Chad Orzel says there’s just too much to read.
[Update a while later]
Sort of related: The culture war has gone nuclear. And yes, that young man was a waste of a good heart.
8 thoughts on “The Real Problem With The Hugos”
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Chad Orzel says there’s just too much to read.
[Update a while later]
Sort of related: The culture war has gone nuclear. And yes, that young man was a waste of a good heart.
Comments are closed.
Culture war aside, it was clear to me years ago that people were nominating and voting for things published by Tor and Analog out of habit.
@FC Back when I read short fiction, I subbed to Analog and most of the short fiction nominees came from Asimov’s. I guess that’s changed.
As for the whole Puppy Slate issue, I see a lot of posturing and some pretty ridiculous rhetoric on both sides. And some of the more prominent people on both sides have expressed some truly repellent opinions on other matters. It’s a junior high school version of the Oscar campaigns and fiascos.
Lord knows I’ve always chosen my fiction authors based on whether they think the same as I do about completely unrelated things.
The problem isn’t that people are writing ‘Social Justice!’ SF, but that, for years, publishers have wanted to publish little else. SF was historically the genre of radical and crazy ideas, so it’s utterly incompatible with an ideology as tired, conservative and dogmatic as ‘Social Justice!’
SJW SF is about as exciting and entertaining as Soviet Socialist Realism novels about the heroic struggles to meet the concrete production levels in the latest Five Year Plan.
Even the best of the left-wing SF writers of the last couple of decades, like Iain Banks, were writing little more than Commies In Space books where Communism magically works because everyone is lovely and no-one lets individual desires get in the way of the Greater Good. The left-wing takeover became so tedious after a while that I just stopped reading new SF about ten years ago.
Fortunately, the Evil Capitalists at Amazon have been doing their best to make publishers obsolete, so it’s not really an issue any more.
The last new SF novel I bought and read was The Martian, which was outstanding. I still buy some fantasy, such as Jim Butcher and Simon Green, but otherwise I largely stick to D&D and some Warhammer stuff(I have far too many miniatures). And history, particularly Byzantine and Hundred Years war.
I had a nearly complete collection of Astounding/Analog, but gave up on it soon after Ben Bova took over after John Campbell died. I haven’t read Analog or any sf magazine in close to 40 years.
Orzel sounds pretty butthurt about his Communist friends not winning.
There was one factual mistake (as opposed to different opinion) in the Weekly Standard article: Chicks Dig Time Lords is a nonfiction book by feminists about how they admire Doctor Who, one of a series. It is academics gushing total utter fluff.
Also, it beat a serious book, the first volume of William H. Patterson’s biography of Robert Heinlein. To add insult to injury, the second volume was not even on the ballot, thanks to the swamping of the category by the “Puppies” planks.
As Larry Correia has pointed out, it’s a stretch to conclude the second volume would have been any likelier to have won the award when one looks at what beat the first one. Probably less insulting and injurious to not even have it on the ballot.