This is going to come out at some point, so I might as well say it here and now: I declined a Hugo nomination for this year’s Best Fan Writer award. I think it’s only fair to the people who voted for me to say why. Be warned, this is going to take a while. (And long-time readers of mine around these parts know that coming from me, that really means something.)
Firstly, given the nature of this post and the scrutiny that surrounds a major award, I should probably introduce myself. Hi. I’m Matthew David Surridge, a Montreal-area writer. I had a couple of longish short stories published a few years ago, one in the paper version of Black Gate and one at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I’ve been fighting some minor but debilitating illnesses for a while which have kept me from writing fiction, but luckily reading and thinking about books is still within my power, and so I’ve been blogging here at Blackgate.com since 2010.
I mostly write about books I’ve recently enjoyed. In 2014, that included posts about surrealist Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, Elizabeth Hand’s Bride of Frankenstein tie-in novel Pandora’s Bride, a collection of short stories by Violet Paget AKA Vernon Lee, Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the medieval tales in the Gesta Romanorum, Mary Gentle’s The Black Opera, Stella Gemmell’s The City, V.E. Schwab’s Vicious, Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, Jan Morris’ wonderful Hav, Phyllis Ann Karr’s Wildraith’s Last Battle, Steven Bauer’s Satyrday, the Harlan Ellison–edited shared-world anthology Medea, Pat Murphy’s three ‘Max Merriwell’ novels (There And Back Again, Wild Angel, and Adventures in Time and Space With Max Merriwell), Sylvia Townsend Warner’s debut novel Lolly Willowes, E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros and Zimiamvia trilogy, and Patricia A. McKillip’s The Changeling Sea. I also often write about comics, and last year I discussed the Steve Ditko/Wally Wood/Paul Levitz run of Stalker from the 1970s; the first volume of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Hugo-winning Saga; Alan Moore, Antony Johnston, and Facundo Percio’s Fashion Beast; and Sage Stossel’s Starling.
I also wrote about going to a local sf book sale, attending a stop on Peter S. Beagle’s Last Unicorn tour, and seeing a stage adaptation of Spider Robinson’s “God is an Iron.” Other posts compared three different iterations of Locus’ Best All-Time Fantasy Novels list from across the decades, and used a recent version of Scooby-Doo to muse about the way intellectual properties and pop culture are reborn across decades and generations. Two posts about my city’s heroes discussed, in one case, the nature of myth and the career of Montreal Canadiens great Jean Béliveau, and in the other, Bernie Mireault’s comic The Jam (along with mention of Montreal’s queer radical feminist real-life super-hero Lightstep).
One of the things I’m happiest to have blogged about last year was Montreal’s Fantasia film festival. Fantasia focuses on genre films from around the world, particularly Asia, and I was able to cover 39 of the 160 features they hosted. That link takes you to the first of 19 posts, which discusses a showing of Ghost in the Shell, and ends with a set of links to other posts in the series.
All told, I’m pretty pleased with the year I had at Black Gate. So why did I refuse the Hugo nomination?
There are three reasons, which all derive from one source. In mid-February, researching an article for another site — an article that in the end never got written — I stumbled on the Hugo slate put forward by Brad Torgersen for the Sad Puppies 3 campaign. At which time I found that I was one of the names suggested for Best Fan Writer. I later found that Vox Day had also suggested me as a part of his Rabid Puppies slate. This all quite surprised me, as to the best of my knowledge I’ve never spoken, electronically or otherwise, with Torgersen; nor for that matter with Larry Correia, who originated the first two Sad Puppies campaigns. Vox Day used to write for Black Gate, and he and I occasionally had vigorous debates in the comments of our posts; we also had a brief e-mail exchange about the time he stopped writing here, but that was years ago. So, again, I was quite surprised to find myself on the two Puppy slates.
Had anybody contacted me to explain the thinking behind the Puppy campaign and ask if I wanted me to be on the slate, I would have politely refused. In retrospect, I certainly should have sent everybody involved e-mails asking to be withdrawn from the Puppy lists in February. I want to sincerely apologise to everybody involved with both Puppy campaigns for not taking action at that time; and while I’m at it, I’ll also apologise to the Hugo organisers for letting things go as far as they did.
Why didn’t I get in touch with Torgersen or Vox Day in February? Quite honestly, I expected nothing to come of my inclusion on those lists. Having seen a complete list of the Hugo voting results for 2014, I knew I wasn’t in the running for an award last year, and I didn’t think they’d be able to mobilise enough voters to put me on the ballot. I was wrong, and the Puppies clearly have more reach than I, with my limited understanding of the sf field, had then understood. Again, my apologies all around.
Given some of the discussions I’ve seen about the Puppy slates, I should make something clear: my reasons for declining the nomination, and saying I should have asked to be withdrawn from the slate beforehand, don’t have anything to do with anyone’s political orientations. In fact, I’m honestly impressed with the Puppy voters’ willingness to step outside their usual politics. My understanding is that most of the people involved in the Sad Puppies campaigns are right-wing Americans, whereas I’m a left-wing Canadian and therefore to a right-wing American probably indistinguishable from Karl Marx (I suppose the beard doesn’t help). I don’t know that I made any particular political statement in my posts last year, but I certainly wasn’t trying to hide any of my attitudes. I will say that Vox Day has said things that I find appalling — and I’m thinking here of his comments about N.K. Jemisin — but people who say things I find appalling still have a right to read my work, to enjoy it if they can, and even to nominate me for the Hugos if they meet the other requirements for voting. Obviously the same thing applies generally to people who have different political views than I do.
My discomfort with being put forward on the Puppy slates come from three aspects of the way Torgersen described the thinking and goals of the Sad Puppy project in his blog posts about the campaign. I couldn’t find a statement by Vox Day outlining exactly what he wanted from his Rabid Puppies, but the post where he introduced the slate seemed to imply he had the same general aims as Torgersen; I’ve therefore assumed he’s in broad agreement with Torgersen’s statements about the principles of the Sad Puppies.
Having said that I disagree with these principles, I think it’s only polite to outline where and why. I regret that what follows is exceptionally long and pedantic. But finding myself in public disagreement with someone, I think it’s best to be as precise as possible in stating where that disagreement lies. And many of these issues are complex, and deeply interlinked one with another.
Since the Hugos and the Puppy campaigns are in one way or another very important to very many people, and because the discussion surrounding them has already become very heated, I want to emphasise before I begin that none of this is meant to disparage Torgersen or any other individual. But there are enough places where I disagree strongly with Torgersen’s assessment of some aspect of the speculative fiction field that I feel it would be inappropriate of me to accept an award nomination based on what he’s had to say about the Sad Puppies slate. (And, again, the same for accepting a nomination as a result of the Rabid Puppies campaign, assuming that it’s in general agreement with Torgersen.)
In explaining why I turned down the award, I feel a responsibility to be as fair and as clear as I can. To be as fair as I can I’ve tried to explain myself as completely as I can, over-explaining rather than risk under-explaining. And to be as clear as I can I’ve tried to structure my various interrelated points of disagreement as precisely as I can. So here are numbered headings keyed to the three main points and many sub-points I feel I need to explain:
I) Aesthetics
A) Ideology and SF
i) Ideology in the history of SF
ii) Ideology in recent Hugo-winning novels
iii) Ideology in the eye of the reader
iv) The value of ideology
B) The ‘literary’
i) The ‘literary’ in the history of SF
ii) The ‘literary’ in recent Hugo-winning novels
iii) The ‘literary’ in non-Hugo-winning SF
iv) The value of the ‘literary’
II) Awards and Popularity
A) General reflections on sales and the Hugos
i) Are the Hugos actually not rewarding best-sellers?
ii) Should awards and sales be correlated?
B) Problems with sales as a measure of quality
i) Marketing and distribution
ii) Granularity and unpredictable responses
iii) The historical record of sales
C) The use of awards
i) Awards as supporting and encouraging writers
ii) Awards as recognition
iii) Awards as presentation of a field to the outside world
III) Worldcon and Fandom
A) Worldcon and the sf community
i) Worldcon and the larger media world
ii) Worldcon’s size and the Hugos
iii) Other awards
B) The nature of fandom
i) The definition of a fan
ii) The nature of the Fan Writer award
iii) I am not a fan
iv) Controversy in fandom
I) Aesthetics
Torgersen makes a number of statements regarding speculative fiction that I disagree with, and puts forward aspirations for the field that I can’t share. I’m going to give some quotations from his posts, and then try to specify where I disagree. Starting with some lines from the January 7 post where he announces he’ll be running a Sad Puppies 3 campaign:
In the last decade we’ve seen Hugo voting skew more and more toward literary (as opposed to entertainment) works. Some of these literary pieces barely have any science fictional or fantastic content in them. Likewise, we’ve seen the Hugo voting skew ideological, as Worldcon and fandom alike have tended to use the Hugos as an affirmative action award: giving Hugos because a writer or artist is (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) or because a given work features (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) characters.
From a January 16 post dealing with the fallout of the announcement:
In other words, while the big consumer world is at the theater gobbling up the latest Avengers movie, “fandom” is giving “science fiction’s most prestigious award” to stories and books that bore the crap out of the people at the theater: books and stories long on “literary” elements (for all definitions of “literary” that entail: what college hairshirts are fawning over this decade) while being entirely too short on the very elements that made Science Fiction and Fantasy exciting and fun in the first place!
And:
… the voting body of “fandom” have tended to go in the opposite direction [in their choices for the Hugos]: niche, academic, overtly to the Left in ideology and flavor, and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun. The kind of child-like enjoyment that comes easily and naturally when you don’t have to crawl so far into your brain (or your navel) that you lose sight of the forest for the trees.
SAD PUPPIES simply holds its collective hand out — standing athwart “fandom” history — and yells, “Stop!”
Then from a February 4 post reflecting on the campaign, Torgersen states that the sf field is engaging in misleading advertising, presenting books with covers that suggest traditional adventure while actually being something else:
Yet SF/F literature seems almost permanently stuck on the subversive switcheroo. If we’re going to do a Tolkien-type fantasy, this time we’ll make the Orcs the heroes, and Gondor will be the bad guys. Space opera? Our plucky underdogs will be transgender socialists trying to fight the evil galactic corporations. War? The troops are fighting for evil, not good, and only realize it at the end. Planetary colonization? The humans are the invaders and the native aliens are the righteous victims. Yadda yadda yadda.
Which is not to say you can’t make a good SF/F book about racism, or sexism, or gender issues, or sex, or whatever other close-to-home topic you want. But for Pete’s sake, why did we think it was a good idea to put these things so much on permanent display, that the stuff which originally made the field attractive in the first place — To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before! — is pushed to the side? Or even absent altogether?
To summarise: as Torgersen sees it, speculative fiction has moved from a literature of excitement and adventure to a literature of politics and … well … ‘literariness,’ I guess. I have to admit that “what college hairshirts are fawning over this decade” strikes me as a bit of a vague definition, especially as I’m not sure how hairshirts relate to colleges — college students inflicting suffering on themselves by reading unpleasant texts, maybe? Anyway, I’m going to assume that by ‘literariness’ Torgersen means some combination of ‘aspiring to profound examination of profound themes’ and ‘experimental in structure and/or style.’ Similarly, from the first quote above, I understand ‘ideological’ to refer to politics, both in the sense of the left-right continuum and in the sense of identity politics. So in general in what follows I’m going to use ‘ideology’ as a synonym for ‘politics.’ Let’s get into where I disagree.
I.A) Ideology and science fiction
I.A.i) Ideology in the history of science fiction
The first issue I have with Torgersen’s assessment of SF is his implicit argument that the field used to be apolitical: that “what made the field attractive in the first place” had nothing to do with any ideology. My reading of science fiction is that it’s been explicitly political right from the start. The American pulp tradition began with Hugo Gernsback, who wanted to publish a magazine of ‘scientifiction’ stories because, among other reasons, he wanted to promote science and scientific progress. That’s a political aim: he wanted to change society, and he wanted to change it in a specific way through his specific actions. And, to give him credit, he succeeded; any number people have become scientists in part because of the genre that Gernsback first identified.
Later, John W. Campbell’s approach to story was (however unconsciously) shaped by his approach to race and politics. Here’s Isaac Asimov, in the first volume of his autobiography, In Memory Yet Green:
[Campbell] was a devout believer in the inequality of man and felt that the inequality could be detected by outer signs such as skin and hair coloring. Though he treated all men kindly and decently in his personal life, and although in his treatment of me, for instance, I never detected any trace of anti-Semitic feelings, the fact is that, in theory, he felt that people of northwestern European extraction were the best human beings.
In science fiction, this translated itself into the Campbellesque thesis that Earthmen (all of whom, in the ideal Campbell story, resembled people of northwestern European extraction) were superior to all other intelligent races — even when the others seemed more intelligent on the surface. It was because I broke this rule that he rejected “Half-Breed.” It was because he saw an opportunity to demonstrate this rule that he was interested in “Homo Sol.”
My point here isn’t that a white man in the 1940s was racist; the point is that, in the estimation of one of his writers, that set of attitudes shaped his estimation, however unconsciously, of the stories pitched to him. He accepted some stories and rejected others based on his ideology. What I’m arguing is: the Golden Age of science fiction, which I understand Torgersen to be saying was a part of “the stuff which originally made the field attractive,” was shaped by ideology and politics as much as any other age, including this one. One can of course argue that it was a different ideology (or set of ideologies) and different politics than what we see today. But that’s a different argument than Torgersen’s making.
So that’s my first point of disagreement: I think SF, and really any literature, has always, explicitly or implicitly, knowingly or unknowingly, had some sort of ideology behind it.
I.A.ii) Ideology in recent Hugo-winning novels
Which leads directly to my next point. Looking over the list of past Hugo-winning novels — the category I feel I know the most about, if only in relative terms — I don’t see that books which have won or been nominated in the last ten years are appreciably more ideological than books which have won or been nominated in any other ten-year stretch.
Some of that may have to do with the way I approach the books (more on this in 1.A.iv, below). I look at Heinlein, in particular, as fundamentally a political writer concerned (speaking generally) with issues of liberty and society — others will disagree, but all my life I’ve generally found the core of his books have less to do with the narratives than with his political beliefs. This is more true in some books, less so in others. But it’s what I find when I read him.
Similarly, take a look at something like H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy (nominated 1963), which I loved as a young teenager. It’s about a man in conflict with a corporation — specifically, a business trying to declare native life on an alien planet to be non-sapient so it can better exploit the planet. That would strike me as a political theme, and I assume it would strike Torgersen as such also: among his list of “subversive switcheroos” he gave on February 4, he mentions “Planetary colonization [stories in which] The humans are the invaders and the native aliens are the righteous victims.” Which to me is essentially Little Fuzzy.
Beyond that, though, I don’t know how to describe writers like Kurt Vonnegut (nominated 1960, 1964, and 1970) and Ursula Le Guin (won 1970, nominated 1972, won 1975) as anything other than political. Or Samuel Delany. Or William Gibson. Or Kim Stanley Robinson.
Of course there are many writers less explicitly concerned with politics on the Hugo ballots of past decades. But it seems to me that there are also certainly a lot of works from the past ten years which are equally inexplicit about their politics. I don’t think Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is fundamentally political. Or The Graveyard Book. Or His Majesty’s Dragon. I suppose you could argue that A Feast For Crows and The Winds of Winter have a general political outlook in how they depict struggles for power and tensions in various societies, but that outlook didn’t strike me as particularly obtrusive in the way or to the extent that Heinlein’s politics seem to me to inflect his writing.
So I want to mark this down as another general area where I disagree with him and the Puppy campaigns: I don’t think the Hugos have become any more political over time.
I.A.iii) Ideology in the eye of the reader
Now, by this point I think it’s clear enough that Torgersen and I have some very different opinions about the books we’ve read. I look at something like Ancillary Justice, and it doesn’t seem to me to be a terribly political text; there are some general reflections on imperialism and hierarchy, but it didn’t seem as interested in critiquing society as, say, The Diamond Age — or Dune, for that matter. Or, I would argue, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. As I said, and I assume Torgersen would disagree, Heinlein’s novels seem to me to be more concerned with politics and ideology than storytelling. I make no claims about what was on Heinlein’s mind, or what his aims were, or what he was conscious of. All I have is the text, and what the text suggests to me. Different readers read different books differently. And any text can be read as making an ideological point.
Which is, I think, my main disagreement with Torgersen’s point about ideology. ‘Ideology’ isn’t an objective constant. It’s something that varies with different readers — and sometimes with different readings by the same readers. A text can, and almost certainly will, strike some readers more than others as overtly ideological. And, as a reader, sometimes you go back and find more politics in a text that you remember; occasionally there even seems to be less.
So there are three tightly related points of disagreement I want to get at here. One: I don’t think it’s possible to find a text that can’t be read as having some kind of political dimension. Two: I think if you do see a text without a political dimension, odds are that the politics are still there and they just happen to be invisible to you — maybe because you’re unfamiliar with them, or maybe because they seem so obvious to you they don’t register as politics. Three: I find a politically-aware reading of a book is usually more rewarding than an apolitical reading, because it’s adding a level of complexity to the text — it’s finding another level of meaning.
Let me give an example to illustrate some of what I mean about politics being invisible. Back around the year 2000, Wizards of the Coast released the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Here’s a passage from the Dungeon Master’s Guide discussing how common the game rules assume magic is in a campaign world: “Spellcasters may be fairly rare in the big picture, but they’re common enough that when Uncle Rufus falls off the back of the wagon, [common people] could take him to the temple to have the priests heal the wound (although the average peasant probably couldn’t afford the price.)” I remember reaching that sentence and stopping for a minute, puzzled why presumably–good-aligned clerics would be charging peasants for healing which, in the game, is effectively a renewable resource. And the only conclusion I could come to was that this was a function of the book being written by Americans, who were used to a for-profit medical system. As a Canadian, I’ve lived my whole life not having to pay for, basically, healing. So what I’d found was an artifact of a specific political sensibility; the authors weren’t aware of it, but it left me as a reader briefly confused.
I’m not necessarily saying the authors would have been better to have a different example — though, if they were looking for sales outside of the US, maybe they would have, and then also maybe the logic of the game should have led them to wonder why priests charge money. My point is that I suspect this was something that was invisible to the writers. I think it was a blind spot that they didn’t know existed, and I think that sort of thing is always going to happen. There’s always going to be, let’s say, the ideology writers don’t see.
I suspect there’s some of that going on in Torgersen’s discussion of classic SF as (implicitly) apolitical. At any rate, as I said way back up in I.A.i, I don’t agree with that assessment. My favourite SF as a kid was Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, and I specifically liked it because of the cosmic view of politics it presented: politics as history, politics as pattern, politics as inevitable. It’s a vision, I suppose, that suggests it’s futile to stand athwart history and yell ‘stop,’ as Torgersen says the Sad Puppies want to do. To each their own; but I don’t have any interest in trying to stop history.
I.A.iv) The value of ideology
So if any text can be read ideologically, is Torgersen right to complain about current Hugo winners having different politics than classic SF? Let’s agree for the sake of the discussion that there are broadly different political sensibilities between the past and present texts. Does he therefore have a point in calling for a return to the old sensibilities?
Well, it’s probably not too terribly surprising that I don’t think so. I don’t believe that it’s a bad thing for contemporary Hugo-winning novels to have different politics from past winners. I don’t just mean that I generally prefer contemporary ideology to past ideology; I mean that in society overall I’d expect changes in politics from era to era, that I’d expect that change to be reflected in the art created in the different eras, and also that, in broad terms, I’d expect the art which best addresses its era to be more widely recognised, as measured either in sales or in awards. That’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but a general observation of why certain genres or subgenres may gain or lose popularity over time, and why a given book may get more critical notice than another book of roughly equal artistic accomplishment.
Here’s an example of what I mean: we can agree that cyberpunk was a pretty popular 80s SF phenomenon, right? It borrowed from and inspired fashions, jargon, and attitudes. It exemplified, particularly in William Gibson’s work, an iconoclastic attitude to old-school science fiction, and suggested a different kind of relationship with technology. And it also included a lot of adventure, violence, and excitement. I’d also say it reflects the ideologies of its age. The paranoia of the late Cold War. The prevalence of new information technologies. The increasing power of corporate interests. All that sort of thing. Fair?
Because if so, then what we’re seeing is a political sensibility that’s different from the golden age, one engaged with the concerns of its time. And one that was also popular, echoed (sometimes after a gap of years) in movies and TV shows and any number of other places — which I’m saying is because it had a different ideology from John W. Campbell, or the original Star Trek, or the New Wave. It was dealing with what was in the air. And did well by it, in sales and awards.
I’m trying to give an example here of a phenomenon which would seem to conflict with Torgersen’s argument that the field should return to ideologies of an earlier time. What I’m saying is that art speaks to its era and is also informed by that era. I don’t think that’s a problem. I think that’s a sign of health.
There are two questions I should address before moving on, I think. First, can it be argued that the ideology of classic SF has become more relevant of late? It does seem to me that as American culture has become more militarised over the past dozen years of war, military science fiction (which I understand Torgersen and Correia write) might become more resonant to an American audience. On the other hand, some of us aren’t American. Maybe more to the point, that doesn’t mean that an older ideology necessarily will or ought to be resurrected unchanged. A different zeitgeist would seem to demand different artistic responses, even if it has some similarities to previous zeitgeists. I don’t know that it’s possible for the Puppies to hold “its collective hands out” and yell stop; and if it is possible, it’s not clear to me that it’s desirable.
Which brings up the second question: granted that Hugo winners are broadly concerned with political issues, then is the ideology Torgersen identifies in recent books — concerned with “racism, or sexism, or gender issues, or sex” — really speaking to its time? For what it’s worth, it seems so to me, as a white male; broadly speaking, my impression is that issues of identity politics and social justice are increasingly prominent in North American society. But that’s beside the point I really want to make here, which is: I think any society will have internal tensions over gender roles and the position of minorities, and, given that, it’s healthy for people in that society to address those tensions and be mindful of them. And I think art — using a broad definition of ‘art,’ specifically including ‘pop culture entertainment’ — is a particularly worthwhile way in which to do that. I don’t mean that I think all art must be or should be explicitly concerned with these issues. But I think it’s clear that art that does so is speaking to the time and culture out of which it was produced.
I think that art which tries to better represent the experience of women and minority groups is good to have. I think it’s good for society in general that it exists, and generally good that more and different points of view are represented in art. I think it’s good for me as a reader that I can find books which are teaching me new things. And I think that art which tries to present varied experiences and varied sensibilities is likely to be better art, in that it will have a deeper sense of the complexity of the world, and I think complexity is usually valuable in art.
So what I’m saying is that the ideology that Torgersen says Sad Puppies are set up to oppose is an ideology that I value and that I think speaks directly to the current era. Torgersen is of the opinion that this ideology is leading to declining sales. This strikes me as a matter of interpretation; at any rate, I’m skeptical. On February 18 Torgersen linked to a blog post discussing Publisher’s Weekly’s annual BookScan-based sales figures, and those figures do show science fiction sales down by 7% and fantasy fiction down by 13% — but also show juvenile science fiction and fantasy increased by 38%. Look at the actual PW chart, and you see that’s the healthiest rise in any category of book, fiction or nonfiction, adult or juvenile. Moreover, the drop in science fiction and fantasy doesn’t seem too out of whack with other adult fiction genres: romance down 11%, action/adventure down 15%, general fiction down 8%. All these figures don’t count ebook sales, which is a problem, and the PW article doesn’t get precise in terms of individual titles or authors. It’s impossible to tell whether specific book series have been recategorised from year to year, or whether the drops or rises have to do with what bestselling novelists published a book during the year — I’d think that if, say, The Winds of Winter comes out this year, the fantasy category’s likely to end up looking pretty healthy in next year’s recap, whatever else happens. At any rate, however the figures are interpreted, it seems odd to me that genre publishers, who are capitalist entities, would push material that didn’t sell.
(For more about the Bookscan figures, albeit from a comics perspective, I’d draw your attention here, here, and particularly here. Comics retailer Brian Hibbs examines the Bookscan data each year to see what it has to say about the comics field, and that last link goes to his analysis of last year’s figures. As I say, it focusses on comics, but does flag some of the issues with what Bookscan says. Note, for example, that Bookscan has consistently classed the prose anthology The Bloody Crown of Conan as comics, and considered some books in the Dork Diary series as comics but not others, while comics like The Complete Persepolis and Maus are classed as ‘memoir.’ It’s reasonable to wonder how much that sort of thing affects the science-fiction and fantasy categories. Also note these figures don’t include sales of e-books, or sales through most specialty stores, which are sales channels perhaps particularly relevant to speculative fiction.)
Certainly I don’t think Togersen’s examples of ‘ideological’ plots — troops fighting for evil, invading humans versus righteous native aliens — are unpopular with the mass audience. Admittedly I’m not a James Cameron fan and so haven’t seen Avatar, but my understanding is that it is precisely a story about invading humans and righteous alien natives. Meanwhile, the first Avengers movie shows connections between the ostensibly-heroic SHIELD and the evil Hydra which are expanded on in later Marvel films (no spoilers here!) until we learn that SHIELD troops were fighting for the bad guys all along. Those are the two biggest-grossing movies in film history; so the “subversive switcheroo” plots seem to do pretty well by the mass audiences the Puppies are concerned with.
In any event, this marks my last point of disagreement with Torgersen about ideology. Now to move on to more substantive issues.
(Well, except for a couple of quick parenthetical points. First, I wanted to go back to something I quoted from Torgersen up above. Specifically, he asked: “why did we think it was a good idea to put these things so much on permanent display, that the stuff which originally made the field attractive in the first place — To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before! — is pushed to the side?” I wanted to say that I thought his use of “To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before!” was a little odd. First, of course, the phrase is most famous for its use in Star Trek, which was a TV show all about social issues. Secondly, the original version of the quote used in the original Star Trek series was “where no man has gone before.” Which means Torgersen is actually using a line that was changed — for Star Trek: The Next Generation — specifically and consciously in a way that addressed sexism. In other words, out of a recognition of a changed political sensibility.)
(Second, I also feel I should address Torgersen’s suggestion that there’s an element of “affirmative action” in the Hugo Award, because it seems to me an especially weighty and indeed inflammatory claim. But all I can say is that I don’t know what he bases it on. Personally, I don’t see it in the novel list, at least. I wish he’d been more specific, because absent a supporting argument it seems more like a piece of rhetoric; indeed, a piece of ideology.)
I.A) A quick recap
So my disagreements with the Puppies so far:
I.A.i: I think SF has always had ideology behind it;
I.A.ii: and that there’s no appreciable increase in ideology in recent Hugo novels;
I.A.iii: and that it’s better to read a text ideologically than not, because ideology is always there;
I.A.iv: and that, in the end, the current ideology Torgersen finds in SF is more important to me personally and to the culture at large than past ideology.
Moving on, then, to a section which is probably more important to me but which ought to be simpler to explain:
I.B) The ‘literary’
To start with, I’d refer any readers still with me (and God bless each and every one of you) back to the working definition I’m using of ‘literary.’ And let me also at this point apologise for the continued use of quotes around ‘literary.’ I tried dropping them, but the result seemed to me to be worse; I think there’s some use in having an implicit reminder that we’re dealing with a specific value of the word ‘literary,’ and one that I’m really just guessing at, as well.
Anyway, on January 7 Torgersen said: “In the last decade we’ve seen Hugo voting skew more and more toward literary (as opposed to entertainment) works.” On January 16, he said that since “SF/F has exploded popularly,” which seems to mean in the years since Star Wars, “the voting body of ‘fandom’ have tended to go in the opposite direction: niche, academic, overtly to the Left in ideology and flavor, and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun.”
I don’t agree with these assessments. I don’t think that’s an accurate description of the Hugos over time. Now, I freely admit he may have a better understanding than I do insofar as I’m reacting primarily to the list of books that have nominated and won Best Novel. So an assessment of the Hugos based on short fiction might provide a different look. But I think the Best Novel category is so fundamentally at odds with what he’s saying it goes some distance to disproving his point.
I.B.i) The ‘literary’ in the history of SF
And the first specific point of disagreement — what I want to establish here — is that having the Hugos reward literary fiction is no new thing. I think the very first book ever to win Best Novel, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, is fairly experimental in its approach. Bester does odd things with names and typography, and uses a variety of techniques to represent telepathy, and for that matter grapples (successfully or not) with Freudian theory. I like the book a lot, largely because of these kinds of devices.
Still, you could argue that the structure of the book is relatively traditional. Fair to say, though, that Kurt Vonnegut’s books aren’t? I honestly have no idea what ‘literary’ can be said to mean if it doesn’t include The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle, and Slaughterhouse-Five. Among other early Hugo honorees that I’ve read, I note Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, a book he wrote by consulting the I Ching, and R.A. Lafferty’s Past Master, a book that is frankly like little else I know. Going on through the list (and I’m looking here for books and writers I’ve read) I see people like Delany and Le Guin, I see Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron which tried to replicate the experience of TV in prose, I see things like Silverberg’s Dying Inside which are about as far away from the sensibility of adventure and excitement Torgersen puts forward as I can imagine.
Of course there are more purely adventure-oriented books on the nomination lists as well. What I’m saying is that it’s incorrect to say that the Hugos are more ‘literary’ now than they were when they nominated John Crowley’s brilliant Little, Big. Or when they nominated three of the five books of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. Or when they nominated the first two books of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion sequence.
I.B.ii) The ‘literary’ in recent Hugo-winning novels
So how does this compare to novels that have won or been nominated for the Hugo in the last ten years? Torgersen characterises these books as ones that “skew more and more toward literary (as opposed to entertainment) works,” “books that bore the crap out of the people at the theater,” and books “ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun.” Among the books this refers to are A Feast For Crows, A Dance With Dragons, His Majesty’s Dragon, The Graveyard Book, Throne of the Crescent Moon, and The Wheel of Time. (Although, in fairness, that last one was highly controversial.) I’d have to say that all those books are much more about visceral fun than boring people.
For what it’s worth, I’ve read about a third of the books nominated for a Hugo over the last ten years (plus I’ve read other books by some of the nominated authors). I’d like to think that’s a passing familiarity with the relevant texts. Personally, I don’t see the list as featuring, on the whole, especially ‘literary’ books. There are some, sure — among those I’ve read, I’d mention Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Among Others, maybe River of Gods; while among those I haven’t The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and The Windup Girl look particularly promising to me. But so far as I can tell, the overall list is no more ‘literary’ than the Hugos have been for most of their history.
So: I disagree with the Sad Puppies that the Hugos have become more ‘literary,’ or indeed can be said to be especially ‘literary’ at all.
I.B.iii) The ‘literary’ in non-Hugo-winning SF
Is that fair, though? Could it be that the Hugos are actually rewarding the most self-consciously literary works that qualify for the award? Are there other novels that count as speculative fiction, that could have been nominated for a Hugo, and are more experimental, more innovative — more literary?
In my opinion, yeah, sure. Looking quickly at some of my favourite novels of the past ten years with some kind of fantastic aspect to them (and which weren’t also nominated for a Hugo), I come up with the following:
Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, The Fall of Troy, and Three Brothers, Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, Brian Catling’s The Vorrh, John Crowley’s Lord Byron’s Novel and Endless Things, Hal Duncan’s Ink and Vellum (which I’ve called quaint, but quaint in a very traditional high-modernist way), Minister Faust’s The Alchemists of Kush, Felix Gilman’s Thunderer, Gears of the City, and Rise of Ransom City, Greer Gilman’s Cloud & Ashes (I’ve said it before, but this is the best fantasy novel of the twenty-first century that I’ve read), Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia, Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black, Joyce Carol Oates’ The Accursed, Helen Oyeyemi’s White is For Witching, Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence, Iain Sinclair’s Dining on Stones, Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, Steph Swainston’s The Year of Our War, No Present Like Time, and The Modern World, and Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek, and Finch.
It’s a ramshackle list. I’m behind in reading a number of those writers. There are other writers whose earlier works I’ve read, like M. John Harrison, but whose recent books I’ve not caught up on. But I’d be happy to see any of those books receive a major award, and depending on the mood I’m in I might add some other favourites — Leah Bobet’s Above, Lydia Millet’s O Pure and Radiant Heart, Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief, Wu Ming-yi’s The Man With the Compound Eyes, any number of recent books by Gene Wolfe. My point is that most or all of these books seem to me to take chances on style and structure, to be experimental and formally ambitious, and generally to take chances with language, irony, and character. More so on average, I think, than the books that I’ve read which have been nominated for the Best Novel Hugo (again, on average). And if I as a single reader can list off the top of my head a number of ‘literary’ speculative fiction novels that haven’t been recognised by the Hugos, then there must be a lot more and a lot more radical ones also out there. Which means there are a lot that didn’t make it onto the Hugo ballot.
So: I don’t agree that the Hugos are going out of their way to find and reward particularly academic or highly ‘literary’ novels.
I.B.iv) The value of the ‘literary’
And let me be clear about this: not only do I disagree with Torgersen that the Hugos are too ‘literary,’ for me personally the awards aren’t ‘literary’ enough. I by no means advocate to change them — they obviously reflect what the voters want, and that’s fine. My point here is that I disagree with the Puppies about the value and importance of the qualities Torgersen’s calling ‘literary.’
People who’ve read my writing here know that I like a lot of adventure fiction quite a bit. I’ve written enough about Robert E. Howard, early Marvel comics, Jack Vance’s Dying Earth — I’ve even written about Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and a D&D webcomic drawn in stick-figures. But personally I generally prefer complex fiction, ‘literary’ fiction if you must, that also has a strong plot and perhaps even some adventure element.
There are any number of examples on the list above. Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris books. Felix Gilman’s novels. Greer Gilman’s Cloud & Ashes. Brian Catling’s The Vorrh. Steph Swainston’s Castle novels. I think John Crowley’s Little, Big is the greatest post-Tolkien fantasy I’ve ever read; and in addition to being cunningly-structured and elegantly written, it has a very strong plot. I think that these books, among many others, are wonderful precisely because they’re formally experimental, thematically complex, and also great stories. The Puppies seem to imply that the ‘literary’ and the adventurous can’t co-exist. I disagree with that.
But, given the choice between the two, I prefer what we’re calling ‘literary.’ I don’t scorn what Torgersen calls “child-like enjoyment” by any means. But at the end of the day, for good or ill, I’m not a child. And as an adult I prefer material that speaks to me on an adult level. Other people, of course, will have different perceptions of what constitutes ‘adult,’ and the value thereof; and that’s fine. But it’s also true that “fun” and even “the very elements that made Science Fiction and Fantasy exciting and fun in the first place” are going to be very different for different people. My sense of what’s “fun” seems to be extremely different from Torgersen’s.
I like a book that experiments. I like a book that takes chances. I like a book that does something different, a book that challenges my idea of what a novel can be. The sense I get from Torgersen is that the Puppies don’t.
Personally, I find that for a book to evoke the oft-spoken-of ‘sense of wonder’ in science fiction and fantasy, there needs to be some kind of really strong prose. The better and more daring the prose, the stronger the sense of wonder is likely to be. The style, in other words, mimics and fosters the feel of the extraordinary.
(One example I particularly want to mention of a relatively traditional space-opera adventure married to incredibly baroque prose is John Clute’s Appleseed. That’s a book I find incredibly valuable. And there’s no way it could have had the same impact on me if it hadn’t been written in the way it was.)
So: I cannot agree with the Puppy sense of what is valuable in fiction. And I think it’s fair to say that this on its own is an insurmountable barrier to me accepting an award nomination after being placed on their slate of candidates.
I.B) A quick recap
So let’s add these disagreements to the previous bunch:
I.B.i: I think that the Hugos have a long track record of rewarding ‘literary’ novels;
I.B.ii: I don’t think that the Hugos have become more ‘literary’ at all (and suspect they may have become less so);
I.B.iii: there are other and arguably more ‘literary’ novels that the Hugos could have rewarded in the last ten years;
I.B.iv: and, most importantly, the ‘literary’ matters to me, even more than the adventurous and exciting, and I do not want to be part of a campaign that doesn’t value the experimental and the ambitious.
So that’s the first set of disagreements I have with Torgersen and the Sad Puppies, concerning aesthetics. Let’s move on to discussing the nature of awards.
II) The Role of Awards
In laying out the principles of the Sad Puppy campaigns Torgersen raises some points about the Hugo awards, and those points in turn seem to raise broader issues about the nature of literary awards in general. I’ll be talking specifically about the Hugos in section III, but here I want to address some disagreements I have with what he implies about how awards should be handed out, and their connection to overall sales.
Let me start off by again going back to Torgersen’s posts. Specifically, I’d like to start by noting the passages I quoted above from his January 16 post (regarding The Avengers). Also, I want to bring up these words, from January 7:
Which may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with actual sales success on the open market. And that was Correia’s original point: if the Hugos really are the preeminent award in SF/F how come the Hugos so often ignore works and people who are, in fact, successful ambassadors of the genre to the consumer world at large?
That’s a fair question. Torgersen’s saying that there is no good answer to it, which undermines the value of the Hugos. I don’t agree. I think there are very good reasons why awards, especially awards considered to be particularly prestigious, may well go to works that don’t sell very well or in general aren’t popular.
II.A) General reflections on sales and the Hugos
II.A.i) Are the Hugos actually not rewarding best-sellers?
Before getting into the nature of awards, it’s worth asking if it’s accurate to say that the Hugos “ignore works and people who are … successful ambassadors of the genre to the consumer world at large?” It is true, as Torgersen says elsewhere in his January 16 post, that there are no video game categories; and, given the range of media the Hugos have chosen to recognise, it would seem logical to add one or more categories dealing with games. But I don’t see how that can be brought about by putting forward candidates for existing categories.
On the other hand, in that same post Torgersen specifically refers to The Avengers as an example of something popular with “the big consumer world.” The Avengers actually won the 2013 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form). Avatar, the only genre movie to make more money worldwide than The Avengers (without adjusting for inflation), was nominated for the same award in 2010. So I’m not immediately convinced Torgersen’s characterisation of the Hugos is accurate when it comes to mass media. When it comes to books, though, is it any better?
Frankly, once again the results seem mixed. Firstly, it’s true that some very popular names are missing from the lists of Hugo-nominated novels. Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games books are nowhere on the lists. Neither are any of the books in Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy. If the Puppies think those books or series should have received Hugos, then fair enough. I do find it a little surprising that they didn’t have Diana Gabaldon’s Written in My Own Heart’s Blood on their slate. I frankly know little about it, but I know it was published last year, I know it hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list, I know it’s the latest in her Outlander series, I know the series involves time travel (and was partly inspired by Doctor Who), and I know that it’s been turned into a successful TV series as well as a graphic novel and a musical. So Gabaldon, as I type this Amazon’s top-ranked author in “Books>Science Fiction&Fantasy>Fantasy,” is clearly one of the genre’s ambassadors to “the big consumer world.”
Moving on, I note that Stephen King hasn’t made the final nomination list since 1982, when he won for Danse Macabre; he was also nominated for 1977′s Carrie. You could argue what this shows either way, I think. He hasn’t been recognised in the past ten years, but then also not for the twenty years before that. And I note the ISFDB does say 11/22/63 received some votes but finished below the threshold for nomination.
Certainly when I go beyond that it seems to me bestselling writers do get rewarded by the Hugos. Both of the Song of Ice and Fire novels George R.R. Martin’s released in the last ten years were nominated. Neil Gaiman won for The Graveyard Book, and declined nominations for Anansi Boys and The Ocean at the End of the Lane. And for all the controversy around the Wheel of Time nomination, well, there it is.
So I’m not sure the Hugos really are that unrepresentative of the mass audience. To tell the truth, though, that’s more of a side issue.
II.A.ii) Should awards and sales be correlated?
In general, I don’t think it makes much sense for awards to go to the biggest-selling work of art in a given category. To start with, what would be the point? Bestsellers already have a reward: high sales, which in turn are usually accompanied by money.
But more to the point, if sales determine awards, why bother handing out awards at all? Look at a generally-accepted source of sales data, and whoever’s at the top gets to be called the winner. Having a ceremony and a shortlist and so forth would be essentially useless.
So I disagree with the general idea that awards should go to whatever is most popular with a mass audience. And I want to note that the Sad Puppies seem to disagree as well. Nominating me for an award makes no sense, in that my work is not on the whole especially popular (weary readers will have a good idea why if they have followed me this far, presumably with the help of coffee, possibly some maps, and maybe a ten-foot pole, rope, and a pony named Bill).
At any rate, is it fair to suggest that sales are a reliable measure of quality?
II.B) Problems with sales as a measure of quality
Well, as you might guess from the section header, I don’t think so. Let me put quickly put forward a couple of reasons why. (I know this will all seem obvious to many, but if you’ve come this far, you’ll have noticed that I really am trying to err on the side of thoroughness.)
II.B.i) Marketing and distribution
To start with, it should be obvious that commercial success isn’t purely determined by quality. It’s determined by a host of factors, including marketing and distribution: will people who might be interested in the given work hear about it? And will they be able to find the thing they want in the format they want it?
Of course the internet makes it easier to hear about things and to buy things; it also makes it easier to pirate things. And ‘easier’ doesn’t mean ‘not difficult.’ If somebody’s never heard of a book, they’re not going to buy it. And whether they’ve heard of it depends on a host of factors — how widely reviewed it is, how much advertising the publisher invests in it, how prominent a place booksellers give it in their stores, all sorts of things. For that matter, even the question of how long an author’s been writing comes into play; somebody who’s been writing in a field for decades will have built up a readership base which a younger writer may not be able to match. And then there are things like tie-in novels — how much is a sale in that case due to the book itself, and how much to a fan buying the book for the franchise label?
My argument here is that it’s wrong to say that the free mark