Hugos, online short fiction, etc

[psocoptera]

It's sounding like in addition to voluntary censorship of specific works/people by the American Hugo admins, there was also a mass tossing of ballots (again, by the American Hugo admins) thought to be influenced by a list of recs in a Chinese magazine, and there should have been way more Chinese finalists.

I have no idea how I would have felt about it if most or all of the nominees had been linguistically inaccessible to me. Possibly I would have been a dick about it, who can say. I tried to make a good-faith engagement with the short stories and Astounding candidates we did actually get on the ballot, but comparing machine translation output to actual human writing is awkward. Maybe I would have been weird and grumpy about a mostly or entirely Chinese year for the Hugos. HOWEVER, I am so pissed off that we don't even get to find out. Like, all these people went to all the trouble of setting up this really interesting experiment, what happens when we try to do the Hugo awards in this cross-language-sphere, truly international way, and then they didn't even actually run the fucking experiment. It could have been really interesting! Something dramatic and unusual producing fascinating data! And instead they just, like, manipulated the results to be generic and "normal" and boring?? (And deeply unfair to all the nominees of course, both disqualified and not, and to the nominators whose votes got disregarded.) Gross and racist and pathetic. :(

Anyways, if anyone has been wondering if I'm going to do online short fiction recs this year, the answer is I don't know. I am not feeling a lot of enthusiasm for nominating for Glasgow, and entirely separately from all that, I have not been doing great on the executive-function-and-anxiety front, such that I'm not currently managing to do a great many things I should do or would like to do. If I do manage to read anything or post any recs they will probably be very limited (and in the timeline where I start making really good choices, I probably don't put time or energy there at all, given some of what else I should be doing.) So, in short, blaaaaaagh.

Comments

[vardibidian]

I enjoy your recommendations entirely independently of awards, and pretty much independently of the works themselves—although the few pieces of short fiction I've read recently are mostly due to your descriptions.

Not that you should read short fiction and write recs solely to amuse me. I'm just saying, if you do decide to read short fiction and then write about the stuff you like, and if thinking about the Hugos while you do that makes you unhappy, you could instead think about your friends enjoying the posts, and maybe even the fiction.

Thanks,
-V.

[glynhogen]

You could transfer your attention and efforts to less obviously corrupt awards. (I know, you've got investment in the Hugos specifically.)

I still want to boost new writers, but I think I'm going to ditch the "Astounding-eligible" frame.