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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.
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(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.