by Doctor Science
The 2014 Hugo Awards were announced August 17, and the results weren’t terribly surprising. The “Sad Puppies Slate”, put together by Larry Correia and other self-described conservatives, lost by a landslide.[1]
Now Correia says both that he isn’t surprised by the results, but also that they prove he was right:
My stated goals this entire time was to get some political untouchables onto their sainted slate, so that they would demonstrate that there was serious political bias in the awards. … I predicted that the SJWs[2] would mobilize to stop the untouchable barbarians, so I got some barbarians through the gates, and the SJWs mobilized like I said they would… And I’m supposed to be sad about that for some reason, why?
In other words, he put together a slate to “make the liberals mad”, liberals got mad, the slate lost, this proves that the awards have a liberal bias.
What kind of weird is that John Scalzi, one of the Sad Puppies’ leading opponents, thought something else was going on:
Correia was foolish to put his own personal capital as a successful and best selling novelist into championing Vox Day and his novelette, because Vox Day is a real bigoted shithole of a human being, and his novelette was, to put it charitably, not good (less charitably: It was like Gene Wolfe strained through a thick and rancid cheesecloth of stupid). Doing that changed the argument from something perfectly legitimate, if debatable — that conservative writers are often ignored for or discounted on award ballots because their personal politics generally conflict with those of the award voters — into a different argument entirely, i.e., fuck you, we got an undeserving bigoted shithole on the Hugo ballot, how you like them apples.
As for me, I see something else that neither Correia nor even Scalzi seems to have noticed:
None of the Sad Puppies’ horses is fit to race. The only ones I can call reasonably competent works of fiction are Correia’s novel and Dan Wells’ “The Butcher of Khardov”. They also read way too much like re-tellings of unfamiliar video games, and lack the most important quality Hugo voters are looking for, world-building. They are, at best, B level works, not the kind of thing I think *anyone* would want associated with “Hugo Award Winning”.
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