You have to read this to understand it, and you have to understand it before you care.
Basically there is a battle in the arena of Science Fiction between people who want to emphasize quality and storytelling development (The Sad Puppies) and SJWs who nominate pure crap for Hugo Awards simply because it has LGBT characters (CHORFS- “Cliquish, Holier-than-thou, Obnoxious, Reactionary Fanatics.”)
I stand with the Sad Puppies. Quality suffers in all areas of life when quotas (diversity) are more important than choosing the best no matter who they are.
If that meant everyone hired would be black (think NBA) so be it.
READ HERE
I’m not a Sci-Fi fan. After running across the #HugoAwards last night it sounded like just a bunch of people who live in a fantasy world being overrun by emotionally stunted unemployed social justice warriors.
I don’t get it. I thought Single Jewish Women liked puppies.
I live in Spokane and I didn’t even know about this. Once upon a time when I was a major league sci fi geek I wouldn’t have missed it. for the world. I still prefer the old stuff, good space operas by EE Doc Smith who was a native of NE Wash. and the Spokane area. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Clifford D Simak, Ray Bradbury, Robert A Heinlein, Isaac Asimov etc. from the golden age of sci fi, the 30’s thru the 60’s and 70’s. The new stuff just doesn’t have a lot of the wild imaginations of the earlier sci fi classics. And besides XM had 2 hrs. of Ray Bradbury stories (to celebrate his 95th what would have been his 95th birthday) on last night including Zero Hour (one of my favorite Bradbury short stories, The Screaming Woman is another one) where the kids are a playing a game of invasion and the adults don’t have a clue till the end when the Martians come up the stairs and dissolve the door with a ray gun and all you hear is a blood curdling scream to end it. Good stuff.
How about they give awards based at least partly on sales? PC crap ain’t gonna sell. But hey, it’s their award, if they want to see respect drop to Nobel Peace Prize level then that’s their prerogative.
I scared the bejeebers out of my youngest daughter once listening to Zero Hour when it was night time and dark outside. She won’t listen to it again ever.
I think my first SF novel was RAH’s ”
Have Spacesuit Will Travel.” I think it
was about 1961. I was 11.
After that I devoured the stuff; decade
after decade. Then, about 15 years ago,
it started to get preachy. Lots of women
writers started up. I adored the old masters
like Andre Norton and Ursula Leguin.
They could Really tell wonderful stories
and they never did it for your own good.
Fun times then, and great reading.
Now, after attempting the masculinized
woman heroine or the eco horror blame
mankind stuff one too many times, I
choose not to pick up most books by
female or hyphenated name authors.
I want mind candy, not an electric drill
in the ear.
There’s a lot of bizarre transhumanism going on in sci fi as well. There is a lot of freaky stuff.
Some is creative and cleverly integrated with the plot line and some is just… stupid.
There are still a few good SciFi authors out there that are well worth reading…
John Ringo’s Posleen Wars Series aka Legacy of the Aldenada
John Ringo’s Troy Rising Series
David Weber’s “Safehold” Series
Steve White…any number of SF series novels
And this year we have Andy Weir’s outstanding novel “The Martian” which Ridley Scott is producing the film for release this October…
“Torgersen often notes in interviews that he’s been married to an African-American woman for 21 years, so “I don’t need some know-it-all to come lecture me about race stuff.” He says the Hugos are beset by identity politics. “When people go on about how we’re anti-diversity, I’m like: No. All we’re saying is storytelling ought to come first.” ”
That is the best description of post-60’s race relations America that I have read. Eat that and die all you race hustlers!
Mine was “The Ant Men”, by Eric North. Also read Andre Norton, although I thought she was a guy at the time. It wouldn’t have mattered, though – good writing is good writing, no matter who produces it. Started buying F&SF off the rack at the newsstand – “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel” was serialized there for the first time, and I loved it. I guess I was lucky enough to get into science fiction when the greats were still writing. Guys like Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov – they were the masters. After that, sci-fi started getting quirky, drifting more into fantasy and the weird. It was cool at first, but then it became boring (or maybe I just became jaded). Anyway, I kinda got away from the genre after the late 1970’s. Once in a while, a good movie plot will come along and surprise me (“The Terminator”, “Blade Runner”, “Back to the Future”, etc), but other than that, I’m pretty much done.
🙂
John Varley’s Gaea trilogy had all manner of sexual variant characters including centaurs, and sexual variants that required the assistance of other sexual variants in order to complete the act, and won multiple prestigious awards. This was in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s mind you.