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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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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