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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, @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.