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2016 Hugo Awards Shortlist Dominated By Rightwing Campaign (theguardian.com)
Dave Knott quotes a report from The Guardian: The annual Hugo awards for the best science fiction of the year have once again been riven by controversy, as a concerted campaign by a conservative lobby has dominated the ballot. The Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies movements, which both separately campaign against a perceived bias towards liberal and leftwing science-fiction and fantasy authors, have managed to get the majority of their preferred nominations on to the final ballot, announced today. Since 2013, the Puppies factions have posted recommendations of works to combat the Hugo tendency to reward works that leaders of the movement deem "niche, academic, overtly to the left in ideology and flavor, and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun." The Rabid Puppies has been successful in getting its nominations on the shortlist again this year; out of 80 recommendations, 62 have received sufficient votes to make the ballot. At MidAmeriCon II this year, it was announced that more than 4,000 nominating ballots were cast for the 2016 Hugo awards, almost double the previous record of 2,122 ballots. This news was initially greeted with cautious optimism, but the shortlist shows that the Puppies and their supporters have redoubled their efforts to "game" the awards. The shortlist will be voted upon and the winners revealed at the forthcoming Worldcon in Kansas in August.
Anything by Heinlein or Jerry Pournelle would fall into the right wing Scifi genre.
I think the "left-wing" label mostly only exists in the minds of these activists - it's a catch-all for "any work that discusses topics or espouses positions that we are uncomfortable with". For instance, I would absolutely classify most of John Scalzi's books as "swashbuckling fun", but they hate Scalzi. I suspect they don't like Lois McMaster Bujold very much either, since she frequently explores gender issues - but most of her books are also pure space opera.
Fans read an SF (not skiffy) book a week, or at least I did when I had the time. The "job" is volunteer, and you get to vote by buying a membership in the con.
The Hugo Awards have always been a popularity contest, since they're nominated and voted on by the fans (or, anyone else willing to pony up the money for a membership, although there are a couple of rules to discourage organized (vs disorganized, like the Puppies) bloc voting.
For that matter, the Nebula Awards, which are nominated and voted on by SF/F writing professionals (ie, SFWA members) are also something of a popularity contest, it's just a different crowd.
I suppose it's inevitable that any kind of award for the "best" in a subjective field like the arts (whether writing, filmmaking, whatever) ultimately devolves to a popularity contest of some kind.
In some objective sense the only contest that counts is who has more readers. As Jerry Pournelle put it when one of his books was nominated but didn't win, "New York Times best sellers [which his was] will get you through times of no Hugos better than Hugos will get you through times of no best sellers."
And while I'd love to have one of those little silver spaceships sitting on my mantle, Jerry has a point. A Hugo by itself isn't going to let me quit my day job and spend more time writing.
-- Alastair
Why not just choose good books, regardless of politics?
That is what has happened, if you actually READ the list of recommended books from the Sad Puppies list for example, it's not really a set of "right wing" books at all. It's simply good books.
The issue is that for many years beforehand it HAD been a politically chosen set by a tiny minority with no diversity of thought, and so the "normal" became a set of overwrought heavily left-wing oriented books. Now that it's reverting to center it's being portrayed as political, when what is occurring is the opposite of a political movement. It is a QUALITY movement.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
By design the Hugos are a popularity contest. The Nebulas are chosen by critics, the Hugos by fans. There's no "stacking the vote" in any way, just voting (it's not like this is an internet poll or something silly like that).
While the only important popularity contest is book sales, the Hugos do sometimes help less-known authors get discovered. Even then it's about the books you like, not the books you're supposed to like - the latter was always the Nebulas.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Science fiction is a vision of how the world could be. Or visions, which is a huge problem if you happen to be an authoritarian with political agenda.
Idealized feudal past and its Divine Right of Kings vs. vilified Industrial Revolution and its robber barons. Or, if you prefer, how right wing wants to see themselves vs. how they actually are.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
A baby's freedom to live certainly supersedes the mother's freedom to kill him or her.
Very true. The problem comes from people who use the term 'baby' to describe a zygote or fetus.
You havn't studied much history have you..
Or perhaps you think the Chinese cultural revolution and Stalinist Russia were right wing?
The reason you are dead wrong of course is the neither left not right is the enemy. Totalitarianism is.. And that can be either..
And the world is rushing to become more totalitarian year by year at present.. In the name of making us safe from ourselves.
The opposite of totalitarian is freedom.. Just remember that.
It would be more accurate to say that the Hugo Awards have been trying to move away from just rewarding
I don't think that would be more accurate: the Hugo awards don't as such do anything at all.
Nominations come from the membership only and then votes come from the membership only. The latter happens at the convention and gets moderate participation, the former, especially for anything other than the popular "best dramatic presentation long form (i.e. film)" , short form (i.e. tv) and novel is extremely low, because frankly, very few people care enough.
The only people who care enough are/were in fact those with some particular interest, and it just so happened that those people who still cared enough to vote had a personal liking for non white, LGBT stuff etc.
HOWEVER! And there's a big however. And this is also of course why the puppies were so effective. Flat-out lies are usually not as effective as lies with a kernel of truth, because people will latch on to the kernel of truth, especially if it's one that resonates.
What those people nominated (and what won!) in previous years was in many cases was the most atrocious drek. I mean just bloody awful. Weak stories, very poor on the speculative element, bad characters and in many cases flat out boring. For instance the risible "The water that falls on you from nowhere[*] won in 2013 and pretty much the only thing that distinguished it from the average scrapings from bottom of the barrel is that it didn't have the usual straight white man protagonist. Likewise "if you were a dinosaur my love". And others too. Were any authors pandering to that, knowing that that sort of thing gets nominated? Probably? It's a big world after all, but either way it doesn't matter because it was that sort of thing getting nominated anyway, and enough authors seemed to want to write it.
Having something other than the usual and rather heavily over-done perspectives is great, but it's not an excuse for poor writing. It seems however that the small community who gave a crap enough to vote didn't feel the same as me, or have different standards for "good writing". They're wrong of course because they disagree with my opinion. But I can't complain too much (define: too much) since I never voted but anyway.
So here's the silly thing. So OK, some small community were the only people voting (and there's no evidence of collusion), and the puppies (in many cases rightly) thought what they were voting for was bad. Heck, many people who weren't puppies agreed that really awful stuff was winning. But that's about as far as it got before it descended into farce. So they stacked the slate, and they had a golden opportunity to see all these marbellous speculative or space opera or mil SF (pew pew!) pieces that we'd been missing out on because no one bothered to vote and... well all they chose was yet more drek! About as bad as whatever had been winning before, arguable worse! And a good bit of it wasn't mainstream stuff, it was Jesus fan-fic (see John C. Wright's entries). What a wasted opportunity.
That also proves that the puppies are in fact a right bunch of nitwits and don't apparently actually care about good writing.
[*] John Chu. I've not read a single thing of his I like or even find passable.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'm a Sad Puppy too, and have been since it all started. What's amusing, is that, last year, Vox Day and his alt-right people decided to leverage the "Sad Puppies" with their own "Rabid Puppies" slate. And, of course, both have been conflated, despite the fact that they come from VERY different places.
Besides, the Hugo Awards, and Worldcon, have been dying for years. The announcement of the Dragon Award by DragonCon in Atlanta is just another nail in the coffin. When the "WorldCon" got 5,171 attendees last year, while DragonCon got over 70K attendees. . . the argument than the WorldCon is representative of Fandom tends to fail. . . similar attendance is seen consistently at the San Diego Comic Con, the Salt Lake City Comic Con, and the New York ComicCon.
That would suggest that perhaps the Hugos and the WorldCon are NOT representative of SF and Fantasy fandom. . .
The government healthcare bureaucracy has drastically impeded the research necessary for prolonging life and restoring youthful characteristics and will most certainly spike any such treatment, at least until most of us boomers are safely killed off.
In 1900 you were lucky to reach 50, my dad died at age 84 and my mom still goes bowling twice a week at age 88. Her brother is in his late nineties. That was almost unheard of a century ago.
When you're faced with limited remaining life in a fragile body on miniscule after-ripoffs savings, with a healthcare system that looks to be dedicated to killing you while retaining plausible deniability
Funny, my mom says Medicare is the best health insurance she's ever had. I'm looking forward to being eligible next year because my insurance REALLY sucks.
You're crazy, Louie. See a doctor about that early onset Alzheimer's.
Free Martian Whores!