from Hacker News

Understanding the world science fiction convention

by cstross on 1/26/24, 11:39 AM with 52 comments

  • by p0w3n3d on 1/27/24, 9:49 PM

    Fun fact: antipope is not an anti-catholic name, according to the site (https://www.antipope.org/charlie/old/antipope.html)

    "What sitename do you want?" he asked.

    I'd been posting on usenet under the alias "AutoPope -- pontifications by email". (If you don't know what the long word means, go look it up.) So I said, "How about autopope.uucp?"

    "Okay." Hic. Burp.

    And the next day, I was the somewhat bemused owner of a site called antipope.uucp

  • by WBrentWilliams on 1/27/24, 10:29 PM

    I've seen more than a few of these kerfuffle happen now. Other commenters have mentioned other times in other directions that the voting has come out weird.

    All I can say is that while yes, these awards do matter, they don't have to matter as much as you think. At best, all the outcome tells you is what someone else thinks is worth reading. Consider it a starting point. It follows that any given list of nominees is way more important, in terms of gathering a list of books with neat ideas and execution, than a list of winners.

  • by boznz on 1/28/24, 5:55 AM

    The world of book writing is an iceberg, and with thousands of works being released a year that not just go unreviewed but unread there is little chance the awards are inclusive of the genre.

    We are literally only a GPT generation away from the book writing machines of 1984 and as a new author myself this makes me so sad.

  • by maire on 1/28/24, 4:38 PM

    This article answers one of the questions I had about this year's Hugo awards.

    R. F. Kuang's Babel was on many other lists of top book of the year. I was surprised that it did not even on the nomination list. Now I find out that it was pre-emptively removed from the nomination list before the vote!

    I am not a big fan of Babel (and posted my issues on Goodreads) but I do want the vote to be fair.

  • by senkora on 1/27/24, 8:36 PM

    I think HN may be interested in another recent instance of the Hugo awards running into difficulties because of its rules: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies

    TL;DR: A conservative block of voters swept the nominations for certain categories. At final voting, members voted to not give awards at all in those categories.

  • by PeterStuer on 1/28/24, 10:12 AM

    This reads like an extremely one sided take with a myopic US west coast moralising slant. The author seems oblivious to the irony of calling something worldcon, then throwing a tantrum if the world does dare not to prostrate to their idiological microbubble.