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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.
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.
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
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).
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 ;)
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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).
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).
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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.
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.
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
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.
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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:
They wanted this, and they got it, full and plenty. And by God, they deserve it.
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.
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":
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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".
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?
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".
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.
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