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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)
Do we have good demographic surveys of sci-fi readers? Anecdotally it seems like women read more than men, and surveys of fiction readership that I googled in the last five minutes say a larger share of women read books and they read more books on average. Is the reason that books about woke mom's saving the world is that woke mom's are becoming the modal reader? Or at least that women are the modal reader and women are disproportionately likely to be woke and or moms.
Wokeness is usually understood as a top-down imposition of "the cathedral" (or at least the HR department), but genre fiction taking on the characteristics of women's fiction as women become the majority of fiction consumers seems like a bottom-up process.
There were women writers back in the 50s and 60s doing the same kind of SF along the lines of planetary romances but while they may have been more on the politically progressive side, they weren't the above kind of 'sit around and talk about things'. [Leigh Brackett] wrote a series about a kind of Conanesque figure from an inhabited Mercury, Eric John Stark. He may sympathise with the native species being displaced by Terran colonisers, but his solution is to run guns to them, not deliver lectures.
C.L. Moore was another woman writer, with Northwest Smith being another one of the space opera heroes. They were writing alongside male writers such as E.E. Smith and in similar genres, and I'd read ten knock-off versions of Shambleau, outdated Freudian symbolism and all, before I'd read anything by Ruthanna.
Leigh Brackett definitely wasn’t on the progressive side. Her The Ginger Star series was very explicitly anti-communist and there are heavy BDSM themes as well throughout.
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I'm not defending the quality of her work or saying it's the only kind of writing female sci-fi authors can produce. I just suspect the modal fiction purchaser in 2023 is a woke woman and the publishing industry reflects that. This is a counterpoint to a lot of other spaces where wokeness is a top down imposition.
The only 2023 Hugo nominee I've read was "Babel, or the Necessity of Violence" and that's a female written alt-history that basically endorses terroristic violence against civilians in a colonizing empire. I'm solidly on the left and I found the extent to which the author's politics made the plot predictable disappointing, though it's definitely not a "sit around and talk" novel. The magic system was a pretty cool idea though.
I initially interpreted this the other way, like a Churchillian call for those savages in Mesopotamia to be bombed until they submit.
Yeah no that would be amusing. It's more like let the people of London suffer because the Opium trade exists. They don't actually do violence they just stop preventing bad things from happening.
Imo part of the problem is that the author is Chinese and so her go to example of colonialism is treaty ports and opium. This is a lot less compelling an example of colonial atrocity than the Belgian congo or the good old fashioned slave trade. Give me some handless magic user from the Congo laying waste to Brussels on his way to King Leopold and I'd be more behind it.
Meanwhile in mainland China, we have stories which smile upon outright genocide. I'd love to send the PC police to take a look at what goes on in webnovels over there - problematic content as far as the eye can see!
Of the two Chinese stories I really like, Reverend Insanity, has just about every ism you could imagine, save transphobia. There's probably some of that too, given it's basically in the 'girdle of change gender' stage of gender awareness. We've got varied and exciting kinds of racism between humans and variant humans, those from different regions, sexism, homophobia, plenty of slavery, wanton slaughter. And yet that's really just the backdrop to what the author's actually trying to say politically about individuality and following one's own path.
Then there's the Three Body Problem series, which goes pretty hard on the 'do not let women have positions of power, don't let your civilization turn into a feminized race of soyboys or you will face complete extermination' angle.
I'm mildly more positively inclined to those with their own ideas or even rabid Chinese nationalists than those like this woman who come to the West and then vomit our own ideas about anti-colonialism back against us, when their home countries are behaving far more outrageously.
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I consider 3BP to be more nuanced than that. Liu quite directly says that humans that rejected their soy/lunar/yin aspect to survive became a different civilization. It's the combination of both soy and chad that makes humanity humanity, even if dooms it on a galactic scale. And even then, there's Yun Tianming, soyboy extraordinaire, who achieves much more than Thomas Wade the gigachad, who is ultimately too lawful stupid, too proud to succeed.
If it weren't for Wade failing, Yun Tianming would've been superfluous. Humanity as a whole didn't listen to him anyway and put in the work to be safe. Sure, Wade was wrong to listen to Ms 'I will never do anything correctly' but at least his instincts and goals were right. He would've made a much better Swordholder, as remarked by the Trisolarans.
To me survival is an unalloyed good. Even if you have everything else, happiness and freedom and prosperity and eudaimonia but you don't survive... then it's still a failure. Those chapters of misery and slaughter of the post-scarcity society and relocation to Australia were haunting. They should've woken up after that. If that didn't make them take things a bit more seriously, then what would? I can't fathom a civilization who thinks 'oh we'll just hide behind Jupiter against an enemy with STAR-BUSTER ATTACKS'. If nothing else, they could just fire 2 or 3 more shots at the gas giants!
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Good lord that meme is top notch. Never thought this of all places is where I’d find a high tier cultivation meme. Impressive.
Saw it on /r/martialmemes, also on 4chan a couple of times.
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ngmi
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There aren't any good public surveys, but most of the limited ones out there still show SF readership skewing male. If this is changing, I would suggest it is "publisher push" and not "reader pull"; as publishers refuse to publish books male readers like because of DEI/feminist issues, male readership goes down.
How would one demonstrate which way the arrow of causation points here? I'm not close enough to publishing to tell pull from push.
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In the Kindle Unlimited world there are really low barriers to entry for publishing. If someone could make a lot of money publishing books other publisher's wouldn't they'd be doing that.
I'd say it's a "publisher pull" effect where if you're a sci-fi publisher and you're looking at a world where women account for 80% of fiction sales you really want to raise the profile of works catering to women in your genre in hopes of attracting a larger audience.
Which makes it damn useless for the reader, because the good stuff gets buried in mountains of crap.
This is a view that assumes there's some fixed demographic ratio of "readers", and therefore SF publishers should cater to women because women are the majority of readers. I don't believe this is the case. Instead, many publishers have catered to women for essentially ideological reasons, and in doing so have caused men to stop reading their output, resulting in that lopsided ratio of women to men.
I just think it's unlikely that a large market with low barriers to entry maintains a large inefficiency like that. If you look at Fanfiction where there's no barrier to entry and no gatekeepers the vast majority of writers and readers appear to be women. That can't be explained by ideological capture of Fanfiction.net or something.
It seems plausible to me that there are gendered differences in entertainment preferences. Are men overrepresented in video games because of ideological capture of gaming studios or because of male preference for competition. Perhaps women are over presented in fiction reading because the competitive edge of the novel over other storytelling media is long form character study which appeals more to women?
There are not low barriers to entry to publishing. There's low barriers to entry to putting stuff up for Kindle that no one will or should read, but these are not the same thing.
We know it isn't ideological capture of gaming studios because ideological capture of gaming studios goes the other way. On the other hand, with (fiction) reading, reading became more and more female as publishers became more and more captured. And publishers which resisted capture kept their male audience.
If there are uncaptured publishers, and massive demand for male oriented fiction that is not being served, why haven't these uncaptured publishers gobbled up market share? Who do you think is an uncaptured publisher?
If there are a bunch of genius male authors being suppressed why don't they put their stuff on Kindle or Fanfiction.net and go viral? A fair number of female authors have turned viral fanfic into successful novels.
And you still haven't explained the gender disparity in fanfic where no barriers to entry exist.
You're assuming the causation is that publisher's are captured so audience's become female but if our only evidence is timing the causation could run the other way. As audiences become more female publisher's cater to female preferences, and women are disproportionately woke. This explanation fits better with the efficient market hypothesis and so I think has Occam on its side.
There is only one I know of (Baen)... and they are limited by how much they can publish, about 5 books a month. And it is becoming captured. Capture is not a market force.
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But books make readers like are being published quite regularly by people like John Ringo and Larry Correia.
And thus Baen (which publishes Ringo and Corriea) likely has a more male readership. But
Baen is only one publisher and they don't and can't publish enough to cover the entire range of what men prefer in SFF books (which was never actually their goal in teh first place)
Since Jim Baen's death, they've been sliding towards the publishing mainstream.
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