Star Trek Writer David Gerrold Attacks Sad Puppies As Wired Rereleases Their Article On The Hugo Awards Controversy

Wired magazine, for some reason, decided to reignite talk about the Hugo Awards and their subsequent destruction from the Sad Puppies controversy of 2015, where social justice activists had taken over the award that used to be revered as something special in science fiction, and normal people decided to fight back by voting for the books that fans actually enjoyed. In response, Star Trek writer David Gerrold issued a rambling Facebook post about the situation, saying, “The Pathetic Pooches never had any intention of winning any Hugos” and more, attacking the main architects of the Sad Puppies, Larry Correia, Vox Day, and Brad Torgersen.

The World Science Fiction Convention has had its share of controversies over the last decade, almost none of them having to do with anything science fiction, but rather all in the realm of the political. It started with authors and fans noticing that the Hugo Awards, which were supposed to be for the best fiction of the year, were increasingly going to DEI choices and not based off of the merit of the works.

Enter Larry Correia, who formed a slate of voting which was eventually called The Sad Puppies to attempt to get the award back to a semblance of normalcy. The elites withing Worldcon instead of allowing this, decided to band together to vote “no award” while libeling those who wanted the award back to normalcy as “fascists” or “Nazis” in one of the most petty situations in science fiction history.

David Gerrold, not to be outdone in crass pettiness, made what he called “asterisk” awards for those who participated, which were shaped like a wooden a*** hole, hence the pun name, showing that indeed, professional science fiction writing is not what it used to be.

Wired Magazine wrote a piece on it in 2015, as Worldcon went along, and attempted to strawman and libel those involved while preserving the social justice establishment within publishing. They rereleased the article yesterday with an expanded edition (behind a paywall) and David Gerrold chimed in to again show how awful he is toward his fellow science fiction writers.

He wrote on Facebook:

Apparently, Wired Magazine has published an expanded version of their story of the Hugo debacle of 2015. While what they published was fairly accurate, it was also incomplete -- it did not include any mention of how hard the con committee worked behind the scenes, or how hard everyone worked to plan and put on a successful Hugo ceremony.

Here’s my take on it.

The Pathetic Pooches never had any intention of winning any Hugos.

From the very beginning, their intention was to destroy the credibility of the awards.

There were three primary actors: Vox Bray who cannot reenter the United States, lest he be arrested for tax fraud, Larry Correa, who was still pissed at not winning an award in a previous year, and Brad Torgesen, who should have known better than to be the hood ornament on the battering ram.

They ran a slate in five Hugo categories and bought enough votes to push other (and probably more deserving) candidates off the ballot.

I’ll leave it to others -- or the Wired article -- to rehash the details, but one thing proves my point that the intention was disruption. Neither Correa nor Torgesen bothered to attend the convention. If either of them truly believed in their cause, they would have shown up to defend their position.

For those who weren’t there, or came in late, the membership of Sasquan was the largest membership of any Worldcon in history -- mostly non-attending members who joined for the specific purpose of voting “no award” in all the pooch-slated categories. The smackdown of the pooches was evident by the applause of the audience.

BTW, I do know something about all this because I was the Hugo Ceremony host, and it was my intention from the beginning that the evening would be a joyous celebration of the fannish community.

Let me say it in the clear -- the Worldcon is a gathering of a marvelous extended family. We come together to celebrate our love of imagination -- in books, in art, in costumes, in filk songs, in all the different crafts that we create. It’s not run for profit and its importance lies in the fact that it’s a celebration of our community.

But based on the evidence that Wired is rehashing the squabble, it may be that the rift that was created is irreparable. It is likely that some of those who were most visibly aligned with that movement will remain separated away from the community that celebrates the genre in which they work.

It may be that some of them will have profitable careers away from fannish community, and that’s certainly an earned measure of success, but if they craved the approval of the community, that ship never sailed, it sank in the harbor.

What I know about community -- any community -- is this: you do not create change by standing outside and hurling invective. You create change by becoming part of the community, supporting it, and advocating efforts that include everyone and support everyone. The essential mistake that the Pathetic Pooches made was declaring themselves enemy of the Worldcon. What they created was their own opposition.

I do know that some of them walked away claiming a great victory -- that they blew a hole in the Hugo awards. Well, yes and no -- they damaged one year’s awards, but the Hugos are still here and the Pathetic Pooches are fading in memory. It was a Pyrrhic victory -- they damaged their own selves, their own reputations, their own careers far more than any lasting damage they might have inflicted on the Worldcon.

Myself ... I think the evidence of their failure was on display at the Hugo ceremony. The audience was overwhelmingly against them. Perhaps they expected to be acknowledged somehow, perhaps they expected some garment-rending, but no -- they got a smackdown, and we acknowledged there was an asterisk on the year’s awards and sold wooden asterisks to commemorate that. We raised $3000 for Terry Pratchett’s Orangutan Foundation.

That’s how fandom works. That’s what they never understood. That’s why they lost.

He then followed up in a comment to make sure that people knew that he was truly done, saying, “I think I’ve said everything I have to say, everything worth saying, I hope we can look to the future instead of the past. I have books to write.”

Laura Resnick, daughter of industry Legend Mike Resnick, virtue signaled and assured those present that her father hated what the Puppies did, though Resnick was very much a conservative who more aligned with those in the Puppies than Worldcon, “My father was very saddened by that whole appalling mess. He loved fandom, regarded it as his family, and hated seeing the massive, bitter rift of Puppygate and seeing the Hugos battered. Publicly, he refused to take sides. I won’t share what he said to me privately about those events or the people who instigated it all, since that was private. I will say that I don’t know whether he still regarded Torgersen, who he had befriended, mentored, and helped until then, as a friend after seeing Brad attack the Hugos and so many of Pop’s longtime friends over and over that year. But I do know that from then until my dad died, I never again ever heard him mention his name.”

Resnick attended LibertyCon along with Torgersen, Correia, and Hoyt, along with several Puppy-friendly and adjacent at least one year in the late 2010s, where the author of this article was pleased to meet Resnick and speak with him before his passing, so perhaps Laura simply missed his friendly interactions in her terminally online state.

As much as he rambles about attending conventions, it is of note that simply trying to humanize those who have different political beliefs and show up is worthy of a ban, according to Worldcon, which banned the author of this article in 2018, soon after the situation.

It’s also of note that Gerrold is frightened to simply write “Vox Day” as he has to hide the fact of who he’s talking about. The science fiction elite has always been afraid of Day, who now runs one of the most lucrative high-end book publishing establishments in the world in Castalia Library, producing leatherbound books that outsell anything Gerrold could possibly produce in modern times.

Correia also outsells Gerrold by leaps and bounds with his releases. The only person who seemed to miss out on the winning is Torgersen, who continued to try for mainstream publishing clout through this whole situation and never really became a cause to rally behind.

It seems the Sad Puppies won in retrospect; meanwhile, the Hugo Awards are dying on the vine with some of the lowest numbers in its history in this year’s offerings. Worldcon is aging and dying and independent publishing has moved on to innovate in what they do while traditional publishing stagnates.

What are your thoughts on David Gerrold’s rant on the Hugo Awards? Leave a comment and let us know.

For a great alternative to mainstream science fiction, with spy thriller action, read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!

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