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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.
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...
No, we are just saying it is like the Oscars now.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
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.
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
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.
No irony at all - the reason for the backlash is because the books that were written by women and minorities were barely "Scifi" at all and were obviously voted in because they "said the right things" rather than be poignant and proper science fiction.
Because I'm sure you noted that the books that were voted on by "teh evil" fan group INCLUDED books by women and minorities.
So what's the argument here? That women and minorities were being shut out or that the women and minorities that are now on this years ballot "didn't say the right things?"
The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies slates weren't about not having women and minorities win. Both slates included several women and minorities and even some left-wing writers who had to be publicly "horrified" the wrong people liked their work.
They're about wanting Hugo nominees/winners that reflect science fiction and what they consider the best story, rather than the last decade or so style of being nominated because the author is a leftist non-white male who includes the properly politically correct representatives in their story, even though the story itself isn't remotely the best SF story of the year. They're about wanting the winners to reflect SF fans, rather than just a small insular group of NY elites in the publishing business. Looking at you, Tor.
If you wonder why there seems to be a big gap of 12-15 years where not a lot of new good SF authors came out in book form, except from Baen, it's because the literary elite decided SF should be about identity politics instead of about science and speculation. SP/RP are about taking the field back for real SF that the fans of SF like, not the kind where it's "important" because it shows a woman musing about how the evil corporations are ruining the environment but if only her homosexual boyfriend would wake up from his coma they could live happily ever after mutually respecting each other in hipster anguish. -Gasp-
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
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.
The problem is that the war over SJW, PC fiction, and other items has all but destroyed sci fi as we know it in the past 10 years.
Sci-fi used to be about promising hopes, about what mankind can do getting to the stars. Take Star Trek, for example. It led the way into devices we take for granted.
Now, take a look at sci-fi today. Dystopic, post-apocalyptic vision, one after the other. I am damn sick and tired of story after story about our future being a world where the only technology advances are to inflict pain and death on other human beings, with alien races being either popcorn eaters on the sidelines, or there to stir things up. Space travel? Either doesn't happen due to everyone wanting to kill each other for religion, or a nation like China or North Korea starts the Kessler Syndrome, preventing anything getting into orbit for the known future. Tricorders and medical benches have been replaced by agonizers, heart plugs, and pain amplifiers.
There is enough depressing drivel on the news. Why should the fiction I read be just as bad if not worse?
Yes, the SJW squads and PC police have engaged a fight... but they have turned a fertile farmland into a hostile desert full of radioactive mine tailings and toxic biological waste. This is a Pyrrhic victory for all sides.
Sci-fi is like modern music... you have to dig and dig for the good stuff, since the mainstream items used to be good, but are warmed over crap with no real vision.
All you did was repeat exactly what the AC said.
... that polarized, no-compromise, take-no-prisoners politics will be the downfall of Western Civilization?
If a winner is a minority then you know the real reason of how they won.
And THAT is exactly why "affirmative action" is a corrosive, nasty thing.
It's used by racists and sexist to denigrate achievement.
See Thomas, Clarence. And Obama, Barack.
"...the reason for the backlash is because the books that were written by women and minorities were barely "Scifi" at all"
Are you aware that the Hugo awards are given for the best science fiction AND FANTASY? So something like "The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere" by John Chu (best short story), set in a world where you get a personal rain shower every time you tell a lie, fits well within the range of the fantastical covered by previous Hugo awards. Sofia Samatar (best new writer, but not technically a Hugo) has written "A Stranger in Olondria," which is high fantasy. In any case the other two book/story awards went for pure science fiction: "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" by Mary Robinette Kowal (best novellette) is about an aging astronaut faced with the chance to go on an interstellar mission. "Ancillary Justice" by Ann Leckie (Best Novel) is straight up space opera.
(And BTW, the Hugo's cover a wider range than just book or story writing. For example, the "Best Editor -- Long Form" and "Best Editor -- Short Form" awards were won by women, but if you think you can consider Ginjer Buchanan and Ellen Datlow as anything other than core figures in the fields, with careers going back decades, and who have probably edited some of your favorite authors, whoever they are, then you know very little about written science fiction.)
I can't agree with you more. The current cliche that has held a lock on the Hugo awards is so biased and hateful. Just go read any comments from the main editors of Tor to see what illogical hatred is.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
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?
Dune dystopic? You know they did end up following the "golden path". Sure there is drama, death, intrigue, war, etc. But there was also love, family, loyalty, duty, honor.
Dune is an epic history of future, not a dystopic story.
Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. 1895
Chambers, Robert W. The King In Yellow. 1985.
Lovecraft, Howard P. The Shadow Over Innsmouth. 1936
Lovecraft, Howard P. At The Mountains of Madness. 1936
Lovecraft, Howard P. The Shadow Out of Time. 1936
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. 1984.
Gibson, William. Count Zero. 1986.
Sterling, Bruce. The Artificial Kid. 1980.
Sterling, Bruce. Mirrorshades. 1986.
Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. 1992
Dystopian sci-fi is not a feature of Social Justice, it's a feature of sci-fi itself.
Finding God in a Dog
Not necessarily. They're only worthless if non whites or non males win apparently.
First a disclaimer. I am a heterosexual White male from the middle class. I am married and have an infant son. I was in a racial minority in elementary and high school (20% of my high school was White). My university was 51% White and had several public debates on how to get more minorities in student government (conclusion: people who don't run for office don't get elected!).
I have long stated that Affirmative Action is broken. I applaud its desire to fix a real problem, but the net effect is reverse discrimination. Best qualified is best qualified whether male, female, black, blue, brown, yellow, white, or orange.
That just goes to show you how touchy the SJWs are. If you toe the lie on all of their points but one, which OSC does, they'll still ostracize you.
One of the core concepts of the book is the franchise is only available through Federal service. So in order to vote you must be indoctrinated into the government and there is no concept of loyal opposition. I don't recall the exact name, but everyone was required to take a class along the lines of History and Moral practices. One thing that has always stood out for me in those sections is the concept of total war. Again I may have the specifics wrong, but the teachers makes a comment about "ask the leading fathers of Carthage how war never solves anything" Implying that wiping out your enemies is not only a valid tactic but is the best one.
At the end with the last drop of Rico's Roughnecks, humanity is appearing to win. But I would say it is at the cost of what makes humans in general good and noble.
A key message throughout the book is that the ends justify the means, that to me is bleak.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.