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Notes -
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 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?
Iowahawk identified this pattern a while ago for "lefties" as he called them
Identify a respected institution.
kill it.
gut it.
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.
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.
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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.
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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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