Something very amusing to me happened over the weekend. The Hugo Awards for Science Fiction in media were given for this year. That by itself is fairly unremarkable, but for the last few years there has been a concerted effort by white male conservatives, usually called the Sad Puppies, to discredit the nomination and awards process because of their personal biases against the increasingly diverse, worldwide slate of candidates whose work is deserving of credit. Most of this took the form of nominating a slate of white, male, conservative authors, although at least a few authors and works that made it to the ballot out of ridiculous audacity, including those of self-publishing Gay Smut ebooks, Chuck Tingle. I'll leave the question of why a bunch of white conservative men who are angry about women and Asians getting award nominations for writing fiction chose to campaign for an author whose works invariable include the phrase "Pounded in the Butt" (not going to link, but look up the author on Amazon. I am not joking) to more inquisitive minds
In any case, in spite of these efforts, no one the Sad Puppies supported won an award. That's not to say that straight white guys didn't do well, just that they didn't win 100% of the awards as they might have 20 years ago. This is a genuinely big deal because that Hugo Award is something that really will get me as a reader to pick up something I might have ignored, and I'm sure I'm not the only other reader who would. I'm glad the community of readers collectively told these guys to take a seat, because over the long term it's going to mean that it'll be easier to find published fiction or produced works by a broader range of authors than would be the case if the Sad Puppies had their way. I think that's a good thing.
