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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44937 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Here’s a list of the Hugo award winners this year:

  • Best Novel: Arkady Martine

  • Best Novella: Becky Chambers

  • Best Novelette: Suzanne Palmer

  • Best Short Story: Sarah Pinsker

  • Best Series: Seanan McGuire

  • Best Graphic Story: N.K. Jemisin

  • Best Related Work: Jane (Charlie) Anders

  • Best Artist: Rovina Cai

Omitted: Best film/tv series and short/long form editors.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg may never (posthumously) see 9 female justices on the Supreme Court. Perhaps she can rest easier knowing that women more or less swept the Hugos this year. And more or less in 2021. And 2019. And 2018. And almost did in 2017. One has to wonder why modern men are so bad at writing science fiction.

I’ve read virtually all of the books on this list prior to 2019, and my recollection is that they are by and large apolitical. Characterization is often sidelined or nonexistent (I’m looking at you, Asimov), there’s some downright weird...social interactions for lack of a better word (Well, rape my lizard!) and the prose is quite often trash. But where it shines is imagining a society reformed by new technology: a space elevator, FTL travel, psychohistory, nanotech, the metaverse (back when we just called it cyberspace), cyberpunk, biopunk, cypherpunk, spice melange and precognition. The best read like instruction manuals for scientists and entrepreneurs to aspire to, the bad were unapologetically sexist and the worst, presumably, have been lost to time.

Looking at the 2022 Hugo list, I’ve only read Iron Widow (I’ve been on a China kick and a scifi adaptation of Wu Zeitian’s story sounded interesting) and the series by Becky Chambers and Ada Palmer. The former was…unpleasant. Some choice quotes:

I think this whole concept of women being docile and obedient is nothing but wishful thinking. Or why would you put so much effort into lying to us? Into crippling our bodies? Into coercing us with made-up morals you claim are sacred? You insecure men, you’re afraid. You can force us into compliance, but, deep down, you know you can’t force us to truly love and respect you.

Men wants us so badly for our bodies, yet hate us so much for our minds.

How do you take the fight out of half the population and render them willing slaves? You tell them they're meant to do nothing but serve from the minute they're born. You tell them they're weak. You tell them they're prey. You tell them over and over, until it's the only truth they're capable of living.

But I have no faith in love. Love cannot save me. I choose vengeance.

I could keep going, but at a certain point I’d be quoting the entire book. Literally every scene that isn’t her fighting in a mecha is more of the above. The main character getting fucked over by her father. By the men in the military. By her lovers. By her copilot. It’s just not readable unless you’re the one being pandered to. She did take her book jacket photo wearing a cow onesie though, so that was pretty cool. Not that it would ever win an award, but I had a similar reaction to The Powers of the Earth with anti-woke libertarian propaganda, and the hypercapitalist Randian rants in Terry Goodkind.

Where Iron Widow is a blasting foghorn wokening our feminist impulses, Becky Chambers is a bit more laidback. I'm still struck by the aimlessness and victimization of the protagonist who just kind of meanders her way from misadventure to misadventure and whose only (?) skill is polylingualism. There's no overarching goal, no training montage or development, no tech wiz hacker bro. The emphasis is on home, belonging, learning about other cultures and refuting the nasty intolerants who disapprove of human-AI or interspecies-lesbian-human-reptilian-nonmonogamous relationships.

I have to ask myself; was I, in turn, being pandered to in the previous eras of scifi in the same way that different demographics are being pandered to now? Am I just primed to like things featuring men or manly women set in space, or that feature nanotech and computers at the expense of character development or good writing? And honestly, the answer is probably yes. There probably is some cosmic Ginsbergian justice to Woke sci-fi taking over traditional awards ceremonies. I don’t think there is a principled, objective stance where William Gibson is a better writer than Octavia Butler and it’s not like we read any of these books because the prose and mechanics of the writing are top tier. Perhaps we’re fated to live in our own little cloistered media bubbles that tell us what we like to hear.

But then…can I at least have my own awards convention so that I know which books from this year aren’t utter crap?

One way to steelman this is to consider that it's a natural process of art returning to its ancestral roots – in a more professional, more specialized world. What worth are visionary utopias conjured by writers (or dramas pointing at some possible utopian outcome)? We have experts, activists and politicians and special services, also payment processors and investors and the rest of the market for that; it's blatantly undemocratic to aid some weird Idea Guy in using his verbal skill to disseminate his non-vetoed ideas, no doubt introducing harmful biases and potentially exposing us to existential risks. Words are power; power ought not to be wielded irresponsibly.

What use are stories, then? Palatable consumable vessels to reinforce ideology which was developed by people trained in ideological domains; warning of evil, reminding us of the attraction of good. Stories are stylized allegories, parables, and myths of the tribe, but the tribe's ethos does not originate in the stories. Imagine if we allowed speechwriters to engineer state or corporate policy, spin doctors to decide the ultimate direction of the spin – preposterous. It's only proper show of humility for an author to simply wrap the approved, taught doctrine from the pulpit in prettier words or images. Perhaps women are naturally better at this than men by such an extent (whereas men are better at autistic daydreaming; though men used to make okay moralist writers). But even if not, this job's not so hard that we'd lose a lot of value by using the award ceremony itself to make the same point as award-winning works.

To group trivial identitarian narcissism together with exploration of group-specific abstract aesthetics under the label of pandering is to make pandering uselessly broad a concept – unless we indulge in some mental gymnastics to define a group that is being pandered to in the latter case. Maybe your group is people who think they don't need social sanction to peddle their homegrown visions for society. Here's a dangerous one.

I read Iron Widow, and it was even worse than you describe.

The protagonist doesn't merely blast aggressive feminism, she engages in outright evil, monstrous actions - she kills her entire family, including a brother who was seemingly innocent. She kills some minor characters who acted against her despite the fact that their sole motivation is that their children were held hostage. And, she kills an antagonist (who, granted, did some pretty terrible things) by personally torturing him to death.

None of these actions trouble her in the least.

The pattern seems to be that outside of the protagonists, the entire world is divided into innocent victims (none of whom, it must be noted, get any real characterization) and evil oppressors, who have no rights and are entitled to no moral consideration. This is the worldview that leads to genocide.

Have I mentioned that this book is in the 'YA' category, so nominally aimed at teenagers?

The troubling thing, in my mind, is how a work with such an abhorrent worldview gets so much approval - it's been nominated for multiple awards, it's on the NYT best-seller list, and highly rated on goodreads. That tells me that either there's a large segment of the public that has no problem with it, or that the tastemakers are actively pushing it. I don't think either possibility is a good sign.

Literally every scene that isn’t her fighting in a mecha is more of the above. The main character getting fucked over by her father. By the men in the military. By her lovers. By her copilot. It’s just not readable unless you’re the one being pandered to. She did take her book jacket photo wearing a cow onesie though, so that was pretty cool.

From the same site:

I’m a 20-something first-gen immigrant from small-town China who was raised by the Internet.

This explains most of this. Especially the last part, obviously.

I'm sure this is a recurring phenomenon. If you're from a culture that is more or less (so far) unaffected by the ongoing global Woke Cultural Revolution, and, as an angry Millennial, you decide that the traditions of your people are actually the source of all your personal misery and thus, although sustaining your ancestors through centuries, are worthy of erasure and oblivion, your most obvious option is to emigrate to the West and try outdoing even the local SJWs, logically using your immigrant background to basically promote yourself as some sort of heroic fugitive. I'm pretty sure you can find thousands, or God knows how many, such people from China, Russia, Central Europe etc. (I suppose it's a lot trickier to manage this if you're from Africa and/or a Muslim country, because any criticism of such cultures is potential grounds for cancellation.)

Also, I'm sure that getting treated badly by the men you sexually select, and then interpreting that as average and universal male behavior, is pretty much the usual life experience of the average liberal Millennial woman at this point. If you utterly lack the simple ability to elicit long-term commitment from men you find eligible, which is something most women have clearly mastered for hundreds of thousands of years, this is how you normally end up, which, in turn, means that such literature will resonate with you.

In year 3 of women dominating the awards I remember there was an article bragging about it:

The Verge: Women swept the Hugo Awards — again

Unsurprisingly, I haven't seen a similar article for the 3 subsequent years. Here is a comment I made about it at the time.

As that comment mentions, in 2013 submissions to Tor UK around 78% of science fiction authors, 67% of "Historical/epic/high-fantasy" authors, and 43% of "Urban fantasy/paranormal romance" authors were male. So the difference between the last 6 years of Hugo nominees/winners and the demographics of the field are even more dramatic. Though it's possible the demographics of the field itself has shifted dramatically since then, especially given the various anecdotal reports of overt discrimination in the publishing industry. (I don't know how much the increased viability of self-publishing might ameliorate this.) But I suspect that if there was a way to get more recent data (does somewhere like Amazon/Goodreads have enough scrapable demographic data on authors?) men would still be writing the majority of the science fiction.

I was under the impression that the most popular sci-fi was by-and-large written by straight white males who are, if not necessarily MAGA republicans, then at least very politically incorrect(eg, John Ringo, Orson Scott Card, David Weber). Is it any real surprise that with that backdrop there is an impetus for the wokes to try to promote already woke stuff as a replacement whether or not it makes any sense?

Plenty of sf classics were written by leftists though? Gibson, arguably the father of cyberpunk, is even woke now.

I'm not even sure what baseline you could pick that would make your proposition true. Straight white men are already a pretty unwoke demo.

But I don't know the numbers, you may be right that conservatives are very overrepresented in sf classics.

I was under the impression that the most popular sci-fi was by-and-large written by straight white males who are, if not necessarily MAGA republicans, then at least very politically incorrect

If we count Hispanic men and conservative leaning black women as "white" and "male" yes. Remember that this is the beef that instigated the whole "sad puppy" affair. The original complaint was that the alleged concern was never about diversity, it was crushing dissent and the competition, and I feel that history has vindicated that position. In essence the whole Hugo controversy from 2013 - 2016 can be summed up as the board of directors at Tor and Del Rey looking to get the Baen crowd canceled for not being woke enough. They may have succeeded, but the cancellation does not seemed to have hurt Baen's sales. Turns out that there is a market for old fashioned (IE "unwoke") pulp fiction and Baen has been happy to fill it.

I don’t have much difficulty wrapping my head around a Hispanic white.

I was unaware of the black women in sci-fi thing.

the most famous example I know is Octavia Butler

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler

I don't think Ringo or Weber are particularly popular? The current bestselling sci-fi book published in the last year is Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith, per Publishers Weekly (Adam Christopher). Behind that, Becky Chambers and Silvia Moreno-Garcia are shipping the most volume for non-star wars sci-fi properties published in the last year. This hardly seems like there is a lot of volume on new books from 'politically incorrect' white male authors. Closest thing is maybe Ernest Cline with Ready Player Two last year?

As most producers and consumers of fiction now are women, by a fair margin, I don't find this too surprising.

Why would you use the current demographics of the industry as evidence about the past demographics of the industry when the topic is the changing demographics of the industry?

I'm not making any contention about the past demographics of the industry. Tired claims of entryism or institutional capture depend on there being a mismatch against revealed consumer preferences. Said mismatch does not exist.

The post you were replying to was about the past demographics of the industry. Are you claiming that Sci fi has never been dominated by white men?

Also "tired", particularly without any evidence behind it or even an explanation of what you think specifically is tired, is consensus building. And data from after the entryism is not revealed consumer preference, so I would appreciate it if you could define those terms so I know what you mean.

This is a claim that really needs evidence. For example, you've cited volume, but didn't mention any hard numbers.

Here it is copied from the PW letter, units are for the four-week period ending 22-7-30 (I have removed titles not published in the last 12 months):

| Title                         | Author               | Publication Date | Units  |

|-------------------------------|----------------------|------------------|--------|

| Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith | Adam Christopher     | Jun 2022         | 11,409 |

| A Prayer for the Crown-Shy    | Becky Chambers       | Jul 2022         | 6,009  |

| Star Wars: Brotherhood        | Mike Chen            | May 2022         | 5,747  |

| The Daughter of Doctor Moreau | Silvia Moreno-Garcia | Jul 2022         | 5,731  |

PW would be pulling from NPD Bookscan like everyone else, but unfortunately I don't have access to them

It's important to remember that the Hugo Awards are not awarded by a panel; they're pure popular vote by those who attend Worldcon (or, alternatively, purchasing a "supporting membership" for voting rights for ~$50).

So naturally they tend to reflect the type of person who cares enough a. to attend Worldcon, b. to vote, and c. to make their vote reflective of their politics.

The results speak for themselves. But I do not think they represent some co-ordinated, deliberate attempt to pander.

It's not just the voting itself, it's also the slate, no? Back during the Sad Puppies days, the slates were a major point of contention.

I don’t think there is a principled, objective stance where William Gibson is a better writer than Octavia Butler

There isn't a principled, objective, stance for every pair of authors you are comparing, but there is for some. You can't really say whether eating at McDonalds is better than Burger King, but they're both better than eating sewage.

There's also the problem that if you're choosing authors by wokeness, you're inherently going to have things which are bad by other standards, because those things are no longer your top priority. You may occasionally get lucky and find a good one anyway by chance, but you're no longer really selecting much for it.

But then…can I at least have my own awards convention so that I know which books from this year aren’t utter crap?

https://www.dragoncon.org/awards/2022-dragon-award-ballot/

The 2022 con is over but they haven't announced the winners yet as far as I know.

I wish they had short stories and novellas in Dragon! It seems like Dragon is also essentially a democratic process for people willing to jump through the hoops. I would say I am overall very impressed by the various sci fi awards to more or less consistently award extremely high quality books over the years despite just being popularity contests.

Terry Goodkind.

Terry Goodkind's life is interesting. He began writing in mid-life without any otherwise demonstrable talent. Nowadays it's more of the opposite, in that top performers start early or are identified early in life.

But then…can I at least have my own awards convention so that I know which books from this year aren’t utter crap?

I'd be interested in just a variant of this awards convention that isn't crap.

You can do really interesting things with an aimless and actless protagonist -- historically, Gulliver's Travels or The Time Machine, but my favorite example is the excellent Kino's Journey series. Chambers flubs not because the Wayfarers series lacks a goal, but for the same reasons the (much less conventionally woke and much more conventionally 'plotted') The Wrong Stars does: there's just not enough tension. Not that it needs to be high-stakes: both stories are, in the same way that Dragon Ball Z is high-stakes. But they have less actual conflict between what characters want and what they're doing than a Sesame Street episode, fewer drawing questions than Haibane Renmai or the average litRPG.

"Bots of the Lost Ark" is stronger in that there's at least something there -- you don't know why any of this is happening or who these people are, and you kinda want to -- but the characters aren't coherent enough to feel like it's important or urgent rather than author fiat. The best I can say about "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather" is that it's interestingly experimental and has a clever 'twist'? But in addition to the experiment sucking, the format just doesn't drive you to care about the gotcha until you're almost three-quarters of the way through, and the best it does for theme is a self-referential 'oh, but maybe themes are mixed' footnote.

Never Say You Can't Survive is... not science-fiction or fantasy, or even really fiction. It's half how-to-write, half self-help book. Which isn't the worst example of unrelated junk that's been put forward for Best Related Work, with some of this year's pieces edging on the onanistic. That's not just a matter of philosophical or political disagreement: “How Twitter can ruin a life” is closer to my views, but it's still very much a writing-about-a-real-world-news-about-sci-fi-writing thing rather than actually Related. But still a long-standing problem. And while I'm not the target audience for podcasts, this doesn't really impress.

But you could do some really fascinating stuff with these pieces, and with the exception of Never Say, it'd be a editing change, rather than a deep change of scope or theme. It just doesn't seem important, any more, in the same way that Tor's not really an editing service to the limited extent it once was.

((There are some Hugo Awards that were serviceable or even good. I don't think I'd have voted for Desolation Called Peace, but it's pretty enjoyable a read. I'd rather Fan Writer go to media writers rather than infrastructure ones, but the WorldCon voters as a whole have long-favored infrastructure and Buhlert has more than paid her dues on that matter. Dune both goes without saying and isn't another godsdamned Doctor Who episode. Lee Moyer is an amazing artist in general, and the small gods project showed that off a lot even if the actual works were incredibly shallow. I've got mixed feelings on Jemesin's writing for the same reasons I don't like Bojack Horseman, but I've heard Far Sector's not bad for a Green Lantern series.))

I'm also generally unhappy about the repeats. A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace aren't awful, as much as the latter had a little too much overlap in one of its twists with Ender's Game. But especially good competition like Project Hail Mary or Black Water Sister, it feels at best like it's a symptom of block voting for the same authors to repeat.

A Memory Called Empire (…) [isn’t] awful, (…)

Is it not? I heard similar sentiment from someone whom I respect, and I started reading it without prejudice (I don’t follow who wins Hugo anymore, so I didn’t know who the author is). Wow was I disappointed. Constant mulling on the protagonist’s emotional state really made me queasy, but when the main character casually shared the most important secret of her culture to some freshly, randomly met guys, it was too stupid to continue.

I'm sure that they pandered to me in some way. But nothing so crass as "you're a man, so you kick ass, unlike those dumb women". That people can read that shit and genuinely like it baffles me. I used to use the hugo awards to find sci fi worth reading, but now I just don't read it much. Or I read old shit.

That might actually be an enjoyable read. Like a true male power fantasy revved up to 100, just for fun. What books count? Closest I can think of is James Bond and Poldark.

Not a book, but the anime series Gurren Lagann. It's like someone said "Hey, what if we made media that actually uses 'the male gaze' and phallic symbolism and 'toxic masculinity' and all that other bullshit that feminists falsely accuse other media of?" And it turns out the result is amazing mecha battles where literal galaxies are being chucked around.

Princess of Mars?

Gor.

Well, maybe for the 40% of men who are into BDSM.

Competence porn is probably a bigger offender.

Well, maybe for the 40% of men who are into BDSM.

I feel like BDSM might cover 20% of men at best where as competence porn must cover 3 quarters at a minimum

If one were determined to explore this particular road, one possible trail begins with the phrase, "oh, John Ringo, no!" It will take you far, far past James Bond, at least.

Other paths running through the LitRPG genre and similar descendents of the old pulps likewise might be fruitful.

You'd probably need to go to Asia for a real male power fantasy. The harem must grow larger!

Tai-Pan and the Noble House probably count. But they are still not actively misogynistic.

What exactly does it mean to pander? If we reduce it to making a product that appeals to some subset of the audience, writing good books is just pandering to people who have good taste.

I don't think the shift in awards is just a matter of "pandering" to a different audience. The Left Hand of Darkness is actually pretty similar in terms of themes and political orientation to a lot of the crap that won this year and it won both the Hugo and Nebula best novel awards 50 years ago.

It is true that the writing and character development are weak points in a lot of sci-fi classics, but it's not like these new winners are any better in that regard.

I have to ask myself; was I, in turn, being pandered to in the previous eras of scifi in the same way that different demographics are being pandered to now? Am I just primed to like things featuring men or manly women set in space, or that feature nanotech and computers at the expense of character development or good writing? And honestly, the answer is probably yes. There probably is some cosmic Ginsbergian justice to Woke sci-fi taking over traditional awards ceremonies. I don’t think there is a principled, objective stance where William Gibson is a better writer than Octavia Butler and it’s not like we read any of these books because the prose and mechanics of the writing are top tier. Perhaps we’re fated to live in our own little cloistered media bubbles that tell us what we like to hear.

This is a good thing to examine, because I think you're right. My initial reaction to the recent Hugo slates has been similar to yours: it almost feels now like an annual victory parade marching over the bones of all those dead cishetwhite dudes. I've read a few of NK Jemisin's books (bleah) and I tried Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning (it's genuinely speculative and interesting SF, I'll give it that - but it wasn't for me), and I've read a few of Seanan McGuire's books (very YA, fun enough if you like fanfic and the same plot retreaded multiple times) but mostly it just seems like celebratory woke awards.

I never thought I'd become one of those guys who just starts refusing to read books by, as Vox Day puts it, People Who Hate You, but I'm becoming one of those guys.

All that being said, you are right that previous eras just pandered to different demographics. (And bitching about the Hugos, and more worthy books being ignored in favor of books that didn't deserve it, goes back to the first WorldCon.) I mean, I really liked Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle when I was younger, but I've recently reread a few of their books, and besides being cringe and soapboxy in their own way, the writing is just bad. They didn't age well.

I will always think Ringworld (and the whole Known Space series) is a magnificent epic, but Niven and Pournelle are both cranky old bastards who kind of embody the "stale pale male" stereotype, if we're being honest. And lots of other previous nominees and winners have been equally full of wooden characters spouting stilted dialog in service of the author's political theories.

I also read Neuromancer recently. It, too, did not age well. I know that's not the book's fault: it's not entirely fair to judge a book in 2022 that was written about the mindblowing cyberpunk future before the Internet was really a thing. But it's just not that great except as an artifact of its time.

So yes, times have changed, the fandom has changed, old fans don't like it, and I just accept that Hugo nominations no longer mean much to me. For all that people complain that "Nothing good is being published anymore," this is flatly bullshit. There is a vast quantity of new SF&F being published. The problem is not that there's nothing to read, the problem is sifting through the ocean of crap new books to find something you like. For this, we mostly rely now on word of mouth and communities known to recommend things that are good - ironically, the function that publishers and awards used to serve.

I didn't read Neuromancer until the twenty-first century, so maybe my view is skewed, but I doubt it was ever a good story. There is no internal logic to the matrix at all; it's just deus ex machina after deus ex machina. It would have been fine, even more fun, if it had used an internal logic unlike that of real computers; that's part of the charm of cyberpunk. But when everything is arbitrary there can be no dramatic tension.

For atmosphere Neuromancer is unparalleled. As a yarn it isn't that great.

I also read Neuromancer recently. It, too, did not age well.

Really? How so?

The Turing police seem fairly prescient, and as time goes on, I think more and more of his general aesthetic loops back to relevance. Print-shoot-repeat and the 3d-printing scene in general feel pretty damn cyberpunk. Give it awhile, and I think we have decent odds of getting there.

The concepts were cool, I just didn't think the writing or the characterization was very good. And like I said, it's not really fair to judge a book for not doing better than any other SF novel in predicting what the near future will look like, but still... coin-op pay phones!

Coin-op payphones granted, there's something to Gibsonian cyberpunk, something between an insight and a thesis, that sets his work apart from the stolid technothrillers of Clancy and company. Something along the lines of "technology is useful, not merely because they have a rock and you have a gun, but because it inherently and intractably complicates the arithmetic of power." His stories are built on a recognition that people are not in control, that our systems reliably fail, that our plans are dismayed, and that far from ameliorating these conditions, technology only accelerates them. This, to me, is a fairly important idea, and I like his stories because he communicates this idea with such force that you feel it in your bones. He does this less with broad plot and character, and more with the nature of the technological ecosystem the characters move through, that the characters and the broad plot serve to illuminate.

I honestly don't mind "outdated" futures all that much, personally.

Huh -- somebody gave me his most recent book (which is true crap), which prompted me to reread some of the old ones in my library, just to check that I didn't used to be insane. Unfortunately somebody stole my copy of Neuromancer at some point, but the rest of the Sprawl series are still very very good IMO. My recollection at the time is not thinking that they quite measured up to Neuromancer; I'll have to give it another read somehow.

I also had a few of the 1990s-2014 books on hand, and blazed through them; not great but not terrible -- definitely had moments of spirit. I think Trump (or something) broke his brain -- the only reason to read Agency is as a kind of meta-analysis of why the other books seem good but this one is bad. (plotline is pretty standard Gibson) There's significant woke pandering, and I gather he still won't get a Hugo for it on account of wrong gender.

Are there actually many sci-fi books that excel not just at exploring fun sci-fi themes, but at actually delivering good prose and characters? The trend of having only the former is so persistent that I came to assume that having these two at the same time is supremely difficult for some reason, like running out of skill points when creating an RPG character.

Orson Scott Card managed to deliver both in parts of his Ender’s Game series, but it’s assuredly not super hard sci-fi. And hard sci-fi in general doesn’t do prose and characters great because that’s not the focus.

Yes, as long as you don't define "good prose and characters" in the literary fashion of "long turgid writing that fails to advance the plot because the plot isn't actually the point, it's all about relationships". Asimov gets a lot of hate, but he was an absolute master of spare prose. As for his characterization, he saved it for the robots.

That's unfair. Donovan, Powell and Calvin all get pretty decent characterization in iRobot. Calvin more than the rest as part of the framing device.

Well, at the risk of this turning into a SF&F recommendation thread (I guess there's nothing wrong with that, but would probably be better for Friday Fun Threads):

Ursula Le Guin really was quite a good writer, though most of her books are bit too slow and contemplative for me. But The Dispossessed does a really splendid job of contrasting a futuristic socialist society with a futuristic capitalist society in a way that genuinely feels like "What if?" and not "This is a pointed allegory." (As opposed to Those Who Walk Away from Omelas and other stories she did write as pointed allegories.)

Peter Watts and Neal Stephenson are two authors whose strength isn't in their prose, but they deliver really slammin' ideas with competent writing.

Ken Liu is pretty woke, but I've still found his writing to be very good.

Daniel Abraham (half of the team that wrote The Expanse series) is quite good; I like his epic fantasy series as well. Likewise Adrian Tchaikovsky, who has a rare ability to write equally good sci-fi and fantasy.

I have many others, but obviously it's going to be subjective. I can enjoy books that tell a good story even when I think writing is mediocre at best (looking at you, Brandon Sanderson), but yes, there are sci-fi authors who actually pay attention to the craft of writing, not just storytelling and worldbuilding.

Those Who Walk Away from Omelas

I've seen a take that particular story was sort of ...very thinly allegorical.

That is, that it was about the attitude of SF fandom in its day to child abuse.

It was a pretty interesting community, as there was a huge controversy when angry fans tried to get child molester* excluded from a con.

*see: https://breendoggle.fandom.com/wiki/Breendoggle_Wiki

Maybe I'm a poor judge of prose and character, but Lem had some good novels, Peace On Earth, and Solaris of course.

Most things by Peter Watts, if you can handle the pitch-black nihilism. Blindsight in particular is very, very good.

But then…can I at least have my own awards convention so that I know which books from this year aren’t utter crap?

I believe that would be the Dragon Awards.

Thanks, I'll take a look.

A lot of institutions are doing this now. Rhodes Scholars was heavily female.

Somewhat related AEI conferences are requiring masks. But claim they don’t discriminate by politics or race or a bunch of other things.

At this point (no proof they work) wearing a masks is about as repugnant a thing a Republican can. You are basically excluding from your event economists who represent the views of half the population. It’s no different than forcing a Hindu to eat beef.

What's stopping you from writing under a female sounding pseudonym?

I'm not sure if you're referencing this intentionally but some male writers did do something like this and it was quite controversial. I had just searched out the first article I could find on the subject without much care to the content besides that it got the basic details right and man is it a funny read. It tries to thread the needle on why publishing under a male sounding pseudonym to target a male dominated audience is good and empowering but publishing under a female pseudonym to captured a female dominated audience is bad and cannot be legitimized. The idea that people shouldn't judge books by their author's genitals is not addressed.

Men like Martínez, Díaz, and Mercero have had their time in the spotlight and the thousands of real Carmen Molas are simply waiting in the wings.

So that's the plan? Individuals are to be sacrificed to balance the demographic scales? Rarely do I see this stated so baldly.

I feel like your post is mixing apples and oranges, or at the very least painting with too broad a brush. You mention that the list of hugo + nebula winning novels are (in your opinion/recollection) apolitical but then you talk about novels that are just nominated for the hugo award. IMO, there are pollical books on that list (e.g. forever war, left hand of darkness, The Dispossessed) and I'm sure there are plenty of others if you actually looked at nominees instead of just novels that are popular enough to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards.

That said, there was a relatively apolitical scientific focused book on the nominees list Project_Hail_Mary, why not just read that?

There have always been political books on the list, but they weren't quite as common, and when they did appear, they had a variety of political opinions, not just all woke--the current diverse Hugos lack actual diversity.

Boy, those quotes are pure, uncut 100% Columbian projection.

I noticed the same thing, and was considering making a post. At this point, just assume that the Hugos are entirely a bluecheck award.

More interestingly, it really stood out in the /fantasy discussion that no one was willing to point out the near total sweep by the ladies. It's kind of eerie, to see something that blatant just go unremarked. I thought about pointing it out, but I expected I would just get the comment deleted and a mod warning.

But then…can I at least have my own awards convention so that I know which books from this year aren’t utter crap?

Probably not. Every time someone picks up the "Don't like it then build your own" gauntlet that's been thrown down, they get deplatformed, smeared, sued, unbanked and destroyed. The mask has slipped. It was never about inclusivity. It was about stealing your toys, smashing them in front of you, and watching you weep.

The mask has slipped. It was never about inclusivity. It was about stealing your toys, smashing them in front of you, and watching you weep.

This is something that anyone interested in Literature has known for awhile, that the "Diversity" agenda was just another tactic in the postmodern Left takeover of the Humanities, that there was no real interest in adding "diverse" authors such as José Saramago, Sei Shonagon, Louise Labe etc etc, but the goal was always the smashing of the 4 Olds and the total ideological takeover of all Lit depts (and outlets).

This is from Mark Bauerlein, who teaches English @ Emory:

"Once the multiculturalists got rid of the old canon, their promise of a richer, fuller curriculum of multiple cultures never materialized. The outcome proves the point. They didn’t want a new and improved humanities curriculum, adding Toni Morrison to Shakespeare, adding wives and mothers to kings and generals in history courses. No, the revolutionaries just wanted to take out the Western/American heritage. The tradition had to go, period. “Diversity” was a dodge, a tactic, a temporary step in the discreditation of the old.

The real goal had already been accomplished, and right in front of us: the demolition of literary tradition, of a Western literary canon and an American literary canon."

/images/16626841365720305.webp

Mod intervention here, I'm afraid. From the rules:

Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.

"As everyone knows . . ."

"I'm sure you all agree that . . ."

We visit this site specifically because we don't all agree, and regardless of how universal you believe knowledge is, I guarantee someone doesn't know it yet. Humans are bad at disagreeing with each other, and starting out from an assumption of agreement is a great way to quash disagreement. It's a nice rhetorical trick in some situations, but it's against what we're trying to accomplish here.

Please avoid stuff like "this is something that anyone interested in literature has known for a while". Phrase it as an opinion or bring up evidence, don't just insist that everyone agrees with you.

I think this is pessimistic. You can easily get tens of thousands of members for a more quality-based fantasy award. You’ll be shit on, yes, but not deplatformed.

Are there any examples of this happening?

I have to ask myself; was I, in turn, being pandered to in the previous eras of scifi in the same way that different demographics are being pandered to now? Am I just primed to like things featuring men or manly women set in space, or that feature nanotech and computers at the expense of character development or good writing? And honestly, the answer is probably yes. There probably is some cosmic Ginsbergian justice to Woke sci-fi taking over traditional awards ceremonies.

No. I think you can only reach this conclusion by essentially obliterating the notion of "quality" when it comes to fiction. This is something implicitly supported by woke fiction producers/critics who explicitly use "(imagined) downstream effects on how humans behave in society" as the measure of quality, but I don't think this is a reasonable position. There's no objective measure of "quality" in fiction, but it doesn't then follow that it's completely subjective and merely a question of who's being pandered to.

I would say that if there is no objective measure of quality, it does necessarily follow that quality is subjective. That's how the definitions of the words work, really.

I would say that if there is no objective measure of quality, it does necessarily follow that quality is subjective.

No—there are plenty of things for which there exists no adequate measure, but that are still objective facts. We can't objectively measure the size of the universe—it's way, way beyond our capacity, light cones notwithstanding—but it is still an obvious objective fact that it's really big.

Likewise it's pretty obvious that, say, 'clarity of writing' or 'passion' can't be objectively measured in any way that makes sense, but they do objectively exist. To deny this is to be philosophically lost in something like moral relativism. And while I admit that it's completely valid to say that meaning and quality are entirely subjective, I don't think it's true nor is it a particularly interesting worldview.

but it doesn't then follow that it's completely subjective and merely a question of who's being pandered to.

"completely subjective" is redundant. A thing is either objective or subjective. There's no such thing as "partially objective", that makes it subjective.

OK, I want to understand your perspective a little better. At this point, it's completely uncontroversially established science that speed is fundamentally subjective. Albert Einstein theorized as such, and experiment after experiment has proven him right on this point. According to your perspective, does it then follow that speed is completely subjective and, as such, whether or not a cheetah is faster than me when running on an African prairie is a completely subjective matter, one open to interpretation with no objectivity whatsoever?

To get away from a question of science, it's also pretty well established that "quality in being a soccer player" is subjective. We can use stats to get close to objectivity, but those stats are also largely determined by the player's teammates and opponents that stats can't get us all the way there. Does it then follow that the question of who is better at soccer, Lionel Messi or 07mk, a completely subjective one, with no way of determining a right answer other than just what answer appeals to whom the most?

I'm pretty sure this isn't true. If it is true, I'm pretty sure it would imply that objectivity doesn't exist, which isn't exactly helpful since it seems to collapse the whole discussion into an argument over semantics.

Why would it imply that objectivity doesn't exist?

because perfect objectivity doesn't seem accessable to humans. Anything that passes through our brains picks up subjectivity along the way. At the same time, people can be more or less objective in their thinking, and the two seem like they can mix in a great many ways. If you use subjective judgement to select objective elements, or vice versa, what do you have?

can I at least have my own awards convention

This is the rub, of course. The woke memeplex grows by entryism and as such treats gatekeeping as an attack. You'd be lucky to get an independent book review site that rates books on explicitly non-woke grounds, but I doubt even that is feasible. (if anyone knows of one, please let me know) Even if it managed to avoid DDOS and doxxing and deplatforming campaigns, you're still left with a userbase of three principled libertarians and a zillion witches.

I dont know how to solve this one, other than 'read books from before 2010' and 'wait for the culture to change again to something less specifically hostile to this one thing'.

Other than, possibly, having a The Motte book review club.

The problem with every attempt I've seen at "explicitly non-woke reviews" is that they just end up pushing right-wing authors because non-woke.

So like, I enjoy Larry Correia and Tom Kratman and John Ringo and John C. Wright, but of those guys, only Wright is what I'd call a literary stylist, and he's hardly innocent of didactic writing.

Thoughts on Blaine Pardoe?

Haven't read him, had to Google him. He writes BattleTech tie-in novels? I played some BattleTech back in the day, but was never interested enough in the lore to read the books.

He wrote some of the bigger novels, IIRC. He's a big part of the Clans storyline.

Who are the villians, and perhaps more crucially, why?

Antagonists don't have to be complex, but generally complex antagonists are better than simple ones. An antagonist who thinks they're the hero, antagonists who follow a code, who are conflicted, or who maybe have a point, these are interesting because they give us something to chew on, to interrogate. Still, sometimes an antagonist is simply evil, and that can work too. Not all the time, but sometimes.

But what makes them an antagonist? This leads us fairly quickly to philosophical questions. Have they abandoned virtue or embraced vice? Have they misguided or foolish, making some dreadful moral or ethical mistake? Are they too blind or stubborn to self-correct? There's lots of interesting ways this can go, because what's interesting is that these are the mistakes we are in danger of making ourselves. The story is a mirror for us to reflect upon, a whetstone to sharpen our moral instincts into something more like durable principles.

A less interesting way, though, is to assert that they are the antagonist because they are a Bad Person, and they do harmful things because that is what Bad People do. This is especially pernicious when the author clearly believes that Bad People really exist in significant numbers, and is building their story as an extended sermon on why you should hate them in real life. This attitude does not, generally speaking, help us to sharpen our moral instincts, but to deaden them. Reflexive moral certainty is not the apex of the soul, but arguably its nadir.

I think the above is pretty general. Where it gets specific is that Progressive media doing the above is absurdly widespread and prominent, to the point that it is probably inescapable. I don't remember much that I read in the old days that worked this way, as straight-up advocacy for bigotry. That really does seem to be a... novel innovation.

As for the Hugos themselves, the problem you're pointing to was identified years ago, and people of good conscience tried to do something about it. They were crushed, leaving the field to bad-faith actors of both tribes. Actions have consequences.

A less interesting way, though, is to assert that they are the antagonist because they are a Bad Person, and they do harmful things because that is what Bad People do. This is especially pernicious when the author clearly believes that Bad People really exist in significant numbers, and is building their story as an extended sermon on why you should hate them in real life. This attitude does not, generally speaking, help us to sharpen our moral instincts, but to deaden them. Reflexive moral certainty is not the apex of the soul, but arguably its nadir.

I think the above is pretty general. Where it gets specific is that Progressive media doing the above is absurdly widespread and prominent, to the point that it is probably inescapable. I don't remember much that I read in the old days that worked this way, as straight-up advocacy for bigotry. That really does seem to be a... novel innovation.

Diana Moon Glampers, steelwoman extraordinaire, would like a word. As would Emperor Jagang and his group of nihilistic-rapist-socialists who literally hate life and beauty. The infantile POTUS in powers of the earth as well, whose name escapes me.

I think you're conflating two issues, which I suppose I did in OP as well. Not every book on that list is like Iron Widow. Octavia Butler and NK Jemisin have both written fantastic books that I've enjoyed; Parable of the Sower in particular is amusingly pro-2A and nevertheless popular. But it still begs the question of why the slate has been dominated by women unless the people running the Hugos would argue that women are innately better at writing scifi, or if it's some form of restorative justice, just how long they want to keep it up.

The second issue is that some books are indeed political dumpster fires. But as I said, I'm not convinced that progressives have a monopoly on publishing trashy media.

As for the Hugos themselves, the problem you're pointing to was identified years ago, and people of good conscience tried to do something about it. They were crushed, leaving the field to bad-faith actors of both tribes. Actions have consequences.

It's hard to imagine Vox Day as a person of good conscience, although I sympathized with the sad puppies. I'm not sure I would trust any of the groups to recommend me books at this point, which is surprising given how consistently good the awards were from the 1960s all the way through the early 2010s.

The infantile POTUS in powers of the earth as well, whose name escapes me.

"Themba Johnson" (and her understudy, "Linda Haig"), because for whatever the merits of MorlockP's writing might be, subtly isn't one of them. Although 'infantile' probably isn't the right measure for her: the character's point is that she's much smarter than she seems, she just applies that to political ends rather than technical ones. Note that whenever she makes a numeric 'mistake', it's in ways that make much better sound bites than the truth. (I think this is meant to directly contrast with some of the spacer leadership: Javier makes a few similar mistakes, usually related to identifying people or places of origin; that the differences don't matter in physical senses but do show relatively lacking social skills is a theme.)

Although agreed she's more a Clinton expy than any sort of steelman. For sympathetic grounder characters in Powers, you'd probably be better-served by Restivo (who's an 'honorable' soldier, if compromised by his loyalty to his commander), or Matthew. For sympathetic women, there's a pretty wide variety of spacer ladies (and a couple sympathetic young women).

Even as a Clinton expy, she's not exactly evil for evil's sake. The UN and US (correctly!) sees spacers as huge physical threats, in addition to acting as a combination of brain drain and tax shelter, not to mention the unlocked AI that's been using half of the moon as a playpen. These are just drastically different values from those of the spacers, and of most readers.

But it still begs the question of why the slate has been dominated by women unless the people running the Hugos would argue that women are innately better at writing scifi, or if it's some form of restorative justice, just how long they want to keep it up.

There's a "the top-5% women are better than top-% men, whether from socialization or other cause, at sort of the coalition management the voting system runs on". Which I don't think is particularly palatable for Hugos, but it's not the most damning indictment.

But it still begs the question of why the slate has been dominated by women unless the people running the Hugos would argue that women are innately better at writing scifi, or if it's some form of restorative justice, just how long they want to keep it up.

I am a little confused by this sentence. Who do you mean by "the people running the Hugos?" As far as I'm aware the Hugos have always been a popularity contest. Nominees and winners decided by a vote of members of the World Science Fiction Convention. Would you accept a symmetrical argument? That years where men dominated the slate must have been due to the voters judgement that men were better at writing science fiction?

There's a fair amount of evidence that the vote is gamed, has been for some time, and that the people gaming it have shifted heavily toward gaming it for ideological reasons rather than raw nepotism or enforcements of personal aesthetic taste.

Your symmetrical argument is, I think, wrong on the merits, but I'd agree that any critique consisting of "these awards are being assessed poorly" should identify examples of what should have won as a reality check.

Diana Moon Glampers, steelwoman extraordinaire, would like a word.

Glampers makes the world a worse place because she has made a mistake: she values equality over human flourishing to an unreasonable degree. I confess I didn't get far enough into Goodkind to learn much about Emperor Jagang, but from what I did read I'd say his empire made the mistake of accepting immediate, concrete evil in pursuit of nebulous, far-off good; they burn down the flawed present in pursuit of a false dream of a better future, a lesson I think you'd agree remains timely. No idea about powers of the earth, I've never heard of it before.

Both of these examples are reductive; in the case of Glampers, this is because she is from a parable so short that nuance is counterproductive; the whole point of the piece is that equality is not, in fact, a valid terminal goal, that "more equality" can actually be a bad thing in at least one case. In the case of Goodkind's books, the reductiveness is in fact a detriment to the story as a whole. Neither are even close to as reductive as "Men want us so badly for our bodies, yet hate us so much for our minds." Nor to the other examples you provided. That is just straight-up bigotry.

The second issue is that some books are indeed political dumpster fires. But as I said, I'm not convinced that progressives have a monopoly on publishing trashy media.

To a first approximation, monopolies don't exist. I don't think you can actually find examples of the same general combination of notability and reductiveness/bigotry from anything other than progressivism. Quotes like that aimed at women surely exist somewhere, but none of us will ever hear about it because such writing is marginalized quite thoroughly. Meanwhile, this is a Hugo winner.

But it still begs the question of why the slate has been dominated by women unless the people running the Hugos would argue that women are innately better at writing scifi, or if it's some form of restorative justice, just how long they want to keep it up.

I'd say that they aren't selecting for objective quality, but for some combination of author identity, ideological fervor, and nepotism. I don't think they're ever really going to stop. Why would they?

It's hard to imagine Vox Day as a person of good conscience, although I sympathized with the sad puppies.

Yeah, the former was who I had in mind with "bad-faith actors of both tribes." From where I sit, it seems clear to me that the reasonable people left for greener pastures long ago.

Harrison Bergeron is a short story, which is expected to have sketchier characterization than a novel. But also, Diana Moon Glampers wasn't a Bad Person who did Bad Things because that's what Bad People do; she was merely the head enforcer for the government. We don't really know how she got her position or anything like that, but she did Bad Things because that was her job.

Iowahawk identified this pattern a while ago for "lefties" as he called them

  1. Identify a respected institution.

  2. kill it.

  3. gut it.

  4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect

To a large extent, I think this isn't even particularly malicious or intentional. The phrase I keep thinking of when I encounter other leftists in CW contexts is "cargo cult." There's just a real lack of understanding of how things work and a deep belief that pantomiming the general behavior of things that did work in the past is how to make things work. One example would be the anti-climate change "strikes" by kids not going to school until They do Something about the Problem. Strikes worked because they were literally workers that company owners needed to literally do stuff so they could literally make money from real customers; kids not going to school doesn't put any such pressure on governments. A more minor but much more common example is calling people "Nazis" as a way to discredit them; Nazis weren't bad because there's something magical about the syllables "nah" and "zee" when put together in order; they were bad because of real things they really did to real people using real guns held by real men.

Likewise, awards like Hugo's aren't prestigious or well-regarded because there's some ceremony and the author gets a fancy statue or whatever; it's because there's some credibility in the institution that chooses the award recipients that provides a sort of promise that the works they selected meet some level of quality that readers value. Handing out awards to people based on sociopolitical preferences doesn't give prestige to those sociopolitical preferences, it just kills the credibility of the awards.

My guess is that this sort of thing is just as common in the right as well, but I just don't see it because I'm a leftist who's mostly exposed to leftist things.

My guess is that this sort of thing is just as common in the right as well, but I just don't see it because I'm a leftist who's mostly exposed to leftist things.

I think this particular failure mode is less common on the right for two reasons: age and tangibility.

For age, there are a couple of relevant saying. "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best", and "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality". I think the general motto of leftism could be summed up as "Why don't we...", while the general motto of conservatism would be "Oh, that's why we don't!" I think just by virtue of being older, conservatives are more likely to have had a relevant personal experience, for example a job that was actually impacted by a strike.

And that ties into the tangibility point. I often see leftists on reddit engaging in cargo cult thinking that seems in the rough ballpark of "Stores are places where food happens, and people have to work at them because billionaires are mean." I think the warehouse workers and stockers who know firsthand what goes into keeping food on those shelves are very unlikely to be politically active enough to be anything-ists. So we have these online discussions that are dominated on that side by people who don't have extensive work experience, and have negligible responsibility experience, in the sense of being the person who has to get the job done no matter what.

It's very easy to confuse cause and effect when you live in a world of words and abstractions and never encounter what Big Yud would call Final Responsibility. Compare that to the plumber in a MAGA hat, who lives every day in a world where the water runs or doesn't by his own ability to manipulate reality.

If you're looking for right-wing examples, replace 'Nazi' with 'socialist' or 'communist'.

While there certainly are right-wing groups and individuals that throw accusations of being a socialist or communist at people they disagree with, I wouldn't say the example is equivalent. The point of calling someone a nazi or a fascist is to draw ire from the public since the words are both nearly universally synonymous with "ideological bully". Calling someone a socialist isn't exactly a head turner for the majority of the public and calling someone a communist is mostly going to draw confused glances at the accuser. From my own observations I'd also say it's significantly more common for leftists to call opponents nazi/fascist in an attempt to discredit them than right-wingers calling their own opponents socialist/communist because it is simply not enough to discredit someone; though I do think it would be just as common if being a socialist were considered culturally taboo as being a nazi.

Perhaps another analogy would be the current craze among (American, somewhat picked up by European) right-wingers at calling their opponents pedophiles (which "groomer" is at least heavily supposed to imply).

Great point, as of late I've noticed a fairly substantial increase in "groomer" rhetoric on twitter, mostly surrounding transgender issues.

One example that comes to mind is people who expect the president to be Christian as some kind of qualification. At one point, maybe that meant something about a man's character if he was running for president and said he was a Christian. But these days, it means nothing except to devalue the label of "Christian".

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