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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15574 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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There are plenty of posts in the CW thread lamenting the takeover of modern TV and movies by 'wokeness,' I figured it might be interesting to look at another area, namely sci-fi novels.

The Hugo Award is probably the most well known science fiction writing award, having existed since 1953 and helping to launch many famous authors' careers such as Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, and many more. Unfortunately, the quality of this award, among others, seems to have gone sharply downhill recently. Specifically, they are becoming overtly political and focusing primarily on female and POC authors.

This phenomenon started back in 2014-2015, and has received massive backlash since the genre of speculative fiction (science fiction + fantasy) is overwhelming male, and seems to select for high systematizers. There have even been organized voting campaigns against the political skew of the Hugo, predictably shut down hard by the social justice camp.

I was recently looking for a new sci-fi series, and stumbled upon Ancillary Justice, a sci-fi novel that won the first so-called 'Triple Crown' of Sci-fi, the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke awards. Despite never having heard of the other two besides the Hugo, I figured that should be a good enough endorsement of the series. I was wrong.

The flaws with this first novel, as I only read about a fifth of it before quitting, are numerous. The basic premise is that the main character used to be an Artificial Intelligence who ran a starship, and communicated/perceived primarily through captured human bodies, called Ancillaries. She (the AI) was betrayed, and now is stuck in a single human body, plotting revenge. Why a super powerful AI needs to take over human bodies is never explained, but we'll chalk it up to suspension of disbelief.

This former-AI-being, despite having lived for over 2,000(!) years, is laughably incompetent and emotional while still managing to come off as a flat character. Starting on a backwater planet called Nilk, where she has been living for almost twenty years, she consistently manages to piss off the locals by mis-gendering them. This is because, as the author takes pain to remind us, the Radch Empire which she came from has one singular gender (or doesn't care about gender, it isn't clear) and the default pronoun is 'she.' This odd convention leads to such beautiful passages as (emphasis mine):

"She out-bulked me, but I was taller, and I was also considerably stronger than I looked. She didn’t realize what she was playing with. She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt."

This inconsistent gendering is constant throughout the novel, to the point where it's difficult to trust the gender of any character. You literally have characters introduced using female pronouns, only to find out two chapters later that it was actually a male character, the former-AI-turned-SJW just failed to correctly gender them!

Despite the fact that this is beyond frustrating from a reader perspective of trying to visualize the characters, it makes literally no sense given the world building. You're telling me that a millenia-old AI, who has explicitly spent centuries studying human expressions, culture, and communication, is so incompetent they can't correctly gender humans in a society they've been living in for twenty years?? Keep in mind this mis-gendering literally threatens the main character's life at multiple points. The amount of mental gymnastics required to suspend my disbelief at this point was far too much.

And yet, despite this inane premise (and the fact that according to many other reviewers, the book never gets better, there's barely any plot, and the AI's scheme for revenge is utterly flawed) this book received massive amounts of praise. Not just from the sci-fi establishment, but more general institutions too such as NPR, and various other celebrities. They somehow try to turn this confusing writing style into a good thing because it encapsulates a 'poignant personal journey':

It won't be easy. The universe of Ancillary Justice is complex, murky and difficult to navigate — no bad thing, as Leckie's deft sketches hint at worlds beyond, none of them neat. Most obvious are the linguistic disconnects: Breq's home tongue uses only "she," reinforcing her otherness as she constantly guesses at genders in other languages.

Now you may ask - why does this matter? Unfortunately, as many know here, awards are a zero-sum game. Speculative fiction, especially fantasy, is entering the main stream with hits like Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. Right now we already have issues of adaptions being too focused on social justice narratives, even though many of the underlying works were popular due to their gritty, realistic, and often misogynistic worlds.

Writing fiction is a brutal career. Amateur authors often spend literally decades building a name for themselves, so short story magazines, awards, and other ways of gaining notoriety and funds are extremely important. If aspiring writers of science fiction and fantasy can't make it without catering to woke sensibilities, then unfortunately the quality of the genre will drop drastically. Writers who can't write woke fiction simply won't be able to support themselves.

When it comes to modern entertainment, science fiction novels especially have been one of the last bastions of male centric, systematized, shape-rotator style writing. It seems that where the genre goes could be an important bell-weather for the future of the culture war in entertainment.

Fwiw, I thoroughly enjoyed that series. It was an interesting story with pretty cool concepts, and made me think a lot.

I’m no wokist, but I’m not as bothered by it as most people here. The one pronoun device seemed just totally plausible to me. A big concept of sci-fi is exploring alien culture, and it doesn’t seem that weird that you’d have a culture that doesn’t use gendered pronouns. Looks like there’s some in real life even, like Hungarian.

The AI used humans as slaves to provide a better interface to it for its captains. IIRC robotics were just a lot more expensive, so the ships ~never used them.

As a big fan of scifi and an aspiring writer myself, I feel the need to point out that a lot of "classic" scifi that won awards is actually probably much worse than this. A lot of stuff by early guys like Asimov is incredibly dry and has no character development. It was often a vehicle for a concept more than a story. The only modern scifi writer who gets away with that now is the "three body problem" author, Liu Cixin. Outside of his original book, the three body problem, which is a masterpiece, his other books are total dumpster fires. (EDIT:I probably shouldn't have said the only one, but having a good concept and nothing else and finding success is rare now)

So you may be right about this book (I havent read it) but your insinuation that writers couldn't have gotten away with this poor quality in the past is definitely wrong. In the past scifi novels catered to young men with little exposure to good writing, and it showed.

I agree. Of the big three: Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein - Heinlein is the only one I enjoy, and he definitely wrote some stinkers. Asimov and Clarke write grand ideas, but their prose is dry and their characters are cardboard. For some people, Big Dumb Objects in space or Big Galactic Empires are enough, but I've never found them that interesting.

(I will admit I liked Asimov's I, Robot as a kid, though.)

Most sci fi conceptual stories would be best told as a short story; The Egg is great, despite having only a single flat character. Foundation I enjoyed a lot as kid but will never read again; adding rich characters would detract heavily from their impact, which is why e.g. the television adaption was terrible.

(On the other hand, 2001 was a great movie, better than the book.)

A lot of stuff by early guys like Asimov is incredibly dry and has no character development.

So you've never read "The Bicentennial Man"?

Asimov was known for his spare writing style, of course. The "no character development" thing is also usually tossed at him. The problem with the claim is twofold. One, it's usually referring to the short stories. Well, there's only so much room in short stories. Two, it generally ignores the characters of the robots.

What little truth remains after those considerations goes back to the two conceptions of the novel championed (respectively) by Henry James and H.G. Wells, the novel of character and the novel of incident. James prevailed and the novel of character became "mainstream literature". It's not reasonable to expect science fiction -- which descends largely from Wells -- to follow the conventions of mainstream literature; if it did it wouldn't be science fiction.

A lot of stuff by early guys like Asimov is incredibly dry and has no character development.

IMO that isn't really worthy of much criticism. Character development is icing, not the cake. You can have a good story with a good plot and bad characters, but not vice versa.

Eh, it all matters. Sure, character development is more "icing" but the characters themselves are crucial. A bad character can ruin a story. Decisions that make no sense are just as much plot holes as any other inconsistency.

I would not agree that the characters themselves are crucial. Look at the Foundation stories by Asimov. The characters are paper thin, but those stories are still wonderful. If I were going to try to formulate a rule, it would be something like: your characters don't have to be detailed, as long as they are still plausible in their actions.

A lot of stuff by early guys like Asimov is incredibly dry and has no character development.

This makes it good. Not all literature needs to have the same characteristics, character development can be good in scifi but I don't think it's actually required in the same way it is in other genres. You don't need character development in the foundation series because the characters are stand ins for massive crushing historical trends. I adore the destiny's crucible series knowing the writing is sub par and the characters he's decided to transplant from modern day to a pre-industrial world are... suspicious because the concept carries the story. If the author is also a great writer with interesting characters that's a plus but when looking for a scifi novel, at least for me, it's concept first.

Concept is useful but there is no reason not to add solid writing to a concept. It's very hard to care about "crushing historical trends" when you just don't care about any individuals. That's just how people work. Even history is much more interesting through the lense of a Hannibal, Thutmoses III, or Joan of Arc.

Concept is useful but there is no reason not to add solid writing to a concept. It's very hard to care about "crushing historical trends" when you just don't care about any individuals.

I did not find this hard at all. The idea of the religious atomics cult using their monopoly on atomics and obfuscating how they work through rituals that are half pointless was fascinating. That the only name I remember from the series is Hari Seldon takes nothing away from the experience to me. I can't say I care at all what was going on in the personal life of the head priest, it's totally unrelated to the central thesis and leaving it out is great time saving. If you have something interesting to say about how these happening impact relationships, sure, say it. But if the world is going to be mainly populated by the kind of people I already know in the real world then what's the point? You're just going to get another awful forced romance to prove that love exists in every universe, blegh.

That's just how people work. Even history is much more interesting through the lense of a Hannibal, Thutmoses III, or Joan of Arc.

Perhaps we're typical minding each other, I absolutely don't think this is true.

That's just how people work.

You haven't provided evidence for assertion. More importantly, even you did, ad populum is a logical fallacy thus not proving the benefits of "character development". Personally, I care more about worldbuilding, than deeply written characters experiencing roller coasters of emotion.

You literally have characters introduced using female pronouns, only to find out two chapters later that it was actually a male character, the former-AI-turned-SJW just failed to correctly gender them!

I heard of the Ancillary Justice series but never bothered with it. This part here is old news, or at least Samuel Delany did it back in 1984 with this novel, and more interestingly; by the use of "she" you do find yourself unconsciously attributing characteristics to people that you know nothing else about (the name is not gendered in a typically male or female style so you have no clue as to their biological sex) and it does make a difference about whether you think so-and-so was a man or a woman:

In Morgre, every person, including evelmi, is labelled a woman and the use of the pronouns ‘she/her’ are most common. For those of whom one finds to be sexually desirable, one uses the pronouns ‘he/him’. When Korga remarks that on Rhyanon, people spoke of both women and men, Marq replies, 'I know the word "man"...It's an archaic term. Sometimes you'll read over it in some old piece or other.'

Sounds like Ms. Leckie is either copying a better writer, or thinks she has invented it all from new.

I have a personal policy of not really criticizing other authors works. People have lots of different tastes, and sometimes in an effort to appeal to one set of tastes you will have to make it unappealing to another set of tastes. I have internally labelled vast swathes of literature as "not for me" and that is perfectly ok. The Hugo awards seems like just one more place that is 'not for me'.

I don't have much to say about the bulk of your post, but I do hope you can find a more enjoyable set of works. There are plenty of up and coming authors writing stuff that could be described as "male centric, systematized, shape-rotator style writing". There are other places you can start looking:

https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing - Shirtaloon, Zogarth, and The First Defier are all people I have read and who would fit that description.

https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/complete - Mother of learning is my favorite. Post Human has AI, sci-fi, aliens, and space battle elements. Royal road in general has lots of fresh authors trying out fun ideas. If you have a tolerance for grammar and spelling mistakes it is full of fiction I think you'd enjoy. If your tolerance is low just stick to the top recommended stories.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgressionFantasy/ - Has progressive-ish politics but still produces good recommendations. But mostly the recommendations are the same. Some of the ones I already mentioned get recommended, but also: Cradle, Iron Prince, and Arcane Ascension.

https://old.reddit.com/r/litrpg/ - Common Recs include: Dungeon Crawler Carl, Azarinth Healer, and He Who Fights with Monsters (Shirtaloon)

Amazon - Once you buy enough of the books you like I have found Amazon has a decent algorithim for finding similar books. You need to be deliberate about it, and give star ratings to books, and also remove certain books from your recommendation list.

Unfortunately I have a huge distaste for reading anything that isn't already completed. The vast majority of prog fantasy/litrpg stuff has a long way to go before being finished, if ever. I've been burned too many times in the past to commit to that type of story.

I have a personal policy of not really criticizing other authors works. People have lots of different tastes, and sometimes in an effort to appeal to one set of tastes you will have to make it unappealing to another set of tastes.

This is a good policy - I could have stood to be less critical, especially since I didn't even read half the book.

Unfortunately I have a huge distaste for reading anything that isn't already completed. The vast majority of prog fantasy/litrpg stuff has a long way to go before being finished, if ever. I've been burned too many times in the past to commit to that type of story.

I thought that might be the case. The link on royalroad I posted only shows Completed fictions. There are also quite a few request threads on progressionFantasy and litrpg subreddits for completed fictions. Mother of Learning is complete, and I'd highly recommend it. Post Human is also complete, and you might enjoy it if you want a different take on AI, empires, and space battles.

I have a personal policy of not really criticizing other authors works. People have lots of different tastes, and sometimes in an effort to appeal to one set of tastes you will have to make it unappealing to another set of tastes.

This is a good policy - I could have stood to be less critical, especially since I didn't even read half the book.

I started the policy when I began writing my own story on royalroad (and yes, I left it unfinished after ~300 pages). I quickly realized how hard it was to please everyone with the story, and I couldn't even please all of my own tastes with the story I was writing. I generally think "more is better" when it comes to fiction and story telling. I want more authors, I want those authors telling more stories, and I want them getting better by just doing tons of writing. I will offer editing help and suggestions if the author asks me, but otherwise I just say what I like to try and encourage more people to write things I like. I'd extend that to you, if you feel there isn't enough "male centric, systematized, shape-rotator style writing" one of the best solutions might be to write your own stories. You have a base level of writing talent that puts you at a better level than many authors on royalroad (you can put together an argument and enough words to make a top level post on themotte). If you have interesting ideas write them. If you don't, just write "fanfiction" and change around some of the things you didn't like in your favorite books.

I've thought about and started trying to write many times. I just don't have the mental energy to do it while juggling a full time job at a startup, partner, clean house, puppy, etc.

In order to do it I stopped moderating at themotte and slatestarcodex, and generally anytime I thought about posting on or reading reddit I spent that time writing instead. Felt good while I was doing it, but yeah I hear you on the mental energy. Its why I haven't been able to do it again.

royalroad

Mother of Learning was great. But some other that I tried were either abandoned or turned into protagonist winning effortlessly because they are protagonist.

Can you recommend anything complete?

(I can recommend https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/45534/this-used-to-be-about-dungeons/ - fantasy slice of life, with some plot. Good characterisation, nice worldbuilding. Nice world, as in "closer to ideal than reality" not some brutal dystopia where everyone is evil and/or stupid)

Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales is on Royal Road* and it's the best novel I've read in years. A 1,600,000 word rational self-insert litRPG isekai webnovel about a depressed teenager who gets transported from his English class to the magical land of Aerb to face his inner demons come to life with the help of a harem of beautiful girls† sounds like a trainwreck, but Wales's genius turns it into a masterpiece. The setting is vast, logically coherent, and enchantingly interesting, Juniper and Amaryllis are incredibly smart, knowledgeable, and driven, there is a great supporting cast, tons of action with interesting obstacles to overcome, and an amazing ending.

* Though I prefer the AO3 version, since it lets you download an EPUB/MOBI/PDF for your Kindle/Kobo/Nook and read the whole thing in one page.

† Or, as the original description put it, "It's a self-insert litRPG portal fantasy, loosely based on my personal experience of falling into a portal to another world and discovering that I had a character sheet attached to my soul."

The section on the website I linked to is only for completed fictions, and the two recs were both completed stories.

Completed stories are not RoyalRoad's strong suite. Typically they have stories with very interesting beginnings and good looooong middles. My approach is to just stop reading them once I get bored with the tropes / writing in the long middles. Usually I'll play "pick my own ending" and just stop reading a story when I feel like it gets to a conclusion and I've started to get bored.

"This Used to be about dungeons" (TUTBAD) was not really for me. But if I had to think three other stories with similar things to what you listed I'd say:

  1. Beneath the dragoneye moons. Slice of life, has more plot than TUTBAD. Lots of characterization, lots of worldbuilding. Most people in the world are nice, even if the setting of the world itself isn't so nice.

  2. Millennial Mage. Slice of life for the first few books. Cool worldbuilding where humans are one of the least powerful species and thus they are all very nice to each other. The other species aren't evil, but more just amoral and don't care about human well-being.

  3. Ar'Kendrithyst. My personal favorite, and perhaps one of my longest going patreon subscriptions. MC is very nice, but thrown into a dangerous and slightly brutal world. He is changed to be more ruthless, but he also changes the world to be a little nicer. Great characterization.

I'll caveat that Ar'Kendrithyst isn't complete, and likely isn't going to be complete for another year or so (if it ends at Book 8). I think you could read Books 1-4, but even going to 1-6 might run into the "winning effortlessly" problem and Book 7 more so.

I think I often don't mind reading the "effortlessly winning" books. Especially if its after a long buildup of power from previous books. The alternate to the effortlessly winning is the perfectly scaling escalator of difficulty. Where somehow the MC only encounters appropriately leveled challenges all throughout the story.

One of my reasons for recommending it is the easiness with which the MC sometimes wins. This matches slice of stories a bit, in that there isn't a ton of tension or strife to hook the reader, and its more of an interest in the world building and characters that keeps you around.

"effortlessly winning" is not a problem by itself, I would be happy to read/watch something about character stomping all over appropriate targets but that is really hard to pull well.

There are stories where the protagonist sometimes wins easily and sometimes gets curbstomped in turn (and to an extent, that's true in Ar'Kendrithyst, cfe Moon Moon), but understood and agreed.

If you liked This Used To Be About Dungeons, you might like other stuff by Alexander Wales, who tends to be well-thought-of in rationalist circles. Probably his best known work is Worth The Candle. Wales' stuff is very well written by many metrics, but he does not write characters that I like, which is fatal as far as I'm concerned.

Royal Road has a number of other stories that I do like, but they are incomplete/in progress/on hiatus. The best thing I've read there is Beware of Chicken, though the first book has moved to Kindle Unlimited and Audible by way of Amazon. A casual knowledge of xianxia/cultivation stories would help, as it's a genre parody, but isn't essential. Very highly recommended.

Strongly anti-recommend Beware of Chicken, it becomes embarrassingly bad after the first book

Seconding Beware of Chicken. It's an innocent pleasure.

No, you are wrong. Ancillary justice is great.

To address a few of your points:

The AIs don't "need" to take over humans, they do it to create perfect AI controlled meat puppet servants for the officer cadres aboard the ships, as non human servants is just low class.

The AI human main character is just a fragment of the actual AI, and due to having loads of bits of brain scooped out to fit in the cyberaugmetics for communication and integration with the AI is basically a weird techno autist. The AI was also not a god AI like a culture mind. What is left is essentially a fusion of a small part of the AI fused with the lobotomised remnants of the original human.

They all use she pronouns not as an endorsement of woke, but as their culture is a slave owning, world conquering, plantation building, mass murdering, genocidal, xenophobic, feudal caste based imperium of polite nazis in space who like to drink tea and wear fine clothes (edit I forgot the end of this bit, so they use one pronoun for eveyone as that is their culture and they literally force it on everyone else, who doesn't get slave lobotomised or killed in their invasiom that is). The language fuckups are the shattered remnants of the AI and lobotomised human autistically struggling to not to act like they have done for their whole life, that is like a conquering army backed up by reams of orbital dakka, ready to genocide the natives if they don't like how things are done now.

It is to my read a praise of autocratic caste based society, while also holding up a dark mirror on how the elements of a woke worldview (pronouns) are intrinsically alienating to humans and flow only from a conquering army backed by the righteousness power of the gun barrel and little else, while being natural only to literal autistic meat puppets lobotomised to act as servants for their caste betters. It is easy to view it as an extreme criticism of wokeness.

The AIs don't "need" to take over humans, they do it to create perfect AI controlled meat puppet servants for the officer cadres aboard the ships, as non human servants is just low class.

The AI human main character is just a fragment of the actual AI, and due to having loads of bits of brain scooped out to fit in the cyberaugmetics for communication and integration with the AI is basically a weird techno autist.

This is basically what I assumed the author was trying to get at - but the beginning was far too slow paced and uninteresting to keep me hooked until this was made explicit. I think she either needed to hook people earlier, or address this explicitly. As I've mentioned elsewhere though I had too much heat in this post and not enough light.

Chances are pretty good you're overestimating how male-dominated the audiences for SFF (particularly Fantasy) are, depending on what you mean by 'overwhelming'. Traditionally it's been heavily skewed towards men (upwards of 90% at some points), but the most recent indications I can find are that it is in the vicinity of 60-40 male/female. Reader demographics are changing and preferences with them, along with the general mainstreaming of nerd culture eroding the influence of old school nerds.

If aspiring writers of science fiction and fantasy can't make it without catering to woke sensibilities, then unfortunately the quality of the genre will drop drastically.

I'm skeptical of both premises here - that it is impossible to have success without catering to woke sensibilities or that "woke" fiction is categorically worse than "non-woke" fiction. It helps if you want Washington Post Lit columnists to jerk you off ("a group of living avatars who personify New York do battle against an ancient eldritch monstrosity that represents gentrification and white nationalism, with the fate of cities everywhere at stake"), almost everyone including their co-partisans considers these people insufferable. You can find obnoxious ideological pandering and bad writing under any flag (looking at you, Ringo).

Perhaps more to the point, SFF awards have always trended towards the... I hesitate to use the word highbrow. Intellectually aspirational? Look at Hugo Awards from the past decades. You're not going to find the kind of pulpy novels Correia and Torgersen were complaining were overlooked*. Partly this is because SFF awards try to maintain some pretense that they are more than popularity contest, partly because the SFF community seems to have perennial cravings for mainstream respectability.

I can't speak particularly highly of Hugo Award winners in recent years (though I've also never had much regard for them - see the remark above about craving mainstream respectability), but frankly I blame that on the Puppies. The voting base leaned left before, but the backlash against the organized voting block activated a bunch of ideologically motivated left-wing/woke voters who seemed to vote more for authors than for books. Notably, the winners take a sharp downward turn in 2013 (regardless of how good a series might be, I find it faintly ridiculous to award an author multiple times for different installments). Even after that effort petered out, the after-effects on the active voters remained.

*as an aside: I'd also note that these are not really what I'd consider "shape rotator" fiction, for which I would point towards authors like Arthur C. Clarke (or, more recently, Andy Weir). Groggy authors like David Weber occupy something of a middle ground, but they lack the concrete problem solving dimension I associate with shape

When it comes to modern entertainment, science fiction novels especially have been one of the last bastions of male centric, systematized, shape-rotator style writing. It seems that where the genre goes could be an important bell-weather for the future of the culture war in entertainment.

Probably, but, as mentioned above, not for the reasons you think. Fortunately, writing is a medium with low production costs, especially if you're willing to forgo marketing and rely on digital distribution. There is perhaps no other domain where the exhortation to "start your own" is more credible. In the event that the shape rotators are driven into the outer darkness by the wordcels, they're still going to be able to write novels about bus crashes on the moon.

But frankly, I don't think that's going to happen. White male nerds continue to attain commercial and critical success within the SFF space (just off the top of my head: Alistair Reynolds, Joe Abercrombie, Brandon Sanderson, Miles/Christian Cameron, Franck and Abraham).

Becky Chambers' books, that someone at the old motte described as "nothing happens to a very diverse crowd,"

Not on the old motte, it was kontextmaschine, back in 2015.

If you have any idea about how I can monetize near-perfect recall of who said what and where, I'm all ears ;)

The community as a whole, or the subset of the community that runs awards and/or gets MFAs? Yeah, there's always people like Atwood sneering down their nose if anyone dares associate her with "genre," since she's got such a pretentious stick holding her up, but most authors and fans (historically) seemed happy to have their niche and weren't too happy with that attitude.

To be fair to Margaret Atwood, this "sneering" you are referring to is mostly based on her assertion that she writes "speculative fiction," not science fiction, and in context, it may be a little pretentious, but it's not sneering at science fiction as a genre. She claims that she didn't set out to write "science fiction" per se, which in her mind is imagining a fictitious future with nonexisting technologies. She has praised the SF genre often.

SF fans have been mad at her for years about that quote, but I think there's more jealousy and insecurity from the SF community (because Atwood is regarded as "literary") than there is condescension from her.

Well, the use of the term "speculative fiction" is somewhat problematic, as the young people say nowadays, because back in the 60s/70s when the New Wave was riding high, popular writers like J.G. Ballard starting going "No, I don't write science fiction, I write speculative fiction" and wanting to be shelved along with the literary writers not on the SF/genre shelves in book shops.

This was seen as biting the hand that fed them because they had made their bones in SF, by using "speculative fiction" they could hang on to the "SF" label and thus maintain sales to the skiffy fans while getting the ego-stroking of Proper Literary Critics (even if literature sold much more poorly and thus they would never make a living if they relied on Proper Literature sales alone).

Those who tended to go for "speculative fiction", be they critics or authors, were perceived as looking down their noses at the grubby proles of SF, hence why Atwood annoyed some (including me) by writing SF or using standard SF tropes in her writing, then loudly going "no no no it's literature not science fiction" in interviews (granted, she did mellow on that later on).

She claims that she didn't set out to write "science fiction" per se, which in her mind is imagining a fictitious future with nonexisting technologies.

So what the fudge is Oryx and Crake then, Maggie? I do find it tedious when these types go "well ackshully skiffy is about robots and rockets, I don't write about that, so I don't write skiffy, I write Propah Litterachur". Ray Bradbury, may the heavens be his bed, was never one bit ashamed of being a filthy genre writer, even though he wrote across many genres and did film scripts as well, and his science fiction was often of the decidedly "soft" kind, not all robots and rockets (and what the hell is wrong with robots and rockets, anyway?). Even Atwood need not be ashamed of having written Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed (if she ever got to write anything as good).

ideological fiction of any sort tends to be worse than that which just wants to tell a good story

Well yes it generally "tends" but that is not a necessity.

Firsly let's not conflate fuzzy set of biases "ideologies" such as wokism with a well defined/scoped opinionated narrarive "ideology".

For example there is deliberate/motivated ideology and even utopism in V for vendetta, the great dictator and black mirror.

I think we live in an era that has a void of ideology, narratives and utopia.

I can imagine many optimistic but insightful rationalist utopia that I would deliberately realize and influence if I was a film maker.

However the world is not rationalist and the wokism and anti workism in modern cinema is pure cancer and I strongly fear the consequences it has on the future allocation of beliefs weights in the worlwide mindshare market.

I think we live in an era that has a void of ideology, narratives and utopia.

That is a bold claim I'd love to see evidence/arguments for, because if true, then it pretty much falsifies, like, this whole community.

then it pretty much falsifies, like, this whole community.

Can you expand on that ?

I am new here so I don't know exactly what you mean and what are the main beliefs of the motte community.

You could mean that a deficit of ideologies in this era would invalidate the motte in general ? Don't think so.

I believe you might have meant that such lack of ideologies would invalidate the notion of culture wars? If so I see what you mean.

So let me constrain my initial statement:

There is no shortage of tribes/groupthink, although some groupthinks have fuzzy/approximate delineations and have not necessarily core identities.

Some tribes do have well scoped ideologies, e.g the feminists/masculinists/egalitarianists.

Some tribes have well scoped beliefs such as flat earthers, but their belief is not an ideology per se, it is not a mindset/mental framework, nor is it a theory that desire to alter society for a "greater good".

Some tribes do have unscoped/universal ideologies though, such as the rationalists/homo logicus.

There is no shortage of beliefs, especially polarizing ones.

One could have thought the advent of the internet would uniformize mankind as in since everyone has easy access to information, people would gradually converge to semi-consensus as to what constitute reality.

There are many explaining factors that explain why people tribalize, polarize and can't assimilate what others says, including cognitive biases, and that is a too rich topic for me to analyze it in this comment.

Fringe theories (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_theory) are very interesting as they represent the frontier of science/knowledge.

Some do have key insights or have had scientific value, for example Lysenkoism.

So if we have more than ever, tribes, polarization and fringe theories/beliefs, what did I mean by

I think we live in an era that has a void of ideology, narratives and utopia.

As I implied, here I have a specific meaning for the term ideologies, the keyword being to ones related to utopia.

The salient message I have is a classic and relatable one, that we live in an era of disenchantment.

The previous centuries, despite all their factual horrors, were filled with a high pace of progress and strong ideologies that made people dream of a better future.

For example:

The advent of democracies,

liberalism,

communism,

and socialism.

Regarding the pace of progress, every single metric of quality of life got improved, medecine, education, transports, socialization, etc

After each ideologies came their implementations and with time, their flaws and limitations got revealed to the world.

Nowadays we have a bitter but realistic look at past ideologies, and a deficit of new ideologies to sell a new dream/utopia.

Concomittant to this is an extreme plateau regarding scientific progress. The number of patents and papers each year is increasing fast and has never been that big, and yet the reality is we are constrained by the immutable laws of physics and we hit considerable diminishing returns everywhere.

There are many reasons to be afraid of the future, so many in fact that I can't be exhaustive about it.

Be it climate deregulation, the insane coming scarcity of chemical elements, the escalation of military and economic tensions worlwide and the risk of pandemics or the fact ageing is not considered to be a disease, to say a few.

The other side of the coin is that, yes we live in a modern world that give us a lot of abilities and yet there are fundamental things technology currently doesn't solves.

Humans are not happy enough. Most lives are utterlerly wasted being dysfunctional. That's right everyone has a mental disease, the fact it's not recognized as one by the medical system is irrelevant and does not invalidate the fact we all have it.

For starters, the diagnostic for ADHD is based on magic numbers for the tresholds, I've seen papers showing that with slighly lower thresholds, ADHD can be diagnosed to ~20% of mankind.

But the real disease concern 100% of mankind. We have a lot of time and we spend it ineptly. Humans are victim of hypnosis, a lack of awareness, very deficient memories regarding their qualias, low available memory, low eugeroy, low volition and of a potent hedonic treadmill.

As such humans waste most of their lives.

Again a topic out of scope for this comment.

In addition to this, people suffer from a loneliness epidemic and a recession in friendship relatability and intensity worldwide.

Mankind needs a new ideology, a new utopia.

Not a new sect/religion, not a new unrealistic dream, but an actionable vision that would bring revolutionnary results and hope in this misery.

People wants to feel like Chaplin made them feel https://youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1Xg6X20

I have theorized a third way, a new power allocation system (a cracy) with results not only in politics but in recommender systems too, as would underdstand the people that ask themselves the right questions. I also have theorized a successor to capitalism. I develop a pragmatic way to AGI with incremental goals, I am the only one to have a precise and complete roadmap to increasing significantly men healthspan and lifespan.

I could go on with my works, why me ? Why if anyone finds a way to disrupts the world will it be me? Because I have not stopped dreaming, and yet I am a true rationalist. Very few people on earth follow simultaneously those two requirements.

You're not going to find the kind of pulpy novels Correia and Torgersen were complaining were overlooked*.

That's the complaint I never got - to quote Mad Men, "that what the money was for." The other stuff, even if I disagreed, I at least understood why they were upset, even if I thought they were silly, but mid-tier pulp in any genre has never really won awards. But yeah, before most people currently complaining about the state of sci-fi were even alive, sci-fi prizes had gone away from military sci-fi or the type of stuff supposedly being locked out by the SJW's, because it was old hat.

I also think you're right the whole Puppy business not only pushed away a lot of 'centrist' voters to stop getting involved, but activated a whole new group of voters who frankly, saw a bunch of whom they saw as assholes trying to steal awards, and get involved to stop it.

Or that is the accepted take on the Puppies now? "It never happened, and if it did, they deserved it"?

I was very sympathetic to the Sad Puppies because a lot of the modern Hugo stuff really was "how the hell is this SF/Fantasy?" and was being patted on the head simply because it was written by a woman/POC/LGBT author.

What I read back when the Sad Puppies were getting going, is that one particular author/member of the SF community claimed that the WorldCon committee was nudging the scales when nominations/awards were going on, so that they could present a slate of preferred (progressive leaning) authors. The counter-claim was "this is impossible and would never happen", so he set it up to show that not only could it happen under the rules, it was perfectly possible. A slate of non-woke nominees followed, much anger from the WorldCon set, and we're off to the races with the Rabid Puppies (since Vox Day could not resist this chance to make trouble) and then the Sad Puppies, and then the purging and now the new, unchallenged, woke in control Hugos which impeccably nominate and vote for non-white, non-male, LGBT+ authors every time.

The one minor kerfuffle that amused me out of the aftermath was one Bogi Takács who was oppressed, persecuted and vilified by the horrible transphobic monsters in control, because some poor over-worked volunteer doing cut'n'paste bios of finalists slipped up and called em "he" instead of "e". Oh, the humanity! E is of course intersex, agender, trans, disabled, autistic, Jewish-Hungarian who uses Spivak pronouns, all of that is so simple to remember that naturally it couldn't have been a mistake, it had to be deliberate and malicious misgendering. Of course e felt so unsafe and threatened by such acts of villainy, e was not sure ey could attend a pit of vipers like WorldCon 2018:

I would very much appreciate a public apology from @worldcon2018 for rewriting my bio to change my name and my gender.

I have never, ever used "he" pronouns.

After many similar exclusionary actions, this is the last straw, I am honestly not sure I can safely attend.

They wanted this, and they got it, full and plenty. And by God, they deserve it.

I was very sympathetic to the Sad Puppies because a lot of the modern Hugo stuff really was "how the hell is this SF/Fantasy?" and was being patted on the head simply because it was written by a woman/POC/LGBT author.

See, the thing about the Puppies is I agreed with them about a lot of the recent winners, but not that therefore "Low-brow pulp action should get Hugos." Like, I'm sorry, but a Hugo was supposed to represent something worthy of becoming a genre classic. I actually enjoy Larry Correia's books, but his writing is strictly derivative action-adventure with no small amount of wish fulfillment. Vox Day is not actually a very good writer (though admittedly his nominations were pure trolling), and Brad Torgerson tries to write in the old classic SF style but he doesn't have the chops for it.

As much as I appreciated the puppies' campaign for its entertainment value, I don't think their tastes in "literature" are any better than the woke cabal's, it just runs in a different lowbrow direction.

See, the thing about the Puppies is I agreed with them about a lot of the recent winners, but not that therefore "Low-brow pulp action should get Hugos."

True, but looking back at 2016 Sad and Rabid Puppies Hugo nominees, ironically one of them is "Ancillary Mercy" by Ann Leckie (low-brow pulp action?). Some of their nominees, I agree, are low-brow pulp and are there mainly as friends/supporters/'up yours' to the opposition, but not all:

Sad Puppies list:

Best Novel

Somewhither – John C Wright

Honor At Stake – Declan Finn

The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass – Jim Butcher

Uprooted – Naomi Novik

A Long Time Until Now – Michael Z Williamson

Seveneves – Neal Stephenson

Son of the Black Sword – Larry Correia

Strands of Sorrow – John Ringo

Nethereal – Brian Niemeier

Ancillary Mercy – Ann Leckie

Rabid Puppies/Vox Day:

Seveneves: A Novel, Neal Stephenson

Golden Son, Pierce Brown

Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm, John C. Wright

The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass, Jim Butcher

Agent of the Imperium, Marc Miller

And seemingly in 2015 the Puppies nominated and voted for The Three-Body Problem but this was bad because it was ideological right-wingism and not because they thought "yeah, this is good hard SF":

GT: Many fans believe that even if The Three-Body Problem had benefited from the “puppies,” it still was deserving of a Hugo Award. Do you agree?

Liu: Deserving is one thing, getting the award is another thing. Many votes went to The Three-Body Problem after Marko Kloos withdrew. That’s something I didn’t want to see. But The Three-Body Problem still would have had a chance to win by a slim margin of a few votes [without the “puppies”].

After the awards, some critics used this – the support right-wing organizations like the “puppies” gave The Three-Body Problem – as an excuse to criticize the win. That frustrated me. The “puppies” severely harmed the credibility of the Hugo Awards. I feel both happy and “unfortunate” to have won this year.

Or that is the accepted take on the Puppies now? "It never happened, and if it did, they deserved it"?

I don't know what this is supposed to mean. The nominees prior reflected a left-skewed and "literary" preference. Enter Correia and Torgersen complaining that not enough stuff they like is getting nominated. I missed the part where they claimed the process was rigged, which just makes them look worse because what transpired was the opposite of what you'd expect from a rigged process. Putting together an organized slate successfully got a bunch of their preferred candidates on the ballot, whereas if there were people putting their thumb on the scale behind the scenes that would have failed. What they did do was piss off a lot of people, resulting in people openly organizing against them. Instead of it being vaguely left-inflected, ideological conflict was made explicit. After a couple of years the effort petered out, but left behind their ideologically motivated adversaries. It's not "they deserved it" it's "they catalyzed the process".

I was very sympathetic to the Sad Puppies because a lot of the modern Hugo stuff really was "how the hell is this SF/Fantasy?" and was being patted on the head simply because it was written by a woman/POC/LGBT author.

Can you give examples? Looking at Hugo Best Novel winners from the pre-puppy era, we (going backwards) have: Among Others (female straight white author, primary world fantasy), Blackout (straight white female author, time travel), Windup Girl/City and the City joint winners (both straight white male authors, cyberpunk and social science fiction, respectively), The Graveyard Book (straight white male author, fantasy), The Yiddish Policeman's Union (bi? white male author, alt-history), Rainbow's End (straight white male author, not-really-cyberpunk-but-that's-probably-the-closest-relative), Spin (straight white male author, classic sci fi), Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (straight white female author, historical fantasy). That takes us back to 2005. You can look back further, but I don't think it is going to reveal anything.

As far as I can tell, the "woke" trend in the Hugo Awards started after and in reaction to the Puppies. Hence my remarks above. The only that seems to even come close to the critique is Among Others.

And the sneering that the Puppies were all racist sexist bigots? That didn't happen either and didn't matter?

Irene Gallo, the Creative Director at Tor Books and an Associate Publisher at Tor.com, wrote:

There are two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups, called the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies respectively, that are calling for the end of social justice in science fiction and fantasy. They are unrepentantly racist, misogynist, and homophobic. A noisy few but they’ve been able to gather some Gamergate folks around them and elect a slate of bad-to-reprehensible works on this year’s Hugo ballot.

Ah, right: science fiction is now about social justice, not, you know, science fiction.

My sympathies with the Sad Puppies were not "I think trashy pulp skiffy should win" (though again, trashy pulp skiffy can be just what the doctor ordered at times), it was "Well if I'm a racist sexist bigot for liking this kind of story and not that kind of story where a trans (possibly) non-white (possibly) lesbian (possibly) paleontologist gets beaten up by gin-swilling rednecks for being (I quote) "a fag, a towel-head, a shemale, a sissy, a spic, every epithet they could think of, regardless of whether it had anything to do with you or not" because I don't think the latter is quite SF, then I'm a racist etc. etc. etc. because I would prefer to read SF/Fantasy and not poor quality literary magazine rejects".

And the sneering that the Puppies were all racist sexist bigots? That didn't happen either and didn't matter?

Oh, it definitely did. Because a quite a lot of the Puppies were racist, sexist bigots, most prominently Vox Day and his followers. Especially considering that Vox Day was more successful than Correia or Torgersen. If the shoe fits, wear it.

It wasn't the about the not-liking, it was about the vicious backlash to, essentially, two short story nominations.

I think 2010 was the last year when I could just pick a Hugo or Nebula award winner and expect to like it. I've marked potential diversity quota winners with italics:

  • 2011: Blackout/All Clear - tried it, didn't like it.

  • 2012: Among Others

  • 2013:

    • Redshirts

    • 2312

  • 2014: Ancillary Justice

  • 2015:

    • The Three-Body Problem - tried it, liked it

    • Annihilation

  • 2017:

    • The Fifth Season

    • All the Birds in the Sky

  • 2018: The Stone Sky

  • 2019: The Calculating Stars - tried it, hated it

  • 2020:

    • A Memory Called Empire (does using a male-presenting pen name make you exempt from being a diversity laureate?)

    • A Song for a New Day

  • 2021: Network Effect

  • 2022:

    • A Desolation Called Peace

    • A Master of Djinn

Does anyone have any disrecommendations before I pull the plug and try to read all of them to form an opinion based on personal impressions?

Spoilers, citizen!

I thought Ancillary Justice was both enjoyable and extremely well-constructed. I semi-disrecommended it a couple months back, but that was purely on aesthetics. It's the kind of book that will raise red flags to a certain kind of reader who happens to be overrepresented on this board.

But first, a little about what I liked.

  • Vast or alien intelligences navigating human society are cool. This is common to lots of books I quite like, such as most anything by Wildbow.

  • Vast or alien empires with aggressively weird structures are also cool. You barely saw any of that until the second half of the book, though.

  • The setting was aggressively authleft and dystopian. More on that later.

  • It played with a few AI and general-intelligence tropes that I was familiar with from my time on /r/rational, but which rarely make it to the mainstream. The most important of these would be value drift and antimemetics, but you didn't get to that part.

  • I found the interleaved chronology to be quite satisfying. You know from the back cover that Justice of Toren One Esk used to "be" a spaceship, but that rightfully elides all the details. More importantly, it doesn't cover the background for why someone might want to betray a spaceship, or what said ship could do about it. The alternating scenes converge on that event in a way I found aesthetically pleasing.

  • There is legitimate characterization. My personal favorite bit was Breq's conclusion when faced with multiple Anaander Mianaais arguing to kill each other.

  • The actual prose was deliciously dense. I suspect this overlaps with what you're calling "confusing." It was genuinely quite fun and immersive for me.

  • I want to write a whole thesis on implied vs. explicit worldbuilding, and how hard it is to do right, but I digress. Suffice to say I found this book technically impressive.

Now for the red flags. Ancillary Justice was obviously part of a Conversation in the SFF community. Yes, the low-hanging fruit would be the (lack of) gender dynamics, since they're quite visible. There were a few passages that were basically a pastiche of Left Hand of Darkness This is not a disqualifier so much as a proud tradition in Thinky Science Fiction, also known as Award Bait. It gives any journalist or reviewer a quick, obvious reference point, and streamlines part of the worldbuilding process by importing a more specific set of cultural assumptions, picking up where LeGuin or Asimov left off. Not coincidentally, that corresponds to a creeping sense of unease in those with a reflexive distaste for Internet leftism.

So instead of being linguistic cultural baggage, carried around even when actively harmful, the pronouns get interpreted as woke pandering. Instead of talking about the bizarre implications of an increasing density of Anaanders as you approach the capital Dyson sphere, people argue over whether various characters were really men. And rather than ask why an author might write her fully automated luxury non-gendered communist empire as a hegemonizing, xenophobic not-so- monoculture...all that matters is whether it fit Vox Day's idea of good sci-fi.

I'll leave you with a couple recommendations.

If you like ship-AI, but want less 2010s politics, less originality, and more HFY: try the Last Angel. Humanity has been subjugated as one of many client races to the Covenant Compact. On a routine mission, one team discovers a drifting hulk which will throw into doubt their overlords' preferred version of history. Yeah, it's Halo without the Flood, and it kicks ass.

If you want something a little bleaker that still deals with transhumanism, space governance, continuity of consciousness, etc., and you don't mind video games, consider Crying Suns. I found its gameplay was good fun; I also enjoyed both the character writing and the overall plot. Or you could just go read Dune again, you cheeky blighter you, since all this branch of sci-fi clearly owes its existence to Frank Herbert. Ancillary Justice is just a little more obtuse about it.

Finally, for those of you who suffered through this whole review thinking Ancillary Justice didn't go far enough, or who would like to see an actual example of unapologetically leftist fiction, just read The Traitor Baru Cormorant.

All this is reminding me of older SF, so Leckie is re-working tropes (deliberately or not? hard to tell). The "AI starship in human body" notion is along the lines of a brainship, a concept I first encountered with Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang, but which is even older than that in SF. Flipping it so that it's "AI intelligence in human body" is a variation, sure, but I bet someone has also done it before.

So reading the differing interpretations in the comments, the question seems to be: is Leckie writing the dark side of The Culture, how that society would really be in practice, or does she mean to put forward the progressive elements as separate and admirable and desirable?

It's definitely intentional. Insofar as the book was intended as award bait, yeah, it's winking-and-nudging the LeGuin fans, and probably a dozen other authors besides. That sort of dialogue with existing ideas is...I don't want to say it's the mark of good sci-fi, because there's excellent stuff out there which firmly abstains from referencing what came before. It would be more accurate to say that deployed properly, a conversation with other sci-fi is an efficient worldbuilding tool, and may make the overall premise more engaging to boot.

Personally, I think Leckie started from an interesting premise rather than from a mandatory message. Rumors of its wokeness have been greatly exaggerated. The Radch isn't the Culture any more than it's Dune's Imperium or Endless Space's Horatio. It's a related concept, developed on familiar lines and richly illustrated.

I read it as a variation on the obvious answer. In-universe, the Radch is its emperors' vanity project, and they subscribe to some level of totalizing xenophobia. The annexations, the citizenship, the ancillaries, the reforms are all serving the interests of Anaander Mianaai.

Out-of-universe, it's because Leckie wrote AJ as an interesting novel, not as agitprop. If she was just going for maximum partisanship, the setting would look very different. I really liked @gemmaem's observation that the author stripped out the two biggest (modern) diversity flags. That puts it more in line with LeGuin or Asimov's approach to political sci-fi.

It is worth noting that Banks' Culture is firmly in that camp, too. FALGC has taken on a life of its own, but Banks spends a lot of time engaging with the Culture as a hegemonic force. At its most extreme, some of the novels are direct allegory to American adventurism. Even in those that aren't, though, the Culture and especially the existence of Contact is pretty unambiguously universalizing.

Aunt Beru, moisture farmer on Tatooine, mother-figure to Luke Skywalker.

Coruscant, shining jewel of the galaxy, city-planet at the heart of trade, and dark home of power and inequity.

Also, a proud tradition of naming ships after birds. Millenium Cormorant?

I'll give a recommend for the Last Angel too, though it's SOOOOOOO SLOW! It's like that gif of a truck constantly accelerating towards but never quite hitting a post, filmed from every angle.

That's not to say that nothing actually happens or that updates aren't frequent. It's good, well-written and interesting but the pacing is arthritic. We still don't know much about the Songeaters after all this time! I thought there were other factions of horrific space entities as well, along with people leaving random space structures around. Someone pointed out that many of the characters know more than the audience does. The Compact's investigation into the father goes on and on, the Triquetrans took so long for their secret to be revealed. It's still not fully revealed, as of the last chapter! And then there are the side-stories, slowing everything down even more.

Also, it seems that sequel is abandoned if I look at forum posts right ( https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel.244209/page-96#post-15777617 is from 2014 ).

No, we've moved on to another sequel, The Hungry Stars, updated last month. Spacebattles has an unintuitive thread format.

Oh, that's good to know. I haven't gotten around to Ascension, yet, but I'll bookmark this for when I cut down my queue.

Can you link it? If you have contact to author - maybe add post mentioning it as a threadmark to the original thread?

Following

I'm too scared to post about it on spacebattles, they're anal about thread necromancy.

These are the sequels, the original is linked above.

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel-ascension.346640/

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel-the-hungry-stars.868549/#post-68912119

This is also what was grating for me in Ancillary Justice - I get how the (ex)AI may be weak on the concept of gender, and how its (her?) default may be stuck on female. That's understandable. But a small child learns to grasp that concept - and how to use it - within rather short time. Breq is clearly aware (it was stated in the text, as I remember) that genders exist, and that gendered languages - including some she is using - exist, and that some of the people she is talking about are male (she may be unaware initially, but it's not after repeated encounters) and there is a proper way to address them in that language. Yet she keeps applying "she" to them as some kind of obsessive tick. That breaks the immersion. At least such a major flaw should be somehow addressed.

In general, the first part itself looked average for me. Some of the ideas and depiction of Raadch, its philosophy and the consequences of its multiple-personalities setup are well done, but the style and the pace didn't really work for me that well, and I couldn't really feel anything for the protagonist. Didn't try the other parts for this reason.

If aspiring writers of science fiction and fantasy can't make it without catering to woke sensibilities, then unfortunately the quality of the genre will drop drastically

I expect this is exactly what is going to happen. Likely already happening. Alas.

I thought it was just Breq not caring about learning other pronouns or gender concepts than Radch female pronouns. Which was character building: Breq is fully-immersed chauvinist partisan for Radch totalitarianism.

By the time we meet her she's anything but, I think.

Breq is clearly aware (it was stated in the text, as I remember) that genders exist, and that gendered languages - including some she is using - exist, and that some of the people she is talking about are male (she may be unaware initially, but it's not after repeated encounters) and there is a proper way to address them in that language. Yet she keeps applying "she" to them as some kind of obsessive tick. That breaks the immersion. At least such a major flaw should be somehow addressed.

Yep this is a great overview of my thoughts. The immersion was just broken when this supposedly brilliant AI who's existed for thousands of years makes such a basic mistake over and over - with no explanation as to why that's happening.

My Chinese ex, despite living in the US for over two years and speaking English everyday, frequently would confuse she / he and use the wrong pronoun in conversation because Chinese doesn’t really have gendered pronouns.

If a real life human has issues with it why wouldn’t an alien?

Two years is not that much, and it's one thing to occasionally make a mistake, and another to consistently use the wrong one while knowing it's wrong.

Yet she keeps applying "she" to them as some kind of obsessive tick.

Maybe hard-wired in, if all the commentary about scooping out bits of brain to fit in all the cybertech is correct? Can't be corrected/reprogrammed without access to the fancy AI starship tech which she currently doesn't have. And/or it is an obsessive tic, the human brain is damaged, this is like Tourettes Syndrome.

I liked Ancillary Justice. The premise is fun once you know what the author is doing. The ship can't properly identify as a human and understand gender distinctions for the same reason the empire folks (or whatever they were called) couldn't understand the native culture of the swamp planet enough to anticipate the brewing shitshow there. And why the ship didn't initially understand the plot. That disinterested misunderstanding was a big theme in the book.

This strikes me as like saying "well, it has evil Jewish bankers in it because that's part of the premise". The premise was created by an author, and premises with some in-story backing can still be created in a contrived way for political reasons.

"The AI just happens to misunderstand gender in a way which just happens to let the story appeal to real world social justice advocates, but that's purely worldbuilding, and has nothing to do with actual social justice advocates" seems like an unlikely scenario. There's a long tradition of sci-fi using proof by fictional evidence to have aliens (or in this case AIs) come to the humans and say how from their objective alien viewpoint untainted by human biases, some difference between humans which humans care about just isn't very important. Even evil aliens or AIs often do this. Is the AI actually shown to be wrong, in a strong enough way that this is not what's happening?

The (bad colonizing meat-robot-creating) culture that has practically no gender is shown in a pretty unsympathetic light whereas the one with a concept of gender is shown in a more sympathetic light.

It's often villains who do the "look objectively at human society" thing. There are a number of variations: the villain's only motivated by base motives so he doesn't care about complex human distinctions; the villain's outside society so human distinctions don't matter; the villain's naive and can't be tricked by human sophistry surrounding distinctions because he doesn't understand it.

The question isn't really "is the no-gender AI evil" or "does not understanding gender have negative consequences", it's whether the narrative treats it as a deficiency which makes it less than human, as if it couldn't understand grief or it had no appreciation of poetry.

I would say that it's treated as a deficiency, but not a dehumanizing one. In fact, the AI is one of the most human characters in the story, despite it's initial attempts to be above such things.

The irony is that both hardcore SJ crowd and anti-SJs miss any such implications.

I loved Ancillary Justice. It did not deserve to get dragged through the mud just because some people were mean to Larry Correia on the internet. It certainly starts out quite opaque, but it rewards attentive reading.

Given the publicity surrounding its use of feminine pronouns for every character, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is a book about gender. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this is really a book that is not about gender. The Imperial Radch is a deeply flawed society with a great deal of systemic injustice -- and it doesn't have gender (as we understand it) and it doesn't have race (as we understand it). So it's a book about systemic injustice that has very carefully excised the main two identity markers that we usually associate with that sort of thing. It takes away the compass that the average social justice advocate would use, and asks readers to learn to navigate anew.

I thought the body horror aspects were excellently handled, creeping up on the reader precisely because they are so normal to the narrator. I also found Anaander Mianaai's troubles with herself to be predictable in the manner of a successful Chekhov's gun -- the sort of thing where you ask "but what if..." partway through the book and then learn later (to great readerly satisfaction) that, indeed, if. On the whole, there is a general theme of throwing the reader into the deep end of some massive cultural and technological differences. If you enjoy subtle clues and tricky empathy leaps, it's a really good book.

Perhaps I was too harsh to the book, I think the huge praise it got and the relatively flat beginning threw me for a loop. I only finished about a fifth before setting it down.

On the whole, there is a general theme of throwing the reader into the deep end of some massive cultural and technological differences. If you enjoy subtle clues and tricky empathy leaps, it's a really good book.

I'm actually pretty okay with getting thrown into the deep end of a world, Malazan Book of the Fallen is my favorite speculative fiction series by far. If I had to pinpoint it, I'd say my main issue is that the world doesn't seem to make sense from a technical perspective, for instance the massive tech difference between the Radch and the Nilk, and the whole AI needing human bodies thing. I suppose it could be explained away as social issues, but I am generally pretty skeptical of galaxy spanning civilizations with godlike technology still having colonies where people have to perform a ton of manual labor, and have little to no real infrastructure.

Well, the tech difference is at least partly because this is an empire that conquers first and develops later, right? It's located somewhere in the same space as colonial Britain or ancient Rome. Conquest is definitely the main idea, and then assimilating the conquered peoples into your high tech, highly "cultured" society is also important, because that's how you keep the empire stable, but it takes longer.

I never really thought about the conditions that would lead to the usefulness of human ancillaries, I have to admit. I mostly took that part for granted. Some of the ships/AIs do have discussions later on about the relative merits of humans and robots, and they seem to subjectively prefer the former, possibly because the former has subjectivity. I don't really remember if the whole thing was actually explained in any depth, though, and I can see it being something that varies in plausibility depending on the reader. I guess that's true of a lot of world-building, in that there are always going to be things that work better for some people than others.

Well, the tech difference is at least partly because this is an empire that conquers first and develops later, right? It's located somewhere in the same space as colonial Britain or ancient Rome.

I more meant the Radch people on these backwaters (and in Ors). They have no implants, no real changes in their day to day tech (like phones/VR/AR type deal). It boggles the mind that after many millenia and conquering an entire galaxy, the military upper crust of this society is just like... a 21st century human. Totally breaks immersion for me.

Peter Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga is a great explanation of how to do this better. Also Gravity Dreams by L.E. Modesitt jr.

I never really thought about the conditions that would lead to the usefulness of human ancillaries, I have to admit. I mostly took that part for granted.

This is probably where I diverge most from what other people are saying about the book. It is so far beyond what I consider realistic it's basically a deal breaker unless it's addressed early and well.

This is because, as the author takes pain to remind us, the Radch Empire which she came from has one singular gender (or doesn't care about gender, it isn't clear) and the default pronoun is 'she.' This odd convention leads to such beautiful passages as (emphasis mine):

Can you really call it misgendering if you don't believe in the rules other people go by? I haven't read this novel, so I'll ask you if there's any dialogue at any point where both sides taboo their words.

Well, the people who don’t believe in the whole trans thing get accused of misgendering for not believing in the rules over people go by.

Yeah, I get that. But the question is whether we should qualify it as misgendering, not what others say.

Eh, it's more like the AI doesn't believe in or understand misgendering because in their society, the idea is totally alien. There's only one gender.

Problem is she's on a backwater, prejudiced planet. So the locals, who have a different conception of gender than her, try to kill her if she misgenders them. Even if the character doesn't believe the rules other people go by, they have serious consequences in this setting.

Can you really call it misgendering if you don't believe in the rules other people go by?

This is the first time I've heard of this being a prerequisite for something being misgendering. My belief was that the people who accuse others of misgendering don't care if the person they're accusing don't believe in the same rules about what differentiates a "he" from a "she." Is there more to it than that?

I can't really tell you, since I don't subscribe to the view that the outcome of an action always casts the action as moral or immoral.

I didn't hate Ancillary Justice - I finished it and thought it was okay, but the agendered/she-pronouns things just seemed like a gimmick meant to say "Look at me, Hugo voters!" The debut novel rough edges and one-note gimmick plus the fact the Anne Leckie has joined the ranks of pretentious twats like N. K. Jemisin and John Scalzi whom I will no longer read out of spite, even though I have enjoyed some of their work, prevented me from finishing the series.

That said, there is still plenty of non-woke fiction being published, but it's mostly either from veterans who pretty much stay off of Twitter and don't get in these stupid online fights, or indie authors. (I used to turn my nose up at self-published/"indie published" books, and the vast majority of it is still pretty crap, but it's actually becoming a viable alternative career path for some authors.)

I think you are overstating the degree to which awards and recognition from the online woke crowd actually matters to marketability. Yeah, a Hugo Award probably boosts sales, but other than that, most of the book-buying audience is really not that aware of the stuff that looms large to those of us too embedded in the culture war. And writing fiction has always been a brutal career that few succeed at.

If you went by online discourse, JK Rowling is now the most hated author in existence, her career and reputation in shambles, and no decent person will ever buy her books again. The reality is that she's still beloved worldwide and her Cormoran Strike novels still hit the bestseller lists.

Oh gosh, I used to see "Hugo Award winner" or "nominee" on the cover of a book and think "Okay, this must be worth giving it a go". Now I see it and go "Ah yes, woke crap that I needn't waste my time on".

I may be missing really good writing because of this, but I've been burned one time too many.

I think you are overstating the degree to which awards and recognition from the online woke crowd actually matters to marketability. Yeah, a Hugo Award probably boosts sales, but other than that, most of the book-buying audience is really not that aware of the stuff that looms large to those of us too embedded in the culture war. And writing fiction has always been a brutal career that few succeed at.

FWIW, I have an unstarted copy of Ancillary Justice that I picked up for $1.97 from the outdoor clearance racks at Books-A-Million.

It's the best way to acquire books, especially if you aren't sure when you'll read them.

I didn't hate Ancillary Justice - I finished it and thought it was okay, but the agendered/she-pronouns things just seemed like a gimmick meant to say "Look at me, Hugo voters!"

Fair, as I mentioned I only read 20% and bailed out. I probably judged it too harshly since I didn't finish it, but the premise and worldbuilding were just not to my taste. I can see it getting better for people that were more patient.

That said, there is still plenty of non-woke fiction being published, but it's mostly either from veterans who pretty much stay off of Twitter and don't get in these stupid online fights, or indie authors.

Discoverability is still extremely tough in speculative fiction novels. I've been trying for years to find consistent lists of good fiction that I enjoy, and haven't found any solid methods besides dredging through tons and tons of series. If you have any good pointers or lists let me know!

I agree that indie/self published novels have had some shining stars, like the Licanius trilogy I mentioned earlier, or Mother of Learning. (I don't know of any good SF self published stuff). Ideally though, indie would be less useful as a category because publishers/magazines/awards would sort out quality writing, and good indie authors would get snapped up quickly.

Unfortunately we don't live in that world, and instead of the overall quality of the established media's (what you call the 'online woke crowd') picks have gone down. I'd argue that the Hugo awards matter quite a bit to an already niche genre.

If you went by online discourse, JK Rowling is now the most hated author in existence

I want to say she's the "exception that proves the rule," but not sure that's any sort of legit principle. Either way, as you mention writing fiction is brutal. I would expect that cancellation and the generally pull from the left would be far more important to the majority of writers, already living on the edge of profitability as it is. Sure a few make it big and can afford to piss off the left crowd, but I'd imagine there are hundreds, if not thousands, of authors that gave up or quit because they weren't in line enough with social justice viewpoints to make a livable career out of their craft.

Bailing out is legitimate, I gave up on it within 10 minutes. If it doesn't engage me quickly, I move on.

I've loaned Ancillary Justice from a friend but haven't had the time to read it, but the whole pronoun she thing sounds like maximally riggered to make it difficult/impossible to translate to Finnish, a language that doesn't have gendered pronouns as a rule.

It might make it easier - ostensibly the whole reason she has it in is because the Radch empire doesn't have gendered pronouns either. Although I'd be willing to bet it's not actually representative of a culture without pronouns, it's probably just, as you say, maximally riggered to promote social justice ideology.

I wonder if woke people trying to argue the points about pronouns being important have actually studied language like Finnish? I'd be curious to see if there are real differences based on pronoun usage in sexism/equality/etc.

AFAIK, the kind of grammatical gender familiar to speakers of European language (he/she/sometimes it) is a peculiarity of Indo-European (Hindi, Farsi, European languages except Basque, Finnish and Hungarian) and Afro-Asiatic (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew) languages. Most languages of other families either have very different "gender" classes (e.g. the prefix system of Swahili, the noun classes based on shape and appearance in Navajo) or none at all.

Even Frisian the closest extant language to English lacks gendered pronouns. Proto-Indo European also lacked gendered pronouns. I’ve always wondered why these gender ideologues don’t advocate we just call everyone he.

I think that adequately describes some conlangs. Esperanto has everything neutral or male, with a suffix -ino for specifically feminine stuff like "mother." I think. It's a point of some controversy for ideological and practical reasons, so I'm not sure I parsed it right.

Because they would consider it an act of submission to the patriarchy, as evidenced by neologisms like "womxn", "herstory", etc.

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(spoken) Chinese

Historically, too. The “she” equivalent (same as “he”, except trade the person radical for the woman radical) was a character repurposed as a pronoun to ape European languages that did have gendered pronouns. This happened barely more than a hundred years ago.

This made the rounds a couple years back, though I've not looked into it.

More generally, Sapir-Whorf makes a plausible claim (the concepts and demarcations in a language determine how we think) that hasn't held up to scrutiny. With pronouns, I think the fixation on them is because of frustration with failures in addressing material issues. If all we need to build a better world is choosing to use the right incantation of pronouns, that's much more accessible and appealing than "you'll have to do a lot of hard work and will face likely disappointment anyway."

Probably one more of those studies whose conclusions are inflated way beyond their actual effects, and at the end they fail reproduction spectacularly, but not before there are 9000 books written about them and "everybody knows" they are true. I mean, it's possible it is not, but most likely it is.

My Linguistics 101 take on it (I hate categorically dismissing a paper):

It's an okay study in itself; they give subjects a stick figure drawing, and say

“Please use the text boxes below to describe in 3 sentences what the person in the image is doing. Please be as specific as possible and provide as much detail as you can. In your description of this individual, it is important that you use the pronouns ‘[he/she/they]’ and ‘[his/her/their].’ This will help to standardize the accounts provided by all participants in this survey, which will make them easier to interpret.”

with each individual receiving a version with one of masculine/female/neutral pronouns (except in Swedish, with they/their being a new pronoun recently introduced by the government).

They then poll subjects on several political topics, and those primed with different pronouns show meaningfully different results. My main complaint here is around social desirability bias, as the prompt makes it pretty obvious the object of study here. They attempt to rule it out by measuring reaction times, but I don't find that particularly compelling. It's also weird that the results they find go beyond salience (e.g. increased recall of female politicians) to a wide range of issues ("profemale preferences"), as there's no suggested short-term mechanism that would do this. I don't think that compelled use of pronouns would make people immediately switch their votes from Trump to Clinton or move from opposition to support of gay marriage and abortion, and they only discuss salience because that's the only part they have a plausible mechanism for. The exceptionally broad result suggests they're not measuring what they think they're measuring, and social desirability fits better than increased adherence to progressive principles.

The broader issue is what you point out: who knows if the study will replicate. If a hundred grad students attempt to, we'll get five papers saying it does replicate, none saying it doesn't, and a thousand articles in the popular media saying it does. Other things (like the known issues with Sapir-Whorf-style linguistic determinism that should make us skeptical of the result) will never be mentioned as important context for the results.

Well we have also the story of the priming work which was hyped to the high heavens and then turned out to be exaggerated, largely non-replicable and looking like Wikipedia's "list of research fallacies". That does not inspire too much confidence in similar approaches.

Are the novels which win sci-fi awards the sci-fi novels which sell? It doesn’t seem like they are- Orson Scott card, David Weber, and John Ringo are not writing particularly woke novels and they seem to top the sales charts for speculative fiction most of the time.

No the system was pretty riggable (the whole point of the alternate Rabid Puppy campaign) so they became about things that pleased an influential clique who wanted the awards to be more like literature awards.

Orson Scott Card very famously won back-to-back Hugos.

I have it on good report that Orson Scott Card is Problematic and should be shunned 🙄 I may be one of the ten people alive on the Earth who have never read "Ender's Game" (though even I have read excerpts and snippets) but even so, I would judge the guy on his writing not on his opinion about transgenderism.

It was gay marriage that got Card his reputation. He was staunchly against it during the (second) Bush administration. By the time transgenderism became relevant, he'd been sufficiently chastened to keep his opinions to himself.

And I do judge him on his writing. His two Hugos were will deserved and some of the best books I've ever read.

When the dinosaurs roamed the earth (1985 and 1986)

David Weber

The two big series he's written are a gender-swapped Horatio Hornblower in space and a transgender android overthrowing fundamentalist religious fanatics. You'd think he'd be swimming in feminist awards.

Haven't looked into the numbers here (not sure where you would find them) but in general, speculative fiction is an extremely competitive and difficult market to break into. Sure, authors who have already proven themselves like the ones you mentioned won't have sales issues. The problem is if awards promote authors like Ann Leckie, then other authors who write better fiction but we have never heard of will lose out.

As I mentioned, it's a zero-sum game. Also, marketing these types of novels doesn't work extremely well as it's a bit of a niche genre. So the main way books gain notoriety is by word of mouth, and the few awards out there. Winning a Hugo is a massive leg up, I'd be curious how you could make a real argument that it isn't.

It's been a few years since I read Ancillary Justice, but I remember disliking it quite a bit as well. My main complaint, if memory serves, was that the author had some interesting ideas but never had a good story to back them up. The plot just was boring. And like you, I came away firmly convinced that the awards for the book were a diversity pick, and that if a male author had presented the same book it would've been panned.

In all honesty, at this point I would take the Hugos (and similar industry awards) to be a negative mark on a book, not a positive one.

I'm not sure I would go that far, even though I do think they've sold out. The Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemisin was particularly impressive, to the point that I gave it a full five stars, rare for me. Jemisin is a black woman, but she wrote an incredible series that really ticked all the boxes for me.

Honestly that series is what put the Hugos on the map for me, thinking they were a decent mark of quality. Other notable good winners/runners up in recent years are Project Hail Mary, 2313 by Kim Stanely Robinson, Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, A Dance with Dragons and Leviathan Wakes of course.

I suppose my issue is that the Hugo has a decent track record of picking pretty good books. Even if they catered slightly towards more progressive works, i.e. used that as a metric to win a close tie, that would be fine. What made me utterly frustrated with Ancillary Justice was that the book had no redeeming features whatsoever in my mind, and won out against greats in the genre like Charles Stross / Brandon Sanderson (WoT) who were runners up.

won out against greats in the genre like Charles Stross

Wait, what? I'm a big fan of Stross, but if you're trying to avoid woke, he actively does not want your business (and has said as much). His writing credentials include intentionally writing a book with no straight characters because he thought it would be funny to piss off anti-LGBT people.

Looking at the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Novel (when Ancillary Justice won)... I enjoyed Neptune's Brood and Parasite but neither were exactly Hugo-bait. And the best series award was added (probably in response to the Wheel of Time nomination?) soon after since awarding a series "best novel" seems weird.

good winners/runners up in recent years are Project Hail Mary

You're one of the people who thought Project Hail Mary was a good book? Nevermind, we'll never agree on literature.

You didn't like Hail Mary? But why man?! The spider people were so cool....

That was sorta the problem with it: there wasn't anything to it past cool things happening. I found it a frustrating read because I thought the premise and worldbuilding were interesting, but plot and characters were awful. The alien is just his immediate perfect ally fully aligned with his goals. Everything the main character tries more or less just works modulo some minor mishaps. Which is an easier sell in the realistic Martian but a harder sell when the author is also writing their own laws of physics that the main character has minimal difficulty with. The Goodreads reviews (filter to 1- or 2-stars) cover plenty of what I disliked about the book in more detail.

The Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemisin was particularly impressive, to the point that I gave it a full five stars, rare for me.

If the writers would just write and shut up about their politics, it might work for everyone. I can't even try the Broken Earth series because of all the gushing critical praise about how this is all about racism and whiteness and men being violent to women (but if women are violent and angry that is fine and dandy). The reviews make me want more to spork out my eyes than read the books.

The Broken Earth trilogy is quite a bizarre read from a cultural perspective because of how it mangles its messaging despite ostensibly being very progressive. A straussian reading* of the book would have you thinking that eugenics is good and correct and racism is absolutely the right choice. But Jemisin's public notoriety clearly rules out that she's trying to do something like that, so you have to assume she is just really incompetent at creating a consistent political message - except that the books themselves are still really good, so I have no idea how it ended up so muddled.

*So the book is about a world that is riddled with massive, years-long natural disasters. Human towns are all organized by caste, with people set apart as good workers or breeders or administrators and so on. The towns are advised to maintain good ratios of these castes and to encourage breeding that helps this. This is never described as eugenics or really discussed within the books, it is just accepted as the right thing.

The main characters of the book are from a race blessed with magical, geomancy-like powers. This race is discriminated against harshly and called "roggers" or something obvious like that, I can't remember exactly. However, because of their power, every member of this race is basically capable of slaughtering entire towns, and children often have very little control over their powers and are shown accidentally killing other children. In this context, the fear people have of them is clearly the correct stance and in most cases it would be wise to avoid the geomancers or require them to be closely controlled.

A straussian reading* of the book would have you thinking that eugenics is good and correct and racism is absolutely the right choice.

Maybe the book's message is confused because the politics that it's trying to sell is similarly confused.

Imagine a present day book which praises BLM rioters and simultaneously complains about racism. You could read that, in an unintended way, as "racism is the right choice because black people are violent rioters".

That makes sense for the racism analogy, but I have no idea how the eugenics stuff went in there and no one, not Jemisin or her editors, noticed what it was

I read it without getting into a ton of reviews and actually didn't think it was woke at all. I was surprised to learn there was so much controversy around it.

I wonder if that's more from interviews and such the author has given, where she's said the books are about black people being treated badly by white people and so on:

N.K. Jemisin: As a black woman living in modern day America, I have lots of questions about validity and exploitation. Black Lives Matter and this book were born out of the same anger and pain. I was sitting at home and writing parts of this book as I was watching Ferguson unfold on Twitter. We saw again and again the names of people who had been extrajudicially murdered. I drew inspiration from a lot of different oppressive situations. One of the protagonists has lived her life as a woman in hiding, effectively similar to a closeted queer person. I’m interested in systems that are exploitative towards oppressed groups for specific reasons.

This looks a lot like our own world except periodically — every two or three hundred years — there is a seismic event powerful enough to kick off something that the locals call a Fifth Season. It’s some kind of massive worldwide disaster that often comes paired with famine and the breakdown of society. So this is a world where, in some ways, the apocalypse happens again and again. Most of the time they're generally democratic and capitalist, but they have rules set up so that when bad things happen, every community breaks into its own little fiefdom and becomes authoritarian and they kick out anybody they deem useless.

If the actual books are worth reading, because you can't tell the progressive foundation, that is surprising. And I suppose I should have expected it, that Jemisin is one of the "well ackshully I write speculative fiction" types 😁:

INTERVIEWER

In an interview with Ursula K. Le Guin, she eschewed the label of science fiction, and called herself a novelist and a poet instead. Maybe it was just how she was feeling that day, but have you ever felt that the label of science fiction is a pigeonhole?

JEMISIN

No, because it hasn’t been for me. Maybe because I am a black woman, there is an automatic assumption that I am somewhere in the margins of science fiction, in the margins of fantasy, and therefore people from outside of the genre’s margins are a little bit more willing to take a look at me, even though I’m writing solidly science-fiction stuff. But the Broken Earth series has gotten the attention that it has in part because I tend to use literary techniques as well. And that’s just because I don’t care. I’ll use whatever techniques are necessary to get the story across and I read pretty widely. So when people kept saying second person is just not done in science fiction, I was like, well, they said first person wasn’t done in fantasy and I did that with my first novel. I don’t understand the weird marriage to particular techniques and the weird insistence that only certain things can be done in science fiction.

In a lot of cases, people read science fiction and fantasy when they’re younger and then they age out of it. Fantasy in particular. They get tired of the endless Tolkien clones. They get tired stories where an elf, a dwarf, and a halfling walk into a bar. They’re not that bad, but you see the formula and once you’ve seen the formula a couple of times, you get tired of it. There are always people within the genre who are perfectly happy with that formula and they seek out that comfort food every time they read, but a lot of readers move on. I believe at least a few of my literary readers are ex–genre readers who had left, basically in a huff, tired of the formula, and came back because something I’m doing speaks to something they want. There’s a change that’s been happening on a number of different levels. There are more literary-style writers in the genre. There are more writers who are willing to be inclusive, whether they themselves are representative of different races, cultures, ethnicities or not. I may be one of the more visible representatives of it, but I’m not the only one.

INTERVIEWER

What would you say to the people who say they don’t read speculative fiction?

JEMISIN

There are always going to be people out there who are weirdly wedded to their perceptions of a thing and are unwilling to challenge those perceptions. You can’t make them try something new. But Le Guin and all these other excellent writers have had their works out there for fifty-something years. It’s never just been the shallow, limited spaceships-and-ray guns thing. So for anyone who has latched on to the notion that that’s all there is, despite evidence to the contrary, there’s no winning them over. Everybody else, though, is already looking at it. So I’m happy about that.

Le Guin might have said that one day, but when it counted, she came to the defence of genre.

'Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.' Ruth Franklin (Slate, 8 May 2007)

Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs – somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly ... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn't rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green. There, again – the slow, squelching, sucking steps, and the foul smell was stronger. Something was climbing her stairs, coming closer to her door. As she heard the click of heel bones that had broken through rotting flesh, she knew what it was. But it was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing? Had he paid no attention at all to the endless rituals of the serious writers and their serious critics – the formal expulsion ceremonies, the repeated anathemata, the stakes driven over and over through the heart, the vitriolic sneers, the endless, solemn dances on the grave? Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo? Had he not even understand the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy – although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust – could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream? No, she would not look at the thing that had squelched its way into her bedroom and stood over her, reeking of rocket fuel and kryptonite, creaking like an old mansion on the moors in a wuthering wind, its brain rotting like a pear from within, dripping little grey cells through its ears. But its call on her attention was, somehow, imperative, and as it stretched out its hand to her she saw on one of the half-putrefied fingers a fiery golden ring. She moaned. How could they have buried it in such a shallow grave and then just walked away, abandoning it? "Dig it deeper, dig it deeper!" she had screamed, but they hadn't listened to her, and now where were they, all the other serious writers and critics, when she needed them? Where was her copy of Ulysses? All she had on her bedside table was a Philip Roth novel she had been using to prop up the reading lamp. She pulled the slender volume free and raised it up between her and the ghastly golem – but it was not enough. Not even Roth could save her. The monster laid its squamous hand on her, and the ring branded her like a burning coal. Genre breathed its corpse-breath in her face, and she was lost. She was defiled. She might as well be dead. She would never, ever get invited to write for Granta now.

I find it interesting that while decrying the woke colonization of speculative fiction awards you still have a very high opinion of The Broken Earth series. The first book, was very obviously good, but books 2 and 3 were flaming dumpster fires. With every POV character in book 2 being boring and predictable(besides the main protag) and book 3's lore of the world having the chance to be great but fell back on being entirely cliché and unoriginal. Book 3 also had an a very predictable ending, no deeper questions asked, its themes only shallowly furrowed. I'm of the opinion that Jemisin won the first award and merit + wokeness and the next two books entirely on woke themes. However I'm super curious why you think they are good if you want to write your thoughts.

Read em a couple years ago so I can't give a really clear summary - mainly just the plot and worldbuilding with the obelisks, how they interact, the final reveal... trying to be vague but damn it was pretty amazing. I didn't find it cliche or unoriginal at all.

I'm shocked that you had never heard of the Hugos before Jemesin. For me it was Ender's Game, which had the Hugo Winner sticker plastered all over it. That plus Speaker for the Dead were my introductions to the award, but then I looked at the winners, and found many, many great books.

The year prior to Card's back-to-back, Gibson won with Neuromancer.

The 70s were stunning with, in order starting from 1970, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ringworld, To Your Scattered Bodies Go (ignore this one), The Gods Themselves, Rendezvous with Rama, The Dispossessed, and The Forever War. The 60s were great, too:

1961 A Canticle for Leibowitz

1962 Stranger in a Strange Land

1963 The Man in the High Castle

1966 Dune

1967 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

1968 Lord of Light

The good books lasted through the 90s, with Hyperion, A Fire Upon the Deep, Green Mars / Blue Mars, Forever Peace, and A Deepness in the Sky. It was this last one, in 2000, that marks what I consider to be the end of the predictive power of the award. In 2001 Harry Potter won, and the award had some hits in the years following (American Gods in 2002, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in 2004, Rainbows End in 2007), it never really was the same, and finally died in 2013. Redshirts was about two-thirds of a good book, and had no business winning. 2014 is Leckie's book, which beat Wheel of Time. 2015 was when Cixin Liu won because his was the only book that wasn't on the original Rapid Puppy slate. Then comes three years of Jemesin, and since then we've had basically nothing but white male transsexuals and colored females even nominated, with predictable outcomes.

Blue Mars

Blue Mars won a Hugo? How? Did they have an off-by-one error and mean to award Red/Green Mars? (Looks like Red Mars was up against A Fire Upon the Deep, so I see how it lost) ... glancing at the nominations list, yeah, okay, I guess that was a pretty weak year. Only other book I've read there is Holy Fire and I thought it was actually a good book unlike Blue Mars but I can see how it lost to the third in a series with two good entries already.

I liked Blue Mars, and while Green Mars won, Red Mars didn't. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a capstone or make-up award.

I get what you are saying about "To Your Scattered Bodies Go" (great premise let down by lack of 'now where do I go?' plot development and poor execution) but Philip José Farmer has always been hit-or-miss, and you will either really like the Riverworld series or be mildly disappointed.

I've had a copy of Riverworld sitting on my shelf for years, worth a shot? Hearing about the later books sorta put me off trying.

With the caveat that it's 70s SF and so of its time. But it's a fantastic premise: every single human being that has ever lived (up to a certain date) has been resurrected on an alien planet beside a seemingly endless river. Who did this? How? What is the intention behind it? And by "every single human being", Farmer really means that - from Neanderthals to Jesus and Buddha. Villains and heroes both, all starting afresh with (at first) no advantages at all.

The first book sets up questions that later books don't really answer adequately, but the first one at least is worth a go. You'll know soon into it if it's for you or not.

I must confess, I've never read it. Rama and Forever War were my two favorite from the 70s.

There's not much truly recent that I can recommend. Kim Stanley Robinson is still publishing new works like 2312. Jim Butcher has been nominated for the Hugo a couple of times, including for Skin Game, but I'm not going to call that representative of golden age sci-fi. Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time is six years old.

I actually loved To Your Scattered Bodies Go lol. It's so insane.

The Gods Themselves

I had no idea this won! I love this book, one of the little gems I found in a secondhand store years ago. Had no idea it was so popular. That list in general is damn impressive.

Seems like you've been tracking it a lot longer than I have, though I've stumbled on a bunch of those. Not sure how I hadn't looked into the Hugo earlier. I had heard it mentioned here and there but never really took a look at the winners.

There was a series of posts on this topic going into the various slates and "puppies?" in the old world. I'm not sure if they made it into the vault. But yes, the Hugos are practically useless these days. I have taken to looking at other writers that the audiobook voice actor for books I've enjoyed also voices because I think they basically follow tastes.

I'd be curious to read those if you happen to stumble across them. I've never been able to get into audiobooks, but sounds like a decent way to discover good novels.

I tend to go through reddit lists and/or look through goodreads and amazon 'readers also enjoyed xyz.' I've built up a pretty long list over the years of to-read stuff luckily, so I don't have to browse too often. This series has been on my list for a while, glad to strike it off.

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