This is a sizeable book that chronicles the attempts by the "Sad Puppies" and "Rabid Puppies" to slate the Hugo Awards from 2015 to 2017, though as you can tell from the subtitle, it provides a lot of historical context. The book is very thorough, and its main strength is in tracking down the words of those involved at the time, digging up archived blog posts and tweets and so on. It's a very useful and necessary work, and will be a valuable resource for anyone doing fan history. I found the statements of the so-called "Sad Puppies" the most interesting; I knew a lot about Vox Day already, but learned much I hadn't know about Larry Correia and Sarah A. Hoyt and Brad Torgersen and John C. Wright, among others. Correia comes across a bit thin-skinned, and Hoyt's descent from bog-standard right-winger to "if-Biden-wins-the-left-will-be-putting-people-like-me-into-camps" is almost tragic. Wright is just a shit. It is, however, self-published... and reads like it. Lots of typos, has a tendency to get lost in the weeds sometimes, sourcing and cross-referencing is often wonky.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-complete-debarkle-from-1880-to-2020-by-cames...

This is on the BSFA Awards long-list; a chronology and analysis of the Sad and Rabid Puppies, and their unsuccessful attempts to take over the 2015 and 2016 Hugo Awards, by the anonymous Australian blogger known as Camestros Felapton. I’ll be upfront and say that I vote for (almost) anything with my own name in it, and I am quoted half a dozen times here so it’s getting my vote to go on the BSFA short-list. In particular, it becomes clear that my own 2011 review, of Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International was a major cause of resentment for him, the one thing he kept coming back to when complaining about mean people in SMOFdom. (At the time I wrote it, of course, I was not a SMOF at all; my involvement with Worldcons did not begin until the following year, and I was appointed as a future Hugo administrator for the first time only in 2015.)

I think in general Debarkle is fair, and attempts to understand both the Puppies and their opponents on their own terms. Throughout, the wider cultural and political context from which the Puppies emerged is linked to the specifics of the story – this includes Racefail, the Requires Hate affair and a bunch of other sf controversies, but also Gamergate, and the future Trump and Brexit victories of 2016.

After all that analysis, one is left a little mystified as to what the goal of the Sad Puppies actually was, once the founder Larry Correia had bowed out and his wounded pride was no longer a factor; the various mission statements made by Brad Torgersen and the Mad Genius Club are somewhat contradictory, to put it mildly. Torgersen is eloquent without actually being articulate, and this meant that a number of naïve, mostly right-wing fans with a vague political grievance threw their lot in with him, whereas other more sensible people took one look at his frothing blog posts and decided they’d seen enough.

As for the Rabid Puppies, they were a manifestation of Vox Day’s determined self-promotion and general evil intention of wrecking other people’s fun. (Vox Day has self-described as “evil” on numerous occasions, so I don’t feel that I am being judgemental here.) Some people saw the (very partial) success of the Rabid Puppy slate as proof of Vox Day’s cunning; in fact all it showed was that he was able to persuade his acolytes to throw away their money. His dismal lack of critical thinking skills, clear enough at the time from his political polemics, have been vividly demonstrated since by his gormless adoption of the QAnon / Trump mythos.

The book ends with the author’s “unified puppy theory” which attempts to explain Correia and Torgersen’s behaviour as manifesting a business development strategy, and it makes some sense, though really I think the briefest summary is that the principals simply lost the run of themselves, as we say back home.

The author has made the whole book available for free here. I wish they had spent a bit more time chasing down typos and tightening up the prose, and also I wish that they’d hyperlinked the footnotes, which would make for an easier read. But it’s very much worth getting, if you lived through that period, and it probably will stand as the best record of what exactly happened. ( )