Just to clear up a few things in this thread:
1. The puppies were not necessarily against fiction with a message. I think the biggest failing was branding the voting blocks in question a cabal. They were not, it was just a relatively homogeneous group of fans that over time had come to make up World Con. Their tastes all tended to run together, and that is why the vote tended toward certain people.
That being said, Jim Baen (who was the first editor/publisher to start incorporating digital distribution and plans for the computer age as a publisher and Lois Bujold, Eric Flint, John Ringo and Dave Weber were all Baen discoveries whom Jim promoted to stardom.) was never awarded a Hugo which I find a crime, and had the puppies not factored in 4 of the 5 nominated editors would have been from TOR. That is a problem. Toni Weisskopf has deserved recognition for years (and this year got more votes for editor than the last 5 winners combined but still fell to no award) and would never have seen the ballot without the puppies taking part. In those cases, I feel that the myopia of the World Con crowd was as limiting in recent years as the puppies slates were this year.
2. SMOF has been a sort of joke in the background regarding those who run Cons and tend to be heavily involved in fandom. It was never invented as a derogatory term. The people who attend and vote at World Con just generally happen to be from this ground. The word CHORF was coined to categorize a particular stripe of SMOF and leave the others alone. In particular, it was Teresa Neilson-Hayden that prompted the creation of the term after changing their tune from "the award represents all of science fiction" to "the award represents World Con" after nominations were announced and the puppies took a large part of the ballot.
3. Thank you escapist community for keeping the "racist, misogynist, homophobe" accusations out of the conversation. It's been a generally rough ride on that account. Arthur Chu accused Sad Puppy grand master Brad Torgersen of using his marriage to a black woman and mixed race daughter as shields to hide his deeply held racist views this year, so yeah it's gotten pretty ugly.
1. The puppies were not necessarily against fiction with a message. I think the biggest failing was branding the voting blocks in question a cabal. They were not, it was just a relatively homogeneous group of fans that over time had come to make up World Con. Their tastes all tended to run together, and that is why the vote tended toward certain people.
That being said, Jim Baen (who was the first editor/publisher to start incorporating digital distribution and plans for the computer age as a publisher and Lois Bujold, Eric Flint, John Ringo and Dave Weber were all Baen discoveries whom Jim promoted to stardom.) was never awarded a Hugo which I find a crime, and had the puppies not factored in 4 of the 5 nominated editors would have been from TOR. That is a problem. Toni Weisskopf has deserved recognition for years (and this year got more votes for editor than the last 5 winners combined but still fell to no award) and would never have seen the ballot without the puppies taking part. In those cases, I feel that the myopia of the World Con crowd was as limiting in recent years as the puppies slates were this year.
2. SMOF has been a sort of joke in the background regarding those who run Cons and tend to be heavily involved in fandom. It was never invented as a derogatory term. The people who attend and vote at World Con just generally happen to be from this ground. The word CHORF was coined to categorize a particular stripe of SMOF and leave the others alone. In particular, it was Teresa Neilson-Hayden that prompted the creation of the term after changing their tune from "the award represents all of science fiction" to "the award represents World Con" after nominations were announced and the puppies took a large part of the ballot.
3. Thank you escapist community for keeping the "racist, misogynist, homophobe" accusations out of the conversation. It's been a generally rough ride on that account. Arthur Chu accused Sad Puppy grand master Brad Torgersen of using his marriage to a black woman and mixed race daughter as shields to hide his deeply held racist views this year, so yeah it's gotten pretty ugly.