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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.
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.
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.
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
There is a bit of irony in how many people scream that sexism and racism are fake, but if women and minorities won most of the awards it MUST be because of SJWs and such since they couldn't have won them on merit.
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?"
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.
We can add yet another notch to the measuring post for things Liberal Progressives have ruined
They wrote something that people liked to read or watch?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
How about books that are barely 'scifi' that are part of collegel-level science fiction lit curriculum, like "Camp of the Saints" by Jean Raspail and "On the Beach" by Nevil Shute?
The definition of Science Fiction is very, very wide. There's a lot of, "no true Scottsman" fallacy in the way people attempt to exclude works because they're not Campbellian enough or they don't mess with society's norms enough.
The only way it's going to be fixed is if works are anonymously judged, much the same way that many orchestras have switched to blind auditions and chair challenges. Unfortunately it's much harder to do that with science fiction because most of the popular stuff has probably been purchased and read by the Hugo voters.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
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?
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?
Hate groups should die
+1 Irony.
Sorry. That second one should be http://www.thehugoawards.org/ .
I am skeptical there would be the same backlash if the winners were not women and minorities since scifi has always been a very flexable genre. Seems like a rather fabricated justification to skirt around the sexism.
Anonymously judged. Interesting concept. Don't publish, and you stay anonymous? We should have anonymous elections too. The things that spill out of open minds are amazing.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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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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.)
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.
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.
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Your selections from Science Fiction may have been the more Utopian style that Star Trek popularized, but post-apocalyptic and dystopian Science Fiction has long been popular. Some of Heinlein's works were very bleak, have you ever read Starship Troopers? Jerry Pournelle's chronicled the downfall of human society over a long period. Authors like Larry Niven contributed to the War World novels which again take place in a dystopian universe.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
If the point is to judge the work on its merit, then knowing who the author is turns the competition into a popularity contest, and criteria other than the work itself become the basis for coming to a conclusion.
Orchestras switched to a system that didn't let the judge physically see or know who the musician was so that the quality of their playing, not their gender, race, or any other characteristic defined how they were rated.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You consider "On the Beach" barely sci fi ?
What's "Brave New World" for you ? Your company's HR manual ?
1984 ? A how to guide ?
I think part of the problem is every issue has became political.
Even issues that really shouldn't be political. Like if humans are causing global warming. So if you were to write a science fiction book about a future devastated by global warming, then it is a political statement.
Science fiction points out what if scenarios, and how would the world be if they follow down a particular sliding scale.
Political debate today has long gone past intelligent debate and fear mongering on the sliding scale worst case scenarios.
Most of the political debates today are science fiction. If you vote Republican you will create a future where there will be a small section of Wealthy elites, and a huge slave class serving them. If you vote Democrat then you will create a future where all your rights are micromanaged by big government.
However science fiction is fiction... It takes the worse case scenarios... Are we living in a 1984 future? No... However there are elements that did come from it, however there are also protections that have prevented it from reaching the worst case scenario.
In terms of politics, good politics is about working on the issues that are at hand for the short/mid term. This long term forecasting, while effective for getting people polarized to vote for you, is bad at actually working on the issues. The debate for global warming, shouldn't be if it is there or not. But what would be the proper balance for correcting it? Efficiency, Economy, deployability of less carbon energy. How to transition workers in Fossil fuel energy to other sectors. How much the government should mandate vs. allowing free market to follow its own trends. Looking at legacy rules and regulations that may may getting new energy source difficult... There is plenty of room for political debate with trying to mitigate climate change.
But it makes politics boring, and not fit for prime time, vs. showing a future, where the statue of liberty is under 10 feet of water, and New York City is covered. Or where a made up Crisis is made to get people to drop all their worldly possessions and follow the guiding rules of the government.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
not Single, Jewish, White?
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
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.
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
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.
Interesting post but you have confused two totally different issues with sci-fi writing.
1. PC/SJW bullshit to "re-educate" sci-fans according to their playbook.
2. The dystopian / post-apocalyptic subject matter that is popular in sci-fi writing.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
L Ron did not kill SciFi ('when weenies started writing space opera'). It thrived for decades after.
I'd put the blame square on the douche Roddenberry. Lucas just put it out of our misery.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
On the Beach was not marketed as a science fiction work. Features no aliens, no fantastic technology, no superhuman abilities. Doesn't even show a significantly different human culture. It tells a narrative of what could happen after what, at the time, was considered a distinct possibility in the form of nuclear war.
It's speculative fiction more than science fiction.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Take Star Trek, for example. It led the way into devices we take for granted.
No, hardworking engineers made the devices possible. As much as I adore star trek, please give credit where credit is due.
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.
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.
Asimov was alive and well during both Roddenberry and Lucas. So was Arthur C. Clarke.
Really their deaths killed sci-fi. Fantasy however has become much more popular and in some ways fills the void that good sci-fi has filled, without hte need to pretend that the world is based in science, a hard thing for non-scientists to work with.
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.
Which minorities were winners last year? Other than the one token Asian who turned out to be a violent sociopath who turned on her fellow leftists?
"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."
No, Star Trek used to be about promising hopes. Sci-Fi in general has never had that theme. I mean, the year before Star Trek came out, Frank Herbert released the quintessential science fiction novel, Dune, which has the overarching theme that the only way humanity will survive in the long term (this is after they already almost annihilated themselves re the Butlerian Jihad) is by relying on a near god-like figure to enforce a form of anarcho-primitivism on the entire galaxy that humans have colonized.
If that isn't bleak, I don't know what is.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Not being smart enough, does not the Azimov series of foundation start slightly dystopic and then grows ??
if you see me, smile and say hello.
While what you say is true, the imagination of these devices were created or adopted by star trek. So we got lucky that TV placed these ideas and engineers tried.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Actually, I'm guessing their mother's basement. But that's purely a guess. (grin)
. . .and when combined, you get. . . .Grey Goo. Seriously, that's what it's referred to. . .
On the Beach is considered sf by The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
...
"Shute's two Australian sf novels remain his best known works of genre interest."
"Much closer to the bone is the famous On the Beach (1957), adapted for BBC Radio as On the Beach (1957) and filmed as On the Beach (1959), a Near Future tale (see Holocaust, Post-Holocaust) in which nuclear World War Three eliminates all life in the northern hemisphere, as confirmed by an Australian submarine sent north to trace a mysterious radio message, but finding the Pacific Rim, including San Francisco (see California), entirely desolated."
It's a story concerning the future and the end of the world, clearly sf.
See the whole entry at: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com...
There is also an interesting entry on Speculative Fiction.
It may not be a dystopic story, but it takes place in an extremely dystopic setting that seems sophisticated to teenagers because it employs slightly subtle royalist and "ends justifies the means" arguments. The idea that there could be non-feudal or non-authoritarian forms of gov't that could sway the human future are simply handwaved away with the suggestion that such societies can never effectively compete.
As for the story itself, is not clear that Paul makes the world a better place in any clearly positive nameable way. It is implied he prevents complete evil (the Harkonnens) from making a grab for the imperial throne. But the fact the Harkonnens could even attempt that is really a side effect of the nominally religious Bene Gesserit having abandoned pretenses of morality for a chance to seize more power.
Now you're just hatin' on the haters.
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.
Did ether or them write anything good that late?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Bleak, but not far from the truth. It has been proven time and again that humanity to not capable of its own checks and balances. If you take humanity in the context of its entire existence, it's hard to be an optimist.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
> up your worthless measurig-everyone-by-race ass
measurig - is that like the Keurig of racism?
I agree. Even before 1960, retreads of "Frankenstein's monster runs amok" and "here in our dying galactic empire..." were run of the mill. In fact, Asimov's great accomplishment is to figure out how to start discussing ideas about how robots might affect human society that did not involve any machines running amok.
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.
Net result: we won't buy books based on the Hugo award, and it stops being relevant. Wait, this happened a long time ago.
Mostly what little sci-fi I've read lately has just been by word of mouth. Wool (and to a lesser extent the Silo series), was excellent. For more low-brow entertainment I found the "Legend of Zero" series by Sara King to be great fun. There was another trilogy whose name I can't recall about advanced alien artifacts appearing and the moralities/impacts of those things, whose first novel was great, I can't recommend the sequels the author seems to have run out of steam.
The only key theme to these is that none of them won a Hugo, and got bought in spite of that. An award is only as valuable as its reward. Of these I think Wool probably deserves an award, it has a relatively timeless story of a dystopian future which (as revealed over the Silo series) strikes me as exactly the kind of foolishness we might get up to if we continue on the present path.
Yes, for example Ancillary Justice. Hardly sci-fi that, right? Another idiot coward heard from.
They also include 6(!) nominations for noted homophobe and pervert John C. Wright, including 3 in one catagory, because OBVIOUSLY he wrote 3 of the best 5 novellas released last year.
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
Or, it could be because that's what people want this decade. I'm guessing a lot of the serious SF market is spending more time on MMORPGs these days than quietly reading books in the corner, myself. At any rate, there is no gatekeeper any more, it's trivial to self-publish. Some of the big establishment names started out that way and just found it easier to let someone else handle the marketing and organization.
That's why the skipped over The Three-Body Problem (as hard sci-fi as you can find) and Vol 2 of the definitive Heinlein bio.
You're an idiot.
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've had an edition of that encyclopedia for many years. I feel that Shute's work is science fiction too, but it was not marketed as science fiction when it debuted and concepts of the end of the world, apocalypse, judgment day, etc are by no means the exclusive domain of science fiction. I also can sympathize with arguments that exclude fifties nuclear war paranoia stories outside of the realm of science fiction when they conjecture a desolate world that is simply dead or dying, as opposed to stories where nuclear war leads to the rise of fantastic creatures or superhuman abilities.
After all, if science fiction is defined too broadly, then all fiction about what could happen becomes science fiction, which simply isn't the case.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
Come on, at least properly quote Tom Lehrer: "There are people out there who don't love their fellow man... and I hate people like that."
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.
SP/RP are about taking the field back for real SF that the fans of SF like
What kind of SF do 'real' SF fans like? Is it even possible to describe them all in one category?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Ah, the ad hominem attack, what a great display of your intellect.
"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.
I know! The whole idea that there is discrimination against women and minorities is laughable, amirite Coward?
That was the other genius move by the SP. They invited gamergate into the whole thing.
And yet, if you actually check that existence, you find ever greater freedoms, greater resistance to totalitarianism, longer life spans with greater health and comforts and an accumulation of knowledge unknown in the past. You seem to equate not having achieved a perfect state with stasis. I find it a bit sad *not* to be optimistic.
Not possible with published works. Even if you strip off the cover and all credit pages, you'd have to find judges who haven't read the book. How to do? Ask if they've read the title? Now they can find the author.
A lot of things we have now were never even addressed in Star Trek. For instance, nobody in Star Trek carried around a digital camera.
No. Happily, the Hugo's have multiple categories and multiple works/people nominated per category.
Ideally, SF awards will be for the best SF works as voted on by SF fans, not taken over by literary elitists (the same type of folks who used to look down over their noses to say SF wasn't real literature, if they deigned to notice it at all) who want to use it to push their latest social cause.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
My understanding it was the slate last year that started the ball rolling with 'Advocate for an Agenda' and this years Sad Puppies group was a backlash against perceived vote-rigging.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
For as much as we've gained, we're beginning to move backwards. Greater resistance to totalitarianism has changed to greater sneakiness in circumventing democracy. Longer lifespans and greater health, but longer work hours, fewer holidays, and lower wages.
I get what you're saying, that we can consider some of the things we've gained to be wins. However if you look at the overarching picture you'll see that developed nations actually have fewer freedoms than they did even 10 years ago.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Fantastic creatures and superhuman abilities are much more fantasy than *science* fiction. It's all a generic pool more accurately referred to as speculative fiction. Even Asimov admitted he had to throw science out to write his stories on occasion. If you define science fiction narrowly, you can't even have reasonable time frame interstellar communication, much less travel.
Affirmative Action was never about best qualified. In fact, it was directly opposed to "best qualified" in order to address centuries of racial discrimination in this country. There is pain and inefficiency in doing that (including "reverse discrimination"). We are but slaves to our history (pardon the play on words). If you have a better, more equitable way to deal with that issue, there are plenty of people who would be interested in your ideas. Yes, you may not have engaged in slavery. But the people of your country did. And you have inherited their legacy; for better or for worse. Just as I, an immigrant to Illinois and Chicago, am inheriting the financial mess of this city and state.
That said, the Hugo Awards are no place for affirmative action.
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?
I've said this before in discussions about Babylon 5 or the Battlestar Galactica remake and usually get shouted down by the fans of those shows. It's not that I disliked either of those shows, it's that I preferred Star Trek's inherent optimism, or at least the optimism that it displayed in the pre Nemesis/JJ Abrams era. One could watch an hour of TNG without feeling the need to slit one's wrists afterwards. Unfortunately, the masses seem to eat up dark depressing story lines, a phenomena that's not limited to Sci-Fi, but rather one that seems to encompass most forms of modern entertainment.
TV and movies are supposed to be escapism. Who the hell wants to escape to somewhere dark and depressing? I'm reminded of the exchange between Dr. Crusher and the terrorist dude in a TNG episode, going something like:
Terrorist: You are an idealist.
Crusher: I live in an ideal culture.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
What the hell do you think tossing around SJW is precious?
Because they could recreate anything on a holodeck: why would anyone bother with a camera?
I am not big on Affirmative Action either.
However, sometimes qualifications need to be gained by access to opportunities for learning. If a person is capable of learning, but is monetarily or background disadvantaged, they will not be able to compete.
I think it is best for everyone if there is a certain level playing field. We want everyone who can complete to be part of the pool. That improves the competitiveness of the whole pool.
Where I think AA fails is that we add people who are not performing to a certain level to a pool of people who do perform at that level. That may or may not be the fault of the people who take advantage of the program, but it is a problem.
In my opinion, we need to spend more on tutoring and other help that improves the home life of the student from when they are younger, and then draw a line after which you no longer differentiate by disadvantaged state, but use a stringently objective process for admission to programs which works hard to avoid any bias towards (or against) cultural, as opposed to purely academic credentials.
In this process, when studies are done of various group admissions, if there are determined to still be bias against disadvantaged groups, we need to get to the root cause and attack it there, instead of any sort of quota system. Quotas devalue the group that gets that advantage. It helps no one if you can perform less, and still obtain advanced placement, and from there, advanced opportunity, but at the same time, you are perceived (rightly or wrongly) as lesser performing.
On the contrary, if anything is racist or sexist then it would be pretty weird if everything wasn't. If you think that one gender is superior, then of course that's going to show on all your interactions, and thus infect any and all social structures you participate in.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I wish I was rich and privileged...wouldn't much care to be a CEO though...too much stress.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
There's also the fact that many female authors steer clear of the genre of pure SF/F and just write sci-fi flavored romance novels instead. They know they're welcome in that genre.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
"Are now"? Heh. They've never mattered.
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.
I'd hate to wind up with brain-dead Conservatives like Ted Cruz in charge.
As opposed to what? Brain dead "Liberals" like Nancy Pelosi? Seriously, what passes for Liberal or Conservative these days is a bad joke. Damn near anyone, on either side, in politics has nothing on their mind other than how to get reelected and have more power. There's damn few issues that you can't find a politician switching opinions on once they're in office long enough.
I feel that Shute's work is science fiction too, but it was not marketed as science fiction when it debuted
That really doesn't mean anything. Science fiction has long been considered a ghetto, and so publishers avoid the label when they have a Big Name or a book they think they can sell to mainstream readers. They don't want to turn off mainstream audiences, and they figure the SF readers will find it, anyway. See also: all but the earliest Vonnegut books, The Lomokome Papers by Herman Wouk, and many others. I'd be willing to bet that the current bestseller The Martian by Andy Weir says that it's "fiction" or a "novel" and not "science fiction."
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
It does feature speculative technology -- specifically atomic bombs "salted" to make their fallout even more deadly and persistent -- that turned out to be even tamer than reality, as the proposed cobalt salting turned out to be less effective and radioactive than the uranium (depleted or natural in early bombs, more modern ones use partially or highly enriched uranium) actually used in the tampers and casing. The scenario, where so many of these bombs had gone off that the entire world was being overcome with lethal fallout, was also highly speculative (even the full release of all bombs in the arsenal wouldn't have that effect), and certainly the Atomic Bomb and it's descendants were the result of science. Both speculative fiction and, in my analysis, science fiction categorizations apply. It's like Crichton's Jurassic Park: clearly science fiction, but marketed as technothriller/mainstream fiction to pull in a larger market share.
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.
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.
You are aware that writers have used nom de plumes for years, right? Both in romance and SF.
He had no money on the island and that money was cursed anyway.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Of course not, that's from Star Wars: R2-D2.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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?
We are moving back, but we will move forward again, as well. Civilization moves in cycles, we get better, the elite want more, take too much, society collapses, we rebuild. But in general the curve is up. I hope that this time the rich, see that they have enough (not holding my breath), and we won't have a major collapse. I can only hope.
"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"
But a reformation seems to be in the works. That's what really underlies this controversy.
Actually, the point the parent makes kind of makes sense. Business leaders may or may not be nice people, but they usually err on the side of making more money for less investment.
If you truly could pay a woman 25% less to do the exact same job at the same level of quality, then men would be much less attractive overall. You might suggest the "Boys' Club" mentality, and there is no doubt that this can come into play, but all it takes is one executive or CEO in a competitive business who starts the "race to the bottom" and suddenly your office and that of all of your competitors is filled with cheap female labor who are now causing you to make more profit for the exact amount of work you were getting before with premium priced men.
Think about it this way. There is no doubt that in the past, many Americans, including business leaders, thought of brown people as inferior for many reasons. They could get them cheaply, even then, but they didn't think they could do the job of the white male working-man and it wasn't as easy to leverage them as labor. As soon as someone figured out how to outsource easily, and move factories elsewhere, we saw where that ideology went. Straight to Mexico, and Taiwan, and China. Do business leaders still think that the "brown people" are inferior. I bet many do. Is that stopping them from making money hand-over-fist from using them? Nope.
So, the understanding is that the rubber meets the road somewhere. Business leaders might stand on their prejudices stubbornly, but when you are talking about a 25% labor discount, do you really believe that they'd ignore the benefit? All it takes is one money-grubbing business leader who couldn't give a fig for medieval notions of gender roles and you have a situation where everyone else in that market has to adapt or die.
None of this is to say that I've logically proven that they get 25% less pay for equal work. The aforementioned prejudice factor, as well as other societal mores can affect females in the workplace. However, there is still something to be said for looking at the factors which might affect how females work in the marketplace differently than men. Those might be differences that make sense. While women make less money, they also live longer than men on average. Would the average woman live a shorter life, but make more money if she operated in the workplace in the same mode as the average man?
Bleakness in itself is not the problem, it's the attitude toward science/tech as a solution to human problems. Contrasting two of the ancient classics taught in our schools illustrates the difference: In 1984 the villain is clearly a dictatorship exploiting technology for its own purposes. Brave New World on the other hand, takes the stand that evil has triumphed because, in Huxley's exact words, "science has replaced Nature."
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! --
Don't be silly. Some of us are CFOs too.
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."
I see no evidence so far that this is guaranteed to happen. I don't see any evidence that we've even started to move forward again. What Governments are showing right now is that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want, and when exposed there are no consequences. It's really only a matter of time until they stop trying to hide it and just do it out in the open, since society as a whole doesn't seem to give much of a shit, or if they do, they're backed in to such a corner that nothing can be done at a meaningful level.
You are right that society will economically collapse again. Probably repeatedly. However this will not impact the rich, because a collapse just makes the rich slightly less rich. It impacts Joe sixpack a ton more. This is not moving forward, it's getting stuck in a loop.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I find it extremely ironic that you rail against "Social Justice in Sci-Fi" and yet you hold up Star Trek, which has tended to be on the forefront of pushing for equality and, yes, social justice.
The Original Series had an INCREDIBLY diverse cast for a 1960s TV show. It may seem anodyne today, but it certainly wasn't then. This was so controversial that many network affiliates (primarily in the South) refused to air the episode where Captain Kirk and Uhura kissed, because at the time, an interracial kiss was simply THAT controversial.
Furthermore, Star Trek has always presented a utopian vision not just of technology, but of human (and interplanetary/alien) society. Heck, the Federation is essentially a completely socialist post-scarcity utopia where everyone gets everything they need because most resources are so abundant. I highly suggest you go back and watch it all again, and pay closer attention to that part of it, rather than just focusing on the recalibration of the deflector array and rerouting of inverted power from the warp core.
As far as the Hugo awards go... yes, demands to be inclusive can go too far, but that doesn't mean that being inclusive, or being aware of writers from previously disadvantaged groups, is a bad thing. As a society, we are nowhere near the point where everyone is on a truly level playing field.
The summary very clearly states that the AC who wrote it thought that Sad Puppies was a response to last years winners of Hugo awards. So yes it is relevant that Sad Puppies has been around for longer than the summary stated. Sad Puppies is all about exposing an ideology.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
If everything else was equal, you'd be right.
However, you're completely discounting the advantages that you (or I) were given simply by the circumstances of our birth. Two centuries of official and unofficial repression mean that black families distinctly worse off in financial terms, and unable to provide the same advantages their children that we received. While some can overcome this, it's certainly not a level playing field if we just "left everything alone."
Now, perhaps a better approach might be to tackle this from the perspective of poverty, because there are certainly poor whites, and wealthy minority individuals, that do not fit the average. The problem with this is that because poverty in the USA tends to correlate very strongly with race, you also tend to see animosity in terms of race manifesting in opposition to any programs to benefit the poor. To be fair, that's not to say being against anti-poverty programs, government assistance, welfare, etc is ipso facto racism, merely that the two are often correlated. There are many who are not at all racist, but oppose welfare/social programs/etc because they strongly believe that poor people are poor because of their own failings, or other Calvinist sort of ideas, and while I would argue they're wrong, it's not necessarily racial. That said, keep in mind that many social programs like Social Security (originally), the WW2 GI Bill, and others, were designed to effectively exclude black people, in order to secure the backing of Southern Conservatives.
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.
I have traced my family history back hundreds of years. Not a single ancestor within the past three hundred years owned a slave. A few were household servants in Europe, while others were nobles. I don't know anyone who was born into slavery in the US, or whose parents were born into slavery in the US, or whose grandparents were born into slavery in the US. How many generations should be entitled to remuneration for the atrocity of slavery? A Black woman is no more entitled to a free ride than I am. I refuse to be punished for the acts committed by individuals over 100 years ago, especially as those acts were not committed by my ancestors.
The real problem is economic slavery which is not limited by race nor ethnicity. People of all races need access to education or training so they can get better paying jobs and break the cycle. The answer is not to punish White males who excel at a job. Quotas don't solve the real issue either. Obviously enforce anti-discrimination laws.
If everything else was equal, you'd be right. However, you're completely discounting the advantages that you (or I) were given simply by the circumstances of our birth. Two centuries of official and unofficial repression mean that black families distinctly worse off in financial terms, and unable to provide the same advantages their children that we received. While some can overcome this, it's certainly not a level playing field if we just "left everything alone."
I'm sorry, but I wasn't born into special circumstances or advantages. My father was unemployed for several years. We lived in poverty most of my childhood. Everything I owned was previously used by my older siblings. The one advantage I had was that my family placed a lot of value on education (my father taught at the university, 3 grandparents taught at high school, 6 great grandparents taught at high school, etc). I had to work to pay for my education. We received reduced lunch during elementary and high school. I didn't own a car until I was 25.
Before you say that being born White is an advantage, I'd like to remind you what I've posted elsewhere. My elementary school was 25% White. 20% of my high school was White. Whites got beat up just for being White. I had friends who had to be snuck off island to escape race based death threats. I quickly learned to play hooky on "Kill Haole Day".
Feel free to keep telling yourself that.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Every bit of major-market SciFi in the 70's was dystopia, from Planet of the Apes to Logan's Run to Soylent Green.
There was a 2001 Superman comic to this effect, entitled "What's so Funny About Truth Justice and the American Way?" (later adapted into an animated short, "Superman vs the Elite"). Largely a reaction to the anti-hero movement and the "flawed god" stories, it addresses the necessity of dreams and ideals and why seeing everything as bleak and depressing is our ultimate self-inflicted damnation. I highly recommend both the comic and the film version.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
It's not Social Justice (TM) that the Sad Puppies are opposing. It's Social Justice (TM) at the expense of a decent or entertaining story. I was on the fence about the whole thing until last year,. What pushed me over the edge was If You Were A Dinosaur My Love winning Best Short Story in the Hugos. Even those who liked it admitted that it probably doesn't qualify as fantasty, science fiction, or speculative fiction.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
Obama's achievement was to work the Chicago machine like a pro and use every tool at his disposal to avoid ever coming up against a healthy opponent in either a primary or general election. Then he hit the presidential scene and the media did it for him and the democrats were dumbfuck enough to vote for a Chicago politician.
If by they you mean Wright's own adherents, then yes. SP certainly didn't slate 6 of Wright's works. Not to mention the nomination of Vox Day was done entirely on his own merit with his own slate. He was not part of SP3 at all.
Except clearly the anti-puppies didn't find it that great since they nominated two other novels in place of it. Moreover, since none of the people involved in SP3 had read it and its market penetration was not great enough to have a copy available for several of the people deciding the final slate to buy easily, the only way for them to nominate it would be to nominate something they hadn't read.
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?
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.
This clearly shows that Sad Puppies is in response to the winners of Hugo awards last year. Which is wrong on two fronts. First as you are unable to understand, this is Sad Puppies 3, as in the 3rd year it has been run. Second Sap Puppies nominees are all over the political spectrum and include women.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
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
I never quite saw it in that way. It was just that their society could not see things working any other way. For them those kinds of regimes were as foreign as an Athenian democracy or Roman republic would be to a Middle Ages European Feudal state.
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
Ask the wealthy Romans how much their wealth saved them when Alaric came.
The rich, most of them at least, don't have enough far-sightedness to think of things that way. To them it will be someone else's problem.
B5 wasn't that depressing. There was the Shadow War but the whole thing is kind of like WW2 redux.
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.
There is no such thing as "reverse racism":
http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/10/history-of-black-white-relations/
I guess "best qualified" is why Whites dominate in the CEO suite:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/diversity_among_ceos.html
It also must be the reason that the US Congress does not look like the US racially:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/01/05/the-new-congress-is-80-percent-white-80-percent-male-and-92-percent-christian/
It also must be why there has not been a noticeable rise in minorities in the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list:
http://gawker.com/5645917/the-forbes-400-a-demographic-breakdown
All I can say is I really want to get some of whatever you are smoking!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
I have traced my family history back hundreds of years. Not a single ancestor within the past three hundred years owned a slave.
Also are you sure that NOBODY In your family owned slaves? Let's see, 300 years is 10 generations, going back to the mid-Seventeenth century. That is 2046 possible ancestors going back "to around the time of the English Civil War and to the early days of British settlement in North America":
https://thewildpeak.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/how-many-ancestors-do-you-have/
Your claim that NONE of your of your ancestors owned slaves is simply unsupportable. First of all you would have to have perfect records kept during wars, revolutions, famines, epidemics, etc. Second unless you are seriously inbred you have family from all over the globe, which complicates tracing one's family history immensely.
I refuse to be punished for the acts committed by individuals over 100 years ago, especially as those acts were not committed by my ancestors.
Meanwhile you take advantage of the system of White privilege that the slave-holding families built, so you are indirectly benefiting from slavery in spite of your dubious claim your family NEVER owned slaves. Must be nice to be White in the US.
A man who wants nothing is invincible
So you never read any Iain M. Banks, Charlie Stross or John Scalzi? Missed William Gibson's return to futuristic fiction? Avoiding last year's Hugo winners?
Science fiction is alive and well, just not in the book section of your local Hefty Mart, I guess.
Off-topic AC is Off-topic. Original AC says the Hugo Awards are now useless, funwithBSD says "No, we're just saying it's like the Oscars now." They just said the exact same thing. Do I need to further explain the mechanics of the joke/statement on a first grade level or do you get it now?
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
Anyone who considers books published in the Twentieth Century as "ancient classics" is either an imbecile or a teenager. But I repeat myself.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
It's also incredibly depressing to think that a society with interstellar (well, I forget, interplanetary anyway) travel still has Lords and Swords.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The definition of Science Fiction is very, very wide. There's a lot of, "no true Scottsman" fallacy in the way people attempt to exclude works because they're not Campbellian enough or they don't mess with society's norms enough.
It's overwhelmingly the former on slashdot. Basically, if a story can't be summarised by a pulp cover featuring a shiny rocket and a chick in a bikini with big bazookas, it ain't Sci Fi.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
if science fiction is defined too broadly, then all fiction about what could happen becomes science fiction, which simply isn't the case.
This is precisely why there is such a strong argument for just not bothering to apply genre labels to works of art at all. It's all primarily a marketing tool anyway.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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
Yeah, sure, if by "good SF" you mean big- guns-in-space Boy's Own Adventures.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
SP/RP are about taking the field back for real SF that the fans of SF like
What kind of SF do 'real' SF fans like? Is it even possible to describe them all in one category?
Simple, everything I like is Real Science Fiction, all the rest is rubbish.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
Wow, in this thread, as long as you include the phrase "SJW" you get modded up.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Before you say that being born White is an advantage, I'd like to remind you what I've posted elsewhere. My elementary school was 25% White. 20% of my high school was White. Whites got beat up just for being White
Gosh, it's almost like when you're an easily identifiable minority group you get bullied.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
That truly is a clear categorization.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
By they, I mean the nominations, and he was nominated 6 times on the RP slate (Vox Day). You can pretend they aren't connected all you like, it won't wash.BTW, the RP slate did far better than the SP slate. Oh, and he had a nomination on the SP slate as well.
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
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-
This is total nonsense. If you look over the last several years of Hugo nominees, you'll see Charles Stross, Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman... consider Charles Stross's 2010 award winner, Palimpsest - white male author, white male protagonist, so it certainly didn't win an award via SJW points. It is mind blowing on multiple levels, it conveys the enormity of space and time like nothing I've ever read, it paints a devastating picture of the heat death of the universe, it presents an entirely new sort of time travel mechanic, and it somehow manages to celebrate technological progress and human capacity by the end. It made me understand the universe differently and my place in it.In contrast, the two Baen books I've read recently, one by John Ringo and one by David Weber, were both fun reads with some cool high-tech war weaponry. And that's it.
Award winners should be the kinds that redefine the genre, that make people understand life and the universe in new ways. The best sci-fi does that, and I love it for that reason. Baen books (at least the ones that I've read) don't qualify though. They fit more into the realm of fun and interesting escapism in a futuristic setting. Classic sci-fi, stuff I enjoy reading, but not stuff that should be held out as the very best the genre has to offer.
Moreover, authors have styles. Stephen King decided he'd write some books under another name. His fans were immediately asking him if he'd written them.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Affirmative Action was a reasonable thing to do way back when. It was not an imposition of a quota system, but a change of quotas (previously, women and/or minorities of some sort tended to get a 0% quota). It also was dealing with a massive immediate injustice.
It was also an extremely blunt instrument. It was never going to end discrimination, for obvious reasons. It was going to be bad for the economy in the short run.
In the past twenty years or so, I haven't found anybody to explain why we still have it. There is no pre-existing quota system to change. There is no massive immediate injustice, although there are still a lot of disparities. There's still racism and discrimination, but Affirmative Action was never going to change that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I have a lot of ancestors who likely discriminated based on race. Black people often have a lot of ancestors who were discriminated. It isn't just slavery. However, we've had civil rights laws for the past fifty years, and so most people in the US have had equal rights since then. (The same is not true of the natives here, unfortunately.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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?
I have traced my family history back hundreds of years. Not a single ancestor within the past three hundred years owned a slave.
Also are you sure that NOBODY In your family owned slaves? Let's see, 300 years is 10 generations, going back to the mid-Seventeenth century. That is 2046 possible ancestors going back "to around the time of the English Civil War and to the early days of British settlement in North America":
I actually do have detailed records for all my direct ancestors going back into the 1600s. Half of my lines arrived on the Mayflower (yes, there are intermarriages). A few others arrived in the 1770s to help free the colonies from English rule. Some arrived in the 1840s 1850s from countries which did not have slavery. All my ancestors lived in the northern colonies which did not practice slavery. For what it's worth, if I limit my family history to just 300 years, I have ancestors from the following countries: Native Americans, England, Scotland, and Sweden. If you add another 100 years you get the general European blend.
I refuse to be punished for the acts committed by individuals over 100 years ago, especially as those acts were not committed by my ancestors.
Meanwhile you take advantage of the system of White privilege that the slave-holding families built, so you are indirectly benefiting from slavery in spite of your dubious claim your family NEVER owned slaves. Must be nice to be White in the US.
I'm sorry but the system of White privilege in the US is a myth.
And I'd submit that was a good part of the reason Star Wars was so popular. Heaven forbid people get to see a fun flick that didn't end on a downer. My parents told me how they pretty much gave up on going to the movies in the seventies because everything was so damn depressing.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
There is no such thing as "reverse racism":
The term reverse racism may not be in common usage, but it does exist. In this case, in order to undo racism from 50+ years ago against Blacks, Affirmative Action institutionalizes racism against Whites. It does not abolish racism, just changes which race is discriminated against.
I guess "best qualified" is why Whites dominate in the CEO suite: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/diversity_among_ceos.html
Correlation does not equal causation. More men are CEOs because more men have more time in the workforce and generally have higher education. Women traditionally take time off from their studies and careers to help raise the kids. My own mother earned her Associate's when she was 40, after raising seven kids.
It also must be the reason that the US Congress does not look like the US racially: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/01/05/the-new-congress-is-80-percent-white-80-percent-male-and-92-percent-christian/
You must run before you can get elected. The student body at my university was also overwhelmingly male (though extremely racially diverse). After studying the situation, it was determined that a female who was running was three times as likely to get elected as a male also in the running. Alas, the general population votes, so there is not single thing that everyone agrees on for what is "best qualified". I was called a sexist for not supporting Hillary Clinton and a racist for not supporting Barak Obama. When I vote, I vote for who's best (IMO) for the country, and not out of fear being called a bigot. I voted for a Black female for a different position, but it's because I agreed with her message. It was only years after the election that I learned of her religious background.
It also must be why there has not been a noticeable rise in minorities in the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list: http://gawker.com/5645917/the-forbes-400-a-demographic-breakdown
This is more about economic classes than races. Most lower and middle class individuals are not in a financial position to take the kind of gambles which can pay out the biggest dividends. It takes a million dollars to start a business. Those of us in the middle and lower classes look like too big a risk for banks to lend that money. Also note that 31% of those 400 come from old money.
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Translation: "I won the lottery and ended up with a highly privileged status, yet somehow have managed to remain completely unaware of exactly how privileged I am."
Being in the middle class is considered winning a lottery or being in a highly privileged status? What planet do you live on? I earn too much to qualify for government assistance but so little that I'm living paycheck to paycheck. I can't even afford a single family residence, having to satisfy myself with a town home.
I was in a racial minority in elementary and high school (20% of my high school was White).
Translation: "I've been around a LOT of those brown people in my life, so I think that qualifies me as an expert on social policy with respect to managing the negro problem."
Another incorrect translation. I don't think there is even a Negro problem. The problem has to do with economic classes and cultural mentality, not race. My point was that I know what it's like being in a minority and being singled out because of my race. My point is that depending on where in the country you are, it might be Whites who are discriminated against instead of Blacks or Latinos.
Translation: "I hope you'll ignore the fact that I haven't told you what proportion of the student government was white, and instead that you'll focus on the fact that I've claimed that fully 49% of the student body was brown at my college! Furthermore, I'll hope you don't ask me for any of the results of those public debates which probably found that there were systemic and social issues at my university that actively discouraged minorities from trying to participate in student government, and just let the domination of student government by white people continue by default. After all, it's not racist if the brown people chose not to participate in student government because they didn't have the time or resources to navigate the vast gauntlet of obstacles and hindrances the white people put in their way!"
Incorrect one more time. Asian does not equate to brown; Black doesn't equate to brown; not all Latinos are brown. You just set up straw man after straw man. You assume that Whites are to blame that so few Polynesians, Asians, and Latinos ran. You assume that it takes vast resources to run for a position in the student body government at a university. You assume there were obstacles which were designed to prevent non-Whites from running.
Translation: "When I get drunk, I secretly worry about how the brown people are getting really uppity. And I tell all my white friends repeatedly that I'm not racist at all, so there's no need for Affirmative Action anymore."
How many straw men can you construct in a single post? Firstly, I abstain from alcohol. Secondly, most of my friends are Polynesian and not White. Thirdly, race hasn't ever been an issue between my friends and I. I only talk race when one group or another cries out that they deserve special privileges based solely on race.
Translation: "I use Affirmative Action as a cornerstone of my justification for my racist behavior. And I make myself feel better about my racist behavior by reminding myself of all the really nice brown people I've known over the years, especially the ones who've given me great service in their dead-end minimum wage jobs."
Yet more wrong assumptions and straw men. I don't have racist behaviors n
Thanks, have a nice day ;)
http://www.educa.net/curso/cur...