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Notes -
(3/3)
DEI…. in Spaaaace!
You've already picked up all of the major Culture War points, but I cannot emphasize just how very, very much a product of a bonafide card-carrying SJW this book is.
Pretty much everyone is queer and/or genderfluid and/or female, except (you guessed it) the unambiguously villainous corporate types (the ambiguously amoral corporate types are genderqueer, and the sympathetic ones are female) and a few government drones. Oh yeah, and the aliens. The male aliens get to be likeable, because the females are in charge.
There are multiple conversations about pronouns and nametags. A minor plot point is that the aliens are matriarchal and so it matters to them who actually gives birth, and Judy's transman housemate is really upset that she didn't put her foot down when the aliens were asking hurtful questions. We also learn that her transman housemate was (of course) abused and almost driven to suicide by bigoted parents who live in one of those conservative enclaves where people are still technophobic, transphobic, and religious.
The wrong kind of religious, I mean. We get multiple digressions about Judy's Jewishness. Growing up in an ultra-leftist Jewish commune, one of the defining moments of her childhood is that some asshole kids drew swastikas on her schoolbooks. In the 2060s. At the corporate-hosted reception for the aliens, she stands around angsting about whether the food (made out of corp-paste or something) contains shrimp or pork. And there's a long talk with the other human mommy in the book (I'll get to that) about the Holocaust. See, the governments and corps put on a display to summarize Earth's history for the aliens, and Judy is very upset that they didn't mention the Holocaust. Like, very upset, in tears.
I don't care about a lot of the woke shit and the neopronouns. I mean, realistically, transpeople are not going away. A writer who writes a story set in 2083 that isn't post-apocalyptic might try to wave away genderspecials as a fad that died out in the 30s, I guess, but otherwise, sure, they are probably a part of the landscape for the foreseeable future, whether you like it or not.
The character is Jewish and Jewish identity (and anti-Semitism) is still Very Important in 2083 - okay, I'll buy it. Our resident Joo-posters I'm sure will have much fun with this, but I mostly shrugged it off, other than, ahem, noticing it. Yes, I did also notice that no one else gets to be religious and not a backwards technophobic asshole. (The aliens have some sort of "spiritual but not religious" thing going on and they even have what I suppose is supposed to be a touching scene with Judy and her transman housemate. The alien wants to do a ritual, Judy can't because she's afraid it might violate her own religion, so the transman, after carefully questioning the alien about what exactly their beliefs entail, overcomes his childhood religious trauma to participate.)
There's also a sex scene. With an alien. Judy (the lesbian) falls in love with one of the male aliens. He's such a good talker and such a good listener, you see. So she discusses it with her wife and they agree to invite the alien into their polycule. This is before they've decided whether to actually have sex with the other humans in their household. But they have a very serious relationship talk with the alien in which they say hey, we kind of like you, and he says well, I kind of like you too, and then they have a threesome.
So human dick is out of the question, but two lesbians are totally DTF with a headless alien spider-thing who is male enough to make hentai jokes.
Even that didn't really squick me much, though. (Larry Niven was writing about alien sex in the 70s.) What did squick me? What made me want to DNF it? (I did finish it.) The many, many, many fucking mommy moments. Yes, I get it, the author is trying to make mothers important characters, not like groty old white dude engineers. Lactating women (and aliens) will save the world.
Judy and her wife literally change a diaper at the moment of first contact. We are constantly treated to descriptions of Judy nursing, how her breasts are feeling, taking nursing pads out of her gear, checking medications for nursing safety, hey, did I mention yet that the main character is a nursing mother nursing throughout the book? (So is the alien girlboss in charge of their expedition.)
One of the other characters, who is so brilliant and important that she's called back from leave to help talk to the aliens, is a NASA engineer who's also a nursing mother. She and Judy talk to each other about aliens and the sociological ramifications of Star Trek captains (yes, seriously) as they "gently sway in sync" while nursing their babies.
Like, hitting on this once or twice would have been an interesting non-traditional perspective. Hitting it as often as Emrys does, I started expecting the book to lactate.
If a man wrote this, we could probably call it a fetish.
The greatest sin of A Half-Built Garden as science fiction is that it turns the entire saga of mankind's (hah, see what I did there?) first contact with aliens into a bunch of table talks about boundaries and consent. And I mean this literally, in every sense – one of the big table talks is on Earth, where the aliens come to Judy's Seder gathering. There's another on a corporate "aisland" (the one where Judy is worried about whether corp-food is kosher.) The last one is in the Ringers' home system, where besides asserting their right to self-determination, the humans lecture the aliens about their wrongbad gender essentialism and explain that humans aren't actually sexually dimorphic and give a speech about gender fluidity that could have come straight out of a LGBTQ+ DEI session. At the end of this speech, one of the aliens comes out as nonbinary (no, I am not making this up), and then we get the big reveal that Judy's wife is, in fact, a transwoman.
Congratulations Earthlings, you've spread ROGD to the stars!
For all my snark and bitterness, the real crime here is that Emrys is not a bad writer. The aliens are genuinely interesting (and alien), the situation that she sets up is plausible and has plenty of potential for actual conflict (which does not have to be armed), and I have to admit that her prose was above my usual expectations for SF&F. A less hyper-woke writer could have written a pretty good book. Instead, she wrote a Hugo-worthy one.
Are there any write-ups on the Sad Puppies situation you would recommend? I find myself wanting to actually have a clear understanding about it, but I don't want an explanation that favors one side or the other.
Also, good book review, but I honestly wish you had actually posted to Amazon. Would make for something interesting at least, and maybe even a response from the author.
I never watched Bridgerton, but I'm told it's about wanting to have a black noble family in the British upper class. I don't mind that in the least, and this book seems to be the same. "What if the biggest issue when dealing with aliens was defeating gender binaries?" and all that. People write fanfics to let characters engage in gay sex literally all the time and some of the best fanfics I've ever read are about homosexual relationships between canonically straight characters.
But damn, you make it sound like there's honestly nothing radical in the discourse itself. Like, if you want to explore gender and whatnot, at least do something more creative than assuming the literal aliens are also gender essentialists in the way humans are. Maybe the aliens are a hivemind which doesn't have gender because the hivemind doesn't see itself as made up of individuals, but merely puppeting bodies who can reproduce.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's really possible to learn in enough detail with developing judgements. I'm more pro-Sad than anti-Sad, though I'm also pretty heavily anti-Rabid. To give as neutral a summary as possible...
The Hugo Awards (and a few separate non-Hugo Awards like the Campbell/"Astounding Award for Best New Writer") are annual awards given at WorldCon. Since the 1960s, the process has the worldcon membership submit (up to) five works for each award category for nomination, the nominations were checked for eligibility, and then totaled up. Until 2016, the finalist round consisted of the top three (minimum) or up to five works (sometimes requiring the work to receive at least 5% of the nomination-round vote); since 2016, they use the top six works with no minimum threshold.
((The categories themselves were originally selected by WorldCon committees, but they've since been defined into the WorldCon constitution and members can change them over a couple years.))
There were always some awkward bits to this process: They'd Rather Be Right was widely believed to have been a Scientologist op in 1955 back when the initial nomination was open to the public, a number of the lower-relevance categories tended to be starved for nominations due to the 5% threshold, Best Related Work was kinda a wasteland of garbage 'how to write' and bad fictional encyclopedia for decades at a time, and a few very good works and their voters got screwed over due to the arcane eligibility rules (Lady Astronaut of Mars most famously, but it's also one of the reasons Iain Banks was only seriously considered once, and at that for one of his lesser-known works).
But for the most part, it worked and was considered mostly respectable. Not every Hugo Award-winning novel was great, and a lot of the less-well-known categories tended to collect dreck or be little more than popularity contests, but they were the sorta thing you could point toward as a novelist and be pretty happy.
However, because of the award's relatively insular nature, it tended to get a little tactical when it came to voting. There were only hundreds of nominating ballots, and it wasn't unusual to see (non-Dramatic Fiction) rockets break by twenty to fifty votes. Some of this becomes pretty obvious, like the fifth time the same person wins the Best Editor award with near-identical breakdowns, or from the other direction where Girl Genius starts refusing nomination so someone else can finally take a rocket. But even a lot of the bigger-name awards became hard to clear as the number of published eligible works increased: when there are literally hundreds of good works being written every year, the vote becomes more and more diluted without some coordination mechanism. For the most part, this was just 'award eligibility posts' in the nomination phase (or... less subtle things) followed by highly-publicized reviews of the nominee, but there'd been some rumors of vote-trading for some of the final rounds.
In 2011, Larry Correia was nominated for the Campbell award, a (non-Hugo) WorldCon award for new writers. While Campbells don't cite specific works, he'd published Monster Hunter International in 2009 and that was the work in the eligibility period. While not exactly high fiction, it's a pretty good World Of Darkness-style slightly ridiculous work and got some moderate acclaim. He lost, and lost honestly, to Lev Grossman's The Magicians, which I personally hate but had a pretty widespread fandom at the time, along with some other strong competition.
Correia also claims that at least some opposition to him was motivated by his religion (Mormon) and politics (he's the sort of person where the gun-nut self-insert daily-carry dude is toned down from his real life persona), and that even had he lost naturally, this separately reflected an increasing exclusion within WorldCon insiders over anything that remotely smelled of right-wing and, more broadly, of science fiction and fantasy that didn't match a very specific worldview and flavor, to a point of excluding many works that once would have been Hugo-worthy. Correia uses SMOF (Secret Masters of Fandom) as a joke-term for this faction and viewpoint, but also because it was pretty much the explicit stance of the Science-Fiction Writers Association (SFWA).
This isn't entirely true -- Bujold got a ton of rockets for literal Baen-style writing, sometimes in preference to the (often-better) most fem-progressive works -- but she was very much an exception. Baen, mil- or action-focused scifi, or more gonzo works, including a lot of pretty mainstream fantasy, had become very disfavored outside of Dramatic Long-Form (which ended up doing Doctor Who for fucking ever) and a (very small) block of voters. And this was post-Racefail WorldCon: there absolutely was a pretty significant number of voters who thought about their votes in Broader Context Of Harm, especially given the politics around gay rights (which Correia was mostly holding his tongue on) and gun control (which he very much wasn't) at the time.
In 2013, Scalzi won the Novel award with Redshirts. Some of that reflects a lackluster competition (eg Captain Vorpatil's Alliance is a comedy and not Bujold's strongest), but most of it was Scalzi being a Tor writer with a big following and putting a ton of effort into getting people to vote for him and a slate of other people who also advertised his work in turn. Redshirts... is an awkward book. It's kinda funny, but it's a worse Galaxy Quest in a lot of ways, and while that's praising with faint damns it made it a weird Hugo award. Correia made a joking "Sad Puppy" request for Monster Hunter Legion, which missed the nomination by <20 votes and... well, I don't think I'd have voted for it on the Rocket, but it's a lot closer than Redshirts.
In 2014, Correia submitted to his fandom a Sad Puppy II slate, along with information on voting requirements and options. While this was mostly a bunch of generic (and not always especially-great) conservative or libertarianish authors (I'll admit a guilty pleasure in Hoyt's writing, but it's... uh, not going to appeal to the general scifi audience), one notable problem point was Opera Vita Aeterna by Vox Day (aka Theodore Beale). Where Correia or Hoyt were just Boomer (if Mormon) Conservatives, Beale was an asshole.
I mean, charitably, 'alt-right'? But mostly asshole. Like, 'oh, I didn't call that African-American person names, just made a comparison that was very easy to read as such'-level, /r/culturewarroundup founders think he's a bit too much-level. He got attention for getting in a fight with (and kicked out from) the SFWA in 2013, and turned that into a business model, which to be as fair to him as I can at least meant a lot of his enemies were jerks too. So that Got Some Attention.
Once those effects shook out, Sad Puppies II got absolutely clobbered. There's a bit of weirdness in the votes for novel because the Wheel of Time also separately got a ton of protest votes/anti-votes because its eligibility was very complicated, but about 300 general Sad Puppies and about 150 more that were willing to vote for Beale were largely crunched by a pretty active Tor/McGuire/Glover faction that tried to raise as much outreach as possible to vote against them. Opera Vita Aeterna was somewhat unusual for getting smashed so hard it lost to No Award, then pretty much unheard of because of the necessary coordination.
Correia et all took this as pretty clear evidence of his thesis: even assuming that Beale's writing is atrocious, so was and is Scalzi's, and that didn't result in a giant outcry or mainstream media coverage or a near-industry-wide effort to absolutely smash any chance at victory. Nor was it just Beale's (odious) politics; Torgersen and Correia seemed to be getting similar repulsion. John C Wright said he didn't get fired he quit, but it's not exactly subtle. Nor was even not having public political positions or the wrong gender the issue, as Toni Weisskopf went from second-place to fourth in the ranked choice voting despite having picked up more votes than Correia's writing did (and imo had at least as reasonable a claim as Ginjer Buchanan, and definitely over Gorinsky in 2014, given Tor's problems at the time). Likewise, a lot of the 2014 winners and high-ranks weren't great sci-fi/fantasy, or even sci-fi fantasy: "The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere" has little to recommend it besides the politics, "We Have Always Fought"... uh at least it's actually Related, which isn't always something Best Related Work hits.
Beale took it as an opportunity.
((About this point, there's a campaign for women's representation starting at the Nebula Awards, a more insiders-focused awards system, eventually culminating in 2016's awards.))
In 2015, Torgersen ran the Sad Puppies III slate, specifically as recommendations after Correia had been accused of trying to crowd out other works. There's a few stinkers in there (why on earth is Kevin J Anderson near your awards list?!), but intentionally mixed as much political, racial, and gender mix as Torgersen could come up with while still finding good(ish) names who wouldn't have won otherwise. The day after that, Beale published the Rabid Puppies I slate, with some overlap but a very explicit 'fill exactly this' setup, and things got complicated, not least of all because no few of the Sad Puppies recs were only willing to be on the Sad Puppy list if Beale specifically was not. And, uh, Beale also pushed a lot of works from either him directly, or his print shop Castilla House.
Later, the actual nomination results came in, and everything went to hell. Rather than struggling to even get some pieces nominated, a majority of works in both slates went forward, and in many cases they made up all five slots. And because of how the nominations procedure works, it was really hard for people to tell if they made it because of Torgersen's recommendation, Beale's recommendation, or a combination of both. A number of authors -- including many of the progressive ones -- declined nomination after the votes were tallied, specifically to avoid the taint. Correia himself dropped out.
Then the media got involved. Sad Puppies II had gotten some mainstream press coverage, but mostly in a 'look at the dweebs' sense. This time, it was a good deal more. For an example, The Guardian wrote about "The Puppies’ real beef is that SF, and society as a whole, has become too feminist, too multiracial, too hospitable to gay and trans voices" while Sarah Hoyt's nomination was one of the gayest and fanficiest things ("All the President's Men" is exactly that pun) I've ever read, and I read furry porn. But pretty much every major mainstream newspaper had something on it, all with the same framework and about the same interest in accuracy.
Internal to the scifi/fantasy world, it got heavier. Everyone remotely involved had to have politics somewhere to the right of John C Wright; the slate as a whole was a couple full Gamergates. An unrelated attempt to clean up some of the leftover problems of the Wheel of Time snafu underwent revision lest it benefit Old White Guys. And there was a massive campaign to No Award every slot any Puppy candidate had, even over non-Puppy votes.
In the end, No Award picked up over half of the total ballots for some awards, and the only big Puppy nominee to win was Guardians of the Galaxy. Laura Mixon's report on MsScribe won, but still got over 1k No Awards votes and an asterisk, despite not being a recommendation from either Puppy Slate, because she was perceived as Puppy-adjacent or at best a tool of white people. The finalists that scraped through that got delightful little "Asterisk" awards, complete with a slideshow presentation mentioning how sports leagues would mark questionable victories or records with an asterisk; a number of other bits and pieces were set up to humiliate them as much as possible. The voting membership rushed through a couple changes to the nomination and voting system specifically to resist this form of slate, which would apply after the 2016 year -- penalizing multiple nominations in the same category, got the most coverage, but there were other rule changes that reduced slate- or slate-looking votes.
This absolute sucked for the Sad Puppies (even many of the ones who pulled out still have a Reputation today), and was absolutely hilarious for Beale specifically, who got a ton of publicity even outside of the fandom. And it turned up the evaporative cooling at the Hugos directly.
In 2016, Kate Paulk ran Sad Puppies IV. It... mostly focused on being as unobtrusive as possible; technically, they promoted Neil Gaiman and I'm not sure Gaiman noticed. Beale ran Rabid Puppies II, but wasn't particularly successful either. A lot of Sad Puppies started to promote the DragonCon awards, a separate and already-extant setup that ran the same weekend as WorldCon and had long had a feud. The Dragon Awards are going ok, as are most of the Hugo Awards, although Best Related Work remains absolute garbage.
((The 2016 Sad Puppy Slate ended up including or promoting Chuck Tingle's Space Raptor Butt Invasion for the short story rocket, which is a) exactly what it sounds like and b) still felt more scifi/fantasy to Sad Puppies than If You Were A Dinosaur My Love. This could have ended up raising some interesting questions about the relationship between Hugo awards and the increasing prominence of adult pornographic media, but it didn't win and most of the time progressives (including Tingle) and Sad Puppies only really brought it up to bash each other.))
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