(urth) George R. R. Martin on Gene Wolfe

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes]

To call the Hugos "politicized" is to miss the point: it is the Puppies who
have truly politicized them, who have put up a slate with a political
agenda. To say that they were slanted liberal before is not exactly untrue,
but ignores the fact that fandom tends to slant liberal (as is likely when
dealing with people who look toward the future rather than the past), and
ignores, among other things, the nomination of Correia's own book just last
year. Likewise to say that "good ol' space opera" isn't being nominated
ignores the space opera of people like Ann Leckie, Lois McMaster Bujold,
and so on - the Puppies probably *do* ignore them because they're gurlz in
the boiz klubhouse.

The Hugos have a long history of nominating a wide variety of --
admittedly, English language -- sf/f, and *that* is what the Puppies have
attacked.

/rant I now return you to your previously scheduled discussion of Gene
Wolfe.

On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 9:31 AM, Gwern Branwen <gwern at gwern.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 11:30 AM, Nick Lee <starwaterstrain at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > They never bring up Wolfe, from what I've seen, and you would think he's
> the
> > perfect example. He's obviously Catholic and conservative, to a degree.
> See
> > arguments about this in the past of the List and recently on Reddit. He's
> > never won a Hugo despite numerous other accolades. You would think he'd
> be
> > their most damning evidence. So what gives?
>
> I saw this anti-Puppy argument previously brought up in, I think, a
> New Republic blog; they added on as another example R.A. Lafferty. It
> doesn't work because of the timing: the politicization of the Hugos
> and associated sites like Tor.com (still publishing a notorious
> cyberstalker because her politics & gender are correct, incidentally)
> only really starts hitting in force in the '90s and '00s.
>
> R.A. Lafferty wasn't even writing at that point, having given up until
> his unpublished stuff sold and then went to meet his maker, and Gene
> has still been writing but as much as I love his books, I would have a
> hard time making the case that any of _The Wizard Knight_, _Pirate
> Freedom_, _An Evil Guest_, _The Sorcerer's House_ or _Home Fires_
> *really* deserved to take home a Hugo for Best Novel. (Just compare
> the level of discussion on urth.net of any of those novels to that of,
> say, _Peace_ or even some of the short stories - having read through
> all of the hits for both, I think it's entirely possible that there
> has been more discussion here of the scant few paragraphs of "Suzanne
> Delage" than of the entirety of _Pirate Freedom_.)
> _The Long Sun_ was good and did manage to get some nominations, but
> also finished in '96 - or 19+ years ago now.
>
> Hence, Lafferty's and Wolfe's nominations and awards are uninformative
> since they either were in time periods where the Sad Puppies see
> minimal problems, or they are drawn from a time period where the
> relevant works did not exist / weren't clearly deserving of awards.
>
> --
> gwern
> http://www.gwern.net
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-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
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