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From the The Guardian.
Introducing the Sad Puppies...
"The shortlists for the long-running American genre awards, won in the past by names from Kurt Vonnegut to Ursula K Le Guin and voted for by fans, were announced this weekend to uproar in the science fiction community, after it emerged that the line-up corresponded closely with the slates of titles backed by certain conservative writers. The self-styled "Sad Puppies" campaigners had set out to combat what orchestrator and writer Brad Torgersen had criticised as the Hugos' tendency to reward "literary" and "ideological" works.
Today's Hugos, Torgersen has blogged, "have lost cachet, because at the same time SF/F has exploded popularly – with larger-than-life, exciting, entertaining franchises and products – the voting body of 'fandom' have tended to go in the opposite direction: niche, academic, overtly to the Left in ideology and flavor, and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun".
Twenty years ago, he writes, "if you saw a lovely spaceship on a book cover, with a gorgeous planet in the background, you could be pretty sure you were going to get a rousing space adventure featuring starships and distant, amazing worlds". Nowadays, he claims, the same jacket is likely to be a story "merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings".
And here we have the Rabid Puppies definitely not mentioning GamerGate:
Another group of allied rightwing campaigners, dubbing themselves the Rabid Puppies and led by Vox Day, real name Theodore Beale, have also added their voices to the block-voting campaign against what Day called "the left-wing control freaks who have subjected science fiction to ideological control for two decades and are now attempting to do the same thing in the game industry".
And finally a bit of Martin:
"Call it block voting. Call it ballot stuffing. Call it gaming the system. There's truth to all of those characterisations. You can't call it cheating, though. It was all within the rules. But many things can be legal, and still bad ... and this is one of those, from where I sit. I think the Sad Puppies have broken the Hugo awards, and I am not sure they can ever be repaired," he wrote.
"If the Sad Puppies wanted to start their own award ... for Best Conservative SF, or Best Space Opera, or Best Military SF, or Best Old-Fashioned SF the Way It Used to Be ... whatever it is they are actually looking for ... hey, I don't think anyone would have any objections to that. I certainly wouldn't. More power to them," he added. "But that's not what they are doing here, it seems to me. Instead they seem to want to take the Hugos and turn them into their own awards."
(Score: 3, Informative) by jdccdevel on Monday April 13 2015, @06:38PM
I'm not sure what sort of S/F you're interested in. Some people like the "Hard Sci-Fi", and others like more of a crossover between "Sci-Fi and Fantasy". A LOT of the Sci-Fi out there now is very much Military Sci-Fi which, if it isn't your thing, can be off-putting.
My wife and I mostly read Fantasy, but I have read some interesting Sci-Fi lately, most of the more recent stuff has at least some military overtones though, and I can only take so much of that at a time.
Earthweb [baenebooks.com] by Marc Stiegler is a standalone book, but a really, really good read with some interesting near-future looks at technology. (If you can find a copy. It used to be on the Baen Free Library, but disappeared at some point.) If you like the sample chapters, I have the ebook.
Freehold [baenebooks.com], The Weapon, and Rogue by Michael Z Williamson [michaelzwilliamson.com] are very entertaining, without being too stereotypical. Some of his other stuff is very, very military though, and he doesn't hide his politics.
With the Lightnings [baenebooks.com], and the rest of the "RCN" Series by David Drake was really engaging. Very much "High seas adventure in space" sort of stuff, older now but not dated at all.
(I read a lot of Baen, thanks to devouring their free library when I had less disposable income to feed my book habit.)
If you want to try branching out to Fantasy, you might find that worthwhile, and I would have tons of recommendations there depending on what you're into. (A lot of people I know have migrated to fantasy because newer Sci-Fi has become so militaristic.)