The reason I mentioned about vox day is because I read this
http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/24/an-explanation-about-the-hugo-awards-controversy/
Where Larry Corriea says he nominated vox day to prove a point. So I hope this will get me out of spurious jail. I should have mentioned it earlier. It's just stuff like this which makes me think it has less and less to do with the quality of the stories every year, and more and more to do with politics.
And for me the fact that fact that none of the vox day bag of stories actually got an award, or seriously ranked in the voting, shows that the Hugos are actually pretty hard to fix ;-)
I still say that Occam's razor points us to different kinds of stories being written and published — and the community of readers' tastes changing — as being a far more parsimonious explanations that conspiracy and politics.
The comments on all the Hugo stories this year certainly show a bunch of people who do like them. I liked 'em. I found them fun and interesting and thought provoking. If I was an attendee I would have probably voted for 'em. In other years there have been stories that got Hugo's that I didn't like.
So what? :-)
Occam's razor is all well and good, but how about the old adage: no smoke without fire?
This was my first year paying any attention to the hugos what-so-ever and after seeing the stories nominated and the pieces that won, I have to say, speaking as an outsider looking in, it did appear to be a pretty good year for the liberals.
And so what? Erm... nothing I guess. Nerds like equality. No big news there. It's pretty clear that 'modern day' genre fiction has penchant for stories which feature diverse characters. Again so what? I don't see why everyone has to go around claiming that all stories are created equally, when clearly stories which feature diversity are favoured. Again so what? Maybe thats as it should be, but why not just admit that. There's no shame in it as far as I'm concerned. There's no need to go around pretending you would have voted for vox day when that simply isn't true. I wouldn't have voted for him because he's a huge racist, and I don't like that on a personal level, and to be honest I have a pretty hard time believing anyone who says otherwise.
It's a great time for gays and women and ethnicities of all kinds to writing genre fiction. Why not just come out and say so.
I think a lot of this stink arises from the fact that a large chunk of old school (read: straight white male) sci-fi and genre fans feel abandoned by all this diversity and change. They don't have any characters they can relate to anymore. Which sucks for them, but the times they are a changin' I guess.
The only question left is weather or not diversity (genre fictions buzz word for the last three years) is taking precedent over quality. There is no answer to that. Art being subjective an all. But I'm sure all the old school geeks certainly think so. We all want characters that are relatable, even straight white males. And people shouldn't be so hostile when discussing this stuff. This topic carries huge tension on this forum, and to be honest I don't think it helps anyone.