Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
I think it's a pretty fair summary. They game the system to get invalid results, we modify the rules to make sure only deserving books win. The only real difference is if you like the results or not. The sad puppies basically brought the clique issue to a head. It's not a shock that the only two years that Baen got a book in the finalist was when the sad puppies were active.
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The last science fiction convention I attended was Norwescon in 2018. I was chatting with some people about which books we were reading. Out of a group of ~10, 2/3 of them were totally disgusted that I would read any books from Baen. Evidently Baen was not considered politically correct. There are no "persons of colour" in Baen books which came as a bit of a surprise to me, there are no women other than in trivial roles (I guess they'd never read any of David Weber's Honor Harrington books). Too much military in the books—after all in the future, humanity will have given up war and the aliens could never had had such an aberration in their pasts. Or in the case of Eric Flint's 1632 series, the inhabitants of Grantville should have been able to declare peace against the world.
Admittedly, the same people also disapproved of the Harry Potter stories since there are too few persons of colour, too few "strong" female characters, too few characters who display a non-heterosexual gender expression, etc. No mention of the number of young readers (and their parents) who would probably be rather confused as to why Rowling was writing graphic sex scenes featuring, for example, Grindelwald and Dumbledore as was one person's suggestion to "improve" the stories.