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Becoming Radicalized by the Hugos
A Very Culture Warrish Review of A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys
In which my fellow nerds will recognize the battlefield and everyone else will roll their eyes and not know who the fuck these people are.
Wordy Pretentious Preamble About My Reading Habits
Everyone remembers the Sad Puppies affair (and the sequel, the Rabids), right? It's been covered here (well, at the old place) before. At the time, I admit to some schadenfreude at the wailing and gnashing of teeth, but I thought Vox Day and Larry Correia were making entirely too much of the fact that phallic rocketship stories don't win Hugos anymore. I actually read some of Vox Day's "Hugo Nominated" fiction. He is… not a good writer. I enjoy Larry Correia, but it's bubblegum bang-bang shoot'em up wish fulfillment, which is all well and good, but the same caliber as Ian Fleming's writing – entertaining and marketable and would make for great movies, but not really, well, whatever the Hugos used to represent. Ditto Brad Torgerson; serviceable prose, but fanzine-level execution.
As for the three Johns (Kratman, Ringo, and Wright), I've read all of them, and Kratman and Ringo tell rippin' good yarns with execrable prose and plotting. Only John C. Wright is actually a really good writer (though he does get a bit up his own ass, especially since his conversion to Catholicism).
I'm just saying, if the right wants to reclaim any creative spaces, they need to find better creatives.
Conversely, I used to really like John Scalzi. I watched Vox Day beat him like a pinata online, and though I hadn't gone full anti-SJW yet, I started to think…. "VD is right." His cruel but accurate takedowns were intensely petty, spiteful, and personal, and yet he had the squishy little man pegged.
Scalzi has since become ever more pretentious, ever more virtue signaling, ever more… well, VD would say "effeminate," I'd just say I started to recognize the sight of someone rolling over to show his belly, someone desperate to stay in the good graces of a clique where being a straight white male who cites Heinlein as an inspiration means he's always one bad Tweet away from being consigned to the outer darkness. My fondness for his books curdled, as I started to see his smarmy potato face in all his characters.
As went Scalzi, so went the Hugos, where for the past few years it seems like there's a little bit of straight white guy affirmative action so that John Scalzi and Clarkesworld can stay relevant, but basically it's a women's fiction award now, and if there's ever a white dude-dominated slate again (yet alone a white dude-dominated winners' list), Worldcon will burn.
And ya know, I don't hate women's fiction, or women in SF. I really am an omnivorous reader. But over time, some things have become hard not to notice. Like the fact that N.K. Jemisin is a fanfic-level hack who's fawned over and feted and cooed adoringly as the next Octavia Butler (she's not). Like how Kameron Hurley and Seanan McGuire and Ann Leckie are all decent writers but such insufferably hateful harpies that, like Scalzi, I can't stand to read them anymore.
Vox Day and the alt-right say "Don't give money to people who hate you," but I am not alt-right and have remained determinedly apolitical in my media consumption. But gods help me I'm becoming one of those guys who side-eyes anything written post Great-Awokening by a chick.
Which brings me to…
A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys
A literary descendent of Ursula K. Le Guin, Ruthanna Emrys crafts a novel of extra-terrestrial diplomacy and urgent climate repair bursting with quiet, tenuous hope and an underlying warmth. A Half-Built Garden depicts a world worth building towards, a humanity worth saving from itself, and an alien community worth entering with open arms. It's not the easiest future to build, but it's one that just might be in reach.
I know, I know, I should have paid more attention to that blurb.
I picked this up because it's a First Contact story that got batted around as some new hotness in SF, and I like alien stories with a modern perspective that are more original than "How will we repel the invaders?"
(I like alien invasion and other MilSF stories too, but like I said, I am an omnivorous reader.)
A Half-Built Garden is very likely going to wind up on the Hugo shortlist this year, and probably has a decent chance of winning. It's a well-written, creative story that brings some interesting ideas to the table, it's innovative science fiction…
.. and it's also a meandering, actionless piece of women's fiction dwelling on pronouns, interstellar consent culture, lactating breasts, and internal monologues that all but drowned me in estrogen.
I've seen this book compared to Becky Chambers. I haven't read any of Becky Chambers's books, but they sound exactly like the kind of story I am not interested in (people go to space, have problems which they solve by talking them out in a civilized fashion, the end?).
A Half-Built Garden is "Aliens arrive, people have problems which they solve by talking them out in a civilized fashion, the end."
(1/3)
My friend, I am sitting back laughing here, because I was around for part of the Sad Puppies fight on Mr. Wright's blog, and while I knew nothing of the Rabids writers or Vox Day or Larry Correia, and wouldn't read them because not my thing, I was generally supportive of the Sads.
Do I agree with them politically/culturally on everything? No, they tend to skew more (American) right-wing and conservative than I do. But as I read a bunch of people in the SF community, especially from the Tor publishers, just smear them all as racists and white supremacists and homophobes and Literally Hitler, the more I went "Okay, whatever modern day SFF is, this ain't what I mean by it".
There's always been the progressive, liberal and even libertarian strain in SF, but the Hugo stories that were being nominated and winning awards at the time weren't even SFF. The well-written one about the magic rain was in fact a coming-out story about a gay Chinese guy worrying about how to tell his conservative, traditionalist parents that in fact he was gay and worse, his boyfriend was white. The magic rain was only a Macguffin and could just as well have been stripped out. The dreadfully written one about the gay lesbian trans BIPOC palaeontologist getting beat up by gin-swilling rednecks - well, comment would be superfluous. Milquetoast revenge fantasies about 'if you were a dinosaur' are what wins Hugos? Okay, but let me off this bus, I'm sticking here behind with Bradbury.
My understanding is that the original trouble kicked off with someone alleging the Hugo and Worldcon committees were pushing a slate of their favourites who were all the liberal LGBT BIPOC progressive sort. The committee(s) said this isn't happening because we have procedures in place. Guy then sets up a slate of his own to show procedures, what procedures? And then the progressives get angry and here we go.
It was very instructive for me. Previously, my impression had been that the Hugos were 'the fans' choice' as distinct from the Nebulas and other awards, and that fandom in general (which in effect always meant American fandom) voted on them. I was educated on that: only Worldcon members who had bought memberships could vote, and the Hugos were the property of Worldcon.
So here we are today, where to even be in with a sniff of a chance, you have to be female/non-white/LGBT+. And people like me now know that the Hugos are meaningless.
I've tried reading Seanan McGuire and Ann Leckie, but I can't get a handle on their writing (and I dislike McGuire, possibly because of her claims to Irish ancestry which may be legit but her first name keeps making me twitch because my hindbrain insists it should be Senan and that's a male name anyway; possibly because of the smug self-satisfied tone of her writing and commentary).
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