When it comes to news about George R.R. Martin, most A Song of Ice and Fire fans would probably prefer to hear that he’s hard at work on The Winds of Winter, or better yet, done. Martin has cancelled many of his science fiction convention appearances to work on that tome, but he didn’t cancel his plans to attend the World Science Fiction Convention, or WorldCon, which was held just this past weekend in Spokane, Washington. He’s seldom missed this convention since he first started attending it in 1971, and he had a special interest in it this year.
You see, WorldCon hosts the Hugo Awards, which have been honoring the best in science fiction since 1953. Martin has won a few Hugos himself, including one for his work on the screenplay for Game of Thrones Season 2’s “Blackwater.”
The rocket-shaped Hugo award.
This year’s Hugos were fraught with controversy. Wired has a very in-depth article on exactly what went down, but the short version is that it was an award ceremony divided against itself. A select group of science fiction authors calling themselves the “Sad Puppies” (they named themselves after those depressing commercials where animals look forlornly into the camera while Sarah Mclachlan sings mournfully) were acting to correct what they saw as the Hugo voters’ preference to give awards to “Social Justice Warriors,” science fiction authors who focused on political statements and left-leaning messages over plot development. Coincidentally (or not), those kinds of authors tended to break with the stereotypical image of science fiction writers as white, male, and straight, a fact that raised more than a few eyebrows.
The Sad Puppies stacked the nominations with authors who they felt represented their message, and suddenly the Hugos weren’t so much an award convention as they were a referendum on the future of the genre. This year, 65 percent more votes came in than had ever been cast before.
The conflict took an ugly turn when a man named Theodore Beale, a game designer who opposes women’s suffrage on account of women being “very easy to manipulate,” started a faction called the “Rabid Puppies.” His group supports the same platform as the Sad Pupplies, but with a lot more racist, sexist, and homophobic overtones, so that’s nice.
Enter George R.R. Martin. The author threw a huge “Hugo Losers Party” (here’s how his invitations read: “Losers Welcome. Winners Will Be Mocked. No Assholes!”) to cut through the controversy. At midnight, he announced that he would be giving out his own awards: the Alfies, named for Alfred Bester, whose book The Demolished Man won Best Novel at the first Hugo awards. Martin based his nominations on data that suggested what the field would have looked like if the Puppies hadn’t intervened, plus a few extra nominees who were decided “by committee, and that committee is me.”
Photo by Holly Anders for Wired.
This seemed like Martin’s attempt to lighten things up after the whole Puppy controversy resulted in some bad blood among convention attendees—each Alfie was made from a streamlined hood ornament from the ’50s, and winners who showed up to the party had to wear rubber coneheads on which losers could write things with magic markers. For the record, none of the Puppy-nominated candidates won awards. In the categories occupied exclusively by Puppy pics, voters chose the “No Award” option instead.
All things considered, many fans would probably still prefer that Martin be working on Winds, but at least he got up to some interesting stuff during his downtime.