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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):
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':
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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