Thank you Sad Puppies, you’ve done more for diversity in sci-fi than an army of social justice warriors.

For those arriving new to Hugogeddon 2015 I will briefly reprise the state of play. The Hugos are a fan-decided award for sci-fi books. In Spokane, Washington, at the weekend, the Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin won the big prize for best novel, but “no award” was declared in five other categories. The awards bring an end to months of controversy, in which George RR Martin himself waded in several times to urge fans to defeat the Sad Puppies.

The Puppies have riven the SF community this year by organising a reactionary vote in protest against the increasing number of women and writers and colour who have been winning the awards. This group of conservative authors and fans were able to make a sizeable impact because the awards are decided by a relatively small number of fans.

As I write it is clear that the Puppies’ disproportional effect on the Hugo shortlists was not reflected in the award winners. In fact, the fan vote was triumphant in nearly all categories, except a handful where the Sad Puppy bloc vote forced work of such poor quality onto the ballot that fans were left no choice but to nominate “no award” instead. It was the worst result possible for the Sad Puppy voters, and a personal humiliation for their leaders.

Far from infecting sci-fi with with their right-wing rhetoric, the Sad Puppies have only succeeded in inoculating the field against it. Theodore Beale, a Hugo protest leader and prominent anti-vaxxer, has himself acted like a weakened viral infection, catalysing sci-fi’s immune response against the retrograde aesthetics on which he has built his reputation. The other Puppy leaders retreated into relative silence as the determined response of sci-fi fans rolled over them. Meanwhile, their antics have woken up all of sci-fi fandom to the value of diversity.

Science fiction’s problems with diversity have been, and continue to be, very real. For most of sci-fi’s history women writers have faced steep barriers, and writers of colour have had to overcome systematic exclusion. High-profile names like Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler are often used by sci-fi’s apologists to say diversity has never been a problem. But all too often, these or a few others are the only “diverse” writers they can name.

Diversity in sci-fi has improved, in painfully slow steps, for the simple reason that a growing number of minority writers have been producing great work and struggling past every barrier to getting it published and read. Nnedi Okarafor, Wesley Chu, Kameron Hurley and Daniel José Older are just a few of the names changing the face of the genre. Around these writers are a growing cohort of fans, not only cheering them on but buying their work, backing their Kickstarters and Patreons, and helping to build an alternative pathway for writers in the face of an industry that is still not doing anywhere near enough to help.

A snapshot of today’s sci-fi publishing industry – as opposed to the fandom that ultimately underwrites the industry’s business – does not show a diverse picture. Both bookshelves and cinema screens are currently dominated by the Matt Damon/Andy Weir vehicle The Martian and its archaically old-fashioned (and vastly overrated) SF. The lead sci-fi news story of recent weeks is Ernest Cline’s high seven-figure advance for a third novel, which will presumably pander to exactly the same Beavis and Butthead demographic as Ready Player One and Armada. And with all the controversy around the Hugo awards, this year’s all-white male shortlists for the David Gemmell Legend awards crept past almost, but not quite, without comment. None of these creators or awards can be blamed for the field’s lack of diversity. But they are indicative of an industry that still categorises genres on gender lines – dystopian YA sci-fi for the girls, axe-wielding heroic fantasies for the boys. Worse, it still seems to believe, despite much evidence to the contrary, that stories for a narrow, white male demographic are the way to make money.

While we can write off the Sad Puppies as the clown show they proved to be, we should also give them a tiny thank you for the result of their actions. For many years, it was possible for sci-fi fans to thoughtlessly dismiss their diversity failure. When the sci-fi imprint Tor UK published (statistically incomplete) data blaming the lack of diversity in genre on a shortage of submissions, many hundreds of fans took to social mediaf to voice all the commonly heard excuses (“women just don’t write science fiction” and so on). The real problem for writers from any excluded background is not the extreme chauvinism of people like the Sad Puppies. It’s the general apathy to the entire issue of diversity which so often silences new authors from different backgrounds.

So. Thank you Sad Puppies. You have woken sci-fi fandom from its slumber and proved that diversity in sci-fi really is a problem. There will never be another WorldCon or Hugo awards where diversity is not addressed. Diversity will now be carried to every new world and parallel dimension we visit. And sci-fi writing will be all the stronger for it. The future of humankind is global and many-hued. By reflecting that reality, sci-fi makes itself a fit literature for and of the future.