How the 2015 Hugos answered an organised slate: No Award, five times

The Hugo Awards have been given for science fiction and fantasy since 1953, which makes them the longest-running prize in the field. Nominations and final votes are cast by members of the World Science Fiction Convention, and the ballot has always had a feature that most awards lack: voters rank the nominees, and one of the options they can rank is No Award.

For sixty years that option was mostly theoretical. In 2015 it decided five categories.

The campaigns

Sad Puppies began in 2013, when the author Larry Correia organised a voting bloc to get his novel Monster Hunter Legion onto the ballot. It grew into published slates: sets of works that supporters were encouraged to nominate. Correia led the 2014 effort, and Brad R. Torgersen took over for 2015, announcing a slate on 1 February that year. The campaign ran until 2017.

Torgersen’s stated case was aesthetic rather than political: that popular works were unfairly passed over by Hugo voters in favour of more literary work, or of stories with progressive political themes. The slate’s nominees were predominantly male, though it included women and people of various racial backgrounds. Other participants were less restrained. The Los Angeles Times reported activists accusing the awards of “giving awards on the basis of political correctness and favoring authors and artists who aren’t straight, white and male”.

A day after the Sad Puppies slate appeared, the writer and publisher Vox Day announced a second one, Rabid Puppies, taking most of the Sad Puppies items and adding others. The procedural difference between the two mattered more than the overlap. Sad Puppies was presented as a list of recommendations. Day instructed his followers to nominate his slate “precisely as they are”.

What that did to the ballot

Bloc nominating works because Hugo nominations have historically been decided by a small number of ballots relative to the size of the readership. Coordinate a few hundred people and you can fill categories.

The results were:

• 51 of 60 Sad Puppy recommendations reached the final ballot.
• 58 of 67 Rabid Puppy recommendations reached the final ballot.
• Two of those nominations were for Vox Day himself, and eleven were for works published by Castalia House, his small Finnish publisher, where he acts as lead editor.
• At least six nominees declined their nomination, both before and — for the first time in the awards’ history — after the ballot was published.

Five categories ended up composed entirely of slate nominees: Best Related Work, Best Short Story, Best Novella, Best Editor (Short Form) and Best Editor (Long Form). In those categories, a voter who disliked the slate had no alternative nominee to rank above it.

How the vote went

In all five Puppy-only categories, No Award was ranked above every nominee. No Hugo was awarded in any of them.

In the other categories where slate nominees appeared alongside independently nominated work — Best Novel, Best Novelette, Best Graphic Story, Best Professional Artist, Best Semiprozine, Best Fanzine, Best Fancast and Best Fan Writer — every slate nominee finished below No Award. The same held for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

The single exception was Guardians of the Galaxy, which appeared on a slate and won Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. It is difficult to read that as a campaign victory: the film was among the highest-grossing releases of its year and would have been an obvious nominee regardless.

Why the mechanism worked

The interesting part is structural rather than moral. The campaigns exploited an asymmetry between the two stages of the award, and the voters answered by exploiting the same asymmetry in reverse.

Nominating is cheap and low-turnout, so a coordinated minority can control which names appear. The final vote is high-turnout and preferential, so a coordinated minority cannot control which name wins. No Award converts the final stage into a referendum on the ballot itself, and that is precisely what it was used for.

There was a cost, and it fell on people who had not chosen to be part of any of it. A writer or editor placed on a slate without being asked found their name on a ballot that was going to be voted down as a bloc, which is why some declined nomination after publication. The award functioned; individuals absorbed the damage.

Afterwards

Feeling ran high enough to acquire a name. George R.R. Martin called it “Puppygate”. Tor Books’ creative director Irene Gallo described the two campaigns on her personal Facebook page as “unrepentantly racist, misogynist, and homophobic” and “extreme right-wing to neo-Nazi” respectively, later clarifying that this was not her employer’s position. Commentators drew parallels with the Gamergate controversy of the same period.

The campaigns changed after 2015. For 2016 Kate Paulk reorganised Sad Puppies around open recommendation threads and reported the most-recommended works rather than issuing her own list; the Rabid Puppies campaign did not follow suit. Sad Puppies did not return in 2017.

What remains is one of the cleaner natural experiments in institutional design. A sixty-year-old voting system was attacked at its weakest stage by people who had correctly identified the weakness, and the rule that saved it was one nobody had needed to use.