SFF fandom in a nutshell.

Normally I don't write about this stuff, because normally I don't care anymore. Science Fiction and Fantasy awards have been rewarding objectionable, unreadable socialistic crap for a very long time. Twenty years at least, by my count, the Hugos and Nebulas etc. have been 100% political. Nothing that doesn't hit the Red Underwear socialist political checklist will be nominated by WorldCon.

Once upon a time Larry Correia got angry about that, and organized the Campaign to Reduce Puppy Related Sadness. It was fabulously effective in its clearly stated goal: reveal the political nature of the Hugo nominations. Rub their noses in it. The WorldCon weenies went the extra mile and changed the way votes are collected to preserve their status quo in 2016.

In Canada we have the Aurora Award given by the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. Here's more of the same WorldCon attitude in a column by Robert J. Sawyer.

Yesterday, I attended the annual general meeting of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, which was held by Zoom, due to the COVID pandemic.

The first issue the chair raised was what he considered to be a precipitous drop in the number of voters over the years. Years ago, he said, the number was in the mid-two-hundreds and he cited year-by-year figures showing a steady decline down to the current tally of 140 or so. Much discussion ensued about how to beef up the number.

My feeling is two-fold. First, it's NOT an Aurora-specific issue, and, second, it's NOT even a problem.

Okay, so the "national" award given for SFF in Canada is down to 140 voters, and Mr. Sawyer is good with that.  It isn't a problem, according to him.

How is that not a problem in a country with 30 million people? Your genre award has 140 voters! Nobody cares what you're doing! That's bad, isn't it?

Well, apparently not:

When people talk about bringing in vast new swaths of fans to beef up Aurora voting numbers, they usually mean finding a way to get young fans involved. But young fans, by and large, AREN'T SF&F readers, and have their own fandom traditions -- they expect, for instance, their events to be high-cost and run to professional standards (even if mostly staffed by volunteers).

These are the fine folk who enjoy the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo; Fan Expo in Toronto; Anime North, also in Toronto; OtakuThon in Montreal; and so-called "comic-cons" across the country. They want to see actors and comic-book artists. Politely, they don't need us -- AND WE DON'T NEED THEM.

There's a reason those kids have turned to Anime and comics, Mr. Sawyer, but I'll let him finish his thought first.

In the past, we've seen huge numbers of votes of dubious pedigree: people who have no known connection to fandom but a personal connection to one of the nominees nominating and voting en masse, propelling questionable works onto the ballot and sometimes shamefully even winning the award.

Thankfully, those days of hustling seem to have fallen by the wayside.

Yes, because nobody cares about the Aurora award, or more likely has ever heard of it. To Sawyer that's a good thing.

What we have now is a committed, intelligent, and honest pool of nominators and voters who receive a comprehensive "voter's packet" of nominated works so that they can make informed decisions. The result? The awards are doing precisely what they were meant to do when founded forty years ago: honour the best.

Where "the best" is decided by Mr. Sawyer and his 139 friends. Same as the Hugos really, just with an order of magnitude fewer people. They probably have on the loose order of 1,500 voters, now that the rest of us proved our point in 2016.

Now, I wouldn't really care a damn about what Sawyer and his 139 friends have to say about what the "best" science fiction of the year is, except that A) they're very wrong and B) all the publishers listen to them.

Which gets us back to why Fan Expo, Comic Con and OtakuThon etc. are huge events and "regular" fan events are ten old fat guys like Sawyer drinking in a hotel bar wearing Star Trek uniforms.

Kids and young adults aren't skipping "traditional" SFF because they don't read.. They're skipping modern SF because it sucks. It has sucked for years. It sucks so bad that life-long SF reader The Phantom stopped reading it in 2014 and started writing instead.

I'm not going to pretend my book should win an award. I can say for sure that you won't feel like you need a shower after you read it. 

Looking at the list of Aurora 2020 nominees, a shower and a quart of brain bleach might be indicated in some cases. Or it's just stupid, and you can't be bothered with it. I'll stack my first book "Unfair Advantage" against "This is How You Lose the Time War" in a contest judged by those Fan Expo kids any time.

As an author, who do I want to appeal to? The BIG CROWD. Do I care what 140 people think? Generally no. But those 140 people who pick "This is How You Lose the Time War"for an award are calling the shots for an entire industry.

Full disclosure:

I used to be a big Marvel Comics and DC Comics fan. I used to buy -all- the comics every week. I stopped buying in 1993 when Marvel and DC went hard Woke.

I used to read four or five SF/F books a week. I stopped around 2010 when all the publishers went hard Woke.

I used to go to the movies pretty much every week. Any adventure flick or SF I'd go to see. I stopped about 2005 when the movies went hard Woke. About the only things I've seen since were the Marvel Comics movies, not-coincidentally the ONLY franchise out there that didn't go hard Woke.

I used to watch TV. Series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer were my faves. But now there's really nothing like that on TV. (Don't give me all the recommendations, please. I know quite well what's out there, I just don't watch it.)

I don't read SF. I write instead. I don't watch Hollywood or TV at all. I watch Korean soaps, anime and Chinese kung fu movies/soaps. I'm a bit crusty about the whole thing, but I'm only an outlier of a general trend.

That's the reason why anime and manga are so popular in North America with kids, and why their conventions are so big. Those kids, like me, are tired of the Same Old Shit wrapped up in fresh newspaper and sold by the pound.