For those who weren’t around in 1983 … a history lesson. Because, as I’ve said before, science fiction’s culture wars have been with us always.

The Sad Puppies, who have successfully campaigned their slate onto the ballot, hope they can break the Hugo Awards in order to rebuild them—a sentiment which has, I’m afraid, a bit too much of a “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” ring for my comfort. But note this isn’t the first time such a concept has been put forward.

“If you too are unhappy with the Hugo system, it’s time to do your bit,” wrote Charles Platt in his editorial to the March-May issue of The Patchin Review. He didn’t put a full slate forward back then, just a single novel, written by … well … you can see the name of the author in a box at the bottom of the front cover.

That’s right—L. Ron Hubbard, whose novel Battlefield Earth had been published in 1982.

Platt posited in his editorial—

If he won, would it bring about a reformation of the Hugo system, or even its abolition? There’s only one way to find out.

As Platt shared in the editorial reproduced below, he’d written Hubbard and the organization promoting the novel to let them know one needn’t attend Worldcon in order to make this happen, and that anyone willing to cough up $15.00 for a supporting membership could vote.

He recommended that subscribers and non-subscribers alike buy their supporting memberships so they could nominate the novel, and if it made the final ballot, vote for it as Best Novel. This suggestion didn’t make Platt any friends back then, for the book was controversial enough even before this controversial suggestion, but it never bothered me, for I didn’t see the suggestion as malicious, or even totally serious, more a Merry Prankster-ish, Abbie Hoffman-like piece of performance art. (But to be honest, I think I was pretty much in the minority there.)

How’d it all turn out? Considering the Best Novel slate at the 1984 Worldcon looked like this—

Foundation’s Edge by Isaac Asimov
The Pride of Chanur by C. J. Cherryh
2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke
Friday by Robert A. Heinlein
Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury
The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe

—the attempt to game the system didn’t work. Which means the Sad Puppies are more powerful than Scientology!

Though I suspect that if the Internet had been around in 1983, Hubbard would have gotten that nomination.

But would he have won? I guess we’ll all find out when the Hugo winners are announced in August.

Thus endeth the lesson.