Why Sad Puppies Still Matters

The 2015 Hugo Awards were almost eleven years ago, but the people and the ideas from back then are very much still with us.

One topic that I’ve dealt with a few times on my Twilight Patriot Substack is right-wing authors and artists whose response to the wokification of pop culture isn’t simply to complain, but to create art or literature of their own that reflects their own values. Last April I profiled Alexander Macris, a creator of several tabletop RPGs and graphic novels, and in August I reviewed Richard Nichols’ spy novel Lost Causes. Then in December, the military sci-fi author Tom Kratman mailed me an advance copy of his time travel novel For The Eternal Glory of Rome, which I also reviewed.

To introduce my readers to Tom Kratman’s life and works, I had to learn a bit about the Sad Puppies movement within the Hugo Awards – aka Puppygate, to people like George R. R. Martin who considered it a scandal. Sad Puppies happened a while ago, in 2013 to 2017 to be precise, with 2015 being the peak of its influence, so some of my readers might not know much about it. But it’s still important to understand what it was, and what happened in the aftermath.

The story began in 2013, when Larry Correia wrote a blog post about how his readers could get one of his books, Monster Hunter Legion, nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

“Monster Hunter Legion is eligible… I’m just pointing that out. The fact that I write unabashed pulp action that isn’t heavy handed message fic annoys the literati to no end. When I got nominated for the Campbell, the literati message-fic crowd had a conniption fit. A European snob reviewer actually wrote ‘If Larry Correia wins the Campbell, it will END WRITING FOREVER.’”

After explaining a bit about the mechanics of that year’s Worldcon (which was held in Texas, and whose members – even “supporting members” who pay $60 for voting rights but don’t attend – get to choose the Hugo winners) he finished with:

“Here’s the kicker, it doesn’t take very many votes for something to actually get nominated! I was shocked how few it was. The thing is, the same group of people vote every year, so their favorites insta-win, and since most readers who disagree don’t realize that their opinion actually matters, they don’t even bother. In the smaller categories, like Best Fanzine (which ELITIST BOOK REVIEWS should totally win), it only takes like 30 votes! In best novel, the biggest, baddest award, it only takes like 100… Seriously. All these years you’ve thought these fancy awards meant something, it is actually a popularity contest where the nominees have been decided by the tiny percentage of people who cared enough to show up. (sort of like life, imagine that).”

In the end, Monster Hunter Legion only got 101 nominations, 17 short of what it would have needed to make the final ballot. (Every member gets to nominate five works in each category; the top five become nominees, and a round of ranked choice voting determines the winners.)

But the incident brought an important fact to the minds of a lot of readers – that the most prestigious award in science fiction and fantasy is handed out by the thousand-or-so random people who care enough to show up. So, when a lot of recent awards had been going to stories full of literary pretentiousness, or left-wing political messages, or when popular genres like military science fiction, time travel stories, and Star Wars tie-ins (this was before Star Wars went woke) got short shrift, or when the 2012 Hugos (the last pre-Puppies event) gave the majority of its major nominations (Best Novel, Novella, Novelette, and Short Story) to women, even though the writers and readers of science fiction are at least 70 percent male… the people who disliked all this realized that it wasn’t inevitable. Conservatives just needed to be persuaded to show up, and to vote their interests.

Which is what happened with Sad Puppies 2 (2014) and Sad Puppies 3 (2015), in which large numbers of right-wing sci-fi and fantasy fans organized behind a slate of candidate novels and short stories. You can read the blog posts announcing the campaigns here and here. In 2015, Brad Torgerson was leading the movement, and he had three to five suggested nominees for each of the major categories. By that year, enough sci-fi and fantasy authors and readers were on board that Sad Puppies swept the nominations, with 51 of their recommended works making the final ballot, and five categories consisting entirely of Puppies nominees.

Predictably, the liberal establishment was incensed. Rather than let their enemies win anything, a majority of 2015 Worldcon members opted to vote “No Award.” (Usually, once all of the instant-runoffs have been resolved, “No Award” ranks dead last, but this time it ranked above the Puppy nominees, meaning that in the all-Puppy categories like Best Novella and Best Short Story, no Hugo Awards were given out at all.)

Then, the mainstream press celebrated with grossly inaccurate headlines like “‘Sad Puppies’ campaign fails to undermine sci-fi diversity at the Hugo Awards.” (Yes, they really went with the claim that it was an “anti-diversity” campaign and nothing else, even though the 2015 Puppy slate included nominations for at least seven women, and several non-white people.)

This reaction is especially unhinged in light of the fact that most of the Puppies nominees had little or no political agenda. For instance, for Best Dramatic Presentation they nominated The Lego Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, Interstellar, and The Maze Runner (due to the overlap with non-Puppies nominations, this was the only category where one of the Puppies picks was able to win).

For Best Novella, the options included Flow, by Arlan Andrews – a tale set millions of years in the future that follows a humanoid youth as he helps steer an iceberg south from the polar regions to sell in the temperate zone, and also (by leaving the land of endless mist and clouds behind) learns things about his world that no one else in his tribe knows. Then there was Big Boys Don’t Cry, by Tom Kratman, a master of military science fiction, which deals with events in the thirtieth century told from the point of view of a Ratha, one of the sentient supertanks built to fight mankind’s wars. Meanwhile John C. Wright’s One Bright Star to Guide Them begins when the child-heroes of a Narnia-like portal fantasy get recalled to action in their middle age. When Thomas tries to tell his old friend Richard that the talking cat Tybalt has an errand for them, Richard at first makes fun of Thomas for still believing the silly tales they told as children… until the twist reveal that something much darker has been going on.

Like in any year, a few of the nominees were genuinely bad and didn’t deserve an award. But for the most part the rejection of the Puppies candidates was just a rejection of their authors. Big Boys Don’t Cry deals with fairly standard anti-war themes, and could have gotten an award with no trouble if it had Joe Haldeman’s or George R. R. Martin’s name attached to it. But Big Boys Don’t Cry was by a man who spoke proudly of having left the “People’s Republic of Massachusetts” to join the Army at age 17, and who later wrote a novel called Caliphate in which Christians in 22^nd century Germany live under dhimmitude and can have their daughters sold as brothel slaves if they fall behind on their taxes. Therefore anything by Kratman simply must be bigoted dreck.

Unfortunately, the Sad Puppies movement fell apart after the fiasco of 2015. To avoid irking Worldcon attendees who disliked bloc voting, one of the Puppies leaders, Kate Paulk, replaced the rigid slates with a Sad Puppies forum on which readers could discuss their favorite works, of which she would choose ten or so in each category and encourage her followers to vote for the five they liked most. But a breakoff group called the “Rabid Puppies” followed Vox Day, who insisted on voting his slate “precisely as they are.” Then, knowing his picks had no chance of winning, Day began listing works like Space Raptor Butt Invasion just to embarrass the Hugos. Meanwhile the left-wing faction hammered in its victory by giving awards to stories like this one and this one that went much further with their progressive moralizing than most Puppies stories had ever gone in the other direction.

In 2017, Worldcon changed its rules so that six works would be nominated in each category (though members would still vote for only five), and when a lot of voters submitted an identical slate, its weight would be reduced in accordance with a complicated algorithm called “E Pluribus Hugo.” This, plus the demoralization that comes with not winning anything, finished off the Sad Puppies campaign. (For some more details on the history and motivation of Sad Puppies, check out this Medium article, which is the one honest account of the fiasco that I’ve been able to find in professional media.)

So why does it still matter?

First, because the authors whose work was being promoted during Sad Puppies have not gone away. Kratman, for instance, is working on a series of time travel novels set in ancient Rome, of which I reviewed the first volume here. If you are at all a fan of time travel stories, or even just a history buff who likes to contemplate the decline and fall of civilizations, then Kratman’s work is definitely worth looking into.

And second, because readers who want exciting stories rather than elitist message-fic have also not gone away. They just tend to hang out at places other than the increasingly woke and irrelevant Worldcon. (Worldcon dug itself even deeper into the hole by holding the 2023 Hugos in China, where the government had veto power over nominees – and used it mainly to exclude Asian-Americans from the nominations, so as not to let its own citizens think that the grass might be greener on the other side of the fence. The fact that wokesters can bleat about “diversity” while putting up with this should tell you all you need to know about them.)

One of the beneficiaries of Worldcon’s slow-burn decline is Dragoncon, which meets annually in Atlanta and is by far the best-attended sci-fi and fantasy convention in the world. This convention began giving out its own Dragon Awards in 2016, and several of the Dragon Award winners are Sad Puppies veterans – namely John C. Wright, Brad Torgerson, Larry Correia, and Brian Niemeier.

There is a future for non-woke pop culture. And while it takes a bit of effort on the part of right-wingers to find likeminded creatives and support their work, Sad Puppies proved that it can be done. And it also showed that progressives who prefer to write for a progressive echo chamber, and pout when they don’t get their way, aren’t the most relevant people in the long run, even if they’re still in control of the Hugo Awards.

This article was originally written for the American Thinker.