John Scalzi has argued that the Hugo
nominations shouldn't be announced so close to Easter since too many people are
busy to get caught up in them. Cleverly, the voters circumvented that this year
by nominating people that would piss everyone off.
The most outrage is about Vox Day's novelette, Opera Vita Aeterna, published in The Last Witchking. Everyone was furious
without having read the story. Why? Because
Vox Day is also a cartoonishly bigoted blogger, most famous for writing unforgivable things about N.K. Jemisin. Here his fiction has been nominated,
not the person, but liberal voters have a difficult time extricating the two,
or even seeing why they should bother. It's the most brazen example yet of Hugo
voters copping to the awards not being exclusively about the works nominated.
The nomination presents a fascinating problem for WorldCon.
We knew about 10% of SFWA members voted for him to be their president before he was kicked out of the group. Now we know enough WorldCon members are willing to
vote in his work, and it feels like there's a reactionary element here,
hoisting him up in retribution for his booting.
But what do we do about this? Kick out anyone who votes for
him? Go make a new club that doesn't let "the wrong kind" of people in?
For all the negativity flowing right now, I don't see any reasonable solutions
proposed.
