Worth sharing? Yes. This is not shoveling crap, as I put it in my last post on the Hugos. This is sharing useful, relevant information. Or more specifically, sharing useful, relevant information that Mike Glyer found and posted over on File770 (which if you’re a Science-Fiction fan, you should be checking).
Anyway, the useful bit of info was this. In doing some digging on the origins of the Hugo award, Mike dug back all the way to the first Hugo award and found this little tidbit:
Remember, there is still time to (a) do a little campaigning to line up a solid bloc of votes for your favorites, (b) get some members—every membership is a potential vote for your favorites, and (c) get your own votes in …
So, there’s been a lot of stuff flung around by the anti-SP insular group, usually a contradiction in that block voting and slate voting is either A) completely horrible, inexcusable thing that should never happen or B) once pointed out that the insular group has been doing it for years, something that only they should be allowed to do because they’re “special.”
The truth is, everyone, that block and slate voting, suggesting en mass just like the Sad Puppies did, the Rapid Puppies did, and the Insular group did, is entirely legal and totally part of the system to the degree that it was encouraged all the way back at the first ever Hugo award.
I expect there’s going to be some interesting fallout on this one. You can read the original post by Mike here, and remember, if you want to keep up to date on more news not just about the Hugo awards but all things Sci-Fi, consider adding File770 to your regular list of sites. I’ve certainly found it refreshing lately.
Unusual Things 
Thank you for sharing Mike’s website. I am pretty new to the serious reading of sci-fi world and I am always looking for new blogs to follow. Simply googling is not effective on pulling up the good reads. After all I found you through another sci-fi blog.
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Thanks! Glad to hear I’ve helped out in some way! I hope you continue to find a lot more useful stuff here and elsewhere!
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There’s the Sad Puppies, the Rabid Puppies, everyone else who cares about the Hugos, and those who don’t care.
I guess “Insular group” is shorter than “everyone else who cares about the Hugos” but I really think “non-Puppies” is a better way to put that. More accurate.
And the flyer, (which is so old the Hugos weren’t even *named* the Hugos yet) is not organizing a bloc vote, nor is it noting that such exist–it’s saying there is time to do that if people want. In a time before the Hugo traditions had been established.
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“Non-puppies” isn’t a very good descriptor, though, because there’s a very vocal, very aggressive group of people out there who happen to amass a very large part of the “talking about the Hugo’s” crowd who are quite certainly “anti-puppies.” These are the people who are campaigning to get the votes changed so that in the future votes are weighted at the Hugos. These are the people saying that every category in which a SP work was nominated should be given “no award,” just to spite those who were recommended by SP. These are the people who, despite having pushed for votes and nominations for books on their own sites, argue that the SP shouldn’t be allowed to. These are the individuals who have publicly called people on the SP side racist, homophobic bigots (and who, when shown that they’re wrong, have attacked those defending the SPs with jargon slogans like #notyourshield, which attack quite honestly smacks so hard of the stance “you don’t understand, so I’m going to protect you from you,” which was a common argument in defense of racism decades ago that I’m surprised the users of the term haven’t had their heads explode from the hypocrisy).
Now, are there groups past that? Of course. There are people who just want to read books. There are people who don’t care one way or another and just want the controversy to go away. There are people who just want things to go back to the way they were. There are people who want things to get better. There are people who stopped reading the Hugos five-six years ago because they’d stopped being interested in them … only to turn back now because they’re interested again by the new blood.
But as much as there are SP and RP, there are the insulars, who have been aggressive enough, angry enough, and flat out uncaring enough that some of the things they’ve published and spread around have had to be retracted over threats of libel. They are the group that will argue Point A until there’s nothing they can do to defend it any more, switch to point B and argue that until they can’t defend it anymore … and then go back to point A and proceed to ignore everything that was pointed out earlier to disprove A. They will do this endlessly. They will argue definitions of words, build straw men until there’s a shortage at the farm, and refuse to say three little words, “I was wrong” because they’re so convinced they must be right that nothing else is an option.
And unfortunately, this group is a group in this battle for the Hugos alongside SP and RP. They are as much a group in their own right as anyone else, but they’re kind of built on attacking anyone and everything. I call them the insular group because it’s a polite, clean definition for what they are. They don’t want anyone else messing with their system. They like being able to tell everyone else “this is what you are, and don’t you dare disagree,” and they like the spot they’re in. They’re the woman who complained the SP and RP needed to be barred because the system worked fine, had always worked fine, because she’d won five (or seven) Hugos and been nominated every years since she started, and this year was the first year she hadn’t. That group. The group whose initial response to the SP group was that they were all racist, white, men, despite the fact that a lot of them aren’t men … and a very large number of them aren’t white.
Then again, this is the same group who argued that one of the people in SP (during last years SP I believe) wasn’t ‘hispanic enough’ and was ‘basically white, and therefore is white.’ How’s that for looking through a lens?
As far as the age of the Hugos, so what if the rules have changed since then? Would you argue that we should throw out Olympic sport records or whole sports every time a minute rule-change is made?
No. That’d be ridiculous and completely invalidate a good portion of the Olympics. Likewise, I believe that you’re misaimed by claiming that the Hugos weren’t “organizing a bloc vote.” While correct, and it would be ludicrous, that would be the people in charge of the Hugo controlling what got voted on. But what they’re doing here is reminding everyone else that they can organize a block-vote on their own, something that has not been wrong during the entire run of the Hugos, as many people have pointed out.
So unless you have proof that the SP and RP are also running the Hugo awards, that argument it seems you are making doesn’t make much sense. In fact, an extrapolation of your point, which seems to be that if the Hugos organized their own vote while running the Hugo awards wouldn’t be bad, would more support what some of the SP/RP supporters have been claiming in that that is a very bad thing, and no one group should have total control over what goes on the Hugo. Which, as I pointed out above, some of the Insular group are already calling for a change in the rules to put it place, as far as I am aware from keeping up with things on File770.
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