The last time I talked about an article in The Federalist, it was written by Jon Del Arroz and if you think that might be a low point in the history of a political commentary website then you would be very wrong. A 2017 article defending conservative Roy Moore's behaviour is far, far worse:
"Here is one thing we know and should admit from the start: in his early thirties, Moore had a penchant for dating teenagers. Apparently, this was not an uncommon occurrence during this time. In fact, this practice has a long history and is not without some merit if one wants to raise a large family."
https://thefederalist.com/2017/11/30/alabamians-vote-roy-moore/
So if you aren't familiar with The Federalist that should give you an idea. It is an outlet that attempts to rationalise whatever manifestly awful behaviour somebody on the right has done. Who funds the website remains something of a mystery.
So from this dubious source comes a new article about the Hugo Awards. Ostensibly, the article is covering the recent scandal of the 2023 Hugo Award but approximately two-thirds of the article is a rehash of the Sad Puppy conflict. This isn't a surprise as the author is D.J. Butler, a friend of Larry Correia's and somebody not lacking in experience of science fiction awards with shadowy, unaccountable practices having won the 2020 Dragon Award for Best Alternative History.
The article starts as it means to go on:
"For the second time in 10 years, insiders of the World Science Fiction Convention (colloquially known as "Worldcon") have bent their own rules in an attempt to police the bounds of what books and writers are to be seen as acceptable science fiction and fantasy. This time, they've done so on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party."
https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/01/the-long-arm-of-chinese-censorship-comes-for-science-fiction-awards/ and ab archive version https://web.archive.org/web/20240301190757/https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/01/the-long-arm-of-chinese-censorship-comes-for-science-fiction-awards/
"Bent their own rules" is an interesting claim and if you want to know what rules D.J. Butler thinks were bent 10 years ago, you will be disappointed. Despite providing his own version of Sad Puppy history, he somehow forgets to cover any examples of rules being bent during that conflict.
The article is an attempt to codify a "Larry was right" narrative among former Puppies. It is a line that Larry Correia has been pushing himself in an attempt to make the current Hugo Awards scandal a kind of vindication of his original culture war. As I've already pointed out, his complaint about fans voting the wrong way has little in common with a rogue Hugo Admin breaking (not bending) the rules but we'll come to that. In the meantime, there are several paragraphs of mangled Hugo Award history to cover.
Interestingly, the conflicting narratives are quite clear in D.J. Butler's essay. The first two thirds complain about the Hugo Awards in terms of a narrow clique of voters and industry insiders:
"However, there is a clique of insiders that has unusual sway over what happens at Worldcon and the Hugo Awards. It is comprised of writers and editors associated with a small number of the largest science fiction and fantasy publishers, as well as their friends and allies who work behind the scenes organizing conventions. The insiders don't want you to think the turf-war games they gleefully engaged in have now gone awry on them. For instance, science fiction novelist John Scalzi informed commenters on his blog post on the subject that "Attempts to re-litigate the Sad Puppy nonsense in the comments here will be Malleted." But why would anyone connect the events of Worldcon 81 in Chengdu, China, with the Sad Puppy conflicts?"
ibid
Why would anybody connect one Hugo scandal with another Hugo scandal? The obvious reason would be that they were both Hugo scandals and outside of the more insular world of former Puppies and their hangers-on, the recent Hugo scandal has seen people connecting it to the Raytheon sponsorship scandal or criticism of George R.R. Martin. Supporters of the fan-fiction site and Best Related Work winner Archive of Our Own (aka AO3) have relitigated a whole associated conflict over who does or does not get to call themselves a Hugo Award winner.
Butler's version of the Sad Puppies places Larry Correia at the heart of the matter. Correia, we are told "found himself a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to be awarded at Worldcon 69 in Reno", as one does. Correia attends the convention where we know (based on accounts of both him and Brad Torgersen) he had a fun old time meeting many author friends. However, Butler goes for the revised history of Larry's experience:
"Correia expected to go to Worldcon and hang out with like-minded nerdy writers, but even before the event, he found himself socially snubbed by a wall of sneering leftism. He was called "an NRA stooge" and a "merchant of death" who liked to "dance in the blood of children." Most famously, he was told he was "not a real writer," a jibe that Correia's fans to this day repeat with ironic delight."
ibid
Butler is correct that "not a real writer" looms large in Larry Correia's own mythology but it comes not from his experience at the 2011 Worldcon but from a blog story about a post about Correia had written about "tax day" in April 2011 several months before the convention. Even then it wasn't an actual statement but Larry's own paraphrasing of a comment:
"Oh, silly Correia, but you've never won or been nominated for any prestigious literary awards! So I'm not a real writer. He he he… Tune back in next month when I can officially announce something that is going to blow your little mind."
https://monsterhunternation.com/2011/04/18/a-response-to-the-tax-day-response/
That's an interesting post in itself as I think it illustrates a lot of where Correia's mythos and beliefs about the Hugo Awards come from. His Campbell nomination was going to be a counter-argument. I don't think I've covered this aspect before but if you are curious about the origins of Correia's complexes you should take a few moments to read this 2011 article in Raw Story. It isn't a great piece of writing but there are several lines which will feel familiar to people who have had to endure Correia's complaints:
"Larry, who works for a defense contractor, is angry about how much money the government spends on things like defense contractors. He is also publishing four (yes, four) novels this year, which one hopes are edited for the sake of the English language. He is deeply and truly angry about the fact that the financial success gained from his science fiction novels causes him to pay the government money. Probably because the money goes to pay finance managers for defense contractors who spend their time writing science fiction novels."
https://www.rawstory.com/2011/04/pandagon-taxes_are_a_hell_of_a_drug/
Some things to note: as I already said, this isn't a good piece of writing but notably it is the exact reverse of Correia's version of his history. This isn't a critic of his writing using his politics or career choices to dismiss his presence in fandom or awards but rather somebody attacking his political writing and making digs about his fiction writing to do it. Not a very credible debate strategy in my opinion but clearly not "literary snobs" giving him a hard time. The point about Larry working for a defence contractor is not there to put people off reading his books but to point out the absurd hypocrisy of somebody complaining about taxes whose job is deeply dependent on the huge amount of tax dollars that go into US defence spending. However, most notable is that at no point does the article say that Correia is "not a real writer". That phrase comes from nobody but, you guessed it, Larry Correia and he's been carrying it as a grievance ever since.
So Larry goes to Reno and actually has a nice time and if there was some kind of large anti-Correia online backlash from science fiction/Worldcon fandom as a consequence of his Campbell nomination, the evidence of it or even contemporary quotes of it on Larry's website have largely vanished.
Butler goes on to claim that the internet harassment of Correia was so bad that he decided to make a point:
"The convention was small enough that it took only a modest number of votes for a book to win one of the convention's coveted Hugo Awards and even fewer for a book to become a finalist. Correia confidently predicted that he and his readers could get one of his books in as a finalist for Best Novel, though he expressed doubt that he had enough pull with fandom to make any book a winner."
ibid
Correia has also framed matter recently in a similar way: he went to Reno and saw from the published statistics that it would be easy to get a work as a finalist. I assume that aspect is true, although it actually demonstrates how transparent the Hugo Awards are. So then what happened? Correia did make an attempt to get one of his novels nominated for a Hugo Award in 2012.
"Only you can make a real difference in the life of a pulp novelist. Every day, over a thousand writers of explody, action-adventure, gun-nut, monster-killin', novels are maligned on the internet by stuffy literati critics for not being "real" novelists who write ham-fisted, navel gazing, message-fic about starving polar bears or some crap. How can you make a difference? By nominating Larry Correia's Hard Magic for the Hugo award for best novel. "
https://monsterhunternation.com/2012/02/23/how-you-can-make-a-difference-getting-me-nominated-for-a-hugo/
Larry's "cruel auditor brain" had crunched the numbers and he mobilized his supporters and the rest is history...or rather, very little happened. True, Brad Torgersen did make it as a finalist in both Best Novelette and the Campbell but Larry's post had only suggested him for the Campbell and Torgersen had made it as a Nebula finalist without Larry's aid. Larry's own novel did not even make the longlist.
It took several attempts by Larry to make a dent in the Hugo Awards and it was his third attempt (counting his original Campbell campaign) that became known as Sad Puppies 1. It was Sad Puppies 2 that would draw more controversy when Correia recruited Vox Day onto his slate in a bid to bring the ongoing fueds in the sci-fi writer's organisation, the SFWA, into the Hugo Awards. This was the final Hugo campaign that Larry would lead.
Not that you would know that from Butler's article. Instead, we get a time skip in which internet leftist/fans are just so mean to Larry that eventually he just has enough and launches a campaign against Spokane:
"At any point, Correia could have walked away. And at any point, the lefty insiders of science fiction could have stopped insulting and threatening him. Neither happened. Instead, with the Worldcon insiders leaning hard into the banner of "diversity" while giving awards to white liberals, Correia put forward a slate of recommendations for Worldcon 73 in Spokane. He called his nominees the "Sad Puppies" slate in a tongue-in-cheek cartoon as a reference to a Sarah McLachlan animal charity commercial, because "boring message fiction is the leading cause of Puppy Related Sadness.""
ibid
"Correia" is a very strange way to spell "Torgersen" and Butler appears to be melding 2013 and 2015 together. I guess clarity and accuracy don't matter so much for The Federalist. Butler goes on to say:
"Correia maintains he had no idea what the skin color or sexual orientation of his nominees were. "We were just picking people who were popular or good but who'd normally get ignored by the leftist cliques." His slate nevertheless included women, ethnic minorities, and people we might today call "LGBTQIA+.""
ibid
I'm confident that Larry Correia was aware of the colour, gender and public sexual orientation of Kevin J. Anderson, Charles E. Gannon, Jim Butcher, Marko Kloos, Arlan Andrews Sr, John C. Wright, Tom Kratman, Mike Resnick, Toni Weisskopf, Dave Truesdale, Steve Diamond, Tim Bolgeo, Bryan Thomas Schmidt, Michael Z. Williamson and many others on the Sad Puppies 3 slate but it is possible that he wasn't aware of those aspects of some of the others on the list. The slate was dominated by people known by Brad Torgersen or people connected to Baen or Analog Magazine with a few others. To be fair to Butler, Larry Correia was also on that slate and arguably Larry is confused as to his colour, having once declared that "I'm blacker than Barack Obama", so that is at least one nominee where he could be said to have "no idea".
Butler then launches into more overt conspiracy mongering:
"The Hugo voting in 2015 was flooded with non-attending memberships. You can see it in the number of total votes cast. Worldcon 72 (in cosmopolitan London): 3,587, Worldcon 73 (in backwater Spokane): 5,950. Insiders didn't want any of Correia's candidates to win, and insiders bought enough bogus memberships to ensure it didn't happen. One result was that No Award, a previously little-used ballot option, was the winner in five categories. In five categories, confronted with a list of five eligible finalists, many preferred by hundreds of voters, the ballot-stuffers chose to give the prize to no one."
ibid
This is, of course, bollocks. Does Butler provide any kind of evidence that the huge number of supporting memberships were "ballot stuffing" or "bogus memberships"? No. Has any Puppy supporter EVER presented any such evidence? No. Are there many, many people online who have been quite public about how they joined up to vote in the 2015 Hugo Awards not because of "insiders" but because they wanted to vote expressly against an attempted far-right coup of the Hugo Awards? Yes. And why did so many, many people join up and vote No Award? Why did so many people feel like it was important to do so? Well, Butler has forgotten to mention the Beale-in-the-room. Don't worry, he will eventually acknowledge the existence of the self-styled voice of god.
"Finalists for the Hugo for Best Editor, Long Form included Anne Sowards, Toni Weisskopf, and Sheila Gilbert, all powerful and respected women in the field. It also included Vox Day, a right-wing provocateur who was drafting in Correia's wake with his own slate of candidates and further muddying the waters. Weisskopf was Correia's suggested candidate. I'm slightly simplifying the complicated voting process, but Weisskopf won more votes than any previous winner of the Hugo for Best Editor, Long Form at 1,216 … but "No Award" won 2,496. By comparison, Ginjer Buchanan won the award in 2014 with 359 votes. To prevent Vox Day from winning the Hugo, and to show Larry Correia who was boss, the Worldcon insiders threw the award away."
ibid
Weisskopf was Torgersen's suggested candidate (but yes, Correia's as well) but also she was Vox Day's suggested candidate. Correia, Torgersen and Day had all been part of a group that had planned the preparation for the 2015 Hugo Campaign. It was Vox Day's organisational acumen that resulted in the two Puppy campaigns sweeping the 2015 Hugo Award nominations and the eventual popular backlash against it. Butler also neatly forgets to mention that in 2014 Ginjer Buchanan beat Toni Weisskopf, so where had the massive increase in Weisskopf's vote come from? If, as Butler alleges, the increase in 2015 supporting membership was purely down to insiders buying bogus memberships, where did the extra votes for Puppy candidates come from?
Butler wraps up the first two thirds of his essay with his resentment about the award ceremony:
"Well, I booed then, and I boo now. Boo on you silly people who think that science fiction and fantasy literature is your personal plaything. Boo on you fools who think you are virtuous for shouting down and excluding those who disagree with you. Boo on you who decided to rig the voting. And boo on you, David Gerrold, who went along with it, who literally handed out wooden asterisks to finalists and participated in degrading the Hugo Awards into meaninglessness."
ibid
Yet, in his account he only gives one concrete example with evidence of somebody planning to attempt to distort the Hugo Award voting: Larry Correia.
Which means, finally, Butler gets to 2023.
"Fast forward to Worldcon 81, held in 2023 in Chengdu, China. Worldcon sites are chosen by vote two years in advance. In 2021, Worldcon was again flooded with non-participating memberships, and Chengdu, China, was selected as the site for Worldcon 81. It clobbered Winnipeg, 2,006 to 807. More than 1,900 of Chengdu's votes were from non-attending members — i.e., mail-in ballots — and more than 1,500 of those didn't even give a street address for the putative voter. The ballot box had been stuffed again, this time to get the convention to China."
ibid
I like the "mail-in ballots" line. I did worry when writing Debarkle that I was laying it on to thick when I drew parallels with how the Puppies saw the Hugo Awards and how they would go on to see the the Trump years. It's nice to see how often they draw the parallels themselves.
"The in-person event apparently went well, but the scandal doesn't end there: The 2023 Hugo Awards were rigged. Leaked emails and other documents reveal that the Hugo administrators for Worldcon 81 removed from consideration authors and works they deemed not eligible for a Hugo. Eligibility turns out to have depended on suitability for publication under Chinese censorship laws, with Hugo administrator Dave McCarty emailing the rest of the committee to watch out for "mentions of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, negatives of China.""
ibid
This largely accurate, although it leans heavily on the idea of this all being an evil Communist plot. The evidence points to this being primarily a move by Dave McCarty and just the tip of the iceberg of the malpractice in the awards. The evidence points to Chinese nominees being shut out from the awards for reasons unknown but which almost certainly had nothing to do with political censorship.
What 2023 showed was that when an award is controlled by an unaccountable administrator the value of the award is badly diminished. That is not what happened in 2015. Notably, the Sad Puppy nominees were not disqualified in 2013, 2014 or 2015 nor were the Rabid Puppy nominees disqualified in 2015, 2016 or 2017. There is zero evidence of any vote tampering against the Puppy campaigns or ballot stuffing against the Puppy campaigns. I've mentioned before this quote from Larry Correia which is specifically about the 2014 Hugo Awards:
"Already there is all sorts of outragey outrage coming from the usual suspects, with allegations of, I kid you not, "ballot stuffing" For everyone who has been involved in this process, you know how especially ironic and hilarious that actually is, since behind the scenes I've been collecting counts of Sad Puppies nominators the whole time to see if the process was rigged because there have been some really suspicious things that have happened in the past to other author friends of mine. Can't help myself. I'm a retired auditor. But the London committee appears to be totally honest.
https://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/20/a-blow-has-been-struck-against-puppy-related-sadness/
The "totally honest" committee included Dave McCarty and Ben Yalow, who are deeply implicated in the 2023 Hugo scandal.
We see time and again, when supporters of the former Sad Puppy campaign write about its history they make errors both in general and in detail. In particular, there have been repeated attempts to reframe the campaign as a heroic attempt by Larry Correia to expose hypocrisy and essentially erase Vox Day from the narrative. Removing Day serves two purposes, firstly it is an attempt to distance Larry from Day's more overt extremism but secondly it serves to make the backlash against the Sad Puppy 3 campaign appear bizarre and irrational. Thousands of people paying money just to No Award poor old Larry? Absurd! In reality thousands of people joined up to say a defiant no to Day's views on women and race and violent nationalist terror.
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