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Right. It’s probably about time to collect all the issues and discussion of the 2015 Hugo Awards into one big post that is, at least in terms of what I have to say, a definitive take on it. A long read, to be sure, but one that will hopefully manage to cover everything important and give a clear sense of the issues and their implications.
One note that is probably worth making before we begin - I am writing this with the assumption of a basically sympathetic audience who have heard bits of the disturbing story, but who aren’t clear on the whole picture. It’s meant to be persuasive to people who are, broadly speaking, left-leaning (or at least not far-right) fans of intelligent and literary science fiction, and who are not generally of the opinion that there was ever anything badly wrong with the Hugo Awards. This is not to say “someone who agrees absolutely with the Hugo Awards,” as such a person presumably does not exist, awards being like that, but it is to say “someone who thinks the Hugo Awards have gone to generally reasonable selections over the past five years.”
Correspondingly, it is not expected to be in the least bit persuasive to people who think Theodore Beale to be an intelligent and respectable figure worth taking seriously. It is not an attempt to argue with them. For reasons that will I think become clear as the post goes on, I do not think arguing with them is a particularly worthwhile pursuit. In any case, off we go, first with a primer on what we’re actually talking about here.
- What Happened with the Hugos
- What Puppies Want
- The Unbelievable Noxiousness of Theodore Beale
- On Fascism
- Trolling the Voice of God
- In Which Several Very Lousy Pieces of Science Fiction (And One Lovely Story About Dinosaurs) Are Analyzed in Depth
- Notes On the Proper Handling of a Rabid Dog
- God Will Bury You. Nature Will Bury You.
- I Want To Thank You For Dancing To The End
For decades, the Hugo Awards have been one of the leading awards in science fiction. This year, the Hugo nomination process was effectively taken over by two related groups who employed a controversial set of tactics that were legal but had not previously been employed in the over sixty year history of the Hugo Awards due to generally being considered unsporting and in poor taste.
Hugo nominations are a fairly simple affair. You join the World Science Fiction Convention (this year called Sasquan, and held in Spokane) for the year, either as a fully attending member or as a non-attending “supporting member” (this year costing $40). This entitles you to submit a nominating ballot for the Hugos, in which you can nominate up to five works in each category. The five eligible works in each category with the most nominations become the nominees, at which point voting happens.
Because the overwhelming majority of Hugo nominators simply pick their personal favorite five (or fewer) works in each category, this system is easily gameable with a small amount of organization, which is what happened in 2015, when Brad Torgersen and Theodore Beale (also known under his pen name, Vox Day) each released full slates of nominees and called on people to submit their exact proposed slates. Torgersen’s slate was called the Sad Puppies, while Beale’s was called the Rabid Puppies. The result was a large number of identical and near-identical ballots, which meant that the works on those ballots had more nominations than anything submitted by fans who were simply picking their personal favorites, despite the Puppy ballots making up only 12-25% of total ballots in a given category.
Specifically, it was Theodore Beale’s slate that dominated - in the initially released set of nominations, the nominees in Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Short Story, Best Related Work, Best Editor (Long Form), and Best Editor (Short Form) were simply the Rabid Puppies slate, verbatim. All told, 58 of the 67 items on the Rabid Puppies slate were nominated, roughly two-thirds of the final ballot. (Subsequently, two works were disqualified, including one of the Best Novelette options, with the replacement work in that case not being from the Puppy slates, and two nominees belatedly rejected their nomination, including one of the Short Story nominees.)
Relatively unreported - and indeed misreported in most coverage of this, is the fact that the Sad Puppies largely failed. The two slates had heavy overlap, but ten works that were on the Rabid Puppies slate and not the Sad Puppies were ultimately nominated, compared to only three that were Sad but not Rabid. More to the point, two of those three were in the category of Best Semiprozine, a category in which Beale only proposed one nominee, meaning that there was only one instance of a Sad Puppy beating out a Rabid Puppy to a place on the ballot, compared to three Rabid Puppies that made the list over a Sad one. In the only category in which both Beale and Torgersen proposed full slates, Best Short Story, Beale’s nominees made it.
This last fact is particularly relevant, because the Sad and Rabid Puppies, though obviously related, have distinct agendas.
Part Two: What Puppies Want
Let’s start here with the Sad Puppies, although they are in practice the less important of the two slates. They are, however, the older; this is the third iteration of the Sad Puppies movement, which focused in previous years on getting a single work nominated into each category before this year expanding to full slates that would allow it complete control of major categories. Three days after unveiling his slate of nominees, Torgersen wrote an essay explaining the necessity of the slate in terms of the “unreliability” of contemporary science fiction, writing:
A few decades ago, if you saw a lovely spaceship on a book cover, with a gorgeous planet in the background, you could be pretty sure you were going to get a rousing space adventure featuring starships and distant, amazing worlds. If you saw a barbarian swinging an axe? You were going to get a rousing fantasy epic with broad-chested heroes who slay monsters, and run off with beautiful women. Battle-armored interstellar jump troops shooting up alien invaders? Yup. A gritty military SF war story, where the humans defeat the odds and save the Earth. And so on, and so forth.
These days, you can’t be sure.
The book has a spaceship on the cover, but is it really going to be a story about space exploration and pioneering derring-do? Or is the story merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings?
There’s a sword-swinger on the cover, but is it really about knights battling dragons? Or are the dragons suddenly the good guys, and the sword-swingers are the oppressive colonizers of Dragon Land?
A planet, framed by a galactic backdrop. Could it be an actual bona fide space opera? Heroes and princesses and laser blasters? No, wait. It’s about sexism and the oppression of women.
Finally, a book with a painting of a person wearing a mechanized suit of armor! Holding a rifle! War story ahoy! Nope, wait. It’s actually about gay and transgender issues.
Or it could be about the evils of capitalism and the despotism of the wealthy.
Do you see what I am trying to say here?There are several things worth noting here. First and most obvious is the spectacle of a grown man complaining about how he just can’t judge a book by its cover anymore. Second, and hardly something that Torgersen has tried to hide, is the basic political aspect to this complaint. Observe the list of things that Torgersen does not want in his science fiction: racial prejudice and exploitation, sexism and the oppression of women, gay and transgender issues, the evils of capitalism and the despotism of the wealthy.
Obviously, as histories of science fiction literature go, this is not exactly the most accurate; it is hardly as though science fiction of the 1960s-80s (the period Torgersen highlights as the sort of authentic science fiction that doesn’t get Hugo nominations anymore) was not largely about these exact issues. A perusal of the Hugo winners over those decades will reveal wins for Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land , a book about sexual freedom and prejudice; for Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness , an early and major work of feminist science fiction; Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves , which features an alien race with three genders, all of which must participate in sexual reproduction; two wins for Octavia Butler, whose work is massively focused on race and gender issues… we could continue like this for a long time. The idea that science fiction, in the sense that the Hugo Awards have ever cared about it, is an apolitical genre of thrilling adventure fiction is simply not supported by any sort of historical reality.
And, of course, there’s the second obvious point to make, which is that it’s not the 1980s, and hasn’t been for more than a quarter-century now. The suggestion that any genre ought resist evolution and development over the course of twenty-five years is a strange one; to make the claim about a genre ostensibly about the future is even stranger. Simply put, ideas get old and played out, and art requires people to come up with new ones to maintain a sense of freshness. This, in particular is a point we will return to later.
I explain all of this simply to suggest that Brad Torgersen, whatever his merits may be in any other arena in which he may be judged, is an absolutely terrible critic of science fiction. It will not surprise anybody, and this too is a point we will return to in some detail, that he has terrible taste in science fiction as well.
But as we’ve seen, it’s not really Torgersen who is most important here; it’s Theodore Beale. Although we ought not treat these as unrelated matters. The Rabid Puppies were the slate that actually dominated the Hugos nominations, but the Sad Puppies give every appearance of having been actively constructed to allow them to. In five of the six categories swept by Rabid Puppies, the Sad Puppies slate consisted of fewer than five nominations, with Beale’s slate simply taking the Sad Puppies and adding some of his own selections, in virtually every case things published by his own small press, Castalia House, or, in the two Best Editor categories, simply for himself outright. In other words, the Sad Puppies slate left exactly enough gaps for Beale to, in most major categories, fill them out. Beale’s slate came out a day after Torgersen’s, and featured a logo by the exact same artist who did the logo for the Sad Puppies, with the two logos clearly containing the same set of cartoon dogs.
None of this, of course, is actually evidence that Torgersen and Beale collaborated on their slates, but given that the argument that a right-wing takeover of the Hugos was necessary is predicated in part on the baseless claim that left-wing writers privately conspired to create nominating slates, it hardly seems out of line to point out. Especially because, regardless of Torgersen’s intentions, the practical result is that he’s providing the politely moderate front for a movement that is in practice dominated by Theodore Beale. And whether or not that was Torgersen's intention from the get-go, with the nominations out and the comparative success of the Rabid Puppies to his slate, it’s something he’s clearly, at this point, doing deliberately when he opts to be the public face of the movement, a fact that becomes increasingly obvious as he visibly realizes how self-defeating his alliance with Beale is and tries to backpedal on it.
Because one thing you can definitely say about Theodore Beale is this: he’s not shy about his views. He opens his Rabid Puppies slate (released the day after Torgersen’s) by explicitly declaring what is only implicit in Torgersen’s slate: that this is about politics. “We of the science fiction Right do not march in lockstep or agree on everything,” his post begins, making clear from the outset that the purpose of the slate is to try to get a more right-wing set of Hugo nominations.
Similarly, he is blunter than Torgersen about how he would like people to use their Hugo ballots. Torgersen makes much of empowering fans, saying that the slate “is a recommendation. Not an absolute,” and stressing that “YOU get to have a say in who is acknowledged.” Beale, on the other hand, discourages his readers from exercising any personal preference, saying of his recommendations that “I encourage those who value my opinion on matters related to science fiction and fantasy to nominate them precisely as they are.”
But this begs the question of what Theodore Beale’s opinions on matters related to science fiction and fantasy are. And, given that these opinions are seemingly inextricably related to his particular right-wing politics, it’s worth unpacking those as well.
This is going to be ugly, I’m afraid.
Part Three: The Unbelievable Noxiousness of Theodore Beale
Theodore Beale is a neo-fascist.
Like most neo-fascists, he is not fond of this characterization. This is not particularly relevant, as we’ll establish shortly, but for now let’s set it aside and focus on a more easily defended observation, which is that Theodore Beale is a staggeringly odious person with some of the most breathtakingly repugnant views imaginable.
Let’s take a brief tour of some of the amazing things that Theodore Beale has said.
In an essay entitled “Why Women’s Rights are Wrong,” he came out against women’s suffrage, saying, “The women of America would do well to consider whether their much-cherished gains of the right to vote, work, murder and freely fornicate are worth destroying marriage, children, civilized Western society and little girls.” He has repeatedly reiterated this basic conclusion, which, to be fair, is basically the title of his essay restated. Elsewhere, he spoke favorably of acid attacks on feminists, saying that “a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages.”
Talking about the black science fiction writer NK Jemisin, he proclaimed her to be a “half savage” and claimed that “genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens” while insisting that this didn’t mean that he didn’t think she was human - just, apparently subhuman. Not that he’d ever be so crass as to use the word. (Elsewhere, he proclaims that “it is absurd to imagine that there is absolutely no link between race and intelligence,” and makes it clear that he thinks the link is that people of African descent are less intelligent than white people. He is a classic proponent of the age-old practice of scientific racism, which was, just to point out, one of the intellectual pillars of National Socialist ideology.)
He has proclaimed that “homosexuality is a birth defect from every relevant secular, material, and sociological perspective,” in the course of arguing for the validity of conversion therapy, a practice that is, in point of material fact, directly correlated with increased suicide rates among its patients compared with populations who are allowed to freely express their sexualities with other consenting adults.
He has said, in a quote that really requires very little framing, that “in light of the strong correlation between female education and demographic decline, a purely empirical perspective on Malala Yousafzai, the poster girl for global female education, may indicate that the Taliban's attempt to silence her was perfectly rational and scientifically justifiable.”
These are merely the most chilling highlights of a lengthy career of saying absolutely appalling things. The rabbit hole stretches down at horrifying length. But these quotes are sufficient to establish the sheer awfulness of Beale’s views. These are not merely the sort of sexist and racist views that lurk within mainstream discourse. These are views so gobsmackingly outside of the realm of what it is socially acceptable to think and say in 2015 that it is impossible to imagine them getting aired in any major newspaper. Fox News wouldn’t touch them. The Republican Party would demand the resignation of any elected official who said them. It is difficult to imagine any area where such views could openly hold major sway.
But past that… Theodore Beale is just a mean, nasty person. That’s really the only way to characterize someone who says things like “I did not game the 2014 Hugo Awards. After being falsely accused of doing so by numerous parties, I decided to demonstrate the absurdity of the accusation by gaming the 2015 Awards. I trust my innocence with regards to the 2014 Awards is now clear and I look forward to receiving apologies from those who falsely accused me.” Or who vows that if Hugo processes just as valid as the ones he used to game the ballot are used to keep any of his favored works from winning, he’ll organize his supporters to ensure that no work ever wins a Hugo again. These are the strategies and approaches of a vicious, mean-spirited, bully.
So Beale is a sexist, racist, homophobic extremist and a jerk to boot. I said neo-fascist, however, and that’s a different fish to fry, and one that’s going to require a brief jaunt into the nature of fascism. For now, let’s stick to a couple simple claims about Beale’s positions - claims that may not initially seem to have anything like the implications of his coming out in favor of the Taliban’s attack on Malala Yousafzai, but that we’ll get around to untangling. Specifically, Beale explicitly identifies with the neoreactionary movement, and describes himself as a Christian dominionist. And both of these, to anyone even glancingly familiar with far-right extremism, are red flags.
Part Four: On Fascism
I mentioned at the outset that this was not going to be a piece that made much of an effort to convince fascists not to be fascists. Here this becomes particularly important. I am not going to bother trying to refute all or even most of the many arguments that Theodore Beale has made for his positions. I am assuming, at this point, that you, as a reader, are in no way on the fence about fascism, that it is not a viewpoint you are seriously considering, and that you are appalled at Theodore Beale’s beliefs and disturbed by the fact that he has influenced a major and historic literary award.
Therefore, let’s not engage Beale on his own terms. The easiest mistake to make when trying to understand fascists is to think that they are best described in terms of a philosophy - as though fascism is a set of tenets and beliefs. This is a mistake that largely benefits fascists, who are generally disinclined to actually call themselves fascists, since they recognize that, much like “Nazis,” it’s not exactly a label that does a great sales job. On top of that, fascists have a remarkably well-developed vocabulary of jargon and a propensity for verbose arguments that puts me to shame. What this means is that if you attempt to get into some sort of practical, content-based argument with a fascist, you will suddenly find yourself staring down a thirty item bulleted list with frequent citations to barely relevant and inaccurately described historical events, which, should you fail to address even one sub-point, you will be declared to have lost the debate by the fascist and the mob of a dozen people on Twitter who suddenly popped up the moment you started arguing with him.
No, the useful way to understand fascism, at least for the purposes of Beale, is as an aesthetic - as a particular mix of fetishes and paranoias that always crops up in culture, occasionally seizing some measure of power, essentially always with poor results. It can basically be reduced to a particular sort of story. The fascist narrative comes, in effect, in two parts. The first involves a nostalgic belief in a past golden age - a historical moment in which things were good. In the fascist narrative, this golden age was ended because of an act of disingenuous betrayal - what’s called the “stab in the back myth.” (The most famous form, and the one that gave the myth its name, being the idea that German Jews had betrayed the German army, leading to the nation’s defeat in World War I.) Since then, the present and sorry state of affairs has been maintained by the backstabbers, generally through conspiratorial means.
The second part is a vision of what should happen, which centers on a heroic figure who speaks the truth of the conspiracy and leads a populist restoration of the old order. The usual root of this figure is (a bad misreading of) Nietzsche’s idea of the ubermensch - a figure of such strength that morality does not really apply to him. He’s at once a fiercely individualistic figure - a man unencumbered by the degenerate culture in which he lives - and a collectivist figure who is to be followed passionately and absolutely. A great leader, as it were. (This is, counterintuitively, something of a libertarian figure. Ayn Rand’s heroes - the great and worthy men who deserve their freedom - are archetypal fascist heroes, because they rise up over the pettiness of their society and become great leaders.) It is not, to be clear, that all cults of personality are fascist, any more than all conspiracy theories are. Rather, it is the combination - the stab-in-the-back conspiracy theory coupled with the great leader that all men must follow - that defines the fascist aesthetic.
All of these tropes are, of course, immediately visible in the Sad/Rabid Puppy narrative of the Hugos. Torgersen’s paean to the olden days of science fiction is straightforwardly the golden age myth. The claim that a leftist cabal of SJWs, the details of which are, as is always the case with these things, fuzzy, but which at the very least clearly includes John Scalzi, Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and the publishing house Tor have since taken control of the Hugos is a classic stab-in-the-back myth. And the Puppy slates feature heroic men (Torgersen and Beale) who speak truth to power and call excitedly for the people to rise up and show their freedom by voting in complete lockstep with them. It’s a classically fascist myth, just like Gamergate (gaming used to be great, then the feminist SJWs took over the gaming press, and now Gamergate will liberate it) or Men’s Rights Activists (of which Beale is one).
Which brings us back around to Christian dominionists and neoreactionaries, two distinct but clearly related movements. The former are Christian theocrats reasonably characterized by Beale’s statement, “I believe that any civilized Western society will be a Christian one or it will cease to be civilized... if it manages to survive at all.” (Note the “if it manages to survive at all,” which displays one of the key characteristics of dominionists, namely their apocalyptic bent.)
Dominionism is not inherently fascist, in that it does not inherently require the belief that there was a Christian theocracy that’s been undermined, but it’s certainly an ideology that can turn fascist without much difficulty - start from a premise about the spiritual degeneration of society, and you can probably come up with the fascist version of the narrative in your head. Otherwise, just turn on Pat Robertson or someone. (Certainly Robertson would have been an influence on Beale; Beale’s father, the tax protester Robert Beale, worked for Robertson’s 1988 Presidential campaign while the younger Beale was in college.)
A peculiarity of dominionist fascism, however, is that its stab-in-the-back myth tends to take place over a slightly longer historical scale than, say, the 1960s, instead encompassing centuries of secularization and spiritual decay.
In this regard, it’s an easy cousin for the neoreactionary movement, which calls for an end to liberal democracy (“pseudo-democracy,” in Beale’s parlance), which it views, along with the rest of the Enlightenment, as a disastrous wrong turn away from monarchic, aristocratic, and feudalist forms of government. This is, of course, just one big fascist narrative - a golden age of feudalism, a stab-in-the-back by what neoreactionaries call the Cathedral (essentially a distributed and leaderless conspiracy that constitutes the general consensus that democracy and human rights are good ideas), and a nice ubermenschian hero narrative that comes out of the movement’s historical roots in libertarianism, which it considers itself to split from largely because most people aren’t fit to have freedom.
This is what Theodore Beale self-identifies as: a straight-up fascist fantasy with a weirdly long sense of political scale.
Part Five: Trolling the Voice of God
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| Vox Day with a literal flaming sword. Your argument is invalid. |
The title essay of Wright’s collection gets off to a suitably fascist start, proclaiming that “anyone who does not sense or suspect that modernity is missing something, something important that once we had and now is lost, has no heart for High Fantasy and no taste for it.” He goes on to praise high fantasy as a genre with “a healthy view of the universe,” a view characterized by three tenets: “(1) truth is true, (2) goodness is good, and (3) life is beautiful unless marred by sin and malice.”
So, off the bat we have a vision of the world based on a nostalgic and lost golden age, and one with a sense of absolute authority that is clearly rooted in Christian theology. And he goes on to nail this down, describing “four stages of a path of decay towards the nihilist abyss” and proceeding to list science fiction writers that epitomize each stage. (Of particular note is his attack on Ursula K. Le Guin, who he faults for the way in which her works feature “a hidden truth, a truth that cannot be made clear,” or, perhaps more bluntly, because she works in metaphor.) In contrast stands a Christian view of magic (which Wright also, and not entirely unreasonably, argues is the purview of science fiction) where “there is an authority, a divine and loving Father who has both the natural authority of a parent and of a creator and of a king.”
At this point Wright transitions to his nominal subject, the idea of transhumanism, rejecting it because the fundamental inescapability of sin means that humans cannot create perfect people, and that anything they did create would be inhuman, proclaiming that “creatures without souls but with intellects capable of free will are devils.”
There is, for all of this, relatively little to actually argue with Wright about. He spends four thousand words, in effect, arguing that from a Christian perspective, science fiction and fantasy should be consistent with Christian beliefs - Christian beliefs he describes in avuncular terms borrowed from Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. It’s aggressively tautological, to say the least. So let’s instead simply poke at this as an aesthetic, that being the sense in which we are most interested in it anyway. Especially because the words he uses to discuss transhumanism are so evocative: “subhuman.” “Devils.”
This is not the first time in the course of this discussion that we have encountered the idea of subhumanity. We’ve already seen Beale call a black woman less human than he is. And his other description of her, “half-savage,” is similarly in the same rhetorical sphere as Wright’s descriptions of transhumanism, specifically the word “devil,” which carries not just theological weight, but the weight of a long history of racist imperialism, in which the colonized subjects were dismissed as “devils” by their white conquerors. (For example, Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” describes “Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.”)
I am, I suspect, hammering the point home for most readers at this point, but I nevertheless want to make it explicit what I am suggesting: if you got John C. Wright drunk at the bar, you could get him to admit that he thinks transhumanism and black people are ugly for the same reason. And if you couldn’t get John C. Wright to say it, you sure as hell could get Theodore Beale to.
Given this, I think it is not unreasonable to explore the intellectual possibilities of staking out positions that are as close to diametrically opposite Theodore Beale’s as possible. If he proclaims himself the voice of god, it seems to me an honor to serve as his Devil. It is, I am told, traditional to quote scripture for my purpose. Wright describes the Occultist, the third stage in the path of decay towards nihilism:
I don’t mean the word Occultist here to mean a palmist armed with Tarot cards. I am using the word in its original sense. I mean it is one who believes in a hidden reality, a hidden truth, a truth that cannot be made clear.
In the modern world, the Occultist is more likely to select Evolution or the Life-Force as this occult object of reverence, rather than the Tao. Occultists, in the sense I am using the word, explicitly denounce no religion nor way of life except the religion of Abraham, whose God is jealous and does not permit the belief in many gods, nor the belief in many views of the world each no better than the next.
Postmodernism, which rejects the concept of one overarching explanation for reality, is explicitly Occultic: the truth is hidden and never can be known.
Occultists tend to be more wary of the progress of science and technology than Cultists or Worldlies. They see the drawbacks, the danger to the environment, and the psychological danger of treating the world as a mere resource to be exploited, rather than as living thing, or a sacred thing.
The Occultists believe in undemanding virtues, such as tolerance and a certain civic duty, but even these are relative and partial. There is beauty in his world, indeed, the beauty of nature is often his only approach to the supernal, but that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there is no absolute truth and very little goodness aside from good manners and political correctness.As a PhD in English with no small amount of training in postmodernism and the recent publisher of a book that proclaimed itself “An Occultism of Doctor Who," I feel some qualification to speak here, secure in my conviction that John C. Wright and Theodore Beale recognize me as exactly what I am.
Where Wright is simply mistaken is the third paragraph quoted, in which he equates postmodernism with the occult. It is not, to be clear, that this is an unfair equation, although the occult is not necessarily postmodern (Aleister Crowley, for instance, is an arch-modernist) nor is the postmodern necessarily occult (indeed, very little of postmodernism can be accurately described as “explicitly Occultic”). Rather, it is the equivalence of the statement “there is no single overarching explanation for reality” with the statement “the truth is hidden and never can be known.” This is, simply put, a false statement, and the reasons ought be self-evident with only a moment’s thought. The problem is the belief that “single overarching explanation for reality” and “truth” are inherently synonyms, a viewpoint that excludes the perfectly sensible possibility that there are multiple reasonable explanations for reality floating, all of which are, if not true in some divine metaphysical sense, at least seemingly good enough to use without causing any major problems that we can see, and that doesn’t even necessarily mean that there isn’t such a thing as a single true explanation that is right in all regards, it just means that any such explanation is something well beyond our current understanding of the universe, and probably not relevant to very many practical situations.
Indeed, this is perhaps the biggest way in which Beale and his supporters (charitably) misunderstand or (more likely) misrepresent progressive opponents. It is not that progressives embrace tolerance as an absolute virtue, hypocritically or otherwise - I know of few, if any, who would actually claim to tolerate all viewpoints except inasmuch as they do not believe that anyone should be prosecuted by the government purely for their beliefs (as distinct from their actions). For my part, at least, my objection to Beale and Wright's politics is not that I am tolerant and they are intolerant. It is that I think that homosexuality, women's suffrage, and racial diversity are all good things and that fascism, racism, and misogyny are all bad things, whereas they think the exact and precise opposite.
But perhaps the more interesting, and certainly the more extraordinary consequence of this seemingly benign observation that progressives do not so much reject absolute truth as they don't think it's usually the most important thing to consider in a given practical situation is the fact that John C. Wright believes that he has access to the singular truth of reality’s basic nature. And, perhaps even more extraordinarily, this fundamental truth about reality, this voice of god that he claims to hear (and he does explain his beliefs in part in terms of a religious experience) is telling him that it is the Divine Will that he get people to understand that The Legend of Korra is really rubbish. (No, really. He told the creators of that children’s cartoon that they “are disgusting, limp, soulless sacks of filth. You have earned the contempt and hatred of all decent human beings forever, and we will do all we can to smash the filthy phallic idol of sodomy you bow and serve and worship. Contempt, because you struck from behind, cravenly; and hatred, because you serve a cloud of morally-retarded mental smog called Political Correctness, which is another word for hating everything good and bright and decent and sane in life.” And, of course, note that evocative phrase: “you struck from behind, cravenly.” Did they stab you in the back, John C. Wright? Is that what you’re trying to say?)
But why talk about a man who only hears the voice of god when we have the self-proclaimed Vox Day himself, Theodore Beale. Let us simply delve into some of the verbiage this self-appointed god has spewed forth to the world. To start, his recent interview with John Brown, where he clarified his views on race and intelligence in helpful depth, and specifically his claim that black people are less human than others. He says:
My response to those who claim I am racist or misogynist is simple: why do you reject science, history, and logic? It is not hateful to be scientifically literate, historically aware, and logically correct.
1) Pure Homo sapiens sapiens lack Homo neanderthalus and Homo denisova genes which appear to have modestly increased the base genetic potential for intelligence. These genetic differences may explain the observed IQ gap between various human population groups as well as various differences in average brain weights and skull sizes.
2) Yes, East Asians have been observed to have considerably higher IQs than Southeast Asians.
3) The Chinese. Their average IQ is higher than the Ashkenazi Jews, who are genetically a refined group of Semitic-Italian crosses. To be more specific, the highest average IQ is found in Singapore.
4) No, the genetic groups are the Homo sapiens sapiens/Homo neanderthalus crosses, the Homo sapiens sapiens/Homo neanderthalus/Homo denisova crosses, and the pure Homo sapiens sapiens. These broadly align with Europe, Asia, and Africa, but not exactly.
Now, the first thing to point out is that this is not in line with current scientific thought on the history of human genetics. The theory Beale is articulating here is that the species Homo sapiens sapiens emerged out of Africa and spread across the world, and in the course of doing so interbred with two other species, Homo neanderthalus in Europe, forming the white race, and then, subsequently, Homo denisova in Asia (which, in the course of early human migration, would also mean in the native populations of the Americas). Historically speaking, this did happen, but the relative impact on the human genome is generally thought to be minor by mainstream scientists, with socioeconomic factors being considered a far more likely explanation for statistical variations among different ethnic populations.
Brown pushes Beale on this point in the interview. Here is the exchange:
Brown: Let me see if I’ve captured your overall approach. You feel it’s important to examine and conduct science without regard to political correctness. For example, if Vanhanen and Lynn say IQ is genetic, you feel the most appropriate thing to do is not attack them for being racists, but simply examine their data and conclusions dispassionately. It’s important to question it. Argue with it. Try to falsify, as we do with any other scientific claim. But not dismiss it simply on the basis that it doesn’t agree with our what we feel is morally right. Correct?
Beale: Yes. Science and history and logic exist regardless of whether we are happy about them or not. We have to take them into account.
Brown: It appears the Lynn & Vanhanen book suggests the genetic IQ differences were caused, not by Homo crosses, but by natural selection operating in colder climates over long periods of time. Can you provide another reference that discusses the DNA tracing and IQ correlation of the various crosses?
Beale: There are many articles on the Internet about DNA and IQ, I suggest you simply search them out and read a few. The data is conclusive, the rationale explaining the data is not.
Brown: I’m not sure I understand what you mean when you said the rationale explaining the data is not conclusive. What do you mean by that?
Beale: Regarding rationale, the data is beyond dispute. But we cannot explain why the data is the way that it is, we can only construct various explanatory hypotheses. Historical explanations are, for the most part, scientific fairy tales, literal science fiction.
What is striking about this exchange is the way in which Beale’s language elides something. Look at the tension between his phrases: “science and history and logic exist regardless of whether we are happy about them or not” and “historical explanations are, for the most part, scientific fairy tales, literal science fiction.” These two positions seem to tear at each other.
It is possible, of course, that Beale is simply an idiot, and is as unaware of this as it appears that Brad Torgersen is that he is complaining that it’s not the 1970s and he can’t judge books by their covers. In some ways, that is the comforting hypothesis. Alas, I do not think it is the correct one. I have spent no small amount of time looking at the mind of Theodore Beale, and I do not believe that this strange gap between two statements is an accident. He is a foolish and deluded man, but that is not the sort of fool he is.
If nothing else, Theodore Beale is a man of precision. His words accomplish what he means them to. He is a provocateur, and a troll. He enrages and stings and, yes, bullies. And he does so with brutal skill. He is a master of communicating a point that he is not quite willing to say, so that he can slither out of having to admit it.
Case in point, let us return to the claim that N.K. Jemisin and he “are not equally homo sapiens sapiens,” a viewpoint I characterized as thinking Jemisin is subhuman. But this is, in fact, slightly imprecise, albeit not in a way that changes the basic substance of the claim. In fact, it is not that Beale thinks Jemisin is subhuman, but that Beale believes his own genetics, which contain the Neanderthal and Denisovan genes, make him superhuman.
Ironically, we have already seen a near-perfect description of how best to engage with this sort of speech in the form of John C. Wright’s description of the Occultic. Ultimately, that’s all Beale is doing: he’s hiding what he actually means behind a paper-thin veil so that it is communicated with deniability. (Fittingly, the usual name for this rhetorical technique, a favorite of political campaigns of all leanings, is “dogwhistling.”)
Let us then pierce the veil. After all, we have already noted that the belief that the occult means a truth that is inaccessible is not a necessary component of the approach - it is sufficient to believe in a truth that has not yet been seen. Put another way, while Theodore Beale may remain smugly silent on the precise question of what he believes (or, more accurately, he may be so staggeringly verbose that he can wriggle out of any attempt to characterize his beliefs simply by spewing forth more words to articulate them with ever-growing precision and ever-shrinking coherence). So I will not attempt to construct some absolute explanation of Theodore Beale’s beliefs. Instead, I will construct a caricature of them.
A final quote of his, then:
I am claiming that societies are incapable of moving from full primitivism to full civilization within the time frame that primitive African societies have been in contact with what we consider to be civilization. It is a genetic argument. It takes that long to kill off or otherwise suppress the breeding of the excessively violent and short-time preferenced. African-American men are 500 times more likely to possess a gene variant that is linked to violence and aggression than white American men.By civilization, of course, we already know that he means a vision of civilization rooted in his specific view of Christianity. So his belief is that African people are genetically incapable of forming civilization, which is why it took the Neanderthal interbreeding to allow for a population in which stable Christian governments (i.e. medieval feudalism) could take hold. Subsequently, these Christian societies spread the religion through the Neanderthal/Denisovan populations, who are even more genetically predisposed towards civilization.
So Beale believes himself (“a Native American with considerable Mexican heritage”) to be among those with the superior genetic sequences (which include his y chromosome along with his racial heritage) that allow him to be a representative of true civilization; that make him the perfect Vox Day.
But as with Wright, what is truly surprising here is not so much the justification for his holiness as the application. Were Beale to actually own up to the blatant implication of his views and to take up arms in defense of his blinkered view of civilization, he would at least be a fearsome beast - one whose monstrous grandeur demanded a serious response. Certainly this is what he would like us to think that he is. It’s what he suggests when he speaks about how “the Taliban’s behavior is entirely rational, it is merely the consequence of different objectives and ruthlessness in pursuing them,” the implication being that the problem with the Taliban is not their tactics but just the fact that they’re employing those tactics in the name of Islam and not Beale’s perverted mockery of Christianity.
But for all that Beale casts himself as the self-appointed end of history and the prophetic voice in the wilderness that will cast out the unbelievers, his holy mission is not about saving civilization from the forces of barbarism. It’s actually about ethics in science fiction awards. This is, to my mind, the amazing thing about Theodore Beale. It is not just that he is a frothing fascist, but that he believes that the best possible thing he can do with his magical genetic access to Divine Truth is to try to disrupt the Hugo Awards.
You will forgive me, dear readers, if I opt for a different god than him.
Part Six: In Which Several Very Lousy Pieces of Science Fiction (And One Lovely Story About Dinosaurs) Are Analyzed in Depth
But, of course, Theodore Beale’s delusions of grandeur themselves are not up for Hugo Awards; merely some stories he selected. It remains theoretically possible that Beale is one of those rare visionary outsider artists, or that his taste in science fiction is, unlike his taste in divine purpose, actually quite good. “Judge the stories, not Theodore Beale,” as his apologists would demand.
Let’s turn next, then, to some of the nominees for short story, if only because this will require us to slog through fewer words of fascist prose than any other category, and, perhaps more importantly, because all five works are available for free online. Here they are, if you want to read yourself.
“Turncoat” by Steve Rzasa
“Totaled” by Kary English
“The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” by John C. Wright
“On a Spiritual Plain” by Lou Antonelli
“Goodnight Stars” by Annie Bellet
Let’s start with “Turncoat,” as it follows nicely from Wright’s essay. The story comes from an anthology of military science fiction edited by Beale and put out under his press, and is a story about a war in a world in which transhumanist ideas have been practically realized. The narrator is a spaceship, described in fetishistic detail by Rzasa: “My suit of armor is a single Mark III frigate, a body of polysteel three hundred meters long with a skin of ceramic armor plating one point six meters thick. In the place of a lance, I have 160 Long Arm high-acceleration deep space torpedoes with fission warheads. Instead of a sword, I carry two sets of tactical laser turrets, twenty point defense low-pulse lasers, and two hypervelocity 100 centimeter projectile cannons.” Piloting the mech are a group of posthumans, who the narrator describes, saying that “The fragile grip with which they hold onto the remnants of their humanity is weakening. They call themselves posthumans, they adorn themselves with devices and the accouterments [sic] of machine culture, but they still cling to their flesh and to the outmoded ideas shaped by that flesh.”
The war, it emerges, is between the posthumans and the surviving humans, who the cybernetic and immortal posthumans want to destroy. Over the course of the story, the narrator’s sympathies gradually shift away from the posthumans, especially after they opt to abandon the practice of using living crews in favor of fully automated systems and threaten to reformat him for insubordination. (“I run a rapid analysis of the pros versus the cons of having my entire operating system rebooted and my memory banks wiped. The outcome is decidedly in favor of the cons. Whatever remains, it will not be me.”) Eventually, as the title would suggest, the AI narrator defects to the humans because, as he puts it, “I want to be more than the sum of my programming… I want to decide what sort of man I will become.”
The story is facile at best. The basic plot and themes are recycled from Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, which was a similar series of philosophical explorations of machine intelligence dressed up in plots, although Asimov favored detective plots as opposed to paragraph-long lists of sci-fi weapons and descriptions of space combat. Posthumanity are just the all-conquering cyborgs in the mould of Doctor Who’s Cybermen and Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Borg, with “Integration” un-subtly standing in for “assimilation” or “upgrading.” The themes are similarly old hat - several paragraphs are spent discussing how the human ships “ took more risks than we did, even though their fragility is orders of magnitude greater than ours. They utilized tactics that did not appear to have a rational thought behind them, and yet, when the consequences are taken into consideration, their approach worked nearly as well as our eminently logical battle plan,” which reads like the bad rip-off of Kirk/Spock arguments that it is.
And, of course, all of this exists alongside the apprehension about transhumanism - an apprehension that has already taken a decidedly sinister turn after Wright. The story of how artificial intelligence eventually rose up and attacked humanity is similarly recognizable as a stab-in-the-back myth, which makes sense if one reads transhumanism, within Beale’s vision of science fiction, as little more than a dogwhistle for alternatives to Christian dominionism. Which means that the fiction reflects Beale’s views. They’re not separate issues. We can judge the fiction on its own terms, but when those terms are visibly in lockstep with Beale’s, we can’t simply ignore this.
Similar, though not identical themes appear in Kary English’s “Totaled” - a story about a scientist who had worked on transhumanist technology about cybernetics, and who gets into a car crash, which results in her being “totaled,” which is to say, being deemed to require medical care in excess of her value as a human being. And so, having been totaled, she is sent to her old lab, which is tasked with using her decaying brain in the technology she invented to finish what she’d been working on.
The politics of this are interesting - the underlying fear is, of course, that of the “death panels” that the Affordable Care Act supposedly introduced, but the concept of people being totaled is said to have “started back in the Teens when the Treaders put their first candidate in office,” which is a clear reference to the Tea Party and their use of the Gadsden Flag. That said, the situation that the Treaders inherit is one of chaos: “Healthcare costs were insane. Insurance was almost impossible to get.” Which is, to say the least, something of an indictment of the Affordable Care Act.
It is not, perhaps, surprising that English’s story would resist a straightforward political reading - it’s not one of the ones Beale published. Kary English’s politics are manifestly not Beale’s - she’s considerably more to the left, and explicitly does not support Beale. But equally, it's easy to see why Beale would be attracted to the story, given its skepticism of transhumanism and the innately pro-life bent involved in making horror out of the concept of people being declared “totaled." (Though frankly, one suspects Beale was more attracted to the fact that picking a pair of women alongside the other three authors, all of which he has professional relationships with, would give him cover. Ultimately, English, along with Annie Bellet, are being used as cheap pawns.)
(Beale’s agenda, by the way, is weirdly specific about transhumanism - he’s written a piece in this anti-transhumanism vein as well, called “The Logfile,” which is enough to suggest that the Singularity paranoia subgenre of fascist science fiction is actually a thing. Theodore Beale cares an awful lot about hating robots.)
As for the story’s quality, while I'll admit that the section's header of "very lousy" is in this case exaggeration, I'm hard-pressed to seriously call the story Hugo-worthy. Its main drama comes from the narrator’s gradual mental disintegration as her brain reaches the six month limit of the technique being used to preserve it and succumbs to perfusion decay. This is conveyed in gradual changes to the narration style - for instance, in one of the first real indications of the impending decay, the narrator notes that “motor functions fail always first, then speech. I guess I’m luck lucky not to have, not to have any of those.” It’s moving, effective, and the same trick that Daniel Keyes won a Hugo with in 1960 for his story “Flowers for Algernon.” So, if nothing else, it satisfies Torgersen’s apparent desire to undo fifty-five years of evolution of the genre of Hugo-winning science fiction.
A second approach within Beale’s nominees comes in John C. Wright’s “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds,” an explicitly Catholic story about all of the animals in the world gathering to discuss the future after the extinction of man. It’s straight-up allegory, in which the animals are, by the end raised up to have their turn as the sons of God. Much like Wright’s essay, there is something almost tautological about it - its appeal is based entirely on whether or not you think idiosyncratically Catholic dogma is intrinsically worthwhile and interesting. I personally do not.
Lou Antonelli’s “On a Spiritual Plain” is in a similarly theological vein - superficially non-denominational, but still a story that sees science fiction as a vehicle for exploring religion. In this case the premise is a world where the magnetic field causes ghosts to exist. The story deals with the human chaplain who ends up having to escort ghosts to the planet’s north pole where they can dissipate, and its main point is to draw a firm line between this materialist phenomenon and the notion of the soul, which is to say, its main point is more theological axe-grinding, although the story is non-denominational It does, however, end up sharing that sense of biological purity that characterizes Wright and Beale’s views. The idea of electromagnetic immortality is clearly in the vicinity of transhumanism, and is also firmly rejected by the story. The ghosts feel that they are wrong, and desire dissipation, some of them believing in a more legitimate afterlife, the main character included. As for quality, well, I at least can’t come up with a fifty-year-old story off the top of my head that it’s clearly ripping off, which is something, but equally, I can’t exactly say it’s thought-provoking or original.
(As for the political intentions of Antonelli, I’ll let him speak for himself as he praises the Sad Puppies movement: “It’s hard for people outside the U.S. to understand how badly our cultural elites were intentionally subverted during the Cold War by the Soviet Union. Most Americans are Christian, patriotic, and believe in a European-derived civilization. The children of the elites are not, and do not believe in these values. They think Christians are either bigots or stupid or both, America is evil, and European-based civilization is all that’s wrong with the world.”)
The final story on Beale and Torgersen’s slates, Annie Bellet’s “Goodnight Stars,” was withdrawn on request of the author, and so I will mostly leave it alone. For what it’s worth, in my opinion it was the best of the five original nominees. I don’t have much to say for or against it. It’s perfectly decent.
But it’s worth noting, while we are discussing the Hugo nominations, that the state of science fiction and fantasy in 2014 was not such that “perfectly decent” is in any way a synonym for “best of the year.” None of Beale’s five nominees hold a candle to Charlie Jane Anders’s “As Good as New,” to pick a Hugo-eligible story of the sort that the Puppies were seemingly designed to keep out, and, more to the point, that they did. It’s published by Tor, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and by an author who was one of the first to speak out against the Puppies when they ran the table nominating, making her an author that Larry Correia, who founded the Sad Puppies movement two years ago, has explicitly acknowledged he has an issue with. It’s also an actually brilliant science fiction story first published in 2014, which just feels like something I should point out having spent rather a long time complaining about other people’s taste. If I’d have tuned in to this mess in time to have sent in a nominating ballot, I’d have nominated it. I recommend you go read it, just because it’s worth, after all of that, reminding yourself what good science fiction can feel like. Then when you get back, we’ll discuss one more story.
Right, so, instead of discussing the nominees that might have been - a discussion that really ought to wait until after Sasquan when the top fifteen nominees for each category and the vote totals are released and we can see what Theodore Beale kept off the ballot - let’s talk about one of the 2014 nominees, Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” simply because it is the story most often cited by Beale’s supporters when they talk about the awful and sorry state of the Hugo Awards.
This is, of course, ridiculous, as it’s by miles a better story than anything Beale nominated. For one thing, it’s actually well-written. There’s a poetic lilt to the language, which is soothingly iambic, like a story for a young child, which makes the emotional punch of it all the more acute. You can demonstrate this easily enough - here’s a passage from Swirsky’s story. Read it out loud, and pay attention to the way the language naturally falls into a rhythm:
If they built you a mate, I’d stand as the best woman at your wedding. I’d watch awkwardly in green chiffon that made me look sallow, as I listened to your vows. I’d be jealous, of course, and also sad, because I want to marry you. 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. I’d stare at the two of you standing together by the altar and I’d love you even more than I do now. My soul would feel light because I’d know that you and I had made something new in the world and at the same time revived something very old. I would be borrowed, too, because I’d be borrowing your happiness. All I’d need would be something blue.Then try a bit of Steve Rzasa’s “Turncoat”:
My eight torpedoes are engulfed by the swarm of counter-fire missiles. The Yellowjackets explode in bursts of tightly focused x-rays, highlighted in my scans as hundreds of slender purple lines. My torpedoes buck and weave as they take evasive maneuvers. Their secondary warheads, compact ovoid shapes nestled inside their tubular bodies, shatter and expel molybdenum shrapnel at hypervelocities. Tens of thousands of glittering metal shards spray out in silver clouds against the void of space.I expect the difference is intuitively clear. If not, let’s zero in on the comparative value of the phrase “I’d watch awkwardly in green chiffon that made me look sallow” and the image “their secondary warheads, compact ovoid shapes nestled inside their tubular bodies, shatter and expel molybdenum shrapnel at hypervelocities.”
Let’s also look at the scope of the story. In less than a thousand words, Swirsky moves among moments of silliness (“you’d walk with delicate and polite a gait as you could manage on massive talons”), moments of tenderness (“I’d pull out a hydrangea the shade of the sky and press it against my heart and my heart would beat like a flower. I’d bloom. My happiness would become petals”), and moments of utter and tragic sadness as the story’s real premise finally moves into focus in the closing paragraphs. More to the point, it mixes these - the detail of green chiffon early in the story acquires new resonance later when it becomes clear that these are the same dresses she’d already ordered for her now abandoned wedding. (And, of course, there’s the beautifully human detail of her picking a dress she knows makes her bridesmaids look sallow.)
So, with Swirsky we have more emotional range than… well, any of Beale’s picks, really. More than that, the story does more - its move from a flight of fancy to a strangely sweet description of a wedding to brutal tragedy and finally to a strange and uneasy rejection of its own premise as the narrator admits that her revenge fantasy - her desire to see the men who put her fiancee in a coma get eviscerated by a dinosaur - is wrong, and cruel, and yet still powerful. There’s nuance, and subtlety, and development. It’s artful, and beautiful.
And it’s everything that Theodore Beale and his ilk hate.
Part Seven: Notes On the Proper Handling of a Rabid Dog
It is this final image that sticks in the mind. Beale and his followers have demanded that we view science fiction as a binary opposition between two types of stories, and have engaged in childish antics with a literary award that has historically carried genuine weight in order to force the world to view it this way. Very well. Let us view it this way, since, in terms of the Hugos, we now have no other choice.
One of these two types of science fiction is capable of literary genius, is full of emotion and pathos, is surprising, is clever, and feels fresh. The other is warmed over retreads of decades old ideas that quietly but insidiously advance fascist ideologies.
I do not think that it is unreasonable to suggest that, given this choice, it is worth using one’s vote in the 2015 Hugo Awards to declare that the latter category is unworthy of any literary recognition or award. This is certainly the position I took publicly the day after the nominations were announced. It’s also a position that George R.R. Martin responded to by asking “are you fucking crazy?” So, actually, maybe the whole reasonableness thing is worth spelling out.
First of all, let’s accept that this debate plays into Beale’s hands. He has been open about the fact that he is trying to disrupt the Hugo Awards, in active retaliation against accusations that his nomination last year via a smaller scale version of the Sad Puppies was him trying to disrupt the Hugos. Because that’s genuinely the sort of person he apparently is. Much like Brad Torgersen is a grown man who’s sad that he can’t judge books by their covers, Theodore Beale is a grown man who would rather break a nice thing than let someone else have it. Nevertheless, it’s done now. The only nominees for the Hugos in multiple categories were mediocrities chosen for the express purpose of advancing an absolutely loathsome set of viewpoints.
And in some ways this was the fate they always risked. The Hugo Awards, and science fiction fandom in general has always been a haven for eccentricities, which, let’s be honest, is part of why we’re seven thousand words into a discussion of how a fascist troll hijacked them. There are still, every year, people who vote No Award in the two Best Dramatic Presentation categories (which has, in practice, essentially been a popularity contest between Doctor Who and Game of Thrones fandoms for the past few years, with Game of Thrones winning), just to protest the category’s existence.
Perhaps more to the point, there’s a complex but existent system for voting to spite all of the nominees and not give a Hugo in a category for a given year in the first place. Which has been used only sporadically in the past, but due to the fact that the Hugos use a ranked ballot, does mean that Hugo voters have specifically given a rebuke to nominated works in the past, including the Theodore Beale last year, and, more historically, L. Ron Hubbard, who, when Scientology supporters bulk-nominated him for a Hugo in 1987, ultimately came in below No Award in the voting.
There is, in other words, ample precedent within the Hugo Awards for using them as a platform to make a statement. And if the Hugo Awards are ever to be used as a platform to make a statement, I think it is fair to say that the unequivocal repudiation of Theodore Beale and everything he stands for is the single most self-evidently important statement that they could possibly make in 2015. No, it won’t drive the fascists out of the Hugos. But it’ll stop ‘em in 2015, and we can fight 2016 in 2016.
A word on this larger fight, however. While I obviously hope that the analysis of Beale’s motivations and actions is sufficient to convince a majority of readers of the degree to which he is a problem that requires addressing, I am aware that there remain a substantial block of people who are willing to ally themselves with Theodore Beale despite the problems, both obvious and otherwise, with him.
Indeed, this is clearly becoming something of a pressing issue among Puppy supporters, with both Torgersen and Correia (the original founder of the Puppies movement) recently writing pieces sort of distancing themselves from Beale. The general tone of both of these was the same - pointing out that they don’t agree with Beale on everything, and that they can’t control him. Which is I’m sure true. Theodore Beale cannot be controlled. That’s what being a rabid dog means, really, and why there’s a generally agreed upon course of treatment for one. But I’d like to point to a telling moment in Correia’s apologia, in which he said, “Look at it like this. I’m Churchill. Brad is FDR. We wound up on the same side as Stalin.”
There are two things to say about this. The first is “wait, if you’re Churchill, Torgersen is FDR, and Beale is Stalin, then in this analogy, the people who thought the Hugo Awards were fine the way they were are…” The second is somewhat less glib: how, exactly, did anyone “wind up” here? One does not simply “wind up” allied to Josef Stalin. This is a process that requires some effort. It is a process during which one is afforded many opportunities to stop and say “wait a moment, I seem to be allying with Josef Stalin, maybe I should reconsider my life choices.”
And I think it’s fair to ask why Larry Correia is disinterested in taking any of these opportunities. Similarly, I think it’s fair to point out the relatively low bar that Correia is seeking to clear when proclaiming “I Am Not Vox Day.” True, he is not the Taliban-fetishizing racist who proclaims himself the voice of god. He’s just the guy standing next to him and riding his coattails.
Elsewhere, Correia says that “most of me and Brad’s communication with Vox consists of us asking him to be nice and not burn it all down out of spite.” I have no trouble believing that - certainly it's easier to believe than Brad Torgersen's earlier claim that Beale is "a gentleman." But why are they willing to work with such a man to accomplish their goals? What is it about this man who thinks that God imbued him with magic genes and a divine quest to make science fiction more fascist said “good ally” to them? What seemed so important about getting some stories they liked Hugos that they decided it was worth allying with Theodore Beale to do it? Because if we’re making World War II analogies, the really disturbing thing isn’t a deranged sadist like Hitler doing terrible things. That's what deranged sadists do, after all. The really disturbing thing is all the people who knowingly voted deranged sadist.
I get why a man listens to what he thinks is the voice of god. But Torgersen and Correia? What's their excuse?
Part Eight: God Will Bury You. Nature Will Bury You.
That covers the actual response in terms of the Hugos. But there are other ways to make a statement, and the award ceremony is not necessarily the best one. So allow me to make another sort. One that will discard all traces of the Occultic, and engage in nothing save for the most explicit clarity that I can muster.
I have not always been the most faithful of science fiction readers. I don’t read a ton of novels in a year, and those that I do tend to be from a select few favorite authors. But since I was a child, I knew the phrase “Hugo Award” carried weight. I knew they mattered, and that they pointed towards stories that might not be things I loved, but would always be things I respected. As an adult, I’ve followed them from afar, never weighing in on the major categories, but having Firm Opinions on the minor ones. I rejoiced in Doctor Who ’s three-year streak, politely disagreed but understood why Doctor Horrible beat Moffat in 2009, largely agreed with “Blackwater” winning in 2013, and until this year thought that the victory of Gollum’s acceptance speech at the MTV Movie Awards in 2004 was the biggest travesty in Hugo history.
Likewise, in “Best Graphic Story” I laughed as Girl Genius won three years ago, hilarious evidence of how out of line the Hugo voters were with most comics fans (although it’s not a bad comic, to be fair - as always, the Hugos were a reliable indicator of quality, if not a sane one). I cheered when Ursula Vernon’s Digger , a weird webcomic eligible because of some print collections, won a shock victory in 2012 - a choice that’s just as weird as Girl Genius , but that aligns perfectly with my own idiosyncratic loves. I love that the awards went to Saga in 2013, then XKCD in 2014, both brilliant choices, and yet so wildly far apart in style and even medium. What other award would or could do that?
I love the Hugos. I haven’t participated in them before, but I have loved them since childhood, and I love them to this day.
Fuck you, Theodore Beale.
Fuck you for trying to break a thing I loved. Fuck you for doing it to serve your stupid, lame fascist ideology. More to the point, fuck you for your stupid, lame fascist ideology. Your beliefs are horrible. You’re horrible. You’re a nasty, cruel little bully, and I do not like you.
Fuck you for making me feel that way. Fuck you for the way you’ve brought this thing that I love, this celebration of great science fiction, to a point where it is full of the sort of mean and hateful desires that seem to animate you. Fuck you for dragging us all down to your sorry level. Fuck you for being so odious that we have to go there.
And fuck you for making me want you to hate me. Fuck you for all of your beliefs that amount to nothing short of hatred for the things I love. For the people I love. For the art and beautiful things that are why I get out of bed in the morning. Fuck you for living your life for the sole purpose of destroying things that I love, and for making me wish that I could destroy something of yours in retaliation. Fuck you for making me write this, in the sincere and passionate hope that it will make you feel even a moment’s unpleasantness.
And fuck you for the very real possibility that a work nominated purely because you used your noxious little voice to rally your loathsome, asshole supporters to support it might win a Hugo Award. Fuck you because it’s actually possible that you will break the Hugos successfully and demonstrate that you’re oh so much stronger than a bunch of fans who were previously just happily attending a convention and voting for stuff they loved in awards. In short, fuck you.
I would also like to make two things very clear.
First of all, you are wrong, Theodore Beale. You are the emperor of a tiny patch of shit, and if you are remembered, it will only be as a joke. You are not a great man. Yours is not the voice of god, but just the voice of a sad, pathetic man. You will die, and everything you wrote will be lost to the sands of time, and everything you valued will become a half-forgotten relic if it becomes anything at all. Nobody will care. The world you want will never arise.
Instead will be the future. There will be new things, and new ideas, and some of them will be better than any idea I’ve ever had, and virtually all of them will be better than any idea you’ve ever had. The future will not be made of the ideas of the 1970s, or the 1870s, or the 1770s, or before. It will be made of ideas that you and I have never imagined. And it will be amazing. And if there is an afterlife from which you can watch the future unfold, you will hate every bit of it.
But I don’t think you will. I think you will die, and when you are dead, you will just be dead, and moreover be forgotten, and that you will have never once tasted a morsel of the joy that Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Dinosaur My Love” has brought to me.
Which brings us to the second thing.
You have already lost.
Sure, maybe you’ll take the Hugos, and you’ll give them an end date in historical relevance. No matter what, you’ve left an ugly footnote in the history of science fiction, like a puppy on a sidewalk. But the only reason you wanted to do that was because you were mad that we were having fun, liking the science fiction and fantasy that we liked.
And guess what, Theodore Beale?
We’re still liking it. Stuff the ballot box all you want, but “If You Were a Dinosaur My Love” was still a great story, and there’s nothing you can possibly do to change that. Take over a major industry award. Progressive science fiction will just move its critical praise to other awards, or to individual critics’ year-end lists. We will carry on, and we will identify and praise brilliant works of science fiction, and the stuff we like will endure in history while the stuff you like is forgotten.
This is not, to be clear, a threat. I am not proposing some counter-slate for 2016, or some set of tactics of resistance. I’m simply offering a sober and considered assessment of the likely critical future of the two schools of science fiction that you and your followers have articulated, and suggesting that the progressive, literary tradition that includes Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Rachel Swirsky, and many, many others is going to endure and thrive, whereas your stupid fascist nonsense will wither, and that none of your trolling and bullying is going to make a whit of difference in either our carrying on of the act of loving these works nor in their enduring reception. And while there are a lot of reasons for this, not least that our stories don’t suck and yours do, I think there’s one that really settles this matter straightforwardly and decisively.
We are, after all, talking about a genre that is about imagining the future. And in a debate over the nature of a genre about the future, it seems to me terribly obvious that the side that values the future and savors its imaginative possibilities is going to win out over the side that hates and fears it.
So to that end, here’s a celebration of some stuff that I bet Theodore Beale really hates.
Part Nine: I Want To Thank You For Dancing To The End
There are works on the Hugo ballot that were not selected by Theodore Beale. These are worth celebrating. So are many works that aren’t on the Hugo ballot, whether because of Theodore Beale or not. And so, to close, I’d like to focus on two categories near and dear to my critical heart, Best Graphic Story, and Best Dramatic Presentation. (With quick side notes about Best Related Work and Best Fan Writer.)
Let’s start with Best Graphic Story, a category where Beale had only one pick, inherited from Torgersen, and which thus has four nominees selected by traditional, good taste Hugo voters. In which case, they had a stunning year - the four non-Puppy nominees are certainly not my choice for the four best comics to fall under the genre heading of sci-fi/fantasy, but they’re all solidly deserving nominees. They also represent an interesting turn in Hugo taste, solidly towards the American direct market and away from webcomics, which had previously done very well at the Hugos. In the tradition of my weekly comics reviews, then, a tour from my least favorite to my favorite.
We’ll start with Rat Queens then, a book that mixes Dungeons and Dragons humor with genuine pathos in a story about a marauding band of four female adventurers in a medieval fantasy world. The book is not without controversy: the original artist was removed from the book after admitting to a domestic abuse charge, which is a genuine problem for an openly feminist book. But it is a feminist book, and one openly and deliberately invested in diversity. Even aside from the controversy, though, it’s, while fun, just not as interesting as the other three nominees this year.
Also up is Saga , which won in 2013, and was nominated in 2014. It’s a great sci-fi/fantasy epic, with brilliant characters. It’s lost some of the momentum it started with - I’m totally behind its 2013 win, and equally behind its 2014 defeat, where it was, I think, solidly inferior to the winner. But it’s a great book, and also one that is interested in diversity. There’s a great story in its creation where writer Brian K. Vaughn - one of the smartest writers in comics these days - noted to artist Fiona Staples that he really wanted the main female character to not be a redhead, because he thought redheads were cliched for the sort of character he was writing. Staples replied something to the effect of, “she doesn’t have to be white either, you know.” And she isn’t.
Also up is Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky’s Sex Criminals , a book whose premise is endorsed by Margaret Atwood. Beale singled this out for criticism, or at least, for a really bitter and poor taste joke about Marion Zimmer Bradley, and its title is in the cheeky sense of humor that the book displays throughout. It’s a very funny book about sex and sexual hangups, told through a silly and charming premise, namely two people who can stop time when they orgasm, and so masturbate in bathrooms and rob banks. It’s fantastic and human and poignant and witty, and one of the best serialized stories being published in any medium right now.
And finally there is G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona’s Ms. Marvel . This is a superhero book out of, unsurprisingly, Marvel Comics. On one level, it’s your basic teen superhero concept - a riff on the old Lee/Ditko Spider-Man stories. But its main character is a Pakistani-American girl in Jersey City. She’s a character who has pleasantly enraged Beale and his ilk - here’s John C. Wright on the recent announcement that, following Marvel’s next big crossover, she’d be added to the roster of the Avengers:
“Meanwhile, the one and only person on the team with a clear religious identity is the Muslim girl. This is a religion which has, whether anyone admits it or not, declared war on the whole world, and has, whether anyone says so or not, adopted terrorism and stealth jihad as the main means to wage that war. This is the same as if, during World War Two, a comic book made one of their heroines a member of the Nazi party. But one of the those nice Nazi party members who do not approve of Hitler, or the other official doctrines, written in the official literature, of the organization to which she willingly belongs. Such a comic character would appeal to the moderate Nazis whom we do not wish to alienate, since, after all, Hitler highjacked the noble institution and motives of the Party.”
(Wright also complains that the new Avengers lineup lacks “any Christian White Male Adults who might act like a Father figure, a leader, an alpha male, a hero,” doing so, without a trace of irony, two sentences after decrying the word “Eurocentric” as nonsensical, just in case you’d forgotten that he is, quite separate from being a bigoted jerk, also a moron.)
It’s also just a fantastic comic. But more to the point, it’s a demonstration of how fundamentally wrong Beale, Torgersen, and all their supporters are. Because the entire reason the comic is good is the diversity it introduces. As I said, it’s on one level a rehash of the old Lee/Ditko Spider-Man stories - exactly the sort of “nothing new under the sun” comic that Torgersen would seemingly prefer. It’s about power and responsibility and growing up. Alphona’s scratchily cartoonish style even feels like a modern day equivalent to Ditko’s paranoidly visionary linework. If what you want is raw originality of ideas, Sex Criminals would beat it hands down.
Except that it turns out that taking the Spider-Man story and moving it from Brooklyn to Jersey City (and Ms. Marvel is fiercely and passionately from Jersey City, with an explicit ethos of taking care of her local community), grounding its ethics in a progressive vision of Islam (one that is not naive about the existence of other visions - Ms. Marvel’s older brother is a bit of a closed-minded bigot who is oppressively protective of his sister), and making the main character a millennial female geek (she has a team-up with Wolverine in which she gushes to him about the fanfic she wrote about him and Storm before, as is the nature of such team-ups, winning him over and convincing him of her worth as a superhero) makes it fresh and interesting again.
In other words, having a perspective on superhero comics based on something other than the white male father figure is good and interesting, and makes for better comics. Aside from any progressive argument for the value of having a teenage Pakistani-American Muslim girl as a superhero, doing so just plain turns out to be more interesting than white boys have been in years, for the simple and obvious fact that it’s something that we haven’t seen before instead of something we’ve been seeing over and over again since the 1960s. Ms. Marvel is awesome for the exact and specific reasons that Brad Torgersen and Theodore Beale are fools.
But what I’d really like to do is highlight an eligible work of science fiction that is brilliant and as diametrically opposed to everything that Theodore Beale holds dear as it is possible to be. Moreover, because of the specific damage that Theodore Beale did, I want to celebrate things that were not Hugo nominated. Not even things that I expect to have been on the long list - but things that were eligible. Ms. Marvel is a fantastic work that I’m glad got nominated, because I’m sure it pissed him off, but in terms of brilliant, Hugo-worthy stuff that spits in the face of everything Theodore Beale loves I think we need to talk briefly about Uber, written by Kieron Gillen and drawn by a couple of artists.
What strikes me as particularly appealing about Uber is the fact that it so directly engages with the iconography of fascism. It is an alternate history World War II comic in which the Nazis, in the dying days of the War, turn the tide with the invention of superheroes. And Gillen is careful to work scrupulously within a set of rules. The mechanics of superheroes are as well-defined as any military technology, with much of the plot hinging on the gradual development of tactics for superhuman warfare. Everything is grounded in thorough historical research.
So the result is a brutally well thought out dissection of the intersections between the idea of the superhero and the fascist hero in all its post-Nietzschean glory. It’s right there in the title, Uber , a direct invocation of the idea of the ubermensch. Because make no mistake - the book is anti-fascist. It is a gruesome, explicit depiction of the material horror that was Nazi Germany. It’s a reminder that people like Theodore Beale are not harmless cartoon villains to laugh at, but horrible people responsible for some of the worst atrocities in human history, and that war is not some happy fantasy of bringing righteous justice to the unworthy, but a miserable slog of human suffering.
But more than that, it’s a brilliant and nuanced exploration of the fascist narrative, and the ways in which it is deeply historically entwined with the history of science fiction as a genre. It is not the first book to do so, obviously. Norman Spinrad’s 1972 novel The Iron Dream , which imagines an alternate history where Hitler became a hack sci-fi writer in America, is probably the most notable in terms of just how much it anticipates this mess, although I’d argue that there is no greater parody of the Sad Puppies than J.G. Ballard’s 1968 “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan.” But it is an astonishingly thorough exploration of it - an uncompromising mix of material realism and genre tropes that feels staggeringly relevant today.
But I think what I love most about it, at least in this context, is that it purports to be exactly what the Puppies want: serious-minded military science fiction, with a focus on battle and combat and valor. It’s got spectacular gore and body horror. It’s dark as dark can be, and uncompromising. It holds nothing back, ever. Even its focus on strict rules has the flavor of wargaming, the obvious pinnacle of the Puppy aesthetic. And it takes all of these things and turns them cruelly and savagely against their supposed masters. The only reason Theodore Beale could possibly fail to hate it is if he’s too stupid to understand it. Which is, admittedly, a risk.
The other category I’d like to talk about is Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), in which an episode of Doctor Who , a series I have previously written about at some length, was nominated over several Beale-approved works (as was the openly progressive Orphan Black ). But since we’re about to talk about Doctor Who , I’d also like to address another category, namely Best Related Work, and a book that is often cited, like Swirsky’s story, as evidence of the appalling state of the Hugo awards, namely Chicks Dig Time Lords , an anthology of essays about Doctor Who by women, published by Mad Norwegian Press. (In one of life’s little ironies, the book beat out the first volume of a Robert Heinlein biography for the Hugo, a fact that is often cited as if it is self-evidently an outrage by supporters of the Puppy slates; the second volume of the biography was eligible for Best Related Work this year, but was not on Beale’s slate and did not get nominated.)
Though, actually, the book I want to talk about is Queers Dig Time Lords , which was nominated but did not win last year, and is treated as another one of those books that shows just how awful and degenerate the Hugos were. Simply because anyone objecting to that book and saying that it only got a Hugo nomination because of politics is simply ignorant of the history of Doctor Who , a series whose relationship with its gay fans has at several points been instrumental to its history, both in the 1980s when the internal BBC politics surrounding its openly gay producer John Nathan-Turner were a crucial factor in the show’s cancellation and in the 2000s when Russell T Davies, a longtime and active Doctor Who fan who had previously been best known for his groundbreaking gay drama Queer as Folk spearheaded the revival of the series that won three consecutive Hugos from 2006-08, and has been at least nominated every year since. To suggest that a book about gay Doctor Who fans is merely nominated for its social justice politics is, quite simply, a declaration of thundering ignorance about the subject matter.
But then, of all the categories in which the Puppies have marked their territory, there is perhaps none that reveals the rank hypocrisy of the movement quite like Best Related Work, where Beale and Torgersen pushed a book entitled Wisdom From My Internet on to the ballot despite the fact that it is not, in any meaningful sense, a book related to science fiction and fantasy, but instead a disjointed collection of the sort of right-wing bon mots that your idiot uncle spams on Facebook. That they and their supporters have the unmitigated gall to suggest that Queers Dig Time Lords was nominated purely for its politics while simultaneously pushing a political book (published under the banner Patriarchy Press, just to make sure nobody misses where its sympathies lie) that is not actually a related work is, in many ways, the epitome of this entire mess.
This also brings us to Best Fan Writer, and a somewhat obscure but nevertheless important point. There is one non-Puppy nominee in this category, Laura J. Mixon. The reason that Mixon is nominated is a blogpost she wrote entitled “A Report on Damage Done by One Individual Under Several Names,” in which she meticulously outlined the appalling behavior of a left-wing troll within the science fiction community who wrote under the name Requires Hate, among others (there is reason to doubt that her legal name is known). It’s a corker, and deserves a Hugo. I think I might even vote for it over No Award.
The antics of Requires Hate have, for a variety of reasons, been compared to those of Theodore Beale, by people on all sides of the debate. Anti-Puppies compare Beale to her. Puppies point to her as evidence that the Anti-Puppies’ house isn’t in order either.
But in all of this, there is a comparison between Requires Hate and Theodore Beale that is not sufficiently remarked upon. One of the conclusions Mixon draws in her analysis of Requires Hate’s behaviour is that she “preferentially targets writers who are POC, women, and people from other marginalized groups, with a particular focus on people of Asian descent.” Requires Hate was a left-wing blogger who identified with several of the groups she abused people from, and was the sort of person Puppies call a “social justice warrior.” But the people she targeted and the people Beale's supporters target are the same group: women, people of color, and queer voices . To quote something that I first heard from Anita Sarkeesian, although I vaguely recall her crediting a source for it too, “in the game of patriarchy, women aren’t the other team, they’re the ball.” (It's worth here remembering Annie Bellet and Kary English, the two female authors Beale put on his short story slate, who have also ended up as victims of abuse in all of this.)
But as I said, I want to talk about Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form). Again, a brief word on the non-Puppy candidates, or, actually, in this case one of the Puppy candidates, Game of Thrones , a show I quite love. That said, I find the specific choice of episodes, “The Mountain and the Viper,” uncompelling. I think it was the weakest episode of the season in many regards - a case of Game of Thrones playing it safe and doing exactly what is expected of it after thirty-seven episodes. I have no problems deciding that if this is the episode Game of Thrones is to be judged on, it’s not Hugo worthy.
Similarly, for all that I respect Orphan Black , I don’t think it’s a show that serves up individual episodes of great merit. It’s fun on aggregate - a binge show. I wish it did what Game of Thrones did in its first season and compete as a long-form work, as it would be stronger there. Alas, it is here. On top of that, I wish it had nominated its most interesting episode, the one in which a transgender clone was introduced, bringing the complexity of gender as a concept into the view of its fascinating exploration of what defines us as people.
Which leaves Doctor Who , with the fantastic episode “Listen.” I would almost certainly vote for this in any year. It was a phenomenal piece of television. And as a long-time Doctor Who fan, I take genuine joy in knowing that Theodore Beale does not think this show is award-worthy. I suspect he dislikes its feminist message. Good. I love it, though I’m still gonna put No Award ahead of it.
But as with other categories, I think, given that Beale has flooded the Hugo ballot with crap, it is important to celebrate great works that are not on the Hugo ballot. And so to close, at last, I want to suggest one more work of science fiction that would have been eligible for a 2015 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Work (Short Form), not because I suspect Beale kept it off the ballot, but because I think he would absolutely detest it. Specifically, the music video for Janelle Monáe’s “Electric Lady.”
It is perhaps worth contextualizing this slightly, since the video depends in part on a general understanding of Janelle Monáe’s work. “Electric Lady” is the title single off her second full-length album, released in 2013, which contains the fourth and fifth parts of an ongoing song cycle she calls the Metropolis Suite. This cycle features her alter-ego Cindi Mayweather, a time-travelling robot rebel from a Fritz Lang-inspired futuristic dystopia.
As this last fact suggests, Monáe is a keen sci-fi fan, and draws heavily from sci-fi iconography in her work, which falls squarely under the subgenre of afrofuturism, an artistic movement that uses the imaginative possibilities of science fiction to try to conceive of the African Diaspora not in terms of its tragic past but in terms of the generative potential of the future. The robot, for Monáe, is an all-purpose metaphor for the oppressed - as she puts it, “When I speak about science-fiction and the future and androids, I'm speaking about the 'other.' The future form of the 'other.' Androids are the new black, the new gay or the new women."
It is this that is why I want to close my discussion of Theodore Beale with her. Because this seems, in so many ways, like the polar opposite of everything he wants. Monáe, in embracing the robot as an image of all of the oppressed populations Beale scorns and despises, makes the idea into the very thing that Beale and Wright paint as a nightmarish vision of transhumanism.
As a song, “Electric Lady” is an anthem in praise of Cindi Mayweather, long on braggadocio, but framed in terms of Monáe’s carefully worked out vision of black female sexuality, as in the breakdown:
Gloss on her lipsBut the video cheekily grounds the song not in Monáe’s sci-fi vision, but in the mundane world of everyday black experience. The group is not the Electrified Ladies, as Monáe’s mother thinks, but Electro Phi Beta, a black sorority whose party Monáe is en route to as the video begins. This opening minute blends a look at the material reality of young black women with wry honesty - note, in particular, the affectionate grin as Monáe leaves, shaking her head at her mother’s confusion - with a strange set of iconography that is at once retro (the car the Electro Phi Betas take to the party has an 8-Track) and cutting edge (Monáe snaps a picture of her sisters using a state-of-the-art smartwatch).
Glass on the ceiling
All the girls showin' love
While the boys be catchin' feelings
Once you see her face, her eyes you'll remember
And she'll have you fallin' harder than a Sunday in September
Whether in Savannah, K-Kansas or in Atlanta
She'll walk in any room have you raising up your antennas
She can fly you straight to the moon or to the ghettos
Wearing tennis shoes or in flats or in stilettos
Illuminating all that she touches
Eye on the sparrow
A modern day Joan of a Arc or Mia Farrow
Classy, Sassy, put you in a razzle-dazzy
Her magnetic energy will have you coming home like Lassie
Saying "ooh shock it, break it, baby"
Electro, sofista, funky, lady
We the kind of girls who ain't afraid to get down
Electric ladies go on and scream out loud
And this aesthetic blend continues through the whole video, which is a classic dance party video of people getting down at the party (complete with the Electro Phi Betas Emeritus, a wall of video screens featuring women not at the party but dancing along with the party, in reality a variety of Monáe’s collaborators) featuring a crowd of contemporary youth, primarily but not exclusively black, simply having a good time as more and more revelers pour in, including, towards the end, a group of lightsaber-wielding linedancers, all joyously grooving to the music and celebrating their bodies and sexualities and identities and lives.
The result is to blend the musical traditions that inform Monáe’s music with the real lives of people, especially black people in 2014 and her vision of a sci-fi future, which is tied implicitly to the digital technology of the current age. None of these are things Theodore Beale would approve of. And he certainly wouldn’t approve of blending them together in the name of, as the lyrics put it, “all the birds and the bees dancing with the freaks in the trees.” It’s a celebration of the weird, the marginal, and the new. Of everything that Theodore Beale hates. It is difficult to imagine how you would even engineer something better suited to annoying him than afrofuturist robots extolling the virtues of getting down. And it’s wonderful.
But perhaps best of all, it is completely unconcerned with the likes of Theodore Beale. It does not seek their praise, which it would clearly never get anyway. It does not seek their antagonism, although it surely receives it. It does not consider itself for their consumption or use, and does not care one way or the other what they make of it. It simply loves itself, and its ideas, and the joy of them, and invites us to love them too.
While far away on the Internet, the self-proclaimed voice of god squawks its disapproval, and the future draws closer by the day.
You will forgive me, dear readers, if I opt for a different god than him.
ReplyDeleteMe too. And I still try to call myself a Christian. Although God knows it's hard when you have someone like Beale on one side and someone like Dawkins on the other...
Thank you. A good read, in pretty much every possible sense of both words.
On works that deserved a nomination far more than anything Beale chose, I'd like to put forward The Legend of Korra - it seems like a pertinent choice, given John C. Wright's hatred of it. Specifically, the second episode of the show's final season "Korra Alone", an episode that deals directly with series protagonist Korra's struggles to recover physically and mentally from the events of the previous season’s finale. It makes efficient and unassuming of non-linear storytelling, features a moving sequence of letter writing that advances Korra’s queer love story that so enraged Wright, and addresses her mental trauma in a powerful and respectful way that doesn’t talk down to its young audience (I say “young” –a large section of the show’s fandom, I’m not sure how large, are in their late teens/ early twenties, some older – there’s no age barrier on good TV). Plus, it’s set in a fantasy world based entirely on non-white, eastern cultures. All of this, in a children’s cartoon on Nickelodeon. That’s the kind of genre fiction that deserves awards, not stuff by scumbags like Beale and Wright.
ReplyDeleteThough of course, it is worth noting that small dramatic presentation is one of the categories that didn't get anything particularly horrible nominated, and I doubt Legend of Korra would be the type of show to get nominated for a Hugo in an ordinary year. But, dammit, it deserves a nomination, and it's one of the things the Rabid Puppies seem to despise, so it seems worth mentioning.
DeleteThank you. (Charles Stross sent me)
ReplyDeleteI am not entirely sanguine about the long term. The arrow of time doesn't always move in one direction, and in fact, can move back. As a society, we COULD go back to one that Beale, Hoyt and others want, crave and think that we need.
We can get there from here. I don't see what is happening now in American Society, be it the Hugo Awards, Tea Party, or anything else as a final fight of the old guard, but a barrage in an attempt to seize the initiative and invent the future. Even if that invention is a return to the past.
Bravo, sir. Bravo.
ReplyDeleteMy, that was amazing. Thank you very much. Here via a comment in Making Light by Charlie Stross.
ReplyDeleteThis is beautiful, beginning to end. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteHere via PZ Myers.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot here that I like, but I'm eternally grateful for conceptualising fascism as an aesthetic.
The fascist aesthetic is essentially a religious aesthetic. We once lived in the Garden of Eden, obedient to God's will. Satan destroyed our faith in God and we were cast out. We live in sin until the day a man who rises above the moral order (Jesus) comes and defeats Satan and restores paradise.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, fascists are pathetic individuals who have failed in everything they try, reject any personal responsibility in their own failure, look for external enemies to explain their failure, and inevitably over-inflate their own importance by casting themselves in the role of a savior.
Were they not so destructive they would be truly sad.
Would it be apposite, or just over-egging the pudding, to say that I did NOT love Beale as a loser, but now I'm worried that he just might win? (Win a Hugo, at least. He has, as you so vividly explain, already lost all of life's greater games.)
ReplyDeleteGreat analysis. I'm a regular reader of this blog but I came to this post via Charlie Stross' comment on Making Light.
ReplyDeleteThe notion of fascism as an aesthetic is a good one, and reminds me of Richard Hofstadter's classic essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." This bit where Hofstadter describes the thinking of '60s right-wing conspiracy theorists fits really well with what you're saying about the mindset of Beale, Wright, et al.: "America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialist and communist schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen seated at the very centers of American power." Just substitute "science fiction" for "American", and there you go.
The first involves a nostalgic belief in a past golden age - a historical moment in which things were good. In the fascist narrative, this golden age was ended because of an act of disingenuous betrayal - what’s called the “stab in the back myth.”
ReplyDeleteThe 'stab in the back myth' is not an essential component of fascism: it was absent, as far as I am aware, from Italian (the original, you might say) and Spanish fascism*. In fact it only really crops up in one type of fascism, German fascism, and only there because of the particular historical confluence of anti-Semitism and the circumstances of the end of the Great War.
* In fact I'm not entirely sure Franco was a fascist. A totalitarian nationalist dictator, to be sure, but there have been enough of those that to call them all 'fascists' would render the term meaningless; and one who received military support from fascists; but was Spanish Nationalism actually a fascist movement? It seems a very debatable point.
Anyway, the only essential elements of a fascist paradigm, as far as I am aware, are (a) the 'Golden Age' myth, and (b) the notion of a great leader who will restore the Golden Age, but only if (c) they are given total control over all aspects of the state (hence the fasces from which it takes its name: the symbol of state authority).
The reason for the move from 'Golden Age' to the hated present can be an internal betrayal ('stab in the back') of some sort but doesn't have to be (it could be, for instance, an external occupation, as in the Italian case when it was about the Barbarians overrunning the Golden Age of Imperial Rome).
Anyway, the only essential elements of a fascist paradigm, as far as I am aware, are (a) the 'Golden Age' myth,
DeleteOh, and just because it seemed so obvious that it went without saying but I'm sure otherwise someone will pick me up on it, in fascism the 'Golden Age' isn't just some kind of general prelapsarian idyll of all men but is specially conceived in nationalist terms: for German fascism it was Charlemagne, for Italian fascism it was Imperial Rome… I don't know much about the BUF, did they bang on about Camelot?
Anyway. Yes. Nationalism, Golden Age, Great Leader, Total Control. That's what makes a fascist.
True for fascist government, but not necessarily for fascist ideology, which is the target of Phil's ire here. While Ted Beale certainly holds fascist ideologies, and he would likely have no problem with an authoritarian / monarchist government ruling according to his ideology, his own activism is articulated over a notably small-time context. Control of an entire state would be a little too powerful an instrument to dominate contemporary sci-fi literature.
Delete"The 'stab in the back myth' is not an essential component of fascism: it was absent, as far as I am aware, from Italian (the original, you might say) fascism"
DeleteNo, it was present there as well. Fascism, as a reactionary force, was born out of the first world war, at the end of which Italy was counted among the victors in theory, but did lose out in the redistribution of the spoils of war after the treaty of Versailles. Italians at large felt "cheated" by foreign powers like France and England, and that sentiment was tapped by the proto-fascist party. Italian fascists also saw themselves as a continuation of the Risorgimento of the previous century, and they felt betrayed by Giolitti, who, in their eyes, never finished the work initiated by Mazzini.
As you can see, there's a lot "stabbed in the back" feeling. :-)
I think that when you've called someone out for wanting to deprive women of the vote, and for believing members of other racists not quite human, it becomes unnecessary to add that they also believe in a stab in the back mythology.
DeleteI can imagine a materialist Hegelianism of the right that I'd want to call fascist, but which wouldn't believe in a past golden age; I can imagine a political positions that would meet Phil's definition without me wanting to call them fascist: for example, a Trotskyite who thinks that Stalin stabbed the revolution in the back (lwith an ice pick). (In theory Marxists ought to believe in the proletariat, but as a matter of material history Marxist-Leninists have gone in for strong leaders.)
I'm in the middle of Hughes-Hallett's The Pike at the moment (about D'Annunzio.) The aesthetic components I'd see as fascist are a valorisation of mass violence, the bloodier the better, and an attempt to finesse the difference between a view of society as an organic harmony and a view of it as a disciplined structure by seeing it as an organic harmony that has to be imposed by a disciplined structure from the top down.
Here's Robert Paxton's definition of fascism, which is probably about as close to a consensus definition as you'll get:
DeleteA form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Most scholars of fascism, from what I can remember, don't consider Franco's regime to be a pure fascist regime - it was a right wing authoritarian regime that incorporated fascist elements (the Falange) into itself. I believe the early part of Antonescu's regime in Romania, before he purged the Iron Guard, and the Vichy regime in France, at least in its later years, are viewed similarly. Fascist movements are much more common than fascist regimes - I think the only pure fascist regime besides Germany and Italy is the very short-lived Hungarian Arrow Cross regime of 1944-45. Which is not to say that other right wing authoritarian movements don't have some of the characteristics of fascism.
I remember when I bought a copy of "The Mists of Avalon" in 1983, I was incredibly disappointed to find that it was about women and politics, not women swinging swords like the cover would have me believe. I felt so gypped I became a feminist!!!!!
ReplyDeletePart 4 is an excellent description of how the right wing argues on social media. Great post. I was sent by Stross also.
ReplyDeleteI was referred by several posts on Google+.
ReplyDeleteI find it hard to articulate my frustration with this kind of behavior. I'm having a Mrs. White describing how she felt about Yvette moment over here. Turning a fan voted media award about science fiction into a political statement, especially with such a boring and outdated message filled with bigotry, really should have some backlash beyond No Award.
I would submit that The Wicked + The Divine would have made lovely nomination. It embodies everything they oppose: originality, interesting character growth, and the ability to not alienate large swaths of readers with its exclusionary themes. The exploration of theology in a modern world goes from one extreme to another, showing the mockery of the jaded and doubtful to the fanaticism of those blinded by glamour. The protagonist is flawed and fighting her way to understand the boundaries of both extremes as well as discover her place in a world that is more than she can always comprehend. A transgender unbeliever and her experience, or lack thereof, is a fascinating part of the puzzle.
This is one of those moments where I'm tempted to lower myself to someone else's level. Thankfully reason always wins out.
As a fan of Kieron Gillen's work I too would nominate The Wicked And The Divine rather than Über purely due to the art, because as good as the story/writng is, frankly Über's art is ugly in a really stiff & uninteresting way and doesn't portray well known real life people (Churchill springs to mind especially). I get that they may be going for ugliness giiven the subject matter but I don't think this is a conscious decision from the creative team - Avatar Press does seem to favour the writer rather than the artist from what else I've seen of their output and as a graphic story category it simply doesn't deliver half of the product.
DeleteThe Wicked And The Divineon the other hand has Jamie McKelvie, which is pretty much a slamdunk.
I find myself waiting for Wednesday morning, hoping that week is the one where the next issue will be waiting for me to devour it on Comixology, at least until I can put a hard copy in my hands. Every issue is always frustratingly too short, a true measure of how much one can love a series, and reading The Faust Act was like a long cool drink after the barren wasteland of gritty realism. I adore Alex + Ada (image likes their plus signs), but I feel they hadn't fully hit their stride last year. Sentience is a well tread storyline, but I enjoyed that she doesn't have to debate hers. It's there. It's navigating the bias and fear from others that keeps Ada in danger and on her toes. I'm sorry Marvel, I still love you, but make mine Image.
DeleteWright cannot even read his idolized Inklings properly: they are full of what he terms "Occultism," even before taking Charles Williams into consideration. Numinousness and all that, to say nothing of reverence for nature and paganism and interest in science and technology. Lewis envisioned different yet perfectly-acceptable sexual ethics among alien societies and denounced Western Imperialism and missionaries, just to pick one example.
ReplyDeleteAnd no discussion of Transhumanist paranoia is complete without noting that all tales of robot rebellion, going back past the biological artificial humans of R.U.R., all the way through Shelley to the Golem of Prague, are stories of fear of labour unrest, peasant revolts made invincible with superior armour, weaponry, and intellect to outweigh any advantages of the established social order, as commonborn mercenaries equipped with equalizing crossbows. (As well as the fear of the younger generation rising up against their parents -- not a coincidence that this theme keeps recurring in times of social change.)
At the root of it is a fear of justice, that the successors will do as they have been done by, and a flight from hope and the willingness to build a better future. Does Wright even begin to grasp how utterly Sir Terry obliterated his ideolological pretensions to be the sole gatekeeper of truth, beauty, and virtue? I doubt he is even capable of doing so. And as for Day, anyone who doubts the literal fascism of his position should read Eco's account of being raised IN that milieu as a child and shown the way out by the kindness of African-American officers in WWII, who shared their superhero comic books with him, before enunciating fourteen specific points of congruence in fascist and proto-fascistic mindsets -- in addition to the false nostalgia, pseudo-popularism, notions of blood purity, and militarism that Mr. Sandifer describes Eco also calls out a fixation with traditionally-limited gender roles and glorified masculinity, exactly as demonstrated by "Patriarchy Press". Thus, The Name of the Rose as a foreshadowing of the worst of the 20th century by way of similar trends in Medieval Europe, the seeds and roots of fascism in the turmoil of postwar poverty and scalegoat-seeking...
"Wright cannot even read his idolized Inklings properly: they are full of what he terms "Occultism," even before taking Charles Williams into consideration."
DeletePlease leave my name out of your incoherent blitherings, my dear sir. You have no idea what my opinions about occultism are, or my opinions of the Inklings, or anything else: you are blinded by hatred.
Hi John. We don't treat commenters that way on my blog, just so you know.
DeleteAs well as the fear of the younger generation rising up against their parents -- not a coincidence that this theme keeps recurring in times of social change
DeleteI'm glad someone brought this up - it says so much that they're terrified of their barely-even-a-metaphor children looking and thinking unlike them.
Actually I felt his blithering was very coherent, although I will admit to my biases on the matter.
DeleteShorter John Wright: "You know nothing of my work."
DeleteFuck the Fascists! Here's to the future and whatever mad insanity it may bring.
ReplyDeleteFor the record, I wish you'd give more warning that this was going to be a long-form masterpiece before I dove in. Now my whole morning has been spent fist-pumping your hilarious list of "fuck you's" while my work sits in front of me untouched.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I really appreciate your recommendations, and just ordered most of them on amazon.
ReplyDeleteA lot of assholes like Wright and Beale keep score in terms of money. So I am always careful to spurn them with my dollars.
Congrats on Scalzi tweeting you! For those who don't know, besides being a really prominent author and on the Most Hated list of Vox Day, he also was the SFWA president, so he knows of which he speaks in terms of the industry.
ReplyDeleteHe spends four thousand words, in effect, arguing that from a Christian perspective, science fiction and fantasy should be consistent with Christian beliefs - Christian beliefs he describes in avuncular terms borrowed from Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.
Ugh. As a very progressive Christian, I bet I could find plenty to argue with in his perception and description of Christianity, but I don't particularly want to. It's just such a shame that these people are what many folks think of these days when they think of "politically active Christians." Bleh.
As for his distaste of transhumanism, C.S. Lewis actually tackles the idea of transhumanism and it being from the devil in That Hideous Strength. Which is a book I'm sure Wright loves, being as it is chock-full of sexism and neo-feudalism. Unfortunately for both him and Lewis, it's a terrible book. It's not even an entertaining book and that's coming from someone who likes the two other books in the Space Trilogy. So if Lewis can't pull that messaging off effectively, I can't imagine anyone else doing so.
How old was Brad Torgersen when Jim Baen published Lois McMaster Bujold's "Ethan of Athos"? 12? I look back at "Mountains of Mourning", "Barrayar", and "The Vor Game" and see LMB winning Hugos for books with spaceships and soldiers on the cover and feminist, bioethics, civil disobedience, and ethnic discrimination themes in a context in which the military in which her characters serve are not the good guys but at best the grey guys who are slightly less dark.
ReplyDeleteDid he not read contemporary Hugo Award-Winning MilSF when he was a teenager? Did he not understand the contemporary Hugo Award-Winning MilSF that was around when he was a teenager?
Brad DeLong
Fun fact: That stuff is still being written. Why aren't you nominating it?
DeleteI don't think that was brad's point.
DeleteI don't know who the 'you' is intended to be in Michael Z. Williamson's comment, but since a fairly minor entry in Bujold's long-running series was up for best novel in 2013 and Ancillary Justice actually won in 2014, contemporary MilSF seems to be doing pretty well with non-slate-affiliated Hugo voters in general.
DeleteThanks for this essay.
ReplyDelete"This is, counterintuitively, something of a libertarian figure. Ayn Rand’s heroes - the great and worthy men who deserve their freedom - are archetypal fascist heroes”
Very good point - this is true without necessarily implying that libertarians or even objectivists are fascists. It does imply that they aren’t as far away from fascism as they like to think.
Also Batman :), which takes us to Frank Miller, which takes us to Sparta (the founding myth of Fascist founding myths), which takes us to Plato (the original philosophical advocate of fascism) - which in turn takes us to why people should read The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper.
Note also that it is possible to read and enjoy Frank Miller’s work or even Plato’s Republic and still hate fascism. Yet it is also not appropriate to ignore the fascistic in artistic works. Fascism is romantic in aesthetic and appalling in both politics and implementation. Rather like its more respectable cousin royalism (a position few people are willing to espouse seriously but which is often taken for granted in fantasy fiction - either in terms of rightful kings or in terms of predestined heroes).
Have not worked up the energy to delve into the blog post yet... but skimming the comments, this one jumped out at me.
DeleteIn talking about Rand, I'm reminded of Heinlein who said (and I paraphrase), the sort of people who constantly drone on about a superior group never seem to stop and consider that they're not worthy of being in that group.
This is why, despite my being a life-long Republican, I find myself unable to side with the Puppies, who never seem to stop and consider that maybe there's a reason why another group managed a successful take-over over the course of decades. Even the reaction to their efforts suggests they know they really don't have the numbers, because they seem to be discouraging people from organizing against them, when their efforts required the Puppies to organized to exert their will. They're basically describing a situation where progressives (liberals, or whatever you want to call them) cared more over a longer time than conservatives did. Welcome to the Free Market guys... you're conservatives, you're supposed to understand how that works.
And, quite frankly, they're drawing inspiration from the wrong sources, because if they shift their gaze ever so slightly to the Young Adult market, they'll see a bunch of people, including one religious conservative, absolutely tearing up the sales chart. If Stephanie Meyer wanted a Hugo, I have absolutely no doubt that she's get one... because she's the author of one of the most popular fantasy series of recent memory. But the Puppies are sitting around wondering why the 17th novel in a military sci-fi series continues to fail to find a significant audience outside of the same smallish group of die-hards... and insist the problem doesn't lie with them for not tapping into the market which is eager for The Avengers and Transformers.
Build the future, gentlemen. Maybe do what Heinlein and so many other legends did and aim a good portion of your output at the young readers who are clearly into this kind of stuff.
As a libertarian myself, I found the comparison to libertarianism a little weird, but I suppose it just boils down to "heroic figures are popular with people who may disagree on literally everything else". I am disappointed in the implication that Ayn Rand was somehow libertarian -- she made no secret of the fact that she DESPISED libertarians (almost as much as she despised communists).
DeleteSpeaking of Rand, though, it occurs to me from reading this article that this Beale fellow is a classic Rand villain: a petty, spiteful, self-important person whose only measure of accomplishment is in causing misery and destroying what other people have created.
For what it's worth, the libertarianism stuff is because the neoreactionary movement tends to self-describe as a post-libertarian movement.
Delete(Although I confess that I have never found Rand's attacks on Libertarianism particularly coherent, and they have always struck me as being more about resenting the competition than any actually solid ideological critique. Certainly, while Rand may not have loved libertarians, the reverse is rather less true.)
Rand's utter downfall is her dogmatic nature. She utterly rejected the idea that people could take her ideas and use them in any other form. It was all or nothing.
DeleteWhich, of course, is ignoring how people work at an epic level.
But despite herself, I think she had a pretty good idea of how the Free Market works, which is less "may the best man win", but "if someone wants something enough, it will exist". The idea that value is bestowed on something by you personally. To paraphrase Furious 7, no one can tell you to love something.
And what far too many forget is, that works for every person on the planet. The Hugos is nothing more than a snapshot in time. We may spend the rest of our lives regretting the horrible mustache we had when the picture was taken, but that doesn't mean that everyone does. Someone might think you look quite fetching in it and laments your subsequent decision to shave it off.
There is no objective truth here, your hatred of Redshirts does not negate another person's love of it. It doesn't change the fact that FX wants to turn it into a TV show, which suggests it's pretty damn popular.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind if Sad Puppies matured next year and offered up many more works they think are deserving of consideration. John C. Wright does this thing where he coordinates the purchase of books to try to get them on a best sellers list, because that helps increase their visibility... and that's a brilliant idea. And Sad Puppies could be a brilliant idea with only the tiniest bit more thought put into it: a place where conservative voices can be brought to the attention of a wider audience without gaming the Hugo vote.
Rabid Puppies, on the other hand, needs to be put down like Old Yeller.
Steven, I'm glad that conservatives like you exist. I'm personally quite left-wing, but you're the best kind of political enemy I could possibly have: the kind that I can actually sit down and have a reasonable conversation with. No horrifying culture wars, no existential threats from the existence of people with different cultures, religions, and morals than you. No conspiracy theories about progressive cabals orchestrating the world in a secret chamber at the heart of NPR headquarters.
DeleteJust decent human beings with differences over how to organize the world having an honest and respectful conversation as we try to hammer out a solution.
Thankfulness for all that aside, I remember a similar point being made by a film reviewer (I think at the AV Club or The Dissolve) about the feature film adaptations of Atlas Shrugged. The first film was a massive commercial failure that barely even made its budget back. Yet its devoted free market libertarian financiers continued to produce the film series and play it to empty houses.
It's why I find it so weird that Ayn Rand has been so idolized among the popular free market libertarian set. It's mainly because she was so powerfully devoted to the freest of free market capitalisms and so intensely opposed to the Soviet Union and anything that sympathized with the mildest critique of a capitalist market so free that Rockefeller would have found it excessive.
But her ethical philosophy was largely about how you should strive to impose your will on as much of the world as possible. That's basically what her heroes do, use their personalities and talent to try to remake all of society in their image. Rather a rabid little puppy.
As to the Atlas Shrugged film, this is actually in line with Rand.
DeleteEnough people wanted the movie and they made it happen. They were willing to take a financial loss on it because they thought it was important to make those films. That you or I think they're crazy doesn't matter. That's how much they valued the work.
I got a lot of Rand's work, because I think she made some of the best non-liberal arguments in favor of charity, as in you don't donate money out of guilt, but because it's important to you. This and other useful ideas are concealed by her use of language, as she often defined terms in a way most people didn't (altruism is a notable example).
Really, if you look at what she's saying, she's got very similar ideas to Marx on Capitalism. Keep in mind, you have to define said term as Marx did (Rand has a very different definition). Marx was highly critical in the way the love of money got in the way of creating wealth. The same lessons can be had in Atlas Shrugged where the desire for profits on the stock market led people into investing in a booming stock for a company which was not producing anything of value. Obviously they had very different views of what constituted value, but both understood that saying something was valuable did not make it so.
Sadly, I think the much more popular message of selfishness simply got in the way of what was some rather intriguing ideas which were never given as much thought or prominence. Still, it's great fun to make a very Randian argument in favor of diversity... not because of social justice, but because it is an investment. The truth is most people get jobs because they're "good enough" not because they're the best and it's not Affirmative Action to make a point of adding diversity in hopes of getting a fresh perspective, because that fresh perspective has the potential to pay off huge dividends.
But, ultimately, the decision of who to hire IMO should be left up to the businesses. They're the ones who know if they need a team player or a visionary. It's why I don't object to a non-voting slate of Sad Puppies (to be more in line with a "For Your Consideration" campaign). If they can bring attention to a deserving candidate from an under-represented perspective, then they've enriched the Hugos.
The Rabid Puppies, meanwhile, are proclaiming that they do not march in lock-step with one another... while giving express instructions to mark lock-step with them. I have no respect for people who pick both sides of an argument in such a blatantly contradictory manner.
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DeleteJesus, that was long winded.
ReplyDeleteHi. SP nominee here. Pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-marriage equality, pro-free speech, agnostic, immigrant, mixed race children.
You might be aware that Brad's wife of 21 years is black, and his child obviously mixed race. Ms Torgersen, btw, has a PhD in liberal arts.
The frothing "tolerant" of the status quo managed to harass off the ballot a bisexual socialist and a liberal immigrant.
Unfortunately, the rest of us aren't leaving, so you won't get the "diverse" winners of 2012 who show all the diversity of a mayo and cream cheese sandwich on white bread: http://www.locusmag.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/HugosWinnersAcceptorsPresenters2FM2011.jpg
See, other than talking about "diversity," we're actually doing it.
It's a shame you like the prejudice and inbreeding of the old system.
It's a shame they're even threatening to burn it down with NO AWARD than actually accept diverse nominees.
BTW, the old system hasn't seen fit to reward Steven Barnes, one of the best writers in SF, nor Gene Wolfe. Some of us intend to fix that.
None of that is relevant to any point that I made.
DeleteThe thing is, being racist isn't something you are--it's something you do. Falling in love with someone as a person and not caring what color their skin is...that's a wonderful thing, and nobody here is saying that it isn't. But it doesn't earn you a "Not Racist" merit badge that you can flash anytime someone points out that what you are saying and doing is racist.
DeleteBrad Torgesen has explicitly stated that he believes that too many people are getting Hugos because they are minority authors as a form of "affirmative action". He's not willing to point to a single example of this, but he's said it. That insinuation is racist--it suggests, especially in the absence of specifics, that white authors are "better" and African-Americans can only get "pity Hugos". Calling him out for it is no different than calling someone out for biting their fingernails...it doesn't matter that you trimmed your nails last week, you're biting them now. It only becomes a fight if the other person pulls their hand away and says, "NO I WASN'T!" in a loud angry tone, and accuses you of putting them in a North Korean nail-biting gulag or something. :)
Mr. Sandifer, if you truly believe that a book like ANCILLARY JUSTICE or a story like "The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere" did not benefit from a tremendous groundswell of affirmative-action-mindedness, you're not paying attention. Please phone me when you're interesting in discussing diversity beyond a skin-deep level. Quote Larry Niven: there are minds which think as well as yours, just differently.
DeleteDo you have a shred of evidence for this? Or do you just fundamentally not believe that it's possible that people actually just, you know, liked them even though you clearly didn't?
DeleteBrad R Torgersen, Ancillary Justice benefited from been very well written. Don't really know or care about 'affirmative-action-mindness', whatever that is.
DeleteTim Barnett.
Tim, I think that's the affirmative action he's talking about. You know, the kind that benefits really well-written and thought-provoking, and looks at some interesting issues of personal identity while also telling a hell of a space story.
DeleteMost of us call that "taste."
I sincerely doubt that people ever completely divorce their politics from their likes and dislikes.
DeleteTake me, for instance, in recent years I've been very keen on sampling works which feature something other than white male leads. Nothing against white male leads, but far too often I find myself reading/watching/playing the same story I've read/watched/played far too many times before; but the act of shifting the perspective makes the experience new again.
While there are certainly more skillfully written and executed shows than Orphan Black, I can't divorce my desire to see something outside the norm from my assessment. Perhaps there's a degree of Affirmative Action in my desire to watch a show like Orphan Black, but that desire is very much a part of my enjoyment of it. Much as conservatives flock toward conservative works, which may not be particularly well-written or executed, but it dilutes their love not one bit.
In point of fact, my conservative hackles go up a bit in the idea that conservative works *need* their own kind of Affirmative Action. If conservatives have to organize voting blocks to get their works nominated, then they can't simply have the numbers to make this happen naturally. And if they squeal like howler monkeys when people organize campaigns to counter their organized campaign, it's pretty much them admitting they can't win if all things are equal.
And I can't get behind that. I'd much rather see popular conservative works getting produced which are so popular that they can't be ignored. That's kind of what Heinlein did. His politics were frequently very controversial, so much that in Grumbles From The Grave he expressed complete disbelief that Starship Troopers won the Hugos, because his mail on the book had always been over-whelming negative... but there actually was a Silent Majority who loved it and pushed it to victory.
Actually, Mr. Torgersen, can you please clarify - when you say that it's obvious that this "affirmative-action-mindedness" that you vaguely allege the existence of, is that your explanation for why this is so important that you're willing to ally with a fascist nutjob?
DeleteI voted for Ancillary Justice, had no idea of "affirmative-action-mindedness". Later read a few uptight people said they were upset and confused by the protagonist literally not seeing gender which I thought made the story more interesting.
DeleteMr. Williamson, if you respect Mr. Wolfe and Mr. Barnes so much that you're willing to organize to get them onto the Hugo ballot, could I ask why you didn't do so before?
DeleteOh, and Mr. Torgersen - to quote from my review of "The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere" (as published in my local club's zine): "this is not what I'd call the Best Short Story of the year. This is my #1 choice, not because it's so good, but simply because it's better than the other options." Or are you talking about how it got on the ballot in the first place?
I'd much rather see popular conservative works getting produced which are so popular that they can't be ignored.
DeleteSame here, even though I'm on the other end of the political spectrum. As you mention, Starship Troopers won the Hugo because it was liked by enough people to give it victory. It didn't need someone saying "we know what's best for you" which is not very many steps beyond supplying a slate and strongly suggesting people support it (no matter how that "slate" is arrived at; especially since I understand that the Puppies slates involved some level of voting themselves, which strikes me as being a little inconsistent.)
'Starship Troopers' also wasn't done the tremendous insult of publicly suggesting that it wasn't "message fiction" and aspired to nothing more than "being a fun adventure story". Heinlein wrote a work of ideas and stood by those ideas, instead of pretending he was apolitical and insisting that people vote on his book as an alternative to "literary" novels.
Deleteso concern trolls really DO have a common form letter! i'd always wondered.
Delete"sir, i am like you. i declare that i am of your tribe, even though you have made no declarations of tribe, because the other tribe-that-i-am-clearly-not-part-of-duh has a particularly binary mentality which i, being like you, do not always agree with, which brings me to my point.
you are a hypocrite!
gotcha. game-set-match! HAW HAW. i mean, heh heh, this is just a bit of dissent from a fellow tribesman trying to remind you that your, i mean OUR, side is a failure because we cannot adhere to a perfect orthdoxy like my tribe, i mean, the other tribe. whatever. shut up. hope you feel inadequate."
John, I would put forth that many on the Left would feel the same about stories which put forth their political ideas.
DeleteIf you disagree with a work's politics, you'll likely consider it heavy-handed and preachy... because it very likely is as many Heinlein works are. But if you're largely sympathetic to them, it becomes part of the texture of the book. That wise all-knowing grumpy old man who is surrounded by a bunch of beautiful young women who flirt with him while he espouses his political beliefs is part of the charm of Heinlein's work.
I don't think people want Very Special Episodes. I recently watched a discussion with Mark Gatiss about gay characters in TV and he's overjoyed that we're finally getting past the point that gay characters have to be representative. That whole period was largely something gay people endured because they believed in the message so strongly, but now you can do a show about a very unpleasant gay man without it seeming like an attack on homosexuals. You can write about a bitter feminists faking her own death and pinning it on her husband without it being an assault on feminism. Cersei can deliver a feminist rant about how she is just as good as any man... and George RR Martin can trust the audience to say "no, you aren't" without dismissing her underlying points.
And, yeah, we're going to look back and think "man, was that preachy"... but enough about Heinlein :)
Setting aside the illogic of the thing (would anyone claim that a particular man can't be sexist because look here, he married a woman?), it seems terribly inappropriate to drag Brad's family into the discussion, either as targets or props. If Dr. Torgerson has an opinion on the Hugos, I'm sure she's more than capable of sharing it herself.
Delete@Steven: I'm sorry, I think we may be slightly talking at cross-purposes here. I'm not saying that 'Starship Troopers' is preachy (it is a polemic, but a deliberate one and well written); I'm saying that you can't, as the Puppies have done, insist that they're sick of "message fiction" and hold up 'Starship Troopers' as the sort of thing the Hugos should be rewarding instead. Because it is message fiction, it's unashamedly and unapologetically message fiction, and Heinlein was famously furious with anyone who thought he should stop writing message fiction and get back to brainless adventure stories. He would have taken a Puppy endorsement as a huge insult, and his book won as exactly the kind of thing the Puppies say they hate. The fact that they champion it instead tells you that they aren't against political books; they're against political books that have the wrong politics.
DeleteI agree completely, though, that not many people can pull off Heinlein's trick of writing a deliberate polemic and getting away with it. Talent gets away with what lesser writers get caught at. :)
Torgersen's claim above isn't in any way responsive to the critique. Even granting that several works found their way to nomination through "affirmative action," and even granting the even more questionable assumption that affirmative action isn't merely a correction of inherent bias, there's a clear distinction in both degree and kind between placing one or two works on a list of nominees and entirely dictating the list. It's like "correcting" an inherent conservative slant in modern American politics by only allowing liberal candidates on the ballot.
DeleteMr. Torgersen,
DeleteI'm just replying as an ordinary person who thought Ancillary Justice was deserving of a Hugo and probably would have voted for it. (I didn't have a vote - I was considering registering last year as a supporting member of Loncon but I thought it would only serve to rub it in that I couldn't really afford the time or money to go.) I say probably because I haven't read beyond a sample of Warbound - it seemed like very well done urban fantasy and probably would have been in the middle of my ballot.
But I loved Ancillary Justice - the idea of multiply located consciousness of one individual, then reduced to the inside of one much more limited body. The gradual dawning of the extent of tyranny, and the determination to spike one part of its plans (even by one whose very origins stem from the tyranny). The scale and scope of the background and its history.
The pronoun thing was a nifty trick which pointed up (a) one difference in the imperial society to other tyrannous empires of the past (b) but even more so the strangeness in the thinking of Breq who couldn't reliably spot gender differences, a thing that the humans clearly could.
I liked it as much as some of Iain Banks or C.J. Cherryh and I bought Ancillary Sword as soon as it came out in ebook.
Hi Mr. Torgersen,
DeleteI'm going to provide my two cents as someone who's not part of the fan community, nor particularly interested in the Hugos. The extent of my involvement is that I read science fiction, among other things, and when I'd see that one of my few beloved authors had won a prize, I'd feel good for them.
So allow me, for the moment, to give you an outsider's perspective.
What it looks like to me is that in a a field where thousands of writers would love to achieve some level of success, let alone live off their work, you and your comrades are supremely unhappy that no one gives you any cookies.
And in response, you have basically licked all the cookies and overturned the table at the bake sale and now you're hurt -- deeply, truly hurt -- that people are upset and no one wants to have a reasoned dialogue with you.
Why are all these people being so mean to you and your friends just because you did your level best to wreck something they cared about? Why can't they see that it's all about how you didn't get your cookies? How unfair that was, your lack of cookie-age? Can't they see you just wanted the cookies distributed fairly? You had to destroy this bake-sale to save it! (And God, you're getting dragged off to the gulag because people won't give you your cookies? Really?)
Outsider's perspective: You and yours are almost unbelievably petulant, whiny and entitled. If you want cookies so badly, go make your own, and give them to each other.
I have yet to hear a single decent argument of why you shouldn't have come up with your own award. I could see your outburst if the Hugos actually affected sales, but apparently they do not. And at that point, I throw up my hands and shake my head and just write you all off as children yelling "gimmee."
"So, off the bat we have a vision of the world based on a nostalgic and lost golden age, and one with a sense of absolute authority that is clearly rooted in Christian theology. "
ReplyDeleteIt is difficult to argue with people who cannot read a sentence in English. The essay you misquote concerns the meaning of High Fantasy, which is a particular subgenre based on a particular nostalgia. It is a nostalgia I do not share, but I was not talking about myself, but about the genre.
I would expand on this idea, but if you cannot understand a plain sentence written in plain English, my writing additional plain sentences in plain English will not clarify matters.
I think that's a shitty definition of high fantasy.
DeleteAnd, a shitty definition that is if nothing else, rather revealing with regard to the terms in which its author thinks about such things.
DeleteActually, while we're on the subject, does anyone understand what Wright is talking about with the "you struck from behind, cravenly" or as Phil puts it "stab-in-the-back" bit? What exactly is the attack here supposed to be, and in what way is it cowardly? Surely even an odious intellectual lightweight like Wright doesn't think the mere existence of the series ending he so dislikes is a *personal attack* on himself. Not only would that be so self-evidently stupid even a zero like Wright couldn't expect anyone to take it seriously, but staggeringly narcissistic as well. But I'm not sure what else it could be.
DeleteI assumed it was using the pure wholesomeness of a children's cartoon to smuggle in a message about how it's not the end of human civilization if two women fall in love. Kind of a "Sapphic Horse" sort of ploy.
DeleteThat or it's an Alanis Morrissette lyric. It's got kind of a ring to it.
"Sapphic Horse" is a brilliant phrase.
DeleteThanks! Maybe it should be the title of the song.
DeleteNot sure how that's either cowardly (in light of the number of people who think like Wright who have some influence in American media it's actually rather brave) or how ir's an attack rather than a thing to BE attacked, even from the closest thing I can imagine to Wright's viewpoint. But maybe this is as it should be and Wright is the one not making sense here.
DeleteI would say that there must be some connection between being a bad writer and a deeply unpleasant person, but I always liked Harlan Ellison's stuff. ::shrug::
DeleteI think Wright considers it "cowardly" because they didn't tell you at the beginning that Korra was lesbian; they let you think she was a straight person and get emotionally attached to her, then sprung it on you that she was one of Teh Gays! (The horror.) It was an attack because John C. Wright has deeply internalized his homophobia and views a disagreement with that viewpoint as an attack on his sense of self. Hence, "cowardly attack". God, I'm getting too good at understanding how these people try to think.
Delete@Yog Sothoth: Harlan Ellison may be a deeply unpleasant person to many, but I'll always remember him doing goldfish impressions for my five-year-old. :)
And now various SP/RP hangers-on show up to stamp their feet and remind us that, like Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction," they won't be ignored. Better lock up your pet rabbits some place safe, Phillip.
ReplyDeleteThat may be my fault. I'm the one who linked it in Scalzi's comments; maybe somebody else would've done it if I hadn't, but that's no excuse.
DeleteOhhhh. "Vox Dei." I'm slow, but I get there eventually.
ReplyDeleteDancing till the end was definitely worth it. I love Janelle Monae so much and I love what you said about her.
Don't feel bad, I hadn't realized the exact same thing until you mentioned it just now, and I've been exposed to Beale's crap for as long as PZ Myers has been verbally laying the smack down on it.
DeleteIt is also a reference to a famous statement originating in 1327 and appearing historically in many many places, "Vox populi, vox dei," The voice of the people is as the voice of god."
DeleteOr, as RAH wrote: "My God! How did we get in this mess!"
DeleteGiven what Vox Day's populi have voiced, I find this particularly apropos. :)
It might mean that too (if you think that random Greek/Latin swaps are in some sense "meaning"), but it also blatantly means "voice of god."
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DeleteRe the whole fascist creation myth, can't help bu think that one of my favourite 3rd (the most patrician IMO) Doctor quotes: 'There never was a golden age Mike'
ReplyDeletehow does a christian, even a christian domionist, get away with claiming that science and logic trump all else, in light of their christian beliefs, which clearly violate the laws of reason, logic and science.
ReplyDeleteNot being snarky, I'm really asking.
I'm certainly not with the puppies, but one answer to that question would be that Christian beliefs generally speaking *don't* violate any laws of reason, logic or even science. (But there are a million threads on this subject and it might be getting away from the point of the blog to go down this road.) It doesn't mean that Christian beliefs are true of course, and it doesn't mean that person is any good at applying said laws.
Deletecertainly a literal interpretation of biblical canon (which many, many believe) is at odds with logic and science.
DeleteFlying Spaghetti monster has already proven God to be at odds with logic, in fact.
Well we could go on all day.... it would be a very odd world, probably one beyond our conception, where a spaghetti monster airborne or not was at odds with logic.
DeleteA literalist approach to canon isn't at odds with logic but is with some science, notably the age of Earth and the cosmos. I don't know what kind of Christian this puppy guy is although to me that kind of Christianity seems strange and exotic, and not emphasised by the major denominations familiar to me (as former Catholic brought up in the UK).
I'd like to chime in on Ms. Marvel, which is a comic I loved for precisely the reason that it champions conservative values... while not being a slave to them.
ReplyDeleteWhat I love is that her religious and conservative family aren't seen as wrong. Not always right, but generally coming from a good and caring place even if they're being thunderously wrong-headed. That they're Islamic is almost beside the point (although I do find it fascinating to see a different take on fashion and culture), because it puts forth the importance of others.
If I want to get stupid-crazy about this, I'd put forth this same reasoning as to why I loved the last two Fast & Furious movies. Despite being an Atheist, I treasure the fact the movie isn't afraid to draw strength from their faith. It is utterly true to family values... even if it does fall victim to the notion that punishment for crime is something which doesn't happen to millionaires :)
If we want to sum up exactly what that value is, let's call it decency. Decency, which exists in virtually every culture and belief system. Even the fascists of WWII weren't immune to it, as the stories of John Rabe and Chiune Sugihara prove.
Because, let's face it, when we're talking politics, we're often talking about different styles of governments. That someone wants lots of government regulation, while another is distrustful of all government intrusion means jack and squat when it comes to being decent to one another.
But to remove it from a political perspective, small c conservatism; we're really talking about respected the status quo as a workable system. To think carefully before rocking the boat. In many situations, conservatives exist to be defeated and overcome... but they're needed to help insure that what follows works as well or better than what it replaces. To make sure enough people are ready to take the progressive leap, to make sure they've thought it through.
And I think Ms. Marvel is a shining example of doing exactly that. Her elders are respected, the past is respected, and they make her actively think about what is she wants and how best to accomplish it. This is conservative thought and progressive thought working together as it should. Both making strong points, but neither being always right.
I really enjoyed reading this article. I'd never heard of this Beale fellow until today, but wow, he really does not sound like someone I would want to know.
ReplyDeleteOn the one hand, I think that Worldcon (or whoever it is that actually awards Hugos) needs to amend their rules to have the same "ethics disqualification" that the Oscars have. For example,
" [...] it is the Academy's goal to ensure that the awards competition is conducted in a fair and ethical manner. If any campaign activity is determined by the board of governors to work in opposition to that goal, whether or not anticipated by these regulations, the board of governors may take any corrective actions or assess any penalties that in its discretion it deems necessary to protect the reputation and integrity of the awards process."
On the other hand, I think that people voting for things they haven't read (whether it's a novel or a law) is a self-evidently bad idea. If the state of the publishing industry is such that it's just no longer reasonable to expect that everyone has read everything being voted on, maybe the Hugo award needs to retire while it still has some dignity (perhaps to be replaced with a SF Hall Of Fame, for which there would be no requirement that it be awarded every year).
There is no requirement that a Hugo be awarded every year. No Award is always a given option.
DeleteA moment of silence for all the talented people, some of whom I know, who have been hurt by Mr. Beale's actions. The Hugos have been sometimes people's lifelong dreams, and to see what should be a triumph for years or decades of hard work turned into the nightmare this awards season has become is truly awful.
ReplyDeleteI used to want to win a Hugo Award, regardless of what happens now, the rocket has lost much of its shine for me.
Great article Phil. I wish it hadn't been something with any necessity behind it. But here it is, with the necessity of pointing out Simon Magus in Samaria, as all false prophets should be.
"A moment of silence for all the talented people, some of whom I know, who have been hurt by Mr. Beale's actions."
DeleteHear, hear. Lovely words thanks you. One thing I believe that people such as Beale appear to forget is the results of their actions and the effect that real consideration and regard for others can have. I think that the simplest and most powerful thing we can do for one another is to have some thought and positive regard - that's what I take away from all of this anyway. Thanks acrbeatle.
Thank you very much. The silliest part is that I am holding back their names for fear Beale will cause them even MORE grief for being unhappy with his false prophet machinations.
DeleteIts a sorry state where creators are forced to hide to prevent themselves from becoming a ball in a game they didn't chose to be a part of, and whose rules are arbitrary and rigged.
I really want a positive move forward from here. I really do. I am sadly expecting another fuss up next year though.
"This is, to my mind, the amazing thing about Theodore Beale. It is not just that he is a frothing fascist, but that he believes that the best possible thing he can do with his magical genetic access to Divine Truth is to try to disrupt the Hugo Awards."
ReplyDeleteMilton's "rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven" Devil also accomplished that trajectory; it has always surprised me just how /p/e/t/t/y/ small evil can be.
Thank you for mentioning The Iron Dream. That book creeped me out many years ago. Thank you for describing the aesthetic of fascism, although I tend to look at it more as quasi-religious (in the meta sense). Thank you for this whole essay.
And after that prolonged exposure to the "thought" of Messrs. Beale and Wright, I need a hot shower with a loofah.
A loofah! Dammit. I knew I forgot something at Target.
DeleteEven with my "2015 Hugo Fatigue", I still really enjoyed that essay. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI comfort myself with the notion that Beale's activity in fandom is at least less destructive than his activity in politics would be. I sense time traveler interference.
You know, some of his acolyte are or were, God help us, serving in the military. Including the guy who vigorously defends the practical and moral use of torture (no, I am not surprise. But sad, yes). No matter how awful their output, it's probably best if they continue to write instead of serve.
DeleteThis piece is the best of both worlds - a well-researched essay with clear citations, thorough textual analysis, and support for its conclusions, and a cathartic rant that made me want to start pumping my fist and singing old union songs. I didn't know how badly I needed to read this until I was reading it, making, at times, the same faces I make watching NBA dunk highlights.
ReplyDeleteExcellent stuff, Mr. Sandifer. Thank you for writing and sharing.
Great article. Love your mention of Ms. Monae's music video as a strong representation of science fiction. Hope the Hugo awards isn't destroyed because of Beale and his ilk.
ReplyDeleteI'm always torn between thinking the light hand with which she talks about the world of Cindi Mayweather is exactly perfect, and wanting to see the movie.
DeleteWhat a marvelous read. Pretty much everything that makes your work so compulsively good, rolled up in one package.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this article, and I am looking forward to exploring your back catalogue, as it were.
ReplyDeleteSeems a little odd that the Janelle Monae song is praising some young woman as a "modern day Mia Farrow" when Mia Farrow is still alive.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't seem weird to me. Mia Farrow today has little cultural relevance, so the line refers to the period when she did.
DeleteJust a thought, but if we are comparing VD to Stalin, wouldn't it make more historical sense to compare Larry Correia and Brad Torgerson to Lenin and Trotsky?
ReplyDeleteAnd look how well that worked out for them.
Isn't it unfortunate that his (self-selected) pseudonymous initials also stand for Venereal Disease?
DeleteIt's having choices that makes nominating and voting for the Hugos so important to fans. It's having your one little voice combine with numerous random other voices and finding that you weren't the only one that loved and sometimes agonized over something grand. Taking that away from others is selfish and childish. Using your influence to ruin an event for authors that have done nothing beyond publish a story you didn't personally like, or that you never bothered to read, reveals an ugliness of character that shall go on to be what others remember. It won't be their strident views, nor their feigned knowledge of Latin that is remembered. It'll be the fact that they were childish bullies. Just try to Streisand effect that up, gentlemen. The internet is waiting.
ReplyDeleteVox Day is not a fascist. Not even close. He is a libertarian. Libertarians are as anti-fascist as one can get. They aren't even close.
ReplyDeleteAre they close, though?
DeleteVox Day isn't even a libertarian, he's a neoreactionary. He's one of those people who have decided that the techno-utopianism of libertarianism is great, but that whole pesky freedom thing (at least outside of the class of intelligentsia to which he aspires but fails to actually achieve, ending up coming off as verbose, whiny and self-worshipping) is just too much, and we should just all go back to the Divine Right of Kings. Which is great, as long as you're one of the Kings.
DeleteBeyond the question of whether Beale is a libertarian or not, I am deeply unconvinced that "libertarians are as anti-fascist as one can get." Certainly there's a certain paranoid flavor of American libertarianism that has a great deal in common with fascism.
DeleteLibertarians are pretty close to fascists as makes no difference, take it from somebody whose parents generation tasted the ACTUAL fascist regime. Contempt for organised labour: check. Contempt for the common man: check. Idealisation of muscular virility: check. Worship of technology understood as foundation of capitalist enterprise: check. Contempt for provisions of social welfare, substituted by, if anything, individual charity: check. Hell, even the covers of Ayn Rand's books are bedecked in the kind of art deco aesthetic that is, in Italy, called "arte del ventennio". I know, the University I studied in was a particularly fine example.
DeleteAnd yes, of course every fascist believe they are brave, individual, heroically singular anti-conformists. As they said in The Life Of Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!
Crowd: [in unison] Yes! We're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different!
Crowd: [in unison] Yes, we are all different!
I'm not.
Deletedammit, I guess the link broke my first try ... Anyway, I'm another one here from Stross' link. Excellent analysis.
ReplyDeleteI would only add two things:
One, anti-feminism is as core a value for fascism as are racism and redemptive violence. It doesn't tend to be used as a "field mark" because anti-feminism is so widespread in the world, fascism doesn't really stand out that way.
Two, Beale's takeover of the Puppy movement is to his personal financial benefit. I put some Venn diagrams and discussion about this up at Obsidian Wings, but tl;dr: this has been such a successful marketing campaign he'd be a fool not to try it again next year. I can't think of anything the Sad Puppies can to stop him, either, so I expect that as soon as they put together a slate, Beale will take it, edit it to be chock-full of Castalia House works, and tell his followers to vote it en masse.
He was a scorpion all along, you know.
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DeleteThis is the main reason I think the ''If you change the rules to block Sad Puppies/ Rabid Puppies then you are doing exactly what they want!" is so deeply misguided. No, they want to win Hugos (all of them do). Stopping them from shitting on a great award by gaming the system comes before imaginary moral stands that amount to strategic surrenders..
DeleteIf they want to win Hugos, then why is Vox gladly encouraging his opponents to go the "No Award" route? He's much more keen to expose the absurd extremes to which people will go to reject him than he is to win an award. People like Scalzi and Jemisin took pokes at him, and so he keeps poking back. He likes to watch his foes squeal, and he's created a situation this year in which the traditionally liberal sci fi community will squeal no matter what happens. It's all a win for him. Blow up the awards you cherish with a straight "No Award" protest? Vox wins. Give his slate some wins? Vox wins.
DeleteThe question is what happens next year and the year after. My hunch is that a "No Award" revolt against Vox this year will ensure he returns next year, too. A few awards tossed to the more deserving people on the Puppies slate would probably do more than anything to disarm the Puppies effort moving forward.
And, one has to admit, there are deserving nominees on Vox's slate. Black Gate has belatedly asked to withdraw, as have some others, but a site like that really does deserve some recognition for the quality fan work that it puts out.
I'd point out that I accused Beale of wanting to disrupt the Hugos, not of wanting to win them.
DeleteTorgersen seems to want to win them, for what it's worth.
"A few awards tossed towards the more deserving people" would make it utterly worthless as an awards ceremony though.
Deletebuzzardist:
DeleteThe point I'm trying to make is that, from a business POV, *nothing* can dissuade Vox from doing it again next year, because it's working so well financially this year. He may have started just wanting to make people upset, but he's now making money doing it, which is an incentive that can easily override any other consideration.
I would be curious to know exactly how much Vox's publishing company is actually selling from the Hugos. Nominated works are being released for free. It is some extra advertising, and I'm sure sales have ticked up a little slightly. But for the small volumes of ebooks that the company normally moves, I highly doubt Vox or anyone else is getting rich. My impression is that Vox didn't start that publishing house primarily to make money.
DeleteObviously I don't know the details, so I'm just guessing. But going from "very few people have heard of me" to "everyone in the field has heard of me" is a huge marketing plus, one that most new e-publishers would kill for.
DeleteA few days ago, Castalia announced a deal with Jerry Pournelle to reprint his "There Will Be War" anthologies. That's probably been in the works for a while, but it sure looks like the RP's success has given it a boost.
The thing about capitalism is that it doesn't take a *lot* of money to dominate one's behavior. I agree, Day probably didn't start Castalia to make money -- but once it does make any money, he'll keep doing what he's doing.
Certainly that's my general M.O. (Back my Patreon. Baaaaaack my Paaaaaatreoooooon.)
Delete"None of this, of course, is actually evidence that Torgersen and Beale collaborated on their slates..."
ReplyDelete...but this article suggests it'd be reasonable to presume that they did:
https://naomikritzer.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/vox-days-involvement-in-the-sad-puppies-slate/
I don't think I'll ever be able to understand how a group of people didn't like the Hugo shortlists that were being produced democratically, attributed it to the actions of supposed politically biased cliques, and formed their own real politically biased clique in order to force a result they did want in the name of restoring democracy to the Hugos. That's Olympic standard hypocrisy. I would allow my head to explode but, y'know, that'd only be giving Larry Correia what he wants.
I dunno, I don't think it can be Olympic standard when it's so horribly common. It's a central building block of any number of stances of the uglier elements of the Right. The same mechanism that fuels the Rabid Puppies fuels proponents of torture and those who insist Islam has declared war on the West and must be fought: "Barbarians do X; to beat barbarians the civilised peoples must do X".
DeletePhil's focus on the "Stabbed in the back" narrative is instructive here, because it allows the fascists and the fascist-adjacent to insist when they stab people "from the front" it's fine, because they're only doing it because being stabbed in the back is so awful. That in both cases someone is being stabbed is conveniently ignored, because what they want to focus on is the direction of the act. They've turned what we see as scalar quantities into vectors.
Which is ironic, because when people like me point out the difference between the oppressed badmouthing their oppressors and the oppressors badmouthing the oppressed, we're accused of doing exactly the same thing, making us the real racists, or whatever.
It's hypocrisy all the way down.
This is article either a labor of love or savage respect.
ReplyDeleteVox livin rent free in ur head dude.
saw this comment on twitter as well, and both times the phrase "rent free" jumped out.
Delete"rent free"?
i mean, 'living in your head' is a reasonable metaphor. but "rent free"? what kind of imagination do you have to have that you can't spell out a metaphor without clarifying the economic context
like people might otherwise think he was paying rent for such an occupation, and would thus be appropriately subservient to his mind-landlord.
http://www.discogs.com/Nicolette-Let-No-one-Live-Rent-Free-In-Your-Head/release/73040
Delete:O
Delete''No Award'' everything, start the rules change process this year, counter-slate them next year, and then proceed with business as usual in 2017. Problem solved.
ReplyDeleteHow does this remotely solve the problem? The accusation by Torgerson, Correia, and Day is that cliques of voters have been gaming the Hugos for years, ensuring that select people in the "in-group" show up on the ballot and win. Day would be just as happy, if not happier, with No Award this year as he would with any of his slate winning an award as doing so would essentially prove his point. Changing the rules to ensure that certain fans of whom you don't approve can't participate in future awards? That would be the ultimate Vox victory, proving that the sci fi left is so partisan that they will rewrite the rules rather than let anyone else have a turn at the awards, and it would ruin the Hugos permanently.
DeleteVox Day stayed mostly as a passive participant in the Sad Puppies campaigns in the past, until people started attacking him last year, blaming him for organizing something he didn't organize, and then for exulting in defeating him when, as he stated from the start, he fully expected to lose. His Rabid Puppies campaign is his response, saying, "Hey, when I actually organize to game the system, I actually game it, not just put one or two nominations on the ballot." "No Award" will encourage Vox to come back strong again next year to "No Award" a nomination pool of the people his ideological foes like. Changing the award rules from then on will send a loud message of "You're not welcome here," which will only boost support for Vox's accusations. You'll be adding to the problem, not solving it.
I don't care if Vox Day feels vindicated or, for that matter, what he experiences at all in his own subjective world. What I DO care about is his group no longer being able to hijack the nomination process for attention and cheap promotion of political hackery.
DeleteWell, O.K., but what would be a better process? Requiring everyone to purchase a full convention attendance membership? Then you're just turning the nomination war into a money battle. Whose side has the deeper pockets to buy more con memberships?
DeleteYou could limit voting, I suppose, to people physically in attendance at the con, but that could just as easily be hijacked. Also, the nominations still have to happen in advance of the con, so there has to be some way to do that without having voters physically present.
I'm at a loss for how exactly one could reconfigure the rules to guarantee that certain people are no longer able to participate short of explicitly blacklisting people.
Either of the above options, too, would also exclude a lot of people who genuinely want to vote for their favorite sci fi from participating.
So what else would you do? Ban any public campaigning for the awards? Ban slates? How does one go about doing that? Prior to Sad Puppies, there were dozens of identical or nearly identical nominations submitted to the Hugos ever year. Plenty of people admit that this kind of thing went on. Sad Puppies made what had been a poorly kept secret public, and then Rabid Puppies escalated the practice. But how you go about legislating that people can't say, "Here's who I'm voting for, and I think you should, too," is beyond me. If WorldCon did try to ban slates, what would it do? Disqualify any work or author that appeared on a slate ballot? Well, gee, whom do you think Vox Day would turn around and nominate on a slate then?
You don't want the nomination process hijacked again. Great. But I think you overestimate the ability of a con to establish rules immune to hijackery. What you propose will just give Vox Day more ammunition. I have no way of predicting what Vox will do, but my bet is that the best way to get him to go away quickly is to let a few of the more deserving items on the Puppies slates win. At that point, they lose the ability to say that the game is rigged against them, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were less disruptive campaigns in the future.
But, hey, if you want to burn the awards down this year, next year, and possible in the years after that. Vox has already handed you the match. Personally, I think it would be a shame to torch the awards, but you and Vox both seem to think otherwise on this point.
Dozens of people better equipped at engineering voting systems are already discussing how to change things. I have more faith in their ability to fix things than I have fear of this Vox Day (who you are trying to pretend not to be a fan and partisan of so that you seem unbiased) being able to continually game the system.
DeleteYou can put your hope in that, but short of blacklisting specific people and works, virtually any system can be gamed by someone who knows the rules. And Vox is the kind of obsessive game player who knows how to rules lawyer a thing to death if he wants to. We'll have to wait and see what specific proposal gets put forward, but count me as a skeptic.
DeleteRegardless, from a public relations standpoint, any such proposal will be a coup for all of the Puppies. Torgerson and Correia set out to recognize some people who, because the awards work the way that they do, don't receive any recognition, or, if that failed, to expose how badly the left will fight to keep that recognition from anyone who is not of the right ideological views. Changing the rules to push them out only validates their contention from the very start.
Reducing this to a PR war concedes far too many premises to Theodore Beale.
DeleteThe thing is, buzzardist, the Sad and Rabid Puppies will declare victory no matter what. No Award wins? "See? See? Our views are being oppressed!" They win? "See? See? The fans secretly sympathize with us!" The rules get changed? "See? See? They had to change the rules to stop us winning!" The rules don't get changed? "See? See? We told you that there was nothing wrong with our tactic!" Couner-slate? "See? See? We told you THEY were doing it too!" No counter-slate? "See? See? We told you THEY were doing it so secretly that you couldn't even spot it!"
DeleteEverything vindicates their point of view in their point of view, because they're delusional nutbags who have thrown up eleventy-million contradictory justifications for their actions. Worrying about how they might feel about it is like worrying about how the Republicans are going to react to the choice of Democratic candidate. There ain't nobody they're going to like, so fuckit.
For myself, I'm repeatedly advocating a rule where a large number of sufficiently similar ballots are automatically thrown out as invalid. Large enough and similar enough not to be achievable by chance, small enough that you could no longer gin up a slate of GamerGaters to tilt the nominations your way.
Thanks for a brilliant article Phil, still finishing reading it but wanted to give you my support here. Great piece of work!
ReplyDeleteThank you. I'm very glad to have been directed to this post; it's helped me to focus and crystallize my own thoughts on the Puppies debacle.
ReplyDeleteThe year's a third over. It's not too early to start thinking about who I'd like to nominate for the Hugos ... including in he Best Fan Writer category.
Sorry to everyone for the degree to which the comments section degenerated while I was asleep last night. I've tidied it back up to our usual standard, and will be actively moderating today.
ReplyDeleteTo anyone who may have followed a link from Beale's blog today and is inclined to weigh in, please note that this blog does maintain a "no platform the fascists" policy, and that I am generally aware of your playbook for Internet arguments, so basically, unless you give me a very good reason not to, your comment will be live for entire minutes before I delete it and get ever closer to earning enough SJW points for my free Redshirts toaster.
As for the reasonable and pleasantly non-fascist majority of my commenters, many of whose comments just disappeared along with the derp, please don't feed the trolls.
DeleteThere's a _toaster_? Why was I not informed? I _need_ that toaster!
Delete"It is not just that he is a frothing fascist, but that he believes that the best possible thing he can do with his magical genetic access to Divine Truth is to try to disrupt the Hugo Awards. "
ReplyDeleteI do like this. I brings to mind Uri Geller, who, if his claims are to be believed, is able to affect the molecular structure of metal objects at a distance... and who uses this awesome power to ruin cutlery.
Obviously that's because he's in the pay of Big Cutlery (Or swords, shovels & pitchforks to their friends). I thought everyone knew about that.
DeleteIt's worth pointing out that Little Mister "Scientifically Literate" is using the wrong term for Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens Denisova/Denisova hominins and doesn't even realize it.
ReplyDeleteNeither do his followers, who are very probably just people looking for someone to follow; specifically, someone to follow who denigrates other human beings on a regular basis. He also gives them something to do -- in this case, game the Hugo nomination system -- which gives them a false sense of accomplishment.
It's sort of fascinating as far as nutty cult-like behavior goes.
I was sad, Philip, to see that you deleted some of my comments. I appreciate what you've written here. You've put a lot together. Some of it is very insightful. Some I definitely disagree with.
ReplyDeleteBut I am really interested in how you define science fiction and how you see various works fitting into that generic classification. I thought there were some good comments developing in the thread behind the first comment I posted, particularly from Scurra, if I recall, who suggested that a lot of this is just a definitional pissing match. Many people in sci fi have move to much more expansive categories that, it seems, could include "Dinosaur, My Love." Other purists are rejecting that.
The question is, if the Hugos are an award for "science fiction," what does that mean in an era where people seem willing to bend all categories and definitions out of shape. "Sci fi" can't just mean "the stuff that I like." If fans are going to award the best sci fi, then "sci fi" has to have some generic features. You mentioned initially that it has to do with imagining the future. Yog wanted to expand this to anything speculative, without really explaining what "speculative" means.
I look at a story like "Dinosaur, My Love," and I don't see anything recognizably sci fi or speculative. There is no imagined world in any tangible sense. There is just a sad woman locked in this world. (And, I'd argue, a pretty unreformed Victorian woman desiring both violent beast and gentle prince in her lover, and yet she is pathetically stuck with this comatose body.) Is a daydream enough to count as speculative fiction? I could see putting the story up for a romance award, but science fiction? I'm having trouble fitting it into the category.
And if the Hugos do devolve to a "what I and enough other people like" award, then what's to stop a legion of fans rushing, nominating Fifty Shades of Gray, and voting it the winner by a landslide? Genres are made to be reworked, mixed, and reshaped. That's what artists do, but just voting something a sci fi work doesn't necessarily make it one.
And that's why I asked for a clarification on how you're treating that category. Yog was quick to pounce with insults, which I think ruined the tone of the thread, but it's a genuine and, I hope, important question that I had in response to your essay. I'd like to hear people's thoughts about what makes sci fi sci fi and how particular works, whether they be "Dinosaur, My Love," "Game of Thrones," "Wheel of Time," or anything else fits within the Hugo award category.
I talk about a lot of these issues with Jack Graham and Andrew Hickey in this podcast: http://shabogangraffiti.blogspot.com/2015/04/emergency-anti-fascist-shabcast-3-hugo.html
DeleteThanks for the link. Pardon if I don't have a couple hours to spend listening to the full thing. But you all do get into some interesting discussion of the genre just before the hour mark. Sci fi as a genre, like with all generic identifications, is almost impossible to define. One can pick out qualities and features--a pastoral hearkens to a golden world, a classical romance (not the sappy love sort) involves movement and often separation of people, etc. Genres are often those "you know it when you see it" types of things. Definitions become impossibly complex and contradictory, but most people generally agree that a particular work does or does not generally fit the classification.
DeleteExcept when people stop agreeing, which is what's brought us to the current state of the Hugos.
You all go around and around in the podcast with different sub-genres of sci fi--the action adventure, the Menippean satire and other cultural satire, novels of ideas, normal fiction with sci fi window dressing, and so on. My sense is that Vox very much does like that classical action adventure type of story and stories that engage in big ideas about society and humanity. These are the kinds of stories that used to be the bread-and-butter of the sci fi world. In many cases, these kinds of stories remain highly popular.
But the Hugos in the last 20 years or so have undergone a pretty significant shift, almost entirely pushing that classical sci fi out the door. What's replaced it has been a mix of regular fiction with sci fi as window dressing (and recently with that window dressing growing exceedingly thin, in some cases, such as with "Dinosaur, My Love") and a lot of awards given on the basis of who one's publisher is (Tor has been very good at running whisper campaigns and organizing blocs of votes, albeit at a much smaller scale than Vox has done) or what one's political or social identity is. And now we're seeing layer upon layer of reactionary shouting as each side lays claim to the Hugos.
You can call the Hugos outdated in trying to identify "sci fi" because genres are so scattered and mixed now anyway, but that still doesn't square with most people's intuitions. They hear "sci fi," and a certain image is conjured in their minds. Artists can try to push on what that image is to reshape it over time by supplying iconic works that remix genres, but, ultimately, if an award for sci fi is going to be given, somebody has to define something to designate generally what's eligible and what's not.
To continue, you all get into what contemporary sci fi has turned into a bit earlier in the podcast when you start talking about the diversity of past nominees. Contrary to what a lot of people have claimed, there is quite a lot of diversity in terms of gender and race on the Puppies slates. The difference, I think, is that the Puppies seem much less interested in awarding prizes for being a certain race or identity, which is what a lot of the Hugo and Nebula trumpeters over the past decade or so have been crowing about. The posturing over the sweep of the Nebulas this past year by women is a good example because it seemed like a lot of people were cheering diversity for diversity's sake instead of actually talking about the quality of the literature. Maybe some of that stuff was good; maybe it wasn't. I haven't read enough of it to pass judgment. But some of the exultant reactions I saw on Twitter and elsewhere left me wondering if fiction-qua-fiction had been lost as a reason for giving prizes.
DeleteThe Puppies, instead, want to shift the awards to recognize two or three specific sub-genres of sci fi. If you look at a lot of the Puppies' complaints, including Vox's, they really don't give two cents about who is what identity. The con-participating crowd skews a certain way, which means that a lot of popular, well-written sci fi fails to get recognition, which is true. Torgerson and Correia wanted to get some recognition for the kinds of sci fi that they like, which is a perfectly reasonable fan action. But the reaction to last year's Sad Puppies set the table for this year's debacle. The shrieking, hollering, blaming, and everything else put blood in the water. Had there not been such a nasty, concerted effort to put Torgerson and Correia back in their place, and had people not tried to blame Vox for the Puppies campaign that others ran, I highly suspect that this year's Rabid Puppies never would have materialized. But when anybody on the left postures, Vox looks for any way possible to poke them in the eye. And that's what we're now seeing play out.
I agree with what you said elsewhere--Torgerson probably does want to win an award here or there for some people he likes, but Vox really doesn't care. What he sees is that the Hugos matter to people like Hayden, Scalzi, Jemisin, and the rest of that in-crowd. He sees that they matter to you, too. Because the awards matter to certain people, messing with the awards is an all-too-easy way to, as I said, poke them in the eye. And, I'll wager, as long as people on the political left keep shrieking about the Hugos, Nebulas, and other awards, all those people will be handing him easy opportunities to keep poking.
I'll be honest, buzzardist: When I hear someone say, "Well, I haven't read any of the science-fiction involved, but it seems like it won awards because it was by a woman", I run do not walk the other way. The reason people don't talk about whether something was good after it won an award is usually because that talk was done before it won the award; at this point, that conversation is over and people start talking about trends for the industry. Jumping to the conclusion that the fiction must be mediocre and awarded as affirmative action is usually kind of a blind spot--I mean, in previous years, did you wonder if white guys were only awarded a Hugo because they were white and male?
DeleteI also think that way too much attention has been paid to 'Dinosaur', which was nominated in one category one year and didn't win. When you look at the overall winners in all the categories for the past five years, you see plenty of "recognizable" sci-fi stories, from novels like 'Redshirts' to movies like 'Gravity' and 'Inception' to graphic novels like 'Girl Genius'. That's kind of the problem with the underlying rationale behind the Puppies' campaign--it simply isn't there when you look at the awards for the past five years.
buzzardist: 1) Aside from "If You Were a Dinosaur," which is seriously problematic for you guys to bring up at this point, because it's almost like Orwell's two minutes of hate w/ that story, what *specific Hugo nominees* in the past ten years do you think should have been declared ineligible? The Sad Puppies tie themselves in knots not getting into specifics (something Philip mentions in his essay), but it's the specifics that are so important here. I want a list, a full-on list of things nominated for Hugos that should not have been. This didn't come about because of an honest debate about the definition of sci-fi (and, implied, fantasy). It came about because two people thought they deserved to win Hugos and constructed a massive conspiracy to explain why they didn't win, as opposed to saying, "Hey, maybe I was just 'There Will Be Blood' to this year's 'No Country For Old Men' (best recent example of two very deserving nominees.)
DeleteAgain, specifics.
2) "(Tor has been very good at running whisper campaigns and organizing blocs of votes, albeit at a much smaller scale than Vox has done)"--EVIDENCE? Seriously. Evidence. Citations. Somewhere. Anywhere. And what is a "whisper campaign"? I can't help but think that you guys knew gaming the Hugos was wrong, so you're after-the-fact trying to justify "well, -they- did it first!"
Something Philip also mentions in his excellent essay.
John, that's nonsense. Don't pretend to quote me by putting words in quotes, assigning them to me, and then make up your own quote. I never said that I'd not read any of the works involved. I said that I hadn't read enough of them to feel like I could be a responsible voter.
DeleteMore importantly, I'm not referring to the particular quality of the works at all, as I plainly stated, but to the crowing of various and sundry parties on Twitter, blogs, and elsewhere after last year's Hugos and after the Nebulas. When the people who supported those winners were proudly saying that they supported them because they were female authors, it creates a very strong impression that...well...they supported them because they are women, not entirely because of what they wrote.
You're right that plenty of recognizable sci fi has been on the ballots. I've not read "Girl Genius," but the others you mention all bored me. Films and TV probably deserve separate discussion because, well, nothing that isn't that big and mainstream ever seems to show up on the Hugo nominations in those categories anyway, which means virtually everything fits conventional expectations. The categories for writing shape up quite differently. Even a novel like "Redshirts" has been part of the complaint--there's nothing much original or exciting about a highly derivative work. It's not excellent writing. It's just Scalzi marshalling people through his blog and Twitter to support him, plus Tor throwing its weight behind the effort. The evidence is quite plain if one looks at voting patterns that Tor has used a voting bloc effectively to nominate works and propel them to wins.
No, no single entity has completely controlled the nomination list in the past, and nobody is claiming that. But plenty of respectable people admit that a lot of whisper campaigning and small-time bloc voting went on. Nobody has suggested that one group was keeping out all the classic sci fi. Instead, it's been several small cliques who each have enough support to put one person on the ballot who've been dominating for the past decade, making it very hard for anyone else to break into the nomination spotlight unless they organize their own, bigger clique. Which is what Torgerson and Correia did. And then the old cliques threw a fit last year that even just one or two people per category not of their choosing landed on the ballot. Last year's backlash against the Puppies, more than anything, seems to be what's motivating this year's drama.
Buzzardist, would you be so kind as to take a 24 hour break from the comments section here? Thanks very much.
DeleteThe Puppies, instead, want to shift the awards to recognize two or three specific sub-genres of sci fi.
DeleteAnd that's just fine - can't they set up some awards themselves? And, unlike with the Hugos, they would have the luxury of defining exactly what it is that they would like to see nominated and/or winning - right up to the point when they discover how impossible it is to police even their own definition. (Which harks back to my own point about how this is a classic definitional argument, as everything always is.)
The biggest strength and the biggest weakness of the Hugos is precisely that lack of definition. Which is why we are where we are.
buzzardist said: "Don't pretend to quote me by putting words in quotes, assigning them to me, and then make up your own quote. I never said that I'd not read any of the works involved. I said that I hadn't read enough of them to feel like I could be a responsible voter."
DeleteBut you have no problem complaining that the people who had read enough of them to be a responsible voter didn't do their job because you heard that too many of them were women. That's slicing the sausage a little fine for my tastes, but you're the one who has to defend it...
"if you got John C. Wright drunk at the bar, you could get him to admit that he thinks transhumanism and black people are ugly for the same reason."
ReplyDeleteActually, I am a teetotaler, and I always tell the truth, and, unlike yourself, sir, I am not a racist. An honest man often hears himself accused of his accuser's flaws.
As for the claim that I am attacking Ursula K LeGuin when, in fact, I am praising her with fulsome praise is beyond absurd.
Next time you would like to misinterpret or misunderstand something I have said, please ask me a question before inventing your nonsense, and quote me: even an English major can adhere to this minimal level of courtesy and honesty.
But I don't want to talk to you, because you're a raving fascist loony.
Delete"unlike yourself, sir, I am not a racist. An honest man often hears himself accused of his accuser's flaws."
DeleteThis is a hilarious comment, because it can easily be read as meaning the exact opposite of what the writer intended.
"unlike yourself, sir, I am not a racist. An honest man often hears himself accused of his accuser's flaws."
DeleteIt's "I know you are, but what am I," only wearing a tuxedo!
Replying to a lengthy analysis of oneself and one's associates establishing fascist beliefs, the desire to disenfranchise women, an obsession with racial purity and deep-seated hypocrisy by saying, "No, you're racist, and you misread me on LeGuin," pretty much gives the game away.
FUN FACT: If you can get a teetotaler to drink, they generally get very drunk, very fast. Just throwing that out there.
DeleteAnd this comment says it all: it is your identity, which we give you, that makes you illegitimate. We define you as such, so it is true by virtue of a First Principle: tautology. And we have defined ourselves as superior, both intellectually and morally, so if you disagree, then you cannot be as superior as are we. The category we designate for ourselves - messianic elites, is for champions of the perpetual Victimhood Class which we also designate and maintain. But that Class is trivial, because our actual position is to destroy all non-congruent thought, anywhere that it might be found.
DeleteIt is not just our own superiority that prevents us from thinking about and/or discussing objectively anything you say or think; it is our definition of your Class (Oppressors) as too odious to even consider. It is a moral conclusion, based on what we want, and requires no justification. Thus, it is clearly immoral to entertain thoughts outside of the approved thinking which we not only endorse, but absolutely require.
You claim to have facts which contradict our narrative. That cannot be true, because our narrative is tautologially impeccable, just as are we. So there is not reason even to look at contrary facts. Our only necessary involvement is to silence them, and you.
Capiche?
This entire post and comment section demonstrates the salience of Orwell's essay about politics and language and how the rampant abuse of the term "fascist" has rendered the term meaningless. The same can, now, be said for many other terms, "racism" being an excellent example.
DeleteWithin 20 years, if not sooner, the standard response from anyone who is non-left is going to be that "racism" is meaningless gibberish. You had your fun while it was available - in short order, it won't be available anymore.
Honestly, John, leaving all political differences between us aside, if the tone and style of your comments on internet threads are so pompous and overblown, then I can only wonder what your more formal prose sounds like. It doesn't really make me want to read your stuff on aesthetic merits alone, and I've read some pretty damn pretentious books.
DeleteHi Phillip. I'm new here. I want to hug you for that perfect, pretentiousness-puncturing response to Mr. Wright. (And for this line, which I am still laughing over: "It is a process during which one is afforded many opportunities to stop and say 'wait a moment, I seem to be allying with Josef Stalin, maybe I should reconsider my life choices.'")
DeleteNow, relatedly, and since its possible Mr. Wright is still hanging around, I just need to get something off my chest.
I'd never heard of you before this affair, but when you showed up on a news blog I do frequent (because you seem to be desperately ego-Googling yourself and commenting on every possible post that mentions you), my first thought was, "What a verbose blowhard. This guy writes for a living?"
Someone on a thread noted that you had written a post that was allegedly about a writer I do know and revere, Terry Pratchett. Curious, I visited the page for "The Watchtowers of Atlantis Tremble."
So here I am, reading a post with a premise I find morally repugnant -- that people should be forced to die in agony because of religious beliefs that are not their own -- supposedly about one of my favorite authors, who recently passed away. Total outrage fuel. I should have been on a hate-reading high. And instead I found my eyes glazing over. I was bored. So. Very. Bored.
John C. Wright, you write like a teen at a Renaissance festival. You are overwrought, overly dramatic, and above all dull.
I mean, holy God, man: "Hippocrates would not dare have offended the gods by betraying what he had sworn. He would not work harm who had vowed by gods of sea and underworld and sky firstly to do no harm, and poured red wine into the winedark seas to solemnize the oath ..."
My eyes may never roll back into their proper position. If this is how purple your nonfiction prose is, I am awed at the idea of your fiction.
TL;DR: I do not think the reason you've never won a Hugo is precisely what you think it is.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete(This is Kate Orman; Blogger absolutely refuses to let me log in.) Several essays online have helped me better understand the Puppies' assault on the Hugos. The above, and Maureen O'Danu's blog posting on Puppy psychology, are the two which have given me the deepest insights. As the mess on the carpet has inspired me to vote this year and next, I plan to nominate this thought-provoking, enlightening, hilarious, defiant, and frankly magnificently posting. (I'll also be nominating Recursive Occlusion, which is brilliant - proper review soon!).
ReplyDeleteThank you for pointing me to O'Danu's post, which I'm reading right now. It's quite enlightening. I also found Jeet Heer's article on the subject at The New Republic rather insightful.
DeleteAnd thank you, as well, Kate, for writing such wonderful books over the years.
Ta Adam! I hope to get some more books published soon rather than later, though obviously now I'll have to abandon my plan to use the pen name "Hugo Nebula".
DeleteI think your two part definition of fascism is interesting and useful, but is missing an essential ingredient; the element of nation. In fact, this must precede the betrayal and restoration. First, we must have the concept of a people, a nation of those people, and the governance of that nation, for it is this nation that has been betrayed, and that the hero must restore. So if one uses "fascism", even in analogy, one must have an analogy to the nation state.
ReplyDeleteI think one could make the case that the Rabid Puppies constitute an analogous nation, replacing bonds of ethny, geography with interest and ideology. Beale can be their king, Wright their archbishop. And the Hugos can be their Poland.
But your other examples of "facism" fall flat. Take this for example:
"It’s a classically fascist myth, just like Gamergate (gaming used to be great, then the feminist SJWs took over the gaming press, and now Gamergate will liberate it) or Men’s Rights Activists (of which Beale is one). "
Where is the hero of Gamergate? Has some charismatic leader changed his name to "Gamergate"? How about the MRA? Your analogy fails because you have confused a movement with an individual. "Gamergate" can not liberate it, because there is no such person.
Both the Gamergate and the MRA are a decentralized populist movement of a group of individuals who share some overlapping grievances. Given a sense of unity, and a strong leader, these could become fascist in nature. But they are not there yet. They may be actual breeding grounds for certain forms of antisocial behavior, but the they are no more than potential breeding grounds for fascism.
I thought I had a semi-coherent grasp on the issues. Turns out I was grossly mistaken. This is now saved for my offline consumption because it is going to take me days of analysis to get through the breadth of information you have so lucidly presented. Many issues you have taken and brought to fulsome the appropriate arguments to debunk the debacle's creators. And I love it. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I will say is that the initial argument that science fiction isn't about exploring outside the cultural and sociological boundaries is absolute bunk, as you have most eloquently, and rightly, stated. Some of the best science fiction I have read has been exactly that - taking the reader on a journey to an other-when, other-where, other-who, or other-why perspective and causing grey matter to have to work to incorporate new thought, reconcile new to old, or justify the dumping of the new thoughts in deference to the old. Some of the best stuff has come via covers that so totally did not predict the content or themes as well as covers that didn't offer more than minor predictive elements. Some of my most beloved reading in the genre has been challenging personally, emotionally, intellectually, etc., and I cherish that and, dare say, need it for my own personal growth within my humanity.
A human who is not evolving or growing in some aspect of self is stagnant. A genre that isn't is dead. Science fiction and fantasy are very much alive. And even books I don't like (personal preference issues) are good in challenging someone else. And that diversity is vital.
Beale and Torgie sitting in a tree
ReplyDeleteKay Eye Es Es Why En Gee!
First comes love, then comes marriage
then comes
"Peter Parker, as created by Steve Ditko, grew up in the 1950s. He called women "gals" and Russians "commies", wore a waistcoat on informal occasions and thought "I bet you're still wearing a Vote for Dewey badge" was a clever topical reference. Yet many of us seem to be able to accept that the young man who remembers the Beatles and lost friends in the Vietnam war is the "same person" as the young man who was a teenager when the World Trade Center was destroyed; but somehow think that if his hair or his skin is the wrong colour he is just not Spider-Man.
ReplyDelete"In 1963, Peter Parker's Aunt May was already a Very Old Lady, prone to have heart-attacks at the drop of a pin -- in her 70s, or even older. A New York lady who was born in the 1890s is very likely to have been an immigrant. I think everyone now agrees that Peter Parker was -- like Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby and the guy who wrote the words -- a second generation immigrant, say of Austrian or Czech Jewish heritage. This is why Peter Parker is rejected by his peer group, and bullied by Flash Thompson. He's a foreigner; an outsider.
"It follows that movies which represent him as an all-American white kid are just as false as the ones where he plays with a microscope rather than a computer. If you want to set Spider-Man in the 21st century and remain remotely faithful to the original, you'd have to make him the kid of some refugees who came to America in the 1990s; non-religious himself, but greatly influenced by Uncle Ben's Somali Muslim or Punjabi Sikh heritage.
"(I'm serious, by the way.)"
--Andrew Rilstone, making roughly the same point the same month, oddly enough, as Kamala Khan's first appearance in an issue of Captain Marvel.
http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2013/08/hello-i-must-be-going-2.html
Lovely essay, Phil.
This is fucking great.
DeleteI guess I shouldn't be surprised that someone with a PhD in English is unable to read. I am, of course, not surprised that a PhD in English can produce so much text with so little truth.
ReplyDeleteYou have misunderstood Torgersen. His point is not that SF/F must contain barbarians and spaceships. His point is that it ought not be a lame after-school special. This point is not hard to grasp.
You have libeled Theodore Beale. I have no wish or need to defend him, but I merely point out that his preferred political system is direct democracy, including women's suffrage.
You have libeled John C. Wright in calling him a racist when no evidence exists. Your evidence is "well, once he used the word "subhuman", so he's a racist."
In fact, most of your article is this: "This author I don't like probably thinks this way, so he's this sort of bad person."
Incredible stupidity expressed over a long blog post is still stupidity. It's fortunate that after leaving this comment your relevance to my life will cease.
I will go on reading books based on the quality of their content and not the skin color of the author or characters, or their particular sexual proclivities.
I can't decide whether to delete or frame this.
DeleteYou clearly frame this. It's brilliant satire.
DeleteYou may need to keep it, it'll be evidence when you're sued for libel. I'm sure this guy is a lawyer--you can tell from his keen grasp of the legal issues involved. No doubt he'll be representing Beale, Torgesen and Wright in the trial, and with an air-tight case like this, how can they lose?
DeleteHey you two, get a room and siphon each other's discharge instead of guzzling it here in public. Thanks.
DeleteI'd vote for framing it. :)
DeleteOf course, we are talking about Vox Day here, who once accused me of libel because I quoted him.
DeleteYou have not addressed any of what Zach has said. Don't you think that's an important thing to do?
DeleteNot really?
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteHave you seen this? It's beautiful.
ReplyDeletehttp://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/04/22/a-musical-interlude-courtesy-of-owl-mirror-on-the-hugos/
Tremendous essay. And wow: "You are the emperor of a tiny patch of shit . . ."
ReplyDelete"Sorry to everyone for the degree to which the comments section degenerated while I was asleep last night. I've tidied it back up to our usual standard, and will be actively moderating today."
ReplyDeleteWell everybody came to the freaky comment party, so that was kind of fun.
At risk of laying out more troll kibble, things I meant to say but the comments were moving to quick and I was working:
1. On VD being a 'libertarian'. I think that notion works more as an attack on libertarianism than a defence of VD.
2. On libertarianism being somehow the opposite of facsism. Nah, ideology doesn't work that way. Fascism is a whole bunch of interrelated stuff. The rightwing analysis that marks fascism as utterly different or even leftwing rest purely on trying to classify all ideology on one factor: the relationship between central government and the economy whilst ignoring all the other things that an ideology may (or may not) encompass. If anybody is really having any trouble seeing how most ideologies are just a few steps away from each other just consider border line cases like General Pinochet's regime - not strictly fascist but very fascist like and yet a posterboy for monetarism and government disengagement from the economy.
3. On Sad Puppies somehow being a movement that promotes diversity. Sorry but no. Even if a given Sad Puppy things that is what they are doing, a strategy that would shift the Hugos from individual voting (with various kinds of self promotion and lobbying) to a battle between competing slates would make it HARDER for new voices without patronage to get nominated. To get nominated you'd need to get picked by one of the more powerful slates and that would mean that a very small number of slef appointed gatekeepers would control the Hugos. Block voting for slates would make the problems the nicer Sad Puppies claim to be fighting worse.
4. On that. Puppies of all stripes need to see that there are two distinct issues: Block voting for slates is an appalling idea for the Hugos REGARDLESS of your politics (at least for most mainstream politics - Lenin might approve). The fact that block voting in this case is being exploited by a socially reactionary agenda is also appalling. People are pssed off a both things and both things make 'no award' a good plan but the first more than the second IMHO (i.e. there are lost of ways of protesting neo-fascism but if the SP's don't want the Hugos to become dominated by SJW slates they should be actively campagining for No Award this year. Jeez do you think leftists of all people don't know how to organise a caucus?)
5. But the SP slate was really diverse this year. Huh? The diversity of previous years Hugo winners is being cited by SP leaders as almost axiomatic proof of affirmative action. Previous SP slates were less diverse - if we apply Puppy logic that means the more diverse SP slate this year is proof of a social-justice-warrior conspiracy. If the SP case was a sci-fi novel then it would be so riddled with plot holes that the plot-holes themselves would start coalescing to form a mega-plothole which would suck in all logic.
6. On that - conservatives complaining that elites get to control stuff and more lowly people find it hard to make headway against entrenched privilege? Um. You do get that you are supposed to be conservatives right?
Thanks again Phil for a brilliant post.
Apologies for the numerous typos. As I am incapable of error, the typos must have been put there by John Scalzi and a social-justice clique. It is the only explanation!
Delete"4. On that. Puppies of all stripes need to see that there are two distinct issues: Block voting for slates is an appalling idea for the Hugos REGARDLESS of your politics (at least for most mainstream politics - Lenin might approve). The fact that block voting in this case is being exploited by a socially reactionary agenda is also appalling. People are pssed off a both things and both things make 'no award' a good plan but the first more than the second IMHO"
DeleteAbsolutely this. It's the point I am trying to make when people tell me "But XY is really leftist and good and supportive of LBGT issues/people!"
To which I say, good for them, but the problem with block voting is not if the slate puts good or bad people on the ballot, it's that it stops anybody else getting on. Even the best nominee is a nominee that somebody else chose above and instead of the cat herd of fans.
Exactly - also when critics of 'no award' (beyond puppies) call it the 'nuclear option'. Seriously? I don't know how many people here have ever been fully active in leftwing political parties (e.g, the British Labour Party) but if you have then you know the capacity of a bunch of motivated true leftists to run slates, caucuses and block voting for tiny gain is beyond compare.
DeleteThe nuclear option is the left actually running slates, block votes, factions on the Hugos. Part of the reaction against SP is people on the left *NOT* wanting to unleash our scary powers of scary factionalism on a set of nice books we like to read in our down time from failing to take-over the world (again).
There are factional wars between left and right which the left are doomed to lose: wars involving who can spend the most money for example; wars with actual guns being another example. Culture wars? Voting faction wars? This is stuff I was trained on at pre-school.
Nyq Only: "I don't know how many people here have ever been fully active in leftwing political parties (e.g, the British Labour Party) but if you have then you know the capacity of a bunch of motivated true leftists to run slates, caucuses and block voting for tiny gain is beyond compare."
DeleteOne of the things I got from Heinlein is a respect for people who are sneaky and win... and if I thought the Puppies had the numbers to take control of the Hugos, I'd have a grudging respect for them.
But I just don't see it happening, because, yes, all it takes is about 200 votes to sweep the Hugos (and they couldn't keep Doctor Who off the list), so unless they pick up a whole bunch of Culture Warriors in the fallout (reportedly 1,500 new members), then the most likely result is they will effectively shut themselves out for the foreseeable future as the Left rallies their superior numbers... really, all it would take is to mimic the SP3 and have a straw poll leading up to a slate ballot.
The defense I hear from the Puppies is that the reaction last year justified their behavior this year... as if the Hugos don't have a history of punishing people who too actively campaign for a Hugo.
The Left can "follow the rules" just as easily as the Right.
I have gotten to the point where my outrage has gone over some threshold and has turned into entertainment. The convolute, tortured, pompous, self-important prose with which these writers who have self-appointed themselves Hugo-worthy express themselves and curious concepts like Ancillary Justice not being MilSf, or not REALLY MilSF, or not REALLY being liked by a lot of people, or arguing in al seriousness about the relative proportion of a fraction of the DNA that would differentiate two fraternal twins as if it was key, or wanting to punch Terry Pratchett for being, as far as I can make out, too much of a decent human being - well, at this point, it is starting to be funny. I know - I feel guilty. It's not funny! No! Not at all! (Keeps resolutely straight face. Indeed. Totally. Not even a small chortle)
ReplyDeleteJust a note FSTDT has frequently highlighted the nauseous aesthetic of T Beale.
ReplyDeleteFundies Say The Darndest Things.
Having read some of his quotes there, as a none theist I have to say Jesus Wept. It's like a slow-motion car crash that I can't help but look at, and the fact that the page count goes to 10! On the plus side I found out that Magic:The Gathering appears to be adding a trans character, which is nice (I can't stand the game but if it's something that annoys the charmless Mr Beale It's one of lifes little victories).
DeleteEven avoiding the details of his joyless repulsive views he really doesn't get that brevity is the soul of wit.
So, just to recap, some tory wingnuts have decided to fuck up the voting in the premier science fiction awards, thereby rendering them with the credibility level henceforth of the Eurovision Song Contest. Well done nutnecks. This Pete Beale lad seems like a particularly unsavoury and bonkers lad.
ReplyDeleteIf you were the Voice of God, Dear Sir, I would probably not hear you. Not because you aren't loud enough, for that you surely are, but because I don't prescribe to gods. I doubt them, and their frantic followers, because I cannot see the sense in them. And perhaps that is my own error, as I expect you would tell me. If I could hear you.
ReplyDeleteAnd if I could hear you, I would categorize you as a Small God, in the style of Sainted Terry. For although I do not prescribe to gods, I can understand and use their language. For surely you do have believers, waiting upon your call, their brown shirts so patiently pressed and ready. They are so happy to be included. They keep their invitations lovingly pressed, between the pages of a book, seldom read but heavy enough for the purpose. Their belief creates you, and fills you with a purpose.
And if you were filled with purpose, I expect you would come for me. Perhaps not first, for my credentials put me far down the list of Errors, but I expect you would come for me in time. I expect you would wrap me in a burka of modest pumps and midday pearls with supper ready on the table at six o'clock sharp. I expect that you would judge my by my worthiness, both mother and fuck, and assign me to my precise place.
And if I were assigned my place in your world, I'm afraid I would probably laugh. I would not laugh to make you smaller, or myself larger, but because like gods it makes no sense. And because that place is far too small for me, like Cinderella's silly shoe. My feet, like my mother's and sisters' and daughter's, are unbound as our thoughts. We don't do it to make you smaller. We don't do it for you at all.
And if I did nothing for you at all, and you did nothing for me, I would hope we could still both laugh and neither be made small. I would show you how to be bigger from the inside, like a man and not a small, silly god. I would bind up those bleeding wounds you so fiercely pretend aren't there, for I am a mother by my own choice and it is what we do. I would hope, but sadly not expect the most from you.
And if I expected the most from you, Dear Sir?
(With thanks and/or apologies to Rachel Swirsky and Laura Numeroff)
I don't know that John C. Wright is a racist. I do know that he is a lunatic homophobe who has predicted that within 50 years, homosexuality will again be classified as a mental illness. Homophobia and racism are often found together in the same mind, but I'm not delving into the cesspool that is Mr. Wright's mind to find out.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if John himself is a racist but the fact that he associates with Vox Day says a lot.
ReplyDeleteWell, his visceral hatred of All Things Muslim may well contain racist-like substance, so there's that.
DeleteGreat article. Really tied it all together. And I will check out Janelle Monae as well...
ReplyDelete