Some rambling about the #Hugoawards

I know, I get it.  Awards don’t mean anything.  Sometimes terrible things win awards, and sometimes things that are wonderful don’t win them, and did you know that the award for Best Thing was won in 1935 by this thing that you’ve never seen or heard of when that thing is totally still around and being used by everyone everywhere, and they came out in the same year???

Don’t care.  I ain’t gonna lie: I’d love to be nominated for a Hugo.  I’d love to win a Hugo, or even the John W. Campbell award, which is given out with the Hugos but isn’t one for some reason.  Weirdly, as an independent author I think I’m eligible for all of the Hugo awards except the Campbell, which is awarded for Best New Writer and requires a professional sale to qualify.  Needless to say, I’m pretty sure I received no nominations on this ballot that I’m aware of, and even if my career as a writer takes off more substantially in 2016 (not that I’m complaining about 2015, or at least the non-August parts of 2015) that probably isn’t likely to change in the next year or two.

Hopefully the awards will still be worth winning by then.  This year’s shenanigans have ensured that the bad guys are going to declare victory no matter what happens tonight; if the Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies slate wins, it’ll be because Yay white guys!!! and if it loses it’ll be See, we were right about the conspiracy!!!, and if some of them win and some of them lose we’ll see people declaring victory from both angles.  I’d like to hope that we won’t have to go through this bullshit again next year but these jackasses do not seem to be very good at shutting up and going away, and they do seem very good at shitting all over everything they can touch, which is not an especially good combination.

For the record, I’ve voted in the last two WorldCons, and for this one I mostly voted for No Award, although I was happy to toss a vote to The Goblin Emperor, which I enjoyed tremendously even though to this day I can’t quite explain why.  Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem was also excellent, although rereading my review just now it appears to have grown on me since I initially read it.

Maybe I’ll start my own slate next year.  We can call ourselves the Fucking Exhausted Puppies.  You never know, it might work.