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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26716 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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To be fair, Torgersen received a double nomination in 2012 for Hugo Novelette and a Campbell (a not-Hugo-for-historic-reasons award selected by WorldCon voters in the same packet), and came close second in both, and Correia was nominated for the Campbell in 2011 (though he didn't rank very high, and that year was an absolute mess from block voting perspectives).

For winners, a while. Pournelle famously never won one, though Niven did in the 70s. Orson Scott Card in 1987? Progressives might argue Resnick, but... not very credibly.

Maybe one of the lesser-known slots like editor, but it'd have been before my time.

I mean there’s not a shortage of conservative science fiction authors. I won’t claim that them being underrepresented in awards is ipso facto evidence the awards are biased against them but considering that right wing science fiction writers are seemingly more popular than left wing ones(David Weber, John Ringo, Orson Scott Card, Larry Correia…) it probably does incline us to wonder why these extremely popular writers aren’t getting awarded.

Ringo gets awards, he just gets them for shooting people. I think he might have gotten one for a romance story published under a pseudonym. Card is old enough to have gotten Hugos before they were taken over; he's gotten a bunch of others as well. Correia has a few Dragon awards, but also a Locus.

The bigger problem for "conservative" (and not just conservative) SF is pretty soon there will be no one to publish it. Most of the major publishers are only interested in SF which is based on the current line of environmental crises leading to a smaller and meaner world, not a greater and more glorious one.

It seems like someone will pick up that particular $20 bill on the sidewalk because this stuff sells and conservative book publishing is already a thing that exists.

If conservative publishers get cancelled, "picking up the $20 bill" is going to amount to "create your own social media and your own bookstore chain". In some cases it may mean "create your own payment processor".

Conservative book publishing outside of some of Baen doesn't have access to a general audience, and anything that gets big enough that it can try to sell to a general audience is going to get driven out of business. There will always be individuals selling on Amazon Kindle, but the audience will be tiny, just like there are always forums like themotte, but the audience is tiny.

Also, conservatives are quite happy to read the works of old, dead, white men, of which there are already plenty. The lack of new sci-fi is less of a problem for them than it would be for progressives.

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