melannen | dead dogs

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fandom:sf lit

dead dogs

I missed the Hugo announcements because I spent all day floating around in

lindentreeisle's mom's swimming pool, which was definitely a better life choice, let's face it.

I'm still catching up on liveblogs and stuff, but looking at the numbers that were released, something occurs to me: the puppies may not have been 100% wrong. Because if you look at the nominations numbers, it really does look like a small group of people (~70-100) are all nominating from the exact same relatively small group of works, all of which share the trait that they are very thoughtful about stuff like gender, sexuality, race, imperialism. Whereas when you looked at the other (non-puppy) works nominated, there are a lot more of them, but fewer of them hit that nominations threshhold, because the votes are spread among more works, so they are each less likely to get a nomination.

And the taste of that small group of people, while it isn't entirely different from the tastes of the wider fandom, isn't exactly convergent, either. Just look at some of the stuff that did get wins this year. And the effect is that it almost looks like slate nominations.

I mean, obviously it *isn't* : what it is, is that if you've come to the realization that fiction that isn't deeply thoughtful about stuff like gender, sexuality, race, and imperialism is not good fiction, and especially is not great SFF, because anything else is lazy goddamn worldbuilding, then you still have a WHOLE LOT FEWER stories to pick from. And so there's a lot less less spread in the noms.

And obviously the answer isn't to have a competing slate, because that's a solution to a different problem. The answer is for the Puppies and their friends to make sure there are SO MANY books published every year for the diversity-aware bloc to pick from that their nominations are as spread out as the straight-white-men's nominations.

Get on that, Puppies. Please.

(That might actually happen anyway, if all the people who bought first-time votes this year nominate next year, and nominate a lot of less-printsff-mainstream stuff. We'll see.)

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Wait, where are you drawing this conclusion from? Just the released nominations data, or the complete anonymized dataset that they were planning to release on request? Because I don't see how you could conclude from the released nominations data that any group of people other than the Puppies were all nominating the same works.

just the publicly released aggregates. and I didn't run any stats on them or anything; it's entirely possible that it wouldn't stand up to a rigorous analysis, or to looking at the actual ballots (certainly it's not going to be anything like as lockstep as the puppies, because again, not actually a slate. certainly I suspect most of those voters had a fair amount of spread in their noms, and there were people outside those circles who nommed some of them, because most of them were at least not objectively terrible.)

but to this casual observer, it did seem striking that a lot of the authors I associate with the corners of sf that I see overlapping on my circles were in very similar spots in the nominations listings, over and over again, even with things that didn't get a huge amount of buzz.

so it may not be true at all, but I definitely see how it could look true without doing the math. and we should implement my suggested fix either way. :p

so it may not be true at all, but I definitely see how it could look true without doing the math. and we should implement my suggested fix either way. :p

Heh, yep. :P

But I suspect this probably is the parable of drawing a bullseye around the bullet holes in the wall at play. There are other authors you might associate with the same social-justicey people that don't cluster around that 70-100 nomination point, but you found a pattern because you were looking for one.

It's hard to tell because they didn't release the long tail, and certainly a lot of them got a lot of other votes too! And obviously there's a lot of complication in the voting patterns. Plus I'm talking out my backside because I don't even follow print SF closely enough atm to know who a lot of these people are in the shorter categories. But that means I mostly only know the names that *do* get play in DW-y circles. And I look at, say, Novelette with Seanan McGuire at 69 and Novella with Scalzi at 78 (and I read that one and it wasn't... great) and Short Story with Ursula Vernon at 76 (and I read that one and it was, but), and Related Work with Invisible and Tropes vs. Women at 79 and 77, and PNH at 65, and many of those categories having a pretty steep drop-off after those names, and I... wonder. Maybe it's less about diversity than about pixel-stained technopeasants, but it seems like there's *something* there. (In fact the nominations drop-off around the mid-70s to mid-60s seems almost as consistent as, if much smaller than, the post-puppies drop-off. But maybe that's a statistical artifact. Or confirmation/rounding bias on my part.)

It'll be very interesting to see what comes out of the anonymized noms, anyway!

I just put in a request for the full dataset. I think my intended general methodology is to try to look at individual works on the Puppy List, individual non-Puppy nominated works, and some sort of sampling of works below the ballot threshold and count the total number of other works that were nominated on the same ballots in the same category as a particular work.

i.e. my hypothesis would be that the nominating ballots that contained The Dark Between the Stars would have less other Best Novel nominees than the ballots containing The Three Body Problem, since TDBTS was part of a slate and 3BP was not.

This would also let us look at your hypothesis that the ballots containing Unlocked would look more like the ballots containing The Dark Between the Stars than the ballots containing The Three body Problem.

Yeah, my hypothesis would be that that sort of analysis will find a cluster of very tightly similar ballots that are the Puppies, probably divisible into two sub-clusters for sad and rabid; and then a smaller, much less similar but still significant and discernable cluster of pixel-stained technopeasants at the 70-100 level, which have a lot of spread but overlap on several things in most categories. And then maybe a few very small clusters that are, like, very specific subgenres or groups of friends, but everything else is pretty scattered.

I hope we get some good stats out of this! Because stats + SFF fandom can only lead to good things.

http://file770.com/?p=24790

...if you've come to the realization that fiction that isn't deeply thoughtful about stuff like gender, sexuality, race, and imperialism is not good fiction, and especially is not great SFF, because anything else is lazy goddamn world building...

You know, this may be a slight derail, but I'm actually not certain I agree with this. In terms of my own reading preferences, I absolutely do, but overall I feel that there are a lot of different things to be thoughtful about and a lot of different goals that stories can be aiming at. A short story about the physics of alien beings living on a neutron star might be incredibly thoughtful about physics but not be designed to say anything about gender or race - even if the protagonist is a racial or gender minority.

My point is completely different from the ones the Puppies are making, but I do think the world of literature would actually be a poorer place if all fiction focused specifically on these issues. Generally speaking you can't have it all - even if you're talking about the balance between plot, characterisation, and style - and to say that one axis always has to be turned up to full means that you're discounting other types of good writing.

(I feel like I shouldn't have to say this, but I probably do: I don't believe that the Puppy nominations were good fiction by any metric.)

I would suspect there is a distinction between

melannen's "deeply thoughtful about" and your "focused specifically on". Ancillary Justice is not in any sense a book focused specifically on gender. It's a space opera that in support to a fairly intricate plot, is primarily asking questions about power, freedom, and the problems of empire. But it is deeply thoughtful about gender and its place in the worldbuilding.

Whereas Hugo nominee from a few years back Leviathan Wakes is a densely plotted book with similar themes about power and empire, but which is not at all thoughtful about gender and defaults to conventional detective novel tropes with basically a single female character in the whole novel. There is much to admire about Leviathan Wakes, but its failure to think about gender and race and their place in its world building weakens the novel because it results in much shallower world building.

Yeah, basically what he said: A story doesn't have to *focus* on that stuff to be a good story, but it has to be *thoughtful* about it. Your alien beings story could be not focused on soft-sciences stuff at all - could be not *about* that - but if it completely uncritically copies one (any!) particular version of 20th/21st century American social/political/historical views, then I'm sorry, that's bad worldbuilding, because it makes 0 sense that neutron star aliens would have exactly the same gender/class/etc. dynamics that we do.

(You could have a neutron star story that *does* carry that all stuff over *because* it has something to say about it - is thoughtful about it - and it could still be a great story - but if you're going to do that you're going to have to sell me on it and you're going to have to do a really, really amazing job at it.)

And doing that kind of worldbuilding work *is* hard, and if you don't want to focus on that it might not be worth doing the work, and that's fine, you could still write an interesting and readable book, but it's not one I'm going to nominate for an award, because you skimped on the basic work. I mean, even the world I live in *right now* isn't like that, idk why you expect me to buy that the 28th century on a planet with magic and dragons would be, unless you've put some actual work into telling me why.

And that kind of skip-the-hard-worldbuilding story is still so common that I think a lot of people don't even notice it, read it as background static? Which, whatever, some of those stories still have interesting things to say and are fun. But once you've realized, oh yeah, the entire world is not actually like that much less the entire galaxy, then you start having trouble with that kind of book. And it really has been a lightbulb moment for a lot of people, I think. On that level it really is more about basic diversity than about message.

(And it doesn't even have to be a 'secondary world' story for this to be an issue - if you're writing a non-SF story where all the main characters just happen to have exactly the same social background and views as the author and anybody who doesn't is a non-person or a token, it's still not a great story. I have read plenty of those, too. Or, say, an urban fantasy set in a city that's only 30% white but your characters from said city, including the background ones, are at least 85% white, not that there was one of those nommed for the hugos this year or anything <_<. It doesn't require being actively racist to do that, and it doesn't necessarily mean you're a bad writer, but it doesn't require having something to say about race to fix it, either; it just requires, like, looking up the city on wikipedia and going 'oh yeah...', and being willing to write something that might be a little less comfortable for you.)

Regarding "good worldbuilding": it's literally impossible to give careful and serious thought to every single aspect of worldbuilding, because it's not literally possible for a single human being to build an entire world in complete detail. Anyone who tries will just end up like Tolkien: spending so long building the world that they'll never get around writing the actual story. And to me, singling out one particular aspect of worldbuilding, whether it's the sociology of race and gender or scientifically-accurate physics or biology, and saying "this element is absolutely necessary to good worldbuilding, but the others are optional" just seems... kind of arbitrary? I just don't see any reason to think that a story that deals thoughtfully with gender issues but puts zero thought into its portrayal of FTL travel and whether it makes any scientific sense has objectively better worldbuilding than one which does the opposite. And while a story could do both things, I don't think it necessarily has to in order to be good.

See, I certainly don't think it's necessary - or *possible* - to do a good job (or even an adequate job) at all aspects of worldbuilding. Or for that matter any aspect of worldbuilding.

I do think it's necessary - if you want your story to be taken seriously as top-tier SF - to at least be thoughtful about all aspects of worldbuilding.

So if a book is not mostly about FTL physics, I'm willing to accept that their FTL drives are kind of perfunctory, because that's not the point of the story, and SF has a toolkit of FTL options that we're willing to accept as good enough, you've done your due diligence. If they're traveling through the vacuum of space using propellors, though, then they had better be deliberately doing a Victorian pastiche where the bad physics is the point (or messing with, like, winding up superstrings or something, you get the point.) If you're doing a perfunctory job, you still need to do a base-level acceptable job.

I do think over the course of the history of SF, the baseline acceptable range for the social part of worldbuilding has been changing for a lot of people. And we're getting more toolkits for how to do it acceptably along those new lines. It really doesn't take much: you should have some characters who aren't straight white dudes who have agency, have some of your background NPCs be diverse, if your aliens are completely nonhumanoid maybe their society should be a tiny bit different from ours in fundamental ways, possibly US-style culturally Christian xenophobic late-stage capitalism isn't the only system that has ever existed, etc.

And for a lot of this stuff it's not even on the level of propellor-driven spaceships, it's on the level of failure to notice that gravity pulls down: when your worldbuilding & characterization is so narrow that it can't even accurately describe the normal humans I meet every day, when there's more different sorts of people going past my desk at work in an hour than going through your major hub space station in a month, then yeah, that's just bad writing, that's a-fish-in-a-bottle-of-7up level worldbuilding fail, an award-winning writer regardless of genre needs some basic observational and research ability, and skill at seeing through eyes other than their own.

I mean. I hold people to a higher standard of worldbuilding than a lot of readers, I think, and it's not just the diversity issue that bothers me (the number of writers who don't seem to have ever even thought about like, basic economics and supply lines, augh, where are they getting steel swords if there is no metal production and no trade? How do they all have personal copies of the scripture if there are no printing presses and nobody working as copyists?? I personally would take all the faux-medieval-white-people fantasies if just one of them was rigorous about production and trade.)

But all I was trying to say originally, I guess, is that I think for increasing numbers of readers, the lines between "good enough to win an award", "perfunctory but acceptable" and "no, that's just badly written" are moving on the social diversity aspects faster than on other stuff, and that's part of the evolution of SF as a genre, and part of what we're seeing in the Hugo nominations.

( I really didn't expect this to be the part of that post that got the arguments! Gosh, I was just trying to define who the group of people were that I was ID in the nominations, not write a worldbuilding manifesto. But I will rant about worldbuilding any day, so carry on.)

then yeah, that's just bad writing, that's a-fish-in-a-bottle-of-7up level worldbuilding fail

I just have to say that I snorted at this. HEE.

I have possibly started describing certain kinds of stories as "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bottle of 7-up" stories...

That's a beautiful line.

Well, yes, a book should be at least "baseline adequate" in all significant areas of worldbuilding in order to be good SF. It sounds though like you're differentiating between baseline adequacy and "deeply thoughtful" worldbuilding, and saying that a work needs to be not just adequate but excellent in all areas in order to be worthy of a Hugo, which is what I was reacting to. Am I misunderstanding you?

I think there's a big difference between "deeply thoughtful" and "excellent", I guess? You can be deeply thoughtful about something and not do a great job, and you can even be deeply thoughtful about something and decide to not put that much of your thought on the topic into any given work. But either of those will still be distinguishable from being thoughtless about the topic.

And a lot of SF writers, from what I can tell, still rarely put much thought at all into certain aspects of worldbuilding.

I also do think that what I'm groping toward articulating in these threads is that there are topics where being adequate does require putting significant amounts of thought in, and ones that touch on race/gender/etc are among those topics? Because if you haven't ever thought deeply about it, and you are in a position where you were never forced to think deeply about it, the stuff you will have picked up from just the memes floating in the air will be dead wrong. So even rising from there to a point of adequacy requires having put in specific effort.

...also yeah I do think to really deserve a hugo, in an ideal world, something needs to be more than just adequate in all levels, it needs to be excellent in as many as possible. That doesn't mean *perfect* in all levels, but I want evidence that the author has put real thought into them? Which is hard to do, and the vast majority of SF novels don't do, but "hugo award-winning" should not mean the vast majority of novels. Of this year's nominees, they were all good enough that I grudgingly put them above "no award", but I honestly didn't think any of them reached the level that I would be enthusiastic about nominating them. A hugo-award-winning novel should be one where I finish it and feel like someone has opened up the top of my head and stirred my brains around and I need a couple days to recover. That shouldn't be too much to ask, surely. Plenty of them have in the past.

Out of curiosity, have you read any novels published in 2014 that you think would have really deserved the award?

Um, maybe?

I thought Ancillary Sword was close, actually, it definitely did its work on the worldbuilding, but it was inescapably a second book in a trilogy, and that kept it from true greatness when evaluated a stand-alone. (Ancillary Justice, which did win the year it came out, I think is definitely in the top ranks of SFF I've ever read, though. And I suspect the trilogy as a whole will end up there, unless Mercy really drops the ball.)

The Story of Owen, Dragon-Slayer of Trondheim was close! There were a few places where she deliberately punted the worldbuilding in order to make its ridiculous premise stand up, and the pacing wasn't perfect, but in even in those places it was still very thoughtful about what it was doing, and I loved what it was doing. But it's YA so the chance it would win the novel Hugo is tiny.

...and that's two out of a total of five qualifying novels I have read. I am sure there were other good ones published that I have not read. I read more short stories & novellas I would have been willing to nominate, though. (And I read 170 other books in 2014, but I tend to read widely rather than reading a lot of recent stuff, which is probably why my standards are what they are.)

(If I'm nominating this year I'm going to have to start reading for the recent, but so far that's meant 'being on a lot of library waiting lists', alas.)

(And tbh what kept Goblin Emperor out of it for me was just that there wasn't much there there, not any particular issues with what was there. And for 3BP it was partly that I hated the MC and partly the massive plotholes and dropped threads. So I think you may be getting the impression my standards are higher than they are? It's just that there's a lot of published SF out there that's pretty terrible. And a lot where I can tell from the summary and skimming the first couple chapters that I never need to read it.)

I want to +1 this comment so badly.

Yeah, I agree with this, although I see what

melannen is saying too.

That is, I think to be great fiction/SFF you have to be thoughtful about all kinds of things, including worldbuilding/gender/imperialism. (And in my opinion, to be great SF, you additionally have to be thoughtful enough about the science not to make any stupid mistakes.)

But you can be adequate fiction/SFF -- even a Hugo winner -- without necessarily thinking about those things. See 3BP, which I thought succeeded on many levels while failing dramatically on a number of other levels.

(And to be fair, I did vote it under No Award, but I think I might have been convinced to vote it over No Award, glaring flaws and all, had it just gotten that one piece of physics right that it got terribly wrong.)

See, I think you should be more than 'adequate SFF' to win a Hugo, and if all we can manage most years is 'adequate' then, well, maybe Mr. Ward needs to turn up more often...

But I also think my threshhold for voting is lower than my threshhold for nominating; I would never have nominated Goblin Emperor, it was way too flat, but it was adequate enough that I was willing to vote it above No Award.

Oh, I agree! And I've got a high threshold both ways: to get my vote I feel you should be more than adequate. I would (had I been voting then) also have No Awarded Scalzi's Redshirts, which while it was adequate and entertaining, I didn't find particularly interesting or thoughtful.

I used to have nightmares about Stephen Colbert deciding he wants a Hugo. I've since decided that that would be an awesome thing, and shine a spotlight on how broken certain aspects of fandom are, especially where it intertwines with the professional world.

The Hugos were a terrific set of awards when the core of the SFF fandom community--as sparse and diverse as it was--did their community-building at SFF conventions. They don't, anymore, so it's a bit weird for the broader community, including publishers, to give much credence to an award that's always been a popularity contest among a specific subset of fans.

Forty years ago, that subset was more-or-less representative of SFF readership as a whole. Now, it's not; there are huge genres completely ignored by Worldcon and the Hugos. (I'm waiting for the year when "Best Video Game" gets on the ballot. You think we've got drama now...)

Other than that, though, I agree. There's a problem in that the convention-going community's standards for groundbreaking, thought-provoking, innovative-worldbuilding stories are being met by a relatively small group of authors. And the solution is obviously to get so much diverse fiction published that there are hundreds of amazing choices every year, instead of hundreds of variants of formulaic military fic or space-opera fluff, and a only handful of books that can change the way people look at the world.

Stephen Colbert definitely deserves a hugo! He did some excellent SF over the course of the show. I wonder if we could get him a nom for his recent interview with Neil about Pluto? (I also think Stephen is too much of a native of SF fandom and too much of a gentleman to ever think about campaigning for one. Unless he could satirically egg on something grassroots.)

I don't know that the worldcon makeup is that much less representative now than it used to be, though. Certainly the Worldcon in the Golden Age wasn't giving awards to comics, for example. And there was always a huge amount of diversity in the readership that wasn't well represented by congoers - if you look at, for example, the letter-columns of old issues of Astounding in the 50s, you see a much better gender ratio and class diversity than you do in the memberships of those old cons. And that's after the letters have been winnowed by male editors. But the internet is making that non-con-going segment a lot harder to ignore and a lot harder to exclude from the core, so even as the cons are getting more diverse, their lagging diversity is a lot more visible.

Also, of course, there's just a lot more people now, and therefore a lot more stuff being published so it's a lot harder to feel like you've got a handle on everything.

"fiction that isn't deeply thoughtful about stuff like gender, sexuality, race and imperialism is not good fiction, and especially is not great SFF"

So, so true.

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