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posted by janrinok on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the she-done-good dept.

The Hugo awards, being the favorite they are with SN readers, are out again!

As posted at The Vox.

The first-ever threepeat of the Hugo Awards — the prestigious, long-running fantasy awards handed out annually at WorldCon — just issued a giant rejection of right-wing gatekeeping in the struggle to diversify the world of science fiction and fantasy writing.

N.K. Jemisin's groundbreaking fantasy series the Broken Earth trilogy has won critical acclaim, been optioned for development as a TV series, and received numerous accolades from the sci-fi and fantasy community. And on August 19, it achieved yet another milestone when Jemisin became the first author in the Hugos' 65-year history to win back-to-back awards for every book in a trilogy. Jemisin won the award for Best Novel three years in a row, starting with The Fifth Season in 2016, The Obelisk Gate in 2017, and now The Stone Sky in 2018.

Meanwhile, The Verge reports:

The 2018 Hugo Awards were held last night at the World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, California. The Hugo award, voted on by members of the fan community, is considered the highest honor for science fiction and fantasy literature.

Like the previous couple of years, women almost completely swept the awards. N.K. Jemisin took home the top honor for The Stone Sky, the third installment of her Broken Earth trilogy. Other winners include Martha Wells for her first Murderbot novella All Systems Red, Suzanne Palmer for her novelette “The Secret Life of Bots,” and Rebecca Roanhorse for her short story “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™.” (Roanhorse also took home the John W. Campbell Jr. Award for Best New Writer.)

Jemisin’s win gives her a history-making hat trick: she’s won the top award for each Broken Earth installment, the first two having been for The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate. It’s a significant achievement, earned for Jemisin’s groundbreaking writing, blending of genres, and outstanding storytelling.

The complete list of nominees can be found in The Verge's story. Additional reporting can be found at the Guardian, on TOR.com, and elsewhere.


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:11PM (4 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:11PM (#725169)

    I don't agree.

    The remainder of your comment seems to agree its a VERY lightly skinned WWII paratrooper story.

    Not that there's anything wrong with WWII paratrooper stories; its just not SF. A WWII paratrooper story thinly reset into the year 3000 is merely military fiction or more likely fantasy. And even that is not necessarily a bad book, but it is not SF.

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  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 23 2018, @04:18PM (1 child)

    by tangomargarine (667) on Thursday August 23 2018, @04:18PM (#725254)

    A science fiction version of the story would explain why spaceparatroopers were still viable, regardless of how well the explanation stands up to scrutiny.

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday August 24 2018, @05:45PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 24 2018, @05:45PM (#725932)

      Agree and extend that having read the book you'd think the argument is you need brains on site high IQ to require infantry instead of "nuke it from orbit just to be sure" so naturally the outcome of all the battles I recall from the book resemble the outcome of an artillery barrage.

      You can replace massed charges with mortars and drones and missiles; delta force will never be replaced, etc.

      Its a good book and I liked it, but theres no getting around the issue that he wanted to write a book about WWII era US Marine Corps paratrooper operations, so he EXTREMELY thinly skinned it. And because he did an excellent job he gets a free pass a lot. But its still not SF. You just can't plagiarize "Band of Brothers" and copy and paste in a space suit helmet and "now its good sci fi".

  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:50PM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:50PM (#725300) Journal

    "Hard" science seems to really mean just engineering, stuff like rocket science, astronomy, physics, chemistry, mechanics, and maybe a dash of biology, particularly in the direction of cyborgs. Steampunk is that taken to the extreme, and then washed out to ignore the insurmountable problem that steam power is relatively weak. SF stories can have behavioral science, political science, marketing, language, and history, but most works skip that. It's really fantastical how well we communicate with the aliens we encounter in SF stories. One of the best STNG episodes was Darmok, possibly because its theme was communication, and that is a rare story line in SF. Usually, it's let us skip the boring difficulties so we can get down to cases. At the other extreme is how frequent autocracies are in SF, like the Empire in Star Wars, as if despite all this incredible scientific advance, we've gone nowhere in advancing the means of governing ourselves, even are still stuck in the backward methods of the Middle Ages, when despite the invention of democracy in classical antiquity centuries before, Europeans were busy sucking up to The Man, in the form of a king and his nobility. Even crazier is stories with advanced alien societies that are organized in such a backward way.

    So, yes, Starship Troopers is hard science, but very narrow. It tries to address the engineering needs of the idea of paratrooping in from space-- need a spacesuit, check, needs to be armored, the armor needs to be powered, need good communications-- and handwaves away the questions of why a military could need that particular capability, including the larger engineering questions of how a paratroop drop from orbit could work at all in the face of automatic precision weaponry and aliens who've obviously never heard of the Geneva Conventions (no shooting at parachuting people, that's hitting below the belt!) and wouldn't comprehend it let alone subscribe to it. But there are even larger questions of why a society could need or use space borne military, why the author thinks a militaristic society is evidently such a natural progression or state of affairs it need hardly be explained. What is more likely is that should we encounter intelligent aliens, they will be far more advanced than us, and a war with them would make about as much sense as the Aztecs sending troops to Spain to punish the Spanish for trying to overthrow their government. We would be utterly at their mercy. In short, the premises of Heinlein's classic are very, very wrong. But it shouldn't be knocked too hard for that-- futurology is notoriously hard, and being spectacularly wrong is just par for the course. One of the fundamental premises of Asimov's Foundation series is that fantastically far reaching futurology is possible. It fits with the sort of engineering arrogance prevalent in that post WWII era.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday August 24 2018, @06:01PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 24 2018, @06:01PM (#725941)

      There are aspects of your argument that are extremely convincing. Yes I do recall that "everyone" knows about powered armor now, but that was a new idea then.

      What is more likely is that should we encounter intelligent aliens, they will be far more advanced than us, and a war with them would make about as much sense as the Aztecs sending troops to Spain to punish the Spanish for trying to overthrow their government.

      War is all about logistics, and a counter-example is Afghanistan has enough logistical challenges that its been the graveyard of multiple empires over millennia. So ... 50 really talented dudes from another galaxy arrives, they might waste an entire tank division before we wipe them out, and it costs their parent civilization a hundred trillion bitcoin (corrected for inflation and currency) to make and send those 50 special forces guys to our galaxy and our backyard whereas we can stand up a tank division for maybe a million bitcoin so in the long run...