cos | Hugos and Puppies

I'd like to read some of the Hugo Award nominees in the next few months, but avoid spending time on less-good nominees who are only there due to the sadness of the nutty puppies^*.

ckd gave me a link to a puppy-free slate, but that's not exactly what I want. Some books & stories good enough to have had a great shot at the Hugo ballot without any puppies, were probably included on the puppy slates. I'd like to read some of those, but don't have time to read everything, so I want to avoid the ones that would near-certainly not have been on on a puppyless ballot.

People who are familiar with a bunch of the entries on the 2015 Hugo ballot, which ones do you recommend spending my time on?

* For a long version of the puppies thing, you can read George R.R. Martin's series of posts on his LiveJournal starting with this one and continuing from there. For a short version... anyone got a link to a good short summary for readers who don't know anything about this and are curious?

Edit: This looks like a good readable summary that doesn't require that you already know a lot about it: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/13/1376743/-Freeping-the-Hugo-Awards You do need to know what "freeping" refers to: Overwhelming a poll/vote/election by getting a large number of people from outside its usual community (people who would otherwise not have been involved) to all vote in the same way.

Edit2: Another good piece, with more historical context:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121554/2015-hugo-awards-and-history-science-fiction-culture-wars

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

http://andrewhickey.info/2015/04/04/so-whats-happening-with-the-hugos/

That's written of an audience that's presumed to start with a lot of context. They already know how the Hugo process works, they already know about the puppies, etc., and this gives them an update on what happened with nominations this year.

"Some books & stories good enough to have had a great shot at the Hugo ballot without any puppies, were probably included on the puppy slates."
Are you saying that some of the puppies ballots probably included actually good materials, that were recommended in good faith? And you want to untangle the bad faith recommendations from the good ones?
Or that you want to look at non puppy reccomendations that got buried?

I think that yes, some actually good materials were on some of the puppy slates. Whether the puppies listed them "in good faith" isn't something I want to untangle. I just want to know which of the nominees are worthy nominees worth reading, without a) automatically disqualifying anything the puppies listed (possibly without the knowledge of the actual author), or b) wasting my time on unworthy nominees the puppies voted.

Things that got buried, I can read in future years. Good ones that actually made the ballot, if I read soon, I could actually vote on. I bought a worldcon supporting membership so I can vote for the Helsinki site bid

chaiya is working on, but that also allows me to vote for the Hugos.

If all of the ballot data were published before the voting, then what I'd want is:
a) Remove all of the puppy-slate ballots, count the rest, and see what gets nominated or comes close to being nominated.
b) Which of the nominees or near-nominees from that step a, are on the actual ballot?
Regardless of whether some of those happen to also be on the puppy slates, those are the ones I'd want to read.

Since the ballots aren't published until after the award, from what I understand, I can't do that. But I'm looking for informed peoples' best guesses as to what that list might be.

Edited 2015-04-16 02:37 (UTC)

So... Can't you just google the various authors to see if they're misogynistic, white supremacist f*ck-wits and extrapolate from there?
It's *actually* ironic, you would be excluding authors based on their politics and not their writing.

I think a large part of the problem with the slates is that you can't tell the difference between people who made a slate because of their writing, and people who made a slate because of their politics and despite poor writing, at least not without taking the time to read everything. --Or without asking other people who may have read them, which is what Cos is asking here.

If you have the time, reading everything yourself is the best tactic.

My understanding is that Cos isn't trying to exclude people based on their politics -- if he was doing that, I imagine he wouldn't be considering nominees who were on the slates at all (though again, there are people on the Sad Puppies slate whose politics are not objectionable). He's just noting he has very limited time and trying to give good writers/works his time, regardless of their political slant.

My impression is that he's assuming good works that *are* on the sad puppies slate would have gotten nominations even if you removed all the purely-identical-slate-based nominees.

This is the opposite assumption to what the creators of the slates assume, which is that people/works have been being excluded based on their politics. But, see, I think the creators of the slates are wrong in that regard. However, I do agree that circles of people tend to become insular and only find out about or read works their friends like and promote, or that are published in magazines that tend to match rather than challenge their tastes. And the group nominating for the Hugos has been way too small.

So, I do think that some of the people who participated in building the Sad Puppies slate were in it for just what they originally claimed -- getting a more diverse selection of *high quality* work on the ballot. So there was good stuff on the SP slate, and it shouldn't all be disregarded out of hand. And I'm glad to see Cos is *not* disregarding it out of hand.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/sad-puppies

Why is that called "freeping"? Is it somehow related to either the Detroit Free Press, the defunct Los Angeles Free Press, or some other similarly-named newspaper?

It refers to Free Republic, a heavily conservative website that was really active about 10-15 years ago. They called themselves Freepers.

"Freeping" was mentioned in this salon.com article as "a phrase used to rally posters on the Free Republic to mass-flood a poll or comments section hosted by some random website or local newspaper in order to create the impression of an overwhelming majority supporting their fringe-right views."

You can skip everything by John C Wright, because he's a terrible writer. (

secritcrush is reading the Puppy nominees.)

Ancillary Sword I'm told is awesome. I haven't read it yet, but I thought Ancillary Justice (last year's winner) was really good, so I assume part 2 is, too. (I hear it may suffer from middle book syndrome.)

Everyone I know LOVES the Goblin Emperor.

The Day the World Turned Upside Down is probably good. Olde Heuvelt is a good writer.

Annie Bellet withdrew her nomination, as did Marko Kloos.

In Graphic Story, I liked all the non-Puppy ones there. (That would be everything except the one about zombies.)

Down in Semiprozine, BCS, Lightspeed, and SH have consistently good fiction.

Thanks! This was very helpful.

A few other people (including

netmouse and

ckd) recommended The Goblin Emperor and Ancillary Sword, so I've already ordered both (and Ancillary Justice).

This matches my impressions, although I merely liked Goblin Emperor (did not love it) and I thought Ancillary Sword was a big let-down (although still good) from Ancillary Justice (which was amazing).

I really like Jim Butcher's Dresden Files in general, but thought that Skin Game in particular was not one of his stronger books--again, I'd put it at the okay to pretty good level.

Ms. Marvel is fantastic--I don't think I've read any of the other Graphic Story entries.

Surprisingly, I've watched all of the Dramatic Presentation Long-Form nominees. They're all worth watching, imo, although I thought Winter Soldier was weaker than the first Captain America, Interstellar was disappointing but good, and Lego Movie was fantastic but not very much scifi/fantasy. Edge of Tomorrow is the most underrated of the group, and is actually quite good.

The DailyKos link was an interesting read; I had no idea all that was going on. I found the animosity to John C. Wright's work being nominated interesting though, as I've actually enjoyed a number of his books despite obviously not agreeing with his personal/political beliefs.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121554/2015-hugo-awards-and-history-science-fiction-culture-wars

Hugos and Puppies

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