Explain the Sad Puppies (Science Fiction Controversy)

Cafe Society
242

At the point where someone talks a bunch of shit about the evils of Jews, extols the virtues of the Aryan race, and says about Hitler, “By God, I like that boy,” there’s still an argument to made that they’re not fascist, but I don’t find that argument especially interesting.

If it’s important, in that list of people, I’ll swap the words “white supremacist” for “fascist.” All of them held ideas that fascists love–the strong Aryan uberman fighting against the hordes of the lesser races, or against the evil intellectual class of a foreign culture–but strictly speaking that’s not the definition of “fascist,” y’all are right, so I’ll stick with “there’s always been the white supremacist leanings of people like Campbell and Burroughs and Lovecraft.”

Heinlein, though? Dude.

243

It is not surprising to see such a stupid statement in Quillette. Christ, man, Quillette?

Ng’s speech did not treat being male and white as deplorable. It treated having all science fiction as white and male as deplorable. She objected to the genre trope, not to the individual.

But the parenthetical comment “(or, oddly, exalting in industry)” manages to out-stupid even that. “Industrialists” are not the same thing as “industry,” and the most charitable interpretation I can make is that Craig DeLancey is too ignorant to realize that.

244

It’s not like Ng and Doctorow were the first people to call Campbell fascist. Michael Moorcock said that in 1971.

Lovecraft was recognized as being extraordinarily racist by people of his own time. Charles Isaacson wrote that Lovecraft "is against tolerance of color, creed and equality, upholds race prejudice…” in 1915.

245

The fallacy here is that the market for SF has changed. There are more women and more people of color reading and writing it. Publishers understand this and publish books to fit the new market.

The sad puppies just want SF as it used to be, and have a blinkered understanding of what it used to be.

246

I’ve quite often heard the claim that Lovecraft was racist even by the standards of his own day but I don’t think that stands up to scrutiny. Throughout Lovecraft’s life, the lynching of African Americans was a fairly regular occurrence, one that many southerners considered necessary because laws were designed for civilized people not blacks, and the KKK rose to prominence as a mainstream organization. Being against tolerance of color, creed and equality, and an upholder of race prejudice also described millions of Americans at the time.

I don’t say that to excuse Lovecraft’s racism or argue that we shouldn’t condemn it. But there’s a sizable contingent of people who seem to want to see any recognition of Lovecraft’s influence on modern writers purged for some reason. Obviously Lovecraft held abhorrent beliefs, even by the standards of many of his contemporaries, but who did he actually hurt? He was not a particularly successful author nor influential person during his lifetime.

247

So this thread made me think of a SciFi book I read long ago, called 2312. I found it in the library when I was in college - there was a whole display set aside from it - I now see it is because it had just come out, but it would go on to win the Nebula in 2013.

The plot of the story isn’t anything revolutionary. The solar system is colonized and many worlds are inhabited. We follow our heroine as she investigates a terrorist strike on Mercury whose complexity leads her to believe it was done using quantum computers; queue a hunt across the solar system for the ones responsible.

Now, I was reading this book back in 2012, and I have to admit, I was much less open minded at the time then I am now. I suppose completing my college education had something to do with that! But at the time, 2312 made me very uncomfortable, because it tackled gender and sexuality that challenged my sheltered worldview.

None of the main characters are vanilla “cash hetero”. For example, the main romance is between the main character (a woman) and a man she meets on her journey. But both have had relationships with people of their own gender in the past, and both are actually modified to where they have something approaching the other gender’s body (so the main character is a woman but at some point along with various other cybernetic or artificially grown organic implants she got a penis, and her partner did the same with a vagina).

Politically I was always for LGBT equality, but I can’t deny that it made me very uncomfortable back then. Looking back, reading a book with this sort of perspective on gender and sexuality (“it’s all fluid anyways and in the distant future when body modification is common we will get over our current hangups and not find it all that remarkable”) challenged my worldview and forced me to rethink it, and I would definitely credit this book and ones like it with challenging me to examine why I was uncomfortable with LGBT concepts even if I supported them in theory, and helped me get over that.

I can definitely see why the Sad Puppies would get upset about a book like 2312 winning. Here’s the dangerous part. It isn’t a book about LGBT issues. It’s a space opera set in our own solar system. It’s an investigative thriller. For young, sheltered me, this was crucial - I probably would never have sought out a book that was specifically about LGBT issues. It normalizes nonstraight relationships by making them no big deal.

If you have a lot of your identity invested in the belief that nonstraight relationships are NOT ok, then the way this book casually tosses your preconceived notions aside is scary. Like I said, I was uncomfortable at the time. But in the months before and after I read the book, I was at school, having all my other ideas challenged. I was learning that this was a normal and healthy part of growing as a rational thinker. So I internalized the lesson and applied it to these strange new experiences I was having away from home, and I became a better, more well-rounded person for it.

But I can understand the other instinct. When something challenges your ideals, it’s very easy to try and find an excuse to distance yourself from having to engage with it.

248

Good points. And one of the books they hated was Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. The book is a standard space opera overall - the type of thing they usually champion.

But the society no longer used gender-specific pronouns, with “she” referring to all genders. (Chip Delany used the same idea thirty years earlier.) So when it won, it was hated because of “political correctness.” The story and characters didn’t matter. Nor was that sort of speculation anything different from the type of things that were published in the 30s or 40s.

249

I had a similar reaction to The Forever War where humans of the far future were all set to homosexual at birth. But one of the great things about science fiction is that we get exposed to different ideas. I don’t know if Sad Puppies has any valid points to make, but if they do, they went about it in the wrong way I think.

250

My impression–and I could be wrong–is that when Campbell ascended to such a powerful position, he held no truck with that sort of gender-bending. Speculate all you want about faster-than-light travel, bug-eyed aliens, psychic powers, and atomic laundries small enough to fit in a housewife’s closet, but you’d better goddamn well not speculate that gender roles will change in the far future.

251

I don’t know that this is accurate. Even Lovecraft Country, which takes the motherfucker out behind the woodshed, acknowledges and revels in the delight of his pulp fantasies. I’ve played a new Lovecraft role-playing game that works to merge his eldritch horrors with the horrors of 1930s America (the plot of our game was that, in Depression-era New Orleans, our Black characters were fighting an ancient evil who was in the predatory loan business).

I’ve read at least one essay that was all “Lovecraft’s fiction sucked and stop using it.” But most of the reinterpretation of him seeks to examine how his horrible bigotry and neuroses influenced his horror, and how we can take the good parts of his oeuvre without succumbing to the same sorts of fuckeduppery that he indulged in.

252

Over the last few years, Lovecraft has become a more contentious topic at the online RPG forums I frequent. Six years ago the general consensus was that it was okay to like “problematic” things just so long as we realized why it was problematic. But I see more people on these forums call for Lovecraft to be excised from gaming including some people being upset that he was cited as an influence for the recent D&D campaign Rime of the Frost Maiden. (I wrote a 1930s scenario involving the KKK and insurance fraud.)

I think in a lot of ways we’re working to reconcile our love for past works with the knowledge that their creators, and indeed aspects of those works, are antithetical to our modern sensibilities.

I’m looking forward to reading Lovecraft Country over Christmas break.

253

Interesting. I’ve not spent much time on RPG forums lately, so maybe that’s why I haven’t seen that. I’ve definitely heard people bring his toxicity up when he’s cited in an uncomplicated fashion, but like I said, even works like The City We Became (NK Jemisin’s hilarious and kickass “gentrification is the real eldritch horror” novel) recognize the debt they owe to Lovecraft even while recognizing what a thorough shitbird the man was.

254

Thanks for sharing, Babale. I think one of the best things about science fiction is how it challenges traditional paradigms.

And Bujold’s stand-alone novel Ethan of Athos about a guy from a planet completely inhabited by homosexual males. The guy was not only a virulent misogynist, as soon as he left his home planet, he got the shit kicked out of him by gay-bashing men. Bujold could have gone totally camp with the story (as it was a woman who kept him out of trouble - it could have been a lazy romance or battle of the sexes), but instead she turned it into a thoughtful study on preconceived assumptions. That was in 1986.

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I remember when 8 years seemed like a long time ago…

I remember 2312, too, and still hold the position that the whole book was just a setup to have a saturnine character from Saturn and a mercurial character from Mercury.

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There are many examples of gender bending in SF long before the 21st century. For exampled:

  • Theodore Sturgeon’s “The World Well Lost” (1953) where homosexuality is treated sympathetically.
  • Fred Pohl’s “Day Million” (1966), whose protagonist is transgender
  • Johanna Russ’s “When It Changed” (1972) about a society of women who get along just fine without men. Russ also wrote “The Mystery of the Young Gentleman,” where the mystery involves gender and is completely ambiguous.
  • James Tiptree Jr.'s “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976) where all men on Earth are dead and aren’t particularly missed.
  • John Varley’s “Eight Worlds” novels and stories (starting in 1974), where sex change operations are the norm.
  • Samuel R. Delany used “she” as the universal pronoun in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, though “he” was used in one very specific case – when you’re sexually aroused by the person you’re speaking about.

Left_Hand_of_Dorkness has mentioned several others.

As far as feminist SF, it appeared in the 60s with “The Heat Death of the Universe” by Pamela Zoline, Tiptree’s “The Woman Men Don’t See,” and many other places.

257

“Racist by the standards of his time,” doesn’t mean “uniquely racist.” It just means that they were racist enough that a significant percentage of their contemporaries would look at them and say, “Damn, that’s racist.” As contrasted with people who held views that are considered racist now, but would have been considered progressive and enlightened by contemporary standards.

258

In Oceanic by Greg Egan (Hugo winner for best novella in 1999) the people have double-ended penises that swap between partners after sex. The male partner becomes female, the female male.

259

There may be people who want to erase Lovecraft completely, but the authors I’ve been reading are well aware of the virtues and long-term influence of his writing - they are just trying to make sure that the good parts (cosmic horror) doesn’t bring along the other attitudes.

The men who tolerated (or performed!) lynchings seemed to have no problem with the presence of black people in their society - they just wanted to ensure a permanently second-class position for them. Lovecraft was different. His wife reports: “Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York, Howard would become livid with rage. He seemed almost to lose his mind.” - that’s not normal even by the standards of a society that has institutional racism.

260

So now I’m laughing, thinking “Cthulhu would be such a nice guy, if only he weren’t so racist.”

That sounds to me like mental illness.

261

I’m thinking more “Reading about cosmic horror is cool, but it’s a pain when shocking ending is more about Italians moving into the neighborhood than about non-Euclidean monsters.”

True.