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There have been some interesting results in relation to the Hugo Awards, and to the broader WorldCon environment. Kevin Standlee, a previous chair of the World Science Fiction Society (the WorldCon runners) posts Elections have Consequences:
The Hugo Nomination statistics were released on Friday, and unsurprisingly there are some oddities. Some of the disqualifications are likely politically charged over Chinese-specific matters, and others more universal. To be fair, the exact rules for qualification are complex, and some past nominees have been screwed over by esoterica of first publication dates; given the number of new voters, it's not too surprising that some nominated works fell outside of the eligibility timeline.
To be somewhat less charitable, I'm not familiar with too many previous times where nominees were listed as eligible by associated vendors before getting disqualified. The nominations are also bizarre in other ways, if one expected a largely Chinese fandom: there's a few Chinese-original pieces and editors, but not many.
Officially, there was absolutely no political pressure for these decisions, which have an explanation that the WorldCon Chendgu admins won't be providing.
On one hand, it's hard to be surprised if something wacky happened, and surely the people who set up WorldCon inside the CCP should have known it'd be a charlie foxtrot one way or the other. It's even part of the WorldCon bylaws that given a lot of power to the laws of the hosting nation, as Standlee points out. WorldCon locations are determined by member votes, even if this rounds out a little weird.
On the other hand, there were some fun questions about exactly how fair that vote for the 2023 WorldCon bid was well before this point -- quite a lot of ballots were allegedly filled out remotely and dropped off by a small number of visitors. Which wasn't and currently isn't against the rules, mind you! And the WSFS certainly wouldn't bring up questions of authenticity in 2021.
((On the gripping hand, unlike nearly every other vote at WorldCon, the location vote is heavily vetted internally rather than going through a member nominee process; only sufficiently prepared locales are listed. And WorldCon Chengdu advocates had been wining-and-dining hard for a while, which, given the logistical issues the convention had that included a complete rescheduling, might have been descisive.))
Schadenfruede isn't great for the soul, so to some extent I'm pretty happy to that a number of critics of modern WorldCon have had better things to do with their time, even if I personally have struggled not to snark a bit. And it's hard to expect too much to come from any retrospective at this point: because ballots and nominations, proving or disproving any tomfoolery incoherent as a position; more likely, it ends up with some minor tweaks to the location bid process, and just becomes one of those weird bits of fan lore, like when people wonder why Mercedes Lackey disappeared from SFWA conferences.
It's already too late to pass out the Asterisk Awards v2, and most of the winners weren't bad; many would have won regardless, even if the novel slot is definitely curious. ((Though I'm definitely less-than-happy that Scalzi squeaked in a nomination on another terrible work because of the DQ's)). Which brings up the culture war side. Standlee has an example :
To be fair, Standlee gets pushback, and eventually admits that no, that's not actually the existing law. I expect if pressed hard enough, he'd even admit it would surprise him were a Florida WorldCon's subcommittee willing to comply with such a law. (To be a little less charitable, he's probably going to be a go-to example for people on the left assuming conservative jurisdictions will ignore courts orders, if only because most people use video format or circumlocutions). And perhaps there are uses to bringing forward a nearby hypothetical over a distant reality (and, tbf, the at-least-up-as-a-bid-but-still-implausible WorldCon Uganda gets some attention on File 770).
But it's a slightly awkward comparison. It's not like either of these hypotheticals are really things this cohort experience personally, or even by second- or third-hand. Yet they're useful boogeymen.
I find this comment on Standlee's blog post to be interesting:
The thing is, if you took literature and threw out all the perverts, assholes, authoritarians, supporters of controversial wars, racists, sexists, and just plain kooks, I am not sure how much writing that is worth reading would be left.
And science fiction, in particular, is not exactly a field that is known for authors who are well-adjusted, non-controversial people with moderate political opinions.
I get the desire to not platform people whose politics one dislikes, and I actually think that it is a perfectly understandable desire. But at the same time, I also don't imagine that any genre of literature could actually thrive after being passed through the wringer of political correctness.
You've managed to use mistake theory in the middle of conflict theory.
Nobody wants to get rid of all such people. They want to get rid of the ones who are not ideologically on their side.
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When was the last time one of the right-wing science fiction authors got lauded by worldcon?
To be fair, Torgersen received a double nomination in 2012 for Hugo Novelette and a Campbell (a not-Hugo-for-historic-reasons award selected by WorldCon voters in the same packet), and came close second in both, and Correia was nominated for the Campbell in 2011 (though he didn't rank very high, and that year was an absolute mess from block voting perspectives).
For winners, a while. Pournelle famously never won one, though Niven did in the 70s. Orson Scott Card in 1987? Progressives might argue Resnick, but... not very credibly.
Maybe one of the lesser-known slots like editor, but it'd have been before my time.
I mean there’s not a shortage of conservative science fiction authors. I won’t claim that them being underrepresented in awards is ipso facto evidence the awards are biased against them but considering that right wing science fiction writers are seemingly more popular than left wing ones(David Weber, John Ringo, Orson Scott Card, Larry Correia…) it probably does incline us to wonder why these extremely popular writers aren’t getting awarded.
Ringo gets awards, he just gets them for shooting people. I think he might have gotten one for a romance story published under a pseudonym. Card is old enough to have gotten Hugos before they were taken over; he's gotten a bunch of others as well. Correia has a few Dragon awards, but also a Locus.
The bigger problem for "conservative" (and not just conservative) SF is pretty soon there will be no one to publish it. Most of the major publishers are only interested in SF which is based on the current line of environmental crises leading to a smaller and meaner world, not a greater and more glorious one.
It seems like someone will pick up that particular $20 bill on the sidewalk because this stuff sells and conservative book publishing is already a thing that exists.
If conservative publishers get cancelled, "picking up the $20 bill" is going to amount to "create your own social media and your own bookstore chain". In some cases it may mean "create your own payment processor".
Conservative book publishing outside of some of Baen doesn't have access to a general audience, and anything that gets big enough that it can try to sell to a general audience is going to get driven out of business. There will always be individuals selling on Amazon Kindle, but the audience will be tiny, just like there are always forums like themotte, but the audience is tiny.
Also, conservatives are quite happy to read the works of old, dead, white men, of which there are already plenty. The lack of new sci-fi is less of a problem for them than it would be for progressives.
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While I wouldn't overall classify Heinlein as a right-wing science fiction author generally, Starship Troopers won the 1960 Hugo for best novel, and is generally considered a (far?) right-leaning book. So the answer isn't "never". Looking at the list of winners (and limiting to books I've read, which does bias against the last two decades) gives A Canticle for Leibowitz (1961), Dune (1966), Ender's Game (1986) which I'd at least describe that way.
Afaik, the usual claim is that the hugo awards have always been left-leaning, but tolerated right-wing authors and would occasionally even give awards to them. But then in the last 20 years it veered hard off the lefty deep end and the awards are now pretty much exclusively given to left-wing authors. See the sadpuppy controversy. So your description is pretty much perfectly in line with this.
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