The Sad Puppies are back again, putting forward their slate of nominees for the Hugo awards. I haven’t read any of them, or any of the other slates that have been put forward (except for one story that had absolutely no fantasy or science fiction in it, but was about a lake I’m fond of). I probably won’t read any of them. My book club is doing The Worm Ouroborus, and it looks as if I’ll be enmeshed in that for the foreseeable future. But wow, am I enjoying the Sad Puppies brouhaha!
You see, for years now I’ve been feeling less and less comfortable even on the fringes of the SF community. I have a high tolerance for academic criticism – I write fantasy set in universities, after all – but it has been exceeded. It’s seemed every year as if only certain opinions about things SFnal should be voiced, and I never quite understood what the current versions were.
In the past year alone, far more established and more savvy authors than myself have written about being made to feel unwelcome at conventions because they wanted to openly discuss certain policies, about not attending any cons at all until the infighting died down, about ‘dodging a bullet’ by refusing to comment on what was happening, about being ‘disappeared’ from movements they helped establish. Every year it’s seemed as if there were more career-wrecking mistakes to be made, until I began to feel that the best thing would be for nobody to even notice my books at all.
So to have the Sad Puppies charge in, slamming the doors open and trampling the eggshells with their muddy boots and making raucous, unapologetic demands that we pay attention to their brand of non-cautious fiction — suddenly the SF I once knew is back! By which I don’t mean the particular SF they write, for I haven’t read it, but the SF with the wide horizon, in which you could play with any idea that interested you. The SF where you could find lock-and-load he-men on one shelf and books about five-gender anarchist societies on the next; where unwashed barbarians rubbed covers with witches and dragon-riders and starship designers, and where the authors of all that stuff were treated as individuals with imagination, not exemplars of political positions.
The SF where it was all right to just have fun. The SF where you could breathe.
So I say, go Sad Puppies! But I also say, one Sad Puppies movement is not enough – it’s too easily turned into a binary, progressives-vs-reactionaries story. We need eight or ten more movements like this; a big, colorful, noisy chaos of creativity and invention. After all, shouldn’t a field that does worldbuilding be at least as big and vibrant as the world?
