I wrote a few thoughts on Nethereal for the Puppy of the Month Club. Also, I’m trying to learn a bit more about the origins and claims of the Puppies, so I may need a little help. What I plan to do is to read those books and authors that, according to the critics, have infested Science Fiction, to see if they are as dreadful as people claim. I’ve read the original Puppy’s post by Larry Correia, but he doesn’t give any examples, he just states that the genre has become infested (and he says it naturally, implying it’s common knowledge, and that it’s a problem that has gone for a long time.) I don’t doubt that, but I want to know the specifics, to know if almost every Hugo Award of the last years has gone to ideological warriors and their friends and/or it’s just that a few of them are goddam annoying, loud, and obnoxious (which may give the impression that they are everywhere.)
I already know a few of the “problematic” authors, but probably more for their social media antics than for anything else. So the question is this: because I don’t want to read thousands of books from the last 5 decades (the problem probably started in the 70s anyway,) at which point (a) did Hugo and Nebula winners started to go full ideological warrior (2012? earlier?) and (b) are there any especially outrageous examples (like Ancillary Justice or that thing about If you were a Dinosaur, my Love,) that forced people to say “No, way, this is too much. This will not stand, man!” A tipping point, basically.
Thanks.
Emperor's Notepad 
Specifically gets too much into revisiting the slings and arrows of insult we had to endure. Many of us stopped reading for awhile because what was held up hated us. Basically, a lot of SF has been insulting to people of faith since 1980’s and became prevalent in the 90’s, and is hard to avoid in mainstream SF now. Mainstream Fantasy has largely abandoned the idea that faith even can be other than evil, or is just World of Darkness/fairy tale steampunk fanfic, when you boil it down.
Sorry if this isn’t helpful, but it’s a snapshot of what I saw, and why I had stopped reading Sf and had reduced my fantasy reading until last year, when I found out about the Puppies. Now, I’m back to happily consuming SFF rapidly.
LikeLike
Not exactly what I needed, but it helps. But it’s something I have seen, and even if someone doesn’t hold strong beliefs, seeing all those people from fantasy and science fiction settings behaving and thinking like twentieth-century extreme liberals can get very tiresome and ridiculous.
LikeLike
a) A widely cited tipping point is the splitting of the Best Editor Hugo into Short Form and Long Form awards, which occurred at the behest of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, science fiction manager at Tor Books, which is the main source of the Hugos’ ideological bias. PNH and his fellow Tor editor David Hartwell pretty much shared custody of the Best Editor–Long Form award until the Puppies showed up.
b) Answers to this question may differ depending on readers’ tastes, but the example that tends to come up most often is Redshirts.
LikeLike
Thanks, that makes sense, and I didn’t know about that split.
From what I have been able to see, the first wave started in 2006 or so, then -around 2013 & 2014- with the rise of social media, it went in full force.
LikeLike
I don’t have time to find them at the moment (I’ll try to remember for later), but there was a series of blog post exchanges between JC Wright and George RR Martin on the topic that may prove illuminating. I remember reading them helped me understand the situation a little better.
LikeLiked by 1 person