The Hugo Awards

Some thoughts on taking back SFF from the SJWs, from Brad Thorgersen, and Sarah Hoyt:

I lived in fear, unable to associate normally or make friends with anyone. It was like being spied on all the time and knowing the worst construction would be put on my actions and words, even if the actions and words were not political, even if I just forgot what the week’s hate and the week’s cause was.

I got tired. I got really tired. I know authors who walked away after one or two books because they simply couldn’t take it anymore. I know others – gentle souls – who didn’t realize they’d been blacklisted on suspicion of being – dropped voice – conservative. This was particularly true of Libertarians (and libertarians) who never thought of themselves (I still don’t) as “conservatives” and couldn’t understand it when I tried to explain it.

All this was justified, you see, because in the minds of the establishment and establishment hangers on, conservatives are creatures shown as “right wing” on movies and tv (none of whose writers would know a true conservative, much less a libertarian if one bit them in the fleshy part of the *ss [and libertarians might.] They give conservatives (which again is everyone to the right of Lenin) informed attributes never found in the real creature: conservatives, in their crazy little heads, are people who are racist, sexist, homophobic, ultra-religious in a medieval fashion or a crazy-evangelical (there are some, but not many) one.

This kind of thing isn’t the only reason I haven’t been reading much in the past few years, but it doesn’t help.

[Afternoon update]

Michael Z. Williamson: “I am not a ‘real fan’.

13 thoughts on “The Hugo Awards”

  1. Last week, there was a link here to a report and the report had a graph which showed the percentage of people who “worried” about various catastrophes, including Global Warming, over the decades. But I was intrigued that all of the “worries” seemed to spike in the mid-1990s and then slowly, steadily dropped from there. I mean, why did everybody suddenly start becoming less afraid, on a whole range of issues?

    Then, of course, it struck me: The Internet. Actually, the WWW. Multiple channels of news, multiple channels of opinion. An end-run around self-censorship. The WWW was beating the MSM into submission, or at least irrelevance.

    So, I have high hopes for the indie publishing phenom as well, that more people will be exposed to more ideas in their entertainment, as the gate-keepers run out of traffic cones. I believe Sarah Hoyt’s instincts are correct and that the awards controversy will, in the end, be seen as a rear-guard action by the SJWs as they not-so-quietly slide out of history.

    That is my hope, at least. Of course, watch for other rear-guard actions along the way, like Net Neutrality.

  2. In the minds of the establishment conservatives are morlocks. Which association has a basis in fact, though not what the establishment thinks. Like morlocks, conservatives actually keep things running.

    1. Indeed. There is a strong sadomasochistic streak among “liberals” (and by “liberals” I mean of course “tax-happy, coercion-addicted, power-tripping State-fellators”), and some come out stronger on the “sado” than the “maso” side. The Admiral has generally struck me on the “maso” side. (“I’m not worthy! Rule me, rule me, tax me, tax me–tax me hard!”)

  3. So this is why I’ve been rereading Heinlein and clinging to David Weber. Neal Stephenson’s work isn’t too bad, however. He generally seems to be pro-science and pro-capitalist.

    Lefties love to be whipped. They need submission-their own.

    1. If you haven’t already, you might want to check out Andy Weir’s The Martian. I read it for 99 cents a few years ago when it was still indie only. Jason Bond’s Hammerhead, Sabrina Chase’s Sequoyah trilogy, and Markos Kloos’ series are all indie. They’re fun and really cool.

  4. Several years ago I found a dodgy Russian torrent site with every Hugo winner ever (up to that date). I’ve read through them on my iphone, even the ones I’d read before. It was very interesting, especially as it appears that the versions I’d read before appear to often have been considerably abridged — Fahrenheit 451 and Stranger in a Strange Land are obvious examples.

    Of the winners since 1980 I enjoyed the Cherryh, Asimov, Card, Simmons, Bujold, Vinge, Halderman, Rowling, Sawyer.

    Brin, Gibson, and Stephenson … have their good points, but pretty bleh. As for the rest … difficult to even finish a lot of them, let alone enjoy.

  5. Some boring history 🙂

    In 1986, fresh out of university, I convinced my (stockbroker) employer that it would enhance my productivity as a programmer to have access to a service in the USA called “bix”, which had programmer forums. I’d seen some printouts from it in BYTE magazine.

    At the time it cost $200/MB to access it from New Zealand via the international X.25 network. However a MB is a *lot* of plain text. And I think $15/hour on top of that. My fingers still remember how to type “clear;file read all;down” (“show scra” rather than “down” at first).

    While I was there, I also found forums on space, aviation, sci fi, and … the most fun of all … Baen’s Bar.

    Amazing the people I met in real life as a result of that.

    On a 1989 trip to California and Arizona I stayed with a bixen known as ‘david42’ at Laguna Beach. I visited Bruce Webster in San Diego, where he had a pre-production “NeXT” computer he was writing a book on (and about). In Phoenix there was an impromptu midnight visit to Denny’s with Rick Cook, Harry Stine, Peter Manly. Back in LA I had dinner with Joanne Dow and ‘arog’ (I forgot his real name). At MacWorld in SF I met Bruce Webster again, and also Tom Thompson and others from BYTE. I also bought about 30 kg of books from Liberty Books on Howard St (no airline baggage weight limit back then!)

    On a trip to New York in December 1990 I had dinner with Hillary Rettig, Jim Baen, Bjarne Stroustrup, Greg Comeau, and some others I don’t recall now. All BIXen.

    In 1994, after a business trip in Phoenix, I stayed on another week or so, sleeping on a sofa at Henry Vanderbilt’s place, and running one or two errands to help organise a conference he was putting on. I can’t even recall all the people I met there, but they included Aleta Jackson, Joe Pistritto, Stephen Fleming, Mitchell Burnside-Clapp — all of whom were also BIXen.

    What a fantastic online venue and times those were for a farm boy from New Zealand! Just a couple of years earlier we were pretty much cut off from the rest of the world.

  6. And not to mention you showing up at the XCOR hangar to watch the first WK1/SS1 flight… at which time you probably met most of the NSS high command as well… including one who later became the head of TSC: George Whitesides.

    Rand and I were up there and crashed in the hangar the night before… and I presume you were at the NSS party in the sand storm 😉

    1. Yes. Not the first SS1 flight, but the first 100 km high one. When I heard the (probable) date of the flight I looked at flights from NZ and found I could get to LAX noon-ish the day before — and Joe Pistritto was going to Mojave via LA anyway to pick someone else up. But I couldn’t get a flight back to NZ for a week! I emailed Aleta and she promised I could stay with XCOR people. I ended up crashing a few nights each with Rich P and Doug Jones.

      What you probably don’t know was in 2002 I spent a week at Oshkosh working on the XCOR display stand, explaining the Ez-Rocket to the public. That was pretty awesome too — and a nice four days each way roadtrip to/from San Francisco with Joe P and his boys in the Hummer.

      It’s been a while since I travelled or had adventures, but today I received the official invitation for a 3 year work visa in Moscow (which means it’s all approved, I just have to take it and my passport to the local embassy to get the visa issued) . I’ll be working for Samsung Research there. YOLO.

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