on the nominations, but not on the final voting. We should rise to the puppies’ challenge (and example) and participate in the nominations for next year’s ‪Hugos‬.

If you take the time to read though the various posts and comments from both sides (and I admit I stayed up very late Saturday night and Sunday morning, doing exactly that), you’ll find pretty much what you expect. Both sides talking past each other. A lot of hurt feelings, and a sense (probably accurate) that the other side isn’t listening. No wonder both sides are talking exclusively to their own small audience — they’re the only ones listening.

Only the most hardened Puppy kickers refuse to acknowledge that the Puppies have a point about the fiction they love being shoved aside for major awards. And for the most part, the puppies have (grudgingly) admitted that they could have fielded a better slate. I suppose that’s understanding, of a sort. So there’s that. Most of the grumpy talk in the past 48 hours hasn’t really bothered me.

With one exception. There’s one class of complaints that drives me absolutely batty, because it seems to me to arise from willful ignorance, an overabundance of pride, or raw, simple stupidity. And that’s the anguished cry from some Puppy nominees who didn’t win, and who put the blame squarely on the entire industry.

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