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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The 75th World Science Fiction Convention (commonly known as WorldCon) is being held this weekend in Helsinki, Finland. The convention is where the annual Hugo Awards are presented, and today, the convention announced the latest recipients.
This year, women almost completely swept the Hugo Awards, taking home the top prizes for literature in the science fiction community. That's particularly notable, given how the awards have been increasingly recognizing works from female and minority creators. The trend prompted a counter-movement from two group of fans, the self-described "Sad Puppies," and their alt-right equivalents, the "Rabid Puppies." These groups gamed the awards and forced a slate of nominees onto the Hugo ballot in 2015, prompting widespread backlash within the wider genre community. Another award, the Dragon, faced similar issues earlier this week when several authors asked to pull their nominations over concerns about Puppy interference and the award's integrity.
This year's sweep by female creators seems to be a strong repudiation of anti-diversity groups. 2017 also marked the year the ceremony earned its own award: a representative from the Guinness Book of World Records certified that the Hugos are the longest-running science fiction awards ever.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @09:45AM (14 children)
Sure, if it's based on merit and not a diversity push. If it's a result of affirmative action (aka: discrimination) it is sexist (to both sexes) and the awards just became meaningless.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Wednesday August 16 2017, @10:30AM (12 children)
"Sure, if it's based on merit and not a civersity push"
Yes, well, about that.
The article claims that the "Sad Puppies" and "Rabid Puppies" gamed the awards in previous years. That depends on your definition: the rules are, anyone can vote. So the puppies did. Seeing that the puppy-candidates were in danger of winning, the usual in-crowd that always votes couldn't get their chosen works through, so they used to rules to avoid giving anyone an award in several categories. So...who, exactly, gamed the system?
This year, the puppy groups did not vote. The results are out, and they're back to what the awards had become before the Puppy-intervention: The authors are properly diverse (no straight white males need apply), and the stories are all about portraying a correct political and societal landscape. The science fiction is especially bad, because there is no science to be found. I picked one random example from this year's winners: The Art of Space Travel [tor.com]. It's about colonizing Mars in 2046, but this is the kind of "science" you get in the story:
"There’s a good chance the whole crew will wind up dead before they can even set up a base there, or a sealed habitat, or whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing when they arrive."
Otherwise, the story is about a woman's rambling internal thoughts, among other things wondering why people would ever do such a crazy thing as trying to colonize Mars. That might be fine, if it were some kind of exception, but it's not. That's as good, as "science-fiction" as SF&F gets. The Hugo awards have become a great list of stuff not to read.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday August 16 2017, @01:22PM
So, in short, the awards are almost meaningless. In other news, women swept the women's competitions in the last Olympics, while men were segregated into separate competitions.
I will admit that I have found a few stories written by women that were worth reading, because they were nominated for awards. But, by and large, women aren't exactly writing "science fiction". Someone should have created a whole new award system for things like space opera. Women do well at that - but I'm not interested in it. Let them have all the awards they want, I really don't care. Just don't call it science fiction, unless it really IS science fiction.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 16 2017, @02:52PM (4 children)
I liked sci-fi better back in the good ol' 1950s, when characters had lots of casual sex, polyamory, "line marriages", etc. What happened to those days?
(My point here being, I'll bet any classic Heinlein novel was way more socially liberal than whatever these award-winning authors are pumping out today, and his stuff came out in the ultra-conservative 50s.)
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 16 2017, @05:31PM (1 child)
I think those Heinlein books were published in the 60's, not the 50's.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 16 2017, @06:03PM
You're right, I stand corrected. However, according to the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org], Stranger in a Strange Land came out in 1961, which was still some time before the free-love era of the late 60s, and he started exploring these themes as far back as 1939.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tibman on Wednesday August 16 2017, @06:16PM (1 child)
The last one i read that had a more interesting take on social stuff and sex was Walkaway by Cory Doctorow. Came out just a few months ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkaway_(Cory_Doctorow_novel) [wikipedia.org]
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 16 2017, @06:37PM
Sounds pretty interesting. Of course, it's by a man, and an old one at that (he's 46--a Gen Xer) in the eyes of the hipsters, so it's irrelevant to modern sci-fi literature.
Looks like it'd make a good movie; it has everything. Military + mercenaries attacking communes and later war, sex, post-scarcity, open source... But the hipsters will probably hate it.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 16 2017, @02:59PM (4 children)
A brief teaser about the book from your link:
Holy crap does this sound boring. But it would explain why the rambling thoughts would include wondering why people would colonize Mars, and that one line you quoted: the story is from the point-of-view of a *hotel housekeeper*. That's like writing a story about making the world's most advanced processor chips, and have it written by one of the janitors at the fab's front office. I didn't bother reading the novelette, just the teaser, but if you wanted to paint a picture of a future world where men and women are equals, including in STEM professions, why would you have the main female protagonist be a maid, instead of one of the astronauts?
(Score: 2) by https on Wednesday August 16 2017, @03:24PM (3 children)
I'll bite.
Because good science fiction is intended to look at society, and society has room service.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:23PM (2 children)
Society has always had "shit jobs", but that doesn't mean I want to read a long narrative about some janitor's thoughts and feelings, even if it is set in a hypothetical future. Some stories about the lowest members of society can be interesting, but usually only when they're properly set in an actual time period, either present or past (so you get a "slice of life" perspective), or when something really interesting happens to them (such as, a robot from the future is sent back in time to terminate her before she can give birth to the resistance leader) and they become much more than just some lowly worker. When you set a story in the future, you're already making up the setting instead of borrowing from reality/history, so I really don't see the appeal of looking at this imagined future from the perspective of someone who just isn't very interesting and doesn't do anything interesting. Going by the little bit I read, it looks like the imagined future really isn't even explored very much, which is the whole point of sci-fi: to explore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:42PM (1 child)
Men: forgetting they are only half the species since the 1950s.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 16 2017, @06:10PM
I guess we'll see from the sales numbers just how well chick-sci-fi actually sells to female readers. Considering the very poor showing of women in STEM in western society, and the general disinterest western women seem to have in sci-fi in general, I don't think these authors are going to be big sellers. After all, if women really did have a serious interest in this stuff, don't you think Lifetime TV would be making a bunch of boring female-oriented sci-fi movies along these lines by now?
Meanwhile, mainstream sci-fi movies seem to have no trouble casting women in leading roles while attracting large audiences (which are probably over 50% male), and they've been doing it since at least "Alien" in 1979.
(Score: 1) by insanumingenium on Wednesday August 16 2017, @06:31PM
Am I blind, or do I not actually see that story on the winners list?
I will be the first to admit, other than "The Expanse" I don't actually recognize anything on the winning list, I don't read a lot of "new" fiction.
The winner is apparently a sequel to last years winner, hard to judge if that is politics or good fiction without reading it, but the synopsis isn't as inane as what you describe in "The Art of Space Travel". I do get worried about the fact that there is a very well publicized positive NPR review by another one of the winners from this year. Whether that is an "old boys club", or just cream rising to the top would be hard to judge without reading the books. Then again I can't stand Orson Scott Card, and he is the only other back to back winner I see on a cursory inspection of the list.
I also note that Ursula K. Le Guin (who won a minor category) is a Best Novel winner from 1970 and 1975, perhaps these aren't all diversity hires?
I will read the winning series, winning consecutive Hugos is rare. If it turns out that they are the trash reported here, I will know not to trust the Hugos anymore, which is sad, because it was a prestigious award once upon a time. But I will at least give them a chance.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:07AM
And that's the problem with this one: If you won a Hugo this year, you now no longer know whether you got it was because (a) you've created a story that's genuinely better than anyone else's or (b) you created a so-so story and have tits. Friend of mine actually declined an award some years ago because she felt insulted by the fact that the main criterion for getting it was her gender, not her (considerable) talent.