Slashdot Mirror
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...
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
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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
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.