It’s interesting to see which of these books hold up after nearly fifty years, and which of them really don’t. Of the five here, I think Children of Dune is the only one that still has any lasting cultural relevance, and that only because of the first book, Dune.
Children of Dune is also (perhaps not surprisingly) the only book that I would consider worthy of voting for. It’s nowhere near as good as Dune, but of the Dune sequels, it’s the best one I’ve read so far (though the way Leto transformed into a… whatever really seemed to come out of nowhere). Man Plus and Shadrach in the Furnace weren’t terrible, but I didn’t finish them. I can’t speak to Mindbridge, because I didn’t bother reading it: I’ve read enough Haldeman to know that he has a penchant for nihilism that really rubs me the wrong way.
As for Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, it was really awful. I don’t remember the plot exactly, but the book is full of leftist 70s doom porn regarding climate change and Malthusian resource shortages, combined with a resurgence of The Patriarchy that forces all the female characters into becoming breeders. It’s dark, dystopian, and apocalyptic in all the worst ways, with a very strong political bent to it that holds up about as well as all of the end-of-the-world predictions that the climate cultists have been peddling since the 70s. Basically, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is why I’d vote “No Award” after Children of Dune.
Man Plus had some interesting writing, but it didn’t really hold my interest, probably because of all the Malthusian and Freudian undertones. It wasn’t insufferably political, though, which is why I would actually affirmatively vote for it after “No Award.” I would certainly rather that Man Plus had won out over Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. Same with Shadrach in the Furnace, which isn’t terrible, though it does have some weird communist power fantasies in it. I really love the way Silverberg writes, but the things he chooses to write about just seem totally pointless to me.
The 70s was a very weird time for science fiction… and probably a weird time for the world in general. As you can probably tell, I’m not a huge fan of New Wave science fiction (with a few notable exceptions). Things got a lot better after Reagan’s Morning in America, not just for the country, but for science fiction as well. Then we hit the 90s, which the Zoomers tend to look on as a simple, idyllic time when all was bright and wonderful in the world, which strikes me as hilarious because I remember it as a time of rampant school shootings and MTV-driven cultural decay. But that’s a subject for another post.
The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
The Actual Results
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
How I Would Have Voted
No Award
Explanation
The wokery was strong this year.
I have a list of tropes that I cannot stand anymore, to the point that I will usually DNF any book that uses them. All of the nominated books this year fell fell into at least one of those tropes, including:
All true love is LGBTQ love
A profane and vulgar childhood
Death is chic
Life is not worth saving
Badass woman warrior, slay!
One of these days, I’ll write a blog post describing all of these tropes. If they weren’t so common in fiction these days, I would have more tolerance for them, but I’ve seen them all so much that they get an immediate “nope” whenever I see them.
The City in the Middle of the Night was like something written by a mental patient, and not in a good way. If I wrote a parody of a book written by a leftist, it would read no differently than this book.
I forget why I DNFed The Ten Thousand Doors of January, but I think it was because of the trope I call “a profane and vulgar childhood,” where children lose (or are never really allowed to experience) their innocence before they grow up, and the author doesn’t treat this like the tragedy it truly is. There may have also been an anti-racist / anti-colonialist bent that turned me off, if I remember correctly.
I wanted to like The Dark Brigade, because I enjoy reading Kameron Hurley’s op-eds in Locus Magazine, but the book was way too dark and profane. Also, it suffered from “all true love is LGBTQ love” and “badass woman warrior, slay!” which I am just so tired of reading.
A Memory Called Empire is one of those sprawling space operas about a massive galactic empire, but it read too much like something written by an English major with little to no understanding of how geopolitics actually works. Also, the “all true love is LGBTQ love” was strong with this one.
Finally, Middlegame and Gideon the Ninth are both prime examples of “death is chic,” a trope which plays right into the death cult that currently dominates our culture. But even if the macabre obsession with death is just an aesthetic, it’s one that I personally cannot stand. With that said, though, I think it goes beyond the aesthetic for both of these books—but I didn’t stick around long enough to find out.
For all of these books, the characters fell completely flat for me. One of the things I need in order to connect with a character is to get a sense right off the bat that they’re a good person—or, if they’re a bad person, that needs to be lampshaded clearly as a flaw. But in so many books that are published these days, the characters are just downright awful people who care only for themselves, and rarely is this pointed out as a flaw.
Increasingly, it seems that we live in a world where the culture tells us that nothing is true and everything is permitted. Screw that.
I’ve been going back and forth on this post for almost a year now, wondering how exactly to express my thoughts. Some of the positive reviews on my fiction have expressed that I write “libertarian fiction,” and in some ways, I think that’s accurate: certainly, I value liberty very strongly, and support those government policies that are designed to safeguard our liberties while opposing those that seek to destroy it. That has not changed. But my views of libertarianism more generally have, perhaps in some ways that might surprise my longtime readers.
First, a little bit of my personal history. I grew up in one of the most liberal parts of the country, Pioneer Valley, Massachusetts, and considered myself a conservative while I lived there. Then, after serving a two-year mission for my church in Silicon Valley, California—what is probably the most progressive, leftist part of the country—I went to college at Brigham Young University, in the most Republican county of the most Republican state in the United States. At that point, I considered myself to be a sort of left-leaning classical liberal. When Dick Cheney spoke at BYU’s commencement, I blogged about the protests and attended the alternate commencement where Ralph Nader spoke.
I graduated in 2010, in the middle of the Great Recession, and made the fateful decision not to go to grad school at that time. To this day, I count that as the single best decision I ever made in my life (right up there with deleting my Facebook and Twitter accounts). Not only did this force me to learn how to navigate the real world, but it also got me out of the indoctrination factory that the national university system has become, even to a degree at my alma mater, BYU.
About five years after I graduated, I got red-pilled and started listening to right-wing commentators like Glenn Beck, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. I also looked seriously into Ron Paul and the libertarian movement, and became something of a libertarian. As fractitious as libertarianism is as a political philosophy, it seemed like the most logically coherent and intellectually honest way of understanding the world, whereas leftism and conservatism were both riddled with internal contradictions.
But then I got married and started a family. That experience has changed me in a lot of ways, perhaps even more than all the rest of my life experiences combined. But politically, the biggest thing it has caused me to rethink is this question:
What is the fundamental unit of society?
I’d always played lip service to the belief that the family is the fundamental unit of society, but starting a family of my own has made that real for me—indeed, has made me realize—in a way that simple bumper-sticker slogans never could. Before, I was living for myself. Now, I live for my children. Before, I was the hero of my own story, and that story was a single volume. Now, my story is just a single volume in an ongoing saga, a link in the chain of the generations that came before and will go on after me.
Libertarians believe that they stand in opposition to authoritarians of all stripes, be they communists, fascists, socialists, etc. But both libertarians and authoritarians operate on the unspoken assumption that the individual, not the family, is the fundamental unit of society. Leftists want to destroy the family and put the state in charge of raising and educating children, in order to make them obedient to government authority. Libertarians, on the other hand, romanticize this idea of the atomized individual who follows his own path and eschews all forms of collectivism, including the family. Ayn Rand’s books are populated by ubermensch who seem like they’ve sprung forth from the head of Zeus, and the children in her novels are basically just adults in miniature.
Allow me to put it this way: Margaret Thatcher had a brilliant quote about socialism that libertarians love to repeat. And from a purely economic standpoint, I believe that the libertarians are correct. But change that quote just a little, and you get this:
The problem with socialism libertarianism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money families.
Families don’t just happen. They take a lot of work to build and to maintain, and unless they are planted in a culture that nourishes them, they will wither and die. Libertarianism does not foster that kind of a culture, yet it depends on families in order to raise the kind of people who can make a libertarian society work. People from broken families often lack the mental and emotional maturity to take upon themselves the personal responsibilities that come with personal liberty—in other words, they lack the capacity for personal independence which libertarianism depends on. Growing up in a healthy family isn’t the only way to develop that sort of independence, but a society of broken families will invariably fail to produce such a people.
This is why libertarianism ultimately leads to authoritarianism. We aren’t all characters in an Ayn Rand novel: we aren’t all ubermensch all of the time, reshaping the world by the strength of our will. And when we inevitable fail, where can we turn to for help? If society is nothing more than a group of individuals, then ultimately the only place to turn to is the state. Perhaps there may be churches, companies, or other private civic organizations to which a person may turn, but any form of libertarianism that rejects altruism as a moral good will fail to foster these organizations as well. So, in the absense of anywhere else to turn, individuals will, over time, turn increasingly to the state, trading their libertarian freedoms for economic and social security. A society that exalts the individual at the expense of the family will always, in the end, devolve into a statist tyranny.
If you want to create a stable society that recognizes individual freedom, you have to recognize the family as the fundamental unit of that society, and you have to proactively enact policies that will foster a culture of strong families. Not only does this give you a social safety net that is totally apart from the state, but it also ensures that your society will be self-perpetuating, since one of the central purposes of the family is to create and raise children.
In fact, the family is perhaps the best antidote to government power creeping into every facet of society, which also makes it the best way to push back against woke leftism, ESG, and the Great Reset. Hence why everything about leftist progressivism is calculated to destroy the family. Parents concerned about CRT in their schools? Domestic terrorists. Kids who say that they’re transgender? Transition them without telling the parents, and take them away from their families if the parents object.
But it’s not just a partisan issue. If the family is the fundamental unit of society and needs to be strengthened, then there are things on both the left and the right that need to change. For example, poverty is a huge issue for families, since poor families are much more likely to break up due to the stress. But conservatives often ignore the issue of income inequality, mouthing platitudes about the free market while giving us socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. And the libertarians are little better, what with how they push for the legalization of drugs, prostitution, abortion, and pornography. Few things have done more to destroy the family than widespread substance abuse and the hypersexualization of our society.
This is why I’ve mostly given up on reading Heinlein anymore. He’s a brilliant writer with a fascinating take on some of science fiction’s most fundamental tropes, but whenever he writes about sex or sexuality, all I can think of is “the problem with libertarianism is that you eventually run out of other people’s families.” Heinlein and his boomer readership took the family for granted, neglected their own, and gave us a world of widespread sexual promiscuity, where society is falling apart.
So that’s why I don’t consider myself a libertarian anymore, even though there are many tenets of libertarianism that I still admire and believe, especially on the economic side. I suppose you say that I’m a conservative, but that isn’t really accurate either, because most strains of conservatism in 2024 really seem more about conserving the leftism of two or three generations ago. So I guess that means I’m politically homeless—just like most of my fellow Americans these days.
The Big Time has a lot of things in it that I normally would like. It’s a time travel story that bucks the popular convention of the butterfly effect—the idea that small changes in the past lead to big changes in the future. Instead, Leiber’s view of time travel is much closer to Connie Willis’s, in that the continuum itself tends to seek a stable equilibrium, negating the effect of small changes. But unlike Willis’s books, the time travelers aren’t just a bunch of cloistered academics looking to be passive observers of history. Instead, there’s a full-on time war between two monolithic factions, each of which has screwed so much with the timeline that they hardly know who they are anymore.
So what’s so bad about it that I feel it didn’t earn my vote? I’ve tried twice to read this book, and I’ve DNFed it both times because I just can’t get over the fact that it’s about a bunch of comfort women—with everything that term implies—servicing the time warriors of their particular faction. In WWII, “comfort women” was a euphemistic term for civilian sex slaves taken captive by the Japanese Imperial Army. That’s basically what’s happening here, except it’s played straight, with no ick factor, or even really an acknowledgment that an ick factor might exist. And that’s what turns me off—not just the ick factor itself, but the way that the author treats it as something normal and blase—progressive, even. After all, every good time soldier needs a “sex therapist.” </sarc>
Usually when older science fiction turns me off, it has something to do with the sexual content. So many scifi writers in the 50s, 60s, and 70s had these almost utopian visions of a free love future, or at least a very optimistic view of the sexual revolution. They never imagined that we might become even more prudish than the Victorians, or that incels would be a thing, or that we’d be facing a loneliness epidemic, a population collapse, and both a war on men and a war on women because, in large part, of how the Boomers tore down all the boundaries around sex and sexuality—which is to say nothing of how so many people can’t even define what a woman is these days.
These scifi writers were supposed to be our visionaries, but they were so totally blinded by their own carnal lusts that they failed to predict the second- and third-order effects of the kind of free love future they were writing about. That’s not exactly the case with The Big Time, but it falls into that same trap, along with most of Fritz Leiber’s work that I’ve read. However, it wasn’t so bad that I’d vote No Award over this book. Rather, it was more of a background element that rubbed me the wrong way, to the point where I just couldn’t finish the book.
If you haven’t checked out my book blog yet, go give it a look! The latest post has more of my thoughts on Zelazny’s excellent Chronicles of Amber series, and short vs. long fantasy in general.
