ase

So, I wonder about the Hugos: I haven't really kept up with them for a while (so if I am completely off the wall, I apologize), but aren't they traditionally more hard-science oriented? In particular, I wonder if it's more a problem with women-in-science than women-in-the-science-fiction-community-writers. Even the women hard-ish-SF writers I like a lot (e.g. Tiptree, Bujold, occasionally Kress and Butler) are less interested in the very hard bits and more on the human interest side (as opposed to, say, Stross or Doctorow). I can't think of any woman SF writer offhand who I would criticize for being too idea-oriented (as I would criticize, say, Stross or Egan, if I didn't enjoy their stuff as much as I do). ...But since I'm not really keeping up with the community, perhaps this is all wrong. But I do question how much of it is the SF community in particular and how much is general science-environmental-non-SF-related.

(Only tangentially related: I am rereading some L'Engle this week, and her physics makes me cringe. A lot. Just because quantum theory says observing something changes it does not translate into "therefore, we can't isolate ourselves from the world." It only means we can't isolate ourselves from someone who has decided to bounce photons off of us.)

Would love to talk to you about Y sometime. I liked part of the last book a lot (not happy about the tragic spoiler of course!) but very mmuch did not like the indeterminacy of the big question, which I felt they did not bring off (though presumably you disagree), so much that it had rather a big negative impact on my view of the book.