(no subject)

[cahn]

On vacation (first vacation with baby!) and having a blast, but of course I did stay up a little past bedtime Saturday night and livememe the Hugos. I am pleased and unsurprised at the results. I knew there was no way the Puppies were going to win, because I am basically the epitome of the new voters this year: lazy, filled with inertia, feeling like the Hugos have been going on just fine without me for years so why should I do anything about it -- until they didn't go on just fine. And here we are.

(Dear Bad Loser Puppies: this church-going-Mormon, Asimov-and-Heinlein-reading, married-heterosexually-with-two-kids new voter -- basically your target demographic! -- would like to inform you that your literary taste sucks.)

Okay, I am surprised about Three-Body Problem; I would have bet money on Goblin Emperor to win, even though I (sort of) voted for 3BP. And I did not think the Heuvelt deserved a Hugo, although I'm okay with the idea that other people did.

But I am quite displeased at reading what was displaced by the Puppies, because that was some good stuff there. Best Related Work, as ase wrote, has some really cool stuff. Although her fiction is not necessarily my thing, I would absolutely have voted for Jo Walton's What Makes This Book So Great; I've loved her Tor column for ages.

While nursing I've been reading the short stories that got bumped, and this makes me angry, because the worst of these was better than the best of the Puppy slate. (At some point, probably I'll post links and short reviews.)

So I know the Puppies are going to try again next year. I do not think they will succeed this time with the nominations, because I know I'm not the only person out there who loves the Hugos but never voted or nominated before. They have woken us up, and we are angry, and we are going to nominate.

(If you have any suggestions, I would dearly like to know. For novel, I've got Ken Liu's Grace of Kings and Ishiguro's Buried Giant on my reading list... what else? And obviously I've read Bujold's new Chalion novella.)

Comments

[carmarthen]

I'm honestly still boggled by how terrible the Puppy noms were, from a purely stylistic POV. I'm pretty sure there are conservative authors out there who can string together a readable sentence. I'm pretty sure I've read some of them. And the best they could come up with was John C. Wright, who writes like he swallowed a thesaurus and some 17th century hellfire-and-brimstone sermons and regurgitated them with a veneer of Narnia and all the words just slightly wrong? Ugh.

[cahn]

Yes! I'm pretty sure I have read them too! I mean, for that matter, you're talking to someone who has been known to read Ayn Rand, who obviously has a plethora of her own problems (...and because I am a bad person I find these problems endlessly fascinating), but at least she can string together readable prose. Whereas I can literally close my eyes and point randomly to a sentence on a page written by John C. Wright, and there will be something horribly wrong with that sentence.

who writes like he swallowed a thesaurus and some 17th century hellfire-and-brimstone sermons and regurgitated them with a veneer of Narnia and all the words just slightly wrong?

...This is an amazingly accurate description of Wright's writing. YES.