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.
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).
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).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link