Saturday 4 April 2015

Hugo nominations kerfuffle

So, am I understanding the Hugo controversy correctly? A bigot & some paranoid conspiracy theorists dislike literary, character-centric fiction and perceived efforts to make SF/F books more ethnically and sexually diverse, so they decided to block nominate an agreed list of works to reward books they think are fun (action books with no more than token diversity)? A celebration of populism as the highest quality? Basically, they're Murdochifying / Fox Newsing a literary award?

And this year, they succeeded at defining the shortlist?

How odd. If pure popularity is their highest literary virtue, why don't they sing the praises of the Goodreads Choice Awards?

Oh well. I guess that I'll take less note of any "Hugo nominated" blurbs mentioned on book covers when buying books in future.

That said, it looks like a list which does include works that decent folk have been enthusiastically praising, too, so not really a complete disaster. (John Scalzi's summary is the best I've seen so far), and few of the nominated authors would want to be on a list picked by a-holes. I feel quite sorry for this year's nominees - this kerfuffle is probably tainting what should have been a pure celebration for them.

I still expect that the winning works will be deserving ones...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yep. Basically, you've got it. They tried last year though, and got fairly trounced, so I agree they're unlikely to succeed.