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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.

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.

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.