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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).
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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