We need to rewind back to March 2015.
Brad Torgersen's Sad Puppies 3 was on the verge of a remarkable publicity coup — a major sweep of the Hugo Award nominations. It wasn't public knowledge but behind the scenes, authors were being contacted by the Hugo Award administrators and notified that they were finalists and being asked to not announce this publicly until the official announcement was made.
At the Mad Genius Club blog, Kate Paulk was excited and pointed to "interesting whispers and things floating around the Internets". Paulk was an Australian IT specialist who had moved to America and had begun writing and publishing novels independently. Having become friends with Sarah Hoyt, she had been critical of feminism in science-fiction and of the perceived role of the left in the SFWA controversies of 2013-14 (see earlier chapters). Her Mad Genius post on the Sad Puppies in March 2015 was only partly about Brad Torgersen's campaign. Paulk had other news to tell people:
"Because in a fit of even greater insanity than usual, yours truly, Kate the Impaler of the Evil Legion of Evil, will be picking up the banner for Sad Puppies 4 and running with it. I even promised not to impale anyone with it (it's such a pretty flag, and getting blood and… stuff… all over it would make those poor sad puppies even more sad. Even the Evil Legion of Evil has standards, you know. We're completely against letting Sad Puppies stay sad. We want them to be happy)."
https://madgeniusclub.com/2015/03/26/carefully-on-tip-toe-stealing/ [1]
Paulk had volunteered to run the fourth iteration of the Sad Puppies but with the Sad Puppies 3 campaign thoroughly embroiled in its own controversy for much of 2015, there was little for the fourth member of the litter to do until at least some of the dust had settled after the victory of 'no award' at 2015 Hugo Award ceremony in August.
September 3 2015 brought the first official announcement of the campaign, courtesy of the Mad Genius Club blog:
Introducing Sad Puppies Four: The Bitches are Back
(also the Embiggening, and the Embitchening, given that I, Kate the Impaler, am Queen Bitch and I am ably seconded by Sarah, the Beautiful But Evil Space Princess, and Amanda, the Redhead of Doom, and we are all more than capable of going Queen Bitch when we need to).
https://madgeniusclub.com/2015/09/03/introducing-sad-puppies-four-the-bitches-are-back/
The post came complete with a brand new logo by the same artist (Artracoon) who had produced the Ad Puppies 3 and Rabid Puppies logos earlier in the year. As well as a new logo, the campaign came with its own website which was intended to be the main venue to organise the campaign.
Paulk offered a much simpler rationale for the campaign than the previous Sad Puppies:
"The Hugo awards has entirely too small a voting and nominating pool. Five thousand votes is the largest number ever received? Two thousand nomination ballots? That's piddly. For a field loved by millions, it's nowhere near enough, and makes it easy for any small clique to corrupt the idea of awarding great SF and start giving themselves awards.
We want at least ten thousand nomination ballots. Tens of thousands of votes (which means tens of thousands of Hugo memberships, either supporting or attending). So many votes and voters that it's almost impossible for any one group – and yes, that includes the Sad Puppies – to dominate anything."
ibid
After months of argument about the Hugo Awards, the shifting rationales for the Puppy campaigns had focused on an undeniable fact. Sad Puppies 3 had led to a substantial increase in the number of people participating in the Hugo Award. True, the majority of those additional people were voting against the Sad Puppies but it was a measurable impact and arguably the Hugo Awards were richer for it.
Of course, mass participation book awards were not new. The book-cataloguing social media site Goodreads had been running its own awards for several years. The 2014 Awards (run in 2015[3]) had received over 50 thousand votes for the fantasy category and over 30 thousand votes for the science fiction category[4]. Both categories carried some overlap both with the Sad Puppies 3 nominees and with non-slated books that were either finalists or on the long-list for the 2015 Hugo Awards (e.g. John Scalzi's Lock In was ranked second in the Goodreads after The Martian). Boosting the Hugo Award participation to the level of Goodreads when even a supporting membership in Worldcon cost money whereas Goodreads was free, was going to be a major task.
Sad Puppies 4 though had several advantages over the previous campaigns. Paulk had started the campaign months earlier than the previous campaigns. Also, while not conceding that the critics of the Puppies had legitimate issues, Paulk had clearly listened to many of the criticism of how Brad Torgersen had run Sad Puppies 3.
Firstly, the Sad Puppies 4 website had been organised into multiple pages — one for each Hugo Award category. Anybody (and everybody) was invited to leave comments on the appropriate page with eligible works that they had enjoyed. Paulk promised that everything listed would be included in a list for that category. Both Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen had attempted to crowdsource suggestions for their slates but had done so unsystematically. Torgersen had later claimed that the process had been transparent but Paulk's approach demonstrated there was a clearer way of doing it.
Paulk also had a response to the arguments about whether or not the Sad Puppies 3 recommendations had been a slate or not. Of course, Torgersen had literary called it a slate but the semantic arguments had run through 2015 with critics of the Puppies pointing to how the slate had led to a block of nominees sweeping the categories and supporters of the Puppies pointing to other recommendation lists such as the Locus Recommended Reading List. A central point in these arguments had been that the Puppy slate had four or five works in several categories, making it a defacto slate regardless of any other quibbles. For Sad Puppies 4, Paulk stated that the outcome of the nomination process would be both a complete list of everything suggested and also a top-10 (based on the number of suggestions).
In addition, Paulk, Sarah Hoyt and Amanda Green recused themselves from inclusion in the list. Further, Paulk stated that:
"Anyone can post any number of recommendations (obviously not for the same work – one recommendation per person per work), and there is NO political test. The only criteria is that you've read it/watched it/seen it and you think it's one of the best in its Hugo class published in 2015."
And then the process started. In September people began leaving recommendations on the Sad Puppies 4 website. It was not a deluge and most of the recommendations were on the Best Novel page. Initially, many of the suggestions were from people who were regular commenters at Mad Genius Club or Sarah Hoyt's blog. However, a number of critics of the Sad Puppy campaign who had been active in the comment section of File 770 also turned up to leave suggestions. However, there was little tension and the comments were focused on the books rather than the culture war conflict of 2015.
In this first month, recommendations in the Best Novel category for Sad Puppies 4 including such varied works as John C Wright's Castalia House published Somewither as well as N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season. By early October, new recommendations had trailed off on the Best Novel page and the other categories were even more moribund.
December 2015 came and Kate Paulk made a new attempt to boost interest in Sad Puppies 4[6] and called for more people to leave suggestions at the site. In addition, she began at Mad Genius Club a series of profiles of each Hugo category to help people vote[7]. Within these Sad Puppies 4 specific posts, Paulk largely avoided using strong culture war rhetoric but elsewhere Sarah Hoyt attempted to draft in more of that tone via her platform at right-wing blog Instapundit:
"They called us neo nazis and bad to reprehensible. This year we aim to show that there are real fans of science fiction not in their little club. A lot of them. My friend Kate Paulk nefariously explains the different categories, one a week, so you can, you know, decide for yourself and vote your conscience. Which, needless to say is totally "neo-nazi" of us. At least in the fevered minds of vile progs."
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/221745/
Hoyt connected the comment from Irene Gallo (see earlier chapters) that had spawned the Tor Boycott with the Sad Puppies 4 campaign. For whatever reason, recommendations picked up again in December[8].
What was also increasingly obvious by this point was that one Sad Puppy supporter, in particular, was having a significant impact on the number of recommendations.
Declan Finn was an aspiring author of Catholic-themed thrillers and urban-fantasy stories who had been an avid supporter of the Sad Puppies 3 campaign. Through 2015 he had been writing a series of "parodies" involving violent confrontations involving notable authors who were either supporters or opponents of the Sad Puppies[9]. Finn had recently published an urban fantasy novel entitled Honor at Stake about a beautiful Catholic Russian vampire who falls for a psychopathic (but good) young man, who together investigate a mystery involving evil vampires, the UN and Vatican ninjas.
Fans of Declan Finn's books, as well as Finn himself, had become a small but significant number of the people suggesting books at the Sad Puppies 4 website. Finn had taken a leaf from the Sad Puppy book of campaigning and was now actively campaigning for a spot in the Top 10 of the Sad Puppies 4 recommended list. In the age of ebooks and independent publishing, it was an obvious way to boost his own profile. By mid-February of 2016, Declan Finn was vying for the top spot in the Sad Puppies 4 Best Novel list with John C. Wright. Finn was also asking for his fans to suggest his Sad Puppies Bite Back series for the Best Related Work and Best Fan Writer categories[10].
Finn was just one of a new generation of Puppy-supporting writers — people not campaigning for the Hugo Awards per see but rather campaigning for recognition within the pool of readers that had coalesced around the Sad Puppies 3 controversy. Accompanying Finn in this meta-level of quasi-political book promotion was GamerGate supporter, trad-Catholic and regular commenter at Monster Hunter Nation, Brian Niemeier who described his approach as:
"I write for the quiet multitude that legacy publishing abandoned in its rush to be socially conscious–people who'd read SF for years and almost gave up, or did give up, on it for lack of the entertainment that was really all they ever wanted."
https://brianniemeier.com/2016/01/sad-puppies-4-update-my-readers-are/
Niemeier was also running 8th in the Best Novel lists in late January with his science-fiction novel Nethereal but was doing even better on the Campbell Award for Best New Writer page. Several people had suggested Andy Weir (author of The Martian) in that category but overall the page had received many fewer comments than the Best Novel category[11]. With so few people making suggestions, Niemeier was almost guaranteed a prominent spot in the Sad Puppies 4 lists.
With Hugo Nominations due to close at the end of March, Paulk closed the Sad Puppies 4 site to new recommendations on the last day of February, to give her time to collate votes and publish the lists[12].
On March 17, Kate Paulk cross-posted the final lists at both the Sad Puppies 4 site and at the Mad Genius Club blog. In addition, a full tabulation of all works listed was made available on a Google Drive[13]. The final top-10 were much shorter than 10 for some categories. Best Editor Long Form was particularly short:
・Toni Weisskopf – Baen
・Jim Mintz – Baen
・Tony Daniel – Baen
https://madgeniusclub.com/2016/03/17/the-list/
Other categories had more suggestions but often just one person per work. Best Novel though had 132 works suggested and a total of 419 votes. John C. Wright's Somewither beat Declan Finn's Honor at Stake by one vote, 25 to 24.
Across the categories, the lists were a strange mixed bag of things. Mike Glyer's File 770 was one of the top picks for the Sad Puppies 4 fanzine list but in truth, only three people had suggested it (which was one more than Dave Truesdale's Tangent Online). Small participation meant that even a small number of non-Puppies taking part shifted the choices for the list by a significant amount.
Brian Niemeier came joint first in the Campbell list alongside publishing giant Andy Weir. Declan Finn's efforts paid off not just in Best Novel but also in Best Fan Writer and Best Related Work. Other categories such as Best Novella and Best Novelette looked more like a selection made without any Puppy influence at all.
What was most notably lacking was many new or overlooked conservative authors. A claim of the Puppies had been that conservative writers had been progressively marginalised by the Hugo Awards. Sad Puppies 4 was a chance for ordinary readers to promote these ignored writers but the result looked not so very different from the past. In some cases, authors promoted by Sad Puppies 3 had vanished from the lists in Sad Puppies 4. Author Kevin J. Anderson received only one vote and his sequel to the Sad Puppies 3 nominated Hugo finalist The Dark Between the Stars did not appear at all[14].
The announcement of the Sad Puppies 4 lists created a new problem for Kate Paulk. The lists as stated had fewer features of a slate (although the rankings were available so the capacity to use them as a slate was still present) but the "Sad Puppies" brand was still one of the most toxic in fandom. In January of 2016, Elizabeth Sandifer had made a telling point in an open letter to Sad Puppie IV:
"Everything you've done since launching last summer has looked like a staggeringly disingenuous attempt to distance yourself from your existing supporters without actually alienating any of them. You're making a grand show of saying "no, we're not the people who recruited a lunatic who actively doxes anyone who gives him a bad review to help try to hijack a literary award" while trying to retain your existing support. I mean, you're not even trying to build bridges with the people who previously opposed you; you're just engaging in cheap theater to try to pretend that their objections aren't true anymore.
And sure, maybe the superficial objections aren't. You're not providing a slate, just a "list of recommendations." You're not explicitly allied with Vox Day, you're just still catering to the people he brought in. But these weren't the reasons people despised the Sad Puppies. They were just the most blatant pieces of evidence that the Sad Puppies were a bunch of jerks. And what you're blatantly and conspicuously failing to do is to actually give the slightest suggestion that A) you recognize that the Sad Puppies have in the past been a bunch of jerks and B) you're not anymore."
https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/an-open-letter-to-sad-puppies-iv
Among people paying close attention to Sad Puppies 4, the lists once produced were relatively innocuous but that didn't mean authors wanted to be associated with the Sad Puppies brand. Several writers including Catherynne M Valente and David Levine asked to be removed from the lists. British author Alastair Reynolds explained his objections:
"I was away for a few days without internet access and discovered when I returned that my novella "Slow Bullets" has been included on the "SP4" Sad Puppies list for Hugo nominators.
At this point it's of no concern to me whether this is a slate or a set of recommendations. Given the taint left by last year's antics, I don't care for any work of mine to be associated with any list curated by the Sad Puppies."
http://approachingpavonis.blogspot.com/2016/03/slow-bullets-and-sad-puppies.html
Paulk declined to remove people from the lists but as a compromise, she added an asterisk to those names who had objected to being included. At Mad Genius Club she replied to Reynolds, saying:
"I will not insult those who consider your novella to be Hugo-worthy by removing you from the List. I will, however, be updating the version of this post at http://sadpuppies4.org/the-list/ to note that you prefer that your work not be purchased, enjoyed, and nominated without your prior approval."
https://madgeniusclub.com/2016/03/17/the-list/#comment-74245
At the end of the process, it was unclear what had been proven. Paulk had avoided many of the objections raised against Sad Puppies 3 but in doing so had created lists of works that were largely unremarkable. Inadvertently, Sad Puppies 4 had demonstrated that without the culture war style campaigning there was not much substance.
Sad Puppies 4 and Kate Paulk's involvement in the 2016 Hugo Awards did not end there. However, the bigger question people had been asking about the 2016 Hugos was not about the Sad Puppies but rather, what was Vox Day going to do next.
Next Time: Rabid Puppies 2...
Footnotes
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