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Comment by jcriddle4 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, some of use find the current generation has plenty of stories that seem dedicated to showing men as total losers and women as three million percent better. Yes it is painful, ham-fisted, sexist and vapid.

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I am a subscriber to Clarkesworld Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and spend significant time pouring over novels that are coming up for the Hugos and Nebulas every year.

Where are you finding these stories? I'm certainly not reading them!

The hugos and nebulas are now highly politically motivated awards, and their winners often not really deserving stories more stories that told the right tales that someone wanted to hear ideologically.

They've devalued themselves and old winners of those awards should feel angry knowing that when people see "hugo winner" seals on books it makes that book more likely to be a political sledgehammer is pretend sci fi form, than a story worth reading.

And I say this as someone who buys 4-5 new fiction novels a month, which I think is relatively high for today's entertainment consumption trends.

Could you indicate won works that aren't really deserving stories? The works I've read recently have been entertaining reads that explore humanity in interesting ways, that have been produced with excellent craftmanship.

Awards don't exist in a vacuum. The stories that make it to nomination and win are competing but no longer on the story but the adjacent political bent.

there were more interesting stories that did not win because they did not espouse the right politics or identity.

I have no interest in singling out stories that won I'm interested in why they won.

I'm glad you enjoyed what you read but to me the modern Hugo is the brand that intentionally devalues itself for the purpose of political manipulation in sledgehammer levels of subtlety.

I am less likely to buy a modern day Hugo winner than another book, because they've demonstrated that the values they use to decide who wins are too politically motivated and don't match my interest.

Eh. When I look at the Hugo lists, I'm looking for truly excellent work to read. It still checks that box for me more than other awards I'm aware of, so I don't feel it's devalued. The winners still seem very deserving. You could argue (and I think you may be) that many runners-up are also deserving. Of the stories that deserve to win, they choose one they more endorse the message of. That seems fine to me.

I've only really sought out the short story winners, but they remain really really excellent, and who cares about the subtlety. A sledgehammer can tell a great story, and at the end of the day, it's the greatness I care about, not how it's achieved. Last year's winner, Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™ for example, wasn't exactly subtle, but it was really really excellent and enjoyable. Likewise the year before's winner: Seasons of Glass and Iron.

Between writing and editing this comment I read this year's winner and decided you are absolutely wrong.

> Between writing and editing this comment I read this year's winner and decided you are absolutely wrong.

Which book are you talking about?

I'd love to hear about this difference between the new Hugo-awarded novels and the authentic Hugo awards of old. Would there be any good examples of this?

I know you mentioned you didn't want to single out anything particular, but I feel like I could use a reference point or two to help understand the "why"s you mentioned.

Can you link more interesting stories that did not win because they did not espouse the right politics or identity? What made them more interesting?

The Hugos have always been like that. Not necessarily about politics, but about what it is that the kind of people who vote for the Hugos find comforting. There have been occasional diamonds, but for the most part, the Hugos have been anointing embarrassingly poor books for decades.

I can't speak to your personal motivations/preferences, but the viewpoint you're espousing was pushed hard by the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, who were (a) very highly politically motivated themselves, and (b) based on the evidence of the works they advocated for during their campaigns, manifestly failed to demonstrate that better works were being systematically discounted for award consideration.

I don't doubt that there are worthy books that never made the ballot for various reasons, and I don't doubt that there are books that don't make the ballot due to fan politics and personalities. But it was hard not to notice that it was very, very hard to get any Puppy to point to more than one of a handful of titles as "proof" of the Hugos being taken over by the Evil Liberal SJWs: the short story "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" by Rachael Swirsky; Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. It was hard, in the final analysis, not to draw the parallels between the Puppies and the GamerGate crowd: one got the impression that they didn't really care how bad the case they were making was, because it was a proxy for a larger conservative culture war.

Again, I'm not necessarily ascribing any of this to you, but generally speaking the last few years of Hugo and Nebula Award winners/nominees have been both critically acclaimed and popular, with very few if any titles being stories that nobody particularly liked but just had the perception of "being important" in the way, say, it seems at least one Best Picture nominee always is ("Green Book," anyone?).

I was handed a collection of shorts a while ago [1] [2]. Only two of the stories had a male protagonist: one is an ineffectual programmer trapped inside a smart house (which has a female AI personality; in the end a female colleague rescues him) [3], and the other is an insane space probe. It's not quite the pogrom jcriddle4 was describing, but it was an interesting swing of the pendulum.

The stories were mostly pretty average. I thought 'Escape from Caring Seasons' by Sarah Pinsker was great; sadly, it doesn't seem to be online. 'Byzantine Empathy' by Ken Liu enraged me greatly, because it was about the transformative power of blockchain, and like everything about the transformative power of blockchain, contains a massive implicit "???" right before the "profit".

[1] http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?659620

[2] https://factordaily.com/twelve-tomorrows-mit-technology-revi...

[3] http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/okay-glory/

[4] https://breakermag.com/kchain-science-fiction-premiere-byzan...

I'm kind of confused; this is a collection of 12 stories that does not appear to claim that they reflect all of science fiction or even a broad subset of science fiction. It could be entirely possible that it just happened that that specific anthology fell that way (it is an n=12 only, after all). How does it compare with The Best Science Fiction Of The Year and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy?

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