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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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(3/3)

DEI…. in Spaaaace!

You've already picked up all of the major Culture War points, but I cannot emphasize just how very, very much a product of a bonafide card-carrying SJW this book is.

Pretty much everyone is queer and/or genderfluid and/or female, except (you guessed it) the unambiguously villainous corporate types (the ambiguously amoral corporate types are genderqueer, and the sympathetic ones are female) and a few government drones. Oh yeah, and the aliens. The male aliens get to be likeable, because the females are in charge.

There are multiple conversations about pronouns and nametags. A minor plot point is that the aliens are matriarchal and so it matters to them who actually gives birth, and Judy's transman housemate is really upset that she didn't put her foot down when the aliens were asking hurtful questions. We also learn that her transman housemate was (of course) abused and almost driven to suicide by bigoted parents who live in one of those conservative enclaves where people are still technophobic, transphobic, and religious.

The wrong kind of religious, I mean. We get multiple digressions about Judy's Jewishness. Growing up in an ultra-leftist Jewish commune, one of the defining moments of her childhood is that some asshole kids drew swastikas on her schoolbooks. In the 2060s. At the corporate-hosted reception for the aliens, she stands around angsting about whether the food (made out of corp-paste or something) contains shrimp or pork. And there's a long talk with the other human mommy in the book (I'll get to that) about the Holocaust. See, the governments and corps put on a display to summarize Earth's history for the aliens, and Judy is very upset that they didn't mention the Holocaust. Like, very upset, in tears.

I don't care about a lot of the woke shit and the neopronouns. I mean, realistically, transpeople are not going away. A writer who writes a story set in 2083 that isn't post-apocalyptic might try to wave away genderspecials as a fad that died out in the 30s, I guess, but otherwise, sure, they are probably a part of the landscape for the foreseeable future, whether you like it or not.

The character is Jewish and Jewish identity (and anti-Semitism) is still Very Important in 2083 - okay, I'll buy it. Our resident Joo-posters I'm sure will have much fun with this, but I mostly shrugged it off, other than, ahem, noticing it. Yes, I did also notice that no one else gets to be religious and not a backwards technophobic asshole. (The aliens have some sort of "spiritual but not religious" thing going on and they even have what I suppose is supposed to be a touching scene with Judy and her transman housemate. The alien wants to do a ritual, Judy can't because she's afraid it might violate her own religion, so the transman, after carefully questioning the alien about what exactly their beliefs entail, overcomes his childhood religious trauma to participate.)

There's also a sex scene. With an alien. Judy (the lesbian) falls in love with one of the male aliens. He's such a good talker and such a good listener, you see. So she discusses it with her wife and they agree to invite the alien into their polycule. This is before they've decided whether to actually have sex with the other humans in their household. But they have a very serious relationship talk with the alien in which they say hey, we kind of like you, and he says well, I kind of like you too, and then they have a threesome.

So human dick is out of the question, but two lesbians are totally DTF with a headless alien spider-thing who is male enough to make hentai jokes.

Even that didn't really squick me much, though. (Larry Niven was writing about alien sex in the 70s.) What did squick me? What made me want to DNF it? (I did finish it.) The many, many, many fucking mommy moments. Yes, I get it, the author is trying to make mothers important characters, not like groty old white dude engineers. Lactating women (and aliens) will save the world.

Judy and her wife literally change a diaper at the moment of first contact. We are constantly treated to descriptions of Judy nursing, how her breasts are feeling, taking nursing pads out of her gear, checking medications for nursing safety, hey, did I mention yet that the main character is a nursing mother nursing throughout the book? (So is the alien girlboss in charge of their expedition.)

One of the other characters, who is so brilliant and important that she's called back from leave to help talk to the aliens, is a NASA engineer who's also a nursing mother. She and Judy talk to each other about aliens and the sociological ramifications of Star Trek captains (yes, seriously) as they "gently sway in sync" while nursing their babies.

Like, hitting on this once or twice would have been an interesting non-traditional perspective. Hitting it as often as Emrys does, I started expecting the book to lactate.

If a man wrote this, we could probably call it a fetish.

The greatest sin of A Half-Built Garden as science fiction is that it turns the entire saga of mankind's (hah, see what I did there?) first contact with aliens into a bunch of table talks about boundaries and consent. And I mean this literally, in every sense – one of the big table talks is on Earth, where the aliens come to Judy's Seder gathering. There's another on a corporate "aisland" (the one where Judy is worried about whether corp-food is kosher.) The last one is in the Ringers' home system, where besides asserting their right to self-determination, the humans lecture the aliens about their wrongbad gender essentialism and explain that humans aren't actually sexually dimorphic and give a speech about gender fluidity that could have come straight out of a LGBTQ+ DEI session. At the end of this speech, one of the aliens comes out as nonbinary (no, I am not making this up), and then we get the big reveal that Judy's wife is, in fact, a transwoman.

Congratulations Earthlings, you've spread ROGD to the stars!

For all my snark and bitterness, the real crime here is that Emrys is not a bad writer. The aliens are genuinely interesting (and alien), the situation that she sets up is plausible and has plenty of potential for actual conflict (which does not have to be armed), and I have to admit that her prose was above my usual expectations for SF&F. A less hyper-woke writer could have written a pretty good book. Instead, she wrote a Hugo-worthy one.

Lactating women (and aliens) will save the world.

...

The last one is in the Ringers' home system

Wait a minute. So this alien species name is the Ringers, and some of them are lactating. In other words, we have lactating Ringers. Are we quite sure the point of this novel isn't just to make a bad IV-fluids-related joke?

A lot of this seems like a role-reversal of Independence Day. You still have the environmentally-aware Jewish Savior with the stereotypically Jewish parents, complete with a virus upload to cripple the enemy- only the corporate aislands are the intended target instead of the aliens.

Instead of First Contact uniting humanity against the alien enemy with violence, it unites humanity with lessons in gender and consent.

The character is Jewish and Jewish identity (and anti-Semitism) is still Very Important in 2083 - okay, I'll buy it

Well, Jews have history much longer than 60 years, and for a lot of these years the questions of identity and anti-Semitism were pretty important. It'd be strange if that suddenly stopped right now.

At the end of this speech, one of the aliens comes out as nonbinary

Wait, so they're saying even in alien civilizations, among the stars, on the endless expanses of the Universe, being a "nonbinary" is so controversial and unusual that you need a special "coming out" act to recognize that? It's not some stupid quirk of a patriarchal Western culture, it's actually a universal law of the Universe itself?

Like the fact that N.K. Jemisin is a fanfic-level hack who's fawned over and feted and cooed adoringly as the next Octavia Butler

Hey now, I unironically loved The Broken Earth, some of the most fascinating and well done worldbuilding I've read in a decade. Sure she gets a lot of credit for being a female BIPOC, but damn that series was good. Credit where credit is due.

Governments. The old nation-states (including the USA) are still around, creaky old dinosaurs who are kind of obsolete except they still have armies and nukes so you can't exactly ignore them.

The lack of focus or care about violence and force will be our generations downfall, unfortunately. I hope we can snap out of it before it's too late.

For all my snark and bitterness, the real crime here is that Emrys is not a bad writer.

This is how I felt about Ann Leckie while smearing Ancillary Justice. The prose and writing is fine it's just the incessant use of pronouns and focus on the feminine that I can't handle. Not sure why.

The wrong kind of religious, I mean.

Oh, that's par for the course for skiffy, bless 'em. The wokies have just taken the ball and run with it, but that's (ironically) an old familiar staple trope - religion bad! unless native ancestral mystic wisdom or techo-science rational spirituality or something - so that's the one thing in common with traditional SF this story has.

I can't comment as to the congruence of worrying over 'does this mush contain shrimp by-products because that would be treif' while being a lesbian polyamorous person who (probably) got knocked up by the trans woman she's gay married to and is DTF spider aliens. Strain a gnat and swallow a camel, indeed.

I've seen this book compared to Becky Chambers. I haven't read any of Becky Chambers's books, but they sound exactly like the kind of story I am not interested in (people go to space, have problems which they solve by talking them out in a civilized fashion, the end?).

Based on your review (and having read Chambers), I would guess that the similarity is that both authors very obviously were aiming to write something that exemplified their politics, with telling a good story (or really telling a story at all) being secondary.

In The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, you cannot go more than a chapter without Chambers going out of her way to inject her politics into the book in a very unsubtle way. Neopronouns all over the place is one example, but worse still is that Chambers doesn't just insert them into the world and let the reader draw his own conclusions. She actually has a scene where the main character has an internal monologue about how she calls some alien "xe", because she doesn't know how gender works for that species and using "xe" is just what Good People do when they don't know someone's gender. Never mind that a character who believes that wouldn't consciously tell themselves to do it (they would just act out their beliefs), Becky Chambers wants you to know how she thinks Good People should act no matter how awkward it makes the scene.

It's like that all over the place in the book. Throughout the whole thing, it's hard to not spot the signs that Chambers wanted to preach, not tell a story. And your review here gives me very much the same vibe.

I completely understand what you're saying, but I have no idea how to reformulate this in a way to cannot be pulled apart by an unsympathetic audience. Every single piece of criticism is not really damning by itself. You write yourself she's not a bad writer, she's not even bad at the science part of sci-fi, like Koval. Everything else is a matter of taste: who says a good novel needs a violent resolution of the central conflict? Who says the omnipresence of LGBT is worse than Nautilus (long, hard and full of seamen)? Who says lactating breasts are worse than Kirk chasing alien pussy?

There must be something more tangible that makes me enjoy The Tombs of Atuan (woman writer, girl protagonist, minimal violence) and hate most sci-fi/fantasy written by women starting from Blackout/All Clear.

There must be something more tangible that makes me enjoy The Tombs of Atuan (woman writer, girl protagonist, minimal violence)

Because not alone was LeGuin a good writer as regards her prose, she understood what the fuck the purpose of a story was about. Not to be a sermon, even if you do introduce themes of social importance in your day, but to be a story:

Had he not even understood the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy — although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust — could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream?

So while the later Earthsea stories did unhappily succumb to the preachiness, The Tombs of Atuan isn't about girl power or anything like that, not so crudely; it's a story about that Earthsea culture and the monsters and what the hero/heroine does to beat them.

Emrys' story is about gender and non-binary and anti-capitalism and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. The SF part isn't really the point, the point is the MORAL MESSAGING ABOUT DON'T BE BINARY BIGOTS GENDER ESSENTIALISTS.

For all my snark and bitterness, the real crime here is that Emrys is not a bad writer.

let's see it

"No one on the Chesapeake network is talking about anything else, except for the dedicated monks at the treatment plant. They're reporting the latest energy production figures with great determination. Other watersheds are starting to pick up our news." He waved at screens for the household's secondary networks, projected on the table in between hard-boiled eggs and goat cheese and pu-erh pot. Reassuring, solid things: I turned up the input on my lenses and saw supply chains leading to a neighbor's flock, the herd of goats that kept our invasives in check, and a summary icon that, if I followed it, would show me every step of carbon-balanced tea importation from the Mekong watershed. The networks were familiar, too. Carol's textile exchange and Dinar's corporate gig-work watercooler and Atheo's linguistic melting pot and the neighborhood's hyperfirewalled energy grid scrolled over polished pine. Only the content was strange. The last time they'd all dovetailed on one topic had been when Maria Zhao died and every network devolved into Rain of Grace quotes.

better than all but a few on /lit/. this is not praise.

The first thing I noticed was the air. It might be terrestrial—but kin to the thriving swamp DC had replaced rather than the cool afternoon outside. I'd expected sterility; instead I found something more like Dinar's greenhouse or the aquaculture dome. I tasted humidity, wet leaves, orchids, and something like shed snakeskin. I breathed abundance. [Paragraph break] And then held my breath, too late, as I thought of dangers. Bacteria. Windblown seeds. Insects, or their equivalents, and scuttling scavengers carrying the remains of meals out spaceship doors and into the wide new world beyond. Maybe they couldn't survive here, most of them. But maybe I'd already scuffed my shoe through the spore of some alien kudzu, or coated my lungs with their native E. Coli.

this isn't good writing. it isn't bad. literally well-written, she has technical proficiency. it's uninspired.

i was going to ask you a section you found memorable, then i read a little more:

"Humans really do hide their kids most of the time," said Cytosine. "I thought it was only a taboo in your movies." [Line break] "We could never figure out why so much of your fiction doesn't show children," added Rhamnetin

this is absurd. is there backstory explaining swathes of all human canon was wiped out? or the aliens have a ridiculous standard? or eventual clarification from the humans their picture is incomplete? if not and if the book has more insane lines like this, she's a bad writer.

this is absurd. is there backstory explaining swathes of all human canon was wiped out? or the aliens have a ridiculous standard? or eventual clarification from the humans their picture is incomplete?

At least in-setting, I think those statements are meant to be relative: due to their biology, the plains-folk (which includes Cytosine and Rhamnetin) are biologically wired to react to having a 'nursing' mother around taking a leadership role, and ideally more than one. Doing that mothering results in as much of a physiological and psychological change as any genetic influence does. The tree-folk have something kinda similar at an egg level.

So it would make sense for motherhood and young children to be far more central in Plains-folk fiction; human fiction tends to emphasize kids, but plains-folk fiction you'd expect to see them showing up in action films or military fiction, so on. This could be considered a ridiculous standard (and as aesoptinium goes, it's not exactly subtle!), but it's not that weird by scifi standards.

sure if that were the line in the book. the line in the book says the aliens saw so few kids in movies they thought it was taboo. the perspective character's feeling is "the alien is right and i don't know what to say." but in the real world we know kids are everywhere in our storytelling. so without explaining it, like "x disaster destroyed a shitload of human canon" or "the aliens are weirded out if 100% of stories don't prominently feature kids" or "actually aliens, you're wrong" it's bad writing. for your note, depicting xenophilic spacefaring races who think their experiences are universal is also bad writing, as is using blue-orange morality to show alienness. everybody does "weird" things to fit in. it will be no different for aliens.

i think it'll be exactly the same. we evolved civilization, off endless competition with animals, with nature, and with ourselves. birds don't need civilization, fish don't need civilization. some arthropods don't need civilization, others have it so innately they've perfected it within their niche. apes need civilization. the human is the product of epochal processes that occur on every single planet suitable for life; the human is the product of universal law. if and when we meet friendly ETs they'll be exo-hominid descendants of exo-simians and their most alien quality will be how very similar they are with us.

this is absurd. is there backstory explaining swathes of all human canon was wiped out? or the aliens have a ridiculous standard? or eventual clarification from the humans their picture is incomplete? if not and if the book has more insane lines like this, she's a bad writer.

Maybe the aliens used someone's porn collection to learn about humans? /s

But seriously, I think there is something to that. She's trying to say that a lot of fiction uses parenthood to do stuff like "Rob Schneider is both an X and a parent! And it ain't easy being both!" or simply ignores it the way it ignores shopping or sleeping or studying. Batman isn't a dad because he's a mogul by day and a crimefighter by night, when is he going to spend time with his children? And there's always Robin if Bruce wants to be a father figure for a moment. The aliens could be saying "oh, we didn't know humans actually spent so much time studying in college! We thought they just formed cliques, dealt with relationship troubles and aced through exams by using the powers of friendship and montage!"

Of course, this can be countered by saying, "how come these aliens who aren't that alien and understand parenthood don't understand the law of conservation of detail? Do they even have literature? Or do they just watch unedited reality TV feeds for entertainment?" Which a very good writer would have preempted by showing that yes, these aliens really don't have anything that resembles human literature. Or that they love children and parenthood so much they don't consider that "the boring part" of the narrative.

This makes me think of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross (which some of you might better recognize as Robotech), where part of the plot was that the attacking Zentraedi aliens were literally culture-less, having bred themselves for nothing but war. Watching Hikaru /Rick kiss a woman came as a complete shock to them, and Minmay's singing was literally a weapon against them.

If motherhood is such a big deal for the aliens, then yeah probably it's an important part of "who the characters are" in their literature and popular entertainment. X has three kids (details about them), Y is pregnant (details about that), Z has no kids yet but is trying for them and so on.

The same way I skip over the pages of detail about exact model of gun and ammo and so forth when reading thrillers 😁 So far as I am concerned, Big Hero Dink Atsom has a Big Gun and is going to shooty the bad guys. That's as much detail as I need, but other readers (men?) seem to want all the details of what kind of Big Gun exactly and calibre of ammo etc.

Or the fashion details (for women) in bad popular fiction, where you get pages of description about what designer clothes, shoes, handbag, perfumes, etc. the characters are wearing. "Sylvia Shiny wore clothes - mostly coloured pale blue, today" is, again, as much detail as I need there.

Hah I relate to this so strongly, it’s why Tolkein never really did it for me. Endless descriptions of a forest turn me off a series like few other things.

Or the fashion details (for women) in bad popular fiction, where you get pages of description about what designer clothes, shoes, handbag, perfumes, etc. the characters are wearing. "Sylvia Shiny wore clothes - mostly coloured pale blue, today" is, again, as much detail as I need there.

Oh god, the shopping lists from The Girl that Played with Fire are coming back to haunt me. My pet theory is that when Stieg Larssen died no one edited his books past the first one.

My eyes glaze over at both the male and female versions of this because I don't know anything about guns and I don't know anything about fashion and I don't care about either. I don't know why a Horace de Latté ballgown and machine gun is better than a Sylvain Bompe-de-Bompe missile launcher and tea dress, and I don't want to know.

To borrow Evola's vocabulary, this is lunar civilization porn.

One couldn't write a more authentic parody of a world dominated by the feminine principle if they tried. All of it is there: materialistic and decadent, based upon money and sensuous pleasures, and lacking even in the contemplation of the possibility of violence (even, action) as a reality of the human condition.

The temptation of course is to just let it rot in the garbage bin of history as the sycophantic drivel that it is. But anger and reaction, though cruel mistresses in everything else, are powerful muses.

I wish I had the talent to infuse this world with a good dose of solar Heinlein and write the story from the other side of the bayonets. Because while your political lesbian MIT graduates are having interspecies sex and playing at carbon neutral inclusive and equitable court intrigue whilst swapping tips on how to be a smothering mother with our alien oppressors, you know someone, somewhere, is dying in a ditch actually fighting for something they believe in.

Who are they? What's their story? Because however few explosions it contains, it's probably infinitely more interesting than whatever is happening here.

Because however few explosions it contains, it's probably infinitely more interesting than whatever is happening here.

This seems very much an "in the eye of the beholder" thing. People with "lunar" personalities will prefer "lunar" stories and people with "solar" personalities will prefer "solar" stories.

As vain as it is to say when it comes to aesthetics: I disagree.

I pride myself on being able to appreciate both Hard Boiled and Pan's Labyrinth which are sublimations of the respective metaphysical tendencies.

The lunar essence is not inherently bad or in-conducive to art. It just isn't conducive to the same forms of art. I think lunar science fiction is a contradiction in terms in the same way that you couldn't make a lunar action movie or a solar romantic comedy (or if you can it's definitely a tour de force).

If you manage to sublimate sensation to the degree that you transcend your setting, you are not writing science fiction. You are writing classical literature that just happens to contain spaceships.

My criticism of this particular work isn't so much that it is lunar at all, but rather that it is so unabashedly and inappropriately lunar as to be perverse. And that is a failure. I think a more balanced work would better capture the spirit of the human condition and at least have to ability to qualify as art, and not mere propaganda.

The lunar essence is not inherently bad or in-conducive to art. It just isn't conducive to the same forms of art.

Fair enough, and probably true. But granting that lunar currently-called-science-fiction is a fundamentally different form of art as compared to solar actual-science-fiction, it's still not clear to me that one is less worthy of existing than the other, or inferior in some objective sense, as opposed to simply being less appealing to people with taste for the other.

If what you mean is that a work of fiction should not be too tilted toward one...

I think a more balanced work would better capture the spirit of the human condition and at least have to ability to qualify as art, and not mere propaganda.

... then I can't disagree; but earlier weren't you proposing hyper-solar fiction, and describing it as superior art to hyper-lunar fiction? Perhaps I misunderstood your point. Thanks for the in-depth answer, in any case.

I've seen this book compared to Becky Chambers. I haven't read any of Becky Chambers's books, but they sound exactly like the kind of story I am not interested in (people go to space, have problems which they solve by talking them out in a civilized fashion, the end?).

Yeah, that's a pretty reasonable summary of A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet. I don't think it's the critical problem, though. A Miracle Of Science actually has a pretty similar big-strokes plot summary (including 'scuffle and then people lecture and stop') and I'd unabashedly recommend it, and am a little disappointed it doesn't have broader recognition.

((Or for more conventional FemSciFi, Chanur does it on a few books.))

But A Miracle of Science is a masterclass in maintaining rising tension and serious threat and explaining reasonable motivations even (maybe especially) for its best heroes and worst villains, where Chambers and Emyrs... aren't.

There's also a sex scene. With an alien. Judy (the lesbian) falls in love with one of the male aliens. He's such a good talker and such a good listener, you see. So she discusses it with her wife and they agree to invite the alien into their polycule. This is before they've decided whether to actually have sex with the other humans in their household.

Tbf, some stuff in the furry fandom suggests at least some sexual orientation stuff is very specific to humans, especially since the plains-folk are implied to tie gender and reproductive role a little more loosely than humans do ("work out who’s going to take what role, and shifting what parts of your bodies are awake to accommodate each other"). Though I definitely agree Emrys doesn't take it nearly with the level of introspection that would be necessary from other authors to avoid a cancelling if she had the wrong politics, nevermind enough to make it seems reasonable.

Like, hitting on this once or twice would have been an interesting non-traditional perspective. Hitting it as often as Emrys does, I started expecting the book to lactate.

If a man wrote this, we could probably call it a fetish.

I think the more damning part is that it never really goes anywhere. There's kink works where the kink reinforces the overall theme (sometimes even the non-sex theme!): games with an exhibitionism kink can say things about honesty, noncon or slavery-kink about disparities of power, (most) coming out games have a pretty obvious connected theme, so on. I won't pretend that's always (or even often) done well, but it's almost always more fulfilling than its absence.

And works where the One Fake Science reinforces the central theme can do a lot more than even great porn authors like Robert Baird's statements about interpersonal interaction do. See Zahn's Conquerors Trilogy for an example here, where one species has ghosts stick around that are harmed by radio waves, and Zahn uses this to make a lot of statements about the difficulty of peace and communication across drastically different species including a 'species' that is neither human nor magic-ghost.

There's a pretty obvious plausible connection to the central conflict about ever-increasing resource demands destroying civilizations! Especially if it's a major shared value, and a value the author proposes as vital. Even if it's something the author wants to have a villain bring up for the reject. And nothing ever shakes loose from it. At most, there's a throwaway line about maintaining populations.

That's not really a problem specific to the sex stuff. You don't need (or even want!) all the details for a story to interact with the overt themes. But the dandelion networks and the EPA (yes, it's literally the EPA in the book) don't really interact, somehow; asexuality seems to just be a missing mood; egg-theft is an Important Thing for the solution to the plot but nothing else. Even the climate engineering vs 'harmony with nature' just kinda flounders when the denouement turns into a 'we can coexist'. Charitably, there might have been some parts of the transguy's interactions that are supposed to be about the conflict between strongly gendered and less-strongly gendered people that the bizarre alien physiology is supposed to resonate with, but if so it's either so subtle or indirect I didn't catch it.

I get that the author wanted a lot of it to just be normal, not just in-universe but as a detail to add to a universe, but the more related they get to the story's plot without touching on the story's themes the more they feel like the social-science equivalent of Teching The Tech in the worse Star Trek episodes.

Which, to be fair, is a lot more plausible than most Teching. But "better than Voyager's bad episodes" is faint praise indeed.

"Brazil has decided you're cute."

It really is an underrated series. Well, more underrecognized, as youre the only other person I've met in the wild who's familiar with it, so thats 2 for 2 on rating it highly.

There's also a sex scene. With an alien. Judy (the lesbian) falls in love with one of the male aliens. He's such a good talker and such a good listener, you see.

An entirely political lesbian, then. I'm sure a good 'talk' would unlock her creativity.

Cheap shot I know, but the sheer womanness on display is so overwhelming, and since more cerebral criticism is likely to be seen as just as sexist, I find myself reverting to a primitive state.

Given the big reveal is that she's married to a man, it seems like the character is never actually a lesbian.

A less hyper-woke writer could have written a pretty good book. Instead, she wrote a Hugo-worthy one.

Best burn I've read in a while.

I... I just can't do fiction written by most female authors. I wrote before how in a mostly male dominated Battletech fiction library, a female author snuck into a short story compilation. It was immediately obvious. I got 4 pages in before I had to thumb back to the table of contents and check the credit.

There are a grab bag obvious tells. Long introspective monologues. Often a touch of female chauvinism around motherhood. And of course all the characters emote like a knitting circle full of menopausal aunts. But undergirding all of it is an undercurrent of neuroticism that utterly stifles anything from actually happening. I'm not even talking about big fancy testosterone boosting action sequences. I mean even simple causality flies out the window. Things happen, characters feel. More things happen, with no one exercising any agency what so ever. More feelings. Something resembling a conclusion occurs, but I can only tell because the book is almost out of pages. Once again, without anyone exercising any agency at all. Some more feelings end the... story? Is that a story? Or was it a therapy journaling session?

I can't do it. I simply cannot do it. I refuse to read fiction by women. Frankenstein gets a pass, and that's about it.

Please stop writing this to what you presumably hope is a sympathetic anti-woman audience who won't laugh you out of the thread, instead go and read Patricia Highsmith, Donna Tartt, Hilary Mantel, Robin Hobb and Gillian Flynn and report back.

  • -10

Please stop telling people what to write or not to write - and you are engaging in the same kind of consensus-building you accuse him of.

Several people have already said pretty much the same thing you did ("this is a bad opinion" followed by recommendations for women writers) without sounding like someone from reddit coming in to wag their finger.

Oh, I guess I am coming in from Reddit to wag my finger. I did consider fully disguising my feelings beneath a more constructive-sounding comment but I decided it would be dishonest; frankly, I was motivated to respond to the comment by a feeling of strong distaste for the bigotry of the comment, so I wanted that to come through at least a bit. (I am perfectly happy to abandon this forum if such things are taboo'd here? Let me know.)

  • -11

It's not against the rules to express distaste for bigotry. But you are required to engage civilly with people and avoid unnecessary antagonism (like by going out of your way to express your disgust for someone), even if you do think they hold abhorrent views.

Fair enough, it's your house. I am not sure if you can draw a bright boundary between expressing abhorrent views vs expressing disgust for someone (my disgust for a racist, say, is based on their disgust for others). In my view someone who says they never read female writers is being less civil than someone calling that person a bigot.

Perhaps it's a 'know it when you see it' thing.

Expressing "a feeling of strong distaste for the bigotry of [a] comment" is taboo here because it doesn't actually add anything to the discussion. This is an anonymous forum; none of your friends will be outraged that you tried to engage a neo-Nazi/incel/paedo-fascist constructively instead of dismissing them without a second thought.

Realistically, a large proportion of the users and comments here are bigoted by the standards of Reddit. If you're going to post something that amounts to "yikes, sweaty" under one in every 3 or 4 comments, then you should leave, for your sake and ours. But I believe a constructive and mutually beneficial discussion can be had as long as everyone sincerely tries to "be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary". If you can do that, I urge you to stay. We could use more ideological diversity.

I mostly agree with the policy as far as it applies to completely informationally empty comments. I would say mine was one part salt and one part recommendations of really good authors, however, and was actually mostly well intended (I wanted to make the poster think, "I have gone too far, I am grossing this other commenter out, maybe I need to go and get some different experiences, such as reading the authors they mentioned."

I suppose one danger of this no-expressions-of-distaste policy is that it could leave posters unaware that they are causing contempt/disgust reactions in others. Though to be honest, in the case of someone given to generalisations of the level 'I will not read books by women', said posters are probably getting that feedback elsewhere in their lives anyway, even if they are unable to receive and act on it constructively.

The original comment could have been phrased better, and perhaps criticism along those lines would have been more acceptable to the admin above. However, it seems your objection is not to the comment's tone but to its content. I agree that the near-total dismissal of female writers is based on ignorance, but the correct response is a counterargument, not finger-wagging and pearl-clutching.

The comment's author has now received many suggestions of writers whose works may change his mind. Surely you agree that this is a good thing. But this is only possible because he posted his comment. The alternative is him not posting anything, and hence not getting any recommendations, and hence remaining ignorant. Surely you agree that this would be a bad thing. Therefore, it makes no sense to scold him for posting the comment. Your comment, even if well-intended, was counterproductive.

This forum's rules are the way they are because its purpose is to facilitate free discussion, and we want free discussion because it is the only path to progress. Self-censorship cannot eliminate incorrect or disagreeable beliefs: at best, it will hide them; at worst, it will cement them.

I admire your attitude, but don't see it quite that way. If he was posting in good faith, then yes, he got recommendations and his ignorance is ameliorated. Hurrah. But if he's not, and was rather hoping to garner emotional reward from the rise and attention he gets out of people, or their sympathetic and confirmatory anti-woman posts, then engaging with him is just entertaining him.

More comments

How do you feel about the Vorkosigan novels? In my experience they have a solid voice, fleshed-out settings, and loads of highly agentic characters. All things which this book seems to lack.

Bujold's Barrayar series does a bit of the female essentialism, especially when totally not a self-insert Lady Vorkorsigan is on the page, but she's very much not going to run into the causality problems: Komarr and Memory in particular are masterpieces in fair-play whodunnits.

From the other direction, Diana Wynne Jones's Dark Lord of Derkholm is far more paternal, but there's a reason she got picked up for a Miyazaki movie in Howl's Moving Castle. She very much is against the menopausal neurotic aunt annoyances.

I will highly recommend Robin Hobb's works. Farseer, Liveship Traders, Tawny Man, Rain Wild, and Fitz and the Fool. I haven't read her other works, but the 16 books over 22 years constitute one of the best fantasy series I've ever read. There are stopping points, and the connections don't show up until the last two groups, so you can take it on in groups of 3 at first.

That said, she's the only female author that comes to mind when I think of books I've enjoyed.

Eh, I tried her books and got a good way into the Farseer series but I had to eventually give it up because it was too talky and emotional and all the flaws about women writers above. It reminded me of Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books, that same kind of treacly 'outsider saves everyone but is universally despised but never mind we know he's heroic' attitude, and there came a point midway through one book where I was just "No, to hell with this, no. Don't do the big stupid elaborate psychological manipulative scheme, just do the clear practical action thing".

But of course you couldn't do that because then you wouldn't have the maaagic and how unfaaaair it is about Fitz being a bastard and all the rest of the glurge. I mean, look at this bloody synopsis extract from the Fitz and the Fool trilogy:

Web asks Fitz to meet a crow who is not bonded with a human, but is in danger from other crows by having white feathers among her black ones. She can speak some words. Through Fitz, she meets the Fool and they connect. The Fool names her Motley. Fitz paints her white feathers black so that she can go out without being attacked by regular crows.

Do you get it, huh, huh? Do you? It's about racism, see! And homophobia and pretty much any -phobia or -ism you want to slap in. With goddamn racist, exclusionary animals. Because of course we must have the cuddly-wuddly animals that are sentient beings too, and make Victorian Moral Lessons out of them.

My God, and this is only off the Wikipedia article, I think if I had read this book I would have clawed my own eyes out. I dunno who the villains of that set of books were, but I'm already cheering them on to massacre the feckin' heroes with their handy pots of crow feather paint.

I admire the Farseer books, although I found them frustrating as a boy. The weakest parts are, as you say, the hamfisted social commentary. Hobb could not have been more blatant about the analogy between closeted gays and wit-bonders if she tried.

What fascinated me was her anti-fantasy approach. From just the plot synopsis, FitzChilvary seems to have gone on a standard set of fantasy adventures and achieved a standard set of fantasy great deeds. And yet he never gains status. Near the very end of the series, he is the equivalent of the CNA in a group care home. No one knows his name. Those who do have a low opinion of it.

But Hobb doesn't present any wallowing by FitzChivalry as valid. He was acting out of selfless intentions, not for personal glory... right?

I thought her basic take on this was original and good: the royal family needs assassins, but who do you trust? Well, your own family. But if you give them that kind of ability, and trust them with those kind of secrets, what's to stop them from deciding the crown would look as good on their head as on yours? You make sure they can't inherit. Thus you have a line of bastards who can't inherit because they're not legitimate, but they are close enough in blood to be amenable to the demands of the royal role.

That's clever. But the way it worked out was poor - so you need people with the royal blood but not too close to the throne? That's what the minor branches of the family are for, as every noble house knows. Put the poor relations to work this way! You don't need to have bastards. And bastards can be recognised and legitimised, this has also happened historically. The set-up where "okay, main line prince, go out and have a bastard or two for us to have our new pool of assassins" was clunky. It could work in a Machiavellian world, but this world was supposed to be" if you're named after a heroic virtue, you embody that virtue" and that doesn't work well when you have honourable people as royals. Prince YesI'mHorrible can do that, but not Prince Generous or Prince Noble or whatever.

But that didn't suit Hobb, because she wanted the "Alas! 'Tis so tragic, the selfless heroism of the exploited bastard who is never valued or given his proper due!" bit, and after a couple of books it grated on me. Fitz was so groovy he should have been acknowledged as a legitimate royal but that's not going to happen because the main line are so ungrateful and they prefer to cynically use him to get his hands dirty so they can keep their hands technically clean.

But that's okay because Fitz is so noble himself, he only did it for the greater good and not for personal gain, even though he totally could have tricked them all and taken over because he's so smart and capable and and and....

Yeah, I get it, he's Marty Stu.

Have you tried Earthsea?

If you do, stick to the original trilogy. The later books are disappointing.

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I'm the type to read romance novels, if any on earth were written for straight men -- and trust me, I've looked.

I'm not sure if Sir Walter Scott's novels count as romance novels (I imagine that some of them do) and they're usually from a very straight male perspective, though it's true that many women enjoy them, e.g. Waverley, The Bride of Lamermoor, Ivanhoe, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, The Talisman, and Rob Roy. These have non-romantic historical stories in them, but (sexual) romance is ultimately the point, I think.

My main objections to his writing occur in the passages where Scott is writing a romantic ode to Latin, Scots, or legalese, rather than telling the story. See also Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson.

I'm the type to read romance novels, if any on earth were written for straight men -- and trust me, I've looked.

What's the difference between a romance novel for men and a romance novel for women? Is it something like this:

  • regular novel for men: man wants X, gets X (or Y), gets woman as a bonus;

  • romance novel for women: woman wants man, ends up doing X to get him;

  • romance novel for men: man wants woman, ends up doing X to get her?

Another thought. Male-oriented romances do exist in droves, but they tend to be chameleons. One, it's easy to mischaracterize a male-oriented romance ("Man believes he cannot do X, woman sees man's potential and falls in love with him despite not doing X. Inspired, man does X.") as a novel about X. Second, the flipside of the open secret that females are hypergamous is that males want to sleep around, or at least be the sort of man who is able to sleep around but virtuously declines. In male-oriented romances, the protagonist will have one madonna they want to prove themselves to, and a gaggle of discreet admirers.

To give an example, Name of the Wind is secretly male Twilight.

I think male romance novels were Westerns. That's the romantic image of the male heroic lead, and the villains he has to overcome, and the woman he wins along the way.

Look at Louis L'Amour's books - some of them are what in other terms would be called family sagas. To take a snippet from a sniffy critic quoted in the Wikipedia article:

His Western fiction is strictly formulary and frequently, although not always, features the ranch romance plot where the hero and the heroine are to marry at the end once the villains have been defeated.

I think male romance novels were Westerns.

Let's test Cormac McCarthy

  • All the Pretty Horses? Check

  • The Crossing? Nope

  • Cities of the Plain? Check

  • Blood Meridian? Nopenopenope

Two out of four ain't bad, but I wouldn't say that his books are entirely full of internal monologues, undercurrents of neuroticism, and sweeping character emotions at all.

Whether the male or female lead gets more attention from the author.

Well. Male Gaze alone isn’t enough to make a romance novel; it still has to have the pursuit/conflict of the relationship front and center. But given that a book is about a couple, the character that’s more fully realized is probably the intended interest. In (female-oriented) romance this is usually the man.

This intersects with viewpoint characters in the form of self-inserting. Romance novels are often 1st or close 3rd person, putting the reader in the head of one character. Obviously, that’s a big clue as to the intended sex of the audience!

It’s not foolproof, especially for slash. Consider MDZS, a famous cultivation web novel. The gay main pairing is front and center despite very definitely being marketed to women. Likewise, romance genres like yaoi which use the more distant 3rd person of manga can’t rely on self-inserting. All bets are off when it comes to lesbian romance.

Maybe men are less likely to self-insert, or maybe there’s an author bias against writing accordingly. I can’t say. But there is definitely a style which tells me a book is intended as romance.

romance novel for women: woman wants man, ends up doing X to get him;

This doesn't feel quite right to me. Women tend to be the objects more than the actors in romance novels geared towards women. I think it's more like:

Woman is irresistible to man for some reason. Man, despite being rich and handsome has awful flaw. Man approaches woman. Woman rejects man. Woman is worried man is gone. But man is still irresistibly attracted. Man pushes through objections (could be kinda rapey at this point). Woman is overcome.

Well, I've heard it said that The Dresden Files are harlequin romance novels for lonely 20something men. But, women who encounter the books also tend to really really like them.

Similar to The Witcher, which is really just a bodice-ripping sex romp with some fantasy monster-hunting thrown in, and also has a sizable female fan base. Maybe this is more a case of dudes getting tricked into reading romance novels.

Both series are also very Detective Noir, so maybe that's the secret gender fandom crossover element.

I do like the Dresden Files, but Harry's track record with romance? 🤦‍♀️ Also, the sure-fire way to lure him into a trap is to dangle a damsel in distress before him. By this stage, he should have copped on but no, he keeps rushing to the rescue no questions asked. It is a very sympathetic flaw, but one of these days it will get him into serious, serious trouble.

Only if Butcher writes more, which seems unlikely. And he's already one of the most powerful beings in creation (that we know about), so how much worse can it get? (LOL, don't ask THAT, Harry)

Yeah he doesn't seem in any hurry to start the next novel, does he? I think he wrote himself into a corner with the cliffhanger he left us all dangling on, and now doesn't want to tackle the next book and I can't blame him. Plus, there are a lot of hints about Harry and his ultimate meaning that he now has to start paying out on, because he's dropped too many hints and built Harry up to this peak of power, so the next step will turn Harry from "all these Big Powers push the little people around but I stand up for the plain folks" to being a Big Power himself, and I don't think Butcher is ready to shift gears like that.

romance novel for men: man wants woman, ends up doing X to get her?

Man believes he cannot do X, woman sees man's potential and falls in love with him despite not doing X. Inspired, man does X.

romance novel for women: woman wants man, ends up doing X to get him

Man courts woman with low self esteem. Man has severe character flaw or skeletons in closet. Man fixes woman's self esteem, woman fixes man.

Man courts woman with low self esteem. Man has severe character flaw or skeletons in closet. Man fixes woman's self esteem, woman fixes man.

Don't forget the: Woman is presented as ugly or non-atractive at the begining but with a plucking of eyebrows and a wardrobe change everyone else finds out she is beautiful. And first sexual encounter between the love interests being nonRape.

If you like historical fiction I would consider the Wolf Hall books. Told from the perspective of Henry VIII's Prime minister. Written by a woman but no wokery or historical anachronism in sight.

Written by a woman but no wokery or historical anachronism in sight.

Uhhhhh...

Okay, admission of bias time up front: I am a St. Thomas More stan and Catherine of Aragon stan, so a novel which is a love letter to Thomas Cromwell is going to have a hard time winning me over from the start.

The trilogy is good, and it's a great primer in the absolute snake-pit that the Tudor court was (I was going to say "under Henry VIII" but I think that during the War of the Roses and when his father, Henry VII, was the last man standing, things were not too peachy either). It deals with the religious upheaval and the rise and fall of great families, as well as Henry's marital travails and why these mattered, and it's all from the viewpoint of Thomas Cromwell, one of Henry's New Men who came from humble beginnings, rose to the heights and - like his patron Wolsey - fell at the moment his influence and power was at its zenith.

Mantel is a Cromwell stan, there's no denying that; she's half in love with her character (you can always tell when an author fell in love with their character). He was genuinely smart and capable, but she makes him omnicompetent, he's a Marty Stu. The one good trait she gives him that I can appreciate is his loyalty to his old master, Wolsey.

It's very good on how Cromwell both was an innovator, who updated the bureaucracy and laid the foundations for the modern parliamentary system, and how he bent the laws around to serve Henry's purposes in a very nasty way, so that it's satisfying (if you're like me) to see him hoist with his own petard. Bills of Attainder are a lovely little legal device where we don't need to give you a trial, we've already decided you're guilty, now just confess like a good chap (or lady).

Mantel tends to slide over the nasty implications of what her boy is doing; she dislikes More (being a Cromwell stan, and for the same reasons I dislike Cromwell, being a More stan) so he gets to be a bigot fanatic torturer etc. etc. etc. while Cromwell, well gosh gee he just sort of had to do these things, you know? Seemingly she's ex-Catholic so that explains a lot of her attitudes to "bad old church, bad old pope, Reformation great, we'll just pretend it was all about now you can read the Gospels in English and be vaguely uplifted spiritually".

I would recommend the trilogy but with the caveat that Mantel thinks Cromwell was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

EDIT: I'd recommend, as non-fiction, the biography by Diarmaid Macculloch; a 1523 letter shows that politics hasn't changed much in 500 years 😁

Cromwell’s letter rounds up London gossip for his friend in Spain, and demonstrates a relaxed satirical wit on the subject of Parliament, speaking volumes about his capacity for making friends:

by long time I, amongst other, have endured a parliament, which continued by the space of seventeen whole weeks, where we communed of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, penury, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity, activity, force, attemperance [moderation] – treason, murder, felony [?]concealed – and also how a commonwealth might be edified and also continued within our realm. Howbeit, in conclusion, we have done as our predecessors have been wont to do, that is to say, as well as we might, and left where we began.

I completely agree with your assessment. Mantell definitely seemed like she was trying to rehabilitate Cromwell, and her depiction of Moore was cartoonish.

In particular, the (not) torture of Mark Smeaton before he confessed to adultery with Anne Boleyn was absurd. The idea that he would confess to a crime that guaranteed his death due to being put in a scary cellar wasn't exactly convincing.

The BBC miniseries was also fantastic. They really went all in on the historical realism, including things like not having any artificial lighting, and even refusing to use modern candles in place of historically accurate tallow candles.

I might give Macculloch's biography a read, the reviews on Amazon seem positive.

It is good, and I say that as someone who is probably on the exact opposite of Macculloch in every way (he's English of Scottish descent, former Anglican, Unionist etc.) It's fair to Cromwell and also shows the environment he was working in, the changes going on not just in England but in Europe, and the reasons both for his success and his fall. It does show his flaws, too. And he was ruthless, there's no two ways about that. Throughout his career, he was a fixer for a lot of people, he was lobbied by people for that purpose, and he worked as Henry's fixer and his downfall came when he made missteps and could no longer provide the 'fixes' Henry wanted.

Henry VIII really is a fascinating character and despite reading a couple of biographies, I can't really get a handle on his character because nobody seems to be able to do that; one writer will describe him as a man's man, impatient of the world of women, while another will write him as brought up in a woman's world and thus being less sure of his position in the all-male world of the court. Nobody could really claim to know him, or be able to control him. And whatever one's opinions on their merits, I think More made a better end by standing up for his principles even though he knew this would probably end in his death eventually, as against Cromwell who went with the king on everything he asked and still ended up begging for mercy in one last, pathetic letter because his downfall, too, was assured.

I don't have much sympathy for Anne Boleyn because she did a lot to get herself into the position she ended up in (whatever about family pressure, and all the highborn families were dangling their daughters in front of Henry for hopes of getting advancement, she was - if we believe her supporters - smart and capable, so she was not some delicate blossom forced into chasing the king, she went for it too with her full consent). But her end was miserable, and the list of ridiculous charges was just Henry's ego at work. Smeaton is a victim, too; a bit of a cocky idiot who liked the idea of chasing the queen, did too much bragging, and ended up being used by men much cleverer and more powerful than him because he was a weak link who could be used for their purposes. I don't think anyone really believed that Smeaton was Anne's lover, but he could be portrayed as such, and coerced into a confession about it all, and that was what they wanted: the excuse to prosecute her.

Yes, I don't think it's at all credible that "we'll just sit him in a spooky cellar" was as far as Cromwell went, because (1) he was fighting for his survival against Anne himself and (2) he was not the kind of man to be squeamish about what needed to be done to get what he wanted.

There's a good video about the Holbein Tudor portraits here. I didn't see the BBC series, but I did read somewhere that the visual of Cromwell was, ironically, based more on the More portrait than the Cromwell portrait. It is fascinating to compare the two pictures, the one of More seems a lot more detailed and realistic than the one of Cromwell which is a lot flatter and old-fashioned. Does that mean Holbein preferred More to Cromwell, or that Cromwell made sure the painting would not reveal more than the surface he wanted to present?

Come on, this is ridiculous. Are there books that meet that description? Unfortunately, yes. But there are many quality female authors, both classic and modern, who are perfectly capable of writing competent plots and characters with agency. I've read romances that defeat your description in detail. Random example--no exploration of the mystery genre is complete without hitting Agatha Christie.

I can't guarantee you'd like any book or author I'd recommend, but your tastes are extremely narrow if no female author would qualify.

I was once five books into a series of police procedural mysteries with a sci-fi setting when the librarian checking out number six informed me I was reading Nora Roberts.

I quickly switched to self-checkout kiosks, which respect my desire to read male authors like Robert Galbraith or C.J. Cherryh.

I've heard good things about this new guy, James Tiptree Jr., as well 😁

You should try Deanna Dwyer, Danielle Brown, and Madeleine Brent.

I have limited free time, or reading time for that matter. If I grab a random female authored SF or Fantasy book that comes "highly recommended" or has won a bunch of awards to get it in front of my eyes, what do you think are the odds it affirms all the terrible and odious stereotypes I've come to loath? Greater than 50%? Greater than 80%?

This isn't the trite old talking about about the bowl full of M&M's with a few poison ones sprinkled in. It's a bowl of poison with a few... mediocre candies. The juice simply isn't worth the squeeze.

Motte, meet bailey. This is a very much narrower and more defensible claim--yes, the awards are owned by woke activists. "Hugo-winning" is still an unmistakeable mark of quality, but not good quality. But even if we narrow to SF/Fantasy--you originally made claims about fiction written by women generally--there are still female published authors who are not woke, or are even anti-woke. Baen is the obvious place to start; Sarah Hoyt is one example. (No promises that you'll like her writing, but if you don't, it won't be for woke reasons, and she actually likes men!)

There's also good stuff to be found outside traditional publishing, both indie and web serial, though as always, a random grab will not serve you well. The Wandering Inn is a web serial with a pseudonymous author (though I have high confidence she's female), and it's excellent. Unfortunately, "The Wandering Inn" and "limited reading time" are not concepts that work well together.

you originally made claims about fiction written by women generally--there are still female published authors who are not woke, or are even anti-woke.

My complaints about what I perceive to be the female writing style are orthogonal to complaints about wokeness. You'll notice I didn't mention politics at all.

I also didn't say it's all trash, or terrible, or that women can't write. I laid out a list of characteristics I've found endemic in women's writing, and said I can't do it. I simply cannot. I'm not sure how well you digested my tastes, since you went off about "wokeness" instead of addressing my specific dislikes.

But there are many quality female authors, both classic and modern, who are perfectly capable of writing competent plots and characters with agency.

Already addressed.

I'm not saying you should like or even tolerate a lack of plot or agency--I agree that any work meeting your original description (or even close to it) is crap. The common modern failing is to replace the missing plot and agency with wokeness, which is why I brought it up. But you are painting with too broad a brush to say there aren't any female authors in SF/Fantasy worth reading, which is exactly what you did here:

It's a bowl of poison with a few... mediocre candies.

I was going to bring Madeline L'Engle up as a counterexample, but she's a fantasy author with a few (very few) sciency-themes; no more of a sci-fi author than Susan Cooper.

For me, this is a things/ideas vs. people interest problem. If I want very acute novels about people's personalities and interactions, I can read classic literature and get something far beyond what a sci-fi author will manage. I go to sci-fi for either descriptions of cool stuff (paradigmatically, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) or explorations of ideas (paradigmatically, Frank Herbert or Isaac Asimov).

EDIT: For kid's sci-fi, I suppose some of Gillian Cross's work is good in every respect, though even it tends to be more fantasy e.g. the Demon Headmaster books have a lot of sci-fi, but the Headmaster himself is fundamentally a fantasy figure, since there's no scientific reason for his powers.

I agree that Madeline L'Engle is more of a fantasy author than a sci -fi author, but to be fair the statement wasn't "I refuse to read sci -fi written by women", it was all fiction written by women. So L'Engle is a good counterexample here.

antasy author than a sci -fi author, but to be fair the statement wasn't "I refuse to read sci -fi written by women", it was all fiction written by women. So L'Engle is a good counterexample here.

Good point. Say what you like about L'Engle novels, but plenty of stuff happens in them, and in my opinion it's often (bizarre) fun stuff. It's hard to say what L'Engle is interested in most of the time, which is part of the joy of her books, but she's definitely interested in something other than just people and their inner lives.

I can't do it. I simply cannot do it. I refuse to read fiction by women. Frankenstein gets a pass, and that's about it.

This is funny, because I didn't like Frankenstein very much, precisely because it was so full of histrionic monologues and Dr. Frankenstein acting like a dude written by a woman.

Frankenstein is about as Romantic as it comes, but it should be understood that this was the prevailing style of the time - overwrought and emotional. Men wrote this way back then too.

Conversely, I used to really like John Scalzi. I watched Vox Day beat him like a pinata online, and though I hadn't gone full anti-SJW yet, I started to think…. "VD is right." His cruel but accurate takedowns were intensely petty, spiteful, and personal, and yet he had the squishy little man pegged.

Do you have a link for this?

https://voxday.net/2013/06/25/mailvox-on-scalzi-author/

Something along these lines I'm assuming?

@atelier came along with the goods

If you aren't already familiar with Vox Day, I wouldn't recommend digging deeper. He's fairly smart, but he's a lot more arrogant and mean, and it seems to me that the later outweigh the former decisively. I don't think he's a good-faith communicator; similar to Scott Adams, if you're reading him you need to assume that anything he says is meant to manipulate you, not to get at the truth. I followed his blog for a while, but watching his comments on the 2020 election I concluded that reading further was not going to be a net-value proposition.

I was just kind of hoping there was like one big rant post/series on the topic I could binge without really investing much into it. Impassioned niche rants where the author is totally right about an unpopular belief are a guilty pleasure of mine.

I would expect almost all of it to be found under this tag, though the rivalry petered out in the last several years, so you'll want to go back at least 4 or 5 years go get to the relevant posts.

Thanks you,

edit: Oh yeah, this is good junk food ranting.

Starts are page 22 for other going down the rabbit hole

edit 2: Eh, kind of petered out in quality.

Thank you for your service.

Vox Day used to write about Scalzi a lot on his blog, Vox Populi. I haven't followed him for a few years, so I don't know if he's still going on about him, but you can probably search his archives.

Are there any write-ups on the Sad Puppies situation you would recommend? I find myself wanting to actually have a clear understanding about it, but I don't want an explanation that favors one side or the other.

Also, good book review, but I honestly wish you had actually posted to Amazon. Would make for something interesting at least, and maybe even a response from the author.

I never watched Bridgerton, but I'm told it's about wanting to have a black noble family in the British upper class. I don't mind that in the least, and this book seems to be the same. "What if the biggest issue when dealing with aliens was defeating gender binaries?" and all that. People write fanfics to let characters engage in gay sex literally all the time and some of the best fanfics I've ever read are about homosexual relationships between canonically straight characters.

But damn, you make it sound like there's honestly nothing radical in the discourse itself. Like, if you want to explore gender and whatnot, at least do something more creative than assuming the literal aliens are also gender essentialists in the way humans are. Maybe the aliens are a hivemind which doesn't have gender because the hivemind doesn't see itself as made up of individuals, but merely puppeting bodies who can reproduce.

I found the fanlore write up did a good job covering the timeline. Predictably, it quite enjoys making fun of the Puppies.

The dinosaur porn got nominated as a potshot at the whole diversity-in-SF concept - like, a YOU WANT DIVERSITY??? HERE, HAVE SOME FUCKING DIVERSITY type thing. However, that has kind of backfired because a) pretty much everybody loves the dinosaur porn, b) the dinosaur porn is also excellent SF and c) the Puppies are now not only known as the people who voluntarily named themselves "the Sad Puppies", but are also the people who nominated gay dinosaur erotica for a Hugo award.

I unironically say that Chuck Tingle, whom God preserve, wrote a story that was much more traditional skiffy with his astronaut dinosaur porn than "If I Weren't Such A Crybaby And Gave You Back Your Balls, My Love" and so it was perfectly cromulent for the Sad Puppies to nominate him. Also, the Sads did have a sense of humour about the entire affair, which the blow-up ignored or never noticed, wanting to lump both camps in together as fascist white supremacists and so on.

The actual reason it was nominated was to mock If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love being a Hugo nominee in 2014. It's short so it's a quick read if you want to better understand why its nomination was mocked.

Heh.

Still, I’d know that it was for the best that you marry another creature like yourself, one that shares your body and bone and genetic template.

Horseshoe theory strikes again!

Unfortunately, I don't think it's really possible to learn in enough detail with developing judgements. I'm more pro-Sad than anti-Sad, though I'm also pretty heavily anti-Rabid. To give as neutral a summary as possible...

The Hugo Awards (and a few separate non-Hugo Awards like the Campbell/"Astounding Award for Best New Writer") are annual awards given at WorldCon. Since the 1960s, the process has the worldcon membership submit (up to) five works for each award category for nomination, the nominations were checked for eligibility, and then totaled up. Until 2016, the finalist round consisted of the top three (minimum) or up to five works (sometimes requiring the work to receive at least 5% of the nomination-round vote); since 2016, they use the top six works with no minimum threshold.

((The categories themselves were originally selected by WorldCon committees, but they've since been defined into the WorldCon constitution and members can change them over a couple years.))

There were always some awkward bits to this process: They'd Rather Be Right was widely believed to have been a Scientologist op in 1955 back when the initial nomination was open to the public, a number of the lower-relevance categories tended to be starved for nominations due to the 5% threshold, Best Related Work was kinda a wasteland of garbage 'how to write' and bad fictional encyclopedia for decades at a time, and a few very good works and their voters got screwed over due to the arcane eligibility rules (Lady Astronaut of Mars most famously, but it's also one of the reasons Iain Banks was only seriously considered once, and at that for one of his lesser-known works).

But for the most part, it worked and was considered mostly respectable. Not every Hugo Award-winning novel was great, and a lot of the less-well-known categories tended to collect dreck or be little more than popularity contests, but they were the sorta thing you could point toward as a novelist and be pretty happy.

However, because of the award's relatively insular nature, it tended to get a little tactical when it came to voting. There were only hundreds of nominating ballots, and it wasn't unusual to see (non-Dramatic Fiction) rockets break by twenty to fifty votes. Some of this becomes pretty obvious, like the fifth time the same person wins the Best Editor award with near-identical breakdowns, or from the other direction where Girl Genius starts refusing nomination so someone else can finally take a rocket. But even a lot of the bigger-name awards became hard to clear as the number of published eligible works increased: when there are literally hundreds of good works being written every year, the vote becomes more and more diluted without some coordination mechanism. For the most part, this was just 'award eligibility posts' in the nomination phase (or... less subtle things) followed by highly-publicized reviews of the nominee, but there'd been some rumors of vote-trading for some of the final rounds.

In 2011, Larry Correia was nominated for the Campbell award, a (non-Hugo) WorldCon award for new writers. While Campbells don't cite specific works, he'd published Monster Hunter International in 2009 and that was the work in the eligibility period. While not exactly high fiction, it's a pretty good World Of Darkness-style slightly ridiculous work and got some moderate acclaim. He lost, and lost honestly, to Lev Grossman's The Magicians, which I personally hate but had a pretty widespread fandom at the time, along with some other strong competition.

Correia also claims that at least some opposition to him was motivated by his religion (Mormon) and politics (he's the sort of person where the gun-nut self-insert daily-carry dude is toned down from his real life persona), and that even had he lost naturally, this separately reflected an increasing exclusion within WorldCon insiders over anything that remotely smelled of right-wing and, more broadly, of science fiction and fantasy that didn't match a very specific worldview and flavor, to a point of excluding many works that once would have been Hugo-worthy. Correia uses SMOF (Secret Masters of Fandom) as a joke-term for this faction and viewpoint, but also because it was pretty much the explicit stance of the Science-Fiction Writers Association (SFWA).

This isn't entirely true -- Bujold got a ton of rockets for literal Baen-style writing, sometimes in preference to the (often-better) most fem-progressive works -- but she was very much an exception. Baen, mil- or action-focused scifi, or more gonzo works, including a lot of pretty mainstream fantasy, had become very disfavored outside of Dramatic Long-Form (which ended up doing Doctor Who for fucking ever) and a (very small) block of voters. And this was post-Racefail WorldCon: there absolutely was a pretty significant number of voters who thought about their votes in Broader Context Of Harm, especially given the politics around gay rights (which Correia was mostly holding his tongue on) and gun control (which he very much wasn't) at the time.

In 2013, Scalzi won the Novel award with Redshirts. Some of that reflects a lackluster competition (eg Captain Vorpatil's Alliance is a comedy and not Bujold's strongest), but most of it was Scalzi being a Tor writer with a big following and putting a ton of effort into getting people to vote for him and a slate of other people who also advertised his work in turn. Redshirts... is an awkward book. It's kinda funny, but it's a worse Galaxy Quest in a lot of ways, and while that's praising with faint damns it made it a weird Hugo award. Correia made a joking "Sad Puppy" request for Monster Hunter Legion, which missed the nomination by <20 votes and... well, I don't think I'd have voted for it on the Rocket, but it's a lot closer than Redshirts.

In 2014, Correia submitted to his fandom a Sad Puppy II slate, along with information on voting requirements and options. While this was mostly a bunch of generic (and not always especially-great) conservative or libertarianish authors (I'll admit a guilty pleasure in Hoyt's writing, but it's... uh, not going to appeal to the general scifi audience), one notable problem point was Opera Vita Aeterna by Vox Day (aka Theodore Beale). Where Correia or Hoyt were just Boomer (if Mormon) Conservatives, Beale was an asshole.

I mean, charitably, 'alt-right'? But mostly asshole. Like, 'oh, I didn't call that African-American person names, just made a comparison that was very easy to read as such'-level, /r/culturewarroundup founders think he's a bit too much-level. He got attention for getting in a fight with (and kicked out from) the SFWA in 2013, and turned that into a business model, which to be as fair to him as I can at least meant a lot of his enemies were jerks too. So that Got Some Attention.

Once those effects shook out, Sad Puppies II got absolutely clobbered. There's a bit of weirdness in the votes for novel because the Wheel of Time also separately got a ton of protest votes/anti-votes because its eligibility was very complicated, but about 300 general Sad Puppies and about 150 more that were willing to vote for Beale were largely crunched by a pretty active Tor/McGuire/Glover faction that tried to raise as much outreach as possible to vote against them. Opera Vita Aeterna was somewhat unusual for getting smashed so hard it lost to No Award, then pretty much unheard of because of the necessary coordination.

Correia et all took this as pretty clear evidence of his thesis: even assuming that Beale's writing is atrocious, so was and is Scalzi's, and that didn't result in a giant outcry or mainstream media coverage or a near-industry-wide effort to absolutely smash any chance at victory. Nor was it just Beale's (odious) politics; Torgersen and Correia seemed to be getting similar repulsion. John C Wright said he didn't get fired he quit, but it's not exactly subtle. Nor was even not having public political positions or the wrong gender the issue, as Toni Weisskopf went from second-place to fourth in the ranked choice voting despite having picked up more votes than Correia's writing did (and imo had at least as reasonable a claim as Ginjer Buchanan, and definitely over Gorinsky in 2014, given Tor's problems at the time). Likewise, a lot of the 2014 winners and high-ranks weren't great sci-fi/fantasy, or even sci-fi fantasy: "The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere" has little to recommend it besides the politics, "We Have Always Fought"... uh at least it's actually Related, which isn't always something Best Related Work hits.

Beale took it as an opportunity.

Why do you hate The Magicians?

The Sy-fy show is also way better than the books fyi.

Why do you hate The Magicians?

The Magicians proper has a complex relationship with magic. It's advertised as about an Hogwarts-for-Adults with Bakebill, and Narnia-for-Adults with Fillory. ((The Magician King also adds in not!urbanfantasy with the hedge witches and Underground.)) It's also about how they all kinda suck. That's not necessarily bad as a story decision, but the execution is awful and undermines the central themes of the trilogy (which are at least in theory about wanting things and depression), or the critiques of the original fiction.

This is most obvious with Fillory. No, it's not legally defamatory to have the thinly-veiled CS Lewis stand-in as a literal pedophile who diddles his own male family member into cannibalistic monstrosity, especially as you can't legally defame the dead, but it's doesn't feel like a particularly strong send-up of Narnia so much as an insult for insult's sake. Having his sister turn away from not!Narnia out of misplaced allegiance to your Aslan-analogues is a bit on the nose; having them do so to become a Texan evangelical is just stupid. I'm not opposed to atheist stories, but when you make a story where the crux eventually becomes "what if lionram!Jesus won't sacrifice himself for the world" (in Land) it runs into the problem where the author doesn't believe it, the author's fellow atheists don't believe it, and the religious nuts adherents that they're criticizing also don't believe that. It doesn’t really matter if the atheists and the religious disbelieve it in different ways: it doesn’t leave any meaningful discussion ground.

About the most clever beat for Fillory involves the Watcherwoman's time shenanigans, and it's still the sort of thing that would get mockery were it written by M Night Shyamalan. There's definitely ways to parody Narnia, and to do it well, just as there are ways to critique religious fiction and do it well. But Grossman isn't really trying a parody or serious critique; he's throwing his characters into a knockoff of the setting and giving them things (things Grossman doesn't like) to emote at.

Bakebill... nostalgebraist has a review that focuses more on it, but the tl;dr is that it tries to send-up the hidden magic school as hard and boring like normal school, and the students being assholes. Which is absolutely something that could happen, but it's neither interesting nor particularly compelling. The ways that they're assholes aren’t even that interesting; there's so many more varied ways even an anhedonic magician could do things that the students come across as prats at best and bullies at worst.

These decisions undermine each other, rather than simply being incoherent. The best defense I've seen describes the first book as resonant for someone with severe depression, as an understanding of the feeling that nothing fixes things and all the promises you've had given were lies. And that could be interesting! There's nothing wrong with a slow-burn drama story about interpersonal interaction. It's even possible to mix it with the sudden existential dread of the botched prank leaving a fellow student eaten, or life-threatening final exams; it's anathema to a story where the protagonist is getting a lot dropped in his lap. Depression's hard enough for focused works like Catcher In the Rye (which became far more famous for 'phonies' and the prostitute scene than for the protagonist have had a cancer death in his family and a suicide literally in his view); without being handled very carefully you end up with a protagonist who comes across as a whiny little sod or cause of many of his own problems, and Quentin definitely falls here.

On its own, this'd just make the story 'not for me'. The trick's that The Magicians isn't a bad book. I want to say it could have easily been a great one! There's a few pacing problems, but overall it's technically very well-executed, and there's a few individual scenes that are absolutely excellent prose. It's just the glue holding these portions together's just missing, in a way that’s far more disappointing than a merely bad or disagreeable piece wouldn’t bug me.

The Sy-fy show is also way better than the books fyi.

I could believe that.

The Sy-fy show is also way better than the books fyi.

Then the books must be bloody awful. The only thing I saw about the show were fan posts on Tumblr, and they were more enthused about the four main characters(?) all being in some version of a pansexual polycule(?) but since the enthusiasm dropped off when the show stopped airing (has it?) I don't care.

Even just looking at the photos and clips of the characters, they seemed so drippy that I can well believe book Quentin is a whiny little sod who causes most of his own problems.

As for better opposition takes on Narnia, heck yes. See this artist, who has their own complicated relationship to Christianity from what I can make out of their history, but they get it in ways that I can agree with as well:

https://www.tumblr.com/tomato-bird/674387478831120384/tomato-bird-inexorable-2020-taylor-leong-some?source=share

((About this point, there's a campaign for women's representation starting at the Nebula Awards, a more insiders-focused awards system, eventually culminating in 2016's awards.))

In 2015, Torgersen ran the Sad Puppies III slate, specifically as recommendations after Correia had been accused of trying to crowd out other works. There's a few stinkers in there (why on earth is Kevin J Anderson near your awards list?!), but intentionally mixed as much political, racial, and gender mix as Torgersen could come up with while still finding good(ish) names who wouldn't have won otherwise. The day after that, Beale published the Rabid Puppies I slate, with some overlap but a very explicit 'fill exactly this' setup, and things got complicated, not least of all because no few of the Sad Puppies recs were only willing to be on the Sad Puppy list if Beale specifically was not. And, uh, Beale also pushed a lot of works from either him directly, or his print shop Castilla House.

Later, the actual nomination results came in, and everything went to hell. Rather than struggling to even get some pieces nominated, a majority of works in both slates went forward, and in many cases they made up all five slots. And because of how the nominations procedure works, it was really hard for people to tell if they made it because of Torgersen's recommendation, Beale's recommendation, or a combination of both. A number of authors -- including many of the progressive ones -- declined nomination after the votes were tallied, specifically to avoid the taint. Correia himself dropped out.

Then the media got involved. Sad Puppies II had gotten some mainstream press coverage, but mostly in a 'look at the dweebs' sense. This time, it was a good deal more. For an example, The Guardian wrote about "The Puppies’ real beef is that SF, and society as a whole, has become too feminist, too multiracial, too hospitable to gay and trans voices" while Sarah Hoyt's nomination was one of the gayest and fanficiest things ("All the President's Men" is exactly that pun) I've ever read, and I read furry porn. But pretty much every major mainstream newspaper had something on it, all with the same framework and about the same interest in accuracy.

Internal to the scifi/fantasy world, it got heavier. Everyone remotely involved had to have politics somewhere to the right of John C Wright; the slate as a whole was a couple full Gamergates. An unrelated attempt to clean up some of the leftover problems of the Wheel of Time snafu underwent revision lest it benefit Old White Guys. And there was a massive campaign to No Award every slot any Puppy candidate had, even over non-Puppy votes.

In the end, No Award picked up over half of the total ballots for some awards, and the only big Puppy nominee to win was Guardians of the Galaxy. Laura Mixon's report on MsScribe won, but still got over 1k No Awards votes and an asterisk, despite not being a recommendation from either Puppy Slate, because she was perceived as Puppy-adjacent or at best a tool of white people. The finalists that scraped through that got delightful little "Asterisk" awards, complete with a slideshow presentation mentioning how sports leagues would mark questionable victories or records with an asterisk; a number of other bits and pieces were set up to humiliate them as much as possible. The voting membership rushed through a couple changes to the nomination and voting system specifically to resist this form of slate, which would apply after the 2016 year -- penalizing multiple nominations in the same category, got the most coverage, but there were other rule changes that reduced slate- or slate-looking votes.

This absolute sucked for the Sad Puppies (even many of the ones who pulled out still have a Reputation today), and was absolutely hilarious for Beale specifically, who got a ton of publicity even outside of the fandom. And it turned up the evaporative cooling at the Hugos directly.

In 2016, Kate Paulk ran Sad Puppies IV. It... mostly focused on being as unobtrusive as possible; technically, they promoted Neil Gaiman and I'm not sure Gaiman noticed. Beale ran Rabid Puppies II, but wasn't particularly successful either. A lot of Sad Puppies started to promote the DragonCon awards, a separate and already-extant setup that ran the same weekend as WorldCon and had long had a feud. The Dragon Awards are going ok, as are most of the Hugo Awards, although Best Related Work remains absolute garbage.

((The 2016 Sad Puppy Slate ended up including or promoting Chuck Tingle's Space Raptor Butt Invasion for the short story rocket, which is a) exactly what it sounds like and b) still felt more scifi/fantasy to Sad Puppies than If You Were A Dinosaur My Love. This could have ended up raising some interesting questions about the relationship between Hugo awards and the increasing prominence of adult pornographic media, but it didn't win and most of the time progressives (including Tingle) and Sad Puppies only really brought it up to bash each other.))

Bridgerton is pure fantasy, it's taking the romance novel genre of Regency Romance and dialling it up to eleven (it's not even based on Jane Austen, though the Pride and Prejudice TV adaptations clearly have an influence).

So if the author wants to put in black nobility and everyone is race-mixed and so forth, that's fine - it's not pretending to be our world and forget all the blah about representation and diversity, it stands or falls on 'do the romances work, does the audience find the characters attractive and interesting?'

"What if the biggest issue when dealing with aliens was defeating gender binaries?" could be done well, but by the sounds of it the novel is one long lecture (the heroine has to be gay and Jewish and anti-capitalist and so on and so forth). Honestly, if they had the Marines out of Aliens being the ones to do the lectures about defeating gender essentialism (while being kick-ass with big guns and the aliens are the hippy commune free love poly matriarchal society) it would be ten times funnier and I might even read that!

Okay, that’s one I might actually enjoy. Play it straight (ha!), no irony, “make the galaxy safe for liberalism.” Wait, we’ve reinvented some of Banks’ more militant Culture novels.

For a less extreme example, this might be what I liked about Ancillary Justice.

Putting the "WARRIOR" into "SJW" 🤣

It seems exceptionally difficult to find a good non partisan discussion of it because it is so very "inside baseball" and emotions surrounding ing it have since come to run so high.

The extremely abridged version is that there came to be a perception that the hugos had become "captured" by Tor and Random House and that they had been using thier positions/market share to freeze out independent authors and those affiliated withother publishers that had previously refused to bend the knee, namely Baen. The specific mechanism being about who was allowed to vote in the nomination process, something about attendence at specific cons and such.

Anyway an effort lead by a few Baen authors most notably Larry Correia ("sad puppies" refers to a running gag on correia's blog) sought to break the Tor grip on the nomination process by getting thier fans into the cons and having them canvas the attendees and harvest ballots, to get more independent authors on the ballot, displacing some of Tor's favored authors

This is decried by the head of Tor as politicization of the Hugos, it was already political claims Correia.

The Hugos subsequently change the voting and nomination rules to aviod a repeat.

The specific mechanism being about who was allowed to vote in the nomination process, something about attendence at specific cons and such.

WorldCon didn't require physical attendance, but it did require membership, and few people realized how open the membership requirements were. Even for people who were in the know, most were aware of WorldCon membership as a great deal for voracious readers, since an annual remote membership (I think 40 USD?) would get you a free copy of most of the nominated works in a big folder, than for the ability to vote remotely.

Correia et all's claim was that regardless of who was allowed to vote, the actual voting for both nominations and final round was actually done by a pretty small and intellectually-cloistered group, turning from the 100 sort of people who read the WorldCon constitution to the 500 sort of people who'd read Scalzi's and Glover's blog and somehow stay awake. Moreover, because of the nature of the nomination phase, it was very easy for a fairly small amount of coordination to overcome a lot of other more popular works.

This is the basic outline, but it's worth mentioning that all this played out over the pattern of Social Justice driving community closure, as it was doing to countless communities at the time. 2013-2015 was when Social Justice hit critical mass, and started enforcing its preferences on online and offline communities. People who weren't on board became aware that it was happening, and tried to push back; in almost all cases, this resulted in a fight over legible, objective mechanisms of power and status; moderation positions, awards, control of events and so on.

This one is a more neutral overview about hugo's from Eric Flint

Flint’s commentary leaves me with a much better impression than his books. That’s kind of unusual for an author.

Are there any write-ups on the Sad Puppies situation you would recommend? I find myself wanting to actually have a clear understanding about it, but I don't want an explanation that favors one side or the other.

I honestly don't know of a good source that makes a credible attempt to present it in a non-partisan manner. You can find fairly comprehensive writeups from both sides from which you can piece together what happened, but just about every summary I have seen is hopelessly tainted by the biases of the writer.

Also, good book review, but I honestly wish you had actually posted to Amazon. Would make for something interesting at least, and maybe even a response from the author.

I doubt the author would respond except possibly to demand that Amazon remove the review. I'd have to clean it up a lot to avoid probably triggering some TOS violation.

I doubt the author would respond except possibly to demand that Amazon remove the review.

My view on that is "feck the begrudgers" but then I'm a lot more confrontational than you are 😁

I honestly don't know of a good source that makes a credible attempt to present it in a non-partisan manner

There can't be one. Anyone conceding the Puppies had any kind of legitimate grievience is effectively a pro-puppy partisan.

I never watched Bridgerton, but I'm told it's about wanting to have a black noble family in the British upper class. I don't mind that in the least, and this book seems to be the same.

You missed nothing, it is ordinary regency romance, except set in alternate world where British empire was always racially diverse and completely color blind.

Because old European kingdoms and empires were awesome, and their only flaw was racism. If people of color were equally represented among European royalty and nobility, it would be true paradise on earth.

Very conservative and "trad" attitude, called "progressive" today.

Because old European kingdoms and empires were awesome, and their only flaw was racism. If people of color were equally represented among European royalty and nobility, it would be true paradise on earth.

I was just reading about Haitian history...:

While the French settlers debated how new revolutionary laws would apply to Saint-Domingue, outright civil war broke out in 1790 when the free men of color claimed they too were French citizens under the terms of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

In Paris, a group of wealthy mulattoes, led by Julien Raimond and Vincent Ogé, unsuccessfully petitioned the white planter delegates to support mulatto claims for full civil and political rights. Through the efforts of a group called Société d'Amis des Noirs, of which Raimond and Ogé were prominent leaders, in March 1790 the National Assembly granted full civic rights to the gens de couleur.

Vincent Ogé traveled to St. Domingue to secure the promulgation and implementation of this decree, landing near Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien) in October 1790 and petitioning the royal governor, the Comte de Peynier. After his demands were refused, he attempted to incite the gens de couleur to revolt.

However, the mulatto rebels refused to arm or free their slaves, or to challenge the status of slavery, and their attack was defeated by a force of white militia and black volunteers (including Henri Christophe).

Systemic slavery internalized by strong people of color smh.

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