The Huge Awards is the highest award in science fiction and fantasy. This year, it is center stage in SF/F’s own GamerGate. Through vigorous campaigning and buying voter-only memberships to the World Science Fiction convention, a movement that seems eerily similar to the GamerGate of last year swept the nomination ballot in opposition of diversity in science fiction and fantasy, edging out women, persons of color, and persons of the LGBT+ community and stories about themselves in an effort to “take back” the genres from “liberal elitist” conspiracy. Though their methods are within the rules of the award, it’s still smacks as somehow wrong and their motives are completely unsavory.
Brad Torgerson, the leader of the three-year-old Sad Puppies movement, wrote on his blog:
The book has a spaceship on the cover, but is it really going to be a story about space exploration and pioneering derring-do? Or is the story merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings?
There’s a sword-swinger on the cover, but is it really about knights battling dragons? Or are the dragons suddenly the good guys, and the sword-swingers are the oppressive colonizers of Dragon Land?
A planet, framed by a galactic backdrop. Could it be an actual bona fide space opera? Heroes and princesses and laser blasters? No, wait. It’s about sexism and the oppression of women.
Finally, a book with a painting of a person wearing a mechanized suit of armor! Holding a rifle! War story ahoy! Nope, wait. It’s actually about gay and transgender issues.
Or it could be about the evils of capitalism and the despotism of the wealthy.
Do you see what I am trying to say here?
Our once reliable packaging has too often defrauded our readership. It’s as true with the Hugos as it is with the larger genre as a whole. Our readers wanted Nutty Nuggets because (for decades) Nutty Nuggets is what we gave them. Maybe some differences here and there, but nothing so outrageously different as to make our readers look at the cover and say, “What the hell is this crap??”
What I don’t understand is why Torgerson, and those his movement’s values speak to, believe that stories about racial prejudice and exploitation, sexism and oppression of women, gay and transgender issues do not have a place in science fiction and fantasy. Why is anything he’s described mutually exclusive? Is writing about sexism and the oppression of women automatically disclude a story from being a space opera? Is a story about gay and transgender issues automatically not a war story?
The Hugo Awards have never looked less like the future of anything.
— Joe Abercrombie (@LordGrimdark) April 4, 2015
The Sad Puppies movement has been called out by major entertainment outlets–from Entertainment Weekly (who were forced by the movement to print a “correction,” but more on that later) to the Daily Beast to the Atlantic to the Daily Dot to Slate to A Song of Ice and Fire‘s George R.R. Martin–as racist, sexist, homophobic, and fearful of diversity in science fiction and fantasy literature. And I agree.
Torgerson feels otherwise. The slate Sad Puppies pushed, he states, includes many women and persons of color, and he doesn’t care for what their orientation is. He himself is also married to a nonwhite woman. Therefore, the movement isn’t against women and nonwhite authors. The Daily Beast quickly punches a hole in this argument using sheer numbers: “in a ballot with 85 entries on it they can name 11 women and/or people of color they’ve nominated, which in the year 2015 is apparently somehow impressive. (And because we all know using women and people of color as a shield for your own actions isn’t gross at all.)”
It does not help that Theodore Beale, the infamous Vox Day, GamerGate supporter, blatant racist, anti-woman’s suffrage, anti-working woman and pro-rape, amongst other things, supports Sad Puppies.
Even if Torgerson feels that he is supporting women, persons of color, and persons of the LGBT+ community, it does not change the fact that he and his movement is opposed to seeing these people in science fiction fantasy, their issues taking center stage, and these novels winning an award. He is only fine with these people if their works do not reflect themselves as people nor focus on the struggles of their community, only if they remain silent.
If Torgerson and the Sad Puppies don’t want to see these people in our stories about the future, it only says what kind of future he wants these people to have. He wants them to be invisible, silent, nonexistent. If these people are invisible in our fictional futures, then it will only encourage the creation of a real future where they do not exist. This movement, and all its cousins, threaten the future and are dangerous. There is no other way to see it.
