[bluedays]

Hugo Awards have been weirdly political since the whole Sad Puppies thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies

[IronWolve]

Wikipedia is documenting one view of sad puppies. Check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76xQ_49V500 for another view with more details.

This and gamergate made the public aware of politics in reviews and awards, which did help push people to look for a more group review about books. There are now tons of subreddits with each genre you can see what popular books are out.

I stopped reading the hugo collections when they started to mix sci-fi and fantasy, because fantasy has more diversity, so mixing genres pushed the diversity goal. Now lots of diversity in sci-fi books, so its not really an issue of mixing genres to accomplish a goal.

Kinda sucks that clashing of politics is included in everything, when all you want to do is a read a book. But the wikipedia article really isn't the entire truth from people watching from the outside knew what was going on. Thus they had to change the rules from block voting to stop the plebs from voting.

[lebean]

I'm not in the scene, but as an outsider, this sounded like someone is complaining about DEI for Orcs, Dwarves, and Elves.

[TheCoelacanth]

The Hugos have always included fantasy.

[concordDance]

The near complete absence of male winners (none in any main category from 2017 to 2022) since then is admittedly pretty suspicious.

[tobias3]

I wouldn't care if this wouldn't impact winner quality. Presumably there are a lot of authors which need discovering (or perhaps not, idk).

But a book like "The Calculating Stars" is just so bad, I'll never trust the Hugo award again.