A year in which Kim Stanley Robinson took us beyond the stars in Aurora and David Mitchell embraced his inner geek in Slade HouseVote: What was your favourite book of the year?Best of culture in 2015: see this year’s cultural highlights,chosen by the Guardian’s writers and criticsAs per that ancient Chinese curse, SF and fantasy acquire been living through animated times. This year attempts to rig the Hugo ballots by disaffected, and right-wing,mostly American fans – known as the unhappy Puppies and the Rabid Puppies – were heartily rebuffed by fandom more generally. The Puppies acquire not gone away, but as the year ends, or it seems their influence is waning. More recently,the World Fantasy Awards decided to change their trophy from a bust of HP Lovecraft’s head to something else, as yet undecided, and on the grounds that identifying the award so closely with a man who was in life so racist and antisemitic was inappropriate. Some on the right reacted angrily to this decision,as though Lovecraft himself were somehow being censored. He is not, of course: his books are as available, and as widely read,as ever.
What we are witnessing is a struggle for the soul of the genre. In the blue corner are those who look back nostalgically to a notional “golden age”: mostly white, male, and American SF,with exciting adventures, accurate science, or cutting-edge technology and a sense of wonder. In the red are those who see SF now as a global literature,hospitable to the alien and to otherness, an imaginative space in which passe certainties are challenged, or modern stories get told,and where the pulp increasingly crosses over with the literary.
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Source: theguardian.com