I know, because I was one of those angry young white guy misfits when I started reading “real” SF (as opposed to media tie-ins) around 1986 or so, when I was a high school freshman who was unhealthily into Harlan Ellison. The genre had diversified a bit since my dad’s days, there were a lot more women writing SF, but…

I’m not sure what any author’s personal politics have to do with this particular controversy.  Hugo voters nominated certain works and people, and the award admins removed them for no explained reason.  Might it have been about politics those people had regarding China?  It’s a reasonable hypothesis, but your comment…

But the SF community has diversified tremendously in just the past 15 years or so, and the angry young white guy misfits who were the genre’s bread and butter for most of the 20th Century (some with a STEM bent) just don’t seem to read a lot of SF anymore, or much of anything else for that matter.

If you recall, we discussed “Babel’s” lack of a nomination when I gave my annual summary of all the Hugo and Nebula nominees. I speculated that maybe Kuang had turned down a nomination but you pointed out she denied that at the time. At least other people also found it odd.

I’d say the biggest difference between the Rabid and Sad Puppies is that the latter are still writing SF, while the former have given up on the genre entirely and have tried to reinvent themselves as far-right influencers, because they realized they’d never make any money at it. The Sads, I think, are still hanging on…

You’re not moving in with the authors, but reading a novel is a bigger investment of time and mental energy than picking something at random off Netflix. I’ve always been very curious about the political views of the novelists I read, because books don’t get written in a vacuum, and they don’t get read in one either.…

I’ve not been paying more than very tangential attention to the internal politics of the Hugos since I stopped buying supporting membership a few years before the Sad/Rabid Puppies era (and by the way, it’s still a bit sloppy to not distinguish between the two.) Back then, it wasn’t too hard to see the storm on the…

I’m not sure how useful it would’ve been to write about “obvious potential reasons” beyond very generally saying that the Chinese government might’ve applied some kind of pressure. That’s an obvious idea that’s been widely discussed in all of the other forums that the article links to, but it’s pretty hard to…

On top of that, while the ineligibility questions are the easier ones to make a story about, the math in the nomination data makes no sense. At best, a ton of errors were made, but far more likely is some form of tampering occurred.

I’ve asked quite a few questions, because aside from the “not eligible” problems, the numbers in the nomination data do not add up.  We’ll see if this is answered or even addressed, but I suspect there’s going to be continued stonewalling.

That’s where the controversy started. Its now significantly worse.

The weird thing about these little invincible buggers are, you can’t kill them but they die on their own in a couple of years, some may only live a few months.

Stephen Hawking was most likely right when he said:

Get the Welsh Tidy Mouse to clean up after them.

This idea discards cooperative pilfering. One bird opens, the second (or more) removes the goods. Social birds like these don’t have any problems learning those kinds of cooperative behaviors.

Wouldn’t surprise me. Whenever a large company or conglomerate wants to “enrich the public’s lives” by interfering in a government’s job through products and at the same time discourages public services investment like improved internet services or road technology then you know where their true intent lies: They want a…

Yes They started buying up property in 2009-2019 because of how scarce houses were.... not because of all the foreclosed properties from 2008 that they could get pennies on the dollar at actions. what was I thinking. And I live in a desirable area of town and there are 14 houses empty in my neighborhood of about 150…

Then support massive up-zoning in existing cities. Berkeley and Oakland and San Francisco should be full of 15-30 story residential apartment buildings.

Well here is a fact. According to that map they have the “city” subdivided into 22 “blocks” of those 22 blocks like 7 of them are designated to maker/technology/industrial zones. or a little under one third. Which amazingly is about the same the company towns in coal and steel country in the turn of the 20th century.…

We dont need more housing. We need legislation that regulates hedge funds and private equity firms from being able to buy residential real estate as commodities and artificially inflate the housing market.

Hedge funds and institutional investors as of june 2022 owned 547000 residential properties. In the first quarter…