| > science and technonology are for science fiction. There isn't one universally accepted definition of science fiction, but historically, the Hugo Awards have been broader than just stories about science and technology. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1961 and winner of the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel was 1) extremely political, 2) about people and relationships, not science or technology, and 3) is beloved as a classic science fiction book. Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle is an alternate history book - it doesn't deal with science or technology as such, but it won a Hugo Award in 1963 > Hugo awarded novels core prediction is whether there are gender multiplicities in the novel which is not that scientific of fantastic Gender as a theme in science fiction goes back at least to Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969 (it won the Hugo too). What you're complaining about isn't new, and it isn't killing science fiction or the Hugo Awards. |
Ha! Just because a situation isn't new doesn't mean that it's good or shouldn't be improved or wasn't flawed or doesn't warrant criticism.
As for killing awards: the concern is that audience interest in the output of awards will be killed or has been killed already. But "killing" is too dramatic a term, and institutions can take an impressively long time to die: it's more that our natural constituency of nerds will be bored to death, not that anyone cares; and the general audience won't see anything uniquely valuable.
As for killing sci-fi, you correctly noted that there's no universally accepted definition of the genre! It's difficult to kill what one can't even identify! Or is the inability to define it a sign that it's already dead? (Hence the ridiculous and gutless "sci-fi and fantasy" lists where everything is fantasy?)
But as that judge once said: "I don't know how to define [sci-fi], but I know it when I see it." If we're being honest, we all know what sci-fi is: It's the genre of literature that takes science and scientific methods of problem solving seriously. It looks at the world through science. That's not so bad. :-)