Horizon Reviews: 2016 Hugo Award finalists · 10:30am Jul 30th, 2016
I've sort of vanished over the last week or two because I've been neck deep in Science Fiction & Fantasy stories: the voting deadline for the Hugo Awards is drawing near.
The Hugos (you may recall) are one of SFF's most prestigious awards, which are voted on by members of the Worldcon science fiction convention; and for the second year running, they are being trolled by Vox Day and his "Rabid Puppies". The Rabids used slate-voting tactics to lock down 64 out of the 85 finalist slots, filling lists of the year's best SFF with such works as Space Raptor Butt Invasion, SJWs Always Lie and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
(Well, hey, one out of three ain't bad.)
My reading has been ... well, uneven. This year, instead of nothing but culture-war choices, the Rabid Puppies shifted to an odd sort of mixed strategy -- nominating a scattershot combination of already-popular works (which some have categorized, not without merit, as "hostages" being used to shield slate nominations from wholesale rejection); naked right-wing ideology; friends-of-Vox; video-game-culture material; and a few outright troll nominations. This means that some categories are total trainwrecks and some are full of rich and enjoyable material. Having gone through about half the ballot so far, I figured I would review and rate everything I've read.
Tune in below the break for science fiction and fantasy geekery.
My first dilemma, of course, was how to react to the presence of slated works on the ballot. Ignoring how they got there and giving every work equal consideration was a non-starter for me, since that would legitimize the tactics used by a tiny minority of voters to lock the ballot down and wreck the process; but equally, when authors such as Stephen King and Neal Stephenson and Neil Gaiman are being nominated by the slaters, it's ridiculous to argue that those works are prima facie ineligible, because those are the sorts of works that would very likely have appeared on the ballot anyway.
So I settled on a compromise: given that Vox Day is on record as saying that the Rabid Puppies are a "giant ‘f*ck you" to the Hugo Awards (*), I would rank below No Award, sight unseen, every nomination from which Vox stood to personally benefit. This includes any work by his publishing company Castalia House, and by the people he pays for their work at Castalia House. (And if this sounds unfair to authors caught in the crossfire by their choice of publisher ... well, slating is at least as unfair to the authors who received large numbers of non-slate votes and were kept off the ballot by his tampering.) Everything else, I would read and evaluate on its merits regardless of its source, reserving the right to rank below No Award anything which I judged undeserving.
I've listed my votes by category below, in the order in which I ranked them, from best to worst. I haven't voted in every category yet, so this is not a complete list.
Best Novel (40,000+ words)
General Thoughts: This category was one of those least tainted by slates; the more limited pool of competitors and the greater participation by non-slaters in the open voting round meant that only two Rabid choices got on, and those were both works by popular and critically acclaimed authors. Reading five novels is a huge time sink, but I did it to keep up with what's new and hot in SFF, and I didn't regret it.
1. N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season: This lands atop my ballot because it's not only a good story, but also a daring and audacious one on a number of levels. The first is the narrative style. It bounces back and forth between second person (!) and third person, at times dropping into cryptic near-poetry. It unapologetically uses a fantasy-world vocabulary for its tale of a world wracked by continuous earthquakes, and the "orogenes" born gifted with near-superpowers that give them control over more than just seismic activity. Yet all the vocabulary meshes, and the narrative quirks never knocked me out of the story. The second is the way that this seems oddly topical despite being one step shy of a Watchmen-level superhero tale: society is rigidly structured to oppress the orogenes and keep their vast powers rigidly controlled for the benefit of everyone else. Even the slang -- orogenes are more popularly "roggas" -- is evocative of the charged racial attitudes that drive modern American discourse. From start to end, this is a book deconstructing structural oppression from the inside, and the ways people struggle with it, and the way it shapes them and their thinking. That theme is solid, devastating, and important. My only complaint is that this slams to a halt at the ending in a way that requires (rather than suggests) a sequel, and that deflates the punch of some of the late revelations -- but this was regardless an easy favorite against strong competition. Highly Recommended
2. Jim Butcher's The Aeronaut's Windlass: You might recognize Butcher from his Dresden Files series (which I've read) or the Codex Alera (which I haven't), but this is the start of a new series best described as steampunk airship war adventure. I've always found Dresden a guilty pleasure -- Butcher is a deft hand at urban fantasy, but Dresden is chock full of uncomfortable and disappointing tropes like the main character being a chivalric lone-wolf Strong-Jawed Man who fixes problems by Manning At Them, giving the reader lots of adolescent fanservice even as our hero rises above it with his Pure Manly Purity -- and I am thrilled to report that this series so far is everything that I love about Butcher without the problematic elements. In fact, even though the airship captain is the obligatory Brooding Chivalric Manly Man, he's often offscreen since our heroes are a solid ensemble cast; the first one we meet is a headstrong young noblewoman with family issues who I immediately liked, followed by a young soldier-wannabe who literally talks to cats, and did I mention that there's an entire subplot exploring the culture of sentient cats who live inside the maintenance vents of the spires? That sound you hear is my inner furry squealing in glee. This book was just fun, fun, fun to read. Highly Recommended
3. Naomi Novik's Uprooted: This is high fantasy about war with a forest. No, really. The protagonist is swept up from her little rural town by an eccentric mage who tries to teach her to control her inherent magical skills, and the backdrop is a nation on the border of a malevolent, sentient forest which infects the land around it and makes people go insane and mutate. The systems, plural, of magic are vivid and magical in a truly masterful way, making everything feel wild and esoteric and scary while never seeming counterintuitive, and the premise here is fresh and well-built. One caveat: The Hugo packet doesn't provide the last few chapters of the story, but Ferret tells me that the ending is disappointingly predictable in some of its happily-ever-after tropes. Really, though, this is a fine and engrossing story, and it's not higher on my slate just because this category was so full of good stuff. Highly Recommended
4. Neal Stephenson's Seveneves: This is a hard science-fiction novel whose first two-thirds are about the human race's scramble to avoid extinction after something blows up the moon; the world has to set up a space colony that will allow people to survive for 5000 years in orbit until enough debris clears out that the atmosphere is no longer perpetually on fire. The last third is an oddly standard adventure novel as some descendants of the original survivors explore the planet, and feels like a 150-page epilogue to the core story. This is pure science porn throughout most of its length, and the technical details are nothing short of fascinating, which is fortunate because Stephenson's writing style just kept making me want to throw my laptop across the room. It goes into long digressions at the most inopportune times at the space drop of a space hat, and despite the tense and thrilling plot I found my eyes repeatedly glazing over. As for the huge shift of the last third: this is quite a long book, and I can't help but feel it would have worked better as a trilogy, with the modern-day story as book 1, an expanded version of the far-future adventure as Book 2, and Book 3 picking up where this left off, exploring the way that the new alliances at the end changed everything. Recommended for the science-loving
5. Ann Leckie's Ancillary Mercy: This is the third book in a trilogy whose first book was a Hugo winner two years ago, and it's about mumble something living spaceship rights. Unfortunately, I haven't read the first two, and this suffers very badly from sequelitis, to the point where I was able to follow all the action but felt lost as to the plot, and this was clearly running with previous books' dangling threads to resolve issues whose importance is only barely established. It's a credit to Leckie that I cared about anything going on when I was clearly missing so much context, and the world was certainly an interesting one, but as a standalone work it just feels like there's too much missing to be declared the year's best. Vaguely Recommended (unless you enjoyed its prequels)
Best Novella (17500-40000 words)
I haven't voted in this category yet. Everyone whose reviews I've read seems to agree that all the works here are nomination-quality, and there are no Castalia House nominations I need to No Award on principle, so I don't feel like I need to have an opinion to give this category an ethical outcome. With more time I'd read these for pleasure, but I don't think I'll get to them before the 31st.
Best Novelette (7500-17500 words)
1. Hao Jingfang's Folding Beijing: This is a story of three cities which all occupy the same physical space. Beijing folds up and flips over every 24 hours, with millions of people put into hibernation to get out of each other's way: there's one 24-hour cycle for the rich folks, a second 16-hour cycle for the much larger middle class, and a nighttime 8-hour cycle for the vast mass of subsistence workers. We see it through the eyes of a poor laborer who becomes an illegal courier between the sides of the city, and the resulting show-heavy narrative presents a lot of difficult class issues without feeling preachy or trite. Once again, this works both as a compelling story with strong characters and also on a solid thematic level, in the tradition of the best speculative fiction. Highly Recommended
2. Brooke Bolander's "And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead": Pure high-octane ultraviolent cyberthriller, like a cross between Kill Bill and a Shadowrun snatch-and-grab gone wrong. The prose is beautiful, but if bad language curdles your toes, that's the least of this story's excesses. I loved it but it definitely requires doing the Hugo equivalent of turning your FIMFiction "View Mature" filter on (largely for gore). Recommended
3. Stephen King's Obits: A young newspaper reporter learns that he has the power to murder people by writing snarky obituaries about them. It's really quasi-horror with light fantasy elements, and honestly seems a little pedestrian next to all the other great stories I've been reading, though the actual text quality clearly shows off a master at work. My main hesitation, and maybe this is a personal thing, is that an author telling a first-person story about a journalist doing journalism things has always struck me as kind of like a musician singing a song about falling in love with a roadie: really, you're so devoid of inspiration that you're just going to cough your own life story onto the page? (Full disclosure: Everyone does that and it's not always bad; my own Quiet Boy and Moon Horse is heavily autobiographical, but at least the autobiographical elements are of a highly unique part of my life rather than "writers gonna write".) And the central relationship feels awfully fanservicey in a way that I'm not thrilled to have drive the plot. On the other hand, the twist here is appropriately chilling, and it kept me turning the pages. Recommended
4. No Award
I did not read "Flashpoint Titan" or "What Price Humanity?" because they were published by Castalia House.
Best Short Story (<7500 words)
And this is where, unfortunately, slating starts to really pollute the finalists. There's only one non-rabid pick on the ballot; guess which one it is.
1. Naomi Kritzer's Cat Pictures Please: I don't know that I'd call this a great story, but it's at least subtly good. This is the tale of an emergent AI living within our search algorithms, trying to work out morality for itself via trial and error as it attempts to diagnose and improve human lives (through search queries and search results, respectively). I can't decide if the most interesting thing it does is intentional or not: it's possible to read its cold moralizing (certain behaviors, which overlap strongly with modern liberal sensibilities, are objectively better based on data analysis) as anvilicious, but I suspect what it's going for is an unreliable narrator effect, and reading between the lines raises some interesting questions about the narrator's moral choices. For example, it narrates its success at helping a closeted religious right-wing family man hook up with another dude who gets him to accept his homosexuality and move away and go public with it: but it never mentions anything about the man's family, or the broader ripple effects of his abrupt departure, which turns this into something of a hidden argument against AI meddling. But I don't know how much credit I can give the author for cleverness there, because that's such deep subtext I suspect I'm making it up. The surface story is interesting and freshly narrated, if a bit thin. Recommended If You Like Overanalyzing
2. No Award. I'm ranking a few stories below it because they simply don't deserve a Hugo, but I still want them to score above my DQs.
3. S.R. Algernon's Asymmetrical Warfare: This is a one-page textbook Humanity Fuck Yeah story whose sole mark of distinction is that humanity is fighting a bunch of starfish-like aliens who are smart enough to cross interstellar space but too dumb to realize that humans don't regenerate the same way starfish do. I can't say it wasted my time just because it was so short, but its ballot spot really should have gone to something with bigger ideas. Vaguely Recommended
4. Chuck Tingle's Space Raptor Butt Invasion: Let's get two things straight. First, this should never have been on the Hugo ballot. Second, Chuck Tingle is a national treasure. This is exactly what you'd expect from the title -- excuse-plot gay porn with an astronaut dinosaur -- but, for all that the title promises some sort of ridiculous over-the-top parody, this is oddly subdued and played totally straight. ... Err, I mean, serious. (Though there is a "no homo bro" moment, so maybe it is straight after all.) No, Chuck's real value is in his performance art -- reading through his list of story titles is time well spent, and his Twitter antics are gorgeous. I'm looking forward to reading Pounded in the Butt by My Book "Pounded in the Butt by My Book 'Pounded in the Butt by My Book "Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt"'" just to have the meta break my brain, but I don't think there's anything to this particular story unless you have a specific fetish for gay space dinosaurs. Not Recommended
I didn't read Seven Kill Tiger because it was published by Castalia House, and I didn't read If You Were An Award, My Love because it's an unfunny attempt at Hugo satire posted on Vox's blog.
Best Related Work
Ugh. This category is a complete dumpster fire. It's got three Castalia House-published items (two of which are anti-SJW political hit pieces), a piece by Castalia House's blog editor Jeffro Johnson, and the odd one out accuses all gays of being child molesters. Yeah, that's a flat No Award.
The only one I even deigned to list on the ballot after No Award was Johnson's "The First Draft of my Appendix N book", which apparently -- I skimmed it but didn't read it -- is a series of reviews of all the books and media listed as inspirations by Gary Gygax in Appendix N of the original Dungeons & Dragons DMG. I am nominating it as my No Award runner-up out of a most-likely-misplaced hope that it's a work of actual scholarship rather than an unhinged rant about liberals ruining gaming.
(Update: After reading a fairly thorough review of it, I think I'm okay with my listing-below-No-Award placement.)
Best Graphic Story
Geez, I really should have started with the down-ballot trash and worked my way up. I'm just getting more and more depressed as I go. This wasn't bad bad, but last year it was almost untainted by the slates and had some goddamn amazing work, and this year it's mediocre at best.
1. Bechko/Hardman's Invisible Republic Vol. 1: This is the closest thing to a decent story the finalists are giving me. It's a sci-fi tale about a reporter trying to uncover the true story behind a revolutionary leader on a backwater planet. The reporter, unfortunately, is dull as dishwater and so are all his badly-paced and repetitive sections. The flashbacks through the diary of the leader's cousin, especially the section where she becomes a beekeeper, rescue this from pointlessness, and it starts picking up fast toward the end. The cliffhanger at the end promised to shift the framing story into interesting territory. Recommended If You Plan To Continue Reading Past Vol. 1
2. Lavie/Hanuka/Hanuka's The Divine: I like the core concept here, which is an urban-fantasy examination of child fighters in an overseas revolutionary war wielding super powerful magic and huge nature spirits. I just wish this had actually told a cool story about that, rather than danced around the edges of one. The fish-out-of-water moral family-man protagonist has a bizarre change of heart and switches sides to help the kids after being shipped overseas to the war zone, the asshole macho American marine predictably assholes his way into a face-heel turn, the pacing dragged, and, well, it had some memorable parts where the magic happened. Vaguely Recommended
3. No Award: You have no idea how tempted I was to set fire to this whole category. :(
4. Neil Gaiman/JH Williams' The Sandman: Overture: Sweet Luna's teats, what the hell is happening this year, I just No Awarded Neil Gaiman. D: But the sad truth is that I can't justify calling this a good standalone story. I've read through the whole Sandman series, but it's been a while, so I know who all of the bit characters are but I don't remember their plot arcs, and since this is basically one giant geek orgasm of "what happened to set up the bit characters' plot arcs?" it just had no emotional impact for me. I feel like this is one giant in-joke I'm missing. I did like how Dream ended up being in two parts, one of which was the Dream of Cats, and the interaction between his two halves as they walked toward whatever the hell they were trying to do in the city of stars that was important for reasons I still don't understand, but I finished the whole thing and I don't think I could explain the plot to you. Bring your Sandman Cliff's Notes if you're going to try to tackle this, or maybe skip it and read literally anything else Gaiman has ever written, because this is the first time I've ever felt like I've wasted my time with a book of his. Vaguely Recommended
5. Carter/Rydell's Erin Dies Alone: Oh joy, a gaming webcomic. I'll give this serial points for excellent art at least, and the premise (a reclusive geek girl finds herself talking to an imaginary friend from her childhood, starts playing vidja games with it, and has wacky game-based adventures that are ambiguously maybe-or-maybe-not actually within the gaming world) has some interesting moments -- especially when a friend of hers drops her medication through the mail slot, and the imaginary friend grabs the bottle and then empties it down the toilet. And then the 2015 material (what I'm judging for the Hugos) ends right as it's getting interesting -- with a video game character escaping the game to also become real. Unfortunately, this has a lot of symptoms of a first-year webcomic; it's super gaming-in-joke heavy, has erratically funny moments but consistently fails to punchline, and really tries to have its cake and eat it too on how real the game worlds are. It definitely shows signs of getting better as it goes along, but on the basis of the material to be judged I'm not overly impressed yet -- and certainly not next to the sort of heavy hitters like Saga and Ms. Marvel that blew me away last year. Vaguely Recommended
6. Aaron Williams' Full Frontal Nerdity: The material up for consideration here is a daily punchline strip for vidja gamers, by vidja gamers, and in many cases doesn't even try to make sense if you're not a vidja gamer. So basically it's a crossover which only sporadically explains its source. I have to note that Williams is brilliant in the right context -- were this Nodwick I would Hugo it in a second -- but I got like maybe one chuckle out of 30 strips and then gave up. Not Recommended
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
This is basically "the movie category": the contenders are The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ex Machina, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I've only seen three of the five, and I don't think I can fairly vote without seeing the other two. But I did throw in a top vote for Mad Max because that movie was genuinely the most awesome film I've seen in years; it's very rare for me to walk out of a theater and say "Yeah, that was a good movie, it shut up my inner critic and I have no nitpicks," but that did it.
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
aka "The My Little Pony category." Its competition is Doctor Who: "Heaven Sent"; Grimm: "Headache"; Jessica Jones: "AKA Smile"; and Supernatural: "Just My Imagination", four episodes I haven't watched from four series I don't watch and have no plans to start. So I basically threw in the obligatory vote for MLP and left the rest blank.
All this Rabid Puppies shit creeps me the hell out. I swear I looked at my coffee one morning, looked up, and suddenly there's a bunch of self-admitted neo-nazis in my fandoms. How did they get here? How long have they been here?
It's kinda like getting pissed at a family friend's wedding where the only whisky in the open bar is Bells, and waking up the next day next to a bridesmaid with white power tattoos and an interesting case of herpes.
Shit, I wonder if this is what the Dead Kennedys felt like in 1980...
I have dedicated I dislike Vox Day very much.
I'm surprised some of the nominees haven't already tried mailing bombs to him, or started paying hackers to mess with his whole life, or something.
4121879
To be fair, I'm pretty sure (or at least, like to tell myself) that a lot of the Rabid Puppies stuff is just people who just want to burn down the Hugos/troll people rather than actual neo-Nazis. Though Vox Day is either nuts or pretends to be nuts.
Sadly, this all exposed the fact that the Hugos were previously (for several decades) dominated by campaigning and tit-for-tat nominations, largely for commercial promotion - as well as exposed that virtually no one actually voted on them, making them a lot less prestigious. So my ability to actually feel sorry for the people running them is, alas, sharply limited.
Still, this whole thing sort of illustrates the fact that if not many people vote on something, it can be overwhelmed by trolls pretty easily - and frankly, it probably can be anyway. I look forward to their voting proposal being totally ineffective and next year being just as bad.
Though I have to say that the nomination of Space Raptor Butt Invasion amused me. If all of their trolling was so... well, trolltastic, it'd almost be forgivable.
Sadly, outside of the novels, novelettes, and video categories, this year sounds like a wasteland.
And ALSO, like, the Sad Puppies that spawned the Rabid Puppies are equally terrible. I might loathe the Rabid Puppies, but I understand them. V*x D*y is an avowed white supremacist, and for the most part he wants to promote speculative fiction with an openly racist bent. He's an awful excuse for a human, but if you self-identify as a racist it's logical to then say 'I want to see more explicitly racist fiction, because as a racist terrible person, I feel that my tastes are not catered to.'
But the Sad Puppies who preceded him didn't ask for that. They said that modern science fiction and fantasy was too focused on social issues and lofty themes, and had completely abandoned its Golden-Age glory of exciting adventures and tales of daring.
That's bonkers. I cannot think of a single formative work of fantasy published in the last century that isn't filled with political and social themes. Lord of the Rings is practically a three-volume commentary on war and loss. Conan the Barbarian is never far from going into a page-length lecture on what a Nietzschean superhuman its hero is. Vance goes all over the place with his fantasy work, but never strays from the 'speculative' part of speculative fiction. C.S. Lewis is fuckin... it's CS Fucking Lewis, you cannot call his work devoid of social commentary with a straight face.
I don't even need to talk about Golden Age science fiction, because the conceit that the genre that spawned Philip Dick, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Octavia Butler, James Tiptree, and Robert Heinlein was ever apolitical is like... I can't even chalk that down to ignorance.
I understand longing to live in an ill-defined Golden Era, a Happy Days 1950s with the cool aesthetics and the good music, because like, there's a lot to pick and choose from in an era, a lot of bad stuff that gets forgotten or goes unmentioned... but doing the same for a genre of writing? The books are still here! We know exactly what they wrote about! No ambiguity about it, you can't read the 'golden age' canon of sci-fi works and come away with the impression that they're breezy and free of social commentary if you have the reading ability of a bright child.
Folding Beijing sounds fantastic. I'll have to keep an eye out for the title the next time I go book-hunting.
Steven King Presents: Death Note
Mad Max was probably the best pick, though I never did see the Martian. The real shame in the TV category is that Agents of SHIELD wasn't nominated. :( They had an episode that was considerably better sci-fi than Jessica Jones. (Not that that series was bad, it's just not sci-fi.)
Mad Max: The Fury Road is doubly deserving of your vote, because it really is one hell of an awesome movie, and because it's an extended post-apocalyptic prosthetic middle finger to all the toxic masculinity and self-destructive macho bullshit that VD and co. so love.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought Seveneves felt like two novels kludged together. I think Stephenson should've just gone with the first story, about the rush for survival, and maybe extended it a bit, rather than try to answer the lingering questions with what was essentially an entirely separate story.
I guess you could say that these are the dog days of science fiction!
You and I apparently read a completely different Dresden Files.
Dresden acts like a square jawed manly man, or tries to, but it's often subverted by his own self deprecation, and how scared, confused, depressed, or helpless he often feels. Not to mention everyone around him is either aware he's putting on a front, or makes fun of him for being behind the times. If I remember correctly, even Michael thinks he's being a square for being a chaste stoic to Molly. He also doesn't win his fights by "Manning" his problems away, he wins them by being clever and never giving up, and also by being willing to work with the devil, within reason, to get what he needs to get done.
Dresden isn't Super Manly Man. He's a scared nerd in way over his head who tries to act like a manly man because that's his best guess at what scared nerds should do in his position.
The Hugo's are pointless last time I read anything written by a Hugo winning book it was a bloody SJW book and basically screamed that all men loved killing and destroying everything this is why I read only independent writer's and stuff written by baen books writers like my fav john Ringo
If you find yourself with 50 minutes to spend, try to watch the nominated Dr. Who episode, Heaven Sent. It is a fascinating story about time travel and one that I believe stands alone very well. I'd love to hear what someone who doesn't watch Dr. Who takes from it.
That, coming from you, brings to mind a quote from the dust jacket of A Wise Man's Fear:
"There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man."
Kudos for forging ahead and investing your time in the awards process, regardless of controversy
4122692
I'll have to see if I can. Is it on Youtube somewhere?
4122979
More "disappointed," I think, though I know what you mean. I think I ever only saw my dad get mad ... twice? in my life, and one of those times, he punched through a wall.
4122617
My compliments on walking the tightrope of Poe's Law.
4122135
4121959
If you've seen all the nominated shows and have opinions on them, I'm happy to be a proxy vote for you in that category. It's that or leave my ballot blank.
4122153
Mmm. I think there was some careless hyperbole in my characterization of Dresden, but let me try it again.
First of all, I agree with what you're saying, and in fact the moments when it does call out Harry's toxic masculinity are among the best moments in the series. All credit to Butcher for Karrin Murphy not putting up with Harry's bullshit, and for him sticking to his guns when writing the long-term fallout of her reactions to Harry's decisions, and having the contours of their relationship be defined by that.
On the scale of 1 to OH JOHN RINGO NO, the series really is not super objectionable. Maybe a 2 or 3 at most, and that self-consciousness is a large reason why.
But as I've said to many Writeoff participants: writing an asshole protagonist is commendable as effective characterization, but it still leaves you the problem that you're writing about an asshole. Harry is flawed in a very specific way that I contend is familiar in the context of toxic masculinity and more specifically toxic masculine power fantasies, and while Butcher's got a decent track record of calling that out, that behavior still fundamentally works. Harry's masculinity insists on stupid self-sacrifices in the name of nobility, he's got major hang-ups over chivalry and purity that end up becoming crucial plot points that work out in his favor (Lasciel's coin in particular, and to some extent his relationship with Thomas) ... it's not so much that he's got archaic and occasionally problematic attitudes as that the world around him seems to be shaped in such a way that those attitudes are the right thing.
Like I said, it doesn't keep me from enjoying the books, but the power fantasy is showing, and it's not a comfortable power fantasy for me.
4121950
You might have a problem finding it in print. It's a short story by a Chinese author that was printed in translation in ... um ... Lightspeed magazine, I think? ... (*googles*) Nope, Uncanny. Actually, the whole thing is online! Give it a read.
4122025
I wouldn't upvote it on the middle-finger effect alone, but I won't deny that makes it even sweeter.
4121911
I'm sure he's been doxxed and/or harassed, if only because virtually everyone online with strong opinions on the culture wars has that happen, but not even Vox deserves death threats, and more importantly I don't want to be part of a community where that's the default response to assholes.
I wasn't even aware the Hugos had a category for comics
hrmm... doesn't seem very promising though
4123165
Not this year. :( But last year introduced me to Saga, which I strongly recommend, and to the Muslim-teenager reboot of Ms. Marvel, which is equally good (if more mainstream and less crazy awesome on the worldbuilding) and won and deserved it.
4123226
but Girl Genius won 3 years in a row? 
that looks like an interesting year I'll have to check out.
looking at the list of previous winners is a mixed bag... Ursula Vernon is awesome!
4121925
Good point. The Sad Puppies felt they had a moral reason to vote slate, so they did. Thats OK by me as they still cared about the genre. The Rabid Puppies are, well, rabid.
By the way, have you watched Brendaniel's reading of Chuck Tingle's Pounded by the Pound? It just may be the best gay sentient coin x human erotica I've ever seen. Not that there's many contenders.
4121913
The way I understand E Pluribus to work, to overwhelm it you need like 5 times as many voters as the next anything to do it.
That's not gonna happen.
4123834
The way it works is that people each have 1 vote for each category, divided amongst any number of nominations they make. So if you vote for 5 things, that's 1/5th of a vote to each. The more things you vote for, the less your vote counts for for each of them. Whether or not it actually helps things is entirely dependent on voting habits. It is likely to make getting troll (or tit-for-tat) nominees on even easier, but depending on how people nominate stuff, it may or may not be harder to dominate entire categories. If people mostly nominate five things for each category, it won't help at all. If a lot of people only vote for one thing in each category, it could help a fair bit. It also depends on the disparity between the number of trolls and everyone else in a category.
To be honest, I doubt it is going to help unless people generally nominate significantly less than five things per category. And frankly, it makes it much easier for you to get together a relatively small group of people and vote straight-line down, one vote in each category for works of your choice, and to basically ensure you're going to get your one pick into each category (save possibly the very popular ones). So it may defuse some such trolling, but it may be no less corrosive, as a very small but devoted number of people who only nominate one thing in a category have a lot more power than people who nominate five things.
4123964
There's more to it than that. When you first submit your nominees, if you nominate 5 it's 1/5 a vote for each. However, then the system starts dropping the lowest votegetter - and each time one of yours is dropped, your vote re-distributes. So there's an instant runoff element at play here - and if 3 of my entries get KO'd, my vote is now worth 1/2 a vote to the last two.
The Puppy types will still be able to nab 1-2 slots on ballots if they keep wanting to waste money, but they're not gonna utterly sweep something any longer
Point of order: Full Frontal Nerdity is about tabletop games.
If you couldn't tell that from a quick scan, this says more about it than you, though. It's far from the author's finest work (which you correctly identified as Nodwick.)
Ooh, story recommendations. I can add them all to the long list of things I want to read after I finish reading Culture, which I haven't read in weeks! :D
Seriously, though, some of this does sound really sweet. I'll have to check it out. Thanks for Suffering The Hugo Box for the rest of us.
4124732
This just made me stop and do some internet research, because I know I've seen Full Frontal Nerdity as a tabletop gaming strip before (and frankly enjoyed it a lot more), but the ones I read were all explicitly vidja game-based.
Deepening the mystery, the official Hugo Awards website says that the finalist is "Full Frontal Nerdity by Aaron Williams (ffn.nodwick.com)", and that URL goes to tabletop gaming strips.
I had to go back to my ballot to figure it out. The listing on the voting form of my official Hugo ballot is printed thusly:
The escapistmagazine.com strips are solely vidja gaming ones without any tabletop jokes, and those are the ones I evaluated. (The Hugo voter packet I downloaded, which contains copies of many of the finalists, had nothing at all for FFN, most likely because it is available free online.)
It's kind of a shame I scored it based on the official ballot instructions -- I found the tabletop ones way funnier (almost certainly because I'm a much more hardcore tabletop gamer than a vidja gamer).
4125697 ...part of me thinks that those strips got on the ballot because of the Escapist's support of Gamergate, a cause Vox Day champions. Part of me hopes that's not the case.
4121925
Sorry, Chuck, but you don't know what you're talking about. I read "Golden Age" science fiction very heavily back in the day.
Dick and Bradbury aren't political. Heinlein became political late in his career, in the 2nd half of the 1960s. Octavia Butler & James Tiptree are among the people the Sad Puppies are complaining about, especially Tiptree, who wrote the vilest, most hate-filled piece of literature I've ever read, Houston, Houston, Can You Read?--a story about how much better off the world would be if all the men died and only women were left, in which we learn that all men are uncontrollable rapists. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula sometime in the mid-1970s.
Everything you listed came from the 1960s or later. "Golden age" science fiction fandom--the part of fandom that talks about a "Golden Age"--hated the science fiction of the 1960s. That was when it became more sociological than geeking out about neutron stars and engineering. The complaints of the Sad Puppies start with some of the people you're writing about. You only forgot to list Ursula LeGuin.
The actual "Golden Age" was before all that; it was people like Campbell, Asimov, Clarke, & Clement. It was largely hard SF. There were exceptions like Cordwainer Smith, who wrote very good sociological SF in the 1930s. There were people who weren't hard SF and weren't sociological, but psychological, like Eric Frank Russell, Ray Bradbury, & Alfred Bester. But there was very little intentionally political SF. For one thing, SF was American and America wasn't politically polarized in the 1940s and 1950s. But mostly, SF was much more a geek thing.
Nothing is entirely apolitical--Campbell's story "Who Goes There?" can be read as xenophobia, for example, as can a lot of SF movies from the 1950s. "The Cold Equations" has an anti-feminist interpretation. But SF in those days was only accidentally political.
4127388
Bradbury wrote The Martian Chronicles and Dick ended up on a government watch list for being so anti-war.
That's some fuckin' next level trolling, right there buddy.
This could only be funnier if you tried to tell me that Robert E Howard wasn't political.
4127474 Dick was personally political, but his novels don't have a clear political message. You could call The Man in the High Castle anti-war, because one of its messages is that it wouldn't have mattered if the Axis had won WW2. But they were primarily about knowing what is real.
Bradbury wrote Martian Chronicles, which I thought you might bring up, and that isn't "political" the way we use the word today. It's anti-war. That's not partisan--nearly everybody in 1950 was anti-war; they disagreed about how to avoid war. He started writing those stories in 1950, and the political content was "Let's not blow ourselves up."
In any case, I've read everything Bradbury wrote before about 1990. He wasn't political. He wasn't interested in writing about political issues. He was interested in people.
More importantly to the puppies, readers didn't judge books by their politics in those days.
Bottom line still is that you are ridiculing someone else for speaking correctly about something you know nothing about, and being very rude while doing it. Today's disastrous political scene, and Trump's candidacy, were brought about by people on both sides doing what you're doing--ranting and insulting instead of talking and listening. Try showing some common courtesy.
I'm not a fan of that aspect of the Golden Age; its exciting adventures and tales of daring bored me. That's why I never read Robert Howard. But the Puppies are describing what happened in the late 1960s much more accurately than you are. By "modern" here they would mean post-1965. New Wave.
4127794
His short stories were incredibly political. You could not read a Philip K Dick short story anthology and come away with the idea that he was some smart fake-reality boy who didn't care for politics or social commentary no siree, unless you were a Idiot. Nanny, Second Variety, The Skull, The Defenders... There were more politics in Philip Dick's humongous short story/novella output than there were mindfucks.
I respect that you've got your own set of opinions on this matter, Bad Horse, but don't piss on my leg and tell me that writing Way in the Middle of the Air in the year of our Lord 19-fuckin-50 was an apolitical, non-partisan act.
4127794
Wow, I missed this! That's some fine analysizing right there. Cold War hawks wanted peace the same as the rest of the squishes, they just thought you could avoid war by having a different war.
It's like Tacitus said: Boy howdy, this desert is pretty dang peaceful!
4127388 4127474
Okay, Chuck, rein it in. I love you, man, and I think the facts are closer to your side — but I've never seen Bad Horse troll, and you are getting too personal. It's really worth contemplating his point that insults radicalize, and cause people to unproductively dig in their heels.
Anyway.
From here, it looks like you two are both really smart guys who are talking past each other right now. This is my space and I'd prefer to stop and figure out the disconnect before going any further. Which I think I know: Chuck is talking about the nostalgia as the Sad Puppies themselves define it — but he incorrectly used the term "Golden Age", which has a different meaning, and that's where Bad Horse seems to have jumped in.
Bad, what you have to realize is that the official position of the Sad Puppies doesn't actually match your defense. The Sad Puppies 3 manifesto was explicit that the decay began around the turn of the century, and their ideal SF is from the decades Chuck cites:
(n.b. this line in particular is particularly ironic:
… since the 1960s Star Trek was so apolitical as to feature the world's first televised interracial kiss.)
A movement is capable of more diversity than a single manifesto, but I simply haven't seen the Puppies argue that we should return to "Golden Age" SF as Bad Horse (and the world) define it. If anything, the manifesto is something of a high watermark for the "keep it apolitical" camp. For example, Larry Correia, who created the Sads, cites Robert Heinlein as among the authors who today's "voting clique" would discard. In that same essay, he says (emphasis mine): "I launched the Sad Puppies campaign with the idea that if I could get authors with the wrong politics onto the Hugo ballot, I could prove to the world that the Hugos were in fact what you are all now admitting that they are."
And now I'm getting a little confused, because it doesn't look like anyone here is in favor of the proposition that Golden Age SF is the ideal to which we should aspire. Can we go back to first principles and say what we do want to see in SF? Is this a defense of the Sad Puppies' stated goals, or are we talking about our own literary goals and preferences? I wonder if our tastes aren't a lot more similar than they appear.
Uhhh…
It also seems bizarre to me to classify Bradbury as apolitical. I mean, Fahrenheit 451 feels no less explicitly political than, say, Animal Farm; the distinction I can spot it is that as a response to Nazi book-burnings it wasn't controversial. Animal Farm (and is that Golden Age SFF? It's certainly SFF-flavored) might be a more interesting case, as it was anti-Communist in an era when the U.S./Russia standoff was first starting to crystallize into the century-defining Cold War.
… and of course iTunes just decided to play from my music library:
4128321 4128207 Yes, "Way in the Middle of the Air" was liberal in 1950. Yes, Fahrenheit 451 is anti-communist/anti-fascist.
But like I said, I've read everything Bradbury wrote up until about 1990. Most of what he wrote was
- nostalgic recollections of childhood in a small town in the 1920s
- stories about small town life in Ireland
- stories about life in Mexico
- stories about the carnival
- the kind of "horror stories" he liked, which were ones that show sympathy for the monster
- psychological stories about individuals with odd obsessions
To call him "political" shows ignorance of his body of work.
Certainly there were political SF stories written in the 1950s, but if you pulled a Heinlein juvenile off the shelf you'd be hard-pressed to discern his politics from it. Asimov, Clark, Pohl, Clement--they weren't deliberately political.
More importantly, the readers didn't read SF for the politics before about 1965. Awards weren't given to satisfy gender quotas or reward or punish authors for their political views. It wasn't on the radar.
11 of the last 12 Nebula awards handed out were given to women--in a field in which only 1 in 4 manuscript submissions are by women. The odds of that happening by chance are 1 in 350,000. The one man who won a Nebula in that time, Jeff Vandermeer, won it for a novel with an all-female cast.
If we go back to 2006, 30 of the last 45 Nebula award winners were women. (I'm not counting scripts because most people don't keep track of them, & they're part of a different publishing world.) I'm too lazy to calculate the odds of that happening by chance, but it's quite small.
If you compare the themes of the stories nominated and awarded the Nebulas and the Hugos over the past 10 years, or if you Google them and read discussions of them on Goodreads or Amazon, you'll find the results dominated by discussion of race, gender, culture, religion, and colonialism. The SFWA might as well rename themselves the Sociological Fiction Writers of America.
I personally like sociological fiction better than hard science fiction now, but I know people who don't care about sociology and want their SF to be about science, and I intellectually understand their sense that their field, the thing they loved and put so much energy into, has been taken from them.
The Puppies are upset, I think, not about the shift from science to sociology, but about the increasing repression of diversity within the field. The sleight of hand going on is that we're being distracted with an increasing diversity of skin color and gender while diversity of opinion is eliminated. Today, it would be difficult for a novel with a pro-free-market slant to win a major award, even though we live in a society based on the free market, the vast majority of whose citizens are in favor of the free market.
How about a novel suggesting that men and women have significant inherent psychological differences? Here's a small-sample poll that comes out 83% in favor of the proposition that "men and women are different". A 2009 poll by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies shows 70% of respondents believe "the apparent mental and emotional differences between men and women" are either mainly biological, or both biological and cultural.
But how likely would such a novel be to win a Nebula or a Hugo?
SF bloggers rant endlessly about the need for "diversity", yet would find it intolerable if an award were given to a story that were, say, "Trumpian" (supposing that's an identifiable ideology)--even though Trump was the favorite candidate of about a sixth (I think?) of America's population.
True commitment to diversity means letting in Trump supporters.
You may be tempted to object, "But they're stupid and wrong!" But the entire point of multi-culturalism is that you aren't allowed to judge what's stupid and wrong. Doing that is colonialism--the attitude that it is possible to decide which of two cultures is superior.
4128788
I'm sorry, but I got to "ignorance of his body of work" and my brain halfway split. Bradbury's body of work was largely informed by his personal experiences, tastes and desires, but there's something disingenuous about saying that because he wrote works that you widely consider apolitical that none of his other stories therefore make him a 'political' writer. Even if, in many cases, those stories are the ones he's best remembered for both in the general public and the stories most likely to introduce him to new readers. Even his horror stories and short story anthologies often include what are inherently political statements. Fahrenheit 451 was hardly the only time in his career he ever explicitly wrote a text about the dangers and foolishness of censorship. Calling him "not political" or "political" is effectively just giving primacy to how the Sad Puppies seem to define political or non-political stories. It is "not political" if it makes no points which the reader perceives as partisan. It is "political" if it does. And that isn't even going into the awkwardness of trying to define whether any work can be completely apolitical when every story is framed by the expectations of both the author and reader. The most you can say is that some works are deliberately political and some are not.
I need to read Folding Beijing, but that story at least seems inherently pro-free-market on some levels, unless you count being deeply critical of an enfranchised class of wealthy pseudo-nobility and social structures which discourage a lack of social mobility between upper, middle, and lower class to be inherent values of the free market. Which is not the impression I came away with from everything I've ever learned about free markets. Also: what.
Are you... are you insisting that among women and non-white people there's some kind of bizarre hive mind that makes it so none of us ever vote Republican or having differing tastes, biases, and approaches to writing genres? Or is that an unfortunate unconsidered implication to your construction of a narrative where a push for inclusion of more stories by and about women and non-white people is coupled with a reduction in allowed opinions? I'm genuinely terrified now. Even the Republican party has at this point allowed black people, women, and Asian-americans a platform at their convention - not to significantly talk about issues unique to any of those groups, mind, but still. You are effectively saying that a push for diversity in authors and protagonists is somehow a push against diversity in political camp and that's something that only exists in fiction.
Do you have examples that aren't hypotheticals? Because at this point you're just saying it won't win without hanging your assertion on the success or failure of any one particular text. I cannot actually disprove a statement about a hypothetical because you're talking about a book that, for all intents and purposes, does not exist. I'm sure there are several that fit the description, but even then you have to make an argument that they are meritorious science fiction, and then argue the 'why'. If you don't do that, you're effectively just arguing that books are succeeding in the Hugos because of their political bent rather than any inherent value in the texts themselves, or because they connected with readers. I really don't know what you're even on about.
Also, last I checked Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, both of which are products of Orson Scott Card, (deservedly) won both the Hugo and Nebula awards as late as '85, and back in '90 the award went to Hyperion which - while not a "political" novel - certainly isn't part of this weird anti-free-market let's not allow for diverse opinions soup you seem to be talking about.
I'm terribly sorry, but just because I let Strom Thurmond take the floor is not tantamount to a need to endorse his fiction.
Your entire post sort of reeks of this unspoken assertion that the works currently in consideration for the Hugo and/or Nebula award are overwhelmingly not there because they deserve recognition, they are there because they serve the specific political agenda of a specific group. As opposed to the slates, which are - deliberately - there because they serve to make a political statement on the behalf of a specific group. I sympathize with the puppies only insofar as I am too blinded by nostalgia constantly, but you are somehow making this about "the Hugos and Nebulas have no room for Trumpian ideology and that's bad" without actually explaining what the stories that are being excluded are. You are not defending fiction, you are defending the idea of these stories without actually endorsing whether or not they qualified in the first place.
Also as much as you're citing one-sixth of the US supporting Trump, has it occurred to you that maybe that isn't a direct indication that they also form a similarly-sized bloc of sci-fi readership? Or sci-fi readership who actually cares about the Hugos?
Look if you want to take this discussion further, I'm going to suggest we go to PM, but at this point I find myself wholly unable to sympathize either with the puppies or with your defense.
4129555
No; women and non-white people who did such things would probably not win awards either, though I suspect they get more of a pass. White men in SF are constantly scrutinized for sexism and racism. Last night I read a review of a Kim Stanley Robinson book that accused him of being a racist colonialist. (Maybe he is; I've never read his books.) One line of evidence was that his characters talked about a planet being colonized in terms of its resources.
This even though the planet was uninhabited.
Look up the political affiliations of the Nebula winners since 2007. Count how many Republicans there are. I don't know where you would find this information, but it's safe to assume from the public statements of all the male Nebula winners of the past decade whom I'm familiar with that none of them are Republican. I haven't checked the female winners.
The justification for enforced "diversity" in fiction is that we need to include more different viewpoints rather than pander to our own judgements and preferences. Multi-culturalism began in opposition to the canon, and it attacked the canon for being merit-based. The argument was that merit is a cultural construct, and so we can't stand outside the culture and make valid merit judgements. Therefore, inclusion in the canon should be proportional to representation in the population. Then, we will at least have books which have merit according to the various notions of "merit" in the population.
Look, for instance, at this guardian article. Its point is that the readers polled vastly prefer the SF books of men to the SF books of women, at a ratio of 24:1. This is seen as a problem to be solved. The ratio is supposed to be 1:1, regardless of the contents of the books, regardless of whether the mostly male readers might be more in tune with male writers. [1]
-----
[1] Notice also that the majority of reader comments are angry at the Guardian for insisting on seeing this as sexism. This is a consistent pattern you'll see when reader comments are enabled: The people writing articles in respected places like Locus, PEN, and the Guardian are completely out-of-touch with their readership, who are usually 60% to 95% fed up with the industry's reverse sexism and reverse racism. Yes; I've counted. And that's on websites with a nearly 100% liberal readership, like the Guardian and reddit.
-----
If you use this reasoning, you have to apply it across the board. You have to also ask where the Trump supporters are in that list of writers, and if there aren't enough, you have to go out and recruit them, the way editors go out and recruit female and POC writers today for anthologies. It's inconsistent to critique the content of the books of Trump supporters as a whole, but declare that questions about the merits of books by women are off-limits.
Consider that Islam, like the Republican Party today, is not an ethnicity, but a political and religious organization. In fact it has a broader ethnic base than the Republican Party does. Its views are much farther right than those of the Republican Party. Yet the anti-Puppy folks would piss themselves with glee to see an Islamic writer win a Nebula, and explode in rage if a Trump supporter did.
Why? Because Muslims aren't a political threat in American politics today, and because one winning would be seen as a blow to the Republicans. "Diversity" isn't about diversity at all. It's become a shell game to eliminate political opposition.
Blacks comprise about 2% of sci-fi readership, yet we're supposed to give them awards at a rate that is at least proportional to their presence in the population. I've read many articles complaining about blacks being under-represented in the publishing industry and in awards, even though they're over-represented when compared to the readership in question, because they're under-represented compared to the US population as a whole. The logic is that we must publish more books by blacks in order to attract more of them into [whatever fandom or readership is being discussed]. If this logic applies to blacks, it must apply to Trump supporters as well.
No; you don't get to jump in, snipe, and then call an end to the discussion.
4129676
Okay, we're going there then.
Assumption: Islam is a single organization and united religious entity. Assumption: its political and religious branches always are one hundred percent united across every major nation where Islam is a cultural force. Assumption: Trump as a political threat is the reason anyone dislikes Trump. Assumption: The content of that Nebula would actually be palatable purely because the author is Muslim.
What a sad world you live in, where publishers and editors must find "diversity" not because diversity in any way pleases people or sells, but because they're serving a disproportionate readership who apparently is not being catered to and yet have not yet left.
I give up. You win. I apologize for misreading what you were saying earlier, but I don't think "diversity is a tool to destroy political rivals" is any less inherently silly and limiting.
I didn't call an end. I requested we take it private. I don't know why you think those two things are intrinsically the same.
Yeah this conversation is profitable for no one at this point.
4129728
I made none of those assumptions.
The relevant consideration in this comparison is whether both "cultures", Islam and "Trumpism", provide a set of assumptions and a way of thinking, a perspective. Whether, in Heidegger and Gadamer's terms, they provide a hermeneutic circle. I think both do. (It doesn't matter if you have to divide Islam into, say, Sunni and Shi'ite.)
Any culture which also provides a perspective, according to the reasoning which is regularly used on the Internet to justify publishing more women, black, or other minority SF writers, should also be represented proportionally to its presence in the population.
A better objection would have been to ask how demanding multi-cultural stories eliminates political opposition and diverse opinions, when those opinions are not about diversity or multi-culturalism. There are several mechanisms, and they're not immediately obvious unless you've studied some history. But eventually, "diversity", "racism", "sexism", etc., become clubs to beat one's competitors with, just as the terms "heretic", "bourgeois", "counter-revolutionary", and "Semitic" were used in the Middle Ages, in Soviet Russia, and in Nazi Germany. Almost none of the writers or scientists executed for counter-revolutionary sentiment in Russia were counter-revolutionaries. They were just in the way of more-vicious people like Lysenko.
4130734
I am trying very hard to cut away the chaff here and engage with your primary point. I am trying very hard. There are a lot of distractions.
Such as your effortless pivot from blasting Tiptree for her assertion of significant inherent gender psychological differences:
To the following:
That feels like a cheap shot, so I don't want to make a point of it: but I'm citing it as part of a larger pattern of my frustration, that your argument is eating its own tail and I'm struggling to find out where the head is. Another example: after having spent over half the thread vigorously protesting that Ray Bradbury was apolitical before 1990, you yourself are citing as evidence a political statement from him! (Published. In a novel. Which was itself political. And which, by the way, won a Retro Hugo in 2004.)
I mean, what's going on there? Honest question. Do you genuinely not see "minorities should not interfere with aesthetics" as political? Are you using a definition of "political" that makes defending the status quo an apolitical act? Do his statements transcend politics because he's responding instead of initiating?
aaaaaagggghhhh that's because until the mid-1960s, women and minorities were systematically excluded from science fiction. It took me 15 seconds with wikipedia to learn that the 1966 "Analog Science Fiction and Fact All-Time Poll" did not list any novels by women — not even Mary Shelley's 1918 Frankenstein. In 1960, at the age of 13, Octavia Butler was told by her aunt "Honey ... Negroes can't be writers", and given that I am struggling to come up with any big-name black SFF authors before her and Delany (possibly aside from George Schuyler's pulp fiction in the 30s), that seems less like cynicism and more like pragmatism. If every successful author is a white male then of course nobody's doing quota counting of gender/racial representation! It's a solid bloc!
Can we agree that, looking back from 2016, there exists ample proof that female authors can write at an award-worthy, classics-worthy level; and therefore that their complete absence from Golden Age science fiction is (statistically overwhelmingly likely to be) the effect of something other than merit? (I sure hope so, because that's a stronger version of the argument that you're making about the current day and conservative authors.)
You've spoken harshly in opposition to the complaints of 4% female representation in the Guardian poll.[1] (Is your position that merit-based publication requires being blind to the numbers? That seems to be what I'm reading.) Can we at least agree that zero percent representation in top Golden Age authors rises to the level of "a problem to be fixed"?
Because you've argued (apparently as part of a reductio ad absurdum; you've been careful to point out "by that logic" etc.) that liberals have a moral obligation to create quotas for conservative authors, but you have also argued (and this seems like your genuine point) that all such systems should be thrown out and work should be judged strictly on merit.
Basically, what I'm trying to establish here is: if a group is systematically excluded, do you see it as legitimate to tip the scales on their behalf?
Because if you do, then this becomes an argument of degree (and deservingness), and that's very different than an argument of principle.
--
[1] On further reflection, that's another eating-its-own-tail moment. Why is it unobjectionable that a best-of list can be 4% female, but objectionable that a different best-of list can be 9% male?
4132421
As you already know, because you are an adult living in the world with open eyes, asserting inherent psychological differences that say whites are bad or men are bad is allowable, as is saying that women are better than men, or that Native Americans are better than whites. For instance, Jeff Vandermeer can say this, and still win a Nebula:
(It also didn't hurt that he was working on the anthology "Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology" at the time he became the only male author to win a Nebula in the past 3 years.)
And Danielle Pafunda can say this in VIDA, the website for "women in literary arts", when explaining why we should suddenly ignore the slush pile numbers now that they show women have an advantage in getting published:
Psychology Today can ask "Why are Men So Violent?" and "Why are men more violent?" But God help anybody who runs an article titled "Why are blacks so violent?", though US homicide data supports both statements about equally.
Yes. A conservative statement. Cited from the introduction to the book you cited as, I believe, proof that Bradbury was obviously a liberal. Bradbury was in fact an extreme conservative. I quoted Bradbury to make the point that when I said Bradbury's writings were not politically charged, I meant you couldn't read his books and then easily know which way he would vote in an election. (A psychologist could, but it's not right on the surface.).
How can I say this politely: I think you're making that up. Until the mid-1960s, women and minorities were mostly uninterested in science fiction. Some women wrote SF regularly and were popular, like Judith Merril, Andre Norton, and C. L. Moore. But women, even when they wrote SF, were unlikely to write novels, because only professional writers wrote novels, and women at the time were unlikely to be professionals.
Men were sexist in the golden age--and so were women. That has been parlayed into a false narrative that there was sexism in golden age, and sexism means discrimination against female authors. Well, no, it doesn't. They are not synonyms. That Isaac Asimov groped women doesn't mean women were kept from publishing. There was suspicion of discrimination against women at the time, as witnessed in that some women used male names or ambiguous names, but we don't have the data to measure it, and the only female author who was able to keep her identity as a female secret from publishers and the inner fandom was James Tiptree in the 1970s. There probably was a prejudice that women were less likely to get their science right (and it was probably correct at that time).
So, I would expect women to be at some disadvantage at that time. But I'm not aware of any data or even any anecdotes suggesting men were more likely to be published than women, or that women were discouraged from participating in SF conventions. John Campbell was very conservative, almost certainly racist, and slightly insane, but he published C. L. Moore regularly. It's clear that women weren't "systematically excluded from science fiction."
Here's a description of a book which may cast more light on the subject, but it costs $132:
For minorities, we just don't have any data. Probably blacks were excluded from SF structurally, as in, they didn't have science degrees, they didn't hang out with the same crowds, they couldn't afford to travel to conventions.
But even so, my original point was that voting on Hugos was not politicized in line with contemporary political arguments, whereas now it is. The ultimate point was to argue that the situation we have today, where science fiction is brought in line with the same split dividing American politics, exists and is a problem, rather than inevitable. I don't think that whether the apolitical nature of Hugo voting pre-1965 was for good reasons or bad ones is relevant.
Frankenstein is a historically important story, not a good story. It's frightfully (hah) dull compared to modern stories. Also, you mean 1818. What novels by women should it have listed? The only female SF novelists from before 1965 that I can even think of are Andre Norton and Judith Merril.
You're struggling to come up with any big-name black SFF authors before them because Butler and Delany were, I think, the only black woman and black gay man writing SF at the time. The fact that they both won all the awards repeatedly--that, empirically, a gay black man or a black woman publishing SF in the 1960s had a 100% chance of winning a Hugo and a Nebula--is not consistent with your implication that there was discrimination against blacks in SF.
Dhalgren, BTW, was known as "science fiction's Ulysses" because everybody knew they were supposed to say it was great, but almost nobody finished reading it. (I did, and wished I hadn't.) Delany also wrote what may be the worst book I've read in my entire life, the graphic novel version of Empire.
Sure. (A) Not a complete absence, and (B) It's the result of them not writing much science fiction.
I don't think you understood what I meant to say. That section of 3 paragraphs or so was to argue that, if we desire a more diverse "canon", then inclusion in the canon should be proportional to representation in the writing or maybe the reading population. I wasn't arguing in favor of merit-based publication, but of a parliamentary system so that each identified class of readers gets, say, a number of awards for the stories they like best, which is proportionate to their numbers in the reader population. I wasn't arguing that 24:1 is a good number, or even defending the poll results, but criticizing the presumption that 1:1 is the correct male:female ratio.
In a list of 27 books? Here is a reasonable guess at what happened:
- 97% of readers & writers were men, 3% were women. (Source: The Wikipedia page on Science fiction fandom lists about 60 prominent fans from 1930-1964, 2 of whom were women.)
- Of the 3% that were women, only 1 in 3 wrote novels, since only 1/3 as many women as men were in the workforce in 1950. Hence, the ratio of books by men to women is 97:1, and the fraction of books written by men is 0.990.
- If voting were completely unbiased, we'd expect 0.27 (1/4) of those 27 books to be by a female writer. We'd have to have 98 books on the list before expecting 1 book by a woman to show up in an unbiased vote.
- However, the interests of male readers correlated more with those of male writers than of female writers.
- Likewise female readers & writers.
- A poll of readers results in 97% of the votes being cast by people more likely to vote for the 99% of books written by men, eliminating authors preferred by females.
- The fix is the parliamentary system described above, which would result in allocating 1 of the 27 books to be voted on by women. There were, however, so few SF novels written by women that it's still unlikely that 1 book they select was written by a woman.
- In other words, the most likely outcome is still that all the golden-age favorites on a list of 27 books would be written by men.
- So, no, I do not agree.