On trendiness in science fiction & fantasy: Comments on the 2020 Hugo Awards with observations on representation in fiction
I need a break from heavy stuff. I'm writing about sci-fi today. Who's gonna stop me?
So, the world of science fiction & fantasy might tell itself that we're a bunch of outsider nerds who don't care about trends or "fashion" or anything like that, but... this is the point at which you know I'm going to call bullshit, right? I am. Last weekend, the Hugo Awards were announced, and yeah, trendiness. There is a high likelihood that anyone who doesn't know what the Hugos are is skipping this post, but for the sake of completeness and my obsessive need to explain anything I write in an overly-pedantic manner, the Hugos are big awards in science fiction and fantasy. There. Is that enough of an explanation? There are also the Nebula Awards, the Locus Awards, and others, but the Hugos are the biggies. Moving on.
First, novel of the year. Of the six novels nominated, I've read three so far. Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, Tamsyn Muir's Gideon The Ninth, and Charlie Jane Anders's The City In The Middle Of The Night. I still plan to read Middlegame and The Light Brigade, but I haven't gotten to them yet.
If I'm going to recommend one of these books, it's going to be Gideon. Why? It's... fun. It's ludicrous, insane, over-the-top, funny, brutally satirizes the tropes of gothic fantasy and everything about it just has an "I can't believe someone wrote this" thing going for it. Necromancers. IN SPACE! Is it, in any way, deep literature? No. It's like Jane's Addiction in a world of snooty opera. And that's part of where I'm going here. In fact, I can't believe it got nominated. But it was kind of awesome. (I fell for the buzz, I admit it.)
What won? If I were a gambler, and anyone gambled on the Hugos, I would have bet the farm on Arkady Martine. You know who won? Arkady Martine. A Memory Called Empire is a good book. I actually referenced it a couple of weeks ago, before it won! Good book. Great? Classic? I'm gonna say no. It has some interesting ideas, and the side characters are quite fun. There are, however, some weaknesses in the plot, and the culture of Teixcalaan just doesn't quite gel for me. I'll still give it a thumbs-up, but plot-holes-and-pretense versus over-the-top-fun? I'm recommending you read the fun book. We all need fun right now. Gideon wins the Buchler Award, which doesn't exist, and no one would care if it did, but if you're going to read one of these books, my recommendation at the moment would be Gideon.
I'll add a few comments about The City In The Middle Of The Night before explaining the Muir vs. Martine thing. I've been reading Charlie Jane Anders first on io9, then on TOR.com for a while, her book got good buzz, and a Hugo nomination, so I gave it a try. I was less than impressed. Warning: I'm going to nit-pick, as a social scientist, but I'm also going to make some more generalized comments about the novel. Earth deteriorates, and there's a generation ship to go off and find a new planet. The planet it finds is tidally locked, which means it is only habitable in... "the twilight zone!" Sorrynotsorry. Anyway, it is only habitable in the narrow ring where the tidally locked planet transitions from permanent day to permanent night. How can there be any kind of ecosystem on a planet like that? There can't, as I understand it. OK, so the Gelet (native species) did some stuff to stabilize an ecosystem and they're smart and technologically advanced, but how do you get complex life there in the first place? OK, suspension of disbelief. Moving on. Your first-person POV character, Sophie, comes from a dystopian, controlling city-- gee, no cliches there-- and there's a whole subplot about bringing down the system, and there's ecological collapse (more cliches) and there are these monsters that aren't really monsters because they're sentient beings and they're the real victims (that's the Gelet) and am I making my point about how many sci-fi cliches there are here? I've read this before. The main issue I have with the book is, in fact, that it feels like a hodgepodge of things I have read before. Meh.
And now, I nitpick. Remember how I'm a social scientist? Warning: social science content ahead. Sophie comes from a city called Xiosphant, and part of how they control everybody is that they have lots of different kinds of money.
Huh, you're thinking? There's food money, which you spend on food, and infrastructure money, which you spend on housing, and so forth. When this is explained to one of the characters from outside Xiosphant, her reaction is that it is idiotic.
But... it's more than idiotic. It is completely nonfunctional and misunderstands both the concept of money and how any kind of exchange system could ever work. It's like Anders came up with the idea, and put it into the book without ever thinking it through. Now, think it through.
You own a restaurant in Xiosphant. A customer comes in to eat, and pays with food money. Congratulations! You got paid! In... food money. How do you pay your rent with that? You only have food money because your business collects food money. Do you see the problem here? Money is a unit of exchange. This is not a unit of exchange. At one point in the book, there is some comment about rationing, like maybe these are chits, but that's not actually how it is written, and that's not how money works. No, I'm not stuck in my way of thinking. You explain to me how a restauranteur pays for housing with food money when the legal system prohibits the use of the wrong type of money for the wrong type of purchase! It requires a black market "banker" in the book. Seriously. Currency conversion is a black market operation.
Is this a major plot point? No. It's a very minor thing. I said I was nit-picking, but it really, really bugged me. I teach about this stuff. In fact, I use science fiction novels to teach about money and economics. Charles Stross, just to pick one example, does so well with this, and Anders blew this so badly. Yes, I am over-obsessing about a minor plot point because it happens to be my thing, but oy. No. Don't do that.
Point being, this book did not impress me. OK, I got that out. Now let's get to the main event. Gideon vs. Memory. Why was it so obvious that Memory would win? It was literary.
OK, so I'm pretentious. Maybe you have noticed. I like pretentious books, and it might seem out of character for me to tell you that Gideon The Ninth was a better book than A Memory Called Empire, but... it was. In the same way that Nothing's Shocking was better than, say, a decent but unremarkable piano recital by some Julliard grad.
What do I mean by "literary?" Martine is going for the whole "big ideas" thing. Partly, she succeeds. The book has interesting thoughts about the concepts of memory and identity. And here, when I use the word, "identity," I actually do mean sense of self in the Vorlon Question sense. If a machine records all of your thoughts and experiences, and then once you die, those thoughts and experiences are implanted into someone with a compatible personality, to be integrated in an ongoing imago line, what does that mean for your identity? OK, I'll call that a legitimately big question in sci-fi terms. It also creates interesting questions when you put that into the context of a succession battle within a empire with a dying emperor. Big stuff. Martine also tries to create a big culture, and a contrast of cultures between Teixcalaan and outlying space stations. Martine is ambitious, absolutely.
Muir... is not ambitious in that sense. There is a lot of world-building in Gideon The Ninth, and some of the characters are kind of interesting, but as far as ambition, what struck me repeatedly was that every time someone gave some self-important speech, or something, the main character (Gideon Nav) was there to undercut it with a lewd or otherwise crass and inappropriate remark. Muir was just taking all of the bite out of that self-inflated nonsense. It was almost anti-ambitious. Anti-ambition. As in, if you are a self-important writer, she's gunnin' for you. Or, Gideon's two-handed sword is comin' for you.
Now, which one wins awards? Martine. D'uh. She's the literary writer. But if you're going to try that, you need to not have plot holes or an underdeveloped main character who is less interesting than the side characters or a Teixcalaanli culture that you tell me is important but that I just don't feel. Solid book. High ambitions, but it just didn't quite live up to those ambitions. But those ambitions themselves? Hugo bait. That's what I mean by trendiness.
And we see this further with Novella of the Year. I don't read as many novellas as full novels. I just don't. I did, however, read This Is How You Lose A Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I never bothered to read any other novellas eligible, I never looked up the category, and in a discussion prior to looking up the winners, I said to someone with absolute confidence that ...Time War had won. How did I know? For the same reason I knew that Memory would win novel of the year. It was literary.
And... I didn't actually enjoy it all that much. Basic premise: there's a time war, and agents on opposing sides start writing letters to each other, first taunting each other, and then eventually falling in love through the letters. There were a lot of very interesting ideas in the novella, but... OK, this is a bit of a stylistic preference. How purple do you like your prose? This was a stylistic choice by the authors, but in certain cultures, the prose would have been mistaken for royalty, and we fought a war to get away from that nonsense. You have to be willing to accept a lot being left vague and abstract, and OK, I'll deal, but wow, purple. However, it was absolutely literary, in concept and execution. So, it was-a-gonna win. It's like watching movies and seeing, "ah, that's Oscar-bait." You see some actor giving a monologue, and you know it's being pitched to academy voters. Same thing.
OK, now for a bit of commentary on representation and how that relates to what happens with the Hugos. There's something that all of these works have in common. The main characters in all of these books and novellas are gay women. (NK Jemisin also won the short story award, and a few comments on that anon.)
I've read three out of the six novels nominated, and one of the novellas. All of that subset were about LGBTQ characters. All. Do the math on that. Jemisin's story, "Second Skin," wasn't about LGBTQ characters, but it had nods to the trans community, making her treatment of Isabel Fall later on all the more galling. But, three out of the three novels I've read, with six nominated, and the only novella I've read, of six nominated. Point being, more than random chance if "representation" simply meant the same likelihood as one's proportion of the population.
So I suppose my first reaction to this is as follows. To those who feel underrepresented on tv and in movies... pick up a book!
But the follow-up question would be why do we see, in particular, science fiction and fantasy novels, at the level of the awards, showing so many more points of view? Keep in mind Jemisin's domination of the awards, year after year, along with authors like Leckie, Mary Robinette Kowal won last year...
It must be remembered that this is still a sticking point. The "sad puppies" whine about how science fiction awards should go to white men writing about white men blowing things up in space with rocket ships, like in the good, old days, but they've lost. So what's going on here? I don't have any complete answers, but here are some potential contributing factors.
1) Outsider art forms are more conducive to more points of view. Police procedurals and rom-coms are standardized formats. Science fiction and fantasy are more open and flexible, and hence more appealing to anyone who wants to tell a different story. That doesn't mean you don't get the sad puppies and the people involved with Gamergate and all of that, but there may be an outsider effect.
2) Books. Most people don't read, but people who do tend to have higher levels of education, and statistically, that's the best predictor of attitudes towards disadvantaged groups. Of course, that doesn't explain science fiction versus any other genre.
3) "Buzz." I used this term earlier, but bluntly, nobody has time to read every book, so we are dependent on recommendations, whether critics, ratings, community buzz, or something like that. If that mechanism begins to favor books with representation, then that's what we read, and that creates a cycle.
3 gets tricky because if true, then there may be something factually true at the core of the whinings of the sad puppies. Not that they tend to recommend any good competing books, and really, do you want book recommendations from some crotchety bigot who complains about his inability to use the n-word? But, when I saw the Hugo nominations, and saw that they included A Memory Called Empire, my reaction was, "well, obviously." My reaction when I saw Gideon's nomination was, "seriously?!" Even though I thought Gideon was kind of a better book. But, I knew about the books from before the Hugo nominations because they got such great buzz. And really, it isn't a stretch to say that part of the reason that they, and Time War got buzz is how they handle LGBTQ representation.
And for that, I'm going to single out Time War. As I said, I didn't really like Time War, but it did a really good job of this. The time agents are only referenced as Red and Blue, along with various poetic invocations of those colors. They are both women. You could change the pronouns so that they are both men. It would have worked. You could change the pronouns such that one was male, and it would have worked. To my reading, both characters read as somewhat feminine, but it really didn't matter. This is the Alien approach. Ripley was played by Sigourney Weaver because it didn't matter, and once she was on screen, she made it awesome.
How much "buzz" comes from how these books handle LBGTQ issues? I don't know, but a book that doesn't handle any relevant political or social issues is going to be pretty dull, so the trendiness here, to the degree that that's what it is, is a level of interest, and the challenge to the sad puppies remains, if you think there's someone being unfairly ignored, show me.
Because at the end of the day, even with respect to NK Jemisin's story, "Second Skin," I wrote a rather strong critique of that last year when it was released. But, that didn't mean it was bad as a story. She just didn't think everything through. She wrote a sort of allegory about the deterioration of Earth and society, and utopianism, and wrote something accidentally, unintentionally eugenicist. Oops! It still had interesting thoughts, though.
So are there trends? Yes. Are these trends influencing awards? Yes. Is someone being unfairly ignored?
If so, who? That's the challenge, isn't it?
No, I have nothing to say about George RR Martin. I don't care about him. I never finished Feast For Crows, and stopped caring about him mid-way through that snoozefest.
So, the world of science fiction & fantasy might tell itself that we're a bunch of outsider nerds who don't care about trends or "fashion" or anything like that, but... this is the point at which you know I'm going to call bullshit, right? I am. Last weekend, the Hugo Awards were announced, and yeah, trendiness. There is a high likelihood that anyone who doesn't know what the Hugos are is skipping this post, but for the sake of completeness and my obsessive need to explain anything I write in an overly-pedantic manner, the Hugos are big awards in science fiction and fantasy. There. Is that enough of an explanation? There are also the Nebula Awards, the Locus Awards, and others, but the Hugos are the biggies. Moving on.
First, novel of the year. Of the six novels nominated, I've read three so far. Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, Tamsyn Muir's Gideon The Ninth, and Charlie Jane Anders's The City In The Middle Of The Night. I still plan to read Middlegame and The Light Brigade, but I haven't gotten to them yet.
If I'm going to recommend one of these books, it's going to be Gideon. Why? It's... fun. It's ludicrous, insane, over-the-top, funny, brutally satirizes the tropes of gothic fantasy and everything about it just has an "I can't believe someone wrote this" thing going for it. Necromancers. IN SPACE! Is it, in any way, deep literature? No. It's like Jane's Addiction in a world of snooty opera. And that's part of where I'm going here. In fact, I can't believe it got nominated. But it was kind of awesome. (I fell for the buzz, I admit it.)
What won? If I were a gambler, and anyone gambled on the Hugos, I would have bet the farm on Arkady Martine. You know who won? Arkady Martine. A Memory Called Empire is a good book. I actually referenced it a couple of weeks ago, before it won! Good book. Great? Classic? I'm gonna say no. It has some interesting ideas, and the side characters are quite fun. There are, however, some weaknesses in the plot, and the culture of Teixcalaan just doesn't quite gel for me. I'll still give it a thumbs-up, but plot-holes-and-pretense versus over-the-top-fun? I'm recommending you read the fun book. We all need fun right now. Gideon wins the Buchler Award, which doesn't exist, and no one would care if it did, but if you're going to read one of these books, my recommendation at the moment would be Gideon.
I'll add a few comments about The City In The Middle Of The Night before explaining the Muir vs. Martine thing. I've been reading Charlie Jane Anders first on io9, then on TOR.com for a while, her book got good buzz, and a Hugo nomination, so I gave it a try. I was less than impressed. Warning: I'm going to nit-pick, as a social scientist, but I'm also going to make some more generalized comments about the novel. Earth deteriorates, and there's a generation ship to go off and find a new planet. The planet it finds is tidally locked, which means it is only habitable in... "the twilight zone!" Sorrynotsorry. Anyway, it is only habitable in the narrow ring where the tidally locked planet transitions from permanent day to permanent night. How can there be any kind of ecosystem on a planet like that? There can't, as I understand it. OK, so the Gelet (native species) did some stuff to stabilize an ecosystem and they're smart and technologically advanced, but how do you get complex life there in the first place? OK, suspension of disbelief. Moving on. Your first-person POV character, Sophie, comes from a dystopian, controlling city-- gee, no cliches there-- and there's a whole subplot about bringing down the system, and there's ecological collapse (more cliches) and there are these monsters that aren't really monsters because they're sentient beings and they're the real victims (that's the Gelet) and am I making my point about how many sci-fi cliches there are here? I've read this before. The main issue I have with the book is, in fact, that it feels like a hodgepodge of things I have read before. Meh.
And now, I nitpick. Remember how I'm a social scientist? Warning: social science content ahead. Sophie comes from a city called Xiosphant, and part of how they control everybody is that they have lots of different kinds of money.
Huh, you're thinking? There's food money, which you spend on food, and infrastructure money, which you spend on housing, and so forth. When this is explained to one of the characters from outside Xiosphant, her reaction is that it is idiotic.
But... it's more than idiotic. It is completely nonfunctional and misunderstands both the concept of money and how any kind of exchange system could ever work. It's like Anders came up with the idea, and put it into the book without ever thinking it through. Now, think it through.
You own a restaurant in Xiosphant. A customer comes in to eat, and pays with food money. Congratulations! You got paid! In... food money. How do you pay your rent with that? You only have food money because your business collects food money. Do you see the problem here? Money is a unit of exchange. This is not a unit of exchange. At one point in the book, there is some comment about rationing, like maybe these are chits, but that's not actually how it is written, and that's not how money works. No, I'm not stuck in my way of thinking. You explain to me how a restauranteur pays for housing with food money when the legal system prohibits the use of the wrong type of money for the wrong type of purchase! It requires a black market "banker" in the book. Seriously. Currency conversion is a black market operation.
Is this a major plot point? No. It's a very minor thing. I said I was nit-picking, but it really, really bugged me. I teach about this stuff. In fact, I use science fiction novels to teach about money and economics. Charles Stross, just to pick one example, does so well with this, and Anders blew this so badly. Yes, I am over-obsessing about a minor plot point because it happens to be my thing, but oy. No. Don't do that.
Point being, this book did not impress me. OK, I got that out. Now let's get to the main event. Gideon vs. Memory. Why was it so obvious that Memory would win? It was literary.
OK, so I'm pretentious. Maybe you have noticed. I like pretentious books, and it might seem out of character for me to tell you that Gideon The Ninth was a better book than A Memory Called Empire, but... it was. In the same way that Nothing's Shocking was better than, say, a decent but unremarkable piano recital by some Julliard grad.
What do I mean by "literary?" Martine is going for the whole "big ideas" thing. Partly, she succeeds. The book has interesting thoughts about the concepts of memory and identity. And here, when I use the word, "identity," I actually do mean sense of self in the Vorlon Question sense. If a machine records all of your thoughts and experiences, and then once you die, those thoughts and experiences are implanted into someone with a compatible personality, to be integrated in an ongoing imago line, what does that mean for your identity? OK, I'll call that a legitimately big question in sci-fi terms. It also creates interesting questions when you put that into the context of a succession battle within a empire with a dying emperor. Big stuff. Martine also tries to create a big culture, and a contrast of cultures between Teixcalaan and outlying space stations. Martine is ambitious, absolutely.
Muir... is not ambitious in that sense. There is a lot of world-building in Gideon The Ninth, and some of the characters are kind of interesting, but as far as ambition, what struck me repeatedly was that every time someone gave some self-important speech, or something, the main character (Gideon Nav) was there to undercut it with a lewd or otherwise crass and inappropriate remark. Muir was just taking all of the bite out of that self-inflated nonsense. It was almost anti-ambitious. Anti-ambition. As in, if you are a self-important writer, she's gunnin' for you. Or, Gideon's two-handed sword is comin' for you.
Now, which one wins awards? Martine. D'uh. She's the literary writer. But if you're going to try that, you need to not have plot holes or an underdeveloped main character who is less interesting than the side characters or a Teixcalaanli culture that you tell me is important but that I just don't feel. Solid book. High ambitions, but it just didn't quite live up to those ambitions. But those ambitions themselves? Hugo bait. That's what I mean by trendiness.
And we see this further with Novella of the Year. I don't read as many novellas as full novels. I just don't. I did, however, read This Is How You Lose A Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I never bothered to read any other novellas eligible, I never looked up the category, and in a discussion prior to looking up the winners, I said to someone with absolute confidence that ...Time War had won. How did I know? For the same reason I knew that Memory would win novel of the year. It was literary.
And... I didn't actually enjoy it all that much. Basic premise: there's a time war, and agents on opposing sides start writing letters to each other, first taunting each other, and then eventually falling in love through the letters. There were a lot of very interesting ideas in the novella, but... OK, this is a bit of a stylistic preference. How purple do you like your prose? This was a stylistic choice by the authors, but in certain cultures, the prose would have been mistaken for royalty, and we fought a war to get away from that nonsense. You have to be willing to accept a lot being left vague and abstract, and OK, I'll deal, but wow, purple. However, it was absolutely literary, in concept and execution. So, it was-a-gonna win. It's like watching movies and seeing, "ah, that's Oscar-bait." You see some actor giving a monologue, and you know it's being pitched to academy voters. Same thing.
OK, now for a bit of commentary on representation and how that relates to what happens with the Hugos. There's something that all of these works have in common. The main characters in all of these books and novellas are gay women. (NK Jemisin also won the short story award, and a few comments on that anon.)
I've read three out of the six novels nominated, and one of the novellas. All of that subset were about LGBTQ characters. All. Do the math on that. Jemisin's story, "Second Skin," wasn't about LGBTQ characters, but it had nods to the trans community, making her treatment of Isabel Fall later on all the more galling. But, three out of the three novels I've read, with six nominated, and the only novella I've read, of six nominated. Point being, more than random chance if "representation" simply meant the same likelihood as one's proportion of the population.
So I suppose my first reaction to this is as follows. To those who feel underrepresented on tv and in movies... pick up a book!
But the follow-up question would be why do we see, in particular, science fiction and fantasy novels, at the level of the awards, showing so many more points of view? Keep in mind Jemisin's domination of the awards, year after year, along with authors like Leckie, Mary Robinette Kowal won last year...
It must be remembered that this is still a sticking point. The "sad puppies" whine about how science fiction awards should go to white men writing about white men blowing things up in space with rocket ships, like in the good, old days, but they've lost. So what's going on here? I don't have any complete answers, but here are some potential contributing factors.
1) Outsider art forms are more conducive to more points of view. Police procedurals and rom-coms are standardized formats. Science fiction and fantasy are more open and flexible, and hence more appealing to anyone who wants to tell a different story. That doesn't mean you don't get the sad puppies and the people involved with Gamergate and all of that, but there may be an outsider effect.
2) Books. Most people don't read, but people who do tend to have higher levels of education, and statistically, that's the best predictor of attitudes towards disadvantaged groups. Of course, that doesn't explain science fiction versus any other genre.
3) "Buzz." I used this term earlier, but bluntly, nobody has time to read every book, so we are dependent on recommendations, whether critics, ratings, community buzz, or something like that. If that mechanism begins to favor books with representation, then that's what we read, and that creates a cycle.
3 gets tricky because if true, then there may be something factually true at the core of the whinings of the sad puppies. Not that they tend to recommend any good competing books, and really, do you want book recommendations from some crotchety bigot who complains about his inability to use the n-word? But, when I saw the Hugo nominations, and saw that they included A Memory Called Empire, my reaction was, "well, obviously." My reaction when I saw Gideon's nomination was, "seriously?!" Even though I thought Gideon was kind of a better book. But, I knew about the books from before the Hugo nominations because they got such great buzz. And really, it isn't a stretch to say that part of the reason that they, and Time War got buzz is how they handle LGBTQ representation.
And for that, I'm going to single out Time War. As I said, I didn't really like Time War, but it did a really good job of this. The time agents are only referenced as Red and Blue, along with various poetic invocations of those colors. They are both women. You could change the pronouns so that they are both men. It would have worked. You could change the pronouns such that one was male, and it would have worked. To my reading, both characters read as somewhat feminine, but it really didn't matter. This is the Alien approach. Ripley was played by Sigourney Weaver because it didn't matter, and once she was on screen, she made it awesome.
How much "buzz" comes from how these books handle LBGTQ issues? I don't know, but a book that doesn't handle any relevant political or social issues is going to be pretty dull, so the trendiness here, to the degree that that's what it is, is a level of interest, and the challenge to the sad puppies remains, if you think there's someone being unfairly ignored, show me.
Because at the end of the day, even with respect to NK Jemisin's story, "Second Skin," I wrote a rather strong critique of that last year when it was released. But, that didn't mean it was bad as a story. She just didn't think everything through. She wrote a sort of allegory about the deterioration of Earth and society, and utopianism, and wrote something accidentally, unintentionally eugenicist. Oops! It still had interesting thoughts, though.
So are there trends? Yes. Are these trends influencing awards? Yes. Is someone being unfairly ignored?
If so, who? That's the challenge, isn't it?
No, I have nothing to say about George RR Martin. I don't care about him. I never finished Feast For Crows, and stopped caring about him mid-way through that snoozefest.
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