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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?
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.
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.
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