Unfinished Thoughts on the Hugo Awards.
The last time I bought most of the novels nominated for Hugo awards was in 2010
- The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK): A classic Hugo winning book. You would expect it to win. Well written, and presigious enough to poke its head out of world of science fiction and into the mainstream.
- The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade): Pretty standard science fiction even though at the time its mix of biology and flood damaged Thailand made it seem fresh and exciting. Windup Girl is interesting in that Paolo Bacigalupi was later accused of imperialism and racism by Requires Hate.
- Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor): By the fans and for the fans. A badly written, yet sometimes fun sci-fi romp that somehow managed to get itself off of Live Journal and into the hands of readers.
- Wake, Robert J. Sawyer (Ace; Penguin; Gollancz; Analog): Oh god. This was awful. This is the sort of book I imagine being happily trotted out by the #sadPuppies brigade as an example of what Science Fiction should be. To me, it read like a Markov bot that had been fed with the bloated works of presigious but bored aging sci-fi writers.
- Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor): I did not read this.
- Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra): It's the sort of worthy / feminist led book you'd expect to win if the SJW's were in control, but it didn't win. This is a shame, because this is hands down the best book I read in 2010, and probably the best book I've read in the last decade. This book is exceptional in every way. I've since reread it and passed it to people and reccomended it countless times.
What interests me here is how there's an equal mix of those books which would incense the #sadpuppies brigade and those that would be pilloried for being too liberal and politicised. I'm guessing that your view of whether this year was "too conservative" or "too liberal" entirely depends on your position on the Libtard<------>Conservaturd spectrum.
Sci-Fi fandom, and the Hugo awards have always been relatively inclusive and diverse, and they've always had their fair share of (a) people who would twist and abuse that inclusivity for their own ends and (b) Sexist or sexually abusive people who just make the scene dangerous for women and the naive or broken. For every Harlan Ellison sexually touching a woman on stage, there's a Benjanun Sriduangkaew using the language of diversity to unjustly silence her competitors.
The fact that condemning either of these two activities is counted as "taking a side" is sad enough. The fact that there are "sides" now is even sadder. The fact that brigading and vote-fixing is common across both camps is enough to make me despair. By all accounts, Three Body Problem is an amazing book. I'm taking other peoples word on this, but it should have won. The fact that Redshirts won Best novel in 2013 is nothing short of appalling. This reeks of nepotism. Even Blackout (which was also nominated) is better than this awful self-concious 4th wall breaking shit-show.