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posted by janrinok on Thursday August 23 2018, @11:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the best-page-turners dept.

In Science Fiction, some awards have become almost meaningless as they came to be dominated by interests other than the pure enjoyment of a truly good story. The Hugo Awards, for example, have descended into a left/right catfight. They have become as meaningless as a Nobel Peace Prize.

Some, like yours truly, have entirely stopped reading about awards after getting burned once too many times and rely almost entirely on word of mouth or serendipity to find new authors and worthwhile books.

Our recent discussion of "The winners of the 2018 Hugo Awards" brought the idea (from bzipitidoo) that perhaps Soylent News could do a better job of pointing out new works of Science Fiction that could be of interest to soylentils and janrinok supported the idea, going so far as offering a kidney to the best author. (I think he's British, so he might have meant a kidney pie. [Not true, but funny])

Mind you, we would need to separate Science Fiction from Sci-Fi, Fantasy and other genres that have been mishmashed into one by most publishers and awards organizations.

So what do you think? What is the best new author/book in Science Fiction?


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday August 24 2018, @12:45AM (2 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday August 24 2018, @12:45AM (#725497)

    TFS fully believes the claims of the "Sad Puppies" or whoever they are now, who decided that the reason why a certain author's books weren't being nominated for Hugos had nothing to do with their quality and everything to do with some sort of discrimination against him because he was a right-wing white guy. In short, he was butthurt because he hadn't won a Hugo, and wanted to change that.

    This claim is not disprovable, because we don't know for certain why people nominated and voted for certain books over other books. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to think that the claims were total BS that were being put out there for the purposes of selling more of said right-wing white guy's books. Among the many complaints of the Sad Puppies was that the Hugos were preferring works that were deemed more "literary": Well, it's an award for literature, what the heck did you expect? On top of that, Hugos can and have gone to white guys in recent years. And lastly, nobody is "owed" an award.

    Honestly, the Hugos seem like an anachronism to me. Reading Isaac Asimov's anthology of the Hugo-winning novelettes and short stories (which he "brilliantly" decided to call The Hugo Winners), you get a good sense of where the whole thing got started. He described the early annual conventions where they were handed out, and gives the impression of a few hundred friends meeting once a year in a hotel ballroom rather than the thousands of folks at WorldCon nowadays, with the awards basically being given out by authors to each other because they liked each other and each others' work. And as far as being butthurt over not winning any Hugos, it took Asimov a very long time to win his first Hugo, a point which Asimov routinely brought up in both the anthology and apparently as the usual M.C. for the events in question in what was plainly mock dismay. I get the impression that something might have been lost somewhere in all the noise and hype.

    That said, some friends of mine who are much more avid sci fi readers than I am were thoroughly impressed with the quality of this years' winners, for whatever that's worth. I haven't read them, so I can't judge their quality directly.

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    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday August 24 2018, @06:56PM (1 child)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 24 2018, @06:56PM (#725975) Homepage Journal

    So the Hugos started out with authors giving each other awards? Then the Nebula awards are presumably today's equivalent to the Hugos back then.

    • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday August 24 2018, @08:01PM

      by Thexalon (636) on Friday August 24 2018, @08:01PM (#725998)

      It was more that the authors and fans were a relatively small and tight-knit group, and were also the only ones who cared enough to vote on the awards early on. So it wasn't like, say, the Golden Globes, where it's explicitly actors & directors awarding actors & directors, it's more that the authors were a majority of those that cared enough about Hugos to vote on them.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.