That image is from issue #70 of Doom Patrol, published by Vertigo in 1993 and written by Rachel Pollack. The woman in the frog mask is Kate Godwin, a.k.a. Coagula, a trans woman superhero. The words are, of course, mine. If you’d like to know more about the villain, Codpiece, or indeed Coagula, that issue is available on Comixology.

I’m using that as an illustration to remind people that angry, entitled white men are by no means new. Indeed, if you want an even better illustration of the type, go and read Chip Delany’s Triton. Bron is possibly the ur-MRA character, though he does come up with a far more inventive solution to his inability to get laid.

As to this Puppygate thing, let’s see if I have understood it properly.

Postulate: for the past two decades the Hugo Awards have been controlled by an evil cabal of commie, pinko, faggot feminists led by Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden. They use their power over the SF&F industry to ensure that the commie, pinko, faggot feminist writers they publish via Tor Books dominate the Hugos.

Fact: John C. Wright is published by Tor Books.

Fact: This year John C. Wright has five works as Hugo finalists.

Q.E.D..

Or maybe not. I don’t want to go through the whole Puppy 101 here. If you want details, Mike Glyer has them (and he deserves to be a finalist for the Fan Writer Hugo again next year for the sterling work he is doing keeping up with the torrent of comment).

Actually the whole thing is a bit of a mystery to me, because for the past five years or so I’ve heard little save how the Hugos are a conspiracy run by an evil right wing cabal headed by Old White Men such as Kevin and myself. It is actually a bit of a relief to be told that we are commie, pinko, faggot feminists after all.

By the way, please do remember those accusations. Lots of people are weighing in on the Puppygate issue. They all seem to have advice as to what you, the voters, should do about it. Before taking their advice, do bear in mind what they have said about the Hugos in the past. If they are the sort of person who has dissed the Hugos at every possible opportunity, and they are now telling you that the only thing to do is adopt a scorched earth policy and kill off the awards completely, you might want to be a bit suspicious about their advice.

For most of us, however, the Hugos are a thing that we have some affection for, and Puppygate has clearly got people riled up. I must admit that from my point of view the constant carping, not to mention outright greed, of some people claiming to push a diversity agenda had totally put me off. I simply couldn’t be bothered with all of that nonsense anymore. Puppygate, however, has awoken something interesting in fandom. Right now I am more optimistic about the Hugos than I have been for a long time. Let me explain.

The title of this post was inspired by a podcast that Kevin guested on. One of the hosts of the show was complaining that, no matter what fandom did in response to Puppygate, VD was bound to win. I thought that was wrong, so I started thinking about who the winners and losers were in all of this.

The most obvious losers are, of course, Correia and Torgersen. Firstly they have been portrayed in large numbers of articles all over the mainstream media as a couple of bad losers who, when they didn’t get the share of the Hugo cake they felt they were entitled to, invited a bunch of thugs (VD and GamerGate) to come and piss all over the cake so that no one could have it. Secondly, as has been pointed out by many people, they have been totally pwned by VD. And they daren’t try to dissociate themselves from him too strongly because if they do he’ll come after them next.

Some other authors are losers, of course. There are some fine works that could have been finalists for this year’s Hugos had not the Puppies intervened. But then again every year there are far more fine works that are not finalists than fine works that are. The Hugos are a very tough contest, especially in the fiction categories. Doing good work is not a guarantee of a rocket. That, of course, is a point that appears to have escaped the Puppies. It must be so sad when someone takes the silver spoon of patriarchy out of your mouth and forces you to compete with everyone else, no matter how brown, female or queer they might be.

Has fandom lost? Well obviously if VD and his pals win a bunch of Hugos then we will have done this year. But the final ballot hasn’t happened yet. I understand that Sasquan took an additional 1350 supporting memberships in the two days after the Hugo finalists were announced. I suspect that more memberships are still being bought. Sasquan is on course to be the first Worldcon ever to have more supporting memberships than attending, and probably the third largest Worldcon ever. Some people, I know, are convinced that all of those new members are VD loyalists who will vote as he directs. Personally I’m not so sure.

It’s not just those 1350 or so new members (presumably all voters) that we need to think about either. Given the way that nominating eligibility works (members of last year, this year and next year’s Worldcon), there must have been at least 12,000 people eligible to nominate. Only 2,122 people actually did so. And in the Puppy-dominated short fiction categories the largest number of nominating ballots was 1,174.

What would have happened if all 12,000 eligible WSFS members had cast nominating ballots? Well in Novel, where there were 1,827 ballots cast, three non-Puppy works became finalists.

It is certainly true that a small number of people voting for a slate has far more influence on the nominating ballot than a larger number of people voting independently. But there is a limit. With enough people voting, even a slate becomes less effective.

So my first point is this: VD didn’t win the Hugos, we (collectively) gave them to him by failing to use our votes. Obviously there are good reasons why people don’t participate even though they have the right to do so, but if we want to fix the Puppy problem one of our main priorities ought to be to increase the level of participation in Hugo voting. I do, as you might expect, have ideas about how to do that, which I’ll address in a later post. For now, however, fannish outrage at Puppygate is doing a fine job of encouraging people to vote.

My second point, of course, is that if enough of us vote in the final ballot then he won’t win that either.

I understand that VD has threatened that if he doesn’t win the Hugos this year he’ll come back harder next year. Well, let him try. How many loyal followers does he have? A few hundred, at most, I suspect. There are lots more people who enjoy conservative-themed fiction, but I’m pretty sure that most of them have discerning taste.

There is, I understand, a great deal of debate about how to vote in the final ballot. Do we vote as normal? Do we put known Puppies below No Award? Do we put everyone on the Puppy slates below No Award? Or do we vote No Award for everything?

Well, your vote belongs to you. How you use it is up to you, not to anyone claiming to be an arbiter of fannish morality. All I can say is what I’m intending to do.

I’ll start by noting that there is one category (Fan Artist) for which the puppies didn’t put up a single candidate. There is the possibility of the first ever Finnish winner of a Hugo Award. There are other deserving candidates too (hi Spring!). I’m certainly voting in this one.

There are some really good works in Novel and Graphic Novel too, and anyone who thinks I am forgoing the opportunity to vote for Groot and Rocket has got another think coming (though actually I’ll probably put Winter Soldier first because it is a seriously good film). In Fancast I’m torn between my Aussie pals, Alex, Alisa & Tansy, and Bristol’s local heroes, Emma & Pete.

I’m not going to go through all of the categories in detail, but I do want to note that just because something was on a Puppy slate it doesn’t mean that it didn’t deserve a nomination in its own right. Guardians of the Galaxy was a Puppy nominee, despite the fact that the principal villain, Ronan the Accuser, is a right-wing religious fanatic who wants to kill off everyone he deems morally inferior. I have been constantly surprised that Jim Butcher hasn’t appeared on Hugo ballots, given how many books he sells, and he was a Guest of Honour at this year’s Eastercon.

Then again, No Award is available as an option if you think that a work is genuinely not Hugo material, or doesn’t deserve to be on the Hugo ballot for some other reason. I may well be using it. John C. Wright, sadly, has not got better through his career. Some of you might remember what I thought of him in the days when he was the Great White Hope of Libertarian SF.

I understand that VD claims he will have won if he is beaten by No Award because that will “prove” that the results are fixed. The believability of such a claim will depend a lot on how many people vote.

By the way, Puppies, when I first started getting nominated for Hugos, a whole bunch of angry people from Fanzine Fandom started going on about how I had cheated by using immoral campaigning tactics, how I should have been ruled ineligible anyway, and that there should be a campaign to place me below No Award. I was even officially blacklisted from programming at the 2004 Worldcon. I won Fanzine that year, and a rant denouncing my win was put on the Worldcon’s official website¹. Some of them, I think, are still demanding that the “Hugo Committee” correct the results and remove my wins from the record. Frankly, you Puppies are amateurs when it comes to being hated by people who think they own fandom.

I like to think that I won because the voters liked what I was doing. However, I have learned from the latest Galactic Suburbia that, according to Puppy supporters, an Evil Feminist can only win a Hugo if she has a “glittery hoo ha”. A little Googling revealed this means that the poor male members of Worldcon were so desperate to have sex with me that they voted me four Hugos even though I didn’t deserve them. I must admit that I hadn’t noticed this level of general lust, but my ego has benefitted significantly from the discovery.

Given the number of people voting, I am fairly confident that there will be some very fine winners of Hugo Awards this year. There will also be some results I disagree with, but then again the works I nominate rarely become finalists so I am used to that. People need to remember that if some Hugos are won by very popular works that they don’t particularly like, that does not mean that the awards are “broken”.

The real winners of Puppygate, however, are science fiction, and the Hugo Awards themselves.

Why? Well to start with look at all of the press coverage we have got. It is still going on now, more than two weeks after the finalists were announced. No amount of money could have bought that level of attention.

What’s more, most of the coverage is broadly sympathetic. The message has been that there are awards for science fiction that are deeply loved by fans and authors alike, and that those awards have been hijacked by a group of right wing fanatics. A lot of the coverage has explained that diversity has been increasing in the SF&F community, and that this is why a bunch of bigots are so angry.

If that wasn’t enough, we have a whole bunch of top authors writing about their support for the Hugos, and we have hundreds, possibly thousands, of fans signing up to vote.

Thanks Puppies, there’s no way we could have managed all of this without you.

Finally, lots of people have been talking about the need for major change in how the Hugos are run. Normally the WSFS Business Meeting is viewed as a massive snore-fest. This year the eyes of the world will be upon it. Obviously Kevin has a huge responsibility as Chair of the meeting, but I have every confidence in his ability to do a brilliant job. The end result could be a number of really valuable changes that will make the awards much more relevant.

What those changes should be will be the subject of a later post.

I’m closing comments on this, mainly because I don’t have the time to deal with the war that is likely to erupt in the comments if I don’t. There are plenty of other places where partisans can throw insults at each other. If you have genuine questions for me, I’m not that hard to find.

(1) Thanks again to con chair, Deb Geisler, for ordering the web team to take it down, though the matter should never have got that far up the chain of command.

Monday was one of the most unpleasant days I can remember in all my involvement with Worldcon. Just as I was about to set out for an evening appointment (opening the Out Stories Bristol exhibition on another stage of its road trip around the South West), a tweet came in linking to a blog post that accused this year’s Hugos of fraudulently denying a work a place on the ballot, in direct contravention of the rules of the Awards, the explanation for this travesty being rampant misogyny on behalf of the Hugo Administrators. I had to go and catch a train, and Kevin was in the middle of a long drive across Nevada, so neither of us could do much to address this. I did have some Twitter access on the train, and I spent the journey watching in despair as one after another high profile figure in the publishing industry re-tweeted this allegation uncritically. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, an absolute fucking disaster.

Where did this all come from? Well, back in 2008 John Scalzi edited an anthology called METAtropolis. It had a bunch of really good people in it: Elizabeth Bear, Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell and Karl Schroeder. As an anthology, of course, it wasn’t eligible for a Hugo, though the individual stories should each have been eligible. The interesting thing about METAtropolis, however, was that it was published as an audio book only (initially, a print version followed the next year). So someone came up with the wizard wheeze of getting it nominated in Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form. After all, an audio book is a dramatic performance, right, not text?

At this time we were still fighting the whole “form v content” battle. There were still people who insisted that an ebook and a paper book were different things, and should have different Hugo categories (and, of course, that fanzines published electronically were not real fanzines and should not be eligible for Hugos). Audio was a whole different kettle of fish. Where did audio books belong? No one knew.

There was a great deal of online chat about the issue, with many people championing the cause of METAtropolis. As a result the Hugo Administrators had little choice but to accept the nomination. I was OK about this, if the argument was that the audio book was indeed some sort of dramatic production with performers and a producer, but the way the work appeared on the ballot, listing authors and an editor, and ignoring the producer, made it clear that a decision had been made that an audio book, of any form, was a Dramatic Presentation.

By the way, in researching this I noticed that Mark Kelly’s otherwise excellent Science Fiction Awards Database does not include any nominations for Dramatic Presentations. That’s not just METAtropolis. Paul Cornell’s nominations for Doctor Who are missing too. I’m not sure why this is, and it is not necessarily Mark’s fault, but it does seem odd to me.

Fast forward now to 2013, and another audio-only production appears in the nominations. It is “Lady Astronaut of Mars” by Mary Robinette Kowal. This time the voters put it in the Novelette category. The administrators looked at it, looked at the precedent set by METAtropolis, and decided that it really ought to belong in the Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form category instead where, sadly, it didn’t have enough votes to make the ballot.

Correspondence between Mary and this year’s head Hugo Administrator, Todd Dashoff, is available at Mary’s website.

What Todd and his colleagues decided doesn’t surprise me, especially when I saw that Mary’s initial blog post about the story included directions for performing the characters. If anyone’s audio book story was going to be theatrical, I would guess it would be Mary’s. But there are still clearly grey areas in the rules.

What did surprise me is that John Scalzi was apparently told, by the 2009 Administrator, that the individual stories in METAtropolis were also eligible in the various short fiction categories, in their audio form. In retrospect that seems very odd to me, and John did write about it, but I suspect that piece of information didn’t get passed down through the years. In any case, none of the stories was nominated, so no actual precedent was set.

So we have a complex issue here whereby a work has been ruled a Dramatic Presentation, based on precedent, and moved to that category, where it failed to get enough nominations to make the ballot. There are a lot of issues around exactly how and why an audio book might or might not be considered in a fiction category. I don’t want to go into those now, because there is a more important issue at hand.

What happened on Monday was this post, which picks up the story. It follows up some of the complications of audio book eligibility, but despite this it concludes that Mary’s exclusion from the ballot was a case of outright fraud on the part of the Hugo Administrators, and says so, very loudly.

Why? Because everyone knows that those Worldcon people are a bunch of misogynist, racist, ageist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic shitbags, of course. What else do you expect them to do?

Also, just in case any of the guilty parties happen to have some sort of excuse handy for what they have done, the author of the post explained that what they were guilty of was subconscious misogyny. That is, they may not be aware of what they are doing, but being misogynist, racist, ageist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic shitbags they were guilty anyway. It is a sort of Original Sin. You can’t escape.

Quite apart from the accusations leveled at the Hugos, this sort of thing upsets me a lot. That’s because I have spent quite a lot of my life being told that I do not know my own mind, and that I have all sorts of subconscious neuroses and perversions that lead me to think that I am a woman, whereas ‘really’ I’m not, because other people say so. I cannot begin to tell you how annoying that is.

Also, the assumption that everyone involved with the Hugos is some sort of balding, bearded, beer-bellied old man (probably a Christian Fundamentalist Libertarian with a collection of guns even bigger than his collection of Heinlein novels) gets old very quickly. Sadly I know what happens if I’m getting yelled at by some feminist online. If I stick my hand up and say, “excuse me, female here”, someone will tell me, “but you are ‘really’ a man”. I can’t fight this sort of thing, I just end up getting insulted and dismissed.

Back to the issue in hand, however, and there is one thing that Todd & co. did not do well. Given that they found it necessary to move Mary’s story between categories, they should have had the decency to explain it all to her on the night, in person, not force her to exchange emails with them after the convention. In the absence of any other information, that seems plain rude to me.

What they should not have done, despite all of the yelling, is tell anyone before the vote what they were doing. Why? Well, what would happen if that sort of thing were standard practice? Let us suppose, for a moment, that the person in question was not Mary, who is a calm and reasonable sort, but John Ringo, who has recently been claiming that he too has been unfairly denied nominations.

Suppose, then, that a Hugo Administrator wrote to Mr. Ringo explaining that his story could not be considered as a novelette but would instead be in the BDP: Short category. Is it possible, do you think, that Mr. Ringo might kick up a big stink and demand that the decision be reversed? And that there would be a massive online flame war as a result? And that the whole of that year’s ballot would be tainted by accusations of cheating? I think it might be. Which is why Hugo Administrators are very reluctant to deal with this sort of issue beforehand.

Remember also that these days the vast majority of votes come in electronically in the day or two before balloting closes. Even if the Administrators had wanted to warn Mary of the problem, there would have been only a couple of days between them finding out that there was an issue to be dealt with and the end of voting.

This brings us to what I think is a better gender analysis of the whole issue. When John came out with METAtropolis he knew that there were questions of eligibility, so he talked about them openly. Some of the authors did too. The net result was that they proactively created a climate of opinion in which the Hugo Administrators had little choice but to allow the nomination in BDP: Long. It was a very boy thing to do.

Mary, on the other hand, appears to have been fairly quiet about the whole thing. I don’t recall her pushing hard for a nomination, and certainly not doing so specifically in Novelette. She appears to have politely sat back and let the process take its course. Also, even if she had done so, she would have got fair less exposure for her campaign simply because people pay less attention to what women say.

Now, of course, it is a different matter. The story was made available in print this year and should be eligible for Novelette next year as normal. Everyone now knows about Mary not getting a nomination this year, and I am pretty sure that she’ll remind the voters when the time comes. For the reasons explained above, I doubt that Loncon 3’s Hugo Administrators will say publicly what they intend to do, but they would be very foolish not to allow the nomination.

Well, I say that. Others appear to disagree, and think it is inevitable that the story will once again be unfairly excluded, this time by Loncon 3, directly reversing the decision made by Lone Star Con 3. Why? Because misogynist, racist, ageist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic shitbags, of course. It is only natural that they will do the most Evil thing possible.

By the way, if you suspect that the above means that we are slowly drifting into a situation whereby borderline issues of eligibility for the Hugos are not determined by the WSFS Constitution, or by the Hugo Administrators, but by whether or not the authors concerned can mount an effective enough advance online campaign to force the Administrators’ hands, well, I suspect you are right. And I’m not sure it is very healthy either.

Other aspects of the story are of some interest. The post contains some creative interpretations of the WSFS Constitution that will help frame correcting amendments, and which the Nit-Picking and Fly-Specking Committee (yes, there is such a thing) will want to take a look at to prevent any further misunderstanding. The post also quotes the Hugo Awards website as saying, “There is no requirement that a work be published on paper.” I do believe that I wrote that, and of course I was talking about digital books at the time. Kevin and I need to go through the site with a fine toothed comb looking for other potential issues like that.

Of course it would have been nice if the author of that post had come to us with questions. The Hugo website does have an email address, and we are happy to answer enquiries. But I guess there was no point in her bothering. After all, we are misogynist, racist, ageist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic shitbags and we would only have lied to her, if only subconsciously.

Meanwhile the upshot of this is that it appears that all audio books are doubly eligible, as both stories and dramatic presentations, provided that the text is published as text somewhere. The net result of the ruling is that lots of people are suddenly eligible for more Hugos, and a whole lot more works are going to go into the BDP categories. Odd, then, that the whole thing is being spun as a means of denying people eligibility.

Then again, fandom is ever creative. One of the responses to Monday’s debacle was that we should add a Best Audio Book category. Or perhaps several of them, dependent on length. Because, of course, if you have a great deal of confusion as to which of two categories a work is eligible for, the right thing to do is apparently to add a third category it might be eligible for.

*sigh*

It always upsets me when we have this sort of confusion affecting eligibility. I wish we could have nice, clean, simple rules, but the real world doesn’t work like that. Nor does fandom. I did once think that we could get audio accepted as just another format, but then we had the Best Fancast Hugo, which put format ahead of content, so the whole thing is up in the air again.

It upsets me far more, however, to see the Hugos dragged through the mud like this. Individual rants are fine, but having those rants re-tweeted uncritically by people with vast numbers of followers does untold damage. Only a small fraction of the people who saw those tweets will read the offending post. Only a fraction of those will ever read Mary’s post with the explanation, or this one of mine. Most people will say, ”too long, didn’t read”. The one thing that almost everyone will have taken away from this debacle is, “the Hugos are corrupt and misogynist”.

The bottom line here is that if you run awards, any awards, it is important that the public have respect for the people involved in making important decisions. That’s the same whether you have a jury, or a group of Administrators who interpret the rules and count the votes. If you have a situation where, any time you have a disputed decision, the immediate reaction is not to treat that decision as viable but contentious, not even as a lapse in judgment, but as evidence of a deep moral failing on the part of those responsible, well then your awards are worthless. And that, dear readers, is pretty much where the Hugos ended up on Monday.

Why is this my problem? Well, Kevin and I are both on the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee. While we have no say in what Hugo Administrators do (and some of them have been quite hostile to our work), it is our job to ensure that the public has confidence in what they do. We need to be able to explain the rules clearly, and give people confidence that those rules are being applied fairly. In that task, we have failed utterly. If we were working for a proper corporation we’d be finding our belongings in a cardboard box on the sidewalk outside the office around now.

I don’t think that the speed of the Internet is an issue here. The willingness of people to believe anything bad about the Hugos, regardless of how absurd or fantastical the accusation might be, is clear evidence of a much deeper problem that we’ve failed to deal with effectively.

I really don’t know what to do about it. I don’t have the sort of platform that can counter such allegations. Neither does Kevin, or anyone else involved with Worldcon. Besides, as a misogynist, racist, ageist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic shitbag, and an old white man to boot, I am not to be believed. The whole, “guilty until proved innocent, and actually guilty anyway because I am the sort of person who is guilty simply because of who I am,” is incredibly wearing.

I guess I’ll do what I can. I will certainly help Mary frame some motions for next year’s Business Meeting. But I doubt that will help much with the larger issue. I don’t think anything can. I’ll have more to say about this tomorrow.