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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15576 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.

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.

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