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