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.)

Comments

Re:Fans' Vote Was No Award

[silentcoder]

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.