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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?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Friday August 24 2018, @02:59AM (2 children)
The US has had more than two major parties in the past, more than once in fact, but it seems to always eventually devolve into a two-party system. I think this is generally attributed to a tendency of the "first past the post" voting system employed, and is called Duverger's Law [wikipedia.org]. Basically, the idea is that plurality voting (first past the post, e.g. "you only vote for one candidate") discourages the existence of more parties because voting for anything but the biggest two ends up being a wasted vote. People defensively vote for one of the candidates that seem most likely to win, because anything else unlikely to matter, which makes it that much harder for a third party to rise.
To be fair to the early Americans that set these systems up originally, it's one of those things that seems like a good idea until hindsight and new information becomes available. Plurality voting seems like a fair, natural choice, because it works fine at smaller scales (small groups, one-off votes, etc.) where the potential flaws don't matter as much, and it's simple to implement and understand. One person, one vote; easy. They didn't have the benefit of access to decades of election data, so it probably seemed like an obvious choice with few or no negatives.
In theory it's still possible to fix the problem. However, that fix is to change the voting system entirely, which would require the two incumbent parties to agree on a change that's generally known to have the potential to weaken their political power. In other words, not bloody likely.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Friday August 24 2018, @03:35AM (1 child)
I'm always told "it's first past the post", but the UK has FPtP also, and currently has 8 parties in parliament, so I don't buy it.
According to Wikipedia, the US has had two parties since the Civil War, and has never had three parties or more for more than a few years.
You're exactly right about changing the system, too many people make too much money from the status quo for it to change.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @09:00AM
Many US voters seem more religious-minded about their party affiliations too.