[Julie Steiner]

I used to be a big scifi and fantasy fan, and would pay close attention to the Hugo Award nominees and winners. I haven't been as active a reader of those genres in the past decade or so. Last year I became aware that something sad was going on with the Hugo Awards, and this year it got even worse:

Short version: http://www.theguardian.com/books/201...ng-controversy

Long version: http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-sci...wards-matters/

I guess this is what happens when two of social media's stereotypical mobs clash on a literary battlefield: the literature loses.

(Although I think that this particular outcome--some nominees declining their nominations, and thousands of votes cast for "No Award" to reject a panel of options nominated for the authors' politics, rather than for literary merit--was probably the most positive outcome that could have been hoped for in such an ugly situation.)

[Ed Shacklee]

I remember reading about this last year. I agree that "No award" was the best available response, but it's sad that such a well loved, fan-fueled event could be warped by some pathetic glory-hogging weenies.

Ed

[Orwn Acra]

My unpopular opinion is that while Torgerson might be reactionary and immature, he's also sort of right. The current fad among literary publishing is to put more emphasis on subject and personal identity than on style and art. See also: Citizen.

[Julie Steiner]

Oh, I agree. It should be about the style and art. But the tactics used to fight the emphasis on subject and personal identity just emphasized different subjects and personal identities. They didn't try to put the focus back on the writing.

[Quincy Lehr]

On the other hand, as a sometime sci-fi-fantasy fan myself--my God, many of the classic authors--Howard, Niven, Lovecraft (considered horror now, but part of that crowd then), etc.--really couldn't write a half-decent female character. Tolkien has his moments, but they are moments (and the dialogue in The Lord of the Rings is... hit-and-miss), and Sweet Baby Jesus, have you ever seen an issue of Heavy Metal? I agree with Walter, re: Citizen not being very good, but there has been a tendency in sci-fi and fantasy to particularly lay on the gender stereotypes. One might argue that some corrections are overcorrections, but the gender stuff especially gets between me and authors whom I love, but as I get older, love in that way one loves that uncle who's great fun at parties but has an unfortunate tendency to forward ethnic jokes to everyone he knows.

[Julie Steiner]

Ironically, the genre has always had a reputation for valuing ideas over execution.

I re-read a lot of Ray Bradbury stories while I was staying in Los Angeles two years ago. (He was buried just two blocks away from my apartment, so I thought it would be neighborly.) And sheesh--the guy could have used some really savage editing! Ditto for Isaac Asimov, who wrote some great stuff that set my imagination on fire, but also a lot of stuff that feels robotic even when he's not writing about robots. I often felt that the same Asimov character I'd met elsewhere was appearing in a different Asimov story under a different name.

I was floored when I found out that some of the giants of the genre when I was a kid were actually women writing under male names. Alice Mary Norton became Andre Norton. Carolyn Janice Cherry became C.J. Cherryh. As a kid, I enjoyed both, and I particularly loved C.J. Cherryh's female characters and her explorations of gender-related stereotypes, but I had no idea that either of these writers was not the stereotypical white guy. I assume that a lot of their male readers never figured that out, either. Was this subterfuge a good thing, because it helped these women find an audience that otherwise would probably have dismissed their writing...or did it just perpetuate the widespread assumption that pretty much all the good authors in the genre were male, and therefore any author with a recognizably female name probably had nothing interesting to say? [Edited to say: our own M.A. Griffiths seems to have been ambivalent about this, sometimes saying she enjoyed the way that a genderless pen name made her sexual identity irrelevant to readers, and sometimes going out of her way to announce proudly, "I am woman, hear me roar."]

I loved the fact that Ursula K. LeGuin had a recognizably female name, mainly because it made the notion that I, too, might someday become a respected writer seem a bit less impossible. I also loved that she was writing about social justice and gender, and guys were listening because her craft was so damn good.

Orwn, I didn't see Citizen...but as it never appeared on the list of nominees for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, I'm not sure what point you're making, except that relying too heavily on social justice content doesn't necessarily make something a compelling piece of art. Sure, but neither does relying too heavily on anything (gee-whiz special effects come to mind) at the expense of the plot, character development, pacing, enjoyable dialog, etc. And a politically correct cliché is as boring as a politically incorrect one.

[Susan McLean]

Like Julie, I was a fan of science fiction and fantasy from way back when almost all of it was written by white men, and when the women who wrote it usually disguised themselves with pseudonyms or initials, whether willingly or under pressure from publishers who thought that male readers would not read fiction written by women. Back then, race was harder to tell from a name, but it was exciting to hear that writers like Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler were African-American, just as it was to see Ursula Le Guin winning awards for her writing. You might think that a popular award like the Hugo was precisely the kind that would be resistant to pressures for political correctness, but I guess the nomination process makes it particularly vulnerable to manipulation by determined groups. I am very sorry to see the award undermined by such a giant step backward in attitudes. Hurrah for the people who refused to be railroaded into endorsing narrowness and prejudice, and for the principled nominees who withdrew rather than benefit from such a power play.

Susan

[Max Goodman]

Off topic a bit, but Julie mentioned Asimov and LeGuin.

Asimov, who published an astounding amount, didn't hide that volume was his highest value. Part of his advice for writing prolifically was not to care whether the work was as good as one could make it. He claimed believably that once a piece had gone twice through his typewriter, he was done with it. When he took up a word processor--which he wrote about doing--he probably became even lazier. And a rumor says that some of what he published under his own name was written by others, for pay, based on ideas he provided.

LeGuin gave what was probably the best reading I've ever attended. Afterward, at least two of us, independently, rushed to the university library to find the New Yorker in which one of the stories she read had first appeared. We met in the stacks.

[Orwn Acra]

Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Julie.

[Pedro Poitevin]

Like Orwn, I was not impressed with Citizen. It reads like a hypersensitive (and badly written) essay by a delicately aggrieved person wallowing in self-pity. The stoics may not have been right about a few things, but they would have rightly cringed at the rise of the term "micro-aggression." It's important point out how society and culture frames and depicts us (minorities), but what Rankin has done isn't that.

On the other hand, I'm very skeptical of the meritocratic view according to which merit can be judged objectively. Coming from a field in which merit is significantly more easily judged objectively (in mathematics it is far easier to agree about who are the best of the bunch), literature strikes me as a field in which culture and identity seep into taste. If white men keep winning awards, it's probably to a large extent because the people who give these awards have a cultural sensibility built on the expectation that the awards should go to people who write like white men winning awards.

If you are white, it's likely that you will think that some white poet or writer is "objectively" better than the competition, and the strange cultural viewpoint that permeates the work of the cultural other will not appeal to you as much, perhaps because you are not as well trained in reading it with care. This is only natural, and it goes a long way to explain why poetry magazines only publish Latino poets when they write about abuelitas, ancestors, identity, etc., when, in fact, some of the better Latino poets out there are much better (even when not writing about the cliche topics) than many revered luminaries, at least from my vantage point. Then again, my vantage point is truly bilingual. I think a lot of people who are not truly bilingual are much more likely to remain naively meritocratic in their views.