Garwulf’s Corner #27: Revisiting the Night the Hugo Awards Burned
Originally published February 24, 2016
The Dragon Awards were created, the Sad Puppies campaigns came to an end, and the Hugo Defenders clique patted themselves on the back for a battle well fought. To this day, the fact that they left the field a smoking ruin while making voter suppression arguments that would place them on the wrong side of a civil rights movement seems to have escaped them.
WAS IT ALL a terrible dream? Did I really see authors, editors, and publishers I know and respect conduct slander campaigns? Did those who would defend the Hugo Awards from outsiders really torch it and cheer as it burned rather than see a group of fans they disagreed with get their way? Was it all real?
I wish I could ask those questions, but I can’t — I, and the rest of the world, watched it all happen. But there are a couple of questions I can ask: what was it all for? And, what will happen next?
In a few ways, the Hugo Awards seem a really odd place to have a culture war. As conventions go, Worldcon is tiny, bringing in a few thousand. In comparison, the ComiCons can bring in hundreds of thousands of fans and have encompassed science fiction and fantasy fandom for years. The media doesn’t gather at Worldcon to find out what is happening next in SF and fantasy media — they go to ComiCon.
That said, most SF and fantasy readers are familiar with the term “Hugo Award Winner” and “Hugo Award Nominee” — the big publishers plant it on the cover of any author who manages to make the shortlist, regardless of how long ago it might have been. But whether this actually drives sales today is hard to tell, and some of the big break-outs, such as Hugh Howey’s Wool, didn’t step anywhere near the Hugos.
Perhaps most telling was the moment when one of the Rabid Puppies tried to bring the GamerGate movement into the Hugo Award battle…only to have GamerGate look at it, shrug, and move on to what they considered more important things. The more perspective one gets, the more the culture war over the Hugo Awards seems not even a storm in a teacup, but in a thimble.
But if the Hugos are such a niche matter today, why did a culture war happen? And why was it presented as a battle for the soul of science fiction?
The answer lies in prestige and history. The Hugo Awards may not be a big deal today, but they used to be. Only a few decades ago, they were huge.
Science Fiction was a smaller world then. The number of authors and publishers were fewer, and it was physically possible to read almost everything published in the genre in any given year. To win a Hugo Award was to be recognized as the best that was published that year, and people were watching. Being able to put the words “Hugo Award” on a book cover would drive sales through the roof, and the books and stories that won in any given year were very likely to influence what was written after.
And then there was Worldcon.
I remember my Worldcon experience, and it was a blast. My first print book, The EverQuest Companion, was launched at Torcon in Toronto in 2003. Even then, Worldcon was still the convention to top all conventions. Worldcon was where you went to find the legends.
Worldcon was where I had a cup of tea with Terry Pratchett, who was as funny in person as he was in his books, and a snack with Robert Silverberg. I sat with David Brin in the Green Room and had a discussion about whether human beings were evolved enough to handle driving cars. I passed and said hello to Neil Gaiman in the hall. I moderated a panel on military SF where Harry Harrison — the author of Bill the Galactic Hero and The Stainless Steel Rat — turned the entire panel into an uproariously funny one man show about his time in the American military. And then, to top it off, I got to see the Hugo Awards, where I watched Robert J. Sawyer, who had been one of the first to welcome me into the community of authors, win a rocket for best novel…and faked him out after by looking at the award and asking him who “Robert J. Sawwer” was.
I met and walked with the legends, and with the authors who made the genre what it was. That’s what Worldcon was a dozen years ago. For lovers of literary SF that’s probably what it still is (I haven’t been to one since Toronto, so I can no longer speak from first hand experience).
The Hugos were indeed once worth fighting for, and capable of steering the course of the genre. But, that was the past. Today, it has been supplanted by the new media and growing juggernaut of ComiCon. The prestige may be present and accounted for, but the influence is not.
They are also somewhat behind the times. There have been a number of Hugo-worthy video games (Deus Ex: Human Revolution comes immediately to mind), none of which have seen recognition. Likewise, a number of big successes have come not from traditional publishing, but from small indie publishers and self-published work (for example, the aforementioned Wool).
Now that a culture war has been fought over them, the paramount question is, “what happens now?” This is not a simple matter to address. This time last year, there were three main groups active in this issue — what I once called the “established clique” (but which my mother-in-law better named the “Hugo defenders”), the Sad Puppies, and the Rabid Puppies. Today, there are more.
For one thing, there are the spectators, most of whom didn’t have the Hugo Awards on their radars until this culture war broke out. Their reactions will probably depend on their politics — those who are left-leaning will likely be relieved the Puppies were shut out, those who were right-leaning will probably be offended, and it is possible that a large, silent majority will have looked on, and then walked away in disgust at the mud slinging. Then you have the authors who were thrown under the bus — some of them were aligned with the Rabid Puppies, but a number were not, and a lot of them probably have hard feelings about it all, particularly after the crowd cheered them being shut out and they received an award of a big asterisk (which in sports represents results that should not really be considered official) that looked like an asshole.
A lot will depend this year on what the Hugo Defenders do. If they begin the culture war again, this may be the end of the Hugo Awards. The simple fact is that the prestige of any given award is largely dependant on people wanting to win it. If the primary voting pool will shut you out to the point of burning the awards down if you were nominated by the wrong person, it won’t take long before nobody outside of the Hugo Defender clique even wants a rocket.
(I count myself among those who have turned away — after what happened last year, the idea of being nominated for a Hugo Award, regardless of how unlikely that may be, makes me feel physically ill.)
For the Hugo Awards, the key to redemption lies in demonstrating that last year was an anomaly, and that authors won’t be thrown under the bus next time over their nominators. This leads us to the Sad and Rabid Puppies. The new goal of the Sad Puppies is to increase the Hugo voting pool by entire orders of magnitude — making it once again representative of SF fandom as a whole and preventing any slate from ever dominating it again. The Rabid Puppies under Vox Day are likely to attempt to game the Hugos into another repeat, aiming to provoke as many “no award”s as possible.
In the end, the real answer to what happens next lies with the Hugo Defenders, and what they are going to do. If they ignore Vox Day as a troll and come to peace with the fact that not everybody will want the same stories on the ballot as they do, there is hope. A Hugo Awards ceremony with a shortlist drawn from fandom as a whole, and where only the quality of the stories matters in the voting, will do a great deal to restore the prestige, and even the relevance, of the award. On the other hand, another culture war, especially if the Sad Puppies succeed in widening the voter pool to something representative of all SF fandom, may very well be the finishing blow.
In the end, time will tell. It always does.
