Drumroll, please. The end is nigh. The climax approaches. Come Tuesday, I will be flying off to Spokane for Sasquan, Bigfoot’s favorite worldcon. A week from Saturday, this year’s Hugo Awards will be handed out, and we can put an end to the Puppy Wars… the 2015 edition, at least. There will be winners, there will be losers. Some will celebrate, some will weep. The vote totals will be parsed to a fare-the-well, no doubt, and spin doctors will be out in force.

The Puppies are already spinning, in fact. If you visit the Puppy blogs, you’ll soon see that both the Sads and Rabids are busy constructing a nifty little narrative so they can claim victory no matter what happens. If nominees from the Puppy slates take home rockets, they won! If No Award prevails across the board, they won by destroying the Hugos. If non-slate finalists prevail, they won by “proving” something or other (since they keep changing their complaint, pretty much any result is guaranteed to prove something, if squinted at the right way).

All that is nonsense, of course. Like most Puppy claims have been from the start of this fiasco. Hypocrisy and delusion. Me and my friend Occam, we use a simpler razor. If the Puppies win, they win. If they lose, they lose. And No Award… well, that does make this a three-body problem rather than a simple binary one, but I will get to that later. So if the Hugo voters do indeed vote down the bulk of Puppy nominees, please stand up with me and blow a big loud raspberry at any Puppy who tries to claim that black is white, up is down, and losing is winning. It ain’t.

WILL the Puppies lose?

I don’t know. No one knows. Don’t believe any fool who tries to tell you otherwise.

We do know that 5950 Hugo ballots were cast this year, smashing all previous records. You can find the details here: http://www.thehugoawards.org/2015/08/2015-hugo-voting-participation-smashes-records/ Last year, in contrast, only 3587 valid ballots were received, though Loncon was the largest worldcon in history. There’s no doubt that the Puppygate controversy that has iamed the internet since the nominations were announced drove those numbers. Supporting Membership rocketed up to unprecedented levels.

But who are all these new members? Over at FILE 770, the feeling seems to be that most of them are fans rallying to the defense of the Hugos. If so, the Puppy finalists will not only lose, they could very well be crushed, with lots of them finishing behind No Award. But some of the Puppies seem equally convinced that the new members are Puppy supporters, joining up in droves to stick it to those vile [fill in Brad Torgersen’s offensive epithet of the week]. If that’s true, the Puppies could actually win some rockets. Hell, if this betokens a mass migration of Gamergaters, the Rabids might even sweep the awards.

Which narrative is true? Which is deluded? No one knows, and no one is going to know until David Gerrold and Tanarive Due start to rip open those envelopes a week from Saturday.

For those on the edge of their seat wondering how this will all turn out, here’s a hint: watch the Campbell Award.

Just as there are “swing states” and “swing counties” and “swing precincts” that act as predictors of the results of an election, this year’s voting for the John W. Campbell Award (Not A Hugo) for Best New Writer will give us a strong indication of who is likely to prevail in all the races to follow.

the first Campbell winner

The Campbell Award is traditionally the first major writing award of the evening, given before any of the actual Hugo Awards. It is usually preceded by the First Fandom Award and the Big Heart Award, and sometimes by the Seiuns, the “Japanese Hugo.” Some worldcons prefer to give the Seiuns at another time; I have no idea where Sasquan will come down on that. Most of the Puppies do not even know what First Fandom is, and I know damn well that none of them are going to win a Big Heart Award, now or ever, so we can be reasonably certain that those two awards will go as usual. Bringing us to the Campbell.

This year’s Best New Writer finalists include Wesley Chu and four Puppies. Jason Cordova, Kary English, and Eric S. Raymond were on both slates, Sad Puppies and Rabid. Rolf Nelson, the fourth Puppy, was on the Rabid slate, but not the Sad.

In any normal year, Wesley Chu would have to be considered the overwhelming favorite to win the tiara. The Campbell has a two-year window of eligibility, and this is Chu’s second and final year. He was a nominee last year as well, with the third-highest number of nominations, behind only the ultimate winner and a second-place finisher, neither of them eligible this year, so we know that a lot of fans already like his work. His body of work has only gotten stronger in the intervening year. And, honestly, bottom line, Chu is the best writer of this year’s five… and that IS what the Campbell is supposed to reward after all, the Best New Writer.

But will he win? Well, that’s in the hand of those 5950 voters.

If Wesley Chu takes the Campbell, as he should, I think we will be in for a fairly reasonable night in Spokane. There will be some winners from the slates, and some categories will go the No Award, but most of the rockets will actually go to deserving work. If Chu wins, I think the vast majority of the fans in the auditorium will be more happy than not by night’s end.

If No Award wins, however… if No Award takes the Campbell, it will represent a huge and ominous victory for the “nuclear option,” for the faction of fandom that wants to destroy the village in order to save it. A victory by No Award in this category will signify that the voters decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and will likely betoken a long ugly night ahead, with category after category going to No Award. Myself, I think this unlikely. I think the hardcore “vote No Award on everything” voters are a small (if noisy) minority. But I could be wrong. It could happen.

And what if one of the four Puppy finalists takes the tiara?

That would represent a victory for the Puppies, certainly. But even there, certain distinctions should be made. Rolf Nelson was a candidate of the Rabids, but not the Sads. A victory by Nelson would be a singular triumph for Teddy Beale and the most extreme elements of Puppydom… and could suggest even worse results ahead, up to and including VD actually winning one or both of the Editing Hugos for which he is nominated.

Kary English, on the other hand, represents a much more moderate side of Puppydom. Though initially put forward by both the Sad and Rabid slates, VD later dropped her and removed her from his suggested ballot entirely when English put up a couple of blog posts that distanced herself from the Puppy party line. English is also a Hugo nominee this year, for her story “Totalled.” She’s the strongest writer of the four Puppy finalists, and in any normal year would be Wesley Chu’s toughest competition. This year? She could well finish last, since some trufans will not forgive her for being part of the slates to begin with, and the Rabids will not forgive her for breaking ranks. Myself, I think English deserves better. While I don’t think she is as good as Chu at present, she is plainly a talented new writer, and not unworthy of a Campbell nod. I would prefer a Chu victory in this category… but I’d rather see English take the tiara than No Award.

Oh, and while we are crunching candidates here, Eric S. Raymond warrants a few words. A candidate of both the Sad and Rabid slates, Raymond was nominated as one of the field’s best new writers on the basis of a single published story, the thinnest resume in the entire history of the Campbell Award. Maybe if that story was the greatest short ever published in our genre, that would be warranted… but it’s not. Even Raymond himself expressed incredulity at his nomination. Given how little SF he has produced compared to Chu and the other finalists, one might think that Raymond would be the longest of long shots. Ah, but there’s another factor. However much a neophyte he may be as a writer of science fiction, Eric S. Raymond is a well-known figure is the gaming world. Should Raymond win the Campbell, despite his shaky credentials as a writer of fiction, it would suggest strongly that large numbers of gamers had purchased supporting membership to vote for him. (Whether those gamers were Gamergaters is another question entirely, and one that cannot be proved. So far as I know, Raymond has not been a part of the Gamergate controversy).

I have no idea who is going to win.

But once we know the winner, it will tell us a lot about how the rest of the night will go.

Watch the Campbell.

(Some thoughts on the other Hugo categories to follow, if I find the time)

A couple posts down, I posted about worldcon and what it means to me, and why I am going to be going to Sasquan and throwing a big party there (someone needs to make a big futile, stupid gesture, and it might as well be me).

From talking and emailing with various friends and colleagues, however, I know that some of them will NOT be going to Spokane, mainly because the Hugo Wars have left a bad taste in their mouths. Others will attend, but not without trepidation. They wonder how much of the acrimony of Puppygate will spill over into the con itself… to the panels, the parties, the hallways. Will this worldcon be a celebration or a battleground? A family reunion or a family feud?

I wish I could answer that question, but no one really knows. I’m hoping for “celebration” and “family reunion,” and I think that’s the best bet… but we won’t know till the fat lady sings and the dead dogs howl.

There are a couple of questions that are key here.

Number one, how many Puppies are actually going to be coming to Spokane? Hundreds of people have bought Sasquan memberships in the last couple of months, presumably to vote on the awards and site selection, but the majority of those have been supporting memberships. Are any of the Puppies buying attending memberships?

I have no idea. We do know that none of the Puppy leaders will be in Spokane. Brad Torgersen is in the military, and on deployment. Larry Correia attended the Reno worldcon (and blogged about what a great time he had, though he changed his mind a few months ago and revised his trip report retroactively), but he has clearly stated a number of times that he finds Dragoncon and Gencon more congenial and does not plan to return to worldcon. And VD, we are told, cannot attend any worldcon held on US soil. (I do not know the truth of that, though it does appear true that Beale lives somewhere abroad).

Torgersen, Correia, and Beale are by no means the only Puppies, of course. What about the others? Wright, Kratman, Hoyt, Williamson, May, Paulk, the Tor Boycott guys? Any of them? If any of the slate nominees should win a Hugo, will they be there to accept? Sure, many of those on the slates will be there, folks like Mike Resnick and Toni Weisskopf and Jim Minz, but just as we must distinguish between the Sad Puppies and the Rabids, we need to distinguish between the actual Puppies and those they chose to nominate.

Will the Sad Puppies be sitting on panels, signing autographs in the dealer’s room, attending the parties? Hell, will they be throwing parties? (The Furries sometimes have room parties at worldcon, what about the Puppies?) Will any of the Rabids turn up, without their rabid leader?

The fannish fears about Sasquan becoming a battleground are going to prove baseless if no Puppies actually come to Spokane. Which is entirely possible. Way back in one of my first posts on Puppygate, I said that the Puppies want to decide who gets the Ditmars, but they don’t want to be Australians. That analogy still holds true; the Puppies want to decide who gets worldcon’s award, but they don’t seem to want to come to worldcon.

But maybe I am wrong.

If so, the second question arises. Assuming some Puppies do indeed come to Spokane — a lot, a few, just one — what will that do to the atmosphere of the con?

This of course is a two-sided question. Will the Puppies behave? How will the trufans behave toward them? Will people get along, agree to disagree, maintain some semblence of courtesy? Or will we have blood in the halls and the party suites?

Tor always throws a huge party at worldcon. Will the boycotters try to make their presence known there, or at the Tor table in the dealer’s room? Baen Books often has a party too. Is that going to be a Puppy stronghold, or will writers from across the spectrum be welcome? If there is a panel on Puppygate, will it turn into a bloodbath?

And then there the two biggest potential flashpoints. The Business Meeting, and the Hugo ceremony itself. The Business Meeting takes place AFTER the Hugos, and I suspect that much of what happens there will be determined by what happened the night before. But it could get very contentious. The Hugo Awards… David Gerrold has stated several times that he wants to make the ceremony fun and non-political. I commend him for that. But there is only so much that a presenter can do. There’s only one of him, and hundreds in the audience. David can set a tone, but he cannot control what will happen.

What happens at Sasquan, I believe, is going to be very important… because it will go a long way toward determining what happens after worldcon, next year and the year after and the year after that. “The culture war has come to science fiction,” some of the headlines about this kerfuffle have read. True enough, I fear. The question is, is the culture war here to stay, or can we make a peace? Will Puppygate fade and be forgotten after Sasquan, or will we need to fight the same battles next year?

The answer to that lies with the Sad Puppies. The Rabids? Forget it. Beale has vowed to destroy the Hugos, to burn them to the ground, and I have no doubt he will try… this year, next year, the year after. There’s no reconciliation possible there.

The Sads, though… as much as I have disagreed, and continue to disagree, with Correia and Torgersen, I have managed to have relatively civilized and courteous exchanges with them both, and I don’t think either intended what has happened. Beale wants to wreck the Hugos; Correia and Torgersen just seem to have wanted to get themselves and their friends nominated. I don’t like the way they went about it, but they are not the first to have that impulse. Neither one will be involved with Sad Puppies 4, we are told… and that’s good. I can only hope that their chosen successor will go about things differently… recommendations rather than a slate, discussions of the virtues of the writers they like rather than attacks on the writers they don’t like, an end to all the crap about SWJs and CHORFs, the endless name-calling.

I am old enough to remember 1974, when Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle published THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE and Samuel R. Delany published DHALGREN. Both major works by major writers, both bestsellers, both instantly recognized as classics… but in what may have been the last great battle of the Old Wave and New Wave, the fans who loved MOTE hated DHALGREN, and vice versa. (I loved them both myself, but I think I was almost alone in that). At every con I went to that year, fans and writers alike debated the virtues of those two important novels. The arguments were impassionated, endless, often heated, sometimes derisive… but underneath it all was always the sense that we are all still fans together, united by a common love for our genre.

It was not a culture war. It was a literary debate.

That’s what we need to return to, if we are ever to get beyond Puppygate.

Can we? I hope so. One of the things that gives me hope is — surprise — one of the Puppies, a writer named Kary English. She will be up for two awards on Hugo night. Both the Sad Puppies and the Rabids had her on their slate for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and she’s on the ballot there. And both slates also pushed her story “Totaled,” which is on the ballot for Best Short Story. English did not refuse the nominations or ask to be removed from the ballot, like Marko Kloos and Annie Bellet and (later) Edmund Schubert, for which sin some of those on “my side” of this fight will not forgive her. But she did later make two blog posts about Puppygate — you can read them here http://karyenglish.com/2015/06/dear-puppies-please-talk-about-what-you-love/ and here http://karyenglish.com/2015/06/an-open-letter-to-puppies-and-everyone/– calling for the Puppies to talk about the work and why they liked it (which none of them were doing, all the actual literary debate and reviews were coming from the other side) and then asking me to left out of any future Puppy slates. For that sin, she got on the Rabid shitlist too, and Beale dropped her from his slate.

I don’t know Kary English. (It is possible I have met her or been in the same room with her at some previous con, but if so I don’t remember. I meet a lot of people). Until Puppygate and her double nomination, I had never read any of her work. But I agree with much of what she had to say in those posts, and I applaud her for saying it, knowing (as surely she must have) that by breaking ranks with “her side,” aka the Puppies, she would face the wroth of some of those who had previously championed her. I know that there are some on “my side” who have slammed English despite these posts, insisting that she spoke up too late in the game, that she was trying “to have it both ways.” No, sorry, that’s idiocy. Like Kloos and Bellet and Schubert before her, she’s opting out of the kennel and the slates. I will not fault her for not doing so sooner. This thing has been hard for all concerned, and these choices are painful… especially for a young writer who has just received his or her first Hugo nomination.

If there is any hope for reconciliation post-Puppygate, it lies with voices of moderation and forgiveness on both sides, not with the extremists and the haters. It lies with Marko Kloos and Annie Bellet and Edmund Schubert. I hope they are all at worldcon. I would like to meet them, buy them a drink, shake their hands, and argue about books with them.

And Kary English too. The chances are good that, come Hugo night, she will be losing a Hugo Award and a Campbell Award both (maybe not, upsets happen, no one knows, I get surprised every year, but that’s my best guess). If so, I’ll have a Hugo Loser ribbon for her badge, and she’ll be welcome at my Hugo Loser Party.

The clock is ticking. Only two weeks remain to cast a ballot for this year’s Hugo Awards, in what is proving to be the most controversial and hotly contested Hugo race in the award’s long history. The Hugo, as regular readers of this Not A Blog know, is our field’s oldest and most prestigious award. Named in honor of Hugo Gernsbach, the founder of the first SF magazine <i><b>Amazing Stories</b></i>, it has been given annually at every worldcon since 1953 (well, except for 1954). And this year, as never before, the voice and vote of every true fan is needed to help protect the integrity of the rocket.<br/><br/><img src=”http://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/wp-content/uploads/import/260706_300.jpg” alt=”” title=””><img src=”http://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/wp-content/uploads/import/261190_300.jpg” alt=”” title=””><br/><br/>You need to be a member of Sasquan, this year’s worldcon, to vote on the Hugos… but even if you are unable to attend, Supporting Memberships are available that will allow you to vote. If you have not voted the Hugo Awards before, please note that it is an “Australian ballot,” a preferential system whereby one ranks the nominees. You don’t just vote for one. You can rank NO AWARD as if it were any other finalist; ahead of some nominees, behind others.<br/> <br/>You can sign up to buy one at https://sasquan.swoc.us/sasquan/reg.php In addition to voting privileges, a Supporting Membership will get you the convention’s program book (usually a handsome item, though it varies from year to year) and other publications.<br/><br/>The ballot is here: <a href=”http://sasquan.org/hugo-awards/voting/”>http://sasquan.org/hugo-awards/voting/</a><br/><br/><img src=”http://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/wp-content/uploads/import/261628_300.jpg” alt=”” title=””><img src=”http://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/wp-content/uploads/import/261735_300.jpg” alt=”” title=””><br/><br/>You can also sign up as an ATTENDING member and actually attend the convention, which is the course I strongly recommend for those who have the time and the money. Cons are fun, especially worldcon; that’s what they are all about. Reading, panel discussions, the art show, the dealers’ room, the masquerade, filksinging… all sorts of great stuff goes on. Something for all tastes. And EVERYONE is welcome, despite what you have heard. (Just don’t be an asshole. Assholes get welcomed too, but the welcome wears out more quickly).<br/><br/>Both supporting and attending members get an electronic “Hugo packet” that will enable you to read many of the works nominated for this year’s rockets. <br/><br/>FILE 770, which has been doing an exemplary job of reporting on Puppygate, reports that Sasquan memberships continue to climb, and that more than 2300 Hugo ballots have already come in:<br/><br/>http://file770.com/?p=23818<br/><br/>Who are all these new Supporting Members? Are they trufans rallying to the defense of one of our field’s oldest and most cherished institutions? Are they Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies, Happy Kittens, Gamergaters? Are those dreaded SJWs and ASPs and CHORFs turning out by the hundreds and the thousands? Are these the Neo-Nazis and right-wing reactionaries we have been warned of? The truth is… no one knows. We may get a clue when the ballots are opened and counted, but even then, the numbers may well just say, “Answer cloudy, ask again.”<br/><br/><img src=”http://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/wp-content/uploads/import/261906_900.jpg” alt=”” title=””><br/><br/>All I know for sure is that every vote will count. <br/><br/>Once again, balloting closes at midnight on July 31. And it would be best not to wait until the last day to vote, since there is a very real danger that Sasquan’s servers could be overloaded. Even if you haven’t finished all the reading — and I do urge everyone to read the nominees — you can cast a partial ballot today, and go back and revise, add, delete, and change as many times as you want between now and July 31. No votes will be counted until the deadline.<br/><br/>Let this be fandom’s finest hour. Vote.