Rocket to the Red Planet

Originally a comment over on File770.com (one of many many threads on the topic of the Hugo Awards) in response to the claim that all who oppose the Sad Puppy/Rabid Puppy Hugo slates are Marxists:

It's actually the Puppies who are the Marxists.

Their agent of change is a subaltern proletariat—those workaday beer-money fans who have gone unheard and who must be organized by an intellectual caste into a fighting force.

Puppy Leaders take the form of an advance vanguard of leaders who use democratic centralism in the form of slates, and cadre-only decisions to compose the slates, to exercise political power to a greater extent than their numbers would otherwise suggest. Though a numerical minority, they are the practical majority—just like, literally, the Bolsheviks ("majority" faction).

Their aesthetic is socialist realism—wary of experimental fiction, ambiguity, future pessimism, and all the "pink" stuff, the Puppies want meat-and-potato writing, clear and even didactic moralistic themes, and future optimism.

Work is secondary, position is primary: thus Puppies frequently demand to know why writers like Jim Butcher and Kevin J. Anderson haven't gotten Hugos before, since they are so popular. Actual explanations for why the particular books on the slates are important and award-worthy never seem to be made. It's pure proletkult: what is liked by the masses is the best.

A common Puppy theme is that writers who haven't earned Hugo nominations previously should get them, and that a broader fandom should be able to enjoy seeing their favorite writers win awards. For a group of people who sniff at "participation medals", this demand is essentially that: mass redistribution of wealth in a reputation economy.

There's a red star rising over Spokane, comrades! Forget the term puppy, we should be calling Brad and Larry Belka and Strelka!



PS: to learn more about Soviet space dogs, check out Belka, Why Don't You Bark? by Hideo Furukawa.