> 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. :-)
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. :-)