Hugo Nominations, 2014
Apr. 25th, 2014 12:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeIt's Hugo Nomination time, which must mean it's fandom blowup time. Or something like that.
I'm going to daisy-pick a few points.
1) "Is Wheel of Time a Novel?"
This is actually a very good question., but it depends radically on context.
If we view "novel" as a size description, then there's a sequence Short Story, Novelette, Novella, Novel, much as books used to go up Duodecimo, Octavo, Quarto, Folio. Just as the sequence of book sizes (which were based on how many times a sheet was folded in the final volume) could be extended upwards (Elephant Folio), it might seem reasonable to extend the size-of-story upwards to include something which is not a series but is too big to be a novel. Giga-novel, maybe, or novelissimus. You'd have to find an appropriate size boundary for it, bearing in mind that War and Peace is by convention a novel and is 1296 pages long in a current translation, so the limit needs to be well over, say, 1500 pages.
However, that's not really what's usually meant when dividing up types of work. "Novella" and "novelette" are at best publishing categories (and since they aren't really used as anything other than a way to talk about really long stories published, usually alongside shorter stories, in an anthology, they aren't even that (although e-books may be changing the landscape here). Also, if War and Peace is a novel, so is (by ordinary understanding) Heart of Darkness, which is 80 pages long (the Dover version), which means that there's a factor of 15 or so in terms of the allowable range for novels, and no obvious reason not to extend that ceiling.
We usually distinguish a novel[1] from a collection of related short stories by one criterion only: unity of plot. That doesn't mean that there may not be subplots, but that there is one dominant story arc, that it is announced early on, and that the novel ends at the conclusion of that arc. That's why The Man Who Was Thursday is a novel (although its structure is episodic and its ending somewhat arbitrary) and The Poet and The Lunatics a collection of tightly related short stories with a gradually emergent story arc.
Normally, the next step up from a novel is a series of interconnected novels. These may be tightly connected (Stephenson's Baroque Cycle probably sits at an extreme here -- it's almost a novel in three parts, but not quite (it also harks back to the mediaeval romance's technique of entrelacement)) or very loosely connected (the individual novels in La Comédie Humaine, or in the Dance to the Music of Time).
Most tightly-connected series fall into two categories. Either they involve stand-alone volumes (Inspector Alleyn, James Bond, Dominic Flandry) even though there may be some continuity and development between volumes, or they are volumes which have the shape of novels and initially look like the first kind of series but gradually accumulate a momentum towards a larger-scale resolution of a broader story arc (Toby Daye, Harry Dresden, Miles Vorkosigan, The Malazan Book of the Fallen). In either case, it's quite clear that the components are themselves novels: you can pick up, say, One Salt Sea or Iorich and, with a bit of careful incluing, enjoy the volume as a work in itself. The characters' backgrounds may need some filling in, but the action is a single action.
The Wheel of Time does not seem to me to be a series of novels in the normal sense. Aside from the (positive) argument that there's an arc regarding the Dragon Reborn which starts in the first volume with a great deal of emphasis and which is resolved in the last volume -- with a prophecy pointing ahead to that last volume all the way along -- there's also the fact that many of the individual components, after the first three or so volumes, don't have much unity on their own at all. They move the overall plot along (only a bit, in some cases) but have no unity on their own.
It's certainly arguable that WoT is a really large novel.
Personally, I think that it may make more sense to see it as an experiment in a long form which avoids the entrelacement (with multiple alternating plotlines, none of which are dominant or extend through the whole book) model of the mediaeval romance. But it's a failed experiment, in many ways. If WoT showed anything, it's that extending a single plot arc over nearly 10,000 pages, without providing the intervening satisfaction of smaller-scale resolutions which mark the ends of important subsidiary plot arcs, doesn't work very well. The dead zones in the middle of the series (Lord of Chaos, Path of Daggers) would be little more than relaxations in the pace of a novel if the spans were 40 pages rather than 600 pages (which would correspond to a 560 page novel, more or less).
Put another way: if/when you pick up McGuire's The Winter Long you'll have a reasonable expectation that, in addition to moving some of the overall arcs of the series forward, the book will have a clear beginning, middle, and end, and that the resolution will be reasonably satisfying on its own.
I've seen Jo Walton's idea that there should, perhaps, be a Hugo for completed series, on a five-year rather than a one-year cycle. I'm not sure it's needed. For most series, each component part will be a reasonable contender for the Best Novel Hugo. I don't really think that anyone wants to wade back into the swamp that the structure of the Wheel of Time represents for another try. (Maybe three-volume novels split over two years: after all, that was The Lord of the Rings.) GRRM's ASoIaF is the closest I can think of, and it has already had individual components up for Hugos. (Erikson's individual volumes are more novelish and less episodes in a large narrative.) It's not as though we need to encourage series: if anything, we have too many series and not enough standalone novels now.
2) Reading works by authors you dislike
There's been a variety of responses to the question of what a Hugo voter should do with (Correia,Day} works, and I can only assume that a strongly convinced voter on the other side would have the same questions with regard to Leckie and McGuire. There's John Scalzi's approach (read everything and ignore the personal views of the author, reserving the right to stop reading something dull or offensive), and there are various responses which reject this approach for various reasons.
There are two tangential aspects of this that I'd like to touch on.
First, the question of reading authors whose views are objectionable in general. This breaks down into two sub branches -- works which reflect the objectionable views of their authors but are nevertheless artistically fine works and works which do not reflect the views of their authors. The first branch we can dismiss for the moment: such works exist but are rare (the modern touchstones are Riefenstahl and Céline) and are not at stake in the current discussion. The second branch is more common and more relevant. If we have a work by an author who has certain political beliefs but whose commitment to mimesis in art ensures that he/she sets down things "as they are" rather than the way the author would like them to be, and assuming that the author has enough clarity of thought to distinguish between the two, then it really is reasonable to be in a situation where one can potentially separate the author qua author from his/her works. Alternatively, if the author has objectionable views about, say, immigration, but writes historical fiction and does not project their biases back in time into a different context, their work might read very much like that of an author without those views.
Secondly, the issue of how and to what degree works can ever be read in isolation from their authorship. The New Critics stood generally for evaluating works as self-subsistent artifacts, but the fashion for that is now, by and large, gone: at best an informed reading will now recognize that a work's evaluation involve both the background the author brings to it and the interpretative community of which the reader is a part.
With the best will in the world, you can't, in the end, read an author's work aside from the author.
There are some border cases where a reading of a work is going to be entirely determined by knowing the intent of the author. (Consider Alexander Pope's "To Augustus": at least a few contemporary readers read this as serious panegyric of George II Augustus.) There are other border cases -- explicit litterature engagée -- where an author's didactic intent permeates a work; sometimes this gets in the way of the enjoyment of other aspects of the work, but it can be integrated into an artistic unity (as Milton does, or Hugo, or Voltaire). More frequently, works put forward a semblance of "objecvtivity" or (the same thing, rotated a bit) "being just for entertainment", but they still embody the views of their authors, and the views their authors absorb and pass through from their environments.
A "reader" can do some narrower things without paying attention to the author, of course. The model which some people are raising is rather more like that of technical evaluation of a work of art. If it's a poem, does it scan? Does it make effective use of imagery, melody, sense (Pound's phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logpoeia.) If prose, are the sentence structures tight and effective? Are paragraphs constructed with appropriate structure? This is the sort of grading our Grade 8 teachers would give us on our "creative writing". But when it's extended to overall evaluation of a work of literature, it amounts to the claim that one can extract out of a work a subset of elements which should be considered and leave behind a set of elements which are "irrelevant". Now, it's clear that there really are readers who read like this -- they want, say, an exciting plot that keeps them turning pages and will ignore any flaws in the work which don't get in the way of the plot-related payback (for them). But for most readers (1) the experience of the work involves everything in it; (2) that includes knowledge of authorial intent (and also prior experience drawn from other works by the same author).
From where I stand, this is putting a butterfly on a wheel: the works involved aren't of enough stature to warrant it. Opera Vita Aeterna is clunky and second-or-third-rate; Correia's work is better, but still all about plot with flattish characterization and serviceable prose. He's in the same general "guilty pleasure" category as Tom Clancy (before Clancy started on his downward trend). There do seem to be some people who have read both the Correia and the Leckie and genuinely prefer Correia, but they are unlikely to make up a large chunk of the Hugo voters.
[1]This includes "modern prose romance" -- i.e. we'll include adventure stories as well as Jane Austen and George Eliot and company. Mediaeval prose romances are a different beast -- they typically have no unity of plot, but instead a set of interwoven plots: the "frame" isn't a plotline at all, but an excuse for adventures.
I'm going to daisy-pick a few points.
1) "Is Wheel of Time a Novel?"
This is actually a very good question., but it depends radically on context.
If we view "novel" as a size description, then there's a sequence Short Story, Novelette, Novella, Novel, much as books used to go up Duodecimo, Octavo, Quarto, Folio. Just as the sequence of book sizes (which were based on how many times a sheet was folded in the final volume) could be extended upwards (Elephant Folio), it might seem reasonable to extend the size-of-story upwards to include something which is not a series but is too big to be a novel. Giga-novel, maybe, or novelissimus. You'd have to find an appropriate size boundary for it, bearing in mind that War and Peace is by convention a novel and is 1296 pages long in a current translation, so the limit needs to be well over, say, 1500 pages.
However, that's not really what's usually meant when dividing up types of work. "Novella" and "novelette" are at best publishing categories (and since they aren't really used as anything other than a way to talk about really long stories published, usually alongside shorter stories, in an anthology, they aren't even that (although e-books may be changing the landscape here). Also, if War and Peace is a novel, so is (by ordinary understanding) Heart of Darkness, which is 80 pages long (the Dover version), which means that there's a factor of 15 or so in terms of the allowable range for novels, and no obvious reason not to extend that ceiling.
We usually distinguish a novel[1] from a collection of related short stories by one criterion only: unity of plot. That doesn't mean that there may not be subplots, but that there is one dominant story arc, that it is announced early on, and that the novel ends at the conclusion of that arc. That's why The Man Who Was Thursday is a novel (although its structure is episodic and its ending somewhat arbitrary) and The Poet and The Lunatics a collection of tightly related short stories with a gradually emergent story arc.
Normally, the next step up from a novel is a series of interconnected novels. These may be tightly connected (Stephenson's Baroque Cycle probably sits at an extreme here -- it's almost a novel in three parts, but not quite (it also harks back to the mediaeval romance's technique of entrelacement)) or very loosely connected (the individual novels in La Comédie Humaine, or in the Dance to the Music of Time).
Most tightly-connected series fall into two categories. Either they involve stand-alone volumes (Inspector Alleyn, James Bond, Dominic Flandry) even though there may be some continuity and development between volumes, or they are volumes which have the shape of novels and initially look like the first kind of series but gradually accumulate a momentum towards a larger-scale resolution of a broader story arc (Toby Daye, Harry Dresden, Miles Vorkosigan, The Malazan Book of the Fallen). In either case, it's quite clear that the components are themselves novels: you can pick up, say, One Salt Sea or Iorich and, with a bit of careful incluing, enjoy the volume as a work in itself. The characters' backgrounds may need some filling in, but the action is a single action.
The Wheel of Time does not seem to me to be a series of novels in the normal sense. Aside from the (positive) argument that there's an arc regarding the Dragon Reborn which starts in the first volume with a great deal of emphasis and which is resolved in the last volume -- with a prophecy pointing ahead to that last volume all the way along -- there's also the fact that many of the individual components, after the first three or so volumes, don't have much unity on their own at all. They move the overall plot along (only a bit, in some cases) but have no unity on their own.
It's certainly arguable that WoT is a really large novel.
Personally, I think that it may make more sense to see it as an experiment in a long form which avoids the entrelacement (with multiple alternating plotlines, none of which are dominant or extend through the whole book) model of the mediaeval romance. But it's a failed experiment, in many ways. If WoT showed anything, it's that extending a single plot arc over nearly 10,000 pages, without providing the intervening satisfaction of smaller-scale resolutions which mark the ends of important subsidiary plot arcs, doesn't work very well. The dead zones in the middle of the series (Lord of Chaos, Path of Daggers) would be little more than relaxations in the pace of a novel if the spans were 40 pages rather than 600 pages (which would correspond to a 560 page novel, more or less).
Put another way: if/when you pick up McGuire's The Winter Long you'll have a reasonable expectation that, in addition to moving some of the overall arcs of the series forward, the book will have a clear beginning, middle, and end, and that the resolution will be reasonably satisfying on its own.
I've seen Jo Walton's idea that there should, perhaps, be a Hugo for completed series, on a five-year rather than a one-year cycle. I'm not sure it's needed. For most series, each component part will be a reasonable contender for the Best Novel Hugo. I don't really think that anyone wants to wade back into the swamp that the structure of the Wheel of Time represents for another try. (Maybe three-volume novels split over two years: after all, that was The Lord of the Rings.) GRRM's ASoIaF is the closest I can think of, and it has already had individual components up for Hugos. (Erikson's individual volumes are more novelish and less episodes in a large narrative.) It's not as though we need to encourage series: if anything, we have too many series and not enough standalone novels now.
2) Reading works by authors you dislike
There's been a variety of responses to the question of what a Hugo voter should do with (Correia,Day} works, and I can only assume that a strongly convinced voter on the other side would have the same questions with regard to Leckie and McGuire. There's John Scalzi's approach (read everything and ignore the personal views of the author, reserving the right to stop reading something dull or offensive), and there are various responses which reject this approach for various reasons.
There are two tangential aspects of this that I'd like to touch on.
First, the question of reading authors whose views are objectionable in general. This breaks down into two sub branches -- works which reflect the objectionable views of their authors but are nevertheless artistically fine works and works which do not reflect the views of their authors. The first branch we can dismiss for the moment: such works exist but are rare (the modern touchstones are Riefenstahl and Céline) and are not at stake in the current discussion. The second branch is more common and more relevant. If we have a work by an author who has certain political beliefs but whose commitment to mimesis in art ensures that he/she sets down things "as they are" rather than the way the author would like them to be, and assuming that the author has enough clarity of thought to distinguish between the two, then it really is reasonable to be in a situation where one can potentially separate the author qua author from his/her works. Alternatively, if the author has objectionable views about, say, immigration, but writes historical fiction and does not project their biases back in time into a different context, their work might read very much like that of an author without those views.
Secondly, the issue of how and to what degree works can ever be read in isolation from their authorship. The New Critics stood generally for evaluating works as self-subsistent artifacts, but the fashion for that is now, by and large, gone: at best an informed reading will now recognize that a work's evaluation involve both the background the author brings to it and the interpretative community of which the reader is a part.
With the best will in the world, you can't, in the end, read an author's work aside from the author.
There are some border cases where a reading of a work is going to be entirely determined by knowing the intent of the author. (Consider Alexander Pope's "To Augustus": at least a few contemporary readers read this as serious panegyric of George II Augustus.) There are other border cases -- explicit litterature engagée -- where an author's didactic intent permeates a work; sometimes this gets in the way of the enjoyment of other aspects of the work, but it can be integrated into an artistic unity (as Milton does, or Hugo, or Voltaire). More frequently, works put forward a semblance of "objecvtivity" or (the same thing, rotated a bit) "being just for entertainment", but they still embody the views of their authors, and the views their authors absorb and pass through from their environments.
A "reader" can do some narrower things without paying attention to the author, of course. The model which some people are raising is rather more like that of technical evaluation of a work of art. If it's a poem, does it scan? Does it make effective use of imagery, melody, sense (Pound's phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logpoeia.) If prose, are the sentence structures tight and effective? Are paragraphs constructed with appropriate structure? This is the sort of grading our Grade 8 teachers would give us on our "creative writing". But when it's extended to overall evaluation of a work of literature, it amounts to the claim that one can extract out of a work a subset of elements which should be considered and leave behind a set of elements which are "irrelevant". Now, it's clear that there really are readers who read like this -- they want, say, an exciting plot that keeps them turning pages and will ignore any flaws in the work which don't get in the way of the plot-related payback (for them). But for most readers (1) the experience of the work involves everything in it; (2) that includes knowledge of authorial intent (and also prior experience drawn from other works by the same author).
From where I stand, this is putting a butterfly on a wheel: the works involved aren't of enough stature to warrant it. Opera Vita Aeterna is clunky and second-or-third-rate; Correia's work is better, but still all about plot with flattish characterization and serviceable prose. He's in the same general "guilty pleasure" category as Tom Clancy (before Clancy started on his downward trend). There do seem to be some people who have read both the Correia and the Leckie and genuinely prefer Correia, but they are unlikely to make up a large chunk of the Hugo voters.
[1]This includes "modern prose romance" -- i.e. we'll include adventure stories as well as Jane Austen and George Eliot and company. Mediaeval prose romances are a different beast -- they typically have no unity of plot, but instead a set of interwoven plots: the "frame" isn't a plotline at all, but an excuse for adventures.
