jsburbidge (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jsburbidge) wrote2015-02-05 08:23 am
jsburbidge) wrote2015-02-05 08:23 am
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The mainstream and the Sad Puppies
As I was walking through an Indigo the other day, I saw a sign with the headline "We need more diverse books", and a set of authors' photographs below. What it meant, of course, was not that we need more books with diverse topics (Mesopotamian History! Arc Welding! Urban Fantasy/Time-travel crossovers! Studies of ecosystem diversity!) but that we need more books (or more read books) by authors who come from different ethnic / gender / cultural backgrounds (and probably mainly in fiction, at a guess).
There is a very long way to go here, but this has become mainstream. Not universal, but mainstream, for all of the ways in which society still fails in this area. Chapters / Indigo may reflect Heather Reisman's personality to a degree, but it is currently very focussed indeed on margins, and anything that gets through sales and marketing is going to be optimized for appealing to the maximum number of its customers (the broad reading public) and to offending as few as possible.
The argument over the Sad Puppies slate reminded me of this. One defender of the slate talked of "extreme politics" as characterizing the (normal) Hugo nominees, and said "Fandom needs to regain some balance, lest every con turn into WisCon".
Now, aside from the fact that I see no likelihood of every con turning into WisCon, it seems to me that fandom is not (in this matter at least) a hothouse of far-left counter-cultural SJW extremism. It is merely reflecting the broad emerging core of society as a whole, which is shifting (glacially) in the direction of awareness of diversity issues, awareness of privilege issues, awareness of the changing understanding of mental health, and awareness of pervasive bias involving the treatment of violence against women and sexual assault generally. The same problems which have created tensions around the anti-harassment policies in cons long ago triggered a massive change in HR rules in any company large enough to have an HR department.
Fandom is not moving away from a notional "centre" towards an extreme, or even edgy, position; it's shifting (generationally, and gradually) along with a general shift in social consensus.
First, although (along generally left-leaning lines) one can make an argument that everything is political, in the more normal use of the word, aesthetic and cultural judgements which reflect that shift are not particularly "political". Or, put another way: if, like John C. Wright and VD, you are generally in revolt against "secular modern culture", i.e. the mainstream, you really should expect that the mainstream you are in revolt against is going to be inhabited by most of the other people and institutions you interact with.
Imagine that you have a spectrum of positions, (visualizable as a cloud of points spread out left to right, with greater densities toward the middle) and add an additional dimension of time. Your visualization now looks like a bunch of strands of flexible spaghetti going from past to future. In general, one generation's bleeding edge is the next one's commonplace on social issues, so in general that higher density area bends gradually leftward as time goes by. From an external perspective, what is happening is that the views espoused by the mainstream are the progressive views of yesterday. There is always a heavy clumping about the centre, but what the centre holds changes gradually with time. From the perspective of somebody who represents a strand of thought which was mildly conservative N years ago and centrist 2N years ago, though, it looks as though there is no centre anymore. Society now seems divided between the right and the far left. This effect is magnified if he/she also projects a "silent majority" at the centre and underestimate the numbers at the actual centre.
The Sad Puppies are in that latter position.
To be fair, there's some differences between them, at least as far as the leaders go. Torgersen seems to come off fairly well here: he avoided putting his own work on the list, it's reasonably well-respected, and the bone I have to pick with his general argument is just that he generalizes his tastes to the majority of SF readers, something which is, I think, no longer true. (He also asserts that there is a decline in SFF sales compared to the past, which is certainly debatable: that golden age of the Heinlein heyday had many fewer authors and, frankly, divided a smaller pie into fewer slices, and many of the works which are now published as YA would then have simply been SF (indeed, I have seen adult SFF of my youth recently republished as part of a YA line).) Correia comes across as a second-amendment fiction writer whose work is basically mind candy but who really wants a Hugo and is putting his work forward under the cover of a general slate. VD and Wright both appear to be the sort of RCs who are likely to think the current Pope a dangerous radical and are writing from a position that their held doctrine tells them is at the centre of the world. Hoyt just comes across as an obsessed right-wing Republican to the point of sounding unhinged.
Secondly, it really doesn't look to me as though the factors influencing the general Hugo ballot reflect any particular leftish agenda. The test case really ought to be John Scalzi's Redshirts, since that does look like the immediate trigger that set off the Sad Puppies reaction[1]. I had a reaction to the win at the time which was not wildly enthusiastic, but it was running against a weak field, and there was no evidence at all that it was the result of politically-biased voting; like the win for Hominids a decade earlier, it reflected a certain degree of crowd-pleasingness in the novel. (If there had been a left-agenda driven conspiracy, it would have been more likely to pick up Jemisin's The Killing Moon (which was seventh in the nominations) or Kiernan's The Drowning Girl (eleventh). Both are excellent novels, but they are also far more in dialogue with the concerns of the left than Scalzi's playing around with Star Trek is.)
Thirdly, I see two ways in which the defenders of the Sad Puppies list defend it. There are problems with both ways.
Some defenders assert that the list is explicitly political, but justify it by the "politicization" of the existing system. This is at least honest, but given the above, there's really no honest reason for seeing the selection of the Hugo nominees as reflecting anything more than the general cultural mainstream, tending a bit towards the tastes of urban readers (we live in a world with more urban readers than rural ones).
Some, on the other hand, claim that the list is merely an equivalent of the many other posts which appear recommending what the writers feel to be the best SF works of the year -- that, if I may translate, any politics lies merely in the general worldview of the compilers rather than in a "political selection".[2]
Based on this year's list, I find that hard to believe: not because the books they recommend are not necessarily good -- I don't know enough about some of them -- but because of the fact that it manages to exclude Leckie, Walton, Gladstone, Bennett, Addison, Watts, Liu, Mitchell, Grossman, Abraham, and indeed all of the novels on the Locus Recommended Books List. All of them. The Locus list is pretty broad; it certainly includes a range of novels I am not particularly inclined to read, as well as books I would recommend. On any honest selection of genuinely-believed-to-be-best novels coming from a minority position I would certainly expect to see some books ignored by the Locus list, but I find it wildly unlikely that it would exclude every single one: that is understandable only on the claim (see above) that the list is a corrective rather than a "personal favourites" list.
As a side remark, another justification for the Sad Puppies involves popularity versus a perceived effect of the "elites" on the selection of nominees. I already talked about popularity a few posts back, but when I look at the nominees for past years I am reminded that almost every year there is an outcry after Eastercon that the nominees have passed over many (if not most or all, depending on the screed) of the really deserving works in favour of purely popular but mediocre novels. If the elites are weighing in on the selection, maybe someone should tell them, because they certainly don't seem to be aware of the fact themselves.
The other question, I suppose, is why this matters.
Remember the Delphi game in Brunner's The Shockwave Rider? If you throw a bunch of individual inputs together, you stand a decent chance of getting a result that "means" something. In the case of the Hugos, what it's supposed to mean is that the prize reflects the overall views of committed fandom (as opposed to the people who "just read the stuff"). It's not as good as a random statistical sample, and it's complicated by the fact that fen don't have genuinely independent views, but that perception is what gives the Hugo it's value and prestige.
The sample isn't very big, though. Statistically, it doesn't have to be. Fandom worldwide is probably in the mid-to-high tens of thousands; the voters in last year's Worldcon, attendees plus associate members, numbered 3,587 (actual ballots: there were 8,784 eligible voters). The previous high mark was 2,100, in 2011. Nominations, however, are a much smaller set: that year there were 1,495 nominations for Best Novel and the cut-off for the ballot occurred between Parasite, with 98 votes, and The Shining Girls, with 96. And nominations are critical: they control the field that larger sample has to choose from.
In that context, having slates that are being pushed for any "external" purposes can skew the results significantly without being a large part of the voting public. Getting a few tens of followers to vote for such a slate - which might not reflect what they would otherwise have voted for - can have a significant impact on the field of nominees. There were over 200 nominations last year which were Sad Puppy influenced (184 for Warbound and 91 for A Few Good Men, but there may have been some votes which would have gone there in any case; if the nominations had split a little differently between the two, both would have made the ballot and pushed Parasite off). 270 votes (or the 332 who finally voted for Warbound) won't have a massive impact on the final vote, if they're being cast for works which don't have general support in any case; but they can certainly have an effect on nominations.
If somebody really feels that Skin Game is the best novel from last year, more power to them. But if Butcher gets onto the ballot because a group of people want to show the effete snobs what they think of them, it does neither him nor the Hugos any credit.
[1]Scalzi is particularly anathema to the camp, it seems, because conservative / milSF types liked Old Man's War and were then disillusioned by his public political statements on his website. In addition, I can see how Scalzi's personal self-promotional style could be seen as the sort of campaigning which somebody who dislikes his work could see as logrolling to be countered.
[2]There certainly were people involved in the debate last year who seemed to have genuinely bounced off Ancillary Justice completely, for all its general popularity and its Space Opera roots (which one would think would endear it to SF traditionalists), and have been enthusiastic readers of Correia. However, this seems to have been a minority position even within the supporters of the Sad Puppies.
There is a very long way to go here, but this has become mainstream. Not universal, but mainstream, for all of the ways in which society still fails in this area. Chapters / Indigo may reflect Heather Reisman's personality to a degree, but it is currently very focussed indeed on margins, and anything that gets through sales and marketing is going to be optimized for appealing to the maximum number of its customers (the broad reading public) and to offending as few as possible.
The argument over the Sad Puppies slate reminded me of this. One defender of the slate talked of "extreme politics" as characterizing the (normal) Hugo nominees, and said "Fandom needs to regain some balance, lest every con turn into WisCon".
Now, aside from the fact that I see no likelihood of every con turning into WisCon, it seems to me that fandom is not (in this matter at least) a hothouse of far-left counter-cultural SJW extremism. It is merely reflecting the broad emerging core of society as a whole, which is shifting (glacially) in the direction of awareness of diversity issues, awareness of privilege issues, awareness of the changing understanding of mental health, and awareness of pervasive bias involving the treatment of violence against women and sexual assault generally. The same problems which have created tensions around the anti-harassment policies in cons long ago triggered a massive change in HR rules in any company large enough to have an HR department.
Fandom is not moving away from a notional "centre" towards an extreme, or even edgy, position; it's shifting (generationally, and gradually) along with a general shift in social consensus.
First, although (along generally left-leaning lines) one can make an argument that everything is political, in the more normal use of the word, aesthetic and cultural judgements which reflect that shift are not particularly "political". Or, put another way: if, like John C. Wright and VD, you are generally in revolt against "secular modern culture", i.e. the mainstream, you really should expect that the mainstream you are in revolt against is going to be inhabited by most of the other people and institutions you interact with.
Imagine that you have a spectrum of positions, (visualizable as a cloud of points spread out left to right, with greater densities toward the middle) and add an additional dimension of time. Your visualization now looks like a bunch of strands of flexible spaghetti going from past to future. In general, one generation's bleeding edge is the next one's commonplace on social issues, so in general that higher density area bends gradually leftward as time goes by. From an external perspective, what is happening is that the views espoused by the mainstream are the progressive views of yesterday. There is always a heavy clumping about the centre, but what the centre holds changes gradually with time. From the perspective of somebody who represents a strand of thought which was mildly conservative N years ago and centrist 2N years ago, though, it looks as though there is no centre anymore. Society now seems divided between the right and the far left. This effect is magnified if he/she also projects a "silent majority" at the centre and underestimate the numbers at the actual centre.
The Sad Puppies are in that latter position.
To be fair, there's some differences between them, at least as far as the leaders go. Torgersen seems to come off fairly well here: he avoided putting his own work on the list, it's reasonably well-respected, and the bone I have to pick with his general argument is just that he generalizes his tastes to the majority of SF readers, something which is, I think, no longer true. (He also asserts that there is a decline in SFF sales compared to the past, which is certainly debatable: that golden age of the Heinlein heyday had many fewer authors and, frankly, divided a smaller pie into fewer slices, and many of the works which are now published as YA would then have simply been SF (indeed, I have seen adult SFF of my youth recently republished as part of a YA line).) Correia comes across as a second-amendment fiction writer whose work is basically mind candy but who really wants a Hugo and is putting his work forward under the cover of a general slate. VD and Wright both appear to be the sort of RCs who are likely to think the current Pope a dangerous radical and are writing from a position that their held doctrine tells them is at the centre of the world. Hoyt just comes across as an obsessed right-wing Republican to the point of sounding unhinged.
Secondly, it really doesn't look to me as though the factors influencing the general Hugo ballot reflect any particular leftish agenda. The test case really ought to be John Scalzi's Redshirts, since that does look like the immediate trigger that set off the Sad Puppies reaction[1]. I had a reaction to the win at the time which was not wildly enthusiastic, but it was running against a weak field, and there was no evidence at all that it was the result of politically-biased voting; like the win for Hominids a decade earlier, it reflected a certain degree of crowd-pleasingness in the novel. (If there had been a left-agenda driven conspiracy, it would have been more likely to pick up Jemisin's The Killing Moon (which was seventh in the nominations) or Kiernan's The Drowning Girl (eleventh). Both are excellent novels, but they are also far more in dialogue with the concerns of the left than Scalzi's playing around with Star Trek is.)
Thirdly, I see two ways in which the defenders of the Sad Puppies list defend it. There are problems with both ways.
Some defenders assert that the list is explicitly political, but justify it by the "politicization" of the existing system. This is at least honest, but given the above, there's really no honest reason for seeing the selection of the Hugo nominees as reflecting anything more than the general cultural mainstream, tending a bit towards the tastes of urban readers (we live in a world with more urban readers than rural ones).
Some, on the other hand, claim that the list is merely an equivalent of the many other posts which appear recommending what the writers feel to be the best SF works of the year -- that, if I may translate, any politics lies merely in the general worldview of the compilers rather than in a "political selection".[2]
Based on this year's list, I find that hard to believe: not because the books they recommend are not necessarily good -- I don't know enough about some of them -- but because of the fact that it manages to exclude Leckie, Walton, Gladstone, Bennett, Addison, Watts, Liu, Mitchell, Grossman, Abraham, and indeed all of the novels on the Locus Recommended Books List. All of them. The Locus list is pretty broad; it certainly includes a range of novels I am not particularly inclined to read, as well as books I would recommend. On any honest selection of genuinely-believed-to-be-best novels coming from a minority position I would certainly expect to see some books ignored by the Locus list, but I find it wildly unlikely that it would exclude every single one: that is understandable only on the claim (see above) that the list is a corrective rather than a "personal favourites" list.
As a side remark, another justification for the Sad Puppies involves popularity versus a perceived effect of the "elites" on the selection of nominees. I already talked about popularity a few posts back, but when I look at the nominees for past years I am reminded that almost every year there is an outcry after Eastercon that the nominees have passed over many (if not most or all, depending on the screed) of the really deserving works in favour of purely popular but mediocre novels. If the elites are weighing in on the selection, maybe someone should tell them, because they certainly don't seem to be aware of the fact themselves.
The other question, I suppose, is why this matters.
Remember the Delphi game in Brunner's The Shockwave Rider? If you throw a bunch of individual inputs together, you stand a decent chance of getting a result that "means" something. In the case of the Hugos, what it's supposed to mean is that the prize reflects the overall views of committed fandom (as opposed to the people who "just read the stuff"). It's not as good as a random statistical sample, and it's complicated by the fact that fen don't have genuinely independent views, but that perception is what gives the Hugo it's value and prestige.
The sample isn't very big, though. Statistically, it doesn't have to be. Fandom worldwide is probably in the mid-to-high tens of thousands; the voters in last year's Worldcon, attendees plus associate members, numbered 3,587 (actual ballots: there were 8,784 eligible voters). The previous high mark was 2,100, in 2011. Nominations, however, are a much smaller set: that year there were 1,495 nominations for Best Novel and the cut-off for the ballot occurred between Parasite, with 98 votes, and The Shining Girls, with 96. And nominations are critical: they control the field that larger sample has to choose from.
In that context, having slates that are being pushed for any "external" purposes can skew the results significantly without being a large part of the voting public. Getting a few tens of followers to vote for such a slate - which might not reflect what they would otherwise have voted for - can have a significant impact on the field of nominees. There were over 200 nominations last year which were Sad Puppy influenced (184 for Warbound and 91 for A Few Good Men, but there may have been some votes which would have gone there in any case; if the nominations had split a little differently between the two, both would have made the ballot and pushed Parasite off). 270 votes (or the 332 who finally voted for Warbound) won't have a massive impact on the final vote, if they're being cast for works which don't have general support in any case; but they can certainly have an effect on nominations.
If somebody really feels that Skin Game is the best novel from last year, more power to them. But if Butcher gets onto the ballot because a group of people want to show the effete snobs what they think of them, it does neither him nor the Hugos any credit.
[1]Scalzi is particularly anathema to the camp, it seems, because conservative / milSF types liked Old Man's War and were then disillusioned by his public political statements on his website. In addition, I can see how Scalzi's personal self-promotional style could be seen as the sort of campaigning which somebody who dislikes his work could see as logrolling to be countered.
[2]There certainly were people involved in the debate last year who seemed to have genuinely bounced off Ancillary Justice completely, for all its general popularity and its Space Opera roots (which one would think would endear it to SF traditionalists), and have been enthusiastic readers of Correia. However, this seems to have been a minority position even within the supporters of the Sad Puppies.