[LanceH]

Of the winners, I've only read The Three Body Problem, which I liked for a number of reasons.

I'm not familiar with any of the other winners.

Which of these are monsters on par with the big winners from the 60's through 90's?

There are a lot of people saying that the current trend is a backlash against sad puppies (which would also be wrong) while simultaneously denying that it was happening before sad puppies.

My experience is they were doing this, the sad puppies blew it up, now it seems to be happening with impunity. There are alternate more conservative cons out there, maybe the two groups have separated entirely.

Putting all the blame on the sad puppies (who, again are wrong, but I have to say this because people like painting anyone who disagrees as right wing fascist) isn't taking in the whole picture.

[sangnoir]

>> I would say that the same low voter turnout that made sad puppies possible was being abused to prop up obscure books based on the identity of the author rather the quality of the story

> Of the winners, I've only read The Three Body Problem, which I liked for a number of reasons.

I may be misunderstanding you, but if you didn't read the books, how did you judge the quality of the stories? Did you perhaps read the nominations, if so, please let me know any that you feel was not deserving and the possibly got nominated based on author's identity.

[LanceH]

> how did you judge the quality of the stories?

I haven't read them, I haven't judged them.

I'm reporting to you and anyone else who read it that while in attendance at worldcons pre-sad puppies, there was active campaigning for books based on the identity of the author. Sad puppies did not occur in a vacuum. I'm in no way justifying any stuffing the vote or any other shenanigans.

I will say that the last 10 years of winners are certainly more obscure than any 10 years from 1960-2000. Individually an obscure book may be great. As a trend it seems unlikely.

I may be missing out on something from the last 10 years. But after 40+ years of reading, why am I not getting recommendations on anything in the last 10 years (again, except for Three Body Problem)? You dodged that question also. No recommendations from the last 10 years? Why is that?

I won't read something just because it's written by a woman or minority. -- me

I won't read something if it's written by a minority. -- not me

I won't read something just because it's written by a man. -- also me

I'll read something if it is recommended. -- I may judge the recommender if it is awful

I'll read something if the story sounds interesting. -- very little emphasis of this at worlcon

[sangnoir]

> But after 40+ years of reading, why am I not getting recommendations on anything in the last 10 years (again, except for Three Body Problem)? You dodged that question also. No recommendations from the last 10 years? Why is that?

I thought it's a rhetorical question, because on its face, comparing award-winners across decades is orthogonal to the question on whether the recent winners deserve to win, and is frankly subjective. If I accept your prior that the winning story in 20xx is not as good as the winner from 1975; that information is insufficient to support the argument that the 20xx winner didn't deserve to win. IMO, the way to prove that would be to name another book from the same year that deserved to win, but didn't. "Everything is now shit" is an indictment of the entire industry - not minority authors whose quality of work is for our purposes, is yet to be quantified (relative to the rest of the contemporary field).

To answer your question about the lack of "monsters"; I think it's a function of the number of SF authors active in a given decade (big fish in a small pond), the number of SF books published, the relative proportion consumers reading books vs competing media (some of the best SF I've experienced are games - which weren't competitive with books as a vehicle for stories until, SystemShock maybe?). People don't read books as much anymore. I am working through my list of Hugo winners, and there are some not-so-great books in there. IMO, several of Ted Chiang's are better stories than a good chunk of the winners 1960-2000.

[KittenInABox]

>I may be missing out on something from the last 10 years. But after 40+ years of reading, why am I not getting recommendations on anything in the last 10 years (again, except for Three Body Problem)? You dodged that question also. No recommendations from the last 10 years? Why is that?

Who are you getting your recommendations from? I get constantly recommended new work. Exordia by Seth Dickinson was released less than a week ago and it's already had people recommending it to me. The people who I know who mostly recommend only classics... stopped reading!