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So, last night the SJW types over at the Hugo awards decided they'd rather burn the whole thing to the ground than give out an award based on what the readers like instead of social justice reasons:
The members of the World Science Fiction Society rejected the slate of finalists in five categories, giving No Award in Best Novella, Short Story, Related Work, Editor Short Form, and Editor Long Form. This equals the total number of times that WSFS members have presented No Award in the entire history of the Hugo Awards, most recently in 1977.
Here are a few of the people on the #SadPuppies slate that should be quite surprised to learn that they were denied a chance at an award for being white males when they wake up this morning: Rajnar Vajra, Larry Correia, Annie Bellet, Kary English, Toni Weisskopf, Ann Sowards, Megan Gray, Sheila Gilbert, Jennifer Brozek, Cedar Sanderson, and Amanda Green.
takyon: Here are in-depth explanations of the Hugo Awards controversy.
Previously: "Rightwing lobby has 'broken' Hugo awards" Says George R.R. Martin (240 comments)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday August 24 2015, @06:26PM
SF needs new blood. It's not so much that new ideas are needed as that authors should drop wrong ideas. The embarrassing part is that some of these ideas have been kicking around for decades.
Among the worst are ideas on copyright and intellectual property. Unlike a lot of other ideas, that one arouses personal feelings and fears in authors. "How will I earn a living without copyright?" they wail. And so most can't write rationally about that subject. The futures many envision still have ridiculously strong copyright protection. Books are on the way to becoming a quaint relic of the past, entirely supplanted by digital copies, yet in a lot of SF, the paperless office has yet to entirely arrive.
Then there's Faster Than Light travel. The reality we live in is that FTL travel probably is impossible. Every way we've thought up to do it takes absurd amounts of power, or exotic matter, or something else that is utterly impractical or flat impossible. Do the plots really need FTL tech? Mostly, no. Things would take longer, a whole lot longer, and of course some things wouldn't be possible or worth doing. Yet most SF has it. Why? Are they bowing to impatient audiences? Is it so we can act like visiting planets by spaceship is about the same as visiting cities by train? It may be that no FTL travel has kept us safely isolated from hostile aliens, and rather than pining for it, we should be glad it's impossible.
Worse yet is traveling back in time. Forward is fine, nothing wrong with that, we all experience it always. If anything really ruins a story, it's unlimited ability to travel back in time. Any time anyone makes a mistake, just hop back in time and fix it. I suspect that not only is traveling back in time impossible, but that the very thought is a misunderstanding of reality, and we wouldn't even be talking about it if we had a better understanding. Typical time traveling stories restrict the time travel in essentially arbitrary ways, to keep it from being so powerful. Of course in many stories, time travel is the central mechanism that everything revolves around, and the story is an exploration of the ramifications, That's okay, but we have enough of those. It becomes as tiresome as yet another story of what it would be like if the world is flat and you could sail off the edge.
Then there's overbearing space opera, the sort of drama which pushes perfectly valid and often blindingly obvious ideas aside for the sake of making things more dramatic. For instance, in Star Trek, why do they always, always send out an Away Team? Don't they have drones? Remotely operated robots? Probes?
This touches on another problem, which is the desire of people to be the center of action. The amount of personal action needed to accomplish anything is just silly.