Network Effect was pretty good. In fact, it’s my favorite Murderbot book. There was a little bit of wokery, mostly in the form of the polyamorous relationships of the humans, but that didn’t bother me as much because part of the point of the Murderbot books is that the humans are (for the most part) aggravatingly dumb and slow, so the polyamory kind of blended into the rest of the nonsense that muderbot constantly has to deal with. But I can see how it would bother some readers.
I DNFed all the other books, but I didn’t want to lump Piranesi in with all the others because it just wasn’t my kind of book. All the other ones had woke themes or tropes or other issues that turned me off immensely. I DNFed the first Lady Astronauts book when it turned into a story about the brave little woman that could and her band of misfit minorities fighting back against Captain Patriarchy. The City We Became dropped half a dozen f-bombs in the first chapter, and I think it had a gay rape scene too. Also, I have no love whatsoever for New York City. As for Black Sun and Harrow the Ninth, they both suffer from the trope that I call “death is chic.” At best, it’s an aesthetic that turns me off, and at worst it’s just a cover for outright nihilism and a pro-death, anti-life worldview that undergirds everything that I hate about our current culture.
As a side note, I just want to say that when it comes to book blurbs, Neil Gaiman is one of the best contrarian indicators for my own personal tastes that I’ve found. He may have blurbed a book or two that I actually enjoyed, but for every book or author that I can remember, if he gave them praise, I not only didn’t like it, but actively hated it. He may actually be a better indicator for me than the Hugo Award itself, since I actually enjoyed the book that won this year—but I cannot think of a single book that Neil Gaiman blurbed that I didn’t despise.
I recently discovered Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, and have been really enjoying them! Check out my book blog, where I share some of my thoughts on the first book:
I didn’t hate this book—I did finish it, after all—but I had some issues with it, especially the ending. It’s basically a futuristic murder mystery / true crime piece, where the protagonist is a telepathic detective who figures out immediately who committed the murder, but has to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to gather the evidence and prosecute the case. The story isn’t a whodunnit so much as a character piece about the motivations behind murder, with a fair amount of action and some intriguing world-building thrown in for good measure.
There’s a lot of good, old-fashioned sci-fi stuff in here, especially with the espers and the telepaths (which were all the rage back in the science fiction of the 50s), but the ending rubbed me the wrong way, because it’s not about putting the murderer behind bars, but in “demolishing” him, brainwashing him so completely that he’s not even really capable of committing such a crime. Just like telepathy and extra-sensory perception were big in golden-age sci-fi, so was the idea that an elite class of benevolent technocrats could use The Science to usher in a futuristic utopia. That was what rubbed me the wrong way about this one.
There were also some hippy/beatnik elements in it that I didn’t like, such as a dinner party with some flagrant and gratuitous nudity. For all that golden age and new wave authors loved to project a post-sexual revolution future, most of them did a really piss-poor job anticipating its second- and third-order effects (Heinlein being one of the chief offenders—but we’ll get there). In spite of all this, I wouldn’t go so far as to vote “no award” over this one. Rather, I’d probably just abstain.
As a side note, 1953 was the first Hugo Award ever issued. As such, the nominating and voting process hadn’t been ironed out yet, so The Demolished Man was the only nominee.
…when you realize that the internet is a factory for creating cults, and that social media and smart devices are force multipliers for this effect.
Before the internet, your “community” was a geographically bound group of people, who were diverse enough (that’s “diverse” with a lower-case d) to give you an interesting variety of perspectives and worldviews. Also, you typically interacted with each other while physically in person. If you said or did something extremely embarrassing, it typically didn’t get beyond your immediate circle of associates, or the people you decided to tell about it.
The internet changed everything by turning “community” into something that was bound by interests, hobbies, perspectives, or worldviews. Now, every person with a weird and perverse fetish, who before kept it hidden because they were the only person in their community who held it, now could find all the other people in the world who held the same weird and perverse fetish, and create a “community” around that thing. Same with crazy political views. Same with radical ideology.
At the same time, if you said or did something embarrassing, and it went viral, your embarrassing moment would be broadcast far beyond your immediate circle of associates, to people you had never before met—as well as to people whom you would never want to hear about it. This effect was multiplied by the development of social media, and it led people to self-censor and conform to whatever “community” they were a part of, in the fear of standing out and going viral.
At the same time, all these “communities” turned into echo chambers that warped the various members’ view of reality. And because anger and outrage are the things that are most likely to get spread on the internet (see the video above), these echo chambers starting to become paranoid and break off from the rest of the world, taking the dimmest and least charitable view of everyone who wasn’t a member of their “community.”
As these online communities came to take a more prominent place in the average person’s life than their own families and communities, then the average person’s sense of identity increasingly became caught up in whatever hobby, fetish, or ideology united the “community.” And because of how paranoid these communities became, they increasingly came to demand absolute and preeminent allegiance. Is this starting to sound like a cult yet?
But it goes deeper than that, because the devices through which we connect with these “communities” actually make us more physically isolated from each other, while giving us the illusion of a genuine connection. When you’re holding up your smart device to capture a fireworks show, you’re not actually enjoying the fireworks. And when you’re lying in your bed, posting updates on your social media or chatting with your friends, you are still, in reality, lying alone in your bed. Combine with the internet’s penchant to drive outrage, and you have the two key ingredients for a mass formation psychosis: a large group of atomized and isolated individuals suffering from free-floating anxiety.
Before the pandemic, (that’s the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020, for future readers who may be wondering “which one?”) I think that we lived in a world where the majority of our countrymen—the members of our “community” in the traditional sense—were not caught up in one of these cults. Either the majority of people weren’t caught up in one of these echo chambers, or the majority of echo chambers hadn’t yet reached cult-status, but people were still generally reasonable, on the whole. But with the pandemic, I think we passed through some sort of a threshold, to the point where now the best way to make sense of our world is to assume that the majority of people around you are trapped in some sort of a cult—which may literally be the case, considering the theory of mass formation psychosis.
So what does this mean for where the world is headed? Nothing good. I suppose that in an optimistic scenario, a critical mass of people manages to break themselves and their friends out of this mess, and go on to build a new society with proper safeguards in place to prevent this sort of mess from happening again. But I think it’s much more likely that this thing runs its course, and large swaths of our civilization drink the proverbial Kool-Aid.
Fortunately, there is a script that we can run, as individuals and (more importantly) as families, to get through this mess. It’s the same script that we use to get ourselves or our loved ones out of a dangerous cult. I’m not yet an expert on that script, but I know that it’s out there, because cults have been a thing for a very long time. But I’m pretty sure it involves putting your family first, getting off of social media, limiting the amount of time that you spend on your smart devices, and becoming more involved in your real “community”—the real-life one where you actually live.
The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers
A Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark
A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine
She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
The Actual Results
A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine
Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
A Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark
The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers
She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
How I Would Have Voted
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
No Award
Explanation
Project Hail Mary was a fun read, and a really good hard SF novel. There were a couple of minor things that made me roll my eyes, but the story itself was solid, and the science was fascinating. Also, the ending really stuck with me for several days. I don’t think it was better than Hyperion or Ender’s Game, but it certainly was deserving of a positive vote for best novel.
I DNFed everything else on the ballot. Normally, that alone wouldn’t be a reason for voting No Award, but some of these books were just insanely woke: in particular, Light from Uncommon Stars was full of transgender madness (and judging from the author bio in the back, the author herself is caught up in the madness as well).
I didn’t read A Desolation Called Peace or The Galaxy, and the Ground Within because I’d already DNFed the first book in the series, mostly for the “all true love is LGBTQ love” trope (I should do a blog post dissecting that particular trope), so I can’t speak to the relative wokeness of either of those titles. But it says something that I tried and DNFed the series.
But the most infuriating read for me was She Who Became the Sun, since by all indications it should have been right up my alley, what with all the steppe nomad warriors and all. The writing was pretty good too, and the setup was fantastic. Yes, there was some gender bending stuff, but for the first half of the book I generally didn’t find it any more offensive than Mulan. I forget why I decided to skip to the last chapter, but the ending was so infuriating that it put this author solidly on my blacklist, just like The Fifth Season did for N.K. Jemison (more on that when we get to 2016’s Hugo ballot). I can’t say much without spoiling the book, but it has to do with what many conservative and alternate media commentators rightly call the death cult. Really infuriating.
As for A Master of Djinn, having traveled across Egypt and the Middle East, the worldbuilding was so fundamentally broken that I just couldn’t swallow it. The author basically created a steampunk Middle East that embraces several tenets of modern wokism. The only alternate reality in which the main character wouldn’t be tossed off of a high building for being a lesbian is a reality where the source code of Islam has been rewritten so entirely that it isn’t really Islam anymore. Which I suppose is fine for a pulpy escapist fantasy, but this one just didn’t appeal to me.
