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 -
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)
(2/3)
The Bitter Review I Would Not Post on Amazon
The year is 2083. Earth's climate has suffered and we're not out of the woods yet, but the world is finally getting its shit together enough to undo some of the damage.
There are basically three factions in the late 21st century:
Environmental Cooperatives, sort of NGOs on steroids who have vaguely-defined authority over most environmental concerns and are doing the actual work of repairing the environment. How exactly they obtained their authority is never really explained, but presumably it's something like "Everyone finally realized we're all going to die if we don't listen to the environmentalists." Okay. They have lots of virtual meetings and talk about species and ecology preservation, carbon emissions, virus containment, and weather forecasting. They invented this whole new kind of networking called the "dandelion networks" which are kind of like Twitter except very peaceful and everyone reaches a consensus and they are resilient against disinformation and wrongthink.
Governments. The old nation-states (including the USA) are still around, creaky old dinosaurs who are kind of obsolete except they still have armies and nukes so you can't exactly ignore them. When the aliens arrive, NASA is ecstatic to become relevant again.
Corporations. When the environmental cooperatives effectively took over the world (it's never put this way, but it seems like basically they run everything and the governments with… armies and nukes just… let them) the corporations had the choice of getting with the program or fucking off to their own micronations. They decided to fuck off to literal and/or figurative islands. So the remnants of late-stage capitalism now exist in little "aisland" enclaves of their own where everyone plays status-seeking corporate reindeer games while trying to stay relevant by offering goods and services to the environmental cooperatives and governments. They aren't literally given black hats but the author's voice heavily implies they are bad guys who want to go back to the bad old days of despoiling the Earth. (Spoiler: They are the bad guys and they want to go back to the bad old days of despoiling the Earth.)
Aliens Arrive!
They land on the Maryland shore, just outside of Washington, D.C., and are stumbled upon by our first person POV protagonist Judy Wallach-Stevens, a Jewish lesbian who lives in a large manor house with her polycule, including her wife and their infant daughter, a they/them, and a transman (who have a they/them toddler of their own whose gender is pointedly never specified). Judy does ecology stuff for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network, but mostly she cooks. She seems like a really interesting and original char-
… okay, well, Larry Correia writes himself as his MC too, so anyway.
Judy and her wife happen to be carrying their infant daughter while out for a stroll, and this turns out to be significant, as the aliens are matriarchal and bringing your children to diplomatic negotiations is a sign of good faith. So by sheer coincidence, while baby and hir two mommies are staring at the spaceship that landed on their front lawn, they have initiated peaceful contact with their visitors, who respond in kind by sending out one of their own with her children.
Or Hor or Its or Zis… this book was full of neopronouns, though actually the humans were more varied than the aliens.
The "Ringers" are actually two species, who made contact with each other ages ago. Since then, they have searched the galaxy for other intelligent races, and found mostly dead worlds where civilizations once existed. It turns out that most races fall into an industrial death spiral: their technological advancement outpaces their ability to manage their environment, and they all wind up making themselves extinct. The Ringers avoided this by going into space, treating their homeworlds as mere raw materials, and have thus concluded that intelligent species are not meant to be planet-bound. When they picked up radio signals from Earth, they sent an expedition to save us.
This is the central "conflict" of the story: the Ringers believe that humanity has to leave Earth or die. Judy and her eco-coops insist they're actually fixing their world (yes, the whole book is literally a Tikkun Olam meme), but the Ringers claim that Earth is already doomed.
I put "conflict" in scare quotes because it's implied that the Ringers might try to force humans to leave Earth. Except.. other than a few tense conversations where Judy says "What if we don't want to?" and the Ringers say "But you have to!" there's never really any kind of threat. The Ringers sent a diplomatic mission, not a warship, and while there's some talk of nanotechnology and how the Ringers could conceivably start disassembling Earth right out from under us (they are apparently advanced enough to have started building a Dyson sphere back home), there's never any indication that this was actually something they had in mind. They just sort of assumed they'd explain the situation to us in a reasonable manner, and humanity would agree that their solution makes sense.
So all that is interesting enough as a setup. The rest of the book is mostly about the nation-states and the corps and the coops all jockeying to influence the aliens, while the aliens are playing politics in return. Eventually Judy and her wife and child and some corp reps go to the alien home system, there is a bit of nefariousness, but nothing that can't be solved with impassioned speeches inspired by Star Trek (literally).
And that's pretty much it. There is a lot of talking and soapboxing. Every conflict is solved by talking and being more empathetic.
The first is when Judy is invited to visit one of the corporate "aislands" with her new alien friends (who insist on Judy coming along because having made the proper initial diplomatic overtures, they consider her to be Earth's spokeswoman, more or less), and she brings along a weapon that will DDoS the corporate networks. See, the coops' computer network was almost taken down by a virus, which they are pretty sure was caused by the corporations, so Judy's activist parents from a radical Jewish commune cook up a poorly thought-out plan to stick it to the corps. But the whole time Judy is carrying the device around in her pocket she's feeling really bad about using it and feeling sorry for all these capitalist planet-rapers who are, after all, still people just like her. Then one of the capitalist planet-rapers detects the device in her pocket and they talk it out and Judy hands over the device. Then they go to a party and eat lots of food and Judy and the aliens go back to Maryland.
Later, there is another conflict where some of the coop folks want to sabotage the aliens' communications gear. There is some scuffling – someone actually uses a judo throw on someone! Judy lectures everyone about what an immature species we're being. They talk it out.
Finally, they go to the aliens' home system, and the aliens and humans argue a lot, and then the humans demand that they not be "colonized," and the aliens recognize their demand for affirmative consent. They talk it out. The end.
Sigh.
Okay, here is where I am going to be very rude. When your blurb goes "A literary descendent of Ursula K. Le Guin", that is a very damn high bar and you better be worth it or else.
Since I have no idea who this writer is, I had to look her up and oh my here we go:
(Here's where I am rude). Having seen the author photo, well yeah I guess if you look like your name could be Marsh and you come from Innsmouth because you got The Look, then you will be inclined to be sympathetic to the fish-monsters wanting to take over the land. I guess she missed the parts about human sacrifice and forced interbreeding when shaking her head over Lovecraft's racist treatment of the gentle, indigenous, underwater monsters. Looking up the story The Shadow over Innsmouth we don't know that there are concentration camps, this is just something bruited in the newspapers:
The people arrested in Innsmouth weren't human, not fully, and the worst of them are the fish-monsters. So wherever the government locked them away, "concentration camp" is not the correct term (and given that this story was written in 1931, it would be Boer War type concentration camps not Nazi ones that Lovecraft was referencing - not great, but not the worst excesses). So saying "oh Lovecraft had his fish-people locked up in concentration camps" is the wrong reading here.
Now, I have read some "sympathetic to the monsters" new Lovecraftian fiction, I don't know if it was by this woman but I don't recognise her name so I don't think so, and it wasn't bad. But it's not Lovecraft, because his world-building is not about "cuddly native species who have as much right to live in harmony with nature as we do, or maybe even more because we're the bad guys", it's about "the universe is a cold, materialist place that does not give a damn about all your high-mindedness, and there are entities out there who are as gods to us, as far above us as we are above an ant, and they care as little. There's nothing supernatural or divine or demonic, this is all science, but we are bugs to be squished and there is no possibility of all joining hands around the campfire and living in peace".
From another review, which thinks that a novella that contradicts everything Lovecraft wrote in his universe is something for Lovecraft fans:
But of course those were the motivations, not the human sacrifice and murder and forced interbreeding 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 Them pesky Methodees got all riled up about heresy or sumpin':
The Baptists and Congregationalists are doing fine, however:
Or maybe it was the Freemasons, annoyed that they had been displaced?
Oh Amadan, have you never heard of a theyby? Get with the times, grampa! Gaybies are soooo last season, theybies are the new must-have accessory to signal how with-it and super-allyship and woke you are! Why, even in my own country, some idiot fucking politician did an entire newspaper interview about their theyby. Public reaction (well, okay, reaction on a subreddit) was along the lines that this guy was a fucking idiot, so it's not just me 😁
My view on this entire matter is that if you want to write a novel about a lesbian starship engineer, knock yourself out. I'll even shrug if you want to fill out the entire bingo card of trans, multi-racial, differently abled, poly, neo-pronouns and all the rest of it. The only thing I ask is that you write the story about the starship engineer in space, not the LESBIAN in LESBIAN SPACE and did I mention in the last three paragraphs that xie is LESBIAN? Samuel Delany can manage to do that and be kinky and queer, but these modern chumps aren't half the writers he is.
You should post it, and I say that not just because I'm an inveterate contrarian. I leave reviews if something is good or bad, and I think leaving reviews correcting the bad stuff is just as important. If you leave a review saying that you're the type of person who is on the liberal side, likes first contact stories that are not about fighting off the aliens, and read this because you saw it recommended that may be enough to get it not dismissed as "conservative religious bigot transphobe". Criticism from within the tent will always be more impactful than from outsiders.
Pretty sure she didn't. I think she's making a very intentional comparison to antisemitic blood libel.
Except that in Innsmouth people really do go missing and end up dead (or worse) if they poke around in the affairs of the inhabitants, or are suspected of doing the same. It's not a blood libel if you really are murdering people, and I think if she is referring to that, then she's dumb.
Unless she completely changes the narrative, her version of "we just lived peacefully frolicking with our Deep One cousins in the waves until the wicked fascist US government destroyed our town and dragged us off to lock us up in concentration camps" is totally false.
It's not blood libel if you believe Jeffrey Epstein killed himself either.
The USS Liberty was a misunderstanding and Building 7 just collapsed... Because!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've never tried reading any "sympathetic to the monsters" Lovecraft-inspired fiction, but I would argue that Lovecraft himself was good at writing them in a way that was both alien/horrifying and understandable/sympathetic (in the cases where it served the purpose of the story), despite him writing horror in which it was almost never a primary emphasis. So if someone came away from Lovecraft wanting to write a sympathetic treatment without appreciating how Lovecraft himself did it, I strongly suspect they would be worse at it than he was. Most likely by revising Lovecraft antagonists until they are less alien or threatening than even cultures/political-factions/eras other than the author's own, let alone other species. Meanwhile, based on that description for The Litany of Earth, it sounds like the author gave the alien culture of "the 1920s U.S. government" less understandable and sympathetic motives than Lovecraft gave to most of his actual aliens.
Most obviously the protagonist of At the Mountains of Madness comes to appreciate the alien culture and history of the Elder Things through the art and other remnants they left behind and is outright sympathetic to them (which serves the narrative purpose of contrasting with the greater horror), but this applies to antagonists as well. The Great Race of Yith are scholars seeking after science/knowledge and their own survival, the Mi-go are also scientifically inclined and have the more mundane goal of mining resources, and ghouls mostly just want to eat/survive and sometimes serve the role of allies or neutral figures. The reader (and sometimes the characters) can appreciate the wonders and achievements of their civilizations even if they don't share the morality of the early 20th-century United States. (Something much more difficult for SJW writers and readers who tend to have a totalizing view of SJW dictates and taboos, creating a necessity to insert them into fiction where they don't fit.) When beings have goals that aren't understandable, like the godlike beings tend to, he conveys the sense that they have their own reasons for acting as they do, even if they are not reasons that humans understand or appreciate.
The Deep Ones from The Shadow Over Innsmouth are some of his less sympathetic antagonists, in that activities like human sacrifice in service to alien gods seem irrational, but of course human sacrifice is a thing that even humans did, groups like the Aztecs are historical realities, so it is hardly cheating to impute it to a group of non-humans as well. Nor are such activities their only defining feature, just what brings them into conflict with humans. Instead attributing the conflict to "the United States’ motivation for destroying Innsmouth was a mixture of racism as well as hatred for the non-Christian religious practices of the townsfolk" is just flipping it around and having the U.S. government kill people in the name of religion instead, except that the 1920s U.S. government actually existed and not as the author depicts it. Naturally "The Innsmouth people are depicted as victims and the story ignores the Marsh family’s reign of terror over regular humans.", you can't give the "racists" understandable reasons for their actions, so conflicts must be cleanly divided between evil perpetrators and innocent victims. Meanwhile Lovecraft gave "monsters" glorious civilizations that the reader can appreciate even if the incidental consequences for humans produce horror. He was an enthusiast of science who often made his antagonists scientists, which makes sense with the instrumental utility it has for even deeply alien beings. (Compare to the above review for a book where 'non-binary gender identity", a highly specific and recent cultural concept, is immediately adopted by aliens once it is explained to them.) He was an atheist and intellectual who repeatedly wrote stories where the local superstitious traditions contain a kernel of truth that only intellectuals are arrogant enough to disregard (but without depicting science and modernity as having nothing to contribute). The roles of inhuman beings in his stories are shaped by the narrative requirements of primarily writing horror stories, but he could and did write them with complexity and compelling world-building anyway, and that was part of why his stories became so popular and influential to begin with.
I haven't read much Lovecraft-inspired fiction, and it's been a while since I've read Lovecraft himself, but I'd highly recommend the PS4 game Bloodborne for a great "sympathetic to the monsters" Lovecraft-inspired fiction. If you don't like games or don't have access to a PS4/PS5. I thought it did a great job of doing exactly what you're describing Lovecraft himself as doing, presenting these elder gods as both alien/horrifying and understandable/sympathetic. And it doesn't go for the obvious "humans are the real monsters" approach, presenting most human characters as parts horrifying and sympathetic, and the whole story just feels very tragic on all fronts for all characters, including the elder gods. This being a Fromsoft game, the story is cryptic and difficult to make out from a single playthrough, though there is no shortage of YouTube videos that dissect it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fromsoft is a Japanese company with Japanese writers and developers, and their style of writing and game design tends not to be heavily influenced by Western/American norms, despite most of their famous games, including Bloodborne (set in heavily fictionalized Victorian London), being set in Western settings with Western characters.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
For any recent literary work, encountering "subverts" in a friendly review for me would be a huge red flag. That usually means a derivative work concentrated on pushing a point while using somebody's else creation as a prop. Very few people can do anything decent with this as a toolkit. Even less among those capable of it would want to - if you are that powerful, you do your own thing, not mock somebody else's. If you are a Creator, you make elves. If you are not, you make orcs out of somebody else's elves.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link