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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26716 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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I find this comment on Standlee's blog post to be interesting:

The cries of "racism" faded away as the convention approached, for reasons I don't know, and it gradually became more acceptable to criticize the idea of holding a Worldcon under the Chinese government. At first the critics were largely Muslims who were concerned about China's treatment of the Uyghurs. The conversation shifted significantly when Lukianenko supported the Ukraine invasion, and Cixin Liu got criticism for supporting the government's stance on Uyghurs. (In the latter case, I think he was just doing what was necessary to avoid having his career destroyed or worse.) One person commented on my blog that I seemed racist in suggesting that the Chengdu bid was probably bought, but she didn't say anything like that when I talked with her about the con a few months later. -MADFILKENTIST

The thing is, if you took literature and threw out all the perverts, assholes, authoritarians, supporters of controversial wars, racists, sexists, and just plain kooks, I am not sure how much writing that is worth reading would be left.

And science fiction, in particular, is not exactly a field that is known for authors who are well-adjusted, non-controversial people with moderate political opinions.

I get the desire to not platform people whose politics one dislikes, and I actually think that it is a perfectly understandable desire. But at the same time, I also don't imagine that any genre of literature could actually thrive after being passed through the wringer of political correctness.

The thing is, if you took literature and threw out all the perverts, assholes, authoritarians, supporters of controversial wars, racists, sexists, and just plain kooks, I am not sure how much writing that is worth reading would be left.

You've managed to use mistake theory in the middle of conflict theory.

Nobody wants to get rid of all such people. They want to get rid of the ones who are not ideologically on their side.

And science fiction, in particular, is not exactly a field that is known for authors who are well-adjusted, non-controversial people with moderate political opinions

When was the last time one of the right-wing science fiction authors got lauded by worldcon?

To be fair, Torgersen received a double nomination in 2012 for Hugo Novelette and a Campbell (a not-Hugo-for-historic-reasons award selected by WorldCon voters in the same packet), and came close second in both, and Correia was nominated for the Campbell in 2011 (though he didn't rank very high, and that year was an absolute mess from block voting perspectives).

For winners, a while. Pournelle famously never won one, though Niven did in the 70s. Orson Scott Card in 1987? Progressives might argue Resnick, but... not very credibly.

Maybe one of the lesser-known slots like editor, but it'd have been before my time.

I mean there’s not a shortage of conservative science fiction authors. I won’t claim that them being underrepresented in awards is ipso facto evidence the awards are biased against them but considering that right wing science fiction writers are seemingly more popular than left wing ones(David Weber, John Ringo, Orson Scott Card, Larry Correia…) it probably does incline us to wonder why these extremely popular writers aren’t getting awarded.

Ringo gets awards, he just gets them for shooting people. I think he might have gotten one for a romance story published under a pseudonym. Card is old enough to have gotten Hugos before they were taken over; he's gotten a bunch of others as well. Correia has a few Dragon awards, but also a Locus.

The bigger problem for "conservative" (and not just conservative) SF is pretty soon there will be no one to publish it. Most of the major publishers are only interested in SF which is based on the current line of environmental crises leading to a smaller and meaner world, not a greater and more glorious one.

It seems like someone will pick up that particular $20 bill on the sidewalk because this stuff sells and conservative book publishing is already a thing that exists.

If conservative publishers get cancelled, "picking up the $20 bill" is going to amount to "create your own social media and your own bookstore chain". In some cases it may mean "create your own payment processor".

Conservative book publishing outside of some of Baen doesn't have access to a general audience, and anything that gets big enough that it can try to sell to a general audience is going to get driven out of business. There will always be individuals selling on Amazon Kindle, but the audience will be tiny, just like there are always forums like themotte, but the audience is tiny.

Also, conservatives are quite happy to read the works of old, dead, white men, of which there are already plenty. The lack of new sci-fi is less of a problem for them than it would be for progressives.

While I wouldn't overall classify Heinlein as a right-wing science fiction author generally, Starship Troopers won the 1960 Hugo for best novel, and is generally considered a (far?) right-leaning book. So the answer isn't "never". Looking at the list of winners (and limiting to books I've read, which does bias against the last two decades) gives A Canticle for Leibowitz (1961), Dune (1966), Ender's Game (1986) which I'd at least describe that way.

Afaik, the usual claim is that the hugo awards have always been left-leaning, but tolerated right-wing authors and would occasionally even give awards to them. But then in the last 20 years it veered hard off the lefty deep end and the awards are now pretty much exclusively given to left-wing authors. See the sadpuppy controversy. So your description is pretty much perfectly in line with this.

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