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Hugo Awards Turn (Even More) Political
An anonymous reader writes Last year, the Hugo Awards went to mostly minorities and women. In response, a fan group decided to fight back against what they saw as a liberal attack on their medium. It appears that they have succeeded, as the 2015 nominees are predominantly chosen by a group called "Sad Puppies. Now a counter-counter group is trying to ensure that no one wins any Hugo awards in any category except Best Novel.
So we're saying that the Hugo Awards are now completely useless. Got it.
Seems like the vocal minority is finally running up against people who've had enough...they're using their own tactics against them, and whining when people beat them at their own game. Oh and it wasn't liberals(tip it was mainly liberals that started the campaign) it was that lovely 'social justice warrior' crowd, that loves to call anyone who disagrees with them 'bigots, misogynists, racists, etc, etc, etc.'
Om, nomnomnom...
Muslims are allowed to perform genital mutilation, honor killings of rape victims, and the outright murder of gays.
Gotta love the divisiveness of identity politics where your worth to society is determined by the color of your skin and the type of junk you have.
MLK is spinning in his grave.
Isn't he the fat guy from Lost? Maybe he lost weight and won an award.
But fat or not, he was the the only character with a positive attitude. All the others were messed up in some way.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Choosing someone for 'best author' because they're white and male is ridiculous.
What doesn't ever seem to sink into the discussion is that choosing a 'best author' because they're NOT white and male is equally ridiculous.
Then again, to accept that latter proposition would then logically bankrupt the entire concept of 'retributive' racism - ie preferentially picking brown or ovaried-people today, to correct the mistakes of previous generations - so I guess I understand that there's a whole dogma there that would have to be disassembled first.
-Styopa
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Politicizing awards like this seems a bit, dare I say it, dick-ish.
The Hugo is shaped like it is to remind us of what we are celebrating - imagining a future, hopefully better than our present.
The fact that a 1950s/60s rocket ship is shaped like a part of the male anatomy is purely coincidental and it is not a license to encourage us to play petty political games that we should have left behind in adolescence. We are better that this.
The Sad Puppies movement, whatever you think of it, predates the unprecedented (and welcome) number of women and minority nominees and winners for last year's Hugo/Nebula awards. It is not a response to uppity $BADWORDS getting above their places. There's plenty to slam them for, if you're in a slamming mood. Making up lies is not necessary to achieve that goal.
It does seem like a big deal. I mean, last year there nominations titled "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love", which was an unusual choice for both a Nebula (a different SF/F award, chosen by a jury) and a Hugo nomination. The genre is floundering fairly hard.
I agree that the awards are floundering hard, but I disagree about the genre. There is a large body of good SciFi out there, you just have to look a bit harder to find it through the noise.
Slashdot-Journaling Whiners???
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Everything's turning into a puerile dick-waving contest, and in the end it still means fuck-all. Imagine if we could harvest the energy expended by the retards on both sides affecting absolutely nothing of import, it truly would be the renewable energy of the future. Hmm, someone should write a book about that...
I'm trying to recall the last time I read a book because it won an award... but I'm coming up blank.
#DeleteChrome
From that article, it seems people were being excluded for having certain opinions (ostensibly right-leaning ones) by others who thought of themselves as "liberal". But I don't see how anyone willing to enact such a policy of judging the messenger could be considered "liberal" by any measure.
Is there a word for the illiberal who nonetheless see themselves as liberal?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
I'd identify as a social liberal and consider the PC crowd to be vile authoritarians.
Completely agree. And if you get bored giving Baen your money, and you're willing to take a chance, there is some *amazing* indiepub stuff out there. (Note that one of the SP's least controversial nominees is Marko Kloos for Best Novel, and he's indie.) There's a lot of, um, regrettable stuff too. But fabulous adventures await, if you're willing to do some digging.
I think one thing that is clouding the discussion A LOT is a bulk of commenters who are willing to draw conclusions without having read the actual stories. This is not college football, where you might feel obliged to root for the team wearing your college's colors. The stories can be read and judged on their own merits. Substantial contributions to the discussion almost require as a prereq that you have read or at least attempted to read the stories you're referencing. One of the charges levelled against the Sad Puppies is that they went out and rounded up a lot of people to vote, who had not read the actual material they were voting for. The Sad Puppies group has put forward a slate of stories that, by their own admission, use the 'science' in science fiction as window dressing around what would otherwise be conventional adventure stories (e.g. spaceships and aliens and explosions, rescuing the alien princess). Right from that one piece of data, I would have to conclude that they are not using the full descriptive power of the genre. Disclaimer - I have not read the Dinosaur story you're referencing here. So, take that for what it's worth.
This is Hugo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Gernsback
These are the Hugo Awards: http://www.hugoawards.org
As to why you should care, I haven't any idea. If you haven't heard of them before now, getting involved at this stage will basically involve joining one of two rampaging Internet outrage mobs. If that's your idea of a good time, have at.
It kinda strikes me that xenophobic readers are interested in xenophobic stories. Which doesn't bode well in a genre that can feature non-human intelligences ...
We can add yet another notch to the measuring post for things Liberal Progressives have ruined
Here in the States we call them Democrats.
More specifically, Blue Dog Democrats, which are thankfully becomming extinct as they were always wolves in sheeps clothing (Republicans in all but name on virtually every issue, masquerading as deomocrats and now mostly replaced by teabaggers).
The politically correct bullshit from the left is almost as galling as the extreme actions of the right. Almost. Because while the PC rhetoric is problematic, it falls well short of enacting laws designed to legalize discrimination against groups of people, voter suppression, etc. Both are annoying, but they are not equal. The right remains far more toxic than the extreme left, though that may change as the left continues to react to what the right does, and gradually lowers themselves to the same level of political dis-discourse.
For example, see the "Maxwell" books by Peter Grant, which are along the lines of the Heinlein YA fiction, though in a less "ultra-libertarian preachy" sort of way.
First off this is Sad Puppies campaign #3, so it wasn't a sudden reaction to the winners of last year's Hugo's. The first two campaigns worked on verifying the integrity of the awards with Larry Correia, a former accountant, leading the verification. The conclusion was an unqualified opinion that the awards are indeed fairly voted on.
This year the Sad Puppies campaign chose to publish a list of their nominations and encourage fans who had never been part of the Hugo process to nominate works, the Sad Puppies encouraged critical thinking and said nominate books you think are worthy. This is very much like what John Scalzi and other authors have done in the past.
Well with the introduction of new blood into the process the Sad Puppies slate pretty much swept the nomination process. Larry Correia even turned down a nomination because of his involvement with running the Sad Puppies campaigns.
Now we see the backlash from the so called progressives who are willing to burn the awards to the ground by telling everyone to vote No Award for the majority of categories. The sure hatred and virulence since the nominations have been announced are shocking.
I'm now proud to carry the label "Wrong Fan", I've been reading Science Fiction since elementary with some of the earliest books I remember being a bunch of the Tom Swift novels. Yet because I like the works by authors such as Tom Kratman (even if he is very heavy handed with the politics), Larry Correia, David Weber, and pretty much anything published by Baen, I'm not worthy of being involved with the Hugo process.
The main people behind Tor publishing are some of the most reprehensibly in the whole process. The sheer hatred amazes me, for them it is also ego since Tor has dominated the Hugo's for 20+ years.
Several reviewers and authors I've never heard of have gone so far as to state that they will either not read the Sad Puppies related works, or if they do read them won't consider them on their worth. I've seen one blog that some author stated she will rank every Sad Puppies related work below No Award just because it was nominated and on the Sad Puppies recommended list.
Where is the progressive ideas of tolerance here? This is blacklisting in the worst way and I can tell you it is firing up fans who have never cared about the Hugo's in the past.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
Discrimination against women and minorities? People are inventing things that don't even exist.
Look, I'm all for including everyone in the mix. But black people are 13% of the U.S. population. But they now make up 100% of Comedy Central's late night (unless you count Chris Hardwick's pathetic midnight show), one-third of the SNL cast (and featured prominently in almost all the skits), and are being given new TV shows and movies left-and-right. I'm not saying they shouldn't be at the table, but they shouldn't be the ONLY ones at the table either.
The white male is not the cause of all the evil in the world. It's still okay to hire them, you know.
So yet another political/religious hate group tries to ruin science fiction for everyone else. These people need to either die, or get a clue (there, have some pointless hate back).
I heard that story on EscapePod http://escapepod.org/ and couldn't figure out what it had to do with SciFi, but that was true of most of the stories during their 'Hugo Month'. In fact, the hosts noted that the only reason some of those stories were on the show was because they were Hugo nominated.
I find including or excluding anybody or their work because of race/gender/orientation pretty disgusting.
Is it weird in here, or is it just me?
... that polarized, no-compromise, take-no-prisoners politics will be the downfall of Western Civilization?
Sorry. That second one should be http://www.thehugoawards.org/ .
From what I've read, the Hugos, the SFWA, etc. have all been slowly taken over by SJWs in the past 10-15 years. Certainly, I once used the Hugos as a way of finding interesting new authors - but this hasn't been possible for several years, unless you are looking for a social-justice tract. Certainly "hard" SF has been scarce for a long time.
The "sad puppies" group is drumming up support for good writing that wouldn't otherwise get nominated, because it doesn't meet the SJW criteria. If the "sad puppies" have a political center, then it will obviously be a bit on the right, just because they by definition disagree with the SJW crowd. However, politics isn't supposed to be the point - if anything, it is (hopefully!) about removing, or at least counteracting the political filtering from the works nominated for the Hugo awards.
Some of the authors supporting the sad-puppy movement include:
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
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when groups of opposing bigots fight amongst themselves just like Archie Bunker and George Jefferson? Here is hoping Maude steps in and sets them all straight!
Utter nonsense from the lot of them.
You seem to be missing the point entirely.
SF&F is the one crowd that already does a respectable job of not being judgemental about it if someone is a gay, orange, phillipino dolphin. Our genre is one of the first literary genres to actually hold out that doing so is bad for society.
When gripe like this, it just lets everyone know you've not read enough (or you're not smart enough) to understand that you are, in fact, just as much of the problem as the people you claim to be against. You're just a marginally different kind of hate-monger is all.
SJW = Social Justice Warrior
FSA = Free Shit Army
/. isn't news for nerds anymore, its "news for misogynists"
It's not due to recent SJW politics though. SF has always been transgressive ever since the New Wave, and possibly even before. There's also been conservative writers, but ever since Dangerous Visions hit the market in the 70's, SF and Fantasy has trended leftward. This isn't a bad thing, even if you are conservative, so long as the story is fair and not used as a soapbox.
The problem is science.
No space station? Well that's because people wrote those books, and books on moon colonies or terraforming Mars when they weren't really aware of how much effort it took just to get rockets off the ground. People thought going to Mars would be as easy as driving your car to Vegas, and over time people slowly became aware that it wasn't, and science wouldn't create any magical thing that would make it so. Sf really depends too much on magic or extrapolating current ideas into the future: this is why Neuromancer is so laughable to read today in the wake of a non-VRML net and Japan slowly becoming an extinct nation. Or most old SF books on AI seem even less plausible than Pinnocchio; an algorithm is a process, not a consciousness.
You could call this the Venus problem. Remember when 50's SF used to set plots on Venus? Notice how no one does that any more? It's because we found out how harsh it really was, and that our scientific progress can't always magically overcome this harshness. We started hitting hard limits about our ability to expand into the cosmos, and a lot of SF from the old days seems quaint because of it.
So there really isn't much to write on save for some fields where the layman can't even understand the mathematics to make a plausible story in the first place, or the "magical science as commentary on social mores" genre. Ironically for all its atheism, SF was even more religious than most Christians; it's religion was in science, and limitless human possibility. Now that reality has snuck in about the limits of possibility and the costs associated with expanding beyond our planet, is it any wonder its dying a slow death in favor of social realist SF and fantasy?
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I love how you prove his point for him. Strawman much? Welcome to being the part of the problem! Asshat... Yes, I know - pot vs kettle. I am glad I am the kettle.
Their reading lists had a large amount of overlap before. I think these jerks don't realize how precarious the situation of Science Fiction literary genre is... As it is most breakout authors are accidentally sponsored by Scientology, and major publishing houses will not take a chance on anything but space opera, someone with 150,000 blog and twitter readers, or licensed adaptations.
everything stupid and petty we do as a community puts another nail into that coffin. Having our most prestigious award turned into a poor downtrodden straight white male protest is a freaking deathblow.
Heck you don't have to give Baen your money. For a very long time they have run their free library with quite a few books available in multiple eReader formats. For a long time Baen held out against Amazon and Barnes & Noble by only selling eBooks through their site in order to keep the cost to readers down.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
I'd never given much thought to the Hugo or Nebula awards, other than they seemed to be an attempt to promote Science Fiction writing beyond the Semi-Literate Boy's Comic Book Adventure model of writing. (I.e.: you could still write Boilerplate Boy's Adventures - as long as you used multi-syllable words.) However, the idea that they wouldn't be a festering nest of some kind of politics was ridiculous. That politics would be whatever the dominant clique would be.
That the outward expression of the politics has anything to do with the Culture Wars is somewhat startling. It's as if the people running the show think that now that Science Fiction has some kind of money earning power (at least occasionally) that the awards mean something more than advertising for fizzy sugar water that really is fizzy and sugary when you buy it at the store.
Personally, I've been finding it hard to take enjoyment in the genre as much as I used to. Of course, most Science Fiction doesn't age very well - technological developments and their consequence in real life too often rip apart the necessary suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy the other elements of the story. However, I'm also finding discomfort in some of the same sorts of issues (which I'd prefer to think of as moral or ethical rather than political) embedded in some stories (and favored by some authors) that I used to either overlook or had a different perspective on when I was younger. That kind of change is inevitable - a lot of the stories I enjoyed most when I was younger use the polemics of extreme positions in order to remark on (then) contemporary issues (and they did it very well.) But many of those issues have changed since then - some resolved, some partially resolved, and even a few that have become irrelevant. (Think of some of the perspectives on privacy and government intrusion expressed in works from the 1960s - they seem rather naive now in a world with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Stingrays, and the Patriot Act. If only we could go back to a Nixonian era of privacy!)
However, my own laments about maturity and the disappointments of aging aren't the issue here. That issue is the petty nature of the issues inflaming these awards. The issue here is that these cliques forget that the purpose of the Hugo and Nebula awards setting some lower bound to distinguish the illiterate hack writer from the literate hack writer. It's a damn low bar, but I'd rather it not be stirring up the mud in the pigpen.
The Sad Puppies campaign has nothing to do with "minorities and women" winning awards, it had everything to do with Social Justice Warriors taking down and doxxing people for disagreeing with them and trying to impose censorship and speech controls on organizations like SFWA.
In fact this entire, "if you oppose the Social Justice Warrior agenda you hate women and minorities" slight of hand bullshit is one of the very things the sad puppies are fighting against. Thanks for proving the necessity of that fight yet again.
It is that, when liberals are involved, everything gets fucked up, usually permanently.
Even if Osama bin Laden wrote a sci-fi book, I'd want it judged by its content for a literary award, not by its author's politics.
How about the actual Hugo short story winner, "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere"? John Chu may be a talented writer, but that story was NOT a science fiction story. It was a cliched story about a guy bringing home a partner that his family didn't approve of, with a silly "you get wet when you lie" bit tossed in at the beginning to somehow qualify it for the Hugo with a mild fantasy element.
It was another "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" plot retread, only this time the "Who" was gay. So what? It was still a story we've all heard or seen a hundred times in the past 30 years - just substitute your race / religion / ethnicity of choice. What makes this one memorable, besides the sexuality of the main characters?
I cannot believe there wasn't a better science fiction short story published in 2013 than Chu's story. It's not the genre that's floundering, it's what the people who are running the Hugo consider to be "worthy" that has plummeted.
Getting very tired of Journalism that tells me what to think instead of giving me the facts.
On one hand, we have this SJW BS flaring up all over the place, attacking people online and making their lives marginally more difficult. On the other we have this dogmatic crusade against cyber-bullying picking up speed and momentum at a rather interesting pace. Both sides are making the same types of ad passiones arguments and neither side seeing the inevitable conflict.
As an impartial observer and someone who views both sides as a bunch of crackpots and assholes with too much time on their hands, I can not wait to see these two trains collide.
I have trouble understanding how that is even Sci-Fi at all. I mean sure, if the guy was in a coma and his consciousness was somehow transferred to a t-rex and the story proceeded from there, ok fine. In it's current form it's not even fantasy let alone Sci-Fi.
I've been reading SF since I picked up Starman Jones at the elementary school library in 1968. I haven't trusted the Hugos for years. Ann Leckie wins best novel for her unreadable Ancillary Justice, which I just about hurled across the room at the end. But Alastair Reynolds, who's been wrting the same kind of of New Space Opera for longer and much, much better, has barely been nominated, let alone won.
(And don't get me started on on the Nebulas. Jack McDevitt a best novel winner? And Jo Walton? Gah.)
Calling someone a Social Justice Warrior as an insult makes you look like the worst kind of small-minded, hidebound, teentytiny authoritarian terrified of losing his place on the totem pole. Nerdrage over SJWs is an admission that you believe if you don't have someone lower on the social spectrum than yourself to kick around, you're worthless. You're so invested in the totem pole that the thought of a level playing field fries your circuits. If you are anti Social Justice Warriors, what does that make you? Disagreeable Corrupt Cowards? You do realize that nobody gets their feelings hurt from you calling them SJW, it just makes you look small and perpetuates the stereotype that nerds are weaklings.
If a woman truly provided the same work at 75% the cost of a man, then we would see every office filled with women workers and men would be staying home. Its a pure argument of economics.
What a terrible argument. If the problem is at the level of those making the employment and reward decisions, your underlying basis completely falls apart. Women get 75% of what men get likely because those paying and hiring them make that decision consciously or subconsciously ... that because this applicant is female, she won't work as hard so we can compensate her less. Since everyone does it, it persists.
"Argument of economics?" I'm not familiar with this nor do I see how it soundly illustrates that what we observe must be right.
I cannot believe you were modded up.
I haven't really looked at either Nebula or Hugo awards in quite a while, but I'm somewhat surprised of the expanding domination of SF over SciFi/Fantasy. But, "Dinosaur" does seem to fit into the Fantasy genre more so than Speculative Fiction.
I just read "If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love" yesterday.
Its almost like they're trying to create a contest of
fan fiction , middle school author, or award winner.
That story was a steaming pile of self righteous PC crap.
Wow, this post contains epic amounts of FUD and just pure lying.
First of all, the Sad Puppies group started over two years ago.
Second of all, the response was due to stories being subjected to an ideological purity test before being allowed to win.
Third of all, the stories were no longer about telling a story, but were all about 'sending the right (approved) political message' which was killing the medium.
Fourth of all, several of the awards went to things that not only had nothing to do with Science Fiction or Fantasy, but they sucked ('If you were a dinosaur my love'?? Really?)
Go read all the official Sad Puppies posts, make your own decision. Also I'm pretty sure there are more women nominated this year, than there were last year, and that's from the SP Slate. Don't forget as well, that the SP project was started by a minority.
Last note: The Hugo's have been gamed for a very long time now, look at how many were won by only one publisher. The author of 'Red Shirts' heavily gamed the system the year he won, but no one said a word about that. The promotion of 'message fiction' has seriously hurt the genre, and sales have been going down for years, because most of what's been winning the Hugo's the last five or so years has been crap. Heck, Terry Pratchet couldn't even win a Hugo!!
The awards should be about GOOD stories, not about Politically Correct stories written by the 'RIGHT' person! The very fact that the person writing this story had to LIE about the reason for Sad Puppies, and is more focused on the sex and race of writers should make that pretty clear right off the top.
Do you mean He who must not be named?
What's "bleak" about Startship Troopers? Granted, the movie portrays humanity somewhat bleakly, but the book — and you alluded to having read rather than watched it yourself — is not bleak at all.
Yes, humanity has encountered a formidable adversary, whose ideology is totally at odds with ours — but that's not any more bleak, than any WW2 or James Bond story. Heinlein compares "the bugs" with Communists a number of times.
And humans seem to be winning that war too, with the book portraying our efficiency and valour making the reader rather optimistic.
The author does mention past troubles in the book — those having to do with the universal franchise, which, in his not so humble opinion is a mistake — but those are all in the past by the time the events actually described in the book take place (though, yes, they are in our future).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I think one thing that is clouding the discussion A LOT is a bulk of commenters who are willing to draw conclusions without having read the actual stories. This is not college football, where you might feel obliged to root for the team wearing your college's colors. The stories can be read and judged on their own merits. Substantial contributions to the discussion almost require as a prereq that you have read or at least attempted to read the stories you're referencing. One of the charges levelled against the Sad Puppies is that they went out and rounded up a lot of people to vote, who had not read the actual material they were voting for.
The Sad Puppies group has put forward a slate of stories that, by their own admission, use the 'science' in science fiction as window dressing around what would otherwise be conventional adventure stories (e.g. spaceships and aliens and explosions, rescuing the alien princess). Right from that one piece of data, I would have to conclude that they are not using the full descriptive power of the genre.
Disclaimer - I have not read the Dinosaur story you're referencing here. So, take that for what it's worth.
I read the dinosaur story. It's an under-5-minute read. It really isn't a bad story at all compared to typical works of science fiction, but it is also hard to see why anyone actually would class it as science fiction.
What you say about the Sad Puppies stories suggests that they are space opera, which certainly places them well in the tradition of science fiction. (Whether they deserve awards is another matter of course.)
The story is here: http://www.apex-magazine.com/i...
A word of warning. You will not get the minutes of your life wasted on reading this back.
To call it sophomoric drivel is an insult to sophomores.
It may have good and correct political intentions, but it is overtly cloying, snooty, and pretentious.
It is not good writing by any measure. That it is "award winning" is a travesty.
But of course, you're judgement is the only one that matters re: Ancillary Sword. Clearly, a lot of people liked it. It won the juried awards as well as the Hugo. This is the problem for you lot. Just because YOU DON'T LIKE SOMETHING, that doesn't mean it's atuomatically inferior.
Of his work, I've read "A Desert Called Peace" and it seemed to be pretty much nothing BUT heavy handed political messages mixed with wish-fulfillment, so I haven't felt the desire to read more of his work since. Now it's possible A) I simply happened to pick one of his lesser work works and he has also written other much better books B) his writing style appeals to lots of people and I just happen to be an outlier, but another explanation is C) the people who really enjoy his work do so at least in part BECAUSE of the political messages, instead of enjoying the books regardless of the political views put forward. That's not unique to one end of the political spectrum obviously, which is how this whole controversy kicked off in the first place, but the solution isn't to error in the opposite direction, it's to get the focus back on the whether a book/short story etc is enjoyable regardless of political messages.
You also mentioned David Weber, who is a great example of someone whose political principles don't match my own, and, while his views are reflecting in the stories he tells, the books are still plenty entertaining (usually anyway, I don't know what happened with the Safehold series but even there the problem wasn't the politics), and clearly his work shouldn't be penalized because others don't agree with his politics. Come to think of it, from his writing I'm pretty sure Marko Kloos (one of the Sad Puppies backed nominees) and I wouldn't agree politically, but his Andrew Grayson books are excellent, and I'm really happy to see him nominated for Lines of Departure this this year.
So in summary, I agree with you on the general principle of not letting differences in political views get in the way of enjoying or recognizing good writing, but based on my N=1 dataset, I would suggest Tom Kratman may not be a particularly good example to use in making the case to a broad audience for getting politics out of the Hugos.
Of all the the various folks making comments here, I have to admit a bit of curiosity: How many of you are registered as even a supporter of this year's WorldCon in Spokane? How many of you are seriously considering attending this year's World Science Fiction Convention? Because you have to be registered as at least a supporter of the event in order to vote in the Hugos, let alone nominate. So put your money where your mouth is (or should I say fingers) and get registered or STFU. My wife and I will be attending and we are really looking forward to the con as we have in the past. And we will vote. But don't whine, grouse, complain etc., unless you are actually involved enough to cough up a few bucks to participate.
"Heroic Puppies campaign to free the Hugo awards from the evil clutches of the SJWs"
or
"Band of Neo-Nazis corrupt the Hugo awards with cheat voting."
Come on internet. You can be better than this.
That was the other genius move by the SP. They invited gamergate into the whole thing.
An award that purports to be for the "best science fiction that year" and gets voted on by ~6,000 people? Irrelevant. DragonCon has more attendees. GenCon has more attendees. The fact that screechy message fiction has been winning and stories that aren't preachy screeds are on the ballot is causing a meltdown pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Look at some of the messages from the leaders on both sides. Who is doing more labeling of their opponents? I'm not attending. I'm not voting. I wouldn't buy a cup of coffee from Starbucks if the barista was going to preach at me about some fatuous cause. I'm sure as Hell not going to buy a book or go to a movie where I'm going to be hit over the head with a message. No matter what the message is. I'll buy a book or a ticket to a film that tells an entertaining story. End of argument.
The more I get to know people the more I like my dogs.
Not science, economics is the problem. If there were some valuable resource that could only be obtained on the Moon or Mars or Venus or somewhere else off-world, then we'd actually see investment in space technology to obtain that resource. And this where hard SF has always fallen short, too. Exploration and colonization are presented as a given without ever given much justification beyond "human spirit" or some other handwaving.
But of course, there is no reason to believe that your judgment is better.
A lot of people may have liked it, but it is shit.
It's easy to have a positive attitude when you're a lottery winner.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
MLK is spinning in his grave... it's because there hasn't been a single day of peace in the whole Obama Presidency.
He had no money on the island and that money was cursed anyway.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I have a dream of a day when a story will be judged by the content on the pages, not the color of the writers skin, the genitals they posses or the method of sex they engage in. It is just a dream it seems.
Would you also line up behind OBL and promote his politics in order to "prove a point"?
Getting to Mars is easy if you are already in space. Getting off Earth is the hard part. Once we get a viable mining industry going in space, everything becomes much easier in space. If you can build in orbit from supplies already in space, building ships that can go to any part of the solar system is less difficult.
This is why NASA is working on asteroid capture, once we can study the environment of asteroids, maybe we can start mining them for the resources to jump start a space civilization.
I don't believe that Neuromancer is naive. I think that we will get to O'niell Cylinders eventually (like where half the book takes place).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
This is why I only come to slashdot once every few months, it has morphed into 4chan, no, 8chan: full of manbabies whining about not being in control of everything.
You just keep humping GamerGate.
It's about ethics in Sci Fi, amiright?
I'm actually not taking sides on the Hugo issue. I am just amused by the fact that you imbeciles are trading all your principles in order to protect against any threat to your perceived "special snowflake" status in society.
I'll address the first claim. Others feel free to chime in.
First of all, the Sad Puppies group started over two years ago.
Nothing in the summary discusses when the group was formed.
And I say that as the guy who brought back William Gibson's first Hugo Award to Vancouver BC from Australia.
Seriously, grow up, morons.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
TO quote myself from io9:
"So group cries that political consideration prevent works from being chosen on their merits, advances politically-motivated slate with a lot of crap."
It just seems odd to me that there aren't more SF/F stories that both meet the PC sniff-test and are also good works of literature. There are certainly examples of conservative SF writers, but there are usually a lot of progressive themes in SF, given the frequent futuristic subject matter. It is hard to believe that they needed to dig that far into the barrel to find someone who was not objectionable to a progressive, unless even normal "progressives" were not hitting the themes that these voters wanted.
Except, clearly there were people who did _not_ like Ancillary Justice, which is why we have this article. So the parent isn't strictly making this all about his judgement of the book, he's adding his own experience to those of the people who came up with the slate.
Admittedly, he isn't coming at it timidly, but neither have you in your responses.
I just read Dinosaur. I can't for the life of me see how it could be science fiction, (or fantasy for that matter.) It's an ok story, if you like that sort of thing, but science fiction? I don't think so.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
If the hugos were about fulfilling a liberal agenda then there would be a strong correlation between Hugo winners and James Tiptree Award winners. There isn't.
As a voter in previous years, the problem with the scalzi and his ilk's works on the ballot list was they weren't as good as the other works nominated. So they deservedly lost on quality and merit grounds.
as for discrimination, the most reprehensible in recent times was splitting the dramatic presentations so that American works would get a crumb of recognition at a time when the lord of the rings was sweeping all before it. A move that could be viewed as targetting New Zealanders.
It takes absolutely no work to find out the SP has been running their 'campaign' for 3 years now & thus clearly had nothing to do with 'mostly minorities & women' winning last year...I guess the truth would not have made a compelling story.
That dinosaur story was a revenge fantasy about being bullied. Since we're all geeks in here and have mostly been bullied at some time in our lives, and spect a significant percentage of our childhoods dreaming up revenge fantasies about our tormentors, whether such a story would be a "self-righteous pile of PC crap" or not is dependent on what particular kind of bullying you underwent.
Would you feel the same about the story if instead of a gay guy in a pool hall the protagonist had been a Linux fan being mocked in his high school gym?
Redshirts, literally "professional" fan fiction, won the year it came out. Moreover the same people pitching a bitch fit over Williamson's collection of internet schloch voted previously to Scalzis collection of itneret schlock previously and not a peep was made
If by "they" you mean one guy who was also an active GGer tweeted about it, and then your side started bitching about it like the coming of the Antichrist, than yes, "they" brought in GamerGate
The OP asserts that the 2015 awards went to "mostly to minorities and women". How's that again???
Here's a group photo of winners from 2015:
https://warpcordova.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/2013_hugos_fullgroup.jpg
The "Sad Puppies" slate was VASTLY more diverse than that photo .....
There's also been conservative writers, but ever since Dangerous Visions hit the market in the 70's, SF and Fantasy has trended leftward.
Only in the sense that there are few writers (outside the military-space-porn genre) who are actual Nazis.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Are you referring to those unable to solve a quadratic equation? Or to cite their favorite Amendment?
I didn't think, I'll encounter any such on /.
Or, perhaps, you can do all those things yourself, but are worried about the unwashed masses, whom my plan would disenfranchise? In that case, I'd like to ask you, why is it, that you want people unable to learn how to solve a quadratic equation (and I am open to lowering the standard down to a linear one) or to memorize one of the Amendments to participate in governing the country.
What is bleak is that they currently do. The hypothetical future, where my proposal is accepted, is considerably less bleak on account of this change alone...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Yes, well, that's about an accurate description as any other the puppies have given. In other words, not even a little bit accurate.
The problem is science.
No space station? Well that's because people wrote those books, and books on moon colonies or terraforming Mars when they weren't really aware of how much effort it took just to get rockets off the ground. People thought going to Mars would be as easy as driving your car to Vegas, and over time people slowly became aware that it wasn't, and science wouldn't create any magical thing that would make it so.
I think you may be confusing science and engineering/economics. "Rocket science" has been around 202 years according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It's not as expensive to get into orbit as you think. If you just consider the energy it's around $2 a kg to GEO.
By combining Reaction Engines' Skylon and a method the microwave guru Bill Brown proposed, I think it is possible to get the cost down to less than $200/kg to GEO at a flight rate commensurate with the cargo requirements of a power satellite project. At that transport cost, energy from space can undercut electrical energy from coal--if you can get the mass of a 5 GW power satellite under 32,500 tons. Preprint here https://drive.google.com/file/... The one on getting the mass of a thermal power satellite down to where the project makes sense will be out in a few weeks.
But mostly you are right. I remember one place where Heinlein mentioned that "he and Ginny spent three solid days calculating on big sheets of butcher paper some of the Hohmann transfer orbits he was writing about . . ." Nowadays, you can run this off in half an hour with Excel (half hour to write, less than a ms to run) but how many of the current crop of writers would do even that?
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
The exploration as default thing permeates the culture. The Fermi Paradox isn't a paradox if you understand that a) breaking the light barrier may be possible, but will definitely cost a fortune, and b) any single star system has more then enough resources to feed an arbitrarily large number of people. Seriously. Why would we send multiple missions to any given star system in a year if we have everything we need here?
If we're sending like one mission every five years, and only to the very nearest systems, how would the inhabitants of the system tell that our probe/ship/etc. isn't some obscure natural phenomena. And if this is likely to happen to us, why wouldn't it happen to any hypothetical star-faring race close enough to send those probes?
... do you live in the western world? are you a fucking american? then STFU.
lottery winner my ass, we're all lottery winners on a global scale.
hey guess what, you're not starving, you're not working for a dollar a day, hey, you're not a woman in the islamic state, hey, you're not a palestinian... those poor fucks...
but obviously, white men are the problem in your life.
hey, i'm an asian. thank god i'm not a fucking north korean, you know how much my life would suck? you black? thank god you're not an actual african, that continent is fucking horrifying, you muslim? I mean, it would be pretty sweet to be male in one of the stable middle east countries... or pakistan, but don't be female and expect agency of any kind.
Changes are necessary, but every once in a while, take an actual look at what the actual situation is, and what your actual goal is, and think.
You want social justice? or just social justice that would benefit you?
if i were actually interested in social justice, i'd probably be trying to help alleviate poverty in the third world. you know, make sure half the world's population doesn't starve to death. but no, you're thing is important too.
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And once again, we point out that Hugos are not exclusively given out for sci-fi, but for sci-fi AND FANTASY, for which Chu's story falls well within the range established by previous winners. If you don't even know what the scope of the award is, can you really consider yourself qualified to comment?
Thanks, have a nice day ;)
http://www.educa.net/curso/cur...