Virtue and virtue-signaling in science fiction & fantasy, Part I

Awww!  Who's a happy puppy?  Happy puppies are the best, aren't they?  (If you are a hardcore science fiction & fantasy fan, you probably have a sense of where I'm going with this.  I'm needling everyone.  It's what I do best.)

Anyway, it's time to do this.  The J.K. Rowling dust-up is the impetus I need for what will be a series, because I have been meaning to get-a-writin' about this, and there is a lot to say.

The short version of the J.K. Rowling thing is that she tweeted something supportive of a "TERF" (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), and made a comment about sex, omitting gender identity, being "real."  She also made comments about live-and-let-live, but everyone is ignoring those comments.  Regardless, the implication was to give primacy to the biological (sex) over the psychological self-identification (gender identity), while the transgender community wants primacy given to gender identity, as opposed to sex.  And, it's more complicated than that, given what Maya Forstater-- the TERF in question-- has said, but I'm summarizing briefly.

Backlash ensues.

This isn't new in the science fiction & fantasy community.  It's just higher profile because Rowling is a way bigger name than any of our usual authors.  And full disclosure-- I've never read any of her books, or seen any of the movies.  Rowling is irrelevant to me.

On the other hand, have you ever heard of a guy named Orson Scott Card?  Ringing any bells there?  Maybe not, but I'm sure you've heard of a guy who shot first, damn it!  Harrison Ford.  He was in a bad movie adaptation of Ender's Game.

Ender's Game is one of the best and most important books in the history of science fiction.  Whenever anyone starts getting into the genre, and asks for recommendations, it is one of the first books on the list.  Card then wrote some sequels of varying quality, and he even re-wrote Ender's Game from the perspective of a side character, Bean-- Ender's Shadow.  It was... amazing!  (Skip Shadow of the Hegemon, though.)  Ender's Game is one of the cornerstones of science fiction literature.

Card?  Here's a thing about Card.  He is a very, very, very conservative, religious fundamentalist.  Mostly, that's a thing that the ordinarily left-wing audience for science fiction & fantasy knows but surrounds with a "somebody else's problem field" in order to not think about it.  (If you are a real nerd, you get that reference.)  That got harder when the gay marriage debate took center stage because Card would not shut up about it.

Rowling?  She is far to the left of Card.  The big difference is that she's... bigger than Card.  It's only really the hardcore nerds who have even heard of Card.  Rowling is a pop culture figure.  So, more people put more personal investment into what she says.  (And anyone still reading from The Unmutual Political Blog understands that I think that's a problem.)

However, I don't know a single nerd who threw out his or her copy of Ender's Game when Card went around telling everyone what he really thought of gay people.  And to this day, Ender's Game is still a top recommendation.

There are a few more differences, though.  First, the fact that Card was a straight-down-the-line religious conservative meant that his opposition to gay marriage wasn't news, to anyone who knew anything about him.  It was just something that fandom-- left-leaning as it mostly is (and I'll get to that, and the puppy)-- had to accept, and had already accepted.  The second was the timing.  Virtue-signaling wasn't nearly the phenomenon then that it is now.

I wonder what would happen with Card these days.  Suppose that an equivalent author wrote an equivalently brilliant and innovative book, and published it in 2020.  We're just a few days away, which has me thinking back to the days of playing "Cyberpunk 2020," back in the early 1990s.  Anyway, by equivalent, let's add in the religious conservative stuff.  So, in addition to being opposed to gay marriage and all of that, let's give our modern Orson Scott Card a 1950's view of gender roles, so instead of making or modern Card a TERF, like Maya Forstater, let's make our modern Card someone who rejects both a transgender person's claim of identity and desire to live a life that does not comport with the social expectations of biological sex.

Is your blood boiling yet?

Anyway, if you've read Ender's Game, you know that none of this would be at all relevant to the book!  So let's assume all of this, and have our modern Card-- for the sake of a name, let's call him RowlCardStatering-- write a book that does not in any way deal with issues of sex or gender.

Ursula who?  (I'll get to her.)

What would happen when RowlCardStatering releases... "their"... book?  No, his.  Let's just go with "his."  Anyway, what if...?

Let's get back to that adorable puppy up there.  There is a "movement" out there.  The "sad puppies."  Not like that happy puppy up there!  The sad puppies are the people who whine, like a bunch of sad, little puppies, about changes in science fiction & fantasy.  It goes like this.  Once upon a time, science fiction and fantasy were basically boys' clubs, and white boys' clubs in particular.  The big names in the old days of the genre were names like Asimov, Herbert, Heinlein, and others with whom you are probably familiar.

There were women writing science fiction and fantasy!  They just had to hide it by using their initials instead of writing out their names.  They'd even win awards sometimes!  Remember Star Trek?  D.C.  Fontana?  Dorothy.  Some of the most prominent authors in science fiction & fantasy have done the same thing!  C.J. Cherryh?  Carolyn.  C.S. Friedman?  Celia.  My oh-so-beloved Nora Jemisin still goes by N.K.!  It's a thing.  The audience is too misogynistic to accept women as authors, so authors hide their sex/gender behind initials, and the audience is also too stupid to catch on.

Times change, though.  These days, not only are more books being written by women, and women of color, but they seem to be taking over the awards with books that are directly about issues of race, gender and the kinds of stuff that authors like Asimov, Herbert and Heinlein didn't bother to address, or that if they did, they did in, shall we say, ways that would be considered problematic today.

Take Dune.  Really, I love that book.  The series, actually.  Avoid all of the cashing-in that Frank Herbert's son, Brian has tried to do, but the Dune series is rightly considered a masterpiece of science fiction.  Yet, you could read Paul Atreides through the lens of the "white savior" trope, even though he wasn't really much of a messiah, if you understand what was going on.  Still... in today's politics, Herbert might face some blowback for that.  And that's before getting into the gender politics of the Bene Gesserit.  Women as scheming witches.  See what I mean about times changing?  And that's without a word about Heinlein.

But... along came Ursula Le Guin.  Eventually, you get writers in a tradition up through Octavia Butler, and of course, N.K. Jemisin.  Authors who not only weren't white men, but wrote from distinctly not-white-male perspectives.  These days, writers like Nnedi Okorafor are the buzz-iest of the buzz-y.

Jemisin cleans up at the Hugos.  Right after Leckie, and with the rise of afro-futurism as a genre, backlash ensues.  There are still a lot of people who don't want to read about race or gender or any of that.  And worse yet, don't want to read anything by women, or women of color.  They are upset that science fiction and fantasy are moving in a direction of addressing issues that they don't want to see, by authors who are different.  One of the big, new authors is even transgender!  Yoon Ha Lee.  Someone bring me my fainting couch!

Anyway, the name for the group of people upset by all of this?  The "sad puppies," because they whine.  And interestingly enough, one of the focuses of their ire has occasionally been... Rowling.  I wonder what they think of her now.

Regardless, let's pose my what-if to the sad puppies.  What would the sad puppies think about the hypothetical novel by RowlCardStatering?  Their contention is not only that such a book would be thrown aside by the Hugos and the sci-fi community more broadly, but that this is already happening.

They are somewhat undercut in this by the fact that the author most commonly named as "the next Heinlein" for a period of years was John Scalzi, who has told the sad puppies to stop whining.  He has no patience for them.

So, where is RowlCardStatering?  I can't find him, contrary to the assertions of the sad puppies.

Yet, I don't think that any book published by RowlCardStatering would be given a fair reading.

Unless... RowlCardStatering stayed off social media, and kept his damned mouth shut about his political/social views.  And I'm sure TOR, or whichever other press published the book would want that in the contract.

Why?  Are you paying attention to what's happening to Rowling?  And what she said is far more mild than my hypothetical RowlCardStatering.  Consider, too, that Rowling's work is already ingrained in current pop culture.  How long will it stay that way?  There is no way to know, but I have never seen a movement to excise Alice In Wonderland from western culture on the grounds that Lewis Carroll was a child molester.  Too late.  Or, hell.  As I have to remind music fans on a regular basis-- Chuck Berry.

I wonder what James Gunn would have to say about this...

The general politics of the science fiction & fantasy community runs against Maya Forstater, and hence against Rowling, but I think the RowlCardStatering thought experiment demonstrates that there is something bigger going on here, and I'd like to tease that out.  That's going to take more time and verbiage.  As a general rule, I think I've been quite clear that I care about the art rather than the artist's beliefs or words external to the artistic product.  I don't think that it is practical or productive to interrogate artists' beliefs to decide whether or not they meet your requirements before appreciating their art.  It is easy for the general audience to dismiss the sad puppies when they are complaining about N.K. Jemisin and Ann Leckie, even though their alternatives range between phantasmal and ludicrous, but what if it were Orson Scott Card?

Last year, Mary Robinette Kowal won the Hugo for The Calculating Stars.  I thought it was, overall, a fun read with some likable central characters and good dialog.  Ender's Game was better.  No contest.  Not even close.  Would Ender's Game beat out The Calculating Stars in 2020?  I don't know.  That's kind of the point here.  Card's personal politics, combined with the gender politics of The Calculating Stars might give the award to Kowal.  Did that happen?  No, but if it could, that's the gist of the sad puppies' complaint.  Kowal signals virtue by writing a Rah! Rah! Sisterhood! book, Card writes a pre-gender book which really is better, but votes go to the Ra! Ra! Sisterhood! book to signal virtue, and Kowal wins.  That's the contention of the sad puppies.

To be clear, that's not what happened.  Ender's Game came out in 1985, and Kowal wasn't up against an all-time classic like that.  But if it could happen, then there's more goin' on here, both in terms of what writers are doing, and in terms of how audiences react.

Remember, Lewis Carroll was a child molester.  Orson Scott Card is a reactionary religious fundamentalist.  There are interesting things happening in science fiction & fantasy.  I've got a lot more to say here.

But no, I have no interest in reading Rowling's stuff.  I guess I'll keep doing "genre" type posts on Sundays.  This is kind of fun.  And you probably won't have read everything I reference, but maybe you'll pick up some reading suggestions.  (And some things to avoid.)  Part II next week, I think.  And I've been meaning to do some comments on Ada Palmer, which may or may not work into this series.