I haven’t read any of the Hugo examples, but Infinite Jest also had a writing style that mixed classic, solidly-constructed lines with slang, albeit the slang of the time, and you can’t really say that David Foster Wallace was a recipient of affirmative action acclaim.
Do I want to insist that a group of people willing to pay thousands of dollars and travel thousands of miles to attend a literary convention that doesn’t concentrate on movies and TV and apperances of stars from such, some of whom have been attending every year that they can for 30, 40, 50 years actually read books? Yeah, I want to insist that. Worldcons are the venue of very serious reading fans–which is why the Hugo has grown the respect that it has.
I have only read the first one, but thought it was brilliant. So I need to get cracking on the rest of the series.
Anyways, on the Hugo thing, I sometimes find it helpful to compare it to the Nebula Awards, which are voted on by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
In the Nebulas, Stone Sky won this year, but the previous two were nominated but did not win. One of the interesting things is that some popular writers don’t get that much love from the SFWA. Scalzi for one has never been nominated (I’m 100% fine with that). And the only Neal Stephenson nomination was for The Diamond Age.
I’m totally fine with Stephenson not getting much love–I personally find him insufferable ever since the Diamond Age. Different strokes and all, but it’s pretty risible for someone to laud Stephenson and in the same thread imply that science fiction writers should be held to Pulitzer Prize standards.
For the past nearly 20 years, I’ve bought very nearly everything I read on-line, knowing only the author, the genre, the Amazon “people who bought this also bought this”, or meatspace or on-line recommendations. Even when I was buying books at physical locations I used similar criteria. I don’t think that I have ever read the first few pages of a book before buying it.
Also, the Pulitzer judges can go fuck themselves.
I would argue that is quite different though—and I’ve interrogated my feelings on this and don’t think I can be accused of special pleading here. In that book, the narrator is not an omniscient writer-voice but a first-person character, in the thick of the action:
It’s possible the Jemisin narrator will turn out to be a character at some point, but there is no sign of that in the excerpt, and without that to mediate our understanding of “leaderish things” and “ha ha”, it just comes across, again, as sounding like Twitter. And I’ve defended Twitter, right here on this board! I don’t agree with the stuffy sniffing, prevalent in these parts, about its being a worthless waste of time. But it’s Twitter, not a novel in contention for literary awards.
WorldCon member who does read all the nominated books, cover to cover as you put it. Everyone I spoke to said the same. One friend, who did not read them, did not vote. Been reading sci-fi since the 70’s so I have a good grasp of the classics. Things have changed & I am not unhappy.
[spoiler]she totally does,
and he’s an incredibly complex, morally ambiguous, fascinating character at the heart of the trilogy.[/spoiler]
In fact, on that question, here’s a blog post. Interestingly, it’s from someone who like Slacker was put off by the prologue, but unlike Slacker decided to give it another chance, and realized why everyone’s raving about it (spoiler: not because we’re SJWs who hate white dudes).
Why? Hugos are for speculative fiction. That means sci-fi, fantasy, horror, or whatever categories you want to break SF down into. You might as well say “get your own awards, science fiction writers”?
The book makes it very clear from the beginning that the narrator is a character. Don’t judge a book by its out of context excerpts.
Incredibly boring explanation for folks who noticed my pronoun errors:
[spoiler]So when I first wrote the post, I remembered that the second-person chapters involved Essun, the main character of the trilogy, and due to a brainfart misremembered that she was the narrator. Which makes no sense, of course, because you don’t say “you” when talking to yourself, of course. On reading that B&N blog I linked to, I remembered that the actual narrator is Hoa, a different, male character, who is TALKING to Essun, as one does when using the second person. So I corrected one pronoun with the edit, but just realized now I left the other one. For “she”, read “he.”
Also, Essun is the super-compelling morally ambiguous character at the heart of the story, but I didn’t edit that, because Hoa is also pretty awesome and also morally ambiguous, even if not to the same degree.[/spoiler]Super boring explanation over! 
—I don’t like the commingling of SF and fantasy, and never have. It is what it is, but I don’t think that was what it was originally intended to be, based on the winners in the early years.
—Wendell, I provided a detailed response to your request. Any comment or followup?
This really isn’t helping Jemisin’s cause. Yes, she superficially and intermittently uses the second person, but she doesn’t have the control over her craft to sustain it (it’s admittedly a high degree of difficulty, but no one forced her to make the attempt). She lapses into what is quite clearly third-person omniscient writer mode, which is often used to convey something like a first-person perspective without actually using first-person pronouns (“I”, “me”, “myself”):
Does this read like a character telling us about this character? Or is it more like we are dipping into this character’s mind? Even if the narrator is a telepath, we are not getting a “feel” for that narrator-character’s presence and perspective in these passages.
This is the same narrator-character, telling a tale to another character, who brought up “leaderish things”, said “because why not” and “ha ha”? Really? :dubious:
Pick a lane. Or change it up chapter to chapter at least.
You’re casting shade in my direction, so I’m hoping you’ll be willing to answer a couple questions:
(1) Do you deny that the disproportional majority of SF writers are white men?
(2) If you don’t dispute that, how do you explain that only one of the past eight Hugos has gone to a white dude, plus the fact that—if we set aside the coup attempt by the “Sad Puppies”, who nominated lame juvenilia—very few white guys have even been nominated? Does this make probabilistic sense to you? (I kind of wish someone would just admit “okay, so sue us: we’re trying to even things out and provide role models for young black girls—but talking about it out loud spoils the effect, so will you kindly STFU”.)
Yowza! Why so harsh?
That was interesting, thanks for linking. I find it mind-boggling that they too gave their top prize to that Connie Willis book. Does no one else see what I’m talking about, that the writing style is like early juvenile sci-fi? I thought we were several decades into an effort to make the genre more literary, or at least not so…basic. There’s virtually nothing there except wooden dialogue and barebones description of mechanical action. She may have outlined an interesting SF scenario, but she should have found a writing partner to help give it life.
I just assumed it was some kind of gender-fluid situation, like the real LHOD that my dad assigned as a text in his anthropology courses.
The Hugos started in 1953. It’s hard to believe today but fantasy was almost never published in the 1950s. That happened both to be a down period for it just as sf had been given a huge boost by the atomic bomb and rockets used in WWII. Not until after college students found Tolkien in the 60s and Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey founded Del Rey books in 1977 did it start on the four-decade upward course that saw it become a viable commercial genre that now overwhelms science fiction.
How do you know this when you stopped after the prologue?
The majority of writers of fantasy are not men of any color. Fantasy now is a larger field than sf. Therefore, white men are now a small minority of writers in the combined field of f&sf, and so should be expected to be a small minority of award nominees.
I’d argue that white men have achieved a disproportionate percentage of Hugo nominees relative to their numbers. Over the last eight years white male nominees have included John Scalzi (twice), Kim Stanley Robinson (twice), Neal Stephenson, Kevin J. Anderson, Charles Stross, Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson, George R. R. Martin, China Miéville, James S. A. Corey and Ian McDonald, and that’s not including Larry Correia or Jim Butcher (twice) who probably owe their presence to Vox Day’s attempted coup. (Which was first tried in 2014, not the “better part of a decade” ago.)
(For those who have extremely strong stomachs, you can Google Vox Day and check his blog. I refuse to link to it.)
Yeah, what does Connie know about writing. Blackout was her eleventh Hugo Award (and seventh Nebula Award). Maybe she should have stopped after ten. Her first win was in that bastion of women’s domination over males, 1983.
Jesus. Maybe you don’t like Jemisin’s style. But that doesn’t mean that her wins aren’t based on genuine praise from Hugo voters. Your opinion on her is just your opinion, and it’s entirely reasonable to disagree and think she’s a good writer with a unique style.
Nah, man. Maybe I’ve read every book Jemisin has published, but he read an EXCERPT! No way is he any less qualified to blather on about her! All the people who have adored her books? BLIND I TELL YOU BLIND
Yes, I deny that the overwhelming majority of current science fiction and fantasy authors are white men. (Well, I deny that it’s clear that it’s true.) Again, the Hugo Awards are for science fiction and fantasy. If you don’t like that, start your own awards, but don’t tell us that they can’t be given for fantasy. They specifically say that they are for science fiction and fantasy. And, furthermore, we’re talking about current authors. Yes, it used to be true that the overwhelming majority of science fiction and fantasy authors were white men, but is that true today? Can anyone give us some statistics on this matter?
Curious about the questions of whether science fiction is predominantly white dudes (that’s not my impression, given my reading, but hey), I found this website, listing bestsellers. In order, the authors are, as near as I can tell:
- Hispanic dude
- White lady
- White dude
- White dude
- White dude
6*. White lady
7*. White dude
8*. Pakistani-American lady with immigrant parents
9*. Nigerian-American lady with immigrant parents
10*. Korean-American lady with an immigrant mother - White dude
- White lady
- White lady
- White dude
- White lady
- 6-10 are co-authors of the same bestseller.
So of the authors of the top 15 current bestsellers, we’ve got 6 white dudes, 5 white ladies, and 3 non-white ladies, and 1 non-white dude.
This is, of course, best-selling, but I promise you that Yet Another Timothy Zahn Star Wars Novel ain’t gonna win the Hugo. The Hugo goes to folk who are doing interesting and cool stuff with the genre. In my experience–which I don’t know how to quantify, it just is–the folks doing cutting-edge, top-shelf work skew significantly further away from the white dude demographic.
There are some white dudes there, no doubt: Jeff van der Meer is freakin’ amazing, and China Mieville is often incredible, and James SA Corey and Matt Ruff are rock stars. And Scalzi is great fun to read, even if he’s not breaking any new ground. No disrespect whatsoever to these white dudes.
But man oh man, the fresh works being brought by Liu and Jemisin and Kai Ashante Wilson and Okorafor and Leckie and so many others. Drop the whiny identity politics, drop the fussing over what SJWs are doing to this white dude field, and READ.
And see why Scalzi agreed that Jemisin took the Hugo from him in a walk, both in the space he gave her essay on the book and in his wonderful write-up of the most recent Hugo ceremony.
Also, FWIW, when discussing Hugo results you have to take into account the voting system. You don’t vote for one winner, you make a ranked list of the order you would like the books to win. If you look at the PDF I linked in post #3, only 770 out of 2828 voters ranked Stone Sky as their first choice for winning. That just happened to be the one with the most (Collapsing Empire was second with 406.) So around a quarter of the voters put Stone Sky as their favorite book of the six choices–if it is a conspiracy, it is a pretty weak one. The official Hugos site has PDFs breaking down the voting results for other years, too, if you want to look at them.
Quote from that essay.
Heh.