2019 Hugo Award Winners

>seething stale pale males
there's more than enough to last you a lifetime from when your kind was systemically overvalued

who even cares about these awards? lmao

name 5 books that deserved it instead

Publish then. Not the point.

No way! My point was the dearth of quality. Good luck finding one from the last decade.

I'm on it, just fucking takes a while to write a book next to studying.

The only people that think the arts didn't nosedive in the last 10 years are plebs and children who are too young to know any better.

What's the point you're trying to make?

>2015: The Three-Body Problem
>1990: Hyperion
Literally the only two "best novel" winners worth reading from the past 30 years.

they nosedived because academics are saturated with social media and smartphones

all it takes is for one lonely incel to rise up and apply himself

but we have to make sure niggers and women have their representation even if what they write is subpar and mediocre

I'm saying that the award was shit long before they made it the "Negress who managed to string a sentence together" award.

This. Let them fade into the obscurity they deserve.

>Hugo Award
literally who ? "Oh yeah I'm very proud of my HUGO award" - no one ever

literally the Oscars for Yea Forums

Everyone is a minority in some way or another. Will she really be able to write it all in?

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I'm working on a short story; it contains:
>crazy criminal white man
>sassy petite white woman
>black teenage girl
>mexican teenage boy
>older white man (partner of sassy petite white woman)
>older back man (partner of older white man, he turns out to be gay and fucking a back guy)

is this pleasing to the masses? they were all white a couple minutes ago

sounds kinda gay ngl

>science fiction
>fantasy

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so big mistake there
>(partner of older white man, he turns out to be gay and fucking a back guy)
I meant partner of sassy petite white woman

Congrats to all the Authorettes!!

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>heterosexual sex
that's even gayer. how about no sex?

Best Novel: The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal
>On a cold spring night in 1952, a huge meteorite fell to earth and obliterated much of the east coast of the United States, including Washington D.C. The ensuing climate cataclysm will soon render the earth inhospitable for humanity, as the last such meteorite did for the dinosaurs. This looming threat calls for a radically accelerated effort to colonize space, and requires a much larger share of humanity to take part in the process.
>Elma York’s experience as a WASP pilot and mathematician earns her a place in the International Aerospace Coalition’s attempts to put man on the moon, as a calculator. But with so many skilled and experienced women pilots and scientists involved with the program, it doesn’t take long before Elma begins to wonder why they can’t go into space, too.
>Elma’s drive to become the first Lady Astronaut is so strong that even the most dearly held conventions of society may not stand a chance against her.

Best Novella: Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells
>It has a dark past – one in which a number of humans were killed. A past that caused it to christen itself “Murderbot”. But it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more.
>Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART (you don’t want to know what the “A” stands for), Murderbot heads to the mining facility where it went rogue.
>What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks…

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they sound dull and unimaginative. is this the power of American fiction?

these can't be real

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This is the Asian-American's book trilogy, has anybody read this?
>The first installment of the trilogy, Ninefox Gambit, centers on disgraced captain Kel Cheris, who must recapture the formidable Fortress of Scattered Needles in order to redeem herself in front of the Hexarchate.

>To win an impossible war Captain Kel Cheris must awaken an ancient weapon and a despised traitor general.

>Captain Kel Cheris of the hexarchate is disgraced for using unconventional methods in a battle against heretics. Kel Command gives her the opportunity to redeem herself by retaking the Fortress of Scattered Needles, a star fortress that has recently been captured by heretics. Cheris’s career isn’t the only thing at stake. If the fortress falls, the hexarchate itself might be next.

>Cheris’s best hope is to ally with the undead tactician Shuos Jedao. The good news is that Jedao has never lost a battle, and he may be the only one who can figure out how to successfully besiege the fortress.

>The bad news is that Jedao went mad in his first life and massacred two armies, one of them his own. As the siege wears on, Cheris must decide how far she can trust Jedao–because she might be his next victim.

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THERE'S LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE. THERE'S NOTHING BETTER OUT THERE.

you just don't fucking get it, you stay comfy behind your backlog on goodreads but you don't seem to realize that we're in a major new lit/fiction release drought

Don't give the prize then.

You call it a drought, but science fiction might be gone for good. It might be dead.

Here's your best novel bro.

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The Americans have too much money thanks to the fractional reserve banking and the petrodollar as world currency.
In the rest of the world, only nepotism or real talent will send a book to the print; in the USA, you just need to hit the right buttons.

She writes about sex like GRRM writes about food.

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Let it die, it'll come back eventually.

As I was reading, I kept expecting the catch, and I wasn't dissapointed.
>meteor striking earth
Okay. Is there a new spin on it?
>we have to go to space to survive!
Not very interesting, but all right.
>attempts to put a man on the moon
Hmm..
>doesn't take long before Elma begins to wonder why they can't go into space, too
And there it is.
>the first Lady Astronaut
It's all so tiresome.

Embarrassing. She should apologize to the entire planet Earth.

This is the kind of garbage that makes me think that perhaps American English was indeed a mistake.

>“The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society,” by T. Kingfisher (Uncanny Magazine 25, November-December 2018)
sounds like a good one!

It's getting harder and harder for me to find scifi/fantasy that I thoroughly enjoy. Tried getting into 3x Hugo winner Jemisin's "The Fifth Season", just wasn't for me. Same for most fantasy these days. Sanderson is probably rightfully praised, and his books are a fun little read, but nothing that gets under your skin. I'll probably go back reading Horus Heresy books if this shit keeps going. Haven't read Three Body Problem yet.

Vaguely science-themed fantasy written in overwrought prose -- a discount Terra Ignota

Reads like something a grandmother would write.

>every day you have to watch another 10 examples of self-deluded creepy self-congratulating hyperconformist self-backpatting normies pretending their racemixing fetish is a real worldview and clapping for obvious mediocrity and weird shit like drag queens molesting kids and going "no it's normal i love it it's great i'd never criticize this i love everything that everyone else loves because i'm popular" and then tranny gets a medal for World's Best Coder even though it never programmed anything and everyone gets mad at you for being confused and it's one big insanity party and you aren't invited and you try to play a video game to escape from it and they tell you they bought the studio that makes the game you liked from 20 years ago when you were a kid and there weren't any trannies and now they put trannies in the new game and someone's making a youtube video clapping and saying they love the trannies in the game and you go to the store to buy some food and a chinaman's wife is shitting in the street outside and nobody seems weirded out by this but you and a nigger spits on the supermarket floor and steals something and the security guard is a 5'1" bald woman with purple lipstick who doesn't stop the thief but just calls the police lazily and seems annoyed at having to do her job and the police show up 11 minutes later and they're both 4'9" fat hispanic women who seem not to care that a crime took place and you leave the store and blacks are screaming and fighting and you go home and watch a youtube video of a man playing a video game from 1999 really fast faster than anybody else and it turns out the chatroom community centered around playing game fast is filled with neonazis and a transvestite who went to yale blogs about it and you watch a youtube video talking about the blogpost and then it's monday and you have to go back to work at the comcast store

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the fact that an award is mandatory every year is the problem. there should be an option to award nothing. some years even the best work is mediocre in the long run. how many times have you watched shakespeare in love lately?

No award is an option and has won before

Give it another prize then.

Best Series: Wayfarers, by Becky Chambers

>Follow a motley crew on an exciting journey through space—and one adventurous young explorer who discovers the meaning of family in the far reaches of the universe—in this light-hearted debut space opera from a rising sci-fi star.
>Rosemary Harper doesn’t expect much when she joins the crew of the aging Wayfarer. While the patched-up ship has seen better days, it offers her a bed, a chance to explore the far-off corners of the galaxy, and most importantly, some distance from her past. An introspective young woman who learned early to keep to herself, she’s never met anyone remotely like the ship’s diverse crew, including Sissix, the exotic reptilian pilot, chatty engineers Kizzy and Jenks who keep the ship running, and Ashby, their noble captain.
>Life aboard the Wayfarer is chaotic and crazy—exactly what Rosemary wants. It’s also about to get extremely dangerous when the crew is offered the job of a lifetime. Tunneling wormholes through space to a distant planet is definitely lucrative and will keep them comfortable for years. But risking her life wasn’t part of the plan. In the far reaches of deep space, the tiny Wayfarer crew will confront a host of unexpected mishaps and thrilling adventures that force them to depend on each other. To survive, Rosemary’s got to learn how to rely on this assortment of oddballs—an experience that teaches her about love and trust, and that having a family isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the universe.

Isn't anyone going to push back against this?

i literally do not need to have sex but this is just poor

>In 2015, two groups of science fiction writers, the "Sad Puppies" led by Brad R. Torgersen and Larry Correia, and the "Rabid Puppies" led by Vox Day, each put forward a similar slate of suggested nominations which came to dominate the ballot.[48][49] The Sad Puppies campaign had run for two years prior on a smaller scale, with limited success. The leaders of the campaigns characterized them as a reaction to "niche, academic, overtly [leftist]" nominees and the Hugo becoming "an affirmative action award" that preferred female and non-white authors and characters.[48][50] In response, five nominees declined their nomination before and, for the first time, two after the ballot was published.[51][52] Multiple-Hugo-winner Connie Willis declined to present the awards.[53] The slates were characterized by The Guardian as a "right wing",[48] "orchestrated backlash"[54] and by The A.V. Club as a "group of white guys",[55] and were linked with the Gamergate controversy.[49][56][57] Multiple Hugo winner Samuel R. Delany characterized the campaigns as a response to "socio-economic" changes such as minority authors gaining prominence and thus "economic heft".[58] In all but the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form category, "no award" placed above all nominees that were on either slate, and it won all five categories that only contained slate nominees.[51]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award#Since_2000

tl;dr people pushed a slate of non-progressive authors, and every category that they dominated was voted as "no award" so that none of them could win

something something interpassivity.
I'm not kidding, this is a good place to start a cultural critique. I'm giving this idea away because I'm not gonna write it.

Is women's obsession about sex not a meme after all?

Isn't this Guardians of the Galaxy?
How did this win an award?
Should I be writing a thinly veiled ripoff of Infinity War?

>>It has a dark past – one in which a number of humans were killed. A past that caused it to christen itself “Murderbot”

Who are these people? I haven't heard of a single one.

>asking this
hab segs

jesus christ what a horrible unfocused, tonally confused mess of a first page. if this is what literature has become I might as well go back to watching anime.

One of the biggest flaws in our society is that those who shouldn't are given every encouragement to do so, and those that should are convinced not to do so before they even begin.

>Earth is becoming inhospitable so we have to move to the equally inhospitable Mars
This is a legitimately retarded premise

when has propaganda ever been concerned with logical coherence? the premise doesn't need to be plausible to serve as a thinly-veiled excuse for a story about female empowerment/overcoming stereotypes and proving that "women can do it too (and probably better because they are more emotionally regulated and social or something)".

I am coming to terms with the dismal notion that Sanderson might be the best of this generation, and I am a Sanderson-hater. At least he tries, I guess.

Are you two serious? The judges of these things are pozzed as fuck. They actively ignore any story if they know it's by a white guy unless he's ultra-famous in the literary world.

Fantasy is built on a mountain of retarded premises.

such as?

Pick any fiction with fantastical elements in it.

good job hiding behind vague generalities to poorly conceal the fact that your argument doesn't hold up, faggot

Oh, you were serious? Should I list every fiction I've read here? Why would I waste time with a pleb who can't even manage to follow simple rules for forming sentences?

True Chads don't read -- they just write.

How did Hugos came from clarke, asimov, heinlein, bester, zelazny, ellison, gibson, simmons,... to this? Yeah they weren't literary giants, but at least their works where somewhat entertaining and original. Unlike this derivative trash. Do woman really need to start first paragraph of the novel with sex?

>awards decided by popular vote
Horrible idea tbph. Might as well give the prize to the best-selling book. In fact that would be more accurate since people would have to demonstrate -some- level of commitment to it.

I did however enjoy that one author saying 'please stop voting for me, I didn't actually publish a book this year'

More people subscribed to literary magazines that published snippets and short stories. Now it's some idiot in publishing hoping you're the next Harry Potter that gate keeps, not the readers.

I think Hugo is the one that gave a fanfiction site an award a few years ago. All these types of awards are really bad because they're run by leftists.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is pretty good

Wtf I love burgerpunk now

only further proof that sci-fi/fantasy is not real literature. should be banned from this board desu

literature is really going down the shitter huh

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Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest are both sci-fi.

That's "womyn", you misogynist fuck!

>Samuel R. Delany characterized the campaigns as a response to "socio-economic" changes such as minority authors gaining prominence and thus "economic heft".
Wow, this boomer pervo pedophile actually thinks you can make money from writing.

Dude's a writer, he should probably know

Gene Wolfe has dead, and so has this genre.

There probably is good stuff out there but it isn't being published or publicized because the people writing them are the wrong gender and race or maybe it touches on the wrong topics. It just doesn't seem reasonable to believe that human beings have forgotten how to write good science fiction and fantasy.

When I was at college about 10 years ago, I roomed with a guy for 6 months who was in the film department that also wanted to be a director and publish some novels. At the time, he had written, re-written and edited the first novel in what would be a series that he described to me one night. I don't remember much about it anymore, but it was a hard sci-fi series and he took some inspiration from Star Wars (which he was a major fan of) and I remember feeling that it sounded interesting and at least somewhat original.

Although he never actually got the sci-fi novel series published, at least not yet, he did publish a novel in 2016 called The Lines of Union. I've never read it, though.

amazon.com/dp/0997776323/

His IMDB profile:
imdb.com/name/nm3697651/

He also reads Joyce, so that's something else Yea Forums related:
twitter.com/fitzfilmmaker/status/1102742761743237120

I even took a few selfies with him the day he moved out, wanting to prove that I knew and roomed with him if he ever made it big, which at least at the moment, seems to be happening for him, so I'm happy that he was able to go on to bigger and better things.

Pic related is a photo of him and a girl he was in love with a few years before that he had kept on his desk. The girl died in an accident a few years before I met him, and he told me about the whole thing one night about a week or two before he moved out.

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Omnipresent distraction and pleasure have, in fact, lowered the height of human individual achievement.

They became inconsequential, they don't even receive 2000 ballots any more, people aren't even aware at how amateurish the entire event is because so few people are paying it any attention.

They're hilariously entertaining though, the people attending and staff didn't recognize any of the award winners and were constantly asked "Who are you?".

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>This year's controversy wasn't the awards itself, but the "loser's party" held afterwards. Apparently, the venue let in people that weren't even nominated at the awards, let alone losers, and they reached capacity before any of the actual nominees showed up. They were turned away, and by that time, pretty much every restaurant was closed.

OHNONONO. The losers are starting to talk to each other.

They fancy themselves a vanguard, but almost all of the winners will have been forgotten in two or three years. Whatever it is they're doing, they aren't identifying classics.

tick tock

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>Chinese man
>man

Hahahaha

>but almost all of the winners will have been forgotten in two or three years
They aren't even known now, they're posters on Yea Forums with more recognition than some of the winners.

>Das rite! we had sex >:) dont hit on me u silly bois

Spare xus xour lamentations, white m*n. Xour field xis ourx now.

Exactly. The whole affirmative action thing is nothing but another shit in this shitshow.

>Pic related is a photo of him and a girl he was in love with a few years before that he had kept on his desk. The girl died in an accident a few years before I met him, and he told me about the whole thing one night about a week or two before he moved out.

She's like a 6.5/10. Need to see more boobs.

>The Howard Philips Lovecraft Award for Outstanding Achievement in Anglo-American Speculative Fiction was first awarded in 2020.[2] The award is restricted to English-speaking native-born American science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers of purely English heritage proven as far back as the 1800s. (Irish or Scottish heritage is a disqualifying factor, although nominees with limited Welsh ancestry are accepted.)[3] The award was founded as a response to political controversies surrounding the Hugo and Nebula awards over previous years, and the award statuette is modeled after the discontinued World Fantasy Award, which had been replaced in 2016 over concerns for Lovecraft's racist beliefs. The first Lovecraft Award was given to Stephen King on August 15th, 2020 for his 2019 novel The Institute. Starting in 2021, only works which use British spelling (outside of dialect dialogue) will be considered, and a stipulation of having at least one ancestor on the Mayflower is expected to be implemented by 2022. An honorary lifetime achievement award of a black tomcat statuette, the Black Cat Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Contributions to American Speculative Fiction in English, nicknamed "the Niggerman,"[4] is also issued to individuals who have produced an excellent corpus of genre fiction in American English, but do not meet the English heritage criteria of the main award. The first annual winner of the Niggerman is noted fantasy author George R. R. Martin.

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What does the A stand for?

>A past that caused it to christen itself “Murderbot”.
What?

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Hah, and people will laugh at you if you dare to say that maybe, just maybe, white males are discriminated against.

You win an award like this, put it on your resume and use that to open other doors. I gave a talk in Oxford once, put that shit prominently on my resume, and every CFP I've replied to since (that isn't blind) has accepted my work.

She just means more brown people, or, more accurately, less white people.

Is this satire?

I'm surprised there isn't more global warming fiction.

It's being written right now, give it some time to get published etc.

Lol, you guys think the blurb is bad read a review for The Calculating stars.
I see what she was trying to do, I really do, but I can't shake the feeling that MRK has tried to squeeze too many issues into one book.

>Let’s count. Main PoV character, Elma, is discriminated against because she is a woman. Also, people don't understand her Jewish heritage. She has mental health problems. Many of her friends experience racial discrimination. The public at large don't believe the global warming predictions which are driving the space race she is involved in.

And yeah, pick related is really the cover of the book.

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It's all fiction.

i'm only going to say it once
it's the most important thing you're ever going to do in your life, here on earth...

WAKE
THE
FUCK
UP.

Dear Lord

There's a distinct lack of pro-choice fiction as well. The effeminate men who run this award are slipping.

Hugo winner Mary Robinette Kowal at the losers party
@MaryRobinette
·
The Hugo Loser's party: A metaphor for privilege.

Traditionally, there's a party for finalists who didn't get to take a rocket home. This year, the venue was too small and a bus of finalists, their +1s, and acceptors were turned away.

You'll note that I'm there. Now, I could say that it's not my fault. I came at the end after the party had cleared out.

It's not my fault the fire marshall enforced rules about size earlier.

Not my fault too many invitations got handed out.

This is what privilege looks like.

It's not my fault that the venue was too small.

It's not my fault that some people got there earlier than others.

Privilege is rarely the fault of the people who benefit.

I have no idea how to make reparations for this, but I am deeply, deeply sorry.

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5 more minutes mom

Scary stuff

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When I read that first sentence I was hoping she would say something about her being a woman, and in this climate therefore, being much more likely to win an award to the detriment of white males. Alas.

I am firmly convinced that progressivism is a legitimate textbook mental illness. These people are made miserable by their ideas. It makes their own existence a source of distress.

>empires have troubled human civilization
What the fuck do these people think civilization is?

all they need is some fucking dynamite, like seriously just write a book that has some passion and real emotional stakes and you'll be getting your dick sucked

Nice pasta.

>when your shefriend lets you hold her hugo

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Are there any literary awards (or awards in general) that aren't simply participation trophies for "minorities"?

The Nobel arguably, but it's still a shitfest for different reasons.
The Man Booker because it has MAN in the name.

>these are the people that call physiognomy a psuedo-science

If you want to consider the quality of the nominees:
Cervantes and Akutagawa are the best.
Prix Goncourt is good too, but with a few cracks here and there.
Nobel plays safe and likes to avoid controversies, but it's too safe for its own good.
Everything else is pure shit.

That man would look like Spengler's little brother if he closed his mouth. Make of that what you will.

Goncourt has been falling like a that plane who was hit by an ukrainian rocket I'm afraid.

>forgot how to write good science fiction
More like agents began send automatic rejections to all white males.

>implying deserving books even get published these days

OOooff

guys, nevermind white, are just not writing novels
working writing men with some craftsmanship merit to their names, are more comfortable in hollywood, netflix or the stage

if you look at visual media writers you'll see a large portion of them are, in fact, white men

>Lady Astronaut
>Author can't tell 1950s from 1890s when it comes to gender norms

Go onto agents' twatter to see what they are looking for
>we want PoC
>we want trans
>we want topics where muslims or women or blacks are perpetual victims
>we want gay romances
>we want high concept easy to sell gimmicks like Abe Lincoln and Vampires.

I know an artist who is constantly "signal boosting" (if that's the term) calls from companies like Netflix saying shit like "We're looking for Zambian writers and artists!"

God just kill women already
All awards are political capital now, credibility can officially be considered unimportant if it ever was.

This.
Public education was a mistake.

of course, it's easy to sell, nor matter how lazy of a story, the cutout characters or the writing is, people will eat it up and it will get free publicity for the virtue points

when an author comes along that has a real passion for the craft, isn't constantly trying to flex his grand intelligence on every page and has a keen eye for emotional storytelling and can relate the common people, it will be noticed

that person literally doesn't exist in the current year, not yet anyway

I wish Hillary had won because then we might be getting less of the same boilerplate, revenge fantasy Gurl Power tripe infesting every corner of mass media and that everyone pretends is brave and radical

How, in the genre of science fiction, is every best sci-fi finalist a woman? That doesn't even make sense

What an absolute cunt.

This also this is funny because minority people and women are breaking into classic sf pretty much at the moment classic sf is becoming irrelevant. Looking at how the flow of well-paid white men changes over time is a good way to predict what kind of career will be important in the short and not-so-short term.

Like how nurses started being better paid and revalorised when they started to hir emore male nurses.

She knows she lacks real writing talent. But she assumes it's because she is white and went to a good school not because she's a useful Idiot for corporate lefties.

What are some good recent sci-fi books written by men? Genuinely curious. I can only think of Exhalation by Ted Chiang

I took two creative writing classes at community college. This is level of quality of the writing in that class plus an editor.

I can't think of one.

Of course, there aren't any by women, either.

>written by
>published

>Spiteful chiding with an air of moral superiority

Imagine exposing yourself to this for more than a passing moment.

I see Alastair Reynolds mentioned a lot.

You could actually make a neat story out of the premise.
>in ww2 america starts a top secret experiment with female combat pilots in an attempt to make smaller, lighter, more agile dogfighters
>Elma is one of the best and is sent in an experimental fighter to the pacific front near the end of the war
>she actually manages to get a kill but for some plot reason the fighter itself is found to be unviable
>the war ends and she goes back to her normal life as a mathematician
>gets involved in a project that seeks to create a nuclear powered aircraft
>meteorite
>gets work in the space coalition
>spends the rest of the book fighting her hardest to be allowed in to space
>final twist is she is too valuable to send to space because the meteorite was not a random accident but an act of aggression by aliens/moon nazis/space itself
Or
>due to some biological difference any woman sent into space will die and they're scrambling to find a solution because no women =no humanity but they can't really make that public knowledge or mass panic would ensue
Or even
>there is no space colonization program, all footage of ships leaving the atmosphere has been faked to keep citizen morale up since every attempt at a space craft has exploded

Basically anything that doesn't make the leaders of humanity's only hope seem like childish, vindictive, retards just because "men bad". Look at any example of a fate of the world story, the leader is never acting out of petty spite (and in fact they're usually the ones who employ unorthodox or culturally disagreeable tactics) but out of necessity because they've got a bigger fish to fry than some persons feelings.
Like Gendo in Evangelion, the High Priest in Equilibrium, the army guy in Enders Game, etc.

I would prefer it if modern SF/F authors go back to ripping off Tolkien and Le Guin. This overly twee "witty" writing style that all these genre books use now is just so atrocious.

Alastair Reynolds will be heralded as a classic in a few decades, but he's the only contemporary sci fi writet that will. I can see China getting traction as time goes by, but Jemisin, Gaiman and their lot will be forgotten and soon.

I'd prefer they ripped off Wolfe and Ellison, but Ursula will do.

>durrr things used to be better back then
every generation says this, fuck off

it's true though, sure every generation said that but things really suck today as opposed to then, learn the difference it might save your life

Unless you believe in some silly theory about the arc of history, it's likely just from a statistical point of view that you don't live in the best of times.

anything by Peter Watts according to what i hear, although i can only vouch for what i've readmyself which isn't much

>every generation says this, fuck off

That every generation denounces its elders is basically a falsehood journalists in New York cooked up.

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>a lady astronaut novel
kek

interesting, although you didn't give source either

in any case it's something that intuitively should be true, we all have nostalgia. and nowadays things change much faster than before, so I would expect it to be more accentuated than normal. but I do think it's too soon to call today's writers shit though, we need some historic perspective, and time so that the hidden gems can get more known

This "the hidden gems take time to surface" is such a cope. Almost all works that are considered great today were considered great in their own time as well.

bartleby.com/73/195.html

>although you didn't give source either

I snagged it from the Yale Book of Quotations.

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He's still not wrong

>snoop doggy dogg in a university book of quotations
What is wrong with Americans?

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>in any case it's something that intuitively should be true

Would it have been true in places with minimal social change?

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>That every generation denounces its elders
...has nothing at all to do with what user said, which is that every generation says things used to be better.

It's a travesty to be honest.

That's just one example. I remember one character in a Corneille play say something to the effect of "in times such as ours it's already good enough to find someone remotely decent".
Maybe that attitude is only as old as the 17th century but that's already pretty old. Certainly not something cooked up in the 60s.

It's mostly the opposite that happen, lauded works fall into irrelevance.
But there are some people who were discovered late and (perhaps most importantly) many writers who gained traction over several generations. See Shakespeare for instance, he was considered good but not great in his time, by the 19th century he had become nearly God incarnate.

Nah, you'll find the 'good old days' attitude in much older stuff than that. See the Romans or the ancient Chinese. IIRC even the Iliad does it, which is pretty funny when you consider how later Greeks thought of it.

If it's not a cultural universal, it must be pretty close to one

>implying these awards aren’t affirmative action nonsense

I have to say, some of those Roman were pretty cool.

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Phrases like this would legit trigger me into committing an act of violence
>Privilege is rarely the fault of the people who benefit

DUUU ME ME LIKD THE POOPOO XD FORTNIRE

Yea Forums is a pro poo board

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Yes. Read the Greeks, they were bitching about it 25 centuries ago.

Never mind Melville, Kafka, Bulgakov, etc. Coleridge was first and foremost seen as a critic and essayist in his time. RotAM and Kubilai are now seen as classics.

Greece was constantly changing though. I had in mind something much earlier.

Because white men are actively discriminated against. Don't you know we need to counterbalance all that historical sexism? Deal with it. Maybe in 200 years it'll be men's turn again.

>and nothing changes

>Best Related Work
>Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Hey, I won a Hugo!

It is.

Spread fascism and fix the clown world.

fascism is a clown ideology

The Hugo's haven't been indicative of quality science fiction and fantasy since the mid-80's. Kind of funny to see their yearly token Chinese entry, though. "We want to see more foreign writers" they said. No, you want to fellate the Chinese market.

Do you think there is a single author alive in the SF/F scene that is capable of replicating the brilliance of Wolfe in any capacity? I mean that seriously, I haven’t read anything worth while by anyone else in the genre in a long time.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution. (Illustrated London News, 1924)

They did that a few years ago. You know, to avoid giving awards to candidates endorsed by centrists and rightists while trying to prove there is no bias against centrists and rightists.

First person is a crutch for inferior writers. This pisses inferior writers off, and they'll point to one or two examples by people who made it work. But the vast majority of first person narratives are written for the author's convenience.

Poorly?

That thing looks like a man.

Teacher here.

Public education is an unambiguous good. The rules were changed to appease butthurt parents who didn't want to raise their SPED kids.

Another issue is that they don't spend half a decade writing a massive pile of short stories, in order to hone their craft, before going on to a book deal.

What Wolfe did? No, no one's even close. He elevated the genre in a way that very few people are even capable of understanding.

I was just rereading Litany of the Long Sun and have only just bow noticed that it all happens in something like 3 days. Clouding how little time has passed while so much happened is a skill few own.

>"We're looking for Zambian writers and artists!"

Oh, they should. There are many interesting stories there from the farmers who fled racial discrimination in Zimbabwe.

I hate teachers.

Most kids would be better off doing apprenticeships after about the 8th grade and you know it too. You put so much effort into that slow kid because it satisfies your ego, admit it. And you put down the smart kids because they challenge your authority and ruin your smug.

Teachers unions are also a mistake.

>unambiguous good
Not it was not.

Public education in the 'third world' for example is about destroying their traditional culture to impose western economic colonialism on them.

In the West, it is about handing all children over to The State to indoctrinate (modelled on the Prussian system which later also was a big influence on Nazi Germany) under the belief that children ultimately belong to the state and not their families.
It was also done to free up women from child-rearing so that they could go into low end service jobs, which had a deflationary effect on wages and led to greater economic disparity.

Public schools by lumping children by age has led to an inability to as effectively socialize with people of a range of ages as they did in the past, promote herdmindedness and conformity, enable bullying that traumatizes children very deeply.

Some public good, yes, mostly as free babysitters to lazy parents and perhaps some freedom from abusive households. For some, more economic mobility than they may have enjoyed previously but that too is not an unambiguous good.

Choose your words wisely if you really are a teacher. Your dogmatism is showing.

That's what the clown world wants you to think

Could the general decline in the quality of science fiction, with its dearth of modern classics and the decline its ability to generate bold new visions of the future, but in some manner linked in parallel to a similar phenomenon in the actual sciences? It seems to me that invention has slowed down, which is not to say that science has stagnated, but that the 20th century was a perfect storm for rapid innervation, and now we have settled in to a slower, more predictable, pace? Many of the bold world-changing ideas have been had, and now we find ourselves in the game of methodically testing and working out the minutia of those ideas? Could science-fiction have mirrored this change in tempo?

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Wrong. All this generation's great scientists ended up in the dumpster behind the abortion clinic. You can't have innovation with no one to innovate.

Wall posts...more like post wall.

>All this generation's great scientists ended up in the dumpster behind the abortion clinic. You can't have innovation with no one to innovate.
lol that's some bad luck, for us and the aborted, haha, oh well. C'est la vie ~

>Astronaut is so strong that even the most dearly held conventions of society may not stand a chance against her.

Wait, what? They were just talking about the earth being on the brink of destruction and the main character is concerned about being the first Lady Astronaut and societal conventions?

>bullying that traumatizes children very deeply

Bullying is the most natural way to enforce society's rules and it either eliminates or re-educates those who stray from it. It's an unambiguous good.

>ywn be on the receiving end of this
Why even live

>pozzed
What are you, a Manc? Kiwi, maybe? Sounds like bong n boomerang talk to me. This murica, y'hear.
>spits
Now git.

>>>
Accelerationism is the future

>130 years ago
>women need to use a man's pen name to be published.
>today
>men have to use a woman's pen name to be published.

Prix Goncourt is absolutely not good

Didn't our boy Houellebecq win it?

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Any lit explaining this view of human groupthink?

Yes, sadly he's not the only one to have won it

Dumbass. Moby Dick was mostly ignored when it was published and even forgotten after Melville passed away. Nietzsche was ignored in life and his books went unsold. Marx gained some popularity only at the end of his life (it was Engels who popularized Marx), Borges was well into his 60s when he became popular. Just because a writer is a household name doesn't mean he'll live on. You should look the names of popular French writers of the 19th century and see who survived. I can tell you, not many.

Not lit, but still quite important: Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gaugain only became popular after they died.

awards have never meant anything. not in literature, not in science, not in SHIT

>LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE
John C. Wright is probably the greatest SFF novelist of the last 20 years but he’s never going to win a Hugo because he self-publishes or publishes through tiny independent presses since he’s a fucking white male.

I’m confused. Is your argument that nothing ever actually gets better or worse and society has just stayed the same throughout history? Nothing ever changes? Why aren’t we all walking around in togas?

I don't think that's true. If you're not underage one of the greatest technological changes we've experienced still happened in your lifetime. That's smart phones. Everyone has one, so it doesn't sound quite as big. For me, it was when a friend told me he had an app where he points the camera somewhere, and the app overlays data telling him where the store he's looking for is. And then I thought "wait, do we all have tricorders now?" Everyone now has a powerful computer in their pocket that is capable of doing pretty much everything you'd want from a computer. The impact on society is clear: No event can happen without video footage, because there's always someone whipping out their personal recording device. Everyone always has the internet at their fingertips. Everyone also has a device that tracks their movement unless you take effort to disable that feature, which most people don't. Equally, there has been the rise of social media.

The what if of stuff like this is powerful material for science fiction. Black Mirror is one of the big hits of the current TV landscape, and it was built entirely on the premise of exploring this sort of thing. At least, until the most recent season, which is Hugo-worthy in its mediocrity.

No, it's simply exactly what everyone thinks it is: Politics. When you look at The Calculating Stars it just mirrors everything a Western left wing audience considers important in real life. More than that, the things they want to believe are real so they can fight them. Even with the conceit of moving the time frame back to the 50's its pocket critics are saying it's "relevant". This is a book that won an award for being about women, written by a woman, in a show where nearly all other nominated writers were also women. But its fight against 50's gender norms is "relevant".

It's perfectly possible that good science fiction is still being written, but simply is not brought to attention. It might not even be published, because the market is pushing this id-fic in favor of everything else.

>No event can happen without video footage, because there's always someone whipping out their personal recording device.
Deepfakes bro. The very fabric of "reality" is in question. Soon you won't be able to believe anything you see on a screen (PROTIP: you shouldn't believe anything you see on a screen. Not even this post).

>falling for the literary prize meme
never gonna make it

Hugo became SJW shit about 7 years ago.

No one's gonna say user

he himself said public opinion was they owed it to him a long time ago and then when there was no excuse to withdraw it from him because his novel kicked other novel's asses, they had to give the Prix Goncourt to him, if they wanted to be taken serious ever again.

Do people really read that shit?

Its all so tiresome

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>t. the wolf towards the lamb

Smart phones were more or less envisaged in 60's scifi sans touch screen and comtech as been the subject of intense exploration in science-fiction since Gibson at least.

I think a major problem is that these things can only be properly realised by an outsider to these aspects, but even "social outsiders" are still "insiders" to the prevalence of social media.

I think it wont be until we get people leaving the internet that we'll get an outsider's, pulled back, view on all of these aspects.

Kids are bullied constantly for things that are out of their control, like their race or the wealth of their family.

Kids are often bullied for no fucking reason.

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>like their race
Maybe they should live somewhere else with more people of a similar ethnicity

I don't believe that's a condition. Black Mirror did a decent job, and I don't think Charlie Brooker is an outsider. Though, he is a bit of a Boomer, so maybe that counts. But even if that were the case, the point is that a huge swath of international media are using political correctness as a measure of quality. The Calculating Stars didn't win on the merits of it being a well written, thought provoking novel. It won because it confirms world views, rather than challenging them.

It's been like that for years. A few years ago there was seriously a kerfluffle at WorldCon where a woman complained that she got to spoke last at some workshop or another because she was perceived as being white. Take note, the argument wasn't that a pecking order based on ethnicity was bad. The argument was that she didn't deserve it, because she secretly had the correct ethnicity.

Those are the people in charge of deciding what quality in fiction looks like in an official, respect channel.

Yikes. Females authors are such jokes.

Amazing how you brainlets automatically link everything back to Game of Thrones somehow. Try reading her book, I think you’re actually the target audience.

>Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART (you don’t want to know what the “A” stands for),

anal?

He's published through Tor, his problem is more how the puppies mess went down.

Can I just say something? The reason that big publishers look for women and minorities is because that’s what SELLS. This happens overwhelmingly because it’s overwhelmingly how publishers survive. There’s nothing you can do about it, because women love to read these shitty books they write for themselves. The discrimination men are experiencing is exactly the same as women and the pay gap, purely an economic phenomenon. We are experiencing gender inequality.

Isn't he friends with Vox Day too?

Yeah I'm sure they're bursting at the seems with profits. I think it's the only thing that sells because it's the only thing they will sell. I'm one of those people who won't read any modern fantasy or science fiction because I know what they're doing.

It's probably also a little early to be calling the death of the white male. 2018 had finalists by Kim Stanley Robinson and John Scalzi. It'd be hard to argue that either of them deserved to win since New York 2140 was a sprawling unedited rant against 2016 and Collapsing Empire was a nice but not outstanding start to a series. The lack of dudes this year is maybe concerning but it's only one data point. I'm personally more worried about the death of true scifi, more than half of the list the last few years has been pure fantasy .

>John Scalzi

Scalzi is hardly a white male.

He WAS published through Tor because he had a deal with them for Eschaton Sequence.
Everything else has been self-published or through shit presses (like the one Vox Day runs) for years now.

>Scalzi is hardly a white male.

What did he mean by this?

I've never been a fan of the economic argument. First of all, the Hugo Awards (and any awards) are supposed to be a measure of quality, not popularity. I don't recall Twilight winning a Hugo, for instance. Secondly, simple stating "this is what sells" is simplistic. Furry porn sells, too. I've yet to see it on the shelves of my local bookstore. And why does it sell? Is it genuinely popular, and is that why it has such a big market share? Or did it start with the market share, and did the popularity follow? I've seen entirely too many articles about "X needs to change according to my vague NeoMarxist ideology" to blindly accept this is simple impartial market action. The truth is, many of these publishers practice open idealism.

I don't know anything about Kim Stanley Robinson, but Scalzi is a low-brow, scummy ideologue. That's the point, here. It's politics. Scalzi is in the right camp, so he gets his dick sucked. And according to the same politics, female authors need to be pushed forward. While I obviously am not privy to any meetings that preceded the Hugo's, I don't think it's far fetched to say that those politics informed the list of nominees. After all, that's not exactly a new phenomenon, and the post-Puppies Hugo's have been safeguarded against any pesky outsiders trying to upset their little system.

As for the death of SF, I do share your concern. But I think it's part of the same problem. When I look at the nominees, I don't see stories that make particularly good use of their SF angle. Big ideas SF seems to be disappearing in favor of personal journey SF.

The Hugos are dead, have been for years.

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Perhaps "true" science fiction has simply moved elsewhere? SF came from obscurity and now it's returning to obscurity. People are still going to read the classics and try create their own, they just won't be found on a B&N shelf. It'll be online somewhere, buried under a pile of absolute garbage.

One argument has been men are reading less, and engaging less with science fiction literature in general. Men are heavily leaning in the direction of video games in both creation and consumption, while women have essentially filled the gap.

I mean i can kind of grasp that argument, i hate to admit i'm making less time for myself to read. Though plenty of women i know who are nerds don't really care about the personal politics of whoever wrote it, just if the story is good or not (or has a sufficient amount of girlwank material)

>
habo segsu

To be honest i'm returning to a traditional book shop more as it provides a far better filter, amazon is just inundated with garbage, So many "sagas" with 10 volumes produced in under a year that are apparently some kind of uberwank where authors buy each others books and drop 5 star reviews.

I'd love to be able to open up a bookshop that specialises in sci-fi and fantasy one day.

I think a better argument is that people like to identify with the author they read and white males are a minority of the market, of which there is already a large saleable canon that they are probably buying the most of anyway while minorities and women are steering away from classics and consuming new books. White males are literally facing discrimination like how actresses get paid less because they’re 10x as replaceable because every girl wants to be one.

Causality is rarely unidirectional, but mostly feedback loops. SciFi started moving in a direction unappealing to men, for reasons of publisher politics. Men stopped reading it, and the decisions became financial as well, and thus the process accelerated.

White men are a minority and are suffering economically and in representation as such.

I feel immensely shitty for suggesting that something sketchy can be going on, but Yea Forums is about the only place you can question this at all. Which is really fucked up. Every article has someone going "uhh... isn't this biased" and the replies range from "Biased the RIGHT way!" to calling the person questioning it a literal nazi.

I'm not suggesting some bullshit like having a right wing science fiction awards or something, as i'm fairly left leaning and progressive. But the left should be called out on it's bullshit just as much as the right, and that just isn't happening which I think is completely fucked up.

Maybe. I do read the classics almost exclusively. Years ago I tried to find good modern SF, but most of it was garbage. The internet is an unreliable advisor. I used to be able to rely on the SF Masterworks list, but since they have expanded it with other works I've found them to be unreliable as well. Everything from the old list is guaranteed to be good, though. But fucked if I know where the next PKD or Strugatski brothers are hanging out.

Another thing is that it's much more commonly accepted for women to read trash. Things like Romance and YA have a massive gender bias. Schlick-fic sits proudly on the shelves of any self-disrespecting bookstore. Takes no brain to write or read. Male equivalents are much harder to find, and no-one is going to read them out in the open. And I wonder if the male equivalents that people read on WattPad, or Yea Forums writethreads, are even counter in the stats.

That reminds me of one of the things I find disheartening about the current way of the Hugo's. Several nominees and winners are series. Everyone wants to drop a stack, these days. Is it because aSoIaF is popular? Every vapid nobody is dreaming of word counts that would make even the most dour of Russian masters do a double take. They even added a category for series, and then STILL give the award to individual books in series.

I've never really felt that need to self insert into a book like that personally, and generally just enjoy a story as it unfolds. And i suppose a majority of recent books i've read have had female protagonists but that doesn't really bother me as i don't demand a main character be a proxy of myself and my desires.

I mean, outside of self publishing on amazon, i assume that the push for series is also coming from publishers. A series means their investment in an author pays off more, or they can approach an author to do a series where they'd get more than doing one book, but it'd still work out cheaper for the publisher over 3-5 books.

Women are more than 90% of the publishing industry so it isn't surprising this is where we ended up.
Also, scifi is fairly niche as books go, so expect more of the same everywhere else. All aspects of the industry is going to move further in this direction before there is a cultural swing back the other way (if there ever is one).

I never said anything about representation or self-inserting. I talked about appeal. The fact that you don't understand the difference is an important revelation about the limits of your perspective.

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So, what are these factors that lead to a lack of appeal, broadly speaking, for men?

Soembie

Weird how people who love to mock identity politics lose their fucking minds whenever muh white man doesn't get a participation trophy

It doesn’t bother you to be a hypocrite by not agreeing?

Character over ideas.
Applicability to the modern rather than pushing the boundaries of possibility.
Relatability over beauty.

There are not desires of men in general, but of the subset that might be interested in science fiction books.

People aren't upset that men aren't being included. At this point it's got to be more insulting to win one than flattering. Rather, they're lamenting that the it's now a diversity award rather than an award for outstanding writing in science fiction.

I think one problem is that... what was it, retarded puppies group might have ruined it for men over the next few years

The murderbot shit was bad. Women's takes on AI are so boring, their android characters are just human personality + magical science powers.

>Also, people don't understand her Jewish heritage.
Oy vey!

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>murderbot
youtube.com/watch?v=nrY-iXi5o3o

> Moby Dick was mostly ignored when it was published and even forgotten after Melville passed away
Only in America. It was popular in the UK

I got baited into reading the first Murderbot novella by coworkers. It was fucking terrible. There's so many blatant shortcuts and examples of lazy writing, especially with the robots personality.

As someone getting back into reading more, I'm glad I read it so I understand what bad writing is like.

Never again. White bois will be extinct by the year 2050.

The people who run these awards know they're nominating shit. They do it for the same reason television producers shoehorn in some black actors, it's because they think the source of racism or sexism is a lack of exposure so they're intentionally forcing these black actors and authors on us in an attempt to affect out unconscious mind and make us less racist. It's complete bullshit because there's no good reason to think that's how racism works and even if it was that still doesn't give them the right to implement their social engineering.

I don't consume any media where I detect that shit because I resent the attempt. I won't de facto touch any female or black authors because there's a good chance they're being propped up.

I know i probably sounds crazy, but i think thats the exact same bullshit they are pulling only on the opposite side of the spectrum. The most fair thing you can do is to judge the media fairly after consuming it. And at the moment, it is quite unfair to white male authors who arguably the genre survived through for a very long time, but everyone needs a little prop up occasionally and while it's impossible to completely eliminate agenda, it's important to try and be equal and fair.

I think it's pretty safe to dismiss without "consuming" them.

That's some low effort concern trolling.

That's just Rich Evans + magical science powers.

>they're intentionally forcing these black actors and authors on us in an attempt to affect out unconscious mind and make us less racist
Exposure to blacks tends to make people more racist

That’s exposure to real blacks, not the magic blacks from propaganda fiction.

>look for opinions on the Hugo's on YouTube
>only find videos by hyper white girl booktubers
>yeah, I wonder what their views will be...

So, did anyone worthwhile actually have something to say about this thing?

>you don’t want to know what the “A” stands for),
>“ART,” as Murderbot calls it, short for “Asshole Research Transport”

Imagine spending any time caring about any award.

Looks like commie writers have already taken the opportunity to call John W. Campbell a fascist and demand the Campbell Award stops being named after him. It's all so bloody tiresome.

Found Charles Stross in that Twitter thread, too. I used to read his work. One trick pony. Emblematic of my problem with trying to find good, current writers.

>>I don't know anything about Kim Stanley Robinson, but Scalzi is a low-brow, scummy ideologue.
So's KSR, I think. He's(?) some commie scum, IIRC.

The retrospective awards have all the best stuff. Oh well.

AAAAAAA STOP user IM GOING TO COOM

True, you have a point

Yeah, I figured he was. I mean, it's not like you can even be nominated for the award if you're anything else, these days. Makes me wonder if it'd be (relatively) easy to have a career in writing if you just bite the bullet, spout random NeoMarxist attitudes, and write some god-awful book filled with some cutesy humor and far left wish fulfillment.

I saw one reviewer review a Chinese book that's basically just communist propaganda. He did the whole "science fiction has always been political" thing to wave off criticism of that angle. Makes me wonder if that's the end goal behind this sudden sucking off of Chinese writers. After all, there are no Chinese writers being published who are critical of their government. Those guys are all sitting in a gulag somewhere.

Kind of neatly explains why they'd skip Russian writers, German writers, French writers, literally any writer that is not Chinese with their excuse of "we want more foreign writers".

No asians?! Are you a racist?

Science fiction is not dead only because Americans and Brits can't write anymore. I guess it's time to learn some new languages like everyone else in the first world.

Elma is basically a 12 year old's furry OC.

Even the fursona's of 12 year old autists are highly likely to be more developed characters than "me, but as an astronaut who saves defenseless minorities, and also the world".

Not just smartphones, social media is also a pretty big invention. Suddenly the whole world is connected. The masses decide which ideas are worth something. Everyone who thinks different get's downvoted to hell (if they are just a normal person) or silenced (if they are a bit more famous). You can lose your job or get doxxed if you say something really controversial. If you are famous, people might even go as far as to look up tweets from 10 years ago to find something with which they can ruin your career. In this day and age what are you if you don't have social media? (especially as a young person) I'm only 23 and when I went to school everyone who wasn't taking part in social media was seen as a weirdo, an outsider.

>tfw no cute, blonde, and smart nuclear engineer waifu to make babies with
Feels bad.

Maybe the nitty-gritty details, but for sure you can reliably guess the testosterone levels of a man by looking at his skull shape, wrist and clavicle width (frame) etc. etc.

Would he eat the Cheerios if 48 people had previously but their dick in the box?

Would you guys mind recommending some fantasy by Wolfe? Or any other fantasy that has actual literary merit?
I'm writing some fantasy right now and could use some good inspiration.

>reading newly released genre fiction that will be forgotten in 3 years
>still haven't finished the Western canon
I'll never understand people who do this.

>I feel immensely shitty for suggesting that something sketchy can be going on
Sounds like you have been brainwashed and your pozzed brain has trouble processing conflicting data.

No, we're done being fair and having the moral high ground. The right-wing has done the whole "judging by the content of their character" and the left resents us for it. They don't play by the same universalist rules as we do, and we're fed up and going back to tribalism. There's a major left-wing newspaper in my country that regularly gives columns to Moroccan or Turkish immigrants who are 22 years old and have accomplished nothing to deserve a big platform, except speak the native language well and thus defying the stereotype. Meanwhile they can shill their upcoming book on growing up in this racist country. It's all so tiresome.

NRC?

Knowing John "My Wife Fucks My Ass" Green, yes, he'd probably relish in the experience and send each dude a personal letter of thanks on floral stationary with a monogrammed handkerchief.
Also, nice digits.

De Morgen, Belgium. I try to read Dutch newspapers sometimes, it doesn't seem quite as bad over there.

Yeah, I've seen some shit from De Morgen. Ah well, close, but no cigar.

Are you suggesting that only white men are capable of writing good science fiction? I'm trying not to misread you but that seems to be your implication.

No, he's suggesting that there is a political bias behind the selection of nominees in both their gender and ethnic identity as well as the themes they write about. As such, winning the award would suggest that they consider you to be a fellow traveler, which no doubt would be an uncomfortable though to anyone who is not.

Where are the indigenous Australians you racist

Amazing
Her hairline is almost as far receded as those men

>her

There's Wolfe's Wizard Knight, there's Worm Ouroboros, Lord Dunsany, George MacDonald, LeGuin's Earthsea, Vance's Dying Earth, Zelazny's Amber, and the obvious Tolkien. Take your pick. Also, if writing fantasy, look well outside the genre for inspiration: bible, Arthurian myths and welsh legend, the irish myths (particularly yeats), kalevala, nibelungen, shakespeare, chaucer, milton. Try to avoid any prominent influences recent enough to be seen as obvious.

>Or any other fantasy that has actual literary merit?

Consider using Borges as a guide. Wolfe was a big fan of Borges by the way.

>In another, Borges chose “a list of authors,” Monroe writes, “whose works were selected to fill 33 volumes in The Library of Babel, a 1979 Spanish language anthology of fantastic literature edited by Borges, named after his earlier story by the same name.”

openculture.com/2015/12/jorge-luis-borges-picks-33-of-his-favorite-books-to-start-his-famous-library-of-babel.html

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I'm not the user you're replying.
I do not live in the Western society, take that in consideration.
The scope of the books posted are a big problem for me. I don't see, among the winners, an interesting concept. One is about a female astronaut breaking norms and going to space, the other is about a member of a spaceship crew and the other is about a robot that used to kill people, all themes that could be from a comics. Compare these to the summary of Hybrid Child (that looks interesting to me). The japanese book presents 3 fronts of interest to tell a story: The politics of the universe, the technology of the universe and a being from this universe.

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>I'm trying not to misread you but that seems to be your implication.
This is how I know you argue in bad faith

Only white men are capable of writing science fiction that appeals to white men. Getting into discussions of objective "good" will go nowhere.

>try and be equal and fair
>Compensate for other cultures' deficits by vilify whites.
Look, it's simple. Half of white parents do not read to their kid, which is pretty bad. Among blacks, that number is close to ZERO.
Is making characters in adult novels arbitrarily black, written largely by white women for other white women, doing a thing to get more black people reading?
Show me some numbers.

The publising industry isn't even interested in good stories by black authors. Know what? I participated in writing groups with blacks who had a lot of talent. They had finished work.They had no luck getting it published. Why? Because all they cared about was a story (often horror). Their stories lacked sufficient wokiness and did not support the propaganda race bating victim narrative. All these agents and pubishers want is blacks being victims to whites, or acting as dark-skinned white people.

This. I quit reddit and other large books forums because unless you actively cheerlead the SJW agenda - pro-trans, pro-PoC victim narrative regardless of quality, five starring YA fantasies or books that are barely sci fi that are objectively shitty. Anything short of active cheerleading attracts ire. Too herd minded, conformist, ultimately boring.

That economic argument is also false. Corporations are fine with losing money in support of a longer term propaganda agenda. They want race-mixing so that everyone ends up with no real culture or deep heritage, tehy want rootless consumers who'll buy any pap heavily marketed to them and written by friends and family members of the ruling class or their willing lackies. Books by minorities do not sell that well vs the amount spent on hype. I'd say NK Jemesin is the genuine article.The rest, not really.

Do you really think a publisher is going to recoup the sixty-five million advance to Obama within the century for his memoir? Or Comey's book deal?

One of the surest sellers is Military Science fiction and publishers are not touching it, not looking for it.

Also, the paygap is nonsense. Of course you will be paid less doing some office job where you take years off to have kids, vs a skilled manual labor job where demand exceeds supply. Women don't choose to go into HVAC repair or study math in large numbers, and they seek work in the public sector with its benefits and pension over riskier smaller businesses in the private sector.