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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I don’t think there is a principled, objective stance where William Gibson is a better writer than Octavia Butler

There isn't a principled, objective, stance for every pair of authors you are comparing, but there is for some. You can't really say whether eating at McDonalds is better than Burger King, but they're both better than eating sewage.

There's also the problem that if you're choosing authors by wokeness, you're inherently going to have things which are bad by other standards, because those things are no longer your top priority. You may occasionally get lucky and find a good one anyway by chance, but you're no longer really selecting much for it.

But then…can I at least have my own awards convention so that I know which books from this year aren’t utter crap?

https://www.dragoncon.org/awards/2022-dragon-award-ballot/

The 2022 con is over but they haven't announced the winners yet as far as I know.

I wish they had short stories and novellas in Dragon! It seems like Dragon is also essentially a democratic process for people willing to jump through the hoops. I would say I am overall very impressed by the various sci fi awards to more or less consistently award extremely high quality books over the years despite just being popularity contests.