New Hugo Award categories for puppies

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LOL? Wut? For reals?

Letā€™s not bring bronies into thisā€¦ :slight_smile:

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Iā€™m up for it, I think we got a good few to talk about. Do we want the subject to be any more specific than ā€œTalking about speculative transsexualism in early SFā€? How early is ā€œearlyā€? 80s?

Theodore who, Vox who? I donā€™t think I heard about them before, or at least not enough to remember them in the sea of other names. Why are they suddenly so important, so deserving of hundreds kilobytes of text and heated discussion?

The sad thing is, the guy really isnā€™tā€¦ but heā€™s managed to create a shitstorm with all this and get the attention he clearly wants. Thatā€™s one of the tragedies in all this. That a guy who we should all ignore for being an odious, racist, sexist trolley, is now being talked about all across fandom.

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Yep. That is just a little bit from VDā€™s post explaining why it was ok for the Taliban to shoot girls who want better education. He also mixes in some fun stuff from the always humorous world of pickup artist/alpha male ā€œgameā€ to describe women. If you got to have a plan to be an alpha male (whatever that actually is), then maybe you are not?

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I wish this were all a parody, but sadly, itā€™s all too real.

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A lot of us rely on the Hugo nominations lists to find good reads. And I read a lot so those lists are useful for finding new stuff. These groupsā€™ hijacking of the nomination process screws with a system that I have relied on for 20 years to find good reads and recognize novel, ground-breaking sci-fi. I had never heard of these groups before this post. I would like to never hear of them again.

Edit: In other words, they are messing with my free time. It is personal!

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Thatā€™s not mutually exclusive. Look around, we live in a world that became satire on itself.

There are more lists, and more suggestion mechanisms. And comments on the lists (akin to ā€œmeta-moderationā€)ā€¦

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Not so late where we could be discussing other genres, but not so early as to exclude, say Iain Banks.
edit: The queer as evil perv trope probably can be found in early early pulp, but I mean to discuss books where, either a major non-evil character is transgender, or a society in which switching gender is normal.

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What did Zizek say (that I think is a paraphrase of a quote from Marx)? First as tragedy,then as farce? Thatā€™s about right.

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Itā€™s bollocks, though. Itā€™s a pretty transparent attempt to group them for ideological convenience, like a ā€˜beware jew-bolshevism!ā€™ propaganda leaflet.

Evidence for the broad differences?

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Also Samuel R Delanyā€™s Triton

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Which one was that?

I started reading I Will Fear no Evil a few times, I havenā€™t finished yet. But it involves brain sex/gender adapting to body sex/gender. So it isnā€™t really compatible with trans experience.

I think Aristophanes had a storyā€¦ Sex and gender, in general, and sometimes including trans themes, have been (mis)handled in speculative fiction a lot longer than technology has.

I also started reading The Female Man without finishing it either. It is not a story to read with brain fog. I understand that the relevant parts, which havenā€™t come up yet, were transphobic, although Russ later apologized.

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There is that, but at the same time this guy is already publishing SF and presumably applying his own perverted political reasoning to his publishing decisions. At least now heā€™s much more visible and the link between the SF he promotes and his fascist, religious extremist ideology is transparent. Iā€™m happier that heā€™s out of the woodwork, although itā€™s troubling how much support he has.

Why do so many geek guys mutate into venomous fascists? Itā€™s like itā€™s the perfect aspie ideology or something.

I dunno about that, honestly, and struggle with it. Sure, we know see him for what he is, but at the same time, he gets to have a platform for his vileness, and more traffic from the curious.

Iā€™m not sure thatā€™s fair to the majority of geek guys or those with aspergers. I really donā€™t think that people like this guy are truly representative. Iā€™d suspect that the folks who agree with him were already inclined to such elitist thinking in the first place, and do place themselves on some special pedestal.

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I was having wifi issues last night.

But.

Letā€™s try this again:

NOT THE SAME AT ALL! Nope. Nothing to see here.

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So by analogy, Kenneth Clarke=Nigel Farage=Marine Le Pen?

I agree that both groups are essentially engaging in a form of ballot-stuffing, although I think what the SPs have really (and unfortunately) done is introduce a crude kind of party-politics - which frankly everything including actual politics would be better off without. However I think that itā€™s an ignorant subversion of the voting system in their case (many people would struggle to articulate why party-politics undermines democracy), whereas RP/Vox Day appears to me to be much more reprehensible.

Donā€™t get me wrong, I think theyā€™re both damaging the entire process and I think that theyā€™re both founded on entirely idiotic fundamental principles (SPs are harking back to a period of Science Fiction that never fucking existed, for a start!) I donā€™t, however, hold that they are equally malign.

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Itā€™s not that long, but I just skimmed the first time, and and am now working my way more closely as time permits.