Hugos and Puppies

[cos]

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

Comments

[cos]

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.

[estheruth.livejournal.com]

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.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

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.