Hugo Awards 2015
by Sunita
After much excitement and apprehension, the Puppified Hugo Awards were announced last night. For those who want a thorough overview of the backstory, Wired has a very good article. Beware the comment thread.
The list of winners and finalists is here. You’ll see that No Awards cleaned up in a number of categories.
Natalie Luhrs has a summary of an “alternate timeline Hugo awards“, or what the finalists in each category might have been had Puppification not occurred. Her inferences are based on the full nomination and award counts (the link is a cached version of the pdf), which were released right after the awards ceremony. If I’m reading her post correctly, she assumes that none of the Puppy votes would have been transferred to any other nominees or finalists. (I’m describing, not criticizing, since there’s no better alternate way I can think of to infer a non-Puppy outcome.)
If you’re on Twitter you’ve already seen a lot of discussion, but I wanted to provide some information and links for readers who aren’t.
ReaderWriterVille 
You are reading correctly–there’s no way to know if those folks would have nominated without an organized campaign to get them nominating, so I threw out their nominating votes, basically.
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Thanks, Natalie. I couldn’t think of another way either. It would be interesting to know *how* they might have voted, and if they would have voted at all, but somehow I don’t think they’re likely to tell us. 😉
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So happy and relieved about the Mixon report winning, and the utter slapdown delivered to the Puppies.
Unhappy about the nonsense being spread on Twitter by Requires Hate’s fans and apologists, even by Courtney Milan (who admits she doesn’t know all the facts.)
Also unhappy at claims by some people that the Mixon report shouldn’t have won because that category should belong to a body of work. As others pointed out, bother Kameron Hurley and Jim Hines won/were nominated based on a single prominent piece of blogging, and the Mixon Report is just so important and far reaching. It also represented the efforts of dozens of people, named and unnamed, and in that way, was unique for a fan work item.
Those carping after the win on this point, look like sore losers if you ask me (given who we know didn’t make it onto the final nomination list because of the Puppies – *not* Mixon.)
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I agree with you that the single-post v. body-of-work ship seems to have sailed, given the Hines & Hurley wins. I’m not a Hugo voter, so my opinion is basically worthless, but it seems as if the category works for a year’s worth of stuff. And like you, I think the Mixon report is beyond important.
As for the criticisms on other grounds, I basically don’t give a shit what people who weren’t paying attention to RH/BS/WF/etc. in real time have to say about her now. If you can’t support Rachel Manija, Athena Andreadis, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and many, many others have to say about their experiences, I don’t care what you say. I wasn’t there for the Winterfox incarnation, but I read the entirety of the RH blog, the one people are supporting as somehow not as bad, and guess what? It was BAD. Full stop.
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I want to add: I am not an author, there is little or nothing RH could have done to me. My professional position would not have been affected if she had decided to swoop down on me and make my life miserable. But I was still scared of commenting on her blog. And I’ve been criticized by some pretty fucking impressive people. It wasn’t the criticism, it was the scorched-earth tactics and the feeling that it would always be there, for people to bring up and hold receipts on. It’s *nothing* like substantive criticism.
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I had heard of the discussions. Thank you twice, dear Sunita! On one side for mentioning the great article from ”Wired”. On the other side because there I found out that the John Chu’s short story who the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Short Story is online for free: http://www.tor.com/2013/02/20/the-water-that-falls-on-you-from-nowhere/. Excellent writing, believable internal dialogue, original idea. It’s powerful and emotional. I’m glad «The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere» won last year. And sorry for delurking only now and then…
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You’re welcome! John Chu’s story is lovely, isn’t it? We downloaded all the available short stories last year, and that one really resonated. I’m so glad it won.
You are always free to lurk, as you know. 🙂
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I am not, by any means, an avid science fiction or fantasy reader, so I speak from a position of ignorance. However, I find Foz Meadows post (Peeling the Onion) to be very well written and highly relevant to a number of discussions involving gender, race, ethnicity, gender, and difference of any/all kinds.
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Thanks for the link, AL. She makes some very good points.
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[…] Reader Writer Ville with Hugo 2015 links. […]
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