Caltrops - Dead Trees





	[quote name="Injustice"][quote name="<a href="http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/">Wired's Amy Wallace</a>"]Though voted upon by fans, this year’s Hugo Awards were no mere popularity contest. After the Puppies released their slates in February, recommending finalists in 15 of the Hugos’ 16 categories (plus the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer), the balloting had become a referendum on the future of the genre. Would sci-fi focus, as it has for much of its history, largely on brave white male engineers with ray guns fighting either a) hideous aliens or b) hideous governments who don’t want them to mine asteroids in space? Or would it continue its embrace of a broader sci-fi: stories about non-traditionally gendered explorers and post-singularity, post-ethnic characters who are sometimes not men and often even have feelings?[/quote] This is where I was forced to stop taking it seriously. For a magazine that's so good at looking into the future, Wired is pretty bad at looking into the past! [quote name="<a href="http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/">Wired's Amy Wallace</a>"]But from the start, Correia had some serious complaints. He felt that the Hugos had become overly dominated by what he and others call “Social Justice Warriors,” who value politics over plot development. Particular targets of Puppy derision include two 2014 Hugo winners: John Chu’s short story, “The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere,” in which a gay man decides to come out to his traditional Chinese family after the world is beset by a new phenomenon: whenever a person lies, water inexplicably falls on them; and Ann Leckie’s debut novel Ancillary Justice, whose protagonists do not see gender. Leckie conveys this by using female pronouns throughout.[/quote] Ann Leckie's debut novel sounds like a fun puzzle, like that riddle about the doctor operating on their own son whose father died in a car wreck and it was possible not because the father became a ghost dad or a snow dad like you would think but because the doctor was a woman the whole time. Also, I wonder what would happen in John Chu's short story if someone said "I don't know?" [quote name="<a href="http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/">Wired's Amy Wallace</a>"]Correia’s New York Times best-selling book Warbound was up against Leckie’s novel at the 2014 Hugos. (He thinks he was a finalist because of an earlier Sad Puppies lobbying effort.) He and Torgersen, a 41-year-old chief warrant officer in the Army Reserve who took over the Sad Puppies campaign this year, told me they want sci-fi to be less preachy and more fun. Both bristle at assertions made in the blogosphere that they are racist, sexist homophobes.[/quote] I had to look up Warbound on Amazon to find out what it was about, besides racism and sexism and homophobia. [quote name="Amazon.com"]New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author. Gritty urban fantasy set in an alternate noir 1930s. A tough P.I. battles an interdimensional monster that wants to suck magic power out of the world and in the process destroy it. Sequel to Hard Magic and Spellbound. Book Three in the Grimnoir Chronicles.[/quote] I wish I could say something ignorant and hateful about this side's book, too, but I was already losing interest before they got done telling me what kind of chronicles it belonged to. I think, if I were a busy Hugo voter who didn't really have time to read any of the nominees, I would've chosen Ann's book too.[/quote]