My Friend Brad Torgersen Suggests One of My Works for Hugo Award Consideration

Award-winning author Brad Torgersen included my novelette, “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium,” which appeared in the May 2014 issue of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, as part of the Sad Puppies 3 campaign to encourage people to read and consider works that might otherwise be ignored.

I like the crew-patch-style logo:

(Sad Puppies 3 logo.)

Some Background, if You Need It. If you haven’t been following the recent controversy surrounding the Hugo Awards — and if you’re not a convention-going science fiction and fantasy fan, why would you? — bestselling author Larry Correia started the “Sad Puppies” campaign two years ago as a reaction to the tendency for the major genre awards to ignore (if not actually shun) popular works by conservative authors, with the result that nominees often represented highly “literary” works that were experimental or edgy or otherwise inaccessible to wide audiences, or “message” fiction that seemed more concerned with waving the flag for progressive issues than with being entertaining. In addition, there had there been reports of authors being blackballed and suspicions of vote-tampering by World Science Fiction Convention staff members.

Larry, who plied his trade as an accountant and auditor before he started writing full-time, saw that the threshold for making the Hugo ballot was relatively small — as low as a few dozen nominations in some categories — and encouraged people to nominate specific works. By comparing the numbers of people who reported their nominations to him with the figures reported by WorldCon, Larry showed that accusations of fraud were unfounded. The nomination and voting processes appeared to be operating above-board, which speaks well for the volunteers who organize and staff the conventions.

Tongue-in-cheek, Larry called his program the Sad Puppies campaign because some people love to be part of causes on behalf of the downtrodden. He wrote that

The ugly truth is that the most prestigious award in sci-fi/fantasy is basically just a popularity contest, where the people who are popular with a tiny little group of WorldCon voters get nominated and thousands of other works are ignored. Books that tickle them are declared good and anybody who publically deviates from groupthink is bad. Over time this lame ass award process has become increasingly snooty and pretentious, and you can usually guess who all of the finalists are going to be that year before any of the books have actually come out or been read by anyone, entirely by how popular the author is with this tiny group.

This is a leading cause of puppy related sadness.

Of course anything that is voted on is de-facto a popularity contest, and the fact is what I like may not be popular with very many people. The only way to make your vote count is to actually vote, and in the case of the Hugo Awards, not all of the people who buy books are interested in buying convention memberships or voting for awards. So it is that, just as with film awards in which movies that do well at the box office are often overlooked during award season, authors who are popular enough to sell thousands if not millions of books are often shut out of what has long been considered the premiere science fiction award.

Back to the Main Topic. I very much appreciate Brad including my story among his recommendations. You can see all of his suggestions at the Sad Puppies link at the top, where he wrote that he is carrying on the campaign to recognize

entirely deserving works, writers, and editors — all of whom would not otherwise find themselves on the Hugo ballot without some extra oomph received from beyond the rarefied, insular halls of 21st century Worldcon “fandom.”

Which is where YOU guys come in. Everyone who’s signed up as a full or supporting member of either Loncon 3 (last year’s Worldcon) or Sasquan (this year’s Worldcon) or MidAmeriCon II (next year’s Worldcon). If you agree with our slate below — and we suspect you might — this is YOUR chance to make sure YOUR voice is heard. This is YOUR award (as SF/F’s self-proclaimed “most prestigious award”) and YOU get to have a say in who is acknowledged.

I’m pleased that he considers my little story to be deserving! And even if folks find other novelettes to nominate, I’m pleased that some more people might read it now who otherwise may not even have heard of it.

If you’d like to read “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium,” here’s a link to it on the IGMS site.* Hope you like it!

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*If you can’t afford to buy the online magazine and still want to read the story, drop me a line and I’ll see about getting you a copy.

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