EscapeVelocity

Defender of European Christendom
Spread Head

[EscapeVelocity @EscapeVelo]

Political Correctness is a euphemism for exclusivity & closed-mindedness. #GamerGate

[Mary Talley Bowden MD @MaryBowdenMD]

Here’s a gigantic conflict of interest that Calley failed to mention on Rogan. ⬇️

[PeterSweden @PeterSweden7]

IT HAPPENED.

The Swedish parliament just voted to change the constitution today to allow for REVOKING Swedish citizenship.

If someone has several citizenships, Sweden could revoke citizenship if it was given on false grounds or if someone was convicted of serious crimes.

[Eve Keneinan 𝛗☦️ن @EveKeneinan]

This is proper response to such vileness.

[Harrison H. Smith ✞ @HarrisonHSmith]

100% of everyone’s effort should be focused on Rescuing Texas right now.

If the Democrats solidify their hold on Texas, there’s no point in even running a Presidential candidate in ‘28.

We have two years.

[Classicist. ✝️ @Classicist9999]

Hitler was supposedly wrong about the jews. So why are the very things he was supposedly wrong about still happening?

Explain that contradiction.

[🌖ʀᴇᴠᴇɴᴀɴᴛ⚡🦃 @revenant_MMXX]

Imagine how much time & money and how many lives have been ruined over nothing incidents like this. All because black people suffer from crippling racial insecurity.

[RPGPundit❌ @KasimirUrbanski]

You lost the right to call yourself a Pole when you invited German police forces to come in to potentially assault Polish citizens for standing up against your coup.

[🎅 HO-HO-HO-Ping 🎅 @GamingAndPandas]

There was a bridge nicknamed "Bridge of Death" due to all the suicides happening there and the local government tried to re-brand it as "Bridge of Life" filling it with motivational messages, pictures, and a statue.

Suicide rates doubled on that bridge the following years.

[Auron MacIntyre @AuronMacintyre]

He wants to do an amnesty deal so bad

All he has to say is no deal no matter what but he won’t do it

Just keeps stepping on the same rake

[SciFi4Me.com 🇺🇸 @SciFi4Me]

@kitten_beloved I watched this happen. It did not go down quite as you describe.
The "no award" leftists cackled with glee as they burned the Hugos to the ground in 2015.
@BradRTorgersen @monsterhunter45 and others could ... clarify... your account.

[Eli Harman @MartianHoplite]

@kitten_beloved No "Woke" outcome is ever legitmate, no matter what the enabling processes or values were & whether you feel positively towards them. If democracic governance, openness, & "freedom of conscience/freedom of expression" produce woke putcomes, then those things are illegitmate too.

[L. Jagi Lamplighter @lampwright4]

This is incorrect.

The Sad Puppies--who represented the idea that books should win based on the story not the author-- had their suggested slate of books no awarded because World Con brought in outsiders-Leftists who had nothing to do with SF-who paid money to vote in order to crush what was a groumd-roots swell of objection offering books by men and women of multiple races and persuations.

We know this because someone working for the World Con committee confided it to us.

As to only men winning Hugos before this:
1970Ursula K. Le GuinThe Left Hand of Darkness
1975Ursula K. Le GuinThe Dispossessed
1977Kate WilhelmWhere Late the Sweet Birds Sang
1979Vonda N. McIntyreDreamsnake
1981Joan D. VingeThe Snow Queen
1982C. J. CherryhDownbelow Station
1989C. J. CherryhCyteen
1991Lois McMaster BujoldThe Vor Game
1992Lois McMaster BujoldBarrayar
1993Connie WillisDoomsday Book (tied with Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep)
1995Lois McMaster BujoldMirror Dance
1999Connie WillisTo Say Nothing of the Dog
2001J. K. RowlingHarry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
2004Lois McMaster BujoldPaladin of Souls
2005Susanna ClarkeJonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
1

[Chris Edwards @ArsVampyre]

@kitten_beloved You skip the part where the Sad Puppies were a response to the tactics already being used, and were 100% correct about everything. Why is that?

[Kitten 🐈 @kitten_beloved]

The Hugo Awards (or more fittingly, the Women In Speculative Fiction Awards) are an interesting case study in skin-suiting and how it operates in practice.

The quoted tweet is an infographic of winners which demonstrates that right around 2016 something shifted, with nearly every award going to women and mostly to queer-themed books from then on. OP attributes this to a rule change following the sad-puppy affair, which has some truth to it but I think mostly misses the mark and misunderstands the dynamics of the sad-puppy movement and how it failed.

For those not in the know: from 2013 to 2017 a minority of Hugo voters organized a slate of what we would now call "anti-woke" nominees to push back against what they saw as creeping left-wing influence in the nomination process. For some reason they called this movement the sad puppies and later the rabid puppies (no idea where the name came from). They had limited success until 2015, when their slate made it onto the ballot in many categories, meaning that Hugo voters only could vote on one of the "anti-woke" nominees in those categories. This caused a major scandal, as many prominent voting members were locked into nominees they didn't want to win. Voters can also vote for "no-winner" in any category, and that's what won most of the categories where the puppies got their slate in place. After this disappointing outcome, Hugo changed the rules, basically to nerf slate tactics. Because there are hundreds of published works every year and only five nominees per category, a small minority of voters acting as a bloc can get their 5 books on the final ballot. To counteract this, they changed the nomination process so that every nomination ballot gets 1 point distributed among all nominees on that ballot, which has the effect of diluting slate bloc votes.

So that's the background. Men used to win most Hugo awards, and now win basically none. Queer-themed books have more or less taken over. The sad puppies attempted a coup, were beaten back, and the trends they tried to overturn have won the day completely.

There are a couple important things to understand about how this went down.

First, Hugo voting membership is open to anyone. You just pay your dues and you get to vote on the awards. The titles that are nominated and win are a reflection of who those dues-paying members want to win. There is no sinister conspiracy at play to make woke books win, just the individual choices of the thousands of voting members. Hugos are going to the titles that its membership wants them to go to.

Second, the sad puppies were themselves counter-revolutionaries to this mostly-completed takeover. They noticed that by 2013 many awards were going to books with leftist themes written by leftist authors instead of to the best books, which they thought was an injustice and a perversion of the awards. They were fighting back against a late-stage skin-suiting operation. They are the end of that story, not the beginning.

Third, the puppies were a small minority of overall Hugo voters. They were able to game the rules of nomination to get their slates on the ballot, but the fact that "no-winner" won most of these categories demonstrates that they were in fact a small minority. When the Hugos changed the rules, it wasn't a shadowy elite silencing the voice of normal people, it was them closing a procedural loophole which let a small minority dominate the nomination process.

When we talk about skin-suiting, we often imagine it in terms of warfare or espionage, of a few determined entryists managing to get inside the walls, get some amount of power, then twist the rules of the institution to bring more of their friends onboard. This is part of it, but not the main part, not most of the time. Most of the time, it's the boring ordinary process that happened to the Hugos: anybody can be a member (for a small fee), and the people who cared more joined in larger numbers and got their way. The very term "entryist" assumes some measure of subterfuge, of some amount of gatekeeping to prevent such malign influence. But typically this isn't true. The gate is wide open.

[Larry Correia @monsterhunter45]

Yep. Pretty much.
I wanted to show the world that the awards that were supposed to be for the best works were really all about politics and which publishing cliques you belonged to.
In response they freaked out so hard that it turned into nonstop rainbow communism, and licking the PRC’s boot. Literally.
Sad Puppies was a proto battle of the culture wars. Now everybody is onto the woke scam and familiar with how it has infested their industries too.

[EscapeVelocity @EscapeVelo]

@MNightATLARules

[EscapeVelocity @EscapeVelo]

I was a part of the #SadPuppies and the #Rabidpuppies protest against the corruption of the Hugos. I was concurrently a part of the #GamerGate rebellion.

[Brad R. Torgersen @BradRTorgersen]

TL;DR warning. One of the most fascinating things about the past ten years has been watching different people who weren't part of Sad Puppies speak authoritatively on Sad Puppies.

I have my own thoughts, of course.

Understand that everything I am about to say, I say as a guy with several authorial accolades under his belt, including the DragonCon Dragon for Best SF novel in 2019, and three readers' choice awards from Analog magazine in 2010, 2012, and 2014. I was also the rare triple-nominee for Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell awards in 2012.

So . . . did Sad Puppies fail?

For my part I wanted the Hugos to have broad cultural relevance within literary SF again. Versus continuing their long slide into activism-induced irrelevance. In this regard Sad Puppies 3 failed spectacularly. The net dividend of 2015 was the power brokers of Worldcon declaring, "We're gonna Feminist and Queer the Hugos even HARDER!" and that's precisely how it went.

The Hugos are now ignored by the great majority of spec fic and fantasy readers because they know beyond a shadow of a doubt the award has been made into an explicitly political activist totem.

As of 2026 only a fraction of spec fic and fantasy readers even know who the Hugo winners are year to year, and most who remember the Hugos think of the Hugos as they think of almost all entertainment awards: that legacy thing we used to care about but we've stopped caring about because people on stages giving each other trophies doesn't matter to the consumer like it did a few decades ago.

It was already becoming true by 2010. Much moreso, now. Grammys, Emmys, Oscars, yadda. Just don't have the cultural heft of the 1970s-1990s. And the same for both the Hugo and Nebula. Which are not signposts of quality (on a book cover) like they once were. In fact, for many readers they are a, "Stay away, this is a Modern Audience (said in Drinker voice) book!"

And that's precisely what I wanted reversed. Because I remember when the words HUGO WINNER and NEBULA WINNER on a dust jacket actually described what was between the covers. Like with Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead.

But the opposite occurred. Because the Nielsen-Haydens and George R. R. Martin and many other people with media reach and influence decreed that no dirty normal Hugo voters would have a say in their sainted backroom politicized log-rolling process. The Hugos would be perma-Woke.

And so they are. And that's a damned shame, because most readers don't give the Hugos any regard anymore—as they don't give most lit awards any regard.

And if you doubt it ask yourself if Ann Leckie is bigger than Heinlein? Who has been dead for decades. But he outsells Leckie 20 to 1 on Grandpa Bob's slow days.

They hate Heinlein for that. They want him dustbinned.

They tried their best to make Leckie into a thing. Heaped every award possible on her between 2014 and 2016. And all that resulted were massive stacks of deluxe boxed merchandise at B&N locations. With the words HAS WON EVERY SCIENCE FICTION AWARD KNOWN TO MAN plastered across the slipcases and the special selection signage. But the merchandise didn't move.

I repeat: the merchandise didn't move.

They tried the same thing from '16-'18 with Nora Jemisin, and it was a similar result: triple-Hugo Best Novels that sat on shelves. And kept sitting.

Neither Leckie nor Jemisin are bigger than Heinlein. Both remain midlist activist authors who could not be catapulted over the cultural relevance wall by any means, because that's not how a literary work (nor author) achieves long-standing relevance in both geek culture and the wider English-speaking culture as a whole.

You know who does have relevance?

J.K. Rowling. Or Orson Scott Card. Or any dozen other caps-n Names nobody needs to spotlight trophies about. Because their books gained and kept vast audiences all on their own power. Much like Heinlein's.

The dog of culture cannot be wagged.

You can take over institutions believing you will take over culture, but it doesn't really work like that. The Soviet system dominated the Eastern Bloc for most of a century. It literally owned every institution. But all it did was teach generations of Iron Curtain dwellers to subsist on black humor about how their supposed Socialist paradise was in fact a corrupt hell of bureaucrats, toadies, secret police, and fear.

I believe we're entering something like that, where American pop culture is concerned. The Woke own the big gaming companies, along with gaming media. But who's buying and playing the games?

Similarly, the Woke own the big movie studios and all of the media media, but ticket sales have cratered on huge blockbuster projects over and over, and keep cratering.

More broadly, the Woke own the Ivy League, but all this does is make people question if the Ivy League still matters anymore? Or, does a PhD even matter if the person putting those letters next to their name is a raving loon stuffed with terrible ideas and terrible politics, like a rotten Christmas turkey?

You can corrupt an organization, but you cannot corrupt people if they don't want to be corrupted.

In this regard Sad Puppies was a spectacular success. Because it was the loud, emphatic shout of the normie SF/F reader who used to esteem the Hugo and refused to let the Hugo go quietly into the night. People who could not be convinced that mediocre or even terrible storytelling with Woke wrappings and trappings was in fact brilliant and timeless.

Again, the dog of culture cannot be wagged.

[Al Fall @Hector_X_2000]

@BradRTorgersen If I see Hugo and Nebula on a cover, the first thing I do is check when it was written and published. If it is recent, I skip it.

[Professor Suggon Deeznutz @CTHULHUApproves]

@BradRTorgersen Game studios are closing, Hollywood just got embarrassed by Godzilla - Zero, the big publishing houses are slowly going bankrupt and they all have the same thing in common. They like to trash half (or more) of their customer base. The Hugo awards finished themselves in China

[Kelly Ryerson @GlyphosateGirl]

Step 1 of this reboot of MAHA: Eliminate the use of glyphosate and paraquat for pre-harvest desiccation of our grains and pulses. This move would directly decrease our chronic disease levels and open new export markets to countries that currently don't want our poisoned food.