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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
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Slashdot-Journaling Whiners???
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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?"
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.
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?
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.
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.
Maybe this is trolling, but I gotta say, I see this argument a lot lately, and I think it's just a ridiculous argument taken to the extreme.
Let's say I put two rape victims in a room that you can't peek into, and I tell you: Two rape victims are in this room. Okay, great.
Then I tell you one is male and one is female. Are you going to tell me that there's an allotment of suffering there that must be split in favor of the woman?
What if I tell you that the male is black and the female is white? Now what?
What if I tell you the male is underage and white and the female is Asian? What then?
What if I open the door and you see that they are both are white adults? Should you reset to the idea that the woman has suffered more without question, or even start disbelieving that the man has been raped at all?
I'm not a spokesperson for the MRM or anything, and I don't agree with all of their views on stuff (I did the research, which is more than a lot of people who spit vitriol at MRAs can say). But I think the point that a lot of them want to make is that when we talk about violence against women, or minorities, a lot of white men feel almost as if they can be (or even have been) marginalized when they themselves suffer abuse or injustice.
They as a group didn't stop suffering from crime or injustice just because there's a historical precedent for prejudice against other groups. I'm certainly not saying those things (racism/sexism) didn't or don't happen (like the way it most certainly did in Ferguson), just that it can draw more attention in cases where it's claimed to have happened, but didn't (like in the case of Ellen Pao). White men don't have any media "hook" that will get their case more attention, or allow the victims to be viewed more favorably.
It is my hope that the sentiment is not "we're suffering more", but rather "don't forget about us in your quest for equality, okay?"
Signed,
A biracial woman, which shouldn't matter, but does anyway
"...the reason for the backlash is because the books that were written by women and minorities were barely "Scifi" at all"
Are you aware that the Hugo awards are given for the best science fiction AND FANTASY? So something like "The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere" by John Chu (best short story), set in a world where you get a personal rain shower every time you tell a lie, fits well within the range of the fantastical covered by previous Hugo awards. Sofia Samatar (best new writer, but not technically a Hugo) has written "A Stranger in Olondria," which is high fantasy. In any case the other two book/story awards went for pure science fiction: "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" by Mary Robinette Kowal (best novellette) is about an aging astronaut faced with the chance to go on an interstellar mission. "Ancillary Justice" by Ann Leckie (Best Novel) is straight up space opera.
(And BTW, the Hugo's cover a wider range than just book or story writing. For example, the "Best Editor -- Long Form" and "Best Editor -- Short Form" awards were won by women, but if you think you can consider Ginjer Buchanan and Ellen Datlow as anything other than core figures in the fields, with careers going back decades, and who have probably edited some of your favorite authors, whoever they are, then you know very little about written science fiction.)
I can't agree with you more. The current cliche that has held a lock on the Hugo awards is so biased and hateful. Just go read any comments from the main editors of Tor to see what illogical hatred is.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
Everyone is allowed to perform genital mutilation, as long as the victim is a male child.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
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 ?
Have you seen the numerous reviewers and authors who have stated that they will not read any Sad Puppies related work because it is was part of the slate? They have already come to the conclusion that anything Sad Puppies related is not worthy of winning a Hugo. Some have said they will read the Sad Puppies works but regardless of merit will rank them below No Award because of politics.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No. That was the delusional fantasy that they use for an excuse. Works were being excluded because not enough people enjoyed that. Corriea is fine and he's really just another urban fantasy hack, except with gun porn. John C. Wright is a raving lunatic and noted pervert. And Vox Day shouldn't even be allowed in civilized company.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I've actually read books based on what I have found out about them. Later, as a point of interest, I sometimes try and figure out if they won an award. Sometimes, they do. Other times, they don't.
It's like the Oscars. There are fabulous movies that have rightfully won them. And great movies that haven't. And then there are the movies that sort of suck, but you realize that they won because they were "okay" but hit some sort of theme the Academy liked.
At that point, you remember that it is a bunch of movie insiders patting themselves on the back. Sometimes that pat on the back is for true success, and sometimes that pat is for making something that movie people want to make, but the interest is confined to that group.
So, the Hugo Award winners have won the hearts of the Hugo Award voters. And if you think highly of those voters, that may sway you. Mostly, though, there is no actual expectation that the Hugo or Nebula selection people automatically meet my requirements for SF.
Personally, I think they can give a Hugo to anyone they want. I'll just stop thinking Hugo winners are special.
io9 is a Gawker blog. You shouldn't even have to click through to the site to know it's going to be shit.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Yeah, Kratman's out there in terms of politics, and lays it on to the point of ridiculousness in his work (though I haven't read his Hugo nominee). I find his novels are still mostly a fun read (especially because I can laugh at the heavy-handed politics), but I wouldn't vote for them for an award.
Weber, though. How is it that NONE of his Honor Harrington novels were nominated for the major SF awards?
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.