4 Comments

The Big 4 Hugos, by which I mean the ones that have existed longest, that people care most about, and that make someone's career, are novel, novella, novelette, & short story. White males have been banned from all 4. In the past 10 years, out of 40 such awards, only one went to a white male–and that was in 2014, a Sad Puppies year.

Given that most science fiction and fantasy submitted to magazines is written by white males (there have been studies), the odds of that happening by chance, without any discrimination against white males, are about one in 27 billion. (Odds of less than one in twenty suffice to call a claim "proven" in scientific publications.)

For comparison, in the 1960s, a decade when racism and sexism were allegedly endemic in SF, black males won 6 times as many of the Big 4 Hugos as white males have in the past 10 years.

I see that this wave is still cresting: this year, none of the 12 /nominees/ for short story and novelette are white males. The odds of that happening without discrimination against white males are about 1 in 4096.

Expand full comment

Yup. This has been very obvious just by looking at the nominees over the last four years. I hate that the sad puppies were right after all. I do partly blame them for the backlash.

We aren't reading the nominated novels this year, which is the first time we've skipped them in ... I dunno, over 15 years? They're now foremost a marker of wokeism rather than quality. The shorts are easy enough to read, and the tradition is such a good one, that we're doing them still.

Expand full comment

It looks like "Answerless Journey" can be found in a collection here: https://a.co/d/02BZfpCP

As far as I can tell, the only place the English translation of "Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times” exists is in the Hugo packet.

Expand full comment

Thank you for posting these.

Expand full comment