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#HugoAwards, #SadPuppies, Hugo awards, Kate Paulk, Larry Correia, Sad Puppies, Sad Puppies 4, Sarah A. Hoyt, Sarah Hoyt, WorldCon
So the Sad Puppies list is up. Has been up, in fact, which shows you just how closely I follow Hugo drama in the pregame season.
Hint: Not closely.
That having been said, it looks like a pretty diverse set of recommendations, the sort of thing you’d expect a diverse group of people with diverse interests to nominate in an open process that encourages diversity.
And if it’s successful, it’ll almost certainly wind up being labeled as the next coming of Hitler.
(As an aside, aren’t we running out of Hitlers at the moment? Have we, in fact, reached Peak Hitler? I mean, Godwin’s Law is all well and good, but there comes a time when there’s just so much Hitler out there that the very concept of Hitler is devalued.)
Because once you get politics involved in an award, even once, the whole process is tainted pretty much until the end of time. Not because politics are bad, but because people are bad. At least on average. There are at least some enlightened souls out there who can look past an authors politics and/or predilections and enjoy their work for what it is.
I’d like to think I’m one of those people, but it’s hard to know if you are or not, to be honest. I mean, I find William Butler Yeats to be a frankly rather disturbing and borderline contemptible human being… but he’s also one of my favorite poets. At the same time, my preferences in fiction are definitely something that probably align more closely with most of the Sad Puppies than not, since I do tend to shy away from boring message fiction on the ground that it’s freaking boring. And there are authors whose behavior in last year’s Sad Puppies debacle have pushed me towards never buying any of their books again.
I have to draw that line between willingness to acknowledge that someone is talented, and willingness to help them profit as a result of that talent.
To flirt with Godwin’s Law twice in one post, one could argue that Hitler was a relatively talented politician. I still wouldn’t vote for him.
Awards in particular are something of a quandary in this respect. I mean, most awards exist solely as tools of recognition, without cash prizes or other means of profit. But that recognition itself is often a source of profit, the ability to hold up your honors are proof of your talent and value, something to bring to the negotiating table when the time comes to figure out your remuneration.
So yeah.
Even I’m not above being a political asshole at times.
What bothers me about the whole Sad Puppies situation is how often the existence of talent in the opposition has been denied, by both sides in this small battlefield of the culture war. Obviously that was Correia’s point in kicking off the whole affair; to expose what he considered to be ideological filtering in the Hugo nomination and voting process.
Personally, I think he was right. Not because of some grand cabal of liberal hypocrites willing to trash good authors on the grounds of political dissent, but because communities develop specific cultures, and those cultures create preferences.
And WorldCon has its own subculture, and as a result its own preferences, and those preferences lean towards the kind of pretentious twaddle that bores me to tears. But hey, it has the right messages, and that’s what’s important.
Or is it?
You see, there’s something that bothers me more than the denial of talent on the grounds of ideology, and that is the degradation of talent in the service of ideology.
One of the problems you run into, and this is something I’ve seen in other mediums as well, is that when you place the perceived political and social value of a work over its artistic value when determining merit, you get, well, precisely what you deserve. Passive, politically-correct-for-your-critical-lens pablum. A checklist of boxes to be marked off, with the expectation of accolades if enough boxes are checked.
You get boring message fiction. Or games. Or art of any kind.
What’s disturbing is when you’re reading an excellent novel and suddenly a checkmark shows up. Blatantly, jarringly, outside of the rhythm and flow of the work itself, a wild checkmark appears and abruptly takes you out of the world you’ve been visiting. I’ve had books that I’ve otherwise enjoyed that I’ve had to set down for a day or two to get past that moment, where someone courting a particular ideology decided that they’d hit an acceptable spot to shoehorn in something that would appeal to that subculture. Not because I don’t agree with the notion in question, but because it was so obviously written in as a disposable line, a throwaway character, something mentioned in passing to check the box and then move on and never be spoken of again.
You want a homosexual relationship in your novel? Great. Do it in some other way than introducing a character for a single paragraph who inexplicably needs to tell the audience how much he loves his husband before he’s immediately shuttled off into the background, never to be heard from again.
That sort of writing shouldn’t be rewarded, because it’s bad writing, even if it appeals to your personal beliefs.
The sad part is that in courting a small but vocal and locally influential subculture, authors might receive the critical acclaim they crave, but at the same time find themselves failing to achieve financial security.
Say what you will about Larry Correia. Call him a hatey hatemonger of Hitler-y hate, but realize that he’s laughing all the way to the bank because his books sell. And chances are that they sell considerably better than those of the politically-correct author you favor.
And that statement applies equally to either side; once you start pandering to a group to gain their approval, you’re stuck with them, until such time as you wise up and branch out. Authors on both sides of the political divide have, in my eyes, sacrificed success on the altar of ideology, and while it’s their choice to make, it’s one that leaves me strangely depressed.
Because the resulting works are worse than they would be without the checklists. Inferior versions of what might have been had the creator not got bound up in politics uber alles.
Shambling Towards Bethlehem 
Wait. That’s like 3 Godwins in one post!
Three? OR FOUR!? Was there perhaps a hidden Godwin, a subtle Godwin, a Godwin that perhaps you missed?
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An honest question. If a male character appears for a handful of paragraphs (Let’s say a tailor the police need to question) and when the police arrive, he’s just finishing a phone conversation with his wife, or the police interview has him fretting he’ll be late to dinner with his girlfriend, then the character is never seen again – is THAT boring message fiction? Because it’s a common trick to try and imply even a minor character has a life of some kind by mentioning some random relationship or detail about their lives, and that reference to wife or girlfriend is just as shoehorned in as a reference to a husband or boyfriend would be.
You can legitimately argue that both the random shoehorned reference to a boyfriend and the random shoehorned in reference to a girlfriend are boring, and let’s just have an interview without needing to hear about the inner life of random X person, but it doesn’t seem to me that changing the gender around makes it any better – or, to the point, any WORSE.
____
THis is also the reason I like it when people name names when talking about their examples of boring message fiction. or other kinds of fiction they dislike. Because the challenge has been made; point to a recent Hugo finalist or winner who was actually tainted by boring and gratuitous message-ness and so far, the best people have managed to do is point to a short story that didn’t even win.
I’m not even saying it doesn’t exist; I’ve been clunky shoe-horned bits in novels that were obviously meant to be the author’s idea of inclusiveness. What I haven’t seen is actual verifiable reports of those novels making the Hugo finalist list. But I also haven’t read every single Hugo finalist in the last several years, so I am ready to be wrong. If someone ever points out a book.
It’s an interesting question, and thank you for asking it.
The answer is a resounding “I don’t know”. Because it’s a single scene taken from a book completely out of context, and as such until you write a book where the scene happens and let me judge the work as a whole, I can’t say that that particular work is “boring message fiction”.
The cold reality of the situation is that presentation of the status quo is not a message, and disruption of it is. 90%+ of relationships are heterosexual, and heterosexual relationships are therefor presented as the norm; defying that convention, even to the point of doing so for the sole purpose of eroding it, is attempting to convey a message.
The message may well simply be “It shouldn’t matter what relationships I give my background characters”, but that’s… kind of a cop out, don’t you think? If that’s the only time one shows up in your book, if they’re simply background characters to be used and discarded, then it feels, to me at least, like you’re just attempting to check a box.
And it’s not as though conservative authors aren’t guilty of the same thing. The entire genre of action-adventure novels (and their sci-fi equivalents) feel to me, as often as not, as just a huge batch of Mary Sues with the properly regulated number of ideological checkmarks, down to the inevitable appearance of a liberal quisling. Now, the books aren’t often boring, but they are often just plain bad.
As for whether or not any Hugo winners have been boring message fiction, I haven’t the foggiest.
I don’t pay attention to who wins the Hugo. I read the books that I think look interesting enough to read in the time that I have available; the last one was Jim Butcher’s “Aeronaut’s Windlass”, and next up is Lawrence Schoen’s “Barsk”. I tend to favor series I’m comfortable with reading for entertainment value (Weber’s Honorverse, Butcher’s Dresden Files, Corey’s Expanse, etc), but I pick up the occasional new author because the concept looks interesting. And as it turns out, I haven’t read that many authors that people seem to want to give Hugos to over the last couple decades. Maybe one or two a year from the finalists, so I’m not really in a position to respond.
Part of the problem with that challenge is that it’s purely subjective analysis; if I go back to, say, the 2006 Hugos and say that Old Man’s War was boring message fiction (it wasn’t, but for the sake of argument) you can then tell me I’m wrong, my opinion is wrong, and that my point is irrelevant. Now, the fact of the matter is that I don’t really think that Old Man’s War warranted a spot in the finalists, and A Feast For Crows sure as shit shouldn’t have been on there, but opinions vary, oddly enough. Anything I express an opinion on can be countered by a dissenting opinion, and to be brutally honest, I a.) have no interest in throwing any authors under the bus for filling checkmarks in books I otherwise enjoyed, and b.) have no interest in arguing over which of us has the correct opinion of a given work.
I can throw a contentious winner at you if you like though: Haldeman’s “The Forever Peace”. It’s certainly message fiction, and opinions vary on whether or not it’s boring, but there were certainly enough folks out there who described the novel as “plodding” and “muddled” to make me shy away from it that year. So I haven’t read it, and have no strong opinion on it personally, but from a quick scan of Hugo award winners in the last couple decades, it certainly jumped out at me.
My interest in the Hugo’s isn’t proving the Sad Puppies right, or wrong, because they can be both at the same time, or neither, depending on your perspective. My interest is in lamenting that things have come to this. That people felt sufficiently excluded as to start a campaign to poke the hornet’s nest, and that the hornets were sufficiently agitated as to do exactly the wrong thing and sting.
Even if I didn’t pay attention to them, it saddens me to see the Hugos effectively destroyed over an argument as to who deserves them, based on politics. I found last year’s treatment of Toni Weisskopf to be execrable, particularly in the utter duplicity of those who said “Well, if she hadn’t been on the slate, this would have been her year”, while disregarding the fact that she’d never been nominated except by the Sad Puppies.
I can pose a challenge to you, incidentally, if you disagree with the notion that the Hugos have become politicized.
Orson Scott Card won two years in a row. He was a finalist four times in the next five years.
Do you think that would happen now? If Orson Scott Card, once the beloved orator of the Secular Humanist Revival and now reviled homophobe, were to write a serious of magnum opuses (opii?), would WorldCon fandom grant them the accolades they theoretically deserve, or vote them down based on his politics?
It is true that giving specific examples risks falling into the “Is not!” “Is too!” subjective trap — something I was determined to try and avoid if you gave me some examples, In favour of actually looking at how differing tastes cause things to jump out for different readers, which is a vastly different proposition, where nobody is wrong. For one example, I know people who feel Larry Correia’s books are heavily loaded (sic) with messages about “Guns Are Good” and “Second Amendment Rules”. These messages seem to be invisible to people who agree with them, but for people who don’t, they jump out as interrupting the story, even getting in the way of fight scenes. And there seems to be a lengthy discussion about the Wind-Up Girl where people disagree on, well, form what I’ve seen, just about everything. Including whether it’s heavy handed message fic (re climate change, or re sexual politics), whether certain scenes were gratuitous, whether the worldbuilding is excellent or terrible, whether it’s a good take on a non-American perspective or not.
But the thing is, if you are asserting that that sort of check-marking is being rewarded, you do rather need to show your work. If you are asserting that sort of check-marking happens in otherwise excellent novels, then you need to show examples. Yes, the examples can be debatable, but the lack of examples makes it feel like a vague accusation.
Forever Peace is definitely an interesting example worth looking at – alas, I haven’tread it myself yet.
Heh, heavily loaded…
Oh, it jumps right out at me, rest assured. Much like John Ringo’s Objectivist take on things jumps right out at me. I have this weird love/hate relationship with Ringo’s novels; some of them I really enjoy, until his token Gary Stu/Mary Sue for that particular novel starts going off on a rant about whatever horrible thing government and/or liberals are doing at that particular point in the novel.
As for specific examples, I can say that James S. A. Corey’s Expanse novels have had at least one instance of a character that’s introduced, has their sexuality/relationship status explained, and then almost immediately disappears when they’re no longer relevant to the chapter.
Bear in mind that I’m awaiting Babylon’s Ashes with probably as much fervor as anything short of the next Dresden Files book, but I do love me a good epic. At least up until they get bogged down into minutiae and manage to murder their own story while trying to tell it. Martin got pretty close to doing that for me in Dance, but at this point he should be done filling in all the background bits and on to the things he actually wanted to write.
Conversely, one could argue that Ringo’s periodic anti-government rants are the conservative version of checking off boxes, though given the fact that it’s pervasive rather than sporadic, I expect it’s more a matter of conviction than contrivance.
The thing is I’m not really making the accusation that books simply checking boxes are being rewarded for doing so; while those books certainly exist, obvious shoehorning is usually obvious. I do, however, make the argument that people are checking boxes in an attempt to be rewarded, because I’ve seen too many posts online from would-be authors looking to find some way of improving the diversity of their cast. There, my opinion lines up precisely with Correia; your cast is as diverse as it needs to be to tell the story you want to tell. Trying to squeeze in the necessary quotas just isn’t the right way to go about it.
The argument could be made that a subtler checklist IS being rewarded, in the sense that it’s a book with the right protagonist pursuing the right agenda, but that’s an accusation more on the Puppies side than mine. I don’t judge books I haven’t read, and the fact of the matter is that most of those… just don’t interest me. As I mentioned, I tend more towards the action/entertainment side of the spectrum. I’m filled with enough deep thoughts on my own, I don’t really feel compelled to wallow in someone else’s.
Well, based on the tv series (I haven’t red the Expanse books), I would also guess that Corey’s inclusiveness is a matter of conviction rather than checkboxing, even if you an pint to one instance where a minor character was treated hamhandedly. Because I saw a mix of racial types and ethnicities among the major characters, and characters who were LGB (not sure about T) who were not one-scene wonders.
But see, that’;s where the issue comes up. A number of people cite Ringo’s polemics or Correia’s pro-Second Amendment interruptions as just as disruptive to the story as an awkward one-shot character who seems to tick a random inclusive box, but you seem willing to believe Ringo’s beliefs are sincere, but the person with the clunky check-boxing is … what? Trying to please some gatekeeper? They can’t be sincere in their conviction and just, you know, sometimes write a scene BADLY because they ahve those convictions?
Or is ruining one’s writing based on one’s genuine beliefs only acceptable to one side? Shouldn’t we be complaining about it being a moment of BAD WRITING in an otherwise good book from both Ringo and Corey?
You may note that I said the problem was one that crossed ideological lines.
It’s not a matter of believing whether Ringo is more sincere than Corey, it’s how the material in integrated into the work in question. With Ringo it’s pretty much pervasive, but for the most part Corey’s works have done the classic move of putting LGBTQ characters as background decoration, and frequently disposable ones at that. In the background isn’t necessarily BAD, if you’re trying to normalize the notion of homosexual relationships, but when its only in the background it feels to me as if it’s done in the least challenging way, a means of saying “yeah, it’s in my book, but don’t worry about it, instead focus on these heterosexual characters around whom the book revolves”.
Like with a lot of things in this whole mess, again, we’re dealing with issues of perception and interpretation, and that’s all pretty subjective.
I once came to the realization that I could make a convincing case that “How To Train Your Dragon 2” could be interpreted as a parable on the futility of engaging with radical Islam. And then I realized that I’d become my English teacher and vowed to stop doing that.
I feel compelled to point out that David Drake has characters in same-sex relationships all the time, and always has had. And Joachim Steuben was my first exposure to a literary character who was no-shit capital-H Homosexual with no attempt to hide it or talk around it. (So that means my formative experience of homosexual men was super badasses who blew peoples’ heads off with their custom blinged-out rayguns.)
Dunno what that means, or if it means anything.
No, that’s not boring message fiction. You’re confusing demography with ideology. Story-telling thrives on defaulting to the background noise of generic culture and nor is it a pie-chart reflecting reality. In real life one may have a family of Norwegians living in a Cairo suburb. In a fictional story they gotta go unless that is part of the story, and how often do you think you can sell that in a genre like SFF? That’s not genre, that’s an agenda to sell Norwegians. That simple fact has been called “racist,” “sexist,” “exclusionary” and even “erasure.” Do Godzilla movies erase Europeans? If a Japanese male army officer mentions his “boyfriend” in a casual aside that is as jarring as mentioning Yom Kippur. That latter is not a slight, but calling that anti-Semitic “erasure” is a slight.
And let’s not forget the context of this conversation. When a culture comes barging in saying everyone is a homophobic, sexist, privileged racist and asserting that is part of the default background culture, you’re likely to receive something a little less than sympathy for – in principle – calling Chinese bigots for putting a lot of Chinese in their media, or Arabs who do the same in Arab countries. That is not done out of hostility, but to get on with the story. At the end of the day, put who you want in your stories, but please stop with the accusations of privileged Anglo-heterocentric “hegemonic” bigotry when others do the same for better reasons, or when your own stories don’t sell.
Minority-majority populations are a fact of life all over the world, and that is reflected in stories. There is nothing sinister about it.
And then on top of all that we have had the historic lie advanced that the early 20th century reading tastes of American women in regard to their disinterest in SFF has been used as “proof” of “male elitism” by the generation of feminists which followed. If a demographic of homosexuals age 13-20 doesn’t read Field & Stream today, can the next generation of gay folks use that as “proof” gays were “excluded” from Field & Stream?
To be honest, you folks used up your credibility a long time ago by resorting to sheer hostility and the group defamation of men and whites as if being male and white was in and of itself proof of bigotry and any top-heavy male or white demographic a sort of supremacist movement. Mysteriously, this “principle” is never applied to Taiwanese TV, Bollywood, romance fiction, blues or jazz. That’s called “lying.”
All four 2014 Hugo short story noms are virtually devoid of genre in favor of, not only a mindless addiction to racial and sexual diversity, but 3 of them with a clear message as to what racial-sexual demographic must be run away from, savaged by a raptor and causes lying. That year also had a genderblind zombie, Tarzan in Jim Crow-land, not so Snow White, and the eternally fascinating Vietnamese cuz Vietnamese. Had such sleeping pills somehow found their way into All-Story Weekly during WW I, scratch Weird Tales and Amazing Stories from history from sheer lack of a burgeoning interest.
The argument in your opening paragraph uses a population which is likely something in the order of 0.001% of a population, if that, (Norwegians living in Cairo) to explain why it’s okay to have roughly 36% of the population of the US and Canada (White males) be roughly 80% of the heroes of all stories written by people from those countries, with about 15% of the remainder being females, usually love interests, and the lat 5% being non-white males. At least that is what I get the impression you want to see in your fiction, based on your imagining the persecution of white males is involved whenever people ask for more. I have no interest in persecuting white males. Probably close to half the people important to my life ARE white males.
I just find that using the exact same demographic as hero leads to exactly the same motivations cropping up time and again. Immature, overly cocky girl-magnet needs to grow up? Well, there you have Iron Man, Ant-man, Thor, Green Lantern, and Star-Lord out of the recent superhero movies. I cheered a lot for Captain America as a film because it’s not quite the same story, but it is based on another fairly traditional male story – the small scrawny nerdy guy grows up to be someone SPECIAL, more so than all the ones who started buff and ostensibly perfect. But it would be nice to see another story – even as I ENJOYED all those movies. (Even Green lantern, easily the weakest.)
By contrast, Gamora and Black Widow are the only ones in the whole female crop of heroes lately to have similar backstories (And bad guy turns good is a staple of sidekick characters, male or female — witness Bucky). But then, Jessica Jones has a different one from those two, and Agent Carter another as well. The only one who even comes close to the typical *male* backstory in her maturation is Skye/Daisy, and she has it made more interesting by combining it with the “searching for my birth family” trope. She’s also part of a cast and crew which has such a range of backgrounds and origins that it’s much less the focus of the story than it is for all the male heroes who pretty much had a whole movie to display theirs. (And AoS nicely undermines the typical male hero’s origin elsewhere by having their immature, overly cocky male lead turn out to be a Hydra agent and not the seeming hero he was disguised as at first.)
I haven’t see a lot of “asking” when it comes to this. I have seen a lot of what Silvia Moreno-Garcia did a couple weeks back: publicly attack a total stranger, call him vulgar names and ask people to boycott him based on the top-heavy male demographic of a table of contents in an anthology he edited. TorCom podcaster Justin Landon has publicly insulted an anthology over a white, male ToC. Kate Elliott has been obsessive in her insulting Twitter comments about male authors in epic fantasy. Josh Whedon was driven off of Twitter from the “asking.” I could line up a list a mile long of people “asking” for diversity along with charming racial and sexual insults.
And it’s always based on the same irrational suspicion that “white cis dudes” want to keep others out, they fear their loss of privilege and yadda, yadda. It’s boring and it’s not asking. It’s group defamation.
Put whoever you want in your stories. If it works, great. If not, I won’t be coming round. Some of my favorite stories have female leads. By an amazing coincidence that’s because they’re great stories; Infinity Beach, Black God’s Kiss, Engines of God, Palace, In Conquest Born, Judgement Night. My favorite character in GRRM’s series is Cersei, because she is most fully realized and intriguing. It has nothing to do with her sex, nor does my love of the film Black Orpheus have anything to do with race.
Just remember hobbies have weird demographic spikes more often that not. Go tell rap artists they’re wrong for lacking diversity. SFF is based on adventure fiction, which is based on military escapades, which is top-heavy with males. That’s especially true for epic fantasy. I just don’t see anything weird about that. If I am inspired by Bernal Diaz’s account of La Noche Triste which had one women fighting out of hundreds of Spaniards the first thing to enter my head isn’t going to be to alter that to half women. If someone lights me up for that entirely reasonable reaction, sexually insults me as a sexist and then uses words like “persecution” when I push back, we’re not likely to be talking very long.
My impression of that exchange is that the editor in question spent an entire discussion thread attacking a person who 1) asked once, and very mildly, about the lack of diversity, and 2) ALSO both expressed interest in reading it, and asked when the next book in the anthology series would be open to submissions. But no matter how much she amde it clear the question was a minor quibble, he made it a HUGE one, and pretty much turned frothing at the mouth. Only after all that did Moreno-Garcia spoke up, rather acidly, yes, because he was behaving like a jerk.
I know nothing specific about your next two examples, but your apparent lack of awareness about the first one makes me suspect there’s more to the exchange than you’re presenting.
Joss Whedon left Twitter, yes, and because he has regularly both tried to have his cake and eat it to – to be a feminist and anti-racist but not accept polite criticism when he fails. Ignore polite criticism and yes, you get hit next with the loud, shouty criticism. THere are two reasons for this; one is legitimate anger at being ignored. The other is that there are assholes in every demographic. For every bitchy feminist you bring up, though, I can bring up examples of rape threats and death threats from MRAs and women who got attacked and driven out of parts of the internet by those attacks. That’s a lose-lose race, because it doesn’t prove anything about either feminists or MRAs except that jerks are jerks on all sides of the political spectrum.
But we’re not talking about demographic spikes — or at least, not only. Women only submit about 30% of stories on average. Okay. So shouldn’t they have about 30% of stories? So why is it then that the actual percentage they get in a lot of anthologies is closer to 10%? Based on the women who do get published, it’s clearly not because women can’t write an interesting story, even a rocket-ships and explosions story.
I have no problem with a story not being fully diverse when it makes sense that it is so. This doesn’t happen as often as it might, but, well, take several famous Viet Nam or WWII war stories. If you’re setting the story entirely among the soldiers, the reality is they’d be all guys. Where I have a problem is when the story is not diverse when it’s set in a time and place where diversity is more normal – all these super-heroes set here and now – or when the actual diversity of a time and place is ignored or outright denied to excuse it. Like, for instance, those guys in Viet Nam being all white (except the Vietnamese enemy). One of the better tellings of recovery from his time in Viet Nam I personally read was from an Anishinaabe man.
“Diversity” is a principle. If the only diversity feminists are interested in where it affects themselves, then it’s just ideological identity narcissism. There is no equal protection or fair play involved there; there is nothing. The trend of irrational suspicions about any cultural spike occupied by men or whites is as clear as it is noticeably absent when it comes to romance fiction or Afrofuturism conferences. For some reason, those demographic spikes operate on some totally different moral reality, accompanied by self-serving theories like “privilege,” which is what you would suspect of a cult of intersectional female supremacists. These women want to have their cake and eat it too. They justify segregated Women Destroy… anthologies as much as they insist no one but they do such a thing, even insanely referring to their anthologies as “diversity” and “inclusion.”
There is no “legitimate anger” at being ignored if the word “ignored” is twisted to mean the constant immorality of white men, the assumed innocence of everyone else and pretending movies and publishing are some vast racist MRA factory. They exist to make money and it is impossible to do that by flattening them out into a pie-chart at the service of Tumblrinas. Diversity is a shill. Culture has a mind of its own. There are diverse cities all over America and yet have demographic spikes all over the place ranging from neighborhoods to hair salons. If you want to flatten that out because it makes the story better for you then write it or publish it. Projects belong to those who make them and you have a vote: your money. Feminism today is a shill too. You have the right to do anything you want. I have no idea where you get your 30% figure from but when the day comes you start doing that to romance fiction then you’ll have credibility. As for myself, I could care less what a genre of romance writers do or whether men are 5% of the pie there and nor do I bear any malice towards decades of Ladies’ Home Journal. They’re just doing what they want to do and it is no reflection of man-hatred.
Given the context in SFF the last 7 years, there are no “polite” questions about such Table of Contents. The question presumes the answer: men.
The point where I think Correia’s (as well as Brad Torgersen’s) reasoning for Sad Puppies falls apart pretty quickly is when one starts to discuss specific works. I can’t see how popular past winners such as Lois McMaster Bujold, Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge and John Scalzi can be described as writers of boring, politically-motivated message fiction, but maybe you or someone else could explain that logic in some greater detail.
You give this example of terrible writing (and a book like this would certainly be pretty awful) — but can you tell which Hugo winners are really this bad:
You want a homosexual relationship in your novel? Great. Do it in some other way than introducing a character for a single paragraph who inexplicably needs to tell the audience how much he loves his husband before he’s immediately shuttled off into the background, never to be heard from again.
Honestly I think it falls more in the short stories and novellas that their complaints lie, but as mentioned in my reply above, I don’t really pay attention to the Hugos. I can say that a recent Hugo nominee did almost exactly that thing in an even more recent novel, and it was just… jarring.
But I liked the novel and have no interest in throwing the author under the bus for what was one moment in an otherwise excellent book.
We’re talking about matters of perception and opinion here, and as such it’s almost all subjective. I mean, boring books get nominated to the Hugos all the time, and I CAN openly throw George R.R. Martin’s last two under the bus on that account with not a single qualm. Now, those aren’t “message fiction”, but the point remains that I, personally, can’t see how anyone thought that Feast or Dance were worthy of a Hugo nomination, let alone making it to the finals.
But clearly WorldCon voters disagreed with me on that one. And that’s okay with me personally; I don’t share Correia’s (and subsequent SP organizers) need to be a shit-stirrer in this particular pot.
Clearly, WorldCon and I don’t really share the same opinion on what constitutes the best novel of the year. Nor do the Academy and I often agree with who deserves Best Picture, or even to be nominated for such. The Academy, at least, is changing. As will the Hugos, in theory, in coming years. I’m interested in seeing what results from a renewed interest by people who previously felt shut-out of the Hugo process once the changes to the nomination system go through. I expect the results won’t be what was desired, which will make the subsequent evolution of the rules even more entertaining.
Can you spell out what book you’re thinking about? I mean, nobody can really criticize you for not liking a specific book, can they?
Your other answer above (that I didn’t see until I had posted my comment) was quite interesting. You ended it with this note:
I can pose a challenge to you, incidentally, if you disagree with the notion that the Hugos have become politicized.
Orson Scott Card won two years in a row. He was a finalist four times in the next five years.
Do you think that would happen now?
Yeah, there’s no way in hell. I think it’s impossible for a person who thinks that same-sex marriage “marks the end of democracy in America” to win a Hugo award. But does it prove anything else than the fact that people who hold views that significant number of voters vehemently object to cannot win a popular vote?
See above for a specific example. It pains me to criticize Corey, I love their work so…
But regarding Card: Therein lies the point. The Hugos are a popularity contest (which I’ve known since I was 12), not really an award based on objective merit, and yet people like to pretend that they are.
In theory, if enough people voted to get a work on the ballot, the responsibility of the voters is to rank the works on merit alone, and one of the core accusations the Puppies have made is that that simply doesn’t happen at WorldCon. That who you know, and what your politics are, matters as much or even more than the quality of your work.
I don’t know if it’s true or not. What I do know is that the behavior of the WorldCon “establishment” last year certainly lent some weight to the accusation, at least in my eyes.
I found the outcome of SP3 just utterly depressing. I’m hoping SP4 will be different, but honestly I expect at least one or two more purely political rejections this year.
But regarding Card: Therein lies the point. The Hugos are a popularity contest (which I’ve known since I was 12), not really an award based on objective merit, and yet people like to pretend that they are.
Well, yeah, but there is (and can be) no objective merit in arts. A great novel by a widely-hated writer is not going to make it. A great novel by a new and unknown writer is not going to make it (if you don’t manage to get plenty of good publicity). That’s the reality of popular awards, there’s no getting around it.
That who you know, and what your politics are, matters as much or even more than the quality of your work.
I think that’s a wild overstatement. If your politics are far on the fringe and you’re aggressive and outspoken about them, maybe many people won’t read your books or vote for them, and that’s their prerogative. However, I don’t think you can jump to the conclusion that “politics matter more than quality” from there.
Last year, I put Toni Weisskopf, Sheila Gilbert, Anne Sowards and Jim Minz above No Award and all short fiction on the ballot below it. I feel I voted based on quality, but that’s a highly subjective assessment, of course.
Oh, absolutely, art is subjective. The existence of modern art alone is proof of that. Leaving aside discussions of technical skill and whatnot, what people like is… well… what people like.
I picked up the first book in Brent Weeks’ “Night’s Angel” trilogy years ago, struggled through it, declared it the worst book I’d read in years, and refused to buy the sequel. The friend I gave it to (upon request) LOVED IT, bought the whole series, and permanently marred my faith in his taste. I came to the realization that we were just lightyears apart on that particular issue when he told me that Rothfuss’ writing ability didn’t impress him, but that was somewhat later.
Ultimately, the subjective nature of analysis leaves us in something of a conundrum regarding popularity contests like the Hugos. If politics are going to play a role, then politics are simply going to play a role, and the fact that the conservative side has started showing up to the award is something people are just going to have to learn to live with.
One of the arguments against the Puppies I’ve seen repeated most often is that they’re looking at things through a purely ideological filter, yet the outcome of last year’s Hugos undermined any assertion that “the establishment” is doing things any differently. You can argue it was a response to people gaming the system, but it was, in my opinion, the worst way for people opposed to the Puppies to handle the situation, collectively.
Voting your conscience based on merit is commendable, but clearly, you were in the minority in that regard.
Here is a list of the people nudged out of the Hugo noms last year by the Puppies:
Abigail Nussbaum Liz Bourke Natalie Luhrs Anita Sarkeesian Mark Oshiro Lynn Thomas Shaun Duke Paul Weimer Rachel Acks Renay Jodie Aiden Moher Book Smugglers (Anna Grilo & Thea James) Neil Clarke Beth Meacham Patrick Nielsen Hayden John Scalzi Ken Liu Rachel Swirsky Seanan McGuire Kai Ashante Wilson Aliette de Bodard Amal El-Mohtar Max Gladstone Alyssa Wong Carmen Machado Django Wexler Jim Hines Ursula Vernon
Read the non-fiction rhetoric of those people and tell me it is conservative vs. liberal politics. Tell me they obsess over abortion, Middle Eastern wars, or how to fund schools as opposed to a dial tone of about the immorality of the straight white male, Anglo “hegemony,” pronouns, “whitewashing” or the “gender binary.” That list is a stunning indictment of the Hugos. They are 100% supporters of Third Wave Feminism, a cult which has no interest in whether straight white males are GOP or Dem. The best a SWM can be is an “ally,” a word you frequently see the worst of them use, along with “mansplaining,” “cis dudes” and “white tears.” Take away racial and sexual defamation and Third Wave Feminism doesn’t even exist. Take TWF out of the Hugos and you’re left with No Award. These people are crusaders and they’ll permit no rivals if they can help it. They don’t hate “slates”; that list is a slate of the one-mind. They just don’t like anyone else’s.
Chris:
Ultimately, the subjective nature of analysis leaves us in something of a conundrum regarding popularity contests like the Hugos. If politics are going to play a role, then politics are simply going to play a role, and the fact that the conservative side has started showing up to the award is something people are just going to have to learn to live with.
Perhaps you’re right. On the other hand, I guess most Hugo voters (be they left or right leaning in real elections) don’t really care that much about politics and things will settle down eventually if there’s nobody throwing gas on the fire.
I’m not really sure about the conservative side showing up last year. Statistics show us that the Rabid Puppies slate voting effort (by Vox Day/Theodore Beale) was way more successful than Sad Puppies, and pretty much everybody (including many Sad Puppy people) agreed that Day was in it for pure trolling and self-promoting purposes.
I’m quite happy to see that Sad Puppies campaign is handled this year the way it is handled (with open recommendations and all). Hopefully, the discussion around the Hugos will be more constructive and meaningful this time around.
Last I looked at the numbers, the two Puppies groups showed up in about equal numbers, just with less cohesion on the Sad side.
And yeah, this year will hopefully be better, I’m just not a hopeful person by nature.
Hence why I’m preparing for the possibility of President Trump, gods help us all.
It’s easy to see. Stop pushing this cult farther back in time than is justified; it’s a fake argument you of course easily win. The important date is 2009 with stuff like Racefail and things don’t really start rolling until 2012. Was there a Puppies movement in reaction to Bujold or Vinge? No. Did they sport “white tears” coffee mugs, whine about “mansplaining” or try and make me think my actual name is “white cis dude”? No. Scalzi doesn’t start sending up his virtue-flags until his blog hosts a two-part white privilege post in 2009. His own follows in 2012. K. Tempest Bradford’s Angry Black Woman blog starts in with the posts about “intersectionality” and a post about a black version of the Bechdel Test written by a predictable future Nebula-nominee Alaya Dawn Johnson in 2009. America invaded Okinawa after Pearl Harbor, not before.
The point is that people may have been bored by politically motivated fiction prior to 2009, but the anger didn’t come until the defamation of men and whites as an entire group started with the entrance of this bizarre cult of Third Wave Feminism. That is not “politics,” that is hatred. The fact that obvious race and sex-hatred was passed off and is still being passed off as “anti-sexism” and “anti-racism” makes it all the more bizarre.
Well, beginning from 2009, Hugo novel finalists include works by Katherine Addison, Saladin Ahmed, Kevin J. Anderson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Lois McMaster Bujold, Jim Butcher, James S.A. Corey, Larry Correia, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, Mira Grant (x3), N.K. Jemisin, Robert Jordan, Ann Leckie (x2), Cixin Liu, George R.R. Martin, Ian McDonald, China Miéville (x2), Cherie Priest, Brandon Sanderson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert J. Sawyer, John Scalzi (x2), Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross (x2), Catherynne M. Valente, Jo Walton, Connie Willis and Robert Charles Wilson.
Even if we leave out the ones put on the list by Sad Puppies campaigns, it’s an insanely diverse bunch with lots of different subgenres, writing styles, viewpoints et cetera (probably also political stances, but it’s hard to measure that one). You can certainly make the case that some relevant works and writers are missing from the list (all lists are like that), but in no way is this an ideologically homogeneous set.
The discussion about (white/male/whatever) privilege has been going on for quite some time. SF author Joanna Russ wrote How to Suppress Women’s Writing over 30 years ago, and the way I see it, the second-wave feminism of sixties, seventies and early eighties was much more hardline than anything we have around today.
However that is, I don’t believe many Hugo voters know or care much about intersectional feminism, Racefail or K. Tempest Bradford’s blog (even though I personally find them all sorta interesting). If they did, the list of finalists above would probably look a bit different.
You’re doing it again. You give out a straw man argument and of course you win. When have I ever asserted some absolute control of the Hugos? I also said this didn’t really get rolling until 2012. Having said that, look at your list of names. Even including the transition period 2009-11, fully a third of those names are advocates of Third Wave Feminist principles. It’s much worse now. I’d guess that feminist culture controls something around 80-85% of the Nebula and Hugo nominees. Outside in the normal world? Statistical 0% of people support this bizarre cult.
I’ve said this before, and it’s so simple: adopt a neutral definition of the concept of group defamation and boot those people out. It’s amazing how people understand what group defamation is when it comes to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation or the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. But when it comes to me, somehow I get a rewards points system or point-shaving scam which erodes my Constitutional rights and right to be treated a human being because of something or other the East India Company once did or because of feminist memory-hole versions of historic slavery and colonialism. As long as I live I will never accept that, so this cult can just knock it off with their “privilege” nonsense. Somehow 3 million non-Jewish Poles or thousands of Irishmen murdered for being on their own soil or tens of thousands of Greeks booted out of Istanbul 1955-65 are never “disadvantaged groups.” How convenient. How convenient when one rigs a game to corner the market on radicalized group self-pity and oppression. The Nazis did that, so did the KKK. So has every supremacist moron who’s ever come down the pike. It’s simple: lie about history or even just make it up. Lie about the history of SFF magazines by simply never mentioning the massive American magazine market which catered to women elsewhere to the point women’s magazines out circulated mens’ 4 to 1 out of the top 40 mags in 1955. Is that how the “patriarchy” “suppresses” women’s writing?
The surest way to make a feminist angry is to argue due process, equal protection and free speech. Nothing else, just that. Then the screaming starts.
You’re wrong about general old school as opposed to new school radical feminism today. The rhetoric is a perfect match, both in tone and dogma. In SFF, it’s far worse than Russ or Le Guin. You’re also wrong about who knows what about who. Twitter has a very simple function: “You may also like…” Use it. This is a very small culture. Two presidents of the SFWA made this feminism a priority and the current one is a former women and gender studies teacher. What does that tell you? The website associate of the largest publisher of SFF is devoted to this feminism and allows zero rebuttal. Who overfunded Lightspeed’s segregated series of “Destroy” anthologies? Do you really think a hysterical feminist got two Hugos as a reward for an essay which mugs historic context and throws it in a ditch, (using paintings no less) or because she talked smack about men? A far more honest title using feminism’s own rhetoric would’ve been “We Have Always Avoided Military Service Like the Plague.”
By now, this is just part of the background noise. That’s what the term “mainstreaming” means.
On second-wave versus current feminism:
I was thinking more of people like Andrea Dworkin, Valerie Solanas and other radical second-wave feminists than Ursula K. Le Guin. They are way more militant than anything by K. Tempest Bradford (who is the single person you name there) I’ve come across.
On K. Tempest Bradford’s popularity:
I think Bradford hasn’t been nominated for a Hugo at all, so I’m not really sure how influential her fan writing is among Hugo voters.
On feminists screaming when one mentions due process and equal protection:
I like to consider myself a feminist and I’m not screaming, so I can’t agree with you there.
You’re misunderstanding my point. I am not saying the majority of this culture is specifically aware of the timing or origin of these entry points. I’m talking about how ideas are mainstreamed into a culture and when they first started. How many feminists do you think know the foundational text for the term “rape culture” compared to the term itself? Do you really think Scalzi is aware of the specific foundational texts for his post about gender pronouns this week? How many social justice feminists in SFF know what the metaphor and double entendre “before the law” means as written about by Jacques Derrida, or to what use Judith Butler put that, even as these same feminists promote that specific idea? They are promoting a thing which has been mainstreamed into their consciousness, unaware of when and how that occurred. Like I said, at this point, it’s just background noise full of buzzwords like “misogyny,” aneurotypical” and “gender norms.”
This is a comment section. I’ve no room to write an essay. I mentioned Bradford as a single event and I disagree she is less militant. Anyway, there are in fact tons of modern feminist hate Tweeters in SFF as nutty and paranoid as Dworkin or SCUM and Redstockings manifestos.
“… ‘mainstream American art’ is almost exclusively created from within, and to serve, the white male colonial gaze. That is an established fact that requires no further proof or validation going forward.”
“The truth about which white people are innocent of racist acts? Yeah, I’ll admit to not caring about that.”
The first quote is from a Tiptree Award Winner. The second from the co-creator of WisCon’s racially segregated “safer-space.” A Nebula nominee wrote that a case of racial mistaken identity is “institutional racism”; that’s just plain nuts. I got hundreds more. Please don’t tell me these aren’t a ton of these nutty and hateful people mainstreaming this nonsense into our genre as “social justice.” Back when I was researching this, I wouldn’t even really call it research. All I did was read Twitter that day, or the latest blog. It was a flood. I could do the same thing this very minute.
Let’s not be overly literate about the term “screaming”; you know what I meant. If you believe in white privilege you are anti-equal protection. “Rape culture” is anti-due process, SFF’s feminists are obviously anti-free speech, and power/privilege, punching up theories are anti-equal protection. If you want an example of the opposite in SFF, listen to Rod Serling’s Nov.11, 1966 UCLA speech on youtube. That was back in the day when due process, equal protection and free speech was mainstreamed into our consciousness via SFF; no more. Serling is now nothing more than a privileged heteronormative white male with the Mark of Cain and a Scarlet Letter.
Well, some feminist thought may be taking hold in the mainstream, but I don’t consider that a bad thing at all. Understanding that gender is not necessarily a binary thing and using pronouns that the person in question prefers don’t hurt anybody. If they are becoming more mainstream, the chances are that people respond to them positively and consider them good ideas — the process doesn’t have to involve a shady feminist cabal running the show.
I still think that “intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of contempt for women’s bodies” (Dworkin) is significantly more unreasonable and militant opinion than “‘mainstream American art’ is almost exclusively created from within, and to serve, the white male colonial gaze” (is it Monica Byrne?). I have no idea about the context of the latter sweeping generalization, but it doesn’t sound caterogically false when we consider the history of cinema, for example.
I get that we disagree, and debating is probably not going to change our views.
If you could leave even one comment without some strawman like “shady feminist cabal running the show,” that would be great. If you cannot debate without putting words in my mouth then you have already lost that debate. And in fact this stuff about the “gender binary” is a bad thing because it is not just an idea put out there but used to relentlessly attack men as immoral, oppressive bigots. It is scapegoating, not some impartial science. I have never said simply using pronouns hurts anybody, I said it’s used by this cult to attack men. What is there about a Hugo nominee Tweeting “[redacted] the gender binary, is what I’m saying. [redacted] it sideways with a chainsaw, and ESPECIALLY when it comes to children” that is unclear? What is there about the term “compulsory heterosexuality” you don’t understand or who the “oppressor” is there, or that pronouns are meant to be used against the “fake” ideology that is heterosexuality in the same way Radio Free Europe was meant to undermine communism? That is not scientists in lab coats but bigots who talk about men the same way anti-Semites talk about Jews.
As for debate, it certainly should change views. It changed the views of people like Orwell and Christopher Hitchens throughout their lives, though they were highly opinionated people. I have left sales figures about women’s vs. men’s magazines. If that doesn’t change your views of Joanna Russ’s (and the entire feminist movement in SFF) nonsense about suppressing womens’ writing, you are probably incapable of having your views changed. There is a gigantic discrepancy there, as is also reflected in the fact Russ was professionally published at 22 in the Magazine of F & SF while still in college and a reviewer at F & SF for 15 years. In short, Russ was a fabulist. Why not just admit that entire subject is a falsehood and therefore this entire “diversity” movement in SFF built on that falsehood? The facts speak plain on this issue.
“Retweeted by Charlie Stross Kameron Hurley @KameronHurley Highly suggest every woman-identified person writing/speaking publicly pick up Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing…”
“Retweeted by M J Locke Dan[i/iel] Franklin @Daniel_Libris · How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ…”
It’s nice to be accused of strawmanning in a post which also says that questioning binary gender means attacking men. 😀
What is there about a Hugo nominee Tweeting “[redacted] the gender binary, is what I’m saying. [redacted] it sideways with a chainsaw, and ESPECIALLY when it comes to children” that is unclear?
I am completely at a loss here. You throw this quote on the table like it’s a smoking gun, but I see nothing suspicious in it. Quite the opposite, making it easier for LGTBIQ kids is a very good idea on my opinion.
Russ was professionally published at 22 in the Magazine of F & SF while still in college and a reviewer at F & SF for 15 years.
Hmm, this has to be a straw man too, now that you mentioned them, because I’m pretty sure nobody thinks that Russ wasn’t published. What she says in How to Suppress Women’s Writing, I think, is that it’s tremendously harder to get credit for your writing if you’re a woman. Sure, a lot of women have been published, but just a quick look on the Science Fiction Hall of Fame demonstrates that she may have a point.
1. That’s not what a straw man is. And read your Monique Wittig, Robin Morgan, Gayle Rubin, Adrienne Rich and Judith Butler. I didn’t make up this theory, they did.
2. Chainsaw-girl isn’t referring to gay kids. She is referring to all kids. That’s the whole point of French Queer Theory. Why would people who’ve already acknowledged their non-heterosexual status need to be freed from the illusory “performative” effects of “compulsory heterosexuality” which acts to suppress such things?
3. The male/female ratio of the SF Hall of Fame is no more significant than it is in the 1956 hardcover anthology The Ladies Home Journal Treasury: 73 Years of Its Best Stories, Articles and Poetry.
Here’s the breakdown of the top 40 magazines by circulation per issue in 1955:
16 aimed at women with a total combined circulation of 44.7 million.
8 aimed at men with a total combined circulation of 11.8 million
16 general interest with a combined total of 51.4 million
By that standard, I could argue mens’ writing was being suppressed in commercial magazines. What if I wanted to see more of myself in magazines in 1955? Should I have started a movement barking at women? In truth we’re merely talking about nothing more than the reading tastes of the American public. Russ had no argument – none. It’s not Ben Bova’s fault, nor that of any man in SF that mid-century American women preferred to read and write what they did any more than it’s Latin America’s fault Americans aren’t big soccer fans. Are Latinos “suppressing” American soccer? Why does an American man come in at 18th place in all-time international mens’ goal scoring in soccer as opposed to American women who are 1, 3 and 4 on their list? Are American women suppressing American male soccer players? Are they hogging the limelight?
Throw this irrational and suspicious feminist view of culture and the world out the window. It is worthless junk.
And read your Monique Wittig, Robin Morgan, Gayle Rubin, Adrienne Rich and Judith Butler.
Umm, why exactly? I’ve been to a couple of women’s studies classes in a university and I’m fairly sure I know quite a bit more about these issues than an average SFF reader but I’ve never heard of the first four (Rich’s name sort of rings a bell but I can’t remember anything specific about her). I think that one can discuss feminist ideas without having to first read a theoretical shitload.
Chainsaw-girl [huh?] isn’t referring to gay kids. She is referring to all kids. That’s the whole point of French Queer Theory.
As you know, Bob, the timing of the emergence, recognition, and expression of one’s sexual orientation varies among individuals (that’s a quote from a booklet endorsed by APA and practically every other professional association there is). During their adolescence, all kids may find out that their sexual orientation is something other than heterosexual, so making it easier to live through that makes sense to me.
The male/female ratio of the SF Hall of Fame is no more significant than it is in the 1956 hardcover anthology The Ladies Home Journal Treasury: 73 Years of Its Best Stories, Articles and Poetry.
If we’re having a discussion about the recognition of women writers in SFF, I think the Hall of Fame has some significance. There may have well been more best-selling magazines aimed at female audiences in the 50s, but it’s quite obvious that they aren’t considered as prestigious as the male-dominated ones.
If things are as well as you try to make them look, I wonder why a number of women, gay and black writers, such as Russ and Delany, have had some bad things to say about the inclusiveness of SFF fan culture back in the day.
That’s the point of reading them; to understand where this stuff comes from which has been mainstreamed and smoothed out in the translation so it seems rather innocuous. Having an initiative like “No Gender December” mainstreamed so parents think giving their little girl a G.I. Joe doll will allow her to be a forklift driver is different than what the original intent was, which was to suppress the heterosexual “gender binary.”
You’re wrong about the fiction in women’s magazines. Because of their high revenue, they often used high-priced prestigious writers and directly competed with general interest magazines like Cosmopolitan and the Saturday Evening Post. On the other hand, the eight mens’ magazine on that list were American Legion, True, Popular Mechanics, Argosy, Popular Science Monthly, Boy’s Life, V.F.W. Magazine and Elks Magazine, in order of circulation success.
The top mens’ magazine that year was American Legion, founded in 1919, with a circulation of 2.8 million. The top womens’ mag was Ladies’ Home Journal, with 4.8, founded in 1883. Another womens’ mag, McCall’s, had 4.5. The general interest Sat Evening Post was in between with 4.6.
I don’t know anything about fan culture back then. I do know Delany had 9 novels published by Ace from age 20-28 starting in 1962 and won 4 Nebulas and 2 Hugos in the ’60s, which speaks for itself. That places him in an elite group, not roped off.
According to Theodore Peterson, prior to the year 1900, editor “Edward Bok offered an expense-paid education at leading conservatories to young women who obtained the requisite number of subscriptions to Ladies’ Home Journal and later he extended the plan to include regular college scholarships.”
“We want stories. That is what we mean – stories, not dialect sketches, not washed out studies of effete human nature, not weak tales of sickly sentimentality, not ‘pretty’ writing… We do want fiction in which there is a story, a force, a tale that means something – in short a story. Good writing is as common as clam shells, while good stories are as rare as statesmanship.” – Frank Munsey, 1895, founder of the All-Story Weekly which first published E. Rice Burroughs, Francis Stevens and Abraham Merritt
It’s almost as if Munsey had been reading Hugo nominees from the last few years. Are we surprised Munsey is the unsung hero of SF’s Golden Age? Put those two quotes together and they reveal the empty art and feminist falsehoods which is the heart of today’s social justice crusaders in SFF.
Having an initiative like “No Gender December” mainstreamed so parents think giving their little girl a G.I. Joe doll will allow her to be a forklift driver is different than what the original intent was, which was to suppress the heterosexual “gender binary.”
You make no sense. If giving her a G.I.Joe doll will allow her to become a forklift driver (in case that’s what she wants), good for her. If it helps people who are troubled because their gender identity doesn’t conform to the binary model, even better. These things don’t affect you, so why bother obsessing about it and attacking feminists?
I don’t know anything about fan culture back then. I do know Delany had 9 novels published by Ace from age 20-28 starting in 1962 and won 4 Nebulas and 2 Hugos in the ’60s, which speaks for itself. That places him in an elite group, not roped off.
Neither Russ nor Delany has suggested that they weren’t published (that would of course be quite ridiculous). What they are saying is that women and black writers had it harder than white dudes. I’m sorry, but I’m more inclined to believe a woman writer and a black writer on this than a contemporary white dude.
Incidentally, a note/disclaimer/caveat here: Comments on my blog are set to auto-approve, so long as you make it past WordPress’s spam filter.
That having been said.
Keep it civil.
I would like one person to explain to me the con which has motivated this entire feminist movement in SFF: namely, that SFF magazine fiction 1912-60 was Patriarchy Island. How would editors, many of whom didn’t even know each other, tacitly connive to exclude women from SFF over a period of 50 years? Why would they even want to do that compared to the rest of the magazine industry, or at all? Most all SFF mags were competitors. Wouldn’t the easiest way to beat your competitor be to allow in that massive flood of women banging on the door to be published? Wouldn’t that allow circulation to increase, the thing which allows you to keep your job? Do you think an SFF magazine editor didn’t at least have an inkling women’s mags had outsold mens’ mags during that entire 50 years? How do you ignore 45 million women’s magazines sold each issue compared to 12 million mens’ mags in the top 40 in 1955? Were SFF male editors a suicide cult?
Dorothy McIlwraith was the editor of Weird Tales the final 15 years of its existence, almost half the life of the magazine. Did she hate women? What about Mary Gnaedinger, the sole editor of Famous Fantastic Mysteries 1939-53? Stockholm Syndrome? Orders from Der Fuhrer of Mensch? What about Judith Merril’s yearly anthologies 1955-68, missing only 1955? How about Cele Goldsmith at the helm of Amazing and Fantastic 1958/59-65? Internal misogyny? How did they even get in there? Shy girlish glances? Freemasonry?
I have an alternate explanation: Third Wave Feminists are amazing liars and have pulled off the greatest scam in the 100 year history of our genre. They have used that snow job to stack the awards deck in their favor, continuing to howl at any table of contents which isn’t Pie-Chart Island, selling the same old lies about patriarchy, misogyny and sexism. By that standard, romance fiction owes me reparations for being Matriarchy Island.
“And chances are that they sell considerably better than those of the politically-correct author you favor.”
Are you sure about this, internationally? I’ve never even seen a Correia book on a UK bookshelf, and generally Baen books are difficult to find.
I’m currently living in Turkey and the SFF that is hitting the Turkish language market and selling is probably what you would call PC: Le Guin is very popular, Leckie, Scalzi, Corey, Scott Lynch, Rothfuss etc.
No, hence the phrase “Chances are”.
Also, when I use that phrase, I’m generally not thinking about people like Le Guin (a legend in her own time), Scalzi (an inexplicable success story to me personally), or other major players. Correia himself isn’t what I would term a major player in SF/F.
Seems like a tautological argument if you don’t include successful “PC” writers.
Fair enough lol.
The weirder thing about Scalzi is that he was a success with conservative readers at first–I remember “Old Man’s War” being held up on Instapundit as some shining example of how folks ought to be writing war stories.
These days, not so much.
Oh, “A Feast for Crows.” Brilliant writing in the Arya section, and in other places, but in desperate need of pruning. You could’ve cut 300 pages without missing a thing. The only interesting Iron Islands character was Asha; Dorne was potentially interesting, but the disastrous decision to head jump from new character to new character is inexplicable, the gratuitous slaughter of yet another honorable character who makes a bone-stupid decision…
HOWEVER, George R. R. Martin has never won a Best Novel Hugo, and he surely deserved one for the at least one of the first three Song of Ice and Fire books, so I chalk that up to the “Paul Newman Color of Money Oscar” scenario. Fingers crossed The Winds of Winter will set the ship right.
Yeah, I felt that Martin could have made one book out of Feast and Dance and come up with something pretty good.
Actually wrote a post about it about a year ago, oddly enough.
Third Wave feminism is an ideology built of myths powered by suspicion, fear and even hatred, rather than facts. As such it cannot be moved by facts. It is full of self-serving, circular Kafkatraps which feed on themselves in perfect logic loops polished and perfected over a period of 50 years in the books and essays of thousands of feminist texts. TWF need not resort to the outside world of reality. It need only know that men, whites and heterosexuals exist in that world. That in and of itself is an open and shut case. If you tell a TWF no one has ever driven across a bridge in America built by a gang of women they’ll have a “reason” for that, and it will be men. If statistical zero of people working in freezer warehouses across America are women TWF will have the same explanation. They will have an explanation for why they insist on diversity in tech as much as they don’t in freezer warehouses. They are never wrong, because the target is never right. TWFs can see this Table of Contents here, but not there; this colonialism here, but not there, this slavery here, but not there, this lack of diversity here, but not there. TWF is a supremacist ideological blinder driven by race and sex. In principle, it is in no way different than white supremacy or anti-Semitism. All seek to diminish the footprint of their chosen target in order to enhance their own societal profile, all are driven by hatred.
There is no doubt TWF is the default orthodoxy of the Hugos, and to a massive extent, just as it is in the SFWA. To all intents and purposes the Hugo’s main ideological driver is little different from WisCon.