Personally, when I’m looking for a book, the title & cover make me notice it, then I read the blurb. If it still sounds OK, I’ll open it randomly and read a page. If it still seems attractive and the price isn’t extortionate then I’ll buy it. I’ve been doing that for 40 years and I’ve had very few where I’d rather have bought something else so it’s worked for me.

In fact, if I hadn’t read this blog I wouldn’t even have noticed this was happening. So from my perspective, the Hugo’s and all the participants look like a self obsessed bubble that has no relevance to the real world. Am I alone in that view?

Ditto, but it’s educational. I’ve learned a lot about human nature in the last five years.

# Everyone is doubling down and their positions are becoming
# more entrenched.

Yep, and notice, these are the very people who are promising us a world where everyone’s going to live in diversified harmony. Much as in the Soviet system, the people who sing the hymns loudest are often those closest to the devil.

# Try to suggest compromises or suggest that not everyone on the
# opposing side is a demon and you get shouted own with canned
# talking points.

Yep. A lot of this is just people getting off on hate. People love to hate, for many it seems to be an essential part of their nature, without someone to hate, they’re lost.

# You have a point about why we need a fandom. We can still
# read books without needing a community around them,
# especially if the community has become toxic.

Or we could start a parallel community of our own. The only problem there is that it will have to be an exclusionary community, otherwise the extremists will come in and take it over. It’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s the reality.

# Despite it being only thirty miles away, I didnt attend LonCon last year.

I did, but it will be one of the last ones I attend.

# I felt that in the wake of Rossgate the atmosphere was just too
# unpleasant, and I’m not good at walking on eggshells.

Ditto, and I’ve always challenged people when they say biggotted things. Got to say, even people who were boarderline nazis took that better than the ‘social justice’ SF crowd.

# Since then its only got worse.

Yep. We need a new community and a new ideology that challenges both the SJWs and the ‘god and guns’ crowd. SF is devoid of new ideas anyway, what’s been written since neuromancer that anyone can say is *really* significant? Time to split and start afresh.

Colum

You have a point about why we need a fandom. We can still read books without needing a community around them, especially if the community has become toxic.

Despite it being only thirty miles away, I didn’t attend LonCon last year. I have several friends who did go, and asked me if I was going. I felt that in the wake of Rossgate the atmosphere was just too unpleasant, and I’m not good at walking on eggshells. Since then it’s only got worse.

# a big victory for the Puppy-Free ballot of Deirdre Moen.

Ah, Ms Moen again. Her name keeps popping up. She’s come out of nowhere to ally with requires_hate (or ‘Bee’, as she calls her) while admitting she’s ignorant of how we got here. Now she’s on the anti-puppy bandwagon. This is someone to keep an eye on.

# Swamping the nominations ballot by block voting a slate was a dick move
# that was always going to provoke a backlash. It was a major escalation in a
# turf war that pre-dates the Puppies campaigns, and goes back several years.

I agree, and it is a turf war. In the end it’s less about diversity and more about who, and who’s mates, gets to be nominated for awards or gets to be on panels at cons. Many of the footsoldiers think they’re fighting for fairness, but the generals are people like Vox Day and Requires Hate, and they are fighting for their own self-interest. ’twas ever thus.

# In recent years there has been an active campaign from some quarters to
# marginalise conservatives and libertarians out of fandom, with concerns being
# dismissed as Old men yelling at clouds. Rhetoric like The dinosaurs are going
# extinct and were the comet give that game away.

I totally agree, although I think the range of people being marginalized is far wider than that. There’s a new line of rhetoric appearing targetting ‘white feminism’. Old-school feminists are the people who have stood up against the extremes of SJW madness, and they are the next group in the crosshairs. Basically anyone who disagrees with the ideology is going to be purged. It’s a ‘first they came for the white guys’ situation.

Of course, marginalizing these viewpoints was one of the things that created an echo-chamber of groupthink where the likes of requires_hate could thrive. I don’t doubt that similar things are happening among the puppies too.

# Are they Science Fictions equivalent of The Oscars, showcasing the best of
# the genre to the wider world?

No.

# Or are they more like the CRS Awards, celebrating the favourites of a
# small community within a much larger fandom?

Yes. How can they be anything but this? How many people actually vote for a Hugo compared to the number who read, watch, or play science-fiction media? Furthermore, audiences at SF cons are very white, middle-class, old and left-wing, they don’t represent national demographics or the readership of SF. People who don’t fit into that description don’t feel comfortable at cons, so the membership is skewed, and always will be.

# My position at the moment is still A pox on both camps.

Me too. We should be the ‘pox party’ or the ‘poxsters’.

# still considers a great many known acolytes of Requires Hate to be respected
# members of the community,

I’m prepared to give many of the acolytes a break. Most everyone in leftist SF was an enabler of RH at some level, though many now deny it. The truth is that the acolytes were, in some ways, her victims. She played them, used their ideological commitments against them, and they are the kind of people who are easily led. For all that many people in SF make claims to a kind of faux intellectualism, a lot of them are not too wordly-wise. RH landing among them was like Professor Moriarty finding himself among the keystone cops.
Hopefully some of them now are a bit older and wiser.

# both sides play games with motes and beams when it comes to guilt-by-association.

That’s certainly true, and both sides misbehave in similar ways, and then object that the ‘other side’ is doing something that they’ve been doing themselves.

# I am not buying either sides partisan narrative, echoed in their respective
# agenda-driven and nuance-free media channels.

Yeah, I have to say, the way this was handled by online leftist channels was eye-opening, wasn’t it? Makes me doubt a lot of what they say on every topic.

# As long as this nonsense goes on, while I continue to read SF, I refuse to identify
# myself as part of SF fandom. My fandom is, and will remain, music.

Me too, but then why do we need ‘fandom’? You can be a consumer of a thing, and enjoy it, and even produce some of it, without being a ‘fan’, surely?