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My friend, I am sitting back laughing here, because I was around for part of the Sad Puppies fight on Mr. Wright's blog, and while I knew nothing of the Rabids writers or Vox Day or Larry Correia, and wouldn't read them because not my thing, I was generally supportive of the Sads.
Do I agree with them politically/culturally on everything? No, they tend to skew more (American) right-wing and conservative than I do. But as I read a bunch of people in the SF community, especially from the Tor publishers, just smear them all as racists and white supremacists and homophobes and Literally Hitler, the more I went "Okay, whatever modern day SFF is, this ain't what I mean by it".
There's always been the progressive, liberal and even libertarian strain in SF, but the Hugo stories that were being nominated and winning awards at the time weren't even SFF. The well-written one about the magic rain was in fact a coming-out story about a gay Chinese guy worrying about how to tell his conservative, traditionalist parents that in fact he was gay and worse, his boyfriend was white. The magic rain was only a Macguffin and could just as well have been stripped out. The dreadfully written one about the gay lesbian trans BIPOC palaeontologist getting beat up by gin-swilling rednecks - well, comment would be superfluous. Milquetoast revenge fantasies about 'if you were a dinosaur' are what wins Hugos? Okay, but let me off this bus, I'm sticking here behind with Bradbury.
My understanding is that the original trouble kicked off with someone alleging the Hugo and Worldcon committees were pushing a slate of their favourites who were all the liberal LGBT BIPOC progressive sort. The committee(s) said this isn't happening because we have procedures in place. Guy then sets up a slate of his own to show procedures, what procedures? And then the progressives get angry and here we go.
It was very instructive for me. Previously, my impression had been that the Hugos were 'the fans' choice' as distinct from the Nebulas and other awards, and that fandom in general (which in effect always meant American fandom) voted on them. I was educated on that: only Worldcon members who had bought memberships could vote, and the Hugos were the property of Worldcon.
So here we are today, where to even be in with a sniff of a chance, you have to be female/non-white/LGBT+. And people like me now know that the Hugos are meaningless.
I've tried reading Seanan McGuire and Ann Leckie, but I can't get a handle on their writing (and I dislike McGuire, possibly because of her claims to Irish ancestry which may be legit but her first name keeps making me twitch because my hindbrain insists it should be Senan and that's a male name anyway; possibly because of the smug self-satisfied tone of her writing and commentary).
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