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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I have to ask myself; was I, in turn, being pandered to in the previous eras of scifi in the same way that different demographics are being pandered to now? Am I just primed to like things featuring men or manly women set in space, or that feature nanotech and computers at the expense of character development or good writing? And honestly, the answer is probably yes. There probably is some cosmic Ginsbergian justice to Woke sci-fi taking over traditional awards ceremonies. I don’t think there is a principled, objective stance where William Gibson is a better writer than Octavia Butler and it’s not like we read any of these books because the prose and mechanics of the writing are top tier. Perhaps we’re fated to live in our own little cloistered media bubbles that tell us what we like to hear.

This is a good thing to examine, because I think you're right. My initial reaction to the recent Hugo slates has been similar to yours: it almost feels now like an annual victory parade marching over the bones of all those dead cishetwhite dudes. I've read a few of NK Jemisin's books (bleah) and I tried Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning (it's genuinely speculative and interesting SF, I'll give it that - but it wasn't for me), and I've read a few of Seanan McGuire's books (very YA, fun enough if you like fanfic and the same plot retreaded multiple times) but mostly it just seems like celebratory woke awards.

I never thought I'd become one of those guys who just starts refusing to read books by, as Vox Day puts it, People Who Hate You, but I'm becoming one of those guys.

All that being said, you are right that previous eras just pandered to different demographics. (And bitching about the Hugos, and more worthy books being ignored in favor of books that didn't deserve it, goes back to the first WorldCon.) I mean, I really liked Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle when I was younger, but I've recently reread a few of their books, and besides being cringe and soapboxy in their own way, the writing is just bad. They didn't age well.

I will always think Ringworld (and the whole Known Space series) is a magnificent epic, but Niven and Pournelle are both cranky old bastards who kind of embody the "stale pale male" stereotype, if we're being honest. And lots of other previous nominees and winners have been equally full of wooden characters spouting stilted dialog in service of the author's political theories.

I also read Neuromancer recently. It, too, did not age well. I know that's not the book's fault: it's not entirely fair to judge a book in 2022 that was written about the mindblowing cyberpunk future before the Internet was really a thing. But it's just not that great except as an artifact of its time.

So yes, times have changed, the fandom has changed, old fans don't like it, and I just accept that Hugo nominations no longer mean much to me. For all that people complain that "Nothing good is being published anymore," this is flatly bullshit. There is a vast quantity of new SF&F being published. The problem is not that there's nothing to read, the problem is sifting through the ocean of crap new books to find something you like. For this, we mostly rely now on word of mouth and communities known to recommend things that are good - ironically, the function that publishers and awards used to serve.

I didn't read Neuromancer until the twenty-first century, so maybe my view is skewed, but I doubt it was ever a good story. There is no internal logic to the matrix at all; it's just deus ex machina after deus ex machina. It would have been fine, even more fun, if it had used an internal logic unlike that of real computers; that's part of the charm of cyberpunk. But when everything is arbitrary there can be no dramatic tension.

For atmosphere Neuromancer is unparalleled. As a yarn it isn't that great.

I also read Neuromancer recently. It, too, did not age well.

Really? How so?

The Turing police seem fairly prescient, and as time goes on, I think more and more of his general aesthetic loops back to relevance. Print-shoot-repeat and the 3d-printing scene in general feel pretty damn cyberpunk. Give it awhile, and I think we have decent odds of getting there.

The concepts were cool, I just didn't think the writing or the characterization was very good. And like I said, it's not really fair to judge a book for not doing better than any other SF novel in predicting what the near future will look like, but still... coin-op pay phones!

Coin-op payphones granted, there's something to Gibsonian cyberpunk, something between an insight and a thesis, that sets his work apart from the stolid technothrillers of Clancy and company. Something along the lines of "technology is useful, not merely because they have a rock and you have a gun, but because it inherently and intractably complicates the arithmetic of power." His stories are built on a recognition that people are not in control, that our systems reliably fail, that our plans are dismayed, and that far from ameliorating these conditions, technology only accelerates them. This, to me, is a fairly important idea, and I like his stories because he communicates this idea with such force that you feel it in your bones. He does this less with broad plot and character, and more with the nature of the technological ecosystem the characters move through, that the characters and the broad plot serve to illuminate.

I honestly don't mind "outdated" futures all that much, personally.

Huh -- somebody gave me his most recent book (which is true crap), which prompted me to reread some of the old ones in my library, just to check that I didn't used to be insane. Unfortunately somebody stole my copy of Neuromancer at some point, but the rest of the Sprawl series are still very very good IMO. My recollection at the time is not thinking that they quite measured up to Neuromancer; I'll have to give it another read somehow.

I also had a few of the 1990s-2014 books on hand, and blazed through them; not great but not terrible -- definitely had moments of spirit. I think Trump (or something) broke his brain -- the only reason to read Agency is as a kind of meta-analysis of why the other books seem good but this one is bad. (plotline is pretty standard Gibson) There's significant woke pandering, and I gather he still won't get a Hugo for it on account of wrong gender.

Are there actually many sci-fi books that excel not just at exploring fun sci-fi themes, but at actually delivering good prose and characters? The trend of having only the former is so persistent that I came to assume that having these two at the same time is supremely difficult for some reason, like running out of skill points when creating an RPG character.

Orson Scott Card managed to deliver both in parts of his Ender’s Game series, but it’s assuredly not super hard sci-fi. And hard sci-fi in general doesn’t do prose and characters great because that’s not the focus.

Yes, as long as you don't define "good prose and characters" in the literary fashion of "long turgid writing that fails to advance the plot because the plot isn't actually the point, it's all about relationships". Asimov gets a lot of hate, but he was an absolute master of spare prose. As for his characterization, he saved it for the robots.

That's unfair. Donovan, Powell and Calvin all get pretty decent characterization in iRobot. Calvin more than the rest as part of the framing device.

Well, at the risk of this turning into a SF&F recommendation thread (I guess there's nothing wrong with that, but would probably be better for Friday Fun Threads):

Ursula Le Guin really was quite a good writer, though most of her books are bit too slow and contemplative for me. But The Dispossessed does a really splendid job of contrasting a futuristic socialist society with a futuristic capitalist society in a way that genuinely feels like "What if?" and not "This is a pointed allegory." (As opposed to Those Who Walk Away from Omelas and other stories she did write as pointed allegories.)

Peter Watts and Neal Stephenson are two authors whose strength isn't in their prose, but they deliver really slammin' ideas with competent writing.

Ken Liu is pretty woke, but I've still found his writing to be very good.

Daniel Abraham (half of the team that wrote The Expanse series) is quite good; I like his epic fantasy series as well. Likewise Adrian Tchaikovsky, who has a rare ability to write equally good sci-fi and fantasy.

I have many others, but obviously it's going to be subjective. I can enjoy books that tell a good story even when I think writing is mediocre at best (looking at you, Brandon Sanderson), but yes, there are sci-fi authors who actually pay attention to the craft of writing, not just storytelling and worldbuilding.

Those Who Walk Away from Omelas

I've seen a take that particular story was sort of ...very thinly allegorical.

That is, that it was about the attitude of SF fandom in its day to child abuse.

It was a pretty interesting community, as there was a huge controversy when angry fans tried to get child molester* excluded from a con.

*see: https://breendoggle.fandom.com/wiki/Breendoggle_Wiki

Maybe I'm a poor judge of prose and character, but Lem had some good novels, Peace On Earth, and Solaris of course.

Most things by Peter Watts, if you can handle the pitch-black nihilism. Blindsight in particular is very, very good.

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