Liberal versus Conservative in the realm of Sci-Fi & Fantasy

[Potoooooooo]

http://www.blackgate.com/2015/04/05/black-gate-nominated-for-a-hugo-award-in-a-terrible-ballot/

Here’s a brief recap: over the last few years a number of writers (primarily conservative Americans) have become increasingly convinced that the growing number of women and non-white authors winning Hugo Awards is somehow evidence that the awards have been ‘hijacked’ by a minority group of voters and social justice warriors (SJWs). Their concerns are succinctly summarized at the right-wing new site Breitbart.com.
To make a point about how the awards are influenced by what they perceive as a small group of liberal elites, a handful of authors created a slate of nominees heavily dominated by conservative writers, and asked their followers to support those slates in their entirety. The primary slates were Brad Torgersen’s Sad Puppies 3 and Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies list.
Under cover of this semi-political movement, which added roughly 200 additional nominating ballots to last year’s total (and nearly 800 to the 2013 total), at least one of the organizers heavily seeded his slate with his own works. Vox Day’s Rapid Puppies ballot included no less than ten nominees for his Castalia House publishing company, and listed himself for both Best Editor (Short Form) and Best Editor (Long Form).
The results? As tabulated by Mike Glyer over at File 770, a total of 61 final ballot nominees from Sad Puppies 3 and Rabid Puppies made the final list of nominees. Only 24 nominees did not come from either list.
In short, the Hugo ballot this year was essentially dictated by two individuals who asked their followers to vote for their suggested candidates, regardless of what they actually thought was deserving.

 

[Togo]

Hm.. I actually voted in the Hugo awards for 2014. I'm not sure stacking the nominations is all that helpful...

 

[Potoooooooo]

Hm.. I actually voted in the Hugo awards for 2014. I'm not sure stacking the nominations is all that helpful...

I know this 2013 Nebula Award Winner for best short story http://www.apex-magazine.com/if-you-were-a-dinosaur-my-love/

podcast version here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUAQnMnBniE

is one that the sad/rabid puppies crowd got up in arms about.

Now, IMHO the story is rather inane and it doesn't really seem to be sci-fi or fantasy. However, I don't see why they hate it so much.

 

[Togo]

I remember giving up on some of the Castalia House stuff in the Hugos, because it was angst-provoking military hard sf that looks like it was produced according to a formula.

The idea of a political shift in SF and fantasy is not new. The SF genre used to be dominated by fairly poorly written stories with minimal characterisation and plot, containing interesting ideas. Many of the most famous SF writers have early stories in this form, and then picked up a skill for clarity, plot and characterisation later on. More recently, the emphasis has been on a good story, which has left some of the less empathic fans, particularly the hard sf and military fantasy crowd, who tend to be a little more right-wing, out in the cold. Some writers, like C J Cherryr, literally went back and re-wrote earlier stories. The Foreigner sequence is now one of her most popular series, but the ideas mostly came from the earlier Golden Witchbreed, which is largely free of both characters and plot. Modern hard SF, like Pandora Star, now feels obligated to include not just the obligatory alien invasion, but a vast cast of characters reacting to the same at a human level, swelling the page count immensely and pushing the actual technical details into the background. SAGA, the winner of best graphic novel, may be about a variety of high-tech races interacting with each other, but the central characters are from two sides of a planetary war, and raising a baby in a harsh environment. Tear-stained scenes of family variously putting their beliefs in front of their children, or getting destroyed for putting their family ahead of their greater loyalties, may leave hard SF fans a little cold.

Similarly, on the fantasy side, the emphasis put on traditional writing skills and characterisation has greatly increased in recent years. This isn't the 80s any more, where you could sell stuff just by putting a dragon on the cover. So there has been a shift in the writing, I think. But a 'political' shift? I don't see it.

Not in the writing. In the convention, maybe. I can see Worldcon moving more and more from a US convention dominated by US writers and US concerns to a more global convention. That's a nasty shock for some of the more political US attendees, since most of the non-US global SF market are Europeans. Loncon 2014 had a few political panels, and in those a radical left-wing presence was both overt and largely unchallenged. I got to see Cory Doctorow discussing his views on the ethics of hacking in a room where he wasn't the most radical view there, and a panel on the future of democracy where the Labour and Conservative representatives were dismissed as hopelessly conservative. But then you can't host a convention of speculative fiction readers, get them to talk about politics in the middle of a recession caused by the negligence of the banking elite, and expect a massive upswelling of support for the status quo. SF readers want to try new ideas by definition.

So maybe the attendees, and thus the voters, in Worldcon, are getting more left-wing. That's not a conspiracy though. That's just the people who are willing to buy tickets.