It's too late for me to scream at clouds, about the politicization of literature awards. Should I lament the rise of the MFA and the institutionalization of writing fiction in the academy? That ship has sailed and many celebrate that, which is fine.
And yet, I still find myself wanting to read sci-fi (not fantasy) that's about non-trivial ideas, written by authors who are obsessed with science and things, rather than relationships and identities and traumas and oppression.
I especially want to read writing by authors who can hold conflicting ideas in their heads without imploding and are able to say to themselves, "there's a high probability that all my fundamental values and beliefs are wrong and it is instead 'they' — the spectral, despicable They! — who are ethically and philosophically correct."
I imagine a sci-fi author who has seen further than other humans, and wants to share what they have seen. I'd also love beautiful sentences if possible.
Then I'd love literary sci-fi prizes whose judges have a deep and principled understanding of human history, who aren't activists in spirit, but want contrarian ideas that set the imagination and intellect on fire about the possibilities of technology and science and human problem solving. Finally, I want a sci-fi prize that conveys optimism about humanity on the cusp of great accomplishments; humanity on the verge of even greater and more bewildering and challenging adventures.
Why are relationships, identities, trauma, and oppression trivial ideas? Why do you think these authors cannot hold conflicting views in their mind?
I fully appreciate what you’re trying to say and absolutely there should be an award for what you’re looking for too. But it doesn’t help the discussion to put down those who write what you’re not interested in.
You might already know this but my recommendation would be to look at the Nebula awards. Those are industry awards. The Hugo is a fan award so the style of writing is much more likely to change as popular tastes change.
It is good you are trying to appreciate what he is saying.
For another attempt at explaining for you in a simplified matter: Dragons and monsters are for fantasy genre even if they wear a spacesuit, relationships and drama for romantic novels even if they wear a spacesuite, science and technonology are for science fiction.
Hugo awards core description is sci fi and fantasy as per their declaration.
Hugo awarded novels core prediction is whether there are gender multiplicities in the novel which is not that scientific of fantastic. It has danger of killing the scifi genre or the awards. Although I sympathize, I find it boring on a scifi or fantasy perspective
> science and technonology are for science fiction.
There isn't one universally accepted definition of science fiction, but historically, the Hugo Awards have been broader than just stories about science and technology.
Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1961 and winner of the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel was 1) extremely political, 2) about people and relationships, not science or technology, and 3) is beloved as a classic science fiction book.
Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle is an alternate history book - it doesn't deal with science or technology as such, but it won a Hugo Award in 1963
> Hugo awarded novels core prediction is whether there are gender multiplicities in the novel which is not that scientific of fantastic
Gender as a theme in science fiction goes back at least to Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969 (it won the Hugo too).
What you're complaining about isn't new, and it isn't killing science fiction or the Hugo Awards.
> What you're complaining about isn't new, and it isn't killing science fiction or the Hugo Awards.
Ha! Just because a situation isn't new doesn't mean that it's good or shouldn't be improved or wasn't flawed or doesn't warrant criticism.
As for killing awards: the concern is that audience interest in the output of awards will be killed or has been killed already. But "killing" is too dramatic a term, and institutions can take an impressively long time to die: it's more that our natural constituency of nerds will be bored to death, not that anyone cares; and the general audience won't see anything uniquely valuable.
As for killing sci-fi, you correctly noted that there's no universally accepted definition of the genre! It's difficult to kill what one can't even identify! Or is the inability to define it a sign that it's already dead? (Hence the ridiculous and gutless "sci-fi and fantasy" lists where everything is fantasy?)
But as that judge once said: "I don't know how to define [sci-fi], but I know it when I see it." If we're being honest, we all know what sci-fi is: It's the genre of literature that takes science and scientific methods of problem solving seriously. It looks at the world through science. That's not so bad. :-)
Science Fiction has a long history of exploring the political climate of the day by extrapolating from the current period. Frankenstein is a good classic example of course but even something like War of the Worlds has many possible interpretations some of which are deeply political.
I'm all for awards which promote hard sci-fi. I also appreciate that for someone who's looking for that sort of novel the latest awards feel like they might put that genre at risk.
> Science Fiction has a long history of exploring the political climate of the day by extrapolating from the current period. Frankenstein is a good classic example…
I would like to know your reasons for thinking this. I see Frankenstein as something far more perverse. Mary Shelly wrote it after the traumatic loss of her child in childbirth. Knowing this, it is hard to understand the novel as anything other than a speculation: ‘if men could make life, what form would that life-giving take?’
I think political was probably a poor word choice by me. Maybe just societal would have been better. I see the primary comments to be bothered by sci-fi that is addressing more than just “what if X was possible.” Frankenstein addresses both grief(or trauma to tie it to my first comment) and societal acceptance of outcasts(relationships). Maybe those things flow freely for you from “what if X was possible.” They do for me. But the comment I was initially responding to seems to think they don’t, or at least shouldn’t be core to science fiction.
“If men could give life what form would that life-giving take?” Is the first portion of the book. The remainder is “and how would humanity react”. That second piece is core, in my opinion, to any good science fiction and will always include much more than just science and be molded by the time in which it’s written.
> Why are relationships, identities, trauma, and oppression trivial ideas?
That's just, my opinion. :-)
It's difficult to explain if you, with access to the entire corpus of literature humans have published until now, and having read 10, 20, 50, 100 or more of past and current books, don't already know why.
It's impossible to explain if those are the things you already think are most important.
One way — and there are many others — to think about it is to ask: what can I use these ideas in this book to build that will advance humanity? Another is: what is new about what this author is saying that hasn't already been said by anyone in the past?
> Why do you think these authors cannot hold conflicting views in their mind?
This one is more simple (but you can probably invent a better method here as well): Read any recent award winning book that "interrogates identity" (or pick another MFA blurb descriptor) then write down what you think the author's values are. Often enough, if you simply take the view that the author's values are slightly or completely mistaken, the entire novel ceases to have a purpose.
Holding a conflicting view in my mind means being able to wholeheartedly (and at least, while writing) believe that my fundamental values and assumptions about the world are wrong.
p.s. Another reply to your comment also explained it rather nicely.
To try to succinctly respond to both points, I think the most clear way to describe the conflict is that you have different fundamental values than these authors do. Which of course I'm sure you understand.
I think you'd agree with the statement: "things that do not advance humanity are trivial". And that's totally fine, plenty of people feel that way. But not everyone does.
Furthermore that also assumes that "advancing humanity" is a clearly definable thing. I know plenty of people who'd argue that helping people understand the relationships in their life as advancing humanity.
But of course none of that really matters. I fully agree that there should be a multitude of awards which exist to promote diversity of thought and topic in literature.
My main point though is that these discussions suffer and don't go as far if they turn into a discussion about the value of the content as opposed to simply discussing the type of content we're looking to promote.
> My main point though is that these discussions suffer and don't go as far if they turn into a discussion about the value of the content as opposed to simply discussing the type of content we're looking to promote.
That makes sense. I think I mostly agree with you.
I do think that some values are objectively better than others. I believe, for instance, that societies that survive while other decay, do so because they happen, intentionally or accidentally, to discover or adopt objectively better values. Sci-fi is an especially well-placed genre to think about such questions: What got us here so successfully? What will take us into the future?
The practical definition of "things that advance humanity" is: the values/priorities/ideas that enable human civilizations to survive and not go extinct.
> I know plenty of people who'd argue that helping people understand the relationships in their life as advancing humanity.
I feel bad that such people are having so much difficulty that they need a stream of new novels to understand their relationships, assuming that these books even succeed at that. But such is life I guess. :-(
I'm re-reading The Expanse series, which started in 2011. I was talking about it with some friends, and they basically said, "Oh cool my MFA friends really like that series because it has so many non-binary relationships and stuff." I'm paraphrasing but you get the gist.
I literally had to stop and think about it. It's not that I didn't notice while I was reading that there was relationship stuff going on, and concepts of identities, traumas and oppression, it's just that all those things were woven so well into some damn good hard science fiction that it just felt natural right next to rail guns, asteroid bases and mysterious alien stuff.
Whether the series has optimism about humanity ... well I personally think the point of the series is to explore that.
The series won a Hugo in 2020 and I think they deserved it.
Speaking as someone who rolled his eyes at the synopsis of each entry in GP's list... I mean, you can just ignore the awards.
Like, think of it like the Oscars. It has been a very long time that "winning an Oscar" was predictive of how much I would enjoy a movie. What would some book awards be any different?
Just look for authors that write the sort of things you want to read, awards be damned.
> A lot of the themes covered there just don't appeal to my tastes either.
Yes. That's how I feel. Sorry I didn't elucidate.
The broader point I was making is about what I see as a pipeline problem. I don't want to generalize too much but if you've also attempted to get a novel or short story published, or apply for a writing workshop/grant/fellowship/retreat so that you can work on a novel you've drafted, you tend to encounter strange dynamics that I'm not sure I can competently describe without sounding like a "reply guy".
Nevertheless, I'm … concerned that literary culture is being (already has been) shaped into something that makes the books I'm interested in increasingly rare. Either they never get published, or take longer to get published than they otherwise would, or they are self-published and don't receive the editorial attention they deserve, or are never promoted, making them harder to find and subsequent work from that author unlikely.
I don't have comprehensive data to demonstrate this and it's impossible to prove counterfactuals. But to the extent that prizes are how an industry or community presents its culture to the rest of the world, I worry about ideological capture and try to pitch different directions.
I have no idea how the book industry works, but I think I sort of understand the problem you are gesturing at.
Instead of being worried, I just feel an unsurmountable sense of apathy to new publications. Maybe due to my disconnect and disinterest in themes being addressed, and what I perceive as excessive contamination of current sociopolitical agitation. Stories are often highjacked to in favor of those things. Perhaps it was always like this, and I just didn't know better? It changes little.
This extends to other forms of art, such as movies, comics, videogames. My solution was embracing the past, sticking to things created more than a decade and a half ago. For more modern things, I try to look at more independent produced works.
Maybe I am just too old and boring at this point.
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane"
> I just feel an unsurmountable sense of apathy to new publications[…] disinterest in themes being addressed […]
You've nailed it: there's a massive disconnect because this alienation of the interested reader as well as the average person, is not even recognised as a problem.
> My solution was embracing the past, sticking to things created more than a decade and a half ago.
It's wild that I was told something similar by a mentor. And it's an excellent strategy.
> a decade and a half ago was the day before yesterday.
Ha! True. Which was why he said "more than a decade and a half ago", and in the comment below he said to go even further back in time. :-) I was told simply not to bother reading stuff from my generation.
> And yet, I still find myself wanting to read sci-fi (not fantasy) that's about non-trivial ideas, written by authors who are obsessed with science and things, rather than relationships and identities and traumas and oppression.
Still quite a lot of that around, AIUI. Just takes (quite a bit) more trial and error to find it nowadays.
> Just takes (quite a bit) more trial and error to find it nowadays.
Agreed. I can't complain too strenuously about being required to do more legwork to find good writing. If I'm going to spend a week or longer with a book, I'm happy to do more than merely swipe-right, swipe-left :-)
It's too late for me to scream at clouds, about the politicization of literature awards. Should I lament the rise of the MFA and the institutionalization of writing fiction in the academy? That ship has sailed and many celebrate that, which is fine.
And yet, I still find myself wanting to read sci-fi (not fantasy) that's about non-trivial ideas, written by authors who are obsessed with science and things, rather than relationships and identities and traumas and oppression.
I especially want to read writing by authors who can hold conflicting ideas in their heads without imploding and are able to say to themselves, "there's a high probability that all my fundamental values and beliefs are wrong and it is instead 'they' — the spectral, despicable They! — who are ethically and philosophically correct."
I imagine a sci-fi author who has seen further than other humans, and wants to share what they have seen. I'd also love beautiful sentences if possible.
Then I'd love literary sci-fi prizes whose judges have a deep and principled understanding of human history, who aren't activists in spirit, but want contrarian ideas that set the imagination and intellect on fire about the possibilities of technology and science and human problem solving. Finally, I want a sci-fi prize that conveys optimism about humanity on the cusp of great accomplishments; humanity on the verge of even greater and more bewildering and challenging adventures.