Slashdot Mirror
Hugos Refuse To Award Anyone Rather Than Submit To Fans' Votes
An anonymous reader writes: You may remember way back in April there was a bit of a kerfuffle over the nominees for the Hugo Awards being "too conservative" based on a voting campaign organized by a group of science fiction fans who wanted to promote hard science fiction over more recent nominees. This was spun as conservatives "ruining" a "progressive" award. The question was left: would the final voters of the Hugo awards accept these nominees, or just take their ball home and refuse to give out anyway awards at all? The votes are in and we know the answer now: they'd rather just not give out any awards. (Wired has a slightly different slant on the process as well as the outcome of this year's awards.)
...and most of the folks I know did indeed sit down and slog through most every story, and only voted "No Award" if they really felt nothing was up to Hugo quality. (Personally, I'm perfectly happy to stop reading about the point that stabbing pencils into my eyes sounds like more fun than continuing reading, but then I'm not a purist.)
The saddest story is the alternate universe where there wasn't an attempt to organize a voting bloc: http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2...
(As an aside, I think there's at lot to be said to building bridges with sad puppies, though it has to be a mutual effort. Rabid puppies? Not so much.)
Meh, digging into the numbers a bit, it seems 5950 people voted. For contrast 8363 people voted on the last slashdot poll, so we aren't talking about a whole lot of fans, making it an easy balance to swing either way with relatively small numbers of voters. There's more detail on the breakdown of the voting here.
Nobody had to pay $40 to vote in the Slashdot poll. They had to pay at least $40 to vote in the Hugos. This is also, apparently, a huge increase over the last number of people who voted in the Hugos (65% more than last time?) suggesting a significant groundwell.
Okay, but I think you're missing the component here that espousing that point of view fails to account for: that diversity for its own sake is not necessarily beneficial.
Not that I agree with the Sad or Rabid Puppies here, or that I have any problem with what you're saying on the surface, but that's the problem with ideology. There's been a lot of "taking a good idea to absurd levels" going on in geek arenas, and that's where the charges of "racism" and "misogyny" come from.
Minorities and women are sure welcome, but ideologues from the outside marched in and started telling everyone on the outside that they don't seem to be welcome enough, by some vague standard of "enough" that can't be satisfied because there are no existing qualifications to satisfy it. So, of course the media jumped on a juicy story that can get people worked up.
What, really, does "diverse enough" mean, that make fields like science fiction really guilty of not being diverse enough by some standards, and where such guilt is quantified by things other than stereotypes and strawmen?
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
MRAs literally had absolutely nothing to do with this, it was a reaction to the hugos becoming a cliquish groupthink approved voting slate that rewarded toxic bigots like Requires Hate while ostracizing people like Toni Weisskopf for their crimethink... or even purely because crimethinkers liked them.
Congratulations AniMojo, once again you've proven unequivocably that you don't give a flying fuck about women or equality and only use that line as a cover for siding with toxic bigots who disproportionately target women and minorities.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Except it's completely the opposite. The puppies scattered their votes between who they thought most deserved an award. The SJWs concentrated their votes on "No Award" to landslide out anyone, especially women or non-whites, who was tainted by crimethink.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Sad Puppies believes that the Hugo's can be reformed. Rabid Puppies believes the entire thing should be burned and started oer from scratch. In the end, they were proven right that the Hugo's are being vote blocked and that it needs to be fixed.
Om, nomnomnom...
Politics not a huge deal in SF ? Politics has been the foundation of great SF for more than a century.
It is politics that lie at the heart of "20-thousand leagues under the sea" - a famous work by perhaps the first true SF writer. Politics gave us Star Trek - and everything Philip K. Dick wrote. Heinlein's works are filled with political messages.
In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a single good SF novel that isn't political. They are from all sides of the political spectrum and quite frequently the same novels are read as defending entirely opposing political messages. Many libertarians despise Star Trek as "statist and socialist" but Ayn Rand was a huge fan of it and considered Roddenberry a personal hero. Snowcrash by Neil Stephenson is set in a libertarian "paradise" but is he celebrating it as a dream come true or calling it a dystopian nightmare ? Which way you read it depends more on you than on what he intended. Now think about Diamond Age?
Why is it that those who have the loudest opinions so rarely know what they are talking about ?
On the contrary, the reason SF is so much more worthy of literary attention than it normally receives is actually BECAUSE of it's power for political messaging. SF is the ultimate exploration of "what if" - it allows authors to explore the outcomes of ideas, and political ideas are as important a part of that as technology. Every good SF author has realized that a world is more than the machines it contains - it's the people using them, and the society in which they live - that shapes them, without comment on that society, you would have no story to tell at all.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *