Entry tags:
dead dogs
I missed the Hugo announcements because I spent all day floating around in ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.)
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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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.)
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I just have to say that I snorted at this. HEE.
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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.
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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.)
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