This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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 have a personal policy of not really criticizing other authors works. People have lots of different tastes, and sometimes in an effort to appeal to one set of tastes you will have to make it unappealing to another set of tastes. I have internally labelled vast swathes of literature as "not for me" and that is perfectly ok. The Hugo awards seems like just one more place that is 'not for me'.
I don't have much to say about the bulk of your post, but I do hope you can find a more enjoyable set of works. There are plenty of up and coming authors writing stuff that could be described as "male centric, systematized, shape-rotator style writing". There are other places you can start looking:
https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing - Shirtaloon, Zogarth, and The First Defier are all people I have read and who would fit that description.
https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/complete - Mother of learning is my favorite. Post Human has AI, sci-fi, aliens, and space battle elements. Royal road in general has lots of fresh authors trying out fun ideas. If you have a tolerance for grammar and spelling mistakes it is full of fiction I think you'd enjoy. If your tolerance is low just stick to the top recommended stories.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgressionFantasy/ - Has progressive-ish politics but still produces good recommendations. But mostly the recommendations are the same. Some of the ones I already mentioned get recommended, but also: Cradle, Iron Prince, and Arcane Ascension.
https://old.reddit.com/r/litrpg/ - Common Recs include: Dungeon Crawler Carl, Azarinth Healer, and He Who Fights with Monsters (Shirtaloon)
Amazon - Once you buy enough of the books you like I have found Amazon has a decent algorithim for finding similar books. You need to be deliberate about it, and give star ratings to books, and also remove certain books from your recommendation list.
Mother of Learning was great. But some other that I tried were either abandoned or turned into protagonist winning effortlessly because they are protagonist.
Can you recommend anything complete?
(I can recommend https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/45534/this-used-to-be-about-dungeons/ - fantasy slice of life, with some plot. Good characterisation, nice worldbuilding. Nice world, as in "closer to ideal than reality" not some brutal dystopia where everyone is evil and/or stupid)
The section on the website I linked to is only for completed fictions, and the two recs were both completed stories.
Completed stories are not RoyalRoad's strong suite. Typically they have stories with very interesting beginnings and good looooong middles. My approach is to just stop reading them once I get bored with the tropes / writing in the long middles. Usually I'll play "pick my own ending" and just stop reading a story when I feel like it gets to a conclusion and I've started to get bored.
"This Used to be about dungeons" (TUTBAD) was not really for me. But if I had to think three other stories with similar things to what you listed I'd say:
Beneath the dragoneye moons. Slice of life, has more plot than TUTBAD. Lots of characterization, lots of worldbuilding. Most people in the world are nice, even if the setting of the world itself isn't so nice.
Millennial Mage. Slice of life for the first few books. Cool worldbuilding where humans are one of the least powerful species and thus they are all very nice to each other. The other species aren't evil, but more just amoral and don't care about human well-being.
Ar'Kendrithyst. My personal favorite, and perhaps one of my longest going patreon subscriptions. MC is very nice, but thrown into a dangerous and slightly brutal world. He is changed to be more ruthless, but he also changes the world to be a little nicer. Great characterization.
I'll caveat that Ar'Kendrithyst isn't complete, and likely isn't going to be complete for another year or so (if it ends at Book 8). I think you could read Books 1-4, but even going to 1-6 might run into the "winning effortlessly" problem and Book 7 more so.
I think I often don't mind reading the "effortlessly winning" books. Especially if its after a long buildup of power from previous books. The alternate to the effortlessly winning is the perfectly scaling escalator of difficulty. Where somehow the MC only encounters appropriately leveled challenges all throughout the story.
One of my reasons for recommending it is the easiness with which the MC sometimes wins. This matches slice of stories a bit, in that there isn't a ton of tension or strife to hook the reader, and its more of an interest in the world building and characters that keeps you around.
There are stories where the protagonist sometimes wins easily and sometimes gets curbstomped in turn (and to an extent, that's true in Ar'Kendrithyst, cfe Moon Moon), but understood and agreed.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link