I’m a little mad actually.

Here’s the thing, folks.

Chuck Tingle’s erotic works are short stories, i.e. works of fiction under 7500 words.

They are science fiction: they take place in a complicated multiverse full of sentient objects, dinosaurs, and unicorns.

They are inarguably popular: there is no way Chuck Tingle, as a self-published author of erotica, would have the profile to get troll-nominated for a Hugo if he wasn’t drawing thousands of delighted readers to his short stories–can you name another science fiction author who regularly does that? (Can you name any other author of self-published SF erotica??)

But you wanna be mad about Chuck Tingle getting nominated for a fan-voted award for best (most popular) SF short story, because his story is silly? Because it’s got buuuttttt seeeexxxxxx?

I haven’t seen one person get mad about the Related Work nominated this year which is hosted on a website called Ask A Bigot and in which the author lays the blame for child rape solely on homosexuality. I haven’t seen one. And that blog post is nominated for a Hugo as Best Related Work (to Science Fiction), because the child rapist in question was a fantasy author–but you want to tell me “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” doesn’t belong in its category? You want to tell me Chuck Tingle is the nominee bringing down the tone of this year’s Hugos?

Fuck a whole lot of that.

Or as our friend Jane put it:

“Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.  Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than any other literary corporation in this world, no species of composition has been so much decried. … There seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and under-valuing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.“

–Jane Austen, defending that most reviled of genres: the novel.

One of the drawbacks of writing Tumblr posts when I’m angry is that I don’t even always work out what point I’m trying to make until long afterward, let alone consider whether I’ve made that point clearly. So! A morning-after addendum.

Here’s the thing, guys. The Rabid Puppies put SIXTY-FOUR NOMINATIONS ON THE HUGO BALLOT THIS YEAR. Sixty-four! 

Some of those have, rightly, gotten a pass as things that are good and popular with mainstream Hugo voters and would have gotten nominated anyway: Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, Lois McMaster Bujold’s “Penric’s Demon”, The Sandman: Overture, The Martian. 

Some things have likewise gotten a pass because even though they likely wouldn’t have appeared on a Hugo ballot prior to the Puppies takeover, they’re generally acknowledged to be popular in their own parts of the genre: Jim Butcher and Stephen King were not regularly appearing on Hugo ballots before last year, but okay, yeah, they fit the parameters of the categories, they have massive fan followings and enjoy enormous commercial success; maybe they do deserve to be considered. The blind, rabid pig finds an acorn once in a while.

And there is also a lot of toxic self-aggrandizing garbage on the ballot because the Puppies are nominating their own leaders and friends. The entire Best Related Work category is a tire fire. Three short fiction nominees were published by Castalia House, which Vox Day owns, and one was published on Vox Day’s website. I don’t even know what’s going on in Best Graphic Story and I’m not sure I want to.

I just want people to recognize that automatically lumping “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” into the category of “horrible turds foisted on us by the Rabid Puppies”–making it the banner for that category–is a nasty knee-jerk reaction to surreal humor and gay erotica. 

There are a lot of actual turds on the ballot. A LOT. But I’m pretty sure “Space Raptor Butt Invasion,” as a very popular short story that happens to fall way outside the Hugo voting mainstream, is actually an acorn.